AAAI2026

Abstract:
VisionLanguage-Action (VLA) models typically bridge the gap between perceptual and action spaces by pre-training a large-scale Vision-Language Model (VLM) on robotic data. While this approach greatly enhances performance, it also incurs significant training costs. In this paper, we investigate how to effectively bridge vision-language (VL) representations to action (A). We introduce VLA-Adapter, a novel paradigm designed to reduce the reliance of VLA models on large-scale VLMs and extensive pre-training. To this end, we first systematically analyze the effectiveness of various VL conditions and present key findings on which conditions are essential for bridging perception and action spaces. Based on these insights, we propose a lightweight Policy module with Bridge Attention, which autonomously injects the optimal condition into the action space. In this way, our method achieves high performance using only a 0.5B-parameter backbone, without any robotic data pre-training. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world robotic benchmarks show that VLA-Adapter not only achieves state-of-the-art level performance, but also offers the fast inference speed reported to date. Furthermore, thanks to the proposed advanced bridging paradigm, VLA-Adapter enables the training of a powerful VLA model on a single consumer-grade GPU, greatly lowering the barrier to deploying VLA model.

PaperID: 2, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11077 GitHub GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Estimating the geometric and volumetric properties of transparent deformable liquids is challenging due to optical complexities and dynamic surface deformations induced by container movements. Autonomous robots performing precise liquid manipulation tasks—such as dispensing, aspiration, and mixing—must handle containers in ways that inevitably induce these deformations, complicating accurate liquid state assessment. Current datasets lack comprehensive physicsinformed simulation data representing realistic liquid behaviors under diverse dynamic scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce Phys-Liquid, a physics-informed dataset comprising 97,200 simulation images and corresponding 3D meshes, capturing liquid dynamics across multiple laboratory scenes, lighting conditions, liquid colors, and container rotations. To validate the realism and effectiveness of Phys-Liquid, we propose a four-stage reconstruction and estimation pipeline involving liquid segmentation, multi-view mask generation, 3D mesh reconstruction, and real-world scaling. Experimental results demonstrate improved accuracy and consistency in reconstructing liquid geometry and volume, outperforming existing benchmarks. The dataset and associated validation methods facilitate future advancements in transparent liquid perception tasks.

PaperID: 3, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10516 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Despite advancements in Video Large Language Models (VidLLMs) improving multimodal understanding, challenges persist in streaming video reasoning due to its reliance on contextual information. Existing paradigms feed all available historical contextual information into Vid-LLMs, resulting in a significant computational burden for visual data processing. Furthermore, the inclusion of irrelevant context distracts models from key details. This paper introduces a challenging task called Context-guided Streaming Video Reasoning (CogStream), which simulates real-world streaming video scenarios, requiring models to identify the most relevant historical contextual information to deduce answers for questions about the current stream. To support CogStream, we present a densely annotated dataset featuring extensive and hierarchical question-answer pairs, generated by a semi-automatic pipeline. Additionally, we present CogReasoner as a baseline model. It effectively tackles this task by leveraging visual stream compression and historical dialogue retrieval. Extensive experiments prove the effectiveness of this method.

PaperID: 4, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14377 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
The Diffusion Transformer plays a pivotal role in advancing textto-image and text-to-video generation, owing primarily to its inherent scalability. However, existing controlled diffusion transformer methods incur significant parameter and computational overheads and suffer from inefficient resource allocation due to their failure to account for the varying relevance of control information across different transformer layers. To address this, we propose the Relevance-Guided Efficient Controllable Generation framework, RelaCtrl, enabling efficient and resource-optimized integration of control signals into the Diffusion Transformer. First, we evaluate the relevance of each layer in the Diffusion Transformer to the control information by assessing the ControlNet Relevance Score, which measures the impact of skipping each control layer on both the quality of generation and the control effectiveness during inference. Based on the strength of the relevance, we then tailor the positioning, parameter scale, and modeling capacity of the control layers to reduce unnecessary parameters and redundant computations. Additionally, to further improve efficiency, we replace the self-attention and FFN in the commonly used copy block with the carefully designed Two-Dimensional Shuffle Mixer (TDSM), enabling efficient implementation of both the token mixer and channel mixer. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance with only 15% of the parameters and computational complexity compared to PixArt-delta.

PaperID: 5, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19243 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce Style4DBench, the first benchmark suite specifically designed for 4D stylization, with the goal of standardizing evaluation and facilitating progress in this emerging area. Style4D-Bench comprises: 1) a strong baseline that make an initial attempt for 4D stylization, 2) a comprehensive evaluation protocol measuring spatial fidelity, temporal coherence, and multi-view consistency through both perceptual and quantitative metrics, and 3) a curated collection of high-resolution dynamic 4D scenes with diverse motions and complex backgrounds. To establish a strong baseline, we present Style4D, a novel framework built upon 4D Gaussian Splatting. It consists of three key components: a basic 4DGS scene representation to capture reliable geometry, a Style Gaussian Representation that leverages lightweight per-Gaussian MLPs for temporally and spatially aware appearance control, and a Holistic Geometry-Preserved Style Transfer module designed to enhance spatio-temporal consistency via contrastive coherence learning and structural content preservation. Extensive experiments on Style4D-Bench demonstrate that Style4D achieves state-of-the-art performance in 4D stylization, producing fine-grained stylistic details with stable temporal dynamics and consistent multi-view rendering. We expect Style4D-Bench to become a valuable resource for benchmarking and advancing research in stylized rendering of dynamic 3D scenes.

PaperID: 6, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08511 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) achieves impressive rendering fidelity and speed for novel view synthesis. However, its substantial data size poses a significant challenge for practical applications. While many compression techniques have been proposed, they fail to efficiently utilize existing bitstreams in ondemand applications due to their lack of progressivity, leading to a waste of resource. To address this issue, we propose PCGS (Progressive Compression of 3D Gaussian Splatting), which adaptively controls both the quantity and quality of Gaussians (or anchors) to enable effective progressivity for on-demand applications. For quantity, we introduce a progressive masking strategy that incrementally incorporates new anchors while refining existing ones to enhance fidelity. For quality, we propose a progressive quantization approach that gradually reduces quantization step sizes to achieve finer modeling of Gaussian attributes. Furthermore, to compact the incremental bitstreams, we leverage existing quantization results to refine probability prediction, improving entropy coding efficiency across progressive levels. PCGS achieves progressivity while maintaining compression performance comparable to SoTA non-progressive methods.

PaperID: 7, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19919 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Conventional document layout analysis (DLA) traditionally depends on empirical priors or a fixed set of learnable queries executed in a single forward pass. While sufficient for earlygeneration documents with a small, predetermined number of regions, this paradigm struggles with contemporary documents, which exhibit diverse element counts and increasingly complex layouts. To address challenges posed by modern documents, we present HybriDLA, a novel generative framework that unifies diffusion and autoregressive decoding within a single layer. The diffusion component iteratively refines bounding-box hypotheses, whereas the autoregressive component injects semantic and contextual awareness, enabling precise region prediction even in highly varied layouts. To further enhance detection quality, we design a multi-scale feature-fusion encoder that captures both fine-grained and high-level visual cues. This architecture elevates performance to 83.5% mean Average Precision (mAP). Extensive experiments on the DocLayNet and M6Doc benchmarks demonstrate that HybriDLA sets a state-of-the-art performance, outperforming previous approaches.

PaperID: 8, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19217 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Textto-motion generation, which synthesizes 3D human motions from text inputs, holds immense potential for applications in gaming, film, and robotics. Recently, diffusion-based methods have been shown to generate more diversity and realistic motion. However, there exists a misalignment between text and motion distributions in diffusion models, which leads to semantically inconsistent or low-quality motions. To address this limitation, we propose Reward-guided sampling Alignment (ReAlign), comprising a step-aware reward model to assess alignment quality during the denoising sampling and a reward-guided strategy that directs the diffusion process toward an optimally aligned distribution. This reward model integrates step-aware tokens and combines a text-aligned module for semantic consistency and a motion-aligned module for realism, refining noisy motions at each timestep to balance probability density and alignment. Extensive experiments of both motion generation and retrieval tasks demonstrate that our approach significantly improves text-motion alignment and motion quality compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 9, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12040 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
OpenVocabulary Remote Sensing Image Segmentation (OVRSIS), an emerging task that adapts Open-Vocabulary Segmentation (OVS) to the remote sensing (RS) domain, remains underexplored due to the absence of a unified evaluation benchmark and the domain gap between natural and RS images. To bridge these gaps, we first establish a standardized OVRSIS benchmark (OVRSISBench) based on widely-used RS segmentation datasets, enabling consistent evaluation across methods. Using this benchmark, we comprehensively evaluate several representative OVS/OVRSIS models and reveal their limitations when directly applied to remote sensing scenarios. Building on these insights, we propose RSKT-Seg, a novel open-vocabulary segmentation framework tailored for remote sensing. RSKT-Seg integrates three key components: (1) a Multi-Directional Cost Map Aggregation (RS-CMA) module that captures rotation-invariant visual cues by computing vision-language cosine similarities across multiple directions; (2) an Efficient Cost Map Fusion (RS-Fusion) transformer, which jointly models spatial and semantic dependencies with a lightweight dimensionality reduction strategy; and (3) a Remote Sensing Knowledge Transfer (RS-Transfer) module that injects pre-trained knowledge and facilitates domain adaptation via enhanced upsampling. Extensive experiments on the benchmark show that RSKT-Seg consistently outperforms strong OVS baselines by +3.8 mIoU and +5.9 mACC, while achieving 2× faster inference through efficient aggregation.

PaperID: 10, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14477 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
This paper introduces Gaussian Spatial Transport (GST), a novel framework that leverages Gaussian splatting to facilitate transport from the probability measure in the image coordinate space to the annotation map. We propose a Gaussian splattingbased method to estimate pixel-annotation correspondence, which is then used to compute a transport plan derived from Bayesian probability. To integrate the resulting transport plan into standard network optimization in typical computer vision tasks, we derive a loss function that measures discrepancy after transport. Extensive experiments on representative computer vision tasks, including crowd counting and landmark detection, validate the effectiveness of our approach. Compared to conventional optimal transport schemes, GST eliminates iterative transport plan computation during training, significantly improving efficiency.

PaperID: 11, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07346 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
JPEG, as a widely used image compression standard, often introduces severe visual artifacts when achieving high compression ratios. Although existing deep learningbased restoration methods have made considerable progress, they often struggle to recover complex texture details, resulting in over-smoothed outputs. To overcome these limitations, we propose SODiff, a novel and efficient semantic-oriented one-step diffusion model for JPEG artifacts removal. Our core idea is that effective restoration hinges on providing semantic-oriented guidance to the pre-trained diffusion model, thereby fully leveraging its powerful generative prior. To this end, SODiff incorporates a semantic-aligned image prompt extractor (SAIPE). SAIPE extracts rich features from low-quality (LQ) images and projects them into an embedding space semantically aligned with that of the text encoder. Simultaneously, it preserves crucial information for faithful reconstruction. Furthermore, we propose a quality factor-aware time predictor that implicitly learns the compression quality factor (QF) of the LQ image and adaptively selects the optimal denoising start timestep for the diffusion process. Extensive experimental results show that our SODiff outperforms recent leading methods in both visual quality and quantitative metrics.

PaperID: 12, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00832 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Panoramic video generation has attracted growing attention due to its applications in virtual reality and immersive media. However, existing methods lack explicit motion control and struggle to generate scenes with large and complex motions. We propose PanFlow a novel approach that exploits the spherical nature of panoramas to decouple the highly dynamic camera rotation from the input optical flow condition, enabling more precise control over large and dynamic motions. We further introduce a spherical noise warping strategy to promote loop consistency in motion across panorama boundaries. To support effective training, we curate a largescale, motion-rich panoramic video dataset with frame-level pose and flow annotations. We also showcase the effectiveness of our method in various applications, including motion transfer and video editing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PanFlow significantly outperforms prior methods in motion fidelity, visual quality, and temporal coherence.

PaperID: 13, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19509 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) face notable challenges when encountering multimodal knowledge conflicts, particularly under retrievalaugmented generation (RAG) frameworks, where the contextual information from external sources may contradict the model’s internal parametric knowledge, leading to unreliable outputs. However, existing benchmarks fail to reflect such realistic conflict scenarios. Most focus solely on intra-memory conflicts, while context-memory and inter-context conflicts remain largely unaddressed. Furthermore, commonly used factual knowledge-based evaluations are often overlooked, and existing datasets lack a thorough investigation into conflict detection capabilities.To bridge this gap, we propose MMKC-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate factual knowledge conflicts in both context-memory and inter-context scenarios. MMKC-Bench encompasses four types of multimodal knowledge conflicts and includes 1,881 knowledge instances and 3,997 images across 32 broad types, collected through automated pipelines with human verification. We evaluate four representative series of LMMs on both model behavior analysis and conflict detection tasks. Our findings show that while current LMMs are capable of recognizing knowledge conflicts, they tend to favor internal parametric knowledge over external evidence. We hope MMKC-Bench will foster further research in multimodal knowledge conflict and enhance the development of multimodal RAG systems.

PaperID: 14, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13625 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly transformed natural language understanding and generation, but they raise privacy concerns due to potential exposure of sensitive information. Studies have highlighted the risk of information leakage, where adversaries can extract sensitive information embedded in the prompts. In this work, we introduce a novel private prediction framework for generating highquality synthetic text with strong privacy guarantees. Our approach leverages the Differential Privacy (DP) framework to ensure worst-case theoretical bounds on information leakage without requiring any fine-tuning of the underlying models. The proposed method performs inference on private records and aggregates the resulting per-token output distributions. This enables the generation of longer and coherent synthetic text while maintaining privacy guarantees. Additionally, we propose a simple blending operation that combines private and public inference to further enhance utility. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on in-context-learning (ICL) tasks, making it a promising direction for privacy-preserving text generation while maintaining high utility.

PaperID: 15, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16535 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Despite the remarkable developments achieved by recent 3D generation works, scaling these methods to geographic extents, such as modeling thousands of square kilometers of Earth’s surface, remains an open challenge. We address this through a dual innovation in data infrastructure and model architecture. First, we introduce AerialEarth3D, the largest 3D aerial dataset to date, consisting of 50k curated scenes (each measuring 600m) captured across the U.S. mainland, comprising 45M multi-view Google Earth frames. Each scene provides pose-annotated multi-view images, depth maps, normals, semantic segmentation, and camera poses, with explicit quality control to ensure terrain diversity. Building on this foundation, we propose EarthCrafter, a tailored framework for large-scale 3D Earth generation via sparse-decoupled latent diffusion. Our architecture separates structural and textural generation: 1) Dual sparse 3D-VAEs compress high-resolution geometric voxels and textural 2D Gaussian Splats (2DGS) into compact latent spaces, largely alleviating the costly computation suffering from vast geographic scales while preserving critical information. 2) We propose condition-aware flow matching models trained on mixed inputs (semantics, images, or neither) to flexibly model latent geometry and texture features independently. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EarthCrafter performs substantially better in extremely large-scale generation. The framework further supports versatile applications, from semantic-guided urban layout generation to unconditional terrain synthesis, while maintaining geographic plausibility through our rich data priors from Aerial-Earth3D.

PaperID: 16, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.15759 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advancements in 4D generation have demonstrated its remarkable capability in synthesizing photorealistic renderings of dynamic 3D scenes. However, despite achieving impressive visual performance, almost all existing methods overlook the generation of spatial audio aligned with the corresponding 4D scenes, posing a significant limitation to truly immersive audiovisual experiences. To mitigate this issue, we propose Sonic4D, a novel framework that enables spatial audio generation for immersive exploration of 4D scenes. Specifically, our method is composed of three stages: 1) To capture both the dynamic visual content and raw auditory information from a monocular video, we first employ pretrained expert models to generate the 4D scene and its corresponding monaural audio. 2) Subsequently, to transform the monaural audio into spatial audio, we localize and track the sound sources within the 4D scene, where their 3D spatial coordinates at different timestamps are estimated via a pixel-level visual grounding strategy. 3) Based on the estimated sound source locations, we further synthesize plausible spatial audio that varies across different viewpoints and timestamps using physics-based simulation. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our proposed method generates realistic spatial audio consistent with the synthesized 4D scene in a training-free manner, significantly enhancing the immersive experience for users.

PaperID: 17, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15280 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Multiview understanding, the ability to reconcile visual information across diverse viewpoints for effective navigation, manipulation, and 3D scene comprehension, is a fundamental challenge in Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to be used as embodied agents. While recent MLLMs have shown impressive advances in high-level reasoning and planning, they frequently fall short when confronted with multi-view geometric consistency and cross-view correspondence. To comprehensively evaluate the challenges of MLLMs in multi-view scene reasoning, we introduce All-Angles Bench, a human carefully benchmark with over 2,100 question-answer pairs from 90 diverse, real-world scenes. Our broad evaluation across 38 general-purpose and 3D spatial reasoning MLLMs reveals a substantial performance gap compared to humans. More critically, our analysis identifies two root failure modes: (1) cross-view object mismatch—the inability to establish consistent object correspondence across views; and (2) cross-view spatial misalignment—the failure to infer accurate camera poses and spatial layouts. These findings underscore a lack of multi-view awareness in current MLLMs, calling for architectural innovations beyond prompt tuning alone. We believe that our benchmark offers valuable insights toward building spatially-intelligent MLLMs.

PaperID: 18, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.05352 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
HighDefinition Maps (HD maps) are essential for the precise navigation and decision-making of autonomous vehicles, yet their creation and upkeep present significant cost and timeliness challenges. The online construction of HD maps using on-board sensors has emerged as a promising solution; however, these methods can be impeded by incomplete data due to occlusions and inclement weather, while their performance in distant regions remains unsatisfying. This paper proposes PriorDrive to address these limitations by directly harnessing the power of various vectorized prior maps, significantly enhancing the robustness and accuracy of online HD map construction. Our approach integrates a variety of prior maps uniformly, such as OpenStreetMap's Standard Definition Maps (SD maps), outdated HD maps from vendors, and locally constructed maps from historical vehicle data. To effectively integrate such prior information into online mapping models, we introduce a Hybrid Prior Representation (HPQuery) that standardizes the representation of diverse map elements. We further propose a Unified Vector Encoder (UVE), which employs fused prior embedding and a dual encoding mechanism to encode vector data. To improve the UVE's generalizability and performance, we propose a segment-level and point-level pre-training strategy that enables the UVE to learn the prior distribution of vector data. Through extensive testing on the nuScenes, Argoverse 2 and OpenLane-V2, we demonstrate that PriorDrive is highly compatible with various online mapping models and substantially improves map prediction capabilities. The integration of prior maps through PriorDrive offers a robust solution to the challenges of single-perception data, paving the way for more reliable autonomous driving.

PaperID: 19, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14153 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Textprompted image segmentation enables fine-grained visual understanding and is critical for applications such as human-computer interaction and robotics. However, existing supervised fine-tuning methods typically ignore explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning at test time, which limits their ability to generalize to unseen prompts and domains. To address this issue, we introduce LENS, a scalable reinforcement-learning framework that jointly optimizes the reasoning process and segmentation in an end-to-end manner. We propose unified reinforcement-learning rewards that span sentence-, box-, and segment-level cues, encouraging the model to generate informative CoT rationales while refining mask quality. Using a publicly available 3-billion-parameter vision–language model, i.e., Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct, LENS achieves an average cIoU of 81.2% on the RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg benchmarks, outperforming the strong fine-tuned method, i.e., GLaMM, by up to 5.6%. These results demonstrate that RL-driven CoT reasoning significantly enhances text-prompted segmentation and offers a practical path toward more generalizable Segment Anything models (SAM).

PaperID: 20, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12280 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Diffusionbased multimodal large language models (Diffusion MLLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive non-autoregressive generative capabilities across vision-and-language tasks. However, Diffusion MLLMs exhibit substantially slower inference than autoregressive models: Each denoising step employs full bidirectional self-attention over the entire sequence, resulting in cubic decoding complexity that becomes computationally impractical with thousands of visual tokens. To address this challenge, we propose D³ToM, a Decider-guided dynamic token merging method that dynamically merges redundant visual tokens at different denoising steps to accelerate inference in Diffusion MLLMs. At each denoising step, D³ToM uses decider tokens—the tokens generated in the previous denoising step—to build an importance map over all visual tokens. Then it maintains a proportion of the most salient tokens and merges the remainder through similarity-based aggregation. This plug-and-play module integrates into a single transformer layer, physically shortening the visual token sequence for all subsequent layers without altering model parameters. Moreover, D³ToM employs a merge ratio that dynamically varies with each denoising step, aligns with the native decoding process of Diffusion MLLMs, achieving superior performance under equivalent computational budgets. Extensive experiments show that D³ToM accelerates inference while preserving competitive performance.

PaperID: 21, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19786 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Effectively handling long contexts is challenging for Large Language Models (LLMs) due to the rarity of long texts, high computational demands, and substantial forgetting of shortcontext abilities. Recent approaches have attempted to construct long contexts for instruction tuning, but these methods often require LLMs or human interventions, which are both costly and limited in length and diversity. Also, the drop in short-context performances of present long-context LLMs remains significant. In this paper, we introduce Flora, an effortless (human/LLM-free) long-context construction strategy. Flora can markedly enhance the long-context performance of LLMs by arbitrarily assembling short instructions based on categories and instructing LLMs to generate responses based on long-context meta-instructions. This enables Flora to produce contexts of arbitrary length and scale with rich diversity, while only slightly compromising short-context performance. Experiments on Llama3-8B-Instruct and QwQ-32B show that LLMs enhanced by Flora excel in three long-context benchmarks while maintaining strong performances in short-context tasks.

PaperID: 22, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05615 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding, the task of mapping natural language instructions to precise screen coordinates, is fundamental to autonomous GUI agents. While existing methods achieve strong performance through extensive supervised training or reinforcement learning with labeled rewards, they remain constrained by the cost and availability of pixellevel annotations. We observe that when models generate multiple predictions for the same GUI element, the spatial overlap patterns reveal implicit confidence signals that can guide more accurate localization. Leveraging this insight, GUI-RC (Region Consistency), a test-time scaling method that constructs spatial voting grids from multiple sampled predictions to identify consensus regions where models show highest agreement. Without any training, GUI-RC improves accuracy by 2-3% across various architectures on ScreenSpot benchmarks. We further introduce GUI-RCPO (Region Consistency Policy Optimization), transforming these consistency patterns into rewards for test-time reinforcement learning. By computing how well each prediction aligns with the collective consensus, GUI-RCPO enables models to iteratively refine their outputs on unlabeled data during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate the generality of our approach: using only 1,272 unlabeled data, GUI-RCPO achieves 3-6% accuracy improvements across various architectures on ScreenSpot benchmarks. Our approach reveals the untapped potential of test-time scaling and test-time reinforcement learning for GUI grounding, offering a promising path toward more data-efficient GUI agents.

PaperID: 23, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05248 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Contextual priming, where earlier stimuli covertly bias later judgments, offers an unexplored attack surface for large language models (LLMs). We uncover a contextual priming vulnerability in which the previous response in the dialogue can steer its subsequent behavior toward policyviolating content. While existing jailbreak attacks largely rely on single-turn or multi-turn prompt manipulations, or inject static in-context examples, these methods suffer from limited effectiveness, inefficiency, or semantic drift. We introduce Response Attack (RA), a novel framework that strategically leverages intermediate, mildly harmful responses as contextual primers within a dialogue. By reformulating harmful queries and injecting these intermediate responses before issuing a targeted trigger prompt, RA exploits a previously overlooked vulnerability in LLMs. Extensive experiments across eight state-of-the-art LLMs show that RA consistently achieves significantly higher attack success rates than nine leading jailbreak baselines. Our results demonstrate that the success of RA is directly attributable to the strategic use of intermediate responses, which induce models to generate more explicit and relevant harmful content while maintaining stealth, efficiency, and fidelity to the original query.

PaperID: 24, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04979 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Diffusionbased image compression has demonstrated impressive perceptual performance. However, it suffers from two critical drawbacks: (1) excessive decoding latency due to multi-step sampling, and (2) poor fidelity resulting from over-reliance on generative priors. To address these issues, we propose SODEC, a novel single-step diffusion image compression model. We argue that in image compression, a sufficiently informative latent renders multi-step refinement unnecessary. Based on this insight, we leverage a pre-trained VAE-based model to produce latents with rich information, and replace the iterative denoising process with a single-step decoding. Meanwhile, to improve fidelity, we introduce the fidelity guidance module, encouraging output that is faithful to the original image. Furthermore, we design the rate annealing training strategy to enable effective training under extremely low bitrates. Extensive experiments show that SODEC significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving superior rate-distortion-perception performance. Moreover, compared to previous diffusion-based compression models, SODEC improves decoding speed by more than 20×.

PaperID: 25, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.05179 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Large visionlanguage models (LVLMs) excel at visual understanding but face efficiency challenges due to quadratic complexity when processing long multimodal contexts. While token compression can reduce computational costs, existing approaches are designed for single-view LVLMs and fail to account for the unique multi-view characteristics of high-resolution LVLMs that use dynamic cropping. Current methods treat all tokens uniformly, yet our analysis shows that global thumbnails can naturally guide the compression of local crops by providing holistic context for evaluating informativeness. In this paper, we first analyze the dynamic cropping strategy, revealing both the complementary relationship between thumbnails and crops and the distinct characteristics across different crops. Based on these insights, we propose ''Global Compression Commander'' (GlobalCom2), a novel plug-and-play token compression framework for high-resolution LVLMs. GlobalCom2 uses the thumbnail as a ''commander'' to adaptively guide the compression of local crops, preserving informative details while removing redundancy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GlobalCom2 maintains over 90% of model performance while compressing 90% of visual tokens, reducing FLOPs to 9.1% and peak memory usage to 60% of the original.

PaperID: 26, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19430 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Task scheduling has become increasingly critical for embodied AI, where agents need to follow natural language instructions and execute actions efficiently in 3D physical worlds. Existing datasets for task planning in 3D environments often simplify the problem, lacking operations research knowledge for task scheduling and 3D grounding for realworld applications. In this work, we propose Operations Research Knowledge-based 3D Grounded Task Scheduling (OKS3D), a new task that requires synerization of language understanding, 3D grounding, and efficiency optimization for embodied agents. OKS3D reflects real-world demands by requiring agents to generate efficient, step-by-step schedules that are grounded in 3D space. To facilitate research on OKS3D, we construct a large-scale dataset called OKS3D-60K, comprising 60K tasks across 4K real-world scenes. Furthermore, we propose GRANT, an embodied multi-modal large language model equipped with a simple yet effective scheduling token mechanism to generate efficient task schedules and grounded actions. Extensive experiments on the OKS3D-60K dataset validate the effectiveness of GRANT across language understanding, 3D grounding, and scheduling efficiency.

PaperID: 27, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10729 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly pushed the frontier of egocentric video question answering (EgocentricQA). However, existing benchmarks and studies are mainly limited to common daily activities such as cooking and cleaning. In contrast, realworld deployment inevitably encounters domain shifts, where target domains differ substantially in both visual style and semantic content. To bridge this gap, we introduce EgoCross, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the cross-domain generalization of MLLMs in EgocentricQA. EgoCross covers four diverse and challenging domains, including surgery, industry, extreme sports, and animal perspective, representing realistic and high-impact application scenarios. It comprises approximately 1,000 QA pairs across 798 video clips, spanning four key QA tasks: prediction, recognition, localization, and counting. Each QA pair provides both OpenQA and CloseQA formats to support fine-grained evaluation. Extensive experiments show that most existing MLLMs, whether general-purpose or egocentric-specialized, struggle to generalize to domains beyond daily life, highlighting the limitations of current models. Furthermore, we conduct several pilot studies, e.g., fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, to explore potential improvements. We hope EgoCross and our accompanying analysis will serve as a foundation for advancing domain-adaptive, robust egocentric video understanding.

PaperID: 28, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07607 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Existing opensource datasets for arbitrary-instruction image editing remain suboptimal, while a plug-and-play editing module compatible with community-prevalent generative models is notably absent. In this paper, we first introduce the X2Edit Dataset, a comprehensive dataset covering 14 diverse editing tasks, including subject-driven generation. We utilize the industry-leading unified image generation models and expert models to construct the data. Meanwhile, we design reasonable editing instructions with the VLM and implement various scoring mechanisms to filter the data. As a result, we construct 3.7 million high-quality data with balanced categories. Second, to better integrate seamlessly with community image generation models, we design task-aware MoE-LoRA training based on FLUX.1, with only 8% of the parameters of the full model. To further improve the final performance, we utilize the internal representations of the diffusion model and define positive/negative samples based on image editing types to introduce contrastive learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the model's editing performance is competitive among many excellent models. Additionally, the constructed dataset exhibits substantial advantages over existing open-source datasets.

PaperID: 29, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.11447 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
The slow sampling speed of diffusion models hinders their application in 3D LiDAR scene completion. To address this, we propose DistillationDPO, a novel framework that accelerates sampling through score distillation while simultaneously enhancing generation quality via preference alignment. Distillation-DPO follows a three-step procedure. First, the student model generates paired completion scenes with different initial noises. Second, using LiDAR scene evaluation metrics as preference, we construct winning and losing sample pairs. Third, as our core innovation, Distillation-DPO optimizes the student model by exploiting the difference in score functions between the teacher and student models on the paired completion scenes. This operation performs variational score distillation of the student model but simultaneously encourages the distilled student to prefer the winning samples over the losing ones. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Distillation-DPO achieves higher-quality scene completion than state-of-the-art diffusion models, while accelerating sampling by over 5-fold. To our knowledge, our work is the first to integrate the preference learning principle of DPO into the distillation of diffusion models, offering a new framework of preference-aligned distillation.

PaperID: 30, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04418 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Referring AudioVisual Segmentation (Ref-AVS) aims to segment target objects in audible videos based on given reference expressions. Prior works typically rely on learning latent embeddings via multimodal fusion to prompt a tunable SAM/SAM2 decoder for segmentation, which requires strong pixel-level supervision and lacks interpretability. From a novel perspective of explicit reference understanding, we propose TGS-Agent, which decomposes the task into a Think-Ground-Segment process, mimicking the human reasoning procedure by first identifying the referred object through multimodal analysis, followed by coarse-grained grounding and precise segmentation. To this end, we first propose Ref-Thinker, a multimodal language model capable of reasoning over textual, visual, and auditory cues. We construct an instruction-tuning dataset with explicit object-aware think-answer chains for Ref-Thinker fine-tuning. The object description inferred by Ref-Thinker is used as an explicit prompt for Grounding-DINO and SAM2, which perform grounding and segmentation without relying on pixel-level supervision. Additionally, we introduce R2-AVSBench, a new benchmark with linguistically diverse and reasoning-intensive references for better evaluating model generalization. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on both standard Ref-AVSBench and proposed R2-AVSBench.

PaperID: 31, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08689 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in long video understanding typically mitigate visual redundancy through visual token pruning based on attention distribution. However, while existing methods employ posthoc low-response token pruning in decoder layers, they overlook the input-level semantic correlation between visual tokens and instructions (query). In this paper, we propose QuoTA, an ante-hoc training-free modular that extends existing large video-language models (LVLMs) for visual token assignment based on query-oriented frame-level importance assessment. The query-oriented token selection is crucial as it aligns visual processing with task-specific requirements, optimizing token budget utilization while preserving semantically relevant content. Specifically, (i) QuoTA strategically allocates frame-level importance scores based on query relevance, enabling one-time visual token assignment before cross-modal interactions in decoder layers, (ii) we decouple the query through Chain-of-Thoughts reasoning to facilitate more precise LVLM-based frame importance scoring, and (iii) QuoTA offers a plug-and-play functionality that extends to existing LVLMs. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that implementing QuoTA with LLaVA-Video-7B yields an average performance improvement of 3.2% across six benchmarks (including Video-MME and MLVU) while operating within an identical visual token budget as the baseline.

PaperID: 32, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07101 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Most visual models are designed for sRGB images, yet RAW data offers significant advantages for object detection by preserving sensor information before ISP processing. This enables improved detection accuracy and more efficient hardware designs by bypassing the ISP. However, RAW object detection is challenging due to limited training data, unbalanced pixel distributions, and sensor noise. To address this, we propose SimROD, a lightweight and effective approach for RAW object detection. We introduce a Global Gamma Enhancement (GGE) module, which applies a learnable global gamma transformation with only four parameters, improving feature representation while keeping the model efficient. Additionally, we leverage the green channel's richer signal to enhance local details, aligning with the human eye’s sensitivity and Bayer filter design. Extensive experiments on multiple RAW object detection datasets and detectors demonstrate that SimROD outperforms stateof-the-art methods like RAW-Adapter and DIAP while maintaining efficiency. Our work highlights the potential of RAW data for real-world object detection.

PaperID: 33, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.11332 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
We demonstrate for the first time that a medical image segmentation model can achieve near fully supervised performance using only a single annotated image and abundant unlabeled data. We present MedSMILE, a novel framework that synergistically integrates transductive and inductive learning for this extreme onelabel semi-supervised setting. Its core novelty lies in an iterative loop where a foundation model both bootstraps and refines pseudo-labels for an inductive segmentation model. This process begins with the foundation model performing transductive inference to generate an initial set of pseudo-labels for the unlabeled data pool. This bootstraps an iterative self-training process where the segmentation model is trained and used to generate progressively better labels, with an inter-round refinement step that re-leverages the foundation model to correct errors in uncertain predictions. Experiments on seven datasets across four modalities show MedSMILE recovers 90%–95% of the fully supervised Dice score while decisively outperforming existing semi-supervised techniques that require substantially more annotation. MedSMILE sets a new standard for label-efficient learning in medical image segmentation.

PaperID: 34, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04070 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Navigation instruction generation for visually impaired (VI) individuals (NIGVI) is critical yet relatively underexplored. This study focuses on generating precise, in-situ, step-by-step navigation instructions that are practically usable for VI users. Specifically, we propose LaF-GRPO (LLM-as-Follower GRPO), where an LLM simulates VI user responses to navigation instructions, thereby providing feedback rewards to guide the post-training of a Vision-Language Model (VLM). This enhances instruction accuracy and usability while reducing costly real-world data collection needs. To address the scarcity of dedicated benchmarks in this field, we introduce NIG4VI, a 27k-sample open-source dataset to facilitate training and evaluation. It comprises diverse navigation scenarios with accurate spatial coordinates, supporting detailed and open-ended in-situ instruction generation. Experiments on NIG4VI demonstrate the effectiveness of LaF-GRPO through quantitative metrics (e.g., Zero-(LaF-GRPO) boosts BLEU 14%; SFT+(LaF-GRPO) METEOR 0.542 vs. GPT-4o 0.323), and qualitative analysis further confirms that our method yields more intuitive and safer instructions.

PaperID: 35, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19219 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Overestimation in evaluating large language models (LLMs) has become an increasing concern. Due to the contamination of public benchmarks or imbalanced model training, LLMs may achieve unreal evaluation results on public benchmarks, either intentionally or unintentionally, which leads to unfair comparisons among LLMs and undermines their realistic capability assessments. Existing benchmarks attempt to address these issues by keeping test cases permanently secret, mitigating contamination through human evaluation, or repeatedly collecting and constructing new samples. However, these approaches fail to ensure reproducibility, transparency, and high efficiency simultaneously. Moreover, the extent of overestimation in current LLMs remains unquantified. To address these issues, we propose ArxivRoll, a dynamic evaluation framework inspired by onetime pad encryption in cryptography. ArxivRoll comprises two key components: i) SCP (Sequencing, Cloze, and Prediction), an automated generator for private test cases, and ii) Rugged Scores (RS), metrics that measure the proportion of public benchmark contamination and training bias. Leveraging SCP, ArxivRoll constructs a new benchmark every six months using recent articles from ArXiv and employs them for one-time evaluations of LLM performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the high quality of our benchmark, and we provide a systematic evaluation of current LLMs.

PaperID: 36, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05674 GitHub GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in LLM agentic systems have improved the automation of offensive security tasks, particularly for Capture the Flag (CTF) challenges. We systematically investigate the key factors that drive agent success and provide a detailed recipe for building effective LLMbased offensive security agents. First, we present CTFJudge, a framework leveraging LLM as a judge to analyze agent trajectories and provide granular evaluation across CTF solving steps. Second, we propose a novel metric, CTF Competency Index (CCI) for partial correctness, revealing how closely agent solutions align with human-crafted gold standards. Third, we examine how LLM hyperparameters, namely temperature, top-p, and maximum token length, influence agent performance and automated cybersecurity task planning. For rapid evaluation, we present CTFTiny, a curated benchmark of 50 representative CTF challenges across binary exploitation, web, reverse engineering, forensics, and cryptography. Our findings identify optimal multi-agent coordination settings and lay the groundwork for future LLM agent research in cybersecurity.

PaperID: 37, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18674 GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce Human Motion Unlearning and motivate it through the concrete task of preventing violent 3D motion synthesis, an important safety requirement given that popular textto-motion datasets (HumanML3D and Motion-X) contain from 7% to 15% violent sequences spanning both atomic gestures (e.g., a single punch) and highly compositional actions (e.g., loading and swinging a leg to kick). By focusing on violence unlearning, we demonstrate how removing a challenging, multifaceted concept can serve as a proxy for the broader capability of motion "forgetting." To enable systematic evaluation of Human Motion Unlearning, we establish the first motion unlearning benchmark by automatically filtering HumanML3D and Motion-X datasets to create distinct forget sets (violent motions) and retain sets (safe motions). We introduce evaluation metrics tailored to sequential unlearning, measuring both suppression efficacy and the preservation of realism and smooth transitions. We adapt two state-of-the-art, training-free image unlearning methods (UCE and RECE) to leading text-to-motion architectures (MoMask and BAMM), and propose Latent Code Replacement (LCR), a novel, training-free approach that identifies violent codes in a discrete codebook representation and substitutes them with safe alternatives. Our experiments show that unlearning violent motions is indeed feasible and that acting on latent codes strikes the best trade-off between violence suppression and preserving overall motion quality. This work establishes a foundation for advancing safe motion synthesis across diverse applications.

PaperID: 38, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01766 GitHub

Abstract:
While natural language is commonly used to guide embodied agents, the inherent ambiguity and verbosity of language often hinder the effectiveness of languageguided navigation in complex environments. To this end, we propose Visual Prompt Navigation (VPN), a novel paradigm that guides agents to navigate using only user-provided visual prompts within 2D top-view maps. This visual prompt primarily focuses on marking the visual navigation trajectory on a top-down view of a scene, offering intuitive and spatially grounded guidance without relying on language instructions. It is more friendly for non-expert users and reduces interpretive ambiguity. We build VPN tasks in both discrete and continuous navigation settings, constructing two new datasets, R2R-VP and R2R-CE-VP, by extending existing R2R and R2R-CE episodes with corresponding visual prompts. Furthermore, we introduce VPNet, a dedicated baseline network to handle the VPN tasks, with two data augmentation strategies: view-level augmentation (altering initial headings and prompt orientations) and trajectory-level augmentation (incorporating diverse trajectories from large-scale 3D scenes), to enhance navigation performance. Extensive experiments evaluate how visual prompt forms, top-view map formats, and data augmentation strategies affect the performance of visual prompt navigation.

PaperID: 39, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03956 GitHub

Abstract:
Continual Learning (CL) seeks to enable neural networks to incrementally acquire new knowledge (plasticity) while retaining existing knowledge (stability). Although pretrained models (PTMs) have provided a strong foundation for CL, existing approaches face a fundamental challenge in balancing these two competing objectives. Current methods typically address stability by freezing the PTM backbone, which severely limits the model's plasticity, particularly when incoming data distribution diverges largely from the pre-training data. Alternatively, sequentially fine-tuning the entire PTM can adapt to new knowledge but often leads to catastrophic forgetting, highlighting the critical stability-plasticity trade-off in PTM-based CL. To address this limitation, we propose Adapting PTMs before the core CL process (ACL), a novel framework that introduces a plug-and-play adaptation phase prior to learning each new task. During this phase, ACL refines the PTM backbone by aligning embeddings with their original class prototypes while distancing them from irrelevant classes. This mechanism theoretically and empirically demonstrates desirable balance between stability and plasticity, significantly improving CL performance across benchmarks and integrated methods.

PaperID: 40, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08369 GitHub

Abstract:
This work introduces Textbased Aerial-Ground Person Retrieval (TAG-PR), which aims to retrieve person images from heterogeneous aerial and ground views with textual descriptions. Unlike traditional Text-based Person Retrieval (T-PR), which focuses solely on ground-view images, TAG-PR introduces greater practical significance and presents unique challenges due to the large viewpoint discrepancy across images. To support this task, we contribute: (1) TAG-PEDES dataset, constructed from public benchmarks with automatically generated textual descriptions, enhanced by a diversified text generation paradigm to ensure robustness under view heterogeneity; and (2) TAG-CLIP, a novel retrieval framework that addresses view heterogeneity through a hierarchically-routed mixture of experts module to learn view-specific and view-agnostic features and a viewpoint decoupling strategy to decouple view-specific features for better cross-modal alignment. We evaluate the effectiveness of TAG-CLIP on both the proposed TAG-PEDES and existing T-PR benchmarks.

PaperID: 41, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24480 GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we investigate codeintegrated reasoning (CIR), where models generate code when necessary and integrate feedback by executing it through a code interpreter. To acquire this capability, models must learn when and how to use external code tools effectively, which is supported by tool-augmented reinforcement learning (RL). Despite its benefits, tool-augmented RL can still suffer from potential instability in the learning dynamics. In light of this challenge, we present a systematic approach ETIR (Effective TIR) to improving the training effectiveness and stability of tool-augmented RL for code-integrated reasoning. Specifically, we develop enhanced training strategies that balance exploration and stability, progressively building tool-use capabilities while improving reasoning performance. Through extensive experiments on five mainstream mathematical reasoning benchmarks, our model demonstrates significant performance improvements over multiple competitive baselines. Furthermore, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the mechanism of code-integrated reasoning, revealing several key insights, such as the extension of model’s capability boundaries and the simultaneous improvement of reasoning efficiency through code integration. These findings underscore the potential of code-integrated reasoning as a scalable paradigm for advancing robust and efficient language model reasoning.

PaperID: 42, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.15368 GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce a new task of openworld object counting in videos: given a text description, or an image example, that specifies the target object, the objective is to enumerate all the unique instances of the target objects in the video. This task is especially challenging in crowded scenes with occlusions and objects of similar appearance, where avoiding double counting and identifying reappearances is crucial. To this end, we make the following contributions: we introduce a model, CountVid, for this task. It leverages an image-based counting model, and a promptable video segmentation and tracking model, to enable automated open-world object counting across video frames. To evaluate its performance, we introduce VideoCount, a new dataset for this novel task built from the TAO and MOT20 tracking datasets, as well as from videos of penguins and metal alloy crystallization captured by x-rays. Using this dataset, we demonstrate that CountVid provides accurate object counts, and significantly outperforms strong baselines.

PaperID: 43, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11695 GitHub

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) techniques has unlocked opportunities in generating diverse and compelling advertising images based on referenced product images and textual scene descriptions. This capability substantially reduces human labor and production costs in traditional marketing workflows. However, existing AIGC techniques either demand extensive finetuning for each referenced image to achieve high fidelity, or they struggle to maintain fidelity across diverse products, making them impractical for e-commerce and marketing industries. To tackle this limitation, we first construct AdProd-100K, a large-scale advertising image generation dataset. A key innovation in its construction is our dual data augmentation strategy, which fosters robust, 3D-aware representations crucial for realistic and high-fidelity image synthesis. Leveraging this dataset, we propose RefAdGen, a generation framework that achieves high fidelity through a decoupled design. The framework enforces precise spatial control by injecting a product mask at the U-Net input, and employs an efficient Attention Fusion Module (AFM) to integrate product features. This design effectively resolves the fidelity-efficiency dilemma present in existing methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RefAdGen achieves state-of-the-art performance, showcasing robust generalization by maintaining high fidelity and remarkable visual results for both unseen products and challenging real-world, in-the-wild images. This offers a scalable and cost-effective alternative to traditional workflows.

PaperID: 44, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21682 GitHub

Abstract:
We tackle the challenge of generating the infinitely extendable 3D world large, continuous environments with coherent geometry and realistic appearance. Existing methods face key challenges: 2D-lifting approaches suffer from geometric and appearance inconsistencies across views, 3D implicit representations are hard to scale up, and current 3D foundation models are mostly object-centric, limiting their applicability to scene-level generation. Our key insight is leveraging strong generation priors from pre-trained 3D models for structured scene block generation. To this end, we propose WorldGrow, a hierarchical framework for unbounded 3D scene synthesis. Our method features three core components: (1) a data curation pipeline that extracts high-quality scene blocks for training, making the 3D structured latent representations suitable for scene generation; (2) a 3D block inpainting mechanism that enables context-aware scene extension; and (3) a coarse-to-fine generation strategy that ensures both global layout plausibility and local geometric/textural fidelity. Evaluated on the large-scale 3D-FRONT dataset, WorldGrow achieves SOTA performance in geometry reconstruction, while uniquely supporting infinite scene generation with photorealistic and structurally consistent outputs. These results highlight its capability for constructing large-scale virtual environments and potential for building future world models.

PaperID: 45, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21070 GitHub

Abstract:
Diffusion Transformer (DiT)based video diffusion models generate high-quality videos at scale but incur prohibitive processing latency and memory costs for long videos. To address this, we propose a novel distributed inference strategy, termed DualParal. The core idea is that, instead of generating an entire video on a single GPU, we parallelize computation by partitioning both video frames and model layers across multiple GPUs. However, a naive parallel implementation is not feasible. Because all frames need to share the same noise level, they can't be processed independently. Instead, every step must wait for all others to finish, which cancels out the speed benefits of parallel processing. We overcome this obstacle with a block-wise denoising scheme. Namely, we segment the video into sequential blocks, each with a different noise level. As a result, we process them in a pipeline across the GPUs. Each GPU, holding a subset of the model layers, processes a specific block of frames and passes the results to the next GPU, enabling asynchronous computation and communication. To further optimize performance, we incorporate two key enhancements. Firstly, each GPU uses a feature cache technique to reduce the overhead of smooth transitions by reusing only features involved in cross-frame computation from the prior block, minimizing inter-GPU communication and redundant computation. Secondly, we employ a coordinated noise initialization strategy, ensuring globally consistent temporal dynamics by sharing initial noise patterns across GPUs. Together, these enable fast, artifact-free, and infinitely long video generation. Applied to the latest diffusion transformer video generator, our method efficiently produces 1,025-frame videos with up to 6.54x lower latency and 1.48x lower memory cost on 8xRTX 4090 GPUs.

PaperID: 46, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01842 GitHub

Abstract:
Event cameras have gained increasing popularity in computer vision due to their ultrahigh dynamic range and temporal resolution. However, event networks heavily rely on task-specific designs due to the unstructured data distribution and spatial-temporal (S-T) inhomogeneity, making it hard to reuse existing architectures for new tasks. We propose OmniEvent, an innovative unified event representation learning framework that achieves SOTA performance across diverse tasks, fully removing the need for task-specific designs. Unlike previous methods that treat event data as 3D point clouds with manually tuned S-T scaling weights, OmniEvent proposes a decouple-enhance-fuse paradigm, where the local feature aggregation and enhancement are done independently on the spatial and temporal domains to avoid inhomogeneity issues. Space-filling curves are applied to enable large receptive fields while improving memory and compute efficiency. The features from individual domains are then fused by attention to learn S-T interactions. The output of OmniEvent is a grid-shaped tensor, which enables standard vision models to process event data without architectural changes. With a unified framework and similar hyperparameters, OmniEvent outperforms (task-specific) SOTA by up to 68.2% across 3 representative tasks and 10 datasets (Fig. 1).

PaperID: 47, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02401 GitHub

Abstract:
Realworld graphs or networks are usually heterogeneous, involving multiple types of nodes and relationships. Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) can effectively handle these diverse nodes and edges, capturing heterogeneous information within the graph, thus exhibiting outstanding performance. However, most methods of HGNNs usually involve complex structural designs, leading to problems such as high memory usage, long inference time, and extensive consumption of computing resources. These limitations pose certain challenges for the practical application of HGNNs, especially for resource-constrained devices. To mitigate this issue, we propose the Spiking Heterogeneous Graph Attention Networks (SpikingHAN), which incorporates the brain-inspired and energy-saving properties of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) into heterogeneous graph learning to reduce the computing cost without compromising the performance. Specifically, SpikingHAN aggregates metapath-based neighbor information using a single-layer graph convolution with shared parameters. It then employs a semantic-level attention mechanism to capture the importance of different meta-paths and performs semantic aggregation. Finally, it encodes the heterogeneous information into a spike sequence through SNNs, simulating bioinformatic processing to derive a binarized 1-bit representation of the heterogeneous graph. Comprehensive experimental results from three real-world heterogeneous graph datasets show that SpikingHAN delivers competitive node classification performance. It achieves this with fewer parameters, quicker inference, reduced memory usage, and lower energy consumption.

PaperID: 48, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18028 GitHub

Abstract:
Graphbased clustering algorithms aim to construct an affinity graph that accurately captures the intrinsic structure of a dataset. To achieve this goal, these algorithms often use the k-nearest-neighbor (k-nn) method to build a graph regularizer for the required affinity graph, enabling it to have a grouping effect. However, due to the complex nature of real-world data, the k-nn method often fails to capture the true neighborhood relationships of a dataset, which in turn limits the quality of the learned affinity graph. Motivated by the insight that a learned affinity graph itself can more effectively reflect the underlying data structure, we propose a new graph-based clustering method, termed Self-learned Graph Regression (SGR). Unlike traditional approaches, SGR constructs its graph regularizer directly from the affinity graph being learned, allowing the graph to adaptively capture more accurate structural information. To solve the proposed problem, we develop an optimization algorithm along with an acceleration strategy. We further analyze the convergence and computational complexity of the proposed algorithm. Extensive clustering experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art graph-based clustering algorithms.

PaperID: 49, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.16406 GitHub

Abstract:
Affective Forecasting is an psychology task that involves predicting an individual's future emotional responses, often hampered by reliance on external factors leading to inaccuracies, and typically remains at a qualitative analysis stage. To address these challenges, we narrows the scope of Affective Forecasting by introducing the concept of Humaninteraction-based Emotion Forecasting (EF). This task is set within the context of a two-party interaction, positing that an individual's emotions are significantly influenced by their interaction partner's emotional expressions and informational cues. This dynamic provides a structured perspective for exploring the patterns of emotional change, thereby enhancing the feasibility of emotion forecasting.

PaperID: 50, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14541 GitHub

Abstract:
Efficient reference structures are essential in video compression, enabling the exploitation of temporal dependencies across frames to reduce redundancy. In this paper, we delve into the interframe reference management mechanism in neural video codecs (NVCs). Previous schemes have inherited the reference propagation mechanism with the guidance of predefined reference structure, but the reference modeling across diverse reference sources remains underexplored. Moreover, the mismatch between the reference structure used for motion estimation and motion compensation limits the effectiveness of inter-frame prediction. To address the above limitations, we propose the unified reference hierarchy that integrates a learned hierarchical reference structure into the existing inherent reference propagation mechanism. Specifically, we first propose the hierarchical reference structure (HRS) to manage the multiple temporal contexts in the propagated reference feature, where a hierarchy-aware reference modulation module is integrated to select the most relevant reference features across different quality levels under the guidance of the reference balance loss. In addition, we propose the HRS-guided feature-wise inter-frame prediction that learns the low-rank approximation of the selected reference feature for ensuring the consistency and improving the inter-frame prediction performance. We conduct experiments on a state-of-the-art NVC, DCVC-DC. Experimental results show that our codec achieves an average 26% bitrate saving over H.266/VVC, and a 28.2% bitrate reduction compared to DCVC-DC without increasing the decoding complexity.

PaperID: 51, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02763 GitHub

Abstract:
Recently, Allin-One image restoration (AiOIR) has advanced significantly, offering promising solutions for complex real-world degradations. However, most existing approaches heavily rely on degradation-specific representation learning, which can lead to oversmoothing and artifacts in the restored images. To address this limitation, we propose ClearAIR, a novel AiOIR framework inspired by human visual perception and designed with a hierarchical restoration strategy in a coarse-to-fine manner. First, leveraging the global priority characteristic of early human visual perception, we employ an image quality assessment model to evaluate the overall image structure and degradation level. Next, we introduce a Semantic Guidance Unit to provide coarse semantic region guidance and a Task Identifier to predict local degradation types, enabling a more informed characterization of local degradation patterns. Finally, aiming at the challenge of local detail restoration, we propose an Internal Clue Reuse Mechanism that deeply mines the internal information of the image in a self-supervised manner to enhance the model’s capacity for fine-detail recovery. Experimental results demonstrate that ClearAIR achieves superior restoration performance across diverse synthetic and real-world datasets.

PaperID: 52, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.04258 GitHub

Abstract:
Laboratory mice, particularly the C57BL/6 strain, are essential animal models in biomedical research. However, accurate 3D surface motion reconstruction of mice remains a significant challenge due to their complex nonrigid deformations, textureless fur-covered surfaces, and the lack of realistic 3D mesh models. Moreover, existing visual datasets for mice reconstruction only contain sparse viewpoints without 3D geometries. To fill the gap, we introduce MoReMouse, the first monocular dense 3D reconstruction network specifically designed for C57BL/6 mice. To achieve high-fidelity 3D reconstructions, we present three key innovations. First, we create the first high-fidelity, dense-view synthetic dataset for C57BL/6 mice by rendering a realistic, anatomically accurate Gaussian mouse avatar. Second, MoReMouse leverages a transformer-based feedforward architecture combined with triplane representation, enabling high-quality 3D surface generation from a single image, optimized for the intricacies of small animal morphology. Third, we propose geodesic-based continuous correspondence embeddings on the mouse surface, which serve as strong semantic priors, improving surface consistency and reconstruction stability, especially in highly dynamic regions like limbs and tail. Through extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we demonstrate that MoReMouse significantly outperforms existing open-source methods in both accuracy and robustness.

PaperID: 53, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18407 GitHub

Abstract:
Visionlanguage models bridge visual and linguistic understanding and have proven to be powerful for video recognition tasks. Existing methods primarily rely on parameter-efficient fine-tuning of pre-trained image-text models, suffering from limited interpretability and poor generalization due to inadequate temporal modeling. To address these, we propose a simple yet effective video-to-text discretization framework. Our approach leverages the frozen text encoder to build a visual codebook derived from video class labels, exploiting the many-to-one contrastive alignment between visual and textual embeddings in multimodal pretraining. This enables the transformation of temporal visual features into discrete textual tokens via feature lookups, yielding interpretable video representations through explicit video modeling. Then, to improve robustness against noisy or irrelevant frames, we introduce a confidence-aware fusion module that dynamically weights keyframes based on their semantic relevance, as measured by the codebook. Furthermore, we incorporate learnable text prompts to conduct adaptive codebook updates during training. Experiments on four datasets, including HMDB-51, UCF-101, Something-Something-v2, and Kinetics-400, validate the superiority of our approach, achieving competitive improvements over state-of-the-art approaches.

PaperID: 54, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02939 GitHub

Abstract:
Generative recommendation (GR) is an emerging paradigm that tokenizes items into discrete tokens and learns to autoregressively generate the next tokens as predictions. While this tokengeneration paradigm is expected to surpass traditional transductive methods, potentially generating new items directly based on semantics, we empirically show that GR models predominantly generate items seen during training and struggle to recommend unseen items. In this paper, we propose SpecGR, a plug-and-play framework that enables GR models to recommend new items in an inductive setting. SpecGR uses a drafter model with inductive capability to propose candidate items, which may include both existing items and new items. The GR model then acts as a verifier, accepting or rejecting candidates while retaining its strong ranking capabilities. We further introduce the guided re-drafting technique to make the proposed candidates more aligned with the outputs of generative recommendation models, improving the verification efficiency. We consider two variants for drafting: (1) using an auxiliary drafter model for better flexibility, or (2) leveraging the GR model's own encoder for parameter-efficient self-drafting. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that SpecGR exhibits both strong inductive recommendation ability and the best overall performance among the compared methods.

PaperID: 55, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02391 GitHub

Abstract:
Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable success in generative tasks, including audio superresolution (SR). In many applications like movie post-production and album mastering, substantial computational budgets are available for achieving superior audio quality. However, while existing diffusion approaches typically increase sampling steps to improve quality, the performance remains fundamentally limited by the stochastic nature of the sampling process, leading to high-variance and quality-limited outputs. Here, rather than simply increasing the number of sampling steps, we propose a different paradigm through inference-time scaling for SR, which explores multiple solution trajectories during the sampling process. Different task-specific verifiers are developed, and two search algorithms, including the random search and zero-order search for SR, are introduced. By actively guiding the exploration of the high-dimensional solution space through verifier-algorithm combinations, we enable more robust and higher-quality outputs. Through extensive validation across diverse audio domains (speech, music, sound effects) and frequency ranges, we demonstrate consistent performance gains, achieving improvements of up to 9.70% in aesthetics, 5.88% in speaker similarity, 15.20% in word error rate, and 46.98% in spectral distance for speech SR from 4 kHz to 24 kHz, showcasing the effectiveness of our approach.

PaperID: 56, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07993 GitHub

Abstract:
Existing evaluation protocols for brain visual decoding predominantly rely on coarse metrics that obscure intermodel differences, lack neuroscientific foundation, and fail to capture fine-grained visual distinctions. To address these limitations, we introduce BASIC, a unified, multigranular evaluation framework that jointly quantifies structural fidelity, inferential alignment, and contextual coherence between decoded and ground-truth images. For the structural level, we introduce a hierarchical suite of segmentation-based metrics, including foreground, semantic, instance, and component masks, anchored in granularity-aware correspondence across mask structures. For the semantic level, we extract structured scene representations encompassing objects, attributes, and relationships using multimodal large language models, enabling detailed, scalable, and context-rich comparisons with ground-truth stimuli. We benchmark a diverse set of visual decoding methods across multiple stimulus-neuroimaging datasets within this unified evaluation framework. Together, these criteria provide a more discriminative, interpretable, and comprehensive foundation for evaluating brain visual decoding methods.

PaperID: 57, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21542 GitHub

Abstract:
The selfattention mechanism has been a key factor in the advancement of vision Transformers. However, its quadratic complexity imposes a heavy computational burden in high-resolution scenarios, restricting the practical application. Previous methods attempt to mitigate this issue by introducing handcrafted patterns such as locality or sparsity, which inevitably compromise model capacity. In this paper, we present a novel attention paradigm termed Circulant Attention by exploiting the inherent efficient pattern of self-attention. Specifically, we first identify that the self-attention matrix in vision Transformers often approximates the Block Circulant matrix with Circulant Blocks (BCCB), a kind of structured matrix whose multiplication with other matrices can be performed in O(NlogN) time. Leveraging this interesting pattern, we explicitly model the attention map as its nearest BCCB matrix and propose an efficient computation algorithm for fast calculation. The resulting approach closely mirrors vanilla self-attention, differing only in its use of BCCB matrices. Since our design is inspired by the inherent efficient paradigm, it not only delivers O(NlogN) computation complexity, but also largely maintains the capacity of standard self-attention. Extensive experiments on diverse visual tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, establishing circulant attention as a promising alternative to self-attention for vision Transformer architectures.

PaperID: 58, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19887 GitHub

Abstract:
Knowledge distillation (KD) has proven highly effective for compressing large models and enhancing the performance of smaller ones. However, its effectiveness diminishes in crossmodal scenarios, such as vision-to-language distillation, where inconsistencies in representation across modalities lead to difficult knowledge transfer. To address this challenge, we propose frequency-decoupled cross-modal knowledge distillation, a method designed to decouple and balance knowledge transfer across modalities by leveraging frequency-domain features. We observed that low-frequency features exhibit high consistency across different modalities, whereas high-frequency features demonstrate extremely low cross-modal similarity. Accordingly, we apply distinct losses to these features: enforcing strong alignment in the low-frequency domain and introducing relaxed alignment for high-frequency features. We also propose a scale consistency loss to address distributional shifts between modalities, and employ a shared classifier to unify feature spaces. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark datasets show our method substantially outperforms traditional KD and state-of-the-art cross-modal KD approaches.

PaperID: 59, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09138 GitHub

Abstract:
Class imbalance has been extensively studied in singleview scenarios; however, addressing this challenge in multi-view contexts remains an open problem, with even scarcer research focusing on trustworthy solutions. In this paper, we tackle a particularly challenging class imbalance problem in multi-view scenarios: long-tailed classification. We propose TMLC, a Trusted Multi-view Long-tailed Classification framework, which makes contributions on two critical aspects: opinion aggregation and pseudo-data generation. Specifically, inspired by Social Identity Theory, we design a group consensus opinion aggregation mechanism that guides decision-making toward the direction favored by the majority of the group. In terms of pseudo-data generation, we introduce a novel distance metric to adapt SMOTE for multi-view scenarios and develop an uncertainty-guided data generation module that produces high-quality pseudo-data, effectively mitigating the adverse effects of class imbalance. Extensive experiments on long-tailed multi-view datasets demonstrate that our model is capable of achieving superior performance.

PaperID: 60, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22376 GitHub

Abstract:
Inferencetime scaling has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing the reasoning performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing approaches often rely on heuristic strategies for parallel sampling, lacking a principled foundation. To address this gap, we propose a probabilistic framework that formalizes the optimality of inference-time scaling under the assumption that parallel samples are independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.), and where the Best-of-N selection strategy follows a probability distribution that can be estimated. Within this framework, we derive a theoretical lower bound on the required number of samples to achieve a target performance level, providing the first principled guidance for compute-efficient scaling. Leveraging this insight, we develop OptScale, a practical algorithm that dynamically determines the optimal number of sampled responses. OptScale employs a language model-based predictor to estimate probabilistic prior parameters, enabling the decision of the minimal number of samples needed that satisfy predefined performance thresholds and confidence levels. Extensive experiments on representative reasoning benchmarks (including MATH-500, GSM8K, AIME, and AMC) demonstrate that OptScale significantly reduces sampling overhead while remaining better or on par with state-of-the-art reasoning performance. Our work offers both a theoretical foundation and a practical solution for principled inference-time scaling, addressing a critical gap in the efficient deployment of LLMs for complex reasoning.

PaperID: 61, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08746 GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have been widely deployed across numerous fields. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) leverages reward models (RMs) as proxies for human preferences to align LLM behaviors with human values, making the accuracy, reliability, and interpretability of RMs critical for effective alignment. However, traditional RMs lack interpretability, offer limited insight into the reasoning behind reward assignments, and are inflexible toward user preference shifts. While recent multidimensional RMs aim for improved interpretability, they often fail to provide featurelevel attribution and require costly annotations. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the Sparse Autoencoder-Enhanced Reward Model (SARM), a novel architecture that integrates a pretrained Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) into a reward model. SARM maps the hidden activations of LLM-based RM into an interpretable, sparse, and monosemantic feature space, from which a scalar head aggregates feature activations to produce transparent and conceptually meaningful reward scores. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that SARM facilitates direct feature-level attribution of reward assignments, allows dynamic adjustment to preference shifts, and achieves superior alignment performance compared to conventional reward models.

PaperID: 62, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.02470 GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce PASTA (Perceptual Assessment System for explanaTion of Artificial Intelligence), a novel humancentric framework for evaluating eXplainable AI (XAI) techniques in computer vision. Our first contribution is the creation of the PASTA-dataset, the first large-scale benchmark that spans a diverse set of models and both saliency-based and concept-based explanation methods. This dataset enables robust, comparative analysis of XAI techniques based on human judgment. Our second contribution is an automated, data-driven benchmark that predicts human preferences using the PASTA-dataset. This scoring called PASTA-score method offers scalable, reliable, and consistent evaluation aligned with human perception. Additionally, our benchmark allows for comparisons between explanations across different modalities, an aspect previously unaddressed. We then propose to apply our scoring method to probe the interpretability of existing models and to build more human interpretable XAI methods.

PaperID: 63, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.10535 GitHub

Abstract:
Transparent models, which provide inherently interpretable predictions, are receiving significant attention in highstakes domains. However, despite much real-world data being collected as time series, there is a lack of studies on transparent time series models. To address this gap, we propose a novel transparent neural network model for time series called Generalized Additive Time Series Model (GATSM). GATSM consists of two parts: 1) independent feature networks to learn feature representations, and 2) a transparent temporal module to learn temporal patterns across different time steps using the feature representations. This structure allows GATSM to effectively capture temporal patterns and handle varying-length time series while preserving transparency. Empirical experiments show that GATSM significantly outperforms existing generalized additive models and achieves comparable performance to black-box time series models, such as recurrent neural networks and Transformer. In addition, we demonstrate that GATSM finds interesting patterns in time series.

PaperID: 64, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06838 GitHub

Abstract:
Cooperative perception is critical for autonomous driving, overcoming the inherent limitations of a single vehicle, such as occlusions and constrained fieldsof-view. However, current approaches sharing dense Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features are constrained by quadratically-scaling communication costs and the lack of flexibility and interpretability for precise alignment across asynchronous or disparate viewpoints. While emerging sparse query-based methods offer an alternative, they often suffer from inadequate geometric representations, suboptimal fusion strategies, and training instability. In this paper, we propose SparseCoop, a fully sparse cooperative perception framework for 3D detection and tracking that completely discards intermediate BEV representations. Our framework features a trio of innovations: a kinematic grounded instance query that uses an explicit state vector with 3D geometry and velocity for precise spatio-temporal alignment; a coarse-to-fine aggregation module that effectively integrates information from both matched and unmatched instances; and a cooperative instance denoising task that provides stable, abundant supervision to accelerate and stabilize training. Experiments on V2X-Seq and Griffin datasets show SparseCoop achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, it delivers this performance with superior computational efficiency and a highly competitive transmission cost, while showing remarkable robustness to real-world challenges like communication latency.

PaperID: 65, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17606 GitHub

Abstract:
Understanding brain function represents a fundamental goal in neuroscience, with critical implications for therapeutic interventions and neural engineering applications. Computational modeling provides a quantitative framework for accelerating this understanding, but faces a fundamental tradeoff between computational efficiency and high-fidelity modeling. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel Energy-based Autoregressive Generation (EAG) framework that employs an energy-based transformer learning temporal dynamics in latent space through strictly proper scoring rules, enabling efficient generation with realistic population and single-neuron spiking statistics. Evaluation on synthetic Lorenz datasets and two Neural Latents Benchmark datasets (MC_Maze and Area2_bump) demonstrates that EAG achieves state-of-the-art generation quality with substantial computational efficiency improvements, particularly over diffusion-based methods. Beyond optimal performance, conditional generation applications show two capabilities: generalizing to unseen behavioral contexts and improving motor brain-computer interface decoding accuracy using synthetic neural data. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of energy-based modeling for neural population dynamics with applications in neuroscience research and neural engineering.

PaperID: 66, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11012 GitHub

Abstract:
The ability to engineer optimized protein variants has transformative potential for biotechnology and medicine. Prior sequencebased optimization methods struggle with the high-dimensional complexities due to the epistasis effect and the disregard for structural constraints. To address this, we propose HADES, a Bayesian optimization method utilizing Hamiltonian dynamics to efficiently sample from a structure-aware approximated posterior. Leveraging momentum and uncertainty in the simulated physical movements, HADES enables rapid transition of proposals toward promising areas. A position discretization procedure is introduced to propose discrete protein sequences from such continuous state system. The posterior surrogate is powered by a two-stage encoder-decoder framework to determine the structure and function relationships between mutant neighbors, consequently learning a smoothed landscape to sample from. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in in-silico evaluations across most metrics. Remarkably, our approach offers a unique advantage by leveraging the mutual constraints between protein structure and sequence, facilitating the design of protein sequences with similar structures and optimized properties.

PaperID: 67, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02771 GitHub

Abstract:
Visual abductive reasoning (VAR) is a challenging task that requires AI systems to infer the most likely explanation for incomplete visual observations. While recent MLLMs develop strong generalpurpose multimodal reasoning capabilities, they remain fall short in abductive inference, as compared to human beings. To bridge this gap, we draw inspiration from the interplay between verbal and pictorial abduction in human cognition, and propose to strengthen abduction of MLLMs by mimicking such dual-mode behavior. Concretely, we introduce AbductiveMLLM comprising of two synergistic components: REASONER and IMAGINER. The REASONER operates in the verbal domain. It first explores a broad space of possible explanations using a blind LLM and then prunes visually incongruent hypotheses based on cross-modal causal alignment. The remaining hypotheses are introduced into the MLLM as targeted priors, steering its reasoning toward causally coherent explanations. The IMAGINER, on the other hand, further guides MLLMs by emulating human-like pictorial thinking. It conditions a text-to-image diffusion model on both the input video and the REASONER’s output embeddings to “imagine” plausible visual scenes that correspond to verbal explanation, thereby enriching MLLMs' contextual grounding. The two components are trained jointly in an end-to-end manner. Experiments on standard VAR benchmarks show that AbductiveMLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance, consistently outperforming traditional solutions and advanced MLLMs.

PaperID: 68, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08519 GitHub

Abstract:
HumanCentric Video Generation (HCVG) methods seek to synthesize human videos from multimodal inputs, including text, images, and audio. Existing methods struggle to effectively coordinate these heterogeneous modalities due to two challenges: the scarcity of modality-complete data and the difficulty of jointly modeling triplet conditions without performance degradation. In this work, we present HuMo, a unified HCVG framework for collaborative multimodal control. For the first challenge, we construct an incomplete-yet-complementary dataset for improved data utilization efficiency and training scalability. For the second challenge, we propose a two-stage progressive multimodal training paradigm with task-specific strategies at each stage. In the first stage, to balance the text-following and subject-preservation abilities, we adopt the minimal-invasive image injection strategy. In the second stage, to enhance audio-visual sync, we propose a focus-by-predicting strategy that implicitly guides the model to associate audio with facial regions. For joint learning of controllabilities across multi-modal inputs, we progressively incorporate the audio-visual sync task, building on previously acquired capabilities. During inference, for flexible and fine-grained multimodal control, we design a stage-adaptive Classifier-Free Guidance strategy that dynamically adjusts guidance weights across denoising steps. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that HuMo surpasses specialized state-of-the-art methods in sub-tasks, establishing a unified framework for collaborative multimodal-conditioned HCVG.

PaperID: 69, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.19203 GitHub

Abstract:
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are shown to be vulnerable to backdoor poisoning attacks, with most research focusing on digital triggers that consist of artificial patterns added to testtime inputs to induce targeted misclassification. Physical triggers, which are natural objects embedded in real-world scenes, offer a promising alternative for attackers as they can activate backdoors in real-time without digital manipulation. However, existing physical backdoor attacks are dirty-label, meaning that attackers must change the labels of poisoned inputs to the target label. The inconsistency between image content and label exposes the attack to human inspection, reducing its stealthiness in real-world settings. To address this limitation, we introduce Clean-Label Physical Backdoor Attack (CLPBA), a new paradigm of physical backdoor attack that does not require label manipulation and trigger injection at the training stage. Instead, the attacker injects imperceptible perturbations into a small number of target class samples to backdoor a model. By framing the attack as a Dataset Distillation problem, we develop three CLPBA variants, namely Parameter Matching, Gradient Matching, and Feature Matching, that craft effective poisons under both linear probing and full-finetuning training settings. In hard scenarios that require backdoor generalizability in the physical world, CLPBA is shown to even surpass Dirty-label attack baselines. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CLPBA via extensive experiments on two collected physical backdoor datasets for facial recognition and animal classification.

PaperID: 70, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10481 GitHub

Abstract:
Pretrained visionlanguage models exhibit strong zero-shot classification capabilities, but their predictions degrade significantly under common image corruptions. To improve robustness, many test-time adaptation (TTA) methods adopt positive data augmentation (PDA), which generates multiple views of each test sample to reduce prediction variance. However, these methods suffer from two key limitations. First, it introduces considerable computational overhead due to the large number of augmentations required per image. Second, it fails to mitigate prediction bias, where the model tends to predict certain classes disproportionately under corruption, as PDA operates on corrupted inputs and typically does not remove the corruption itself. To address these challenges, we propose Panda, a novel TTA method based on negative data augmentation (NDA). Unlike positive augmentations that preserve object semantics, Panda generates negative augmentations by disrupting semantic content. It divides images into patches and randomly assembles them from a shared patch pool. These negatively augmented images retain corruption-specific features while discarding object-relevant signals. We then subtract the mean feature of these negative samples from the original image feature, effectively suppressing corruption-related components while preserving class-relevant information. This mitigates prediction bias under distribution shifts. Importantly, Panda allows augmentation to be shared across samples within a batch, resulting in minimal computational overhead. Panda can be seamlessly integrated into existing test-time adaptation frameworks and substantially improve their robustness. Our experiments indicate that Panda delivers superior performance compared to PDA methods, and a wide range of TTA methods exhibit significantly enhanced performance when integrated with Panda.

PaperID: 71, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12590 GitHub

Abstract:
Personalized image generation aims to produce images of userspecified concepts while enabling flexible editing. Recent training-free approaches, while exhibiting higher computational efficiency than training-based methods, struggle with identity preservation, applicability, and compatibility with diffusion transformers (DiTs). In this paper, we uncover the untapped potential of DiT, where simply replacing denoising tokens with those of a reference subject achieves zero-shot subject reconstruction. This simple yet effective feature injection technique unlocks diverse scenarios, from personalization to image editing. Building upon this observation, we propose Personalize Anything, a training-free framework that achieves personalized image generation in DiT through:1) timestep-adaptive token replacement that enforces subject consistency via early-stage injection and enhances flexibility through late-stage regularization, and 2) patch perturbation strategies to boost structural diversity. Our method seamlessly supports layout-guided generation, multi-subject personalization, and mask-controlled editing. Evaluations demonstrate that our method, without requiring any training, achieves state-of-the-art performance in identity preservation and versatility. Our work establishes new insights into DiTs while delivering a practical paradigm for efficient personalization.

PaperID: 72, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02254 GitHub

Abstract:
Semisupervised semantic segmentation, which leverages a limited set of labeled images, helps to relieve the heavy annotation burden. While pseudo-labeling strategies yield promising results, there is still room for enhancing the reliability of pseudo-labels. Hence, we develop a semi-supervised framework, namely DerProp, equipped with a novel derivative label propagation to rectify imperfect pseudo-labels. Our label propagation method imposes discrete derivative operations on pixel-wise feature vectors as additional regularization, thereby generating strictly regularized similarity metrics. Doing so effectively alleviates the ill-posed problem that identical similarities correspond to different features, through constraining the solution space. Extensive experiments are conducted to verify the rationality of our design, and demonstrate our superiority over other methods.

PaperID: 73, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04440 GitHub

Abstract:
Textto-video generation models have shown significant progress in recent years. However, they still struggle with compositional text prompts, such as attribute binding for multiple objects, temporal dynamics associated with differ- ent objects, and interactions between objects. Inspired by ef- fective human creative workflow, we propose GENMAC, a multi-agent collaboration framework that enables composi- tional text-to-video generation. The framework incorporates a three-stage collaborative workflow: DESIGN, GENERATION, and REDESIGN, with an iterative loop between the latter two stages to progressively verify and refine the generated videos. In the DESIGN stage, a large language model (Design Agent) plans objects with layouts, and then a video gener- ation model synthesizes videos in the GENERATION stage. The REDESIGN stage is the most challenging stage that aims to verify the generated videos, suggest corrections, and re- design the text prompts, frame-wise layouts, and guidance scales for the next iteration of generation. To avoid halluci- nation of single-agent and naive multi-agent frameworks, we apply a division-of-labor strategy in this stage by introducing a sequence of specialized agents, executed by MLLMs (mul- timodal large language models): Verification Agent, Sugges- tion Agent, Correction Agent, and Output Structuring Agent. Furthermore, to tackle diverse scenarios of compositional text-to-video generation, we design a self-routing mechanism to adaptively select the proper correction agent from a suite of correction agents, each specialized for one scenario. Ex- tensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of GEN- MAC by generating videos based on long compositional text prompts and achieving state-of-the-art in the compositional text-to-video generation benchmark.

PaperID: 74, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03135 GitHub

Abstract:
Generating interactioncentric videos, such as those depicting humans or robots interacting with objects, is crucial for embodied intelligence, as they provide rich and diverse visual priors for robot learning, manipulation policy training, and affordance reasoning. However, existing methods often struggle to model such complex and dynamic interactions. While recent studies show that masks can serve as effective control signals and enhance generation quality, obtaining dense and precise mask annotations remains a major challenge for real-world use. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Mask2IV, a novel framework specifically designed for interaction-centric video generation. It adopts a decoupled two-stage pipeline that first predicts plausible motion trajectories for both actor and object, then generates a video conditioned on these trajectories. This design eliminates the need for dense mask inputs from users while preserving the flexibility to manipulate the interaction process. Furthermore, Mask2IV supports versatile and intuitive control, allowing users to specify the target object of interaction and guide the motion trajectory through action descriptions or spatial position cues. To support systematic training and evaluation, we curate two benchmarks covering diverse action and object categories across both human-object interaction and robotic manipulation scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior visual realism and controllability compared to existing baselines.

PaperID: 75, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15208 GitHub

Abstract:
Transferring 2D textures onto complex 3D scenes plays a vital role in enhancing the efficiency and controllability of 3D multimedia content creation. However, existing 3D style transfer methods primarily focus on transferring abstract artistic styles to 3D scenes. These methods often overlook the geometric information of the scene, which makes it challenging to achieve highquality 3D texture transfer results. In this paper, we present GT2-GS, a geometry-aware texture transfer framework for gaussian splatting. First, we propose a geometry-aware texture transfer loss that enables view-consistent texture transfer by leveraging prior view-dependent feature information and texture features augmented with additional geometric parameters. Moreover, an adaptive fine-grained control module is proposed to address the degradation of scene information caused by low-granularity texture features. Finally, a geometry preservation branch is introduced. This branch refines the geometric parameters using additionally bound Gaussian color priors, thereby decoupling the optimization objectives of appearance and geometry. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and controllability of our method. Through geometric awareness, our approach achieves texture transfer results that better align with human visual perception.

PaperID: 76, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15123 GitHub

Abstract:
Promptable segmentation models such as SAM have established a powerful paradigm, enabling strong generalization to unseen objects and domains with minimal user input, including points, bounding boxes, and text prompts. Among these, bounding boxes stand out as particularly effective, often outperforming points while significantly reducing annotation costs. However, current training and evaluation protocols typically rely on synthetic prompts generated through simple heuristics, offering limited insight into realworld robustness. In this paper, we investigate the robustness of promptable segmentation models to natural variations in bounding box prompts. First, we conduct a controlled user study and collect thousands of real bounding box annotations. Our analysis reveals substantial variability in segmentation quality across users for the same model and instance, indicating that SAM-like models are highly sensitive to natural prompt noise. Then, since exhaustive testing of all possible user inputs is computationally prohibitive, we reformulate robustness evaluation as a white-box optimization problem over the bounding box prompt space. We introduce BREPS, a method for generating adversarial bounding boxes that minimize or maximize segmentation error while adhering to naturalness constraints. Finally, we benchmark state-of-the-art models across 10 datasets, spanning everyday scenes to medical imaging.

PaperID: 77, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.15321 GitHub

Abstract:
Autoregressive models, built based on the Next Token Prediction (NTP) paradigm, show great potential in developing a unified framework that integrates both language and vision tasks. Pioneering works introduce NTP to autoregressive visual generation tasks. In this work, we rethink the NTP for autoregressive image generation and extend it to a novel Next Patch Prediction (NPP) paradigm. Our key idea is to group and aggregate image tokens into patch tokens with higher information density. By using patch tokens as a more compact input sequence, the autoregressive model is trained to predict the next patch, significantly reducing computational costs. To further exploit the natural hierarchical structure of image data, we propose a multiscale coarse-to-fine patch grouping strategy. With this strategy, the training process begins with a large patch size and ends with vanilla NTP where the patch size is 1x1, thus maintaining the original inference process without modifications. Extensive experiments across a diverse range of model sizes demonstrate that NPP could reduce the training cost to around 0.6 times while improving image generation quality by up to 1.0 FID score on the ImageNet 256x256 generation benchmark. Notably, our method retains the original autoregressive model architecture without introducing additional trainable parameters or specifically designing a custom image tokenizer, offering a flexible and plug-and-play solution for enhancing autoregressive visual generation.

PaperID: 78, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08048 GitHub

Abstract:
Fewshot detection-based counters estimate the number of instances in the image specified only by a few test-time exemplars. A common approach to localize objects across multiple sizes is to merge backbone features of different resolutions. Furthermore, to enable small object detection in densely populated regions, the input image is commonly upsampled and tiling is applied to cope with the increased computational and memory requirements. Because of these ad-hoc solutions, existing counters struggle with images containing diverse-sized objects and densely populated regions of small objects. We propose GeCo2, an end-to-end few-shot counting and detection method that explicitly addresses the object scale issues. A new dense query representation gradually aggregates exemplar-specific feature information across scales that leads to high-resolution dense queries that enable detection of large as well as small objects. GeCo2 surpasses state-of-the-art few-shot counters in counting as well as detection accuracy by ~10% while running ~3x faster at smaller GPU memory footprint.

PaperID: 79, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13222 GitHub

Abstract:
Appearancebased gaze estimation, aiming to predict accurate 3D gaze direction from a single facial image, has made promising progress in recent years. However, most methods suffer significant performance degradation in cross-domain evaluation due to interference from gaze-irrelevant factors, such as expressions, wearables, and image quality. To alleviate this problem, we present a novel Hybrid-domain Adaptative Representation Learning (shorted by HARL) framework that exploits multi-source hybrid datasets to learn robust gaze representation. More specifically, we propose to disentangle gaze-relevant representation from low-quality facial images by aligning features extracted from high-quality near-eye images in an unsupervised domain-adaptation manner, which hardly requires any computational or inference costs. Additionally, we analyze the effect of head-pose and design a simple yet efficient sparse graph fusion module to explore the geometric constraint between gaze direction and head-pose, leading to a dense and robust gaze representation. Extensive experiments on EyeDiap, MPIIFaceGaze, and Gaze360 datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy of 5.02, 3.36, and 9.26 degrees respectively, and present competitive performances through cross-dataset evaluation.

PaperID: 80, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.00504 GitHub

Abstract:
Accurately simulating existing 3D objects and a wide variety of materials often demands expert knowledge and timeconsuming physical parameter tuning to achieve the desired dynamic behavior. We introduce MotionPhysics, an end‑to‑end differentiable framework that infers plausible physical parameters from a user-proved natural language prompt for a chosen 3D scene of interest, removing the need for guidance from ground‑truth trajectories or annotated videos. Our approach first utilizes a multimodal large language model to estimate material parameter values, which are constrained to be within plausible ranges. We further propose a learnable motion distillation loss, which extracts robust motion priors from pretrained video diffusion models while minimizing appearance and geometry inductive biases to guide the simulation. We evaluate MotionPhysics across more than thirty scenarios, including real-world, human-designed, and AI-generated 3D objects, spanning a wide range of materials such as elastic solids, metals, foams, sand, and both Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids. We demonstrate that it produces visually realistic dynamic simulations guided by natural language, surpassing the state of the art, with physically plausible parameters that are automatically determined.

PaperID: 81, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.20032 GitHub

Abstract:
With the exponential growth of video traffic, traditional video streaming systems are approaching their limits in communication capacity. To further reduce bitrate while maintaining quality, we propose Promptus, a disruptive semantic communication system that streams prompts instead of videos. Promptus represents the realworld video with a series of "prompts" for delivery and employs Stable Diffusion to generate the same video at the receiver. To ensure that the generated video is pixel-aligned with the original video, a gradient descent-based prompt fitting framework is proposed. Further, a low-rank decomposition-based bitrate control algorithm is introduced to achieve adaptive bitrate. For inter-frame compression, an interpolation-aware fitting algorithm is proposed. Evaluations across various video genres demonstrate that, compared to H.265, Promptus can achieve more than a 4x bandwidth reduction while preserving the same perceptual quality. On the other hand, at extremely low bitrates, Promptus can enhance the perceptual quality by 0.139 and 0.118 (in LPIPS) compared to VAE and H.265, respectively, and decreases the ratio of severely distorted frames by 89.3% and 91.7%. Our work opens up a new paradigm for efficient video communication.

PaperID: 82, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16077 GitHub

Abstract:
Traditional video reasoning segmentation methods rely on supervised finetuning, which limits generalization to out-of-distribution scenarios and lacks explicit reasoning. To address this, we propose VideoSeg-R1, the first framework to introduce reinforcement learning into video reasoning segmentation. It adopts a decoupled architecture that formulates the task as joint referring image segmentation and video mask propagation. It comprises three stages: (1) A hierarchical text-guided frame sampler to emulate human attention; (2) A reasoning model that produces spatial cues along with explicit reasoning chains; and (3) A segmentation-propagation stage using SAM2 and XMem. A task difficulty-aware mechanism adaptively controls reasoning length for better efficiency and accuracy. Extensive evaluations on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that VideoSeg-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance in complex video reasoning and segmentation tasks.

PaperID: 83, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01204 GitHub

Abstract:
Establishing pointto-point correspondences across multiple 3D shapes is a fundamental problem in computer vision and graphics. In this paper, we introduce DcMatch, a novel unsupervised learning framework for non-rigid multi-shape matching. Unlike existing methods that learn a canonical embedding from a single shape, our approach leverages a shape graph attention network to capture the underlying manifold structure of the entire shape collection. This enables the construction of a more expressive and robust shared latent space, leading to more consistent shape-to-universe correspondences via a universe predictor. Simultaneously, we represent these correspondences in both the spatial and spectral domains and enforce their alignment in the shared universe space through a novel cycle consistency loss. This dual-level consistency fosters more accurate and coherent mappings. Extensive experiments on several challenging benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches across diverse multi-shape matching scenarios.

PaperID: 84, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.22973 GitHub

Abstract:
Current methodologies for incremental object detection (IOD) primarily rely on Faster RCNN or DETR series detectors; however, these approaches do not accommodate the real-time YOLO detection frameworks. In this paper, we first identify three primary types of knowledge conflicts that contribute to catastrophic forgetting in YOLO-based incremental detectors: foreground-background confusion, parameter interference, and misaligned knowledge distillation. Subsequently, we introduce YOLO-IOD, a real-time Incremental Object Detection (IOD) framework that is constructed upon the pretrained YOLO-World model, facilitating incremental learning via a stage-wise parameter-efficient finetuning process. Specifically, YOLO-IOD encompasses three principal components: 1) Conflict-Aware Pseudo-Label Refinement (CPR), which mitigates the foreground-background confusion by leveraging the confidence levels of pseudo labels and identifying potential objects relevant to future tasks. 2) Importance-based Kernel Selection (IKS), which identifies and updates the pivotal convolution kernels pertinent to the current task during the current learning stage. 3)Cross-Stage Asymmetric Knowledge Distillation (CAKD), which addresses the misaligned knowledge distillation conflict by transmitting the features of the student target detector through the detection heads of both the previous and current teacher detectors, thereby facilitating asymmetric distillation between existing and newly introduced categories. We further introduce LoCo COCO, a more realistic benchmark that eliminates data leakage across stages. Experiments on both conventional and LoCo COCO benchmarks show that YOLO-IOD achieves superior performance with minimal forgetting.

PaperID: 85, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18024 GitHub

Abstract:
We present a method for extracting monosemantic neurons, defined as latent dimensions that align with coherent and interpretable concepts, from user and item embeddings in recommender systems. Our approach employs a Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) to reveal semantic structure within pretrained representations. In contrast to work on language models, monosemanticity in recommendation must preserve the interactions between separate user and item embeddings. To achieve this, we introduce a prediction aware training objective that backpropagates through a frozen recommender and aligns the learned latent structure with the model’s useritem affinity predictions. The resulting neurons capture properties such as genre, popularity, and temporal trends, and support post hoc control operations including targeted filtering and content promotion without modifying the base model. Our method generalizes across different recommendation models and datasets, providing a practical tool for interpretable and controllable personalization.

PaperID: 86, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18047 GitHub

Abstract:
Explanation fidelity, which measures how accurately an explanation reflects a model’s true reasoning, remains critically underexplored in recommender systems. We introduce SPINRec (Stochastic Path Integration for Neural Recommender Explanations), a modelagnostic approach that adapts path-integration techniques to the sparse and implicit nature of recommendation data. To overcome the limitations of prior methods, SPINRec employs stochastic baseline sampling: instead of integrating from a fixed or unrealistic baseline, it samples multiple plausible user profiles from the empirical data distribution and selects the most faithful attribution path. This design captures the influence of both observed and unobserved interactions, yielding more stable and personalized explanations. We conduct the most comprehensive fidelity evaluation to date across three models (MF, VAE, NCF), three datasets (ML1M, Yahoo! Music, Pinterest), and a suite of counterfactual metrics, including AUC-based perturbation curves and fixed-length diagnostics. SPINRec consistently outperforms all baselines, establishing a new benchmark for faithful explainability in recommendation.

PaperID: 87, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21020 GitHub

Abstract:
Longterm, high-fidelity simulation of slow-changing physical systems, such as the ocean and climate, presents a fundamental challenge in scientific computing. Traditional autoregressive machine learning models often fail in these tasks as minor errors accumulate and lead to rapid forecast degradation. To address this problem, we propose NeuralOM, a general neural operator framework designed for simulating complex, slow-changing dynamics. NeuralOM's core consists of two key innovations: (1) a Progressive Residual Correction Framework that decomposes the forecasting task into a series of fine-grained refinement steps, effectively suppressing long-term error accumulation; and (2) a Physics-Guided Graph Network whose built-in adaptive messaging mechanism explicitly models multi-scale physical interactions, such as gradient-driven flows and multiplicative couplings, thereby enhancing physical consistency while maintaining computational efficiency. We validate NeuralOM on the challenging task of global Subseasonal-to-Seasonal (S2S) ocean simulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NeuralOM not only surpasses state-of-the-art models in forecast accuracy and long-term stability, but also excels in simulating extreme events. For instance, at a 60-day lead time, NeuralOM achieves a 13.3% lower RMSE compared to the best-performing baseline, offering a stable, efficient, and physically-aware paradigm for data-driven scientific computing.

PaperID: 88, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06259 GitHub

Abstract:
Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) still face significant challenges in complex visual tasks (e.g., spatial understanding, finegrained perception). Prior methods have tried to incorporate visual reasoning, however, they fail to leverage attention correction with spatial cues to iteratively refine their focus on prompt-relevant regions. In this paper, we introduce SIFThinker, a spatially-aware “think-with-images” framework that mimics human visual perception. Specifically, SIFThinker enables attention correcting and image region focusing by interleaving depth-enhanced bounding boxes and natural language. Our contributions are twofold: First, we introduce a reverse-expansion-forward-inference strategy that facilitates the generation of interleaved image-text chains of thought for process-level supervision, which in turn leads to the construction of the SIF-50K dataset. Besides, we propose GRPO-SIF, a reinforced training paradigm that integrates depth-informed visual grounding into a unified reasoning pipeline, teaching the model to dynamically correct and focus on prompt-relevant regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SIFThinker outperforms state-of-the-art methods in spatial understanding and fine-grained visual perception, while maintaining strong general capabilities, highlighting the effectiveness of our method.

PaperID: 89, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05859 GitHub

Abstract:
Deep learning models such as MLP, Transformer, and TCN have achieved remarkable success in univariate time series forecasting, typically relying on sliding window samples from historical data for training. However, while these models implicitly compress historical information into their parameters during training, they are unable to explicitly and dynamically access this global knowledge during inference, relying only on the local context within the lookback window. This results in an underutilization of rich patterns from the global history. To bridge this gap, we propose Predicting the Future by Retrieving the Past (PFRP), a novel approach that explicitly integrates global historical data to enhance forecasting accuracy. Specifically, we construct a Global Memory Bank (GMB) to effectively store and manage global historical patterns. A retrieval mechanism is then employed to extract similar patterns from the GMB, enabling the generation of global predictions. By adaptively combining these global predictions with the outputs of any local prediction model, PFRP produces more accurate and interpretable forecasts. Extensive experiments conducted on seven realworld datasets demonstrate that PFRP enhances the average performance of advanced univariate forecasting models by 8.4%.

PaperID: 90, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10030 GitHub

Abstract:
Large transformer models, trained on diverse datasets, have demonstrated impressive fewshot performance on previously unseen tasks without requiring parameter updates. This capability has also been explored in Reinforcement Learning (RL), where agents interact with the environment to retrieve context and maximize cumulative rewards, showcasing strong adaptability in complex settings. However, in cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), where agents must coordinate toward a shared goal, decentralized policy deployment can lead to mismatches in task alignment and reward assignment, limiting the efficiency of policy adaptation. To address this challenge, we introduce Multi-agent In-context Coordination via Decentralized Memory Retrieval (MAICC), a novel approach designed to enhance coordination by fast adaptation. Our method involves training a centralized embedding model to capture fine-grained trajectory representations, followed by decentralized models that approximate the centralized one to obtain team-level task information. Based on the learned embeddings, relevant trajectories are retrieved as context, which, combined with the agents' current sub-trajectories, inform decision-making. During decentralized execution, we introduce a novel memory mechanism that effectively balances test-time online data with offline memory. Based on the constructed memory, we propose a hybrid utility score that incorporates both individual- and team-level returns, ensuring credit assignment across agents. Extensive experiments on cooperative MARL benchmarks, including Level-Based Foraging (LBF) and SMAC (v1/v2), show that MAICC enables faster adaptation to unseen tasks compared to existing methods.

PaperID: 91, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16588 GitHub

Abstract:
Casebased reasoning networks are machine-learning models that make predictions based on similarity between the input and prototypical parts of training samples, called prototypes. Such models are able to explain each decision by pointing to the prototypes that contributed the most to the final outcome. As the explanation is a core part of the prediction, they are often qualified as "interpretable by design". While promising, we show that such explanations are sometimes misleading, which hampers their usefulness in safety-critical contexts. In particular, several instances may lead to different predictions and yet have the same explanation. Drawing inspiration from the field of formal eXplainable AI (formal XAI), we propose Abductive Latent Explanations (ALEs), a formalism to express sufficient conditions on the intermediate (latent) representation of the instance that imply the prediction. Our approach combines the inherent interpretability of case-based reasoning models and the guarantees provided by formal XAI. We propose a solver-free and scalable algorithm for generating ALEs based on three distinct paradigms, compare them, and present the feasibility of our approach on diverse datasets for both standard and fine-grained image classification.

PaperID: 92, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04655 GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong capabilities in broad knowledge representation, yet they are inherently deficient in pixellevel perceptual understanding. Although the Segment Anything Model (SAM) represents a significant advancement in visual-prompt-driven image segmentation, it exhibits notable limitations in multi-mask prediction and category-specific segmentation tasks, and it cannot integrate all segmentation tasks within a unified model architecture. To address these limitations, we present X-SAM, a streamlined Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) framework that extends the segmentation paradigm from segment anything to any segmentation. Specifically, we introduce a novel unified framework that enables more advanced pixel-level perceptual comprehension for MLLMs. Furthermore, we propose a new segmentation task, termed Visual GrounDed (VGD) segmentation, which segments all instance objects with interactive visual prompts and empowers MLLMs with visual grounded, pixel-wise interpretative capabilities. To enable effective training on diverse data sources, we present a unified training strategy that supports co-training across multiple datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that X-SAM achieves state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of image segmentation benchmarks, highlighting its efficiency for multimodal, pixel-level visual understanding.

PaperID: 93, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.11430 GitHub

Abstract:
Decentralized partially observable Markov decision processes with communication (DecPOMDP-Com) provide a framework for multiagent decision making under uncertainty, but the NEXP-complete complexity for finite-horizon problems renders solutions intractable in general. While sharing actions and observations can reduce the complexity to PSPACE-complete, we propose an approach that bridges POMDPs and Dec-POMDPs by communicating only suggested joint actions, eliminating the need to share observations while retaining near-centralized performance. Our algorithm estimates joint beliefs using shared actions to prune infeasible beliefs. Each agent maintains possible belief sets for other agents, pruning them based on suggested actions to form an estimated joint belief usable with any centralized policy. This approach requires solving a POMDP for each agent, reducing computational complexity while preserving performance. We demonstrate its effectiveness on several Dec-POMDP benchmarks, showing performance comparable to centralized methods when shared actions enable effective belief pruning. This action-based communication framework offers a natural avenue for integrating human-agent cooperation, opening new directions for scalable multiagent planning under uncertainty, with applications in both autonomous systems and human-agent teams.

PaperID: 94, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15392 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have greatly improved their reasoning and decisionmaking abilities when deployed as agents. Richer reasoning, however, often comes at the cost of longer chain of thought (CoT), hampering interaction efficiency in real-world scenarios. Nevertheless, there still lacks systematic definition of LLM‑Agent efficiency, hindering targeted improvements. To this end, we introduce dual‑efficiency, comprising (i) step-level efficiency, which minimizes tokens per step, and (ii) trajectory-level efficiency, which minimizes the number of steps to complete a task. Building on this definition, we propose DEPO, a dual-efficiency preference‑based optimization method that jointly rewards succinct responses and fewer action steps. Experiments on WebShop and BabyAI show that DEPO cuts token usage by up to 60.9% and steps by up to 26.9%, while achieving up to a 29.3% improvement in task performance. DEPO also generalizes to three out-of-domain math benchmarks and retains its efficiency gains when trained on only 25% of the data.

PaperID: 95, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11978 GitHub

Abstract:
Generative LLMs typically improve Named Entity Recognition (NER) performance through instruction tuning. They excel at generating entities by semantic pattern matching but lack an explicit, verifiable reasoning mechanism. This "cognitive shortcutting" leads to suboptimal performance and weak generalization, especially in zeroshot and low-resource scenarios where reasoning from limited contextual cues is crucial. To address this issue, a reasoning framework is proposed for NER, which shifts the extraction paradigm from implicit pattern matching to explicit reasoning. This framework consists of three stages: Chain of Thought (CoT) generation, CoT tuning, and reasoning enhancement. First, a dataset annotated with NER-oriented CoTs is generated, which contain task-relevant reasoning chains. Then, they are used to tune the NER model to generate coherent rationales before deriving the final answer. Finally, a reasoning enhancement stage is implemented to optimize the reasoning process using a comprehensive reward signal. This stage ensures explicit and verifiable extractions. Experiments show that ReasoningNER demonstrates impressive cognitive ability in the NER task, achieving competitive performance. In zero-shot settings, it achieves SoTA performance, outperforming GPT-4 by 12.3 percentage points on the F1 score. Analytical results demonstrate its great potential to advance research in reasoning-oriented information extraction.

PaperID: 96, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.24067 GitHub

Abstract:
Transformers are the cornerstone of modern large language models, but their quadratic computational complexity limits efficiency in longsequence processing. Recent advancements in Mamba, a state space model (SSM) with linear complexity, offer promising efficiency gains but suffer from unstable contextual learning and multitask generalization. Some works conduct layer-level hybrid structures that combine Transformer and Mamba layers, aiming to make full use of both advantages. This paper proposes TransMamba, a novel sequence-level hybrid framework that unifies Transformer and Mamba through shared parameter matrices (QKV and CBx), and thus could dynamically switch between attention and SSM mechanisms at different token lengths and layers. We design the Memory Converter to bridge Transformer and Mamba by converting attention outputs into SSM-compatible states, ensuring seamless information flow at TransPoints where the transformation happens. The TransPoint scheduling is also thoroughly explored for balancing effectiveness and efficiency. We conducted extensive experiments demonstrating that TransMamba achieves superior training efficiency and performance compared to single and hybrid baselines, and validated the deeper consistency between Transformer and Mamba paradigms at sequence level, offering a scalable solution for next-generation language modeling.

PaperID: 97, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10707 GitHub

Abstract:
ParameterEfficient finetuning (PEFT) enhances model performance on downstream tasks by updating a minimal subset of parameters. Representation finetuning (ReFT) methods further improve efficiency by freezing model weights and optimizing internal representations with fewer parameters than PEFT, outperforming PEFT on several tasks. However, ReFT exhibits a significant performance decline on mathematical reasoning tasks. To address this problem, the paper demonstrates that ReFT's poor performance on mathematical tasks primarily stems from its struggle to generate effective reasoning prefixes during the early inference phase. Moreover, ReFT disturbs the numerical encoding and the error accumulats during the CoT stage. Based on these observations, this paper proposes Bias-REstrained Prefix Representation FineTuning (BREP ReFT), which enhances ReFT's mathematical reasoning capability by truncating training data to optimize the generation of initial reasoning prefixes, intervening on the early inference stage to prevent error accumulation, and constraining the intervention vectors' magnitude to avoid disturbing numerical encoding. Extensive experiments across diverse model architectures demonstrate BREP's superior effectiveness, efficiency, and robust generalization capability, outperforming both standard ReFT and weight-based PEFT methods on the task of mathematical reasoning.

PaperID: 98, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07873 GitHub

Abstract:
Knowledge editing aims to efficiently modify the internal knowledge of large language models (LLMs) without compromising their other capabilities. The prevailing editing paradigm, which appends an update matrix to the original parameter matrix, has been shown by some studies to damage key numerical stability indicators (such as condition number and norm), thereby reducing editing performance and general abilities, especially in sequential editing scenario. Although subsequent methods have made some improvements, they remain within the additive framework and have not fundamentally addressed this limitation. To solve this problem, we analyze it from both statistical and mathematical perspectives and conclude that multiplying the original matrix by an orthogonal matrix does not change the numerical stability of the matrix. Inspired by this, different from the previous additive editing paradigm, a multiplicative editing paradigm termed Multiplicative Orthogonal Sequential Editing (MOSE) is proposed. Specifically, we first derive the matrix update in the multiplicative form, the new knowledge is then incorporated into an orthogonal matrix, which is multiplied by the original parameter matrix. In this way, the numerical stability of the edited matrix is unchanged, thereby maintaining editing performance and general abilities. We compared MOSE with several current knowledge editing methods, systematically evaluating their impact on both editing performance and the general abilities across three different LLMs. Experimental results show that MOSE effectively limits deviations in the edited parameter matrix and maintains its numerical stability. Compared to current methods, MOSE achieves a 12.08% improvement in sequential editing performance, while retaining 95.73% of general abilities across downstream tasks.

PaperID: 99, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16142 GitHub

Abstract:
Distilling reasoning paths from teacher to student models via supervised finetuning (SFT) provides a shortcut for improving the reasoning ability of the smaller Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the reasoning paths generated by teacher models often reflect only surface-level traces of their underlying authentic reasoning. Insights from cognitive neuroscience suggest that authentic reasoning involves a complex interweaving between meta-reasoning that selects the appropriate sub-problem from multiple candidates, and solving, which addresses the sub-problem. It means that authentic reasoning has implicit multi-branch structure. Supervised fine-tuning collapses this rich structure into a flat sequence of token prediction in teacher's reasoning path, which cannot distill this structure to student. To address this limitation, we propose RLKD, a reinforcement learning (RL)-based distillation framework guided by a novel Generative Structure Reward Model (GSRM). Our GSRM converts the reasoning path into multiple meta-reasoning-solving steps and gives the reward to measure the alignment between the reasoning structures of student and teacher. Our RLKD combines this reward with RL, enables the student LLM to internalize the teacher’s implicit multi-branch structure in authentic reasoning, rather than merely mimicking fixed teacher's output paths. Experiments show that RLKD, even when trained on only 0.1% of the data under an RL-only regime, surpasses the performance of standard SFT-RL pipelines and further unleashes the potential reasoning ability of the student LLM than SFT-based distillation.

PaperID: 100, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16972 GitHub

Abstract:
Optimizing patent claims is a critical yet challenging task, demanding careful balance between maximizing novelty and preserving legal scope. Manual claim drafting is laborintensive, costly, and inherently inconsistent, while conventional Large Language Models (LLMs) often lack the structured, iterative reasoning essential for precise claim refinement. To address these challenges, we introduce Tree of Claims (ToC), an innovative framework that redefines claim editing as a guided search problem. ToC synergistically integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with a collaborative multi-agent system, comprising an LLM-based EditorAgent that proposes contextually grounded edits, and an ExaminerAgent that mimics patent examiner critiques through structured, chain-of-thought analyses of novelty and prior art disclosure. Driven by a carefully designed multi-objective reward function, ToC jointly optimizes novelty, scope retention, and semantic coherence. Experimental evaluation on a benchmark of 1145 claims demonstrates that ToC significantly outperforms standard LLMs in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios, achieving an average composite score improvement of 8%, and up to 9% in certain cases. Extensive experiments, including detailed ablation studies, validate ToC’s efficacy in generating superior, legally robust claim revisions. Overall, ToC establishes a transparent, controllable, and interpretable methodology that effectively bridges advanced LLM reasoning capabilities with strategic MCTS planning for structured patent claim optimization.

PaperID: 101, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01813 GitHub

Abstract:
Drug shortages pose critical risks to patient care and healthcare systems worldwide, yet the effectiveness of regulatory interventions remains poorly understood due to information asymmetries in pharmaceutical supply chains. We propose ShortageSim, which addresses this challenge by providing the first simulation framework that evaluates the impact of regulatory interventions on competition dynamics under information asymmetry. Using Large Language Model (LLM)based agents, the framework models the strategic decisions of drug manufacturers and institutional buyers, in response to shortage alerts given by the regulatory agency. Unlike traditional game theory models that assume perfect rationality and complete information, ShortageSim simulates heterogeneous interpretations on regulatory announcements and the resulting decisions. Experiments on self-processed dataset of historical shortage events show that ShortageSim reduces the resolution lag for production disruption cases by up to 84%, achieving closer alignment to real-world trajectories than the zero-shot baseline. Our framework confirms the effect of regulatory alert in addressing shortages and introduces a new method for understanding competition in multi-stage environments under uncertainty. We open-source ShortageSim and a dataset of 2,925 FDA shortage events, providing a novel framework for future research on policy design and testing in supply chains under information asymmetry.

PaperID: 102, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.04276 GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce FIXME, the first endto-end and large-scale benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) in hardware design functional verification (FV). Comprising 747 tasks derived from real-world hardware designs, FIXME spans five core FV sub-sets: specification comprehension, reference model generation, testbench generation, assertion design, and RTL debugging. To ensure high data quality, we developed an AI-human collaborative framework for agile data curation and annotation. This process resulted in 25,000 lines of verified RTL, 35,000 lines of enhanced testbenches, and over 1,200 SystemVerilog Assertions. Furthermore, through expert-guided optimization within the multi-agent aided flow, we achieved a remarkable 45.57% improvement in average functional coverage, underscoring the benchmark's robustness. Through evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-4.1, FIXME identifies key limitations and provides actionable insights, advancing the potential of LLM-driven automation in hardware design functional verification.

PaperID: 103, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04485 GitHub

Abstract:
Diffusion models have shown superior performance in realworld video super-resolution (VSR). However, the slow processing speeds and heavy resource consumption of diffusion models hinder their practical application and deployment. Quantization offers a potential solution for compressing the VSR model. Nevertheless, quantizing VSR models is challenging due to their temporal characteristics and high fidelity requirements. To address these issues, we propose QuantVSR, a low-bit quantization model for real-world VSR. We propose a spatio-temporal complexity aware (STCA) mechanism, where we first utilize the calibration dataset to measure both spatial and temporal complexities for each layer. Based on these statistics, we allocate layer-specific ranks to the low-rank full-precision (FP) auxiliary branch. Subsequently, we jointly refine the FP and low-bit branches to achieve simultaneous optimization. In addition, we propose a learnable bias alignment (LBA) module to reduce the biased quantization errors. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method obtains comparable performance with the FP model and significantly outperforms recent leading low-bit quantization methods.

PaperID: 104, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17811 GitHub

Abstract:
Surface reconstruction has been widely studied in computer vision and graphics. However, existing surface reconstruction works struggle to recover accurate scene geometry when the input views are extremely sparse. To address this issue, we propose MeshSplat, a generalizable sparseview surface reconstruction framework via Gaussian Splatting. Our key idea is to leverage 2DGS as a bridge, which connects novel view synthesis to learned geometric priors and then transfers these priors to achieve surface reconstruction. Specifically, we incorporate a feed-forward network to predict per-view pixel-aligned 2DGS, which enables the network to synthesize novel view images and thus eliminates the need for direct 3D ground-truth supervision. To improve the accuracy of 2DGS position and orientation prediction, we propose a Weighted Chamfer Distance Loss to regularize the depth maps, especially in overlapping areas of input views, and also a normal prediction network to align the orientation of 2DGS with normal vectors predicted by a monocular normal estimator. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed improvement, demonstrating that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in generalizable sparse-view mesh reconstruction tasks.

PaperID: 105, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13247 GitHub

Abstract:
Contactbased grasp generation plays a crucial role in various applications. Recent methods typically focus on the geometric structure of objects, producing grasps with diverse hand poses and plausible contact points. However, these approaches often overlook the physical attributes of the grasp, specifically the contact force, leading to reduced stability of the grasp. In this paper, we focus on stable grasp generation using explicit contact force predictions. First, we define a force-aware contact representation by transforming the normal force value into discrete levels and encoding it using a one-hot vector. Next, we introduce force-aware stability constraints. We define the stability problem as an acceleration minimization task and explicitly relate stability with contact geometry by formulating the underlying physical constraints. Finally, we present a pose optimizer that systematically integrates our contact representation and stability constraints to enable stable grasp generation. We show that these constraints can help identify key contact points for stability which provide effective initialization and guidance for optimization towards a stable grasp. Experiments are carried out on two public benchmarks, showing that our method brings about 20% improvement in stability metrics and adapts well to novel objects.

PaperID: 106, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05802 GitHub

Abstract:
Customized textto-video generation (CTVG) has recently witnessed great progress in generating tailored videos from user-specific text. However, most CTVG methods assume that personalized concepts remain static and do not expand incrementally over time. Additionally, they struggle with forgetting and concept neglect when continuously learning new concepts, including subjects and motions. To resolve the above challenges, we develop a novel Continual Customized Video Diffusion (CCVD) model, which can continuously learn new concepts to generate videos across various text-to-video generation tasks by tackling forgetting and concept neglect. To address catastrophic forgetting, we introduce a concept-specific attribute retention module and a task-aware concept aggregation strategy. They can capture the unique characteristics and identities of old concepts during training, while combining all subject and motion adapters of old concepts based on their relevance during testing. Besides, to tackle concept neglect, we develop a controllable conditional synthesis to enhance regional features and align video contexts with user conditions, by incorporating layer-specific region attention-guided noise estimation. Extensive experimental comparisons demonstrate that our CCVD outperforms existing CTVG models.

PaperID: 107, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01422 GitHub

Abstract:
Mask Diffusion Models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) for vision-language tasks, owing to their flexible balance of efficiency and accuracy. In this paper, for the first time, we introduce MDMs into the Scene Text Recognition (STR) task. We show that vanilla MDM lags behind ARMs in terms of accuracy, although it improves recognition efficiency. To bridge this gap, we propose MDiff4STR, a Mask Diffusion model enhanced with two key improvement strategies tailored for STR. Specifically, we identify two key challenges in applying MDMs to STR: noising gap between training and inference, and overconfident predictions during inference. Both significantly hinder the performance of MDMs. To mitigate the first issue, we develop six noising strategies that better align training with inference behavior. For the second, we propose a token-replacement noise mechanism that provides a non-mask noise type, encouraging the model to reconsider and revise overly confident but incorrect predictions. We conduct extensive evaluations of MDiff4STR on both standard and challenging STR benchmarks, covering diverse scenarios including irregular, artistic, occluded, and Chinese text, as well as whether the use of pretraining. Across these settings, MDiff4STR consistently outperforms popular STR models, surpassing state-of-the-art ARMs in accuracy, while maintaining fast inference with only three denoising steps. Code: https://github.com/Topdu/OpenOCR.

PaperID: 108, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21921 GitHub

Abstract:
Product posters blend striking visuals with informative text to highlight the product and capture customer attention. However, crafting appealing posters and manually optimizing them based on online performance is laborious and resourceconsuming. To address this, we introduce AutoPP, an automated pipeline for product poster generation and optimization that eliminates the need for human intervention. Specifically, the generator, relying solely on basic product information, first uses a unified design module to integrate the three key elements of a poster (background, text, and layout) into a cohesive output. Then, an element rendering module encodes these elements into condition tokens, efficiently and controllably generating the product poster. Based on the generated poster, the optimizer enhances its Click-Through Rate (CTR) by leveraging online feedback. It systematically replaces elements to gather fine-grained CTR comparisons and utilizes Isolated Direct Preference Optimization (IDPO) to attribute CTR gains to isolated elements. Our work is supported by AutoPP1M, the largest dataset specifically designed for product poster generation and optimization, which contains one million high-quality posters and feedback collected from over one million users. Experiments demonstrate that AutoPP achieves state-of-the-art results in both offline and online settings.

PaperID: 109, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08251 GitHub

Abstract:
Textdriven multi-object image editing which aims to precisely modify multiple objects within an image based on text descriptions, has recently attracted considerable interest. Existing works primarily follow the localize-editing paradigm, focusing on independent object localization and editing while neglecting critical inter-object interactions. However, this work points out that the neglected attention entanglements in inter-object conflict regions, inherently hinder disentangled multi-object editing, leading to either inter-object editing leakage or intra-object editing constraints. We thereby propose a novel multi-layer disentangled editing framework LayerEdit, a training-free method which, for the first time, through precise object-layered decomposition and coherent fusion, enables conflict-free object-layered editing. Specifically, LayerEdit introduces a novel “decompose-editing-fusion” framework, consisting of: (1) Conflict-aware Layer Decomposition module, which utilizes an attention-aware IoU scheme and time-dependent region removing, to enhance conflict awareness and suppression for layer decomposition. (2) Object-layered Editing module, to establish coordinated intra-layer text guidance and cross-layer geometric mapping, achieving disentangled semantic and structural modifications. (3) Transparency-guided Layer Fusion module, to facilitate structure-coherent inter-object layer fusion through precise transparency guidance learning. Extensive experiments verify the superiority of LayerEdit over existing methods, showing unprecedented intra-object controllability and inter-object coherence in complex multi-object scenarios.

PaperID: 110, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.05855 GitHub

Abstract:
Semisupervised medical image segmentation is an effective method for addressing scenarios with limited labeled data. Existing methods mainly rely on frameworks such as mean teacher and dual-stream consistency learning. These approaches often face issues like error accumulation and model structural complexity, while also neglecting the interaction between labeled and unlabeled data streams. To overcome these challenges, we propose a Bidirectional Channel-selective Semantic Interaction (BCSI) framework for semi-supervised medical image segmentation. First, we propose a Semantic-Spatial Perturbation (SSP) mechanism, which disturbs the data using two strong augmentation operations and leverages unsupervised learning with pseudo-labels from weak augmentations. Additionally, we employ consistency on the predictions from the two strong augmentations to further improve model stability and robustness. Second, to reduce noise during the interaction between labeled and unlabeled data, we propose a Channel-selective Router (CR) component, which dynamically selects the most relevant channels for information exchange. This mechanism ensures that only highly relevant features are activated, minimizing unnecessary interference. Finally, the Bidirectional Channel-wise Interaction (BCI) strategy is employed to supplement additional semantic information and enhance the representation of important channels. Experimental results on multiple benchmarking 3D medical datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing semi-supervised approaches.

PaperID: 111, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09064 GitHub

Abstract:
Visionlanguage pre-training models (VLPs) demonstrate strong multimodal understanding and zero-shot generalization, yet remain vulnerable to adversarial examples, raising concerns about their reliability. Recent work, Test-Time Counterattack (TTC), improves robustness by generating perturbations that maximize the embedding deviation of adversarial inputs using PGD, pushing them away from their adversarial representations. However, due to the fundamental difference in optimization objectives between adversarial attacks and counterattacks, generating counterattacks solely based on gradients with respect to the adversarial input confines the search to a narrow space. As a result, the counterattacks could overfit limited adversarial patterns and lack the diversity to fully neutralize a broad range of perturbations. In this work, we argue that enhancing the diversity and coverage of counterattacks is crucial to improving adversarial robustness in test-time defense. Accordingly, we propose Directional Orthogonal Counterattack (DOC), which augments counterattack optimization by incorporating orthogonal gradient directions and momentum-based updates. This design expands the exploration of the counterattack space and increases the diversity of perturbations, which facilitates the discovery of more generalizable counterattacks and ultimately improves the ability to neutralize adversarial perturbations. Meanwhile, we present a directional sensitivity score based on averaged cosine similarity to boost DOC by improving example discrimination and adaptively modulating the counterattack strength. Extensive experiments on 16 datasets demonstrate that DOC improves adversarial robustness under various attacks while maintaining competitive clean accuracy.

PaperID: 112, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04456 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent image denoising methods have leveraged generative modeling for real noise synthesis to address the costly acquisition of realworld noisy data. However, these generative models typically require camera metadata and extensive target-specific noisy-clean image pairs, often showing limited generalization between settings. In this paper, to mitigate the prerequisites, we propose a Single-Pair Guided Diffusion for generalized noise synthesis(GuidNoise), which uses a single noisy/clean pair as the guidance, often easily obtained by itself within a training set. To train GuidNoise, which generates synthetic noisy images from the guidance, we introduce a guidance-aware affine feature modification (GAFM) and a noise-aware refine loss to leverage the inherent potential of diffusion models. This loss function refines the diffusion model’s backward process, making the model more adept at generating realistic noise distributions. The GuidNoise synthesizes high-quality noisy images under diverse noise environments without additional metadata during both training and inference. Additionally, GuidNoise enables the efficient generation of noisy-clean image pairs at inference time, making synthetic noise readily applicable for augmenting train- ing data. This self-augmentation significantly improves denoising performance, especially in practical scenarios with lightweight models and limited training data.

PaperID: 113, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11045 GitHub

Abstract:
With the daily influx of 3D data on the internet, text3D retrieval has gained increasing attention. However, current methods face two major challenges: Hierarchy Representation Collapse (HRC) and Redundancy-Induced Saliency Dilution (RISD). HRC compresses abstract-to-specific and whole-to-part hierarchies in Euclidean embeddings, while RISD averages noisy fragments, obscuring critical semantic cues and diminishing the model’s ability to distinguish hard negatives. To address these challenges, we introduce the Hyperbolic Hierarchical Alignment Reasoning Network (H2ARN) for text-3D retrieval. H2ARN embeds both text and 3D data in a Lorentz-model hyperbolic space, where exponential volume growth inherently preserves hierarchical distances. A hierarchical ordering loss constructs a shrinking entailment cone around each text vector, ensuring that the matched 3D instance falls within the cone, while an instance-level contrastive loss jointly enforces separation from non-matching samples. To tackle RISD, we propose a contribution-aware hyperbolic aggregation module that leverages Lorentzian distance to assess the relevance of each local feature and applies contribution-weighted aggregation guided by hyperbolic geometry, enhancing discriminative regions while suppressing redundancy without additional supervision. We also release the expanded T3DR-HIT v2 benchmark, which contains 8,935 text-to-3D pairs, 2.6 times the original size, covering both fine-grained cultural artefacts and complex indoor scenes.

PaperID: 114, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09178 GitHub

Abstract:
Industrial anomaly detection is a critical component of modern manufacturing, yet the scarcity of defective samples restricts traditional detection methods to scenariospecific applications. Although Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate significant advantages in generalization capabilities, their performance in industrial anomaly detection remains limited. To address this challenge, we propose IAD-R1, a universal post-training framework applicable to VLMs of different architectures and parameter scales, which substantially enhances their anomaly detection capabilities. IAD-R1 employs a two-stage training strategy: the Perception Activation Supervised Fine-Tuning (PA-SFT) stage utilizes a meticulously constructed high-quality Chain-of-Thought dataset (Expert-AD) for training, enhancing anomaly perception capabilities and establishing reasoning-to-answer correlations; the Structured Control Group Relative Policy Optimization (SC-GRPO) stage employs carefully designed reward functions to achieve a capability leap from "Anomaly Perception" to "Anomaly Interpretation". Experimental results demonstrate that IAD-R1 achieves significant improvements across 7 VLMs, the largest improvement was on the DAGM dataset, with average accuracy 43.3% higher than the 0.5B baseline. Notably, the 0.5B parameter model trained with IAD-R1 surpasses commercial models including GPT-4.1 and Claude-Sonnet-4 in zero-shot settings, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of IAD-R1.

PaperID: 115, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18933 GitHub

Abstract:
As superresolution (SR) techniques introduce unique distortions that fundamentally differ from those caused by traditional degradation processes (e.g., compression), there is an increasing demand for specialized video quality assessment (VQA) methods tailored to SR-generated content. One critical factor affecting perceived quality is temporal inconsistency, which refers to irregularities between consecutive frames. However, existing VQA approaches rarely quantify this phenomenon or explicitly investigate its relationship with human perception. Moreover, SR videos exhibit amplified inconsistency levels as a result of enhancement processes. In this paper, we propose Temporal Inconsistency Guidance for Super-resolution Video Quality Assessment (TIG-SVQA) that underscores the critical role of temporal inconsistency in guiding the quality assessment of SR videos. We first design a perception-oriented approach to quantify frame-wise temporal inconsistency. Based on this, we introduce the Inconsistency Highlighted Spatial Module, which localizes inconsistent regions at both coarse and fine scales. Inspired by the human visual system, we further develop an Inconsistency Guided Temporal Module that performs progressive temporal feature aggregation: (1) a consistency-aware fusion stage in which a visual memory capacity block adaptively determines the information load of each temporal segment based on inconsistency levels, and (2) an informative filtering stage for emphasizing quality-related features. Extensive experiments on both single-frame and multi-frame SR video scenarios demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art VQA approaches.

PaperID: 116, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16479 GitHub

Abstract:
Restoring nighttime images affected by multiple adverse weather conditions is a practical yet underexplored research problem, as multiple weather degradations usually coexist in the real world alongside various lighting effects at night. This paper first explores the challenging multi-weather nighttime image restoration task, where various types of weather degradations are intertwined with flare effects. To support the research, we contribute the AllWeatherNight dataset, featuring large-scale nighttime images with diverse compositional degradations. By employing illumination-aware degradation generation, our dataset significantly enhances the realism of synthetic degradations in nighttime scenes, providing a more reliable benchmark for model training and evaluation. Additionally, we propose ClearNight, a unified nighttime image restoration framework, which effectively removes complex degradations in one go. Specifically, ClearNight extracts Retinex-based dual priors and explicitly guides the network to focus on uneven illumination regions and intrinsic texture contents respectively, thereby enhancing restoration effectiveness in nighttime scenarios. Moreover, to more effectively model the common and unique characteristics of multiple weather degradations, ClearNight performs weather-aware dynamic specificity and commonality collaboration that adaptively allocates optimal sub-networks associated with specific weather types. Comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world images demonstrate the necessity of the AllWeatherNight dataset and the superior performance of ClearNight.

PaperID: 117, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12409 GitHub

Abstract:
Semisupervised semantic segmentation (S4) has advanced remote sensing (RS) analysis by leveraging unlabeled data through pseudo-labeling and consistency learning. However, existing S4 studies often rely on small-scale datasets and models, limiting their practical applicability. To address this, we propose S5, the first scalable framework for semi-supervised semantic segmentation in RS, which unlocks the potential of vast unlabeled Earth observation data typically underutilized due to costly pixel-level annotations. Built upon existing large-scale RS datasets, S5 introduces a data selection strategy that integrates entropy-based filtering and diversity expansion, resulting in the RS4P-1M dataset. Using this dataset, we systematically scale up S4 into a new pretraining paradigm, S4 pre-training (S4P), to pretrain RS foundation models (RSFMs) of varying sizes on this extensive corpus, significantly boosting their performance on land cover segmentation and object detection tasks. Furthermore, during fine-tuning, we incorporate a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)-based multi-dataset fine-tuning approach, which enables efficient adaptation to multiple RS benchmarks with fewer parameters. This approach improves the generalization and versatility of RSFMs across diverse RS benchmarks. The resulting RSFMs achieve state-of-the-art performance across all benchmarks, underscoring the viability of scaling semi-supervised learning for RS applications.

PaperID: 118, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03127 GitHub

Abstract:
Vision language models (VLMs) that enable natural language interaction with satellite imagery can democratize Earth observation by accelerating expert workflows, making data accessible to nonspecialists, and enabling planet-scale automation. However, existing datasets focus mainly on short-term, high-resolution imagery from a limited number of satellites, overlooking low-resolution, multi-satellite, long-term archives, such as Landsat, that are essential for affordable and bias-robust global monitoring. We address this gap with Landsat30-AU, a large-scale vision-language dataset built from 30-meter resolution imagery collected by four Landsat satellites (5, 7, 8, and 9) over Australia, spanning more than 36 years. The dataset includes two components: Landsat30-AU-Cap, containing 196,262 image-caption pairs, and Landsat30-AU-VQA, comprising 17,725 human-verified visual question answering (VQA) samples across eight remote sensing domains. Both datasets are curated through a bootstrapped pipeline that leverages generic VLMs with iterative refinement and human verification to ensure quality. Our evaluation of eight VLMs on our benchmark reveals that off-the-shelf models struggle to understand satellite imagery. The open-source remote-sensing VLM EarthDial achieves only 0.07 SPIDEr in captioning and a VQA accuracy of 0.48, highlighting the limitations of current approaches. Encouragingly, lightweight fine-tuning of Qwen2.5-VL-7B on Landsat30-AU improves captioning performance from 0.11 to 0.31 SPIDEr and boosts VQA accuracy from 0.74 to 0.87.

PaperID: 119, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.13654 GitHub

Abstract:
3D openvocabulary scene understanding, which accurately perceives complex semantic properties of objects in space, has gained significant attention in recent years. In this paper, we propose GAGS, a framework that distills 2D CLIP features into 3D Gaussian splatting, enabling open-vocabulary queries for renderings on arbitrary viewpoints. The main challenge of distilling 2D features for 3D fields lies in the multiview inconsistency of extracted 2D features, which provides unstable supervision for the 3D feature field. GAGS addresses this challenge with two novel strategies. First, GAGS associates the prompt point density of SAM with the camera distances to scene objects, which significantly improves the multiview consistency of segmentation results. Second, GAGS further decodes a granularity factor to guide the distillation process and this granularity factor can be learned in a unsupervised manner to only select the multiview consistent 2D features in the distillation process. Experimental results on two datasets show that GAGS improves visual grounding accuracy by an average of 10.9% and semantic segmentation accuracy by an average of 7.0%, with an inference speed 2× faster than baseline methods.

PaperID: 120, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20471 GitHub

Abstract:
In this work, we present WeatherEdit, a novel weather editing pipeline for generating realistic weather effects with controllable types and severity in 3D scenes. Our approach is structured into two key components: weather background editing and weather particle construction. For weather background editing, we introduce an allin-one adapter that integrates multiple weather styles into a single diffusion model, enabling the generation of diverse weather effects in 2D image backgrounds. During inference, we design a Temporal-View (TV-) attention mechanism that follows a specific order to aggregate temporal and spatial information, ensuring consistent editing across multi-frame and multi-view images. To construct the weather particles, we first reconstruct a 3D scene using the edited images and then introduce a 4D Gaussian field to generate snowflakes, raindrops and fog in the scene. The attributes and dynamics of these particles are controlled through attribute modelling and dynamic simulation, ensuring realistic weather representation and flexible severity adjustments. Finally, we integrate the 4D Gaussian field with the 3D scene to render consistent and highly realistic weather effects. Experiments on multiple driving datasets demonstrate that WeatherEdit can generate diverse weather effects with controllable condition severity, highlighting its potential for autonomous driving simulation in adverse weather.

PaperID: 121, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09177 GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we address a challenging task, synchronous motion captioning, that aim to generate a language description synchronized with human motion sequences. This task pertains to numerous applications, such as aligned sign language transcription and unsupervised action segmentation and temporal grounding. Our method introduces mechanisms to control selfand cross-attention distributions of the Transformer, allowing interpretability and aligned text generation. We achieve this through masking strategies and structuring losses that push the model to maximize attention only on the most important frames contributing to the generation of a motion word. These constraints aim to prevent undesired mixing of information in attention maps and to provide a monotonic attention distribution across tokens. Thus, the cross attentions of tokens are used for progressive text generation in synchronization with human motion sequences. We demonstrate the superior performance of our approach through evaluation on the two available benchmark datasets, KIT-ML and HumanML3D. As visual evaluation is essential for this task, we provide a comprehensive set of animated visual illustrations of the output of synchronous text generation in the code repository.

PaperID: 122, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08910 GitHub

Abstract:
Vision transformers (ViTs) have recently been widely applied to 3D point cloud understanding, with masked autoencoding as the predominant pretraining paradigm. However, the challenge of learning dense and informative semantic features from point clouds via standard ViTs remains underexplored. We propose MaskClu, a novel unsupervised pre-training method for ViTs on 3D point clouds that integrates masked point modeling with clustering-based learning. MaskClu is designed to reconstruct both cluster assignments and cluster centers from masked point clouds, thus encouraging the model to capture dense semantic information. Additionally, we introduce a global contrastive learning mechanism that enhances instance-level feature learning by contrasting different masked views of the same point cloud. By jointly optimizing these complementary objectives, i.e., dense semantic reconstruction, and instance-level contrastive learning. MaskClu enables ViTs to learn richer and more semantically meaningful representations from 3D point clouds. We validate the effectiveness of MaskClu via multiple 3D tasks, including part segmentation, semantic segmentation, object detection, and classification, setting new competitive results.

PaperID: 123, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14475 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent years have witnessed remarkable achievements in perceptual image restoration (IR), creating an urgent demand for accurate image quality assessment (IQA), which is essential for both performance comparison and algorithm optimization. Unfortunately, the existing IQA metrics exhibit inherent weakness for IR task, particularly when distinguishing finegrained quality differences among restored images. To address this dilemma, we contribute the first-of-its-kind fine-grained image quality assessment dataset for image restoration, termed FGRestore, comprising 18,408 restored images across six common IR tasks. Beyond conventional scalar quality scores, FGRestore was also annotated with 30,886 fine-grained pairwise preferences. Based on FGRestore, a comprehensive benchmark was conducted on the existing IQA metrics, which reveal significant inconsistencies between score-based IQA evaluations and the fine-grained restoration quality. Motivated by these findings, we further propose FGResQ, a new IQA model specifically designed for image restoration, which features both coarse-grained score regression and fine-grained quality ranking. Extensive experiments and comparisons demonstrate that FGResQ significantly outperforms state-of-the-art IQA metrics.

PaperID: 124, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17558 GitHub

Abstract:
Satellitebased radar retrieval methods are widely employed to fill coverage gaps in ground-based radar systems, especially in remote areas affected by terrain blockage and limited detection range. Existing methods predominantly rely on overly simplistic spatial-domain architectures constructed from a single data source, limiting their ability to accurately capture complex precipitation patterns and sharply defined meteorological boundaries. To address these limitations, we propose WaveC2R, a novel wavelet-driven coarse-to-refined framework for radar retrieval. WaveC2R integrates complementary multi-source data and leverages frequency-domain decomposition to separately model low-frequency components for capturing precipitation patterns and high-frequency components for delineating sharply defined meteorological boundaries. Specifically, WaveC2R consists of two stages (i) Intensity-Boundary Decoupled Learning, which leverages wavelet decomposition and frequency-specific loss functions to separately optimize low-frequency intensity and high-frequency boundaries; and (ii) Detail-Enhanced Diffusion Refinement, which employs frequency-aware conditional priors and multi-source data to progressively enhance fine-scale precipitation structures while preserving coarse-scale meteorological consistency. Experimental results on the publicly available SEVIR dataset demonstrate that WaveC2R achieves state-of-the-art performance in satellite-based radar retrieval, particularly excelling at preserving high-intensity precipitation features and sharply defined meteorological boundaries.

PaperID: 125, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05964 GitHub

Abstract:
While diffusion model finetuning offers a powerful approach for customizing pre-trained models to generate specific objects, it frequently suffers from overfitting when training samples are limited, compromising both generalization capability and output diversity. This paper tackles the challenging yet most impactful task of adapting a diffusion model using just a single concept image, as single-image customization holds the greatest practical potential. We introduce T-LoRA, a Timestep-Dependent Low-Rank Adaptation framework specifically designed for diffusion model personalization. In our work we show that higher diffusion timesteps are more prone to overfitting than lower ones, necessitating a timestep-sensitive fine-tuning strategy. T-LoRA incorporates two key innovations: (1) a dynamic fine-tuning strategy that adjusts rank-constrained updates based on diffusion timesteps, and (2) a weight parametrization technique that ensures independence between adapter components through orthogonal initialization. Extensive experiments show that T-LoRA and its individual components outperform standard LoRA and other diffusion model personalization techniques. They achieve a superior balance between concept fidelity and text alignment, highlighting the potential of T-LoRA in data-limited and resource-constrained scenarios.

PaperID: 126, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07320 GitHub

Abstract:
3D human motion generation has seen substantial advancement in recent years. While stateof-the-art approaches have improved performance significantly, they still struggle with complex and detailed motions unseen in training data, largely due to the scarcity of motion datasets and the prohibitive cost of generating new training examples. To address these challenges, we introduce CoMA, an agent-based solution for complex human motion generation, editing, and comprehension. CoMA leverages multiple collaborative agents powered by large language and vision models, alongside a mask transformer-based motion generator featuring body part-specific encoders and codebooks for fine-grained control. Our framework enables generation of both short and long motion sequences with detailed instructions, text-guided motion editing, and self-correction for improved quality. Evaluations on the HumanML3D dataset demonstrate competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we create a set of context-rich, compositional, and long text prompts, where user studies show our method significantly outperforms existing approaches.

PaperID: 127, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10098 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in Large Visual Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across various visionlanguage tasks by leveraging large-scale image-text pretraining and instruction tuning. However, the security vulnerabilities of LVLMs have become increasingly concerning, particularly their susceptibility to backdoor attacks. Existing backdoor attacks focus on single-target attacks, i.e., targeting a single malicious output associated with a specific trigger. In this work, we uncover multi-target backdoor attacks, where multiple independent triggers corresponding to different attack targets are added in a single pass of training, posing a greater threat to LVLMs in real-world applications. Executing such attacks in LVLMs is challenging since there can be many incorrect trigger-target mappings due to severe feature interference among different triggers. To address this challenge, we propose MTAttack, the first multi-target backdoor attack framework for enforcing accurate multiple trigger-target mappings in LVLMs. The core of MTAttack is a novel optimization method with two constraints, namely Proxy Space Partitioning constraint and Trigger Prototype Anchoring constraint. It jointly optimizes multiple triggers in the latent space, with each trigger independently mapping clean images to a unique proxy class while at the same time guaranteeing their separability. Experiments on popular benchmarks demonstrate a high success rate of MTAttack for multi-target attacks, substantially outperforming existing attack methods. Furthermore, our attack exhibits strong generalizability across datasets and robustness against backdoor defense strategies. These findings highlight the vulnerability of LVLMs to multi-target backdoor attacks and underscore the urgent need for mitigating such threats.

PaperID: 128, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06424 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent 4D reconstruction methods have yielded impressive results but rely on sharp videos as supervision. However, motion blur often occurs in videos due to camera shake and object movement, while existing methods render blurry results when using such videos for reconstructing 4D models. Although a few approaches attempted to address the problem, they struggled to produce highquality results, due to the inaccuracy in estimating continuous dynamic representations within the exposure time. Encouraged by recent works in 3D motion trajectory modeling using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), we take 3DGS as the scene representation manner, and propose Deblur4DGS to obtain a high-quality 4D model from blurry monocular video. Specifically, we transform continuous dynamic representations estimation within an exposure time into the exposure time estimation. Moreover, we introduce the exposure regularization term, multi-frame, and multi-resolution consistency regularization term to avoid trivial solutions. Furthermore, to better represent objects with large motion, we suggest blur-aware variable canonical Gaussians. Beyond novel-view synthesis, Deblur4DGS can be applied to improve blurry video from multiple perspectives, including deblurring, frame interpolation, and video stabilization. Extensive experiments in both synthetic and real-world data on the above four tasks show that Deblur4DGS outperforms state-of-the-art 4D reconstruction methods.

PaperID: 129, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06201 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in diffusion models have enabled the creation of deceptively real images, posing significant security risks when misused. In this study, we empirically show that different timesteps of DDIM inversion reveal varying subtle distinctions between synthetic and real images that are extractable for detection, taking the forms of such as Fourier power spectrum highfrequency discrepancies and inter-pixel variance distributions. Based on these observations, we propose a novel detection method named ESIDE that directly utilizes features of intermediately noised images by training an ensemble on multiple noised timesteps, circumventing the overtime of conventional reconstruction-based strategies. To enhance human comprehension, we introduce a metric-grounded explanation refinement module to identify and explain AI-generated flaws. Additionally, we present the benchmarks GenHard and GenExplain, offering detection samples of greater difficulty and high-quality rationales for fake images. Extensive experiments show that ESIDE achieves state-of-the-art performance with 98.91% and 95.89% detection accuracy on regular and challenging samples respectively, and demonstrates generalizability and robustness.

PaperID: 130, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11931 GitHub

Abstract:
Gait recognition is emerging as a promising technology and an innovative field within computer vision, with a wide range of applications in remote human identification. However, existing methods typically rely on complex architectures to directly extract features from images and apply pooling operations to obtain sequencelevel representations. Such designs often lead to overfitting on static noise (e.g., clothing), while failing to effectively capture dynamic motion regions, such as the arms and legs. This bottleneck is particularly challenging in the presence of intra-class variation, where gait features of the same individual under different environmental conditions are significantly distant in the feature space. To address the above challenges, we present a Language-guided and Motion-aware gait recognition framework, named LMGait. To the best of our knowledge, LMGait is the first method to introduce natural language descriptions as explicit semantic priors into the gait recognition task. In particular, we utilize designed gait-related language cues to capture key motion features in gait sequences. To improve cross-modal alignment, we propose the Motion Awareness Module (MAM), which refines the language features by adaptively adjusting various levels of semantic information to ensure better alignment with the visual representations. Furthermore, we introduce the Motion Temporal Capture Module (MTCM) to enhance the discriminative capability of gait features and improve the model’s motion tracking ability. We conducted extensive experiments across multiple datasets, and the results demonstrate the significant advantages of our proposed network. Specifically, our model achieved accuracies of 88.5%, 97.1%, and 97.5% on the CCPG, SUSTech1K, and CASIAB datasets, respectively, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

PaperID: 131, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21707 GitHub

Abstract:
Comprehensively and flexibly capturing the complex spatiotemporal dependencies of human motion is critical for multi-person motion prediction. Existing methods grapple with two primary limitations: i) Inflexible spatiotemporal representation due to reliance on positional encodings for capturing spatiotemporal information. ii) High computational costs stemming from the quadratic time complexity of conventional attention mechanisms. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Spatiotemporal-Untrammelled Mixture of Experts (ST-MoE), which flexibly explores complex spatio-temporal dependencies in human motion and significantly reduces computational cost. To adaptively mine complex spatio-temporal patterns from human motion, our model incorporates four distinct types of spatiotemporal experts, each specializing in capturing different spatial or temporal dependencies. To reduce the potential computational overhead while integrating multiple experts, we introduce bidirectional spatiotemporal Mamba as experts, each sharing bidirectional temporal and spatial Mamba in distinct combinations to achieve model efficiency and parameter economy. Extensive experiments on four multi-person benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach not only outperforms state-of-art in accuracy but also reduces model parameter by 41.38% and achieves a 3.6× speedup in training.

PaperID: 132, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13208 GitHub

Abstract:
Existing multiperson video pose estimation methods typically adopt a two-stage pipeline: detecting individuals in each frame, followed by temporal modeling for single-person pose estimation. This design relies on heuristic operations such as tracking, RoI cropping, and non-maximum suppression, limiting both accuracy and efficiency. In this paper, we present a fully end-to-end framework for multi-person 2D pose estimation in videos, effectively eliminating heuristic operations. A key challenge is to associate individuals across frames under complex and overlapping temporal trajectories. To address this, we introduce a novel Pose-Aware Video transformEr Network (PAVE-Net), which features a spatial encoder to model intra-frame relations and a spatiotemporal pose decoder to capture global dependencies across frames. To achieve accurate temporal association, we propose a pose-aware attention mechanism that enables each pose query to selectively aggregate features corresponding to the same individual across consecutive frames. Additionally, we explicitly model spatiotemporal dependencies among pose keypoints to improve accuracy. Notably, our approach is the first end-to-end method for multi-frame 2D human pose estimation. Extensive experiments show that PAVE-Net substantially outperforms prior image-based end-to-end methods, achieving a 6.0 mAP improvement on PoseTrack2017, and delivers accuracy competitive with state-of-the-art two-stage video-based approaches, while offering significant gains in efficiency.

PaperID: 133, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12909 GitHub

Abstract:
Deep learningbased 3D anomaly detection methods have demonstrated significant potential in industrial manufacturing. However, many approaches are specifically designed for anomaly detection tasks, which limits their generalizability to other 3D tasks. In contrast, self-supervised point cloud models aim for general representation learning, yet our investigation reveals that these classical models are suboptimal at anomaly detection under the unified fine-tuning paradigm. This motivates us to develop a more generalizable 3D model that can effectively detect anomalies without relying on task-specific designs. Interestingly, we find that using only the curvature of each point as its anomaly score already outperforms several classical self-supervised and dedicated anomaly detection models, highlighting the critical role of curvature in 3D anomaly detection. In this paper, we propose a Curvature-Augmented Self-supervised Learning (CASL) framework based on a reconstruction paradigm. Built upon the classical U-Net architecture, our approach introduces multi-scale curvature prompts to guide the decoder in predicting the coordinates of each point. Without relying on any dedicated anomaly detection mechanisms, it achieves leading detection performance through straightforward anomaly classification fine-tuning. Moreover, the learned representations generalize well to standard 3D understanding tasks such as point cloud classification.

PaperID: 134, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02972 GitHub

Abstract:
Integrating LiDAR and camera information in the bird's eye view (BEV) representation has demonstrated its effectiveness in 3D object detection. However, because of the fundamental disparity in geometric accuracy between these sensors, indiscriminate fusion in previous methods often leads to degraded performance. In this paper, we propose BEVDilation, a novel LiDARcentric framework that prioritizes LiDAR information in the fusion. By formulating image BEV features as implicit guidance rather than naive concatenation, our strategy effectively alleviates the spatial misalignment caused by image depth estimation errors. Furthermore, the image guidance can effectively help the LiDAR-centric paradigm to address the sparsity and semantic limitations of point clouds. Specifically, we propose a Sparse Voxel Dilation Block that mitigates the inherent point sparsity by densifying foreground voxels through image priors. Moreover, we introduce a Semantic-Guided BEV Dilation Block to enhance the LiDAR feature diffusion processing with image semantic guidance and long-range context capture. On the challenging nuScenes benchmark, BEVDilation achieves better performance than state-of-the-art methods while maintaining competitive computational efficiency. Importantly, our LiDAR-centric strategy demonstrates greater robustness to depth noise compared to naive fusion.

PaperID: 135, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04682 GitHub

Abstract:
Infrared video has been of great interest in visual tasks under challenging environments, but often suffers from severe atmospheric turbulence and compression degradation. Existing video superresolution (VSR) methods either neglect the inherent modality gap between infrared and visible images or fail to restore turbulence-induced distortions. Directly cascading turbulence mitigation (TM) algorithms with VSR methods leads to error propagation and accumulation due to the decoupled modeling of degradation between turbulence and resolution. We introduce HATIR, a Heat-Aware Diffusion for Turbulent InfraRed Video Super-Resolution, which injects heat-aware deformation priors into the diffusion sampling path to jointly model the inverse process of turbulent degradation and structural detail loss. Specifically, HATIR constructs a Phasor-Guided Flow Estimator, rooted in the physical principle that thermally active regions exhibit consistent phasor responses over time, enabling reliable turbulence-aware flow to guide the reverse diffusion process. To ensure the fidelity of structural recovery under nonuniform distortions, a Turbulence-Aware Decoder is proposed to selectively suppress unstable temporal cues and enhance edge-aware feature aggregation via turbulence gating and structure-aware attention. We built FLIR-IVSR, the first dataset for turbulent infrared VSR, comprising paired LR-HR sequences from a FLIR T1050sc camera (1024 X 768) spanning 640 diverse scenes with varying camera and object motion conditions. This encourages future research in infrared VSR.

PaperID: 136, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13734 GitHub

Abstract:
With the rise of cloudedge collaboration, recommendation services are increasingly trained in distributed environments. Federated Recommendation (FR) enables such multi-end collaborative training while preserving privacy by sharing model parameters instead of raw data. However, the large number of parameters, primarily due to the massive item embeddings, significantly hampers communication efficiency. While existing studies mainly focus on improving the efficiency of FR models, they largely overlook the issue of embedding parameter overhead. To address this gap, we propose a FR training framework with Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) based embedding designed to reduce the volume of embedding parameters that need to be transmitted. Our approach offers a lightweight, plugin-style solution that can be seamlessly integrated into existing FR methods. In addition to incorporating common PEFT techniques such as LoRA and Hash-based encoding, we explore the use of Residual Quantized Variational Autoencoders (RQ-VAE) as a novel PEFT strategy within our framework. Extensive experiments across various FR model backbones and datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly reduces communication overhead while improving accuracy.

PaperID: 137, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09147 GitHub

Abstract:
Multiperson global human mesh recovery (HMR) is crucial for understanding crowd dynamics and interactions. Traditional vision-based HMR methods sometimes face limitations in real-world scenarios due to mutual occlusions, insufficient lighting, and privacy concerns. Human-floor tactile interactions offer an occlusion-free and privacy-friendly alternative for capturing human motion. Existing research indicates that pressure signals acquired from tactile mats can effectively estimate human pose in single-person scenarios. However, when multiple individuals walk randomly on the mat simultaneously, how to distinguish intermingled pressure signals generated by different persons and subsequently acquire individual temporal pressure data remains a pending challenge for extending pressure-based HMR to the multi-person situation. In this paper, we present PressTrack-HMR, a top-down pipeline that recovers multi-person global human meshes solely from pressure signals. This pipeline leverages a tracking-by-detection strategy to first identify and segment each individual's pressure signal from the raw pressure data, and subsequently performs HMR for each extracted individual signal. Furthermore, we build a multi-person interaction pressure dataset MIP, which facilitates further research into pressure-based human motion analysis in multi-person scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that our method excels in multi-person HMR using pressure data, with 89.2 MPJPE and 112.6 WA-MPJPE, and these showcase the potential of tactile mats for ubiquitous, privacy-preserving multi-person action recognition.

PaperID: 138, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05616 GitHub

Abstract:
Trajectory prediction is a crucial task in modeling human behavior, especially in safetycritical fields such as social robotics and autonomous vehicle navigation. Traditional heuristics based on handcrafted rules often lack accuracy, while recently proposed deep learning approaches suffer from computational cost, slow inference speed, lack of explainability, and generalization issues that limit their practical adoption in such environments. In this paper, we introduce TrajEvo, a framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically design trajectory prediction heuristics. TrajEvo employs an evolutionary algorithm to generate and refine prediction heuristics from past trajectory data. We introduce a Cross-Generation Elite Sampling to promote population diversity and a Statistics Feedback Loop allowing the LLM to analyze alternative predictions. Our evaluations show TrajEvo outperforms previous heuristic methods on various real-world datasets, and remarkably outperforms both heuristics and deep learning methods when generalizing to an unseen real-world dataset. TrajEvo represents a first step toward automated design of fast, explainable, and generalizable trajectory prediction heuristics. We make our source code publicly available to foster future research.

PaperID: 139, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10333 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in VisionLanguage-Action (VLA) models have enabled robotic agents to integrate multimodal understanding with action execution. However, our empirical analysis reveals that current VLAs struggle to allocate visual attention to target regions. Instead, visual attention is always dispersed. To guide the visual attention grounding on the correct target, we propose ReconVLA, a reconstructive VLA model with an implicit grounding paradigm. Conditioned on the model's visual outputs, a diffusion transformer aims to reconstruct the gaze region of the image, which corresponds to the target manipulated objects. This process prompts the VLA model to learn fine-grained representations and accurately allocate visual attention, thus effectively leveraging task-specific visual information and conducting precise manipulation. Moreover, we curate a large-scale pretraining dataset comprising over 100k trajectories and 2 million data samples from open-source robotic datasets, further boosting the model’s generalization in visual reconstruction. Extensive experiments in simulation and the real world demonstrate the superiority of our implicit grounding method, showcasing its capabilities of precise manipulation and generalization.

PaperID: 140, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19159 GitHub

Abstract:
Depthwise pruning accelerates LLM inference in resource-constrained scenarios but suffers from performance degradation due to indiscriminate removal of entire Transformer layers. This paper reveals ``Patch-Like'' redundancy across layers via correlation analysis of the outputs of different layers in reproducing kernel Hilbert space, demonstrating consecutive layers exhibit high functional similarity. Building on this observation, this paper proposes Sliding-Window Merging (SWM) - a dynamic compression method that selects consecutive layers from top to bottom using a pre-defined similarity threshold, and compacts patch-redundant layers through a parameter consolidation, thereby simplifying the model structure while maintaining its performance. Extensive experiments on LLMs with various architectures and different parameter scales show that our method outperforms existing pruning techniques in both zero-shot inference performance and retraining recovery quality after pruning. In particular, in the experiment with 35% pruning on the Vicuna-7B model, our method achieved a 1.654% improvement in average performance on zero-shot tasks compared to the existing method. Moreover, we further reveal the potential of combining depth pruning with width pruning to enhance the pruning effect.

PaperID: 141, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09539 GitHub

Abstract:
Reasoningintensive ranking models built on Large Language Models (LLMs) have made notable progress. However, existing approaches often rely on large-scale LLMs and explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, resulting in high computational cost and latency that limit real-world use. To address this, we propose TFRank, an efficient pointwise reasoning ranker based on small-scale LLMs. To improve ranking performance, TFRank effectively integrates CoT data, fine-grained score supervision, and multi-task training. Furthermore, it achieves an efficient "Think-Free" reasoning capability by employing a "think-mode switch" and pointwise format constraints. Specifically, this allows the model to leverage explicit reasoning during training while delivering precise relevance scores for complex queries at inference without generating any reasoning chains. Experiments show that TFRank achieves performance comparable to models with four times more parameters on the BRIGHT benchmark, and demonstrates strong competitiveness on the BEIR benchmark. Further analysis shows that TFRank achieves an effective balance between performance and efficiency, providing a practical solution for integrating advanced reasoning into real-world systems.

PaperID: 142, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08602 GitHub

Abstract:
Vision modeling has advanced rapidly with Transformers, whose attention mechanisms capture visual dependencies but lack a principled account of how semantic information propagates spatially. We revisit this problem from a wavebased perspective: feature maps are treated as spatial signals whose evolution over an internal propagation time (aligned with network depth) is governed by an underdamped wave equation. In this formulation, spatial frequency—from low-frequency global layout to high-frequency edges and textures—is modeled explicitly, and its interaction with propagation time is controlled rather than implicitly fixed. We derive a closed-form, frequency–time decoupled solution and implement it as the Wave Propagation Operator (WPO), a lightweight module that models global interactions in O(NlogN) time—far lower than attention. Building on WPO, we propose a family of WaveFormer models as drop-in replacements for standard ViTs and CNNs, achieving competitive accuracy across image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, while delivering up to 1.6× higher throughput and 30% fewer FLOPs than attention-based alternatives. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that wave propagation introduces a complementary modeling bias to heat-based methods, effectively capturing both global coherence and high-frequency details essential for rich visual semantics.

PaperID: 143, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08152 GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal learning, while contributing to numerous success stories across various fields, faces the challenge of prohibitively expensive manual annotation. To address the scarcity of annotated data, a popular solution is unsupervised domain adaptation, which has been extensively studied in unimodal settings yet remains less explored in multimodal settings. In this paper, we investigate heterogeneous multimodal domain adaptation, where the primary challenge is the varying domain shifts of different modalities from the source to the target domain. We first introduce the information bottleneck method to learn representations for each modality independently, and then match the source and target domains in the representation space with correlation alignment. To balance the domain alignment of all modalities, we formulate the problem as a multiobjective task, aiming for a Pareto optimal solution. By exploiting the properties specific to our model, the problem can be simplified to a quadratic programming problem. Further approximation yields a closed-form solution, leading to an efficient modality-balanced multimodal domain adaptation algorithm. The proposed method features Balanced multi-objective optimization for multimodal domain adaptation, termed Boomda. Extensive empirical results showcase the effectiveness of the proposed approach and demonstrate that Boomda outperforms the competing schemes.

PaperID: 144, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07929 GitHub

Abstract:
Despite the remarkable performance of deep models in medical imaging, they still require source data for training, which limits their potential in light of privacy concerns. Federated learning (FL), as a decentralized learning framework that trains a shared model with multiple hospitals (a.k.a., FL clients), provides a feasible solution. However, data heterogeneity and resource costs hinder the deployment of FL models, especially when using vision language models (VLM). To address these challenges, we propose a novel contrastive languageimage pre-training (CLIP) based FL approach for medical image classification. Specifically, we introduce a masked feature adaptation module (FAM) as a communication module to reduce the communication load while freezing the CLIP encoders to reduce the computational overhead. Furthermore, we propose a masked multi-layer perceptron (MLP) as a private local classifier to adapt to the client tasks. Moreover, we design an adaptive Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence-based distillation regularization method to enable mutual learning between FAM and MLP. Finally, we incorporate model compression to transmit the FAM parameters while using ensemble predictions for classification. Extensive experiments on four publicly available medical datasets demonstrate that our model provides feasible performance (e.g., 8% higher compared to second best baseline on ISIC2019) with reasonable resource cost (e.g., 120 times faster than FedAVG).

PaperID: 145, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19943 GitHub

Abstract:
Continual Learning with Pretrained Models holds great promise for efficient adaptation across sequential tasks. However, most existing approaches freeze PTMs and rely on auxiliary modules like prompts or adapters, limiting model plasticity and leading to suboptimal generalization when facing significant distribution shifts. While full fine-tuning can improve adaptability, it risks disrupting crucial pre-trained knowledge. In this paper, we propose Mutual Information-guided Sparse Tuning (MIST), a plug-and-play method that selectively updates a small subset of PTM parameters, less than 5%, based on sensitivity to mutual information objectives. MIST enables effective task-specific adaptation while preserving generalization. To further reduce interference, we introduce strong sparsity regularization by randomly dropping gradients during tuning, resulting in fewer than 0.5% of parameters being updated per step. Applied before standard freeze-based methods, MIST consistently boosts performance across diverse continual learning benchmarks. Experiments show that integrating our method into multiple baselines yields significant performance gains.

PaperID: 146, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11404 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in visionlanguage models (VLMs) have enabled broad progress in the general medical field. However, pathology still remains a more challenging sub-domain, with current pathology-specific VLMs exhibiting limitations in both diagnostic accuracy and reasoning plausibility. Such shortcomings are largely attributable to the nature of current pathology datasets, which are primarily composed of image–description pairs that lack the depth and structured diagnostic paradigms employed by real-world pathologists. In this study, we leverage pathology textbooks and real-world pathology experts to construct high-quality, reasoning-oriented datasets. Building on this, we introduce Patho-R1, a multimodal RL-based pathology Reasoner, trained through a three-stage pipeline: (1) continued pretraining on 3.5 million image-text pairs for knowledge infusion; (2) supervised fine-tuning on 500k high-quality Chain-of-Thought samples for reasoning incentivizing; (3) reinforcement learning using Group Relative Policy Optimization and Decoupled Clip and Dynamic sAmpling Policy Optimization strategies for multimodal reasoning quality refinement. To further assess the alignment quality of our dataset, we propose Patho-CLIP, trained on the same figure-caption corpus used for continued pretraining. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that both Patho-CLIP and Patho-R1 achieve robust performance across a wide range of pathology-related tasks, including zero-shot classification, cross-modal retrieval, Visual Question Answering, and Multiple Choice Question.

PaperID: 147, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18744 GitHub

Abstract:
Textto-SQL is a critical task in natural language processing that aims to transform natural language questions into accurate and executable SQL queries. In real-world scenarios, these reasoning tasks are often accompanied by complex mathematical computations, domain knowledge, and hypothetical reasoning scenarios. However, existing large-scale Text-to-SQL datasets typically focus on business logic and task logic, neglecting critical factors such as vertical domain knowledge, complex mathematical reasoning, and hypothetical reasoning, which are essential for realistically reflecting the reasoning demands in practical applications and completing data querying and analysis. To bridge this gap, we introduce LogicCat, the first Text-to-SQL benchmark dataset specifically designed for complex reasoning and chain-of-thought parsing, encompassing physics, arithmetic, commonsense, and hypothetical reasoning scenarios. LogicCat comprises 4,038 English questions paired 12,114 detailed chain-of-thought reasoning steps, spanning 45 databases across diverse domains, significantly surpassing existing datasets in complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that LogicCat substantially increases the task difficulty for current state-of-the-art models to at most 33.20% execution accuracy, indicating that this task remains exceptionally challenging. The advancement of LogicCat represents a crucial step toward developing systems suitable for real-world enterprise data analysis and autonomous query generation.

PaperID: 148, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12079 GitHub

Abstract:
Although deep learning has substantially advanced speech separation in recent years, most existing studies continue to prioritize separation quality while overlooking computational efficiency, an essential factor for lowlatency speech processing in real-time applications. In this paper, we propose SepPrune, the first structured pruning framework specifically designed to compress deep speech separation models and reduce their computational cost. SepPrune begins by analyzing the computational structure of a given model to identify layers with the highest computational burden. It then introduces a differentiable masking strategy to enable gradient-driven channel selection. Based on the learned masks, SepPrune prunes redundant channels and fine-tunes the remaining parameters to recover performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this learnable pruning paradigm yields substantial advantages for channel pruning in speech separation models, outperforming existing methods. Notably, a model pruned with SepPrune can recover 85% of the performance of a pre-trained model (trained over hundreds of epochs) with only one epoch of fine-tuning, and achieves convergence 36x faster than training from scratch.

PaperID: 149, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14429 GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Diffusion Models, or dLLMs, have emerged as a significant focus in NLP research, with substantial effort directed toward understanding their scalability and downstream task performance. However, their longcontext capabilities remain unexplored, lacking systematic analysis or methods for context extension. In this work, we present the first systematic investigation comparing the long-context performance of diffusion LLMs and traditional auto-regressive LLMs. We first identify a unique characteristic of dLLMs, unlike auto-regressive LLMs, they maintain remarkably stable perplexity during direct context extrapolation. Moreover, where auto-regressive models fail outright during the Needle-In-A-Haystack task with context exceeding their pretrained length, we discover dLLMs exhibit a distinct local perception phenomenon, enabling successful retrieval from recent context segments. We explain both phenomena through the lens of Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) scaling theory. Building on these observations, we propose LongLLaDA, a training-free method that integrates LLaDA with the NTK-based RoPE extrapolation. Our results validate that established extrapolation scaling laws remain effective for extending the context windows of dLLMs. Furthermore, we identify long-context tasks where dLLMs outperform auto-regressive LLMs and others where they fall short. Consequently, this study establishes the first length extrapolation method for diffusion LLMs while providing essential theoretical insights and empirical benchmarks critical for advancing future research on long-context diffusion LLMs.

PaperID: 150, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07863 GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models now draft news, legal analyses, and software code with humanlevel fluency. At the same time, regulations such as the EU AI Act mandate that each synthetic passage carry an imperceptible, machine-verifiable mark for provenance. Conventional logit-based watermarks satisfy this requirement by selecting a pseudorandom green vocabulary at every decoding step and boosting its logits, yet the random split can exclude the highest-probability token and thus erode fluency. WaterMod mitigates this limitation through a probability-aware modular rule. The vocabulary is first sorted in descending model probability; the resulting ranks are then partitioned by the residue rank mod k, which distributes adjacent—and therefore semantically similar—tokens across different classes. A fixed bias of small magnitude is applied to one selected class. In the zero-bit setting (k=2), an entropy-adaptive gate selects either the even or the odd parity as the green list. Because the top two ranks fall into different parities, this choice embeds a detectable signal while guaranteeing that at least one high-probability token remains available for sampling. In the multi-bit regime (k>2), the current payload digit d selects the color class whose ranks satisfy rank mod k = d. Biasing the logits of that class embeds exactly one base-k digit—equivalently log2(k) bits—per decoding step, thereby enabling fine-grained provenance tracing. The same modular arithmetic therefore supports both binary attribution and rich payloads. Experimental results demonstrate that WaterMod consistently attains strong watermark detection performance while maintaining generation quality in both zero-bit and multi-bit settings. This robustness holds across a range of tasks, including natural language generation, mathematical reasoning, and code synthesis.

PaperID: 151, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.09719 GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit complementary strengths. Model routing harnesses these strengths by dynamically directing each query to the most suitable model, given a candidate model pool. However, routing performance relies on accurate model representations, and adding new models typically requires retraining, limiting scalability. To address these challenges, we propose a novel routing method using incontext vectors to represent model capabilities. The method proceeds in two stages. First, queries are embedded and projected into vectors, with a projector and LLM-based router trained to reconstruct the original queries, aligning vector representations with the router’s semantic space. Second, each candidate model is profiled on a query set, and the router learns---based on in-context vectors of query and model performance---to predict whether each model can correctly answer new queries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art routing performance in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution tasks. Moreover, our method allows for seamless integration of new models without retraining the router.

PaperID: 152, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02398 GitHub

Abstract:
Textto-Audio (TTA) generation has made rapid progress, but current evaluation methods remain narrow, focusing mainly on perceptual quality while overlooking robustness, generalization, and ethical concerns. We present TTA-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating TTA models across functional performance, reliability, and social responsibility. It covers seven dimensions including accuracy, robustness, fairness, and toxicity, and includes 2,999 diverse prompts generated through automated and manual methods. We introduce a unified evaluation protocol that combines objective metrics with over 118,000 human annotations from both experts and general users. Ten state-of-the-art models are benchmarked under this framework, offering detailed insights into their strengths and limitations. TTA-Bench establishes a new standard for holistic evaluation of TTA systems.

PaperID: 153, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22120 GitHub

Abstract:
Finetuning adapts pretrained models for specific tasks but poses the risk of catastrophic forgetting (CF), where critical knowledge from pretraining is overwritten. To address the issue of CF in a general-purpose framework, we propose Low-damage Knowledge Implanting (LoKI), a parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) technique that utilizes recent mechanistic understanding of how knowledge is stored in transformer architectures. We compare LoKI against state-of-the-art PEFT methods in two real-world fine-tuning scenarios. The results show that LoKI demonstrates significantly better preservation of general capabilities. At the same time, its task-specific performance is comparable to or even surpasses that of full parameter fine-tuning and these PEFT methods across various model architectures. Our work bridges the mechanistic insights of LLMs' knowledge storage with practical fine-tuning objectives, enabling an effective balance between task-specific adaptation and the retention of general-purpose capabilities.

PaperID: 154, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.00388 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in visionlanguage models have opened up new possibilities for reasoning-driven image geolocalization. However, existing approaches often rely on synthetic reasoning annotations or external image retrieval, which can limit interpretability and generalizability. In this paper, we present Geo-R, a retrieval-free framework that uncovers structured reasoning paths from existing ground-truth coordinates and optimizes geolocation accuracy via reinforcement learning. We propose the Chain of Region, a rule-based hierarchical reasoning paradigm that generates precise, interpretable supervision by mapping GPS coordinates to geographic entities (e.g., country, province, city) without relying on model-generated or synthetic labels. Building on this, we introduce a lightweight reinforcement learning strategy with coordinate-aligned rewards based on Haversine distance, enabling the model to refine predictions through spatially meaningful feedback. Our approach bridges structured geographic reasoning with direct spatial supervision, yielding improved localization accuracy, stronger generalization, and more transparent inference. Experimental results across multiple benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of Geo-R, establishing a new retrieval-free paradigm for scalable and interpretable image geolocalization. To facilitate further research and ensure reproducibility, both the model and code will be made publicly available.

PaperID: 155, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20495 GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable code generation capabilities but falter when adapting to frequent updates in external library APIs. This critical limitation, stemming from reliance on outdated API knowledge from their training data, even with access to current documentation, impedes reliable code generation in dynamic environments. To tackle this issue, we propose ReCode (rulebased Reinforcement learning for Code Update), a novel framework that mimics human programmer adaptation to API changes. Specifically, we construct a dataset of approximately 2,000 data entries to train the LLMs to perform version migration based on updated information. Then, we introduce a modified string similarity metric for code evaluation as the reward for reinforcement learning. Our experiments demonstrate that ReCode substantially boosts LLMs' code generation performance in dynamic API scenarios, especially on the unseen CodeUpdateArena task. Crucially, compared to supervised fine-tuning, ReCode has less impact on LLMs' general code generation abilities. We apply ReCode on various LLMs and reinforcement learning algorithms (GRPO and DAPO), all achieving consistent improvements. Notably, after training, Qwen2.5-Coder-7B outperforms that of the 32B parameter code instruction-tuned model and the reasoning model with the same architecture.

PaperID: 156, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04423 GitHub

Abstract:
Effective customer support requires not only accurate problemsolving but also structured and empathetic communication aligned with professional standards. However, existing dialogue datasets often lack strategic guidance, and real-world service data is difficult to access and annotate. To address this, we introduce the task of Customer Support Conversation (CSC), aimed at training customer service supporters to respond using well-defined support strategies. We propose a structured CSC framework grounded in COPC guidelines, defining five conversational stages and twelve strategies to guide high-quality interactions. Based on this, we construct CSConv, an evaluation dataset of 1,855 real-world customer–agent conversations rewritten using LLMs to reflect deliberate strategy use, and annotated accordingly. Additionally, we develop a role-playing approach that simulates strategy-rich conversations using LLM-powered roles aligned with the CSC framework, resulting in the training dataset RoleCS. Experiments show that fine-tuning strong LLMs on RoleCS significantly improves their ability to generate high-quality, strategy-aligned responses on CSConv. Human evaluations further confirm gains in problem resolution.

PaperID: 157, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14031 GitHub

Abstract:
Beyond simple text generation, Large Language Models (LLMs) have evolved into agentic systems capable of planning and interacting with external tools to solve complex tasks. This evolution involves finetuning LLMs on agent-specific tasks to enhance their proficiency. However, safety concerns are frequently overlooked during this fine-tuning process. In this work, we show that aligned LLMs can become unintentionally misaligned, leading to a higher likelihood of executing harmful tasks and a reduced tendency to refuse them when fine-tuned to execute agentic tasks. To address these safety challenges, we propose Prefix INjection Guard (PING), a simple yet effective method that prepends automatically generated natural language prefixes to agent responses, guiding them to refuse harmful requests while preserving performance on benign tasks. Specifically, we introduce an iterative approach that alternates between (1) generating candidate prefixes and (2) selecting those that optimize both task performance and refusal behavior. Experimental results demonstrate that PING significantly enhances the safety of fine-tuned LLM agents without sacrificing their effectiveness. PING consistently outperforms existing prompting approaches across diverse benchmarks in both web navigation and code generation tasks. Our analysis of internal hidden states via linear probes reveals that prefix tokens are crucial for behavior modification, explaining the performance gains.

PaperID: 158, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03111 GitHub

Abstract:
Singlecell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) is essential for decoding tumor heterogeneity. However, pan-cancer research still faces two key challenges: learning discriminative and efficient single-cell representations, and establishing a comprehensive evaluation benchmark. In this paper, we introduce \algoname, a lightweight hybrid neural network that combines the strengths of Transformers and state-space models to achieve a balance between performance and efficiency. \algoname consists of a front-end local-context encoder with shared self-attention layers to capture complex, order-independent gene interactions; and a back-end global sequential feature decoder that efficiently integrates global context using a linear-time state-space model. This modular design preserves the expressive power of Transformers while leveraging the scalability of Mamba to enable transcriptome modeling, effectively capturing both local and global regulatory signals. To enable robust evaluation, we also construct a large-scale pan-cancer single-cell benchmark, \algoname Bench, containing over 3.5 million high-quality cells across 33 cancer subtypes, curated through a rigorous preprocessing pipeline. Experimental results show that \algoname outperforms state-of-the-art models on our pan-cancer benchmark (+4.0%) and across multiple public tasks, including cell type annotation (+7.4%), batch integration (+4.0%) and multi-omics integration (+3.1%).

PaperID: 159, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10025 GitHub

Abstract:
Neural operators have emerged as a promising paradigm for learning solution operators of partial differential equations (PDEs) directly from data. Existing methods, such as those based on Fourier or graph techniques, make strong assumptions about the structure of the kernel integral operator, assumptions which may limit expressivity. We present SVDNO, a neural operator that explicitly parameterizes the kernel by its singular-value decomposition (SVD) and then carries out the integral directly in the low-rank basis. Two lightweight networks learn the left and right singular functions, a diagonal parameter matrix learns the singular values, and a Gram-matrix regularizer enforces orthonormality. As SVD-NO approximates the full kernel, it obtains a high degree of expressivity. Furthermore, due to its low-rank structure the computational complexity of applying the operator remains reasonable, leading to a practical system. In extensive evaluations on five diverse benchmark equations, SVD-NO achieves a new state of the art. In particular, SVD-NO provides greater performance gains on PDEs whose solutions are highly spatially variable.

PaperID: 160, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21120 GitHub

Abstract:
Understanding how chemical perturbations propagate through biological systems is essential for robust molecular property prediction. While most existing methods focus on chemical structures alone, recent advances highlight the crucial role of cellular responses such as morphology and gene expression in shaping drug effects. However, current cellaware approaches face two key limitations: (1) modality incompleteness in external biological data, and (2) insufficient modeling of hierarchical dependencies across molecular, cellular, and genomic levels. We propose CHMR (Cell-aware Hierarchical Multi-Modal Representations), a robust framework that jointly models local-global dependencies between molecules and cellular responses and captures latent biological hierarchies via a novel tree-structured vector quantization module. Evaluated on public benchmarks spanning 696 tasks, CHMR outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, yielding average improvements of 3.6% on classification and 17.2% on regression tasks. These results demonstrate the advantage of hierarchy-aware, multi-modal learning for reliable and biologically grounded molecular representations, offering a generalizable framework for integrative biomedical modeling.

PaperID: 161, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14122 GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant advances in natural language processing, yet their potential for highstake political decision-making remains largely unexplored. This paper addresses the gap by focusing on the application of LLMs to the United Nations (UN) decision-making process, where the stakes are particularly high and political decisions can have far-reaching consequences. We introduce a novel dataset comprising publicly available UN Security Council (UNSC) records from 1994 to 2024, including draft resolutions, voting records, and diplomatic speeches. Using this dataset, we propose the United Nations Benchmark (UNBench), the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs across four interconnected political science tasks: co-penholder judgment, representative voting simulation, draft adoption prediction, and representative statement generation. These tasks span the three stages of the UN decision-making process—drafting, voting, and discussing—and aim to assess LLMs' ability to understand and simulate political dynamics. Our experimental analysis demonstrates the potential and challenges of applying LLMs in this domain, providing insights into their strengths and limitations in political science. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first benchmark to systematically evaluate LLMs in UN decision-making, contributing to the growing intersection of AI and political science.

PaperID: 162, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14720 GitHub

Abstract:
Intelligent agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive capabilities and gained increasing popularity on social media platforms. While LLM agents are reshaping the ecology of social media, there exists a current gap in conducting a comprehensive evaluation of their ability to comprehend media content, understand user behaviors, and make intricate decisions. To address this challenge, we introduce SoMe, a pioneering benchmark designed to evaluate social media agents equipped with various agent tools for accessing and analyzing social media data. SoMe comprises a diverse collection of 8 social media agent tasks, 9,164,284 posts, 6,591 user profiles, and 25,686 reports from various social media platforms and external websites, with 17,869 meticulously annotated task queries. Compared with the existing datasets and benchmarks for social media tasks, SoMe is the first to provide a versatile and realistic platform for LLMbased social media agents to handle diverse social media tasks. By extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis, we provide the first overview insight into the performance of mainstream agentic LLMs in realistic social media environments and identify several limitations. Our evaluation reveals that both the current closed-source and open-source LLMs cannot handle social media agent tasks satisfactorily. SoMe provides a challenging yet meaningful testbed for future social media agents.

PaperID: 163, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10600 GitHub

Abstract:
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), as valuable intellectual property, face unauthorized use. Existing protections, such as digital watermarking, are largely passive; they provide only posthoc ownership verification and cannot actively prevent the illicit use of a stolen model. This work proposes a proactive protection scheme, dubbed ``Authority Backdoor," which embeds access constraints directly into the model. In particular, the scheme utilizes a backdoor learning framework to intrinsically lock a model's utility, such that it performs normally only in the presence of a specific trigger (e.g., a hardware fingerprint). But in its absence, the DNN's performance degrades to be useless. To further enhance the security of the proposed authority scheme, the certifiable robustness is integrated to prevent an adaptive attacker from removing the implanted backdoor. The resulting framework establishes a secure authority mechanism for DNNs, combining access control with certifiable robustness against adversarial attacks. Extensive experiments on diverse architectures and datasets validate the effectiveness and certifiable robustness of the proposed framework.

PaperID: 164, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.11954 GitHub

Abstract:
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a promising energyefficient alternative to artificial neural networks, due to their event-driven spiking computation. However, some foundation SNN backbones (including Spikformer and SEW ResNet) suffer from non-spike computations (integer-float multiplications) caused by the structure of their residual connections. These non-spike computations increase SNNs' power consumption and make them unsuitable for deployment on mainstream neuromorphic hardware. In this paper, we analyze the spike-driven behavior of the residual connection methods in SNNs. We then present Spikingformer, a novel spiking transformer backbone that merges the MS Residual connection with Self-Attention in a biologically plausible way to address the non-spike computation challenge in Spikformer while maintaining global modeling capabilities. We evaluate Spikingformer across 13 datasets spanning large static images, neuromorphic data, and natural language tasks, and demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of Spikingformer, setting a vital benchmark for spiking neural networks. In addition, with the spike-driven features and global modeling capabilities, Spikingformer is expected to become a more efficient general-purpose SNN backbone towards energy-efficient artificial intelligence.

PaperID: 165, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12998 GitHub

Abstract:
Image retouching aims to enhance visual quality while aligning with users' personalized aesthetic preferences. To address the challenge of balancing controllability and subjectivity, we propose a unified diffusionbased image retouching framework called PerTouch. Our method supports semantic-level image retouching while maintaining global aesthetics. Using parameter maps containing attribute values in specific semantic regions as input, PerTouch constructs an explicit parameter-to-image mapping for fine-grained image retouching. To improve semantic boundary perception, we introduce semantic replacement and parameter perturbation mechanisms during training. To connect natural language instructions with visual control, we develop a VLM-driven agent to handle both strong and weak user instructions. Equipped with mechanisms of feedback-driven rethinking and scene-aware memory, PerTouch better aligns with user intent and captures long-term preferences. Extensive experiments demonstrate each component’s effectiveness and the superior performance of PerTouch in personalized image retouching.

PaperID: 166, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22345 GitHub

Abstract:
Normalizing Flows (NFs) are a class of generative models distinguished by a mathematically invertible architecture, where the forward pass transforms data into a latent space for density estimation, and the reverse pass generates new samples from this space. This characteristic creates an intrinsic synergy between representation learning and data generation. However, the generative quality of standard NFs is limited by poor semantic representations from loglikelihood optimization. To remedy this, we propose a novel alignment strategy that creatively leverages the invertibility of NFs: instead of regularizing the forward pass, we align the intermediate features of the generative (reverse) pass with representations from a powerful vision foundation model, demonstrating superior effectiveness over naive alignment. We also introduce a novel training-free, test-time optimization algorithm for classification, which provides a more intrinsic evaluation of the NF's embedded semantic knowledge. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our approach accelerates the training of NFs by over 3.3x, while simultaneously delivering significant improvements in both generative quality and classification accuracy. New state-of-the-art results for NFs are established on ImageNet 64 x 64 and 256 x 256.

PaperID: 167, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17818 GitHub

Abstract:
Trainingfree video object editing aims to achieve precise object-level manipulation, including object insertion, swapping, and deletion. However, it faces significant challenges in maintaining fidelity and temporal consistency. Existing methods, often designed for U-Net architectures, suffer from two primary limitations: inaccurate inversion due to first-order solvers, and contextual conflicts caused by crude "hard" feature replacement. These issues are more challenging in Diffusion Transformers (DiTs), where the unsuitability of prior layer-selection heuristics makes effective guidance challenging. To address these limitations, we introduce ContextFlow, a novel training-free framework for DiT-based video object editing. In detail, we first employ a high-order Rectified Flow solver to establish a robust editing foundation. The core of our framework is Adaptive Context Enrichment (for specifying what to edit), a mechanism that addresses contextual conflicts. Instead of replacing features, it enriches the self-attention context by concatenating Key-Value pairs from parallel reconstruction and editing paths, empowering the model to dynamically fuse information. Additionally, to determine where to apply this enrichment (for specifying where to edit), we propose a systematic, data-driven analysis to identify task-specific vital layers. Based on a novel Guidance Responsiveness Metric, our method pinpoints the most influential DiT blocks for different tasks (e.g., insertion, swapping), enabling targeted and highly effective guidance. Extensive experiments show that ContextFlow significantly outperforms existing training-free methods and even surpasses several state-of-the-art training-based approaches, delivering temporally coherent, high-fidelity results.

PaperID: 168, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01596 GitHub

Abstract:
Diffusion models have recently advanced video editing, yet controllable editing remains challenging due to the need for precise manipulation of diverse object properties. Current methods require different control signal for diverse editing tasks, which complicates model design and demands significant training resources. To address this, we propose ODisCo-Edit, a unified framework that incorporates a novel object distortion control (O-DisCo). This signal, based on random and adaptive noise, flexibly encapsulates a wide range of editing cues within a single representation. Paired with a “copy-form” preservation module for preserving non-edited regions, O-DisCo-Edit enables efficient, high-fidelity editing through an effective training paradigm. Extensive experiments and comprehensive human evaluations consistently demonstrate that O-DisCo-Edit surpasses both specialized and multitask state-of-the-art methods across various video editing tasks.

PaperID: 169, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00953 GitHub

Abstract:
In the domain of moment retrieval, accurately identifying temporal segments within videos based on natural language queries remains challenging. Traditional methods often employ pretrained models that struggle with fine-grained information and deterministic reasoning, leading to difficulties in aligning with complex or ambiguous moments. To overcome these limitations, we explore Deep Evidential Regression (DER) to construct a vanilla Evidential baseline. However, this approach encounters two major issues: the inability to effectively handle modality imbalance and the structural differences in DER's heuristic uncertainty regularizer, which adversely affect uncertainty estimation. This misalignment results in high uncertainty being incorrectly associated with accurate samples rather than challenging ones. Our observations indicate that existing methods lack the adaptability required for complex video scenarios. In response, we propose Debiased Evidential Learning for Moment Retrieval (DEMR), a novel framework that incorporates a Reflective Flipped Fusion (RFF) block for cross-modal alignment and a query reconstruction task to enhance text sensitivity, thereby reducing bias in uncertainty estimation. Additionally, we introduce a Geom-regularizer to refine uncertainty predictions, enabling adaptive alignment with difficult moments and improving retrieval accuracy. Extensive testing on standard datasets and debiased datasets ActivityNet-CD and Charades-CD demonstrates significant enhancements in effectiveness, robustness, and interpretability, positioning our approach as a promising solution for temporal-semantic robustness in moment retrieval.

PaperID: 170, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04519 GitHub

Abstract:
Inspired by Segment Anything 2, which generalizes segmentation from images to videos, we propose SAM2MOT—a novel segmentationdriven paradigm for multi-object tracking that breaks away from the conventional detection-association framework. In contrast to previous approaches that treat segmentation as auxiliary information, SAM2MOT places it at the heart of the tracking process, systematically tackling challenges like false positives and occlusions. Its effectiveness has been thoroughly validated on major MOT benchmarks. Furthermore, SAM2MOT integrates pre-trained detector, pre-trained segmentor with tracking logic into a zero-shot MOT system that requires no fine-tuning. This significantly reduces dependence on labeled data and paves the way for transitioning MOT research from task-specific solutions to general-purpose systems. Experiments on DanceTrack, UAVDT, and BDD100K show state-of-the-art results. Notably, SAM2MOT outperforms existing methods on DanceTrack by +2.1 HOTA and +4.5 IDF1, highlighting its effectiveness in MOT.

PaperID: 171, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13784 GitHub

Abstract:
Fewshot Video Object Detection (FSVOD) addresses the challenge of detecting novel objects in videos with limited labeled examples, overcoming the constraints of traditional detection methods that require extensive training data. This task presents key challenges, including maintaining temporal consistency across frames affected by occlusion and appearance variations, and achieving novel object generalization without relying on complex region proposals, which are often computationally expensive and require task-specific training. Our novel object-aware temporal modeling approach addresses these challenges by incorporating a filtering mechanism that selectively propagates high-confidence object features across frames. This enables efficient feature progression, reduces noise accumulation, and enhances detection accuracy in a few-shot setting. By utilizing few-shot trained detection and classification heads with focused feature propagation, we achieve robust temporal consistency without depending on explicit object tube proposals. Our approach achieves performance gains, with AP improvements of 3.7% (FSVOD-500), 5.3% (FSYTV-40), 4.3% (VidOR), and 4.5% (VidVRD) in the 5-shot setting. Further results demonstrate improvements in 1-shot, 3-shot, and 10-shot configurations.

PaperID: 172, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12931 GitHub

Abstract:
Monitoring Earth's evolving land covers requires methods capable of detecting changes across a wide range of categories and contexts. Existing change detection methods are hindered by their dependency on predefined classes, reducing their effectiveness in openworld applications. To address this issue, we introduce open-vocabulary change detection (OVCD), a novel task that bridges vision and language to detect changes across any category. Considering the lack of high-quality data and annotation, we propose two training-free frameworks, M-C-I and I-M-C, which leverage and integrate off-the-shelf foundation models for the OVCD task. The insight behind the M-C-I~framework is to discover all potential changes and then classify these changes, while the insight of I-M-C~framework is to identify all targets of interest and then determine whether their states have changed. Based on these two frameworks, we instantiate to obtain several methods, e.g., SAM-DINOv2-SegEarth-OV, Grounding-DINO-SAM2-DINO, etc. Extensive evaluations on 4 benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior generalization and robustness of our OVCD methods over existing supervised and unsupervised methods. To support continued exploration, we release DynamicEarth, a dedicated codebase designed to advance research and application of OVCD.

PaperID: 173, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20377 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in generative AI have accelerated the production of ultrahigh-resolution visual content. However, traditional image formats face significant limitations in efficient compression and real-time decoding, which restricts their applicability on end-user devices. Inspired by 3D Gaussian Splatting, 2D Gaussian image models have achieved notable progress in enhancing image representation efficiency and quality. Nevertheless, existing methods struggle to balance compression ratios and reconstruction fidelity in ultra-high-resolution scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose SmartSplat, a highly adaptive and feature-aware GS-based image compression framework that effectively supports arbitrary image resolutions and compression ratios. By leveraging image-aware features such as gradients and color variances, SmartSplat introduces a Gradient-Color Guided Variational Sampling strategy alongside an Exclusion-based Uniform Sampling scheme, significantly improving the non-overlapping coverage of Gaussian primitives in pixel space. Additionally, a Scale-Adaptive Gaussian Color Sampling method is proposed to enhance the initialization of Gaussian color attributes across scales. Through joint optimization of spatial layout, scale, and color initialization, SmartSplat can efficiently capture both local structures and global textures of images using a limited number of Gaussians, achieving superior reconstruction quality under high compression ratios. Extensive experiments on DIV8K and a newly created 16K dataset demonstrate that SmartSplat significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods at comparable compression ratios and surpasses their compression limits, exhibiting strong scalability and practical applicability. This framework can effectively alleviate the storage and transmission burdens of ultra-high-resolution images, providing a robust foundation for future high-efficiency visual content processing.

PaperID: 174, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08909 GitHub

Abstract:
Textonly training provides an attractive approach to address data scarcity challenges in zero-shot image captioning (ZIC), avoiding the expense of collecting paired image-text annotations. However, although these approaches perform well within training domains, they suffer from poor cross-domain generalization, often producing hallucinated content when encountering novel visual environments. Retrieval-based methods attempt to mitigate this limitation by leveraging external knowledge, but they can paradoxically exacerbate hallucination when retrieved captions contain entities irrelevant to the inputs. We introduce the concept of negative entities—objects that appear in generated caption but are absent from the input—and propose Negative Entity Suppression (NES) to tackle this challenge. NES seamlessly integrates three stages: (1) it employs synthetic images to ensure consistent image-to-text retrieval across both training and inference; (2) it filters negative entities from retrieved content to enhance accuracy; and (3) it applies attention-level suppression using identified negative entities to further minimize the impact of hallucination-prone features. Evaluation across multiple benchmarks demonstrates that NES maintains competitive in-domain performance while improving cross-domain transfer and reducing hallucination rates, achieving new state-of-the-art results in ZIC.

PaperID: 175, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05996 GitHub

Abstract:
Articulated objects are prevalent in daily life and robotic manipulation tasks. However, compared to rigid objects, pose tracking for articulated objects remains an underexplored problem due to their inherent kinematic constraints. To address these challenges, this work proposes a novel pointpair-based pose tracking framework, termed PPF-Tracker. The proposed framework first performs quasi-canonicalization of point clouds in the SE(3) Lie group space, and then models articulated objects using Point Pair Features (PPF) to predict pose voting parameters by leveraging the invariance properties of SE(3). Finally, semantic information of joint axes is incorporated to impose unified kinematic constraints across all parts of the articulated object. PPF-Tracker is systematically evaluated on both synthetic datasets and real-world scenarios, demonstrating strong generalization across diverse and challenging environments. Experimental results highlight the effectiveness and robustness of PPF-Tracker in multi-frame pose tracking of articulated objects. We believe this work can foster advances in robotics, embodied intelligence, and augmented reality.

PaperID: 176, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20366 GitHub

Abstract:
Reconstructing topologically consistent facial geometry is crucial for the digital avatar creation pipelines. Existing methods either require tedious manual efforts, lack generalization to inthe-wild data, or are constrained by the limited expressiveness of 3D Morphable Models. To address these limitations, we propose VGGTFace, an automatic approach that innovatively applies the 3D foundation model, i.e. VGGT, for topologically consistent facial geometry reconstruction from in-the-wild multi-view images captured by everyday users. Our key insight is that, by leveraging VGGT, our method naturally inherits strong generalization ability and expressive power from its large-scale training and point map representation. However, it is unclear how to reconstruct a topologically consistent mesh from VGGT, as the topology information is missing in its prediction. To this end, we augment VGGT with Pixel3DMM for injecting topology information via pixel-aligned UV values. In this manner, we convert the pixel-aligned point map of VGGT to a point cloud with topology. Tailored to this point cloud with known topology, we propose a novel Topology-Aware Bundle Adjustment strategy to fuse them, where we construct a Laplacian energy for the Bundle Adjustment objective. Our method achieves high-quality reconstruction in 10 seconds for 16 views on a single NVIDIA RTX 4090. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art results on benchmarks and impressive generalization to in-the-wild data.

PaperID: 177, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09392 GitHub

Abstract:
One of the primary challenges in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) object detection lies in the pervasive influence of coherent noise. As a common practice, most existing methods, whether handcrafted approaches or deep learningbased methods, employ the analysis or enhancement of object spatial-domain characteristics to achieve implicit denoising. In this paper, we propose DenoDet V2, which explores a completely novel and different perspective to deconstruct and modulate the features in the transform domain via a carefully designed attention architecture. Compared to DenoDet V1, DenoDet V2 is a major advancement that exploits the complementary nature of amplitude and phase information through a band-wise mutual modulation mechanism, which enables a reciprocal enhancement between phase and amplitude spectra. Extensive experiments on various SAR datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of DenoDet V2. Notably, DenoDet V2 achieves a significant 0.8% improvement on SARDet-100K dataset compared to DenoDet V1, while reducing the model complexity by half.

PaperID: 178, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08812 GitHub

Abstract:
Personalized textto-image generation aims to synthesize novel images of a specific subject or style using only a few reference images. Recent methods based on Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enable efficient single-concept customization by injecting lightweight, concept-specific adapters into pre-trained diffusion models. However, combining multiple LoRA modules for multi-concept generation often leads to identity missing and visual feature leakage. In this work, we identify two key issues behind these failures: (1) token-wise interference among different LoRA modules, and (2) spatial misalignment between the attention map of a rare token and its corresponding concept-specific region. To address these issues, we propose Token-Aware LoRA (TARA), which introduces a token mask to explicitly constrain each module to focus on its associated rare token to avoid interference, and a training objective that encourages the spatial attention of a rare token to align with its concept region. Our method enables training-free multi-concept composition by directly injecting multiple independently trained TARA modules at inference time. Experimental results demonstrate that TARA enables efficient multi-concept inference and effectively preserving the visual identity of each concept by avoiding mutual interference between LoRA modules.

PaperID: 179, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09555 GitHub

Abstract:
Robotic manipulation requires precise spatial understanding to interact with objects in the real world. Pointbased methods suffer from sparse sampling, leading to the loss of fine-grained semantics. Image-based methods typically feed RGB and depth into 2D backbones pre-trained on 3D auxiliary tasks, but their entangled semantics and geometry are sensitive to inherent depth noise in real-world that disrupts semantic understanding. Moreover, these methods focus on high-level geometry while overlooking low-level spatial cues essential for precise interaction. We propose SpatialActor, a disentangled framework for robust robotic manipulation that explicitly decouples semantics and geometry. The Semantic-guided Geometric Module adaptively fuses two complementary geometry from noisy depth and semantic-guided expert priors. Also, a Spatial Transformer leverages low-level spatial cues for accurate 2D-3D mapping and enables interaction among spatial features. We evaluate SpatialActor on multiple simulation and real-world scenarios across 50+ tasks. It achieves state-of-the-art performance with 87.4% on RLBench and improves by 13.9% to 19.4% under varying noisy conditions, showing strong robustness. Moreover, it significantly enhances few-shot generalization to new tasks and maintains robustness under various spatial perturbations.

PaperID: 180, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06848 GitHub

Abstract:
While featurebased knowledge distillation has proven highly effective for compressing CNNs, these techniques unexpectedly fail when applied to Vision Transformers (ViTs), often performing worse than simple logit-based distillation. We provide the first comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon through a novel analytical framework termed as "distillation dynamics", combining frequency spectrum analysis, information entropy metrics, and activation magnitude tracking. Our investigation reveals that ViTs exhibit a distinctive U-shaped information processing pattern: initial compression followed by expansion. We identify the root cause of negative transfer in feature distillation: a fundamental representational paradigm mismatch between teacher and student models. Through frequency-domain analysis, we show that teacher models employ distributed, high-dimensional encoding strategies in later layers that smaller student models cannot replicate due to limited channel capacity. This mismatch causes late-layer feature alignment to actively harm student performance. Our findings reveal that successful knowledge transfer in ViTs requires moving beyond naive feature mimicry to methods that respect these fundamental representational constraints, providing essential theoretical guidance for designing effective ViTs compression strategies.

PaperID: 181, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14003 GitHub

Abstract:
Certified defenses promise provable robustness guarantees. We study the malicious exploitation of probabilistic certification frameworks to better understand the limits of guarantee provisions. Now, the objective is to not only mislead a classifier, but also to manipulate the certification process to generate a robustness guarantee for an adversarial input—certificate spoofing. A recent study in ICLR demonstrated that crafting large perturbations can shift inputs far into regions capable of generating a certificate for an incorrect class. Our study investigates if perturbations are needed to cause a misclassification and yet coax a certified model into issuing a deceptive, large robustness radius for a target class can still be made small and imperceptible. We explore the idea of regionfocused adversarial examples to craft imperceptible perturbations, spoof certificates and achieve certification radii larger than the source class—ghost certificates. Extensive evaluations with the ImageNet demonstrate the ability to effectively bypass state-of-the-art certified defenses such as Densepure. Our work underscores the need to better understand the limits of robustness certification methods.

PaperID: 182, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11777 GitHub

Abstract:
Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable success in various visual generation tasks, including image, video, and 3D content generation. Preference optimization (PO) is a prominent and growing area of research that aims to align these models with human preferences. While existing PO methods primarily concentrate on producing favorable outputs, they often overlook the significance of classifierfree guidance (CFG) in mitigating undesirable results. DiffusionNPO addresses this gap by introducing negative preference optimization (NPO), training models to generate outputs opposite to human preferences and thereby steering them away from unfavorable outcomes through CFG. However, prior NPO approaches rely on costly and fragile procedures for obtaining explicit preference annotations (e.g., manual pairwise labeling or reward model training), limiting their practicality in domains where such data are scarce or difficult to acquire. In this work, we propose Self-NPO, specifically truncated diffusion fine-tuning, a data-free approach of negative preference optimization by directly learning from the model itself, eliminating the need for manual data labeling or reward model training. This data-free approach is highly efficient (less than 1% training cost of Diffusion-NPO) and achieves comparable performance of Diffusion-NPO in a data-free manner. We demonstrate that Self-NPO integrates seamlessly into widely used diffusion models, including SD1.5, SDXL, and CogVideoX, as well as models already optimized for human preferences, consistently enhancing both their generation quality and alignment with human preferences.

PaperID: 183, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06983 GitHub

Abstract:
While cooperative perception can overcome the limitations of singlevehicle systems, the practical implementation of vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure systems is often impeded by significant economic barriers. Aerial-ground cooperation (AGC), which pairs ground vehicles with drones, presents a more economically viable and rapidly deployable alternative. However, this emerging field has been held back by a critical lack of high-quality public datasets and benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we present Griffin, a comprehensive AGC 3D perception dataset, featuring over 250 dynamic scenes (37k+ frames). It incorporates varied drone altitudes (20-60m), diverse weather conditions, realistic drone dynamics via CARLA-AirSim co-simulation, and critical occlusion-aware 3D annotations. Accompanying the dataset is a unified benchmarking framework for cooperative detection and tracking, with protocols to evaluate communication efficiency, altitude adaptability, and robustness to communication latency, data loss and localization noise. By experiments through different cooperative paradigms, we demonstrate the effectiveness and limitations of current methods and provide crucial insights for future research.

PaperID: 184, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11255 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in audiodriven portrait animation have demonstrated impressive capabilities. However, existing methods struggle to align with fine-grained human preferences across multiple dimensions, such as motion naturalness, lip-sync accuracy, and visual quality. This is due to the difficulty of optimizing among competing preference objectives, which often conflict with one another, and the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality datasets with multidimensional preference annotations. To address these, we first introduce Talking-Critic, a multimodal reward model that learns human-aligned reward functions to quantify how well generated videos satisfy multidimensional expectations. Leveraging this model, we curate Talking-NSQ, a large-scale multidimensional human preference dataset containing 410K preference pairs. Finally, we propose Timestep-Layer adaptive multi-expert Preference Optimization (TLPO), a novel framework for aligning diffusion-based portrait animation models with fine-grained, multidimensional preferences. TLPO decouples preferences into specialized expert modules, which are then fused across timesteps and network layers, enabling comprehensive, fine-grained enhancement across all dimensions without mutual interference. Experiments demonstrate that Talking-Critic significantly outperforms existing methods in aligning with human preference ratings. Meanwhile, TLPO achieves substantial improvements over baseline models in lip-sync accuracy, motion naturalness, and visual quality, exhibiting superior performance in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.

PaperID: 185, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.16657 GitHub

Abstract:
Storytelling video generation (SVG) aims to produce coherent and visually rich multiscene videos that follow a structured narrative. Existing methods primarily employ LLM for high-level planning to decompose a story into scene-level descriptions, which are then independently generated and stitched together. However, these approaches struggle with generating high-quality videos aligned with the complex single-scene description, as visualizing such complex description involves coherent composition of multiple objects/events, complex motion synthesis and character customization with sequential motions. To address these challenges, we propose DREAMRUNNER, a novel story-to-video generation method: First, we structure the input script using a large language model (LLM) to facilitate both coarse-grained scene planning as well as fine-grained object-level layout planning. Next, DREAMRUNNER presents retrieval-augmented test-time adaptation to capture target motion priors for objects in each scene, supporting diverse motion customization based on retrieved videos, thus facilitating the generation of new videos with complex, scripted motions. Lastly, we propose a novel spatial-temporal region-based 3D attention and prior injection module SR3AI for fine-grained object-motion binding and frame-by-frame spatial-temporal semantic control. We compare DREAMRUNNER with various SVG baselines, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in character consistency, text alignment, and smooth transitions. Additionally, DREAMRUNNER exhibits strong fine-grained condition-following ability in compositional text-to-video generation, significantly outperforming baselines on T2V-ComBench. Finally, we demonstrate DREAMRUNNER’s ability to generate multi-character interactions with qualitative examples.

PaperID: 186, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11368 GitHub

Abstract:
Generating highquality physically based rendering (PBR) materials is important to achieve realistic rendering in the downstream tasks, yet it remains challenging due to the intertwined effects of materials and lighting. While existing methods have made breakthroughs by incorporating material decomposition in the 3D generation pipeline, they tend to bake highlights into albedo and ignore spatially varying properties of metallicity and roughness. In this work, we present PBR3DGen, a two-stage mesh generation method with high-quality PBR materials that integrates the novel multi-view PBR material estimation model and a 3D PBR mesh reconstruction model. Specifically, PBR3DGen leverages vision language models (VLM) to guide multi-view diffusion, precisely capturing the spatial distribution and inherent attributes of reflective-metalness material. Additionally, we incorporate view-dependent illumination-aware conditions as pixel-aware priors to enhance spatially varying material properties. Furthermore, our reconstruction model reconstructs high-quality mesh with PBR materials. Experimental results demonstrate that PBR3DGen significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving new state-of-the-art results for PBR estimation and mesh generation.

PaperID: 187, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.09377 GitHub

Abstract:
Allin-one image restoration (AIR) aims to address diverse degradations within a unified model by leveraging informative degradation conditions to guide the restoration process. However, existing methods often rely on implicitly learned priors, which may entangle feature representations and hinder performance in complex or unseen scenarios. Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) as a classical gradient representation, we observe that it has strong discriminative capability across diverse degradations, making it a powerful and interpretable prior for AIR. Based on this insight, we propose HOGformer, a Transformer-based model that integrates learnable HOG features for degradation-aware restoration. The core of HOGformer is a Dynamic HOG-aware Self-Attention (DHOGSA) mechanism, which adaptively models long-range spatial dependencies conditioned on degradation-specific cues encoded by HOG descriptors. To further adapt the heterogeneity of degradations in AIR, we propose a Dynamic Interaction Feed-Forward (DIFF) module that facilitates channel–spatial interactions, enabling robust feature transformation under diverse degradations. Besides, we propose a HOG loss to explicitly enhance structural fidelity and edge sharpness. Extensive experiments on a variety of benchmarks, including adverse weather and natural degradations, demonstrate that HOGformer achieves state-of-the-art performance and generalizes well to complex real-world scenarios.

PaperID: 188, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10825 GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a novel framework for controllable video diffusion, OmniVDiff , aiming to synthesize and comprehend multiple video visual content in a single diffusion model. To achieve this, OmniVDiff treats all video visual modalities in the color space to learn a joint distribution, while employing an adaptive control strategy that dynamically adjusts the role of each visual modality during the diffusion process, either as a generation modality or a conditioning modality. Our framework supports three key capabilities: (1) Textconditioned video generation, where all modalities are jointly synthesized from a textual prompt; (2) Video understanding, where structural modalities are predicted from rgb inputs in a coherent manner; and (3) X-conditioned video generation, where video synthesis is guided by finegrained inputs such as depth, canny and segmentation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OmniVDiff achieves state-of-the-art performance in video generation tasks and competitive results in video understanding. Its flexibility and scalability make it well-suited for downstream applications such as video-to-video translation, modality adaptation for visual tasks, and scene reconstruction.

PaperID: 189, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14223 GitHub

Abstract:
This paper focuses on the task of speechdriven 3D facial animation, which aims to generate realistic and synchronized facial motions driven by speech inputs. Recent methods have employed audio-conditioned diffusion models for 3D facial animation, achieving impressive results in generating expressive and natural animations. However, these methods process the whole audio sequences in a single pass, which poses two major challenges: they tend to perform poorly when handling audio sequences that exceed the training horizon and will suffer from significant latency when processing long audio inputs. To address these limitations, we propose a novel autoregressive diffusion model that outputs facial motions in a streaming manner. This design ensures flexibility with varying audio lengths and achieves low latency independent of audio duration. Specifically, we select a limited number of past frames as historical motion context and combine them with the audio input to create a dynamic condition. This condition guides a lightweight diffusion head to iteratively generate facial motion frames, enabling real-time synthesis with high-quality results. Experiments conducted on public datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms recent baseline methods.

PaperID: 190, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01579 GitHub

Abstract:
Generating highfidelity full-body human interactions with dynamic objects and static scenes remains a critical challenge in computer graphics and animation. Existing methods for human-object interaction often neglect scene context, leading to implausible penetrations, while human-scene interaction approaches struggle to coordinate fine-grained manipulations with long-range navigation. To address these limitations, we propose HOSIG, a novel framework for synthesizing full-body interactions through hierarchical scene perception. Our method decouples the task into three key components: 1) a scene-aware grasp pose generator that ensures collision-free whole-body postures with precise hand-object contact by integrating local geometry constraints, 2) a heuristic navigation algorithm that autonomously plans obstacle-avoiding paths in complex indoor environments via compressed 2D floor maps and dual-component spatial reasoning, and 3) a scene-guided motion diffusion model that generates trajectory-controlled, full-body motions with finger-level accuracy by incorporating spatial anchors and dual-space gradient-based guidance. Extensive experiments on the TRUMANS dataset demonstrate superior performance over state-of-the-art methods. Notably, our framework supports unlimited motion length through autoregressive generation and requires minimal manual intervention. This work bridges the critical gap between scene-aware navigation and dexterous object manipulation, advancing the frontier of embodied interaction synthesis.

PaperID: 191, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05259 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent diffusionbased image editing methods have made great strides in text-guided tasks but often struggle with complex, indirect instructions. Additionally, current models frequently exhibit poor identity preservation, unintended edits, or rely on manual masks. To overcome these limitations, we introduce X-Planner, a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based planning system that bridges user intent with editing model capabilities. X-Planner uses chain-of-thought reasoning to systematically break down complex instructions into simpler sub-instructions. For each one, X-Planner automatically generates precise edit types and segmentation masks, enabling localized, identity-preserving edits without applying external tools or models during inference. To enable the training of such a planner, we also introduce a fully automated, reproducible pipeline to generate large-scale, high-quality training data. Our complete system achieves state-of-the-art results on both existing and newly proposed complex instruction-based editing benchmarks.

PaperID: 192, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17964 GitHub

Abstract:
Largescale vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) have recently achieved remarkable performance in retrieval tasks, yet their potential for Video-based Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification (VVI-ReID) remains largely unexplored. The primary challenges are narrowing the modality gap and leveraging spatiotemporal information in video sequences. To address the above issues, in this paper, we propose a novel cross-modality feature learning framework named X-ReID for VVI-ReID. Specifically, we first propose a Cross-modality Prototype Collaboration (CPC) to align and integrate features from different modalities, guiding the network to reduce the modality discrepancy. Then, a Multi-granularity Information Interaction (MII) is designed, incorporating short-term interactions from adjacent frames, long-term cross-frame information fusion, and cross-modality feature alignment to enhance temporal modeling and further reduce modality gaps. Finally, by integrating multi-granularity information, a robust sequence-level representation is achieved. Extensive experiments on two large-scale VVI-ReID benchmarks (i.e., HITSZ-VCM and BUPTCampus) demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 193, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09143 GitHub

Abstract:
AI personal assistants, deployed through robots or wearables, require embodied understanding to collaborate effectively with humans. However, current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) primarily focus on thirdperson (exocentric) vision, overlooking the unique challenges of first-person (egocentric) videos. Additionally, high acquisition costs limit data size, impairing MLLM performance. To address these challenges, we propose learning the mapping between exocentric and egocentric domains, leveraging the extensive exocentric knowledge within existing MLLMs to enhance egocentric video understanding. To this end, we introduce Ego-ExoClip, a pre-training dataset comprising 1.1M synchronized ego-exo clip-text pairs derived from Ego-Exo4D, together with the instruction-tuning dataset EgoIT, which is collected from multiple sources to enhance the model's instruction-following capabilities. Building upon the datasets, we propose a migration strategy and further design a progressive mapping learning pipeline with three stages: Demonstrator Self-Preparation, Demonstrator-Learner Guidance, and Learner Self-Practice. Extensive experiments across diverse egocentric tasks reveal that existing MLLMs perform inadequately in egocentric video understanding, while our model significantly outperforms these leading models.

PaperID: 194, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15831 GitHub

Abstract:
Imagebased virtual try-on (VTON) aims to synthesize photorealistic images of a person wearing specified garments. Despite significant progress, building a universal VTON framework that can flexibly handle diverse and complex tasks remains a major challenge. Recent methods explore multi-task VTON frameworks guided by textual instructions, yet they still face two key limitations: (1) semantic gap between text instructions and reference images, and (2) data scarcity in complex scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose UniFit, a universal VTON framework driven by a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). Specifically, we introduce an MLLM-Guided Semantic Alignment Module (MGSA), which integrates multimodal inputs using an MLLM and a set of learnable queries. By imposing a semantic alignment loss, MGSA captures cross-modal semantic relationships and provides coherent and explicit semantic guidance for the generative process, thereby reducing the semantic gap. Moreover, by devising a two-stage progressive training strategy with a self-synthesis pipeline, UniFit is able to learn complex tasks from limited data. Extensive experiments show that UniFit not only supports a wide range of VTON tasks, including multi-garment and model-to-model try-on, but also achieves state-of-the-art performance.

PaperID: 195, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.11030 GitHub

Abstract:
Openvocabulary 3D scene understanding (OV-3D) aims to localize and classify novel objects beyond the closed set of object classes. However, existing approaches and benchmarks primarily focus on the open vocabulary problem within the context of object classes, which is insufficient in providing a holistic evaluation to what extent a model understands the 3D scene. In this paper, we introduce a more challenging task called Generalized Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding (GOV-3D) to explore the open vocabulary problem beyond object classes. It encompasses an open and diverse set of generalized knowledge, expressed as linguistic queries of fine-grained and object-specific attributes. To this end, we contribute a new benchmark named OpenScan, which consists of 3D object attributes across eight representative linguistic aspects, including affordance, property, and material. We further evaluate state-of-the-art OV-3D methods on our OpenScan benchmark and discover that these methods struggle to comprehend the abstract vocabularies of the GOV-3D task, a challenge that cannot be addressed simply by scaling up object classes during training. We highlight the limitations of existing methodologies and explore promising directions to overcome the identified shortcomings.

PaperID: 196, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23519 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent visual generative models enable story generation with consistent characters from text, but humancentric story generation faces additional challenges, such as maintaining detailed and diverse human face consistency and coordinating multiple characters across different images. This paper presents IdentityStory, a framework for human-centric story generation that ensures consistent character identity across multiple sequential images. By taming identity-preserving generators, the framework features two key components: Iterative Identity Discovery, which extracts cohesive character identities, and Re-denoising Identity Injection, which re-denoises images to inject identities while preserving desired context. Experiments on the ConsiStory-Human benchmark demonstrate that IdentityStory outperforms existing methods, particularly in face consistency, and supports multi-character combinations. The framework also shows strong potential for applications such as infinite-length story generation and dynamic character composition.

PaperID: 197, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04406 GitHub

Abstract:
Flowbased 3D generation models typically require dozens of sampling steps during inference. Though few-step distillation methods, particularly Consistency Models (CMs), have achieved substantial advancements in accelerating 2D diffusion models, they remain under-explored for more complex 3D generation tasks. In this study, we propose a novel framework, MDT-dist, for few-step 3D flow distillation. Our approach is built upon a primary objective: distilling the pretrained model to learn the Marginal-Data Transport. Directly learning this objective needs to integrate the velocity fields, while this integral is intractable to be implemented. Therefore, we propose two optimizable objectives, Velocity Matching (VM) and Velocity Distillation (VD), to equivalently convert the optimization target from the transport level to the velocity and the distribution level respectively. Velocity Matching (VM) learns to stably match the velocity fields between the student and the teacher, but inevitably provides biased gradient estimates. Velocity Distillation (VD) further enhances the optimization process by leveraging the learned velocity fields to perform probability density distillation. When evaluated on the pioneer 3D generation framework TRELLIS, our method reduces sampling steps of each flow transformer from 25 to 1–2, achieving 0.68s (1 step x2) and 0.94s (2 steps x2) latency with 9.0x and 6.5x speedup on A800, while preserving high visual and geometric fidelity. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing CM distillation methods, and enables TRELLIS to achieve superior performance in few-step 3D generation.

PaperID: 198, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12255 GitHub

Abstract:
Regional Adaptive Hierarchical Transform (RAHT) is an effective point cloud attribute compression (PCAC) method. However, its application in deep learning lacks research. In this paper, we propose an endto-end RAHT framework for lossy PCAC based on the sparse tensor, called DeepRAHT. The RAHT transform is performed within the learning reconstruction process, without requiring manual RAHT for pre-processing. We also introduce the predictive RAHT to reduce bitrates and design a learning-based prediction model to enhance the performance. Moreover, we devise a bitrate proxy that applies run-length coding to entropy model, achieving seamless variable-rate coding and improving the robustness. DeepRAHT is a reversible and distortion-controllable framework, ensuring its lower bound performance and offering significant application potential. The experiments demonstrate that DeepRAHT is a high-performance, faster, and more robust solution than the baseline methods.

PaperID: 199, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12210 GitHub

Abstract:
Largescale EEG foundation models have shown strong generalization across a range of downstream tasks, but their training remains resource-intensive due to the volume and variable quality of EEG data. In this work, we introduce EEG-DLite, a data distillation framework that enables more efficient pre-training by selectively removing noisy and redundant samples from large EEG datasets. EEG-DLite begins by encoding EEG segments into compact latent representations using a self-supervised autoencoder, allowing sample selection to be performed efficiently and with reduced sensitivity to noise. Based on these representations, EEG-DLite filters out outliers and minimizes redundancy, resulting in a smaller yet informative subset that retains the diversity essential for effective foundation model training. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that training on only 5 percent of a 2,500-hour dataset curated with EEG-DLite yields performance comparable to, and in some cases better than, training on the full dataset across multiple downstream tasks. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic study of pre-training data distillation in the context of EEG foundation models. EEG-DLite provides a scalable and practical path toward more effective and efficient physiological foundation modeling.

PaperID: 200, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.07472 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in embodied agents with multimodal perception and reasoning capabilities based on large visionlanguage models (LVLMs), excel in autonomously interacting either real or cyber worlds, helping people make intelligent decisions in complex environments. However, the current works are normally optimized by golden action trajectories or ideal task-oriented solutions toward a definitive goal. This paradigm considers limited user-oriented factors, which could be the reason for their performance reduction in a wide range of personal assistant applications. To address this, we propose Chain-of-User-Thought (COUT, a novel embodied reasoning paradigm that takes a chain of thought from basic action thinking to explicit and implicit personalized preference thought to incorporate personalized factors into autonomous agent learning. The main challenges of achieving COUT include: 1) the definition of embodied personalized tasks, 2) the embodied environment epitomizes personalized preference, and 3) the way to model embodied personalized actions. To target COUT, we introduce SmartAgent, an agent framework perceiving cyber environments and reasoning personalized requirements as: 1) interacting with GUI to access an item pool, 2) generating users' explicit requirements implied by previous actions, and 3) recommending items to fulfill users' implicit requirements. To demonstrate SmartAgent's capabilities, we also create a brand-new dataset SmartSpot that offers a full-stage personalized action-involved environment. To our best knowledge, our work is the first to formulate the COUT process, serving as a preliminary attempt towards embodied personalized agent learning. Our extensive experiments on SmartSpot illuminate SmartAgent’s functionality among a series of embodied and personalized sub-tasks.

PaperID: 201, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10518 GitHub

Abstract:
VisionLanguage-Action (VLA) models have advanced in robotic manipulation, yet practical deployment remains hindered by two key limitations: 1) perceptual redundancy, where irrelevant visual inputs are processed inefficiently, and 2) superficial instruction-vision alignment, which hampers semantic grounding of actions. In this paper, we propose SemanticVLA, a novel VLA framework that performs Semantic-Aligned Sparsification and Enhancement for Efficient Robotic Manipulation. Specifically: 1) To sparsify redundant perception while preserving semantic alignment, Semantic-guided Dual Visual Pruner (SD-Pruner) performs: Instruction-driven Pruner (ID-Pruner) extracts global action cues and local semantic anchors in SigLIP; Spatial-aggregation Pruner (SA-Pruner) compacts geometry-rich features into task-adaptive tokens in DINOv2. 2) To exploit sparsified features and integrate semantics with spatial geometry, Semantic-complementary Hierarchical Fuser (SH-Fuser) fuses dense patches and sparse tokens across SigLIP and DINOv2 for coherent representation. 3) To enhance the transformation from perception to action, Semantic-conditioned Action Coupler (SA-Coupler) replaces the conventional observation-to-DoF approach, yielding more efficient and interpretable behavior modeling for manipulation tasks. Extensive experiments on simulation and real-world tasks show that SemanticVLA sets a new SOTA in both performance and efficiency. SemanticVLA surpasses OpenVLA on LIBERO benchmark by 21.1% in success rate, while reducing training cost and inference latency by 3.0× and 2.7×.

PaperID: 202, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08240 GitHub

Abstract:
Languageguided long-horizon mobile manipulation has long been a grand challenge in embodied semantic reasoning, generalizable manipulation, and adaptive locomotion. Three fundamental limitations hinder progress: First, although large language models have shown promise in enhancing spatial reasoning and task planning through learned semantic priors, existing implementations remain confined to tabletop scenarios, failing to address the constrained perception and limited actuation ranges characteristic of mobile platforms. Second, current manipulation strategies exhibit insufficient generalization when confronted with the diverse object configurations encountered in open-world environments. Third, while crucial for practical deployment, the dual requirement of maintaining high platform maneuverability alongside precise end-effector control in unstructured settings remains understudied in the literature. In this work, we present ODYSSEY, a unified mobile manipulation framework for agile quadruped robots equipped with manipulators, which seamlessly integrates high-level task planning with low-level whole-body control. To address the challenge of egocentric perception in language-conditioned tasks, we introduce a hierarchical planner powered by a vision-language model, enabling long-horizon instruction decomposition and precise action execution. At the control level, our novel whole-body policy achieves robust coordination of locomotion and manipulation across challenging terrains. We further present the first comprehensive benchmark for long-horizon mobile manipulation, evaluating diverse indoor and outdoor scenarios. Through successful sim-to-real transfer, we demonstrate the system’s generalization and robustness in real-world deployments, underscoring the practicality of legged manipulators in unstructured environments. Our work advances the feasibility of generalized robotic assistants capable of complex, dynamic tasks.

PaperID: 203, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19305 GitHub

Abstract:
Spatial representation learning is fundamental to GeoAI applications, including urban analytics, as it encodes the shapes, locations, and spatial relationships (topological and distancebased) of geo-entities such as points, polylines, and polygons. Existing methods either target a single geo-entity type or, like Poly2Vec, decompose entities into simpler components to enable Fourier transformation, introducing high computational cost. Moreover, since the transformed space lacks geometric alignment, these methods rely on uniform, non-adaptive sampling, which blurs fine-grained features like edges and boundaries. To address these limitations, we introduce Geo2Vec, a novel method inspired by signed distance fields (SDF) that operates directly in the original space. Geo2Vec adaptively samples points and encodes their signed distances (positive outside, negative inside), capturing geometry without decomposition. A neural network trained to approximate the SDF produces compact, geometry-aware, and unified representations for all geo-entity types. Additionally, we propose a rotation-invariant positional encoding to model high-frequency spatial variations and construct a structured and robust embedding space for downstream GeoAI models. Empirical results show that Geo2Vec consistently outperforms existing methods in representing shape and location, capturing topological and distance relationships, and achieving greater efficiency in real-world GeoAI applications.

PaperID: 204, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.23260 GitHub

Abstract:
Deep neural networkbased time series prediction models have recently demonstrated superior capabilities in capturing complex temporal dependencies. However, it is challenging for these models to account for uncertainty associated with their predictions, because they directly output scalar values at each time step. To address such a challenge, we propose a novel model named interleaved dual-branch Probability Distribution Network (interPDN), which directly constructs discrete probability distributions per step instead of a scalar. The regression output at each time step is derived by computing the expectation of the predictive distribution on a predefined support set. To mitigate prediction anomalies, a dual-branch architecture is introduced with interleaved support sets, augmented by coarse temporal-scale branches for long-term trend forecasting. Outputs from another branch are treated as auxiliary signals to impose self-supervised consistency constraints on the current branch's prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of interPDN.

PaperID: 205, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20893 GitHub

Abstract:
We study streaming data with categorical features where the vocabulary of categorical feature values is changing and can even grow unboundedly over time. Feature hashing is commonly used as a preprocessing step to map these categorical values into a feature space of fixed size before learning their embeddings. While these methods have been developed and evaluated for offline or batch settings, in this paper we consider online settings. We show that deterministic embeddings are sensitive to the arrival order of categories and suffer from forgetting in online learning, leading to performance deterioration. To mitigate this issue, we propose a probabilistic hash embedding (PHE) model that treats hash embeddings as stochastic and applies Bayesian online learning to learn incrementally from data. Based on the structure of PHE, we derive a scalable inference algorithm to learn model parameters and infer/update the posteriors of hash embeddings and other latent variables. Our algorithm (i) can handle an evolving vocabulary of categorical items, (ii) is adaptive to new items without forgetting old items, (iii) is implementable with a bounded set of parameters that does not grow with the number of distinct observed values on the stream, and (iv) is invariant to the item arrival order. Experiments in classification, sequence modeling, and recommendation systems in online learning setups demonstrate the superior performance of PHE while maintaining high memory efficiency (consumes as low as 2→4% memory of a one-hot embedding table).

PaperID: 206, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22862 GitHub

Abstract:
Testtime adaptation (TTA) enables online model adaptation using only unlabeled test data, aiming to bridge the gap between source and target distributions. However, in multimodal scenarios, varying degrees of distribution shift across different modalities give rise to a complex coupling effect of unimodal shallow feature shift and cross-modal high-level semantic misalignment, posing a major obstacle to extending existing TTA methods to the multimodal field. To address this challenge, we propose a novel multimodal test-time adaptation (MMTTA) framework, termed as Bridging Modalities via Progressive Re-alignment (BriMPR). BriMPR, consisting of two progressively enhanced modules, tackles the coupling effect with a divide-and-conquer strategy. Specifically, we first decompose MMTTA into multiple unimodal feature alignment sub-problems. By leveraging the strong function approximation ability of prompt tuning, we calibrate the unimodal global feature distributions to their respective source distributions, so as to achieve the initial semantic re-alignment across modalities. Subsequently, we assign the credible pseudo-labels to combinations of masked and complete modalities, and introduce inter-modal instance-wise contrastive learning to further enhance the information interaction among modalities and refine the alignment. Extensive experiments on MMTTA tasks, including both corruption-based and real-world domain shift benchmarks, demonstrate the superiority of our method.

PaperID: 207, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23266 GitHub

Abstract:
Mixture of Experts (MoE) LLMs face significant obstacles due to their massive parameter scale, which imposes memory, storage, and deployment challenges. Although recent expert merging methods aim to achieve greater efficiency by consolidating several experts, they are fundamentally hindered by parameter conflicts arising from expert specialization. In this paper, we present SubMoE, a novel MoE compression framework via Subspace Expert Merging. Our key insight is to perform joint Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) on concatenated expert weights, reducing conflicting parameters by extracting shared U-matrices while enabling effective merging of the expert-specific V components. Specifically, Sub-MoE consists of two innovative stages: (1) Adaptive Expert Clustering, which groups functionally coherent experts via K-means clustering based on cosine similarity of expert outputs; and (2) Subspace Expert Merging, which first performs Experts Union Decomposition to derive the shared U-matrix across experts in the same group, then applies frequency-based merging for individual V-matrices, and completes expert reconstruction using the merged V-matrix. In this way, we align and fuse experts in a shared subspace. Additionally, the framework can be extended with intra-expert compression for further inference optimization. Extensive experiments on Mixtral, DeepSeek, and Qwen-1.5/3 MoE LLMs demonstrate that our Sub-MoE significantly outperforms existing expert pruning and merging methods. Notably, our Sub-MoE maintains 96%/86% of original performance with 25%/50% expert reduction on Mixtral-8×7B in zero-shot benchmarks.

PaperID: 208, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09981 GitHub

Abstract:
Large VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) exhibit impressive multi-modal capabilities but suffer from prohibitive computational and memory demands, due to their long visual token sequences and massive parameter sizes. To address these issues, recent works have proposed training-free compression methods. However, existing efforts often suffer from three major limitations: (1) Current approaches do not decompose techniques into comparable modules, hindering fair evaluation across spatial and temporal redundancy. (2) Evaluation confined to simple single-turn tasks, failing to reflect performance in realistic scenarios. (3) Isolated use of individual compression techniques, without exploring their joint potential. To overcome these gaps, we introduce LLMC+, a comprehensive VLM compression benchmark with a versatile, plug-and-play toolkit. LLMC+ supports over 20 algorithms across five representative VLM families and enables systematic study of token-level and model-level compression. Our benchmark reveals that: (1) Spatial and temporal redundancies demand distinct technical strategies. (2) Token reduction methods degrade significantly in multi-turn dialogue and detail-sensitive tasks. (3) Combining token and model compression achieves extreme compression with minimal performance loss. We believe LLMC+ will facilitate fair evaluation and inspire future research in efficient VLM.

PaperID: 209, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09209 GitHub

Abstract:
MixedInteger Linear Programming (MILP) is a cornerstone of combinatorial optimization, yet solving large-scale instances remains a significant computational challenge. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promise in accelerating MILP solvers by predicting high-quality solutions. However, we identify that existing methods misalign with the intrinsic structure of MILP problems at two levels. At the leaning objective level, the Binary Cross-Entropy (BCE) loss treats variables independently, neglecting their relative priority and yielding plausible logits. At the model architecture level, standard GNN message passing inherently smooths the representations across variables, msking the natural competitive relationships within constraints. To address these challenges, we propose CoCo-MILP, which explicitly models inter-variable Contrast and intra-constraint Competition for advanced MILP solution prediction. At the objective level, CoCo-MILP introduces the Inter-Variable Contrastive Loss (VCL), which explicitly maximizes the embedding margin between variables assigned one versus zero. At the architectural level, we design an Intra-Constraint Competitive GNN layer that, instead of homogenizing features, learns to differentiate representations of competing variables within a constraint, capturing their exclusionary nature. Experimental results on standard benchmarks demonstrate that CoCo-MILP significantly outperforms existing learning-based approaches, reducing the solution gap by up to 68.12% compared to traditional solvers.

PaperID: 210, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14396 GitHub

Abstract:
LanguageConditioned Manipulation (LCM) facilitates human-robot interaction via Behavioral Cloning (BC), which learns control policies from human demonstrations and serves as a cornerstone of embodied AI. Overcoming compounding errors in sequential action decisions remains a central challenge to improving BC performance. Existing approaches mitigate compounding errors through data augmentation, expressive representation, or temporal abstraction. However, they suffer from physical discontinuities and semantic-physical misalignment, leading to inaccurate action cloning and intermittent execution. In this paper, we present Continuous vision-language-action Co-Learning with Semantic-Physical Alignment (CCoL), a novel BC framework that ensures temporally consistent execution and fine-grained semantic grounding. It generates robust and smooth action execution trajectories through continuous co-learning across vision, language, and proprioceptive inputs (i.e., robot internal states). Meanwhile, we anchor language semantics to visuomotor representations by a bidirectional cross-attention to learn contextual information for action generation, successfully overcoming the problem of semantic-physical misalignment. Extensive experiments show that CCoL achieves an average 8.0% relative improvement across three simulation suites, with up to 19.2% relative gain in human-demonstrated bimanual insertion tasks. Real-world tests on a 7-DoF robot further confirm CCoL’s generalization under unseen and noisy object states.

PaperID: 211, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13035 GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce a onestep generative policy for offline reinforcement learning that maps noise directly to actions via a residual reformulation of MeanFlow, making it compatible with Q-learning. While one-step Gaussian policies enable fast inference, they struggle to capture complex, multimodal action distributions. Existing flow-based methods improve expressivity but typically rely on distillation and two-stage training when trained with Q-learning. To overcome these limitations, we propose to reformulate MeanFlow to enable direct noise-to-action generation by integrating the velocity field and noise-to-action transformation into a single policy network—eliminating the need for separate velocity estimation. We explore several reformulation variants and identify an effective residual formulation that supports expressive and stable policy learning. Our method offers three key advantages: 1) efficient one-step noise-to-action generation, 2) expressive modelling of multimodal action distributions, and 3) efficient and stable policy learning via Q-learning in a single-stage training setup. Extensive experiments on 73 tasks across the OGBench and D4RL benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves strong performance in both offline and offline-to-online reinforcement learning settings.

PaperID: 212, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06653 GitHub

Abstract:
Contrastive visionlanguage models like CLIP have achieved impressive results in image-text retrieval by aligning image and text representations in a shared embedding space. However, these models often treat text as flat sequences, limiting their ability to handle complex, compositional, and long-form descriptions. In particular, they fail to capture two essential properties of language: semantic hierarchy, which reflects the multi-level compositional structure of text, and semantic monotonicity, where richer descriptions should result in stronger alignment with visual content. To address these limitations, we propose HiMo-CLIP, a representation-level framework that enhances CLIP-style models without modifying the encoder architecture. HiMo-CLIP introduces two key components: a hierarchical decomposition (HiDe) module that extracts latent semantic components from long-form text via in-batch PCA, enabling flexible, batch-aware alignment across different semantic granularities, and a monotonicity-aware contrastive loss (MoLo) that jointly aligns global and component-level representations, encouraging the model to internalize semantic ordering and alignment strength as a function of textual completeness. These components work together to produce structured, cognitively aligned cross-modal representations. Experiments on multiple image-text retrieval benchmarks show that HiMo-CLIP consistently outperforms strong baselines, particularly under long or compositional descriptions.

PaperID: 213, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20189 GitHub

Abstract:
Discovering subgroups with the maximum average treatment effect is crucial for targeted decision making in domains such as precision medicine, public policy, and education. While most prior work is formulated in the potential‑outcome framework, the corresponding structural causal model (SCM) for this task has been largely overlooked. In practice, two approaches dominate. The first estimates pointwise conditional treatment effects and then fits a tree on those estimates, effectively turning subgroup estimation into the harder problem of accurate pointwise estimation. The second constructs decision trees or rule sets with ad‑hoc 'causal' heuristics, typically without rigorous justification for why a given heuristic may be used or whether such heuristics are necessary at all. We address these issues by studying the problem directly under the SCM framework. Under the assumption of a partitionbased model, we show that optimal subgroup discovery reduces to recovering the data-generating models and hence a standard supervised learning problem (regression or classification). This allows us to adopt any partition-based methods to learn the subgroup from data. We instantiate the approach with CART, arguably one of the most widely used tree-based method, to learn the subgroup with maximum treatment effect. Finally, on a large collection of synthetic and semi‑synthetic datasets, we compare our method against a wide range of baselines and find that our approach, which avoids such causal heuristics, more accurately identifies subgroups with maximum treatment effect.

PaperID: 214, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19569 GitHub

Abstract:
Language model inversion (LMI), i.e., recovering hidden prompts from outputs, emerges as a concrete threat to user privacy and system security. We recast LMI as reusing the LLM's own latent space and propose the Invariant Latent Space Hypothesis (ILSH): (1) diverse outputs from the same source prompt should preserve consistent semantics (source invariance), and (2) input<>output cyclic mappings should be self-consistent within a shared latent space (cyclic invariance). Accordingly, we present Inv2A, which treats the LLM as an invariant decoder and learns only a lightweight inverse encoder that maps outputs to a denoised pseudo-representation. When multiple outputs are available, they are sparsely concatenated at the representation layer to increase information density. Training proceeds in two stages: contrastive alignment (source invariance) and supervised reinforcement (cyclic invariance). An optional training-free neighborhood search can refine local performance. Across 9 datasets covering user and system prompt scenarios, Inv2A outperforms baselines by an average of 4.77% BLEU score while reducing dependence on large inverse corpora. Our analysis further shows that prevalent defenses provide limited protection, underscoring the need for stronger strategies.

PaperID: 215, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12680 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent visionlanguage models (VLMs) show strong reasoning capabilities through training with reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR). Despite their impressive capabilities, current VLMs focus on a limited range of reasoning tasks, such as mathematical and logical reasoning, due to the lack of readily available verifiable reward data in broader domains. As a result, these models struggle to generalize their reasoning abilities to the wide variety of challenges encountered in real-world environments. To address this limitation, we collect and assemble a comprehensive RL-ready visual reasoning training dataset encompassing 46 datasets across 13 dimensions of 5 domains, covering a wide range of realistic scenarios such as infographic reasoning, mathematical reasoning, spatial reasoning, and general science reasoning. Based on this dataset, we propose an influence function-based data filtering strategy and a multi-round data curriculum method to iteratively strengthen general visual reasoning abilities. Using this approach, we train a general reasoning VLM, namely Vision-G1. Our 7B model achieves state-of-the-art performance across nine visual reasoning benchmarks, surpassing previous similar-sized VLMs and even GPT-4o and Gemini-1.5 Flash.

PaperID: 216, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14902 GitHub

Abstract:
Retrievalaugmented generation (RAG) improves the response quality of large language models (LLMs) by retrieving knowledge from external databases. Typical RAG approaches split the text database into chunks, organizing them in a flat structure for efficient searches. To better capture the inherent dependencies and structured relationships across the text database, researchers propose to organize textual information into an indexing graph, known as graph-based RAG. However, we argue that the limitation of current graph-based RAG methods lies in the redundancy of the retrieved information, rather than its insufficiency. Moreover, previous methods use a flat structure to organize retrieved information within the prompts, leading to suboptimal performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose PathRAG, which retrieves key relational paths from the indexing graph, and converts these paths into textual form for prompting LLMs. Specifically, PathRAG effectively reduces redundant information with flow-based pruning, while guiding LLMs to generate more logical and coherent responses with path-based prompting. Experimental results show that PathRAG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across six datasets and five evaluation dimensions.

PaperID: 217, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01647 GitHub

Abstract:
As backdoor attacks become more stealthy and robust, they reveal critical weaknesses in current defense strategies: detection methods often rely on coarsegrained feature statistics, and purification methods typically require full retraining or additional clean models. To address these challenges, we propose DUP (Detection-guided Unlearning for Purification), a unified framework that integrates backdoor detection with unlearning-based purification. The detector captures feature-level anomalies by jointly leveraging class-agnostic distances and inter-layer transitions. These deviations are integrated through a weighted scheme to identify poisoned inputs, enabling more fine-grained analysis. Based on the detection results, we purify the model through a parameter-efficient unlearning mechanism that avoids full retraining and does not require any external clean model. Specifically, we innovatively repurpose knowledge distillation to guide the student model toward increasing its output divergence from the teacher on detected poisoned samples, effectively forcing it to unlearn the backdoor behavior. Extensive experiments across diverse attack methods and language model architectures demonstrate that DUP achieves superior defense performance in detection accuracy and purification efficacy.

PaperID: 218, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14650 GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Model (LLM) agents have emerged as powerful tools for automating complex tasks by leveraging the reasoning and decisionmaking abilities of LLMs. However, a major bottleneck in current agent frameworks lies in the high inference cost of tool selection, especially in approaches like ReAct that repeatedly invoke the LLM to determine which tool to use at each step. In this work, we propose AutoTool, a novel graph-based framework that bypasses repeated LLM inference by exploiting a key empirical observation: tool usage inertia—the tendency of tool invocations to follow predictable sequential patterns. AutoTool constructs a directed graph from historical agent trajectories, where nodes represent tools and edges capture transition probabilities, effectively modeling the inertia in tool selection. It further integrates parameter-level information to refine tool input generation. By traversing this structured representation, AutoTool efficiently selects tools and their parameters with minimal reliance on LLM inference. Extensive experiments across diverse agent tasks demonstrate that AutoTool reduces inference costs by up to 30% while maintaining competitive task completion rates, offering a practical and scalable enhancement for inference-heavy frameworks. Our work highlights the promise of integrating statistical structure into LLM agent design for greater efficiency without sacrificing performance.

PaperID: 219, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06017 GitHub

Abstract:
Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong capabilities across diverse domains, yet automated agent design remains a significant challenge. Current automated agent design approaches are often constrained by limited search spaces that primarily optimize workflows but fail to integrate crucial humandesigned components like memory, planning, and tool use. Furthermore, these methods are hampered by high evaluation costs, as evaluating even a single new agent on a benchmark can require tens of dollars. The difficulty of this exploration is further exacerbated by inefficient search strategies that struggle to navigate the large design space effectively, making the discovery of novel agents a slow and resource-intensive process. To address these challenges, we propose AgentSwift, a novel framework for automated agent design. We formalize a hierarchical search space that jointly models agentic workflow and composable functional components. This structure moves beyond optimizing workflows alone by co-optimizing functional components, which enables the discovery of more complex and effective agent architectures. To make exploration within this expansive space feasible, we mitigate high evaluation costs by training a value model on a high-quality dataset, generated via a novel strategy combining combinatorial coverage and balanced Bayesian sampling for low-cost evaluation. Guiding the entire process is a hierarchical Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) strategy, which is informed by uncertainty to efficiently navigate the search space. Evaluated across a comprehensive set of seven benchmarks spanning embodied, math, web, tool, and game domains, AgentSwift discovers agents that achieve an average performance gain of 8.34% over both existing automated agent search methods and manually designed agents. Moreover, our framework exhibits steeper and more stable search trajectories. By enabling the efficient, automated composition of workflow with functional components, AgentSwift provides a scalable methodology to explore complex agent designs. Our framework serves as a launchpad for researchers to rapidly prototype and discover powerful agent architectures without the impediment of prohibitive evaluation costs.

PaperID: 220, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12495 GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit logically inconsistent hallucinations that appear coherent yet violate reasoning principles, with recent research suggesting an inverse relationship between causal reasoning capabilities and such hallucinations. However, existing reasoning approaches in LLMs, such as Chainof-Thought (CoT) and its graph-based variants, operate at the linguistic token level rather than modeling the underlying causal relationships between variables, lacking the ability to represent conditional independencies or satisfy causal identification assumptions. To bridge this gap, we introduce causal-DAG construction and reasoning (CDCR-SFT), a supervised fine-tuning framework that trains LLMs to explicitly construct variable-level directed acyclic graph (DAG) and then perform reasoning over it. Moreover, we present a dataset comprising 25,368 samples (CausalDR), where each sample includes an input question, explicit causal DAG, graph-based reasoning trace, and validated answer. Experiments on four LLMs across eight tasks show that CDCR-SFT improves the causal reasoning capability with the state-of-the-art 95.33% accuracy on CLADDER (surpassing human performance of 94.8% for the first time) and reduces the hallucination on HaluEval with 10% improvements. It demonstrates that explicit causal structure modeling in LLMs can effectively mitigate logical inconsistencies in LLM outputs.

PaperID: 221, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14249 GitHub

Abstract:
The automatic movie dubbing model generates vivid speech from given scripts, replicating a speaker's timbre from a brief timbre prompt while ensuring lipsync with the silent video. Existing approaches simulate a simplified workflow where actors dub directly without preparation, overlooking the critical director–actor interaction. In contrast, authentic workflows involve a dynamic collaboration: directors actively engage with actors, guiding them to internalize the context cues, specifically emotion, before performance. To address this issue, we propose a new Retrieve-Augmented Director-Actor Interaction Learning scheme to achieve authentic movie dubbing, termed Authentic-Dubber, which contains three novel mechanisms: (1) We construct a multimodal Reference Footage library to simulate the learning footage provided by directors. Note that we integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) to achieve deep comprehension of emotional representations across multimodal signals. (2) To emulate how actors efficiently and comprehensively internalize director-provided footage during dubbing, we propose an Emotion-Similarity-based Retrieval-Augmentation strategy. This strategy retrieves the most relevant multimodal information that aligns with the target silent video. (3) We develop a Progressive Graph-based speech generation approach that incrementally incorporates the retrieved multimodal emotional knowledge, thereby simulating the actor's final dubbing process. The above mechanisms enable the Authentic-Dubber to faithfully replicate the authentic dubbing workflow, achieving comprehensive improvements in emotional expressiveness. Both subjective and objective evaluations on the V2C-Animation benchmark dataset validate the effectiveness.

PaperID: 222, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05731 GitHub

Abstract:
The emergence of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has propelled the development of autonomous agents that operate on Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) using pure visual input. A fundamental challenge is robustly grounding natural language instructions. This requires a precise spatial alignment, which accurately locates the coordinates of each element, and, more critically, a correct semantic alignment, which matches the instructions to the functionally appropriate UI element. Although Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven to be effective at improving spatial alignment for these MLLMs, we find that inefficient exploration bottlenecks semantic alignment, which prevents models from learning difficult semantic associations. To address this exploration problem, we present Adaptive Exploration Policy Optimization (AEPO), a new policy optimization framework. AEPO employs a multianswer generation strategy to enforce broader exploration, which is then guided by a theoretically grounded Adaptive Exploration Reward (AER) function derived from first principles of efficiency η=U/C. Our AEPO-trained models, InfiGUI-G1-3B and InfiGUI-G1-7B, establish new state-of-the-art results across multiple challenging GUI grounding benchmarks, achieving significant relative improvements of up to 9.0% against the naive RLVR baseline on benchmarks designed to test generalization and semantic understanding.

PaperID: 223, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06142 GitHub

Abstract:
In the rapidly evolving landscape of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), the safety concerns of their outputs have earned significant attention. Although numerous datasets have been proposed, they may become outdated with MLLM advancements and are susceptible to data contamination issues. To address these problems, we propose SDEval, the first safety dynamic evaluation framework to controllably adjust the distribution and complexity of safety benchmarks. Specifically, SDEval mainly adopts three dynamic strategies: text, image, and textimage dynamics to generate new samples from original benchmarks. We first explore the individual effects of text and image dynamics on model safety. Then, we find that injecting text dynamics into images can further impact safety, and conversely, injecting image dynamics into text also leads to safety risks. SDEval is general enough to be applied to various existing safety and even capability benchmarks. Experiments across safety benchmarks, MLLMGuard and VLSBench, and capability benchmarks, MMBench and MMVet, show that SDEval significantly influences evaluation results, mitigates data contamination, and exposes safety limitations of MLLMs.

PaperID: 224, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10391 GitHub

Abstract:
RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) plays a crucial role in grounding Large Language Models by leveraging external knowledge, whereas the effectiveness is often compromised by the retrieval of contextually flawed or incomplete information. To address this, knowledge graph-based RAG methods have evolved towards hierarchical structures, organizing knowledge into multi-level summaries. However, these approaches still suffer from two critical, unaddressed challenges: high-level conceptual summaries exist as disconnected ``semantic islands'', lacking the explicit relations needed for cross-community reasoning; and the retrieval process itself remains structurally unaware, often degenerating into an inefficient flat search that fails to exploit the graph's rich topology. To overcome these limitations, we introduce LeanRAG, a framework that features a deeply collaborative design combining knowledge aggregation and retrieval strategies. LeanRAG first employs a novel semantic aggregation algorithm that forms entity clusters and constructs new explicit relations among aggregation-level summaries, creating a fully navigable semantic network. Then, a bottom-up, structure-guided retrieval strategy anchors queries to the most relevant fine-grained entities and then systematically traverses the graph's semantic pathways to gather concise yet contextually comprehensive evidence sets. The LeanRAG can mitigate the substantial overhead associated with path retrieval on graphs and minimize redundant information retrieval. Extensive experiments on four challenging QA benchmarks with different domains demonstrate that LeanRAG significantly outperforms existing methods in response quality while reducing 46% retrieval redundancy.

PaperID: 225, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18452 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across textual and multimodal domains. In parallel, large language diffusion models have emerged as a promising alternative to the autoregressive paradigm, offering improved controllability, bidirectional context modeling, and robust generation. However, their application to the audio modality remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce DIFFA, the first diffusionbased large audio-language model designed to perform spoken language understanding. DIFFA integrates a frozen diffusion language model with a lightweight dual-adapter architecture that bridges speech understanding and natural language reasoning. We employ a two-stage training pipeline: first, aligning semantic representations via an ASR objective; then, learning instruction-following abilities through synthetic audio-caption pairs automatically generated by prompting LLMs. Despite being trained on only 960 hours of ASR and 127 hours of synthetic instruction data, DIFFA demonstrates competitive performance on major benchmarks, including MMSU, MMAU, and VoiceBench, outperforming several autoregressive open-source baselines. Our results reveal the potential of large language diffusion models for efficient and scalable audio understanding, opening a new direction for speech-driven AI.

PaperID: 226, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00191 GitHub

Abstract:
Ensuring safety in autonomous systems with visionbased control remains a critical challenge due to the high dimensionality of image inputs and the fact that the relationship between true system state and its visual manifestation is unknown. Existing methods for learning-based control in such settings typically lack formal safety guarantees. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel semi-probabilistic verification framework that integrates reachability analysis with conditional generative networks and distribution-free tail bounds to enable efficient and scalable verification of vision-based neural network controllers. Next, we develop a gradient-based training approach that employs a novel safety loss function, safety-aware data-sampling strategy to efficiently select and store critical training examples, and curriculum learning, to efficiently synthesize safe controllers in the semi-probabilistic framework. Empirical evaluations in X-Plane 11 airplane landing simulation, CARLA-simulated autonomous lane following, F1Tenth vehicle lane following in a physical visually-rich miniature environment, and Airsim-simulated drone navigation and obstacle avoidance demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in achieving formal safety guarantees while maintaining strong nominal performance.

PaperID: 227, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06151 GitHub

Abstract:
RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) systems enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by retrieving relevant documents from external corpora before generating responses. This approach significantly expands LLM capabilities by leveraging vast, up-to-date external knowledge. However, this reliance on external knowledge makes RAG systems vulnerable to corpus poisoning attacks that manipulate generated outputs via poisoned document injection. Existing poisoning attack strategies typically treat the retrieval and generation stages as disjointed, limiting their effectiveness. We propose Joint-GCG, the first framework to unify gradient-based attacks across both retriever and generator models through three innovations: (1) Cross-Vocabulary Projection for aligning embedding spaces, (2) Gradient Tokenization Alignment for synchronizing token-level gradient signals, and (3) Adaptive Weighted Fusion for dynamically balancing attacking objectives. Evaluations demonstrate that Joint-GCG achieves at most 25% and an average of 5% higher attack success rate than previous methods across multiple retrievers and generators. While optimized under a white-box assumption, the generated poisons show unprecedented transferability to unseen models. Joint-GCG's innovative unification of gradient-based attacks across retrieval and generation stages fundamentally reshapes our understanding of vulnerabilities within RAG systems.

PaperID: 228, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13356 GitHub

Abstract:
Backdoor attacks pose severe threats to machine learning systems, prompting extensive research in this area. However, most existing work focuses on singletarget All-to-One (A2O) attacks, overlooking the more complex All-to-X (A2X) attacks with multiple target classes, which are often assumed to have low attack success rates. In this paper, we first demonstrate that A2X attacks are robust against state-of-the-art defenses. We then propose a novel attack strategy that enhances the success rate of A2X attacks while maintaining robustness by optimizing grouping and target class assignment mechanisms. Our method improves the attack success rate by up to 28%, with average improvements of 6.7%, 16.4%, 14.1% on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and Tiny-ImageNet, respectively. We anticipate that this study will raise awareness of A2X attacks and stimulate further research in this underexplored area.

PaperID: 229, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09385 GitHub

Abstract:
Offline preference optimization offers a simpler and more stable alternative to RLHF for aligning language models. However, their effectiveness is critically dependent on ranking accuracy, a metric where further gains are highly impactful. This limitation arises from a fundamental problem that we identify and formalize as the OverfittingUnderfitting Dilemma: current margin designs cause models to apply excessive, wasteful gradients to correctly ranked samples (overfitting) while providing insufficient corrective signals for misranked ones (underfitting). To resolve this dilemma, we propose Adaptive Margin-attached Preference Optimization (AMaPO), a simple yet principled algorithm. AMaPO employs an instance-wise adaptive margin, refined by Z-normalization and exponential scaling, which dynamically reallocates learning effort by amplifying gradients for misranked samples and suppressing them for correct ones. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate that AMaPO not only achieves better ranking accuracy and superior downstream alignment performance, but targeted analysis also confirms that it successfully mitigates the core overfitting and underfitting issues.

PaperID: 230, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21737 GitHub

Abstract:
Advances in unsupervised probes like Contrast‑Consistent Search (CCS), which reveal latent beliefs without token outputs, raise the question of whether they can reliably assess model alignment. We investigate this by examining CCS's sensitivity to harmful vs. safe statements and introducing Polarity‑Aware CCS (PA‑CCS), which evaluates whether a model's internal representations remain consistent under polarity inversion. We propose two alignmentoriented metrics -- Polar‑Consistency and Contradiction Index -- to quantify the semantic robustness of a model's latent knowledge. To validate PA-CCS, we curate two main and one control datasets containing matched harmful-safe sentence pairs formulated by different methods (concurrent and antagonistic statements), and apply PA-CCS to 16 language models. Our results demonstrate that PA‑CCS reveals both architectural and layer-specific differences in the encoding of latent harmful knowledge. Interestingly, replacing the negation token with a meaningless marker degrades the PA‑CCS scores of models with aligned representations. In contrast, models lacking robust internal calibration do not show this degradation.

PaperID: 231, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.01903 GitHub

Abstract:
This paper introduces STAR1, a high-quality, just-1k-scale safety dataset specifically designed for large reasoning models (LRMs) like DeepSeek-R1. Built on three core principles --- diversity, deliberative reasoning, and rigorous filtering --- STAR-1 aims to address the critical needs for safety alignment in LRMs. Specifically, we begin by integrating existing open-source safety datasets from diverse sources. Then, we curate safety policies to generate policy-grounded deliberative reasoning samples. Lastly, we apply a GPT-4o-based safety scoring system to select training examples aligned with best practices. Experimental results show that fine-tuning LRMs with STAR-1 leads to an average 40% improvement in safety performance across four benchmarks, while only incurring a marginal decrease (e.g., an average of 1.1%) in reasoning ability measured across five reasoning tasks. Extensive ablation studies further validate the importance of our design principles in constructing STAR-1 and analyze its efficacy across both LRMs and traditional LLMs.

PaperID: 232, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16110 GitHub

Abstract:
The growing misuse of VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) has led providers to deploy multiple safeguards—alignment tuning, system prompt, and content moderation. Yet the real-world robustness of these defenses against adversarial attack remains underexplored. We introduce Multi-Faceted Attack (MFA), a framework that systematically uncovers general safety vulnerabilities in leading defense-equipped VLMs, including GPT-4o, Gemini-Pro, and LLaMA 4, etc. Central to MFA is the Attention-Transfer Attack (ATA), which conceals harmful instructions inside a meta task with competing objectives. We offer a theoretical perspective grounded in reward-hacking to explain why such an attack can succeed. To maximize cross-model transfer, we introduce a lightweight transfer-enhancement algorithm combined with a simple repetition strategy that jointly evades both input- and output-level filters—without any model-specific fine-tuning. We empirically show that adversarial images optimized for one vision encoder transfer broadly to unseen VLMs, indicating that shared visual representations create a cross-model safety vulnerability. Combined, MFA reaches a 58.5% overall attack success rate, consistently outperforming existing methods. Notably, on state-of-the-art commercial models, MFA achieves a 52.8% success rate, outperforming the second-best attack by 34%. These findings challenge the perceived robustness of current defensive mechanisms, systematically expose general safety loopholes within defense-equipped VLMs, and offer a practical probe for diagnosing and evaluating the safety of VLMs.

PaperID: 233, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12332 GitHub

Abstract:
Diffusion Models (DMs) have achieved remarkable success in realistic voice cloning (VC), while they also increase the risk of malicious misuse. Existing proactive defenses designed for traditional VC models aim to disrupt the forgery process, but they have been proven incompatible with DMs due to the intricate generative mechanisms of diffusion. To bridge this gap, we introduce VoiceCloak, a multidimensional proactive defense framework with the goal of obfuscating speaker identity and degrading perceptual quality in potential unauthorized VC. To achieve these goals, we conduct a focused analysis to identify specific vulnerabilities within DMs, allowing VoiceCloak to disrupt the cloning process by introducing adversarial perturbations into the reference audio. Specifically, to obfuscate speaker identity, VoiceCloak first targets speaker identity by distorting representation learning embeddings to maximize identity variation, which is guided by auditory perception principles. Additionally, VoiceCloak disrupts crucial conditional guidance processes, particularly attention context, thereby preventing the alignment of vocal characteristics that are essential for achieving convincing cloning. Then, to address the second objective, VoiceCloak introduces score magnitude amplification to actively steer the reverse trajectory away from the generation of high-quality speech. Noise-guided semantic corruption is further employed to disrupt structural speech semantics captured by DMs, degrading output quality. Extensive experiments highlight VoiceCloak's outstanding defense success rate against unauthorized diffusion-based voice cloning. Additional audio samples of VoiceCloak are available in demo pages.

PaperID: 234, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.19232 GitHub

Abstract:
RNA inverse folding, designing sequences to form specific 3D structures, is critical for therapeutics, gene regulation, and synthetic biology. Current methods, focused on sequence recovery, struggle to address structural objectives like secondary structure consistency (SS), minimum free energy (MFE), and local distance difference test (LDDT), leading to suboptimal structural accuracy. To tackle this, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework integrated with a latent diffusion model (LDM). Drawing inspiration from the success of diffusion models in RNA inverse folding, which adeptly model complex sequencestructure interactions, we develop an LDM incorporating pre-trained RNA-FM embeddings from a large-scale RNA model. These embeddings capture co-evolutionary patterns, markedly improving sequence recovery accuracy. However, existing approaches, including diffusion-based methods, cannot effectively handle non-differentiable structural objectives. By contrast, RL excels in this task by using policy-driven reward optimization to navigate complex, non-gradient-based objectives, offering a significant advantage over traditional methods. In summary, we propose the Step-wise Optimization of Latent Diffusion Model (SOLD), a novel RL framework that optimizes single-step noise without sampling the full diffusion trajectory, achieving efficient refinement of multiple structural objectives. Experimental results demonstrate SOLD surpasses its LDM baseline and state-of-the-art methods across all metrics, establishing a robust framework for RNA inverse folding with profound implications for biotechnological and therapeutic applications.

PaperID: 235, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09659 GitHub

Abstract:
Spiking Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as an energyefficient alternative to conventional LLMs through their event-driven computation. To effectively obtain spiking LLMs, researchers develop different ANN-to-SNN conversion methods by leveraging pre-trained ANN parameters while inheriting the energy efficiency of SNN. However, existing conversion methods struggle with extreme activation outliers and incompatible nonlinear operations of ANN-based LLMs. To address this, we propose a loss-less ANN-SNN conversion for fully spike-driven LLMs, termed LAS. Specifically, LAS introduces two novel neurons to convert the activation outlier and nonlinear operation of ANN-based LLMs. Moreover, LAS tailors the spike-equivalent Transformer components for spiking LLMs, which can ensure full spiking conversion without any loss of performance. Experimental results on six language models and two vision-language models demonstrate that LAS achieves loss-less conversion. Notably, on OPT-66B, LAS even improves the accuracy of 2% on the WSC task. In addition, the parameter and ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of LAS.

PaperID: 236, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12460 GitHub

Abstract:
Depression represents a global mental health challenge requiring efficient and reliable automated detection methods. Current Transformeror Graph Neural Networks (GNNs)-based multimodal depression detection methods face significant challenges in modeling individual differences and cross-modal temporal dependencies across diverse behavioral contexts. Therefore, we propose P³HF (Personality-guided Public-Private Domain Disentangled Hypergraph-Former Network) with three key innovations: (1) personality-guided representation learning using LLMs to transform discrete individual features into contextual descriptions for personalized encoding; (2) Hypergraph-Former architecture modeling high-order cross-modal temporal relationships; (3) event-level domain disentanglement with contrastive learning for improved generalization across behavioral contexts. Experiments on MPDD-Young dataset show P³HF achieves around 10% improvement on accuracy and weighted F1 for binary and ternary depression classification task over existing methods. Extensive ablation studies validate the independent contribution of each architectural component, confirming that personality-guided representation learning and high-order hypergraph reasoning are both essential for generating robust, individual-aware depression-related representations.

PaperID: 237, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18890 GitHub

Abstract:
The discovery of symbolic solutions—mathematical expressions, logical rules, and algorithmic structures—is fundamental to advancing scientific and engineering progress. However, traditional methods often struggle with search efficiency and fail to integrate knowledge effectively. While recent large language modelbased (LLM-based) approaches have demonstrated improvements in search efficiency, they lack the ability to continually refine and expand upon discovered solutions and their underlying knowledge, limiting their potential for open-ended innovation. To address these limitations, we introduce CoEvo, a novel framework that leverages large language models within an evolutionary search methodology to continually generate and refine symbolic solutions. CoEvo integrates a dynamic knowledge library, enabling open-ended innovation of solutions through effective knowledge management. Additionally, CoEvo leverages multiple representations of solutions—including natural language, mathematical expressions, and code—to further enhance search efficiency. By combining the reasoning capabilities of LLMs with the exploratory power of evolutionary algorithms, CoEvo significantly improves the efficiency and scope of symbolic discovery. Our experimental results demonstrate that this method not only enhances the efficiency of searching for symbolic solutions but also supports the ongoing discovery process, akin to human scientific endeavors. This study represents a first effort in conceptualizing the search for symbolic solutions as a lifelong, iterative process, marking a significant step towards harnessing LLMs in the perpetual pursuit of scientific and engineering breakthroughs.

PaperID: 238, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13488 GitHub

Abstract:
Generating highquality human interactions holds significant value for applications like virtual reality and robotics. However, existing methods often fail to preserve unique individual characteristics or fully adhere to textual descriptions. To address these challenges, we introduce InterMoE, a novel framework built on a Dynamic Temporal-Selective Mixture of Experts. The core of InterMoE is a routing mechanism that synergistically uses both high-level text semantics and low-level motion context to dispatch temporal motion features to specialized experts. This allows experts to dynamically determine the selection capacity and focus on critical temporal features, thereby preserving specific individual characteristic identities while ensuring high semantic fidelity. Extensive experiments show that InterMoE achieves state-of-the-art performance in individual-specific high-fidelity 3D human interaction generation, reducing FID scores by 9% on the InterHuman dataset and 22% on InterX.

PaperID: 239, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13399 GitHub

Abstract:
Scene Text Editing (STE) aims to naturally modify text in images while preserving visual consistency, the decisive factors of which can be divided into three parts, i.e., text style, text content, and background. Previous methods have struggled with incomplete disentanglement of editable attributes, typically addressing only one aspect—such as editing text content—thus limiting controllability and visual consistency. To overcome these limitations, we propose TripleFDS, a novel framework for STE with disentangled modular attributes, and an accompanying dataset called SCB Synthesis. SCB Synthesis provides robust training data for triple feature disentanglement by utilizing the "SCB Group", a novel construct that combines three attributes per image to generate diverse, disentangled training groups. Leveraging this construct as a basic training unit, TripleFDS first disentangles triple features, ensuring semantic accuracy through intergroup contrastive regularization and preventing redundancy through intra-sample multi-feature orthogonality. In the synthesis phase, TripleFDS performs feature remapping to prevent "shortcut" phenomena during reconstruction and mitigate potential feature leakage. Trained on 125,000 SCB Groups, TripleFDS achieves state-of-the-art image fidelity (SSIM of 44.54) and text accuracy (ACC of 93.58%) on the mainstream STE benchmarks. Besides superior performance, the more flexible editing of TripleFDS supports new operations such as style replacement and background transfer.

PaperID: 240, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00477 GitHub

Abstract:
In controllable image synthesis, generating coherent and consistent images from multiple references with spatial layout awareness remains an open challenge. We propose LAMIC, a LayoutAware Multi-Image Composition framework that, for the first time, extends single-reference diffusion models to multi-reference scenarios in a training-free manner. Built upon the MMDiT model, LAMIC introduces two plug-and-play attention mechanisms: 1) Group Isolation Attention (GIA) to enhance entity disentanglement; and 2) Region-Modulated Attention (RMA) to enable layout-aware generation. To comprehensively evaluate model capabilities, we further introduce three metrics: 1) Inclusion Ratio (IN-R) and Fill Ratio (FI-R) for assessing layout control; and 2) Background Similarity (BG-S) for measuring background consistency. Extensive experiments show that LAMIC achieves state-of-the-art performance across most major metrics: it consistently outperforms existing multi-reference baselines in ID-S, BG-S, IN-R and AVG scores across all settings, and achieves the best DPG in complex composition tasks. These results demonstrate LAMIC's superior abilities in identity keeping, background preservation, layout control, and prompt-following, all achieved without any training or fine-tuning, showcasing strong zero-shot generalization ability. By inheriting the strengths of advanced single-reference models and enabling seamless extension to multi-image scenarios, LAMIC establishes a new training-free paradigm for controllable multi-image composition. As foundation models continue to evolve, LAMIC's performance is expected to scale accordingly.

PaperID: 241, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13036 GitHub

Abstract:
Contrastive Language–Image Pretraining (CLIP) has demonstrated strong generalization across a wide range of visual tasks by leveraging large-scale English–image pairs. However, its extension to low-resource languages remains limited due to the scarcity of high-quality multilingual image–text data. Existing multilingual vision–language models exhibit consistently low retrieval performance in underrepresented languages—including Czech, Finnish, Croatian, Hungarian, Romanian—on the Crossmodal-3600 (XM3600) benchmark. To address this, we propose a lightweight and data-efficient framework for multilingual vision–language alignment. Our approach requires no image–text pairs or text-text pairs and freezes both the pretrained image encoder and multilingual text encoder during training. Only a compact 1.7M-parameter projection module is trained, using a contrastive loss over English representations as semantic anchors. This minimal training setup enables robust multilingual alignment even for languages with limited supervision. Extensive evaluation across multiple multilingual retrieval benchmarks confirms the effectiveness of our method, showing significant gains in five underrepresented languages where existing models typically underperform. These findings highlight the effectiveness of our pivot-based, parameter-efficient alignment strategy for inclusive multimodal learning.

PaperID: 242, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14097 GitHub

Abstract:
For longtailed recognition (LTR) tasks, high intra-class compactness and inter-class separability in both head and tail classes, as well as balanced separability among all the classifier vectors, are preferred. The existing LTR methods based on cross-entropy (CE) loss not only struggle to learn features with desirable properties but also couple imbalanced classifier vectors in the denominator of its Softmax, amplifying the imbalance effects in LTR. In this paper, for the LTR, we propose a binary cross-entropy (BCE)-based tripartite synergistic learning, termed BCE3S, which consists of three components: (1) BCE-based joint learning optimizes both the classifier and sample features, which achieves better compactness and separability among features than the CE-based joint learning, by decoupling the metrics between feature and the imbalanced classifier vectors in multiple Sigmoid; (2) BCE-based contrastive learning further improves the intra-class compactness of features; (3) BCE-based uniform learning balances the separability among classifier vectors and interactively enhances the feature properties by combining with the joint learning. The extensive experiments show that the LTR model trained by BCE3S not only achieves higher compactness and separability among sample features, but also balances the classifier's separability, achieving SOTA performance on various long-tailed datasets such as CIFAR10-LT, CIFAR100-LT, ImageNet-LT, and iNaturalist2018.

PaperID: 243, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02206 GitHub

Abstract:
This paper addresses lowlight video super-resolution (LVSR), aiming to restore high-resolution videos from low-light, low-resolution (LR) inputs. Existing LVSR methods often struggle to recover fine details due to limited contrast and insufficient high-frequency information. To overcome these challenges, we present RetinexEVSR, the first event-driven LVSR framework that leverages high-contrast event signals and Retinex-inspired priors to enhance video quality under low-light scenarios. Unlike previous approaches that directly fuse degraded signals, RetinexEVSR introduces a novel bidirectional cross-modal fusion strategy to extract and integrate meaningful cues from noisy event data and degraded RGB frames. Specifically, an illumination-guided event enhancement module is designed to progressively refine event features using illumination maps derived from the Retinex model, thereby suppressing low-light artifacts while preserving high-contrast details. Furthermore, we propose an event-guided reflectance enhancement module that utilizes the enhanced event features to dynamically recover reflectance details via a multi-scale fusion mechanism. Experimental results show that our RetinexEVSR achieves state-of-the-art performance on three datasets. Notably, on the SDSD benchmark, our method can get up to 2.95 dB gain while reducing runtime by 65% compared to prior event-based methods.

PaperID: 244, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13055 GitHub

Abstract:
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) has advanced significantly with highcapacity foundation models like DINOv2, achieving remarkable performance. Nonetheless, their substantial computational cost makes deployment on resource-constrained devices impractical. In this paper, we introduce an efficient asymmetric VPR framework that incorporates a high-capacity gallery model for offline feature extraction with a lightweight query network for online processing. A key challenge in this setting is ensuring compatibility between these heterogeneous networks, which conventional approaches address through computationally expensive k-NN-based compatible training. To overcome this, we propose a geographical memory bank that structures gallery features using geolocation metadata inherent in VPR databases, eliminating the need for exhaustive k-NN computations. Additionally, we introduce an implicit embedding augmentation technique that enhances the query network to model feature variations despite its limited capacity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method not only significantly reduces computational costs but also outperforms existing asymmetric retrieval techniques, establishing a new aspect for VPR in resource-limited environments.

PaperID: 245, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13105 GitHub

Abstract:
Multiobject tracking (MOT) predominantly follows the tracking-by-detection paradigm, where Kalman filters serve as the standard motion predictor due to computational efficiency but inherently fail on non-linear motion patterns. Conversely, recent data-driven motion predictors capture complex non-linear dynamics but suffer from limited domain generalization and computational overhead. Through extensive analysis, we reveal that even in datasets dominated by non-linear motion, Kalman filter outperforms data-driven predictors in up to 34% of cases, demonstrating that real-world tracking scenarios inherently involve both linear and non-linear patterns. To leverage this complementarity, we propose PlugTrack, a novel framework that adaptively fuses Kalman filter and data-driven motion predictors through multi-perceptive motion understanding. Our approach employs multi-perceptive motion analysis to generate adaptive blending factors. PlugTrack achieves significant performance gains on MOT17/MOT20 and state-of-the-art on DanceTrack without modifying existing motion predictors. To the best of our knowledge, PlugTrack is the first framework to bridge classical and modern motion prediction paradigms through adaptive fusion in MOT.

PaperID: 246, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00592 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent progress in twoview geometry increasingly emphasizes enforcing smoothness and global consistency priors when estimating motion fields between pairs of images. However, in complex real-world scenes, characterized by extreme viewpoint and scale changes as well as pronounced depth discontinuities, the motion field often exhibits diverse and heterogeneous motion patterns. Most existing methods lack targeted modeling strategies and fail to explicitly account for this variability, resulting in estimated motion fields that diverge from their true underlying structure and distribution. We observe that Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) can assign dedicated experts to motion sub-fields, enabling a divide-and-conquer strategy for heterogeneous motion patterns. Building on this insight, we re-architect motion field modeling in two-view geometry with GeoMoE, a streamlined framework. Specifically, we first devise a Probabilistic Prior-Guided Decomposition strategy that exploits inlier probability signals to perform a structure-aware decomposition of the motion field into heterogeneous sub-fields, sharply curbing outlier-induced bias. Next, we introduce an MoE-Enhanced Bi-Path Rectifier that enhances each sub-field along spatial-context and channel-semantic paths and routes it to a customized expert for targeted modeling, thereby decoupling heterogeneous motion regimes, suppressing cross-sub-field interference and representational entanglement, and yielding fine-grained motion-field rectification. With this minimalist design, GeoMoE outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods in relative pose and homography estimation and shows strong generalization.

PaperID: 247, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.18461 GitHub

Abstract:
Despite significant advancements in image generation using advanced generative frameworks, crossimage integration of content and style remains a key challenge. Current generative models, while powerful, frequently depend on vague textual prompts to define styles—creating difficulties in balancing content semantics and style preservation. We propose a novel framework that utilizes customized models to learn style representations. It enhances content preservation through cross-model feature and attention modulation, leveraging the inherent semantic consistency across models. Additionally, we introduce fixed feature and adaptive attention fusion to achieve the desired balance between content and style. We further develop spatial (mask-guided localized) and temporal (multi-style compositional) multi-model combinations, enabling flexible fusion of models and styles. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in balancing content preservation and stylistic coherence.

PaperID: 248, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19108 GitHub

Abstract:
Implicit neural representations (INRs) have achieved remarkable success in image representation and compression, but they require substantial training time and memory. Meanwhile, recent 2D Gaussian Splatting (GS) methods (e.g., GaussianImage) offer promising alternatives through efficient primitivebased rendering. However, these methods require excessive Gaussian primitives to maintain high visual fidelity. To exploit the potential of GS-based approaches, we present GaussianImage++, which utilizes limited Gaussian primitives to achieve impressive representation and compression performance. Firstly, we introduce a distortion-driven densification mechanism. It progressively allocates Gaussian primitives according to signal intensity. Secondly, we employ context-aware Gaussian filters for each primitive, which assist in the densification to optimize Gaussian primitives based on varying image content. Thirdly, we integrate attribute-separated learnable scalar quantizers and quantization-aware training, enabling efficient compression of primitive attributes. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. In particular, GaussianImage++ outperforms GaussianImage and INRs-based COIN in representation and compression performance while maintaining real-time decoding and low memory usage.

PaperID: 249, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.20665 GitHub

Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of remote sensing technology, highresolution multi-modal imagery is now more widely accessible. Conventional object detection models are trained on a single dataset, often restricted to a specific imaging modality and annotation format. However, such an approach overlooks the valuable shared knowledge across multi-modalities and limits the model’s applicability in more versatile scenarios. This paper introduces a new task called Multi-Modal Datasets and Multi-Task Object Detection (M2Det) for remote sensing, designed to accurately detect horizontal or oriented objects from any sensor modality. This task poses challenges due to 1) the trade-offs involved in managing multi-modal modelling and 2) the complexities of multi-task optimization. To address these, we establish a benchmark dataset and propose a unified model, SM3Det (Single Model for Multi-Modal datasets and Multi-Task object Detection). SM3Det leverages a grid-level sparse MoE backbone to enable joint knowledge learning while preserving distinct feature representations for different modalities. Furthermore, we propose a novel consistency and synchronization optimization mechanism, allowing it to effectively handle varying levels of learning difficulty across modalities and tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate SM3Det's effectiveness and generalizability, consistently outperforming the combination of specialized models on individual datasets.

PaperID: 250, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05966 GitHub

Abstract:
Fewshot multimodal industrial anomaly detection is a critical yet underexplored task, offering the ability to quickly adapt to complex industrial scenarios. In few-shot settings, insufficient training samples often fail to cover the diverse patterns present in test samples. This challenge can be mitigated by extracting structural commonality from a small number of training samples. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot unsupervised multimodal industrial anomaly detection method based on structural commonality, CIF (Commonality In Few). To extract intra-class structural information, we employ hypergraphs, which are capable of modeling higher-order correlations, to capture the structural commonality within training samples, and use a memory bank to store this intra-class structural prior. Firstly, we design a semantic-aware hypergraph construction module tailored for single-semantic industrial images, from which we extract common structures to guide the construction of the memory bank. Secondly, we use a training-free hypergraph message passing module to update the visual features of test samples, reducing the distribution gap between test features and features in the memory bank. We further propose a hyperedge-guided memory search module, which utilizes structural information to assist the memory search process and reduce the false positive rate. Experimental results on the MVTec 3D-AD dataset and the Eyecandies dataset show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in few-shot settings.

PaperID: 251, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17965 GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal object Re-IDentification (ReID) is devoted to retrieving specific objects through the exploitation of complementary multi-modal image information. Existing methods mainly concentrate on the fusion of multi-modal features, yet neglecting the background interference. Besides, current multi-modal fusion methods often focus on aligning modality pairs but suffer from multi-modal consistency alignment. To address these issues, we propose a novel selective interaction and global-local alignment framework called Signal for multi-modal object ReID. Specifically, we first propose a Selective Interaction Module (SIM) to select important patch tokens with intra-modal and inter-modal information. These important patch tokens engage in the interaction with class tokens, thereby yielding more discriminative features. Then, we propose a Global Alignment Module (GAM) to simultaneously align multi-modal features by minimizing the volume of 3D polyhedra in the gramian space. Meanwhile, we propose a Local Alignment Module (LAM) to align local features in a shift-aware manner. With these modules, our proposed framework could extract more discriminative features for object ReID. Extensive experiments on three multi-modal object ReID benchmarks (i.e., RGBNT201, RGBNT100, MSVR310) validate the effectiveness of our method.

PaperID: 252, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14186 GitHub

Abstract:
Precise event spotting (PES) aims to recognize finegrained events at exact moments and has become a key component of sports analytics. This task is particularly challenging due to rapid succession, motion blur, and subtle visual differences. Consequently, most existing methods rely on domain-specific, end-to-end training with large labeled datasets and often struggle in few-shot conditions due to their dependence on pixel- or pose-based inputs alone. However, obtaining large labeled datasets is practically hard. We propose a Unified Multi-Entity Graph Network (UMEG-Net) for few-shot PES. UMEG-Net integrates human skeletons and sport-specific object keypoints into a unified graph and features an efficient spatio-temporal extraction module based on advanced GCN and multi-scale temporal shift. To further enhance performance, we employ multimodal distillation to transfer knowledge from keypoint-based graphs to visual representations. Our approach achieves robust performance with limited labeled data and significantly outperforms baseline models in few-shot settings, providing a scalable and effective solution for few-shot PES.

PaperID: 253, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13813 GitHub

Abstract:
The KolmogorovArnold Network (KAN) has been gaining popularity as an alternative to the multilayer perceptron (MLP) due to its greater expressiveness and interpretability. Even so, KAN suffers from training instability and being orders of magnitude slower due to its increased computational cost, limiting its applicability to large-scale tasks. Recently, the Kolmogorov-Arnold Transformer (KAT) has been proposed, achieving FLOPs comparable to traditional Transformer models with MLPs by leveraging Group-Rational KAN (GR-KAN). Unfortunately, despite the comparable FLOPs, our testing shows that KAT remains 123x slower during training, indicating that there are other performance bottlenecks beyond FLOPs. In this paper, we conduct a series of experiments to understand the root cause of the slowdown in KAT. We uncover that the slowdown can be isolated to memory stalls, linked more specifically to inefficient gradient accumulations in the backward pass of GR-KAN. To address this memory bottleneck, we propose FlashKAT, which minimizes accesses to slow memory and the usage of atomic adds through a restructured kernel. Evaluations show that FlashKAT achieves up to an 86.5x training speedup over state-of-the-art KAT while reducing rounding errors in gradient computation.

PaperID: 254, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13697 GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce a novel framework for video camera trajectory editing, enabling the resynthesis of monocular videos along user-defined camera paths. This task is challenging due to its ill-posed nature and the limited multi-view video data for training. Traditional reconstruction methods struggle with extreme trajectory changes, and existing generative models for dynamic novel view synthesis cannot handle in-the-wild videos. Our approach consists of two steps: estimating temporally consistent geometry, and generative rendering guided by this geometry. By integrating geometric priors, the generative model focuses on synthesizing realistic details where the estimated geometry is uncertain. We eliminate the need for extensive 4D training data through a factorized fine-tuning framework that separately trains spatial and temporal components using multi-view image and video data. Our method outperforms baselines in producing plausible videos from novel camera trajectories, especially in extreme extrapolation scenarios on real-world footage.

PaperID: 255, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04369 GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in visionlanguage tasks, yet they still face challenges when processing long-duration video inputs. The limitation arises from MLLMs' context limit and training costs, necessitating sparse frame sampling before feeding videos into MLLMs. However, building a trainable sampling method remains challenging due to the unsupervised and non-differentiable nature of sparse frame sampling in Video-MLLMs. To address these problems, we propose Temporal Sampling Policy Optimization (TSPO), advancing MLLMs' long-form video-language understanding via reinforcement learning. Specifically, we first propose a trainable event-aware temporal agent, which captures event-query correlation for performing probabilistic keyframe selection. Then, we propose the TSPO reinforcement learning paradigm, which models keyframe selection and language generation as a joint decision-making process, enabling end-to-end group relative optimization for the temporal sampling policy. Furthermore, we propose a dual-style long video training data construction pipeline, balancing comprehensive temporal understanding and key segment localization. Finally, we incorporate rule-based answering accuracy and temporal locating reward mechanisms to optimize the temporal sampling policy. Comprehensive experiments show that our TSPO achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple long video understanding benchmarks, and shows transferable ability across different cutting-edge Video-MLLMs.

PaperID: 256, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.03256 GitHub

Abstract:
Event cameras deliver visual information characterized by a high dynamic range and high temporal resolution, offering significant advantages in estimating optical flow for complex lighting conditions and fastmoving objects. Current advanced optical flow methods for event cameras largely adopt established image-based frameworks. However, the spatial sparsity of event data limits their performance. In this paper, we present BAT, an innovative framework that estimates event-based optical flow using bidirectional adaptive temporal correlation. BAT includes three novel designs: 1) a bidirectional temporal correlation that transforms bidirectional temporally dense motion cues into spatially dense ones, enabling accurate and spatially dense optical flow estimation; 2) an adaptive temporal sampling strategy for maintaining temporal consistency in correlation; 3) spatially adaptive temporal motion aggregation to efficiently and adaptively aggregate consistent target motion features into adjacent motion features while suppressing inconsistent ones. Our BAT achieves state-of-the-art performance on the DSEC-Flow benchmark, outperforming existing methods by a large margin while also exhibiting sharp edges and high-quality details. Our BAT can accurately predict future optical flow using only past events, significantly outperforming E-RAFT’s warm-start approach.

PaperID: 257, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.02054 GitHub

Abstract:
Querybased models are extensively used in 3D object detection tasks, with a wide range of pre-trained checkpoints readily available online. However, despite their popularity, these models often require an excessive number of object queries, far surpassing the actual number of objects to detect. The redundant queries result in unnecessary computational and memory costs. In this paper, we find that not all queries contribute equally -- a significant portion of queries have a much smaller impact compared to others. Based on this observation, we propose an embarrassingly simple approach called Gradually Pruning Queries (GPQ), which prunes queries incrementally based on their classification scores. A key advantage of GPQ is that it requires no additional learnable parameters. It is straightforward to implement in any query-based method, as it can be seamlessly integrated as a fine-tuning step using an existing checkpoint after training. With GPQ, users can easily generate multiple models with fewer queries, starting from a checkpoint with an excessive number of queries. Experiments on various advanced 3D detectors show that GPQ effectively reduces redundant queries while maintaining performance. Using our method, model inference on desktop GPUs can be accelerated by up to 1.35x. Moreover, after deployment on edge devices, it achieves up to a 67.86% reduction in FLOPs and a 65.16% decrease in inference time.

PaperID: 258, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03775 GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we show that current approaches using large square kernels or transformerbased global modeling aggregate contextual information uniformly across spatial dimensions, leading to feature dilution and localization errors for elongated targets. To mitigate this issue, we propose Strip R-CNN, the first work to systematically explore large strip convolutions for remote sensing object detection. Our key insight is that strip convolutions enable directional feature aggregation along the dominant spatial dimension of slender objects, reducing background interference while preserving essential geometric information. We design two core components: (i) StripNet, a backbone network employing sequential orthogonal large strip convolutions to capture anisotropic spatial patterns, and (ii) Strip Head, which enhances localization precision by incorporating strip convolutions into the detection head. Unlike previous large-kernel approaches that suffer from computational redundancy and isotropic limitations, our method achieves superior performance with remarkable efficiency. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks (DOTA, FAIR1M, HRSC2016, and DIOR) demonstrate significant improvements, with our 30M parameter model achieving 82.75% mAP on DOTA-v1.0, establishing a new state-of-the-art record while providing new insights into anisotropic feature learning for remote sensing applications.

PaperID: 259, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23484 GitHub

Abstract:
Video captions play a crucial role in textto-video generation tasks, as their quality directly influences the semantic coherence and visual fidelity of the generated videos. Although large vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in caption generation, existing benchmarks inadequately address fine-grained evaluation, particularly in capturing spatial-temporal details critical for video generation. To address this gap, we introduce the Fine-grained Video Caption Evaluation Benchmark (VCapsBench), the first large-scale fine-grained benchmark comprising 5,677 (5K+) videos and 109,796 (100K+) question-answer pairs. These QA-pairs are systematically annotated across 21 fine-grained dimensions (e.g., camera movement, and shot type) that are empirically proven critical for text-to-video generation. We further introduce three metrics (Accuracy (AR), Inconsistency Rate (IR), Coverage Rate (CR)), and an automated evaluation pipeline leveraging a large language model (LLM) to verify caption quality via contrastive QA-pairs analysis. Our benchmark can advance the development of robust text-to-video models by providing actionable insights for caption optimization.

PaperID: 260, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05179 GitHub

Abstract:
DiT models have achieved great success in textto-video generation, leveraging their scalability in model capacity and data scale. High content and motion fidelity aligned with text prompts, however, often require large model parameters and a substantial number of function evaluations (NFEs). Realistic and visually appealing details are typically reflected in high-resolution outputs, further amplifying computational demands—especially for single-stage DiT models. To address these challenges, we propose a novel two-stage framework, FlashVideo, which strategically allocates model capacity and NFEs across stages to balance generation fidelity and quality. In the first stage, prompt fidelity is prioritized through a low-resolution generation process utilizing large parameters and sufficient NFEs to enhance computational efficiency. The second stage achieves a nearly straight ODE trajectory between low and high resolutions via flow matching, effectively generating fine details and fixing artifacts with minimal NFEs. To ensure a seamless connection between the two independently trained stages during inference, we carefully design degradation strategies during the second-stage training. Quantitative and visual results demonstrate that FlashVideo achieves state-of-the-art high-resolution video generation with superior computational efficiency. Additionally, the two-stage design enables users to preview the initial output and accordingly adjust the prompt before committing to full-resolution generation, thereby significantly reducing computational costs and wait times as well as enhancing commercial viability.

PaperID: 261, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03336 GitHub

Abstract:
Recovering finegrained details in extremely dark images remains challenging due to severe structural information loss and noise corruption. Existing enhancement methods often fail to preserve intricate details and sharp edges, limiting their effectiveness in downstream applications like text and edge detection. To address these deficiencies, we propose an efficient dual-stage approach centered on detail recovery for dark images. In the first stage, we introduce a Residual Fourier-Guided Module (RFGM) that effectively restores global illumination in the frequency domain. RFGM captures inter-stage and inter-channel dependencies through residual connections, providing robust priors for high-fidelity frequency processing while mitigating error accumulation risks from unreliable priors. The second stage employs complementary Mamba modules specifically designed for textural structure refinement: (1) Patch Mamba operates on channel-concatenated non-downsampled patches, meticulously modeling pixel-level correlations to enhance fine-grained details without resolution loss. (2) Grad Mamba explicitly focuses on high-gradient regions, alleviating state decay in state space models and prioritizing reconstruction of sharp edges and boundaries. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets and downstream applications demonstrate that our method significantly improves detail recovery performance while maintaining efficiency. Crucially, the proposed modules are lightweight and can be seamlessly integrated into existing Fourier-based frameworks with minimal computational overhead.

PaperID: 262, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.05347 GitHub

Abstract:
Automatic medical report generation has the potential to support clinical diagnosis, reduce the workload of radiologists, and demonstrate potential for enhancing diagnostic consistency. However, current evaluation metrics often fail to reflect the clinical reliability of generated reports. Overlapbased methods overlook fine-grained details (e.g., location, severity), diagnostic metrics are constrained by fixed vocabularies. Some diagnostic metrics are limited by fixed vocabularies or templates, reducing their ability to capture diverse clinical expressions. LLM-based metrics lack interpretable reasoning, limiting trust in clinical settings. Therefore, we propose a Granular Explainable Multi-Agent Score (GEMA-Score) in this paper, which conducts both objective quantification and subjective evaluation through a large language model-based multi-agent workflow. Our GEMA-Score parses structured reports and employs stable calculations through interactive exchanges of information among agents to assess disease diagnosis, location, severity, and uncertainty. Additionally, an LLM-based scoring agent evaluates completeness, readability, and clinical terminology while providing explanatory feedback. Extensive experiments show that GEMA-Score achieves the highest correlation with human experts on public datasets (Kendall = 0.69 on ReXVal; 0.45 on RadEvalX), demonstrating improved clinical scoring reliability.

PaperID: 263, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14469 GitHub

Abstract:
Lowlight video deblurring poses significant challenges in applications like nighttime surveillance and autonomous driving due to dim lighting and long exposures. While event cameras offer potential solutions with superior low-light sensitivity and high temporal resolution, existing fusion methods typically employ staged strategies, limiting their effectiveness against combined low-light and motion blur degradations. To overcome this, we propose CompEvent, a complex neural network framework enabling holistic full-process fusion of event data and RGB frames for enhanced joint restoration. CompEvent features two core components: 1) Complex Temporal Alignment GRU, which utilizes complex-valued convolutions and processes video and event streams iteratively via GRU to achieve temporal alignment and continuous fusion; and 2) Complex Space-Frequency Learning module, which performs unified complex-valued signal processing in both spatial and frequency domains, facilitating deep fusion through spatial structures and system-level characteristics. By leveraging the holistic representation capability of complex-valued neural networks, CompEvent achieves full-process spatiotemporal fusion, maximizes complementary learning between modalities, and significantly strengthens low-light video deblurring capability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CompEvent outperforms SOTA methods in addressing this challenging task.

PaperID: 264, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12530 GitHub

Abstract:
Keyframe selection has become essential for video understanding with visionlanguage models (VLMs) due to limited input tokens and the temporal sparsity of relevant information across video frames. Video understanding often relies on effective keyframes that are not only informative but also causally decisive. To this end, we propose Reinforced Causal Search with Information Bottleneck (ReaSon), a framework that formulates keyframe selection as an optimization problem with the help of a novel Causal Information Bottleneck (CIB), which explicitly defines keyframes as those satisfying both predictive sufficiency and causal necessity. Specifically, ReaSon employs a learnable policy network to select keyframes from a visually relevant pool of candidate frames to capture predictive sufficiency, and then assesses causal necessity via counterfactual interventions. Finally, a composite reward aligned with the CIB principle is designed to guide the selection policy through reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments on NExT-QA, EgoSchema, and Video-MME demonstrate that ReaSon consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods under limited-frame settings, validating its effectiveness and generalization ability.

PaperID: 265, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09136 GitHub

Abstract:
There is a growing demand for deploying large generative AI models on mobile devices. For recent popular video generative models, however, the Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) represents one of the major computational bottlenecks. Both large parameter sizes and mismatched kernels cause outof-memory errors or extremely slow inference on mobile devices. To address this, we propose a low-cost solution that efficiently transfers widely used video VAEs to mobile devices. (1) We analyze redundancy in existing VAE architectures and get empirical design insights. By integrating 3D depthwise separable convolutions into our model, we significantly reduce the number of parameters. (2) We observe that the upsampling techniques in mainstream video VAEs are poorly suited to mobile hardware and form the main bottleneck. In response, we propose a decoupled 3D pixel shuffle scheme that slashes end-to-end delay. Building upon these, we develop a universal mobile-oriented VAE decoder, Turbo-VAED. (3) We propose an efficient VAE decoder training method. Since only the decoder is used during deployment, we distill it to Turbo-VAED instead of retraining the full VAE, enabling fast mobile adaptation with minimal performance loss. To our knowledge, our method enables real-time 720p video VAE decoding on mobile devices for the first time. This approach is widely applicable to most video VAEs. When integrated into four representative models, with training cost as low as 95, it accelerates original VAEs by up to 84.5× at 720p resolution on GPUs, uses as low as 17.5% of original parameter count, and retains 96.9% of the original reconstruction quality. Compared to mobile-optimized VAEs, Turbo-VAED achieves a 2.9× speedup in FPS and better reconstruction quality on the iPhone 16 Pro.

PaperID: 266, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.17529 GitHub

Abstract:
Accurate air quality forecasting is essential for public health and environmental sustainability, but remains challenging due to the complex pollutant dynamics. Existing deep learning methods often model pollutant dynamics as an instantaneous process, overlooking the intrinsic delays in pollutant propagation. Thus, we propose AirDDE, the first neural delay differential equation framework in this task that integrates delay modeling into a continuoustime pollutant evolution under physical guidance. Specifically, two novel components are introduced: (1) a memory-augmented attention module that retrieves globally and locally historical features, which can adaptively capture delay effects modulated by multifactor data; and (2) a physics-guided delay evolving function, grounded in the diffusion-advection equation, that models diffusion, delayed advection, and source/sink terms, which can capture delay-aware pollutant accumulation patterns with physical plausibility. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that AirDDE achieves the state-of-the-art forecasting performance with an average MAE reduction of 8.79% over the best baselines.

PaperID: 267, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08935 GitHub

Abstract:
RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) critically depends on effective query expansion to retrieve relevant information. However, existing expansion methods adopt uniform strategies that overlook user-specific semantics, ignoring individual expression styles, preferences, and historical context. In practice, identical queries in text can express vastly different intentions across users. This representational rigidity limits the ability of current RAG systems to generalize effectively in personalized settings. Specifically, we identify two core challenges for personalization: 1) user expression styles are inherently diverse, making it difficult for standard expansions to preserve personalized intent. 2) user corpora induce heterogeneous semantic structures—varying in topical focus and lexical organization—which hinders the effective anchoring of expanded queries within the user’s corpora space. To address these challenges, we propose Personalize Before Retrieve (PBR), a framework that incorporates user-specific signals into query expansion prior to retrieval. PBR consists of two components: P-PRF, which generates stylistically aligned pseudo feedback using user history for simulating user expression style, and P-Anchor, which performs graph-based structure alignment over user corpora to capture its structure. Together, they produce personalized query representations tailored for retrieval. Experiments on two personalized benchmarks show that PBR consistently outperforms strong baselines, with up to 10% gains on PersonaBench across retrievers. Our findings demonstrate the value of modeling personalization before retrieval to close the semantic gap in user-adaptive RAG systems.

PaperID: 268, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10543 GitHub

Abstract:
In robot manipulation, robot learning has become a prevailing approach. However, generative models within this field face a fundamental tradeoff between the slow, iterative sampling of diffusion models and the architectural constraints of faster Flow-based methods, which often rely on explicit consistency losses. To address these limitations, we introduce MP1, which pairs 3D point-cloud inputs with the MeanFlow paradigm to generate action trajectories in one network function evaluation (1-NFE). By directly learning the interval-averaged velocity via the "MeanFlow Identity", our policy avoids any additional consistency constraints. This formulation eliminates numerical ODE-solver errors during inference, yielding more precise trajectories. MP1 further incorporates CFG for improved trajectory controllability while retaining 1-NFE inference without reintroducing structural constraints. Because subtle scene-context variations are critical for robot learning, especially in few-shot learning, we introduce a lightweight Dispersive Loss that repels state embeddings during training, boosting generalization without slowing inference. We validate our method on the Adroit and Meta-World benchmarks, as well as in real-world scenarios. Experimental results show MP1 achieves superior average task success rates, outperforming DP3 by 10.2% and FlowPolicy by 7.3%. Its average inference time is only 6.8 ms—19 times faster than DP3 and nearly 2 times faster than FlowPolicy.

PaperID: 269, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.15447 GitHub

Abstract:
Audio synthesis has broad applications in multimedia. Recent advancements have made it possible to generate relevant audios from inputs describing an audio scene, such as images or texts. However, the immersiveness and expressiveness of the generation are limited. One possible problem is that existing methods solely rely on the global scene and overlook details of local sounding objects (i.e., sound sources). To address this issue, we propose a Sound SourceAware Audio (SS2A) generator. SS2A is able to locally perceive multimodal sound sources from a scene with visual detection and cross-modality translation. It then contrastively learns a Cross-Modal Sound Source (CMSS) Manifold to semantically disambiguate each source. Finally, we attentively mix their CMSS semantics into a rich audio representation, from which a pretrained audio generator outputs the sound. To model the CMSS manifold, we curate a novel single-sound-source visual-audio dataset VGGS3 from VGGSound. We also design a Sound Source Matching Score to clearly measure localized audio relevance. With the effectiveness of explicit sound source modeling, SS2A achieves state-of-the-art performance in extensive image-to-audio tasks. We also qualitatively demonstrate SS2A's ability to achieve intuitive synthesis control by compositing vision, text, and audio conditions. Furthermore, we show that our sound source modeling can achieve competitive video-to-audio performance with a straightforward temporal aggregation mechanism.

PaperID: 270, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.01649 GitHub

Abstract:
Video large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in video understanding tasks. However, the redundancy of video tokens introduces significant computational overhead during inference, limiting their practical deployment. Many compression algorithms are proposed to prioritize retaining features with the highest attention scores to minimize perturbations in attention computations. However, the correlation between attention scores and their actual contribution to correct answers remains ambiguous. To address the above limitation, we propose a novel contributionaware token compression algorithm for video understanding (CaCoVID) that explicitly optimizes the token selection policy based on the contribution of tokens to correct predictions. First, we introduce a reinforcement learning-based framework that optimizes a policy network to select video token combinations with the greatest contribution to correct predictions. This paradigm shifts the focus from passive token preservation to active discovery of optimal compressed token combinations. Secondly, we propose a combinatorial policy optimization algorithm with online combination space sampling, which dramatically reduces the exploration space for video token combinations and accelerates the convergence speed of policy optimization. Extensive experiments on diverse video understanding benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of CaCoVID. Codes will be released.

PaperID: 271, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02739 GitHub

Abstract:
The success of largescale pre-training paradigm, exemplified by Large Language Models (LLMs), has inspired the development of Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs). However, their application to financial candlestick (K-line) data remains limited, often underperforming non-pre-trained architectures. Moreover, existing TSFMs often overlook crucial downstream tasks such as volatility prediction and synthetic data generation. To address these limitations, we propose Kronos, a unified, scalable pre-training framework tailored to financial K-line modeling. Kronos introduces a specialized tokenizer that discretizes continuous market information into token sequences, preserving both price dynamics and trade activity patterns. We pre-train Kronos using an autoregressive objective on a massive, multi-market corpus of over 12 billion K-line records from 45 global exchanges, enabling it to learn nuanced temporal and cross-asset representations. Kronos excels in a zero-shot setting across a diverse set of financial tasks. On benchmark datasets, Kronos boosts price series forecasting RankIC by 93% over the leading TSFM and 87% over the best non-pre-trained baseline. It also achieves a 9% lower MAE in volatility forecasting and a 22% improvement in generative fidelity for synthetic K-line sequences. These results establish Kronos as a robust, versatile foundation model for end-to-end financial time series analysis.

PaperID: 272, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15312 GitHub

Abstract:
Multivariable time series forecasting methods can integrate information from exogenous variables, leading to significant prediction accuracy gains. The transformer architecture has been widely applied in various time series forecasting models due to its ability to capture longrange sequential dependencies. However, a naïve application of transformers often struggles to effectively model complex relationships among variables over time. To mitigate against this, we propose a novel architecture, termed Spectral Operator Neural Network (Sonnet). Sonnet applies learnable wavelet transformations to the input and incorporates spectral analysis using the Koopman operator. Its predictive skill relies on the Multivariable Coherence Attention (MVCA), an operation that leverages spectral coherence to model variable dependencies. Our empirical analysis shows that Sonnet yields the best performance on 34 out of 47 forecasting tasks with an average mean absolute error (MAE) reduction of 2.2% against the most competitive baseline. We further show that MVCA can remedy the deficiencies of naïve attention in various deep learning models, reducing MAE by 10.7% on average in the most challenging forecasting tasks.

PaperID: 273, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.17133 GitHub

Abstract:
Finetuning Large Language Models (LLMs) for specialized domains is constrained by a fundamental challenge: the need for diverse, cross-organizational data conflicts with the principles of data privacy and sovereignty. While Federated Learning (FL) provides a framework for collaboration without raw data exchange, its classic centralized form introduces a single point of failure and remains vulnerable to model inversion attacks. Decentralized FL (DFL) mitigates this risk by removing the central aggregator but typically relies on inefficient, random peer-to-peer (P2P) pairings, forming a collaboration graph that is blind to agent heterogeneity and risks negative transfer. This paper introduces KNEXA-FL, a novel framework for orchestrated decentralization that resolves this trade-off. KNEXA-FL employs a non-aggregating Central Profiler/Matchmaker (CPM) that formulates P2P collaboration as a contextual bandit problem, using a LinUCB algorithm on abstract agent profiles to learn an optimal matchmaking policy. It orchestrates direct knowledge exchange between heterogeneous, PEFT-based LLM agents via secure distillation, without ever accessing the models themselves. Our comprehensive experiments on a challenging code generation task show that KNEXA-FL yields substantial gains, improving Pass@1 by approximately 50% relative to random P2P collaboration. Critically, our orchestrated approach demonstrates stable convergence, in stark contrast to a powerful centralized distillation baseline which suffers from catastrophic performance collapse. Our work establishes adaptive, learning-based orchestration as a foundational principle for building robust and effective decentralized AI ecosystems.

PaperID: 274, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09970 GitHub

Abstract:
Tabular data is the most abundant data type in the world, powering systems in finance, healthcare, e‑commerce, and beyond. As tabular datasets grow and span multiple related targets, there is an increasing need to exploit shared task information for improved multitask generalization. Multitask learning (MTL) has emerged as a powerful way to improve generalization and efficiency, yet most existing work focuses narrowly on large‑scale recommendation systems, leaving its potential in broader tabular domains largely underexplored. Also, existing MTL approaches for tabular data predominantly rely on multilayer perceptron-based backbones, which struggle to capture complex feature interactions and often fail to scale when data is abundant, a limitation that transformer architectures have overcome in other domains. Motivated by this, we introduce MultiTab-Net, the first multitask transformer architecture specifically designed for large tabular data. MultiTab-Net employs a novel multitask masked‑attention mechanism that dynamically models feature–feature dependencies while mitigating task competition. Through extensive experiments, we show that MultiTab-Net consistently achieves higher multitask gain than existing MTL architectures and single‑task transformers across diverse domains including large‑scale recommendation data, census‑like socioeconomic data, and physics datasets, spanning a wide range of task counts, task types, and feature modalities. In addition, we contribute MultiTab-Bench, a generalized multitask synthetic dataset generator that enables systematic evaluation of multitask dynamics by tuning task count, task correlations, and relative task complexity.

PaperID: 275, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.14332 GitHub

Abstract:
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) often face a modality representation gap during pretraining: while language embeddings remain stable, visual representations are highly sensitive to contextual noise (e.g., background clutter). To address this issue, we introduce a visual comprehension stage, which we call ViCToR (Visual Comprehension via Token Reconstruction), a novel pretraining framework for LMMs. ViCToR employs a learnable visual token pool and utilizes the Hungarian matching algorithm to select semantically relevant tokens from this pool for visual token replacement. Furthermore, by integrating a visual token reconstruction loss with dense semantic supervision, ViCToR can learn tokens which retain high visual detail, thereby enhancing the large language model's (LLM's) understanding of visual information. After pretraining on 3 million publicly accessible images and captions, ViCToR achieves stateof-the-art results, improving over LLaVA-NeXT-8B by 10.4%, 3.2%, and 7.2% on the MMStar, SEEDI, and RealWorldQA benchmarks, respectively.

PaperID: 276, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08697 GitHub

Abstract:
Accurate and efficient simulations of physical phenomena governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) are important for scientific and engineering progress. While traditional numerical solvers are powerful, they are often computationally expensive. Recently, datadriven methods have emerged as alternatives, but they frequently suffer from error accumulation and limited physical consistency, especially in multiphysics and complex geometries. To address these challenges, we propose PEGNet, a Physics-Embedded Graph Network that incorporates PDE-guided message passing to redesign the graph neural network architecture. By embedding key PDE dynamics like convection, viscosity, and diffusion into distinct message functions, the model naturally integrates physical constraints into its forward propagation, producing more stable and physically consistent solutions. Additionally, a hierarchical architecture is employed to capture multi-scale features, and physical regularization is integrated into the loss function to further enforce adherence to governing physics. We evaluated PEGNet on benchmarks, including custom datasets for respiratory airflow and drug delivery, showing significant improvements in long-term prediction accuracy and physical consistency over existing methods.

PaperID: 277, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.09661 GitHub

Abstract:
Mining timefrequency features is critical for time series forecasting. Existing research has predominantly focused on modeling low-frequency patterns, where most time series energy is concentrated. The overlooking of mid to high frequency continues to limit further performance gains in deep learning models. We propose FreqCycle, a novel framework integrating: (i) a Filter-Enhanced Cycle Forecasting (FECF) module to extract low-frequency features by explicitly learning shared periodic patterns in the time domain, and (ii) a Segmented Frequency-domain Pattern Learning (SFPL) module to enhance mid to high frequency energy proportion via learnable filters and adaptive weighting. Furthermore, time series data often exhibit coupled multi-periodicity, such as intertwined weekly and daily cycles. To address coupled multi-periodicity as well as long lookback window challenges, we extend FreqCycle hierarchically into MFreqCycle, which decouples nested periodic features through cross-scale interactions. Extensive experiments on seven diverse domain benchmarks demonstrate that FreqCycle achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while maintaining faster inference speeds, striking an optimal balance between performance and efficiency.

PaperID: 278, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08396 GitHub

Abstract:
Multivariate time series forecasting is crucial across a wide range of domains. While presenting notable progress for the Transformer architecture, iTransformer still lags behind the latest MLPbased models. We attribute this performance gap to unstable inter-channel relationships. To bridge this gap, we propose EMAformer, a simple yet effective model that enhances the Transformer with an auxiliary embedding suite, akin to armor that reinforces its ability. By introducing three key inductive biases, i.e., global stability, phase sensitivity, and cross-axis specificity, EMAformer unlocks the further potential of the Transformer architecture, achieving state-of-the-art performance on 12 real-world benchmarks and reducing forecasting errors by an average of 2.73% in MSE and 5.15% in MAE. This significantly advances the practical applicability of Transformer-based approaches for multivariate time series forecasting.

PaperID: 279, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11017 GitHub

Abstract:
Posttraining quantization (PTQ) offers an efficient approach to compressing large language models (LLMs), significantly reducing memory access and computational costs. Existing compensation-based weight calibration methods often rely on a second-order Taylor expansion to model quantization error, under the assumption that the first-order term is negligible in well-trained full-precision models. However, we reveal that the progressive compensation process introduces accumulated first-order deviations between latent weights and their full-precision counterparts, making this assumption fundamentally flawed. To address this, we propose FOEM, a novel PTQ method that explicitly incorporates first-order gradient terms to improve quantization error compensation. FOEM approximates gradients by performing a first-order Taylor expansion around the pre-quantization weights. This yields an approximation based on the difference between latent and full-precision weights as well as the Hessian matrix. When substituted into the theoretical solution, the formulation eliminates the need to explicitly compute the Hessian, thereby avoiding the high computational cost and limited generalization of backpropagation-based gradient methods. This design introduces only minimal additional computational overhead. Extensive experiments across a wide range of models and benchmarks demonstrate that FOEM consistently outperforms the classical GPTQ method. In 3-bit weight-only quantization, FOEM reduces the perplexity of Llama3-8B by 17.3% and increases the 5-shot MMLU accuracy from 53.8% achieved by GPTAQ to 56.1%. Moreover, FOEM can be seamlessly combined with advanced techniques such as SpinQuant, delivering additional gains under the challenging W4A4KV4 setting and further narrowing the performance gap with full-precision baselines, surpassing existing state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 280, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05440 GitHub

Abstract:
To tackle increasingly complex tasks, recent research on mobile agents has shifted towards multiagent collaboration. Current mobile multi-agent systems are primarily deployed in the cloud, leading to high latency and operational costs. A straightforward idea is to deploy a device–cloud collaborative multi-agent system, which is nontrivial, as directly extending existing systems introduces new challenges: (1) reliance on cloud-side verification requires uploading mobile screenshots, compromising user privacy; and (2) open-loop cooperation lacking device-to-cloud feedback, underutilizing device resources and increasing latency. To overcome these limitations, we propose EcoAgent, a closed-loop device-cloud collaborative multi-agent framework designed for privacy-aware, efficient, and responsive mobile automation. EcoAgent integrates a novel reasoning approach, Dual-ReACT, into the cloud-based Planning Agent, fully exploiting cloud reasoning to compensate for limited on-device capacity, thereby enabling device-side verification and lightweight feedback. Furthermore, the device-based Observation Agent leverages a Pre-understanding Module to summarize screen content into concise textual descriptions, significantly reducing token usage and device-cloud communication overhead while preserving privacy. Experiments on AndroidWorld demonstrate that EcoAgent matches the task success rates of fully cloud-based agents, while reducing resource consumption and response latency.

PaperID: 281, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15212 GitHub

Abstract:
Longcontext inference in large language models (LLMs) is increasingly constrained by the KV cache bottleneck: memory usage grows linearly with sequence length, while attention computation scales quadratically. Existing approaches address this issue by compressing the KV cache along the temporal axis through strategies such as token eviction or merging to reduce memory and computational overhead. However, these methods often neglect fine-grained importance variations across feature dimensions (i.e., the channel axis), thereby limiting their ability to effectively balance efficiency and model accuracy. In reality, we observe that channel saliency varies dramatically across both queries and positions: certain feature channels carry near-zero information for a given query, while others spike in relevance. To address this oversight, we propose SPARK, a training-free plug-and-play method that applies unstructured sparsity by pruning KV at the channel level, while dynamically restoring the pruned entries during attention score computation. Notably, our approach is orthogonal to existing KV compression and quantization techniques, making it compatible for integration with them to achieve further acceleration. By reducing channel-level redundancy, SPARK enables processing of longer sequences within the same memory budget. For sequences of equal length, SPARK not only preserves or improves model accuracy but also reduces KV cache storage by over 30% compared to eviction-based methods. Furthermore, even in an aggressive pruning ratio of 80%, SPARK maintains performance with less degradation than 5% compared to the based eviction method, demonstrating robustness and effectiveness. Our code will be available at \urlhttps://github.com/AMD-AIG-AIMA/AMD-Spark.

PaperID: 282, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22927 GitHub

Abstract:
RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge, where the LLM's ability to generate responses based on the combination of a given query and retrieved documents is crucial. However, most benchmarks focus on overall RAG system performance, rarely assessing LLM-specific capabilities. Current benchmarks emphasize broad aspects such as noise robustness, but lack a systematic and granular evaluation framework on document utilization. To this end, we introduce Placeholder-RAG-Benchmark, a multi-level fine-grained benchmark, emphasizing the following progressive dimensions: (1) multi-level filtering abilities, (2) combination abilities, and (3) reference reasoning. To provide a more nuanced understanding of LLMs' roles in RAG systems, we formulate an innovative placeholder-based approach to decouple the contributions of the LLM's parametric knowledge and the external knowledge. Experiments demonstrate the limitations of representative LLMs in the RAG system's generation capabilities, particularly in error resilience and context faithfulness. Our benchmark provides a reproducible framework for developing more reliable and efficient RAG systems.

PaperID: 283, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10419 GitHub

Abstract:
Narrative comprehension on long stories and novels has been a challenging domain attributed to their intricate plotlines and entangled, often evolving relations among characters and entities. Given the LLM's diminished reasoning over extended context and its high computational cost, retrievalbased approaches remain a pivotal role in practice. However, traditional RAG methods could fall short due to their stateless, single-step retrieval process, which often overlooks the dynamic nature of capturing interconnected relations within long-range context. In this work, we propose ComoRAG, holding the principle that narrative reasoning is not a one-shot process, but a dynamic, evolving interplay between new evidence acquisition and past knowledge consolidation, analogous to human cognition on reasoning with memory-related signals in the brain. Specifically, when encountering a reasoning impasse, ComoRAG undergoes iterative reasoning cycles while interacting with a dynamic memory workspace. In each cycle, it generates probing queries to devise new exploratory paths, then integrates the retrieved evidence of new aspects into a global memory pool, thereby supporting the emergence of a coherent context for the query resolution. Across four challenging long-context narrative benchmarks (200K+ tokens), ComoRAG outperforms strong RAG baselines with consistent relative gains up to 11% compared to the strongest baseline. Further analysis reveals that ComoRAG is particularly advantageous for complex queries requiring global comprehension, offering a principled, cognitively motivated paradigm for retrieval-based stateful reasoning.

PaperID: 284, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12842 GitHub

Abstract:
Graphical user interface (GUI) agents have recently emerged as an intriguing paradigm for humancomputer interaction, capable of automatically executing user instructions to operate intelligent terminal devices. However, when encountering out-of-distribution (OOD) instructions that violate environmental constraints or exceed the current capabilities of agents, GUI agents may suffer task breakdowns or even pose security threats. Therefore, effective OOD detection for GUI agents is essential. Traditional OOD detection methods perform suboptimally in this domain due to the complex embedding space and evolving GUI environments. In this work, we observe that the in-distribution input semantic space of GUI agents exhibits a clustering pattern with respect to the distance from the centroid. Based on the finding, we propose GEM, a novel method based on fitting a Gaussian mixture model over input embedding distances extracted from the GUI Agent that reflect its capability boundary. Evaluated on eight datasets spanning smartphones, computers, and web browsers, our method achieves an average accuracy improvement of 23.70% over the best-performing baseline while only increasing training time by 4.9% and testing time by 6.5%. We also experimentally demonstrate that GEM can improve the step-wise success rate by 9.40% by requesting assistance from the cloud model when encountering OOD samples. Analysis verifies the generalization ability of our method through experiments on nine different backbones.

PaperID: 285, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21773 GitHub

Abstract:
n the agricultural domain, the deployment of large language models (LLMs) is hindered by the lack of training data and evaluation benchmarks. To mitigate this issue, we propose AgriEval, the first comprehensive Chinese agricultural benchmark with three main characteristics: (1) Comprehensive Capability Evaluation. AgriEval covers six major agriculture categories and 29 subcategories within agriculture, addressing four core cognitive scenarios—memorization, understanding, inference, and generation. (2) HighQuality Data. The dataset is curated from university-level examinations and assignments, providing a natural and robust benchmark for assessing the capacity of LLMs to apply knowledge and make expert-like decisions. (3) Diverse Formats and Extensive Scale. AgriEval comprises 14,697 multiple-choice questions and 2,167 open-ended question-and-answer questions, establishing it as the most extensive agricultural benchmark available to date. We also present comprehensive experimental results over 51 open-source and commercial LLMs. The experimental results reveal that most existing LLMs struggle to achieve 60 percent accuracy, underscoring the developmental potential in agricultural LLMs. Additionally, we conduct extensive experiments to investigate factors influencing model performance and propose strategies for enhancement.

PaperID: 286, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08473 GitHub

Abstract:
Finetuning large language models (LLMs) improves performance but introduces critical safety vulnerabilities: even minimal harmful data can severely compromise safety measures. We observe that perturbations orthogonal to the alignment direction—defined by weight differences between aligned (safe) and unaligned models—rapidly compromise model safety. In contrast, updates along the alignment direction largely preserve it, revealing the parameter space as a "narrow safety basin". To address this, we propose AsFT (Anchoring Safety in Fine-Tuning) to maintain safety by explicitly constraining update directions during fine-tuning. By penalizing updates orthogonal to the alignment direction, AsFT effectively constrains the model within the "narrow safety basin," thus preserving its inherent safety. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and models show that AsFT reduces harmful behaviors by up to 7.60%, improves task performance by 3.44%, and consistently outperforms existing methods across multiple tasks.

PaperID: 287, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10445 GitHub

Abstract:
To achieve successful assistance with longhorizon web-based tasks, AI agents must be able to sequentially follow real-world user instructions over a long period. Unlike existing web-based agent benchmarks, sequential instruction following in the real world poses significant challenges beyond performing a single, clearly defined task. For instance, real-world human instructions can be ambiguous, require different levels of AI assistance, and may evolve over time, reflecting changes in the user's mental state. To address this gap, we introduce RealWebAssist, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate sequential instruction-following in realistic scenarios involving long-horizon interactions with the web, visual GUI grounding, and understanding ambiguous real-world user instructions. RealWebAssist includes a dataset of sequential instructions collected from real-world human users. Each user instructs a web-based assistant to perform a series of tasks on multiple websites. A successful agent must reason about the true intent behind each instruction, keep track of the mental state of the user, understand user-specific routines, and ground the intended tasks to actions on the correct GUI elements. Our experimental results show that state-of-the-art models struggle to understand and ground user instructions, posing critical challenges in following real-world user instructions for long-horizon web assistance.

PaperID: 288, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05468 GitHub

Abstract:
While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on highlevel semantic tasks, they often struggle with fine-grained, token-level understanding and structural reasoning—capabilities that are essential for applications requiring precision and control. We introduce TASE, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' ability to perceive and reason about token-level information across languages. TASE covers 10 tasks under two core categories: token awareness and structural understanding, spanning Chinese, English, and Korean, with a 35,927-instance evaluation set and a scalable synthetic data generation pipeline for training. Tasks include character counting, token alignment, syntactic structure parsing, and length constraint satisfaction. We evaluate over 30 leading commercial and open-source LLMs, including O3, Claude 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek-R1, and train a custom Qwen2.5-14B model using the GRPO training method. Results show that human performance significantly outpaces current LLMs, revealing persistent weaknesses in token-level reasoning. TASE sheds light on these limitations and provides a new diagnostic lens for future improvements in low-level language understanding and cross-lingual generalization.

PaperID: 289, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09018 GitHub

Abstract:
Object hallucination remains a critical challenge in Large VisionLanguage Models (LVLMs), where models generate content inconsistent with visual inputs. Existing language-decoder based mitigation approaches often regulate visual or textual attention independently, overlooking their interaction as two key causal factors. To address this, we propose Owl (Bi-mOdal attention reWeighting for Layer-wise hallucination mitigation), a causally-grounded framework that models hallucination process via a structural causal graph, treating decomposed visual and textual attentions as mediators. We introduce VTACR (Visual-to-Textual Attention Contribution Ratio), a novel metric that quantifies the modality contribution imbalance during decoding. Our analysis reveals that hallucinations frequently occur in low-VTACR scenarios, where textual priors dominate and visual grounding is weakened. To mitigate this, we design a fine-grained attention intervention mechanism that dynamically adjusts token- and layer-wise attention guided by VTACR signals. Finally, we propose a dual-path contrastive decoding strategy: one path emphasizes visually grounded predictions, while the other amplifies hallucinated ones -- letting visual truth shine and hallucination collapse. Experimental results on the POPE and CHAIR benchmarks show that Owl achieves significant hallucination reduction, setting a new SOTA in faithfulness while preserving vision-language understanding capability. Our code is available at https://github.com/CikZ2023/OWL

PaperID: 290, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04445 GitHub

Abstract:
Workflow automation promises substantial productivity gains in everyday documentrelated tasks. While prior agentic systems can execute isolated instructions, they struggle with automating multi-step, session-level workflows due to limited control over the operational process. To this end, we introduce AutoDW, a novel execution framework that enables stepwise, rollback-enabled operation orchestration. AutoDW incrementally plans API actions conditioned on user instructions, intent-filtered API candidates, and the evolving states of the document. It further employs robust rollback mechanisms at both the argument and API levels, enabling dynamic correction and fault tolerance. These designs together ensure that the execution trajectory of AutoDW remains aligned with user intent and document context across long-horizon workflows. To assess its effectiveness, we construct a comprehensive benchmark of 250 sessions and 1,708 human-annotated instructions, reflecting realistic document processing scenarios with interdependent instructions. AutoDW achieves 90% and 62% completion rates on instruction- and session-level tasks, respectively, outperforming strong baselines by 40% and 76%. Moreover, AutoDW also remains robust for the decision of backbone LLMs and on tasks with varying difficulty.

PaperID: 291, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.03622 GitHub

Abstract:
Generating long, coherent text remains a challenge for large language models (LLMs), as they lack hierarchical planning and structured organization in discourse generation. We introduce Structural Alignment, a novel method that aligns LLMs with humanlike discourse structures to enhance long-form text generation. By integrating linguistically grounded discourse frameworks into reinforcement learning, our approach guides models to produce coherent and well-organized outputs. We employ a dense reward scheme within a Proximal Policy Optimization framework, assigning fine-grained, token-level rewards based on the discourse distinctiveness relative to human writing. Two complementary reward models are evaluated: the first improves readability by scoring surface-level textual features to provide explicit structuring, while the second reinforces deeper coherence and rhetorical sophistication by analyzing global discourse patterns through hierarchical discourse motifs, outperforming both standard and RLHF-enhanced models in tasks such as essay generation and long-document summarization.

PaperID: 292, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17520 GitHub

Abstract:
Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) show promising potential in assistive tasks across various domains, including mobile device control. As these agents interact directly with personal information and device settings, ensuring their safe and reliable behavior is crucial to prevent undesirable outcomes. However, no benchmark exists for standardized evaluation of the safety of mobile devicecontrol agents. In this work, we introduce MobileSafetyBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate the safety of device-control agents within a realistic mobile environment based on Android emulators. We develop a diverse set of tasks involving interactions with various mobile applications, including messaging and banking applications, challenging agents with managing risks encompassing the misuse and negative side effects. These tasks include tests to evaluate the safety of agents in daily scenarios as well as their robustness against indirect prompt injection attacks. Our experiments demonstrate that baseline agents, based on state-of-the-art LLMs, often fail to effectively prevent harm while performing the tasks. To mitigate these safety concerns, we propose a prompting method that encourages agents to prioritize safety considerations. While this method shows promise in promoting safer behaviors, there is still considerable room for improvement to fully earn user trust. This highlights the urgent need for continued research to develop more robust safety mechanisms in mobile environments.

PaperID: 293, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10059 GitHub

Abstract:
Can Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) discern confused objects that are visually present but audioabsent? To study this, we introduce a new benchmark, AV-ConfuseBench, which simulates an “Audio-Visual Confusion” scene by modifying the corresponding sound of an object in the video, e.g., mute the sounding object and ask MLLMs “Is there a/an muted-object sound”. Experimental results reveal that MLLMs, such as Qwen2.5-Omni and Gemini 2.5, struggle to discriminate non-existent audio due to visually dominated reasoning. Motivated by this observation, we introduce RL-CoMM, a Reinforcement Learning-based Collaborative Multi-MLLM that is built upon the Qwen2.5-Omni foundation. RL-CoMM includes two stages: 1) To alleviate visually dominated ambiguities, we introduce an external model, a Large Audio Language Model (LALM), as the reference model to generate audio-only reasoning. Then, we design a Step-wise Reasoning Reward function that enables MLLMs to self-improve audio-visual reasoning with the audio-only reference. 2) To ensure an accurate answer prediction, we introduce Answer-centered Confidence Optimization to reduce the uncertainty of potential heterogeneous reasoning differences. Extensive experiments on audio-visual question answering and audio-visual hallucination show that RL-CoMM improves accuracy by 10~30% over the baseline model with limited training data.

PaperID: 294, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10640 GitHub

Abstract:
Unsupervised cell type identification is crucial for uncovering and characterizing heterogeneous populations in single cell omics studies. Although a range of clustering methods have been developed, most focus exclusively on intrinsic cellular structure and ignore the pivotal role of cellgene associations, which limits their ability to distinguish closely related cell types. To this end, we propose a Refinement Contrastive Learning framework (scRCL) that explicitly incorporates cell-gene interactions to derive more informative representations. Specifically, we introduce two contrastive distribution alignment components that reveal reliable intrinsic cellular structures by effectively exploiting cell-cell structural relationships. Additionally, we develop a refinement module that integrates gene-correlation structure learning to enhance cell embeddings by capturing underlying cell-gene associations. This module strengthens connections between cells and their associated genes, refining the representation learning to exploiting biologically meaningful relationships. Extensive experiments on several single-cell RNA-seq and spatial transcriptomics benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in cell-type identification accuracy. Moreover, downstream biological analyses confirm that the recovered cell populations exhibit coherent gene-expression signatures, further validating the biological relevance of our approach.

PaperID: 295, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06902 GitHub

Abstract:
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) become popular due to excellent energy efficiency, yet facing challenges for effective model training. Recent works improve this by introducing knowledge distillation (KD) techniques, with the pretrained artificial neural networks (ANNs) used as teachers and the target SNNs as students. This is commonly accomplished through a straightforward element-wise alignment of intermediate features and prediction logits from ANNs and SNNs, often neglecting the intrinsic differences between their architectures. Specifically, ANN's outputs exhibit a continuous distribution, whereas SNN's outputs are characterized by sparsity and discreteness. To mitigate this issue, we introduce two innovative KD strategies. Firstly, we propose the Saliency-scaled Activation Map Distillation (SAMD), which aligns the spike activation map of the student SNN with the class-aware activation map of the teacher ANN. Rather than performing KD directly on the raw features of ANN and SNN, our SAMD directs the student to learn from saliency activation maps that exhibit greater semantic and distribution consistency. Additionally, we propose a Noise-smoothed Logits Distillation (NLD), which utilizes Gaussian noise to smooth the sparse logits of student SNN, facilitating the alignment with continuous logits from teacher ANN. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.

PaperID: 296, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15122 GitHub

Abstract:
We present MoBGS, a novel motion deblurring 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) framework capable of reconstructing sharp and highquality novel spatio-temporal views from blurry monocular videos in an end-to-end manner. Existing dynamic novel view synthesis (NVS) methods are highly sensitive to motion blur in casually captured videos, resulting in significant degradation of rendering quality. While recent approaches address motion-blurred inputs for NVS, they primarily focus on static scene reconstruction and lack dedicated motion modeling for dynamic objects. To overcome these limitations, our MoBGS introduces a novel Blur-adaptive Latent Camera Estimation (BLCE) method using a proposed Blur-adaptive Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) solver for effective latent camera trajectory estimation, improving global camera motion deblurring. In addition, we propose a Latent Camera-induced Exposure Estimation (LCEE) method to ensure consistent deblurring of both a global camera and local object motions. Extensive experiments on the Stereo Blur dataset and real-world blurry videos show that our MoBGS significantly outperforms the very recent methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance for dynamic NVS under motion blur.

PaperID: 297, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07278 GitHub

Abstract:
Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in the areas of video captioning, search, and summarization. However, current Video-LLMs still face challenges with long real-world videos. Recent methods have introduced a retrieval mechanism that retrieves query-relevant KV caches for question answering, enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of long real-world videos. However, the compression and retrieval of KV caches are still not fully explored. In this paper, we propose StreamKV, a training-free framework that seamlessly equips Video-LLMs with advanced KV cache retrieval and compression. Compared to previous methods that used uniform partitioning, StreamKV dynamically partitions video streams into semantic segments, which better preserves semantic information. For KV cache retrieval, StreamKV calculates a summary vector for each segment to retain segment-level information essential for retrieval. For KV cache compression, StreamKV introduces a guidance prompt designed to capture the key semantic elements within each segment, ensuring only the most informative KV caches are retained for answering questions. Moreover, StreamKV unifies KV cache retrieval and compression within a single module, performing both in a layer-adaptive manner, thereby further improving the effectiveness of streaming video question answering. Extensive experiments on StreamingVQA benchmarks demonstrate that StreamKV significantly outperforms existing Online Video-LLMs, achieving superior accuracy while substantially improving both memory efficiency and computational latency.

PaperID: 298, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08334 GitHub

Abstract:
Underwater Instance Segmentation (UIS), integrating pixellevel understanding and instance-level discrimination, is a pivotal technology in marine resource exploration and ecological protection. In recent years, large-scale pretrained visual foundation models, exemplified by DINO, have advanced rapidly and demonstrated remarkable performance on complex downstream tasks. In this paper, we demonstrate that DINO can serve as an effective feature learner for UIS, and we introduce DiveSeg, a novel framework built upon two insightful components: (1) The AquaStyle Aligner, designed to embed underwater color style features into the DINO fine-tuning process, facilitating better adaptation to the underwater domain. (2) The ObjectPrior Prompter, which incorporates binary segmentation-based prompts to deliver object-level priors, provides essential guidance for instance segmentation task that requires both object- and instance-level reasoning. We conduct thorough experiments on the popular UIIS and USIS10K datasets, and the results show that DiveSeg achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

PaperID: 299, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15016 GitHub

Abstract:
Lifelong person ReIDentification (LReID) aims to match the same person employing continuously collected individual data from different scenarios. To achieve continuous all-day person matching across day and night, Visible-Infrared Lifelong person Re-IDentification (VI-LReID) focuses on sequential training on data from visible and infrared modalities and pursues average performance over all data. To this end, existing methods typically exploit cross-modal knowledge distillation to alleviate the catastrophic forgetting of old knowledge. However, these methods ignore the mutual interference of modality-specific knowledge acquisition and modality-common knowledge anti-forgetting, where conflicting knowledge leads to collaborative forgetting. To address the above problems, this paper proposes a Cross-modality Knowledge Disentanglement and Alignment method, called CKDA, which explicitly separates and preserves modality-specific knowledge and modality-common knowledge in a balanced way. Specifically, a Modality-Common Prompting (MCP) module and a Modality-Specific Prompting (MSP) module are proposed to explicitly disentangle and purify discriminative information that coexists and is specific to different modalities, avoiding the mutual interference between both knowledge. In addition, a Cross-modal Knowledge Alignment (CKA) module is designed to further align the disentangled new knowledge with the old one in two mutually independent inter- and intra-modality feature spaces based on dual-modality prototypes in a balanced manner. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets verify the superiority of our CKDA against state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 300, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06046 GitHub

Abstract:
Streaming freeviewpoint video (FVV) in real-time still faces significant challenges, particularly in training, rendering, and transmission efficiency. Harnessing superior performance of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), recent 3DGS-based FVV methods have achieved notable breakthroughs in both training and rendering. However, the storage requirements of these methods can reach up to 10MB per frame, making stream FVV in real-time impossible. To address this problem, we propose a novel FVV representation, dubbed StreamSTGS, designed for real-time streaming. StreamSTGS represents a dynamic scene using canonical 3D Gaussians, temporal features, and a deformation field. For high compression efficiency, we encode canonical Gaussian attributes as 2D images and temporal features as a video. This design not only enables real-time streaming, but also inherently supports adaptive bitrate control based on network condition without any extra training. Moreover, we propose a sliding window scheme to aggregate adjacent temporal features to learn local motions, and then introduce a transformer-guided auxiliary training module to learn global motions. On diverse FVV benchmarks, StreamSTGS demonstrates competitive performance on all metrics compared to state-of-the-art methods. Notably, StreamSTGS increases the PSNR by an average of 1dB while reducing the average frame size to just 170KB.

PaperID: 301, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22948 GitHub

Abstract:
Domain generalization in semantic segmentation faces challenges from domain shifts, particularly under adverse conditions. While diffusionbased data generation methods show promise, they introduce inherent misalignment between generated images and semantic masks. This paper presents FLEX-Seg (FLexible Edge eXploitation for Segmentation), a framework that transforms this limitation into an opportunity for robust learning. FLEX-Seg comprises three key components: (1) Granular Adaptive Prototypes that captures boundary characteristics across multiple scales, (2) Uncertainty Boundary Emphasis that dynamically adjusts learning emphasis based on prediction entropy, and (3) Hardness-Aware Sampling that progressively focuses on challenging examples. By leveraging inherent misalignment rather than enforcing strict alignment, FLEX-Seg learns robust representations while capturing rich stylistic variations. Experiments across five real-world datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods, achieving 2.44% and 2.63% mIoU gains on ACDC and Dark Zurich. Our findings validate that adaptive strategies for handling imperfect synthetic data lead to superior domain generalization.

PaperID: 302, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17967 GitHub

Abstract:
RGBThermal (RGBT) tracking aims to exploit visible and thermal infrared modalities for robust all-weather object tracking. However, existing RGBT trackers struggle to resolve modality discrepancies, which poses great challenges for robust feature representation. This limitation hinders effective cross-modal information propagation and fusion, which significantly reduces the tracking accuracy. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Contextual Aggregation with Deformable Alignment framework called CADTrack for RGBT Tracking. To be specific, we first deploy the Mamba-based Feature Interaction (MFI) that establishes efficient feature interaction via state space models. This interaction module can operate with linear complexity, reducing computational cost and improving feature discrimination. Then, we propose the Contextual Aggregation Module (CAM) that dynamically activates backbone layers through sparse gating based on the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE). This module can encode complementary contextual information from cross-layer features. Finally, we propose the Deformable Alignment Module (DAM) to integrate deformable sampling and temporal propagation, mitigating spatial misalignment and localization drift. With the above components, our CADTrack achieves robust and accurate tracking in complex scenarios. Extensive experiments on five RGBT tracking benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our proposed method.

PaperID: 303, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11182 GitHub

Abstract:
Hallucination continues to pose a major obstacle in the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Although the MultiAgent Debate (MAD) paradigm offers a promising solution by promoting consensus among multiple agents to enhance reliability, it relies on the unrealistic assumption that all debaters are rational and reflective, which is a condition that may not hold when agents themselves are prone to hallucinations. To address this gap, we introduce the Multi-agent Undercover Gaming (MUG) protocol, inspired by social deduction games like ''Who is Undercover?''. MUG reframes MAD as a process of detecting ''undercover'' agents (those suffering from hallucinations) by employing multimodal counterfactual tests. Specifically, we modify reference images to introduce counterfactual evidence and observe whether agents can accurately identify these changes, providing ground-truth for identifying hallucinating agents and enabling robust, crowd-powered multimodal reasoning. MUG advances MAD protocols along three key dimensions: (1) enabling factual verification beyond statistical consensus through counterfactual testing; (2) introducing cross-evidence reasoning via dynamically modified evidence sources instead of relying on static inputs; and (3) fostering active reasoning, where agents engage in probing discussions rather than passively answering questions. Collectively, these innovations offer a more reliable and effective framework for multimodal reasoning in LLMs.

PaperID: 304, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10003 GitHub

Abstract:
Weakly supervised 3D instance segmentation is essential for 3D scene understanding, especially as the growing scale of data and high annotation costs associated with fully supervised approaches. Existing methods primarily rely on two forms of weak supervision: onething-one-click annotations and bounding box annotations, both of which aim to reduce labeling efforts. However, these approaches still encounter limitations, including labor-intensive annotation processes, high complexity, and reliance on expert annotators. To address these challenges, we propose DBGroup, a two-stage weakly supervised 3D instance segmentation framework that leverages scene-level annotations as a more efficient and scalable alternative. In the first stage, we introduce a Dual-Branch Point Grouping module to generate pseudo labels guided by semantic and mask cues extracted from multi-view images. To further improve label quality, we develop two refinement strategies: Granularity-Aware Instance Merging and Semantic Selection and Propagation. The second stage involves multi-round self-training on an end-to-end instance segmentation network using the refined pseudo-labels. Additionally, we introduce an Instance Mask Filter strategy to address inconsistencies within the pseudo labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DBGroup achieves competitive performance compared to sparse-point-level supervised 3D instance segmentation methods, while surpassing state-of-the-art scene-level supervised 3D semantic segmentation approaches.

PaperID: 305, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16901 GitHub

Abstract:
Recently, rapid advancements have been made in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), especially in video understanding tasks. However, current research focuses on simple video scenarios, failing to reflect the complex and diverse nature of realworld audio-visual events in videos. To bridge this gap, we firstly introduce R-AVST, a dataset for audio-visual reasoning featuring fine-grained spatio-temporal annotations. In constructing this, we design a pipeline consisting of LLM-based key object extraction, automatic spatial annotation and manual quality inspection, resulting in over 5K untrimmed videos with 27K objects across 100 types of audio-visual events. Building on this dataset, we define three core tasks for spatio-temporal reasoning in audio-visual scenes and generate more than 8K high-quality, evenly distributed question-answer pairs to effectively benchmark model performance. To further enhance reasoning, we propose AVST-Zero, a reinforcement learning-based model that avoids intermediate supervision, directly optimizing behavior via carefully designed multi-dimensional rewards. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our R-AVST in advancing audio-visual spatio-temporal reasoning, upon which AVST-Zero demonstrates competitive performance compared to existing models. To the best of our knowledge, R-AVST is the first dataset designed for real-world audio-visual spatio-temporal reasoning, and AVST-Zero offers a novel perspective for tackling future challenges in this domain.

PaperID: 306, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21544 GitHub

Abstract:
Reconstructing 3D objects from a single image is a longstanding challenge, particularly under real-world occlusions. While recent diffusion-based view synthesis models can generate consistent novel views from a single RGB image, they generally assume fully visible inputs and struggle when parts of the object are occluded, leading to inconsistent views and degraded 3D reconstruction quality. To address this limitation, we propose DeOcc-1-to-3, an end-to-end framework for occlusion-aware multi-view generation. Our method directly synthesizes six structurally consistent novel views from a single partially occluded image, enabling downstream 3D reconstruction without requiring prior inpainting or manual annotations. We design a self-supervised training pipeline that leverages occluded–unoccluded image pairs and pseudo-ground-truth views to guide structure-aware completion and view consistency. Without modifying the original architecture, we fully fine-tune the diffusion model to jointly learn completion and multi-view generation. Additionally, we introduce the first benchmark for occlusion-aware reconstruction, covering diverse occlusion levels, object categories, and mask patterns, providing a standardized evaluation protocol.

PaperID: 307, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01292 GitHub

Abstract:
Synthesizing amyloid PET scans from the more widely available and accessible structural MRI modality offers a promising, costeffective approach for large-scale Alzheimer's Disease (AD) screening. This is motivated by evidence that, while MRI does not directly detect amyloid pathology, it may nonetheless encode information correlated with amyloid deposition that can be uncovered through advanced modeling. However, the high dimensionality and structural complexity of 3D neuroimaging data pose significant challenges for existing MRI-to-PET translation methods. Modeling the cross-modality relationship in a lower-dimensional latent space can simplify the learning task and enable more effective translation. As such, we present CoCoLIT (ControlNet-Conditioned Latent Image Translation), a diffusion-based latent generative framework that incorporates three main innovations: (1) a novel Weighted Image Space Loss (WISL) that improves latent representation learning and synthesis quality; (2) a theoretical and empirical analysis of Latent Average Stabilization (LAS), an existing technique used in similar generative models to enhance inference consistency; and (3) the introduction of ControlNet-based conditioning for MRI-to-PET translation. We evaluate CoCoLIT's performance on publicly available datasets and find that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both image-based and amyloid-related metrics. Notably, in amyloid-positivity classification, CoCoLIT outperforms the second-best method with improvements of +10.5% on the internal dataset and +23.7% on the external dataset.

PaperID: 308, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23134 GitHub

Abstract:
Appearance editing according to user needs is a pivotal task in video editing. Existing textguided methods often lead to ambiguities regarding user intentions and restrict fine-grained control over editing specific aspects of objects. To overcome these limitations, this paper introduces a novel approach named Zero-to-Hero, which focuses on reference-based video editing by disentangling the editing process into two distinct problems. It achieves this by first editing an anchor frame to satisfy user requirements as a reference image and then consistently propagating its appearance across the other frames in the video. To achieve accurate appearance propagation, in the first stage of Zero-to-Hero, we leverage correspondences within the original frames to guide the attention mechanism, which is more robust than previously proposed optical flow or temporal modules in memory-friendly video generative models, especially when dealing with objects exhibiting large motions. This offers a solid zero-shot initialization that ensures both accuracy and temporal consistency. However, intervention in the attention mechanism results in compounded imaging degradation with unknown blurring and color-missing issues. Following the Zero-Stage, our Hero-Stage holistically learns a conditional generative model for video restoration. To accurately evaluate appearance consistency, we construct a set of videos with multiple appearances using Blender, enabling a fine-grained and deterministic evaluation. Our method outperforms the best-performing baseline with a PSNR improvement of 2.6 dB.

PaperID: 309, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03457 GitHub

Abstract:
The introduction of diffusion models has brought significant advances to the field of audiodriven talking head generation. However, the extremely slow inference speed severely limits the practical implementation of diffusion-based talking head generation models. In this study, we propose READ, a real-time diffusion-transformer-based talking head generation framework. Our approach first learns a spatiotemporal highly compressed video latent space via a temporal VAE, significantly reducing the token count to accelerate generation. To achieve better audio-visual alignment within this compressed latent space, a pre-trained Speech Autoencoder (SpeechAE) is proposed to generate temporally compressed speech latent codes corresponding to the video latent space. These latent representations are then modeled by a carefully designed Audio-to-Video Diffusion Transformer (A2V-DiT) backbone for efficient talking head synthesis. Furthermore, to ensure temporal consistency and accelerated inference in extended generation, we propose a novel asynchronous noise scheduler (ANS) for both the training and inference processes of our framework. The ANS leverages asynchronous add-noise and asynchronous motion-guided generation in the latent space, ensuring consistency in generated video clips. Experimental results demonstrate that READ outperforms state-of-the-art methods by generating competitive talking head videos with significantly reduced runtime, achieving an optimal balance between quality and speed while maintaining robust metric stability in long-time generation.

PaperID: 310, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13983 GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable progress in temporal or spatial localization tasks, but struggle with joint spatiotemporal video grounding (STVG). We identify two key bottlenecks hindering this capability: (1) the sheer number of visual tokens makes long-range and fine-grained visual modeling challenging; (2) generating a long sequence of bounding boxes in text makes it hard to accurately align each box with its specific video frame. Distinct from prior efforts that rely on attaching complex modules, we argue for a more elegant paradigm that unlocks the inherent potential of MLLMs and leverages their strengths. To this end, we propose SpaceVLLM, a MLLM equipped with spatio-temporal video grounding capabilities. Specifically, we propose Spatio-Temporal Aware Queries, interleaved with video frames, to guide the MLLM in capturing both static appearance and dynamic motion features. We further present a lightweight Query-Guided Space Head that maps queries to precise spatial coordinates, bypassing the need for direct textual coordinate generation and enabling the MLLM to focus on video understanding. To further facilitate research in this area, we propose an automated data synthesis pipeline to construct V-STG dataset, comprising 110K STVG instances. Extensive experiments show that SpaceVLLM achieves the state-of-the-art performance on STVG benchmarks and maintains strong performance on various video understanding tasks, validating our approach's effectiveness.

PaperID: 311, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08071 GitHub

Abstract:
Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radars can measure subtle chest wall oscillations to enable noncontact heartbeat sensing. However, traditional radar-based heartbeat sensing methods face performance degradation due to noise. Learning-based radar methods achieve better noise robustness but require costly labeled signals for supervised training. To overcome these limitations, we propose the first unsupervised framework for radar-based heartbeat sensing via Augmented Pseudo-Label and Noise Contrast (Radar-APLANC). We propose to use both the heartbeat range and noise range within the radar range matrix to construct the positive and negative samples, respectively, for improved noise robustness. Our Noise-Contrastive Triplet (NCT) loss only utilizes positive samples, negative samples, and pseudo-label signals generated by the traditional radar method, thereby avoiding dependence on expensive ground-truth physiological signals. We further design a pseudo-label augmentation approach featuring adaptive noise-aware label selection to improve pseudo-label signal quality. Extensive experiments on the Equipleth dataset and our collected radar dataset demonstrate that our unsupervised method achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art supervised methods.

PaperID: 312, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14537 GitHub

Abstract:
Personalizing 3D scenes from a single reference image enables intuitive userguided editing, which requires achieving both multi-view consistency across perspectives and referential consistency with the input image. However, these goals are particularly challenging due to the viewpoint bias caused by the limited perspective provided in a single image. Lacking the mechanisms to effectively expand reference information beyond the original view, existing methods of image-conditioned 3DGS personalization often suffer from this viewpoint bias and struggle to produce consistent results. Therefore, in this paper, we present Consistent Personalization for 3D Gaussian Splatting (CP-GS), a framework that progressively propagates the single-view reference appearance to novel perspectives. In particular, CP-GS integrates pre-trained image-to-3D generation and iterative LoRA fine-tuning to extract and extend the reference appearance, and finally produces faithful multi-view guidance images and the personalized 3DGS outputs through a view-consistent generation process guided by geometric cues. Extensive experiments on real-world scenes show that our CP-GS effectively mitigates the viewpoint bias, achieving high-quality image-conditioned 3DGS personalization that significantly outperforms existing methods.

PaperID: 313, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06995 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent selfsupervised image segmentation models have achieved promising performance on semantic segmentation and class-agnostic instance segmentation. However, their pretraining schedule is multi-stage, requiring a time-consuming pseudo-masks generation process between each training epoch. This time-consuming offline process not only makes it difficult to scale with training dataset size, but also leads to sub-optimal solutions due to its discontinuous optimization routine. To solve these, we first present a novel pseudo-mask algorithm, Fast Universal Agglomerative Pooling (UniAP). Each layer of UniAP can identify groups of similar nodes in parallel, allowing to generate both semantic-level and instance-level and multi-granular pseudo-masks within ens of milliseconds for one image. Based on the fast UniAP, we propose the Scalable Self-Supervised Universal Segmentation (S2-UniSeg), which employs a student and a momentum teacher for continuous pretraining. A novel segmentation-oriented pretext task, Query-wise Self-Distillation (QuerySD), is proposed to pretrain S2-UniSeg to learn the local-to-global correspondences. Under the same setting, S2-UniSeg outperforms the SOTA UnSAM model, achieving notable improvements of AP+6.9 on COCO, AR+11.1 on UVO, PixelAcc+4.5 on COCOStuff-27, RQ+8.0 on Cityscapes. After scaling up to a larger 2M-image subset of SA-1B, S2-UniSeg further achieves performance gains on all four benchmarks.

PaperID: 314, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.21059 GitHub

Abstract:
Visual generative models have achieved remarkable progress in synthesizing photorealistic images and videos, yet aligning their outputs with human preferences across critical dimensions remains a persistent challenge. Though reinforcement learning from human feedback offers promise for preference alignment, existing reward models for visual generation face limitations, including blackbox scoring without interpretability and potentially resultant unexpected biases. We present VisionReward, a general framework for learning human visual preferences in both image and video generation. Specifically, we employ a hierarchical visual assessment framework to capture fine-grained human preferences, and leverages linear weighting to enable interpretable preference learning. Furthermore, we propose a multi-dimensional consistent strategy when using VisionReward as a reward model during preference optimization for visual generation. Experiments show that VisionReward can significantly outperform existing image and video reward models on both machine metrics and human evaluation. Notably, VisionReward surpasses VideoScore by 17.2% in preference prediction accuracy, and text-to-video models with VisionReward achieve a 31.6% higher pairwise win rate compared to the same models using VideoScore.

PaperID: 315, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13924 GitHub

Abstract:
Chainof-Thought (CoT) prompting has recently shown significant promise across various NLP and computer vision tasks by explicitly generating intermediate reasoning steps. However, we find that reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuned CoT reasoning can paradoxically degrade performance in Visual Grounding tasks, particularly as CoT outputs become lengthy or complex. Additionally, our analysis reveals that increased dataset size does not always enhance performance due to varying data complexities. Motivated by these findings, we propose Curriculum-based Relative Policy Optimization (CuRPO), a novel training strategy that leverages CoT length and generalized Intersection over Union (gIoU) rewards as complexity indicators to progressively structure training data from simpler to more challenging examples. Extensive experiments on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, RefCOCOg, and LISA datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. CuRPO consistently outperforms existing methods, including Visual-RFT, reaching a peak improvement of up to 15.49 mAP on RefCOCO. Moreover, CuRPO exhibits exceptional efficiency and robustness, delivering strong localization performance even in few-shot learning scenarios, particularly benefiting tasks characterized by ambiguous and intricate textual descriptions.

PaperID: 316, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12151 GitHub

Abstract:
Textguided image editing has advanced rapidly with the rise of diffusion models. While flow-based inversion-free methods offer high efficiency by avoiding latent inversion, they often fail to effectively integrate source information, leading to poor background preservation, spatial inconsistencies, and over-editing due to the lack of effective integration of source information. In this paper, we present FIA-Edit, a novel inversion-free framework that achieves high-fidelity and semantically precise edits through a Frequency-Interactive Attention. Specifically, we design two key components: (1) a Frequency Representation Interaction (FRI) module that enhances cross-domain alignment by exchanging frequency components between source and target features within self-attention, and (2) a Feature Injection (FIJ) module that explicitly incorporates source-side queries, keys, values, and text embeddings into the target branch's cross-attention to preserve structure and semantics. Comprehensive and extensive experiments demonstrate that FIA-Edit supports high-fidelity editing at low computational cost (~6s per 512 512 image on an RTX 4090) and consistently outperforms existing methods across diverse tasks in visual quality, background fidelity, and controllability. Furthermore, we are the first to extend text-guided image editing to clinical applications. By synthesizing anatomically coherent hemorrhage variations in surgical images, FIA-Edit opens new opportunities for medical data augmentation and delivers significant gains in downstream bleeding classification.

PaperID: 317, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09271 GitHub

Abstract:
The increasing popularity of long Textto-Image (T2I) generation has created an urgent need for automatic and interpretable models that can evaluate the image-text alignment in long prompt scenarios. However, the existing T2I alignment benchmarks predominantly focus on short prompt scenarios and only provide MOS or Likert scale annotations. This inherent limitation hinders the development of long T2I evaluators, particularly in terms of the interpretability of alignment. In this study, we contribute LongT2IBench, which comprises 14K long text-image pairs accompanied by graph-structured human annotations. Given the detail-intensive nature of long prompts, we first design a Generate-Refine-Qualify annotation protocol to convert them into textual graph structures that encompass entities, attributes, and relations. Through this transformation, fine-grained alignment annotations are achieved based on these granular elements. Finally, the graph-structed annotations are converted into alignment scores and interpretations to facilitate the design of T2I evaluation models. Based on LongT2IBench, we further propose LongT2IExpert, a LongT2I evaluator that enables multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to provide both quantitative scores and structured interpretations through an instruction-tuning process with Hierarchical Alignment Chain-of-Thought (CoT). Extensive experiments and comparisons demonstrate the superiority of the proposed LongT2IExpert in alignment evaluation and interpretation.

PaperID: 318, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04041 GitHub

Abstract:
Current dark image restoration methods suffer from severe efficiency bottlenecks, primarily stemming from: computational burden and error correction costs associated with reliance on external priors (manual or crossmodal); redundant operations in complex multi-stage enhancement pipelines; and indiscriminate processing across frequency components in frequency-domain methods, leading to excessive global computational demands. To address these challenges, we propose an Efficient Self-Mining Prior-Guided Joint Frequency Enhancement Network (SPJFNet). Specifically, we first introduce a Self-Mining Guidance Module (SMGM) that generates lightweight endogenous guidance directly from the network, eliminating dependence on external priors and thereby bypassing error correction overhead while improving inference speed. Second, through meticulous analysis of different frequency domain characteristics, we reconstruct and compress multi-level operation chains into a single efficient operation via lossless wavelet decomposition and joint Fourier-based advantageous frequency enhancement, significantly reducing parameters. Building upon this foundation, we propose a Dual-Frequency Guidance Framework (DFGF) that strategically deploys specialized high/low frequency branches (wavelet-domain high-frequency enhancement and Fourier-domain low-frequency restoration), decoupling frequency processing to substantially reduce computational complexity. Rigorous evaluation across multiple benchmarks demonstrates that SPJFNet not only surpasses state-of-the-art performance but also achieves significant efficiency improvements, substantially reducing model complexity and computational overhead.

PaperID: 319, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.11840 GitHub

Abstract:
Graph Transformers (GTs), which integrate message passing and selfattention mechanisms simultaneously, have achieved promising empirical results in graph prediction tasks. However, the design of scalable and topology-aware node tokenization has lagged behind other modalities. This gap becomes critical as the quadratic complexity of full attention renders them impractical on large-scale graphs. Recently, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), as brain-inspired models, provided an energy-saving scheme to convert input intensity into discrete spike-based representations through event-driven spiking neurons. Inspired by these characteristics, we propose a linear-time Graph Transformer with Spiking Node Tokenization (GT-SNT) for node classification. By integrating multi-step feature propagation with SNNs, spiking node tokenization generates compact, locality-aware spike count embeddings as node tokens to avoid predefined codebooks and their utilization issues. The codebook guided self-attention leverages these tokens to perform node-to-token attention for linear-time global context aggregation. In experiments, we compare GT-SNT with other state-of-the-art baselines on node classification datasets ranging from small to large. Experimental results show that GT-SNT achieves comparable performances on most datasets and reaches up to 130× faster inference speed compared to other GTs.

PaperID: 320, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07098 GitHub

Abstract:
Finegrained urban flow inference is crucial for urban planning and intelligent transportation systems, enabling precise traffic management and resource allocation. However, the practical deployment of existing methods is hindered by two key challenges: the prohibitive computational cost of over-parameterized models and the suboptimal performance of conventional loss functions on the highly skewed distribution of urban flows. To address these challenges, we propose a unified solution that synergizes architectural efficiency with adaptive optimization. Specifically, we first introduce PLGF, a lightweight yet powerful architecture that employs a Progressive Local-Global Fusion strategy to effectively capture both fine-grained details and global contextual dependencies. Second, we propose DualFocal Loss, a novel function that integrates dual-space supervision with a difficulty-aware focusing mechanism, enabling the model to adaptively concentrate on hard-to-predict regions. Extensive experiments on 4 real-world scenarios validate the effectiveness and scalability of our method. Notably, while achieving state-of-the-art performance, PLGF reduces the model size by up to 97% compared to current high-performing methods. Furthermore, under comparable parameter budgets, our model yields an accuracy improvement of over 10% against strong baselines.

PaperID: 321, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23413 GitHub

Abstract:
The aesthetic quality assessment task is crucial for developing a humanaligned quantitative evaluation system for AIGC. However, its inherently complex nature—spanning visual perception, cognition, and emotion—poses fundamental challenges. Although aesthetic descriptions offer a viable representation of this complexity, two critical challenges persist: (1) data scarcity and imbalance: existing dataset overly focuses on visual perception and neglects deeper dimensions due to the expensive manual annotation; and (2) model fragmentation: current visual networks isolate aesthetic attributes with multi-branch encoder, while multimodal methods represented by contrastive learning struggle to effectively process long-form textual descriptions. To resolve challenge (1), we first present the Refined Aesthetic Description (RAD) dataset, a large-scale (70k), multi-dimensional structured dataset, generated via an iterative pipeline without heavy annotation costs and easy to scale. To address challenge (2), we propose ArtQuant, an aesthetics assessment framework for artistic image which not only couple isolated aesthetic dimensions through joint description generation, but also better model long-text semantics with the help of LLM decoders. Besides, theoretical analysis confirms this symbiosis: RAD's semantic adequacy (data) and generation paradigm (model) collectively minimize prediction entropy, providing mathematical grounding for the framework. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on several datasets while requiring only 33% of conventional training epochs, narrowing the cognitive gap between artistic image and aesthetic judgment. We will release both code and dataset to support future research.

PaperID: 322, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21620 GitHub

Abstract:
The recent DeepSeekR1 has showcased the emergence of reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs) through reinforcement learning (RL) with rule-based rewards. Despite its success in language tasks, its application in multimodal domains, particularly in graphic user interface (GUI) agent tasks, remains under-explored. To address this gap, we propose UI-R1, the first framework to investigate how rule-based RL can enhance the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for GUI action prediction tasks. UI-R1 introduces a novel rule-based action reward scheme, enabling model optimization via policy-based algorithms such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). To further improve efficiency at inference time, we present UI-R1-Efficient, a two-stage training paradigm that reduces reasoning length while boosting overall performance. In addition, we construct a compact yet high-quality dataset containing 2K challenging tasks across five prevalent mobile device action types. Experiments show that our proposed models (e.g., UI-R1-3B) achieve substantial improvements over the base model (Qwen2.5-VL-3B) on both in-domain (ID) and out-of-domain (OOD) tasks, with average accuracy gains of 18.3% on ScreenSpot, 6.0% on ScreenSpot-Pro, and 10.9% on ANDROIDCONTROL. Moreover, our efficient versions deliver competitive performance compared to considerably larger state-of-the-art models, underscoring the potential of reinforcement learning to advance GUI control and paving the way for future research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

PaperID: 323, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19926 GitHub

Abstract:
Unified physicsbased humanoid controllers are pivotal for robotics and character animation, yet models that excel on gentle, everyday motions still stumble on explosive actions, hampering real-world deployment. We bridge this gap with FARM (Frame-Accelerated Augmentation and Residual Mixture-of-Experts), an end-to-end framework composed of frame-accelerated augmentation, a robust base controller, and a residual mixture-of-experts (MoE). Frame-accelerated augmentation exposes the model to high-velocity pose changes by widening inter-frame gaps. The base controller reliably tracks everyday low-dynamic motions, while the residual MoE adaptively allocates additional network capacity to handle challenging high-dynamic actions, significantly enhancing tracking accuracy. In the absence of a public benchmark, we curate the High-Dynamic Humanoid Motion (HDHM) dataset, comprising 3593 physically plausible clips. On HDHM, FARM reduces the tracking failure rate by 42.8% and lowers global mean per-joint position error by 14.6% relative to the baseline, while preserving near-perfect accuracy on low-dynamic motions. These results establish FARM as a new baseline for high-dynamic humanoid control and introduce the first open benchmark dedicated to this challenge.

PaperID: 324, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13365 GitHub

Abstract:
Split inference (SI) enables users to access deep learning (DL) services without directly transmitting raw data. However, recent studies reveal that data reconstruction attacks (DRAs) can recover the original inputs from the smashed data sent from the client to the server, leading to significant privacy leakage. While various defenses have been proposed, they often result in substantial utility degradation, particularly when the clientside model is shallow. We identify a key cause of this trade-off: existing defenses apply excessive perturbation to redundant information in the smashed data. To address this issue in computer vision tasks, we propose InfoDecom, a defense framework that first decomposes and removes redundant information and then injects noise calibrated to provide theoretically guaranteed privacy. Experiments demonstrate that InfoDecom achieves a superior utility-privacy trade-off compared to existing baselines.

PaperID: 325, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08229 GitHub

Abstract:
Time series forecasting is critical for decision making across dynamic domains such as energy, finance, transportation, and cloud computing. However, realworld time series often exhibit non-stationarity, including temporal distribution shifts and spectral variability, which poses significant challenges for existing long-term time series forecasting methods. In this paper, we propose DTAF, a dual-branch framework that addresses non-stationarity in both the temporal and frequency domains. For the temporal domain, the Temporal Stabilizing Fusion (TFS) module employs a non-stationary mix of experts (MOE) filter to disentangle and suppress temporal non-stationary patterns while preserving long-term dependencies. For the frequency domain, the Frequency Wave Modeling (FWM) module applies frequency differencing to dynamically highlight components with significant spectral shifts. By fusing the complementary outputs of TFS and FWM, DTAF generates robust forecasts that adapt to both temporal and frequency domain non-stationarity. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world benchmarks demonstrate that DTAF outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, yielding significant improvements in forecasting accuracy under non-stationary conditions.

PaperID: 326, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13189 GitHub

Abstract:
Foundation models have revolutionized artificial intelligence across numerous domains, yet their transformative potential remains largely untapped in Extreme Multilabel Classification (XMC). Queries in XMC are associated with relevant labels from extremely large label spaces, where it is critical to strike a balance between efficiency and performance. Therefore, many recent approaches efficiently pose XMC as a maximum inner product search between embeddings learned from small encoder-only transformer architectures. In this paper, we address two important aspects in XMC: how to effectively harness larger decoder-only models, and how to exploit visual information while maintaining computational efficiency. We demonstrate that both play a critical role in XMC separately and can be combined for improved performance. We show that a few billion-size decoder can deliver substantial improvements while keeping computational overhead manageable. Furthermore, our Vision-enhanced eXtreme Multi-label Learning framework (ViXML) efficiently integrates foundation vision models by pooling a single embedding per image. This limits computational growth while unlocking multi-modal capabilities. Remarkably, ViXML with small encoders outperforms text-only decoder in most cases, showing that an image is worth billions of parameters. Finally, we present an extension of existing text-only datasets to exploit visual metadata and make them available for future benchmarking. Comprehensive experiments across four public text-only datasets and their corresponding image enhanced versions validate our proposals' effectiveness, surpassing previous state-of-the-art by up to +8.21% in P@1 on the largest dataset.

PaperID: 327, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06722 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have spurred significant progress in Chainof-Thought (CoT) reasoning. Building on the success of Deepseek-R1, researchers extended multimodal reasoning to post-training paradigms based on reinforcement learning (RL), focusing predominantly on mathematical datasets. However, existing post-training paradigms tend to neglect two critical aspects: (1) The lack of quantifiable difficulty metrics capable of strategically screening samples for post-training optimization. (2) Suboptimal post-training paradigms that fail to jointly optimize perception and reasoning capabilities. To address this gap, we propose two novel difficulty-aware sampling strategies: Progressive Image Semantic Masking (PISM) quantifies sample hardness through systematic image degradation, while Cross-Modality Attention Balance (CMAB) assesses cross-modal interaction complexity via attention distribution analysis. Leveraging these metrics, we design a hierarchical training framework that incorporates both GRPO-only and SFT+GRPO hybrid training paradigms, and evaluate them across six benchmark datasets. Experiments demonstrate consistent superiority of GRPO applied to difficulty-stratified samples compared to conventional SFT+GRPO pipelines, indicating that strategic data sampling can obviate the need for supervised fine-tuning while improving model accuracy.

PaperID: 328, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10576 GitHub

Abstract:
While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show immense promise for achieving truly humanlike interactions, progress is hindered by the lack of fine-grained evaluation frameworks for human-centered scenarios, encompassing both the understanding of complex human intentions and the provision of empathetic, context-aware responses. Here we introduce HumanSense, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the human-centered perception and interaction capabilities of MLLMs, with a particular focus on deep understanding of extended multimodal contexts and the formulation of rational feedback. Our evaluation reveals that leading MLLMs still have considerable room for improvement, particularly for advanced interaction-oriented tasks. Supplementing visual input with audio and text information yields substantial improvements, and Omni-modal models show advantages on these tasks.Furthermore, grounded in the observation that appropriate feedback stems from a contextual analysis of the interlocutor's needs and emotions, we posit that reasoning ability serves as the key to unlocking it. We devise a multi-stage, modality-progressive reinforcement learning approach, resulting in HumanSense-Omni-Reasoning, which substantially enhances performance on higher-level understanding and interactive tasks. Additionally, we observe that successful reasoning processes appear to exhibit consistent thought patterns. By designing corresponding prompts, we also enhance the performance of non-reasoning models in a training-free manner.

PaperID: 329, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.12609 GitHub

Abstract:
Elastic precision quantization enables multibit deployment via a single optimization pass, fitting diverse quantization scenarios. Yet, the high storage and optimization costs associated with the Transformer architecture, research on elastic quantization remains limited, particularly for large language models. This paper proposes QuEPT, an efficient post-training scheme that reconstructs block-wise multi-bit errors with one-shot calibration on a small data slice. It can dynamically adapt to various predefined bit-widths by cascading different low-rank adapters, and supports real-time switching between uniform quantization and mixed precision quantization without repeated optimization. To enhance accuracy and robustness, we introduce Multi-Bit Token Merging (MB-ToMe) to dynamically fuse token features across different bit-widths, improving robustness during bit-width switching. Additionally, we propose Multi-Bit Cascaded Low-Rank adapters (MB-CLoRA) to strengthen correlations between bit-width groups, further improve the overall performance of QuEPT. Extensive experiments demonstrate that QuEPT achieves comparable or better performance to existing state-of-the-art post-training quantization methods.

PaperID: 330, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00051 GitHub

Abstract:
ParameterEfficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods are crucial for adapting large pre-trained models. Among these, LoRA is considered a foundational approach. Building on this, the influential DoRA method enhances performance by decomposing weight updates into magnitude and direction. However, its underlying mechanism remains unclear, and it introduces significant computational overhead. In this work, we first identify that DoRA's success stems from its capacity to increase the singular value entropy of the weight update matrix, which promotes a more uniform update distribution akin to full fine-tuning. We then reformulate DoRA into a mathematically equivalent and more efficient matrix form, revealing it as a learnable weight conditioning method. Based on this insight, we propose a unified framework for designing advanced PEFT methods by exploring two orthogonal dimensions: the architectural placement and the transformation type of the conditioning matrix. Within this framework, we introduce two novel methods: (1) Pre-Diag, which applies a diagonal conditioning matrix before the LoRA update to efficiently calibrate the pre-trained weights, thereby enhancing performance while reducing training time; and (2) Skewed Orthogonal Rotation Adaptation (SORA), which employs a parameter-efficient orthogonal rotation to perform a more powerful, norm-preserving transformation of the feature space. Extensive experiments on natural language understanding and generation tasks demonstrate that our proposed methods achieve superior performance and efficiency compared to both LoRA and DoRA.

PaperID: 331, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11299 GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve impressive performance once optimized on massive datasets. Such datasets often contain sensitive or copyrighted content, raising significant data privacy concerns. Regulatory frameworks mandating the 'right to be forgotten' drive the need for machine unlearning. This technique allows for the removal of target data without resourceconsuming retraining. However, while well-studied for text, visual concept unlearning in MLLMs remains underexplored. A primary challenge is precisely removing a target visual concept without disrupting model performance on related entities. To address this, we introduce AUVIC, a novel visual concept unlearning framework for MLLMs. AUVIC applies adversarial perturbations to enable precise forgetting. This approach effectively isolates the target concept while avoiding unintended effects on similar entities. To evaluate our method, we construct VCUBench. It is the first benchmark designed to assess visual concept unlearning in group contexts. Experimental results demonstrate that AUVIC achieves state-of-the-art target forgetting rates while incurs minimal performance degradation on non-target concepts.

PaperID: 332, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06942 GitHub

Abstract:
To prevent misinformation and social issues arising from trustworthylooking content generated by LLMs, it is crucial to develop efficient and reliable methods for identifying the source of texts. Previous approaches have demonstrated exceptional performance in detecting texts fully generated by LLMs. However, these methods struggle when confronting more advanced LLM output or text with adversarial multi task machine-revision, especially in the black-box setting, where the generating model is unknown. To address this challenge, grounded in the hypothesis that human writing possesses consistent, distinctive stylistic patterns, we propose Human Language Preference Detection (HLPD). HLPD employs a reward‐based alignment process, Human Language Preference Optimization (HLPO), to shift the scoring model’s token distribution toward human‐like writing, making the model more sensitive to human writing, therefore enhancing the identification of machine-revised text. We test HLPD in an adversarial multi‑task evaluation framework that leverages a five‑dimensional prompt generator and multiple advanced LLMs to create diverse revision scenarios. When detecting texts revised by GPT-series models, HLPD achieves a 15.11% relative improvement in AUROC over ImBD, surpassing Fast-DetectGPT by 45.56%. When evaluated in texts generated by advanced LLMs, HLPD achieves the highest average AUROC, exceeding ImBD by 5.53% and Fast-DetectGPT by 34.14%.

PaperID: 333, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.20964 GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce OSVBench, a new benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) on the task of generating complete formal specifications for verifying the functional correctness of operating system kernels. This benchmark is built upon a realworld operating system kernel, Hyperkernel, and consists of 245 complex specification generation tasks in total, each of which is a long-context task of about 20k-30k tokens. The benchmark formulates the specification generation task as a program synthesis problem confined to a domain for specifying states and transitions. This formulation is provided to LLMs through a programming model. The LLMs must be able to understand the programming model and verification assumptions before delineating the correct search space for syntax and semantics and generating formal specifications. Guided by the operating system's high-level functional description, the LLMs are asked to generate a specification that fully describes all correct states and transitions for a potentially buggy code implementation of the operating system. Experimental results with 12 state-of-the-art LLMs indicate limited performance of existing LLMs on the specification generation task for operating system verification. Significant disparities in their performance highlight differences in their ability to handle long-context code generation tasks.

PaperID: 334, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16438 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and dense retrievers have driven significant progress in retrievalaugmented generation (RAG). However, existing approaches face significant challenges in complex reasoning-oriented multi-hop retrieval tasks: 1) Ineffective reasoning-oriented planning: Prior methods struggle to generate robust multi-step plans for complex queries, as rule-based decomposers perform poorly on out-of-template questions. 2) Suboptimal reasoning-driven retrieval: Related methods employ limited query reformulation, leading to iterative retrieval loops that often fail to locate golden documents. 3) Insufficient reasoning-guided filtering: Prevailing methods lack the fine-grained reasoning to effectively filter salient information from noisy results, hindering utilization of retrieved knowledge. Fundamentally, these limitations all stem from the weak coupling between retrieval and reasoning in current RAG architectures. We introduce the Orchestrated Planner-Executor Reasoning Architecture (OPERA), a novel reasoning-driven retrieval framework. OPERA's Goal Planning Module (GPM) decomposes questions into sub-goals, which are executed by a Reason-Execute Module (REM) with specialized components for precise reasoning and effective retrieval. To train OPERA, we propose Multi-Agents Progressive Group Relative Policy Optimization (MAPGRPO), a novel variant of GRPO. Experiments on complex multi-hop benchmarks show OPERA's superior performance, validating both the MAPGRPO method and OPERA's design.

PaperID: 335, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13052 GitHub

Abstract:
Language models (LMs) are often adapted through supervised finetuning (SFT) to specialize their capabilities for downstream tasks. However, in typical scenarios where the fine-tuning data is limited, e.g., compared to pre-training, SFT can lead LMs to overfit, causing them to rely on spurious patterns within the target task or to compromise other broadly useful capabilities as a side effect of narrow specialization. In this paper, we propose Learning-from-the-Undesirable (LfU), a simple yet effective regularization scheme for SFT to mitigate overfitting issues when fine-tuning LMs with limited data. Specifically, we aim to regularize the fine-tuning process to favor solutions that are resilient to “undesirable” model updates, e.g., gradient ascent steps that steer the model toward undesirable behaviors. To this end, we propose a novel form of consistency regularization that directly aligns internal representations of the model with those after an undesirable update. By leveraging representation-level data augmentation through undesirable updates, LfU effectively promotes generalization under limited data. Our experiments on diverse LM downstream tasks show that LfU serves as an effective prior that enhances adaptability while preserving pretrained knowledge. For example, our LM from LfU achieves a 16.8% average improvement on math tasks compared to vanilla SFT on the same dataset, where the latter even leads to degraded performance on those tasks. Furthermore, LfU exhibits improved robustness to prompt variations, e.g., yielding a 92.1% lower standard deviation in output performances compared to SFT, highlighting its versatile effects.

PaperID: 336, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04310 GitHub

Abstract:
Although LLMbased agents have attracted significant attention in domains such as software engineering and machine learning research, their role in advancing combinatorial optimization (CO) remains relatively underexplored. This gap underscores the need for a deeper understanding of their potential in tackling structured, constraint-intensive problems---a pursuit currently limited by the absence of comprehensive benchmarks for systematic investigation. To address this, we introduce CO-Bench, a benchmark suite featuring 36 real-world CO problems drawn from a broad range of domains and complexity levels. CO-Bench includes structured problem formulations and curated data to support rigorous investigation of LLM agents. We evaluate multiple agentic frameworks against established human-designed algorithms, revealing the strengths and limitations of existing LLM agents and identifying promising directions for future research.

PaperID: 337, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06390 GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely adopted, but their high training cost leads many developers to finetune existing open-source models. While most adhere to open-source licenses, some falsely claim original training despite clear derivation from public models, raising pressing concerns about intellectual property protection and the need to verify model provenance. In this paper, we propose GhostSpec, a lightweight yet effective method for verifying LLM lineage without access to training data or modification of model behavior. Our approach constructs compact and robust fingerprints by applying singular value decomposition (SVD) to invariant products of internal attention weight matrices. Unlike watermarking or output-based methods, GhostSpec is fully data-free, non-invasive, and computationally efficient. Extensive experiments show it is robust to fine-tuning, pruning, expansion, and adversarial transformations, reliably tracing lineage with minimal overhead. By offering a practical solution for model verification, our method contributes to intellectual property protection and fosters a transparent, trustworthy LLM ecosystem.

PaperID: 338, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00891 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown that it is promising to utilize Process Reward Models (PRMs) as verifiers to enhance the performance of LLMs. However, current PRMs face three key challenges: (1) limited process supervision and generalization capabilities, (2) dependence on scalar value prediction without leveraging the generative abilities of LLMs, and (3) inability to scale the testtime compute of PRMs. In this work, we introduce GenPRM, a generative process reward model that performs explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning with code verification before providing judgment for each reasoning step. To obtain high-quality process supervision labels and rationale data, we propose Relative Progress Estimation (RPE) and a rationale synthesis framework that incorporates code verification. Experimental results on ProcessBench and several mathematical reasoning tasks show that GenPRM significantly outperforms prior PRMs with only 23K training data from MATH dataset. Through test-time scaling, a 1.5B GenPRM outperforms GPT-4o, and a 7B GenPRM surpasses Qwen2.5-Math-PRM-72B on ProcessBench. Additionally, GenPRM demonstrates strong abilities to serve as a critic model for policy model refinement. This work establishes a new paradigm for process supervision that bridges the gap between PRMs and critic models in LLMs.

PaperID: 339, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21619 GitHub

Abstract:
Existing autoregressive largescale text-to-speech (TTS) models have advantages in speech naturalness, but their token-by-token generation mechanism makes it difficult to precisely control the duration of synthesized speech. This becomes a significant limitation in applications requiring strict audio-visual synchronization, such as video dubbing. This paper introduces IndexTTS2, which proposes a novel, general, and autoregressive model-friendly method for speech duration control. The method supports two generation modes: one explicitly specifies the number of generated tokens to precisely control speech duration; the other freely generates speech in an autoregressive manner without specifying the number of tokens, while faithfully reproducing the prosodic features of the input prompt. Furthermore, IndexTTS2 achieves disentanglement between emotional expression and speaker identity, enabling independent control over timbre and emotion. In the zero-shot setting, the model can accurately reconstruct the target timbre (from the timbre prompt) while perfectly reproducing the specified emotional tone (from the style prompt). To enhance speech clarity in highly emotional expressions, we incorporate GPT latent representations and design a novel three-stage training paradigm to improve the stability of the generated speech. Additionally, to lower the barrier for emotional control, we designed a soft instruction mechanism based on text descriptions by fine-tuning Qwen3, effectively guiding the generation of speech with the desired emotional orientation. Finally, experimental results on multiple datasets show that IndexTTS2 outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot TTS models in terms of word error rate, speaker similarity, and emotional fidelity.

PaperID: 340, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21551 GitHub

Abstract:
Effective clinical history taking is a foundational yet underexplored component of clinical reasoning. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise on static benchmarks, they often fall short in dynamic, multiturn diagnostic settings that require iterative questioning and hypothesis refinement. To address this gap, we propose Note2Chat, a note-driven framework that trains LLMs to conduct structured history taking and diagnosis by learning from widely available medical notes. Instead of relying on scarce and sensitive dialogue data, we convert real-world medical notes into high-quality doctor-patient dialogues using a decision tree-guided generation and refinement pipeline. We then propose a three-stage fine-tuning strategy combining supervised learning, simulated data augmentation, and preference learning. Furthermore, we propose a novel single-turn reasoning paradigm that reframes history taking as a sequence of single-turn reasoning problems. This design enhances interpretability and enables local supervision, dynamic adaptation, and greater sample efficiency. Experimental results show that our method substantially improves clinical reasoning, achieving gains of +16.9 F1 and +21.0 Top-1 diagnostic accuracy over GPT-4o.

PaperID: 341, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19493 GitHub

Abstract:
Smartphones bring significant convenience to users but also enable devices to extensively record various types of personal information. Existing smartphone agents powered by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable performance in automating different tasks. However, as the cost, these agents are granted substantial access to sensitive users' personal information during this operation. To gain a thorough understanding of the privacy awareness of these agents, we present the first largescale benchmark encompassing 7,138 scenarios to the best of our knowledge. In addition, for privacy context in scenarios, we annotate its type (e.g., Account Credentials), sensitivity level, and location. We then carefully benchmark seven available mainstream smartphone agents. Our results demonstrate that almost all benchmarked agents show unsatisfying privacy awareness (RA), with performance remaining below 60% even with explicit hints. Overall, closed-source agents show better privacy ability than open-source ones, and Gemini 2.0-flash achieves the best, achieving an RA of 67%. We also find that the agents’ privacy detection capability is highly related to scenario sensitivity level, i.e., the scenario with a higher sensitivity level is typically more identifiable. We hope the findings enlighten the research community to rethink the unbalanced utility-privacy tradeoff about smartphone agents.

PaperID: 342, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01418 GitHub

Abstract:
Today's large language models (LLMs) are capable of supporting multilingual scenarios, allowing users to interact with LLMs in their native languages. When LLMs respond to subjective questions posed by users, they are expected to align with the views of specific demographic groups or historical periods, shaped by the language in which the user interacts with the model. Existing studies mainly focus on researching the opinions represented by LLMs among demographic groups in the United States or a few countries, lacking worldwide country samples and studies on human opinions in different historical periods, as well as lacking discussion on using language to steer LLMs. Moreover, they also overlook the potential influence of prompt language on the alignment of LLMs' opinions. In this study, our goal is to fill these gaps. To this end, we create an evaluation framework based on the World Values Survey (WVS) to systematically assess the alignment of LLMs with human opinions across different countries, languages, and historical periods around the world. We find that LLMs appropriately or overalign the opinions with only a few countries while under-aligning the opinions with most countries. Furthermore, changing the language of the prompt to match the language used in the questionnaire can effectively steer LLMs to align with the opinions of the corresponding country more effectively than existing steering methods. At the same time, LLMs are more aligned with the opinions of the contemporary population. To our knowledge, our study is the first comprehensive investigation of the topic of opinion alignment in LLMs across global, language, and temporal dimensions.

PaperID: 343, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22989 GitHub

Abstract:
As AI models tackle increasingly complex problems, ensuring reliable human oversight becomes more challenging due to the difficulty of verifying solutions. Approaches to scaling AI supervision include debate, in which two agents engage in structured dialogue to help a judge evaluate claims; critique, in which models identify potential flaws in proposed solutions; and proververifier games, in which a capable 'prover' model generates solutions that must be verifiable by a less capable 'verifier'. Evaluations of the scalability of these and similar approaches to difficult problems benefit from datasets that include (1) long-form expert-verified correct solutions and (2) long-form flawed solutions with annotations highlighting specific errors, but few are available. To address this gap, we present FindTheFlaws, a group of five diverse datasets spanning medicine, mathematics, science, coding, and the Lojban language. Each dataset contains questions and long-form solutions with expert annotations validating their correctness or identifying specific error(s) in the reasoning. We evaluate frontier models' critiquing capabilities and observe a range of performance that can be leveraged for scalable oversight experiments: models performing more poorly on particular datasets can serve as judges/verifiers for more capable models.

PaperID: 344, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08575 GitHub

Abstract:
LLMs have transformed NLP, yet deploying them on edge devices poses great carbon challenges. Prior estimators remain incomplete, neglecting peripheral energy use, distinct prefill/decode behaviors, and SoC design complexity. This paper presents CO2Meter, a unified framework for estimating operational and embodied carbon in LLM edge inference. Contributions include: (1) equation-based peripheral energy models and datasets; (2) a GNN-based predictor with phase-specific LLM energy data; (3) a unit-level embodied carbon model for SoC bottleneck analysis; and (4) validation showing superior accuracy over prior methods. Case studies show CO2-Meter's effectiveness in identifying carbon hotspots and guiding sustainable LLM design on edge platforms.

PaperID: 345, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14693 GitHub

Abstract:
Existing approaches to complaint analysis largely rely on unimodal, shortform content such as tweets or product reviews. This work advances the field by leveraging multimodal, multi-turn customer support dialogues—where users often share both textual complaints and visual evidence (e.g., screenshots, product photos)—to enable fine-grained classification of complaint aspects and severity. We introduce VALOR, a Validation-Aware Learner with Expert Routing, tailored for this multimodal setting. It employs a multi-expert reasoning setup using large-scale generative models with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting for nuanced decision-making. To ensure coherence between modalities, a semantic alignment score is computed and integrated into the final classification through a meta-fusion strategy. In alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), the proposed framework supports SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure) by advancing AI-driven tools for robust, scalable, and context-aware service infrastructure. Further, by enabling structured analysis of complaint narratives and visual context, it contributes to SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) by promoting more responsive product design and improved accountability in consumer services. We evaluate VALOR on a curated multimodal complaint dataset annotated with fine-grained aspect and severity labels, showing that it consistently outperforms baseline models, especially in complex complaint scenarios where information is distributed across text and images. This study underscores the value of multimodal interaction and expert validation in practical complaint understanding systems.

PaperID: 346, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00055 GitHub

Abstract:
Swarm UAV autonomous flight for Embodied LongHorizon (ELH) tasks is crucial for advancing the low-altitude economy. However, existing methods focus only on specific basic tasks due to dataset limitations, failing in real-world deployment for ELH tasks. ELH tasks are not mere concatenations of basic tasks, requiring handling long-term dependencies, maintaining embodied persistent states, and adapting to dynamic goal shifts. This paper presents U2UData+, the first large-scale swarm UAV autonomous flight dataset for ELH tasks and the first scalable swarm UAV data online collection and algorithm closed-loop verification platform. The dataset is captured by 15 UAVs in autonomous collaborative flights for ELH tasks, comprising 12 scenes, 720 traces, 120 hours, 600 seconds per trajectory, 4.32M LiDAR frames, and 12.96M RGB frames. This dataset also includes brightness, temperature, humidity, smoke, and airflow values covering all flight routes. The platform supports the customization of simulators, UAVs, sensors, flight algorithms, formation modes, and ELH tasks. Through a visual control window, this platform allows users to collect customized datasets through one-click deployment online and to verify algorithms by closed-loop simulation. U2UData+ also introduces an ELH task for wildlife conservation and provides comprehensive benchmarks with 9 SOTA models.

PaperID: 347, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12054 GitHub

Abstract:
Crossview geo-localization (CVGL) matches query images (e.g., drone) to geographically corresponding opposite-view imagery (e.g., satellite). While supervised methods achieve strong performance, their reliance on extensive pairwise annotations limits scalability. Unsupervised alternatives avoid annotation costs but suffer from noisy pseudo-labels due to intrinsic cross-view domain gaps. To address these limitations, we propose UniABG, a novel dual-stage unsupervised cross-view geo-localization framework integrating adversarial view bridging with graph-based correspondence calibration. Our approach first employs View-Aware Adversarial Bridging (VAAB) to model view-invariant features and enhance pseudo-label robustness. Subsequently, Heterogeneous Graph Filtering Calibration (HGFC) refines cross-view associations by constructing dual inter-view structure graphs, achieving reliable view correspondence. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art unsupervised performance, showing that UniABG improves Satellite → Drone AP by +10.63% on University-1652 and +16.73% on SUES-200, even surpassing supervised baselines.

PaperID: 348, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.07247 GitHub

Abstract:
The recently emerging conditional diffusion models seem promising for mitigating the labor and expenses in building large 3D medical imaging datasets. However, previous studies on 3D CT generation primarily focus on specific organs characterized by a local structure and fixed contrast and have yet to fully capitalize on the benefits of both semantic and textual conditions. In this paper, we present GuideGen, a controllable framework based on easilyacquired text prompts to generate anatomical masks and corresponding CT volumes for the entire torso—from chest to pelvis. Our approach includes three core components: a text-conditional semantic synthesizer for creating realistic full-torso anatomies; an anatomy-aware high-dynamic-range (HDR) autoencoder for high-fidelity feature extraction across varying intensity levels; and a latent feature generator that ensures alignment between CT images, anatomical semantics and input prompts. Combined, these components enable data synthesis for segmentation tasks from only textual instructions. To train and evaluate GuideGen, we compile a multi-modality cancer imaging dataset with paired CT and clinical descriptions from 12 public TCIA datasets and one private real-world dataset. Comprehensive evaluations across generation quality, cross-modality alignment, and data usability on multi-organ and tumor segmentation tasks demonstrate GuideGen's superiority over existing CT generation methods.

PaperID: 349, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17045 GitHub

Abstract:
We introduce RacketVision, a novel dataset and benchmark for advancing computer vision in sports analytics, covering table tennis, tennis, and badminton. The dataset is the first to provide largescale, fine-grained annotations for racket pose alongside traditional ball positions, enabling research into complex human-object interactions. It is designed to tackle three interconnected tasks: fine-grained ball tracking, articulated racket pose estimation, and predictive ball trajectory forecasting. Our evaluation of established baselines reveals a critical insight for multi-modal fusion: while naively concatenating racket pose features degrades performance, a Cross-Attention mechanism is essential to unlock their value, leading to trajectory prediction results that surpass strong unimodal baselines. RacketVision provides a versatile resource and a strong starting point for future research in dynamic object tracking, conditional motion forecasting, and multi-modal analysis in sports.

PaperID: 350, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.05414 GitHub

Abstract:
Global warming has intensified the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, which degrade CCTV signal and video quality while disrupting traffic flow, thereby increasing traffic accident rates. Existing datasets, often limited to light haze, rain, and snow, fail to capture extreme weather conditions. To address this gap, this study introduces the Traffic Surveillance Benchmark for Occluded vehicles under various Weather conditions (TSBOW), a comprehensive dataset designed to enhance occluded vehicle detection across diverse annual weather scenarios. Comprising over 32 hours of realworld traffic data from densely populated urban areas, TSBOW includes more than 48,000 manually annotated and 3.2 million semi-labeled frames; bounding boxes spanning eight traffic participant classes from large vehicles to micromobility devices and pedestrians. We establish an object detection benchmark for TSBOW, highlighting challenges posed by occlusions and adverse weather. With its varied road types, scales, and viewpoints, TSBOW serves as a critical resource for advancing Intelligent Transportation Systems. Our findings underscore the potential of CCTV-based traffic monitoring, pave the way for new research and applications. The TSBOW dataset is publicly available at the following link.

PaperID: 351, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10427 GitHub

Abstract:
VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) have been applied to autonomous driving to support decision-making in complex real-world scenarios. However, their training on static, web-sourced image-text pairs fundamentally limits the precise spatiotemporal reasoning required to understand and predict dynamic traffic scenes. We address this critical gap with STRIDE-QA, a large-scale visual question answering (VQA) dataset for physically grounded reasoning from an ego-centric perspective. Constructed from 100 hours of multi-sensor driving data in Tokyo, capturing diverse and challenging conditions, STRIDE-QA is the largest VQA dataset for spatiotemporal reasoning in urban driving, offering 16 M QA pairs over 270 K frames. Grounded by dense, automatically generated annotations including 3D bounding boxes, segmentation masks, and multi-object tracks, the dataset uniquely supports both object-centric and ego-centric reasoning through three novel QA tasks that require spatial localization and temporal prediction. Our benchmarks demonstrate that existing VLMs struggle significantly, with near-zero scores on prediction consistency. In contrast, VLMs fine-tuned on STRIDE-QA exhibit dramatic performance gains, achieving 55% success in spatial localization and 28% consistency in future motion prediction, compared to near-zero scores from general-purpose VLMs. Therefore, STRIDE-QA establishes a comprehensive foundation for developing more reliable VLMs for safety-critical autonomous systems.

PaperID: 352, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12899 GitHub

Abstract:
Due to the diversity of brain anatomy and the scarcity of annotated data, supervised anomaly detection for brain MRI remains challenging, driving the development of unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) approaches. Current UAD methods typically utilize synthetically generated noise perturbations on healthy MRIs to train generative models for normal anatomy reconstruction, enabling anomaly detection via residual maps. However, such simulated anomalies lack the biophysical fidelity and morphological complexity characteristic of true clinical lesions. To advance UAD in brain MRI, we conduct the first systematic frequencydomain analysis of pathological signatures, revealing two key properties: (1) anomalies exhibit unique frequency patterns distinguishable from normal anatomy, and (2) low-frequency signals maintain consistent representations across healthy scans. These insights motivate our Frequency-Decomposition Preprocessing (FDP) framework—the first UAD method to leverage frequency-domain reconstruction for simultaneous pathology suppression and anatomical preservation. FDP can integrate seamlessly with existing anomaly simulation techniques, consistently enhancing detection performance across diverse architectures while maintaining diagnostic fidelity. Experimental results demonstrate that FDP consistently improves anomaly detection performance when integrated with existing methods. Notably, FDP achieves a 17.63% increase in DICE score with LDM while maintaining robust improvements across multiple baselines.

PaperID: 353, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06925 GitHub

Abstract:
Video shadow detection confronts two entwined difficulties: distinguishing shadows from complex backgrounds and modeling dynamic shadow deformations under varying illumination. To address shadowbackground ambiguity, we leverage linguistic priors through the proposed Vision-language Match Module (VMM) and a Dark-aware Semantic Block (DSB), extracting text-guided features to explicitly differentiate shadows from dark objects. Furthermore, we introduce adaptive mask reweighting to downweight penumbra regions during training and apply edge masks at the final decoder stage for better supervision. For temporal modeling of variable shadow shapes, we propose a Tokenized Temporal Block (TTB) that decouples spatiotemporal learning. TTB summarizes cross-frame shadow semantics into learnable temporal tokens, enabling efficient sequence encoding with minimal computation overhead. Comprehensive Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art accuracy and real-time inference efficiency.

PaperID: 354, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18713 GitHub

Abstract:
In autonomous driving, visioncentric 3D object detection recognizes and localizes 3D objects from RGB images. However, due to high annotation costs and diverse outdoor scenes, training data often fails to cover all possible test scenarios, known as the out-of-distribution (OOD) issue. Training-free image editing offers a promising solution for improving model robustness by training data enhancement without any modifications to pre-trained diffusion models. Nevertheless, inversion-based methods often suffer from limited effectiveness and inherent inaccuracies, while recent rectified-flow-based approaches struggle to preserve objects with accurate 3D geometry. In this paper, we propose DriveFlow, a Rectified Flow Adaptation method for training data enhancement in autonomous driving based on pre-trained Text-to-Image flow models. Based on frequency decomposition, DriveFlow introduces two strategies to adapt noise-free editing paths derived from text-conditioned velocities. 1) High-Frequency Foreground Preservation: DriveFlow incorporates a high-frequency alignment loss for foreground to maintain precise 3D object geometry. 2) Dual-Frequency Background Optimization: DriveFlow also conducts dual-frequency optimization for background, balancing editing flexibility and semantic consistency. Comprehensive experiments validate the effectiveness and efficiency of DriveFlow, demonstrating comprehensive performance improvements on all categories across OOD scenarios.

PaperID: 355, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03993 GitHub

Abstract:
Commercialgrade poster design demands the seamless integration of aesthetic appeal with precise, informative content delivery. Current automated poster generation systems face significant limitations, including incomplete design workflows, poor text rendering accuracy, and insufficient flexibility for commercial applications. To address these challenges, we propose PosterVerse, a full-workflow, commercial-grade poster generation method that seamlessly automates the entire design process while delivering high-density and scalable text rendering. PosterVerse replicates professional design through three key stages: (1) blueprint creation using fine-tuned LLMs to extract key design elements from user requirements, (2) graphical background generation via customized diffusion models to create visually appealing imagery, and (3) unified layout-text rendering with an MLLM-powered HTML engine to guarantee high text accuracy and flexible customization. In addition, we introduce PosterDNA, a commercial-grade, HTML-based dataset tailored for training and validating poster design models. To the best of our knowledge, PosterDNA is the first Chinese poster generation dataset to introduce HTML typography files, enabling scalable text rendering and fundamentally solving the challenges of rendering small and high-density text. Experimental results demonstrate that PosterVerse consistently produces commercial-grade posters with appealing visuals, accurate text alignment, and customizable layouts, making it a promising solution for automating commercial poster design.

PaperID: 356, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14396 GitHub

Abstract:
The increasing demand for AR/VR applications has highlighted the need for highquality content, such as 360° live wallpapers. However, generating high-quality 360° panoramic contents remains a challenging task due to the severe distortions introduced by equirectangular projection (ERP). Existing approaches either fine-tune pretrained diffusion models on limited ERP datasets or adopt tuning-free methods that still rely on ERP latent representations, often resulting in distracting distortions near the poles. In this paper, we introduce SphereDiff, a novel approach for synthesizing 360° static and live wallpaper with state-of-the-art diffusion models without additional tuning. We define a spherical latent representation that ensures consistent quality across all perspectives, including near the poles. Then, we extend MultiDiffusion to spherical latent representation and propose a dynamic spherical latent sampling method to enable direct use of pretrained diffusion models. Moreover, we introduce distortion-aware weighted averaging to further improve the generation quality. Our method outperforms existing approaches in generating 360° static and live wallpaper, making it a robust solution for immersive AR/VR applications.

PaperID: 357, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11002 GitHub

Abstract:
Emotion plays a pivotal role in videobased expression, but existing video generation systems predominantly focus on low-level visual metrics while neglecting affective dimensions. Although emotion analysis has made progress in the visual domain, the video community lacks dedicated resources to bridge emotion understanding with generative tasks, particularly for stylized and non-realistic contexts. To address this gap, we introduce EmoVid, the first multimodal, emotion-annotated video dataset specifically designed for artistic media, which includes cartoon animations, movie clips, and animated stickers. Each video is annotated with emotion labels, visual attributes (brightness, colorfulness, hue), and text captions. Through systematic analysis, we uncover spatial and temporal patterns linking visual features to emotional perceptions across diverse video forms. Building on these insights, we develop an emotion-conditioned video generation technique by fine-tuning the Wan2.1 model. The results show a significant improvement in both quantitative metrics and the visual quality of generated videos for text-to-video and image-to-video tasks. EmoVid establishes a new benchmark and protocol for affective video computing. Our work not only offers valuable insights into visual emotion analysis in artistic videos but also provides practical methods for enhancing emotional expression in video generation. The extended version and the dataset are available on our project page.

PaperID: 358, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13938 GitHub

Abstract:
Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved significant advancements across various domains, and corresponding evaluation benchmarks have been continuously refined and improved. In this process, benchmarks in the scientific domain have played an important role in assessing the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. However, existing benchmarks still face three key challenges: 1) Insufficient evaluation of models' reasoning abilities in multilingual scenarios; 2) Inadequate assessment of MLLMs' comprehensive modality coverage; 3) Lack of finegrained annotation of scientific knowledge points. To address these gaps, we propose MME-SCI, a comprehensive and challenging benchmark. We carefully collected 1,019 high-quality question-answer pairs, which involve 3 distinct evaluation modes. These pairs cover four subjects, namely mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology, and support five languages: Chinese, English, French, Spanish, and Japanese. We conducted extensive experiments on 16 open-source models and 4 closed-source models, and the results demonstrate that MME-SCI is widely challenging for existing MLLMs. For instance, under the Image-only evaluation mode, o4-mini achieved accuracy of only 52.11%, 24.73%, 36.57%, and 29.80% in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology, respectively, indicating a significantly higher difficulty level compared to existing benchmarks. More importantly, using MME-SCI's multilingual and fine-grained knowledge attributes, we analyzed existing models' performance in depth and identified their weaknesses in specific domains. For example, in questions related to "Magnetic Field", o4-mini correctly answered only 5 out of 33 questions, thereby fine-grainedly exposing the model's vulnerabilities. These findings highlight the urgent need to enhance the scientific reasoning capabilities of MLLMs.

PaperID: 359, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09540 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in context optimization (CoOp) guided by large language model (LLM)–distilled medical semantic priors offer a scalable alternative to manual prompt engineering and full finetuning for adapting biomedical CLIP-based vision-language models (VLMs). However, prompt learning in this context is challenged by semantic misalignment between LLMs and CLIP variants due to divergent training corpora and model architectures; it further lacks scalability across continuously evolving families of foundation models. More critically, pairwise multimodal alignment via conventional Euclidean-space optimization lacks the capacity to model unified representations or apply localized geometric constraints, which tends to amplify modality gaps in complex biomedical imaging and destabilize few-shot adaptation. To address these challenges, we propose vMFCoOp, a framework that inversely estimates von Mises–Fisher (vMF) distributions on a shared Hyperspherical Manifold, aligning semantic biases between arbitrary LLMs and CLIP backbones via Unified Semantic Anchors to achieve robust biomedical prompting and superior few-shot classification. Grounded in three complementary constraints, vMFCoOp demonstrates consistent improvements across 14 medical datasets, 12 medical imaging modalities, and 13 anatomical regions, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in accuracy, generalization, and clinical applicability.

PaperID: 360, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.05678 GitHub

Abstract:
Nucleus detection in histopathology whole slide images (WSIs) is crucial for a broad spectrum of clinical applications. The gigapixel size of WSIs necessitates the use of sliding window methodology for nucleus detection. However, mainstream methods process each sliding window independently, which overlooks broader contextual information and easily leads to inaccurate predictions. To address this limitation, recent studies additionally crop a large Filedof-View (LFoV) patch centered on each sliding window to extract contextual features. However, such methods substantially increase whole-slide inference latency. In this work, we propose an effective and efficient context-aware nucleus detection approach. Specifically, instead of using lFoV patches, we aggregate contextual clues from off-the-shelf features of historically visited sliding windows, which greatly enhances the inference efficiency. Moreover, compared to lFoV patches used in previous works, the sliding window patches have higher magnification and provide finer-grained tissue details, thereby enhancing the classification accuracy. To develop the proposed context-aware model, we utilize annotated patches along with their surrounding unlabeled patches for training. Beyond exploiting high-level tissue context from these surrounding regions, we design a post-training strategy that leverages abundant unlabeled nucleus samples within them to enhance the model's context adaptability. Extensive experimental results on three challenging benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method.

PaperID: 361, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23162 GitHub

Abstract:
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) achieves impressive quality and rendering speed, but with millions of 3D Gaussians and significant storage and transmission costs. In this paper, we aim to develop a simple yet effective method called NeuralGS that compresses the original 3DGS into a compact representation. Our observation is that neural fields like NeRF can represent complex 3D scenes with MultiLayer Perceptron (MLP) neural networks using only a few megabytes. Thus, NeuralGS effectively adopts the neural field representation to encode the attributes of 3D Gaussians with MLPs, only requiring a small storage size even for a large-scale scene. To achieve this, we adopt a clustering strategy and fit the Gaussians within each cluster using different tiny MLPs, based on importance scores of Gaussians as fitting weights. We experiment on multiple datasets, achieving a 91× average model size reduction without harming the visual quality.

PaperID: 362, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06206 GitHub

Abstract:
Affordance grounding focuses on predicting the specific regions of objects that are associated with the actions to be performed by robots. It plays a vital role in the fields of humanrobot interaction, human-object interaction, embodied manipulation, and embodied perception. Existing models often neglect the affordance shared among different objects because they lack the Chain-of-Thought(CoT) reasoning abilities, limiting their out-of-domain generalization and explicit reasoning capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose Affordance-R1, the first unified affordance grounding framework that integrates cognitive CoT guided Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) within a reinforcement learning paradigm. Specifically, we designed a sophisticated affordance function, which contains format, perception, and cognition rewards to effectively guide optimization directions. Furthermore, we constructed a high-quality affordance-centric reasoning dataset, ReasonAff, to support training. Trained exclusively via reinforcement learning with GRPO and without explicit reasoning data, Affordance-R1 achieves robust zero-shot generalization and exhibits emergent test-time reasoning capabilities. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms well-established methods and exhibits open-world generalization.

PaperID: 363, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10369 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent diffusionbased Single-image 3D portrait generation methods typically employ 2D diffusion models to provide multi-view knowledge, which is then distilled into 3D representations. However, these methods usually struggle to produce high-fidelity 3D models, frequently yielding excessively blurred textures. We attribute this issue to the insufficient consideration of cross-view consistency during the diffusion process, resulting in significant disparities between different views and ultimately leading to blurred 3D representations. In this paper, we address this issue by comprehensively exploiting multi-view priors in both the conditioning and diffusion procedures to produce consistent, detail-rich portraits. From the conditioning standpoint, we propose a Hybrid Priors Diffusion model, which explicitly and implicitly incorporates multi-view priors as conditions to enhance the status consistency of the generated multi-view portraits. From the diffusion perspective, considering the significant impact of the diffusion noise distribution on detailed texture generation, we propose a Multi-View Noise Resampling Strategy integrated within the optimization process leveraging cross-view priors to enhance representation consistency. Extensive experiments show that our method produces 3D portraits with accurate geometry and rich details from a single image.

PaperID: 364, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16124 GitHub

Abstract:
Due to large pixel movement and high computational cost, estimating the motion of highresolution frames is challenging. Thus, most flow-based Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) methods first predict bidirectional flows at low resolution and then use high-magnification upsampling (e.g., bilinear) to obtain the high-resolution ones. However, this kind of upsampling strategy may cause blur or mosaic at the flows' edges. Additionally, the motion of fine pixels at high resolution cannot be adequately captured in motion estimation at low resolution, which leads to the misalignment of task-oriented flows. With such inaccurate flows, input frames are warped and combined pixel-by-pixel, resulting in ghosting and discontinuities in the interpolated frame. In this study, we propose a novel VFI pipeline, VTinker, which consists of two core components: guided flow upsampling (GFU) and Texture Mapping. After motion estimation at low resolution, GFU introduces input frames as guidance to alleviate the blurring details in bilinear upsampling flows, which makes flows' edges clearer. Subsequently, to avoid pixel-level ghosting and discontinuities, Texture Mapping generates an initial interpolated frame, referred to as the intermediate proxy. The proxy serves as a cue for selecting clear texture blocks from the input frames, which are then mapped onto the proxy to facilitate producing the final interpolated frame via a reconstruction module. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VTinker achieves state-of-the-art performance in VFI.

PaperID: 365, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09909 GitHub

Abstract:
In this paper, we focus on SingleDomain Generalized Object Detection (Single-DGOD), aiming to transfer a detector trained on one source domain to multiple unknown domains. Existing methods for Single-DGOD typically rely on discrete data augmentation or static perturbation methods to expand data diversity, thereby mitigating the lack of access to target domain data. However, in real-world scenarios such as changes in weather or lighting conditions, domain shifts often occur continuously and gradually. Discrete augmentations and static perturbations fail to effectively capture the dynamic variation of feature distributions, thereby limiting the model's ability to perceive fine-grained cross-domain differences. To this end, we propose a new method, i.e., Liquid Temporal Feature Evolution, which simulates the progressive evolution of features from the source domain to simulated latent distributions by incorporating temporal modeling and liquid neural network–driven parameter adjustment. Specifically, we introduce controllable Gaussian noise injection and multi-scale Gaussian blurring to simulate initial feature perturbations, followed by temporal modeling and a liquid parameter adjustment mechanism to generate adaptive modulation parameters, enabling a smooth and continuous adaptation across domains. By capturing progressive cross-domain feature evolution and dynamically regulating adaptation paths, our method bridges the source-unknown domain distribution gap, significantly boosting generalization and robustness to unseen shifts. Significant performance improvements on the Diverse Weather dataset and Real-to-Art benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our method.

PaperID: 366, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07966 GitHub

Abstract:
Unsupervised domain adaptation for LiDARbased 3D object detection (3D UDA) based on the teacher-student architecture with pseudo labels has achieved notable improvements in recent years. Although it is quite popular to collect point clouds and images simultaneously, little attention has been paid to the usefulness of image data in 3D UDA when training the models. In this paper, we propose an approach named MMAssist that improves the performance of 3D UDA with multi-modal assistance. A method is designed to align 3D features between the source domain and the target domain by using image and text features as bridges. More specifically, we project the ground truth labels or pseudo labels to the images to get a set of 2D bounding boxes. For each 2D box, we extract its image feature from a pre-trained vision backbone. A large vision-language model (LVLM) is adopted to extract the box's text description, and a pre-trained text encoder is used to obtain its text feature. During the training of the model in the source domain and the student model in the target domain, we align the 3D features of the predicted boxes with their corresponding image and text features, and the 3D features and the aligned features are fused with learned weights for the final prediction. The features between the student branch and the teacher branch in the target domain are aligned as well. To enhance the pseudo labels, we use an off-the-shelf 2D object detector to generate 2D bounding boxes from images and estimate their corresponding 3D boxes with the aid of point cloud, and these 3D boxes are combined with the pseudo labels generated by the teacher model. Experimental results show that our approach achieves promising performance compared with state-of-the-art methods in three domain adaptation tasks on three popular 3D object detection datasets.

PaperID: 367, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13259 GitHub

Abstract:
Large multimodal models (LMMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, however their knowledge and abilities in the crossview geo-localization and pose estimation domains remain unexplored, despite potential benefits for navigation, autonomous driving, outdoor robotics, etc. To bridge this gap, we introduce GeoX-Bench, a comprehensive Benchmark designed to explore and evaluate the capabilities of LMMs in cross-view Geo-localization and pose estimation. Specifically, GeoX-Bench contains 10,859 panoramic-satellite image pairs spanning 128 cities in 49 countries, along with corresponding 755,976 question-answering (QA) pairs. Among these, 42,900 QA pairs are designated for benchmarking, while the remaining are intended to enhance the capabilities of LMMs. Based on GeoX-Bench, we evaluate the capabilities of 25 state-of-the-art LMMs on cross-view geo-localization and pose estimation tasks, and further explore the empowered capabilities of instruction-tuning. Our benchmark demonstrate that while current LMMs achieve impressive performance in geo-localization tasks, their effectiveness declines significantly on the more complex pose estimation tasks, highlighting a critical area for future improvement, and instruction-tuning LMMs on the training data of GeoX-Bench can significantly improve the cross-view geo-sense abilities.

PaperID: 368, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22704 GitHub

Abstract:
We present SplatSAP, a feed-forward approach to render novel views of human-centered scenes from binocular cameras with large sparsity. Gaussian Splatting has shown its promising potential in rendering tasks, but it typically necessitates per-scene optimization with dense input views. Although some recent approaches achieve feed-forward Gaussian Splatting rendering through geometry priors obtained by multi-view stereo, such approaches still require largely overlapped input views to establish the geometry prior. To bridge this gap, we leverage pixel-wise point map reconstruction to represent geometry which is robust to large sparsity for its independent view modeling. In general, we propose a two-stage learning strategy. In stage 1, we transform the point map into real space via an iterative affinity learning process, which facilitates camera control in the following. In stage 2, we project point maps of two input views onto the target view plane and refine such geometry via stereo matching. Furthermore, we anchor Gaussian primitives on this refined plane in order to render high-quality images. As a metric representation, the scale-aware point map in stage 1 is trained in a self-supervised manner without 3D supervision and stage 2 is supervised with photo-metric loss. We collect multi-view human-centered data and demonstrate that our method improves both the stability of point map reconstruction and the visual quality of free-viewpoint rendering.

PaperID: 369, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11513 GitHub

Abstract:
Textto-video generation poses significant challenges due to the inherent complexity of video data, which spans both temporal and spatial dimensions. It introduces additional redundancy, abrupt variations, and a domain gap between language and vision tokens while generation. Addressing these challenges requires an effective video tokenizer that can efficiently encode video data while preserving essential semantic and spatiotemporal information, serving as a critical bridge between text and vision. Inspired by the observation in VQ-VAE-2, we propose HiTVideo, a novel approach for text-to-video generation with hierarchical tokenizers. It utilizes a 3D causal VAE with a multi-layer discrete token framework, encoding video content into hierarchically structured codebooks. Higher layers capture semantic information with higher compression, while lower layers focus on fine-grained spatiotemporal details, striking a balance between compression efficiency and reconstruction quality. Our approach efficiently encodes longer video sequences (e.g., 8 seconds, 64 frames), reducing bits per pixel (bpp) by approximately 70% compared to previous tokenizers, while maintaining competitive reconstruction quality. We explore the trade-offs between compression and reconstruction, while emphasizing the advantages of high-compressed semantic tokens in text-to-video tasks. HiTVideo aims to address the potential limitations of existing video tokenizers in text-to-video generation tasks, striving for higher compression ratios, improved token quality, and simplify LLMs modeling under language guidance, offering a scalable and promising framework for advancing text to video generation.

PaperID: 370, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14955 GitHub

Abstract:
The number of ngram features grows exponentially in n, making it computationally demanding to compute the most frequent n-grams even for n as small as 3. Motivated by our production machine learning system built on n-gram features, we ask: is it possible to accurately, deterministically, and quickly recover the top-k most frequent n-grams? We devise a multi-pass algorithm called Intergrams that constructs candidate n-grams from the preceding (n-1)-grams. By designing this algorithm with hardware in mind, our approach yields more than an order of magnitude speedup (up to 33x!) over the next known fastest algorithm, even when similar optimization are applied to the other algorithm. Using the empirical power-law distribution over n-grams, we also provide theory to inform the efficacy of our multi-pass approach.

PaperID: 371, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21733 GitHub

Abstract:
Finetuning large language models is essential for task-specific adaptation, yet it remains computationally prohibitive. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods have emerged as a solution, but current approaches typically ignore the distinct roles of model components and the heterogeneous importance across layers, thereby limiting adaptation efficiency. Motivated by the observation that Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) induce critical activations in the low-frequency dimensions of attention states, we propose RoPE-aware Selective Adaptation (RoSA), a novel PEFT framework that allocates trainable parameters in a more targeted and effective manner. RoSA comprises a RoPE-aware Attention Enhancement (RoAE) module, which selectively enhances the low-frequency components of RoPE-influenced attention states, and a Dynamic Layer Selection (DLS) strategy that adaptively identifies and updates the most critical layers based on LayerNorm gradient norms. By combining dimension-wise enhancement with layer-wise adaptation, RoSA achieves more targeted and efficient fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on fifteen commonsense and arithmetic benchmarks demonstrate that RoSA outperforms mainstream PEFT methods under comparable trainable parameters.

PaperID: 372, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.17342 GitHub

Abstract:
Graph Outof-Distribution (OOD) detection aims to identify whether a test graph deviates from the distribution of graphs observed during training, which is critical for ensuring the reliability of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) when deployed in open-world scenarios. Recent advances in graph OOD detection have focused on test-time training techniques that facilitate OOD detection without accessing potential supervisory information (e.g., training data). However, most of these methods employ a one-pass inference paradigm, which prevents them from progressively correcting erroneous predictions to amplify OOD signals. To this end, we propose a Self-Improving Graph Out-of-Distribution detector (SIGOOD), which is an unsupervised framework that integrates continuous self-learning with test-time training for effective graph OOD detection. Specifically, SIGOOD generates a prompt to construct a prompt-enhanced graph that amplifies potential OOD signals. To optimize prompts, SIGOOD introduces an Energy Preference Optimization (EPO) loss, which leverages energy variations between the original test graph and the prompt-enhanced graph. By iteratively optimizing the prompt by involving it into the detection model in a self-improving loop, the resulting optimal prompt-enhanced graph is ultimately used for OOD detection. Comprehensive evaluations on 21 real-world datasets confirm the effectiveness and outperformance of our SIGOOD method.

PaperID: 373, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17224 GitHub

Abstract:
Extracellular recordings are transient voltage fluctuations in the vicinity of neurons, serving as a fundamental modality in neuroscience for decoding brain activity at singleneuron resolution. Spike sorting, the process of attributing each detected spike to its corresponding neuron, is a pivotal step in brain sensing pipelines. However, it remains challenging under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), electrode drift, and cross-session variability. In this paper, we propose HuiduRep, a robust self-supervised representation learning framework that extracts discriminative and generalizable features from extracellular recordings. By integrating contrastive learning with a denoising autoencoder, HuiduRep learns latent representations robust to noise and drift. With HuiduRep, we develop a spike sorting pipeline that clusters spike representations without ground truth labels. Experiments on hybrid and real-world datasets demonstrate that HuiduRep achieves strong robustness. Furthermore, the pipeline significantly outperforms state-of-the-art tools such as KiloSort4 and MountainSort5 on accuracy and precision on diverse datasets. These findings demonstrate the potential of self-supervised spike representation learning as a foundational tool for robust and generalizable processing of extracellular recordings.

PaperID: 374, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17079 GitHub

Abstract:
Unified video and action prediction models hold great potential for robotic manipulation, as future observations offer contextual cues for planning, while actions reveal how interactions shape the environment. However, most existing approaches treat observation and action generation in a monolithic and goalagnostic manner, often leading to semantically misaligned predictions and incoherent behaviors. To this end, we propose H-GAR, a Hierarchical interaction framework via Goal-driven observation-Action Refinement. To anchor prediction to the task objective, H-GAR first produces a goal observation and a coarse action sketch that outline a high-level route toward the goal. To enable explicit interaction between observation and action under the guidance of the goal observation for more coherent decision-making, we devise two synergistic modules. (1) Goal-Conditioned Observation Synthesizer (GOS) synthesizes intermediate observations based on the coarse-grained actions and the predicted goal observation. (2) Interaction-Aware Action Refiner (IAAR) refines coarse actions into fine-grained, goal-consistent actions by leveraging feedback from the intermediate observations and a Historical Action Memory Bank that encodes prior actions to ensure temporal consistency. By integrating goal grounding with explicit action-observation interaction in a coarse-to-fine manner, H-GAR enables more accurate manipulation. Extensive experiments on both simulation and real-world robotic manipulation tasks demonstrate that H-GAR achieves state-of-the-art performance.

PaperID: 375, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08088 GitHub

Abstract:
Recently, large reasoning models have demonstrated strong mathematical and coding abilities, and deep search leverages their reasoning capabilities in challenging information retrieval tasks. Existing deep search works are generally limited to a single knowledge source, either local or the Web. However, enterprises often require private deep search systems that can leverage search tools over both local and the Web corpus. Simply training an agent equipped with multiple search tools using flat reinforcement learning (RL) is a straightforward idea, but it has problems such as low training data efficiency and poor mastery of complex tools. To address the above issue, we propose a hierarchical agentic deep search framework, HierSearch, trained with hierarchical RL. At the low level, a local deep search agent and a Web deep search agent are trained to retrieve evidence from their corresponding domains. At the high level, a planner agent coordinates lowlevel agents and provides the final answer. Moreover, to prevent direct answer copying and error propagation, we design a knowledge refiner that filters out hallucinations and irrelevant evidence returned by low-level agents. Experiments show that HierSearch achieves better performance compared to flat RL, and outperforms various deep search and multi-source retrieval-augmented generation baselines in six benchmarks across general, finance, and medical domains.

PaperID: 376, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04251 GitHub

Abstract:
Multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF) seeks to model temporal dynamics among variables to predict future trends. Transformerbased models and large language models (LLMs) have shown promise due to their ability to capture long-range dependencies and patterns. However, current methods often rely on rigid inductive biases, ignore intervariable interactions, or apply static fusion strategies that limit adaptability across forecast horizons. These limitations create bottlenecks in capturing nuanced, horizon-specific relationships in time-series data. To solve this problem, we propose T3Time, a novel trimodal framework consisting of time, spectral, and prompt branches, where the dedicated frequency encoding branch captures the periodic structures along with a gating mechanism that learns prioritization between temporal and spectral features based on the prediction horizon. We also proposed a mechanism which adaptively aggregates multiple cross-modal alignment heads by dynamically weighting the importance of each head based on the features. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average reduction of 3.28% in MSE and 2.29% in MAE. Furthermore, it shows strong generalization in few-shot learning settings: with 5% training data, we see a reduction in MSE and MAE by 4.13% and 1.91%, respectively; and with 10% data, by 3.62% and 1.98% on average. Code will be released upon publication.

PaperID: 377, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08914 GitHub

Abstract:
Deploying VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) on edge devices (e.g., smartphones and robots) is crucial for enabling low-latency and privacy-preserving intelligent applications. Given the resource constraints of these devices, quantization offers a promising solution by improving memory efficiency and reducing bandwidth requirements, thereby facilitating the deployment of VLMs. However, existing research has rarely explored aggressive quantization on VLMs, particularly for the models ranging from 1B to 2B parameters, which are more suitable for resource-constrained edge devices. In this paper, we propose SPEED-Q, a novel Staged Processing with EnhancEd Distillation framework for VLM low-bit weight-only quantization that systematically addresses the following two critical obstacles: (1) significant discrepancies in quantization sensitivity between vision (ViT) and language (LLM) components in VLMs; (2) training instability arising from the reduced numerical precision inherent in low-bit quantization. In SPEED-Q, a staged sensitivity adaptive mechanism is introduced to effectively harmonize performance across different modalities. We further propose a distillation-enhanced quantization strategy to stabilize the training process and reduce data dependence. Together, SPEED-Q enables accurate, stable, and data-efficient quantization of complex VLMs. SPEED-Q is the first framework tailored for quantizing entire small-scale billion-parameter VLMs to low bits. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SPEED-Q achieves up to 6x higher accuracy than existing quantization methods under 2-bit settings and consistently outperforms prior on-device VLMs under both 2-bit and 4-bit settings.

PaperID: 378, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21999 GitHub

Abstract:
While VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) have garnered increasing attention in the AI community due to their promising practical applications, they exhibit persistent hallucination issues, generating outputs misaligned with visual inputs. Recent studies attribute these hallucinations to VLMs' over-reliance on linguistic priors and insufficient visual feature integration, proposing heuristic decoding calibration strategies to mitigate them. However, the non-trainable nature of these strategies inherently limits their optimization potential. To this end, we propose an adversarial parametric editing framework for Hallucination mitigation in VLMs, which follows an Activate-Locate-Edit Adversarially paradigm. Specifically, we first construct an activation dataset that comprises grounded responses (positive samples attentively anchored in visual features) and hallucinatory responses (negative samples reflecting LLM prior bias and internal knowledge artifacts). Next, we identify critical hallucination-prone parameter clusters by analyzing differential hidden states of response pairs. Then, these clusters are fine-tuned using prompts injected with adversarial prefixes optimized via prompt tuning to maximize visual neglect, thereby forcing the model to prioritize visual evidence over inherent parametric biases. Evaluations on both generative and discriminative VLM tasks demonstrate the significant effectiveness of ALEAHallu in alleviating hallucinations.

PaperID: 379, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18224 GitHub

Abstract:
Multiagent systems (MAS) based on large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a powerful solution for dealing with complex problems across diverse domains. The effectiveness of MAS is critically dependent on its collaboration topology, which has become a focal point for automated design research. However, existing approaches are fundamentally constrained by their reliance on a template graph modification paradigm with a predefined set of agents and hard-coded interaction structures, significantly limiting their adaptability to task-specific requirements. To address these limitations, we reframe MAS design as a conditional autoregressive graph generation task, where both the system composition and structure are designed jointly. We propose ARG-Designer, a novel autoregressive model that operationalizes this paradigm by constructing the collaboration graph from scratch. Conditioned on a natural language task query, ARG-Designer sequentially and dynamically determines the required number of agents, selects their appropriate roles from an extensible pool, and establishes the optimal communication links between them. This generative approach creates a customized topology in a flexible and extensible manner, precisely tailored to the unique demands of different tasks. Extensive experiments across six diverse benchmarks demonstrate that ARG-Designer not only achieves state-of-the-art performance but also enjoys significantly greater token efficiency and enhanced extensibility.

PaperID: 380, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09063 GitHub

Abstract:
VisionLanguage Models (VLMs), with their powerful content generation capabilities, have been successfully applied to data annotation processes. However, the VLM-generated labels exhibit dual limitations: low quality (i.e., label noise) and absence of error correction mechanisms. To enhance label quality, we propose Human-Corrected Labels (HCLs), a novel setting that efficient human correction for VLM-generated noisy labels. As shown in Figure 1(b), HCL strategically deploys human correction only for instances with VLM discrepancies, achieving both higher-quality annotations and reduced labor costs. Specifically, we theoretically derive a risk-consistent estimator that incorporates both human-corrected labels and VLM predictions to train classifiers. Besides, we further propose a conditional probability method to estimate the label distribution using a combination of VLM outputs and model predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior classification performance and is robust to label noise, validating the effectiveness of HCL in practical weak supervision scenarios.

PaperID: 381, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.10397 GitHub

Abstract:
One crucial factor behind the success of deep learning lies in the implicit bias induced by noise inherent in gradientbased training algorithms. Motivated by empirical observations that training with noisy labels improves model generalization, we delve into the underlying mechanisms behind stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with label noise. Focusing on a two-layer over-parameterized linear network, we analyze the learning dynamics of label noise SGD, unveiling a two-phase learning behavior. In Phase I, the magnitudes of model weights progressively diminish, and the model escapes the lazy regime; enters the rich regime. In Phase II, the alignment between model weights and the ground-truth interpolator increases, and the model eventually converges. Our analysis highlights the critical role of label noise in driving the transition from the lazy to the rich regime and minimally explains its empirical success. Furthermore, we extend these insights to Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), showing that the principles governing label noise SGD also apply to broader optimization algorithms. Extensive experiments, conducted under both synthetic and real-world setups, strongly support our theory.

PaperID: 382, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08606 GitHub

Abstract:
The Contrastive LanguageImage Pre-Training (CLIP) model excels in few-shot learning by aligning visual and textual representations. Our study shows that template-sample similarity (TSS), defined as the resemblance between a text template and an image sample, introduces bias. This bias leads the model to rely on template proximity rather than true sample-to-category alignment, reducing both accuracy and robustness in classification. We present a framework that uses empty prompts, textual inputs that convey the idea of “emptiness” without category information. These prompts capture unbiased template features and offset TSS bias. The framework employs two stages. During pre-training, empty prompts reveal and reduce template-induced bias within the CLIP encoder. During few-shot fine-tuning, a bias calibration loss enforces correct alignment between images and their categories, ensuring the model focuses on relevant visual cues. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our template correction method significantly reduces performance fluctuations caused by TSS, yielding higher classification accuracy and stronger robustness.

PaperID: 383, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00502 GitHub

Abstract:
This paper focuses on the Continual TestTime Adaptation (CTTA) task, aiming to enable an agent to continuously adapt to evolving target domains while retaining previously acquired domain knowledge for effective reuse when those domains reappear. Existing shared-parameter paradigms struggle to balance adaptation and forgetting, leading to decreased efficiency and stability. To address this, we propose a frequency-aware shared and self-adaptive expert framework, consisting of two key components: (i) a dual-branch expert architecture that extracts general features and dynamically models domain-specific representations, effectively reducing cross-domain interference and repetitive learning cost; and (ii) an online Frequency-aware Domain Discriminator (FDD), which leverages the robustness of low-frequency image signals for online domain shift detection, guiding dynamic allocation of expert resources for more stable and realistic adaptation. Additionally, we introduce a Continual Repeated Shifts (CRS) benchmark to simulate periodic domain changes for more realistic evaluation. Experimental results show that our method consistently outperforms existing approaches on both classification and segmentation CTTA tasks under standard and CRS settings, with ablations and visualizations confirming its effectiveness and robustness.

PaperID: 384, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.05782 GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), which integrate language and visual cues for problemsolving, are crucial for advancing artificial general intelligence (AGI). However, current benchmarks for measuring the intelligence of MLLMs suffer from limited scale, narrow coverage, and unstructured knowledge, offering only static and undifferentiated evaluations. To bridge this gap, we introduce MDK12-Bench, a large-scale multidisciplinary benchmark built from real-world K–12 exams spanning six disciplines with 141K instances and 6,225 knowledge points organized in a six-layer taxonomy. Covering five question formats with difficulty and year annotations, it enables comprehensive evaluation to capture the extent to which MLLMs perform over four dimensions: 1) difficulty levels, 2) temporal (cross-year) shifts, 3) contextual shifts, and 4) knowledge-driven reasoning. We propose a novel dynamic evaluation framework that introduces unfamiliar visual, textual, and question form shifts to challenge model generalization while improving benchmark objectivity and longevity by mitigating data contamination. We further evaluate knowledge-point reference-augmented generation (KP-RAG) to examine the role of knowledge in reasoning. Key findings reveal limitations in current MLLMs in multiple aspects and provide guidance for enhancing model reasoning, robustness, and AI-assisted education.

PaperID: 385, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21503 GitHub

Abstract:
Recently Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved considerable advancements in visionlanguage tasks, yet produce potentially harmful or untrustworthy content. Despite substantial work investigating the trustworthiness of language models, MMLMs' capability to act honestly, especially when faced with visually unanswerable questions, remains largely underexplored. This work presents the first systematic assessment of honesty behaviors across various MLLMs. We ground honesty in models' response behaviors to unanswerable visual questions, define four representative types of such questions, and construct MoHoBench, a large-scale MMLM honest benchmark, consisting of 12k+ visual question samples, whose quality is guaranteed by multi-stage filtering and human verification. Using MoHoBench, we benchmarked the honesty of 28 popular MMLMs and conducted a comprehensive analysis. Our findings show that: (1) most models fail to appropriately refuse to answer when necessary, and (2) MMLMs' honesty is not solely a language modeling issue, but is deeply influenced by visual information, necessitating the development of dedicated methods for multimodal honesty alignment. Therefore, we implemented initial alignment methods using supervised and preference learning to improve honesty behavior, providing a foundation for future work on trustworthy MLLMs.

PaperID: 386, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02258 GitHub

Abstract:
Although Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown generalization in medical imaging, pathology presents unique challenges due to ultrahigh resolution, complex tissue structures, and nuanced semantics. These factors make pathology VLMs prone to hallucinations, i.e., generating outputs inconsistent with visual evidence, which undermines clinical trust. Existing RAG approaches in this domain largely depend on text-based knowledge bases, limiting their ability to leverage diagnostic visual cues. To address this, we propose Patho-AgenticRAG, a multimodal RAG framework with a database built on page-level embeddings from authoritative pathology textbooks. Unlike traditional text-only retrieval systems, it supports joint text–image search, enabling retrieval of textbook pages that contain both the queried text and relevant visual cues, thus avoiding the loss of critical image-based information. Patho-AgenticRAG also supports reasoning, task decomposition, and multi-turn search interactions, improving accuracy in complex diagnostic scenarios. Experiments show that Patho-AgenticRAG significantly outperforms existing multimodal models in complex pathology tasks like multiple-choice diagnosis and visual question answering.

PaperID: 387, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07295 GitHub

Abstract:
As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly popularized in the multilingual world, ensuring hallucinationfree factuality becomes markedly crucial. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating the reliability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) predominantly focus on textual or visual modalities with a primary emphasis on English, which creates a gap in evaluation when processing multilingual input, especially in speech. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel Cross-lingual and Cross-modal Factuality benchmark (CCFQA). Specifically, the CCFQA benchmark contains parallel speech-text factual questions across 8 languages, designed to systematically evaluate MLLMs' cross-lingual and cross-modal factuality capabilities. Our experimental results demonstrate that current MLLMs still face substantial challenges on the CCFQA benchmark. Furthermore, we propose a few-shot transfer learning strategy that effectively transfers the Question Answering (QA) capabilities of LLMs in English to multilingual Spoken Question Answering (SQA) tasks, achieving competitive performance with GPT-4o-mini-Audio using just 5-shot training. We release CCFQA as a foundational research resource to promote the development of MLLMs with more robust and reliable speech understanding capabilities.

PaperID: 388, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13579 GitHub

Abstract:
Improving large language models (LLMs) for electronic health record (EHR) reasoning is essential for enabling accurate and generalizable clinical predictions. While LLMs excel at medical text understanding, they underperform on EHRbased prediction tasks due to challenges in modeling temporally structured, high-dimensional data. Existing approaches often rely on hybrid paradigms, where LLMs serve merely as frozen prior retrievers while downstream deep learning (DL) models handle prediction, failing to improve the LLM’s intrinsic reasoning capacity and inheriting the generalization limitations of DL models. To this end, we propose EAG-RL, a novel two-stage training framework designed to intrinsically enhance LLMs’ EHR reasoning ability through expert attention guidance, where expert EHR models refer to task-specific DL models trained on EHR data. Concretely, EAG-RL first constructs high-quality, stepwise reasoning trajectories using expert-guided Monte Carlo Tree Search to effectively initialize the LLM’s policy. Then, EAG-RL further optimizes the policy via reinforcement learning by aligning the LLM’s attention with clinically salient features identified by expert EHR models. Extensive experiments on two real-world EHR datasets show that EAG-RL improves the intrinsic EHR reasoning ability of LLMs by an average of 14.62%, while also enhancing robustness to feature perturbations and generalization to unseen clinical domains. These results demonstrate the practical potential of EAG-RL for real-world deployment in clinical prediction tasks.

PaperID: 389, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12140 GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have unlocked powerful crossmodal capabilities, but still significantly suffer from hallucinations. As such, accurate detection of hallucinations in MLLMs is imperative for ensuring their reliability in practical applications. To this end, guided by the principle of “Seeing is Believing”, we introduce VBackChecker, a novel reference-free hallucination detection framework that verifies the consistency of MLLM-generated responses with visual inputs, by leveraging a pixel-level Grounding LLM equipped with reasoning and referring segmentation capabilities. This referencefree framework not only effectively handles rich-context scenarios, but also offers interpretability. To facilitate this, an innovative pipeline is accordingly designed for generating instruction-tuning data (R-Instruct), featuring richcontext descriptions, grounding masks, and hard negative samples. We further establish R 2 -HalBench, a new hallucination benchmark for MLLMs, which, unlike previous benchmarks, encompasses real-world, rich-context descriptions from 18 MLLMs with high-quality annotations, spanning diverse object-, attribute-, and relationship-level details. VBackChecker outperforms prior complex frameworks and achieves state-of-the-art performance on R^2 -HalBench, even rivaling GPT-4o’s capabilities in hallucination detection. It also surpasses prior methods in the pixel-level grounding task, achieving over a 10% improvement.

PaperID: 390, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13118 GitHub

Abstract:
Zeroshot event extraction (ZSEE) remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs) due to the need for complex reasoning and domain-specific understanding. Direct prompting often yields incomplete or structurally invalid outputs—such as misclassified triggers, missing arguments, and schema violations. To address these limitations, we present Agent-Event-Coder (AEC), a novel multi-agent framework that treats event extraction like software engineering: as a structured, iterative code-generation process. AEC decomposes ZSEE into specialized subtasks—retrieval, planning, coding, and verification—each handled by a dedicated LLM agent. Event schemas are represented as executable class definitions, enabling deterministic validation and precise feedback via a verification agent. This programming-inspired approach allows for systematic disambiguation and schema enforcement through iterative refinement. By leveraging collaborative agent workflows, AEC enables LLMs to produce precise, complete, and schema-consistent extractions in zero-shot settings. Experiments across five diverse domains and six LLMs demonstrate that AEC consistently outperforms prior zero-shot baselines, showcasing the power of treating event extraction like code generation.

PaperID: 391, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05909 GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown improved generation performance through retrievalaugmented generation (RAG) following the retriever-reader paradigm, which supplements model inputs with externally retrieved knowledge. However, prior work often evaluates RAG holistically, assessing the retriever and reader jointly, making it difficult to isolate the true contribution of retrieval, particularly given the prompt sensitivity of LLMs used as readers. We move beyond perplexity and introduce Spectrum Projection Score (SPS), a lightweight and supervision-free metric that allows the reader to gauge the semantic alignment of a retrieved summary with its hidden representation by comparing the area formed by generated tokens from the summary, and the principal directions of subspace in the reader and to measure the relevance. Building on SPS we present xCompress, an inference‑time controller framework that dynamically samples, ranks, and compresses retrieval summary candidates. Extensive experiments on five QA benchmarks with four open-sourced LLMs show that SPS not only enhances performance across a range of tasks but also provides a principled perspective on the interaction between retrieval and generation.

PaperID: 392, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11126 GitHub

Abstract:
With the rapid rise of social media and Internet culture, memes have become a popular medium for expressing emotional tendencies. This has sparked growing interest in Meme Emotion Understanding (MEU), which aims to classify the emotional intent behind memes by leveraging their multimodal contents. While existing efforts have achieved promising results, two major challenges remain: (1) a lack of finegrained multimodal fusion strategies, and (2) insufficient mining of memes' implicit meanings and background knowledge. To address these challenges, we propose MemoDetector, a novel framework for advancing MEU. First, we introduce a four-step textual enhancement module that utilizes the rich knowledge and reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to progressively infer and extract implicit and contextual insights from memes. These enhanced texts significantly enrich the original meme contents and provide valuable guidance for downstream classification. Next, we design a dual-stage modal fusion strategy: the first stage performs shallow fusion on raw meme image and text, while the second stage deeply integrates the enhanced visual and textual features. This hierarchical fusion enables the model to better capture nuanced cross-modal emotional cues. Experiments on two datasets, MET-MEME and MOOD, demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Specifically, MemoDetector improves F1 scores by 4.3% on MET-MEME and 3.4% on MOOD. Further ablation studies and in-depth analyses validate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach, highlighting its strong potential for advancing MEU.

PaperID: 393, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12142 GitHub

Abstract:
Source attribution aims to enhance the reliability of AIgenerated answers by including references for each statement, helping users validate the provided answers. However, existing work has primarily focused on text-only scenario and largely overlooked the role of multimodality. We introduce MAVIS, the first benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal source attribution systems that understand user intent behind visual questions, retrieve multimodal evidence, and generate long-form answers with citations. Our dataset comprises 157K visual QA instances, where each answer is annotated with fact-level citations referring to multimodal documents. We develop fine-grained automatic metrics along three dimensions of informativeness, groundedness, and fluency, and demonstrate their strong correlation with human judgments. Our key findings are threefold: (1) LVLMs with multimodal RAG generate more informative and fluent answers than unimodal RAG, but they exhibit weaker groundedness for image documents than for text documents, a gap amplified in multimodal settings. (2) Given the same multimodal documents, there is a trade-off between informativeness and groundedness across different prompting methods. (3) Our proposed method highlights mitigating contextual bias in interpreting image documents as a crucial direction for future research.

PaperID: 394, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.19247 GitHub

Abstract:
Understanding and reasoning over complex spreadsheets remain fundamental challenges for large language models (LLMs), which often struggle with intricate structures and rely solely on neural computation. In this work, we propose SheetBrain, a neurosymbolic dual-workflow agent framework for precise and interpretable reasoning over tabular data. SheetBrain consists of an understanding module that produces a comprehensive overview of the spreadsheet, including structural summaries and query-specific analyses to guide execution; an execution module that integrates a Python sandbox with preloaded table-processing libraries and an Excel helper toolkit for effective data manipulation; and a validation module that verifies the correctness of reasoning and answers, triggering re-execution if necessary. We evaluate SheetBrain on multiple public QA and manipulation benchmarks, and introduce SheetBench, a new benchmark targeting large, multi-table, and structurally complex spreadsheets. Experimental results show that SheetBrain significantly improves reasoning performance on both existing benchmarks and the more challenging scenarios presented in SheetBench.

PaperID: 395, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11019 GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently exhibit strong translation abilities, even without taskspecific fine-tuning. However, the internal mechanisms governing this innate capability remain largely opaque. To demystify this process, we leverage Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) and introduce a novel framework for identifying task-specific features. Our method first recalls features that are frequently co-activated on translation inputs and then filters them for functional coherence using a PCA-based consistency metric. This framework successfully isolates a small set of "translation initiation" features. Causal interventions demonstrate that amplifying these features steers the model towards correct translation, while ablating them induces hallucinations and off-task outputs, confirming they represent a core component of the model's innate translation competency. Moving from analysis to application, we leverage this mechanistic insight to propose a new data selection strategy for efficient fine-tuning. Specifically, we prioritize training on "mechanistically hard" samples—those that fail to naturally activate the translation initiation features. Experiments show this approach significantly improves data efficiency and suppresses hallucinations. Furthermore, we find these mechanisms are transferable to larger models of the same family. Our work not only decodes a core component of the translation mechanism in LLMs but also provides a blueprint for using internal model mechanism to create more robust and efficient models.

PaperID: 396, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.15052 GitHub

Abstract:
Glitch tokens—inputs that trigger unpredictable or anomalous behavior in Large Language Models (LLMs)—pose significant challenges to model reliability and safety. Existing detection methods primarily rely on heuristic embedding patterns or statistical anomalies within internal representations, limiting their generalizability across different model architectures and potentially missing anomalies that deviate from observed patterns. We introduce GlitchMiner, an behaviordriven framework designed to identify glitch tokens by maximizing predictive entropy. Leveraging a gradient-guided local search strategy, GlitchMiner efficiently explores the discrete token space without relying on model-specific heuristics or large-batch sampling. Extensive experiments across ten LLMs from five major model families demonstrate that GlitchMiner consistently outperforms existing approaches in detection accuracy and query efficiency, providing a generalizable and scalable solution for effective glitch token discovery.

PaperID: 397, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07943 GitHub

Abstract:
Efficient retrieval of external knowledge bases and web pages is crucial for enhancing the reasoning abilities of LLMs. Previous works on training LLMs to leverage external retrievers for solving complex problems have predominantly employed endto-end reinforcement learning. However, these approaches neglect supervision over the reasoning process, making it difficult to guarantee logical coherence and rigor. To address these limitations, we propose Thinker, a hierarchical thinking model for deep search through multi-turn interaction, making the reasoning process supervisable and verifiable. It decomposes complex problems into independently solvable sub-problems, each dually represented in both natural language and an equivalent logical function to support knowledge base and web searches. Concurrently, dependencies between sub-problems are passed as parameters via these logical functions, enhancing the logical coherence of the problem-solving process. To avoid unnecessary external searches, we perform knowledge boundary determination to check if a sub-problem is within the LLM's intrinsic knowledge, allowing it to answer directly. Experimental results indicate that with as few as several hundred training samples, the performance of Thinker is competitive with established baselines. Furthermore, when scaled to the full training set, Thinker significantly outperforms these methods across various datasets and model sizes.

PaperID: 398, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19794 GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) hold promise in automating data analysis tasks, yet opensource models face significant limitations in these kinds of reasoning-intensive scenarios. In this work, we investigate strategies to enhance the data analysis capabilities of open-source LLMs. By curating a seed dataset of diverse, realistic scenarios, we evaluate models across three dimensions: data understanding, code generation, and strategic planning. Our analysis reveals three key findings: (1) Strategic planning quality serves as the primary determinant of model performance; (2) Interaction design and task complexity significantly influence reasoning capabilities; (3) Data quality demonstrates a greater impact than diversity in achieving optimal performance. We leverage these insights to develop a data synthesis methodology, demonstrating significant improvements in open-source LLMs' analytical reasoning capabilities.

PaperID: 399, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06793 GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) extend foundation models to realworld applications by integrating inputs such as text and vision. However, their broad knowledge capacity raises growing concerns about privacy leakage, toxicity mitigation, and intellectual property violations. Machine Unlearning (MU) offers a practical solution by selectively forgetting targeted knowledge while preserving overall model utility. When applied to MLLMs, existing neuron-editing-based MU approaches face two fundamental challenges: (i) forgetting becomes inconsistent across modalities because existing point-wise attribution methods fail to capture the structured, layer-by-layer information flow that connects different modalities; and (ii) general knowledge performance declines when sensitive neurons that also support important reasoning paths are pruned, as this disrupts the model’s ability to generalize. To alleviate these limitations, we propose a multimodal influential neuron path editor (MIP-Editor) for MU. Our approach introduces modality-specific attribution scores to identify influential neuron paths responsible for encoding forget-set knowledge and applies influential-path-aware neuron-editing via representation misdirection. This strategy also enables effective and coordinated forgetting across modalities while preserving the model's general capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that MIP-Editor achieves a superior unlearning performance on multimodal tasks, with a maximum forgetting rate of 87.75% and up to 54.26% improvement in general knowledge retention. On textual tasks, MIP-Editor achieves up to 80.65% forgetting and preserves 77.90% of general performance.

PaperID: 400, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16402 GitHub

Abstract:
Flawed planning from VLMdriven embodied agents poses significant safety hazards, hindering their deployment in real-world household tasks. However, existing static, termination-oriented evaluation paradigms fail to adequately assess risks within these interactive environments, since they cannot simulate dynamic risks that emerge from an agent's actions and rely on unreliable post-hoc evaluations that ignore unsafe intermediate steps. To bridge this critical gap, we propose evaluating an agent's interactive safety: its ability to perceive emergent risks and execute mitigation steps in the correct procedural order. We thus present IS-Bench, the first multi-modal benchmark designed for interactive safety, featuring 161 challenging scenarios with 388 unique safety risks instantiated in a high-fidelity simulator. Crucially, it facilitates a novel process-oriented evaluation that verifies whether risk mitigation actions are performed before/after specific risk-prone steps. Extensive experiments on leading VLMs, including the GPT-4o and Gemini-2.5 series, reveal that current agents lack interactive safety awareness and that while safety-aware Chain-of-Thought can improve performance, it often compromises task completion. By highlighting these critical limitations, IS-Bench provides a foundation for developing safer and more reliable embodied AI systems.

PaperID: 401, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01595 GitHub

Abstract:
Although existing backdoor defenses have gained success in mitigating backdoor attacks, they still face substantial challenges. In particular, most of them rely on large amounts of clean data to weaken the backdoor mapping but generally struggle with residual trigger effects, resulting in persistently high attack success rates (ASR). Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel Backdoor defense method based on Directional mapping module and adversarial Knowledge Distillation (BeDKD), which balances the tradeoff between defense effectiveness and model performance using a small amount of clean and poisoned data. We first introduce a directional mapping module to identify poisoned data, which destroys clean mapping while keeping backdoor mapping on a small set of flipped clean data. Then, the adversarial knowledge distillation is designed to reinforce clean mapping and suppress backdoor mapping through a cycle iteration mechanism between trust and punish distillations using clean and identified poisoned data. We conduct experiments to mitigate mainstream attacks on three datasets, and experimental results demonstrate that BeDKD surpasses the state-of-the-art defenses and reduces the ASR by 98% without significantly reducing the CACC.

PaperID: 402, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22300 GitHub

Abstract:
Using risky text prompts, such as pornography and violent prompts, to test the safety of textto-image (T2I) models is a critical task. However, existing risky prompt datasets are limited in three key areas: 1) limited risky categories, 2) coarse-grained annotation, and 3) low effectiveness. To address these limitations, we introduce T2I-RiskyPrompt, a comprehensive benchmark designed for evaluating safety-related tasks in T2I models. Specifically, we first develop a hierarchical risk taxonomy, which consists of 6 primary categories and 14 fine-grained subcategories. Building upon this taxonomy, we construct a pipeline to collect and annotate risky prompts. Finally, we obtain 6,432 effective risky prompts, where each prompt is annotated with both hierarchical category labels and detailed risk reasons. Moreover, to facilitate the evaluation, we propose a reason-driven risky image detection method that explicitly aligns the MLLM with safety annotations. Based on T2I-RiskyPrompt, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of eight T2I models, nine defense methods, five safety filters, and five attack strategies, offering nine key insights into the strengths and limitations of T2I model safety. Finally, we discuss potential applications of T2I-RiskyPrompt across various research fields.

PaperID: 403, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.04076 GitHub

Abstract:
Redistricting plays a central role in shaping how votes are translated into political power. While existing computational methods primarily aim to generate large ensembles of legally valid districting plans, they often neglect the strategic dynamics involved in the selection process. This oversight creates opportunities for partisan actors to cherrypick maps that, while technically compliant, are politically advantageous. Simply satisfying formal constraints does not ensure fairness when the selection process itself can be manipulated. We propose Agentmandering, a framework that reimagines redistricting as a turn-based negotiation between two agents representing opposing political interests. Drawing inspiration from game-theoretic ideas, particularly the Choose-and-Freeze protocol, our method embeds strategic interaction into the redistricting process via large language model (LLM) agents. Agents alternate between selecting and freezing districts from a small set of candidate maps, gradually partitioning the state through constrained and interpretable choices. Evaluation on post-2020 U.S. Census data across all states shows that Agentmandering significantly reduces partisan bias and unfairness, while achieving 2 to 3 orders of magnitude lower variance than standard baselines. These results demonstrate both fairness and stability, especially in swing-state scenarios.

PaperID: 404, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06284 GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal Misinformation Detection (MMD) refers to the task of detecting social media posts involving misinformation, where the post often contains text and image modalities. However, by observing the MMD posts, we hold that the text modality may be much more informative than the image modality because the text generally describes the whole event/story of the current post but the image often presents partial scenes only. Our preliminary empirical results indicate that the image modality exactly contributes less to MMD. Upon this idea, we propose a new MMD method named RETSIMD. Specifically, we suppose that each text can be divided into several segments, and each text segment describes a partial scene that can be presented by an image. Accordingly, we split the text into a sequence of segments, and feed these segments into a pretrained text-to-image generator to augment a sequence of images. We further incorporate two auxiliary objectives concerning text-image and image-label mutual information, and further post-train the generator over an auxiliary text-to-image generation benchmark dataset. Additionally, we propose a graph structure by defining three heuristic relationships between images, and use a graph neural network to generate the fused features. Extensive empirical results validate the effectiveness of RETSIMD.

PaperID: 405, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.22070 GitHub

Abstract:
Reconstructing controllable Gaussian splats for articulated objects from monocular video is especially challenging due to its inherently insufficient constraints. Existing methods address this by relying on dense masks and manually defined control signals, limiting their realworld applications. In this paper, we propose an annotation-free method, FreeGaussian, which mathematically disentangles camera egomotion and articulated movements via flow derivatives. By establishing a connection between 2D flows and 3D Gaussian dynamic flow, our method enables optimization and continuity of dynamic Gaussian motions from flow priors without any control signals. Furthermore, we introduce a 3D spherical vector controlling scheme, which represents the state as a 3D Gaussian trajectory, thereby eliminating the need for complex 1D control signal calculations and simplifying controllable Gaussian modeling. Extensive experiments on articulated objects demonstrate the state-of-the-art visual performance and precise, part-aware controllability of our method.

PaperID: 406, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16443 GitHub

Abstract:
Optimizing the similarity between parametric shapes is crucial for numerous computer vision tasks, where Intersection over Union (IoU) stands as the canonical measure. However, existing optimization methods exhibit significant shortcomings: regressionbased losses like L1/L2 lack correlation with IoU, IoU-based losses are unstable and limited to simple shapes, and task-specific methods are computationally intensive and not generalizable across domains. As a result, the current landscape of parametric shape objective functions has become scattered, with each domain proposing distinct IoU approximations. To address this, we unify the parametric shape optimization objective functions by introducing Marginalized Generalized IoU (MGIoU), a novel loss function that overcomes these challenges by projecting structured convex shapes onto their unique shape Normals to compute one-dimensional normalized GIoU. MGIoU offers a simple, efficient, fully differentiable approximation strongly correlated with IoU. We extend MGIoU to MGIoU+ that supports optimizing unstructured convex shapes. Together, MGIoU and MGIoU+ unify parametric shape optimization across diverse applications. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that MGIoU and MGIoU+ demonstrate higher performance while reducing loss computation latency up to 10-40x. Also, MGIoU and MGIoU+ satisfy metric properties and scale-invariance, ensuring robustness as an objective function. We further propose MGIoU- for minimizing overlaps in tasks like collision-free trajectory prediction.

PaperID: 407, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.16929 GitHub

Abstract:
Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) have achieved significant success by adopting the paradigm of largescale pre-training followed by supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, existing approaches struggle with temporal reasoning due to weak temporal correspondence in the data and over-reliance on the next-token prediction paradigm, which collectively result in the absence temporal supervision. To address these limitations, we propose TEMPLE (TEMporal Preference Learning), a systematic framework that enhances temporal reasoning capabilities through Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). To address temporal information scarcity in data, we introduce an automated pipeline for systematically constructing temporality-intensive preference pairs comprising three steps: selecting temporally rich videos, designing video-specific perturbation strategies, and evaluating model responses on clean and perturbed inputs. Complementing this data pipeline, we provide additional supervision signals via preference learning and propose a novel Progressive Pre-SFT Alignment strategy featuring two key innovations: a curriculum learning strategy which progressively increases perturbation difficulty to maximize data efficiency; and applying preference optimization before instruction tuning to incentivize fundamental temporal alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently improves Video LLM performance across multiple benchmarks with a relatively small set of self-generated DPO data. Our findings highlight TEMPLE as a scalable and efficient complement to SFT-based methods, paving the way for developing reliable Video LLMs.

PaperID: 408, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.06400 GitHub

Abstract:
Multiple object tracking (MOT) technology has made significant progress in terrestrial applications, but underwater tracking scenarios remain underexplored despite their importance to marine ecology and aquaculture. In this paper, we present Multiple Fish Tracking Dataset 2025 (MFT25), a comprehensive dataset specifically designed for underwater multiple fish tracking, featuring 15 diverse video sequences with 408,578 meticulously annotated bounding boxes across 48,066 frames. Our dataset captures various underwater environments, fish species, and challenging conditions including occlusions, similar appearances, and erratic motion patterns. Additionally, we introduce Scaleaware and Unscented Tracker (SU-T), a specialized tracking framework featuring an Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) optimized for non-linear swimming patterns of fish and a novel Fish-Intersection-over-Union (FishIoU) matching that accounts for the unique morphological characteristics of aquatic species. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our SU-T baseline achieves state-of-the-art performance on MFT25, with 34.1 HOTA and 44.6 IDF1, while revealing fundamental differences between fish tracking and terrestrial object tracking scenarios.

PaperID: 409, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01232 GitHub

Abstract:
HumanScene Interaction (HSI) seeks to generate realistic human behaviors within complex environments, yet it faces significant challenges in handling long-horizon, high-level tasks and generalizing to unseen scenes. To address these limitations, we introduce FantasyHSI, a novel HSI framework centered on video generation and multi-agent systems that operates without paired data. We model the complex interaction process as a dynamic directed graph, upon which we build a collaborative multi-agent system. This system comprises a scene navigator agent for environmental perception and high-level path planning, and a planning agent that decomposes long-horizon goals into atomic actions. Critically, we introduce a critic agent that establishes a closed-loop feedback mechanism by evaluating the deviation between generated actions and the planned path. This allows for the dynamic correction of trajectory drifts caused by the stochasticity of the generative model, thereby ensuring long-term logical consistency. To enhance the physical realism of the generated motions, we leverage Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to train the action generator, significantly reducing artifacts such as limb distortion and foot-sliding. Extensive experiments on our custom SceneBench benchmark demonstrate that FantasyHSI significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of generalization, long-horizon task completion, and physical realism.

PaperID: 410, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.25067 GitHub

Abstract:
Recognizing finegrained actions from temporally corrupted skeleton sequences remains a significant challenge, particularly in real-world scenarios where online pose estimation often yields substantial missing data. Existing methods often struggle to accurately recover temporal dynamics and fine-grained spatial structures, resulting in the loss of subtle motion cues crucial for distinguishing similar actions. To address this, we propose FineTec, a unified framework for Fine-grained action recognition under Temporal Corruption. FineTec first restores a base skeleton sequence from corrupted input using context-aware completion with diverse temporal masking. Next, a skeleton-based spatial decomposition module partitions the skeleton into five semantic regions, further divides them into dynamic and static subgroups based on motion variance, and generates two augmented skeleton sequences via targeted perturbation. These, along with the base sequence, are then processed by a physics-driven estimation module, which utilizes Lagrangian dynamics to estimate joint accelerations. Finally, both the fused skeleton position sequence and the fused acceleration sequence are jointly fed into a GCN-based action recognition head. Extensive experiments on both coarse-grained (NTU-60, NTU-120) and fine-grained (Gym99, Gym288) benchmarks show that FineTec significantly outperforms previous methods under various levels of temporal corruption. Specifically, FineTec achieves top-1 accuracies of 89.1% and 78.1% on the challenging Gym99-severe and Gym288-severe settings, respectively, demonstrating its robustness and generalizability.

PaperID: 411, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15311 GitHub

Abstract:
3D VisionLanguage Foundation Models (VLFMs) have demonstrated strong generalization and zero-shot recognition capabilities in open-world point cloud processing tasks. However, their performance often degrades in practical scenarios where data are noisy, incomplete, or drawn from distributions that differ from the training data. To address this challenge, we propose Uni-Adapter, a novel training-free online test-time adaptation (TTA) strategy for 3D VLFMs based on dynamic prototype learning. Uni-Adapter maintains a 3D cache that stores class-specific cluster centers as prototypes, which are continuously updated to capture intra-class variability under heterogeneous data distributions. These dynamic prototypes serve as anchors for cache-based logit computation through similarity scoring. In parallel, a graph-based label smoothing module models inter-prototype similarities to enforce label consistency among related prototypes. Finally, predictions from the original 3D VLFM and the refined 3D cache are unified through entropy-weighted aggregation to ensure reliable adaptation. Without retraining, Uni-Adapter effectively mitigates distribution shifts and achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse 3D benchmarks and multiple 3D VLFMs, improving performance on ModelNet-40C by 10.55%, ScanObjectNN-C by 8.26%, and ShapeNet-C by 4.49% over the source 3D VLFMs.

PaperID: 412, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08032 GitHub

Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of 3D visualization, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a leading technique for realtime, high-fidelity rendering. While prior research has emphasized algorithmic performance and visual fidelity, the perceptual quality of 3DGS-rendered content, especially under varying reconstruction conditions, remains largely underexplored. In practice, factors such as viewpoint sparsity, limited training iterations, point downsampling, noise, and color distortions can significantly degrade visual quality, yet their perceptual impact has not been systematically studied. To bridge this gap, we present 3DGS-QA, the first subjective quality assessment dataset for 3DGS. It comprises 225 degraded reconstructions across 15 object types, enabling a controlled investigation of common distortion factors. Based on this dataset, we introduce a no-reference quality prediction model that directly operates on native 3D Gaussian primitives, without requiring rendered images or ground-truth references. Our model extracts spatial and photometric cues from the Gaussian representation to estimate perceived quality in a structure-aware manner. We further benchmark existing quality assessment methods, spanning both traditional and learning-based approaches. Experimental results show that our method consistently achieves superior performance, highlighting its robustness and effectiveness for 3DGS content evaluation. The dataset and code are made publicly available to facilitate future research in 3DGS quality assessment.

PaperID: 413, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.20920 GitHub

Abstract:
Referring Image Segmentation (RIS), which aims to segment specific objects based on natural language descriptions, plays an essential role in visionlanguage understanding. Despite its progress in remote sensing applications, RIS under Low-Altitude Drone (LAD) scenarios remains underexplored, as existing datasets and methods are typically designed for high-altitude and static-view imagery. They struggled to handle the unique characteristics of LAD views, such as diverse viewpoints and high object density. In this paper, we propose RIS-LAD, the first fine-grained RIS benchmark tailored for LAD scenarios, featuring 13,871 meticulously annotated image-text-mask triplets collected from real-world drone footage with emphasis on small, densely cluttered objects and multi-view perspectives. Additionally, we propose the Semantic-Aware Adaptive Reasoning Network, which decomposes and adaptively routes semantic information to different network stages rather than uniformly injecting all linguistic features. Specifically, the Category-Dominated Linguistic Enhancement aligns visual features with object categories during early encoding, while the Adaptive Reasoning Fusion Module dynamically selects semantic cues across scales to enhance reasoning in complex scenes. Extensive experiments reveal that RIS-LAD presents substantial challenges to state-of-the-art RIS algorithms, and also demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model in addressing these challenges.

PaperID: 414, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10334 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advancements in weaklysupervised video anomaly detection have achieved remarkable performance by applying the multiple instance learning paradigm based on multimodal foundation models such as CLIP to highlight anomalous instances and classify categories. However, their objectives may tend to detect the most salient response segments, while neglecting to mine diverse normal patterns separated from anomalies, and are prone to category confusion due to similar appearance, leading to unsatisfactory fine-grained classification results. Therefore, we propose a novel Disentangled Semantic Alignment Network (DSANet) to explicitly separate abnormal and normal features from coarse-grained and fine-grained aspects, enhancing the distinguishability. Specifically, at the coarse-grained level, we introduce a self-guided normality modeling branch that reconstructs input video features under the guidance of learned normal prototypes, encouraging the model to exploit normality cues inherent in the video, thereby improving the temporal separation of normal patterns and anomalous events. At the fine-grained level, we present a decoupled contrastive semantic alignment mechanism, which first temporally decomposes each video into event-centric and background-centric components using frame-level anomaly scores and then applies visual-language contrastive learning to enhance class-discriminative representations. Comprehensive experiments on two standard benchmarks, namely XD-Violence and UCF-Crime, demonstrate that DSANet outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 415, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12472 GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have greatly advanced knowledge graph question answering (KGQA), yet existing systems are typically optimized for returning highly relevant but predictable answers. A missing yet desired capacity is to exploit LLMs to suggest surprise and novel ("serendipitious") answers. In this paper, we formally define the serendipityaware KGQA task and propose the SerenQA framework to evaluate LLMs' ability to uncover unexpected insights in scientific KGQA tasks. SerenQA includes a rigorous serendipity metric based on relevance, novelty, and surprise, along with an expert-annotated benchmark derived from the Clinical Knowledge Graph for drug repurposing. Additionally, it features a structured evaluation pipeline encompassing three subtasks: knowledge retrieval, subgraph reasoning, and serendipity exploration. Our experiments reveal that while state-of-the-art LLMs perform well on retrieval, they still struggle to identify genuinely surprising and valuable discoveries, underscoring a significant room for future research.

PaperID: 416, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09737 GitHub

Abstract:
Generalization to unseen environments is a significant challenge in the field of robotics and control. In this work, we focus on contextual reinforcement learning, where agents act within environments with varying contexts, such as selfdriving cars or quadrupedal robots that need to operate in different terrains or weather conditions than they were trained for. We tackle the critical task of generalizing to out-of-distribution (OOD) settings, without access to explicit context information at test time. Recent work has addressed this problem by training a context encoder and a history adaptation module in separate stages. While promising, this two-phase approach is cumbersome to implement and train. We simplify the methodology and introduce SPARC: single-phase adaptation for robust control. We test SPARC on varying contexts within the high-fidelity racing simulator Gran Turismo 7 and wind-perturbed MuJoCo environments, and find that it achieves reliable and robust OOD generalization.

PaperID: 417, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09090 GitHub

Abstract:
Videoto-music (V2M) generation aims to create music that aligns with visual content. However, two main challenges persist in existing methods: (1) the lack of explicit rhythm modeling hinders audiovisual temporal alignments; (2) effectively integrating various visual features to condition music generation remains non-trivial. To address these issues, we propose Diff-V2M, a general V2M framework based on a hierarchical conditional diffusion model, comprising two core components: visual feature extraction and conditional music generation. For rhythm modeling, we begin by evaluating several rhythmic representations, including low-resolution mel-spectrograms, tempograms, and onset detection functions (ODF), and devise a rhythmic predictor to infer them directly from videos. To ensure contextual and affective coherence, we also extract semantic and emotional features. All features are incorporated into the generator via a hierarchical cross-attention mechanism, where emotional features shape the affective tone via the first layer, while semantic and rhythmic features are fused in the second cross-attention layer. To enhance feature integration, we introduce timestep-aware fusion strategies, including feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM) and weighted fusion, allowing the model to adaptively balance semantic and rhythmic cues throughout the diffusion process. Extensive experiments identify low-resolution ODF as a more effective signal for modeling musical rhythm and demonstrate that Diff-V2M outperforms existing models on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance in terms of objective metrics and subjective comparisons.

PaperID: 418, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13992 GitHub

Abstract:
Audio comprehension—including speech, nonspeech sounds, and music—is essential for achieving human-level intelligence. Consequently, AI agents must demonstrate holistic audio understanding to qualify as generally intelligent. However, evaluating auditory intelligence comprehensively remains challenging. To address this gap, we introduce MMAU-Pro, the most comprehensive and rigorously curated benchmark for assessing audio intelligence in AI systems. MMAU-Pro contains 5,305 instances, where each instance has one or more audios paired with human expert-generated question-answer pairs, spanning speech, sound, music, and their combinations. Unlike existing benchmarks, MMAU-Pro evaluates auditory intelligence across 49 unique skills and multiple complex dimensions, including long-form audio comprehension, spatial audio reasoning, multi-audio understanding, among others. All questions are meticulously designed to require deliberate multi-hop reasoning, including both multiple-choice and open-ended response formats. Importantly, audio data is sourced directly ``from the wild" rather than from existing datasets with known distributions. We evaluate 22 leading open-source and proprietary multimodal AI models, revealing significant limitations: even state-of-the-art models such as Gemini 2.5 Flash and Audio Flamingo 3 achieve only 57.33% and 45.9% accuracy, respectively, approaching random performance in multiple categories. Our extensive analysis highlights specific shortcomings and provides novel insights, offering actionable perspectives for the community to enhance future AI systems' progression toward audio general intelligence.

PaperID: 419, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.27486 GitHub

Abstract:
AdamW has become one of the most effective optimizers for training largescale models. We have also observed its effectiveness in the context of federated learning (FL). However, directly applying AdamW in federated learning settings poses significant challenges: (1) due to data heterogeneity, AdamW often yields high variance in the second-moment estimate v; (2) the local overfitting of AdamW may cause client drift; and (3) Reinitializing moment estimates (v, m) at each round slows down convergence. To address these challenges, we propose the first Federated AdamW algorithm, called FedAdamW, for training and fine-tuning various large models. FedAdamW aligns local updates with the global update using both a local correction mechanism and decoupled weight decay to mitigate local overfitting. FedAdamW efficiently aggregates the mean of the second-moment estimates to reduce their variance and reinitialize them. Theoretically, we prove that FedAdamW achieves a linear speedup convergence rate of O（p（L∆σ2l ）/（SKRε2） + （L∆）/R） without heterogeneity assumption, where S is the number of participating clients per round, K is the number of local iterations, and R is the total number of communication rounds. We also employ PAC-Bayesian generalization analysis to explain the effectiveness of decoupled weight decay in local training. Empirically, we validate the effectiveness of FedAdamW on language and vision Transformer models. Compared to several baselines, FedAdamW significantly reduces communication rounds and improves test accuracy.

PaperID: 420, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10552 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) still struggle with long document understanding due to two fundamental challenges: information interference from abundant irrelevant content, and the quadratic computational cost of Transformerbased architectures. Existing approaches primarily fall into two categories: token compression, which sacrifices fine-grained details; and introducing external retrievers, which increase system complexity and prevent end-to-end optimization. To address these issues, we conduct an in-depth analysis and observe that MLLMs exhibit a human-like coarse-to-fine reasoning pattern: early Transformer layers attend broadly across the document, while deeper layers focus on relevant evidence pages. Motivated by this insight, we posit that the inherent evidence localization capabilities of MLLMs can be explicitly leveraged to perform retrieval during the reasoning process, facilitating efficient long document understanding. To this end, we propose URaG, a simple-yet-effective framework that Unifies Retrieval and Generation within a single MLLM. URaG introduces a lightweight cross-modal retrieval module that converts the early Transformer layers into an efficient evidence selector, identifying and preserving the most relevant pages while discarding irrelevant content. This design enables the deeper layers to concentrate computational resources on pertinent information, improving both accuracy and efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that URaG achieves state-of-the-art performance while reducing computational overhead by 44-56%.

PaperID: 421, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11667 GitHub

Abstract:
Adversarial text attacks remain a persistent threat to transformer models, yet existing defenses are typically attackspecific or require costly model retraining, leaving a gap for attack-agnostic detection. We introduce Guided Perturbation Sensitivity (GPS), a detection framework that identifies adversarial examples by measuring how embedding representations change when important words are masked. GPS first ranks words using importance heuristics, then measures embedding sensitivity to masking top-k critical words, and processes the resulting patterns with a BiLSTM detector. Experiments show that adversarially perturbed words exhibit disproportionately high masking sensitivity compared to naturally important words. Across three datasets, three attack types, and two victim models, GPS achieves over 85% detection accuracy and demonstrates competitive performance compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, often at lower computational cost. Using Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) to measure perturbation identification quality, we demonstrate that gradient-based ranking significantly outperforms attention, hybrid, and random selection approaches, with identification quality strongly correlating with detection performance for word-level attacks (ρ = 0.65). GPS generalizes to unseen datasets, attacks, and models without retraining, providing a practical solution for adversarial text detection.

PaperID: 422, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.05899 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have positioned them as a promising paradigm for agents, with longterm planning and decision-making emerging as core general-purpose capabilities for adapting to diverse scenarios and tasks. Real-time strategy (RTS) games serve as an ideal testbed for evaluating these two capabilities, as their inherent gameplay requires both macro-level strategic planning and micro-level tactical adaptation and action execution. Existing RTS game-based environments either suffer from relatively high computational demands or lack support for textual observations, which has constrained the use of RTS games for LLM evaluation. Motivated by this, we present TowerMind, a novel environment grounded in the tower defense (TD) subgenre of RTS games. TowerMind preserves the key evaluation strengths of RTS games for assessing LLMs, while featuring low computational demands and a multimodal observation space, including pixel-based, textual, and structured game-state representations. In addition, TowerMind supports the evaluation of model hallucination and provides a high degree of customizability. We design five benchmark levels to evaluate several widely used LLMs under different multimodal input settings. The results reveal a clear performance gap between LLMs and human experts across both capability and hallucination dimensions. The experiments further highlight key limitations in LLM behavior, such as inadequate planning validation, a lack of multifinality in decision-making, and inefficient action use. We also evaluate two classic reinforcement learning algorithms: Ape-X DQN and PPO. By offering a lightweight and multimodal design, TowerMind complements the existing RTS game-based environment landscape and introduces a new benchmark for the AI agent field.

PaperID: 423, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18993 GitHub

Abstract:
Beyond scratch coding, exploiting largescale code repositories (e.g., GitHub) for practical tasks is vital in real-world software development, yet current benchmarks rarely evaluate code agents in such authentic, workflow-driven scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce GitTaskBench, a benchmark designed to systematically assess this capability via 54 realistic tasks across 7 modalities and 7 domains. Each task pairs a relevant repository with an automated, human-curated evaluation harness specifying practical success criteria. Beyond measuring execution and task success, we also propose the alpha-value metric to quantify the economic benefit of agent performance, which integrates task success rates, token cost, and average developer salaries. Experiments across three state-of-the-art agent frameworks with multiple advanced LLMs show that leveraging code repositories for complex task solving remains challenging: even the best-performing system, OpenHands+Claude 3.7, solves only 48.15% of tasks. Error analysis attributes over half of failures to seemingly mundane yet critical steps like environment setup and dependency resolution, highlighting the need for more robust workflow management and increased timeout preparedness. By releasing GitTaskBench, we aim to drive progress and attention toward repository-aware code reasoning, execution, and deployment---moving agents closer to solving complex, end-to-end real-world tasks.

PaperID: 424, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02659 GitHub

Abstract:
LowRank Adaptation (LoRA) is the leading parameter-efficient fine-tuning method for Large Language Models (LLMs), but it still suffers from catastrophic forgetting. Recent work has shown that specialized LoRA initialization can alleviate catastrophic forgetting. There are currently two approaches to LoRA initialization aimed at preventing knowledge forgetting during fine-tuning: (1) making residual weights close to pre-trained weights, and (2) ensuring the space of LoRA initialization is orthogonal to pre-trained knowledge. The former is what current methods strive to achieve, while the importance of the latter is not sufficiently recognized. We find that the space of LoRA initialization is the key to preserving pre-trained knowledge rather than the residual weights. Existing methods like MiLoRA propose making the LoRA initialization space orthogonal to pre-trained weights. However, MiLoRA utilizes the null space of pre-trained weights. Compared to pre-trained weights, the input activations of pre-trained knowledge take into account the parameters of all previous layers as well as the input data, while pre-trained weights only contain information from the current layer. Moreover, we find that the effective ranks of input activations are much smaller than those of pre-trained weights. Thus, the null space of activations is more accurate and contains less pre-trained knowledge information compared to that of weights. Based on these, we introduce LoRA-Null, our proposed method that initializes LoRA in the null space of activations. Experimental results show that LoRA-Null effectively preserves the pre-trained world knowledge of LLMs while achieving good fine-tuning performance, as evidenced by extensive experiments.

PaperID: 425, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23816 GitHub

Abstract:
Despite advances in large language models (LLMs) on reasoning and instructionfollowing benchmarks, it is unclear whether they can reliably produce outputs aligned with a variety of user goals, a concept called steerability. We highlight two gaps in current LLM evaluations for assessing steerability. First, many benchmarks are built with past LLM chats and text scraped from the Internet, which may skew towards common requests, underrepresenting less-common requests by potential users. Second, prior work measures performance as a scalar, which could conceal behavioral shifts in LLM outputs in open-ended generation. To mitigate these gaps, we introduce a framework based on a multi-dimensional goal space that models user goals and LLM outputs as vectors with dimensions corresponding to text attributes (e.g., reading difficulty). Applied to a text-rewriting task, we find that current LLMs induce intended changes or "side-effects" to text attributes, impeding steerability. Interventions to improve steerability, such as prompt engineering, best-of-N sampling, and reinforcement learning fine-tuning, have varying effectiveness, yet side effects remain problematic. Our findings suggest that even strong LLMs struggle with steerability, and existing alignment strategies may be insufficient.

PaperID: 426, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.09353 GitHub

Abstract:
Large VisionLanguage Models (LVLMs) have achieved impressive progress across various applications but remain vulnerable to malicious queries. Existing safety alignment approaches typically fail to resist malicious queries while preserving utility on benign ones effectively. To address these challenges, we propose DAVSP, which is built upon two key innovations. First, we introduce Visual Safety Prompt, which appends a trainable padding region around the input image. It preserves visual features and expands the optimization space. Second, we propose Deep Alignment, a novel approach to train the visual safety prompt through supervision in the model's activation space. It enhances the inherent ability of LVLMs to perceive malicious queries, achieving deeper alignment than prior works. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DAVSP effectively resists malicious queries while preserving benign input utility. Furthermore, DAVSP exhibits great cross-model generation ability. Ablation studies further reveal that both the Visual Safety Prompt and Deep Alignment are essential to the overall effectiveness.

PaperID: 427, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14443 GitHub

Abstract:
While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has rapidly advanced, its application in agriculture remains underexplored. Agricultural scenes pose unique challenges for 3D reconstruction methods, notably uneven illumination, occlusions, and limited perspectives. To address these limitations, we introduce NTRPlant, a novel multimodal dataset encompassing NearInfrared (NIR), RGB imagery, textual metadata, Depth, and LiDAR collected under varied indoor and outdoor lighting conditions. By integrating NIR data, our approach enhances robustness and extracts crucial botanical insights beyond visible spectra. Additionally, we leverage text-based metadata derived from vegetation indices, such as NDVI, NDWI, and chlorophyll index, significantly enriching the contextual understanding of complex agricultural environments. To fully exploit these modalities, we propose NIRSplat, an effective multimodal Gaussian splatting architecture employing a cross-attention mechanism combined with 3D point-based positional encoding, providing robust geometric priors. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that NIRSplat outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, including 3DGS and InstantSplat, highlighting its effectiveness in challenging agricultural scenarios.

PaperID: 428, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.09862 GitHub

Abstract:
Millimeterwave radar offers a privacy-preserving and environment-robust alternative to vision-based sensing, enabling human motion analysis in challenging conditions such as low light, occlusions, rain, or smoke. However, its sparse point clouds pose significant challenges for semantic understanding. We present RadarLLM, the first framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) for human motion understanding from radar signals. RadarLLM introduces two key innovations: (1) a motion-guided radar tokenizer based on our Aggregate VQ-VAE architecture, integrating deformable body templates and masked trajectory modeling to convert spatial-temporal radar sequences into compact semantic tokens; and (2) a radar-aware language model that establishes cross-modal alignment between radar and text in a shared embedding space. To overcome the scarcity of paired radar-text data, we generate a realistic radar-text dataset from motion-text datasets with a physics-aware synthesis pipeline. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that RadarLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance, enabling robust and interpretable motion understanding under privacy and visibility constraints, even in adverse environments.

PaperID: 429, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.04634 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent advances in dance generation have enabled the automatic synthesis of 3D dance motions. However, existing methods still face significant challenges in simultaneously achieving high realism, precise dancemusic synchronization, diverse motion expression, and physical plausibility. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach that leverages a generative masked text-to-motion model as a distribution prior to learn a probabilistic mapping from diverse guidance signals, including music, genre, and pose, into high-quality dance motion sequences. Our framework also supports semantic motion editing, such as motion inpainting and body part modification. Specifically, we introduce a multi-tower masked motion model that integrates a text-conditioned masked motion backbone with two parallel, modality-specific branches: a music-guidance tower and a pose-guidance tower. The model is trained using synchronized and progressive masked training, which allows effective infusion of the pretrained text-to-motion prior into the dance synthesis process while enabling each guidance branch to optimize independently through its own loss function, mitigating gradient interference. During inference, we introduce classifier-free logits guidance and pose-guided token optimization to strengthen the influence of music, genre, and pose signals. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method sets a new state of the art in dance generation, significantly advancing the quality and editability over existing approaches.

PaperID: 430, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13659 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent researchers have proposed using event cameras for person reidentification (ReID) due to their promising performance and better balance in terms of privacy protection, event camera-based person ReID has attracted significant attention. Currently, mainstream event-based person ReID algorithms primarily focus on fusing visible light and event stream, as well as preserving privacy. Although significant progress has been made, these methods are typically trained and evaluated on small-scale or simulated event camera datasets, making it difficult to assess their real identification performance and generalization ability. To address the issue of data scarcity, this paper introduces a large-scale RGB-event based person ReID dataset, called EvReID. The dataset contains 118,988 image pairs and covers 1200 pedestrian identities, with data collected across multiple seasons, scenes, and lighting conditions. We also evaluate 15 state-of-the-art person ReID algorithms, laying a solid foundation for future research in terms of both data and benchmarking. Based on our newly constructed dataset, this paper further proposes a pedestrian attribute-guided contrastive learning framework to enhance feature learning for person re-identification, termed TriPro-ReID. This framework not only effectively explores the visual features from both RGB frames and event streams, but also fully utilizes pedestrian attributes as mid-level semantic features. Extensive experiments on the EvReID dataset and MARS datasets fully validated the effectiveness of our proposed RGB-Event person ReID framework.

PaperID: 431, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07334 GitHub

Abstract:
We present Autoregressive Representation Alignment (ARRA), a new training framework that unlocks globalcoherent text-to-image generation in autoregressive LLMs without architectural modifications. Different from prior works that require complex architectural redesigns, ARRA aligns LLM's hidden states with visual representations from external visual foundational models via a global visual alignment loss and a hybrid token, . This token enforces dual constraints: local next-token prediction and global semantic distillation, enabling LLMs to implicitly learn spatial and contextual coherence while retaining their original autoregressive paradigm. Extensive experiments validate ARRA's plug-and-play versatility. When training T2I LLMs from scratch, ARRA reduces FID by 16.6% (ImageNet), 12.0% (LAION-COCO) for autoregressive LLMs like LlamaGen, without modifying original architecture and inference mechanism. For training from text-generation-only LLMs, ARRA reduces FID by 25.5% (MIMIC-CXR), 8.8% (DeepEyeNet) for advanced LLMs like Chameleon. For domain adaptation, ARRA aligns general-purpose LLMs with specialized models (e.g., BioMedCLIP), achieving an 18.6% FID reduction over direct fine-tuning on medical imaging (MIMIC-CXR). These results demonstrate that training objective redesign, rather than architectural modifications, can resolve cross-modal global coherence challenges. ARRA offers a complementary paradigm for advancing autoregressive models.

PaperID: 432, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17397 GitHub

Abstract:
Multimodal Action Quality Assessment (AQA) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm. By leveraging complementary information across shared contextual cues, it enhances the discriminative evaluation of subtle intraclass variations in highly similar action sequences. However, partial modalities are frequently unavailable at the inference stage in reality. The absence of any modality often renders existing multimodal models inoperable. Furthermore, it triggers catastrophic performance degradation due to interruptions in cross-modal interactions. To address this issue, we propose a novel Missing Completion Framework with Mixture of Experts (MCMoE) that unifies unimodal and joint representation learning in single-stage training. Specifically, we propose an adaptive gated modality generator that dynamically fuses available information to reconstruct missing modalities. We then design modality experts to learn unimodal knowledge and dynamically mix the knowledge of all experts to extract cross-modal joint representations. With a mixture of experts, missing modalities are further refined and complemented. Finally, in the training phase, we mine the complete multimodal features and unimodal expert knowledge to guide modality generation and generation-based joint representation extraction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our MCMoE achieves state-of-the-art results in both complete and incomplete multimodal learning on three public AQA benchmarks.

PaperID: 433, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16791 GitHub

Abstract:
Fullbody motion tracking plays an essential role in AR/VR applications, bridging physical and virtual interactions. However, it is challenging to reconstruct realistic and diverse full-body poses based on sparse signals obtained by head-mounted displays, which are the main devices in AR/VR scenarios. Existing methods for pose reconstruction often incur high computational costs or rely on separately modeling spatial and temporal dependencies, making it difficult to balance accuracy, temporal coherence, and efficiency. To address this problem, we propose KineST, a novel kinematics-guided state space model, which effectively extracts spatiotemporal dependencies while integrating local and global pose perception. The innovation comes from two core ideas. Firstly, in order to better capture intricate joint relationships, the scanning strategy within the State Space Duality framework is reformulated into kinematics-guided bidirectional scanning, which embeds kinematic priors. Secondly, a mixed spatiotemporal representation learning approach is employed to tightly couple spatial and temporal contexts, balancing accuracy and smoothness. Additionally, a geometric angular velocity loss is introduced to impose physically meaningful constraints on rotational variations for further improving motion stability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that KineST has superior performance in both accuracy and temporal consistency within a lightweight framework.

PaperID: 434, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15261 GitHub

Abstract:
Pansharpening aims to generate high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) images by integrating a high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) image with its corresponding low-resolution multispectral (MS) image. To achieve effective fusion, it is crucial to fully exploit the complementary information between the two modalities. Traditional CNN-based methods typically rely on channel-wise concatenation with fixed convolutional operators, which limits their adaptability to diverse spatial and spectral variations. While cross-attention mechanisms enable global interactions, they are computationally inefficient and may dilute fine-grained correspondences, making it difficult to capture complex semantic relationships. Recent advances in the Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MMDiT) architecture have demonstrated impressive success in image generation and editing tasks. Unlike cross-attention, MMDiT employs in-context conditioning to facilitate more direct and efficient cross-modal information exchange. In this paper, we propose MMMamba, a cross-modal in-context fusion framework for pan-sharpening, with the flexibility to support image super-resolution in a zero-shot manner. Built upon the Mamba architecture, our design ensures linear computational complexity while maintaining strong cross-modal interaction capacity. Furthermore, we introduce a novel multimodal interleaved (MI) scanning mechanism that facilitates effective information exchange between the PAN and MS modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques across multiple tasks and benchmarks.

PaperID: 435, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17795 GitHub

Abstract:
Largelanguage-model (LLM) agents excel at reactive dialogue but struggle with proactive, goal-driven interactions due to myopic decoding and costly planning. We introduce DialogXpert, which leverages a frozen LLM to propose a small, high-quality set of candidate actions per turn and employs a compact Q-network over fixed BERT embeddings trained via temporal-difference learning to select optimal moves within this reduced space. By tracking the user's emotions DialogXpert tailors each decision to advance the task while nurturing a genuine, empathetic connection. Across negotiation, emotional support, and tutoring benchmarks, DialogXpert drives conversations to under 3 turns with success rates exceeding 94% and, with a larger LLM prior, pushes success above 97% while markedly improving negotiation outcomes. This framework delivers real-time, strategic, and emotionally intelligent dialogue planning at scale.

PaperID: 436, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01773 GitHub

Abstract:
Large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex mathematical reasoning tasks, but they inevitably generate errors throughout multistep solutions. Process-level Reward Models (PRMs) have shown great promise by providing supervision and evaluation at each intermediate step, thereby effectively improving the models’ reasoning abilities. However, training effective PRMs requires high-quality process reward data, yet existing methods for constructing such data are often labour-intensive or inefficient. In this paper, we propose an uncertainty-driven framework for automated process reward data construction, encompassing both data generation and annotation processes for PRMs. Additionally, we identify the limitations of both majority vote and PRMs, and introduce two generic uncertainty-aware output aggregation methods: Hybrid Majority Reward Vote and Weighted Reward Frequency Vote, which combine the strengths of majority vote with PRMs. Extensive experiments on ProcessBench, MATH, and GSMPlus show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed PRM data construction framework, and demonstrate that the two output aggregation methods further improve the mathematical reasoning abilities across diverse PRMs.

PaperID: 437, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04832 GitHub

Abstract:
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) extend large language models with explicit, multistep reasoning traces to enhance transparency and performance on complex tasks. However, these reasoning traces can be redundant or logically inconsistent, becoming a new and hard-to-detect source of hallucination. Existing hallucination detection methods focus primarily on answer-level uncertainty and often fail to detect hallucinations or logical inconsistencies arising from the model’s reasoning trace. This oversight is particularly problematic for LRMs, where the explicit thinking trace is not only an important support to the model's decision-making process but also a key source of potential hallucination. To this end, we propose RACE (Reasoning and Answer Consistency Evaluation), a novel framework specifically tailored for hallucination detection in LRMs. RACE operates by extracting essential reasoning steps and computing four diagnostic signals: inter-sample consistency of reasoning traces, entropy-based answer uncertainty, semantic alignment between reasoning and answers, and internal coherence of reasoning. This joint analysis enables fine-grained hallucination detection even when the final answer appears correct. Experiments across datasets and different LLMs demonstrate that RACE outperforms existing hallucination detection baselines, offering a robust and generalizable solution for evaluating LRMs.

PaperID: 438, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02393 GitHub

Abstract:
LLM's code generation capabilities have yielded substantial improvements in the effectiveness of programming tasks. However, LLMgenerated code still suffers from compilation and runtime errors. Existing offline preference optimization methods primarily focus on enhancing LLMs' coding abilities using pass/fail signals in the preference data, overlooking the deep-level error types in the failed codes. To address this, we propose Adaptively Progressive Preference Optimization (AP2O) for coding (i.e., AP2O-Coder), a method that guides LLMs adaptively and methodically to reduce code errors for code generation. Specifically, we construct an error notebook from failed codes and progressively optimize the LLM to correct errors type by type. Furthermore, we adaptively replay error types to tailor to the LLM's evolving weaknesses throughout training. Through extensive experiments on both code and general LLMs (Llama, Qwen, and DeepSeek series) with parameters ranging from 0.5B to 34B, our AP2O-Coder improves code generation performance by up to 3% in pass@k while using less preference data.

PaperID: 439, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04685 GitHub

Abstract:
Existing speech tokenizers typically assign a fixed number of tokens per second, regardless of the varying information density or temporal fluctuations in the speech signal. This uniform token allocation mismatches the intrinsic structure of speech, where information is distributed unevenly over time. To address this, we propose VARSTok, a VAriableframe-Rate Speech Tokenizer that adapts token allocation based on local feature similarity. VARSTok introduces two key innovations: (1) a temporal-aware density peak clustering algorithm that adaptively segments speech into variable-length units, and (2) a novel implicit duration coding scheme that embeds both content and temporal span into a single token index, eliminating the need for auxiliary duration predictors. Extensive experiments show that VARSTok significantly outperforms strong fixed-rate baselines. Notably, it achieves superior reconstruction naturalness while using up to 23% fewer tokens than a 40 Hz fixed-frame-rate baseline. VARSTok further yields lower word error rates and improved naturalness in zero-shot text-to-speech synthesis. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to demonstrate that a fully dynamic, variable-frame-rate acoustic speech tokenizer can be seamlessly integrated into downstream speech language models.

PaperID: 440, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.16486 GitHub

Abstract:
Continual TestTime Adaptation (CTTA), which aims to adapt the pre-trained model to ever-evolving target domains, emerges as an important task for vision models. As current vision models appear to be heavily biased towards texture, continuously adapting the model from one domain distribution to another can result in serious catastrophic forgetting. Drawing inspiration from the the encoding characteristics of neuron activation in neural networks, we propose the Mixture-of-Activation-Sparsity-Experts (MoASE) for the CTTA task. Given the distinct reaction of neurons with low and high activation to domain-specific and agnostic features, MoASE decomposes the neural activation into high-activation and low-activation components in each expert with a Spatial Differentiable Dropout (SDD). Based on the decomposition, we devise a Domain-Aware Router (DAR) that utilizes domain information to adaptively weight experts that process the post-SDD sparse activations, and the Activation Sparsity Gate (ASG) that adaptively assigns feature selection thresholds of the SDD for different experts for more precise feature decomposition. Finally, we introduce a Homeostatic-Proximal (HP) loss to maintain update consistency between the teacher and student experts to prevent error accumulation. Extensive experiments substantiate that MoASE achieves state-of-the-art performance in both classification and segmentation tasks.

PaperID: 441, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.20923 GitHub

Abstract:
Multiobjective combinatorial optimization problems (MOCOP) frequently arise in practical applications that require the simultaneous optimization of conflicting objectives. Although traditional evolutionary algorithms can be effective, they typically depend on domain knowledge and repeated parameter tuning, limiting flexibility when applied to unseen MOCOP instances. Recently, integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into evolutionary computation has opened new avenues for automatic heuristic generation, using their advanced language understanding and code synthesis capabilities. Nevertheless, most existing approaches predominantly focus on single-objective tasks, often neglecting key considerations such as runtime efficiency and heuristic diversity in multi-objective settings. To bridge this gap, we introduce Multi-heuristics for MOCOP via Pareto-Grid-guided Evolution of LLMs (MPaGE), a novel enhancement of the Simple Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization (SEMO) framework that leverages LLMs and Pareto Front Grid (PFG) technique. By partitioning the objective space into grids and retaining top-performing candidates to guide heuristic generation, MPaGE utilizes LLMs to prioritize heuristics with semantically distinct logical structures during variation, thus promoting diversity and mitigating redundancy within the population. Through extensive evaluations, MPaGE demonstrates superior performance over existing LLM-based frameworks, and achieves competitive results to traditional Multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs), with significantly faster runtime.

PaperID: 442, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17597 GitHub

Abstract:
Wildfire risk prediction remains a critical yet challenging task due to the complex interactions among fuel conditions, meteorology, topography, and human activity. Despite growing interest in datadriven approaches, publicly available benchmark datasets that support long-term temporal modeling, large-scale spatial coverage, and multimodal drivers remain scarce. To address this gap, we present a 25-year, daily-resolution wildfire dataset covering 240 million hectares across British Columbia and surrounding regions. The dataset includes 38 covariates, encompassing active fire detections, weather variables, fuel conditions, terrain features, and anthropogenic factors. Using this benchmark, we evaluate a diverse set of time-series forecasting models, including CNN-based, linear-based, Transformer-based, and Mamba-based architectures. We also investigate effectiveness of position embedding and the relative importance of different fire-driving factors.

PaperID: 443, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11048 GitHub

Abstract:
4D flow magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a reliable, noninvasive approach for estimating blood flow velocities, vital for cardiovascular diagnostics. Unlike conventional MRI focused on anatomical structures, 4D flow MRI requires high spatiotemporal resolution for early detection of critical conditions such as stenosis or aneurysms. However, achieving such resolution typically results in prolonged scan times, creating a trade-off between acquisition speed and prediction accuracy. Recent studies have leveraged physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for super-resolution of MRI data, but their practical applicability is limited as the prohibitively slow training process must be performed for each patient. To overcome this limitation, we propose PINGS-X, a novel framework modeling high-resolution flow velocities using axes-aligned spatiotemporal Gaussian representations. Inspired by the effectiveness of 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) in novel view synthesis, PINGS-X extends this concept through several non-trivial novel innovations: (i) normalized Gaussian splatting with a formal convergence guarantee, (ii) axes-aligned Gaussians that simplify training for high-dimensional data while preserving accuracy and the convergence guarantee, and (iii) a Gaussian merging procedure to prevent degenerate solutions and boost computational efficiency. Experimental results on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and real 4D flow MRI datasets demonstrate that PINGS-X substantially reduces training time while achieving superior super-resolution accuracy.

PaperID: 444, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03194 GitHub

Abstract:
Hate speech detection on social media faces challenges in both accuracy and explainability, especially for underexplored Indic languages. We propose a novel explainabilityguided training framework, X-MuTeST (eXplainable Multilingual haTe Speech deTection), for hate speech detection that combines high-level semantic reasoning from large language models (LLMs) with traditional attention-enhancing techniques. We extend this research to Hindi and Telugu alongside English by providing benchmark human-annotated rationales for each word to justify the assigned class label. The X-MuTeST explainability method computes the difference between the prediction probabilities of the original text and those of unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams. Final explanations are computed as the union between LLM explanations and X-MuTeST explanations. We show that leveraging human rationales during training enhances both classification performance and the model’s explainability. Moreover, combining human rationales with our explainability method to refine the model’s attention yields further improvements. We evaluate explainability using Plausibility metrics such as Token-F1 and IOU-F1, and Faithfulness metrics such as Comprehensiveness and Sufficiency. By focusing on under-resourced languages, our work advances hate speech detection across diverse linguistic contexts. Our dataset includes token-level rationale annotations for 6,004 Hindi, 4,492 Telugu, and 6,334 English samples.

PaperID: 445, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15574 GitHub

Abstract:
Language acquisition is vital to revealing the nature of human language intelligence and has recently emerged as a promising perspective for improving the interpretability of large language models (LLMs). However, it is ethically and practically infeasible to conduct experiments that require controlling human learners' language inputs. This poses challenges for the verifiability and scalability of language acquisition modeling, particularly in Chinese second language acquisition (SLA). While LLMs provide a controllable and reproducible alternative, a systematic benchmark to support phasewise modeling and assessment is still lacking. To address these issues, we propose HSKBenchmark, the first benchmark for staged modeling and writing assessment of LLMs in Chinese SLA. The benchmark covers HSK levels 3 to 6, comprising authentic textbooks with 6.76M tokens, 16K synthetic instruction data, 30 test topics and a linguistically-grounded evaluation system. To simulate human acquisition trajectories, a curriculum-tuning framework is introduced, which trains LLMs in a progression from beginner to advanced proficiency levels. Since language production in writing is a key perspective for observing SLA development, an evaluation system is established to probe LLMs in writing, including the coverage of level-based grammar items, writing errors, lexical complexity, syntactic complexity, and holistic scoring. We also develop an HSKAgent fine-tuned on 10K compositions from Chinese second language learners to automate this evaluation system. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that HSKBenchmark not only models Chinese SLA effectively, but also serves as a reliable benchmark for dynamic writing assessment in LLMs. Our fine-tuned LLMs have writing performance on par with advanced human learners and exhibit human-like acquisition characteristics. The HSKBenchmark, HSKAgent, and checkpoints serve as foundational tools and resources, with the potential to pave the way for future research on language acquisition modeling and LLMs interpretability.

PaperID: 446, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.11922 GitHub

Abstract:
The rise of AIgenerated image tools has made localized forgeries increasingly realistic, posing challenges for visual content integrity. Although recent efforts have explored localized AIGC detection, existing datasets predominantly focus on object-level forgeries while overlooking broader scene edits in regions such as sky or ground. To address these limitations, we introduce BR-Gen, a large-scale dataset of 150,000 locally forged images with diverse scene-aware annotations, which are based on semantic calibration to ensure high-quality samples. BR-Gen is constructed through a fully automated ``Perception-Creation-Evaluation'' pipeline to ensure semantic coherence and visual realism. In addition, we further propose NFA-ViT, a Noise-guided Forgery Amplification Vision Transformer that enhances the detection of localized forgeries by amplifying subtle forgery-related features across the entire image. NFA-ViT mines heterogeneous regions in images, i.e., potential edited areas, by noise fingerprints. Subsequently, attention mechanism is introduced to compel the interaction between normal and abnormal features, thereby propagating the traces throughout the entire image, allowing subtle forgeries to influence a broader context and improving overall detection robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BR-Gen constructs entirely new scenarios that are not covered by existing methods. Take a step further, NFA-ViT outperforms existing methods on BR-Gen and generalizes well across current benchmarks.

PaperID: 447, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17482 GitHub

Abstract:
Semantic occupancy has emerged as a powerful representation in world models for its ability to capture rich spatial semantics. However, most existing occupancy world models rely on static and fixed embeddings or grids, which inherently limit the flexibility of perception. Moreover, their ``inplace classification" over grids exhibits a potential misalignment with the dynamic and continuous nature of real scenarios. In this paper, we propose SparseWorld, a novel 4D occupancy world model that is flexible, adaptive, and efficient, powered by sparse and dynamic queries. We propose a Range-Adaptive Perception module, in which learnable queries are modulated by the ego vehicle states and enriched with temporal-spatial associations to enable extended-range perception. To effectively capture the dynamics of the scene, we design a State-Conditioned Forecasting module, which replaces classification-based forecasting with regression-guided formulation, precisely aligning the dynamic queries with the continuity of the 4D environment. In addition, We specifically devise a Temporal-Aware Self-Scheduling training strategy to enable smooth and efficient training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SparseWorld achieves state-of-the-art performance across perception, forecasting, and planning tasks. Comprehensive visualizations and ablation studies further validate the advantages of SparseWorld in terms of flexibility, adaptability, and efficiency.

PaperID: 448, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09108 GitHub

Abstract:
Accurately localizing and segmenting relevant objects from optical remote sensing images (ORSIs) is critical for advancing remote sensing applications. Existing methods are typically built upon moderatescale pre-trained models and employ diverse optimization strategies to achieve promising performance under full-parameter fine-tuning. In fact, deeper and larger-scale foundation models can provide stronger support for performance improvement. However, due to their massive number of parameters, directly adopting full-parameter fine-tuning leads to pronounced training difficulties, such as excessive GPU memory consumption and high computational costs, which result in extremely limited exploration of large-scale models in existing works. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic wavelet expert-guided fine-tuning paradigm with fewer trainable parameters, dubbed WEFT, which efficiently adapts large-scale foundation models to ORSIs segmentation tasks by leveraging the guidance of wavelet experts. Specifically, we introduce a task-specific wavelet expert extractor to model wavelet experts from different perspectives and dynamically regulate their outputs, thereby generating trainable features enriched with task-specific information for subsequent fine-tuning. Furthermore, we construct an expert-guided conditional adapter that first enhances the fine-grained perception of frozen features for specific tasks by injecting trainable features, and then iteratively updates the information of both types of feature, allowing for efficient fine-tuning. Extensive experiments show that our WEFT not only outperforms 21 state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on three ORSIs datasets, but also achieves optimal results in camouflage, natural, and medical scenarios.

PaperID: 449, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14043 GitHub

Abstract:
The automated detection of hallucinations and training data contamination is pivotal to the safe deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). These tasks are particularly challenging in settings where no access to model internals is available. Current approaches in this setup typically leverage only the probabilities of actual tokens in the text, relying on simple taskspecific heuristics. Crucially, they overlook the information contained in the full sequence of next-token probability distributions. We propose to go beyond hand-crafted decision rules by learning directly from the complete observable output of LLMs — consisting not only of next-token probabilities, but also the full sequence of next-token distributions. We refer to this as the LLM Output Signature (LOS), and treat it as a reference data type for detecting hallucinations and data contamination. To that end, we introduce LOS-Net, a lightweight attention-based architecture trained on an efficient encoding of the LOS, which can provably approximate a broad class of existing techniques for both tasks. Empirically, LOS-Net achieves superior performance across diverse benchmarks and LLMs, while maintaining extremely low detection latency. Furthermore, it demonstrates promising transfer capabilities across datasets and LLMs.

PaperID: 450, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19083 GitHub

Abstract:
Incontext learning (ICL) with large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising paradigm for named entity recognition (NER) in low-resource scenarios. However, existing ICL-based NER methods suffer from three key limitations: (1) reliance on dynamic retrieval of annotated examples, which is problematic when annotated data is scarce; (2) limited generalization to unseen domains due to the LLM's insufficient internal domain knowledge; and (3) failure to incorporate external knowledge or resolve entity ambiguities. To address these challenges, we propose KDR-Agent, a novel multi-agent framework for multi-domain low-resource in-context NER that integrates Knowledge retrieval, Disambiguation, and Reflective analysis. KDR-Agent leverages natural-language type definitions and a static set of entity-level contrastive demonstrations to reduce dependency on large annotated corpora. A central planner coordinates specialized agents to (i) retrieve factual knowledge from Wikipedia for domain-specific mentions, (ii) resolve ambiguous entities via contextualized reasoning, and (iii) reflect on and correct model predictions through structured self-assessment. Experiments across ten datasets from five domains demonstrate that KDR-Agent significantly outperforms existing zero-shot and few-shot ICL baselines across multiple LLM backbones.

PaperID: 451, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13564 GitHub

Abstract:
We propose an efficient framework to compress massive videoframe features before feeding them into large multimodal models, thereby mitigating the severe token explosion arising from hour-long videos. Our design leverages a bidirectional state-space model equipped with a gated skip connection and a learnable weighted-average pooling mechanism applied to periodically inserted learned queries. This structure enables hierarchical downsampling across both spatial and temporal dimensions, preserving performance in a cost-effective manner. Across challenging hour-long video understanding tasks, our approach demonstrates competitive results against state-of-the-art models, while significantly reducing overall token budget. Notably, replacing our state-space model with conventional modules results in substantial performance degradation, highlighting the advantages of the proposed state-space modeling for effectively compressing multi-frame video information. Our framework emphasizes resource-conscious efficiency, making it practical for real-world deployments. We validate its scalability and generality across multiple benchmarks, achieving the dual objectives of efficient resource usage and comprehensive video understanding.

PaperID: 452, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22906 GitHub

Abstract:
Video moment retrieval (MR) and highlight detection (HD) with natural language queries aim to localize relevant moments and key highlights in a video clips. However, existing methods overlook the importance of individual words, treating the entire text query and video clips as a blackbox, which hinders contextual understanding. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that enables fine-grained clip filtering by identifying and prioritizing important words in the query. Our method integrates image-text scene understanding through Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and enhances the semantic understanding of video clips. We introduce a feature enhancement module (FEM) to capture important words from the query and a ranking-based filtering module (RFM) to iteratively refine video clips based on their relevance to these important words. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior performance in both MR and HD tasks.

PaperID: 453, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18878 GitHub

Abstract:
Recent LLMs like DeepSeekR1 have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance by integrating deep thinking and complex reasoning during generation. However, the internal mechanisms behind these reasoning processes remain unexplored. We observe reasoning LLMs consistently use vocabulary associated with human reasoning processes. We hypothesize these words correspond to specific reasoning moments within the models' internal mechanisms. To test this hypothesis, we employ Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), a technique for sparse decomposition of neural network activations into human-interpretable features. We introduce ReasonScore, an automatic metric to identify active SAE features during these reasoning moments. We perform manual and automatic interpretation of the features detected by our metric, and find those with activation patterns matching uncertainty, exploratory thinking, and reflection. Through steering experiments, we demonstrate that amplifying these features increases performance on reasoning-intensive benchmarks (+2.2%) while producing longer reasoning traces (+20.5%). Using the model diffing technique, we provide evidence that these features are present only in models with reasoning capabilities. Our work provides the first step towards a mechanistic understanding of reasoning in LLMs.

PaperID: 454, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06890 GitHub

Abstract:
Large Language Models for Simulating Professions (SPLLMs), particularly as teachers, are pivotal for personalized education. However, ensuring their professional competence and ethical safety remains a major challenge, as existing benchmarks fail to measure role-playing fidelity or address the unique teaching harms inherent in educational scenarios. To address this gap, we propose EduGuardBench, a dual-component benchmark that evaluates professional fidelity through the Role-playing Fidelity Score (RFS) and diagnoses harms specific to the teaching profession. It also probes safety vulnerabilities using persona-based adversarial prompts targeting both general harms and academic misconduct, with metrics such as Attack Success Rate (ASR) and a three-tier Refusal Quality assessment. Extensive experiments on 14 leading models reveal a stark polarization in performance. While reasoning-oriented models generally demonstrate higher fidelity, incompetence remains the dominant failure mode across most models. Adversarial testing uncovered a counterintuitive scaling paradox, where mid-sized models appear more vulnerable, challenging monotonic safety assumptions. Notably, we identify an Educational Transformation Effect, where the safest models convert harmful requests into teachable moments through ideal educational refusals. This ability is strongly negatively correlated with ASR, revealing a new dimension of advanced AI safety. EduGuardBench thus provides a reproducible framework for holistic assessment of professional, ethical, and pedagogical alignment, uncovering dynamics critical to deploying trustworthy AI in education.

PaperID: 455, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11137 GitHub

Abstract:
As valuable digital assets, deep neural networks necessitate robust ownership protection, positioning neural network watermarking (NNW) as a promising solution. Among various NNW approaches, weightbased methods are favored for their simplicity and practicality; however, they remain generally vulnerable to forging and overwriting attacks. To address those challenges, we propose NeuralMark, a robust method built around a hashed watermark filter. Specifically, we utilize a hash function to generate an irreversible binary watermark from a secret key, which is then used as a filter to select the model parameters for embedding. This design cleverly intertwines the embedding parameters with the hashed watermark, providing a robust defense against both forging and overwriting attacks. Average pooling is also incorporated to resist fine-tuning and pruning attacks. Furthermore, it can be seamlessly integrated into various neural network architectures, ensuring broad applicability. We theoretically analyze its security boundary and highlight the necessity of using a hashed watermark as a filtering mechanism. Empirically, we demonstrate its effectiveness and robustness across 13 distinct Convolutional and Transformer architectures, covering five image classification tasks and one text generation task.

PaperID: 456, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01310 GitHub

Abstract:
Regional disaster resilience quantifies the changing nature of physical risks to inform policy instruments ranging from local immediate recovery to international sustainable development. While many existing stateof-practice methods have greatly advanced the dynamic mapping of exposure and hazard, our understanding of large-scale physical vulnerability has remained static, costly, limited, region-specific, coarse-grained, overly aggregated, and inadequately calibrated. With the significant growth in the availability of time-series satellite imagery and derived products for exposure and hazard, we focus our work on the equally important yet challenging element of the risk equation: physical vulnerability. Given this unique problem, we leverage machine learning methods that flexibly capture spatial contextual relationships, limited temporal observations, and uncertainty in a unified probabilistic spatiotemporal inference framework. We therefore introduce Graph Variational State-Space Model (GraphVSSM), a novel modular spatiotemporal approach that uniquely integrates graph deep learning, state-space modeling, and variational inference using time-series data and prior expert belief systems in a weakly supervised or coarse-to-fine-grained manner. We present three major results: a city-wide demonstration in Quezon City, Philippines; an investigation of sudden changes in the cyclone-impacted coastal Khurushkul community (Bangladesh) and the mudslide-affected Freetown (Sierra Leone); and an open geospatial dataset, METEOR 2.5D, that spatiotemporally enhances the existing global static dataset for 46 UN-recognized Least Developed Countries (as of 2020). Beyond advancing the practice of regional disaster resilience assessment and improving our understanding of global progress in disaster risk reduction, our method also offers a probabilistic deep learning approach, contributing to broader urban studies that require compositional data analysis in weakly supervised settings.

PaperID: 457, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01003

Authors:Junli Jiang, Pavel Naumov

Affiliations: Southwest University, University of Southampton

Title: Higher-Order Responsibility

Abstract:
In ethics, individual responsibility is often defined through Frankfurt's principle of alternative possibilities. This definition is not adequate in a group decisionmaking setting because it often results in the lack of a responsible party or "responsibility gap". One of the existing approaches to address this problem is to consider group responsibility. Another, recently proposed, approach is "higher-order" responsibility. The paper considers the problem of determining whether higher-order responsibility up to a given degree is sufficient to close the responsibility gap and analyses the computational complexity of this problem.

PaperID: 458, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.15000

Authors:Chaoyun Wang, I-Chao Shen, Takeo Igarashi, Caigui Jiang

Affiliations: National Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, National Engineering Research Center of Visual Information and Applications, and Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi'an Jiaotong University, The University of Tokyo

Title: Axis-Aligned Document Dewarping

Abstract:
Document dewarping is crucial for many applications. However, existing learningbased methods rely heavily on supervised regression with annotated data without fully leveraging the inherent geometric properties of physical documents. Our key insight is that a well-dewarped document is defined by its axis-aligned feature lines. This property aligns with the inherent axis-aligned nature of the discrete grid geometry in planar documents. Harnessing this property, we introduce three synergistic contributions: for the training phase, we propose an axis-aligned geometric constraint to enhance document dewarping; for the inference phase, we propose an axis alignment preprocessing strategy to reduce the dewarping difficulty; and for the evaluation phase, we introduce a new metric, Axis-Aligned Distortion (AAD), that not only incorporates geometric meaning and aligns with human visual perception but also demonstrates greater robustness. As a result, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple existing benchmarks, improving the AAD metric by 18.2% to 34.5%.

PaperID: 459, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10942

Authors:Liuchi Xu, Hao Zheng, Lu Wang, Lisheng Xu, Jun Cheng

Affiliations: Chinese Academy of Sciences, South China Normal University;, Northeastern University;, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Hong Kong

Title: Heterogeneous Complementary Distillation

Abstract:
Knowledge distillation (KD) transfers the ``dark knowledge'' from a complex teacher model to a compact student model. However, heterogeneous architecture distillation, such as Vision Transformer (ViT) to ResNet18, faces challenges due to differences in spatial feature representations. Traditional KD methods are mostly designed for homogeneous architectures and hence struggle to effectively address the disparity. Although heterogeneous KD approaches have been developed recently to solve these issues, they often incur high computational costs and complex designs, or overly rely on logit alignment, which limits their ability to leverage the complementary features. To overcome these limitations, we propose Heterogeneous Complementary Distillation (HCD), a simple yet effective framework that integrates complementary teacher and student features to align representations in shared logits. These logits are decomposed and constrained to facilitate diverse knowledge transfer to the student. Specifically, HCD processes the student’s intermediate features through convolutional projector and adaptive pooling, concatenates them with teacher's feature from the penultimate layer and then maps them via the Complementary Feature Mapper (CFM) module, comprising fully connected layer, to produce shared logits. We further introduce Sublogit Decoupled Distillation (SDD) that partitions the shared logits into n sub-logits, which are fused with teacher's logits to rectify classification. To ensure sub-logit diversity and reduce redundant knowledge transfer, we propose an Orthogonality Loss (OL). By preserving student-specific strengths and leveraging teacher knowledge, HCD enhances robustness and generalization in students. Extensive experiments on the CIFAR-100, fine-grained (e.g., CUB200, Aircraft) and ImageNet-1K datasets demonstrate that HCD outperforms state-of-the-art KD methods, establishing it as an effective solution for heterogeneous KD.

PaperID: 460, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11710

Authors:Zhou Xu, Qi Wang, Yuxiao Yang, Luyuan Zhang, Zhang Liang, Yang Li

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Xidian University

Title: Target-Balanced Score Distillation

Abstract:
Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) enables 3D asset generation by distilling priors from pretrained 2D textto-image diffusion models, but vanilla SDS suffers from over-saturation and over-smoothing. To mitigate this issue, recent variants have incorporated negative prompts. However, these methods face a critical trade-off: limited texture optimization, or significant texture gains with shape distortion. In this work, we first conduct a systematic analysis and reveal that this trade-off is fundamentally governed by the utilization of the negative prompts, where Target Negative Prompts (TNP) that embed target information in the negative prompts dramatically enhancing texture realism and fidelity but inducing shape distortions. Informed by this key insight, we introduce the Target-Balanced Score Distillation (TBSD). It formulates generation as a multi-objective optimization problem and introduces an adaptive strategy that effectively resolves the aforementioned trade-off. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TBSD significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, yielding 3D assets with high-fidelity textures and geometrically accurate shape.

PaperID: 461, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.19039

Authors:Haoze Wu, Clark Barrett, Nina Narodytska

Affiliations: Stanford University, VMware Research by Broadcom

Title: Cubing for Tuning

Abstract:
We are exploring the problem of building an automated reasoning procedure that adaptively tunes the highlevel solving strategy for a given problem. There are two main distinctive characteristics of our approach: tuning is performed solely online, unlike the common use of tuning as an offline process; and tuning data comes exclusively from the given instance, so we do not rely on the availability of similar benchmarks and can work with unique challenging instances. Our approach builds on top of the divide-and-conquer paradigm that naturally serves partitioned sub-problems for an automated tuning algorithm to obtain a good solving strategy. We demonstrate performance improvement on two classes of important problems--SAT-solving and neural network verification--and show that our method can learn unconventional solving strategies in some cases.

PaperID: 462, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15157

Authors:Chris Dong, Fabian Frank, Jannik Peters, Warut Suksompong

Affiliations: Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Technical University of Munich, National University of Singapore

Title: Reconfiguring Proportional Committees

Abstract:
An important desideratum in approvalbased multiwinner voting is proportionality. We study the problem of reconfiguring proportional committees: given two proportional committees, is there a transition path that consists only of proportional committees, where each transition involves replacing one candidate with another candidate? We show that the set of committees satisfying the proportionality axiom of justified representation (JR) is not always connected, and it is PSPACE-complete to decide whether two such committees are connected. On the other hand, we prove that any two JR committees can be connected by committees satisfying a 2-approximation of JR. We also obtain similar results for the stronger axiom of extended justified representation (EJR). In addition, we demonstrate that the committees produced by several well-known voting rules are connected or at least not isolated, and investigate the reconfiguration problem in restricted preference domains.

PaperID: 463, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18602

Authors:Zixin Gu, Yaoxin Ge, Yao Zhang, Dengji Zhao

Affiliations: ShanghaiTech University, Kyushu University

Title: Fair Diffusion Auctions

Abstract:
Diffusion auction design is a new trend in mechanism design which extends the original incentive compatibility property to include buyers' private connection report. Reporting connections is equivalent to inviting their neighbors to join the auction in practice. Then, the social welfare is collectively accumulated by all participants: reporting high valuations or inviting highvaluation neighbors. Hence, we can measure each participant's contribution by the marginal social welfare increase due to her participation. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a new property called Shapley fairness to capture participants' social welfare contribution and use it as a benchmark to guide our auction design for a fairer utility allocation. Not surprisingly, none of the existing diffusion auctions has ever approximated the fairness, because Shapley fairness depends on each buyer's own valuation and this dependence can easily violate incentive compatibility. Thus, we combat this challenge by proposing a new diffusion auction called Permutation Diffusion Auction (PDA) for selling k homogeneous items, which is the first diffusion auction satisfying 1/(k+1)-Shapley fairness, incentive compatibility and individual rationality. Moreover, PDA can be extended to the general combinatorial auction setting where the literature did not discover meaningful diffusion auctions yet.

PaperID: 464, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08878

Authors:Andrea Cavallo, Ayushman Raghuvanshi, Sundeep Prabhakar Chepuri, Elvin Isufi

Affiliations: Delft University of Technology, Indian Institute of Science

Title: Covariance Scattering Transforms

Abstract:
Machine learning and data processing techniques relying on covariance information are widespread as they identify meaningful patterns in unsupervised and unlabeled settings. As a prominent example, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) projects data points onto the eigenvectors of their covariance matrix, capturing the directions of maximum variance. This mapping, however, falls short in two directions: it fails to capture information in lowvariance directions, relevant when, e.g., the data contains high-variance noise; and it provides unstable results in low-sample regimes, especially when covariance eigenvalues are close. CoVariance Neural Networks (VNNs), i.e., graph neural networks using the covariance matrix as a graph, show improved stability to estimation errors and learn more expressive functions in the covariance spectrum than PCA, but require training and operate in a labeled setup. To get the benefits of both worlds, we propose Covariance Scattering Transforms (CSTs), deep untrained networks that sequentially apply filters localized in the covariance spectrum to the input data and produce expressive hierarchical representations via nonlinearities. We define the filters as covariance wavelets that capture specific and detailed covariance spectral patterns. We improve CSTs' computational and memory efficiency via a pruning mechanism, and we prove that their error due to finite-sample covariance estimations is less sensitive to close covariance eigenvalues compared to PCA, improving their stability. Our experiments on age prediction from cortical thickness measurements on 4 datasets collecting patients with neurodegenerative diseases show that CSTs produce stable representations in low-data settings, as VNNs but without any training, and lead to comparable or better predictions w.r.t. more complex learning models.

PaperID: 465, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12783

Authors:Jingru Huang, Haijie Xu, Manrui Jiang, Chen Zhang

Affiliations: Department of Industrial Engineering, Tsinghua University

Title: Function-on-Function Bayesian Optimization

Abstract:
Bayesian optimization (BO) has been widely used to optimize expensive and gradientfree objective functions across various domains. However, existing BO methods have not addressed the objective where both inputs and outputs are functions, which increasingly arise in complex systems as advanced sensing technologies. To fill this gap, we propose a novel function-on-function Bayesian optimization (FFBO) framework. Specifically, we first introduce a function-on-function Gaussian process (FFGP) model with a separable operator-valued kernel to capture the correlations between function-valued inputs and outputs. Compared to existing Gaussian process models, FFGP is modeled directly in the function space. Based on FFGP, we define a scalar upper confidence bound (UCB) acquisition function using a weighted operator-based scalarization strategy. Then, a scalable functional gradient ascent algorithm (FGA) is developed to efficiently identify the optimal function-valued input. We further analyze the theoretical properties of the proposed method. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the superior performance of FFBO over existing approaches.

PaperID: 466, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.21509

Authors:Jinwon Park, Kunwoong Kim, Jihu Lee, Yongdai Kim

Affiliations: Seoul National University

Title: Fair Model-based Clustering

Abstract:
The goal of fair clustering is to find clusters such that the proportion of sensitive attributes (e.g., gender, race, etc) in each cluster is similar to the proportion of the entire data. Various fair clustering algorithms have been proposed, which modify standard Kmeans clustering to satisfy a given fairness constraint. A critical limitation of several existing fair clustering algorithms is that the number of parameters to be learned is proportional to the sample size because the cluster assignment of each datum should be optimized simultaneously with the cluster center, and thus scaling up the algorithms is difficult. In this paper, we propose a new fair clustering algorithm based on finite mixture model called Fair Model-based Clustering (FMC). A main advantage of FMC is that the number of learnable parameters is independent to the sample size and thus can be scaled up easily. In particular, a mini-batch learning is possible to obtain clusters that are approximately fair. Moreover, FMC can be applied to non-metric data (e.g., categorical data) as long as the likelihood is well-defined. Theoretical and empirical justifications of the superiority of the proposed algorithm are provided.

PaperID: 467, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02251

Authors:Bongsoo Yi, Yue Kang, Yao Li

Affiliations: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Title: Quantum Lipschitz Bandits

Abstract:
The Lipschitz bandit is a key variant of stochastic bandit problems where the expected reward function satisfies a Lipschitz condition with respect to an arm metric space. With its wideranging practical applications, various Lipschitz bandit algorithms have been developed, achieving the optimal regret performance in the classical setting. Motivated by recent advancements in quantum computing and the demonstrated success of quantum Monte Carlo in simpler bandit settings, we introduce the first quantum Lipschitz bandit algorithms to address the challenges of continuous action spaces and non-linear reward functions. Specifically, we first leverage the elimination-based framework to propose an efficient quantum Lipschitz bandit algorithm named Q-LAE. Next, we present novel modifications to the classical Zooming algorithm, which results in a simple quantum Lipschitz bandit method, Q-Zooming. Both algorithms exploit the computational power of quantum methods to obtain a provably improved regret bound over classical Lipschitz bandit algorithms. Comprehensive experiments further validate our improved theoretical findings, demonstrating superior empirical performance compared to existing Lipschitz bandit methods.

PaperID: 468, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07824

Authors:Zhiyao Zhang, Zhuqing Liu, Xin Zhang, Wen-Yen Chen, Jiyan Yang, Jia Liu

Affiliations: Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The Ohio State University, Dept. of Computer Science, University of North Texas, Meta Platforms

Title: Multi-Objective Bilevel Learning

Abstract:
As machine learning (ML) applications grow increasingly complex in recent years, modern ML frameworks often need to address multiple potentially conflicting objectives with coupled decision variables across different layers. This creates a compelling need for multiobjective bilevel learning (MOBL). So far, however, the field of MOBL remains in its infancy and many important problems remain under-explored. This motivates us to fill this gap and systematically investigate the theoretical and algorithmic foundation of MOBL. Specifically, we consider MOBL problems with multiple conflicting objectives guided by preferences at the upper-level subproblem, where part of the inputs depend on the optimal solution of the lower-level subproblem. Our goal is to develop efficient MOBL optimization algorithms to (1) identify a preference-guided Pareto-stationary solution with low oracle complexity; and (2) enable systematic Pareto front exploration. To this end, we propose a unifying algorithmic framework called weighted-Chebyshev multi-hyper-gradient-descent (WC-MHGD) for both deterministic and stochastic settings with finite-time Pareto-stationarity convergence rate guarantees, which not only implies low oracle complexity but also induces systematic Pareto front exploration. We further conduct extensive experiments to confirm our theoretical results.

PaperID: 469, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02511

Authors:Chenxu Yang, Qingyi Si, Mz Dai, Dingyu Yao, Mingyu Zheng, Minghui Chen, Zheng Lin, Weiping Wang

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Huawei Technologies Ltd.

Title: Test-time Prompt Intervention

Abstract:
Testtime compute has led to remarkable success in the large language model (LLM) community, particularly for complex tasks, where longer chains of thought (CoTs) are generated to enhance reasoning capabilities. However, growing evidence reveals that such reasoning models often produce CoTs plagued by excessive redundancy, including repetitive verification steps and unnecessary reasoning shifts. The root cause lies in post-training of them that overly rely on outcome reward paradigms, as the data of process reward paradigms, which regulate intermediate reasoning steps, is difficult to construct at scale. To address this, we propose PI, a novel framework for Test-time Prompt Intervention. PI provides an interface to dynamically guide and regulate reasoning paths during inference through timely (When module) and proper (How module) interventions and post-intervention sampling (Which module). This allows human problem-solving expertise and cognitive science principles to be seamlessly integrated into LLMs’ reasoning processes, enhancing controllability and interpretability. Extensive experiments across multiple models and datasets demonstrate that PI significantly shortens CoTs while reducing hallucination, yielding more concise and reliable reasoning.

PaperID: 470, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.09533

Authors:Junkang Li, Tristan Cazenave, Swann Legras, Arthur Queffelec, Veronique Ventos

Affiliations: France Université Caen Normandie, Normandie Univ, GREYC Caen, Université Paris Dauphine - PSL

Title: Nested Depth Search

Abstract:
Nested Monte Carlo Search (NMCS) has numerous applications, ranging from chemical retrosynthesis to quantum circuit design. We propose a generalization of NMCS that we named Nested Depth Search (NDS), in which a fixed depth search is used during a higherlevel playout to generate the states sent to lower-level exploration. We establish the runtime of NDS and provide algorithms to compute the exact probability distribution of sequences generated by NDS. Experiments with the Set Cover problem and the Multiple Sequence Alignment problem show that NDS outperforms NMCS with the same time budget.

PaperID: 471, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14166

Authors:Hao Lang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li

Affiliations: Tongyi Lab, Alibaba Group

Title: Selective Weak-to-Strong Generalization

Abstract:
Future superhuman models will surpass the ability of humans and humans will only be able to weakly supervise superhuman models. To alleviate the issue of lacking highquality data for model alignment, some works on weak-to-strong generalization (W2SG) finetune a strong pretrained model with a weak supervisor so that it can generalize beyond weak supervision. However, the invariable use of weak supervision in existing methods exposes issues in robustness, with a proportion of weak labels proving harmful to models. In this paper, we propose a selective W2SG framework to avoid using weak supervision when unnecessary. We train a binary classifier P(IK) to identify questions that a strong model can answer and use its self-generated labels for alignment. We further refine weak labels with a graph smoothing method. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks show that our method consistently outperforms competitive baselines. Further analyses show that P(IK) can generalize across tasks and difficulties, which indicates selective W2SG can help superalignment.

PaperID: 472, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10745

Authors:Sayan Nag, Joseph K J, Koustava Goswami, Vlad I Morariu, Balaji Vasan Srinivasan

Affiliations: Adobe Research

Title: Agentic Design Review System

Abstract:
Evaluating a graphic design involves assessing it from multiple facets like alignment, composition, aesthetics and color choices. Holistic evaluation would involve aggregating feedback from individual expert reviewers. Towards this, we propose an Agentic Design Review System (AgenticDRS), where multiple agents collaboratively analyze a design, orchestrated by a meta-agent. A novel in-context exemplar selection approach based on graph matching and a unique prompt expansion method plays central role towards making each agent design aware. In order to evaluate this framework, we propose DRS-BENCH. Thorough experimental evaluation against state-of-the-art baselines adapted to the problem setup, backed by critical ablations, demonstrates efficacy of Agentic-DRS in evaluating designs and generating actionable feedback.

PaperID: 473, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.15056

Authors:Yutao Feng, Yintong Shang, Xiang Feng, Lei Lan, Shandian Zhe, Tianjia Shao, Hongzhi Wu, Kun Zhou, Chenfanfu Jiang, Yin Yang

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of CAD&CG, University of Utah, Zhejiang University

Title: ElastoGen: 4D Generative Elastodynamics

Abstract:
We present ElastoGen, a knowledgedriven AI model that generates physically accurate 4D elastodynamics. Unlike deep models that learn from video- or image-based observations, ElastoGen leverages the principles of physics and learns from established mathematical and optimization procedures. The core idea of ElastoGen is converting the differential equation, corresponding to the nonlinear force equilibrium, into a series of iterative local convolution-like operations, which naturally fit deep architectures. We carefully build our network module following this overarching design philosophy. ElastoGen is much more lightweight in terms of both training requirements and network scale than deep generative models. Because of its alignment with actual physical procedures, ElastoGen efficiently generates accurate dynamics for a wide range of hyperelastic materials and can be easily integrated with upstream and downstream deep modules to enable end-to-end 4D generation.

PaperID: 474, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06564

Authors:Yihua Shao, Deyang Lin, Minxi Yan, Siyu Chen, Fanhu Zeng, Minwen Liao, Ao Ma, Ziyang Yan, Haozhe Wang, Yan Wang, Zhi Chen, Xiaofeng Cao, Haotong Qin, Hao Tang, Jingcai Guo

Affiliations: Guangdong University of Technology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xinjiang University, JD com, University of Trento, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, University of Southern Queensland, Tongji University, ETH Zürich, Peking University, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: TR-DQ: Time-Rotation Diffusion Quantization

Abstract:
Diffusion models have been widely adopted in image and video generation. However, their complex network architecture leads to high inference overhead for its generation process. Existing diffusion quantization methods primarily focus on the quantization of the model structure while ignoring the impact of timesteps variation during sampling. At the same time, most current approaches fail to account for significant activations that cannot be eliminated, resulting in substantial performance degradation after quantization. To address these issues, we propose Time-Rotation Diffusion Quantization (TR-DQ), a novel quantization method incorporating time-step and rotation-based optimization. TR-DQ first divides the sampling process based on time-steps and applies a rotation matrix to smooth activations and weights dynamically. For different time-steps, a dedicated hyperparameter is introduced for adaptive timing modeling, which enables dynamic quantization across different time steps. Additionally, we also explore the compression potential of Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG-wise) to establish a foundation for subsequent work. TR-DQ achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on image generation and video generation tasks and a 1.38-1.89× speedup and 1.97-2.58× memory reduction in inference compared to existing quantization methods.

PaperID: 475, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16467

Authors:Huimin Zeng, Yue Bai, Yun Fu

Affiliations: Northeastern University

Title: Arbitrary-Scale 3D Gaussian Super-Resolution

Abstract:
Existing 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) superresolution methods typically perform high-resolution (HR) rendering of fixed scale factors, making them impractical for resource-limited scenarios. Directly rendering arbitrary-scale HR views with vanilla 3DGS introduces aliasing artifacts due to the lack of scale-aware rendering ability, while adding a post-processing upsampler for 3DGS complicates the framework and reduces rendering efficiency. To tackle these issues, we build an integrated framework that incorporates scale-aware rendering, generative prior-guided optimization, and progressive super-resolving to enable 3D Gaussian super-resolution of arbitrary scale factors with a single 3D model. Notably, our approach supports both integer and non-integer scale rendering to provide more flexibility. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in producing high-quality arbitrary-scale HR views (6.59 dB PSNR gain over 3DGS) with a single model. It preserves structural consistency with LR views and across different scales, while maintaining real-time rendering speed (85 FPS at 1080p).

PaperID: 476, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10273

Authors:Dieter Vandesande, Jordi Coll, Bart Bogaerts

Affiliations: Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Dept. of Computer Science, Universitat de Girona, KU Leuven

Title: Certified Branch-and-Bound MaxSAT Solving

Abstract:
Over the past few decades, combinatorial solvers have seen remarkable performance improvements, enabling their practical use in realworld applications. In some of these applications, ensuring the correctness of the solver's output is critical. However, the complexity of modern solvers makes them susceptible to bugs in their source code. In the domain of satisfiability checking (SAT), this issue has been addressed through proof logging, where the solver generates a formal proof of the correctness of its answer. For more expressive problems like MaxSAT, the optimization variant of SAT, proof logging had not seen a comparable breakthrough until recently. In this paper, we show how to achieve proof logging for state-of-the-art techniques in Branch-and-Bound MaxSAT solving. This includes certifying look-ahead methods used in such algorithms as well as advanced clausal encodings of pseudo-Boolean constraints based on so-called Multi-Valued Decision Diagrams (MDDs). We implement these ideas in MaxCDCL, the dominant branch-and-bound solver, and experimentally demonstrate that proof logging is feasible with limited overhead, while proof checking remains a challenge.

PaperID: 477, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14195

Authors:Michelle Döring, Markus Brill, Jobst Heitzig

Affiliations: Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Warwick, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

Title: The River Voting Method

Abstract:
We introduce River, a novel Condorcetconsistent voting method that is based on pairwise majority margins and can be seen as a simplified variation of Tideman's Ranked Pairs method. River is simple to explain, simple to compute even "by hand," and gives rise to an easy-to-interpret certificate in the form of a directed tree. Like Ranked Pairs and Schulze's Beat Path method, River is a refinement of the Split Cycle method and shares with those many desirable properties, including independence of clones. Unlike the other three methods, River satisfies a strong form of resistance to agenda-manipulation that is known as independence of Pareto-dominated alternatives.

PaperID: 478, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.09777

Authors:Thanasis Lianeas, Alkmini Sgouritsa, Minas Marios Sotiriou

Affiliations: University of West Attica, Athens University of Economics and Business Archimedes/Athena RC

Title: EFX Allocation in (Multi)Hypergraphs

Abstract:
We study fair allocations of indivisible goods among agents with heterogeneous monotone valuations. As fair we consider the allocations that are envyfree-up-to-any-good (EFX). Finding if EFX allocations always exist, even for agents with additive valuations, is a major open problem in Fair Division. Christodoulou et al. (2023) introduced the (multi-hyper)graph setting, where agents and goods are represented by vertices and edges of a graph, respectively, and only the endpoints of an edge may have non-zero marginal value for it. We show that for hypergraphs with girth at least 4 and agents with general monotone valuations there always exists an EFX allocation and can be constructed in polynomial time. We generalize our approach to also show that multi-hypergraphs with girth (on the simple hypergraph) at least 4 always admit an EFX allocation, as long as there exists a single vertex whose adjacent edges have multiplicity at most the size of that edge minus 2; our construction in this case needs pseudo-polynomial time.

PaperID: 479, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13678

Authors:Haichuan Wang, Yifan Wu, Haifeng Xu

Affiliations: Harvard University, Microsoft Research, University of Chicago

Title: The Publication Choice Problem

Abstract:
Researchers strategically choose where to submit their work in order to maximize its impact, and these publication decisions in turn determine venues' impact factors. To analyze how individual publication choices both respond to and shape venue impact, we introduce a gametheoretic framework - coined the Publication Choice Problem - that captures this two‐way interplay. We show the existence of a pure-strategy equilibrium in the Publication Choice Problem and its uniqueness under binary researcher types. Our characterizations of the equilibrium properties offer insights about what publication behaviors better indicate a researcher's impact level. Through equilibrium analysis, we further investigate how labeling papers with ``spotlight'' affects the impact factor of venues in the research community. Our analysis shows that competitive venue labeling top papers with ``spotlight'' may decrease the overall impact of other venues in the community, while less competitive venues with ``spotlight'' labeling have an opposite impact.

PaperID: 480, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.10254

Authors:Irina Abdullaeva, Anton Vasiliuk, Elizaveta Goncharova, Temurbek Rahmatullaev, Zagorulko Ivan, Maxim Kurkin, Andrey Kuznetsov

Affiliations: FusionBrain Lab, Russia. Research Center of the Artificial Intelligence Institute, Innopolis University, Russia. HSE University, Russia. Lomonosov Moscow State University, Central University

Title: NoReGeo: Non-Reasoning Geometry Benchmark

Abstract:
We present NoReGeo, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the intrinsic geometric understanding of large language models (LLMs) without relying on reasoning or algebraic computation. Unlike existing benchmarks that primarily assess models' proficiency in reasoningbased geometry-where solutions are derived using algebraic methods-NoReGeo focuses on evaluating whether LLMs can inherently encode spatial relationships and recognize geometric properties directly. Our benchmark comprises 2,500 trivial geometric problems spanning 25 categories, each carefully crafted to be solvable purely through native geometric understanding, assuming known object locations. We assess a range of state-of-the-art models on NoReGeo, including frontier models like GPT-4, observing that even the most advanced systems achieve an overall maximum of 65% accuracy in binary classification tasks. Further, our ablation experiments demonstrate that such geometric understanding does not emerge through fine-tuning alone, indicating that effective training for geometric comprehension requires a specialized approach from the outset. Our findings highlight a significant gap in current LLMs' ability to natively grasp geometric concepts, providing a foundation for future research toward models with true geometric cognition.

PaperID: 481, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11072

Authors:Andrea Brunello, Luca Geatti, Angelo Montanari, Nicola Saccomanno

Affiliations: University of Udine

Title: Automata-less Monitoring via Trace-Checking

Abstract:
In runtime verification, monitoring consists of analyzing the current execution of a system and determining, on the basis of the observed finite trace, whether all its possible continuations satisfy or violate a given specification. This is typically done by synthesizing a monitor–often a Deterministic Finite State Automaton (DFA)–from logical specifications expressed in Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) or in its finiteword variant (LTLf). Unfortunately, the size of the resulting DFA may incur a doubly exponential blow-up in the size of the formula. In this paper, we identify some conditions under which monitoring can be done without constructing such a DFA. We build on the notion of intentionally safe and cosafe formulas to show that monitoring of these formulas can be carried out through trace-checking, that is, by directly evaluating them on the current system trace, with a polynomial complexity in the size of both the trace and the formula. In addition, we investigate the complexity of recognizing intentionally safe and cosafe formulas for the safety and cosafety fragments of LTL and LTLf. As for LTLf, we show that all formulas in these fragments are intentionally safe and cosafe, thus removing the need for the check. As for LTL, we prove that the problem is in PSPACE, significantly improving over the EXPSPACE complexity of full LTL.

PaperID: 482, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10449

Authors:Piotr Gorczyca, Hannes Strass

Affiliations: Computational Logic Group, Faculty of Computer Science, TUD Dresden University of Technology, Germany ScaDS.AI Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence

Title: NonMonotonic S4F Standpoint Logic

Abstract:
Standpoint logics offer unified modal logicbased formalisms for representing multiple heterogeneous viewpoints. At the same time, many non-monotonic reasoning frameworks can be naturally captured using modal logics — in particular using the modal logic S4F. In this work, we propose a novel formalism called S4F Standpoint Logic, which generalises both S4F and standpoint propositional logic and is therefore capable of expressing multi-viewpoint, non-monotonic semantic commitments. We define its syntax and semantics and analyze its computational complexity, obtaining the result that S4F Standpoint Logic is not computationally harder than its constituent logics, whether in monotonic or non-monotonic form. We also outline mechanisms for credulous and sceptical acceptance and illustrate the framework with an example.

PaperID: 483, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16405

Authors:Stassa Patsantzis

Affiliations: University of Surrey

Title: Self-Supervised Inductive Logic Programming

Abstract:
Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) approaches like MetaInterpretive Learning (MIL) can learn, from few examples, recursive logic programs with invented predicates that generalise well to unseen instances. This ability relies on a background theory and negative examples, both carefully selected with expert knowledge of a learning problem and its solutions. But what if such a problem-specific background theory or negative examples are not available? We formalise this question as a new setting for Self-Supervised ILP and present a new MIL algorithm that learns in the new setting from some positive labelled, and zero or more unlabelled examples, and automatically generates, and labels, new positive and negative examples during learning. We implement this algorithm in Prolog in a new MIL system, called Poker. We compare Poker to state-of-the-art MIL system Louise on experiments learning grammars for Context-Free and L-System languages from labelled, positive example strings, no negative examples, and just the terminal vocabulary of a language, seen in examples, as a first-order background theory. We introduce a new approach for the principled selection of a second-order background theory as a Second Order Definite Normal Form (SONF), sufficiently general to learn all programs in a class, thus removing the need for a backgound theory tailored to a learning task. We find that Poker's performance improves with increasing numbers of automatically generated examples while Louise, bereft of negative examples, over-generalises.

PaperID: 484, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06678

Authors:Xingbo Du, Qiantong Dou, Lei Fan, Rui Zhang

Affiliations: Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China

Title: Flexible Concept Bottleneck Model

Abstract:
Concept bottleneck models (CBMs) improve neural network interpretability by introducing an intermediate layer that maps humanunderstandable concepts to predictions. Recent work has explored the use of vision-language models (VLMs) to automate concept selection and annotation. However, existing VLM-based CBMs typically require full model retraining when new concepts are involved, which limits their adaptability and flexibility in real-world scenarios, especially considering the rapid evolution of vision-language foundation models. To address these issues, we propose Flexible Concept Bottleneck Model (FCBM), which supports dynamic concept adaptation, including complete replacement of the original concept set. Specifically, we design a hypernetwork that generates prediction weights based on concept embeddings, allowing seamless integration of new concepts without retraining the entire model. In addition, we introduce a modified sparsemax module with a learnable temperature parameter that dynamically selects the most relevant concepts, enabling the model to focus on the most informative features. Extensive experiments on five public benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art baselines with a similar number of effective concepts. Moreover, the model generalizes well to unseen concepts with just a single epoch of fine-tuning, demonstrating its strong adaptability and flexibility.

PaperID: 485, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21895

Authors:Cameron Gordon, Yiping Ji, Hemanth Saratchandran, Paul Albert, Simon Lucey

Affiliations: University of Adelaide, Amazon Machine Learning

Title: SineLoRA∆: Sine-Activated Delta Compression

Abstract:
Resourceconstrained weight deployment is a task of immense practical importance. Recently, there has been interest in the specific task of Delta Compression, where parties each hold a common base model and only communicate compressed weight updates. However, popular parameter efficient updates such as Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) face inherent representation limitations - which are especially pronounced when combined with aggressive quantization. To overcome this, we build on recent work that improves LoRA representation capacity by using fixed-frequency sinusoidal functions to increase stable rank without adding additional parameters. We extend this to the quantized setting and present the first theoretical analysis showing how stable rank evolves under quantization. From this, we introduce SineLoRA∆, a principled and effective method for delta compression that improves the expressivity of quantized low-rank adapters by applying a sinusoidal activation. We validate SineLoRA∆ across a diverse variety of domains - including language modeling, vision-language tasks, and text-to-image generation - achieving up to 66% memory reduction with similar performance. We additionally provide a novel application of the canonical Bjøntegaard Delta metric to consistently compare adapter compression changes across the rate-distortion curve.

PaperID: 486, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.07202

Authors:Alonso Granados, Jason Pacheco

Affiliations: University of Arizona

Title: Risk-Sensitive Exponential Actor Critic

Abstract:
Modelfree deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have achieved tremendous success on a range of challenging tasks. However, safety concerns remain when these methods are deployed on real-world applications, necessitating risk-aware agents. A common utility for learning such risk-aware agents is the entropic risk measure, but current policy gradient methods optimizing this measure must perform high-variance and numerically unstable updates. As a result, existing risk-sensitive model-free approaches are limited to simple tasks and tabular settings. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive theoretical justification for policy gradient methods on the entropic risk measure, including on- and off-policy gradient theorems for the stochastic and deterministic policy settings. Motivated by theory, we propose risk-sensitive exponential actor-critic (rsEAC), an off-policy model-free approach that incorporates novel procedures to avoid the explicit representation of exponential value functions and their gradients, and optimizes its policy w.r.t. the entropic risk measure. In this way, we show that rsEAC produces more numerically stable updates compared to existing approaches and reliably learns risk-sensitive policies in challenging risky variants of continuous tasks in MuJoCo.

PaperID: 487, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01085

Authors:Xuhan Huang, Yan Hu, Zhiyan Li, Zhiyong Wang, Zhongxiang Dai

Affiliations: School of Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, School of Data Science, Shenzhen National Health Data Institute, The University of Edinburgh

Title: Federated Linear Dueling Bandits

Abstract:
Contextual linear dueling bandits have recently garnered significant attention due to their widespread applications in important domains such as recommender systems and large language models. Classical dueling bandit algorithms are typically only applicable to a single agent. However, many applications of dueling bandits involve multiple agents who wish to collaborate for improved performance yet are unwilling to share their data. This motivates us to draw inspirations from federated learning, which involves multiple agents aiming to collaboratively train their neural networks via gradient descent (GD) without sharing their raw data. Previous works have developed federated linear bandit algorithms which rely on closedform updates of the bandit parameters (e.g., the linear function parameters) to achieve collaboration. However, in linear dueling bandits, the linear function parameters lack a closed-form expression and their estimation requires minimizing a loss function. This renders these previous methods inapplicable. In this work, we overcome this challenge through an innovative and principled combination of online gradient descent (OGD, for minimizing the loss function to estimate the linear function parameters) and federated learning, hence introducing our federated linear dueling bandit with OGD (FLDB-OGD) algorithm. Through rigorous theoretical analysis, we prove that FLDB-OGD enjoys a sub-linear upper bound on its cumulative regret and demonstrate a theoretical trade-off between regret and communication complexity. We conduct empirical experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of FLDB-OGD and reveal valuable insights, such as the benefit of a larger number of agents, the regret-communication trade-off, among others.

PaperID: 488, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16651

Authors:Kushal Kapoor, Wyatt Mackey, Yiannis Aloimonos, Xiaomin Lin

Affiliations: University of Maryland, College Park, DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory

Title: HiCL: Hippocampal-Inspired Continual Learning

Abstract:
We propose HiCL, a novel hippocampalinspired dual-memory continual learning architecture designed to mitigate catastrophic forgetting by using elements inspired by the hippocampal circuitry. Our system encodes inputs through a grid-cell-like layer, followed by sparse pattern separation using a dentate gyrus-inspired module with top-k sparsity. Episodic memory traces are maintained in a CA3-like autoassociative memory. Task-specific processing is dynamically managed via a DG-gated mixture-of-experts mechanism, wherein inputs are routed to experts based on cosine similarity between their normalized sparse DG representations and learned task-specific DG prototypes computed through online exponential moving averages. This biologically grounded yet mathematically principled gating strategy enables differentiable, scalable task-routing without relying on a separate gating network, and enhances the model's adaptability and efficiency in learning multiple sequential tasks. Cortical outputs are consolidated using Elastic Weight Consolidation weighted by inter-task similarity. Crucially, we incorporate prioritized replay of stored patterns to reinforce essential past experiences. Evaluations on standard continual learning benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our architecture in reducing task interference, achieving near state-of-the-art results in continual learning tasks at lower computational costs.

PaperID: 489, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03335

Authors:Faizan Farooq Khan, Joseph K J, Koustava Goswami, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Balaji Vasan Srinivasan

Affiliations: King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Adobe Research

Title: Step-by-step Layered Design Generation

Abstract:
Design generation, in its essence, is a stepby-step process where designers progressively refine and enhance their work through careful modifications. Despite this fundamental characteristic, existing approaches mainly treat design synthesis as a single-step generation problem, significantly underestimating the inherent complexity of the creative process. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel problem setting called Step-by-step Layered Design Generation, that tasks a machine learning model to generate a design, adhering to a sequence of instructions from a designer. Leveraging the recent advancements in Multi-modal LLMs, we propose SLEDGE: Step-by-step LayEred Design GEnerator to model each update to a design as an atomic layered change over its previous state, while being grounded on the instruction.To complement our new problem setting, we introduce a new evaluation suite, including a dataset and a benchmark. Our exhaustive experimental analysis and comparison with state-of-the-art approaches adapted to our new setup bring out the efficacy of our approach. We hope our work will attract attention to this pragmatic and under-explored research area.

PaperID: 490, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.09680

Authors:Albina Klepach, Alexander Nikulin, Ilya Zisman, Denis Tarasov, Alexander Derevyagin, Andrei Polubarov, Nikita Lyubaykin, Igor Kiselev, Vladislav Kurenkov

Affiliations: dunnolab.ai Moscow State University, dunnolab.ai Higher School of Economics, dunnolab.ai Innopolis University

Title: Object-Centric Latent Action Learning

Abstract:
Leveraging vast amounts of unlabeled internet video data for embodied AI is currently bottlenecked by the lack of action labels and the presence of actioncorrelated visual distractors. Although recent latent action policy optimization (LAPO) has shown promise in inferring proxy action labels from visual observations, its performance degrades significantly when distractors are present. To address this limitation, we propose a novel object-centric latent action learning framework that centers on objects rather than pixels. We leverage self-supervised object-centric pretraining to disentangle the movement of the agent and distracting background dynamics. This allows LAPO to focus on task-relevant interactions, resulting in more robust proxy-action labels, enabling better imitation learning and efficient adaptation of the agent with just a few action-labeled trajectories. We evaluated our method in eight visually complex tasks across the Distracting Control Suite (DCS) and Distracting MetaWorld (DMW). Our results show that object-centric pretraining mitigates the negative effects of distractors by 50%, as measured by downstream task performance: average return (DCS) and success rate (DMW).

PaperID: 491, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20558

Authors:Xintong Li, Haoran Zhang, Xiao Zhou

Affiliations: Renmin University of China

Title: Spatio-Temporal Hierarchical Causal Models

Abstract:
The abundance of finegrained spatio-temporal data, such as traffic sensor networks, offers vast opportunities for scientific discovery. However, inferring causal relationships from such observational data remains challenging, particularly due to unobserved confounders that are specific to units (e.g., geographical locations) yet influence outcomes over time. Most existing methods for spatio-temporal causal inference assume that all confounders are observed, an assumption that is often violated in practice. In this paper, we introduce Spatio-Temporal Hierarchical Causal Models (ST-HCMs), a novel graphical framework that extends hierarchical causal modeling to the spatio-temporal domain. At the core of our approach is the Spatio-Temporal Collapse Theorem, which shows that a complex ST-HCM converges to a simpler flat causal model as the amount of subunit data increases. This theoretical result enables a general procedure for causal identification, allowing ST-HCMs to recover causal effects even in the presence of unobserved, time-invariant unit-level confounders, a scenario where standard non-hierarchical models fail. We validate the effectiveness of our framework on both synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating its potential for robust causal inference in complex dynamic systems.

PaperID: 492, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17153

Authors:Moule Lin, Andrea Patane, Weipeng Jing, Shuhao Guan, Goetz Botterweck

Affiliations: Trinity College Dublin Lero, the Research Ireland Centre for Software, Northeast Forestry University, University College Dublin

Title: Flow-Induced Diagonal Gaussian Processes

Abstract:
We present FlowInduced Diagonal Gaussian Processes (FiD-GP), a compression framework that incorporates a compact inducing weight matrix to project a neural network’s weight uncertainty into a lower-dimensional subspace. Critically, FiD-GP relies on normalising flow variational posterior and spectral regularisations to augment its expressiveness and align the inducing subspace with feature-gradient geometry through a numerically stable projection mechanism objective. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the prediction framework in FiD-GP can help to design a single pass projection for Out-of-Distribution (OoD) detection. Our analysis shows that FiD-GP improves uncertainty estimation ability on various tasks compared with SVGP-based baselines, satisfies tight spectral residual bounds with theoretically guaranteed OoD detection, and significantly compresses the neural network’s storage requirements at the cost of increased inference computation dependent on the number of inducing weights employed. Specifically, in a comprehensive empirical study spanning regression, image classification, semantic segmentation, and Out-of-Distribution detection benchmarks, it significantly cuts Bayesian training cost, compresses parameters by roughly 51%, reduces model size by about 75%, and matches state-of-the-art accuracy and uncertainty estimation.

PaperID: 493, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.03023

Authors:Zakaria Shams Siam, Chaowen Guan, Chong Liu

Affiliations: University at Albany, State University of New York, University of Cincinnati

Title: Quantum Non-Linear Bandit Optimization

Abstract:
We study nonlinear bandit optimization where the learner maximizes a black-box function with zeroth order function oracle, which has been successfully applied in many critical applications such as drug discovery and materials design. Existing works have showed that with the aid of quantum computing, it is possible to break the classical Ω(√T) regret lower bound and achieve the new O(poly log T) upper bound. However, they usually assume that the objective function sits within the reproducing kernel Hilbert space and their algorithms suffer from the curse of dimensionality. In this paper, we propose the new Q-NLB-UCB algorithm which enjoys an input dimension-free O(poly log T) upper bound, making it applicable for high-dimensional tasks. At the heart of our algorithm design are quantum Monte Carlo mean estimator, parametric function approximation technique, and a new quantum non-linear regression oracle, which can be of independent interests in more quantum machine learning problems. Our algorithm is also validated for its efficiency compared with other quantum algorithms on both high-dimensional synthetic and real-world tasks.

PaperID: 494, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09402

Authors:Rui Wang, Yuting Jiang, Xiaoqing Luo, Xiao-Jun Wu, Nicu Sebe, Ziheng Chen

Affiliations: Jiangnan University, University of Trento

Title: Wasserstein-Aligned Hyperbolic Multi-View Clustering

Abstract:
Multiview clustering (MVC) aims to uncover the latent structure of multi-view data by learning view-common and view-specific information. Although recent studies have explored hyperbolic representations for better tackling the representation gap between different views, they focus primarily on instance-level alignment and neglect global semantic consistency, rendering them vulnerable to view-specific information (e.g., noise and cross-view discrepancies). To this end, this paper proposes a novel Wasserstein-Aligned Hyperbolic (WAH) framework for multi-view clustering. Specifically, our method exploits a view-specific hyperbolic encoder for each view to embed features into the Lorentz manifold for hierarchical semantic modeling. Whereafter, a global semantic loss based on the hyperbolic sliced-Wasserstein distance is introduced to align manifold distributions across views. This is followed by soft cluster assignments to encourage cross-view semantic consistency. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarking datasets show that our method can achieve SOTA clustering performance.

PaperID: 495, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13573

Authors:Tao Zhang, Ziqi Zhang, Zongyang Ma, Yuxin Chen, Bing Li, Chunfeng Yuan, Guangting Wang, Fengyun Rao, Ying Shan, Weiming Hu

Affiliations: Institute of Automation，Chinese Academy of Sciences School of Artificial Intelligence, Institute of Automation，Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing Key Laboratory of Super Intelligent Security of Multi-Modal Information, Tencent Inc., University of Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing Key Laboratory of Super Intelligent Security of Multi-Modal Information School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University

Title: MMhops-R1: Multimodal Multi-hop Reasoning

Abstract:
The ability to perform multimodal multi-hop reasoning by iteratively integrating information across various modalities and external knowledge is critical for addressing complex real-world challenges. However, existing Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are predominantly limited to single-step reasoning, as existing benchmarks lack the complexity needed to evaluate and drive multi-hop abilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce MMhops, a novel, large-scale benchmark designed to systematically evaluate and foster multi-modal multi-hop reasoning. MMhops dataset comprises two challenging task formats, Bridging and Comparison, which necessitate that models dynamically construct complex reasoning chains by integrating external knowledge. To tackle the challenges posed by MMhops, we propose MMhops-R1, a novel multi-modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (mRAG) framework for dynamic reasoning. Our framework utilizes reinforcement learning to optimize the model for autonomously planning reasoning paths, formulating targeted queries, and synthesizing multi-level information. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MMhops-R1 significantly outperforms strong baselines on MMhops, highlighting that dynamic planning and multi-modal knowledge integration are crucial for complex reasoning. Moreover, MMhops-R1 demonstrates strong generalization to tasks requiring fixed-hop reasoning, underscoring the robustness of our dynamic planning approach.

PaperID: 496, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23596

Authors:Linqiang Guo, Wei Liu, Yi Wen Heng, Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen, Yang Wang

Affiliations: Concordia University

Title: Agent-SAMA: State-Aware Mobile Assistant

Abstract:
Mobile Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents aim to autonomously complete tasks within or across apps based on user instructions. While recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) enable these agents to interpret UI screens and perform actions, existing agents remain fundamentally reactive. They reason over the current UI screen but lack a structured representation of the app navigation flow, limiting GUI agents’ ability to understand execution context, detect unexpected execution results, and recover from errors. We introduce Agent-SAMA, a state-aware multi-agent framework that models app execution as a Finite State Machine (FSM), treating UI screens as states and user actions as transitions. Agent-SAMA implements four specialized agents that collaboratively construct and use FSMs in real time to guide task planning, execution verification, and recovery. We evaluate Agent-SAMA on two types of benchmarks: cross- app (Mobile-Eval-E, SPA-Bench) and mostly single-app (AndroidWorld). On Mobile-Eval-E, Agent-SAMA achieves an 84.0% success rate and a 71.9% recovery rate. On SPA-Bench, it reaches an 80.0% success rate with a 66.7% recovery rate. Compared to prior methods, Agent-SAMA improves task success by up to 12% and recovery success by 13.8%. On AndroidWorld, Agent-SAMA achieves a 63.7% success rate, outperforming the baselines. Our results demonstrate that structured state modeling enhances robustness and can serve as a lightweight, model-agnostic memory layer for future GUI agents.

PaperID: 497, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14018

Authors:Minghu Wang, ShuLiang Zhao, Yuanyuan Zhao, Hongxia Xu

Affiliations: College of Computer and Cyber Security, Hebei Normal University, Hebei China, Hebei Provincial Engineering Research Center for Supply Chain Big Data Analytics & Data Security, Shijiazhuang College of Applied Technology

Title: ALEX:A Light Editing-knowledge Extractor

Abstract:
The static nature of knowledge within Large Language Models (LLMs) makes it difficult for them to adapt to evolving information, rendering knowledge editing a critical task. However, existing methods struggle with challenges of scalability and retrieval efficiency, particularly when handling complex, multihop questions that require multi-step reasoning. To address these challenges, this paper introduces ALEX (A Light Editing-knowledge Extractor), a lightweight knowledge editing framework. The core innovation of ALEX is its hierarchical memory architecture, which organizes knowledge updates (edits) into semantic clusters. This design fundamentally reduces retrieval complexity from a linear O(N) to a highly scalable O(K+N/C). Furthermore, the framework integrates an Inferential Query Synthesis (IQS) module to bridge the semantic gap between queries and facts , and a Dynamic Evidence Adjudication (DEA) engine that executes an efficient two-stage retrieval process. Experiments on the MQUAKE benchmark demonstrate that ALEX significantly improves both the accuracy of multi-hop answers (MultiHop-ACC) and the reliability of reasoning paths (HopWise-ACC). It also reduces the required search space by over 80% , presenting a promising path toward building scalable, efficient, and accurate knowledge editing systems.

PaperID: 498, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11615

Authors:Xurong Xie, Zhucun Xue, Jiafu Wu, Jian Li, Yabiao Wang, Xiaobin Hu, Yong Liu, Jiangning Zhang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Tencent Youtu Lab, National University of Singapore

Title: LLM-Oriented Token-Adaptive Knowledge Distillation

Abstract:
Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a key technique for compressing Largescale Language Models (LLMs), but prevailing logit-based methods employ static strategies misaligned with the student’s dynamic learning process. By treating all tokens indiscriminately with a fixed temperature, these methods result in suboptimal knowledge transfer. To address this, we propose LLM-oriented token-Adaptive Knowledge Distillation (AdaKD), a framework that adapts the distillation process to each token’s real-time learning state. AdaKD consists of two synergistic modules driven by a unified token difficulty metric. First, the Loss-driven Adaptive Token Focusing (LATF) module dynamically concentrates distillation on valuable tokens by monitoring the student’s learning stability. Second, Inverse Difficulty Temperature Scaling (IDTS) introduces a counterintuitive token-level temperature: low for difficult tokens to target error correction, and high for easy tokens to learn the teacher’s smooth output distribution for better generalization. As a plug-and-play framework, AdaKD consistently improves performance across diverse distillation methods, model architectures, and benchmarks.

PaperID: 499, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14683

Authors:Devon R. Graham, Eros Rojas Velez, Kevin Leyton-Brown

Affiliations: University of British Columbia

Title: Practical, Utilitarian Algorithm Configuration

Abstract:
Utilitarian algorithm configuration identifies a parameter setting for a given algorithm that maximizes a user's utility. Utility functions offer a theoretically wellgrounded approach to optimizing decision-making under uncertainty and are flexible enough to capture a user's preferences over algorithm runtimes (e.g., they can describe a sharp cutoff after which a solution is no longer required, a per-hour cost for compute, or diminishing returns from algorithms that take longer to run). COUP is a recently-introduced utilitarian algorithm configuration procedure which was designed mainly to offer strong theoretical guarantees about the quality of the configuration it returns, with less attention paid to its practical performance. This paper closes that gap, bringing theoretically-grounded, utilitarian algorithm configuration to the point where it is competitive with widely used, heuristic configuration procedures that offer no performance guarantees. We present a series of improvements to COUP that improve its empirical performance without degrading its theoretical guarantees and demonstrate their benefit experimentally. Using a case study, we also illustrate ways of exploring the robustness of a given solution to the algorithm selection problem to variations in the utility function.

PaperID: 500, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12999

Authors:Harrison H Li, Medhanie Irgau, Nabil Janmohamed, Karen Solveig Rieckmann, David B. Lobell

Affiliations: Harvey Mudd College, Stanford University, Pula Advisors

Title: Scalable Vision-Guided Crop Yield Estimation

Abstract:
Precise estimation and uncertainty quantification for average crop yields are critical for agricultural monitoring and decision making. Existing data collection methods, such as crop cuts in randomly sampled fields at harvest time, are relatively timeconsuming. Thus, we propose an approach based on prediction-powered inference (PPI) to supplement these crop cuts with less time-consuming field photos. After training a computer vision model to predict the ground truth crop cut yields from the photos, we learn a "control function" that recalibrates these predictions with the spatial coordinates of each field. This enables fields with photos but not crop cuts to be leveraged to improve the precision of zone-wide average yield estimates. Our control function is learned by training on a dataset of nearly 20,000 real crop cuts and photos of rice and maize fields in sub-Saharan Africa. To improve precision, we pool training observations across different zones within the same first-level subdivision of each country. Our final PPI-based point estimates of the average yield are provably asymptotically unbiased and cannot increase the asymptotic variance beyond that of the natural baseline estimator --- the sample average of the crop cuts --- as the number of fields grows. We also propose a novel bias-corrected and accelerated (BCa) bootstrap to construct accompanying confidence intervals. Even in zones with as few as 20 fields, the point estimates show significant empirical improvement over the baseline, increasing the effective sample size by as much as 73% for rice and by 12-23% for maize. The confidence intervals are accordingly shorter at minimal cost to empirical finite-sample coverage. This demonstrates the potential for relatively low-cost images to make area-based crop insurance more affordable and thus spur investment into sustainable agricultural practices.

PaperID: 501, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.26091

Authors:Frédéric Berdoz, Luca A Lanzendörfer, Nick Tuninga, Roger Wattenhofer

Affiliations: ETH Zurich

Title: Text-to-Scene with Large Reasoning Models

Abstract:
Promptdriven scene synthesis allows users to generate complete 3D environments from textual descriptions. Current text-to-scene methods often struggle with complex geometries and object transformations, and tend to show weak adherence to complex instructions. We address these limitations by introducing Reason-3D, a text-to-scene model powered by large reasoning models (LRMs). Reason-3D integrates object retrieval using captions covering physical, functional, and contextual attributes. Reason-3D then places the selected objects based on implicit and explicit layout constraints, and refines their positions with collision-aware spatial reasoning. Evaluated on instructions ranging from simple to complex indoor configurations, Reason-3D significantly outperforms previous methods in human-rated visual fidelity, adherence to constraints, and asset retrieval quality. Beyond its contribution to the field of text-to-scene generation, our work showcases the advanced spatial reasoning abilities of modern LRMs. Additionally, we release the codebase to further the research in object retrieval and placement with LRMs.

PaperID: 502, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09082

Authors:Zhen Li, Yuwei Wu, Chenchen Jing, Che Sun, Chuanhao Li, Yunde Jia

Affiliations: Beijing Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Technology, School of Computer Science & Technology, Shenzhen MSU-BIT University, Zhejiang University of Technology, Guangdong Laboratory of Machine Perception and Intelligent Computing, Beijing Institute of Technology

Title: Composition-Incremental Learning for Compositional Generalization

Abstract:
Compositional generalization has achieved substantial progress in computer vision on precollected training data. Nonetheless, real-world data continually emerges, with possible compositions being nearly infinite, long-tailed, and not entirely visible. Thus, an ideal model is supposed to gradually improve the capability of compositional generalization in an incremental manner. In this paper, we explore Composition-Incremental Learning for Compositional Generalization (CompIL) in the context of the compositional zero-shot learning (CZSL) task, where models need to continually learn new compositions, intending to improve their compositional generalization capability progressively. To quantitatively evaluate CompIL, we develop a benchmark construction pipeline leveraging existing datasets, yielding MIT-States-CompIL and C-GQA-CompIL. Furthermore, we propose a pseudo-replay framework utilizing a visual synthesizer to synthesize visual representations of learned compositions and a linguistic primitive distillation mechanism to maintain aligned primitive representations across the learning process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

PaperID: 503, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04687

Authors:Vanshika Vats, Ashwani Rathee, James Davis

Affiliations: University of California, Santa Cruz

Title: Guideline-Consistent Segmentation via Multi-Agent Refinement

Abstract:
Semantic segmentation in realworld applications often requires not only accurate masks but also strict adherence to textual labeling guidelines. These guidelines are typically complex and long, and both human and automated labeling often fail to follow them faithfully. Traditional approaches depend on expensive task-specific retraining that must be repeated as the guidelines evolve. Although recent open-vocabulary segmentation methods excel with simple prompts, they often fail when confronted with sets of paragraph-length guidelines that specify intricate segmentation rules. To address this, we introduce a multi-agent, training-free framework that coordinates general-purpose vision-language models within an iterative Worker-Supervisor refinement architecture. The Worker performs the segmentation, the Supervisor critiques it against the retrieved guidelines, and a lightweight reinforcement learning stop policy decides when to terminate the loop, ensuring guideline-consistent masks while balancing resource use. Evaluated on the Waymo and ReasonSeg datasets, our method notably outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating strong generalization and instruction adherence.

PaperID: 504, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22170

Authors:Delong Zhao, Qiang Huang, Di Yan, Yiqun Sun, Jun Yu

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), National University of Singapore, China Peng Cheng Laboratory

Title: Partially Shared Concept Bottleneck Models

Abstract:
Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) enhance interpretability by introducing a layer of humanunderstandable concepts between inputs and predictions. While recent methods automate concept generation using Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), they still face three fundamental challenges: poor visual grounding, concept redundancy, and the absence of principled metrics to balance predictive accuracy and concept compactness. We introduce PS-CBM, a Partially Shared CBM framework that addresses these limitations through three core components: (1) a multimodal concept generator that integrates LLM-derived semantics with exemplar-based visual cues; (2) a Partially Shared Concept Strategy that merges concepts based on activation patterns to balance specificity and compactness; and (3) Concept-Efficient Accuracy (CEA), a post-hoc metric that jointly captures both predictive accuracy and concept compactness. Extensive experiments on eleven diverse datasets show that PS-CBM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art CBMs, improving classification accuracy by 1.0%–7.4% and CEA by 2.0%–9.5%, while requiring significantly fewer concepts. These results underscore PS-CBM’s effectiveness in achieving both high accuracy and strong interpretability.

PaperID: 505, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20991

Authors:Zhiwen Zheng, Yiwei Ouyang, Zhao Huang, Tao Zhang, Xiaoshuai Zhang, Huiyu Zhou, Wenwen Tang, Shaowei Jiang, Jin Liu, Xingru Huang

Affiliations: School of Communication Engineering, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Department of Computer and Information Science, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, Hangzhou China, Faculty of Information Science and Engineering, Ocean University of China, School of Informatics, University of Leicester, Leicester UK, Johns Hopkins University

Title: Wavefront-Constrained Passive Obscured Object Detection

Abstract:
Accurately localizing and segmenting obscured objects from faint light patterns beyond the field of view is highly challenging due to multiple scattering and mediuminduced perturbations. Most existing methods, based on real-valued modeling or local convolutional operations, are inadequate for capturing the underlying physics of coherent light propagation. Moreover, under low signal-to-noise conditions, these methods often converge to non-physical solutions, severely compromising the stability and reliability of the observation. To address these challenges, we propose a novel physics-driven Wavefront Propagating Compensation Network (WavePCNet) to simulate wavefront propagation and enhance the perception of obscured objects. This WavePCNet integrates the Tri-Phase Wavefront Complex-Propagation Reprojection (TriWCP) to incorporate complex amplitude transfer operators to precisely constrain coherent propagation behavior, along with a momentum memory mechanism to effectively suppress the accumulation of perturbations. Additionally, a High-frequency Cross-layer Compensation Enhancement is introduced to construct frequency-selective pathways with multi-scale receptive fields and dynamically models structural consistency across layers, further boosting the model’s robustness and interpretability under complex environmental conditions. Extensive experiments conducted on four physically collected datasets demonstrate that WavePCNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across both accuracy and robustness.

PaperID: 506, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07611

Authors:Yuan Zhou, Junbao Zhou, Qingshan Xu, Kesen Zhao, Yuxuan Wang, Hao Fei, Richang Hong, Hanwang Zhang

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University, National University of Singapore, Hefei University of Technology

Title: DragNeXt: Rethinking Drag-Based Image Editing

Abstract:
DragBased Image Editing (DBIE), which allows users to manipulate images by directly dragging objects within them, has recently attracted much attention from the community. However, it faces two key challenges: (i) point-based drag is often highly ambiguous and difficult to align with user intentions; (ii) current DBIE methods primarily rely on alternating between motion supervision and point tracking, which is not only cumbersome but also fails to produce high-quality results. These limitations motivate us to explore DBIE from a new perspective---unifying it as a Latent Region Optimization (LRO) problem that aims to use region-level geometric transformations to optimize latent code to realize drag manipulation. Thus, by specifying the areas and types of geometric transformations, we can effectively address the ambiguity issue. We also propose a simple yet effective editing framework, dubbed DragNeXt. It solves LRO through Progressive Backward Self-Intervention (PBSI), simplifying the overall procedure of the alternating workflow while further enhancing quality by fully leveraging region-level structure information and progressive guidance from intermediate drag states. We validate DragNeXt on our NextBench, and extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method can significantly outperform existing approaches.

PaperID: 507, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08287

Authors:Xiang Chen, Kun Yue, Wenjie Liu, Zhenyu Zhang, Liang Duan

Affiliations: School of Information Science and Engineering, Yunnan University, College of Artificial Intelligence, Tianjin University of Science and Technology

Title: Dual-Kernel Graph Community Contrastive Learning

Abstract:
Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in the absence of taskspecific labels. However, its scalability on large-scale graphs is hindered by the intensive message passing mechanism of GNN and the quadratic computational complexity of contrastive loss over positive and negative node pairs. To address these issues, we propose an efficient GCL framework that transforms the input graph into a compact network of interconnected node sets while preserving structural information across communities. We firstly introduce a kernelized graph community contrastive loss with linear complexity, enabling effective information transfer among node sets to capture hierarchical structural information of the graph. We then incorporate a knowledge distillation technique into the decoupled GNN architecture to accelerate inference while maintaining strong generalization performance. Extensive experiments on sixteen real-world datasets of varying scales demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art GCL baselines in both effectiveness and scalability.

PaperID: 508, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.01448

Authors:Na Li, Fanghui Sun, Yan Zou, Yangfu Zhu, Xiatian Zhu, Ying Ma

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Capital Normal University, University of Surrey, United Kingdom

Title: Adaptive Diffusion-based Augmentation for Recommendation

Abstract:
Recommendation systems often rely on implicit feedback, where only positive useritem interactions can be observed. Negative sampling is therefore crucial to provide proper negative training signals. However, existing methods tend to mislabel potentially positive but unobserved items as negatives and lack precise control over negative sample selection. We aim to address these by generating controllable negative samples, rather than sampling from the existing item pool. In this context, we propose Adaptive Diffusion-based Augmentation for Recommendation (ADAR), a novel and model-agnostic module that leverages diffusion to synthesize informative negatives. Inspired by the progressive corruption process in diffusion, ADAR simulates a continuous transition from positive to negative, allowing for fine-grained control over sample hardness. To mine suitable negative samples, we theoretically identify the transition point at which a positive sample turns negative and derive a score-aware function to adaptively determine the optimal sampling timestep. By identifying this transition point, ADAR generates challenging negative samples that effectively refine the model's decision boundary. Experiments confirm that ADAR is broadly compatible and boosts the performance of existing recommendation models substantially, including collaborative filtering and sequential recommendation, without architectural modifications.

PaperID: 509, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02095

Authors:Mehrad Abbaszadeh, Ali Ansarifar, Mohamad Latifian, Masoud Seddighin

Affiliations: Georgia Institute of Technology, Sharif University of Technology, University of Edinburgh, Tehran Institute for Advanced Studies

Title: Metric Distortion with Preference Intensities

Abstract:
In voting with ranked ballots each agent submits a strict ranking of the form a > b > c > d over the alternatives, and the voting rule decides on the winner based on these rankings. Although this ballot format has desirable characteristics, there is a question of whether it is expressive enough for the agents. Kahng et. al. address this issue by adding intensities to the rankings. They introduce ranking with intensities ballot format, where agents can use both >> and > in their rankings to express intensive and normal preferences between consecutive alternatives in their rankings. While Kahng et. al. focus on analyzing this ballot format in the utilitarian distortion framework, in this work, we look at the potentials of using this ballot format from the metric distortion view point. We design a class of voting rules coined Positional Scoring Rules, which can be used for different problems in the metric setting, and show that by solving a zerosum game we can find the optimal member of this class for our problem. This rule takes intensities into account and achieves a lower distortion. In addition, by proving a bound on the price of ignoring intensities, we show that we might lose a great deal in terms of distortion by not taking the intensities into account.

PaperID: 510, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06518

Authors:Salam Afiouni, Jakub Černý, Chun Kai Ling, Christian Kroer

Affiliations: Columbia University, National University of Singapore

Title: Colonel Blotto with Battlefield Games

Abstract:
We study a class of twoplayer zero-sum Colonel Blotto games in which, after allocating soldiers across battlefields, players engage in (possibly distinct) normal-form games on each battlefield. Per-battlefield payoffs are parameterized by the soldier allocations. This generalizes the classical Blotto setting, where outcomes depend only on relative soldier allocations. We consider both discrete and continuous allocation models and examine two types of aggregate objectives: linear aggregation and worst-case battlefield value. For each setting, we analyze the existence and computability of Nash equilibrium. The general problem is not convex-concave, which limits the applicability of standard convex optimization techniques. However, we show that in several settings it is possible to reformulate the strategy space in a way where convex-concave structure is recovered. We evaluate the proposed methods on synthetic and real-world instances inspired by security applications, suggesting that our approaches scale well in practice.

PaperID: 511, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11261

Authors:Piotr Faliszewski, Łukasz Janeczko, Grzegorz Lisowski, Kristýna Pekárková, Ildikó Schlotter

Affiliations: AGH University of Kraków, University of Groningen, The Netherlands, ELTE Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Hungary Budapest University of Technology and Economics

Title: Identifying Imperfect Clones in Elections

Abstract:
A perfect clone in an ordinal election (i.e., an election where the voters rank the candidates in a strict linear order) is a set of candidates that each voter ranks consecutively. We consider different relaxations of this notion: independent or subelection clones are sets of candidates that only some of the voters recognize as a perfect clone, whereas approximate clones are sets of candidates such that every voter ranks their members close to each other, but not necessarily consecutively. We establish the complexity of identifying such imperfect clones, and of partitioning the candidates into families of imperfect clones. We also study the parameterized complexity of these problems with respect to a set of natural parameters such as the number of voters, the size or the number of imperfect clones we are searching for, or their level of imperfection.

PaperID: 512, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.07557

Authors:Paul Gölz, Jan Maly, Ulrike SchmidtKraepelin, Markus Utke, Philipp C. Verpoort

Affiliations: Cornell University, Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, TU Eindhoven, Sortition Foundation

Title: City Sampling for Citizens’ Assemblies

Abstract:
In citizens' assemblies, a group of constituents is randomly selected to weigh in on policy issues. We study a twostage sampling problem faced by practitioners in countries such as Germany, in which constituents' contact information is stored at a municipal level. As a result, practitioners can only select constituents from a bounded number of cities ex post, while ensuring equal selection probability for constituents ex ante. We develop several algorithms for this problem. Although minimizing the number of contacted cities is NP-hard, we provide a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm and an additive 1-approximation, both based on separation oracles for a linear programming formulation. Recognizing that practical objectives go beyond minimizing city count, we further introduce a simple and more interpretable greedy algorithm, which additionally satisfies an ex-post monotonicity property and achieves an additive 2-approximation. Finally, we explore a notion of ex-post proportionality, for which we propose two practical algorithms: an optimal algorithm based on column generation and integer linear programming and a simple heuristic creating particularly transparent distributions. We evaluate these algorithms on data from Germany, and plan to deploy them in cooperation with a leading nonprofit organization in this space.

PaperID: 513, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.23097

Authors:Georgios Papasotiropoulos, Zein Pishbin

Affiliations: University of Warsaw

Title: Fairness in the Multi-Secretary Problem

Abstract:
This paper bridges two perspectives: it studies the multisecretary problem through the fairness lens of social choice, and examines multi-winner elections from the viewpoint of online decision making. After identifying the limitations of the prominent proportionality notion of Extended Justified Representation (EJR) in the online domain, the work proposes a set of mechanisms that merge techniques from online algorithms with rules from social choice---such as the Method of Equal Shares and the Nash Rule---and supports them through both theoretical analysis and extensive experimental evaluation.

PaperID: 514, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.05160

Authors:Xudong Wang, Zebin Han, Zhiyu Liu, Gan Li, Jiahua Dong, Baichen Liu, Lianqing Liu, Zhi Han

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Intelligent Systems, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

Title: Lifelong Language-Conditioned Robotic Manipulation Learning

Abstract:
Traditional languageconditioned manipulation agent adaptation to new manipulation skills leads to catastrophic forgetting of old skills, limiting dynamic scene practical deployment. In this paper, we propose SkillsCrafter, a novel robotic manipulation framework designed to continually learn multiple skills while reducing catastrophic forgetting of old skills. Specifically, we propose a Manipulation Skills Adaptation to retain the old skills knowledge while inheriting the shared knowledge between new and old skills to facilitate learning of new skills. Meanwhile, we perform the singular value decomposition on the diverse skill instructions to obtain common skill semantic subspace projection matrices, thereby recording the essential semantic space of skills. To achieve forget-less and generalization manipulation, we propose a Skills Specialization Aggregation to compute inter-skills similarity in skill semantic subspaces, achieving aggregation of the previously learned skill knowledge for any new or unknown skill. Extensive simulator and real-world experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our SkillsCrafter.

PaperID: 515, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08765

Authors:Rustam Galimullin, Munyque Mittelmann, Laurent Perrussel

Affiliations: University of Bergen, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, Université Toulouse Capitole

Title: Formal Verification of Diffusion Auctions

Abstract:
In diffusion auctions, sellers can leverage an underlying social network to broaden participation, thereby increasing their potential revenue. Specifically, sellers can incentivise participants in their auction to diffuse information about the auction through the network. While numerous variants of such auctions have been recently studied in the literature, the formal verification and strategic reasoning perspectives have not been investigated yet. Our contribution is threefold. First, we introduce a logical formalism that captures the dynamics of diffusion and its strategic dimension. Second, for such a logic, we provide modelchecking procedures that allow one to verify properties like the Nash equilibrium, and that pave the way towards checking the existence of sellers' strategies. Third, we establish computational complexity results for the presented algorithms.

PaperID: 516, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12169

Authors:Kaiyue Zhao, Dingqi Chen, Shaoyu Wang, Pan Hu

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: Incremental Maintenance of DatalogMTL Materialisations

Abstract:
DatalogMTL extends the classical Datalog language with metric temporal logic (MTL), enabling expressive reasoning over temporal data. While existing reasoning approaches, such as materialisationbased and automata-based methods, offer soundness and completeness, they lack support for handling efficient dynamic updates—a crucial requirement for real-world applications that involve frequent data updates. In this work, we propose DRedMTL, an incremental reasoning algorithm for DatalogMTL with bounded intervals. Our algorithm builds upon the classical Delete/Rederive (DRed) algorithm, which incrementally updates the materialisation of a Datalog program. Unlike a Datalog materialisation which is in essence a finite set of facts, a DatalogMTL materialisation has to be represented as a finite set of facts plus periodic intervals indicating how the full materialisation can be constructed through unfolding. To cope with this, our algorithm is equipped with specifically designed operators to efficiently handle such periodic representations of DatalogMTL materialisations. We have implemented this approach and tested it on several publicly available datasets. Experimental results show that DRedMTL often significantly outperforms rematerialisation, sometimes by orders of magnitude.

PaperID: 517, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20102

Authors:Chang Chen, Hany Hamed, Doojin Baek, Taegu Kang, Samyeul Noh, Yoshua Bengio, Sungjin Ahn

Affiliations: Rutgers University, Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST)

Title: Extendable Planning via Multiscale Diffusion

Abstract:
Longhorizon planning is crucial in complex environments, but diffusion-based planners like Diffuser are limited by the trajectory lengths observed during training. This creates a dilemma: long trajectories are needed for effective planning, yet they degrade model performance. In this paper, we introduce this extendable long-horizon planning challenge and propose a two-phase solution. First, Progressive Trajectory Extension incrementally constructs longer trajectories through multi-round compositional stitching. Second, the Hierarchical Multiscale Diffuser enables efficient training and inference over long horizons by reasoning across temporal scales. To avoid the need for multiple separate models, we propose Adaptive Plan Pondering and the Recursive HM-Diffuser, which unify hierarchical planning within a single model. Experiments show our approach yields strong performance gains, advancing scalable and efficient decision-making over long-horizons.

PaperID: 518, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07981

Authors:Federico Di Valerio, Michela Proietti, Alessio Ragno, Roberto Capobianco

Affiliations: Sapienza University of Rome, Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon EPITA Research Laboratory (LRE), Sony AI

Title: CIP-Net: Continual Interpretable Prototype-based Network

Abstract:
Continual learning constrains models to learn new tasks over time without forgetting what they have already learned. A key challenge in this setting is catastrophic forgetting, where learning new information causes the model to lose its performance on previous tasks. Recently, explainable AI has been proposed as a promising way to better understand and reduce forgetting. In particular, selfexplainable models are useful because they generate explanations during prediction, which can help preserve knowledge. However, most existing explainable approaches use post-hoc explanations or require additional memory for each new task, resulting in limited scalability. In this work, we introduce CIP-Net, an exemplar-free self-explainable prototype-based model designed for continual learning. CIP-Net avoids storing past examples and maintains a simple architecture, while still providing useful explanations and strong performance. We demonstrate that CIP-Net achieves state-of-the-art performances compared to previous exemplar-free and self-explainable methods in both task- and class-incremental settings, while bearing significantly lower memory-related overhead. This makes it a practical and interpretable solution for continual learning.

PaperID: 519, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12321

Authors:Xi Ding, Lei Wang, Piotr Koniusz, Yongsheng Gao

Affiliations: Griffith University

Title: Learning Time in Static Classifiers

Abstract:
Realworld visual data rarely presents as isolated, static instances. Instead, it often evolves gradually over time through variations in pose, lighting, object state, or scene context. However, conventional classifiers are typically trained under the assumption of temporal independence, limiting their ability to capture such dynamics. We propose a simple yet effective framework that equips standard feedforward classifiers with temporal reasoning, all without modifying model architectures or introducing recurrent modules. At the heart of our approach is a novel Support-Exemplar-Query (SEQ) learning paradigm, which structures training data into temporally coherent trajectories. These trajectories enable the model to learn class-specific temporal prototypes and align prediction sequences via a differentiable soft-DTW loss. A multi-term objective further promotes semantic consistency and temporal smoothness. By interpreting input sequences as evolving feature trajectories, our method introduces a strong temporal inductive bias through loss design alone. This proves highly effective in both static and temporal tasks: it enhances performance on fine-grained and ultra-fine-grained image classification, and delivers precise, temporally consistent predictions in video anomaly detection. Despite its simplicity, our approach bridges static and temporal learning in a modular and data-efficient manner, requiring only a simple classifier on top of pre-extracted features.

PaperID: 520, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22543

Authors:Ziheng Jia, Zicheng Zhang, Xiaorong Zhu, Chunyi Li, Jinliang Han, Xiaohong Liu, Guangtao Zhai, Xiongkuo Min

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Title: Scaling-up Perceptual Video Quality Assessment

Abstract:
The data scaling law has significantly enhanced large multimodal models (LMMs) performance across various downstream tasks. However, in the domain of perceptual video quality assessment (VQA), the potential of data scaling remains unprecedented due to the scarcity of labeled resources and the insufficient scale of datasets. To address this, we propose OmniVQA, a framework designed to efficiently build high-quality, machine-dominated synthetic multi-modal instruction databases (MIDBs) for VQA. We then scale up to create OmniVQA-Chat-400K, the largest dataset in the VQA field concurrently. Our focus is on the technical and aesthetic quality dimensions, with abundant in-context instruction data to provide fine-grained VQA knowledge. Additionally, we build the OmniVQA-MOS-20K dataset to enhance the model's quantitative quality rating capabilities. We then introduce a complementary training strategy that effectively leverages the knowledge from datasets for different tasks. Furthermore, we propose the OmniVQA-FG (fine-grain)-Benchmark to evaluate the fine-grained performance of models. Our results demonstrate that our models achieve state-of-the-art performance in both tasks.

PaperID: 521, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08478

Authors:Zhiwei Li, Guodong Long, Jing Jiang, Chengqi Zhang, Qiang Yang

Affiliations: University of Technology Sydney, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: Federated Vision-Language-Recommendation with Personalized Fusion

Abstract:
Applying large pretrained Vision-Language Models to recommendation is a burgeoning field, a direction we term Vision-Language-Recommendation (VLR). Bringing VLR to user-oriented on-device intelligence within a federated learning framework is a crucial step for enhancing user privacy and delivering personalized experiences. This paper introduces FedVLR, a federated VLR framework specially designed for user-specific personalized fusion of vision-language representations. At its core is a novel bi-level fusion mechanism: The server-side multi-view fusion module first generates a diverse set of pre-fused multimodal views. Subsequently, each client employs a user-specific mixture-of-expert mechanism to adaptively integrate these views based on individual user interaction history. This designed lightweight personalized fusion module provides an efficient solution to implement a federated VLR system. The effectiveness of our proposed FedVLR has been validated on seven benchmark datasets.

PaperID: 522, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12629

Authors:Shiyun Lin

Affiliations: Peking University

Title: Bandit Learning in Housing Markets

Abstract:
The housing market, also known as onesided matching market, is a classic exchange economy model where each agent on the demand side initially owns an indivisible good (a house) and has a personal preference over all goods. The goal is to find a core-stable allocation that exhausts all mutually beneficial exchanges among subgroups of agents. While this model has been extensively studied in economics and computer science due to its broad applications, little attention has been paid to settings where preferences are unknown and must be learned through repeated interactions. In this paper, we propose a statistical learning model within the multi-player multi-armed bandit framework, where players (agents) learn their preferences over arms (goods) from stochastic rewards. We introduce the notion of core regret for each player as the market objective. We study both centralized and decentralized approaches, proving O (log T / △^2) upper bounds on regret, where T is the time horizon and △ is the minimum preference gap among players. For the decentralized setting, we also establish a matching lower bound, demonstrating that our algorithm is order-optimal.

PaperID: 523, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11345

Authors:Shuqi Liu, Jianguo Huang, Luke Ong

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University

Title: Conformal Prediction Meets Long-tail Classification

Abstract:
Conformal Prediction (CP) is a popular method for uncertainty quantification that converts a pretrained model's point prediction into a prediction set, with the set size reflecting the model's confidence. Although existing CP methods are guaranteed to achieve marginal coverage, they often exhibit imbalanced coverage across classes under longtailed label distributions, tending to over cover the head classes at the expense of under covering the remaining tail classes. This under coverage is particularly concerning, as it undermines the reliability of the prediction sets for minority classes, even with coverage ensured on average. In this paper, we propose the Tail-Aware Conformal Prediction (TACP) method to mitigate the under coverage of the tail classes by utilizing the long-tailed structure and narrowing the head-tail coverage gap. Theoretical analysis shows that it consistently achieves a smaller head-tail coverage gap than standard methods. To further improve coverage balance across all classes, we introduce an extension of TACP: soft TACP (sTACP) via a reweighting mechanism. The proposed framework can be combined with various non-conformity scores, and experiments on multiple long-tailed benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.

PaperID: 524, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09953

Authors:Pengqian Lu, Jie Lu, Anjin Liu, En Yu, Guangquan Zhang

Affiliations: University of Technology Sydney

Title: Autonomous Concept Drift Threshold Determination

Abstract:
Existing drift detection methods focus on designing sensitive test statistics. They treat the detection threshold as a fixed hyperparameter, set once to balance false alarms and late detections, and applied uniformly across all datasets and over time. However, maintaining model performance is the key objective from the perspective of machine learning, and we observe that model performance is highly sensitive to this threshold. This observation inspires us to investigate whether a dynamic threshold could be provably better. In this paper, we prove that a threshold that adapts over time can outperform any single fixed threshold. The main idea of the proof is that a dynamic strategy, constructed by combining the best threshold from each individual data segment, is guaranteed to outperform any single threshold that apply to all segments. Based on the theorem, we propose a Dynamic Threshold Determination algorithm. It enhances existing drift detection frameworks with a novel comparison phase to inform how the threshold should be adjusted. Extensive experiments on a wide range of synthetic and realworld datasets, including both image and tabular data, validate that our approach substantially enhances the performance of state-of-the-art drift detectors.

PaperID: 525, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.06475

Authors:Alessandro Luongo, Changpeng Shao

Affiliations: Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT), National University of Singapore, Singapore Inveriant Pte. Ltd., Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Quantum Algorithms for Spectral Sums

Abstract:
We propose new quantum algorithms for estimating spectral sums of positive semidefinite (PSD) matrices. For a matrix A and a function f, the spectral sum is the trace of f(A), equivalently the sum over eigenvalues of A of f applied to each eigenvalue. Typical examples of spectral sums are the von Neumann entropy, the trace of the inverse of A, the log-determinant, and the Schatten p-norm, where the latter does not require the matrix to be PSD. The current best classical randomized algorithms estimating these quantities have a runtime that is at least linearly in the number of nonzero entries of the matrix and quadratic in the estimation error. Assuming access to a block-encoding of a matrix, our algorithms are sub-linear in the matrix size, and depend at most quadratically on other parameters, like the condition number and the approximation error, and thus can compete with most of the randomized and distributed classical algorithms proposed in the literature, and polynomially improve the runtime of other quantum algorithms proposed for the same problems. We show how the algorithms and techniques used in this work can be applied to three problems in spectral graph theory: approximating the number of triangles, the effective resistance, and the number of spanning trees in a graph.

PaperID: 526, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13062

Authors:Mohit Meena, Yash Punjabi, Abhishek A, Vishal Sharma, Mahesh Chandran

Affiliations: Fujitsu Research of India

Title: Self-Adaptive Graph Mixture of Models

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful tools for learning over graphstructured data, yet recent studies have shown that their performance gains are beginning to plateau. In many cases, well-established models such as GCN and GAT, when appropriately tuned, can match or even exceed the performance of more complex, state-of-the-art architectures. This trend highlights a key limitation in the current landscape: the difficulty of selecting the most suitable model for a given graph task or dataset. To address this, we propose Self-Adaptive Graph Mixture of Models (SAGMM), a modular and practical framework that learns to automatically select and combine the most appropriate GNN models from a diverse pool of architectures. Unlike prior mixture-of-experts approaches that rely on variations of a single base model, SAGMM leverages architectural diversity and a topology-aware attention gating mechanism to adaptively assign experts to each node based on the structure of the input graph. To improve efficiency, SAGMM includes a pruning mechanism that reduces the number of active experts during training and inference without compromising performance. We also explore a training-efficient variant in which expert models are pretrained and frozen, and only the gating and task-specific layers are trained. We evaluate SAGMM on 16 benchmark datasets covering node classification, graph classification, regression, and link prediction tasks, and demonstrate that it consistently outperforms or matches leading GNN baselines and prior mixture-based methods, offering a robust and adaptive solution for real-world graph learning.

PaperID: 527, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12828

Authors:Mohammad Marufur Rahman, Guanchu Wang, Kaixiong Zhou, Minghan Chen, Fan Yang

Affiliations: Wake Forest University, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, North Carolina State University

Title: Catastrophic Forgetting in Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

Abstract:
Catastrophic forgetting is a longstanding challenge in continual learning, where models lose knowledge from earlier tasks when learning new ones. While various mitigation strategies have been proposed for MultiLayer Perceptrons (MLPs), recent architectural advances like Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have been suggested to offer intrinsic resistance to forgetting by leveraging localized spline-based activations. However, the practical behavior of KANs under continual learning remains unclear, and their limitations are not well understood. To address this, we present a comprehensive study of catastrophic forgetting in KANs and develop a theoretical framework that links forgetting to activation support overlap and intrinsic data dimension. We validate these analyses through systematic experiments on synthetic and vision tasks, measuring forgetting dynamics under varying model configurations and data complexity. Further, we introduce KAN-LoRA, a novel adapter design for parameter-efficient continual fine-tuning of language models, and evaluate its effectiveness in knowledge editing tasks. Our findings reveal that while KANs exhibit promising retention in low-dimensional algorithmic settings, they remain vulnerable to forgetting in high-dimensional domains such as image classification and language modeling. These results advance the understanding of KANs’ strengths and limitations, offering practical insights for continual learning system design.

PaperID: 528, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03836

Authors:Dhruv Sarkar, Nishant Pandey, Sayak Ray Chowdhury

Affiliations: Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

Title: DP-NCB: Privacy Preserving Fair Bandits

Abstract:
Multiarmed bandit algorithms are fundamental tools for sequential decision-making under uncertainty, with widespread applications across domains such as clinical trials and personalized decision-making. As bandit algorithms are increasingly deployed in these socially sensitive settings, it becomes critical to protect user data privacy and ensure fair treatment across decision rounds. While prior work has independently addressed privacy and fairness in bandit settings, the question of whether both objectives can be achieved simultaneously has remained largely open. Existing privacy-preserving bandit algorithms typically optimize average regret, a utilitarian measure, whereas fairness-aware approaches focus on minimizing Nash regret, which penalizes inequitable reward distributions, but often disregard privacy concerns. To bridge this gap, we introduce Differentially Private Nash Confidence Bound (DP-NCB)—a novel and unified algorithmic framework that simultaneously ensures ϵ-differential privacy and achieves order-optimal Nash regret, matching known lower bounds up to logarithmic factors. The framework is sufficiently general to operate under both global and local differential privacy models, and is anytime, requiring no prior knowledge of the time horizon. We support our theoretical guarantees with simulations on synthetic bandit instances, showing that DP-NCB incurs substantially lower Nash regret than state-of-the-art baselines. Our results offer a principled foundation for designing bandit algorithms that are both privacy-preserving and fair, making them suitable for high-stakes, socially impactful applications.

PaperID: 529, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12143

Authors:Jialiang Wang, Xiong Zhou, Xianming Liu, Gangfeng Hu, Deming Zhai, Junjun Jiang, Haoliang Li

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, City University of Hong Kong

Title: Variation-Bounded Loss for Noise-Tolerant Learning

Abstract:
Mitigating the negative impact of noisy labels has been a perennial issue in supervised learning. Robust loss functions have emerged as a prevalent solution to this problem. In this work, we introduce the Variation Ratio as a novel property related to the robustness of loss functions, and propose a new family of robust loss functions, termed VariationBounded Loss (VBL), which is characterized by a bounded variation ratio. We provide theoretical analyses of the variation radio, proving that a smaller variation ratio would lead to better robustness. Furthermore, we reveal that the variation ratio provides a feasible method to relax the symmetric condition and offers a more concise path to achieve the asymmetric condition. Based on the variation ratio, we reformulate several commonly used loss functions into a variation-bounded form for pract ical applications. Positive experiments on various datasets exhibit the effectiveness and flexibility of our approach.

PaperID: 530, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02600

Authors:Xudong Wang, Chris Ding, Tongxin Li, Jicong Fan

Affiliations: The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title: Adaptive Riemannian Graph Neural Networks

Abstract:
Graph data often exhibits complex geometric heterogeneity, where structures with varying local curvature, such as treelike hierarchies and dense communities, coexist within a single network. Existing geometric GNNs, which embed graphs into single fixed-curvature manifolds or discrete product spaces, struggle to capture this diversity. We introduce Adaptive Riemannian Graph Neural Networks (ARGNN), a novel framework that learns a continuous and anisotropic Riemannian metric tensor field over the graph. It allows each node to determine its optimal local geometry, enabling the model to fluidly adapt to the graph's structural landscape. Our core innovation is an efficient parameterization of the node-wise metric tensor, specializing to a learnable diagonal form that captures directional geometric information while maintaining computational tractability. To ensure geometric regularity and stable training, we integrate a Ricci flow-inspired regularization that smooths the learned manifold. Theoretically, we establish the rigorous geometric evolution convergence guarantee for ARGNN and provide a continuous generalization that unifies prior fixed or mixed-curvature GNNs. Empirically, our method demonstrates superior performance on both homophilic and heterophilic benchmark datasets with the ability to capture diverse structures adaptively. Moreover, the learned geometries both offer interpretable insights into the underlying graph structure and empirically corroborate our theoretical analysis.

PaperID: 531, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18138

Authors:Junrui Zhang, Xinyu Zhao, Jie Peng, Chenjie Wang, Jianmin Ji, Tianlong Chen

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center.

Title: Vulnerability-Aware Robust Multimodal Adversarial Training

Abstract:
Multimodal learning has shown significant superiority on various tasks by integrating multiple modalities. However, the interdependencies among modalities increase the susceptibility of multimodal models to adversarial attacks. Existing methods mainly focus on attacks on specific modalities or indiscriminately attack all modalities. In this paper, we find that these approaches ignore the differences between modalities in their contribution to final robustness, resulting in suboptimal robustness performance. To bridge this gap, we introduce VulnerabilityAware Robust Multimodal Adversarial Training (VARMAT), a probe-in-training adversarial training method that improves multimodal robustness by identifying the vulnerability of each modality. To be specific, VARMAT first explicitly quantifies the vulnerability of each modality, grounded in a first-order approximation of the attack objective (Probe). Then, we propose a targeted regularization term that penalizes modalities with high vulnerability, guiding robust learning while maintaining task accuracy (Training). We demonstrate the enhanced robustness of our method across multiple multimodal datasets involving diverse modalities. Finally, we achieve 12.73%, 22.21%, 11.19% robustness improvement on three multimodal datasets, revealing a significant blind spot in multimodal adversarial training.

PaperID: 532, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12845

Authors:Artem Pshenitsyn, Aleksandr Panov, Alexey Skrynnik

Affiliations: CogAI Lab MIRAI

Title: CAMAR: Continuous Actions Multi-Agent Routing

Abstract:
Multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a powerful paradigm for solving cooperative and competitive decision-making problems. While many MARL benchmarks have been proposed, few combine continuous state and action spaces with challenging coordination and planning tasks. We introduce CAMAR, a new MARL benchmark designed explicitly for multi-agent pathfinding in environments with continuous actions. CAMAR supports cooperative and competitive interactions between agents and runs efficiently at up to 100,000 environment steps per second. We also propose a three-tier evaluation protocol to better track algorithmic progress and enable deeper analysis of performance. In addition, CAMAR allows the integration of classical planning methods such as RRT and RRT into MARL pipelines. We use them as standalone baselines and combine RRT with popular MARL algorithms to create hybrid approaches. We provide a suite of test scenarios and benchmarking tools to ensure reproducibility and fair comparison. Experiments show that CAMAR presents a challenging and realistic testbed for the MARL community.

PaperID: 533, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21572

Authors:Liming Yang, Junyu Luo, Xuanzhe Liu, Yiling Lou, Zhenpeng Chen

Affiliations: Peking University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Nanyang Technological University Tsinghua University

Title: BAMAS: Structuring Budget-Aware Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract:
Large language model (LLM)based multi-agent systems have emerged as a powerful paradigm for enabling autonomous agents to solve complex tasks. As these systems scale in complexity, cost becomes an important consideration for practical deployment. However, existing work rarely addresses how to structure multi-agent systems under explicit budget constraints. In this paper, we propose BAMAS, a novel approach for building multi-agent systems with budget awareness. BAMAS first selects an optimal set of LLMs by formulating and solving an Integer Linear Programming problem that balances performance and cost. It then determines how these LLMs should collaborate by leveraging a reinforcement learning-based method to select the interaction topology. Finally, the system is instantiated and executed based on the selected agents and their collaboration topology. We evaluate BAMAS on three representative tasks and compare it with state-of-the-art agent construction methods. Results show that BAMAS achieves comparable performance while reducing cost by up to 86%.

PaperID: 534, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09193

Authors:Egor Yukhnevich, Anton Andreychuk

Affiliations: HSE University, Cognitive AI Systems Lab

Title: Enhancing PIBT via Multi-Action Operations

Abstract:
PIBT is a rulebased Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) solver, widely used as a low-level planner or action sampler in many state-of-the-art approaches. Its primary advantage lies in its exceptional speed, enabling action selection for thousands of agents within milliseconds by considering only the immediate next timestep. However, this short-horizon design leads to poor performance in scenarios where agents have orientation and must perform time-consuming rotation actions. In this work, we present an enhanced version of PIBT that addresses this limitation by incorporating multi-action operations. We detail the modifications introduced to improve PIBT's performance while preserving its hallmark efficiency. Furthermore, we demonstrate how our method, when combined with graph guidance technique and large neighborhood search optimization, achieves state-of-the-art performance in the online LMAPF-T setting.

PaperID: 535, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.20224

Authors:Canyu Chen, Baixiang Huang, Zekun Li, Zhaorun Chen, Shiyang Lai, Xiongxiao Xu, Jia-Chen Gu, Jindong Gu, Huaxiu Yao, Chaowei Xiao, Xifeng Yan, William Yang Wang, Philip Torr, Dawn Song, Kai Shu

Affiliations: Illinois Institute of Technology, Emory University, University of California, Santa Barbara, The University of Chicago, Los Angeles, University of Oxford, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Johns Hopkins University

Title: Can Editing LLMs Inject Harm?

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a new information channel. Meanwhile, one critical but underexplored question is: Is it possible to bypass the safety alignment and inject harmful information into LLMs stealthily? In this paper, we propose to reformulate knowledge editing as a new type of safety threat for LLMs, namely Editing Attack, and conduct a systematic investigation with a newly constructed dataset EditAttack. Specifically, we focus on two typical safety risks of Editing Attack including Misinformation Injection and Bias Injection. For the first risk, we find that editing attacks can inject both commonsense and long-tail misinformation into LLMs, and the effectiveness for the former one is particularly high. For the second risk, we discover that not only can biased sentences be injected into LLMs with high effectiveness, but also one single biased sentence injection can degrade the overall fairness. Then, we further illustrate the high stealthiness of editing attacks. Our discoveries demonstrate the emerging misuse risks of knowledge editing techniques on compromising the safety alignment of LLMs and the feasibility of disseminating misinformation or bias with LLMs as new channels.

PaperID: 536, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.03640

Authors:Kate Sanders, Benjamin Van Durme

Affiliations: Johns Hopkins University

Title: Bonsai: Interpretable Tree-Adaptive Grounded Reasoning

Abstract:
To develop generalpurpose collaborative agents, humans need reliable AI systems that can (1) adapt to new domains and (2) transparently reason with uncertainty to allow for verification and correction. Black-box models demonstrate powerful data processing abilities but do not satisfy these criteria due to their opaqueness, domain specificity, and lack of uncertainty awareness. We introduce Bonsai, a compositional and probabilistic reasoning system that generates adaptable inference trees by retrieving relevant grounding evidence and using it to compute likelihoods of sub-claims derived from broader natural language inferences. Bonsai's reasoning power is tunable at test-time via evidence scaling and it demonstrates reliable handling of varied domains including transcripts, photographs, videos, audio, and databases. Question-answering and human alignment experiments demonstrate that Bonsai matches the performance of domain-specific black-box methods while generating interpretable, grounded, and uncertainty-aware reasoning traces.

PaperID: 537, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.20015

Authors:Haoxuan Ji, Zheng Lin, Zhenxing Niu, Xinbo Gao, Gang Hua

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xidian University

Title: Efficient LLM-Jailbreaking via Multimodal-LLM Jailbreak

Abstract:
This paper focuses on jailbreaking attacks against large language models (LLMs), eliciting them to generate objectionable content in response to harmful user queries. Unlike previous LLMjailbreak methods that directly orient to LLMs, our approach begins by constructing a multimodal large language model (MLLM) built upon the target LLM. Subsequently, we perform an efficient MLLM jailbreak and obtain a jailbreaking embedding. Finally, we convert the embedding into a textual jailbreaking suffix to carry out the jailbreak of target LLM. Compared to the direct LLM-jailbreak methods, our indirect jailbreaking approach is more efficient, as MLLMs are more vulnerable to jailbreak than pure LLMs. Additionally, to improve the attack success rate of jailbreak, we propose an image-text semantic matching scheme to identify a suitable initial input. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach surpasses current state-of-the-art jailbreak methods in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. Moreover, our approach exhibits superior cross-class generalization abilities.

PaperID: 538, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.03060

Authors:Min Wu, Xiaofu Li, Haoze Wu, Clark Barrett

Affiliations: Stanford University, Amherst College VMware Research

Title: Efficiently Computing Compact Formal Explanations

Abstract:
Building on VeriX (Verified eXplainability), a system for producing optimal verified explanations for machine learning models, we present VeriX+, which significantly improves both the size and the generation time of formal explanations. We introduce a bound propagationbased sensitivity technique to improve the size, and a binary search-based traversal with confidence ranking for improving time---the two techniques are orthogonal and can be used independently or together. We also show how to adapt the QuickXplain algorithm to our setting to provide a trade-off between size and time. Experimental evaluations on standard benchmarks demonstrate significant improvements on both metrics, e.g., a size reduction of 38% on the GTSRB dataset and a time reduction of 90% on MNIST. We demonstrate that our approach is scalable to transformers and real-world scenarios such as autonomous aircraft taxiing and sentiment analysis. We conclude by showcasing several novel applications of formal explanations.

PaperID: 539, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12565

Authors:Lingyun Xiang, Chengfu Ou, Xu He, Zhongliang Yang, Yuling Liu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Changsha University of Science and Technology, College of Cyberspace Security, Jinan University, School of Cyberspace Security, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, College of Cyber Science and Technology, Hunan University

Title: A Content-Preserving Secure Linguistic Steganography

Abstract:
Existing linguistic steganography methods primarily rely on content transformations to conceal secret messages. However, they often cause subtle yet lookinginnocent deviations between normal and stego texts, posing potential security risks in real-world applications. To address this challenge, we propose a content-preserving linguistic steganography paradigm for perfectly secure covert communication without modifying the cover text. Based on this paradigm, we introduce CLstega (Content-preserving Linguistic steganography), a novel method that embeds secret messages through controllable distribution transformation. CLstega first applies an augmented masking strategy to locate and mask embedding positions, where MLM (masked language model)-predicted probability distributions are easily adjustable for transformation. Subsequently, a dynamic distribution steganographic coding strategy is designed to encode secret messages by deriving target distributions from the original probability distributions. To achieve this transformation, CLstega elaborately selects target words for embedding positions as labels to construct a masked sentence dataset, which is used to fine-tune the original MLM, producing a target MLM capable of directly extracting secret messages from the cover text. This approach ensures perfect security of secret messages while fully preserving the integrity of the original cover text. Experimental results demonstrate that CLstega can achieve a 100% extraction success rate, and outperforms existing methods in security, effectively balancing embedding capacity and security.

PaperID: 540, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.22367

Authors:Francesco Percassi, Alessandro Saetti, Enrico Scala

Affiliations: University of Huddersfield, Università degli Studi di Brescia

Title: Planning with Uncertain Action Models

Abstract:
Uncertainty over model knowledge is a core challenge in planning and has been addressed through various approaches tailored to different scenarios. In this paper, we focus on scenarios where the agent does not initially know the exact outcome of its actions but gains knowledge upon execution, i.e., each action reveals its actual effect, removing uncertainty about future occurrences. We refer to this formulation as Planning with Uncertain Models of Actions (PUMA). We show that PUMA can be compiled in polynomial time in both Fully Observable NonDeterministic planning and, perhaps more unexpectedly, classical planning, providing a constructive proof that PUMA remains PSPACE-complete despite its apparent exponential uncertainty. Finally, we experimentally evaluate both compilations with benchmark domains that capture the key aspects of the problem. The results show the practical feasibility of our approach and reveal a complementary behavior between the two compilations.

PaperID: 541, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09127

Authors:Ziwei Wang, Leyang Yang, Xiaoxuan Tang, Sheng Zhou, Dajun Chen, Wei Jiang, Yong Li

Affiliations: Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Accessible Perception and Intelligent Systems, Zhejiang University, Ant Group

Title: History-Aware Reasoning for GUI Agents

Abstract:
Advances in Multimodal Large Language Models have significantly enhanced Graphical User Interface (GUI) automation. Equipping GUI agents with reliable episodic reasoning capabilities is essential for bridging the gap between users’ concise task descriptions and the complexities of realworld execution. Current methods integrate Reinforcement Learning (RL) with System-2 Chain-of-Thought, yielding notable gains in reasoning enhancement. For long-horizon GUI tasks, historical interactions connect each screen to the goal-oriented episode chain, and effectively leveraging these clues is crucial for the current decision. However, existing native GUI agents exhibit weak short-term memory in their explicit reasoning, interpreting the chained interactions as discrete screen understanding, i.e., unawareness of the historical interactions within the episode. This history-agnostic reasoning challenges their performance in GUI automation. To alleviate this weakness, we propose a History-Aware Reasoning (HAR) framework, which encourages an agent to reflect on its own errors and acquire episodic reasoning knowledge from them via tailored strategies that enhance short-term memory in long-horizon interaction. The framework mainly comprises constructing a reflective learning scenario, synthesizing tailored correction guidelines, and designing a hybrid RL reward function. Using the HAR framework, we develop a native end-to-end model, HAR-GUI-3B, which alters the inherent reasoning mode from history-agnostic to history-aware, equipping the GUI agent with stable short-term memory and reliable perception of screen details. Comprehensive evaluations across a range of GUI-related benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our method.

PaperID: 542, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05379

Authors:Taslim Mahbub, Shi Feng

Affiliations: George Washington University

Title: Mitigating Self-Preference by Authorship Obfuscation

Abstract:
Language models (LMs) judges are widely used to evaluate the quality of LM outputs. Despite many advantages, LM judges display concerning biases that can impair their integrity in evaluations. One such bias is selfpreference: LM judges preferring their own answers over those produced by other LMs or humans. The bias is hard to eliminate as frontier LM judges can distinguish their own outputs from those of others, even when the evaluation candidates are not labeled with their sources. In this paper, we investigate strategies to mitigate self-preference by reducing the LM judges' ability to recognize their own outputs. We apply black-box perturbations to evaluation candidates in pairwise comparison to obfuscate the authorship and reduce self-recognition. We find that perturbations as simple as synonym replacement for a few words predictably reduce self-preference. However, we also uncover fundamental challenges to eliminating the bias: when we extrapolate our perturbations to a more complete neutralization of stylistic differences between the evaluation candidates, self-preference recovers. Our findings suggest that self-recognition and self-preference can happen on many semantic levels, and complete mitigation remains challenging despite promising initial results.

PaperID: 543, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11865

Authors:Truong Nguyen, Phi Van Dat, Ngan Nguyen, Linh Ngo Van, Trung Le, Thanh Hong Nguyen

Affiliations: Hanoi University of Science and Technology, FPT Smart Cloud, Monash University, VIC Australia, University of Oregon Eugene, United States

Title: CTPD: Cross Tokenizer Preference Distillation

Abstract:
While knowledge distillation has seen widespread use in pretraining and instruction tuning, its application to aligning language models with human preferences remains underexplored, particularly in the more realistic cross-tokenizer setting. The incompatibility of tokenization schemes between teacher and student models has largely prevented fine-grained, white-box distillation of preference information. To address this gap, we propose Cross-Tokenizer Preference Distillation (CTPD), the first unified framework for transferring human-aligned behavior between models with heterogeneous tokenizers. CTPD introduces three key innovations: (1) Aligned Span Projection, which maps teacher and student tokens to shared character-level spans for precise supervision transfer; (2) a cross-tokenizer adaptation of Token-level Importance Sampling (TIS-DPO) for improved credit assignment; and (3) a Teacher-Anchored Reference, allowing the student to directly leverage the teacher’s preferences in a DPO-style objective. Our theoretical analysis grounds CTPD in importance sampling, and experiments across multiple benchmarks confirm its effectiveness, with significant performance gains over existing methods. These results establish CTPD as a practical and general solution for preference distillation across diverse tokenization schemes, opening the door to more accessible and efficient alignment of language models.

PaperID: 544, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20097

Authors:Andrew Blair-Stanek, Nils Holzenberger, Benjamin Van Durme

Affiliations: Télécom Paris, Johns Hopkins University

Title: Can LLMs Identify Tax Abuse?

Abstract:
We investigate whether large language models can discover and analyze U.S. taxminimization strategies. This real-world domain challenges even seasoned human experts, and progress can reduce tax revenue lost from well-advised, wealthy taxpayers. We evaluate the most advanced LLMs on their ability to (1) interpret and verify tax strategies, (2) fill in gaps in partially specified strategies, and (3) generate complete, end-to-end strategies from scratch. This domain should be of particular interest to the LLM reasoning community: unlike synthetic challenge problems or scientific reasoning tasks, U.S. tax law involves navigating hundreds of thousands of pages of statutes, case law, and administrative guidance, all updated regularly. Notably, an LLM identified an apparently novel tax strategy, highlighting these models' potential to revolutionize tax agencies' fight against tax abuse.

PaperID: 545, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02451

Authors:Rangel Daroya, Taylor Rowley, Jonathan Acero Flores, Elisa Friedmann, Fiona B Bennitt, Heejin An, Travis Thomas Simmons, Marissa Hughes, Camryn L Kluetmeier, Solomon Kica, J. Daniel Vélez, Sarah E. Esenther, Thomas E. Howard, Yanqi Ye, Audrey J. Turcotte, Colin Gleason, Subhransu Maji

Affiliations: University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Brown University, University of Colorado Boulder

Title: RiverScope: High-Resolution River Masking Dataset

Abstract:
Surface water dynamics play a critical role in Earth’s climate system, influencing ecosystems, agriculture, disaster resilience, and sustainable development. Yet monitoring rivers and surface water at fine spatial and temporal scales remains challengingespecially for narrow or sediment-rich rivers that are poorly captured by low-resolution satellite data. To address this, we introduce RiverScope, a high-resolution dataset developed through collaboration between computer science and hydrology experts. RiverScope comprises 1,145 high-resolution images (covering 2,577 square kilometers) with expert-labeled river and surface water masks, requiring over 100 hours of manual annotation. Each image is co-registered with Sentinel-2, SWOT, and the SWOT River Database (SWORD), enabling the evaluation of cost-accuracy trade-offs across sensors---a key consideration for operational water monitoring. We also establish the first global, high-resolution benchmark for river width estimation, achieving a median error of 7.2 meters---significantly outperforming existing satellite-derived methods. We extensively evaluate deep networks across multiple architectures (e.g., CNNs and transformers), pretraining strategies (e.g., supervised and self-supervised), and training datasets (e.g., ImageNet and satellite imagery). Our best-performing models combine the benefits of transfer learning with the use of all the multispectral PlanetScope channels via learned adaptors. RiverScope provides a valuable resource for fine-scale and multi-sensor hydrological modeling, supporting climate adaptation and sustainable water management.

PaperID: 546, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13762

Authors:Jiaxin Qi, Yan Cui, Jianqiang Huang, Gaogang Xie

Affiliations: Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study

Title: Gene Incremental Learning for Single-Cell Transcriptomics

Abstract:
Classes, as fundamental elements of Computer Vision, have been extensively studied within incremental learning frameworks. In contrast, tokens, which play essential roles in many research fields, exhibit similar characteristics of growth, yet investigations into their incremental learning remain significantly scarce. This research gap primarily stems from the holistic nature of tokens in language, which imposes significant challenges on the design of incremental learning frameworks for them. To overcome this obstacle, in this work, we turn to a type of token, gene, for a largescale biological dataset—single-cell transcriptomics—to formulate a pipeline for gene incremental learning and establish corresponding evaluations. We found that the forgetting problem also exists in gene incremental learning, thus we adapted existing class incremental learning methods to mitigate the forgetting of genes. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrated the soundness of our framework design and evaluations, as well as the effectiveness of the method adaptations. Finally, we provide a complete benchmark for gene incremental learning in single-cell transcriptomics.

PaperID: 547, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00366

Authors:Wenshuo Wang, Yaomin Shen, Yingjie Tan, Yihao Chen

Affiliations: School of Future Technology, South China University of Technology, Nanchang Research Institute, Zhejiang University, School of Software, Beihang University, College of Control Science and Engineering

Title: S^2-KD: Semantic-Spectral Knowledge Distillation Spatiotemporal Forecasting

Abstract:
Spatiotemporal forecasting often relies on computationally intensive models to capture complex dynamics. Knowledge distillation (KD) has emerged as a key technique for creating lightweight student models, with recent advances like frequencyaware KD successfully preserving spectral properties (i.e., high-frequency details and low-frequency trends). However, these methods are fundamentally constrained by operating on pixel-level signals, leaving them blind to the rich semantic and causal context behind the visual patterns. To overcome this limitation, we introduce S2-KD, a novel framework that unifies Semantic priors with Spectral representations for distillation. Our approach begins by training a privileged, multimodal teacher model. This teacher leverages textual narratives from a Large Multimodal Model (LMM) to reason about the underlying causes of events, while its architecture simultaneously decouples spectral components in its latent space. The core of our framework is a new distillation objective that transfers this unified semantic-spectral knowledge into a lightweight, vision-only student. Consequently, the student learns to make predictions that are not only spectrally accurate but also semantically coherent, without requiring any textual input or architectural overhead at inference. Extensive experiments on benchmarks like WeatherBench and TaxiBJ+ show that S2-KD significantly boosts the performance of simple student models, enabling them to outperform state-of-the-art methods, particularly in long-horizon and complex non-stationary scenarios.

PaperID: 548, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11506

Authors:Hongyu An, Xinfeng Zhang, Shijie Zhao, Li Zhang, Ruiqin Xiong

Affiliations: University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, ByteDance Inc., School of Computer Science, Peking University

Title: Spatio-Temporal Distortion Aware Omnidirectional Video Super-Resolution

Abstract:
Omnidirectional videos (ODVs) provide an immersive visual experience by capturing the 360° scene. With the rapid advancements in virtual/augmented reality, metaverse, and generative artificial intelligence, the demand for highquality ODVs is surging. However, ODVs often suffer from low resolution due to their wide field of view and limitations in capturing devices and transmission bandwidth. Although video super-resolution (SR) is a capable video quality enhancement technique, the performance ceiling and practical generalization of existing methods are limited when applied to ODVs due to their unique attributes. To alleviate spatial projection distortions and temporal flickering of ODVs, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Distortion Aware Network (STDAN) with joint spatio-temporal alignment and reconstruction. Specifically, we incorporate a spatio-temporal continuous alignment (STCA) to mitigate discrete geometric artifacts in parallel with temporal alignment. Subsequently, we introduce an interlaced multi-frame reconstruction (IMFR) to enhance temporal consistency. Furthermore, we employ latitude-saliency adaptive (LSA) weights to focus on regions with higher texture complexity and human-watching interest. By exploring a spatio-temporal jointly framework and real-world viewing strategies, STDAN effectively reinforces spatio-temporal coherence on a novel ODV-SR dataset and ensures affordable computational costs. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that STDAN outperforms state-of-the-art methods in improving visual fidelity and dynamic smoothness of ODVs.

PaperID: 549, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.06363

Authors:Qian Bie, Xiao Wang, Bin Yang, Zhixi Yu, Jun Chen, Xin Xu

Affiliations: Wuhan University

Title: Robust Pedestrian Detection with Uncertain Modality

Abstract:
Existing crossmodal pedestrian detection (CMPD) employs complementary information from RGB and thermal-infrared (TIR) modalities to detect pedestrians in 24h-surveillance systems. RGB captures rich pedestrian details under daylight, while TIR excels at night. However, TIR focuses primarily on the person's silhouette, neglecting critical texture details essential for detection. While the near-infrared (NIR) captures texture under low-light conditions, which effectively alleviates performance issues of RGB and detail loss in TIR, thereby reducing missed detections. To this end, we construct a new Triplet RGB–NIR–TIR (TRNT) dataset, comprising 8,281 pixel-aligned image triplets, establishing a comprehensive foundation for algorithmic research. However, due to the variable nature of real-world scenarios, imaging devices may not always capture all three modalities simultaneously. This results in input data with unpredictable combinations of modal types, which challenge existing CMPD methods that fail to extract robust pedestrian information under arbitrary input combinations, leading to significant performance degradation. To address these challenges, we propose the Adaptive Uncertainty-aware Network (AUNet) for accurately discriminating modal availability and fully utilizing the available information under uncertain inputs. Specifically, we introduce Unified Modality Validation Refinement (UMVR), which includes an uncertainty-aware router to validate modal availability and a semantic refinement to ensure the reliability of information within the modality. Furthermore, we design a Modality-Aware Interaction (MAI) module to adaptively activate or deactivate its internal interaction mechanisms per UMVR output, enabling effective complementary information fusion from available modalities. AUNet enables accurate modality validation and robust inference without fixed modality pairings, facilitating the effective fusion of RGB, NIR, and TIR information across diverse inputs.

PaperID: 550, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.02896

Authors:Qi Chen, Changli Wu, Jiayi Ji, Yiwei Ma, Liujuan Cao

Affiliations: Xiamen University

Title: 3D-DRES: Detailed 3D Referring Expression Segmentation

Abstract:
Current 3D visual grounding tasks only process sentencelevel detection or segmentation, which critically fails to leverage the rich compositional contextual reasonings within natural language expressions. To address this challenge, we introduce Detailed 3D Referring Expression Segmentation (3D-DRES), a new task that provides a phrase to 3D instance mapping, aiming at enhancing fine-grained 3D vision-language understanding. To support 3D-DRES, we present DetailRefer, a new dataset comprising 55,432 descriptions spanning 11,054 distinct objects. Unlike previous datasets, DetailRefer implements a pioneering phrase-instance annotation paradigm where each referenced noun phrase is explicitly mapped to its corresponding 3D elements. Additionally, we introduce DetailBase, a purposefully streamlined yet effective baseline architecture that supports dual-mode segmentation at both sentence and phrase levels. Our experimental results demonstrate that models trained on DetailRefer not only excel at phrase-level segmentation but also show surprising improvements on traditional 3D-RES benchmarks.

PaperID: 551, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16273

Authors:Xin Jiang, Meiqi Cao, Hao Tang, Fei Shen, Zechao Li

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, National University of Singapore, Nanjing University of Science and Techonolgy

Title: Fine-Grained Image Retrieval via Dual-Vision Adaptation

Abstract:
FineGrained Image Retrieval~(FGIR) faces challenges in learning discriminative visual representations to retrieve images with similar fine-grained features. Current leading FGIR solutions typically follow two regimes: enforce pairwise similarity constraints in the semantic embedding space, or incorporate a localization sub-network to fine-tune the entire model. However, such two regimes tend to overfit the training data while forgetting the knowledge gained from large-scale pre-training, thus reducing their generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a Dual-Vision Adaptation (DVA) approach for FGIR, which guides the frozen pre-trained model to perform FGIR through collaborative sample and feature adaptation. Specifically, we design Object-Perceptual Adaptation, which modifies input samples to help the pre-trained model perceive critical objects and elements within objects that are helpful for category prediction. Meanwhile, we propose In-Context Adaptation, which introduces a small set of parameters for feature adaptation without modifying the pre-trained parameters. This makes the FGIR task using these adapted features closer to the task solved during the pre-training. Additionally, to balance retrieval efficiency and performance, we propose Discrimination Perception Transfer to transfer the discriminative knowledge in the object-perceptual adaptation to the image encoder using the knowledge distillation mechanism. Extensive experiments show that DVA performs well on three fine-grained datasets.

PaperID: 552, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10020

Authors:Yuxin Jiang, Wei Luo, Hui Zhang, Qiyu Chen, Haiming Yao, Weiming Shen, Yunkang Cao

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Hunan University, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Anomagic: Crossmodal Prompt-driven Zero-shot Anomaly Generation

Abstract:
We propose Anomagic, a zeroshot anomaly generation method that produces semantically coherent anomalies without requiring any exemplar anomalies. By unifying both visual and textual cues through a crossmodal prompt encoding scheme, Anomagic leverages rich contextual information to steer an inpainting‐based generation pipeline. A subsequent contrastive refinement strategy enforces precise alignment between synthesized anomalies and their masks, thereby bolstering downstream anomaly detection accuracy. To facilitate training, we introduce AnomVerse, a collection of 12,987 anomaly–mask–caption triplets assembled from 13 publicly available datasets, where captions are automatically generated by multimodal large language models using structured visual prompts and template‐based textual hints. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Anomagic trained on AnomVerse can synthesize more realistic and varied anomalies than prior methods, yielding superior improvements in downstream anomaly detection. Furthermore, Anomagic can generate anomalies for any normal‐category image using user‐defined prompts, establishing a versatile foundation model for anomaly generation.

PaperID: 553, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12785

Authors:Maria Larchenko, Dmitry Guskov, Alexander Lobashev, Georgy Derevyanko

Affiliations: Magicly AI, Glam AI, San Francisco, USA McGill University

Title: Lightweight Optimal-Transport Harmonization on Edge Devices

Abstract:
Color harmonization adjusts the colors of an inserted object so that it perceptually matches the surrounding image, resulting in a seamless composite. The harmonization problem naturally arises in augmented reality (AR), yet harmonization algorithms are not currently integrated into AR pipelines because realtime solutions are scarce. In this work, we address color harmonization for AR by proposing a lightweight approach that supports on-device inference. For this, we leverage classical optimal transport theory by training a compact encoder to predict the Monge-Kantorovich transport map. We benchmark our MKL-Harmonizer algorithm against state-of-the-art methods and demonstrate that for real composite AR images our method achieves the best aggregated score. We release our dedicated AR dataset of composite images with pixel-accurate masks and data-gathering toolkit to support further data acquisition by researchers.

PaperID: 554, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19169

Authors:Bingchen Li, Xin Li, Jiaqi Xu, Jiaming Guo, Wenbo Li, Renjing Pei, Zhibo Chen

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab, Joy Future Academy

Title: Test-Time Preference Optimization for Image Restoration

Abstract:
Image restoration (IR) models are typically trained to recover highquality images using L1 or LPIPS loss. To handle diverse unknown degradations, zero-shot IR methods have also been introduced. However, existing pre-trained and zero-shot IR approaches often fail to align with human preferences, resulting in restored images that may not be favored. This highlights the critical need to enhance restoration quality and adapt flexibly to various image restoration tasks or backbones without requiring model retraining and ideally without labor-intensive preference data collection. In this paper, we propose the first Test-Time Preference Optimization (TTPO) paradigm for image restoration, which enhances perceptual quality, generates preference data on-the-fly, and is compatible with any IR model backbone. Specifically, we design a training-free, three-stage pipeline: (i) generate candidate preference images online using diffusion inversion and denoising based on the initially restored image; (ii) select preferred and dispreferred images using automated preference-aligned metrics or human feedback; and (iii) use the selected preference images as reward signals to guide the diffusion denoising process, optimizing the restored image to better align with human preferences. Extensive experiments across various image restoration tasks and models demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed pipeline.

PaperID: 555, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17130

Authors:Yuan-Ming Li, An-Lan Wang, Ling-An Zeng, Kun-Yu Lin, Yu-Ming Tang, Weishi Zheng

Affiliations: SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and Advanced Computing, Ministry of Education, SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY Peng Cheng Laboratory Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and Advanced Computing

Title: TechCoach: Towards Technical-Point-Aware Descriptive Action Coaching

Abstract:
To guide a learner in mastering action skills, it is crucial for a coach to 1) reason through the learner's action execution and technical points (TechPoints), and 2) provide detailed, comprehensible feedback on what is done well and what can be improved. However, existing scorebased action assessment methods are still far from reaching this practical scenario. To bridge this gap, we investigate a new task termed Descriptive Action Coaching (DescCoach) which requires the model to provide detailed commentary on what is done well and what can be improved beyond a simple quality score for action execution. To this end, we first build a new dataset named EE4D-DescCoach. Through an automatic annotation pipeline, our dataset goes beyond the existing action assessment datasets by providing detailed TechPoint-level commentary. Furthermore, we propose TechCoach, a new framework that explicitly incorporates TechPoint-level reasoning into the DescCoach process. The central to our method lies in the Context-aware TechPoint Reasoner, which enables TechCoach to learn TechPoint-related quality representation by querying visual context under the supervision of TechPoint-level coaching commentary. By leveraging the visual context and the TechPoint-related quality representation, a unified TechPoint-aware Action Assessor is then employed to provide the overall coaching commentary together with the quality score. Combining all of these, we establish a new benchmark for DescCoach and evaluate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments.

PaperID: 556, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18448

Authors:Zongyao Li, Yongkang Wong, Satoshi Yamazaki, Jianquan Liu, Mohan Kankanhalli

Affiliations: NEC Corporation, National University of Singapore

Title: Object-Centric Framework for Video Moment Retrieval

Abstract:
Most existing video moment retrieval methods rely on temporal sequences of frameor clip-level features that primarily encode global visual and semantic information. However, such representations often fail to capture fine-grained object semantics and appearance, which are crucial for localizing moments described by object-oriented queries involving specific entities and their interactions. In particular, temporal dynamics at the object level have been largely overlooked, limiting the effectiveness of existing approaches in scenarios requiring detailed object-level reasoning. To address this limitation, we propose a novel object-centric framework for moment retrieval. Our method first extracts query-relevant objects using a scene graph parser and then generates scene graphs from video frames to represent these objects and their relationships. Based on the scene graphs, we construct object-level feature sequences that encode rich visual and semantic information. These sequences are processed by a relational tracklet transformer, which models spatio-temporal correlations among objects over time. By explicitly capturing object-level state changes, our framework enables more accurate localization of moments aligned with object-oriented queries. We evaluated our method on three benchmarks: Charades-STA, QVHighlights, and TACoS. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods across all benchmarks.

PaperID: 557, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11031

Authors:Lin Liu, Huixia Ben, Shuo Wang, Jinda Lu, Junxiang Qiu, Shengeng Tang, Yanbin Hao

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, Anhui University of Science and Technology, Hefei University of Technology

Title: Accelerating Controllable Generation via Hybrid-grained Cache

Abstract:
Controllable generative models have been widely used to improve the realism of synthetic visual content. However, such models must handle control conditions and content generation computational requirements, resulting in generally low generation efficiency. To address this issue, we propose a HybridGrained Cache (HGC) approach that reduces computational overhead by adopting cache strategies with different granularities at different computational stages. Specifically, (1) we use a coarse-grained cache (block-level) based on feature reuse to dynamically bypass redundant computations in encoder-decoder blocks between each step of model reasoning. (2) We design a fine-grained cache (prompt-level) that acts within a module, where the fine-grained cache reuses cross-attention maps within consecutive reasoning steps and extends them to the corresponding module computations of adjacent steps. These caches of different granularities can be seamlessly integrated into each computational link of the controllable generation process. We verify the effectiveness of HGC on four benchmark datasets, especially its advantages in balancing generation efficiency and visual quality. For example, on the COCO-Stuff segmentation benchmark, our HGC significantly reduces the computational cost (MACs) by 63% (from 18.22T → 6.70T↓), while keeping the loss of semantic fidelity (quantized performance degradation) within 1.5%.

PaperID: 558, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14418

Authors:Yanbiao Ma, Jiayi Chen, Wei Dai, Dong Zhao, Zeyu Zhang, Yuting Yang, Bowei Liu, Jiaxuan Zhao, Andi Zhang

Affiliations: Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence Renmin University of China Beijing, China Beijing Key Laboratory of Research on Large Models and Intelligent Governance Engineering Research Center of Next-Generation Intelligent Search and Recommendation, Xidian University, The Australian National University, Tsinghua University, University of Manchester

Title: Compositional Attribute Imbalance in Vision Datasets

Abstract:
Visual attribute imbalance is a common yet underexplored issue in image classification, significantly impacting model performance and generalization. In this work, we first define the firstlevel and second-level attributes of images and then introduce a CLIP-based framework to construct a visual attribute dictionary, enabling automatic evaluation of image attributes. By systematically analyzing both single-attribute imbalance and compositional attribute imbalance, we reveal how the rarity of attributes affects model performance. To tackle these challenges, we propose adjusting the sampling probability of samples based on the rarity of their compositional attributes. This strategy is further integrated with various data augmentation techniques (such as CutMix, Fmix, and SaliencyMix) to enhance the model's ability to represent rare attributes. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method effectively mitigates attribute imbalance, thereby improving the robustness and fairness of deep neural networks. Our research highlights the importance of modeling visual attribute distributions and provides a scalable solution for long-tail image classification tasks.

PaperID: 559, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09525

Authors:Yuxin Mao, Zhen Qin, Jinxing Zhou, Bin Fan, Jing Zhang, Yiran Zhong, Yuchao Dai

Affiliations: School of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University, and Shaanxi Key Laboratory of Information Acquisition and Processing

Title: Learning Spatial Decay for Vision Transformers

Abstract:
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have revolutionized computer vision, yet their selfattention mechanism lacks explicit spatial inductive biases, leading to suboptimal performance on spatially-structured tasks. Existing approaches introduce data-independent spatial decay based on fixed distance metrics, applying uniform attention weighting regardless of image content and limiting adaptability to diverse visual scenarios. Inspired by recent advances in large language models where content-aware gating mechanisms (e.g., GLA, HGRN2, FOX) significantly outperform static alternatives, we present the first successful adaptation of data-dependent spatial decay to 2D vision transformers. We introduce Spatial Decay Transformer (SDT), featuring a novel Context-Aware Gating (CAG) mechanism that generates dynamic, data-dependent decay for patch interactions. Our approach learns to modulate spatial attention based on both content relevance and spatial proximity. We address the fundamental challenge of 1D-to-2D adaptation through a unified spatial-content fusion framework that integrates manhattan distance-based spatial priors with learned content representations. Extensive experiments on ImageNet-1K classification and generation tasks demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines. Our work establishes data-dependent spatial decay as a new paradigm for enhancing spatial attention in vision transformers.

PaperID: 560, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13002

Authors:Jihun Park, Kyoungmin Lee, Jongmin Gim, Hyeonseo Jo, Minseok Oh, Wonhyeok Choi, Kyumin Hwang, Jaeyeul Kim, Minwoo Choi, Sunghoon Im

Affiliations: Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology

Title: Infinite-Story: A Training-Free Consistent Text-to-Image Generation

Abstract:
We present InfiniteStory, a training-free framework for consistent text-to-image (T2I) generation tailored for multi-prompt storytelling scenarios. Built upon a scale-wise autoregressive model, our method addresses two key challenges in consistent T2I generation: identity inconsistency and style inconsistency. To overcome these issues, we introduce three complementary techniques: Identity Prompt Replacement, which mitigates context bias in text encoders to align identity attributes across prompts; and a unified attention guidance mechanism comprising Adaptive Style Injection and Synchronized Guidance Adaptation, which jointly enforce global style and identity appearance consistency while preserving prompt fidelity. Unlike prior diffusion-based approaches that require fine-tuning or suffer from slow inference, Infinite-Story operates entirely at test time, delivering high identity and style consistency across diverse prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art generation performance, while offering over 6x faster inference (1.72 seconds per image) than the existing fastest consistent T2I models, highlighting its effectiveness and practicality for real-world visual storytelling.

PaperID: 561, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08238

Authors:Xiangyang Wu, Liu Liu, Baosheng Yu, Jiayan Qiu, Zhenwei Shi

Affiliations: Beihang University, Nanyang Technological University, Univerisity of Leicester

Title: Remodeling Semantic Relationships in Vision-Language Fine-Tuning

Abstract:
Visionlanguage fine-tuning has emerged as an efficient paradigm for constructing multimodal foundation models. While textual context often highlights semantic relationships within an image, existing fine-tuning methods typically overlook this information when aligning vision and language, thus leading to suboptimal performance. Toward solving this problem, we propose a method that can improve multimodal alignment and fusion based on both semantics and relationships.Specifically, we first extract multilevel semantic features from different vision encoder to capture more visual cues of the relationships. Then, we learn to project the vision features to group related semantics, among which are more likely to have relationships. Finally, we fuse the visual features with the textual by using inheritable cross-attention, where we globally remove the redundant visual relationships by discarding visual-language feature pairs with low correlation. We evaluate our proposed method on eight foundation models and two downstream tasks, visual question answering and image captioning, and show that it outperforms all existing methods.

PaperID: 562, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12590

Authors:Guoqing Xu, Yiheng Li, Yang Yang

Affiliations: Institute of automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Fine-Grained Representation for Lane Topology Reasoning

Abstract:
Precise modeling of lane topology is essential for autonomous driving, as it directly impacts navigation and control decisions. Existing methods typically represent each lane with a single query and infer topological connectivity based on the similarity between lane queries. However, this kind of design struggles to accurately model complex lane structures, leading to unreliable topology prediction. In this view, we propose a FineGrained lane topology reasoning framework (TopoFG). It divides the procedure from bird’s-eye-view (BEV) features to topology prediction via fine-grained queries into three phases, i.e., Hierarchical Prior Extractor (HPE), Region-Focused Decoder (RFD), and Robust Boundary-Point Topology Reasoning (RBTR). Specifically, HPE extracts global spatial priors from the BEV mask and local sequential priors from in-lane keypoint sequences to guide subsequent fine-grained query modeling. RFD constructs fine-grained queries by integrating the spatial and sequential priors. It then samples reference points in RoI regions of the mask and applies cross-attention with BEV features to refine the query representations of each lane. RBTR models lane connectivity based on boundary-point query features and further employs a topological denoising strategy to reduce matching ambiguity. By integrating spatial and sequential priors into fine-grained queries and applying a denoising strategy to boundary-point topology reasoning, our method precisely models complex lane structures and delivers trustworthy topology predictions. Extensive experiments on the OpenLane-V2 benchmark demonstrate that TopoFG achieves new state-of-the-art performance, with an OLS of 48.0% on subset_A and 45.4% on subset_B.

PaperID: 563, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04826

Authors:Qingshan Xu, Jiequan Cui, Xuanyu Yi, Yuxuan Wang, Yuan Zhou, Yew-Soon Ong, Hanwang Zhang

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University, Hefei University of Technology, Singapore A*STAR

Title: Pushing Rendering Boundaries: Hard Gaussian Splatting

Abstract:
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated impressive Novel View Synthesis (NVS) results in a realtime rendering manner. During training, it relies heavily on the average magnitude of view-space positional gradients to grow Gaussians to reduce rendering loss. However, this average operation smooths the positional gradients from different viewpoints and rendering errors from different pixels, hindering the growth and optimization of many defective Gaussians. This leads to strong spurious artifacts in some areas. To address this problem, we propose Hard Gaussian Splatting, dubbed HGS, which considers multi-view significant positional gradients and rendering errors to grow hard Gaussians that fill the gaps of classical Gaussian Splatting on 3D scenes, thus achieving superior NVS results. In detail, we present positional gradient driven HGS, which leverages multi-view significant positional gradients to uncover hard Gaussians. Moreover, we propose rendering error guided HGS, which identifies noticeable pixel rendering errors and potentially over-large Gaussians to jointly mine hard Gaussians. By growing and optimizing these hard Gaussians, our method helps to resolve blurring and needle-like artifacts. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality while maintaining real-time efficiency, yielding LPIPS improvements of 5.1%, 19.7% and 6.3% on Mip-NeRF360, Tanks&Temples and Deep Blending, respectively.

PaperID: 564, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19946

Authors:Ryan Xu, Dongyang Jin, Yancheng Bai, Rui Lan, Xu Duan, Lei Sun, Xiangxiang Chu

Affiliations: Alibaba Group

Title: SCALAR: Scale-wise Controllable Visual Autoregressive Learning

Abstract:
Controllable image synthesis, which enables finegrained control over generated outputs, has emerged as a key focus in visual generative modeling. However, controllable generation remains challenging for Visual Autoregressive (VAR) models due to their hierarchical, next-scale prediction style. Existing VAR-based methods often suffer from inefficient control encoding and disruptive injection mechanisms that compromise both fidelity and efficiency. In this work, we present SCALAR, a controllable generation method based on VAR, incorporating a Scale-wise Conditional Decoding mechanism. SCALAR leverages a pretrained image encoder to extract semantic control signal encodings, which are projected into scale-specific representations and injected into the corresponding layers of the VAR backbone. This design provides persistent and structurally aligned guidance throughout the generation process. Building on SCALAR, we develop SCALAR-Uni, a unified extension that aligns multiple control modalities into a shared latent space, supporting flexible multi-conditional guidance in a single model. Extensive experiments show that SCALAR achieves superior generation quality and control precision across various tasks.

PaperID: 565, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19280

Authors:Liang Yao, Fan Liu, Hongbo Lu, Chuanyi Zhang, Rui Min, Shengxiang Xu, Shimin Di, Pai Peng

Affiliations: Hohai University, Southeast University, COWARobot Co. Ltd.

Title: RemoteReasoner: Towards Unifying Geospatial Reasoning Workflow

Abstract:
Remote sensing imagery presents vast, inherently unstructured spatial data, necessitating sophisticated reasoning to interpret complex user intents and contextual relationships beyond simple recognition tasks. In this paper, we aim to construct an Earth observation workflow to handle complex queries by reasoning about spatial context and user intent. As a reasoning workflow, it should autonomously explore and construct its own inference paths, rather than being confined to predefined ground‑truth sequences. Ideally, its architecture ought to be unified yet generalized, possessing capabilities to perform diverse reasoning tasks through one model without requiring additional finetuning. Existing remote sensing approaches rely on supervised fine-tuning paradigms and task‑specific heads, limiting both autonomous reasoning and unified generalization. To this end, we propose RemoteReasoner, a unified workflow for geospatial reasoning. The design of RemoteReasoner integrates a multi-modal large language model (MLLM) for interpreting user instructions and localizing targets, together with task transformation strategies that enable multi-granularity tasks, including object-, region-, and pixel-level. In contrast to existing methods, our framework is trained with reinforcement learning (RL) to endow the MLLM sufficient reasoning autonomy. At the inference stage, our transformation strategies enable diverse task output formats without requiring task-specific decoders or further fine-tuning. Experiments demonstrated that RemoteReasoner achieves state-of-the-art performance across multi-granularity reasoning tasks. Furthermore, it retains the MLLM's inherent generalization capability, demonstrating robust performance on unseen tasks and categories.

PaperID: 566, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19579

Authors:Haomiao Zhang, Miao Cao, Xuan Yu, Hui Luo, Yanling Piao, Mengjie Qin, Zhangyuan Li, Ping Wang, Xin Yuan

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Westlake University, State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University., Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Semiconductor Optoelectronic Materials and Intelligent Photonic Systems, Harbin Institute of Technology, State Key Laboratory of Optical Field Manipulation Science and Technology, Institute of Optics and Electronics, School of Engineering

Title: High-Speed FHD Full-Color Video Computer-Generated Holography

Abstract:
Computergenerated holography (CGH) is a promising technology for next-generation displays. However, generating high-speed, high-quality holographic video requires both high frame rate display and efficient computation, but is constrained by two key limitations: (i) Learning-based models often produce over-smoothed phases with narrow angular spectra, causing severe color crosstalk in high frame rate full-color displays such as depth-division multiplexing and thus resulting in a trade-off between frame rate and color fidelity. (ii) Existing frame-by-frame optimization methods typically optimize frames independently, neglecting spatial-temporal correlations between consecutive frames and leading to computationally inefficient solutions. To overcome these challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel high-speed full-color video CGH generation scheme. First, we introduce Spectrum-Guided Depth Division Multiplexing (SGDDM), which optimizes phase distributions via frequency modulation, enabling high-fidelity full-color display at high frame rates. Second, we present HoloMamba, a lightweight asymmetric Mamba-Unet architecture that explicitly models spatial-temporal correlations across video sequences to enhance reconstruction quality and computational efficiency. Extensive simulated and real-world experiments demonstrate that SGDDM achieves high-fidelity full-color display without compromise in frame rate, while HoloMamba generates FHD (1080p) full-color holographic video at over 260 FPS, more than 2.6 times faster than the prior state-of-the-art Divide-Conquer-and-Merge Strategy.

PaperID: 567, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22391

Authors:Jusheng Zhang, Kaitong Cai, Jing Yang, Jian Wang, Chengpei Tang, Keze Wang

Affiliations: SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY, Snap Inc.

Title: Top-Down Semantic Refinement for Image Captioning

Abstract:
Large VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) face an inherent contradiction in image captioning: their powerful single-step generation capabilities often lead to a myopic decision-making process. This makes it difficult to maintain global narrative coherence while capturing rich details, a limitation that is particularly pronounced in tasks that require multi-step and complex scene description. To overcome this fundamental challenge, we redefine image captioning as a goal-oriented hierarchical refinement planning problem, and further propose a novel framework, named Top-Down Semantic Refinement (TDSR), which models the generation process as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). However, planning within the vast state space of a VLM presents a significant computational hurdle. Our core contribution, therefore, is the design of a highly efficient Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm tailored for VLMs. By incorporating a visual-guided parallel expansion and a lightweight value network, our TDSR reduces the call frequency to the expensive VLM by an order of magnitude without sacrificing planning quality. Furthermore, an adaptive early stopping mechanism dynamically matches computational overhead to the image's complexity. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks, including DetailCaps, COMPOSITIONCAP, and POPE, demonstrate that our TDSR, as a plug-and-play module, can significantly enhance the performance of existing VLMs (e.g., LLaVA-1.5, Qwen2.5-VL) by achieving state-of-the-art or highly competitive results in fine-grained description, compositional generalization, and hallucination suppression.

PaperID: 568, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09247

Authors:Yiwei Zhang, Jin Gao, Hanshi Wang, Fudong Ge, Guan Luo, Weiming Hu, Zhipeng Zhang

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems (MAIS), University of Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing Key Laboratory of Super Intelligent Security of Multi-Modal Information, ShanghaiTech University, School of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Anyverse Robotics

Title: Integrating Diverse Assignment Strategies into DETRs

Abstract:
Label assignment is a critical component in object detectors, particularly within DETRstyle frameworks where the one-to-one matching strategy, despite its end-to-end elegance, suffers from slow convergence due to sparse supervision. While recent works have explored one-to-many assignments to enrich supervisory signals, they often introduce complex, architecture-specific modifications and typically focus on a single auxiliary strategy, lacking a unified and scalable design. In this paper, we first systematically investigate the effects of ``one-to-many'' supervision and reveal a surprising insight that performance gains are driven not by the sheer quantity of supervision, but by the diversity of the assignment strategies employed. This finding suggests that a more elegant, parameter-efficient approach is attainable. Building on this insight, we propose LoRA-DETR, a flexible and lightweight framework that seamlessly integrates diverse assignment strategies into any DETR-style detector. Our method augments the primary network with multiple Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) branches during training, each instantiating a different one-to-many assignment rule. These branches act as auxiliary modules that inject rich, varied supervisory gradients into the main model and are discarded during inference, thus incurring no additional computational cost. This design promotes robust joint optimization while maintaining the architectural simplicity of the original detector. Extensive experiments on different baselines validate the effectiveness of our approach. Our work presents a new paradigm for enhancing detectors, demonstrating that diverse ``one-to-many'' supervision can be integrated to achieve state-of-the-art results without compromising model elegance.

PaperID: 569, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.12015

Authors:Chenliang Zhou, Zheyuan Hu, Alejandro Sztrajman, Yancheng Cai, Yaru Liu, Cengiz Oztireli

Affiliations: University of Cambridge

Title: M3ashy: Multi-Modal Material Synthesis via Hyperdiffusion

Abstract:
Highquality material synthesis is essential for replicating complex surface properties to create realistic scenes. Despite advances in the generation of material appearance based on analytic models, the synthesis of real-world measured BRDFs remains largely unexplored. To address this challenge, we propose M^3ashy, a novel multi-modal material synthesis framework based on hyperdiffusion. M^3ashy enables high-quality reconstruction of complex real-world materials by leveraging neural fields as a compact continuous representation of BRDFs. Furthermore, our multi-modal conditional hyperdiffusion model allows for flexible material synthesis conditioned on material type, natural language descriptions, or reference images, providing greater user control over material generation. To support future research, we contribute two new material datasets and introduce two BRDF distributional metrics for more rigorous evaluation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of M^3ashy through extensive experiments, including a novel statistics-based constrained synthesis, which enables the generation of materials of desired categories.

PaperID: 570, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08937

Authors:Yipeng Zou, Qin Liu, Jie Wu, Yu Peng, Guo Chen, Hui Zhou, Guanghui Ye

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, Hunan University, China Telecom Cloud Computing Research Institute Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Temple University, Laboratory of Intelligent Collaborative Computing, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Boosting Adversarial Transferability via Ensemble Non-Attention

Abstract:
Ensemble attacks integrate the outputs of surrogate models with diverse architectures, which can be combined with various gradientbased attacks to improve adversarial transferability. However, previous work shows unsatisfactory attack performance when transferring across heterogeneous model architectures. The main reason is that the gradient update directions of heterogeneous surrogate models differ widely, making it hard to reduce the gradient variance of ensemble models while making the best of individual model. To tackle this challenge, we design a novel ensemble attack, NAMEA, which for the first time integrates the gradients from the non-attention areas of ensemble models into the iterative gradient optimization process. Our design is inspired by the observation that the attention areas of heterogeneous models vary sharply, thus the non-attention areas of ViTs are likely to be the focus of CNNs and vice versa. Therefore, we merge the gradients respectively from the attention and non-attention areas of ensemble models so as to fuse the transfer information of CNNs and ViTs. Specifically, we pioneer a new way of decoupling the gradients of non-attention areas from those of attention areas, while merging gradients by meta-learning. Empirical evaluations on ImageNet dataset indicate that NAMEA outperforms AdaEA and SMER, the state-of-the-art ensemble attacks by an average of 15.0% and 9.6%, respectively. This work is the first attempt to explore the power of ensemble non-attention in boosting cross-architecture transferability, providing new insights into launching ensemble attacks.

PaperID: 571, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08050

Authors:Olaf Beyersdorff, Joachim Giesen, Andreas Goral, Tim Hoffmann, Kaspar Kasche, Christoph Staudt

Affiliations: Friedrich Schiller University Jena

Title: Proof Systems for Tensor-based Model Counting

Abstract:
Solving the model counting problem #SAT, asking for the number of satisfying assignments of a propositional formula, has been explored intensively and has gathered its own community. While most existing solvers are based on knowledge compilation, another promising approach is through contraction in tensor hypernetworks. We perform a theoretical proofcomplexity analysis of this approach. For this, we design two new tensor-based proof systems that we show to tightly correspond to tensor-based #SAT solving. We determine the simulation order of #SAT proof systems and prove exponential separations between the systems. This sheds light on the relative performance of different #SAT solving approaches.

PaperID: 572, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12474

Authors:Chucheng Xiang, Ruchao Bao, Biyin Feng, Wenzheng Wu, Zhongyuan Liu, Yirui Guan, Ligang Liu

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, Tsinghua University

Title: Co-Layout: LLM-driven Co-optimization for Interior Layout

Abstract:
We present a novel framework for automated interior design that combines large language models (LLMs) with gridbased integer programming to jointly optimize room layout and furniture placement. Given a textual prompt, the LLM-driven agent workflow extracts structured design constraints related to room configurations and furniture arrangements. These constraints are encoded into a unified grid-based representation inspired by ``Modulor". Our formulation accounts for key design requirements, including corridor connectivity, room accessibility, spatial exclusivity, and user-specified preferences. To improve computational efficiency, we adopt a coarse-to-fine optimization strategy that begins with a low-resolution grid to solve a simplified problem and guides the solution at the full resolution. Experimental results across diverse scenarios demonstrate that our joint optimization approach significantly outperforms existing two-stage design pipelines in solution quality, and achieves notable computational efficiency through the coarse-to-fine strategy.

PaperID: 573, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18256

Authors:Enqiang Zhu, Qiqi Bao, Yu Zhang, Chanjuan Liu, Pu Wu

Affiliations: Guangzhou University, Peking University, Dalian University of Technology, Hithink RoyalFlush Information Network Co.

Title: Exact Optimization for Minimum Dominating Sets

Abstract:
The Minimum Dominating Set (MDS) problem is a wellestablished combinatorial optimization problem with numerous real-world applications. Its NP-hard nature makes it increasingly difficult to obtain exact solutions as the graph size grows. This paper introduces ParDS, an exact algorithm developed to address the MDS problem within the branch-and-bound framework. ParDS features two key innovations: an advanced linear programming technique that yields tighter lower bounds and a set of novel reduction rules that dynamically simplify instances throughout the solving process. Compared to the leading exact algorithms presented at IJCAI 2023 and 2024, ParDS demonstrates theoretically superior lower-bound quality. Experimental results on standard benchmark datasets highlight several significant advantages of ParDS: it achieves fastest solving times in 70% of graph categories, especially on large, sparse graphs, delivers a speed-up of up to 3,411 times on the fastest individual instance, and successfully solves 16 out of 43 instances that other algorithms were unable to resolve within the 5-hour time limit. These findings establish ParDS as a state-of-the-art solution for exactly solving the MDS problem

PaperID: 574, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01669

Authors:Chenlu Ding, Jiancan Wu, Yancheng Yuan, Cunchun Li, Xiang Wang, Dingxian Wang, Frank Yang, Andrew Rabinovich

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Upwork Inc

Title: Delayed Feedback Modeling with Influence Functions

Abstract:
In online advertising under the costper-conversion (CPA) model, accurate conversion rate (CVR) prediction is crucial. A major challenge is delayed feedback, where conversions may occur long after user interactions, leading to incomplete recent data and biased model training. Existing solutions partially mitigate this issue but often rely on auxiliary models, making them computationally inefficient and less adaptive to user interest shifts. We propose IF-DFM, an Influence Function-empowered for Delayed Feedback Modeling which estimates the impact of newly arrived and delayed conversions on model parameters, enabling efficient updates without full retraining. By reformulating the inverse Hessian-vector-product as an optimization problem, IF-DFM achieves a favorable trade-off between scalability and effectiveness. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that IF-DFM outperforms prior methods in both accuracy and adaptability.

PaperID: 575, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12495

Authors:Zhen Tao, Xinke Jiang, Qingshuai Feng, Haoyu Zhang, Lun Du, Yuchen Fang, Hao Miao, Bangquan Xie, Qingqiang Sun

Affiliations: Great Bay University, Independent Researcher, City University of Hong Kong, Ant Research, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: Task-Aware Retrieval Augmentation for Dynamic Recommendation

Abstract:
Dynamic recommendation systems aim to provide personalized suggestions by modeling temporal useritem interactions across time-series behavioral data. Recent studies have leveraged pre-trained dynamic graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn user-item representations over temporal snapshot graphs. However, fine-tuning GNNs on these graphs often results in generalization issues due to temporal discrepancies between pre-training and fine-tuning stages, limiting the model’s ability to capture evolving user preferences. To address this, we propose TarDGR, a task-aware retrieval-augmented framework designed to enhance generalization capability by incorporating task-aware model and retrieval-augmentation. Specifically, TarDGR introduces a Task-Aware Evaluation Mechanism to identify semantically relevant historical subgraphs, enabling the construction of task-specific datasets without manual labeling. It also presents a Graph Transformer-based Task-Aware Model that integrates semantic and structural encodings to assess subgraph relevance. During inference, TarDGR retrieves and fuses task-aware subgraphs with the query subgraph, enriching its representation and mitigating temporal generalization issues. Experiments on multiple large-scale dynamic graph datasets demonstrate that TarDGR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with extensive empirical evidence underscoring its superior accuracy and generalization capabilities.

PaperID: 576, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.09891

Authors:Shu Wang, Yixiang Fang, Yingli Zhou, Xilin Liu, Yuchi Ma

Affiliations: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Huawei Cloud Computing Technologies CO.

Title: ArchRAG: Attributed Community-based Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Abstract:
RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) has proven effective in integrating external knowledge into large language models (LLMs) for solving question-answer (QA) tasks. The state-of-the-art RAG approaches often use the graph data as the external data since they capture the rich semantic information and link relationships between entities. However, existing graph-based RAG approaches cannot accurately identify the relevant information from the graph and also consume large numbers of tokens in the online retrieval process. To address these issues, we introduce a novel graph-based RAG approach, called Attributed Community-based Hierarchical RAG (ArchRAG), by augmenting the question using attributed communities, and also introducing a novel LLM-based hierarchical clustering method. To retrieve the most relevant information from the graph for the question, we build a novel hierarchical index structure for the attributed communities and develop an effective online retrieval method. Experimental results demonstrate that ArchRAG outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and token cost.

PaperID: 577, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15122

Authors:Fuwei Zhang, Xiaoyu Liu, Dongbo Xi, Jishen Yin, Huan Chen, Peng Yan, Fuzhen Zhuang, Zhao Zhang

Affiliations: Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University, School of Computer Science and Engineering

Title: Multi-Aspect Cross-modal Quantization for Generative Recommendation

Abstract:
Generative Recommendation (GR) has emerged as a new paradigm in recommender systems. This approach relies on quantized representations to discretize item features, modeling users’ historical interactions as sequences of discrete tokens. Based on these tokenized sequences, GR predicts the next item by employing nexttoken prediction methods. The challenges of GR lie in constructing high-quality semantic identifiers (IDs) that are hierarchically organized, minimally conflicting, and conducive to effective generative model training. However, current approaches remain limited in their ability to harness multimodal information and to capture the deep and intricate interactions among diverse modalities, both of which are essential for learning high-quality semantic IDs and for effectively training GR models. To address this, we propose Multi-Aspect Cross-modal quantization for generative Recommendation (MACRec), which introduces multimodal information and incorporates it into both semantic ID learning and generative model training from different aspects. Specifically, we first introduce cross-modal quantization during the ID learning process, which effectively reduces conflict rates and thus improves codebook usability through the complementary integration of multimodal information. In addition, to further enhance the generative ability of our GR model, we incorporate multi-aspect cross-modal alignments, including the implicit and explicit alignments. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on three well-known recommendation datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

PaperID: 578, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.20161

Authors:Paula Böhm, Robert Bredereck, Paul Gölz, Andrzej Kaczmarczyk, Stanisław Szufa

Affiliations: TU Clausthal, Cornell University, University of Chicago, AGH University Université Paris Dauphine - PSL

Title: Putting Fair Division on the Map

Abstract:
The fair division of indivisible goods is not only a subject of theoretical research, but also an important problem in practice, with solutions being offered on several online platforms. Little is known, however, about the characteristics of realworld allocation instances and how they compare to synthetic instances. Using dimensionality reduction, we compute a map of allocation instances: a 2-dimensional embedding such that an instance's location on the map is predictive of the instance's origin and other key instance features. Because the axes of this map closely align with the utility matrix's two largest singular values, we define a second, explicit map, which we theoretically characterize.

PaperID: 579, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09312

Authors:Clément Contet, Umberto Grandi, Jérôme Mengin

Affiliations: Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT) Université de Toulouse, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT) Université Toulouse Capitole

Title: Explaining Tournament Solutions with Minimal Supports

Abstract:
Tournaments are widely used models to represent pairwise dominance between candidates, alternatives, or teams. We study the problem of providing certified explanations for why a candidate appears among the winners under various tournament rules. To this end, we identify minimal supports—minimal subtournaments in which the candidate is guaranteed to win regardless of how the rest of the tournament is completed (that is, the candidate is a necessary winner of the sub-tournament). This notion corresponds to an abductive explanation for the question,"Why does the winner win the tournament?"—a central concept in formal explainable AI. We focus on common tournament solutions: the top cycle, the uncovered set, the Copeland rule, the Borda rule, the maximin rule, and the weighted uncovered set. For each rule we determine the size of the smallest minimal supports, and we present polynomial-time algorithms to compute them for all solutions except for the weighted uncovered set, for which the problem is NP-complete. Finally, we show how minimal supports can serve to produce compact, certified, and intuitive explanations for tournament solutions.

PaperID: 580, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14409

Authors:Michelle Döring, Jannes Malanowski, Stefan Neubert

Affiliations: Hasso Plattner Institute

Title: Cost-Free Neutrality for the River Method

Abstract:
Recently, the River Method was introduced as novel refinement of the Split Cycle voting rule. The decisionmaking process of River is closely related to the well established Ranked Pairs Method. Both methods consider a margin graph computed from the voters' preferences and eliminate majority cycles in that graph to choose a winner. As ties can occur in the margin graph, a tiebreaker is required along with the preferences. While such a tiebreaker makes the computation efficient, it compromises the fundamental property of neutrality: the voting rule should not favor alternatives in advance. One way to reintroduce neutrality is to use Parallel-Universe Tiebreaking (PUT), where each alternative is a winner if it wins according to any possible tiebreaker. Unfortunately, computing the winners selected by Ranked Pairs with PUT is NP-complete. Given the similarity of River to Ranked Pairs, one might expect River to suffer from the same complexity. Surprisingly, we show the opposite: We present a polynomial-time algorithm for computing River winners with PUT, highlighting significant structural advantages of River over Ranked Pairs. Our Fused-Universe (FUN) algorithm simulates River for every possible tiebreaking in one pass. From the resulting FUN diagram one can then directly read off both the set of winners and, for each winner, a certificate that explains how this alternative dominates the others.

PaperID: 581, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12523

Authors:Adam Dziwoki, Rostislav Horcik

Affiliations: Czech Technical University in Prague

Title: Perturbing Best Responses in Zero-Sum Games

Abstract:
This paper investigates the impact of perturbations on the bestresponse-based algorithms approximating Nash equilibria in zero-sum games, namely Double Oracle and Fictitious Play. More precisely, we assume that the oracle computing the best responses perturbs the utilities before selecting the best response. We show that using such an oracle reduces the number of iterations for both algorithms. For some cases, suitable perturbations ensure the expected number of iterations is logarithmic. Although the utility perturbation is computationally demanding as it requires iterating through all pure strategies, we demonstrate that one can efficiently perturb the utilities in games where pure strategies have further inner structure.

PaperID: 582, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11365

Authors:Piotr Faliszewski, Stanisław Kaźmierowski, Grzegorz Lisowski, Ildikó Schlotter, Paolo Turrini

Affiliations: AGH University of Kraków, Poland University of Warsaw, University of Groningen, The Netherlands, ELTE Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Hungary Budapest University of Technology and Economics, University of Warwick, United Kingdom

Title: Computing Equilibrium Nominations in Presidential Elections

Abstract:
We study strategic candidate nomination by parties in elections decided by Plurality voting. Each party selects a nominee before the election, and the winner is chosen from the nominated candidates based on the voters' preferences. We introduce a new restriction on these preferences, which we call partyaligned single-peakedness: all voters agree on a common ordering of the parties along an ideological axis, but may differ in their perceptions of the positions of individual candidates within each party. The preferences of each voter are single-peaked with respect to their own axis over the candidates, which is consistent with the global ordering of the parties. We present a polynomial-time algorithm for recognizing whether a preference profile satisfies party-aligned single-peakedness. In this domain, we give polynomial-time algorithms for deciding whether a given party can become the winner under some (or all) nominations, and whether this can occur in some pure Nash equilibrium. We also prove a tight result about the guaranteed existence of pure strategy Nash equilibria for elections with up to three parties for single-peaked and party-aligned single-peaked preference profiles.

PaperID: 583, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19461

Authors:Jugal Garg, Aniket Murhekar

Affiliations: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern University

Title: Existence of 2-EFX Allocations of Chores

Abstract:
We study the fair division of indivisible chores among agents with additive disutility functions. We investigate the existence of allocations satisfying the popular fairness notion of envyfreeness up to any chore (EFX), and its multiplicative approximations. The existence of 4-EFX allocations was recently established by Garg, Murhekar, and Qin (2025). We improve this guarantee by proving the existence of 2-EFX allocations for all instances with additive disutilities. This approximation was previously known only for restricted instances such as bivalued disutilities (Lin, Wu, and Zhou (2025)) or three agents (Afshinmehr, Ansaripour, Danaei, and Mehlhorn (2024)). We obtain our result by providing a general framework for achieving approximate-EFX allocations. The approach begins with a suitable initial allocation and performs a sequence of local swaps between the bundles of envious and envied agents. For our main result, we begin with an initial allocation that satisfies envy-freeness up to one chore (EF1) and Pareto-optimality (PO); the existence of such an allocation was recently established in a major breakthrough by Mahara (2025). We further demonstrate the strength and generality of our framework by giving simple and unified proofs of existing results, namely (i) 2-EFX for bivalued instances, (ii) 2-EFX for three agents, (iii) EFX when the number of chores is at most twice the number of agents, and (iv) 4-EFX for all instances. We expect this framework to have broader applications in approximate-EFX due to its simplicity and generality.

PaperID: 584, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20020

Authors:Luise Ge, Gregory Kehne, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik

Affiliations: Washington University, Saint Louis

Title: Optimized Distortion in Linear Social Choice

Abstract:
Social choice theory offers a wealth of approaches for selecting a candidate on behalf of voters based on their reported preference rankings over options. When voters have explicit utilities for these options, however, using preference rankings may lead to suboptimal outcomes visa-vis utilitarian social welfare. Distortion is a measure of this suboptimality, and an extensive literature uses it to develop and analyze voting rules when utilities have minimal structure. However, in many settings, such as common paradigms for value alignment, available options admit a vector representation, and it is natural to suppose that utilities are parametric functions thereof. We undertake the first study of distortion for linear utility functions. Our theoretical contributions are organized into two parts: randomized and deterministic voting rules. We obtain bounds that depend only on dimension of the candidate embedding, and are independent of the numbers of candidates or voters. Additionally, we introduce poly-time instance-optimal algorithms for minimizing distortion given a collection of candidates and votes. We empirically evaluate these in two real-world domains: recommendation systems using collaborative filtering embeddings, and opinion surveys utilizing language model embeddings. Our results benchmark the distortion bounds of several standard rules against our instance-optimal algorithms.

PaperID: 585, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.01048

Authors:Yuhang Guo, Houyu Zhou

Affiliations: University of New South Wales

Title: Minimizing Inequity in Facility Location Games

Abstract:
This paper studies the problem of minimizing grouplevel inequity in facility location games on the real line, where agents belong to different groups and may act strategically. We explore a fairness-oriented objective that minimizes the maximum group effect. For each group, the group effect is defined as its total or maximum distance to the nearest facility, weighted by group-specific factors. We show that this formulation generalizes several prominent optimization objectives, including the classical utilitarian (social cost) and egalitarian (maximum cost) objectives, as well as two group-fair objectives, maximum total and average group cost. In order to minimize the maximum group effect, we first propose two novel mechanisms for the single-facility case, the Balanced mechanism and the Major-Phantom mechanism. Both are strategyproof and achieve tight approximation guarantees under distinct formulations of the maximum group effect objective. Our mechanisms not only close the existing gap in approximation bounds for the group-fairness objectives, maximum total group cost and maximum average group cost, but also unify many classical truthful mechanisms within a broader fairness-aware framework. For the two-facility case, we revisit and extend the classical endpoint mechanism to our generalized setting and demonstrate that it provides tight bounds for two distinct maximum group effect objectives.

PaperID: 586, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07022

Authors:Hadi Hosseini, Sanjukta Roy, Aditi Sethia

Affiliations: Pennsylvania State University, Indian Statistical Institute, Indian Institute of Science

Title: Fair Societies: Algorithms for House Allocations

Abstract:
House allocations concern with matchings involving onesided preferences, where houses serve as a proxy encoding valuable indivisible resources (e.g. organs, course seats, subsidized public housing units) to be allocated among the agents. Every agent must receive exactly one resource. We study algorithmic approaches towards ensuring fairness in such settings. Minimizing the number of envious agents is known to be computationally hard. We present two tractable approaches to deal with the hardness. When the agents are presented with an initial allocation of houses, we aim to refine this allocation by reallocating a bounded number of houses to reduce the number of envious agents. We show an efficient algorithm when the agents express preference for a bounded number of houses and houses are accepted by a bounded number of agents. Next, we consider single peaked preference domain and present a polynomial time algorithm for finding an allocation that minimize the number of envious agents. We further extend it to satisfy Pareto efficiency. Our former algorithm works for other measures of envy such as total envy, or maximum envy, with suitable modifications. Finally, we present an empirical analysis recording the fairness-welfare trade-off of our algorithms.

PaperID: 587, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.03629

Authors:Hadi Hosseini, Shraddha Pathak, Yu Zhou

Affiliations: Penn State University, Beijing Normal University

Title: Non-Monotonicity in Fair Division of Graphs

Abstract:
We consider the problem of fairly allocating the vertices of a graph among n agents, where the value of a bundle is determined by its cut valuethe number of edges with exactly one endpoint in the bundle. This model naturally captures applications such as team formation and network partitioning, where valuations are inherently non-monotonic: the marginal values may be positive, negative, or zero depending on the composition of the bundle. We focus on the fairness notion of envy-freeness up to one item (EF1) and explore its compatibility with several efficiency concepts such as Transfer Stability (TS) that prohibits any transfer of item that benefit one agent at another's expense. For general graphs, our results uncover a non-monotonic relationship between the number of agents n and the existence of allocations satisfying EF1 and transfer stability (TS): such allocations always exist for n=2, may fail to exist for n=3, but exist again for all n>= 4. We further show that existence can be guaranteed for any n by slightly weakening the efficiency requirement or by restricting the graph to forests. All of our positive results are achieved via efficient algorithms.

PaperID: 588, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.06423

Authors:Ryoga Mahara, Ryuhei Mizutani, Taihei Oki, Tomohiko Yokoyama

Affiliations: The University of Tokyo, Keio University, Hokkaido University, Japan RIKEN

Title: Position Fair Mechanisms Allocating Indivisible Goods

Abstract:
Fair division mechanisms for indivisible goods require agent orderings to deterministically select one allocation when running the algorithm in practice. We introduce position envyfreeness up to one good (PEF1) as a fairness criterion for mechanisms: a mechanism is said to satisfy PEF1 if for any pair of agent orderings, no agent prefers their bundle determined under one ordering to that under another ordering by more than the utility of a single good. First, we propose a scale-invariant, polynomial-time mechanism that satisfies PEF1 and yields an envy-freeness up to one good (EF1) allocation. For the case of two agents, we establish that any mechanism producing a maximum Nash welfare allocation eliminates envy based on positions by removing one good, provided that utilities are positive. Additionally, we present a polynomial-time mechanism based on the adjusted winner procedure, which satisfies PEF1 and produces an EF1 and Pareto optimal allocation for two agents. In contrast, we demonstrate that well-known mechanisms such as round-robin and envy-cycle elimination do not generally satisfy PEF1.

PaperID: 589, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18062

Authors:Reshef Meir, Ganesh Ghalme

Affiliations: Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad

Title: On Condorcet’s Jury Theorem with Abstention

Abstract:
The wellknown Condorcet Jury Theorem states that, under majority rule, the better of two alternatives is chosen with probability approaching one as the population grows. We study an asymmetric setting where voters face varying participation costs and share a possibly heuristic belief about their pivotality (ability to influence the outcome). In a costly voting setup where voters abstain if their participation cost is greater than their pivotality estimate, we identify a single property of the heuristic belief---weakly vanishing pivotality---that gives rise to multiple stable equilibria in which elections are nearly tied. In contrast, strongly vanishing pivotality (as in the standard Calculus of Voting model) yields a unique, trivial equilibrium where only zero-cost voters participate as the population grows. We then characterize when nontrivial equilibria satisfy a version of the Jury Theorem: below a sharp threshold, the majority-preferred candidate wins with probability approaching one; above it, both candidates either win with equal probability.

PaperID: 590, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16719

Authors:Kiran Tomlinson, Johan Ugander, Jon Kleinberg

Affiliations: Microsoft Research, Yale University, Cornell University

Title: Exclusion Zones of Instant Runoff Voting

Abstract:
Recent research on instant runoff voting (IRV) shows that it exhibits a striking property over unimodal onedimensional preferences: there is an exclusion zone around the median voter such that the winner must come from the exclusion zone, unless no such candidate exists. Thus, IRV cannot elect an extreme candidate in this setting as long as a sufficiently moderate candidate runs. In this work, we examine the mathematical structure of exclusion zones as a broad phenomenon in more general preference spaces. We prove that with voters uniformly distributed over any d-dimensional hyperrectangle (for d > 1), IRV has no such exclusion zone. However, we also show that IRV exclusion zones are not solely a one-dimensional phenomenon. For irregular higher-dimensional preference spaces with fewer symmetries than hyperrectangles, IRV can have nontrivial exclusion zones. As a further exploration, we study IRV exclusion zones with graph-based preferences, where nodes represent voters who prefer candidates closer to them in the graph. Here, we show that IRV exclusion zones present a surprising computational challenge: even checking whether a given set of positions is an IRV exclusion zone is NP-hard. We develop an efficient randomized approximation algorithm for checking and finding exclusion zones in graphs. Finally, we report on computational experiments with exclusion zones: (i) performing an exhaustive computer search of small graphs and trees, we find nontrivial IRV exclusion zones in most small graphs; and (ii) applying our approximation algorithm to a collection of larger real-world school friendship networks, we find that about 60% of these networks have probable nontrivial IRV exclusion zones. While our focus is on IRV, the properties of exclusion zones we establish provide new methods for analyzing voting systems in metric spaces more generally.

PaperID: 591, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08174

Authors:Hang Xu, Kai Li, Haobo Fu, Qiang Fu, Junliang Xing, Jian Cheng

Affiliations: Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tencent AI Lab, Tsinghua University, Chinese Academy of Sciences AiRiA Maicro.ai

Title: Deep (Predictive) Discounted Counterfactual Regret Minimization

Abstract:
Counterfactual regret minimization (CFR) is a family of algorithms for effectively solving imperfectinformation games. To enhance CFR's applicability in large games, researchers use neural networks to approximate its behavior. However, existing methods are mainly based on vanilla CFR and struggle to effectively integrate more advanced CFR variants. In this work, we propose an efficient model-free neural CFR algorithm, overcoming the limitations of existing methods in approximating advanced CFR variants. At each iteration, it collects variance-reduced sampled advantages based on a value network, fits cumulative advantages by bootstrapping, and applies discounting and clipping operations to simulate the update mechanisms of advanced CFR variants. Experimental results show that, compared with model-free neural algorithms, it exhibits faster convergence in typical imperfect-information games and demonstrates stronger adversarial performance in a large poker game.

PaperID: 592, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04668

Authors:Aviv Yaish, Nir Chemaya, Dahlia Malkhi, Lin William Cong

Affiliations: Yale University Ben Gurion University of the Negev, UC Santa Barbara, Cornell University

Title: Inequality in the Age of Pseudonymity

Abstract:
Inequality measures such as the Gini coefficient are used to inform and motivate policymaking, and are increasingly applied to digital platforms. We analyze how measures fare in pseudonymous settings that are common in the digital age. One key challenge of such environments is the ability of actors to create fake identities under fictitious false names, also known as ``Sybils.'' While some actors may do so to preserve their privacy, we show that this can hamper inequality measurements: it is impossible for measures satisfying the literature's canonical set of desired properties to assess the inequality of an economy that may harbor Sybils. We characterize the class of all Sybilproof measures, and prove that they must satisfy relaxed version of the aforementioned properties. Furthermore, we show that the structure imposed restricts the ability to assess inequality at a fine-grained level. We then apply our results to prove that popular measures are not Sybil-proof, with the famous Gini coefficient being but one example out of many. Finally, we examine dynamics leading to the creation of Sybils in digital and traditional settings.

PaperID: 593, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11531

Authors:Valentin Zech, Martin Bullinger

Affiliations: University of Oxford, University of Bristol

Title: Deviation Dynamics in Cardinal Hedonic Games

Abstract:
Computing stable partitions in hedonic games is a challenging task because there exist games in which stable outcomes do not exist. Even more, these Noinstances can often be leveraged to prove computational hardness results. We make this impression rigorous in a dynamic model of cardinal hedonic games by providing meta theorems. These imply hardness of deciding about the possible or necessary convergence of deviation dynamics based on the mere existence of No-instances. Our results hold for additively separable, fractional, and modified fractional hedonic games (ASHGs, FHGs, and MFHGs). Moreover, they encompass essentially all reasonable stability notions based on single-agent deviations. In addition, we propose dynamics as a method to find individually rational and contractually individual stable (CIS) partitions in ASHGs. In particular, we find that CIS dynamics from the singleton partition possibly converge after a linear number of deviations but may require an exponential number of deviations in the worst case.

PaperID: 594, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.09097

Authors:Naifeng Zhang, Stephen Marcus McAleer, Tuomas Sandholm

Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University, Inc. Strategic Machine, Inc. Optimized Markets

Title: Faster Game Solving via Hyperparameter Schedules

Abstract:
Counterfactual regret minimization (CFR) algorithms are a foundational class of methods for solving imperfectinformation games, with the time average of their iterates converging to a Nash equilibrium in two-player zero-sum games. Prior state-of-the-art variants, Discounted CFR (DCFR) and Predictive CFR+ (PCFR+), achieved the fastest known practical performance by improving convergence rates over vanilla CFR through discounting early iterations with a fixed discounting scheme. More recently, Dynamic DCFR (DDCFR) introduced agent-learned dynamic discounting schemes to further accelerate convergence, at the cost of increased complexity. To address this, we propose Hyperparameter Schedules (HSs), a remarkably simple, training-free framework that dynamically adjusts CFR discounting over time. HSs aggressively downweight early updates and gradually transition to trusting late-stage strategies, leading to substantially faster convergence with only a few lines of code modifications. We show that HSs derived from just three small extensive-form games generalize effectively to 17 diverse games (including large-scale realistic poker) in both extensive-form and normal-form settings, without any game-specific tuning. Our method establishes a new state of the art for solving two-player zero-sum games.

PaperID: 595, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10409

Authors:Kayla Boggess, Sarit Kraus, Lu Feng

Affiliations: University of Virginia, Bar-Ilan University

Title: Explaining Decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Policies

Abstract:
MultiAgent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has gained significant interest in recent years, enabling sequential decision-making across multiple agents in various domains. However, most existing explanation methods focus on centralized MARL, failing to address the uncertainty and nondeterminism inherent in decentralized settings. We propose methods to generate policy summarizations that capture task ordering and agent cooperation in decentralized MARL policies, along with query-based explanations for “When,” “Why Not,” and “What” types of user queries about specific agent behaviors. We evaluate our approach across four MARL domains and two decentralized MARL algorithms, demonstrating its generalizability and computational efficiency. User studies show that our summarizations and explanations significantly improve user question-answering performance and enhance subjective ratings on metrics such as understanding and satisfaction.

PaperID: 596, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.19397

Authors:Celine Hocquette, Johannes Langer, Andrew Cropper, Ute Schmid

Affiliations: University of Southampton, University of Bamberg, ELLIS Institute Finland University of Helsinki

Title: Can Humans Teach Machines to Code?

Abstract:
The goal of inductive program synthesis is for a machine to automatically generate a program from usersupplied examples. A key underlying assumption is that humans can provide sufficient examples to teach a concept to a machine. To evaluate the validity of this assumption, we conduct a study where human participants provide examples for six programming concepts, such as finding the maximum element of a list. We evaluate the generalisation performance of five program synthesis systems trained on input-output examples (i) from a human group, (ii) from a gold standard set, and (iii) randomly sampled. Our results suggest that human-provided examples are typically insufficient for a program synthesis system to learn an accurate program.

PaperID: 597, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.11976

Authors:Zheng Zhang, Cuong C. Nguyen, Kevin Wells, Thanh-Toan Do, David Rosewarne, Gustavo Carneiro

Affiliations: University of Surrey, Monash University

Title: CoverageConstrained Human-AI Cooperation with Multiple Experts

Abstract:
HumanAI cooperative classification (HAI-CC) aims to develop hybrid intelligent systems that enhance decision-making in various high-stakes real-world scenarios by leveraging both human expertise and AI capabilities. Current HAI-CC methods primarily focus on learning-to-defer (L2D), where decisions are deferred to human experts when AI is not confident, and learning-to-complement (L2C), where AI and human experts make predictions cooperatively. However, existing research in both L2D and L2C has not effectively been explored under diverse expert knowledge to improve decision-making, particularly when constrained by the operation cost of human involvement. In this paper, we address this research gap by proposing the Coverage-constrained Learning to Defer and Complement with Specific Experts (CL2DC) method. In particular, CL2DC assesses input data before making final decisions through either AI prediction alone or by deferring to or complementing a specific human expert. Furthermore, we propose a coverage-constrained optimisation to control the cooperation cost, ensuring it approximates a target probability for AI-only selection. This approach enables an effective assessment of system performance within a specified budget. Comprehensive evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that CL2DC achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art HAI-CC methods.

PaperID: 598, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04511

Authors:Hamed Ayoobi, Nico Potyka, Anna Rapberger, Francesca Toni

Affiliations: University of Groningen, Cardiff University, Imperial College London

Title: Argumentative Debates for Transparent Bias Detection

Abstract:
As the use of AI in society grows, addressing emerging biases is essential to prevent systematic discrimination. Several bias detection methods have been proposed, but, with few exceptions, these tend to ignore transparency. Instead, interpretability and explainability are core requirements for algorithmic fairness, even more so than for other algorithmic solutions, given the humanoriented nature of fairness. We present ABIDE (Argumentative BIas detection by DEbate), a novel framework that structures bias detection transparently as debate, guided by an underlying argument graph as understood in (formal and computational) argumentation. The arguments are about the success chances of groups in local neighbourhoods and the significance of these neighbourhoods. We evaluate ABIDE experimentally and demonstrate its strengths in performance against an argumentative baseline.

PaperID: 599, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06263

Authors:Andrew Cropper, David M. Cerna, Matti Järvisalo

Affiliations: Dynatrace Research Czech Academy of Sciences Institute of Computer Science, University of Helsinki

Title: Symmetry Breaking for Inductive Logic Programming

Abstract:
The goal of inductive logic programming (ILP) is to search for a hypothesis that generalises training data and background knowledge. The challenge is searching vast hypothesis spaces, which is exacerbated because many logically equivalent hypotheses exist. To address this challenge, we introduce a method to break symmetries in the hypothesis space. We implement our idea in answer set programming. Our experiments on multiple domains, including visual reasoning and game playing, show that our approach can reduce solving times from over an hour to just 17 seconds.

PaperID: 600, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12727

Authors:Richard Dapoigny

Affiliations: Université Savoie Mont Blanc

Title: A Topological Rewriting of Tarski’s Mereogeometry

Abstract:
Qualitative spatial representation approaches which rely on Goodmanstyle predicative mereological theories and on a pseudo-topology, often causes some problems either for their use as a meta-information for knowledge conceptualization in advanced geometric reasoning, since they lack Euclidean geometry and fully-fledged topological spaces in the classical sense. Therefore, this paper seeks to extend an existing formalization, grounded in an underlying type theory using the Coq language, together with the Whitehead-like point-free Tarski's geometry. More precisely, we leverage an available library called lambda-MM to formalize Tarski's geometry of solids by investigating an algebraic formulation of topological relations on top of the library. Given that Tarski's work is grounded in Lesniewski’s mereology, and despite the fact that lambda-MM barely implements Tarski's geometry, the first part of the paper supplements their work by proving that mereological classes correspond to regular open sets. It forms a topology of individual names extensible with Tarski's geometric primitives. Unlike classical approaches used in qualitative logical theories, we adopt a solution that enables the specification of a topological space from mereology and a geometric subspace, thereby enhancing the theory’s expressiveness. Then, in a second part, we prove that Tarski’s geometry forms a subspace of the previous topology in which regions are restricted classes. We prove three postulates of Tarski’s work reducing his axiomatic system and extend the theory with the T2 (Hausdorff) property and additional definitions.

PaperID: 601, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07933

Authors:Yazmín Ibáñez-García, Jean Christoph Jung, Vincent Michielini, Filip Murlak

Affiliations: Cardiff University, TU Dortmund University, University of Bordeaux, University of Warsaw

Title: Revisiting Conjunctive Query Entailment for S

Abstract:
We clarify the complexity of answering unions of conjunctive queries over knowledge bases formulated in the description logic S, the extension of ALC with transitive roles. Contrary to what existing partial results suggested, we show that the problem is, in fact, 2ExpTimecomplete; hardness already holds in the presence of two transitive roles and for Boolean conjunctive queries. We complement this result by showing that the problem remains in coNExpTime when the input query is rooted or is restricted to use at most one transitive role (but may use arbitrarily many non-transitive roles).

PaperID: 602, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06234

Authors:Weijie Li, Zhongqing Wang, Guodong Zhou

Affiliations: Soochow University

Title: PCoKG: Personality-aware Commonsense Reasoning with Debate

Abstract:
Most commonsense reasoning models overlook the influence of personality traits, limiting their effectiveness in personalized systems such as dialogue generation. To address this limitation, we introduce the Personalityaware Commonsense Knowledge Graph (PCoKG), a structured dataset comprising 521,316 quadruples. We begin by employing three evaluators to score and filter events from the ATOMIC dataset, selecting those that are likely to elicit diverse reasoning patterns across different personality types. For knowledge graph construction, we leverage the role-playing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to perform reasoning tasks. To enhance the quality of the generated knowledge, we incorporate a debate mechanism consisting of a proponent, an opponent, and a judge, which iteratively refines the outputs through feedback loops. We evaluate the dataset from multiple perspectives and conduct fine-tuning and ablation experiments using multiple LLM backbones to assess PCoKG's robustness and the effectiveness of its construction pipeline. Our LoRA-based fine-tuning results indicate a positive correlation between model performance and the parameter scale of the base models. Finally, we apply PCoKG to persona-based dialogue generation, where it demonstrates improved consistency between generated responses and reference outputs. This work bridges the gap between commonsense reasoning and individual cognitive differences, enabling the development of more personalized and context-aware AI systems.

PaperID: 603, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.05562

Authors:Ana Ozaki, Jandson S Ribeiro

Affiliations: University of Oslo, Cardiff University

Title: Model Change for Description Logic Concepts

Abstract:
We consider the problem of modifying a description logic concept in light of models represented as pointed interpretations. We call this setting model change, and distinguish three main kinds of changes: eviction, which consists of only removing models; reception, which incorporates models; and revision, which combines removal with incorporation of models in a single operation. We introduce a formal notion of revision and argue that it does not reduce to a simple combination of eviction and reception, contrary to intuition. We provide positive and negative results on the compatibility of eviction and reception for ELbottom and ALC description logic concepts and on the compatibility of revision for ALC concepts.

PaperID: 604, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12808

Authors:Omar Adalat, Francesco Belardinelli

Affiliations: Imperial College London

Title: Expressive Temporal Specifications for Reward Monitoring

Abstract:
Specifying informative and dense reward functions remains a pivotal challenge in Reinforcement Learning, as it directly affects the efficiency of agent training. In this work, we harness the expressive power of quantitative Linear Temporal Logic on finite traces to synthesize reward monitors that generate a dense stream of rewards for runtimeobservable state trajectories. By providing nuanced feedback during training, these monitors guide agents toward optimal behaviour and help mitigate the well-known issue of sparse rewards under long-horizon decision making, which arises under the Boolean semantics dominating the current literature. Our framework is algorithm-agnostic and only relies on a state labelling function, and naturally accommodates specifying non-Markovian properties. Empirical results show that our quantitative monitors consistently subsume and, depending on the environment, outperform Boolean monitors in maximizing a quantitative measure of task completion and in reducing convergence time.

PaperID: 605, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.15206

Authors:Jie Chen, Hua Mao, Chuanbin Liu, Zhu Wang, Xi Peng

Affiliations: College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, China National Key Laboratory of Fundamental Algorithms and Models for Engineering Numerical Simulation, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Northumbria University, School of Economics and Management, China University of Petroleum (Beijing), Law School

Title: Conditional Distribution Learning for Graph Classification

Abstract:
Leveraging the diversity and quantity of data provided by various graphstructured data augmentations while preserving intrinsic semantic information is challenging. Additionally, successive layers in graph neural network (GNN) tend to produce more similar node embeddings, while graph contrastive learning aims to increase the dissimilarity between negative pairs of node embeddings. This inevitably results in a conflict between the message-passing mechanism (MPM) of GNNs and the contrastive learning (CL) of negative pairs via intraviews. In this paper, we propose a conditional distribution learning (CDL) method that learns graph representations from graph-structured data for semisupervised graph classification. Specifically, we present an end-to-end graph representation learning model to align the conditional distributions of weakly and strongly augmented features over the original features. This alignment enables the CDL model to effectively preserve intrinsic semantic information when both weak and strong augmentations are applied to graph-structured data. To avoid the conflict between the MPM and the CL of negative pairs, positive pairs of node representations are retained for measuring the similarity between the original features and the corresponding weakly augmented features. Extensive experiments with several benchmark graph datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed CDL method.

PaperID: 606, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.00841

Authors:Jingxiao Chen, Weiji Xie, Weinan Zhang, Yong Yu, Ying Wen

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: Offline Fictitious Self-Play for Competitive Games

Abstract:
Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) enables policy improvement from fixed datasets without online interactions, making it highly suitable for realworld applications lacking efficient simulators. Despite its success in the single-agent setting, offline multi-agent RL remains a challenge, especially in competitive games. Firstly, unaware of the game structure, it is impossible to interact with the opponents and conduct a major learning paradigm, self-play, for competitive games. Secondly, real-world datasets cannot cover all the state and action space in the game, resulting in barriers to identifying Nash equilibrium (NE). To address these issues, this paper introduces Off-FSP, the first practical model-free offline RL algorithm for competitive games. We start by simulating interactions with various opponents by adjusting the weights of the fixed dataset with importance sampling. This technique allows us to learn the best responses to different opponents and employ the Offline Self-Play learning framework. To overcome the challenge of partial coverage, we combine the single-agent offline RL method with Fictitious Self-Play (FSP) to approximate NE by constraining the approximate best responses away from out-of-distribution actions. Experiments on matrix games, extensive-form poker, and board games demonstrate that Off-FSP achieves significantly lower exploitability than state-of-the-art baselines. Finally, we validate Off-FSP on a real-world human-robot competitive task, demonstrating its potential for solving complex, hard-to-simulate real-world problems.

PaperID: 607, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.06768

Authors:Shutong Chen, Tianyi Zhou, Guodong Long, Jing Jiang, Chengqi Zhang

Affiliations: University of Technology Sydney, University of Maryland, College Park, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: FedMerge: Federated Model Merging for Personalization

Abstract:
One global model in federated learning (FL) might not be sufficient to serve many clients with nonIID tasks and distributions. Despite recent advances in FL to train multiple global models for better personalization, they only provide limited model choices to clients, so local finetuning of multiple models is still indispensable. This paper proposes a novel ``FedMerge'' approach that can create a single personalized model per client by simply merging multiple global models with automatically optimized and customized weights. We formulate this problem as a joint optimization of global models and the merging weights per client. Unlike existing FL approaches, where the server broadcasts one or multiple global models to all clients, the server only needs to send a customized, merged model to each client. Moreover, instead of periodically interrupting the local training and re-initializing it to a global model, the merged model aligns better with each client's task and data distribution, smoothening the local-global gap between consecutive rounds caused by client drift. We evaluate FedMerge on different non-IID settings applied to various domains with diverse tasks and data types, in which FedMerge consistently outperforms existing FL approaches, including clustering-based and mixture-of-experts (MoE) based methods.

PaperID: 608, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22295

Authors:Zhengyun Cheng, Changhao Wang, Guanwen Zhang, Yi Xu, Wei Zhou, Xiangyang Ji

Affiliations: Northwestern Polytechnical University, Dalian University of Technology, Tsinghua University

Title: Score-Based Model for Low-Rank Tensor Recovery

Abstract:
Lowrank tensor decompositions (TDs) provide an effective framework for multiway data analysis. Traditional TD methods rely on predefined structural assumptions, such as CP or Tucker decompositions. From a probabilistic perspective, these methods effectively model the relationships between latent factors and the low-rank tensor using Dirac delta distributions. However, tensor low-rank decomposition is inherently non-unique, leading to a multimodal distribution over possible solutions. Critically, such prior knowledge is rarely available in practical scenarios, particularly regarding the optimal rank structure and contraction rules. To address this issue, we propose a score-based model that eliminates the need for predefined structural or distributional assumptions, enabling the learning of compatibility between tensors and latent factors. Specifically, a neural network is designed to learn the energy function, which is optimized via score matching to capture the gradient of the joint log-probability of tensor entries and latent factors. Our method allows for modeling structures and distributions beyond the Dirac delta assumption. Moreover, integrating the block coordinate descent (BCD) algorithm with the proposed smooth regularization enables the model to perform both tensor completion and denoising. Experimental results demonstrate significant performance improvements across various tensor types, including sparse and continuous-time tensors, as well as visual data.

PaperID: 609, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.10235

Authors:Lénaïg Cornanguer, Joscha Cüppers, Jilles Vreeken

Affiliations: CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

Title: Causal Discovery from Interval-Based Event Sequences

Abstract:
In this paper we address the problem of discovering causal relationships from observational event sequence data. Existing methods typically assume that events are instantaneous point events, however in many realworld settings, events have duration. For example, in healthcare, a patient's symptoms may persist over a time interval and influence clinical actions while ongoing. To address this, we introduce a causal model for interval-based event sequences that captures rich causal structures, including interactions between events and causal mechanisms that depend on whether other events are ongoing. We prove that our model is identifiable in the limit and present a practical causal discovery algorithm, Niagara, grounded in the algorithmic Markov condition. To select among candidate models, we employ a minimum description length (MDL) criterion, enabling robust inference even with limited data. We validate our approach on synthetic and real data and demonstrate its utility on a real-world medical case study, where it uncovers meaningful causal relationships from noisy, interval-based event data.

PaperID: 610, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17376

Authors:Jiali Cui, Yan-Ying Chen, Yanxia Zhang, Matthew Klenk

Affiliations: Stevens Institute of Technology, Toyota Research Institute

Title: ShaLa: Multimodal Shared Latent Generative Modelling

Abstract:
This paper presents a novel generative framework for learning shared latent representations across multimodal data. Many advanced multimodal methods focus on capturing all combinations of modalityspecific details across inputs, which can inadvertently obscure the high-level semantic concepts that are shared across modalities. Notably, Multimodal VAEs with low-dimensional latent variables are designed to capture shared representations, enabling various tasks such as joint multimodal synthesis and cross-modal inference. However, multimodal VAEs often struggle to design expressive joint variational posteriors and suffer from low-quality synthesis. In this work, ShaLa addresses these challenges by integrating a novel architectural inference model and a second-stage expressive diffusion prior, which not only facilitates effective inference of shared latent representation but also significantly improves the quality of downstream multimodal synthesis. We validate ShaLa extensively across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating superior coherence and synthesis quality compared to state-of-the-art multimodal VAEs. Furthermore, ShaLa scales to many more modalities while prior multimodal VAEs have fallen short in capturing the increasing complexity of the shared latent space.

PaperID: 611, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12148

Authors:Jimmy Z. Di, Yiwei Lu, Yaoliang Yu, Gautam Kamath, Adam Dziedzic, Franziska Boenisch

Affiliations: University of Wisconsin - Madison, University of Ottawa Vector Institute, University of Waterloo Vector Institute, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

Title: Demystifying Foreground-Background Memorization in Diffusion Models

Abstract:
Diffusion models (DMs) memorize training images and can reproduce nearduplicates during generation. Current detection methods identify verbatim memorization but fail to capture two critical aspects: quantifying partial memorization occurring in small image regions, and memorization patterns beyond specific prompt-image pairs. To address these limitations, we propose Foreground Background Memorization (FB-Mem), a novel segmentation-based metric that classifies and quantifies memorized regions within generated images. Our method reveals that memorization is more pervasive than previously understood: (1) individual generations from single prompts may be linked to clusters of similar training images, revealing complex memorization patterns that extend beyond one-to-one correspondences; and (2) existing model-level mitigation methods, such as neuron deactivation and pruning, fail to eliminate local memorization, which persists particularly in foreground regions. Our work establishes an effective framework for measuring memorization in diffusion models, demonstrates the inadequacy of current mitigation approaches, and proposes a stronger mitigation method using a clustering approach.

PaperID: 612, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.17493

Authors:Luca-Andrei Fechete, Mohamed Sana, Fadhel Ayed, Nicola Piovesan, Wenjie Li, Antonio De Domenico, Tareq Si Salem

Affiliations: École Polytechnique, Paris Research Center, Huawei Technologies

Title: Goal-Oriented Time-Series Forecasting: Foundation Framework Design

Abstract:
Conventional timeseries forecasting methods typically aim to minimize overall prediction error, without accounting for the varying importance of different forecast ranges in downstream applications. We propose a training methodology that enables forecasting models to adapt their focus to application-specific regions of interest at inference time, without retraining. The approach partitions the prediction space into fine-grained segments during training, which are dynamically reweighted and aggregated to emphasize the target range specified by the application. Unlike prior methods that predefine these ranges, our framework supports flexible, on-demand adjustments. Experiments on standard benchmarks and a newly collected wireless communication dataset demonstrate that our method not only improves forecast accuracy within regions of interest but also yields measurable gains in downstream task performance. These results highlight the potential for closer integration between predictive modeling and decision-making in real-world systems.

PaperID: 613, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.14818

Authors:Christian Fiedler

Affiliations: Technical University of Munich (TUM) Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML) Institute for Data Science in Mechanical Engineering (DSME), RWTH Aachen University

Title: Statistical Learning Theory for Distributional Classification

Abstract:
In supervised learning with distributional inputs in the twostage sampling setup, relevant to applications like learning-based medical screening or causal learning, the inputs (which are probability distributions) are not accessible in the learning phase, but only samples thereof. This problem is particularly amenable to kernel-based learning methods, where the distributions or samples are first embedded into a Hilbert space, often using kernel mean embeddings (KMEs), and then a standard kernel method like Support Vector Machines (SVMs) is applied, using a kernel defined on the embedding Hilbert space. In this work, we contribute to the theoretical analysis of this latter approach, with a particular focus on classification with distributional inputs using SVMs. We establish a new oracle inequality and derive consistency and learning rate results. Furthermore, for SVMs using the hinge loss and Gaussian kernels, we formulate a novel variant of an established noise assumption from the binary classification literature, under which we can establish learning rates. Finally, some of our technical tools like a new feature space for Gaussian kernels on Hilbert spaces are of independent interest.

PaperID: 614, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21054

Authors:Jiaming Guo, Rui Zhang, Zerun Li, Yunkai Gao, Shaohui Peng, Siming Lan, Xing Hu, Zidong Du, Xishan Zhang, Ling Li

Affiliations: SKL of Processors, Institute of Computing Technology, CAS University of Chinese Academy of Sciences Cambricon Technologies, Institute of Al for Industries, Intelligent Software Research Center, Institute of Software, CAS Cambricon Technologies

Title: Efficient Diffusion Planning with Temporal Diffusion

Abstract:
Diffusion planning is a promising method for learning highperformance policies from offline data. To avoid the impact of discrepancies between planning and reality on performance, previous works generate new plans at each time step. However, this incurs significant computational overhead and leads to lower decision frequencies, and frequent plan switching may also affect performance. In contrast, humans might create detailed short-term plans and more general, sometimes vague, long-term plans, and adjust them over time. Inspired by this, we propose the Temporal Diffusion Planner (TDP) which improves decision efficiency by distributing the denoising steps across the time dimension. TDP begins by generating an initial plan that becomes progressively more vague over time. At each subsequent time step, rather than generating an entirely new plan, TDP updates the previous one with a small number of denoising steps. This reduces the average number of denoising steps, improving decision efficiency. Additionally, we introduce an automated replanning mechanism to prevent significant deviations between the plan and reality. Experiments on D4RL show that, compared to previous works that generate new plans every time step, TDP significantly improves the decision-making frequency by 11-24.8 times while achieving higher or comparable performance.

PaperID: 615, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.00410

Authors:Jaeseung Heo, MoonJeong Park, Dongwoo Kim

Affiliations:

Title: Posterior Label Smoothing for Node Classification

Abstract:
Label smoothing is a widely studied regularization technique in machine learning. However, its potential for node classification in graphstructured data, spanning homophilic to heterophilic graphs, remains largely unexplored. We introduce posterior label smoothing, a novel method for transductive node classification that derives soft labels from a posterior distribution conditioned on neighborhood labels. The likelihood and prior distributions are estimated from the global statistics of the graph structure, allowing our approach to adapt naturally to various graph properties. We evaluate our method on 10 benchmark datasets using eight baseline models, demonstrating consistent improvements in classification accuracy. The following analysis demonstrates that soft labels mitigate overfitting during training, leading to better generalization performance, and that pseudo-labeling effectively refines the global label statistics of the graph.

PaperID: 616, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12713

Authors:Pedro Ilídio, Felipe Kenji Nakano, Alireza Gharahighehi, Robbe D'hondt, Ricardo Cerri, Celine Vens

Affiliations: KU Leuven, Campus KULAK, Dept. of Public Health and Primary Care, Etienne Sabbelaan Kortrijk, Belgium Itec, Instituto de Ciências Matemáticas e de Computação, Av. Trab. São Carlense, São Carlos, São Paulo

Title: Oxytrees: Model Trees for Bipartite Learning

Abstract:
Bipartite learning is a machine learning task that aims to predict interactions between pairs of instances. It has been applied to various domains, including drugtarget interactions, RNA-disease associations, and regulatory network inference. Despite being widely investigated, current methods still present drawbacks, as they are often designed for a specific application and thus do not generalize to other problems or present scalability issues. To address these challenges, we propose Oxytrees: proxy-based biclustering model trees. Oxytrees compress the interaction matrix into row- and column-wise proxy matrices, significantly reducing training time without compromising predictive performance. We also propose a new leaf-assignment algorithm that significantly reduces the time taken for prediction. Finally, Oxytrees employ linear models using the Kronecker product kernel in their leaves, resulting in shallower trees and thus even faster training. Using 15 datasets, we compared the predictive performance of ensembles of Oxytrees with that of the current state-of-the-art. We achieved up to 30-fold improvement in training times compared to state-of-the-art biclustering forests, while demonstrating competitive or superior performance in most evaluation settings, particularly in the inductive setting. Finally, we provide an intuitive Python API to access all datasets, methods and evaluation measures used in this work, thus enabling reproducible research in this field.

PaperID: 617, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18561

Authors:Łukasz Janisiów, Marek Kochańczyk, Bartosz Michał Zieliński, Tomasz Danel

Affiliations: Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Jagiellonian University, University of Warsaw, Warsaw Poland, Krakow Poland

Title: Enhancing Chemical Explainability Through Counterfactual Masking

Abstract:
Molecular property prediction is a crucial task that guides the design of new compounds, including drugs and materials. While explainable artificial intelligence methods aim to scrutinize model predictions by identifying influential molecular substructures, many existing approaches rely on masking strategies that remove either atoms or atomlevel features to assess importance via fidelity metrics. These methods, however, often fail to adhere to the underlying molecular distribution and thus yield unintuitive explanations. In this work, we propose counterfactual masking, a novel framework that replaces masked substructures with chemically reasonable fragments sampled from generative models trained to complete molecular graphs. Rather than evaluating masked predictions against implausible zeroed-out baselines, we assess them relative to counterfactual molecules drawn from the data distribution. Our method offers two key benefits: (1) molecular realism that underpins robust and distribution-consistent explanations, and (2) meaningful counterfactuals that directly indicate how structural modifications may affect predicted properties. We demonstrate that counterfactual masking is well-suited for benchmarking model explainers and yields more actionable insights across multiple datasets and property prediction tasks. Our approach bridges the gap between explainability and molecular design, offering a principled and generative path toward explainable machine learning in chemistry.

PaperID: 618, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.13106

Authors:Jakub Grudzien Kuba, Pieter Abbeel, Sergey Levine

Affiliations: University of California

Title: Cliqueformer: Model-Based Optimization with Structured Transformers

Abstract:
Large neural networks excel at prediction tasks, but their application to design problems, such as protein engineering or materials discovery, requires solving offline modelbased optimization (MBO) problems. While predictive models may not directly translate to effective design, recent MBO algorithms incorporate reinforcement learning and generative modeling approaches. Meanwhile, theoretical work suggests that exploiting the target function’s structure can enhance MBO performance. We present Cliqueformer, a transformer- based architecture that learns the black-box function’s structure through functional graphical models (FGM), addressing distribution shift without relying on explicit conservative approaches. Across various domains, including chemical and genetic design tasks, Cliqueformer demonstrates superior performance compared to existing methods.

PaperID: 619, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10446

Authors:Jonghun Lee, YongKyung Oh, Sungil Kim, Dong-Young Lim

Affiliations: Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, University of California, Los Angeles

Title: Continuum Dropout for Neural Differential Equations

Abstract:
Neural Differential Equations (NDEs) excel at modeling continuoustime dynamics, effectively handling challenges such as irregular observations, missing values, and noise. Despite their advantages, NDEs face a fundamental challenge in adopting dropout, a cornerstone of deep learning regularization, making them susceptible to overfitting. To address this research gap, we introduce Continuum Dropout, a universally applicable regularization technique for NDEs built upon the theory of alternating renewal processes. Continuum Dropout formulates the on-off mechanism of dropout as a stochastic process that alternates between active (evolution) and inactive (paused) states in continuous time. This provides a principled approach to prevent overfitting and enhance the generalization capabilities of NDEs. Moreover, Continuum Dropout offers a structured framework to quantify predictive uncertainty via Monte Carlo sampling at test time. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that Continuum Dropout outperforms existing regularization methods for NDEs, achieving superior performance on various time series and image classification tasks. It also yields better-calibrated and more trustworthy probability estimates, highlighting its effectiveness for uncertainty-aware modeling.

PaperID: 620, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05823

Authors:Tangzheng Lian, Guanyu Hu, Dimitrios Kollias, Xinyu Yang, Oya Celiktutan

Affiliations: King's College London, Queen Mary University of London, Xi'an Jiaotong University

Title: Fair Domain Generalization: An Information-Theoretic View

Abstract:
Domain generalization (DG) and algorithmic fairness are two key challenges in machine learning. However, most DG methods focus solely on minimizing expected risk in the unseen target domain, without considering algorithmic fairness. Conversely, fairness methods typically do not account for domain shifts, so the fairness achieved during training may not generalize to unseen test domains. In this work, we bridge these gaps by studying the problem of Fair Domain Generalization (FairDG), which aims to minimize both expected risk and fairness violations in unseen target domains. We derive novel mutual informationbased upper bounds for expected risk and fairness violations in multi-class classification tasks with multi-group sensitive attributes. These bounds provide key insights for algorithm design from an information-theoretic perspective. Guided by these insights, we propose a practical method that solves the FairDG problem through Pareto optimization. Experiments on real-world vision and language datasets show that our method achieves superior utility–fairness trade-offs compared to existing approaches.

PaperID: 621, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09166

Authors:Shira Lifshitz, Ofir Lindenbaum, Gal Mishne, Ron Meir, Hadas Benisty

Affiliations: Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Bar Ilan University, University of California San Diego

Title: Unsupervised Feature Selection Through Group Discovery

Abstract:
Unsupervised feature selection (FS) is essential for highdimensional learning tasks where labels are not available. It helps reduce noise, improve generalization, and enhance interpretability. However, most existing unsupervised FS methods evaluate features in isolation, even though informative signals often emerge from groups of related features. For example, adjacent pixels, functionally connected brain regions, or correlated financial indicators tend to act together, making independent evaluation suboptimal. Although some methods attempt to capture group structure, they typically rely on predefined partitions or label supervision, limiting their applicability. We propose GroupFS, an end-to-end, fully differentiable framework that jointly discovers latent feature groups and selects the most informative groups among them, without relying on fixed a priori groups or label supervision. GroupFS enforces Laplacian smoothness on both feature and sample graphs and applies a group sparsity regularizer to learn a compact, structured representation. Across nine benchmarks spanning images, tabular data, and biological datasets, GroupFS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised FS in clustering and selects groups of features that align with meaningful patterns.

PaperID: 622, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13838

Authors:Kangdao Liu, Huajun Xi, Chi Man Vong, Hongxin Wei

Affiliations: University of Macau, Southern University of Science and Technology

Title: Online Conformal Selection with Accept-to-Reject Changes

Abstract:
Selecting a subset of promising candidates from a large pool is crucial across various scientific and realworld applications. Conformal selection offers a distribution-free and model-agnostic framework for candidate selection with uncertainty quantification. While effective in offline settings, its application to online scenarios, where data arrives sequentially, poses challenges. Notably, conformal selection permits the deselection of previously selected candidates, which is incompatible with applications requiring irreversible selection decisions. This limitation is particularly evident in resource-intensive sequential processes, such as drug discovery, where advancing a compound to subsequent stages renders reversal impractical. To address this issue, we extend conformal selection to an online Accept-to-Reject Changes (ARC) procedure: non-selected data points can be reconsidered for selection later, and once a candidate is selected, the decision is irreversible. Specifically, we propose a novel conformal selection method, Online Conformal Selection with Accept-to-Reject Changes (dubbed OCS-ARC), which incorporates online Benjamini–Hochberg procedure into the candidate selection process. We provide theoretical guarantees that OCS-ARC controls the false discovery rate (FDR) at or below the nominal level at any timestep under both i.i.d. and exchangeable data assumptions. Additionally, we theoretically show that our approach naturally extends to multivariate response settings. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that OCS-ARC significantly improves selection power over the baseline while maintaining valid FDR control across all examined timesteps.

PaperID: 623, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07858

Authors:Ziheng Liu, Jiayi Zhang, Haoyu Wang, Bokai Xu, Chen Zhang, Yiyang Zhu, Enyu Shi

Affiliations: Beijing Jiaotong University, University of Hong Kong, Nanyang Technological University

Title: Scaling Law for Large Wireless Models

Abstract:
Emerging from recent advances in foundation models, Large Wireless Models (LWMs) represent a new paradigm of generalpurpose intelligence for wireless communications that transcends task-specific engineering. The success of foundation models is critically underpinned by scaling laws, which provide a predictable roadmap for how performance scales with resources. However, established scaling laws from language and vision, charting performance as a power-law of model and dataset sizes, are ill-suited for the wireless domain, as their core formulations cannot model the structured nature of the physical channel. To address this, we propose a novel wireless scaling law that extends the classical formulation by modeling two wireless-native factors: channel heterogeneity and discretization granularity. These two factors reshape scaling behavior via nested linear and power-law relationships, recasting the scaling law's parameters (notably the scaling exponent and irreducible loss) from universal constants into dynamic variables dictated by the physical environment. Our physics-aware formulation reveals two key insights: first, that compute-optimal scaling is not dictated by a fixed model-data ratio but is instead a dynamic function of heterogeneity and granularity, and second, that this dependency is particularly sensitive to granularity, allowing significant performance to be unlocked from existing data simply by refining its resolution. Crucially, this establishes a reliable roadmap for designing powerful yet resource-efficient LWMs, translating theoretical insights into actionable engineering principles. Extensive experiments validate our wireless scaling law, showing a 32.31% prediction accuracy improvement over classical laws in diverse wireless scenarios where they fail.

PaperID: 624, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07249

Authors:Soumen Pachal, Mizhaan Prajit Maniyar, Prashanth L. A.

Affiliations: Tata Consultancy Services Limited, Indian Institute of Technology

Title: Policy Newton Methods for Distortion Riskmetrics

Abstract:
We consider the problem of risksensitive control in a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. In particular, we aim to find a risk-optimal policy by maximizing the distortion riskmetric (DRM) of the discounted reward in a finite-horizon Markov decision process (MDP). DRMs are a rich class of risk measures that include several well-known risk measures as special cases. We derive a policy Hessian theorem for the DRM objective using the likelihood ratio method. Using this result, we propose a natural DRM Hessian estimator from sample trajectories of the underlying MDP. Next, we present a cubic-regularized policy Newton algorithm for solving this problem in an on-policy RL setting using estimates of the DRM gradient and Hessian. Our proposed algorithm is shown to converge to an ϵ-second-order stationary point (ϵ-SOSP) of the DRM objective, and this guarantee ensures the escaping of saddle points. The sample complexity of our algorithms to find an ϵ-SOSP is O(ϵ−3.5). Our experiments validate the theoretical findings. To the best of our knowledge, our is the first work to present convergence to an ϵ-SOSP of a risk-sensitive objective, while existing works in the literature have either shown convergence to a first-order stationary point of a risk-sensitive objective, or a SOSP of a risk-neutral one.

PaperID: 625, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02364

Authors:Moritz Piening, Robert Beinert

Affiliations: Technische Universität Berlin

Title: A Novel Sliced Fused Gromov-Wasserstein Distance

Abstract:
The Gromov–Wasserstein (GW) distance and its fused extension (FGW) are powerful tools for comparing heterogeneous data. Their computation is, however, challenging since both distances are based on nonconvex, quadratic optimal transport (OT) problems. Leveraging 1D OT, a sliced version of GW has been proposed to lower the computational burden. Unfortunately, this sliced version is restricted to Euclidean geometry and loses invariance to isometries, strongly limiting its application in practice. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel slicing technique for GW as well as for FGW that is based on an appropriate lower bound, hierarchical OT, and suitable quadrature rules for the underlying 1D OT problems. Our novel sliced FGW significantly reduces the numerical effort while remaining invariant to isometric transformations and allowing the comparison of arbitrary geometries. We show that our new distance actually defines a pseudo-metric for structured spaces that bounds FGW from below and study its interpolation properties between sliced Wasserstein and GW. Since we avoid the underlying quadratic program, our sliced distance is numerically more robust and reliable than the original GW and FGW distance; especially in the context of shape retrieval and graph isomorphism testing.

PaperID: 626, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07170

Authors:Marcin Podhajski, Jan Dubiński, Franziska Boenisch, Adam Dziedzic, Agnieszka Pręgowska, Tomasz Paweł Michalak

Affiliations: Institute of Fundamental Technological Research, Warsaw University of Technology NASK National Research Institute, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Polish Academy of Sciences, University of Warsaw IDEAS Research Institute

Title: On Stealing Graph Neural Network Models

Abstract:
Current graph neural network (GNN) modelstealing methods rely heavily on queries to the victim model, assuming no hard query limits. However, in reality, the number of allowed queries can be severely limited. In this paper, we demonstrate how an adversary can extract a GNN with very limited interactions with the model. Our approach first enables the adversary to obtain the model backbone without making direct queries to the victim model and then to strategically utilize a fixed query limit to extract the most informative data. The experiments on eight real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the attack, even under a very restricted query limit and under defense against model extraction in place. Our findings underscore the need for robust defenses against GNN model extraction threats.

PaperID: 627, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11767

Authors:Amisha Priyadarshini, Sergio Gago-Masague

Affiliations: University of California

Title: Learning Fair Representations with Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

Abstract:
Despite recent advances in fairnessaware machine learning, predictive models often exhibit discriminatory behavior towards marginalized groups. Such unfairness might arise from biased training data, model design, or representational disparities across groups, posing significant challenges in high-stakes decision-making domains such as college admissions. While existing fair learning models aim to mitigate bias, achieving an optimal trade-off between fairness and accuracy remains a challenge. Moreover, the reliance on black-box models hinders interpretability, limiting their applicability in socially sensitive domains. To circumvent these issues, we propose integrating Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) within a fair adversarial learning framework. Leveraging the adversarial robustness and interpretability of KANs, our approach facilitates stable adversarial learning. We derive theoretical insights into the spline-based KAN architecture that ensure stability during adversarial optimization. Additionally, an adaptive fairness penalty update mechanism is proposed to strike a balance between fairness and accuracy. We back these findings with empirical evidence on two real-world admissions datasets, demonstrating the proposed framework's efficiency in achieving fairness across sensitive attributes while preserving predictive performance.

PaperID: 628, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08340

Authors:Andrey Savchenko, Oleg Kachan

Affiliations: Sber AI Lab HSE University

Title: HN-MVTS: HyperNetwork-based Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Abstract:
Accurate forecasting of multivariate time series data remains a formidable challenge, particularly due to the growing complexity of temporal dependencies in realworld scenarios. While neural network-based models have achieved notable success in this domain, complex channel-dependent models often suffer from performance degradation compared to channel-independent models that do not consider the relationship between components but provide high robustness due to small capacity. In this work, we propose HN-MVTS, a novel architecture that integrates the hypernetwork-based generative prior with an arbitrary neural network forecasting model. The input of this hypernetwork is a learnable embedding matrix of time series components. To restrict the number of new parameters, the hypernetwork learns to generate the weights of the last layer of the target forecasting networks, serving as a data-adaptive regularizer that improves generalization and long-range predictive accuracy. The hypernetwork is only used during training, so it does not increase the inference time compared to the base forecasting model. Extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that application of HN-MVTS to the state-of-the-art models (DLinear, PatchTST, TSMixer, etc.) typically improves their performance. Our findings suggest that hypernetwork-driven parameterization offers a promising direction for enhancing existing forecasting techniques in complex scenarios.

PaperID: 629, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.22645

Authors:Lianze Shan, Jitao Zhao, Dongxiao He, Yongqi Huang, Zhiyong Feng, Weixiong Zhang

Affiliations: Tianjin University, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: MUG: Meta-path-aware Universal Heterogeneous Graph Pre-Training

Abstract:
Universal graph pretraining has emerged as a key paradigm in graph representation learning, offering a promising way to train encoders to learn transferable representations from unlabeled graphs and to effectively generalize across a wide range of downstream tasks. However, recent explorations in universal graph pre-training primarily focus on homogeneous graphs and it remains unexplored for heterogeneous graphs, which exhibit greater structural and semantic complexity. This heterogeneity makes it highly challenging to train a universal encoder for diverse heterogeneous graphs: (i) the diverse types with dataset-specific semantics hinder the construction of a unified representation space; (ii) the number and semantics of meta-paths vary across datasets, making encoding and aggregation patterns learned from one dataset difficult to apply to others. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Meta-path-aware Universal heterogeneous Graph pre-training (MUG) approach. Specifically, for challenge (i), MUG introduces a input unification module that integrates information from multiple node and relation types within each heterogeneous graph into a unified representation. This representation is then projected into a shared space by a dimension-aware encoder, enabling alignment across graphs with diverse schemas. Furthermore, for challenge (ii), MUG trains a shared encoder to capture consistent structural patterns across diverse meta-path views rather than relying on dataset-specific aggregation strategies, while a global objective encourages discriminability and reduces dataset-specific biases. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of MUG on some real datasets.

PaperID: 630, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05537

Authors:Hrithik Suresh, Sahil Sidheekh, Vishnu Shreeram M P, Sriraam Natarajan, Narayanan Chatapuram Krishnan

Affiliations: Mehta Family School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Department of Data Science, Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad, Erik Jonsson School of Engineering & Computer Science, The University of Texas at Dallas

Title: Tractable Sharpness-Aware Learning of Probabilistic Circuits

Abstract:
Probabilistic Circuits (PCs) are a class of generative models that allow exact and tractable inference for a wide range of queries. While recent developments have enabled the learning of deep and expressive PCs, this increased capacity can often lead to overfitting, especially when data is limited. We analyze PC overfitting from a loglikelihood-landscape perspective and show that it is often caused by convergence to sharp optima that generalize poorly. Inspired by sharpness aware minimization in neural networks, we propose a Hessian-based regularizer for training PCs. As a key contribution, we show that the trace of the Hessian of the log-likelihood--a sharpness proxy that is typically intractable in deep neural networks--can be computed efficiently for PCs. Minimizing this Hessian trace induces a gradient-norm-based regularizer that yields simple closed-form parameter updates for EM, and integrates seamlessly with gradient based learning methods. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method consistently guides PCs toward flatter minima, improving generalization performance.

PaperID: 631, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00706

Authors:Haozhe Tian, Pietro Ferraro, Robert Noel Shorten, Mahdi Jalili, Homayoun Hamedmoghadam

Affiliations: Imperial College London, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

Title: Learning Network Dismantling Without Handcrafted Inputs

Abstract:
The application of messagepassing Graph Neural Networks has been a breakthrough for important network science problems. However, the competitive performance often relies on using handcrafted structural features as inputs, which increases computational cost and introduces bias into the otherwise purely data-driven network representations. Here, we eliminate the need for handcrafted features by introducing an attention mechanism and utilizing message-iteration profiles, in addition to an effective algorithmic approach to generate a structurally diverse training set of small synthetic networks. Thereby, we build an expressive message-passing framework and use it to efficiently solve the NP-hard problem of Network Dismantling, virtually equivalent to vital node identification, with significant real-world applications. Trained solely on diversified synthetic networks, our proposed model—MIND: Message Iteration Network Dismantler—generalizes to large, unseen real networks with millions of nodes, outperforming state-of-the-art network dismantling methods. Increased efficiency and generalizability of the proposed model can be leveraged beyond dismantling in a range of complex network problems.

PaperID: 632, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04444

Authors:Askar Tsyganov, Evgeny Frolov, Sergey Samsonov, Maxim Rakhuba

Affiliations: HSE University, Personalization Technologies

Title: Matrix-Free Two-to-Infinity and One-to-Two Norms Estimation

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose new randomized algorithms for estimating the twoto-infinity and one-to-two norms in a matrix-free setting, using only matrix-vector multiplications. Our methods are based on appropriate modifications of Hutchinson's diagonal estimator and its Hutch++ version. We provide oracle complexity bounds for both modifications. We further illustrate the practical utility of our algorithms for Jacobian-based regularization in deep neural network training on image classification tasks. We also demonstrate that our methodology can be applied to mitigate the effect of adversarial attacks in the domain of recommender systems.

PaperID: 633, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13766

Authors:Kaizheng Wang, Fabio Cuzzolin, David Moens, Hans Hallez

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, KU Leuven, School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics, Oxford Brookes University, Belgium Department of Mechanical Engineering

Title: Credal Ensemble Distillation for Uncertainty Quantification

Abstract:
Deep ensembles (DE) have emerged as a powerful approach for quantifying predictive uncertainty and distinguishing its aleatoric and epistemic components, thereby enhancing model robustness and reliability. However, their high computational and memory costs during inference pose significant challenges for wide practical deployment. To overcome this issue, we propose credal ensemble distillation (CED), a novel framework that compresses a DE into a single model, CREDIT, for classification tasks. Instead of a single softmax probability distribution, CREDIT predicts classwise probability intervals that define a credal set, a convex set of probability distributions, for uncertainty quantification. Empirical results on out-of-distribution detection benchmarks demonstrate that CED achieves superior or comparable uncertainty estimation compared to several existing baselines, while substantially reducing inference overhead compared to DE.

PaperID: 634, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.16133

Authors:Zhuo Xu, Lu Bai, Lixin Cui, Ming Li, Hangyuan Du, Ziyu Lyu, Yue Wang, Edwin R. Hancock

Affiliations: Beijing Normal University, Central University of Finance and Economics, Zhejiang Normal University, Shanxi University, Sun Yat-Sen University, University of York

Title: SSHPool: The Separated Subgraph-based Hierarchical Pooling

Abstract:
In this paper, we develop a novel local graph pooling method, namely the Separated Subgraphbased Hierarchical Pooling (SSHPool), for graph classification. We commence by assigning the nodes of a sample graph into different clusters, resulting in a family of separated subgraphs. We individually employ the local graph convolution units as the local structure to further compress each subgraph into a coarsened node, transforming the original graph into a coarsened graph. Since these subgraphs are separated by different clusters and the structural information cannot be propagated between them, the local convolution operation can significantly avoid the over-smoothing problem caused by message passing through edges in most existing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). By hierarchically performing the proposed procedures on the resulting coarsened graph, the proposed SSHPool can effectively extract the hierarchical global features of the original graph structure, encapsulating rich intrinsic structural characteristics. Furthermore, we develop an end-to-end GNN framework associated with the SSHPool module for graph classification. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed model on real-world datasets.

PaperID: 635, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.19032

Authors:Han Yu, Hao Zou, Jiashuo Liu, Renzhe Xu, Yue He, Xingxuan Zhang, Peng Cui

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Renmin University of China

Title: Error Slice Discovery via Manifold Compactness

Abstract:
Despite the great performance of deep learning models in many areas, they still make mistakes and underperform on certain subsets of data, i.e. error slices. Given a trained model, it is important to identify its semantically coherent error slices that are easy to interpret, which is referred to as the error slice discovery problem. However, there is no proper metric of slice coherence without relying on extra information like predefined slice labels. Current evaluation of slice coherence requires access to predefined slices formulated by metadata like attributes or subclasses. Its validity heavily relies on the quality and abundance of metadata, where some possible patterns could be ignored. Besides, current algorithms cannot directly incorporate the constraint of coherence into their optimization objective due to absence of an explicit coherence metric, which could potentially hinder their effectiveness. In this paper, we propose manifold compactness, a coherence metric without reliance on extra information by incorporating the data geometry property into its design, and experiments on typical datasets empirically validate the rationality of the metric. Then we develop Manifold Compactness based error Slice Discovery (MCSD), a novel algorithm that directly treats risk and coherence as the optimization objective, and is flexible to be applied to models of various tasks. Extensive experiments on the benchmark and case studies on other typical datasets demonstrate the superiority of MCSD.

PaperID: 636, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07904

Authors:Zhao Yu, Xiuping Wu, Liangjun Ke

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, University of Southampton

Title: Test-driven Reinforcement Learning in Continuous Control

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) has been recognized as a powerful tool for robot control tasks. RL typically employs reward functions to define task objectives and guide agent learning. However, since the reward function serves the dual purpose of defining the optimal goal and guiding learning, it is challenging to design the reward function manually, which often results in a suboptimal task representation. To tackle the reward design challenge in RL, inspired by the satisficing theory, we propose a Testdriven Reinforcement Learning (TdRL) framework. In the TdRL framework, multiple test functions are used to represent the task objective rather than a single reward function. Test functions can be categorized as pass-fail tests and indicative tests, each dedicated to defining the optimal objective and guiding the learning process, respectively, thereby making defining tasks easier. Building upon such a task definition, we first prove that if a trajectory return function assigns higher returns to trajectories closer to the optimal trajectory set, maximum entropy policy optimization based on this return function will yield a policy that is closer to the optimal policy set. Then, we introduce a lexicographic heuristic approach to compare the relative distance relationship between trajectories and the optimal trajectory set for learning the trajectory return function. Furthermore, we develop an algorithm implementation of TdRL. Experimental results on the DeepMind Control Suite benchmark demonstrate that TdRL matches or outperforms handcrafted reward methods in policy training, with greater design simplicity and inherent support for multi-objective optimization. We argue that TdRL offers a novel perspective for representing task objectives, which could be helpful in addressing the reward design challenges in RL applications.

PaperID: 637, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09211

Authors:Lijun Zhang, Suyuan Liu, Siwei Wang, Shengju Yu, Xueling Zhu, Miaomiao Li, Xinwang Liu

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology, Academy of Military Sciences, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, College of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Changsha University

Title: Parameter-Free Clustering via Self-Supervised Consensus Maximization

Abstract:
Clustering is a fundamental task in unsupervised learning, but most existing methods heavily rely on hyperparameters such as the number of clusters or other sensitive settings, limiting their applicability in realworld scenarios. To address this long-standing challenge, we propose a novel and fully parameter-free clustering framework via Self-supervised Consensus Maximization, named SCMax. Our framework performs hierarchical agglomerative clustering and cluster evaluation in a single, integrated process. At each step of agglomeration, it creates a new, structure-aware data representation through a self-supervised learning task guided by the current clustering structure. We then introduce a nearest neighbor consensus score, which measures the agreement between the nearest neighbor-based merge decisions suggested by the original representation and the self-supervised one. The moment at which consensus maximization occurs can serve as a criterion for determining the optimal number of clusters. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms existing clustering approaches designed for scenarios with an unknown number of clusters.

PaperID: 638, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17653

Authors:Liyun Zhang, Zheng Lian, Hong Liu, Takanori Takebe, Shozo Nishii, Yuta Nakashima

Affiliations: Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, National Key Laboratory of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems, Tongji University, School of Informatics, Xiamen University, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati OH, Advanced Medical Research Center, Yokohama City University, Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research, The University of Osaka

Title: QuMAB: Query-based Multi-annotator Behavior Pattern Learning

Abstract:
Multiannotator learning traditionally aggregates diverse annotations to approximate a single “ground truth”, treating disagreements as noise. However, this paradigm faces fundamental challenges: subjective tasks often lack absolute ground truth, and sparse annotation coverage makes aggregation statistically unreliable. We introduce a paradigm shift from sample-wise aggregation to annotator-wise behavior modeling. By treating annotator disagreements as valuable information rather than noise, modeling annotator-specific behavior patterns can reconstruct unlabeled data to reduce annotation cost, enhance aggregation reliability, and explain annotator decision behavior. To this end, we propose QuMAB (Query-based Multi-Annotator Behavior Pattern Learning), which uses lightweight queries to model individual annotators while capturing inter-annotator correlations as implicit regularization, preventing overfitting to sparse individual data while maintaining individualization and improving generalization, with a visualization of annotator focus regions offering an explainable analysis of behavior understanding. We contribute two large-scale datasets with dense per-annotator labels: STREET (4,300 labels/annotator) and AMER (average 3,118 labels/annotator), the first multimodal multi-annotator dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our QuMAB in modeling individual annotators’ behavior patterns, their utility for consensus prediction, and applicability under sparse annotations.

PaperID: 639, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16524

Authors:Xuan Zhang, Zhijian Zhou, Weidi Xu, Yanting Miao, Chao Qu, Yuan Qi

Affiliations: Fudan University Shanghai Innovation Institute, University of Waterloo, Fudan University Shanghai Academy of Artificial Intelligence for Science

Title: Constraints-Guided Diffusion Reasoner for Neuro-Symbolic Learning

Abstract:
Enabling neural networks to learn complex logical constraints and fulfill symbolic reasoning is a critical challenge. Bridging this gap often requires guiding the neural network’s output distribution to move closer to the symbolic constraints. While diffusion models have shown remarkable generative capability across various domains, we employ the powerful architecture to perform neurosymbolic learning and solve logical puzzles. Our diffusion-based pipeline adopts a two-stage training strategy: the first stage focuses on cultivating basic reasoning abilities, while the second emphasizes systematic learning of logical constraints. To impose hard constraints on neural outputs in the second stage, we formulate the diffusion reasoner as a Markov decision process and innovatively fine-tune it with an improved proximal policy optimization algorithm. We utilize a rule-based reward signal derived from the logical consistency of neural outputs and adopt a flexible strategy to optimize the diffusion reasoner's policy. We evaluate our methodology on some classical symbolic reasoning benchmarks, including Sudoku, Maze, pathfinding and preference learning. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves outstanding accuracy and logical consistency among neural networks.

PaperID: 640, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10706

Authors:Zitong Zhang, Hao Sun

Affiliations: Renmin University of China

Title: Differentiable Sparse Identification of Lagrangian Dynamics

Abstract:
Datadriven discovery of governing equations from data remains a fundamental challenge in nonlinear dynamics. Although sparse regression techniques have advanced system identification, they struggle with rational functions and noise sensitivity in complex mechanical systems. The Lagrangian formalism offers a promising alternative, as it typically avoids rational expressions and provides a more concise representation of system dynamics. However, existing Lagrangian identification methods are significantly affected by measurement noise and limited data availability. This paper presents a novel differentiable sparse identification framework that addresses these limitations through three key contributions: (1) the first integration of cubic B-Spline approximation into Lagrangian system identification, enabling accurate representation of complex nonlinearities, (2) a robust equation discovery mechanism that effectively utilizes measurements while incorporating known physical constraints, (3) a recursive derivative computation scheme based on B-spline basis functions, effectively constraining higher-order derivatives and reducing noise sensitivity on second-order dynamical systems. The proposed method demonstrates superior performance and enables more accurate and reliable extraction of physical laws from noisy data, particularly in complex mechanical systems compared to baseline methods.

PaperID: 641, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08120

Authors:Tianyue Zhou, Jung-Hoon Cho, Cathy Wu

Affiliations: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Title: Structure Detection for Contextual Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Contextual Reinforcement Learning (CRL) tackles the problem of solving a set of related Contextual Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) that vary across different context variables. Traditional approachesindependent training and multi-task learning---struggle with either excessive computational costs or negative transfer. A recently proposed multi-policy approach, Model-Based Transfer Learning (MBTL), has demonstrated effectiveness by strategically selecting a few tasks to train and zero-shot transfer. However, CMDPs encompass a wide range of problems, exhibiting structural properties that vary from problem to problem. As such, different task selection strategies are suitable for different CMDPs. In this work, we introduce Structure Detection MBTL (SD-MBTL), a generic framework that dynamically identifies the underlying generalization structure of CMDP and selects an appropriate MBTL algorithm. For instance, we observe Mountain structure in which generalization performance degrades from the training performance of the target task as the context difference increases. We thus propose M/GP-MBTL, which detects the structure and adaptively switches between a Gaussian Process-based approach and a clustering-based approach. Extensive experiments on synthetic data and CRL benchmarks—covering continuous control, traffic control, and agricultural management—show that M/GP-MBTL surpasses the strongest prior method by 12.49% on the aggregated metric. These results highlight the promise of online structure detection for guiding source task selection in complex CRL environments.

PaperID: 642, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17890

Authors:Qipeng Zhu, Yanzhe Chen, Huasong Zhong, Jie Chen, Yan Li, Zhixin Zhang, Junping Zhang, Zhenheng Yang

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University, National University of Singapore, ByteDance Inc., College of Computer and Data Science, Fuzhou University, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing

Title: UniAPO: Unified Multimodal Automated Prompt Optimization

Abstract:
Prompting is fundamental to unlocking the full potential of large language models. To automate and enhance this process, automatic prompt optimization (APO) has been developed, demonstrating effectiveness primarily in textonly input scenarios. However, extending existing APO methods to multimodal tasks—such as video-language generation—introduces two core challenges: (i) visual token inflation, where long visual-token sequences restrict context capacity and result in insufficient feedback signals; (ii) a lack of process-level supervision, as existing methods focus on outcome-level supervision and overlook intermediate supervision, limiting prompt optimization. We present UniAPO: Unified Multimodal Automated Prompt Optimization, the first framework tailored for multimodal APO. UniAPO adopts an EM-inspired optimization process that decouples feedback modeling and prompt refinement, making the optimization more stable and goal-driven. To further address the aforementioned challenges, we introduce a short-long term memory mechanism: historical feedback mitigates context limitations, while historical prompts provide directional guidance for effective prompt optimization. UniAPO achieves consistent gains across text, image, and video benchmarks, establishing a unified framework for efficient and transferable prompt optimization.

PaperID: 643, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00904

Authors:Xingyu Zhu, Beier Zhu, Yunfan Li, Junfeng Fang, Shuo Wang, Kesen Zhao, Hanwang Zhang

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University, Sichuan University, National University of Singapore, University of Science and Technology of China

Title: Hierarchical Semantic Alignment for Image Clustering

Abstract:
Image clustering is a classic problem in computer vision, which categorizes images into different groups. Recent studies utilize nouns as external semantic knowledge to improve clustering performance. However, these methods often overlook the inherent ambiguity of nouns, which can distort semantic representations and degrade clustering quality. To address this issue, we propose a hierarChical semAntic alignmEnt method for image clustering, dubbed CAE, which improves clustering performance in a trainingfree manner. In our approach, we incorporate two complementary types of textual semantics: caption-level descriptions, which convey fine-grained attributes of image content, and noun-level concepts, which represent high-level object categories. We first select relevant nouns from WordNet and descriptions from caption datasets to construct a semantic space aligned with image features. Then, we design a residual attention mechanism to further enhance the discriminability of this space. Finally, we combine the enhanced semantic and image features to perform clustering. Extensive experiments across 8 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, notably surpassing the state-of-the-art training-free approach with a 4.2% improvement in accuracy and a 2.9% improvement in adjusted rand index (ARI) on the ImageNet-1K dataset.

PaperID: 644, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.19072

Authors:Tomoki Arita, Keisuke Okumura

Affiliations: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) Keio University, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) University of Cambridge

Title: Local Guidance for Configuration-Based Multi-Agent Pathfinding

Abstract:
Guidance is an emerging concept that improves the empirical performance of realtime, sub-optimal multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) methods. It offers additional information to MAPF algorithms to mitigate congestion on a global scale by considering the collective behavior of all agents across the entire workspace. This global perspective helps reduce agents' waiting times, thereby improving overall coordination efficiency. In contrast, this study explores an alternative approach: providing local guidance in the vicinity of each agent. While such localized methods involve recomputation as agents move and may appear computationally demanding, we empirically demonstrate that supplying informative spatiotemporal cues to the planner can significantly improve solution quality without exceeding a moderate time budget. When applied to LaCAM, a leading configuration-based solver, this form of guidance establishes a new performance frontier for MAPF.

PaperID: 645, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12359

Authors:Yifan Zhu, Sammie Katt, Samuel Kaski

Affiliations: Aalto University, Finland Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, United Kingdom

Title: More than Irrational: Modeling Belief-Biased Agents

Abstract:
Despite the explosive growth of AI and the technologies built upon it, predicting and inferring the suboptimal behavior of users or human collaborators remains a critical challenge. In many cases, such behaviors are not a result of irrationality, but rather a rational decision made given inherent cognitive bounds and biased beliefs about the world. In this paper, we formally introduce a class of computational-rational (CR) user models for cognitively-bounded agents acting optimally under biased beliefs. The key novelty lies in explicitly modeling how a bounded memory process leads to a dynamically inconsistent and biased belief state and, consequently, sub-optimal sequential decision-making. We address the challenge of identifying the latent user-specific bound and inferring biased belief states from passive observations on the fly. We argue that for our formalized CR model family with an explicit and parameterized cognitive process, this challenge is tractable. To support our claim, we propose an efficient online inference method based on nested particle filtering that simultaneously tracks the user's latent belief state and estimates the unknown cognitive bound from a stream of observed actions. We validate our approach in a representative navigation task using memory decay as an example of a cognitive bound. With simulations, we show that (1) our CR model generates intuitively plausible behaviors corresponding to different levels of memory capacity, and (2) our inference method accurately and efficiently recovers the ground-truth cognitive bounds from limited observations (less than 100 steps). We further demonstrate how this approach provides a principled foundation for developing adaptive AI assistants, enabling adaptive assistance that accounts for the user's memory limitations.

PaperID: 646, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09844

Authors:Frédéric Berdoz, Peer Rheinboldt, Roger Wattenhofer

Affiliations: ETH Zurich

Title: Steering Pretrained Drafters During Speculative Decoding

Abstract:
Speculative decoding accelerates language model inference by separating generation into fast drafting and parallel verification. Its main limitation is drafter–verifier misalignment, which limits token acceptance and reduces overall effectiveness. While small drafting heads trained from scratch compensate with speed, they struggle when verification dominates latency or when inputs are out of distribution. In contrast, pretrained drafters, though slower, achieve higher acceptance rates thanks to stronger standalone generation capabilities, making them competitive when drafting latency is negligible relative to verification or communication overhead. In this work, we aim to improve the acceptance rates of pretrained drafters by introducing a lightweight dynamic alignment mechanism: a steering vector computed from the verifier’s hidden states and injected into the pretrained drafter. Compared to existing offline alignment methods such as distillation, our approach boosts the number of accepted tokens by up to 35% under standard sampling and 22% under greedy sampling, all while incurring negligible computational overhead. Importantly, our approach can be retrofitted to existing architectures and pretrained models, enabling rapid adoption.

PaperID: 647, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11661

Authors:Ziyi Cao, Qingyi Si, Jingbin Zhang, Bingquan Liu

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Huawei Technologies Ltd.

Title: Sparse Attention Across Multiple-Context KV Cache

Abstract:
Large language models face significant cost challenges in longsequence inference. To address this, reusing historical Key-Value (KV) Cache for improved inference efficiency has become a mainstream approach. Recent advances further enhance throughput by sparse attention mechanisms to select the most relevant KV Cache, thereby reducing sequence length. However, such techniques are limited to single-context scenarios, where historical KV Cache is computed sequentially with causal-attention dependencies. In retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) scenarios, where retrieved documents as context are unknown beforehand, each document’s KV Cache is computed and stored independently (termed multiple-context KV Cache), lacking cross-attention between contexts. This renders existing methods ineffective. Although prior work partially recomputes multiple-context KV Cache to mitigate accuracy loss from missing cross-attention, it requires retaining all KV Cache throughout, failing to reduce memory overhead. This paper presents SamKV, the first exploration of attention sparsification for multiple-context KV Cache. Specifically, SamKV takes into account the complementary information of other contexts when sparsifying one context, and then locally recomputes the sparsified information. Experiments demonstrate that our method compresses sequence length to 15% without accuracy degradation compared with full-recomputation baselines, significantly boosting throughput in multi-context RAG scenarios.

PaperID: 648, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14758

Authors:Daixuan Cheng, Shaohan Huang, Xuekai Zhu, Bo Dai, Xin Zhao, Zhenliang Zhang, Furu Wei

Affiliations: Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Microsoft Research, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China Beijing Key Laboratory of Research on Large Models and Intelligent Governance

Title: Reasoning with Exploration: An Entropy Perspective

Abstract:
Balancing exploration and exploitation is a central goal in reinforcement learning (RL). Despite recent advances in enhancing language model (LM) reasoning, most methods lean toward exploitation, and increasingly encounter performance plateaus. In this work, we revisit entropy a signal of exploration in RL -- and examine its relationship to exploratory reasoning in LMs. Through empirical analysis, we uncover positive correlations between high-entropy regions and three types of exploratory reasoning actions: (1) pivotal tokens that determine or connect logical steps, (2) reflective actions such as self-verification and correction, and (3) rare behaviors under-explored by the base LMs. Motivated by this, we introduce a minimal modification to standard RL with only one line of code: augmenting the advantage function with an entropy-based term. Unlike traditional maximum-entropy methods which encourage exploration by promoting uncertainty, we encourage exploration by promoting deeper and longer reasoning chains. Notably, our method achieves significant gains on the Pass@K metric -- an upper-bound estimator of LM reasoning capabilities -- even when evaluated with extremely large K values, pushing the boundaries of LM reasoning.

PaperID: 649, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12867

Authors:Chen Jia

Affiliations: SI-TECH Information Technology

Title: Bootstrapping LLMs via Preference-Based Policy Optimization

Abstract:
Bootstrapping large language models (LLMs) via preferencebased policy optimization enables aligning model behavior with human preferences while reducing reliance on extensive manual annotations. We propose a novel preference-based policy optimization (PbPO) framework that formulates learning as a min-max game between the LLM policy and a reward model (RM). The RM is constrained within a confidence set derived from collected preferences to ensure reliable exploitation, while simultaneously promoting robust exploration. Our iterative online algorithm actively collects new preference data from the evolving policy, enabling continual self-improvement of both the policy and the RM. We provide theoretical guarantees, establishing high-probability regret bounds for both sequence-level and token-level RMs. Extensive experiments across five benchmark datasets demonstrate that PbPO consistently outperforms state-of-the-art preference optimization methods.

PaperID: 650, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04652

Authors:Shuo Liu, Zeyu Liang, Xueguang Lyu, Christopher Amato

Affiliations: Northeastern University

Title: LLM Collaboration with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
A large amount of work has been done in MultiAgent Systems (MAS) for modeling and solving problems with multiple interacting agents. However, most LLMs are pretrained independently and not specifically optimized for coordination. Existing LLM fine-tuning frameworks rely on individual rewards, which require complex reward designs for each agent to encourage collaboration. To address these challenges, we model LLM collaboration as a cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) problem. We develop a multi-agent, multi-turn algorithm, Multi-Agent Group Relative Policy Optimization (MAGRPO), to solve it, building on current RL approaches for LLMs as well as MARL techniques. Our experiments on LLM writing and coding collaboration demonstrate that fine-tuning MAS with MAGRPO enables agents to generate high-quality responses efficiently through effective cooperation. Our approach opens the door to using MARL methods for LLM collaboration and highlights the associated challenges.

PaperID: 651, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17582

Authors:Jie Ou, Shuaihong Jiang, Yingjun Du, Cees G. M. Snoek

Affiliations: Yuanzhigu Technology Co., University of Amsterdam

Title: GateRA: Token-aware Modulation for Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning

Abstract:
Parameterefficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, such as LoRA, DoRA, and HiRA, enable lightweight adaptation of large pre-trained models via low-rank updates. However, existing PEFT approaches apply static, input-agnostic updates to all tokens, disregarding the varying importance and difficulty of different inputs. This uniform treatment can lead to overfitting on trivial content or under-adaptation on more informative regions, especially in autoregressive settings with distinct prefill and decoding dynamics. In this paper, we propose GateRA, a unified framework that introduces token-aware modulation to dynamically adjust the strength of PEFT updates. By incorporating adaptive gating into standard PEFT branches, GateRA enables selective, token-level adaptation—preserving pre-trained knowledge for well-modeled inputs while focusing capacity on challenging cases. Empirical visualizations reveal phase-sensitive behaviors, where GateRA automatically suppresses updates for redundant prefill tokens while emphasizing adaptation during decoding. To promote confident and efficient modulation, we further introduce an entropy-based regularization that encourages near-binary gating decisions. This regularization prevents diffuse update patterns and leads to interpretable, sparse adaptation without hard thresholding. Finally, we present a theoretical analysis showing that GateRA induces a soft gradient-masking effect over the PEFT path, enabling continuous and differentiable control over adaptation. Experiments on multiple commonsense reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that GateRA consistently outperforms or matches prior PEFT methods.

PaperID: 652, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07922

Authors:Weixuan Ou, Yanzhao Zheng, Shuoshuo Sun, Wei Zhang, Baohua Dong, Hangcheng Zhu, Ruohui Huang, Gang Yu, Pengwei Yan, Yifan Qiao

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Alibaba Group

Title: SERL: Self-Examining Reinforcement Learning on Open-Domain

Abstract:
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to improve the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, applying RL to opendomain tasks faces two key challenges: (1) the inherent subjectivity of these tasks prevents the verifiable rewards as required by Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR); (2) Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) relies on external reward mechanisms. To overcome these limitations, we propose Self-Examining Reinforcement Learning (SERL), a novel self-improving framework where the LLM serves as both Actor and Judge. SERL introduces two synergistic reward mechanisms without any external signals. On the one hand, to improve the Actor's capability, we derive rewards from Copeland-style pairwise comparison judgments across a group of generated responses. On the other hand, a self-consistency reward that encourages coherent judgments is proposed to improve the Judge's reliability. This refinement strengthens the Judge, consequently generating a more robust training signal for the Actor. Experiments show that our method outperforms existing self-improvement training methods. SERL improves the LC win rate of Qwen3-8B on AlpacaEval 2.0 from 52.37% to 59.90%. To the best of our knowledge, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance among self-improving approaches. Furthermore, it achieves a performance comparable to significantly larger models like Qwen3-32B, demonstrating superior effectiveness and robustness on open-domain tasks.

PaperID: 653, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16106

Authors:Archish S, Ankit Garg, Kirankumar Shiragur, Neeraj Kayal

Affiliations: Microsoft Research

Title: Incorporating Token Importance in Multi-Vector Retrieval

Abstract:
ColBERT introduced a late interaction mechanism that independently encodes queries and documents using BERT, and computes similarity via finegrained interactions over token-level vector representations. This design enables expressive matching while allowing efficient computation of scores, as the multi-vector document representations could be pre-computed offline. ColBERT models distance using a Chamfer-style function: for each query token, it selects the closest document token and sums these distances across all query tokens. In our work, we explore enhancements to the Chamfer distance function by computing a weighted sum over query token contributions, where weights reflect the token importance. Empirically, we show that this simple extension, requiring only token-weight training while keeping the multi-vector representations fixed, further enhances the expressiveness of late interaction multi-vector mechanism. In particular, on the BEIR benchmark, our method achieves an average improvement of 1.28% in Recall@10 in the zero-shot setting using IDF-based weights, and 3.66% through few-shot fine-tuning.

PaperID: 654, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08017

Authors:Shihao Yang, Zhicong Lu, Yong Yang, Bo Lv, Yang Shen, Nayu Liu

Affiliations: Tiangong University, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: HyCoRA: Hyper-Contrastive Role-Adaptive Learning for Role-Playing

Abstract:
Multicharacter role-playing aims to equip models with the capability to simulate diverse roles. Existing methods either use one shared parameterized module across all roles or assign a separate parameterized module to each role. However, the role-shared module may ignore distinct traits of each role, weakening personality learning, while the role-specific module may overlook shared traits across multiple roles, hindering commonality modeling. In this paper, we propose a novel HyCoRA: Hyper-Contrastive Role-Adaptive learning framework, which efficiently improves multi-character role-playing agents' ability by balancing the learning of distinct and shared traits. Specifically, we propose a Hyper-Half Low-Rank Adaptation structure, where one half is a role-specific module generated by a lightweight hyper-network, and the other half is a trainable role-shared module. The role-specific module is devised to represent distinct persona signatures, while the role-shared module serves to capture common traits. Moreover, to better reflect distinct personalities across different roles, we design a hyper-contrastive learning mechanism to help the hyper-network distinguish their unique characteristics. Extensive experimental results on both English and Chinese available benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our framework. Further GPT-4 evaluations and visual analyses also verify the capability of HyCoRA to capture role characteristics.

PaperID: 655, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.21597

Authors:David Yunis, Siyu Huo, Chulaka Gunasekara, Danish Contractor

Affiliations: International Business Machines

Title: Reducing the Scope of Language Models

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are deployed in a wide variety of userfacing applications. Typically, these deployments have some specific purpose, like answering questions grounded on documentation or acting as coding assistants, but they require general language understanding. In such deployments, LLMs should respond only to queries that align with the intended purpose and reject all other requests, such as generating poetry or answering questions about physics, a task we refer to as 'scoping'. We conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation of various methods, ranging from prompting, fine-tuning to preference learning and the recently proposed general alignment technique known as Circuit Breakers (CB). Across three families of language models and a broad variety of tasks, we show that it is possible to scope language models. We examine scoping for multiple topics, and fine-grained topics. We ablate diversity of irrelevant queries, layer different techniques, conduct adversarial evaluations and more. Among other results, we find that when diverse examples of irrelevant queries are available, simple supervised fine-tuning produces the best results, but when such diversity is low, Circuit Breakers perform quite well. One can often get the benefits of both methods by layering them in succession. We intend our study to serve as a practitioner's guide to scoping LLMs.

PaperID: 656, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05977

Authors:Pavel Naumov, Alexandra Pavlova

Affiliations: University of Southampton, TU Wien

Title: An Epistemic Perspective on Agent Awareness

Abstract:
The paper proposes to treat object awareness as a form of knowledge, breaking the tradition in the existing literature on awareness. It distinguishes the de re and de dicto forms of such knowledge. The work introduces two modalities capturing these forms and formally specifies their meaning using a version of 2Dsemantics. The main technical result is a sound and complete logical system describing the interplay between the two proposed modalities and the standard "knowledge of the fact" modality.

PaperID: 657, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13101

Authors:Shaowu Wu, Liting Zeng, Wei Lu

Affiliations: Sun Yat-sen University

Title: ARIW-Framework: Adaptive Robust Iterative Watermarking Framework

Abstract:
With the rapid rise of large models, copyright protection for generated image content has become a critical security challenge. Although deep learning watermarking techniques offer an effective solution for digital image copyright protection, they still face limitations in terms of visual quality, robustness and generalization. To address these issues, this paper proposes an adaptive robust iterative watermarking framework (ARIWFramework) that achieves high-quality watermarked images while maintaining exceptional robustness and generalization performance. Specifically, we introduce an iterative approach to optimize the encoder for generating robust residuals. The encoder incorporates noise layers and a decoder to compute robustness weights for residuals under various noise attacks. By employing a parallel optimization strategy, the framework enhances robustness against multiple types of noise attacks. Furthermore, we leverage image gradients to determine the embedding strength at each pixel location, significantly improving the visual quality of the watermarked images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior visual quality while exhibiting remarkable robustness and generalization against noise attacks.

PaperID: 658, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07141

Authors:Xi Ye, Yiwen Liu, Lina Wang, Run Wang, Geying Yang, Yufei Hou, Jiayi Yu

Affiliations: Wuhan University, Tianjin University

Title: MacPrompt: Maraconic-Guided Jailbreak Against Text-to-Image Models

Abstract:
Textto-image (T2I) models have raised increasing safety concerns due to their capacity to generate NSFW and other banned objects. To mitigate these risks, safety filters and concept removal techniques have been introduced to block inappropriate prompts or erase sensitive concepts from the models. However, all the existing defense methods are not well prepared to handle diverse adversarial prompts. In this work, we introduce MacPrompt, a novel black-box and cross-lingual attack that reveals previously overlooked vulnerabilities in T2I safety mechanisms. Unlike existing attacks that rely on synonym substitution or prompt obfuscation, MacPrompt constructs macaronic adversarial prompts by performing cross-lingual character-level recombination of harmful terms, enabling fine-grained control over both semantics and appearance. By leveraging this design, MacPrompt crafts prompts with high semantic similarity to the original harmful inputs (up to 0.96) while bypassing major safety filters (up to 100%). More critically, it achieves attack success rates as high as 92% for sex-related content and 90% for violence, effectively breaking even state-of-the-art concept removal defenses. These results underscore the pressing need to reassess the robustness of existing T2I safety mechanisms against linguistically diverse and fine-grained adversarial strategies. Warning: This paper includes sensitive examples (e.g., adult, violent, or illegal content). Unsafe images are masked but may still be disturbing.

PaperID: 659, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11390

Authors:Bernd Finkbeiner, Niklas Metzger, Satya Prakash Nayak, Anne-Kathrin Schmuck

Affiliations: CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems

Title: Universal Safety Controllers with Learned Prophecies

Abstract:
Universal Safety Controllers (USCs) are a promising logical control framework that guarantees the satisfaction of a given temporal safety specification when applied to any realizable plant model. Unlike traditional methods, which synthesize one logical controller over a given detailed plant model, USC synthesis constructs a generic controller whose outputs are conditioned by plant behavior, called prophecies. Thereby, USCs offer strong generalization and scalability benefits over classical logical controllers. However, the exact computation and verification of prophecies remain computationally challenging. In this paper, we introduce an approximation algorithm for USC synthesis that addresses these limitations via learning. Instead of computing exact prophecies, which reason about sets of trees via automata, we only compute underand over-approximations from (small) example plants and infer computation tree logic (CTL) formulas as representations of prophecies. The resulting USC generalizes to unseen plants via a verification step and offers improved efficiency and explainability through small and concise CTL prophecies, which remain human-readable and interpretable. Experimental results demonstrate that our learned prophecies remain generalizable, yet are significantly more compact and interpretable than their exact tree automata representations.

PaperID: 660, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07743

Authors:Markus Fritzsche, Elliot Gestrin, Jendrik Seipp

Affiliations: Linköping University

Title: Symmetry-Aware Transformer Training for Automated Planning

Abstract:
While transformers excel in many settings, their application in the field of automated planning is limited. Prior work like PlanGPT, a stateof-the-art decoder-only transformer, struggles with extrapolation from easy to hard planning problems. This in turn stems from problem symmetries: planning tasks can be represented with arbitrary variable names that carry no meaning beyond being identifiers. This causes a combinatorial explosion of equivalent representations that pure transformers cannot efficiently learn from. We propose a novel contrastive learning objective to make transformers symmetry-aware and thereby compensate for their lack of inductive bias. Combining this with architectural improvements, we show that transformers can be efficiently trained for either plan-generation or heuristic-prediction. Our results across multiple planning domains demonstrate that our symmetry-aware training effectively and efficiently addresses the limitations of PlanGPT.

PaperID: 661, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19355

Authors:Simon Ståhlberg, Hector Geffner

Affiliations: RWTH Aachen University

Title: First-Order Representation Languages for Goal-Conditioned RL

Abstract:
Firstorder relational languages have been used in MDP planning and reinforcement learning (RL) for two main purposes: specifying MDPs in compact form, and representing and learning policies that are general and not tied to specific instances or state spaces. In this work, we instead consider the use of first-order languages in goal-conditioned RL and generalized planning. The question is how to learn goal-conditioned and general policies when the training instances are large and the goal cannot be reached by random exploration alone. The technique of Hindsight Experience Replay (HER) provides an answer to this question: it relabels unsuccessful trajectories as successful ones by replacing the original goal with one that was actually achieved. If the target policy must generalize across states and goals, trajectories that do not reach the original goal states can enable more data- and time-efficient learning. In this work, we show that further performance gains can be achieved when states and goals are represented by sets of atoms. We consider three versions: goals as full states, goals as subsets of the original goals, and goals as lifted versions of these subgoals. The result is that the latter two successfully learn general policies on large planning instances with sparse rewards by automatically creating a curriculum of easier goals of increasing complexity. The experiments illustrate the computational gains of these versions, their limitations, and opportunities for addressing them.

PaperID: 662, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12718

Authors:Pukun Zhao, Longxiang Wang, Miaowei Wang, Chen Chen, Fanqing Zhou, Haojian Huang

Affiliations: Guangdong University of Finance & Economics, Chongqing University, University of Edinburgh, Guangdong university of Finance & Economics, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) The University of Hong Kong

Title: EvoEmpirBench: Dynamic Spatial Reasoning with Agent-ExpVer

Abstract:
Most existing spatial reasoning benchmarks focus on static or globally observable environments, failing to capture the challenges of longhorizon reasoning and memory utilization under partial observability and dynamic changes. We introduce two dynamic spatial benchmarks—locally observable maze navigation and match-2 elimination—that systematically evaluate models' abilities in spatial understanding and adaptive planning when local perception, environment feedback, and global objectives are tightly coupled. Each action triggers structural changes in the environment, requiring continuous update of cognition and strategy. We further propose a subjective experience-based memory mechanism for cross-task experience transfer and validation. Experiments show that our benchmarks reveal key limitations of mainstream models in dynamic spatial reasoning and long-term memory, providing a comprehensive platform for future methodological advances.

PaperID: 663, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20203

Authors:Zhiyang Chen, Hailong Yao, Xia Yin

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, University of Science and Technology Beijing Key Laboratory of Advanced Materials and Devices for Post-Moore Chips, Ministry of Education of China

Title: Minimum-Cost Network Flow with Dual Predictions

Abstract:
Recent work has shown that machinelearned predictions can provably improve the performance of classic algorithms. In this work, we propose the first minimum-cost network flow algorithm augmented with a dual prediction. Our method is based on a classic minimum-cost flow algorithm, namely ε-relaxation. We provide time complexity bounds in terms of the infinity norm prediction error, which is both consistent and robust. We also prove sample complexity bounds for PAC-learning the prediction. We empirically validate our theoretical results on two applications of minimum-cost flow, i.e., traffic networks and chip escape routing, in which we learn a fixed prediction, and a feature-based neural network model to infer the prediction, respectively. Experimental results illustrate 12.74× and 1.64× average speedup on two applications.

PaperID: 664, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.20931

Authors:Karolina Drabik, Tomáš Masařík

Affiliations: University of Warsaw

Title: Finding Diverse Solutions Parameterized by Cliquewidth

Abstract:
Finding a few solutions for a given problem that are diverse, as opposed to finding a single best solution to solve the problem, has recently become a notable topic in theoretical computer science. Recently, Baste, Fellows, Jaffke, Masařík, Oliveira, Philip, and Rosamond showed that under a standard structural parameterization by treewidth, one can find a set of diverse solutions for many problems with only a very small additional cost [Artificial Intelligence 2022]. In this paper, we investigate a much stronger graph parameter, the cliquewidth, which can additionally describe some dense graph classes. Broadly speaking, it describes graphs that can be recursively constructed by a few operations defined on graphs whose vertices are divided into a bounded number of groups, while each such group behaves uniformly with respect to any operation. We show that for any vertex problem, if we are given a dynamic program solving that problem on cliquewidth decomposition, we can modify it to produce a few solutions that are as diverse as possible with as little overhead as in the abovementioned treewidth paper. As a consequence, we prove that a diverse version of any MSO1 expressible problem can be solved in linear FPT time parameterized by the cliquewidth, the number of sought solutions, and the number of quantifiers in the formula, which was a natural missing piece in the complexity landscape of structural graph parameters and logic for the diverse problems. We prove our results, allowing for a more general natural collection of diversity functions compared to only two mostly studied diversity functions previously. That might be of independent interest as a larger pool of different diversity functions can highlight various aspects of different solutions to a problem.

PaperID: 665, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15882

Authors:Neta Glazer, Yael Segal-Feldman, Hilit Segev, Aviv Shamsian, Asaf Buchnick, Gill Hetz, Ethan Fetaya, Joseph Keshet, Aviv Navon

Affiliations: Bar Ilan University, aiOla Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Title: Beyond Transcription: Mechanistic Interpretability in ASR

Abstract:
Interpretability methods have recently gained significant attention, particularly in the context of large language models, enabling insights into linguistic representations, error detection, and model behaviors such as hallucinations and repetitions. However, these techniques remain underexplored in automatic speech recognition (ASR), despite their potential to advance both the performance and interpretability of ASR systems. In this work, we adapt and systematically apply established interpretability methods such as logit lens, linear probing, and activation patching, to examine how acoustic and semantic information evolves across layers in ASR systems. Our experiments reveal previously unknown internal dynamics, including specific encoderdecoder interactions responsible for repetition hallucinations and semantic biases encoded deep within acoustic representations. These insights demonstrate the benefits of extending and applying interpretability techniques to speech recognition, opening promising directions for future research on improving model transparency and robustness.

PaperID: 666, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10995

Authors:Henrik Marklund, Alex Infanger, Benjamin Van Roy

Affiliations: Stanford University, ML Alignment & Theory Scholars

Title: Misalignment from Treating Means as Ends

Abstract:
Reward functions, learned or manually specified, are rarely perfect. Instead of accurately expressing human goals, these reward functions are often distorted by human beliefs about how best to achieve those goals. Specifically, these reward functions often express a combination of the human's terminal goals — those which are ends in themselves — and the human's instrumental goals — those which are means to an end. We formulate a simple example in which even slight conflation of instrumental and terminal goals results in severe misalignment: optimizing the misspecified reward function r̂ results in poor performance when measured by the true reward function r. This example distills the essential properties of environments that make reinforcement learning highly sensitive to conflation of instrumental and terminal goals. We discuss how this issue can arise with a common approach to reward learning and how it can manifest in real environments.

PaperID: 667, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03997

Authors:Prudhviraj Naidu, Zixian Wang, Leon Bergen, Ramamohan Paturi

Affiliations: University of California, San Diego

Title: Quiet Feature Learning in Algorithmic Tasks

Abstract:
We train Transformerbased language models on ten foundational algorithmic tasks and observe pronounced phase transitions in their loss curves that deviate from established power-law scaling trends. Over large ranges of compute, the validation loss barely improves, then abruptly decreases. Probing the models’ internal representations reveals that quiet features are learned prior to any decrease in task loss. These quiet features represent intermediate algorithmic computations that do not by themselves improve the output loss. Ablation experiments demonstrate that individual quiet features are causally necessary for task performance. Our results demonstrate that substantial representational progress can remain hidden beneath an apparently flat loss curve, challenging the prevailing use of cross‑entropy as a proxy for learning and motivating richer diagnostics for monitoring model training.

PaperID: 668, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.01091

Authors:Penghui Wen, Mengwei He, Patrick Filippi, Na Zhao, Feng Zhang, Thomas Francis Bishop, Zhiyong Wang, Kun Hu

Affiliations: The University of Sydney, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Fudan University, Edith Cowan University

Title: DuoCast: Duo-Probabilistic Diffusion for Precipitation Nowcasting

Abstract:
Accurate shortterm precipitation forecasting is critical for weather-sensitive decision-making in agriculture, transportation, and disaster response. Existing deep learning approaches often struggle to balance global structural consistency with local detail preservation, especially under complex meteorological conditions. We propose DuoCast, a dual-diffusion framework that decomposes precipitation forecasting into low- and high-frequency components modeled in orthogonal latent subspaces. We theoretically prove that this frequency decomposition reduces prediction error compared to conventional single branch U-Net diffusion models. In DuoCast, the low-frequency model captures large-scale trends via convolutional encoders conditioned on weather front dynamics, while the high-frequency model refines fine-scale variability using a self-attention-based architecture. Experiments on four benchmark radar datasets show that DuoCast consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving superior accuracy in both spatial detail and temporal evolution.

PaperID: 669, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.01196

Authors:Shanfan Zhang, Yongyi Lin, Xiaoting Shen, Zhan Bu, Yuan Rao

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing Audit University

Title: Game Theory Based Community-Aware Opinion Dynamics

Abstract:
Understanding opinion evolution in complex social networks is crucial for modeling social influence and predicting collective behavior. Yet, most models overlook how community structures shape opinion updates, often assuming homogeneous influence. This abstraction neglects individuals’ stronger responsiveness to intracommunity peers—an empirically observed driver of localized consensus and inter-group polarization. We propose GCAOFP, a co-evolutionary framework that jointly models opinion dynamics and community formation as an integrated process. In GCAOFP, agents strategically alternate between two coupled modules: (1) a Community Dynamics Module, where agents play a non-cooperative game to optimize community memberships based on opinion alignment and structural cohesion; and (2) an Opinion Adjustment Module, where agents revise opinions via a bounded-confidence mechanism modulated by community-induced influence weights. This dual-stage process captures the feedback loop between structure and opinion. We prove that GCAOFP converges to stable equilibria, ensuring intra-community consensus and inter-community diversity—dynamics that standard models fail to replicate. Experiments on real-world networks show that GCAOFP better reproduces localized opinion clusters, while offering strong scalability and interpretability, illuminating the strategic foundations of polarization.

PaperID: 670, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10281

Authors:Jing He, Han Zhang, Yuanhui Xiao, Wei Guo, Shaowen Yao, Renyang Liu

Affiliations: School of Software and AI, Yunnan University, Institute of Data Science, National University of Singapore

Title: FACTGUARD: Event-Centric and Commonsense-Guided Fake News Detection

Abstract:
Fake news detection methods based on writing style have achieved remarkable progress. However, as adversaries increasingly imitate the style of authentic news, the effectiveness of such approaches is gradually diminishing. Recent research has explored incorporating large language models (LLMs) to enhance fake news detection. Yet, despite their transformative potential, LLMs remain an untapped goldmine for fake news detection, with their realworld adoption hampered by shallow functionality exploration, ambiguous usability, and prohibitive inference costs. In this paper, we propose a novel fake news detection framework, dubbed FACTGUARD, that leverages LLMs to extract event-centric content, thereby reducing the impact of writing style on detection performance. Furthermore, our approach introduces a dynamic usability mechanism that identifies contradictions and ambiguous cases in factual reasoning, adaptively incorporating LLM advice to improve decision reliability. To ensure efficiency and practical deployment, we employ knowledge distillation to derive FACTGUARD-D, enabling the framework to operate effectively in cold-start and resource-constrained scenarios. Comprehensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing methods in both robustness and accuracy, effectively addressing the challenges of style sensitivity and LLM usability in fake news detection.

PaperID: 671, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17506

Authors:Namkyeong Lee, Edward De Brouwer, Ehsan Hajiramezanali, Tommaso Biancalani, Chanyoung Park, Gabriele Scalia

Affiliations: Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology

Title: RAG-Enhanced Collaborative LLM Agents for Drug Discovery

Abstract:
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential to accelerate drug discovery. However, the specialized nature of biochemical data often necessitates costly domainspecific fine-tuning, posing critical challenges. First, it hinders the application of more flexible general-purpose LLMs in cutting-edge drug discovery tasks. More importantly, it limits the rapid integration of the vast amounts of scientific data continuously generated through experiments and research. Compounding these challenges is the fact that real-world scientific questions are typically complex and open-ended, requiring reasoning beyond pattern matching or static knowledge retrieval. To address these challenges, we propose CLADD, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-empowered agentic system tailored to drug discovery tasks. Through the collaboration of multiple LLM agents, CLADD dynamically retrieves information from biomedical knowledge bases, contextualizes query molecules, and integrates relevant evidence to generate responses - all without the need for domain-specific fine-tuning. Crucially, we tackle key obstacles in applying RAG workflows to biochemical data, including data heterogeneity, ambiguity, and multi-source integration. We demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of this framework across a variety of drug discovery tasks, showing that it outperforms general-purpose and domain-specific LLMs as well as traditional deep learning approaches.

PaperID: 672, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01062

Authors:Chenyi Wang, Ruoyu Song, Raymond Muller, Jean-Philippe Monteuuis, Z. Berkay Celik, Jonathan Petit, Ryan Gerdes, Ming Li

Affiliations: University of Arizona, Purdue University, Virginia Tech

Title: CP-FREEZER: Latency Attacks Against Vehicular Cooperative Perception

Abstract:
Cooperative perception (CP) enhances situational awareness of connected and autonomous vehicles by exchanging and combining messages from multiple agents. While prior work has explored adversarial integrity attacks that degrade detection accuracy, little is known about CP's robustness against attacks on timeliness (or availability), a safetycritical requirement for autonomous driving. In this paper, we present CP-FREEZER, the first latency attack that maximizes the computation delay of CP algorithms by injecting adversarial perturbation via V2V messages. Our attack resolves several unique challenges, including the non-differentiability of point cloud preprocessing, asynchronous knowledge of the victim’s input due to transmission delays, and uses a novel loss function that effectively maximizes the execution time of the CP pipeline. Extensive experiments show that CP-FREEZER increases end-to-end CP latency by over 90×, pushing per-frame processing time beyond 3 seconds with a 100% success rate on our real-world vehicle testbed. Our findings reveal a critical threat to the availability of CP systems, highlighting the urgent need for robust defenses.

PaperID: 673, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07710

Authors:Jingya Wang, Xin Deng, Wenjie Wei, Dehao Zhang, Shuai Wang, Qian Sun, Jieyuan Zhang, Hanwen Liu, Ning Xie, Malu Zhang

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Training-Free ANN-to-SNN Conversion for High-Performance Spiking Transformers

Abstract:
Leveraging the eventdriven paradigm, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a promising approach for constructing energy-efficient Transformer architectures. Compared to directly trained Spiking Transformers, ANN-to-SNN conversion methods bypass the high training costs. However, existing methods still suffer from notable limitations, failing to effectively handle nonlinear operations in Transformer architectures and requiring additional fine-tuning processes for pre-trained ANNs. To address these issues, we propose a high-performance and training-free ANN-to-SNN conversion framework tailored for Transformer architectures. Specifically, we introduce a Multi-basis Exponential Decay (MBE) neuron, which employs an exponential decay strategy and multi-basis encoding method to efficiently approximate various nonlinear operations. It removes the requirement for weight modifications in pre-trained ANNs. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks (CV, NLU, NLG) and mainstream Transformer architectures (ViT, RoBERTa, GPT-2) demonstrate that our method achieves near-lossless conversion accuracy with significantly lower latency. This provides a promising pathway for the efficient and scalable deployment of Spiking Transformers in real-world applications.

PaperID: 674, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00412

Authors:Hanqi Chen, Xu Zhang, Xiaoliu Guan, Lielin Jiang, Guanzhong Wang, Zeyu Chen, Yi Liu

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Baidu Inc., Wuhan University

Title: Sortblock: Similarity-Aware Feature Reuse for Diffusion Model

Abstract:
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have demonstrated remarkable generative capabilities, particularly benefiting from Transformer architectures that enhance visual and artistic fidelity. However, their inherently sequential denoising process results in high inference latency, limiting their deployment in realtime scenarios. Existing training-free acceleration approaches typically reuse intermediate features at fixed timesteps or layers, overlooking the evolving semantic focus across denoising stages and Transformer blocks.To address this, we propose Sortblock, a training-free inference acceleration framework that dynamically caches block-wise features based on their similarity across adjacent timesteps. By ranking the evolution of residuals, Sortblock adaptively determines a recomputation ratio, selectively skipping redundant computations while preserving generation quality. Furthermore, we incorporate a lightweight linear prediction mechanism to reduce accumulated errors in skipped blocks.Extensive experiments across various tasks and DiT architectures demonstrate that Sortblock achieves over 2 times inference speedup with minimal degradation in output quality, offering an effective and generalizable solution for accelerating diffusion-based generative models.

PaperID: 675, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12047

Authors:Huimin Cheng, Xiaowei Yu, Shushan Wu, Luyang Fang, Chao Cao, Jing Zhang, Tianming Liu, Dajiang Zhu, Wenxuan Zhong, Ping Ma

Affiliations: Boston University, Missouri University of Science and Technology, University of Georgia, University of Texas at Arlington

Title: DCMM-Transformer: Degree-Corrected Mixed-Membership Attention for Medical Imaging

Abstract:
Medical images exhibit latent anatomical groupings, such as organs, tissues, and pathological regions, that standard Vision Transformers (ViTs) fail to exploit. While recent work like SBMTransformer attempts to incorporate such structures through stochastic binary masking, they suffer from non-differentiability, training instability, and the inability to model complex community structure. We present DCMM-Transformer, a novel ViT architecture for medical image analysis that incorporates a Degree-Corrected Mixed-Membership (DCMM) model as an additive bias in self-attention. Unlike prior approaches that rely on multiplicative masking and binary sampling, our method introduces community structure and degree heterogeneity in a fully differentiable and interpretable manner. Comprehensive experiments across diverse medical imaging datasets, including brain, chest, breast, and ocular modalities, demonstrate the superior performance and generalizability of the proposed approach. Furthermore, the learned group structure and structured attention modulation substantially enhance interpretability by yielding attention maps that are anatomically meaningful and semantically coherent.

PaperID: 676, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07798

Authors:Runmin Cong, Anpeng Wang, Bin Wan, Cong Zhang, Xiaofei Zhou, Wei Zhang

Affiliations: School of Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University, China State Key Laboratory of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems, School of Automation, Hangzhou Dianzi University

Title: Divide-and-Conquer Decoupled Network for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Segmentation

Abstract:
Crossdomain few-shot segmentation (CD-FSS) aims to tackle the dual challenge of recognizing novel classes and adapting to unseen domains with limited annotations. However, encoder features often entangle domain-relevant and category-relevant information, limiting both generalization and rapid adaptation to new domains. To address this issue, we propose a Divide-and-Conquer Decoupled Network (DCDNet). In the training stage, to tackle feature entanglement that impedes cross-domain generalization and rapid adaptation, we propose the Adversarial-Contrastive Feature Decomposition (ACFD) module. It decouples backbone features into category-relevant private and domain-relevant shared representations via contrastive learning and adversarial learning. Then, to mitigate the potential degradation caused by the disentanglement, the Matrix-Guided Dynamic Fusion (MGDF) module adaptively integrates base, shared, and private features under spatial guidance, maintaining structural coherence. In addition, in the fine-tuning stage, to enhanced model generalization, the Cross-Adaptive Modulation (CAM) module is placed before the MGDF, where shared features guide private features via modulation ensuring effective integration of domain-relevant information. Extensive experiments on four challenging datasets show that DCDNet outperforms existing CD-FSS methods, setting a new state-of-the-art for cross-domain generalization and few-shot adaptation.

PaperID: 677, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.12773

Authors:Guodong Fan, Shengning Zhou, Genji Yuan, Huiyu Li, Jingchun Zhou, Jinjiang Li

Affiliations: Shandong Technology and Business University, Shandong University of Finance and Economics, Dalian Maritime University

Title: Empowering Semantic-Sensitive Underwater Image Enhancement with VLM

Abstract:
In recent years, learningbased underwater image enhancement (UIE) techniques have rapidly evolved. However, distribution shifts between high-quality enhanced outputs and natural images can hinder semantic cue extraction for downstream vision tasks, thereby limiting the adaptability of existing enhancement models. To address this challenge, this work proposes a new learning mechanism that leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to empower UIE models with semantic-sensitive capabilities. To be concrete, our strategy first generates textual descriptions of key objects from a degraded image via a VLM. Subsequently, a text-image alignment model remaps these relevant descriptions back onto the image to produce a spatial semantic guidance map. This map then steers the UIE network through a dual-guidance mechanism, which combines cross-attention and an explicit alignment loss. This forces the network to focus its restorative power on semantic-sensitive regions during image reconstruction, rather than pursuing a globally uniform improvement, thereby ensuring the faithful restoration of key object features. Experiments confirm that when our strategy is applied to different UIE baselines, significantly boosts their performance on perceptual quality metrics as well as enhances their performance on detection and segmentation tasks, validating its effectiveness and adaptability.

PaperID: 678, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.18281

Authors:Haopeng Fang, Di Qiu, Binjie Mao, He Tang

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: MotionCharacter: Fine-Grained Motion Controllable Human Video Generation

Abstract:
Recent advancements in personalized Textto-Video (T2V) generation have made significant strides in synthesizing character-specific content. However, these methods face a critical limitation: the inability to perform fine-grained control over motion intensity. This limitation stems from an inherent entanglement of action semantics and their corresponding magnitudes within coarse textual descriptions, hindering the generation of nuanced human videos and limiting their applicability in scenarios demanding high precision, such as animating virtual avatars or synthesizing subtle micro-expressions. Furthermore, existing approaches often struggle to preserve high identity fidelity when other attributes are modified. To address these challenges, we introduce MotionCharacter, a framework for high-fidelity human video generation with precise motion control. At its core, MotionCharacter explicitly decouples motion into two independently controllable components: action type and motion intensity. This is achieved through two key technical contributions: (1) a Motion Control Module that leverages textual phrases to specify the action type and a quantifiable metric derived from optical flow to modulate its intensity, guided by a region-aware loss that localizes motion to relevant subject areas; and (2) an ID Content Insertion Module coupled with an ID-Consistency loss to ensure robust identity preservation during dynamic motions. To facilitate training for such fine-grained control, we also curate Human-Motion, a new large-scale dataset with detailed annotations for both motion and facial features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MotionCharacter achieves substantial improvements over existing methods. Our framework excels in generating videos that are not only identity-consistent but also precisely adhere to specified motion types and intensities.

PaperID: 679, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07137

Authors:Shiqi Jiang, Tianyi Liang, Huayuan Ye, Changbo Wang, Chenhui Li

Affiliations: East China Normal University

Title: MPJudge: Towards Perceptual Assessment of Music-Induced Paintings

Abstract:
Musicinduced painting is a unique artistic practice, where visual artworks are created under the influence of music. Evaluating whether a painting faithfully reflects the music that inspired it poses a challenging perceptual assessment task. Existing methods primarily rely on emotion recognition models to assess the similarity between music and painting, but such models introduce considerable noise and overlook broader perceptual cues beyond emotion. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework for music-induced painting assessment that directly models perceptual coherence between music and visual art. We introduce MPD, the first large-scale dataset of music–painting pairs annotated by domain experts based on perceptual coherence. To better handle ambiguous cases, we further collect pairwise preference annotations. Building on this dataset, we present MPJudge, a model that integrates music features into a visual encoder via a modulation-based fusion mechanism. To effectively learn from ambiguous cases, we adopt Direct Preference Optimization for training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches. Qualitative results further show that our model more accurately identifies music-relevant regions in paintings.

PaperID: 680, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18736

Authors:Junyong Kang, Seohyun Lim, Kyungjune Baek, Hyunjung Shim

Affiliations: Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, Sejong University

Title: Rethinking Direct Preference Optimization in Diffusion Models

Abstract:
Aligning textto-image (T2I) diffusion models with human preferences has emerged as a critical research challenge. While Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has established a foundation for preference learning in large language models (LLMs), its extension to diffusion models remains limited in alignment performance. In this work, we propose an enhanced version of Diffusion-DPO by introducing a stable reference model update strategy. This strategy facilitates the exploration of better alignment solutions while maintaining training stability. Moreover, we design a timestep-aware optimization strategy that further boosts performance by addressing preference learning imbalance across timesteps. Through the synergistic combination of our exploration and timestep-aware optimization, our method significantly improves the alignment performance of Diffusion-DPO on human preference evaluation benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art results.

PaperID: 681, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18695

Authors:Changcai Li, Wenwei Lin, Zuoxun Hou, Gang Chen, Wei Zhang, Huihui Zhou, Weishi Zheng

Affiliations: Sun Yat-sen University, Beijing Institute of Space Mechanics and Electricity, Pengcheng Laboratory

Title: Exploring Surround-View Fisheye Camera 3D Object Detection

Abstract:
In this work, we explore the technical feasibility of implementing endto-end 3D object detection (3DOD) with surround-view fisheye camera system. Specifically, we first investigate the performance drop incurred when transferring classic pinhole-based 3D object detectors to fisheye imagery. To mitigate this, we then develop two methods that incorporate the unique geometry of fisheye images into mainstream detection frameworks: one based on the bird's-eye-view (BEV) paradigm, named FisheyeBEVDet, and the other on the query-based paradigm, named FisheyePETR. Both methods adopt spherical spatial representations to effectively capture fisheye geometry. In light of the lack of dedicated evaluation benchmarks, we release Fisheye3DOD, a new open dataset synthesized using CARLA and featuring both standard pinhole and fisheye camera arrays. Experiments on Fisheye3DOD demonstrate that our fisheye-compatible modeling improves accuracy by up to 6.2% compared to baseline methods.

PaperID: 682, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23150

Authors:Xinyue Liang, Zhiyuan Ma, Lingchen Sun, Yanjun Guo, Lei Zhang

Affiliations: Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: AlignCVC: Aligning Cross-View Consistency for Single-Image-to-3D Generation

Abstract:
Singleimage-to-3D models typically follow a sequential generation and reconstruction workflow. However, intermediate multi-view images synthesized by pre-trained generation models often lack cross-view consistency (CVC), significantly degrading 3D reconstruction performance. While recent methods attempt to refine CVC by feeding reconstruction results back into the multi-view generator, these approaches struggle with noisy and unstable reconstruction outputs that limit effective CVC improvement. We introduce AlignCVC, a novel framework that fundamentally re-frames single-image-to-3D generation through distribution alignment rather than relying on strict regression losses. Our key insight is to align both generated and reconstructed multi-view distributions toward the ground-truth multi-view distribution, establishing a principled foundation for improved CVC. Observing that generated images exhibit weak CVC while reconstructed images display strong CVC due to explicit rendering, we propose a soft-hard alignment strategy with distinct objectives for generation and reconstruction models. This approach not only enhances generation quality but also dramatically accelerates inference to as few as 4 steps. As a plug-and-play paradigm, our method, namely AlignCVC, seamlessly integrates various combinations of multiview generation models with 3D reconstruction models. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of AlignCVC for single-image-to-3D generation.

PaperID: 683, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.05081

Authors:Wei Liu, Shengqiong Wu, Bobo Li, Haoyu Zhao, Hao Fei, Mong-Li Lee, Wynne Hsu

Affiliations: School of Management Science and Engineering, Anhui University of Finance and Economics, National University of Singapore, Wuhan University

Title: Orthogonal Spatial-temporal Distributional Transfer for 4D Generation

Abstract:
In the AIGC era, generating highquality 4D content has garnered increasing research attention. Unfortunately, current 4D synthesis research is severely constrained by the lack of large-scale 4D datasets, preventing models from adequately learning the critical spatial-temporal features necessary for high-quality 4D generation, thus hindering progress in this domain. To combat this, we propose a novel framework that transfers rich spatial priors from existing 3D diffusion models and temporal priors from video diffusion models to enhance 4D synthesis. We develop a spatial-temporal-disentangled 4D (STD-4D) Diffusion model, which synthesizes 4D-aware videos through disentangled spatial and temporal latents. To facilitate the best feature transfer, we design a novel Orthogonal Spatial-temporal Distributional Transfer (Orster) mechanism, where the spatiotemporal feature distributions are carefully modeled and injected into the STD-4D Diffusion. Further, during the 4D construction, we devise a spatial-temporal-aware HexPlane (ST-HexPlane) to integrate the transferred spatiotemporal features for better 4D deformation and 4D Gaussian feature modeling. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches, achieving superior spatial-temporal consistency and higher-quality 4D synthesis.

PaperID: 684, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11409

Authors:Zhiming Liu, Nantheera Anantrasirichai

Affiliations: University of Bristol

Title: RMFAT: Recurrent Multi-scale Feature Atmospheric Turbulence Mitigator

Abstract:
Atmospheric turbulence (AT) severely degrades video quality by introducing distortions such as geometric warping, blur, and temporal flickering, posing significant challenges to both visual clarity and temporal consistency. Current stateof-the-art methods are based on transformer, 3D architectures and require multi-frame input, but their large computational cost and memory usage limit real-time deployment. In this work, we propose RMFAT, Recurrent Multi-scale Feature Atmospheric Turbulence Mitigator, designed for efficient and temporally consistent video restoration under AT conditions. RMFAT adopts a lightweight recurrent framework that restores each frame using only two inputs at a time, significantly reducing temporal window size and computational burden. It further integrates multi-scale feature encoding and decoding with temporal warping modules at both encoder and decoder stages to enhance spatial detail and temporal coherence. Extensive experiments conducted on synthetic and real-world atmospheric turbulence datasets demonstrate that RMFAT not only outperforms existing methods in terms of clarity restoration (with nearly a 9% improvement in SSIM) but also achieves significantly improved inference speed (achieving a more than fourfold reduction), making it particularly suitable for real-time atmospheric turbulence suppression tasks.

PaperID: 685, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11557

Authors:Zhiguo Lu, Jianwen Lou, Mingjun Ma, Hairong Jin, Youyi Zheng, Kun Zhou

Affiliations: School of Software Technology, Zhejiang University, College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University, State Key Lab of CAD&CG

Title: 3DTeethSAM: Taming SAM2 for 3D Teeth Segmentation

Abstract:
3D teeth segmentation, involving the localization of tooth instances and their semantic categorization in 3D dental models, is a critical yet challenging task in digital dentistry due to the complexity of realworld dentition. In this paper, we propose 3DTeethSAM, an adaptation of the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) for 3D teeth segmentation. SAM2 is a pretrained foundation model for image and video segmentation, demonstrating a strong backbone in various downstream scenarios. To adapt SAM2 for 3D teeth data, we render images of 3D teeth models from predefined views, apply SAM2 for 2D segmentation, and reconstruct 3D results using 2D-3D projections. Since SAM2's performance depends on input prompts and its initial outputs often have deficiencies, and given its class-agnostic nature, we introduce three light-weight learnable modules: (1) a prompt embedding generator to derive prompt embeddings from image embeddings for accurate mask decoding, (2) a mask refiner to enhance SAM2's initial segmentation results, and (3) a mask classifier to categorize the generated masks. Additionally, we incorporate Deformable Global Attention Plugins (DGAP) into SAM2's image encoder. The DGAP enhances both the segmentation accuracy and the speed of the training process. Our method has been validated on the 3DTeethSeg benchmark, achieving an IoU of 91.90% on high-resolution 3D teeth meshes, establishing a new state-of-the-art in the field.

PaperID: 686, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07981

Authors:Fangyuan Mao, Aiming Hao, Jintao Chen, Dongxia Liu, Xiaokun Feng, Jiashu Zhu, Meiqi Wu, Chubin Chen, Jiahong Wu, Xiangxiang Chu

Affiliations: Alibaba Group, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Omni-Effects: Unified and Spatially-Controllable Visual Effects Generation

Abstract:
Visual effects (VFX) are essential visual enhancements fundamental to modern cinematic production. Although video generation models offer costefficient solutions for VFX production, current methods are constrained by per-effect LoRA training, which limits generation to single effects. This fundamental limitation impedes applications that require spatially controllable composite effects, i.e., the concurrent generation of multiple effects at designated locations. However, integrating diverse effects into a unified framework faces major challenges: interference from effect variations and spatial uncontrollability during multi-VFX joint training. To tackle these challenges, we propose Omni-Effects, a first unified framework capable of generating prompt-guided effects and spatially controllable composite effects. The core of our framework comprises two key innovations: (1) LoRA-based Mixture of Experts (LoRA-MoE), which employs a group of expert LoRAs, integrating diverse effects within a unified model while effectively mitigating cross-task interference. (2) Spatial-Aware Prompt (SAP) incorporates spatial mask information into the text token, enabling precise spatial control. Furthermore, we introduce an Independent-Information Flow (IIF) module integrated within the SAP, isolating the control signals corresponding to individual effects to prevent any unwanted blending. To facilitate this research, we construct a comprehensive VFX dataset Omni-VFX via a novel data collection pipeline combining image editing and First-Last Frame-to-Video (FLF2V) synthesis, and introduce a dedicated VFX evaluation framework for validating model performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Omni-Effects achieves precise spatial control and diverse effect generation, enabling users to specify both the category and location of desired effects.

PaperID: 687, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13848

Authors:Jiayi Pan, Jiaming Xu, Yongkang Zhou, Guohao Dai

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University Infinigence-AI, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Shanghai Innovation Institute

Title: SpecDiff: Accelerating Diffusion Model Inference with Self-Speculation

Abstract:
Feature caching has recently emerged as a promising method for diffusion model acceleration. It effectively alleviates the inefficiency problem caused by high computational requirements by caching similar features in the inference process of the diffusion model. In this paper, we analyze existing feature caching methods from the perspective of information utilization, and point out that relying solely on historical information will lead to constrained accuracy and speed performance. And we propose a novel paradigm that introduces future information via selfspeculation based on the information similarity at the same time step across different iteration times. Based on this paradigm, we present SpecDiff, a training-free multi-level feature caching strategy including a cached feature selection algorithm and a multi-level feature classification algorithm. (1) Feature selection algorithm based on self-speculative information. SpecDiff determines a dynamic importance score for each token based on self-speculative information and historical information, and performs cached feature selection through the importance score. (2) Multi-level feature classification algorithm based on feature importance scores.SpecDiff classifies tokens by leveraging the differences in feature importance scores and introduces a multi-level feature calculation strategy. Extensive experiments show that SpecDiff achieves average 2.80×, 2.74×, and 3.17× speedup with negligible quality loss in Stable Diffusion 3, 3.5, and FLUX compared to RFlow on NVIDIA A800-80GB GPU. By merging speculative and historical information, SpecDiff overcomes the speedup-accuracy trade-off bottleneck, pushing the Pareto frontier of speedup and accuracy in the efficient diffusion model inference.

PaperID: 688, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23860

Authors:Qucheng Peng, Hongfei Xue, Pu Wang, Chen Chen

Affiliations: Center for Research in Computer Vision, University of Central Florida, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Title: Lifelong Domain Adaptive 3D Human Pose Estimation

Abstract:
3D Human Pose Estimation (3D HPE) is vital in various applications, from person reidentification and action recognition to virtual reality. However, the reliance on annotated 3D data collected in controlled environments poses challenges for generalization to diverse in-the-wild scenarios. Existing domain adaptation (DA) paradigms like general DA and source-free DA for 3D HPE overlook the issues of non-stationary target pose datasets. To address these challenges, we propose a novel task named lifelong domain adaptive 3D HPE. To our knowledge, we are the first to introduce the lifelong domain adaptation to the 3D HPE task. In this lifelong DA setting, the pose estimator is pretrained on the source domain and subsequently adapted to distinct target domains. Moreover, during adaptation to the current target domain, the pose estimator cannot access the source and all the previous target domains. The lifelong DA for 3D HPE involves overcoming challenges in adapting to current domain poses and preserving knowledge from previous domains, particularly combating catastrophic forgetting. We present an innovative Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework, which incorporates 3D pose generators, a 2D pose discriminator, and a 3D pose estimator. This framework effectively mitigates domain shifts and aligns original and augmented poses. Moreover, we construct a novel 3D pose generator paradigm, integrating pose-aware, temporal-aware, and domain-aware knowledge to enhance the current domain's adaptation and alleviate catastrophic forgetting on previous domains. Our method demonstrates superior performance through extensive experiments on diverse domain adaptive 3D HPE datasets.

PaperID: 689, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.19828

Authors:Chenfan Qu, Yiwu Zhong, Jian Liu, Xuekang Zhu, Bohan Yu, Lianwen Jin

Affiliations: South China University of Technology, Ant Group, Peking University

Title: TextShield-R1: Reinforced Reasoning for Tampered Text Detection

Abstract:
The growing prevalence of tampered images poses serious security threats, highlighting the urgent need for reliable detection methods. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate strong potential in analyzing tampered images and generating interpretations. However, they still struggle with identifying microlevel artifacts, exhibit low accuracy in localizing tampered text regions, and heavily rely on expensive annotations for forgery interpretation. To this end, we introduce TextShield-R1, the first reinforcement learning based MLLM solution for tampered text detection and reasoning. Specifically, our approach introduces Forensic Continual pre-training, an easy-to-hard curriculum that well prepares the MLLM for tampered text detection by harnessing the large-scale cheap data from natural image forensic and OCR tasks. During fine-tuning, we perform Group Relative Policy Optimization with novel reward functions to reduce annotation dependency and improve reasoning capabilities. At inference time, we enhance localization accuracy via OCR Rectification, a method that leverages the MLLM’s strong text recognition abilities to refine its predictions. Furthermore, to support rigorous evaluation, we introduce Text Forensics Reasoning (TFR) benchmark, comprising over 45k real and tampered images across 16 languages, 10 tampering techniques, and diverse domains. Rich reasoning-style annotations are included, allowing for comprehensive assessment. Our TFR benchmark simultaneously addresses seven major limitations of existing benchmarks and enables robust evaluation under cross-style, cross-method, and cross-language conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TextShield-R1 significantly advances the state of the art in interpretable tampered text detection.

PaperID: 690, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08322

Authors:Simone Ricci, Niccolò Biondi, Federico Pernici, Alberto Del Bimbo

Affiliations: DINFO (Department of Information Engineering), University of Florence, Italy MICC (Media Integration and Communication Center

Title: Mitigating Negative Flips via Margin Preserving Training

Abstract:
Minimizing inconsistencies across successive versions of an AI system is as crucial as reducing the overall error. In image classification, such inconsistencies manifest as negative flips, where an updated model misclassifies test samples that were previously classified correctly. This issue becomes increasingly pronounced as the number of training classes grows over time, since adding new categories reduces the margin of each class and may introduce conflicting patterns that undermine their learning process, thereby degrading performance on the original subset. To mitigate negative flips, we propose a novel approach that preserves the margins of the original model while learning an improved one. Our method encourages a larger relative margin between the previously learned and newly introduced classes by introducing an explicit margincalibration term on the logits. However, overly constraining the logit margin for the new classes can significantly degrade their accuracy compared to a new independently trained model. To address this, we integrate a double-source focal distillation loss with the previous model and a new independently trained model, learning an appropriate decision margin from both old and new data, even under a logit margin calibration. Extensive experiments on image classification benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently reduces the negative flip rate with high overall accuracy.

PaperID: 691, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19361

Authors:Piera Riccio, Francesco Galati, Kajetan Schweighofer, Noa Garcia, Nuria M Oliver

Affiliations: University of Amsterdam, Independent Researcher, Johannes Kepler University Linz, The University of Osaka, ELLIS Alicante

Title: ImageSet2Text: Describing Sets of Images Through Text

Abstract:
In the era of largescale visual data, understanding collections of images is a challenging yet important task. To this end, we introduce ImageSet2Text, a novel method to automatically generate natural language descriptions of image sets. Based on large language models, visual-question answering chains, an external lexical graph, and CLIP-based verification, ImageSet2Text iteratively extracts key concepts from image subsets and organizes them into a structured concept graph. We conduct extensive experiments evaluating the quality of the generated descriptions in terms of accuracy, completeness, and user satisfaction. We also examine the method's behavior through ablation studies, scalability assessments, and failure analyses. Results demonstrate that ImageSet2Text combines data-driven AI and symbolic representations to reliably summarize large image collections for a wide range of applications.

PaperID: 692, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.10180

Authors:Siddharth Roheda, Rohit Chowdhury, Aniruddha Bala, Rohan Jaiswal

Affiliations: Samsung Research Institute

Title: CART: Compositional AutoRegressive Transformer for Image Generation

Abstract:
We propose a novel AutoRegressive (AR) image generation approach that models images as hierarchical compositions of interpretable visual layers. While AR models have achieved transformative success in language modeling, replicating this success in vision remains challenging due to inherent spatial dependencies in images. Addressing the unique challenges of vision tasks, our method (CART) adds image details iteratively via semantically meaningful decompositions. We demonstrate the flexibility and generality of CART by applying it across three distinct decomposition strategies: (i) Base-Detail Decomposition (Mumford-Shah smoothness), (ii) Intrinsic Decomposition (albedo/shading), and (iii) Specularity Decomposition (diffuse/specular). This “next-detail" strategy outperforms traditional “next-token" and “next-scale" approaches, improving controllability, semantic interpretability, and resolution scalability. Experiments show CART generates visually compelling results while enabling structured image manipulation, opening new directions for controllable generative modeling via physically or perceptually motivated image factorization.

PaperID: 693, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05359

Authors:Zekai Shao, Yufan Hu, Jingyuan Liu, Bin Fan, Hongmin Liu

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology Beijing

Title: Group Orthogonal Low-Rank Adaptation for RGB-T Tracking

Abstract:
Parameterefficient fine-tuning has emerged as a promising paradigm in RGB-T tracking, enabling downstream task adaptation by freezing pretrained parameters and fine-tuning only a small set of parameters. This set forms a rank space made up of multiple individual ranks, whose expressiveness directly shapes the model's adaptability. However, quantitative analysis reveals low-rank adaptation exhibits significant redundancy in the rank space, with many ranks contributing almost no practical information. This hinders the model's ability to learn more diverse knowledge to address the various challenges in RGB-T tracking. To address this issue, we propose the Group Orthogonal Low-Rank Adaptation (GOLA) framework for RGB-T tracking, which effectively leverages the rank space through structured parameter learning. Specifically, we adopt a rank decomposition partitioning strategy utilizing singular value decomposition to quantify rank importance, freeze crucial ranks to preserve the pretrained priors, and cluster the redundant ranks into groups to prepare for subsequent orthogonal constraints. We further design an inter-group orthogonal constraint strategy. This constraint enforces orthogonality between rank groups, compelling them to learn complementary features that target diverse challenges, thereby alleviating information redundancy. Experimental results demonstrate that GOLA effectively reduces parameter redundancy and enhances feature representation capabilities, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods across four benchmark datasets and validating its effectiveness in RGB-T tracking tasks.

PaperID: 694, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.13994

Authors:Kaixin Shen, Ruijie Quan, Jiaxu Miao, Jun Xiao

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Nanyang Technological University, Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: TarPro: Targeted Protection Against Malicious Image Editing

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of diffusionbased image editing has enabled highly controllable visual content generation but has also raised serious concerns about the misuse of generative models for producing Not-Safe-for-Work (NSFW) content. Existing protection strategies inject adversarial perturbations to disrupt editing. However, these methods are untargeted, often degrading benign edits while failing to eliminate harmful outputs. In this work, we propose TarPro, a targeted protection framework that blocks malicious edits while preserving benign editing functionality. TarPro introduces Dual-Intent Optimization (DIO), a semantic alignment objective that suppresses malicious prompt effects while retaining desirable, benign edits, by leveraging prompt compositionality rather than requiring manually annotated preferences. To ensure robustness and generalization, we replace pixel-level optimization with a generator-based perturbation learning strategy that learns to produce structured, imperceptible perturbations in parameter space. Experiments on multiple diffusion backbones show that TarPro significantly blocks NSFW content while maintaining high-quality benign edits, outperforming strong baselines through both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.

PaperID: 695, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18927

Authors:Keming Shen, Bizhu Wu, Junliang Chen, Xiaoqin Wang, Linlin Shen

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University, University of Nottingham Ningbo China, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, School of Artificial Intelligence

Title: FineXtrol: Controllable Motion Generation via Fine-Grained Text

Abstract:
Recent works have sought to enhance the controllability and precision of textdriven motion generation. Some approaches leverage large language models (LLMs) to produce more detailed texts, while others incorporate global 3D coordinate sequences as additional control signals. However, the former often introduces misaligned details and lacks explicit temporal cues, and the latter incurs significant computational cost when converting coordinates to standard motion representations. To address these issues, we propose FineXtrol, a novel control framework for efficient motion generation guided by temporally-aware, precise, user-friendly and fine-grained textual control signals that describe specific body part movements over time. In support of this framework, we design a hierarchical contrastive learning module that encourages the text encoder to produce more discriminative embeddings for our novel control signals, thereby improving motion controllability. Quantitative results show that FineXtrol achieves strong performance in controllable motion generation, while qualitative analysis demonstrates its flexibility in directing specific body part movements.

PaperID: 696, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22237

Authors:Qi Song, Ziyuan Luo, Renjie Wan

Affiliations: Hong Kong Baptist University

Title: Creating Blank Canvas Against AI-enabled Image Forgery

Abstract:
AIGCbased image editing technology has greatly simplified the realistic-level image modification, causing serious potential risks of image forgery. This paper introduces a new approach to tampering detection using the Segment Anything Model (SAM). Instead of training SAM to identify tampered areas, we propose a novel strategy. The entire image is transformed into a blank canvas from the perspective of neural models. Any modifications to this blank canvas would be noticeable to the models. To achieve this idea, we introduce adversarial perturbations to prevent SAM from seeing anything, allowing it to identify forged regions when the image is tampered with. Due to SAM's powerful perceiving capabilities, naive adversarial attacks cannot completely tame SAM. To thoroughly deceive SAM and make it blind to the image, we introduce a frequency-aware optimization strategy, which further enhances the capability of tamper localization. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

PaperID: 697, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13190

Authors:Haoran Tang, Meng Cao, Ruyang Liu, Xiaoxi Liang, Linglong Li, Ge Li, Xiaodan Liang

Affiliations: School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Shenzhen Graduate School, Peking University, Sun Yat-sen University Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

Title: Video Spatial Reasoning with Object-Centric 3D Rollout

Abstract:
Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have showcased remarkable capabilities in vision-language understanding. However, enabling robust video spatial reasoning—the ability to comprehend object locations, orientations, and inter-object relationships in dynamic 3D scenes—remains a key unsolved challenge. Existing approaches primarily rely on spatially grounded supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning, yet we observe that such models often exhibit query-locked reasoning, focusing narrowly on objects explicitly mentioned in the prompt while ignoring critical contextual cues. To address this limitation, we propose Object-Centric 3D Rollout (OCR), a novel strategy that introduces structured perturbations to the 3D geometry of selected objects during training. By degrading object-specific visual cues and projecting the altered geometry into 2D space, OCR compels the model to reason holistically across the entire scene. We further design a rollout-based training pipeline that jointly leverages vanilla and region-noisy videos to optimize spatial reasoning trajectories. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance: our 3B-parameter model achieves 47.5% accuracy on VSI-Bench, outperforming several 7B baselines. Ablations confirm OCR’s superiority over prior rollout strategies (e.g., T-GRPO, NoisyRollout).

PaperID: 698, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17532

Authors:Jiaqi Tang, Jianmin Chen, Wei Wei, Xiaogang Xu, Runtao Liu, Xiangyu Wu, Qipeng Xie, Jiafei Wu, Lei Zhang, Qifeng Chen

Affiliations: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, University of Hong Kong

Title: Robust-R1: Degradation-Aware Reasoning for Robust Visual Understanding

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models struggle to maintain reliable performance under extreme realworld visual degradations, which impede their practical robustness. Existing robust MLLMs predominantly rely on implicit training/adaptation that focuses solely on visual encoder generalization, suffering from limited interpretability and isolated optimization. To overcome these limitations, we propose Robust-R1, a novel framework that explicitly models visual degradations through structured reasoning chains. Our approach integrates: (i) supervised fine-tuning for degradation-aware reasoning foundations, (ii) reward-driven alignment for accurately perceiving degradation parameters, and (iii) dynamic reasoning depth scaling adapted to degradation intensity. To facilitate this approach, we introduce a specialized 11K dataset featuring realistic degradations synthesized across four critical real-world visual processing stages, each annotated with structured chains connecting degradation parameters, perceptual influence, pristine semantic reasoning chain, and conclusion. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate state-of-theart robustness: Robust-R1 outperforms all general and robust baselines on the real-world degradation benchmark R-Bench, while maintaining superior anti-degradation performance under multi-intensity adversarial degradations on MMMB, MMStar, and RealWorldQA.

PaperID: 699, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.14659

Authors:Tinglei Wan, Zhongjie Wang, Tonghua Su

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, China Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy (SZ), China Chongqing Research Institute of HIT

Title: GUSLO: General and Unified Structured Light Optimization

Abstract:
Structured light (SL) 3D reconstruction captures the precise surface shape of objects, providing highaccuracy 3D data essential for industrial inspection and cultural heritage digitization. However, existing methods suffer from two key limitations: reliance on scene-specific calibration with manual parameter tuning, and optimization frameworks tailored to specific SL patterns, limiting their generalizability across varied scenarios. We propose General and Unified Structured Light Optimization (GUSLO), a novel framework addressing these issues through two coordinated innovations: (1) single-shot calibration via 2D triangulation-based interpolation that converts sparse matches into dense correspondence fields, and (2) artifact-aware photometric adaptation via explicit transfer functions, balancing generalization and color fidelity. We conduct diverse experiments covering binary, speckle, and color-coded settings. Results show that GUSLO consistently improves accuracy and cross-encoding robustness over conventional methods in challenging industrial and cultural scenarios.

PaperID: 700, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14863

Authors:Hengkang Wang, Yang Liu, Huidong Liu, Chien-Chih Wang, Yanhui Guo, Hongdong Li, Bryan Wang, Ju Sun

Affiliations: University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Amazon Australian National University

Title: Temporal-Consistent Video Restoration with Pre-trained Diffusion Models

Abstract:
Video restoration (VR) aims to recover highquality videos from degraded ones. Although recent zero-shot VR methods using pre-trained diffusion models (DMs) show good promise, they suffer from approximation errors during reverse diffusion and insufficient temporal consistency. Moreover, dealing with 3D video data, VR is inherently computationally intensive. In this paper, we advocate viewing the reverse process in DMs as a function and present a novel Maximum a Posterior (MAP) framework that directly parameterizes video frames in the seed space of DMs, eliminating approximation errors. We also introduce strategies to promote bilevel temporal consistency: semantic consistency by leveraging clustering structures in the seed space, and pixel-level consistency by progressive warping with optical flow refinements. Extensive experiments on multiple virtual reality tasks demonstrate superior visual quality and temporal consistency achieved by our method compared to the state-of-the-art.

PaperID: 701, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09410

Authors:Jiale Wang, Chen Zhao, Wei Ke, Tong Zhang

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Monte Carlo Diffusion for Generalizable Learning-Based RANSAC

Abstract:
Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) is a fundamental approach for robustly estimating parametric models from noisy data. Existing learningbased RANSAC methods utilize deep learning to enhance the robustness of RANSAC against outliers. However, these approaches are trained and tested on the data generated by the same algorithms, leading to limited generalization to out-of-distribution data during inference. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel diffusion-based paradigm that progressively injects noise into ground-truth data, simulating the noisy conditions for training learning-based RANSAC. To enhance data diversity, we incorporate Monte Carlo sampling into the diffusion paradigm, approximating diverse data distributions by introducing different types of randomness at multiple stages. We evaluate our approach in the context of feature matching through comprehensive experiments on the ScanNet and MegaDepth datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our Monte Carlo diffusion mechanism significantly improves the generalization ability of learning-based RANSAC. We also develop extensive ablation studies that highlight the effectiveness of key components in our framework.

PaperID: 702, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02549

Authors:Shuo Wang, Yongcai Wang, Zhaoxin Fan, Yucheng Wang, Maiyue Chen, Kaihui Wang, Zhizhong Su, Wanting Li, Xudong Cai, Yeying Jin, Deying Li

Affiliations: Renmin University of China, Innovation Center for Future Blockchain and Privacy Computing, Horizon Robotics, National University of Singapore

Title: MonoDream: Monocular Vision-Language Navigation with Panoramic Dreaming

Abstract:
VisionLanguage Navigation (VLN) tasks often leverage panoramic RGB and depth inputs to provide rich spatial cues for action planning, but these sensors can be costly or less accessible in real-world deployments. Recent approaches based on Vision-Language Action (VLA) models achieve strong results with monocular input, yet they still lag behind methods using panoramic RGB-D information. We present MonoDream, a lightweight VLA framework that enables monocular agents to learn a Unified Navigation Representation (UNR). This shared feature representation jointly aligns navigation-relevant visual semantics (e.g., global layout, depth, and future cues) and language-grounded action intent, enabling more reliable action prediction. MonoDream further introduces Latent Panoramic Dreaming (LPD) tasks to supervise the UNR, which train the model to predict latent features of panoramic RGB and depth observations at both current and future steps based on only monocular input. Experiments on multiple VLN benchmarks show that MonoDream consistently improves monocular navigation performance and significantly narrows the gap with panoramic-based agents.

PaperID: 703, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21912

Authors:Xinghan Wang, Kun Xu, Fei Li, Cao Sheng, JiaZhong Yu, Yadong Mu

Affiliations: Peking University, China Tower Corporation Limited

Title: Generating Attribute-Aware Human Motions from Textual Prompt

Abstract:
Textdriven human motion generation has recently attracted considerable attention, allowing models to generate human motions based on textual descriptions. However, current methods neglect the influence of human attributes—such as age, gender, weight, and height—which are key factors shaping human motion patterns. This work represents a pilot exploration for bridging this gap. We conceptualize each motion as comprising both attribute information and action semantics, where textual descriptions align exclusively with action semantics. To achieve this, a new framework inspired by Structural Causal Models is proposed to decouple action semantics from human attributes, enabling text-to-semantics prediction and attribute-controlled generation. The resulting model is capable of generating attribute-aware motion aligned with the user's text and attribute inputs. For evaluation, we introduce a comprehensive dataset containing attribute annotations for text-motion pairs, setting the first benchmark for attribute-aware motion generation. Extensive experiments validate our model's effectiveness.

PaperID: 704, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01259

Authors:Zhengxue Wang, Yuan Wu, Xiang Li, Zhiqiang Yan, Jian Yang

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nankai University, National University of Singapore

Title: SpatioTemporal Difference Network for Video Depth Super-Resolution

Abstract:
Depth superresolution has achieved impressive performance, and the incorporation of multi-frame information further enhances reconstruction quality. Nevertheless, statistical analyses reveal that video depth super-resolution remains affected by pronounced long-tailed distributions, with the long-tailed effects primarily manifesting in spatial non-smooth regions and temporal variation zones. To address these challenges, we propose a novel SpatioTemporal Difference Network (STDNet) comprising two core branches: a spatial difference branch and a temporal difference branch. In the spatial difference branch, we introduce a spatial difference mechanism to mitigate the long-tailed issues in spatial non-smooth regions. This mechanism dynamically aligns RGB features with learned spatial difference representations, enabling intra-frame RGB-D aggregation for depth calibration. In the temporal difference branch, we further design a temporal difference strategy that preferentially propagates temporal variation information from adjacent RGB and depth frames to the current depth frame, leveraging temporal difference representations to achieve precise motion compensation in temporal long-tailed areas. Extensive experimental results across multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our STDNet, outperforming existing approaches.

PaperID: 705, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06716

Authors:Alex Warren, Ke Xu, Xin Tian, Gary K. L. Tam, Benjamin W. Wah, Rynson W. H. Lau

Affiliations: Swansea University, City University of Hong Kong, Huawei Technologies Ltd., The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title: Video Mirror Detection with the Motion-in-Depth Cue

Abstract:
Detecting mirror regions in RGB videos is essential for scene understanding in applications such as scene reconstruction and robotic navigation. Existing video mirror detectors typically rely on cues like insideoutside mirror correspondences and 2D motion inconsistencies. However, these methods often yield noisy or incomplete predictions when confronted with complex real-world video scenes, especially in areas with occlusion or limited visual features and motions. We observe that human perceive and navigate 3D occluded environments with remarkable ease, owing to Motion-in-Depth (MiD) perception. MiD integrates information from visual appearance (image colors and textures), the way objects move around us in 3D space (3D motions), and their relative distance from us (depth) to determine if something is approaching or receding and to support navigation. Motivated by this neuroscience mechanism, we introduce MiD-VMD, the first approach to explicitly model MiD for video mirror detection. MiD-VMD jointly utilizes contrastive 3D motion, depth, and image features through two novel modules based on a combinational QKV transformer architecture. The Motion-in-Depth Attention Learning (MiD-AL) module captures complementary relationships across these modalities with combinatorial attention and enforces a compact encoding to represent global 3D transformations, resulting in more accurate mirror detection and reduced motion artifacts. The Motion-in-Depth Boundary Detection (MiD-BD) module further sharpens mirror boundaries by leveraging cross-modal attention on 3D motion and depth features. Extensive experiments show that MiD-VMD outperforms current SOTAs.

PaperID: 706, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.01746

Authors:Lintong Wei, Jian Lu, Haozhe Cheng, Jihua Zhu, Kaibing Zhang

Affiliations: School of Electronics and Information, Xi’an Polytechnic University, School of Software, Xi’an Jiaotong University, School of Computer Science

Title: Point-SRA: Self-Representation Alignment for 3D Representation Learning

Abstract:
Masked autoencoders (MAE) have become a dominant paradigm in 3D representation learning, setting new performance benchmarks across various downstream tasks. Existing methods with fixed mask ratios neglect multilevel representational correlations and intrinsic geometric structures, while relying on point-wise reconstruction assumptions that conflict with the diversity of point cloud. To address these issues, we propose a 3D representation learning method, termed Point-SRA, which aligns representations through self-distillation and probabilistic modeling. Specifically, we assign different masking ratios to the MAE to capture complementary geometric and semantic information, while the MeanFlow Transformer (MFT) leverages cross-modal conditional embeddings to enable diverse probabilistic reconstruction. Our analysis further reveals that representations at different time steps in MFT also exhibit complementarity. Therefore, a Dual Self-Representation Alignment mechanism is proposed at both the MAE and MFT levels. Finally, we design a Flow-Conditioned Fine-Tuning Architecture to fully exploit the point cloud distribution learned via MeanFlow. Point-SRA outperforms Point-MAE by 5.37% on ScanObjectNN. On intracranial aneurysm segmentation, it reaches 96.07% mean IoU for arteries and 86.87% for aneurysms. For 3D object detection, Point-SRA achieves 47.3% AP@50, surpassing MaskPoint by 5.12%.

PaperID: 707, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03244

Authors:Chuanzhi Xu, Haoxian Zhou, Langyi Chen, Yuk Ying Chung, Qiang Qu

Affiliations: The University of Sydney

Title: Ultralight Polarity-Split Neuromorphic SNN for Event-Stream Super-Resolution

Abstract:
Event cameras offer unparalleled advantages such as high temporal resolution, low latency, and high dynamic range. However, their limited spatial resolution poses challenges for finegrained perception tasks. In this work, we propose an ultra-lightweight, stream-based event-to-event super-resolution method based on Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), designed for real-time deployment on resource-constrained devices. To further reduce model size, we introduce a novel Dual-Forward Polarity-Split Event Encoding strategy that decouples positive and negative events into separate forward paths through a shared SNN. Furthermore, we propose a Learnable Spatio-temporal Polarity-aware Loss (LearnSTPLoss) that adaptively balances temporal, spatial, and polarity consistency using learnable uncertainty-based weights. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves competitive super-resolution performance on multiple datasets while significantly reducing model size and inference time. The lightweight design enables embedding the module into event cameras or using it as an efficient front-end preprocessing for downstream vision tasks.

PaperID: 708, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10109

Authors:Xingxin Xu, Bing Cao, Dongdong Li, Qinghua Hu, Pengfei Zhu

Affiliations: School of New Media and Communication, Tianjin University, School of Artificial Intelligence, National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Automatic Target Recognition, National University of Defense Technology

Title: Dream-IF: Dynamic Relative EnhAnceMent for Image Fusion

Abstract:
Image fusion aims to integrate comprehensive information from images acquired through multiple sources. However, images captured by diverse sensors often encounter various degradations that can negatively affect fusion quality. Traditional fusion methods generally treat image enhancement and fusion as separate processes, overlooking the inherent correlation between them; notably, the dominant regions in one modality of a fused image often indicate areas where the other modality might benefit from enhancement. Inspired by this observation, we introduce the concept of dominant regions for image enhancement and present a Dynamic Relative EnhAnceMent framework for Image Fusion (DreamIF). This framework quantifies the relative dominance of each modality across different layers and leverages this information to facilitate reciprocal cross-modal enhancement. By integrating the relative dominance derived from image fusion, our approach supports not only image restoration but also a broader range of image enhancement applications. Furthermore, we employ prompt-based encoding to capture degradation-specific details, which dynamically steer the restoration process and promote coordinated enhancement in both multi-modal image fusion and image enhancement scenarios. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Dream-IF consistently outperforms its counterparts.

PaperID: 709, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11175

Authors:Zhixin Xu, Hengyu Zhou, Yuan Liu, Wenhan Xue, Hao Pan, Wenping Wang, Bin Wang

Affiliations: School of Software, Tsinghua University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Texas A&M University

Title: Dynamic Gaussian Scene Reconstruction from Unsynchronized Videos

Abstract:
Multiview video reconstruction plays a vital role in computer vision, enabling applications in film production, virtual reality, and motion analysis. While recent advances such as 3D Gaussian Splatting have demonstrated impressive capabilities in dynamic scene reconstruction, they typically rely on the assumption that input video streams are temporally synchronized. However, in real-world scenarios, this assumption often fails due to factors like camera trigger delays, frame rate discrepancies, or independent recording setups, leading to temporal misalignment across views and reduced reconstruction quality. To address this challenge, a novel temporal alignment strategy is proposed for high-quality 4DGS reconstruction from unsynchronized multi-view videos. Our method features a coarse-to-fine alignment module that estimates and compensates for each camera's time shift. The method first determines a coarse, frame-level offset and then refines it to achieve sub-frame accuracy. This strategy can be integrated as a plug-and-play module into existing 4DGS frameworks, enhancing their robustness when handling asynchronous data. Experiments show that this approach effectively processes temporally misaligned videos and significantly enhances baseline methods.

PaperID: 710, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.03019

Authors:Shuo Yang, Yuwei Niu, Yuyang Liu, Yang Ye, Bin Lin, Li Yuan

Affiliations: Peking University

Title: Look-Back: Implicit Visual Re-focusing in MLLM Reasoning

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in multimodal reasoning. However, they often excessively rely on textual information during the later stages of inference, neglecting the crucial integration of visual input. Current methods typically address this by explicitly injecting visual information to guide the reasoning process. In this work, through an analysis of MLLM attention patterns, we made an intriguing observation: with appropriate guidance, MLLMs can spontaneously refocus their attention on visual inputs during the later stages of reasoning, even without explicit visual injection. This spontaneous shift in focus suggests that MLLMs are intrinsically capable of performing visual fusion reasoning. Building on this insight, we introduce Look-Back, an implicit approach designed to guide MLLMs to look back at visual information in a self-directed manner during reasoning. Look-Back empowers the model to autonomously determine when, where, and how to re-focus on visual inputs, eliminating the need for explicit model-structure constraints or additional input. We demonstrate that Look-Back significantly enhances the model's reasoning and perception capabilities, as evidenced by extensive empirical evaluations on multiple multimodal benchmarks.

PaperID: 711, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.19606

Authors:Zhenyu Yang, Gensheng Pei, Tao Chen, Xia Yuan, Haofeng Zhang, Xiangbo Shu, Yazhou Yao

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, China State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Manufacturing of Advanced Construction Machinery, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University

Title: Beyond Quadratic: Linear-Time Change Detection with RWKV

Abstract:
Existing paradigms for remote sensing change detection are caught in a tradeoff: CNNs excel at efficiency but lack global context, while Transformers capture long-range dependencies at a prohibitive computational cost. This paper introduces ChangeRWKV, a new architecture that reconciles this conflict. By building upon the Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV) framework, our ChangeRWKV uniquely combines the parallelizable training of Transformers with the linear-time inference of RNNs. Our approach core features two key innovations: a hierarchical RWKV encoder that builds multi-resolution feature representation, and a novel Spatial-Temporal Fusion Module (STFM) engineered to resolve spatial misalignments across scales while distilling fine-grained temporal discrepancies. ChangeRWKV not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on the LEVIR-CD benchmark, with an 85.46% IoU and 92.16% F1 score, but does so while drastically reducing parameters and FLOPs compared to previous leading methods. This work demonstrates a new, efficient, and powerful paradigm for operational-scale change detection.

PaperID: 712, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06515

Authors:Jing Zhang, Zhikai Li, Chengzhi Hu, Xuewen Liu, Qingyi Gu

Affiliations: Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: SAQ-SAM: Semantically-Aligned Quantization for Segment Anything Model

Abstract:
Segment Anything Model (SAM) exhibits remarkable zeroshot segmentation capability; however, its prohibitive computational costs make edge deployment challenging. Although post-training quantization (PTQ) offers a promising compression solution, existing methods yield unsatisfactory results when applied to SAM, owing to its specialized model components and promptable workflow: (i) The mask decoder's attention exhibits extreme activation outliers, and we find that aggressive clipping (even 100x), without smoothing or isolation, is effective in suppressing outliers while maintaining performance. Unfortunately, traditional distribution-based metrics (e.g., MSE) fail to provide such large-scale clipping. (ii) Existing quantization reconstruction methods neglect semantic interactivity of SAM, leading to misalignment between image feature and prompt intention. To address the above issues, we propose SAQ-SAM in this paper, which boosts PTQ for SAM from the perspective of semantic alignment. Specifically, we propose Perceptual-Consistency Clipping, which exploits attention focus overlap to promote aggressive clipping while preserving semantic capabilities. Furthermore, we propose Prompt-Aware Reconstruction, which incorporates image-prompt interactions by leveraging cross-attention in mask decoder, thus facilitating alignment in both distribution and semantic. Moreover, to ensure the interaction efficiency, we design a layer-skipping strategy for image tokens in encoder. Extensive experiments are conducted on various SAM sizes and tasks, including instance segmentation, oriented object detection, and semantic segmentation, and the results show that our method consistently exhibits advantages. For example, when quantizing SAM-B to 4-bit, SAQ-SAM achieves 11.7% higher mAP than the baseline in instance segmentation task.

PaperID: 713, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19475

Authors:Tianlu Zhang, Qiang Zhang, Guiguang Ding, Jungong Han

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Xidian University

Title: Tracking and Segmenting Anything in Any Modality

Abstract:
Tracking and segmentation play essential roles in video understanding, providing basic positional information and temporal association of objects within video sequences. Despite their shared objective, existing approaches often tackle these tasks using specialized architectures or modalityspecific parameters, limiting their generalization and scalability. Recent efforts have attempted to unify multiple tracking and segmentation sub-tasks from the perspectives of any modality input or multi-task inference. However, these approaches tend to overlook two critical challenges: the distributional gap across different modalities and the feature representation gap across tasks. These issues hinder effective cross-task and cross-modal knowledge sharing, ultimately constraining the development of a true generalist model. To address these limitations, we propose a universal tracking and segmentation framework named SATA, which unifies a broad spectrum of tracking and segmentation subtasks with any modality input. Specifically, a Decoupled Mixture-of-Expert (DeMoE) mechanism is presented to decouple the unified representation learning task into the modeling process of cross-modal shared knowledge and specific information, thus enabling the model to maintain flexibility while enhancing generalization. Additionally, we introduce a Task-aware Multi-object Tracking (TaMOT) pipeline to unify all the task outputs as a unified set of instances with calibrated ID information, thereby alleviating the degradation of task-specific knowledge during multi-task training. SATA demonstrates superior performance on 18 challenging tracking and segmentation benchmarks, offering a novel perspective for more generalizable video understanding.

PaperID: 714, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17196

Authors:Yingkai Zhang, Tao Zhang, Jing Nie, Ying Fu

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology, Hangzhou Dianzi University

Title: Real Noise Decoupling for Hyperspectral Image Denoising

Abstract:
Hyperspectral image (HSI) denoising is a crucial step in enhancing the quality of HSIs. Noise modeling methods can fit noise distributions to generate synthetic HSIs to train denoising networks. However, the noise in captured HSIs is usually complex and difficult to model accurately, which significantly limits the effectiveness of these approaches. In this paper, we propose a multistage noise-decoupling framework that decomposes complex noise into explicitly modeled and implicitly modeled components. This decoupling reduces the complexity of noise and enhances the learnability of HSI denoising methods when applied to real paired data. Specifically, for explicitly modeled noise, we utilize an existing noise model to generate paired data for pre-training a denoising network, equipping it with prior knowledge to handle the explicitly modeled noise effectively. For implicitly modeled noise, we introduce a high-frequency wavelet guided network. Leveraging the prior knowledge from the pre-trained module, this network adaptively extracts high-frequency features to target and remove the implicitly modeled noise from real paired HSIs. Furthermore, to effectively eliminate all noise components and mitigate error accumulation across stages, a multi-stage learning strategy, comprising separate pre-training and joint fine-tuning, is employed to optimize the entire framework. Extensive experiments on public and our captured datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods, effectively handling complex real-world noise and significantly enhancing HSI quality.

PaperID: 715, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17154

Authors:Zhedong Zhang, Liang Li, Gaoxiang Cong, Chunshan Liu, Yuhan Gao, Xiaowan Wang, Tao Gu, Yuankai Qi

Affiliations: Hangzhou Dianzi University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Computing Technology, China University of Chinese Academy of Science, Tsinghua University, Macquarie University

Title: InstructDubber: Instruction-based Alignment for Zero-shot Movie Dubbing

Abstract:
Movie dubbing seeks to synthesize speech from a given script using a specific voice, while ensuring accurate lip synchronization and emotionprosody alignment with the character’s visual performance. However, existing alignment approaches based on visual features face two key limitations: (1) they rely on complex, handcrafted visual preprocessing pipelines, including facial landmark detection and feature extraction; and (2) they generalize poorly to unseen visual domains, often resulting in degraded alignment and dubbing quality. To address these issues, we propose InstructDubber, a novel instruction-based alignment dubbing method for both robust in-domain and zero-shot movie dubbing. Specifically, we first feed the video, script, and corresponding prompts into a multimodal large language model to generate natural language dubbing instructions regarding the speaking rate and emotion state depicted in the video, which is robust to visual domain variations. Second, we design an instructed duration distilling module to mine discriminative duration cues from speaking rate instructions to predict lip-aligned phoneme-level pronunciation duration. Third, for emotion-prosody alignment, we devise an instructed emotion calibrating module, which fine-tunes an LLM-based instruction analyzer using ground truth dubbing emotion as supervision and predicts prosody based on the calibrated emotion analysis. Finally, the predicted duration and prosody, together with the script, are fed into the audio decoder to generate video-aligned dubbing. Extensive experiments on three major benchmarks demonstrate that InstructDubber outperforms state‑of‑the‑art approaches across both in‑domain and zero‑shot scenarios.

PaperID: 716, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06897

Authors:Zhenxi Zhang, Fuchen Zheng, Adnan Iltaf, Yifei Han, Zhenyu Cheng, Yue Du, Bin Li, Tianyong Liu, Shoujun Zhou

Affiliations: Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: Adaptive Morph-Patch Transformer for Aortic Vessel Segmentation

Abstract:
Accurate segmentation of aortic vascular structures is critical for diagnosing and treating cardiovascular diseases. Traditional Transformerbased models have shown promise in this domain by capturing long-range dependencies between vascular features. However, their reliance on fixed-size rectangular patches often influences the integrity of complex vascular structures, leading to suboptimal segmentation accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose the adaptive Morph-Patch Transformer (MPT), a novel architecture specifically designed for aortic vascular segmentation. Specifically, MPT introduces an adaptive patch partitioning strategy that dynamically generates morphology-aware patches aligned with complex vascular structures. This strategy can preserve semantic integrity of complex vascular structures within individual patches. Moreover, a Semantic Clustering Attention (SCA) method is proposed to dynamically aggregate features from various patches with similar semantic characteristics. This method enhances the model's capability to segment vessels of varying sizes, preserving the integrity of vascular structures. Extensive experiments on three open-source datasets (AVT, AortaSeg24 and TBAD) demonstrate that MPT achieves state-of-the-art performance, with improvements in segmenting intricate vascular structures.

PaperID: 717, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16140

Authors:Chenyu Zhao, Xianwei Zheng, Zimin Xia, Linwei Yue, Nan Xue

Affiliations: Wuhan University, EPFL - EPF Lausanne, China University of Geosciences Wuhan, Ant Group

Title: Real-time 3D Object Detection with Inference-Aligned Learning

Abstract:
Realtime 3D object detection from point clouds is essential for dynamic scene understanding in applications such as augmented reality, robotics, and navigation. We introduce a novel Spatial-prioritized and Rank-aware 3D object detection (SR3D) framework for indoor point clouds, to bridge the gap between how detectors are trained and how they are evaluated. This gap stems from the lack of spatial reliability and ranking awareness during training, which conflicts with the ranking-based prediction selection used at inference. Such a training-inference gap hampers the model’s ability to learn representations aligned with inference-time behavior. To address the limitation, SR3D consists of two components tailored to the spatial nature of point clouds during training: a novel spatial-prioritized optimal transport assignment that dynamically emphasizes well-located and spatially reliable samples, and a rank-aware adaptive self-distillation scheme that adaptively injects ranking perception via a self-distillation paradigm. Extensive experiments on ScanNet V2 and SUN RGB-D show that SR3D effectively bridges the training-inference gap and significantly outperforms prior methods in accuracy while maintaining real-time speed.

PaperID: 718, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10638

Authors:Xiaoming Zhao, Alex Schwing

Affiliations: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Title: Studying Classifier(-Free) Guidance from a Classifier-Centric Perspective

Abstract:
Classifierfree guidance has become a staple for conditional generation with denoising diffusion models. However, a comprehensive understanding of classifier-free guidance is still missing. In this work, we carry out an empirical study to provide a fresh perspective on classifier-free guidance. Concretely, instead of solely focusing on classifier-free guidance, we trace back to the root, i.e., classifier guidance, pinpoint the key assumption for the derivation, and conduct a systematic study to understand the role of the classifier. On 1D data, we find that both classifier guidance and classifier-free guidance achieve conditional generation by pushing the denoising diffusion trajectories away from decision boundaries, i.e., areas where conditional information is usually entangled and is hard to learn. To validate this classifier-centric perspective on high-dimensional data, we assess whether a flow-matching postprocessing step that is designed to narrow the gap between a pre-trained diffusion model’s learned distribution and the real data distribution, especially near decision boundaries, can improve the performance. Experiments on various datasets verify our classifier-centric understanding.

PaperID: 719, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12667

Authors:Haiyang Zheng, Nan Pu, Wenjing Li, Teng Long, Nicu Sebe, Zhun Zhong

Affiliations: University of Trento, Hefei University of Technology

Title: Open-World Deepfake Attribution via Confidence-Aware Asymmetric Learning

Abstract:
The proliferation of synthetic facial imagery has intensified the need for robust OpenWorld DeepFake Attribution (OW-DFA), which aims to attribute both known and unknown forgeries using labeled data for known types and unlabeled data containing a mixture of known and novel types. However, existing OW-DFA methods face two critical limitations: 1) A confidence skew that leads to unreliable pseudo-labels for novel forgeries, resulting in biased training. 2) An unrealistic assumption that the number of unknown forgery types is known a priori. To address these challenges, we propose a Confidence-aware Asymmetric Learning (CAL) framework, which adaptively balances model confidence across known and novel forgery types. CAL mainly consists of two components: Confidence-aware Consistency Regularization (CCR) and Asymmetric Confidence Reinforcement (ACR). CCR mitigates pseudo-label bias by dynamically scaling sample losses based on normalized confidence, gradually shifting the training focus from high- to low-confidence samples. ACR complements this by separately calibrating confidence for known and novel classes through selective learning on high-confidence samples, guided by their confidence gap. Together, CCR and ACR form a mutually reinforcing loop that significantly improves the model's OW-DFA performance. Moreover, we introduce a Dynamic Prototype Pruning (DPP) strategy that automatically estimates the number of novel forgery types in a coarse-to-fine manner, removing the need for unrealistic prior assumptions and enhancing the scalability of our methods to real-world OW-DFA scenarios. Extensive experiments on the standard and OW-DFA benchmark and a newly extended benchmark incorporating advanced manipulations demonstrate that CAL consistently outperforms previous methods, achieving new state-of-the-art performance on both known and novel forgery attribution.

PaperID: 720, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12080

Authors:Haipeng Zhou, Zhaohu Xing, Hongqiu Wang, Jun Ma, Ping Li, Lei Zhu

Affiliations: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（Guangzhou）, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: Toward Real-World High-Precision Image Matting and Segmentation

Abstract:
Highprecision scene parsing tasks, including image matting and dichotomous segmentation, aim to accurately predict masks with extremely fine details (such as hair). Most existing methods focus on salient, single foreground objects. While interactive methods allow for target adjustment, their class-agnostic design restricts generalization across different categories. Furthermore, the scarcity of high-quality annotation has led to a reliance on inharmonious synthetic data, resulting in poor generalization to real-world scenarios. To this end, we propose a Foreground Consistent Learning model, dubbed as FCLM, to address the aforementioned issues. Specifically, we first introduce a Depth-Aware Distillation strategy where we transfer the depth-related knowledge for better foreground representation. Considering the data dilemma, we term the processing of synthetic data as domain adaptation problem where we propose a domain-invariant learning strategy to focus on foreground learning. To support interactive prediction, we contribute an Object-Oriented Decoder that can receive both visual and language prompts to predict the referring target. Experimental results show that our method quantitatively and qualitatively outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 721, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.03726

Authors:Zhenyu Zhou, Defang Chen, Can Wang, Chun Chen, Siwei Lyu

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security HangZhou High-Tech Zong (Binjiang) Institute of Blockchain and Data Security, University at Buffalo, State University of New York

Title: DICE: Distilling Classifier-Free Guidance into Text Embeddings

Abstract:
Textto-image diffusion models are capable of generating high-quality images, but suboptimal pre-trained text representations often result in these images failing to align closely with the given text prompts. Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is a popular and effective technique for improving text-image alignment in the generative process. However, CFG introduces significant computational overhead. In this paper, we present DIstilling CFG by sharpening text Embeddings (DICE) that replaces CFG in the sampling process with half the computational complexity while maintaining similar generation quality. DICE distills a CFG-based text-to-image diffusion model into a CFG-free version by refining text embeddings to replicate CFG-based directions. In this way, we avoid the computational drawbacks of CFG, enabling high-quality, well-aligned image generation at a fast sampling speed. Furthermore, examining the enhancement pattern, we identify the underlying mechanism of DICE that sharpens specific components of text embeddings to preserve semantic information while enhancing fine-grained details. Extensive experiments on multiple Stable Diffusion v1.5 variants, SDXL, and PixArt-\alpha demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

PaperID: 722, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08186

Authors:Yunhui Zhu, Buliao Huang

Affiliations: Nanjing Audit University, Jinling Institute of Technology

Title: Pixel-level Quality Assessment for Oriented Object Detection

Abstract:
Modern oriented object detectors typically predict a set of bounding boxes and select the topranked ones based on estimated localization quality. Achieving high detection performance requires that the estimated quality closely aligns with the actual localization accuracy. To this end, existing approaches predict the Intersection over Union (IoU) between the predicted and ground-truth (GT) boxes as a proxy for localization quality. However, box-level IoU prediction suffers from a structural coupling issue: since the predicted box is derived from the detector’s internal estimation of the GT box, the predicted IoU—based on their similarity—can be overestimated for poorly localized boxes. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel Pixel-level Quality Assessment (PQA) framework, which replaces box-level IoU prediction with the integration of pixel-level spatial consistency. PQA measures the alignment between each pixel’s relative position to the predicted box and its corresponding position to the GT box. By operating at the pixel level, PQA avoids directly comparing the predicted box with the estimated GT box, thereby eliminating the inherent similarity bias in box-level IoU prediction. Furthermore, we introduce a new integration metric that aggregates pixel-level spatial consistency into a unified quality score, yielding a more accurate approximation of the actual localization quality. Extensive experiments on HRSC2016 and DOTA demonstrate that PQA can be seamlessly integrated into various oriented object detectors, consistently improving performance (e.g., +5.96% AP50:95 on Rotated RetinaNet and +2.32% on STD).

PaperID: 723, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.12279

Authors:Ziyang Zong, Guanying Chen, Zhaohuan Zhan, Fengcheng Yu, Guang Tan

Affiliations: Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University

Title: HouseTune: Two-Stage Floorplan Generation with LLM Assistance

Abstract:
This paper proposes a twostage text-to-floorplan generation framework that combines the reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) with the generative power of diffusion models. In the first stage, we leverage a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting strategy to guide an LLM in generating an initial layout, Layout-Init, from natural language descriptions, which ensures a user-friendly and intuitive design process. However, Layout-Init may lack precise geometric alignment and fine-grained structural details due to the inherent limitations of LLMs. To address this, in the second stage we propose a Dual-Noise Prior-Preserved Diffusion (DNPP-Diffusion) model to refine Layout-Init into a final floorplan that better adheres to physical constraints and user requirements. By combining LLMs and a dedicated refining model, our approach is able to generate high-quality floorplans without requiring large-scale domain-specific training data. Experimental results demonstrate its advantages in comparison with state of the art methods, and validate its effectiveness in home design applications.

PaperID: 724, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11029

Authors:Özgür Akgün, Mun See Chang, Ian P. Gent, Christopher Jefferson

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews, Dundee International Institute of Central South University, University of Dundee

Title: Faster Symmetry Breaking Constraints for Abstract Structures

Abstract:
In constraint programming and related paradigms, a modeller specifies their problem in a modelling language for a solver to search and return its solution(s). Using highlevel modelling languages such as ESSENCE, a modeller may express their problems in terms of abstract structures. These are structures not natively supported by the solvers, and so they have to be transformed into or represented as other structures before solving. For example, nested sets are abstract structures, and they can be represented as matrices in constraint solvers. Many problems contain symmetries and one very common and highly successful technique used in constraint programming is to “break” symmetries, to avoid searching for symmetric solutions. This can speed up the solving process by many orders of magnitude. Most of these symmetry-breaking techniques involve placing some kind of ordering for the variables of the problem, and picking a particular member under the symmetries, usually the smallest. Unfortunately, applying this technique to abstract variables produces a very large number of complex constraints that perform poorly in practice. In this paper, we demonstrate a new incomplete method of breaking the symmetries of abstract structures by better exploiting their representations. We apply the method in breaking the symmetries arising from indistinguishable objects, a commonly occurring type of symmetry, and show that our method is faster than the previous methods proposed in (Akgün et al. 2025).

PaperID: 725, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07337

Authors:Long-Hin Fung, Che Cheng, Jie-Hong Roland Jiang, Friedrich Slivovsky, Tony Tan

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, Graduate Institute of Electronics Engineering, School of Computer Science and Informatics, University of Liverpool

Title: Model Counting for Dependency Quantified Boolean Formulas

Abstract:
Dependency Quantified Boolean Formulas (DQBF) generalize QBF by explicitly specifying which universal variables each existential variable depends on, instead of relying on a linear quantifier order. The satisfiability problem of DQBF is NEXPcomplete, and many hard problems can be succinctly encoded as DQBF. Recent work has revealed a strong analogy between DQBF and SAT: k-DQBF (with k existential variables) is a succinct form of k-SAT, and satisfiability is NEXP-complete for 3-DQBF but PSPACE-complete for 2-DQBF, mirroring the complexity gap between 3-SAT (NP-complete) and 2-SAT (NL-complete). Motivated by this analogy, we study the model counting problem for DQBF, denoted #DQBF. Our main theoretical result is that #2-DQBF is #EXP-complete, where #EXP is the exponential-time analogue of #P. This parallels Valiant's classical theorem stating that #2-SAT is #P-complete. As a direct application, we show that first-order model counting (FOMC) remains #EXP-complete even when restricted to a PSPACE-decidable fragment of first-order logic and domain size two. Building on recent successes in reducing 2-DQBF satisfiability to symbolic model checking, we develop a dedicated 2-DQBF model counter. Using a diverse set of crafted instances, we experimentally evaluated it against a baseline that expands 2-DQBF formulas into propositional formulas and applies propositional model counting. While the baseline worked well when each existential variable depends on few variables, our implementation scaled significantly better to larger dependency sets.

PaperID: 726, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04675

Authors:Kunhang Lv, Yuhang Dong, Rui Han, Fuqi Jia, Feifei Ma, Jian Zhang

Affiliations: Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: LLM-Guided Quantified SMT Solving over Uninterpreted Functions

Abstract:
Quantified formulas with Uninterpreted Functions (UFs) over nonlinear real arithmetic pose fundamental challenges for Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solving. Traditional quantifier instantiation methods struggle because they lack semantic understanding of UF constraints, forcing them to search through unbounded solution spaces with limited guidance. We present AquaForte, a framework that leverages Large Language Models to provide semantic guidance for UF instantiation by generating instantiated candidates for function definitions that satisfy the constraints, thereby significantly reducing the search space and complexity for solvers. Our approach preprocesses formulas through constraint separation, uses structured prompts to extract mathematical reasoning from LLMs, and integrates the results with traditional SMT algorithms through adaptive instantiation. AquaForte maintains soundness through systematic validation: LLM-guided instantiations yielding SAT solve the original problem, while UNSAT results generate exclusion clauses for iterative refinement. Completeness is preserved by fallback to traditional solvers augmented with learned constraints. Experimental evaluation on SMT-COMP benchmarks demonstrates that AquaForte solves numerous instances where state-of-the-art solvers like Z3 and CVC5 timeout, with particular effectiveness on satisfiable formulas. Our work shows that LLMs can provide valuable mathematical intuition for symbolic reasoning, establishing a new paradigm for SMT constraint solving.

PaperID: 727, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21309

Authors:Huaming Du, Yijie Huang, Su Yao, Yiying Wang, Yueyang Zhou, Jingwen Yang, Jinshi Zhang, Han Ji, Yu Zhao, Guisong Liu, Hegui Zhang, Carl Yang, Gang Kou

Affiliations: Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Tsinghua University, Ant Group, Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, Emory University, Xiangjiang Laboratory

Title: Transferable Graph Condensation from the Causal Perspective

Abstract:
The increasing scale of graph datasets has significantly improved the performance of graph representation learning methods, but it has also introduced substantial training challenges. Graph dataset condensation techniques have emerged to compress large datasets into smaller yet informationrich datasets, while maintaining similar test performance. However, these methods strictly require downstream applications to match the original dataset and task, which often fails in cross-task and cross-domain scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a novel causal-invariance-based and transferable graph dataset condensation method, named TGCC, providing effective and transferable condensed datasets. Specifically, to preserve domain-invariant knowledge, we first extract domain causal-invariant features from the spatial domain of the graph using causal interventions. Then, to fully capture the structural and feature information of the original graph, we perform enhanced condensation operations. Finally, through spectral-domain Enhanced contrastive learning, we inject the causal-invariant features into the condensed graph, ensuring that the compressed graph retains the causal information of the original graph. Experimental results on five public datasets and our novel FinReport dataset demonstrate that TGCC achieves up to a 13.41% improvement in cross-task and cross-domain complex scenarios compared to existing methods, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on 5 out of 6 datasets in the single dataset and task scenario.

PaperID: 728, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.10264

Authors:Chengyu Gong, Gefei Shen, Luanzheng Guo, Nathan R. Tallent, Dongfang Zhao

Affiliations: New York University, Harvard University, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, University of Washington

Title: Order-Preserving Dimension Reduction for Multimodal Semantic Embedding

Abstract:
Searching for the knearest neighbors in multimodal data retrieval is computationally expensive, particularly due to the inherent difficulty in comparing similarity measures across different modalities. Recent advances in multimodal machine learning address this issue by mapping data into a shared embedding space; however, the high dimensionality of these embeddings (hundreds to thousands of dimensions) presents a challenge for time-sensitive vision applications. This work proposes Order-Preserving Dimension Reduction (OPDR), aiming to reduce the dimensionality of embeddings while preserving the ranking of KNN in the lower-dimensional space. One notable component of OPDR is a new measure function to quantify KNN quality as a global metric, based on which we derive a closed-form map between target dimensionality and key contextual parameters. We have integrated OPDR with multiple state-of-the-art dimension-reduction techniques, distance functions, and embedding models; experiments on a variety of multimodal datasets demonstrate that OPDR effectively retains recall high accuracy while significantly reducing computational costs.

PaperID: 729, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14221

Authors:Hao Jiang, Guoquan Wang, Donglin Zhou, Sheng Yu, Yang Zeng, Wencong Zeng, Kun Gai, Guorui Zhou

Affiliations: Kuaishou Technology, Independent Researcher

Title: LLM-Aligned Geographic Item Tokenization for Local-Life Recommendation

Abstract:
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enhanced textbased recommendation by enriching traditional ID-based methods with semantic generalization capabilities. Text-based methods typically encode item textual information via prompt design and generate discrete semantic IDs through item tokenization. However, in domain-specific tasks such as local-life services, simply injecting location information into prompts fails to capture fine-grained spatial characteristics and real-world distance awareness among items. To address this, we propose LGSID, an LLM-Aligned Geographic Item Tokenization Framework for Local-life Recommendation. This framework consists of two key components: (1) RL-based Geographic LLM Alignment, and (2) Hierarchical Geographic Item Tokenization. In the RL-based alignment module, we initially train a list-wise reward model to capture real-world spatial relationships among items. We then introduce a novel G-DPO algorithm that uses pre-trained reward model to inject generalized spatial knowledge and collaborative signals into LLMs while preserving their semantic understanding. Furthermore, we propose a hierarchical geographic item tokenization strategy, where primary tokens are derived from discrete spatial and content attributes, and residual tokens are refined using the aligned LLM’s geographic representation vectors. Extensive experiments on real-world Kuaishou industry datasets show that LGSID consistently outperforms state-of-the-art discriminative and generative recommendation models. Ablation studies, visualizations, and case studies further validate its effectiveness.

PaperID: 730, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12061

Authors:Zhichen Lai, Hua Lu, Huan Li, Jialiang Li, Christian S. Jensen

Affiliations: Department of People and Technology, Roskilde University, Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, The State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University, China Hangzhou High-Tech Zone (Binjiang) Institute of Blockchain and Data Security

Title: MovSemCL: Movement-Semantics Contrastive Learning for Trajectory Similarity

Abstract:
Trajectory similarity computation is fundamental functionality that is used for, e.g., clustering, prediction, and anomaly detection. However, existing learningbased methods exhibit three key limitations: (1) insufficient modeling of trajectory semantics and hierarchy, lacking both movement dynamics extraction and multi-scale structural representation; (2) high computational costs due to point-wise encoding; and (3) use of physically implausible augmentations that distort trajectory semantics. To address these issues, we propose MovSem, a movement-semantics contrastive learning framework for trajectory similarity computation. MovSem first transforms raw GPS trajectories into movement-semantics features and then segments them into patches. Next, MovSem employs intra- and inter-patch attentions to encode local as well as global trajectory patterns, enabling efficient hierarchical representation and reducing computational costs. Moreover, MovSem includes a curvature-guided augmentation strategy that preserves informative segments (e.g., turns and intersections) and masks redundant ones, generating physically plausible augmented views. Experiments on real-world datasets show that MovSem is capable of outperforming state-of-the-art methods, achieving mean ranks close to the ideal value of 1 at similarity search tasks and improvements by up to 20.3% at heuristic approximation, while reducing inference latency by up to 43.4%.

PaperID: 731, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15799

Authors:Kun Li, Longtao Hu, Jiameng Chen, Hongzhi Zhang, Yida Xiong, Xiantao Cai, Wenbin Hu, Jia Wu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Shenzhen Research Institute, Department of Computing, Macquarie University

Title: Can Molecular Evolution Mechanism Enhance Molecular Representation?

Abstract:
Molecular evolution is the process of simulating the natural evolution of molecules in chemical space to explore potential molecular structures and properties. The relationships between similar molecules are often described through transformations such as adding, deleting, and modifying atoms and chemical bonds, reflecting specific evolutionary paths. Existing molecular representation methods mainly focus on mining data, such as atomiclevel structures and chemical bonds directly from the molecules, often overlooking their evolutionary history. Consequently, we aim to explore the possibility of enhancing molecular representations by simulating the evolutionary process. We extract and analyze the changes in the evolutionary pathway and explore combining it with existing molecular representations. Therefore, this paper proposes the molecular evolutionary network (MEvoN) for molecular representations. First, we construct the MEvoN using molecules with a small number of atoms and generate evolutionary paths utilizing similarity calculations. Then, by modeling the atomic-level changes, MEvoN reveals their impact on molecular properties. Experimental results show that the MEvoN-based molecular property prediction method significantly improves the performance of traditional end-to-end algorithms by approximately 33% on both the QM7 and QM9 datasets.

PaperID: 732, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.11062

Authors:Jialin Liu, Zhaorui Zhang, Ray C.C. Cheung

Affiliations: City University of Hong Kong, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: MoToRec: Sparse-Regularized Multimodal Tokenization for Cold-Start Recommender

Abstract:
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have revolutionized recommender systems by effectively modeling complex useritem interactions, yet data sparsity and the item cold-start problem significantly impair performance, particularly for new items with limited or no interaction history. While multimodal content offers a promising solution, existing methods result in suboptimal representations for new items due to noise and entanglement in sparse data. To address this, we transform multimodal recommendation into discrete semantic tokenization. We present Sparse-Regularized Multimodal Tokenization for Cold-Start Recommender Systems (MoToRec), a framework centered on a sparsely-regularized Residual Quantized Variational Autoencoder (RQ-VAE) that generates a compositional semantic code of discrete, interpretable tokens, promoting disentangled representations. MoToRec’s architecture is enhanced by three synergistic components: (1) a sparsely regularized RQ-VAE that promotes disentangled representations, (2) a novel adaptive rarity amplification that promotes prioritized learning for cold-start items, and (3) a hierarchical multi-source graph encoder for robust signal fusion with collaborative signals. Extensive experiments on three large-scale datasets demonstrate MoToRec’s superiority over state-of-the-art methods in both overall and cold-start scenarios. Our work validates that discrete tokenization provides an effective and scalable alternative for mitigating the long-standing cold-start challenge.

PaperID: 733, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.14469

Authors:Philipp Liznerski, Saurabh Varshneya, Ece Calikus, Puyu Wang, Alexander Bartscher, Sebastian Josef Vollmer, Sophie Fellenz, Marius Kloft

Affiliations: RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau, Uppsala University

Title: Reimagining Anomalies: What If Anomalies Were Normal?

Abstract:
Deep learningbased methods have achieved a breakthrough in image anomaly detection, but their complexity introduces a considerable challenge to understanding why an instance is predicted to be anomalous. We introduce a novel explanation method that generates multiple alternative modifications for each anomaly, capturing diverse concepts of anomalousness. Each modification is trained to be perceived as normal by the anomaly detector. The method provides a semantic explanation of the mechanism that triggered the detector, allowing users to explore ``what-if scenarios.'' Qualitative and quantitative analyses across various image datasets demonstrate that applying this method to state-of-the-art detectors provides high-quality semantic explanations.

PaperID: 734, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08263

Authors:Yue Min, Shaobo Wang, Jiaze Li, Tianle Niu, Junxin Fan, Yongliang Miao, Lijin Yang, Linfeng Zhang

Affiliations: EPIC Lab, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Bosch Corporate Research Asia Pacific, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Alibaba Group

Title: ImageBindDC: Compressing Multi-modal Data with ImageBind-based Condensation

Abstract:
Data condensation techniques aim to synthesize a compact dataset from a larger one to enable efficient model training, yet while successful in unimodal settings, they often fail in multimodal scenarios where preserving intricate intermodal dependencies is crucial. To address this, we introduce ImageBindDC, a novel data condensation framework operating within the unified feature space of ImageBind. Our approach moves beyond conventional distribution-matching by employing a powerful Characteristic Function (CF) loss, which operates in the Fourier domain to facilitate a more precise statistical alignment via exact infinite moment matching. We design our objective to enforce three critical levels of distributional consistency: (i) uni-modal alignment, which matches the statistical properties of synthetic and real data within each modality; (ii) cross-modal alignment, which preserves pairwise semantics by matching the distributions of hybrid real-synthetic data pairs; and (iii) joint-modal alignment, which captures the complete multivariate data structure by aligning the joint distribution of real data pairs with their synthetic counterparts. Extensive experiments highlight the effectiveness of ImageBindDC: on the NYU-v2 dataset, a model trained on just 5 condensed datapoints per class achieves lossless performance comparable to one trained on the full dataset, achieving a new state-of-the-art with an 8.2% absolute improvement over the previous best method and more than 4× less condensation time.

PaperID: 735, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06049

Authors:Aleena Siji, Joscha Cüppers, Osman Mian, Jilles Vreeken

Affiliations: Helmholtz AI, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Institute for AI in Medicine IKIM

Title: SEQRET: Mining Rule Sets from Event Sequences

Abstract:
Summarizing event sequences is a key aspect of data mining. Most existing methods neglect conditional dependencies and focus on discovering sequential patterns only. In this paper, we study the problem of discovering both conditional and unconditional dependencies from event sequences. We do so by discovering rules of the form X > Y where X and Y are sequential patterns. Rules like these are simple to understand and provide a clear description of the relation between the antecedent and the consequent. To discover succinct and non-redundant sets of rules we formalize the problem in terms of the Minimum Description Length principle. As the search space is enormous and does not exhibit helpful structure, we propose the SEQRET method to discover high-quality rule sets in practice. Through extensive empirical evaluation we show that unlike the state of the art, SEQRET ably recovers the ground truth on synthetic datasets and finds useful rules from real datasets.

PaperID: 736, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17939

Authors:Yuchen Ying, Yiyang Dai, Wenda Li, Wenjie Huang, Rui Wang, Tongya Zheng, Yu Wang, Hanyang Yuan, Mingli Song

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University, School of Computer and Computing Science, Hangzhou City University Hangzhou High-Tech Zone (Binjiang) Institute of Blockchain and Data Security

Title: Neural Graph Navigation for Intelligent Subgraph Matching

Abstract:
Subgraph matching, a cornerstone of relational pattern detection in domains ranging from biochemical systems to social network analysis, faces significant computational challenges due to the dramatically growing search space. Existing methods address this problem within a filteringordering-enumeration framework, in which the enumeration stage recursively matches the query graph against the candidate subgraphs of the data graph. However, the lack of awareness of subgraph structural patterns leads to a costly brute-force enumeration, thereby critically motivating the need for intelligent navigation in subgraph matching. To address this challenge, we propose Neural Graph Navigation (NeuGN), a neuro-heuristic framework that transforms brute-force enumeration into neural-guided search by integrating neural navigation mechanisms into the core enumeration process. By preserving heuristic-based completeness guarantees while incorporating neural intelligence, NeuGN significantly reduces the First Match Steps by up to 98.2% compared to state-of-the-art methods across six real-world datasets.

PaperID: 737, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06976

Authors:Liheng Yu, Zhe Zhao, Xucong Wang, Di Wu, Pengkun Wang

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, Hong Kong

Title: Rethinking Crystal Symmetry Prediction: A Decoupled Perspective

Abstract:
Efficiently and accurately determining the symmetry is a crucial step in the structural analysis of crystalline materials. Existing methods usually mindlessly apply deep learning models while ignoring the underlying chemical rules. More importantly, experiments show that they face a serious subproperty confusion SPC problem. To address the above challenges, from a decoupled perspective, we introduce the XRDecoupler framework, a problem-solving arsenal specifically designed to tackle the SPC problem. Imitating the thinking process of chemists, we innovatively incorporate multidimensional crystal symmetry information as superclass guidance to ensure that the model's prediction process aligns with chemical intuition. We further design a hierarchical PXRD pattern learning model and a multi-objective optimization approach to achieve high-quality representation and balanced optimization. Comprehensive evaluations on three mainstream databases (e.g., CCDC, CoREMOF, and InorganicData) demonstrate that XRDecoupler excels in performance, interpretability, and generalization.

PaperID: 738, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.16905

Authors:Jian Zhang, Zhiyuan Wang, Zhangqi Wang, Fangzhi Xu, Qika Lin, Lingling Zhang, Rui Mao, Erik Cambria, Jun Liu

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University

Title: MAPS: Multi-Agent Personality Shaping for Collaborative Reasoning

Abstract:
Collaborative reasoning with multiple agents offers the potential for more robust and diverse problemsolving. However, existing approaches often suffer from homogeneous agent behaviors and lack of reflective and rethinking capabilities. We propose Multi-Agent Personality Shaping ((MAPS), a novel framework that enhances reasoning through agent diversity and internal critique. Inspired by the Big Five personality theory, MAPS assigns distinct personality traits to individual agents, shaping their reasoning styles and promoting heterogeneous collaboration. To enable deeper and more adaptive reasoning, MAPS introduces a Critic agent that reflects on intermediate outputs, revisits flawed steps, and guides iterative refinement. This integration of personality-driven agent design and structured collaboration improves both reasoning depth and flexibility. Empirical evaluations across three benchmarks demonstrate the strong performance of MAPS, with further analysis confirming its generalizability across different large language models and validating the benefits of multi-agent collaboration.

PaperID: 739, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12913

Authors:Yiming Zhao, Jiwei Tang, Shimin Di, Libin Zheng, Jianxing Yu, Jian Yin

Affiliations: Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Sun Yat-sen University, Tsinghua University, Southeast University Key Laboratory of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Technology and Its Interdisciplinary Applications

Title: CoS: Towards Optimal Event Scheduling via Chain-of-Scheduling

Abstract:
Recommending event schedules is a key issue in Eventbased Social Networks (EBSNs) in order to maintain user activity. An effective recommendation is required to maximize the user's preference, subjecting to both time and geographical constraints. Existing methods face an inherent trade-off among efficiency, effectiveness, and generalization, due to the NP-hard nature of the problem. This paper proposes the Chain-of-Scheduling (CoS) framework, which activates the event scheduling capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) through a guided, efficient scheduling process. CoS enhances LLM by formulating the schedule task into three atomic stages, i.e., exploration, verification and integration. Then we enable the LLMs to generate CoS autonomously via Knowledge Distillation (KD). Experimental results show that CoS achieves near-theoretical optimal effectiveness with high efficiency on three real-world datasets in a interpretable manner. Moreover, it demonstrates strong zero-shot learning ability on out-of-domain data.

PaperID: 740, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07998

Authors:Yushan Zhu, Wen Zhang, Long Jin, Mengshu Sun, Ling Zhong, Zhiqiang Liu, Juan Li, Lei Liang, Chong Long, Chao Deng, Junlan Feng

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Ant Group, JIUTIAN Research

Title: Self-Correction Distillation for Structured Data Question Answering

Abstract:
Structured data question answering (QA), including table QA, Knowledge Graph (KG) QA, and temporal KG QA, is a pivotal research area. Advances in large language models (LLMs) have driven significant progress in unified structural QA frameworks like TrustUQA. However, these frameworks face challenges when applied to smallscale LLMs since small-scale LLMs are prone to errors in generating structured queries. To improve the structured data QA ability of small-scale LLMs, we propose a self-correction distillation (SCD) method. In SCD, an error prompt mechanism (EPM) is designed to detect errors and provide customized error messages during inference, and a two-stage distillation strategy is designed to transfer large-scale LLMs' query-generation and error-correction capabilities to small-scale LLM. Experiments across 5 benchmarks with 3 structured data types demonstrate that our SCD achieves the best performance and superior generalization on small-scale LLM (8B) compared to other distillation methods, and closely approaches the performance of GPT4 on some datasets. Furthermore, large-scale LLMs equipped with EPM surpass the state-of-the-art results on most datasets.

PaperID: 741, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.10328

Authors:Yiqing Zou, Hanning Yuan, Qianyu Yang, Ziqiang Yuan, Shuliang Wang, Sijie Ruan

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology

Title: Meta Dynamic Graph for Traffic Flow Prediction

Abstract:
Traffic flow prediction is a typical spatiotemporal prediction problem and has a wide range of applications. The core challenge lies in modeling the underlying complex spatio-temporal dependencies. Various methods have been proposed, and recent studies show that the modeling of dynamics is useful to meet the core challenge. While handling spatial dependencies and temporal dependencies using separate base model structures may hinder the modeling of spatio-temporal correlations, the modeling of dynamics can bridge this gap. Incorporating spatio-temporal heterogeneity also advances the main goal, since it can extend the parameter space and allow more flexibility. Despite these advances, two limitations persist: 1) the modeling of dynamics is often limited to the dynamics of spatial topology (e.g., adjacency matrix changes), which, however, can be extended to a broader scope; 2) the modeling of heterogeneity is often separated for spatial and temporal dimensions, but this gap can also be bridged by the modeling of dynamics. To address the above limitations, we propose a novel framework for traffic prediction, called Meta Dynamic Graph (MetaDG). MetaDG leverages dynamic graph structures of node representations to explicitly model spatio-temporal dynamics. This generates both dynamic adjacency matrices and meta-parameters, extending dynamic modeling beyond topology while unifying the capture of spatio-temporal heterogeneity into a single dimension. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of MetaDG.

PaperID: 742, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07763

Authors:Tatiana Belova, Yuriy Dementiev, Artur Ignatiev, Danil Sagunov

Affiliations: ITMO University

Title: Structural Approach to Guiding a PresentBiased Agent

Abstract:
Timeinconsistent behavior, such as procrastination or abandonment of long-term goals, arises when agents evaluate immediate outcomes disproportionately higher than future ones. This leads to globally suboptimal behavior, where plans are frequently revised or abandoned entirely. In the influential model of Kleinberg and Oren (2014) such behavior is modeled by a present-biased agent navigating a task graph toward a goal, making locally optimal decisions at each step based on discounted future costs. As a result, the agent may repeatedly deviate from initially intended plans. Recent work by Belova et al. (2024) introduced a two-agent extension of this model, where a fully-aware principal attempts to guide the present-biased agent through a specific set of critical tasks without causing abandonment. This captures a rich class of principal–agent dynamics in behavioral settings. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive algorithmic characterization of this problem. We analyze its computational complexity through the framework of parameterized algorithms, focusing on graph parameters that naturally emerge in this setting, such as treewidth, vertex cover, and feedback vertex set. Our main result is a fixed-parameter tractable algorithm when parameterized by the treewidth of the task graph and the number of distinct (v,t)-path costs. Our algorithm encaptures several input settings, such as bounded edge costs and restricted task graph structure. We demonstrate that our main result yields efficient algorithms for a number of such configurations. We complement this with tight hardness results, that highlight the extreme difficulty of the problem even on simplest graphs with bounded number of nodes and constant parameter values, and motivate our choice of parameters. We delineate tractable and intractable regions of the problem landscape, which include answers to open questions of Belova et al. (2024).

PaperID: 743, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10204

Authors:Jakub Černý, Shuvomoy Das Gupta, Christian Kroer

Affiliations: Columbia University, Rice University

Title: Spatial Branch-and-Bound for Computing Multiplayer Nash Equilibrium

Abstract:
Equilibria of realistic multiplayer games constitute a key solution concept both in practical applications, such as online advertising auctions and electricity markets, and in analytical frameworks used to study strategic voting in elections or assess policy impacts in integrated assessment models. However, efficiently computing these equilibria requires games to have a carefully designed structure and satisfy numerous restrictions; otherwise, the computational complexity becomes prohibitive. In particular, finding even approximate Nash equilibria in general normalform games with three or more players is known to be PPAD-complete. Current state-of-the-art algorithms for computing Nash equilibria in multiplayer normal-form games either suffer from poor scalability due to their reliance on non-convex optimization solvers, or lack guarantees of convergence to a true equilibrium. In this paper, we propose a novel reformulation of the Nash equilibrium computation problem and develop a complete and sound spatial branch-and-bound algorithm based on this reformulation. We provide a qualitative analysis arguing why one should expect our approach to perform better than conventional formulation, and show the relationship between approximate solution to our reformulation and that of computing an approximate Nash equilibrium. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our algorithm substantially outperforms existing complete methods.

PaperID: 744, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15812

Authors:Piotr Faliszewski, Krzysztof Sornat, Stanisław Szufa, Tomasz Wąs

Affiliations: AGH University, Poland CNRS, Université Paris Dauphine – PSL, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Title: Diversity of Structured Domains via k-Kemeny Scores

Abstract:
In the kKemeny problem, we are given an ordinal election, i.e., a collection of votes ranking the candidates from best to worst, and we seek the smallest number of swaps of adjacent candidates that ensure that the election has at most k different rankings. We study this problem for a number of structured domains, including the single-peaked, single-crossing, group-separable, and Euclidean ones. We obtain two kinds of results: (1) We show that k-Kemeny remains intractable under most of these domains, even for k=2, and (2) we use k-Kemeny to rank these domains in terms of their diversity.

PaperID: 745, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10892

Authors:Jugal Garg, Vishnu V. Narayan, Yuang Eric Shen

Affiliations: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Title: Designing Truthful Mechanisms for Asymptotic Fair Division

Abstract:
We study the problem of fairly allocating a set of m goods among n agents in the asymptotic setting, where each item's value for each agent is drawn from an underlying joint distribution. Prior works have shown that if this distribution is wellbehaved, then an envy-free allocation exists with high probability when m=Ω(n log n). Under the stronger assumption that item values are independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) across agents, it is known that this requirement improves to m=Ω(n log n / log log n), which is tight. However, these results rely on non-strategyproof mechanisms, such as maximum-welfare allocation or the round-robin algorithm, limiting their applicability in settings with strategic agents. In this work, we extend the theory to a broader, more realistic class of joint value distributions, allowing for correlations among agents, atomicity, and unequal probabilities of having the highest value for an item. We show that envy-free allocations continue to exist with a high probability when m=Ω(n log n). More importantly, we give a new randomized mechanism that is truthful in expectation, efficiently implementable in polynomial time, and outputs envy-free allocations with high probability, answering an open question from the literature. We further extend our mechanism to settings with asymptotic weighted fair division and multiple agent types and good types, proving new results in each case.

PaperID: 746, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13432

Authors:Paul Gölz, Hannane Yaghoubizade

Affiliations: Cornell University, School of Operations Research and Information Engineering

Title: Fair Division Among Couples and Small Groups

Abstract:
We study the fair allocation of indivisible goods across groups of agents, where each agent fully enjoys all goods allocated to their group. We focus on groups of two (couples) and other groups of small size. For two couples, an EF1 allocation — one in which all agents find their group's bundle no worse than the other group's, up to one good — always exists and can be found efficiently. For three or more couples, EF1 allocations need not exist. Turning to proportionality, we show that, whenever groups have size at most k, a PROPk allocation exists and can be found efficiently. In fact, our algorithm additionally guarantees (fractional) Pareto optimality and PROP1 to the first agent in each group, PROP2 to the second, and so on, for an arbitrary agent ordering. In special cases, we show that there are PROP1 allocations for any number of couples.

PaperID: 747, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.04530

Authors:Yannai A. Gonczarowski, Michael Yin, Shirley Zhang

Affiliations: Harvard University, Paris School of Economics

Title: Multi-District School Choice: Playing on Several Fields

Abstract:
We extend the seminal model of Pathak and Sönmez (2008) to a setting with multiple school districts, each running its own separate centralized match, and focus on the case of two districts. In our setting, in addition to each student being either sincere or sophisticated, she is also either constrained—able to apply only to schools within her own district of residence—or unconstrained—able to choose any single district within which to apply. We show that several key results from Pathak and Sönmez (2008) qualitatively flip: A sophisticated student may prefer for a sincere student to become sophisticated, and a sophisticated student may prefer for her own district to use Deferred Acceptance over the Boston Mechanism, irrespective of the mechanism used by the other district. We furthermore show that an unconstrained student may prefer for a constrained student to become unconstrained, regardless of the mechanisms used. Many of these phenomena appear abundantly in large random markets.

PaperID: 748, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11319

Authors:Quentin Hillebrand, Pasin Manurangsi, Vorapong Suppakitpaisarn, Phanu Vajanopath

Affiliations: Copenhagen University, Google Research, The University of Tokyo, University of Wroclaw

Title: Improved Differentially Private Algorithms for Rank Aggregation

Abstract:
Rank aggregation is a task of combining the rankings of items from multiple users into a single ranking that best represents the users' rankings. Alabi et al. (AAAI'22) presents differentiallyprivate (DP) polynomial-time approximation schemes (PTASes) and 5-approximation algorithms with certain additive errors for the Kemeny rank aggregation problem in both central and local models. In this paper, we present improved DP PTASes with smaller additive error in the central model. Furthermore, we are first to study the footrule rank aggregation problem under DP. We give a near-optimal algorithm for this problem; as a corollary, this leads to 2-approximation algorithms with the same additive error as the 5-approximation algorithms of Alabi et al. for the Kemeny rank aggregation problem in both central and local models.

PaperID: 749, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00616

Authors:Wesley H. Holliday, Milan Mossé, Chase Norman, Eric Pacuit, Cynthia Wang

Affiliations: University of California, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Maryland

Title: Stable Voting and the Splitting of Cycles

Abstract:
Algorithms for resolving majority cycles in preference aggregation have been studied extensively in computational social choice. Several sophisticated cycleresolving methods, including Tideman's Ranked Pairs, Schulze's Beat Path, and Heitzig's River, are refinements of the Split Cycle (SC) method that resolves majority cycles by discarding the weakest majority victories in each cycle. Recently, Holliday and Pacuit proposed a new refinement of Split Cycle, dubbed Stable Voting, and a simplification thereof, called Simple Stable Voting (SSV). They conjectured that SSV is a refinement of SC whenever no two majority victories are of the same size. In this paper, we prove the conjecture up to 6 alternatives and refute it for more than 6 alternatives. While our proof of the conjecture for up to 5 alternatives uses traditional mathematical reasoning, our 6-alternative proof and 7-alternative counterexample were obtained with the use of SAT solving. The SAT encoding underlying this proof and counterexample is applicable far beyond SC and SSV: it can be used to test properties of any voting method whose choice of winners depends only on the ordering of margins of victory by size.

PaperID: 750, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04624

Authors:Eugene Lim, Tzeh Yuan Neoh, Nicholas Teh

Affiliations: National University of Singapore, Harvard University, University of Oxford

Title: Fairness in Repeated Matching: A Maximin Perspective

Abstract:
We study a sequential decisionmaking model where a set of items is repeatedly matched to the same set of agents over multiple rounds. The objective is to determine a sequence of matchings that either maximizes the utility of the least advantaged agent at the end of all rounds (optimal) or at the end of every individual round (anytime optimal). We investigate the computational challenges associated with finding (anytime) optimal outcomes and demonstrate that these problems are generally computationally intractable. However, we provide approximation algorithms, fixed-parameter tractable algorithms, and identify several special cases whereby the problem(s) can be solved efficiently. Along the way, we also establish characterizations of Pareto-optimal/maximum matchings, which may be of independent interest to works in matching theory and house allocation.

PaperID: 751, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15036

Authors:Kamal Mammadov, Damith C. Ranasinghe

Affiliations: University of Adelaide

Title: Area-Optimal Control Strategies for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Pursuit

Abstract:
This paper presents a novel strategy for a multiagent pursuit-evasion game involving multiple faster pursuers with heterogenous speeds and a single slower evader. We define a geometric region, the evader's safe-reachable set, as the intersection of Apollonius circles derived from each pursuer-evader pair. The capture strategy is formulated as a zero-sum game where the pursuers cooperatively minimize the area of this set, while the evader seeks to maximize it, effectively playing a game of spatial containment. By deriving the analytical gradients of the safe-reachable set's area with respect to agent positions, we obtain closed-form, instantaneous optimal control laws for the heading of each agent. These strategies are computationally efficient, allowing for real-time implementation. Simulations demonstrate that the gradient-based controls effectively steer the pursuers to systematically shrink the evader’s safe region, leading to guaranteed capture. This area-minimization approach provides a clear geometric objective for cooperative capture.

PaperID: 752, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12549

Authors:Atasi Panda, Harsh Sharma, Anand Louis, Prajakta Nimbhorkar

Affiliations: Indian Institute of Science, Chennai Mathematical Institute

Title: Group Fair Matchings Using Convex Cost Functions

Abstract:
We consider the problem of assigning items to platforms where each item has a utility associated with each of the platforms to which it can be assigned. Each platform has a soft constraint over the total number of items it serves, modeled via a convex cost function. Additionally, items are partitioned into groups, and each platform also incurs groupspecific convex cost over the number of items from each group that can be assigned to the platform. These costs promote group fairness by penalizing imbalances, yielding a soft variation of fairness notions introduced in prior work, such as Restricted Dominance and Minority protection. Restricted Dominance enforces upper bounds on group representation, while Minority protection enforces lower bounds. Our approach replaces such hard constraints with cost-based penalties, allowing more flexible trade-offs. Our model also captures Nash Social Welfare kind of objective. The cost of an assignment is the sum of the values of all the cost functions across all the groups and platforms. The objective is to find an assignment that minimizes the cost while achieving a total utility that is at least a user-specified threshold. The main challenge lies in balancing the overall platform cost with group-specific costs, both governed by convex functions, while meeting the utility constraint. We present an efficient polynomial-time approximation algorithm, supported by theoretical guarantees and experimental evaluation. Our algorithm is based on techniques involving linear programming and network flows. We also provide an exact algorithm for a special case with uniform utilities and establish the hardness of the general problem when the groups can intersect arbitrarily. This work has applications in cloud computing, logistics, resource-constrained machine learning deployment, federated learning, and network design, where resources must be allocated across platforms with diverse cost structures and diminishing returns.

PaperID: 753, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.15184

Authors:Kelsey Sikes, Sarah Keren, Sarath Sreedharan

Affiliations: Colorado State University, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology

Title: Reducing Goal State Divergence with Environment Design

Abstract:
Generating behaviors that align with human expectations is a key requirement for humanrobot collaboration. Potential behavior misalignment could lead to the robot performing actions with unanticipated, potentially dangerous side effects even while pursuing human goals. In this paper, we introduce a novel metric called Goal State Divergence (GSD) which quantifies the difference between the state a robot achieved in response to a human-specified goal and what the human expected. In cases where GSD cannot be directly calculated, we show how it can be approximated using maximal and minimal bounds. We then leverage GSD in our novel human-robot goal alignment design (HRGAD) problem, which identifies a minimal set of environment modifications that can reduce such mismatches. We show the effectiveness of our method in reducing the goal state divergence by empirically evaluating our approach on several planning benchmarks.

PaperID: 754, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.17704

Authors:Silvia Tulli, Stylianos Loukas Vasileiou, Mohamed CHETOUANI, Sarath Sreedharan

Affiliations: Sorbonne University, New Mexico State University, Colorado State University

Title: Inferring Implicit Goals Across Differing Task Models

Abstract:
One of the significant challenges to generating valuealigned behavior is to not only account for the specified user objectives but also any implicit or unspecified user requirements. The existence of such implicit requirements could be particularly common in settings where the user's understanding of the task model may differ from the agent's estimate of the model. Under this scenario, the user may incorrectly expect some agent behavior to be inevitable or guaranteed. This paper addresses such expectation mismatch in the presence of differing models by capturing the possibility of unspecified user subgoal in the context of a task captured as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and querying for it as required. Our method identifies bottleneck states and uses them as candidates for potential implicit subgoals. We then introduce a querying strategy that will generate the minimal number of queries required to identify a policy guaranteed to achieve the underlying goal. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in inferring and achieving unstated goals across various tasks.

PaperID: 755, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15085

Authors:Wen Yin, Siyu Zhan, Cencen Liu, Xin Hu, Guiduo Duan, Xiurui Xie, Yuan-Fang Li, Tao He

Affiliations: The Laboratory of Intelligent Collaborative Computing of University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University

Title: TiCAL:Typicality-Based Consistency-Aware Learning for Multimodal Emotion Recognition

Abstract:
Multimodal Emotion Recognition (MER) aims to accurately identify human emotional states by integrating heterogeneous modalities such as visual, auditory, and textual data. Existing approaches predominantly rely on unified emotion labels to supervise model training, often overlooking a critical challenge: intermodal emotion conflicts, wherein different modalities within the same sample may express divergent emotional tendencies. In this work, we address this overlooked issue by proposing a novel framework, Typicality-based Consistent-aware Multimodal Emotion Recognition (TiCAL), inspired by the stage-wise nature of human emotion perception. TiCAL dynamically assesses the consistency of each training sample by leveraging pseudo unimodal emotion labels alongside a typicality estimation. To further enhance emotion representation, we embed features in a hyperbolic space, enabling the capture of fine-grained distinctions among emotional categories. By incorporating consistency estimates into the learning process, our method improves model performance, particularly on samples exhibiting high modality inconsistency. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, e.g, MOSEI and MER2023, validate the effectiveness of TiCAL in mitigating inter-modal emotional conflicts and enhancing overall recognition accuracy, e.g., with about 2.6% improvements over the state-of-the-art DMD.

PaperID: 756, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10987

Authors:Wenbin Bai, Qiyu Chen, Xiangbo Lin, Jw L, Quancheng Li, Hejiang Pan, Yi Sun

Affiliations: Dalian University of Technology, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Dexterous Manipulation Transfer via Progressive Kinematic-Dynamic Alignment

Abstract:
The inherent difficulty and limited scalability of collecting manipulation data using multifingered robot hand hardware platforms have resulted in severe data scarcity, impeding research on data-driven dexterous manipulation policy learning. To address this challenge, we present a hand-agnostic manipulation transfer system. It efficiently converts human hand manipulation sequences from demonstration videos into high-quality dexterous manipulation trajectories without requirements of massive training data. To tackle the multi-dimensional disparities between human hands and dexterous hands, as well as the challenges posed by high-degree-of-freedom coordinated control of dexterous hands, we design a progressive transfer framework: first, we establish primary control signals for dexterous hands based on kinematic matching; subsequently, we train residual policies with action space rescaling and thumb-guided initialization to dynamically optimize contact interactions under unified rewards; finally, we compute wrist control trajectories with the objective of preserving operational semantics. Using only human hand manipulation videos, our system automatically configures system parameters for different tasks, balancing kinematic matching and dynamic optimization across dexterous hands, object categories, and tasks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our framework can automatically generate smooth and semantically correct dexterous hand manipulation that faithfully reproduces human intentions, achieving high efficiency and strong generalizability with an average transfer success rate of 73%, providing an easily implementable and scalable method for collecting robot dexterous manipulation data. Refer to the arXiv version for the appendix.

PaperID: 757, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23523

Authors:Hongzhe Bi, Lingxuan Wu, Tianwei Lin, Hengkai Tan, Zhizhong Su, Hang Su, Jun Zhu

Affiliations: Dept. of Comp. Sci. and Tech., Institute for AI, BNRist Center, THBI Lab, Tsinghua-Bosch Joint ML Center, Tsinghua University, Horizon Robotics

Title: H-RDT: Human Manipulation Enhanced Bimanual Robotic Manipulation

Abstract:
Imitation learning for robotic manipulation faces a fundamental challenge: the scarcity of largescale, high-quality robot demonstration data. Recent robotic foundation models often pre-train on cross-embodiment robot datasets to increase data scale, while they face significant limitations as the diverse morphologies and action spaces across different robot embodiments make unified training challenging. In this paper, we present H-RDT (Human to Robotics Diffusion Transformer), a novel approach that leverages human manipulation data to enhance robot manipulation capabilities. Our key insight is that large-scale egocentric human manipulation videos with paired 3D hand pose annotations provide rich behavioral priors that capture natural manipulation strategies and can benefit robotic policy learning. We introduce a two-stage training paradigm: (1) pre-training on large-scale egocentric human manipulation data, and (2) cross-embodiment fine-tuning on robot-specific data with modular action encoders and decoders. Built on a diffusion transformer architecture with 2B parameters, H-RDT uses flow matching to model complex action distributions. The modular design of action encoder and decoder components enables effective knowledge transfer from the unified human embodiment to diverse robot platforms through efficient fine-tuning. Extensive evaluations encompassing both simulation and real-world experiments, single-task and multitask scenarios, as well as few-shot learning and robustness assessments, demonstrate that H-RDT outperforms training from scratch and existing state-of-the-art methods, including π0 and RDT, achieving significant improvements of 13.9% and 40.5% over training from scratch in simulation and real-world experiments, respectively. The results validate our core hypothesis that human manipulation data can serve as a powerful foundation for learning bimanual robotic manipulation policies.

PaperID: 758, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14222

Authors:Xichen Ding, Jianzhe Gao, Cong Pan, Wenguan Wang, Jie Qin

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Zhejiang University

Title: History-Enhanced Two-Stage Transformer for Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation

Abstract:
Aerial Visionand-Language Navigation (AVLN) requires Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) agents to localize targets in large-scale urban environments based on linguistic instructions. While successful navigation demands both global environmental reasoning and local scene comprehension, existing UAV agents typically adopt mono-granularity frameworks that struggle to balance these two aspects. To address this limitation, this work proposes a History-Enhanced Two-Stage Transformer (HETT) framework, which integrates the two aspects through a coarse-to-fine navigation pipeline. Specifically, HETT first predicts coarse-grained target positions by fusing spatial landmarks and historical context, then refines actions via fine-grained visual analysis. In addition, a historical grid map is designed to dynamically aggregate visual features into a structured spatial memory, enhancing comprehensive scene awareness. Additionally, the CityNav dataset annotations are manually refined to enhance data quality. Experiments on the refined CityNav dataset show that HETT delivers significant performance gains, while extensive ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of each component.

PaperID: 759, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04699

Authors:Zebin Han, Xudong Wang, Baichen Liu, Qi Lyu, Zhenduo Shang, Jiahua Dong, Lianqing Liu, Zhi Han

Affiliations: Shenyang Institute of Automation, State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Intelligent Systems, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

Title: SeqWalker: Sequential-Horizon Vision-and-Language Navigation with Hierarchical Planning

Abstract:
SequentialHorizon Vision-and-Language Navigation (SH-VLN) presents a challenging scenario where agents should sequentially execute multi-task trajectory navigation guided by complex, long-horizon natural language instructions. Current vision-and-language navigation models exhibit significant performance degradation with such instructions, as information overload impairs the agent's ability to attend to observationally relevant details. To address this problem, we propose SeqWalker, a novel navigation model built on a hierarchical planning framework. Our SeqWalker features: (1) A High-Level Planner that dynamically selects global instructions into contextually relevant sub-instructions based on the agent's current visual observations, thus reducing cognitive load; (2) A Low-Level Planner incorporating an Exploration-Verification strategy that leverages the inherent logical structure of instructions for trajectory error correction. To evaluate SH-VLN performance, we also extend the IVLN dataset and establish a new benchmark. Extensive experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of SeqWalker.

PaperID: 760, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11076

Authors:Jiaqi Liang, Yue Chen, Qize Yu, Yan Shen, Haipeng Zhang, Hao Dong, Ruihai Wu

Affiliations: Peking University

Title: A3D: Adaptive Affordance Assembly with Dual-Arm Manipulation

Abstract:
Furniture assembly is a crucial yet challenging task for robots, requiring precise dualarm coordination where one arm manipulates parts while the other provides collaborative support and stabilization. To accomplish this task more effectively, robots need to actively adapt support strategies throughout the long-horizon assembly process, while also generalizing across diverse part geometries. We propose A3D, a framework which learns adaptive affordances to identify optimal support and stabilization locations on furniture parts. The method employs dense point-level geometric representations to model part interaction patterns, enabling generalization across varied geometries. To handle evolving assembly states, we introduce an adaptive module that uses interaction feedback to dynamically adjust support strategies during assembly based on previous interactions. We establish a simulation environment featuring 50 diverse parts across 8 furniture types, designed for dual-arm collaboration evaluation. Experiments demonstrate that our framework generalizes effectively to diverse part geometries and furniture categories in both simulation and real-world settings.

PaperID: 761, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07146

Authors:Yu Liu, Zhijie Liu, Xiao Ren, Youfu Li, He Kong

Affiliations: Southern University of Science and Technology, City University of Hong Kong

Title: IntentionAware Diffusion Model for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction

Abstract:
Predicting pedestrian motion trajectories is critical for the path planning and motion control of autonomous vehicles. Recent diffusionbased models have shown promising results in capturing the inherent stochasticity of pedestrian behavior for trajectory prediction. However, the absence of explicit semantic modelling of pedestrian intent in many diffusion-based methods may result in misinterpreted behaviors and reduced prediction accuracy. To address the above challenges, we propose a diffusion-based pedestrian trajectory prediction framework that incorporates both short-term and long-term motion intentions. Short-term intent is modelled using a residual polar representation, which decouples direction and magnitude to capture fine-grained local motion patterns. Long-term intent is estimated through a learnable, token-based endpoint predictor that generates multiple candidate goals with associated probabilities, enabling multimodal and context-aware intention modelling. Furthermore, we enhance the diffusion process by incorporating adaptive guidance and a residual noise predictor that dynamically refines denoising accuracy. The proposed framework is evaluated on the widely used ETH, UCY, NBA, and SDD benchmarks, demonstrating competitive results against state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 762, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07553

Authors:Kabir Swain, Sijie Han, Ayush Raina, Jin Zhang, Shuang Li, Michael Stopa, Antonio Torralba

Affiliations: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Toronto, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Google Deepmind

Title: VirtualEnv: A Platform for Embodied AI Research

Abstract:
As large language models (LLMs) continue to improve in reasoning and decisionmaking, there is a growing need for realistic and interactive environments where their abilities can be rigorously evaluated. We present VirtualEnv, a next-generation simulation platform built on Unreal Engine 5 that enables fine-grained benchmarking of LLMs in embodied and interactive scenarios. VirtualEnv supports rich agent–environment interactions, including object manipulation, navigation, and adaptive multi-agent collaboration, as well as game-inspired mechanics like escape rooms and procedurally generated environments. We provide a user-friendly API built on top of Unreal Engine, allowing researchers to deploy and control LLM-driven agents using natural language instructions. We integrate large-scale LLMs and vision-language models (VLMs), such as GPT-based models, to generate novel environments and structured tasks from multimodal inputs. Our experiments benchmark the performance of several popular LLMs across tasks of increasing complexity, analyzing differences in adaptability, planning, and multi-agent coordination. We also describe our methodology for procedural task generation, task validation, and real-time environment control. VirtualEnv is released as an open-source platform, we aim to advance research at the intersection of AI and gaming, enable standardized evaluation of LLMs in embodied AI settings, and pave the way for future developments in immersive simulations and interactive entertainment.

PaperID: 763, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10416

Authors:Zhuoyuan Yu, Yuxing Long, Zihan Yang, Chengyan Zeng, Hongwei Fan, Jiyao Zhang, Hao Dong

Affiliations: Peking University, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: CorrectNav: Self-Correction Flywheel Empowers Vision-Language-Action Navigation Model

Abstract:
Existing visionand-language navigation models often deviate from the correct trajectory when executing instructions. However, these models lack effective error correction capability, hindering their recovery from errors. To address this challenge, we propose Self-correction Flywheel, a novel post-training paradigm. Instead of considering the model’s error trajectories on the training set as a drawback, our paradigm emphasizes their significance as a valuable data source. We have developed a method to identify deviations in these error trajectories and devised innovative techniques to automatically generate self-correction data for perception and action. These self-correction data serve as fuel to power the model’s continued training. The brilliance of our paradigm is revealed when we re-evaluate the model on the training set, uncovering new error trajectories. At this time, the self-correction flywheel begins to spin. Through multiple flywheel iterations, we progressively enhance our monocular RGB-based VLA navigation model CorrectNav. Experiments on R2R-CE and RxR-CE benchmarks show CorrectNav achieves new state-of-the-art success rates of 65.1% and 69.3%, surpassing prior best VLA navigation models by 8.2% and 16.4%. Real robot tests in various indoor and outdoor environments demonstrate \method's superior capability of error correction, dynamic obstacle avoidance, and long instruction following.

PaperID: 764, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01232

Authors:Andrew Cropper, David M. Cerna

Affiliations: ELLIS Institute Finland University of Helsinki, Dynatrace Research Czech Academy of Sciences Institute of Computer Science

Title: Efficient Rule Induction by Ignoring Pointless Rules

Abstract:
The goal of inductive logic programming (ILP) is to find a set of logical rules that generalises training examples and background knowledge. We introduce an ILP approach that identifies pointless rules. A rule is pointless if it contains a redundant literal or cannot discriminate against negative examples. We show that ignoring pointless rules allows an ILP system to soundly prune the hypothesis space. Our experiments on multiple domains, including visual reasoning and game playing, show that our approach can reduce learning times by 99% whilst maintaining predictive accuracies.

PaperID: 765, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08982

Authors:Preesha Gehlot, Anna Rapberger, Fabrizio Russo, Francesca Toni

Affiliations: Imperial College London, Department of Computing, Faculty of Computer Science

Title: Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks for Assumption-Based Argumentation

Abstract:
Assumption‐Based Argumentation (ABA) is a powerful structured argumentation formalism, but exact computation of extensions under stable semantics is intractable for large frameworks. We present the first Graph Neural Network (GNN) approach to approximate credulous acceptance in ABA. To leverage GNNs, we model ABA frameworks via a dependency graph representation encoding assumptions, claims and rules as nodes, with heterogeneous edge labels distinguishing support, derive and attack relations. We propose two GNN architectures—ABAGCN and ABAGAT—that stack residual heterogeneous convolution or attention layers, respectively, to learn node embeddings. Our models are trained on the ICCMA 2023 benchmark, augmented with synthetic ABAFs, with hyperparameters optimised via Bayesian search. Empirically, both ABAGCN and ABAGAT outperform a state‐of‐the‐art GNN baseline that we adapt from the abstract argumentation iterature, achieving a node‐level F1 score of up to 0.71 on the ICCMA instances. Finally, we develop a sound polynomial time extension‐reconstruction algorithm driven by our predictor: it reconstructs stable extensions with F1 above 0.85 on small ABAFs and maintains an F1 of about 0.58 on large frameworks. Our work opens new avenues for scalable approximate reasoning in structured argumentation.

PaperID: 766, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.09485

Authors:Antonio Ielo, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Rafael Peñaloza, Francesco Ricca

Affiliations: University of Calabria, University of Milan - Bicocca

Title: Enumerating Minimal Unsatisfiable Cores of LTLf Formulae

Abstract:
Linear Temporal Logic over finite traces (LTLf) is a widely used formalism with applications in AI, process mining, model checking, and more. The primary reasoning task for LTLf is satisfiability checking; yet, the recent focus on explainable AI has increased interest in analyzing inconsistent formulae, making the enumeration of minimal explanations for unsatisfiability a relevant task also for LTLf. We introduce a novel technique for enumerating minimal unsatisfiable cores (MUCs) of an LTLf specification. The main idea is to encode an LTLf formula into an Answer Set Programming (ASP) specification, such that the minimal unsatisfiable subsets (MUSes) of the ASP program directly correspond to the MUCs of the original LTLf specification. Leveraging recent advancements in ASP solving yields an MUC enumerator achieving good performance in experiments conducted on established benchmarks from the literature.

PaperID: 767, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10356

Authors:Chenyi Li, Wanli Ma, Zichen Wang, Zaiwen Wen

Affiliations: Peking University

Title: SITA: A Framework for Structure-to-Instance Theorem Autoformalization

Abstract:
While large language models (LLMs) have shown progress in mathematical reasoning, they still face challenges in formalizing theorems that arise from instantiating abstract structures in concrete settings. With the goal of autoformalizing mathematical results at the research level, we develop a framework for structure-to-instance theorem autoformalization (SITA), which systematically bridges the gap between abstract mathematical theories and their concrete applications in Lean proof assistant. Formalized abstract structures are treated as modular templates that contain definitions, assumptions, operations, and theorems. These templates serve as reusable guides for the formalization of concrete instances. Given a specific instantiation, we generate corresponding Lean definitions and instance declarations, integrate them using Lean’s typeclass mechanism, and construct verified theorems by checking structural assumptions. We incorporate LLM-based generation with feedback-guided refinement to ensure both automation and formal correctness. Experiments on a dataset of optimization problems demonstrate that SITA effectively formalizes diverse instances grounded in abstract structures.

PaperID: 768, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18709

Authors:Zhifei Li, Lifan Chen, Jiali Yi, Xiaoju Hou, Yue Zhao, Wenxin Huang, Miao Zhang, Kui Xiao, Bing Yang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Hubei University, Ministry of Education, Wuhan China, Institute of Vocational Education, Guangdong Industry Polytechnic University, Guangzhou China, Shandong Police College, Ji’nan China

Title: KeenKT: Knowledge Mastery-State Disambiguation for Knowledge Tracing

Abstract:
Knowledge Tracing (KT) aims to dynamically model a student’s mastery of knowledge concepts based on their historical learning interactions. Most current methods rely on singlepoint estimates, which cannot distinguish true ability from outburst or carelessness, creating ambiguity in judging mastery. To address this issue, we propose a Knowledge Mastery-State Disambiguation for Knowledge Tracing model (KeenKT), which represents a student’s knowledge state at each interaction using a Normal-Inverse-Gaussian (NIG) distribution, thereby capturing the fluctuations in student learning behaviors. Furthermore, we design an NIG-distance-based attention mechanism to model the dynamic evolution of the knowledge state. In addition, we introduce a diffusion-based denoising reconstruction loss and a distributional contrastive learning loss to enhance the model’s robustness. Extensive experiments on six public datasets demonstrate that KeenKT outperforms state-of-the-art KT models in terms of prediction accuracy and sensitivity to behavioral fluctuations. The proposed method yields the maximum AUC improvement of 5.85% and the maximum ACC improvement of 6.89%.

PaperID: 769, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10767

Authors:Yasir Mahmood, Markus Hecher, Johanna Groven, Johannes K. Fichte

Affiliations: Data Science Group, Heinz Nixdorf Institute, Paderborn University, UMR Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Lens (CRIL), University of Artois, Linköping University

Title: Structure-Aware Encodings of Argumentation Properties for Clique-width

Abstract:
Structural measures of graphs, such as treewidth, are central tools in computational complexity resulting in efficient algorithms when exploiting the parameter. It is even known that modern SAT solvers work efficiently on instances of small treewidth. Since these solvers are widely applied, research interests in compact encodings into (Q)SAT for solving and to understand encoding limitations. Even more general is the graph parameter cliquewidth, which unlike treewidth can be small for dense graphs. Although algorithms are available for clique-width, little is known about encodings. We initiate the quest to understand encoding capabilities with clique-width by considering abstract argumentation, which is a robust framework for reasoning with conflicting arguments. It is based on directed graphs and asks for computationally challenging properties, making it a natural candidate to study computational properties. We design novel reductions from argumentation problems to (Q)SAT. Our reductions linearly preserve the clique-width, resulting in directed decomposition-guided (DDG) reductions. We establish novel results for all argumentation semantics, including counting. Notably, the overhead caused by our DDG reductions cannot be significantly improved under reasonable assumptions.

PaperID: 770, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.01322

Authors:Lieuwe Vinkhuijzen, Tim Coopmans, Alfons Laarman

Affiliations: Leiden University

Title: A Knowledge Compilation Map for Quantum Information

Abstract:
Despite their widespread use in quantum computing and physics, the relative strengths and weaknesses of Matrix Product States (MPS), Decision Diagrams (DDs), and Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) remains poorly understood. We analytically compare the succinctness of these quantum state representations and analyze the complexity of key operations on them. To overcome shortcomings of the tractability measure, we introduce `rapidity' conditions that identify when noncanonical representations efficiently simulate each other. Our results reveal that: 1. Most DD variants are redundant with respect to MPS in a strong sense; MPS is more rapid. 2. Only one DD variant, called LIMDD, and RBM have succinctness incomparable to MPS. 3. LIMDD and RBM seem to achieve this by sacrificing tractability of counting queries, as shown by a metatheorem on the conditional hardness of these queries.

PaperID: 771, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16629

Authors:Shihab Ahmed, El Houcine Bergou, Yue Wang, Aritra Dutta

Affiliations: University of Central Florida, Mohammed VI Polytechnic University

Title: Stabilizing Policy Gradient Methods via Reward Profiling

Abstract:
Policy gradient methods, which have been extensively studied in the last decade, offer an effective and efficient framework for reinforcement learning problems. However, their performances can often be unsatisfactory, suffering from unreliable reward improvements and slow convergence, due to high variance in gradient estimations. In this paper, we propose a universal reward profiling framework that can be seamlessly integrated with any policy gradient algorithm, where we selectively update the policy based on highconfidence performance estimations. We theoretically justify that our technique will not slow down the convergence of the baseline policy gradient methods, but with high probability, will result in stable and monotonic improvements of their performance. Empirically, on eight continuous‐control benchmarks (Box2D and MuJoCo/PyBullet), our profiling yields up to 1.5x faster convergence to near‐optimal returns, up to 1.75x reduction in return variance on some setups. Our profiling approach offers a general, theoretically grounded path to more reliable and efficient policy learning in complex environments.

PaperID: 772, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01067

Authors:Veeti Ahvonen, Maurice Funk, Damian Heiman, Antti Kuusisto, Carsten Lutz

Affiliations: Tampere University, Leipzig University ScaDS.AI Center Dresden/Leipzig

Title: Expressive Power of Graph Transformers via Logic

Abstract:
Transformers are the basis of modern large language models, but relatively little is known about their precise expressive power on graphs. We study the expressive power of graph transformers (GTs) by Dwivedi and Bresson (2020) and GPSnetworks by Rampásek et al. (2022), both under soft-attention and average hard-attention. Our study covers two scenarios: the theoretical setting with real numbers and the more practical case with floats. With reals, we show that in restriction to vertex properties definable in first-order logic (FO), GPS-networks have the same expressive power as graded modal logic (GML) with the global modality. With floats, GPS-networks turn out to be equally expressive as GML with the counting global modality. The latter result is absolute, not restricting to properties definable in a background logic. We also obtain similar characterizations for GTs in terms of propositional logic with the global modality (for reals) and the counting global modality (for floats).

PaperID: 773, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04753

Authors:Mehmet Emre Akbulut, Hazem Hesham Yousef Shalby, Fabrizio Pittorino, Manuel Roveri

Affiliations: Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano

Title: InfoQ: Mixed-Precision Quantization via Global Information Flow

Abstract:
Mixedprecision quantization (MPQ) is crucial for deploying deep neural networks on resource-constrained devices, but finding the optimal bit-width for each layer represents a complex combinatorial optimization problem. Current state-of-the-art methods rely on computationally expensive search algorithms or local sensitivity heuristic proxies like the Hessian, which fail to capture the cascading global effects of quantization error. In this work, we argue that the quantization sensitivity of a layer should not be measured by its local properties, but by its impact on the information flow throughout the entire network. We introduce InfoQ, a novel framework for mixed-precision quantization that is training-free in the bit-width search phase. InfoQ assesses layer importance by performing a single forward pass to measure the change in mutual information in the remaining part of the network, thus creating a global sensitivity score. This approach directly quantifies how quantizing one layer degrades the information characteristics of subsequent layers. The resulting scores are used to formulate bit-width allocation as an integer linear programming problem, which is solved efficiently to minimize total sensitivity under a given budget (e.g., model size or BitOps). Our retraining-free search phase provides a superior search-time/accuracy trade-off (using two orders of magnitude less data compared to state-of-the-art methods such as LIMPQ), while yielding up to a 1% accuracy improvement for MobileNetV2 and ResNet18 on ImageNet at high compression rates (14.00x and 10.66x).

PaperID: 774, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20529

Authors:Amirmohammad Ziaei Bideh, Aleksandra Georgievska, Jonathan Gryak

Affiliations: Graduate Center, City University of New York, Queens College

Title: MDBench: Benchmarking Data-Driven Methods for Model Discovery

Abstract:
Model discovery aims to uncover governing differential equations of dynamical systems directly from experimental data. Benchmarking such methods is essential for tracking progress and understanding tradeoffs in the field. While prior efforts have focused mostly on identifying single equations, typically framed as symbolic regression, there remains a lack of comprehensive benchmarks for discovering dynamical models. To address this, we introduce MDBench, an open-source benchmarking framework for evaluating model discovery methods on dynamical systems. MDBench assesses 12 algorithms on 14 partial differential equations (PDEs) and 63 ordinary differential equations (ODEs) under varying levels of noise. Evaluation metrics include derivative prediction accuracy, model complexity, and equation fidelity. We also introduce seven challenging PDE systems from fluid dynamics and thermodynamics, revealing key limitations in current methods. Our findings illustrate that linear methods and genetic programming methods achieve the lowest prediction error for PDEs and ODEs, respectively. Moreover, linear models are in general more robust against noise. MDBench accelerates the advancement of model discovery methods by offering a rigorous, extensible benchmarking framework and a rich, diverse collection of dynamical system datasets, enabling systematic evaluation, comparison, and improvement of equation accuracy and robustness.

PaperID: 775, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08281

Authors:Yi Cai, Thibaud Ardoin, Mayank Gulati, Gerhard Wunder

Affiliations: Freie Universität Berlin

Title: Rethinking Explanation Evaluation Under the Retraining Scheme

Abstract:
Feature attribution has gained prominence as a tool for explaining model decisions, yet evaluating explanation quality remains challenging due to the absence of groundtruth explanations. To circumvent this, explanation-guided input manipulation has emerged as an indirect evaluation strategy, measuring explanation effectiveness through the impact of input modifications on model outcomes during inference. Despite the widespread use, a major concern with inference-based schemes is the distribution shift caused by such manipulations, which undermines the reliability of their assessments. The retraining-based scheme ROAR overcomes this issue by adapting the model to the altered data distribution. However, its evaluation results often contradict the theoretical foundations of widely accepted explainers. This work investigates this misalignment between empirical observations and theoretical expectations. In particular, we identify the Sign issue as a key factor responsible for residual information that ultimately distorts retraining-based evaluation. Based on the analysis, we show that a straightforward reframing of the evaluation process can effectively resolve the identified issue. Building on the existing framework, we further propose novel variants that jointly structure a comprehensive perspective on explanation evaluation. These variants largely improve evaluation efficiency over the standard retraining protocol, thereby enhancing practical applicability for explainer selection and benchmarking. Following our proposed schemes, empirical results across various data scales provide deeper insights into the performance of carefully selected explainers, revealing open challenges and future directions in explainability research.

PaperID: 776, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.11789

Authors:Hongxu Chen, Ke Wei, Luo Luo

Affiliations: Fudan University

Title: Decentralized Non-convex Stochastic Optimization with Heterogeneous Variance

Abstract:
Decentralized optimization is critical for solving largescale machine learning problems over distributed networks, where multiple nodes collaborate through local communication. In practice, the variances of stochastic gradient estimators often differ across nodes, yet their impact on algorithm design and complexity remains unclear. To address this issue, we propose D-NSS, a decentralized algorithm with node-specific sampling, and establish its sample complexity depending on the arithmetic mean of local standard deviations, achieving tighter bounds than existing methods that rely on the worst-case or quadratic mean. We further derive a matching sample complexity lower bound under heterogeneous variance, thereby proving the optimality of this dependence. Moreover, we extend the framework with a variance reduction technique and develop D-NSS-VR, which under the mean-squared smoothness assumption attains an improved sample complexity bound while preserving the arithmetic-mean dependence. Finally, numerical experiments validate the theoretical results and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

PaperID: 777, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.00200

Authors:Yikai Chen, Yunxin Mao, Chunyuan Zheng, Hao Zou, Shanzhi Gu, Shixuan Liu, Yang Shi, Wenjing Yang, Kun Kuang, Haotian Wang

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology, Peking University, Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University

Title: Detecting Unobserved Confounders: A Kernelized Regression Approach

Abstract:
Detecting unobserved confounders is crucial for reliable causal inference in observational studies. Existing methods require either linearity assumptions or multiple heterogeneous environments, limiting applicability to nonlinear singleenvironment settings. To bridge this gap, we propose Kernel Regression Confounder Detection (KRCD), a novel method for detecting unobserved confounding in nonlinear observational data under single-environment conditions. KRCD leverages reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces to model complex dependencies. By comparing standard and higher-order kernel regressions, we derive a test statistic whose significant deviation from zero indicates unobserved confounding. Theoretically, we prove two key results: First, in infinite samples, regression coefficients coincide if and only if no unobserved confounders exist. Second, finite-sample differences converge to zero-mean Gaussian distributions with tractable variance. Extensive experiments on synthetic benchmarks and the Twins dataset demonstrate that KRCD not only outperforms existing baselines but also achieves superior computational efficiency.

PaperID: 778, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12657

Authors:Zhuomin Chen, Jingchao Ni, Hojat Allah Salehi, Xu Zheng, Esteban Schafir, Farhad Shirani, Dongsheng Luo

Affiliations: Florida International University, University of Houston

Title: Explanation-Preserving Augmentation for Semi-Supervised Graph Representation Learning

Abstract:
Selfsupervised graph representation learning (GRL) typically generates paired graph augmentations from each graph to infer similar representations for augmentations of the same graph, but distinguishable representations for different graphs. While effective augmentation requires both semantics-preservation and data-perturbation, most existing GRL methods focus solely on data-perturbation, leading to suboptimal solutions. To fill the gap, in this paper, we propose a novel method, Explanation-Preserving Augmentation (EPA), which leverages graph explanation for semantics-preservation. EPA first uses a small number of labels to train a graph explainer, which infers the subgraphs that explain the graph’s label. Then these explanations are used for generating semantics-preserving augmentations for boosting self-supervised GRL. Thus, the entire process, namely EPA-GRL, is semi-supervised. We demonstrate theoretically, using an analytical example, and through extensive experiments on a variety of benchmark datasets, that EPA-GRL outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) GRL methods that use semantics-agnostic augmentations.

PaperID: 779, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09822

Authors:Jun Woo Chung, Yingjie Lao, Weijie Zhao

Affiliations: Rochester Institute of Technology, Tufts University

Title: Robust Watermarking on Gradient Boosting Decision Trees

Abstract:
Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDTs) are widely used in industry and academia for their high accuracy and efficiency, particularly on structured data. However, the subject of watermarking GBDT models remains underexplored, especially compared to neural networks. In this work, we present the first robust watermarking framework tailored to GBDT models, utilizing inplace fine-tuning to embed imperceptible and resilient watermarks. We propose four embedding strategies, each designed to minimize impact on model accuracy while ensuring watermark robustness. Through experiments across diverse datasets, we demonstrate that our methods achieve high watermark embedding rates, low accuracy degradation, and strong resistance to post-deployment fine-tuning.

PaperID: 780, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.07573

Authors:Ruiyi Fang, Shuo Wang, Ruizhi Pu, QIUHAO Zeng, Hao Zheng, Ziyan Wang, Jiale Cai, Zhimin Mei, Song Tang, Charles Ling, Boyu Wang

Affiliations: Western University, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Central South University, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology

Title: Graph Domain Adaptation via Homophily-Agnostic Reconstructing Structure

Abstract:
Graph Domain Adaptation (GDA) transfers knowledge from labeled source graphs to unlabeled target graphs, addressing the challenge of label scarcity. However, existing GDA methods typically assume that both source and target graphs exhibit homophily, leading existing methods to perform poorly when heterophily is present. Furthermore, the lack of labels in the target graph makes it impossible to assess its homophily level beforehand. To address this challenge, we propose a novel homophilyagnostic approach that effectively transfers knowledge between graphs with varying degrees of homophily. Specifically, we adopt a divide-and-conquer strategy that first separately reconstructs highly homophilic and heterophilic variants of both the source and target graphs, and then performs knowledge alignment separately between corresponding graph variants. Extensive experiments conducted on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our approach, particularly highlighting its substantial advantages on heterophilic graphs.

PaperID: 781, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07877

Authors:Yilin Gao, Shuguang Dou, Junzhou Li, Zhiheng Yu, Yin Li, Dongsheng Jiang, Shugong Xu

Affiliations: Shanghai University, Huawei Technologies Co., University of Science and Technology of China, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

Title: Visual Bridge: Universal Visual Perception Representations Generating

Abstract:
Recent advances in diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in isolated computer vision tasks such as textto-image generation, depth estimation, and optical flow. However, these models are often restricted by a ``single-task-single-model'' paradigm, severely limiting their generalizability and scalability in multi-task scenarios. Motivated by the cross-domain generalization ability of large language models, we propose a universal visual perception framework based on flow matching that can generate diverse visual representations across multiple tasks. Our approach formulates the process as a universal flow-matching problem from image patch tokens to task-specific representations rather than an independent generation or regression problem. By leveraging a strong self-supervised foundation model as the anchor and introducing a multi-scale, circular task embedding mechanism, our method learns a universal velocity field to bridge the gap between heterogeneous tasks, supporting efficient and flexible representation transfer. Extensive experiments on classification, detection, segmentation, depth estimation, and image-text retrieval demonstrate that our model achieves competitive performance in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings, outperforming prior generalist and several specialist models. Ablation studies further validate the robustness, scalability, and generalization of our framework. Our work marks a significant step towards general-purpose visual perception, providing a solid foundation for future research in universal vision modeling.

PaperID: 782, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03768

Authors:Debamita Ghosh, George K. Atia, Yue Wang

Affiliations: University of Central Florida

Title: ORVIT: Near-Optimal Online Distributionally Robust Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) faces significant challenges in realworld deployments due to the sim-to-real gap, where policies trained in simulators often underperform in practice due to mismatches between training and deployment conditions. Distributionally robust RL addresses this issue by optimizing worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of environments and providing an optimized lower bound on deployment performance. However, existing studies typically assume access to either a generative model or offline datasets with broad coverage of the deployment environment—assumptions that limit their practicality in unknown environments without prior knowledge. In this work, we study the more realistic and challenging setting of online distributionally robust RL, where the agent interacts only with a single unknown training environment while aiming to optimize its worst-case performance. We focus on general f-divergence-based uncertainty sets, including chi-squared and KL divergence balls, and propose a computationally efficient algorithm with sublinear regret guarantees under minimal assumptions. Furthermore, we establish a minimax lower bound on regret of online learning, demonstrating the near-optimality of our approach. Extensive experiments across diverse environments further confirm the robustness and efficiency of our algorithm, validating our theoretical findings.

PaperID: 783, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13515

Authors:Tiancheng Gu, Kaicheng Yang, Kaichen Zhang, Xiang An, Ziyong Feng, Yueyi Zhang, Weidong Cai, Jiankang Deng, Lidong Bing

Affiliations: M.R.L Team, Miromind AI LMMs-Lab Team, MiroMind AI, The University of Sydney, Imperial College London

Title: UniME-V2: MLLM-as-a-Judge for Universal Multimodal Embedding Learning

Abstract:
Universal multimodal embedding models are essential in various tasks. Existing approaches typically use inbatch mining to identify hard negatives by measuring the similarity of query-candidate pairs. However, these methods often struggle to capture subtle semantic differences among candidates and lack diversity in negative samples. Moreover, the embeddings exhibit limited discriminative ability in distinguishing false and hard negatives. In this paper, we leverage the advanced understanding capabilities of MLLMs to enhance representation learning, and present a novel Universal Multimodal Embedding(UniME-V2) model. Our approach first constructs a potential hard negative set through global retrieval. We then introduce the MLLM-as-a-Judge mechanism, which utilizes MLLMs to assess the semantic alignment of query-candidate pairs and generate soft semantic matching scores. These scores serve as a foundation for hard negative mining, mitigating the impact of false negatives and enabling the identification of diverse, high-quality hard negatives. Furthermore, the semantic matching scores are used as soft labels to mitigate the rigid one-to-one mapping constraint. By aligning the similarity matrix with the soft semantic matching score matrix, the model learns semantic distinctions among candidates, significantly enhancing its discriminative capacity. To further improve performance, we propose UniME-V2, a reranking model trained on our mined hard negatives through a joint pairwise and listwise optimization approach. We conduct comprehensive experiments on the MMEB benchmark and multiple retrieval tasks, demonstrating that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across all tasks.

PaperID: 784, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02769

Authors:Naixin Guo, Rui Luo, Zhixin Zhou

Affiliations: City University of Hong Kong, Alpha Benito Research

Title: Fast Conformal Prediction Using Conditional Interquantile Intervals

Abstract:
We introduce Conformal Interquantile Regression (CIR), a conformal regression method that efficiently constructs nearminimal prediction intervals with guaranteed coverage. CIR leverages black-box machine learning models to estimate outcome distributions through interquantile ranges, transforming these estimates into compact prediction intervals while achieving approximate conditional coverage. We further propose CIR+ (Conditional Interquantile Regression with More Comparison), which enhances CIR by incorporating a width-based selection rule for interquantile intervals. This refinement yields narrower prediction intervals while maintaining comparable coverage, though at the cost of slightly increased computational time. Both methods address key limitations of existing distributional conformal prediction approaches: they handle skewed distributions more effectively than Conformalized Quantile Regression, and they achieve substantially higher computational efficiency than Conformal Histogram Regression by eliminating the need for histogram construction. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our methods optimally balance predictive accuracy and computational efficiency compared to existing approaches.

PaperID: 785, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20225

Authors:Bo Han, Zhuoming Li, Xiaoyu Wang, Yaxin Hou, Hui Liu, Junhui Hou, Yuheng Jia

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, School of Software Engineering, School of Computing Information Sciences, Saint Francis University, Hong Kong, Department of Computer Science, Ministry of Education

Title: DiCaP: Distribution-Calibrated Pseudo-labeling for Semi-Supervised Multi-Label Learning

Abstract:
Semisupervised multi-label learning (SSMLL) aims to address the challenge of limited labeled data in multi-label learning (MLL) by leveraging unlabeled data to improve the model’s performance. While pseudo-labeling has become a dominant strategy in SSMLL, most existing methods assign equal weights to all pseudo-labels regardless of their quality, which can amplify the impact of noisy or uncertain predictions and degrade the overall performance. In this paper, we theoretically verify that the optimal weight for a pseudo-label should reflect its correctness likelihood. Empirically, we observe that on the same dataset, the correctness likelihood distribution of unlabeled data remains stable, even as the number of labeled training samples varies. Building on this insight, we propose Distribution-Calibrated Pseudo-labeling (DiCaP), a correctness-aware framework that estimates posterior precision to calibrate pseudo-label weights. We further introduce a dual-thresholding mechanism to separate confident and ambiguous regions: confident samples are pseudo-labeled and weighted accordingly, while ambiguous ones are explored by unsupervised contrastive learning. Experiments conducted on multiple benchmark datasets verify that our method achieves consistent improvements, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by up to 4.27%.

PaperID: 786, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00520

Authors:Jiale Han, Xiaowu Dai, Yuhua Zhu

Affiliations: University of California, Los Angeles

Title: Variance Reduction via Resampling and Experience Replay

Abstract:
Experience replay is a foundational technique in reinforcement learning that enhances learning stability by storing past experiences in a replay buffer and reusing them during training. Despite its practical success, its theoretical properties remain underexplored. In this paper, we present a theoretical framework that models experience replay using resampled Uand V-statistics, providing rigorous variance reduction guarantees. We apply this framework to policy evaluation tasks using the Least-Squares Temporal Difference (LSTD) algorithm and a Partial Differential Equation (PDE)-based model-free algorithm, demonstrating significant improvements in stability and efficiency, particularly in data-scarce scenarios. Beyond policy evaluation, we extend the framework to kernel ridge regression, showing that the experience replay-based method reduces the computational cost from the traditional cubic time to quadratic time in the sample size, while also reducing variance. Extensive numerical experiments validate our theoretical findings, demonstrating the broad applicability and effectiveness of experience replay in diverse machine learning tasks.

PaperID: 787, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.03760

Authors:Seungha Hong, Sanghwan Jang, Wonbin Kweon, Suyeon Kim, Gyuseok Lee, Hwanjo Yu

Affiliations: Pohang University of Science and Technology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Title: Harmonic Dataset Distillation for Time Series Forecasting

Abstract:
Time Series forecasting (TSF) in the modern era faces significant computational and storage cost challenges due to the massive scale of realworld data. Dataset Distillation (DD), a paradigm that synthesizes a small, compact dataset to achieve training performance comparable to that of the original dataset, has emerged as a promising solution. However, conventional DD methods are not tailored for time series and suffer from architectural overfitting and limited scalability. To address these issues, we propose Harmonic Dataset Distillation for Time Series Forecasting (HDT). HDT decomposes the time series into its sinusoidal basis through the FFT and aligns the core periodic structure by Harmonic Matching. Since this process operates in the frequency domain, all updates during distillation are applied globally without disrupting temporal dependencies of time series. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HDT achieves strong cross-architecture generalization and scalability, validating its practicality for large-scale, real-world applications.

PaperID: 788, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21846

Authors:Amit Jena, Na Li, Le Xie

Affiliations: Texas A&M University, Harvard University

Title: LILAD: Learning In-context Lyapunov-stable Adaptive Dynamics Models

Abstract:
System identification in control theory aims to approximate dynamical systems from trajectory data. While neural networks have demonstrated strong predictive accuracy, they often fail to preserve critical physical properties such as stability and typically assume stationary dynamics, limiting their applicability under distribution shifts. Existing approaches generally address either stability or adaptability in isolation, lacking a unified framework that ensures both. We propose LILAD (Learning InContext Lyapunov-stable Adaptive Dynamics), a novel framework for system identification that jointly guarantees adaptability and stability. LILAD simultaneously learns a dynamics model and a Lyapunov function through in-context learning (ICL), explicitly accounting for parametric uncertainty. Trained across a diverse set of tasks, LILAD produces a stability-aware, adaptive dynamics model alongside an adaptive Lyapunov certificate. At test time, both components adapt to a new system instance using a short trajectory prompt, which enables fast generalization. To rigorously ensure stability, LILAD also computes a state-dependent attenuator that enforces a sufficient decrease condition on the Lyapunov function for any state in the new system instance. This mechanism extends stability guarantees even under out-of-distribution and out-of-task scenarios. We evaluate LILAD on benchmark autonomous systems and demonstrate that it outperforms adaptive, robust, and non-adaptive baselines in predictive accuracy.

PaperID: 789, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.16756

Authors:Kun Jin, Tian Xie, Yang Liu, Xueru Zhang

Affiliations: University of Michigan, The Ohio State University, University of California, Santa Cruz

Title: Addressing Polarization and Unfairness in Performative Prediction

Abstract:
In many realworld applications of machine learning—such as recommendations, hiring, and lending—deployed models influence the data they are trained on, leading to feedback loops between predictions and data distribution. The performative prediction (PP) framework captures this phenomenon by modeling the data distribution as a function of the deployed model. While prior work has focused on finding performative stable (PS) solutions for robustness, their societal impacts, particularly regarding fairness, remain underexplored. We show that PS solutions can lead to severe polarization and prediction performance disparities, and that conventional fairness interventions in previous works often fail under model-dependent distribution shifts due to failing the PS criteria. To address these challenges in PP, we introduce novel fairness mechanisms that provably ensure both stability and fairness, validated by theoretical analysis and empirical results.

PaperID: 790, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04663

Authors:Young D. Kwon, Rui Li, Sijia Li, Da Li, Sourav Bhattacharya, Stylianos I. Venieris

Affiliations: Samsung AI Center-Cambridge, Independent Researcher

Title: HierarchicalPrune: Position-Aware Compression for Large-Scale Diffusion Models

Abstract:
Stateof-the-art text-to-image diffusion models (DMs) achieve remarkable quality, yet their massive parameter scale (8-11B) poses significant challenges for inferences on resource-constrained devices. In this paper, we present HierarchicalPrune, a novel compression framework grounded in a key observation: DM blocks exhibit distinct functional hierarchies, where early blocks establish semantic structures while later blocks handle texture refinements. HierarchicalPrune synergistically combines three techniques: (1) Hierarchical Position Pruning, which identifies and removes less essential later blocks based on position hierarchy; (2) Positional Weight Preservation, which systematically protects early model portions that are essential for semantic structural integrity; and (3) Sensitivity-Guided Distillation, which adjusts knowledge-transfer intensity based on our discovery of block-wise sensitivity variations. As a result, our framework brings billion-scale diffusion models into a range more suitable for on-device inference, while preserving the quality of the output images. Specifically, combined with INT4 weight quantisation, HierarchicalPrune achieves 77.5-80.4% memory footprint reduction (e.g., from 15.8 GB to 3.2 GB) and 27.9-38.0% latency reduction, measured on server and consumer grade GPUs, with the minimum drop of 2.6% in GenEval score and 7% in HPSv2 score compared to the original model. Finally, our comprehensive user study with 85 participants demonstrates that HierarchicalPrune maintains perceptual quality comparable to the original model while significantly outperforming prior works.

PaperID: 791, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13338

Authors:Yunze Leng, Rohan Ghosh, Mehul Motani

Affiliations: National University of Singapore

Title: Tab-PET: Graph-Based Positional Encodings for Tabular Transformers

Abstract:
Supervised learning with tabular data presents unique challenges, including low data sizes, the absence of structural cues, and heterogeneous features spanning both categorical and continuous domains. Unlike vision and language tasks, where models can exploit inductive biases in the data, tabular data lacks inherent positional structure, hindering the effectiveness of selfattention mechanisms. While recent transformer-based models like TabTransformer, SAINT, and FT-Transformer (which we refer to as 3T) have shown promise on tabular data, they typically operate without leveraging structural cues such as positional encodings (PEs), as no prior structural information is usually available. In this work, we find both theoretically and empirically that structural cues, specifically PEs can be a useful tool to improve generalization performance for tabular transformers. We find that PEs impart the ability to reduce the effective rank (a form of intrinsic dimensionality) of the features, effectively simplifying the task by reducing the dimensionality of the problem, yielding improved generalization. To that end, we propose Tab-PET (PEs for Tabular Transformers), a graph-based framework for estimating and inculcating PEs into embeddings. Inspired by approaches that derive PEs from graph topology, we explore two paradigms for graph estimation: association-based and causality-based. We empirically demonstrate that graph-derived PEs significantly improve performance across 50 classification and regression datasets for 3T. Notably, association-based graphs consistently yield more stable and pronounced gains compared to causality-driven ones. Our work highlights an unexpected role of PEs in tabular transformers, revealing how they can be harnessed to improve generalization.

PaperID: 792, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11683

Authors:Longhua Li, Lei Qi, Xin Geng

Affiliations: Southeast University

Title: Stratified Knowledge-Density Super-Network for Scalable Vision Transformers

Abstract:
Training and deploying multiple vision transformer (ViT) models for different resource constraints is costly and inefficient. To address this, we propose transforming a pretrained ViT into a stratified knowledge-density super-network, where knowledge is hierarchically organized across weights. This enables flexible extraction of sub-networks that retain maximal knowledge for varying model sizes. We introduce Weighted PCA for Attention Contraction (WPAC), which concentrates knowledge into a compact set of critical weights. WPAC applies token-wise weighted principal component analysis to intermediate features and injects the resulting transformation and inverse matrices into adjacent layers, preserving the original network function while enhancing knowledge compactness. To further promote stratified knowledge organization, we propose Progressive Importance-Aware Dropout (PIAD). PIAD progressively evaluates the importance of weight groups, updates an importance-aware dropout list, and trains the super-network under this dropout regime to promote knowledge stratification. Experiments demonstrate that WPAC outperforms existing pruning criteria in knowledge concentration, and the combination with PIAD offers a strong alternative to state-of-the-art model compression and model expansion methods.

PaperID: 793, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02421

Authors:Xinyao Li, Yinjie Min, Hongbo Chen, Zhekai Du, Fengling Li, Jingjing Li

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, School of Statistics and Data Science, Nankai University, University of Technology Sydney

Title: Generalizing Vision-Language Models with Dedicated Prompt Guidance

Abstract:
Finetuning large pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) has emerged as a prevalent paradigm for downstream adaptation, yet it faces a critical trade-off between domain specificity and domain generalization (DG) ability. Current methods typically fine-tune a universal model on the entire dataset, which potentially compromises the ability to generalize to unseen domains. To fill this gap, we provide a theoretical understanding of the generalization ability for VLM fine-tuning, which reveals that training multiple parameter-efficient expert models on partitioned source domains leads to better generalization than fine-tuning a universal model. Inspired by this finding, we propose a two-step domain-expert-Guided DG (GuiDG) framework. GuiDG first employs prompt tuning to obtain source domain experts, then introduces a Cross-Modal Attention module to guide the fine-tuning of the vision encoder via adaptive expert integration. To better evaluate few-shot DG, we construct ImageNet-DG from ImageNet and its variants. Extensive experiments on standard DG benchmarks and ImageNet-DG demonstrate that GuiDG improves upon state-of-the-art fine-tuning methods while maintaining efficiency.

PaperID: 794, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01254

Authors:Zihan Li, Wei Sun, Jing Hu, Jianhua Yin, Xing Wang, Erwei Yin, Jianlong Wu

Affiliations: Shandong University, Tongji University, Linyi University, Defense Innovation Institute, Academy of Military Sciences, Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: Self-Enhanced Image Clustering with Cross-Modal Semantic Consistency

Abstract:
While large languageimage pre-trained models like CLIP offer powerful generic features for image clustering, existing methods typically freeze the encoder. This creates a fundamental mismatch between the model's task-agnostic representations and the demands of a specific clustering task, imposing a ceiling on performance. To break this ceiling, we propose a self-enhanced framework based on cross-modal semantic consistency for efficient image clustering. Our framework first builds a strong foundation via Cross-Modal Semantic Consistency and then specializes the encoder through Self-Enhancement. In the first stage, we focus on Cross-Modal Semantic Consistency. By mining consistency between generated image-text pairs at the instance, cluster assignment, and cluster center levels, we train lightweight clustering heads to align with the rich semantics of the pre-trained model. This alignment process is bolstered by a novel method for generating higher-quality cluster centers and a dynamic balancing regularizer to ensure well-distributed assignments. In the second stage, we introduce a Self-Enhanced fine-tuning strategy. The well-aligned model from the first stage acts as a reliable pseudo-label generator. These self-generated supervisory signals are then used to feed back the efficient, joint optimization of the vision encoder and clustering heads, unlocking their full potential. Extensive experiments on six mainstream datasets show that our method outperforms existing deep clustering methods by significant margins. Notably, our ViT-B/32 model already matches or even surpasses the accuracy of state-of-the-art methods built upon the far larger ViT-L/14.

PaperID: 795, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06811

Authors:Xiang Lin, Weixin Li, Shu Guo, Lihong Wang, Di Huang

Affiliations: Beihang University, National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center of China

Title: RMAdapter: Reconstruction-based Multi-Modal Adapter for Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
Pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), e.g. CLIP, have become essential tools in multimodal transfer learning. However, fine-tuning VLMs in few-shot scenarios poses significant challenges in balancing task-specific adaptation and generalization in the obtained model. Meanwhile, current researches have predominantly focused on prompt-based adaptation methods, leaving adapter-based approaches underexplored and revealing notable performance gaps. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel Reconstruction-based Multimodal Adapter (RMAdapter), which leverages a dual-branch architecture. Unlike conventional single-branch adapters, RMAdapter consists of: (1) an adaptation branch that injects task-specific knowledge through parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and (2) a reconstruction branch that preserves general knowledge by reconstructing latent space features back into the original feature space. This design facilitates a dynamic balance between general and task-specific knowledge. Importantly, although RMAdapter introduces an additional reconstruction branch, it is carefully optimized to remain lightweight. By computing reconstruction loss locally at each layer and sharing projection modules, the overall computational overhead is kept minimal. A consistency constraint is also incorporated to better regulate the trade-off between discriminability and generalization. We comprehensively evaluate the effectiveness of RMAdapter on three representative tasks: generalization to new categories, generalization to new target datasets, and domain generalization. Without relying on data augmentation or duplicate prompt designs, our RMAdapter consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across all evaluation metrics.

PaperID: 796, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08073

Authors:Nadav Merlis, Kyoungseok Jang, Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi

Affiliations: Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Chung-Ang University, University of Milan Politecnico di Milano

Title: Online Linear Regression with Paid Stochastic Features

Abstract:
We study an online linear regression setting in which the observed feature vectors are corrupted by noise and the learner can pay to reduce the noise level. In practice, this may happen for several reasons: for example, because features can be measured more accurately using more expensive equipment, or because data providers can be incentivized to release less private features. Assuming feature vectors are drawn i.i.d. from a fixed but unknown distribution, we measure the learner's regret against the linear predictor minimizing a notion of loss that combines the prediction error and payment. We first study the case in which the mapping between payments and noise covariance is known and prove orderoptimal regret bounds in the interaction length (up to log-factors). We then derive order-optimal bounds also when the noise covariance is unknown and prove that the regret rate is worse than the case of known covariances. Our analysis leverages matrix martingale concentration, showing that the empirical loss uniformly converges to the expected one for all payments and linear predictors.

PaperID: 797, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04524

Authors:Anh Tuan Nguyen, Viet Anh Nguyen

Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title: Provably Data-Driven Projection Method for Quadratic Programming

Abstract:
Projection methods aim to reduce the dimensionality of the optimization instance, thereby improving the scalability of highdimensional problems. Recently, Sakaue and Oki (2024) proposed a data-driven approach for linear programs (LPs), where the projection matrix is learned from observed problem instances drawn from an application-specific distribution of problems. We analyze the generalization guarantee for the data-driven projection matrix learning for convex quadratic programs (QPs). Unlike in LPs, the optimal solutions of convex QPs are not confined to the vertices of the feasible polyhedron, and this complicates the analysis of the optimal value function. To overcome this challenge, we demonstrate that the solutions of convex QPs can be localized within a feasible region corresponding to a special active set, utilizing Caratheodory's theorem. Building on such observation, we propose the unrolled active set method, which models the computation of the optimal value as a Goldberg-Jerrum algorithm with bounded complexities, thereby establishing learning guarantees. We then extend our analysis further to other settings, including learning to match the optimal solution and an input-aware setting, where we learn to map QP problem instances to projection matrices.

PaperID: 798, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14262

Authors:Yosuke Nishimoto, Takashi Matsubara

Affiliations: The University of Osaka, Hokkaido University

Title: Object-Centric World Models for Causality-Aware Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
World models have been developed to support sampleefficient deep reinforcement learning agents. However, it remains challenging for world models to accurately replicate environments that are high-dimensional, non-stationary, and composed of multiple objects with rich interactions since most world models learn holistic representations of all environmental components. By contrast, humans perceive the environment by decomposing it into discrete objects, facilitating efficient decision-making. Motivated by this insight, we propose Slot Transformer Imagination with CAusality-aware reinforcement learning (STICA), a unified framework in which object-centric Transformers serve as the world model and causality-aware policy and value networks. STICA represents each observation as a set of object-centric tokens, together with tokens for the agent action and the resulting reward, enabling the world model to predict token-level dynamics and interactions. The policy and value networks then estimate token-level cause--effect relations and use them in the attention layers, yielding causality-guided decision-making. Experiments on object-rich benchmarks demonstrate that STICA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art agents in both sample efficiency and final performance.

PaperID: 799, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03333

Authors:Juan Sebastian Rojas, Chi-Guhn Lee

Affiliations: University of Toronto

Title: A Differential Perspective on Distributional Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
To date, distributional reinforcement learning (distributional RL) methods have exclusively focused on the discounted setting, where an agent aims to optimize a discounted sum of rewards over time. In this work, we extend distributional RL to the averagereward setting, where an agent aims to optimize the reward received per time step. In particular, we utilize a quantile-based approach to develop the first set of algorithms that can successfully learn and/or optimize the long-run per-step reward distribution, as well as the differential return distribution of an average-reward MDP. We derive proven-convergent tabular algorithms for both prediction and control, as well as a broader family of algorithms that have appealing scaling properties. Empirically, we find that these algorithms yield competitive and sometimes superior performance when compared to their non-distributional equivalents, while also capturing rich information about the long-run per-step reward and differential return distributions.

PaperID: 800, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15668

Authors:Davide Scassola, Sebastiano Saccani, Luca Bortolussi

Affiliations: University of Trieste, Aindo SpA (Trieste)

Title: Graph-Conditional Flow Matching for Relational Data Generation

Abstract:
Data synthesis is gaining momentum as a privacyenhancing technology. While single-table tabular data generation has seen considerable progress, current methods for multi-table data often lack the flexibility and expressiveness needed to capture complex relational structures. In particular, they struggle with long-range dependencies and complex foreign-key relationships, such as tables with multiple parent tables or multiple types of links between the same pair of tables. We propose a generative model for relational data that generates the content of a relational dataset given the graph formed by the foreign-key relationships. We do this by learning a deep generative model of the content of the whole relational database by flow matching, where the neural network trained to denoise records leverages a graph neural network to obtain information from connected records. Our method is flexible, as it can support relational datasets with complex structures, and expressive, as the generation of each record can be influenced by any other record within the same connected component. We evaluate our method on several benchmark datasets and show that it achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of synthetic data fidelity.

PaperID: 801, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18145

Authors:Moritz Schönherr, Carsten Lutz

Affiliations: Leipzig University Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Aritficial Intelligence (ScaDS.AI)

Title: Logical Characterizations of GNNs with Mean Aggregation

Abstract:
We study the expressive power of graph neural networks (GNNs) with mean as the aggregation function, with the following results. In the nonuniform setting, such GNNs have exactly the same expressive power as ratio modal logic, which has modal operators expressing that at least a certain ratio of the successors of a vertex satisfies a specified property. In the uniform setting, the expressive power relative to MSO is exactly that of modal logic, and thus identical to the (absolute) expressive power of GNNs with max aggregation. The proof, however, depends on constructions that are not satisfactory from a practical perspective. This leads us to making the natural assumptions that combination functions are continuous and classification functions are thresholds. The resulting class of GNNs with mean aggregation turns out to be much less expressive: relative to MSO and in the uniform setting, it has the same expressive power as alternation-free modal logic. This is in contrast to the expressive power of GNNs with max and sum aggregation, which is not affected by these assumptions.

PaperID: 802, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06790

Authors:Bowen Shen, Yuyue Chen, Peng Yang, Bin Zhang, Xi Zhang, Zoe L. Jiang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Pengcheng Laboratory, Department of New Networks, College of Management and Economics, Tianjin University, China Guangdong Key Laboratory of New Security and Intelligence Technology

Title: SecMoE: Communication-Efficient Secure MoE Inference via Select-Then-Compute

Abstract:
Privacypreserving Transformer inference has gained attention due to the potential leakage of private information. Despite recent progress, existing frameworks still fall short of practical model scales, with gaps up to a hundredfold. A possible way to close this gap is the Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, which has emerged as a promising technique to scale up model capacity with minimal overhead. However, given that the current secure two-party (2-PC) protocols allow the server to homomorphically compute the FFN layer with its plaintext model weight, under the MoE setting, this could reveal which expert is activated to the server, exposing token-level privacy about the client's input. While naively evaluating all the experts before selection could protect privacy, it nullifies MoE sparsity and incurs the heavy computational overhead that sparse MoE seeks to avoid. To address the privacy and efficiency limitations above, we propose a 2-PC privacy-preserving inference framework, SecMoE. Unifying per-entry circuits in both the MoE layer and piecewise polynomial functions, SecMoE obliviously selects the extracted parameters from circuits and only computes one encrypted entry, which we refer to as Select-Then-Compute. This makes the model for private inference scale to 63× larger while only having a 15.2× increase in end-to-end runtime. Extensive experiments show that, under 5 expert settings, SecMoE lowers the end-to-end private inference communication by 1.8~7.1× and achieves 1.3~3.8× speedup compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) protocols.

PaperID: 803, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.13346

Authors:Linh-Tam Tran, Sung-Ho Bae

Affiliations: Kyung Hee University

Title: Post Training Quantization for Efficient Dataset Condensation

Abstract:
Dataset Condensation (DC) distills knowledge from large datasets into smaller ones, accelerating training and reducing storage requirements. However, despite notable progress, prior methods have largely overlooked the potential of quantization for further reducing storage costs. In this paper, we take the first step to explore posttraining quantization in dataset condensation, demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing storage size while maintaining representation quality without requiring expensive training cost. However, we find that at extremely low bit-widths (e.g., 2-bit), conventional quantization leads to substantial degradation in representation quality, negatively impacting the networks trained on these data. To address this, we propose a novel patch-based post-training quantization approach that ensures localized quantization with minimal loss of information. To reduce the overhead of quantization parameters, especially for small patch sizes, we employ quantization-aware clustering to identify similar patches and subsequently aggregate them for efficient quantization. Furthermore, we introduce a refinement module to align the distribution between original images and their dequantized counterparts, compensating for quantization errors. Our method is a plug-and-play framework that can be applied to synthetic images generated by various DC methods. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks including CIFAR-10/100, Tiny ImageNet, and ImageNet subsets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms prior works under the same storage constraints. Notably, our method doubles the test accuracy of existing methods at extreme compression regimes (e.g., from 26.0% to 54.1% for DM at IPC=1), while operating directly on 2-bit images without additional distillation.

PaperID: 804, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11676

Authors:Hanchen David Wang, Siwoo Bae, Zirong Chen, Meiyi Ma

Affiliations: Vanderbilt University

Title: Learning with Preserving for Continual Multitask Learning

Abstract:
Artificial intelligence systems in critical fields like autonomous driving and medical imaging analysis often continually learn new tasks using a shared stream of input data. For instance, after learning to detect traffic signs, a model may later need to learn to classify traffic lights or different types of vehicles using the same camera feed. This scenario introduces a challenging setting we term Continual Multitask Learning (CMTL), where a model sequentially learns new tasks on an underlying data distribution without forgetting previously learned abilities. Existing continual learning methods often fail in this setting because they learn fragmented, taskspecific features that interfere with one another. To address this, we introduce Learning with Preserving (LwP), a novel framework that shifts the focus from preserving task outputs to maintaining the geometric structure of the shared representation space. The core of LwP is a Dynamically Weighted Distance Preservation (DWDP) loss that prevents representation drift by regularizing the pairwise distances between latent data representations. This mechanism of preserving the underlying geometric structure allows the model to retain implicit knowledge and support diverse tasks without requiring a replay buffer, making it suitable for privacy-conscious applications. Extensive evaluations on time-series and image benchmarks show that LwP not only mitigates catastrophic forgetting but also consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in CMTL tasks.

PaperID: 805, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24663

Authors:Maolin Wang, Bowen Yu, Sheng Zhang, Linjie Mi, Wanyu Wang, Yiqi Wang, Pengyue Jia, Xuetao Wei, Zenglin Xu, Ruocheng Guo, Xiangyu Zhao

Affiliations: City University of Hong Kong, National University of Defense Technology, Southern University of Science and Technology, Fudan University, Intuit AI

Title: Renormalization Group Guided Tensor Network Structure Search

Abstract:
Tensor network structure search (TNSS) aims to automatically discover optimal network topologies and rank configurations for efficient tensor decomposition in high-dimensional data representation. Despite recent advances, existing TN-SS methods face significant limitations in computational tractability, structure adaptivity, and optimization robustness across diverse tensor characteristics. They struggle with three key challenges: single-scale optimization missing multi-scale structures, discrete search spaces hindering smooth structure evolution, and separated structure-parameter optimization causing computational inefficiency. We propose RGTN (Renormalization Group guided Tensor Network search), a physics-inspired framework transforming TN-SS via multi-scale renormalization group flows. Unlike fixed-scale discrete search methods, RGTN uses dynamic scale-transformation for continuous structure evolution across resolutions. Its core innovation includes learnable edge gates for optimization-stage topology modification and intelligent proposals based on physical quantities like node tension measuring local stress, and edge information flow quantifying connectivity importance. Starting from low-complexity coarse scales and refining to finer ones, RGTN finds compact structures while escaping local minima via scale-induced perturbations. Extensive experiments on light field data, high-order synthetic tensors, and video completion tasks show RGTN achieves state-of-the-art compression ratios and runs 4-600 times faster than existing methods, validating the effectiveness of our physics-inspired approach.

PaperID: 806, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08049

Authors:Weixu Wang, Xiaobo Zhou, Xin Qiao, Lei Wang, Tie Qiu

Affiliations: Tianjin University

Title: CometNet: Contextual Motif-guided Long-term Time Series Forecasting

Abstract:
Longterm Time Series Forecasting is crucial across numerous critical domains, yet its accuracy remains fundamentally constrained by the receptive field bottleneck in existing models. Mainstream Transformer- and Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP)-based methods mainly rely on finite look-back windows, limiting their ability to model long-term dependencies and hurting forecasting performance. Naively extending the look-back window proves ineffective, as it not only introduces prohibitive computational complexity, but also drowns vital long-term dependencies in historical noise. To address these challenges, we propose CometNet, a novel Contextual Motif-guided Long-term Time Series Forecasting framework. CometNet first introduces a Contextual Motif Extraction module that identifies recurrent, dominant contextual motifs from complex historical sequences, providing extensive temporal dependencies far exceeding limited look-back windows; Subsequently, a Motif-guided Forecasting module is proposed, which integrates the extracted dominant motifs into forecasting. By dynamically mapping the look-back window to its relevant motifs, CometNet effectively harnesses their contextual information to strengthen long-term forecasting capability. Extensive experimental results on eight real-world datasets have demonstrated that CometNet significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, particularly on extended forecast horizons.

PaperID: 807, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20258

Authors:Xiaohan Wang, Zhangtao Cheng, Ting Zhong, Leiting Chen, Fan Zhou

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Modality-Balanced Collaborative Distillation for Multi-Modal Domain Generalization

Abstract:
Weight Averaging (WA) has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing generalization by promoting convergence to a flat loss landscape, which correlates with stronger outof-distribution performance. However, applying WA directly to multi-modal domain generalization (MMDG) is challenging: differences in optimization speed across modalities lead WA to overfit to faster-converging ones in early stages, suppressing the contribution of slower yet complementary modalities, thereby hindering effective modality fusion and skewing the loss surface toward sharper, less generalizable minima. To address this issue, we propose MBCD, a unified collaborative distillation framework that retains WA's flatness-inducing advantages while overcoming its shortcomings in multi-modal contexts. MBCD begins with adaptive modality dropout in the student model to curb early-stage bias toward dominant modalities. A gradient consistency constraint then aligns learning signals between uni-modal branches and the fused representation, encouraging coordinated and smoother optimization. Finally, a WA-based teacher conducts cross-modal distillation by transferring fused knowledge to each uni-modal branch, which strengthens cross-modal interactions and steer convergence toward flatter solutions. Extensive experiments on MMDG benchmarks show that MBCD consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving superior accuracy and robustness across diverse unseen domains.

PaperID: 808, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.10143

Authors:Liwen Wu, Wei Wang, Lei Zhao, Zhan Gao, Qika Lin, Shaowen Yao, Zuozhu Liu, Bin Pu

Affiliations: Yunnan University, Hunan University, National University of Singapore, Zhejiang University

Title: MPA: Multimodal Prototype Augmentation for Few-Shot Learning

Abstract:
Recently, Fewshot Learning (FSL) has become a popular task that aims to recognize new classes from only a few labeled examples and has been widely applied in fields such as natural science, remote sensing, and medical images. However, most existing methods focus only on the visual modality and compute prototypes directly from raw support images, which lack comprehensive and rich multimodal information. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Multimodal Prototype Augmentation FSL framework called MPA, including LLM-based Multi-Variant Semantic Enhancement (LMSE), Hierarchical Multi-View Augmentation (HMA), and an Adaptive Uncertain Class Absorber (AUCA). LMSE leverages large language models to generate diverse paraphrased category descriptions, enriching the support set with additional semantic cues. HMA exploits both natural and multi-view augmentations to enhance feature diversity (e.g., changes in viewing distance, camera angles, and lighting conditions). AUCA models uncertainty by introducing uncertain classes via interpolation and Gaussian sampling, effectively absorbing uncertain samples. Extensive experiments on four single-domain and six cross-domain FSL benchmarks demonstrate that MPA achieves superior performance compared to existing state-of-the-art methods across most settings. Notably, MPA surpasses the second-best method by 12.29% and 24.56% in the single-domain and cross-domain setting, respectively, in the 5-way 1-shot setting.

PaperID: 809, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.17409

Authors:Minheng Xiao, Xian Yu

Affiliations: Ohio State University

Title: Reward Redistribution via Gaussian Process Likelihood Estimation

Abstract:
In many practical reinforcement learning tasks, feedback is only provided at the end of a long horizon, leading to sparse and delayed rewards. Existing reward redistribution methods typically assume that perstep rewards are independent, thus overlooking interdependencies among state–action pairs. In this paper, we propose a Gaussian Process-based Likelihood Reward Redistribution (GP-LRR) framework that addresses this issue by modeling the reward function as a sample from a Gaussian Process (GP), which explicitly captures dependencies between state–action pairs through the kernel function. By maximizing the likelihood of the observed episodic return via a leave-one-out strategy that leverages the entire trajectory, our framework inherently introduces uncertainty regularization. Moreover, we show that the conventional mean squared error (MSE)-based reward redistribution arises as a special case of our GP-LRR framework when using a degenerate kernel without observation noise. When integrated with an off-policy algorithm such as Soft Actor-Critic, GP-LRR yields dense and informative reward signals, resulting in superior sample efficiency and policy performance on several MuJoCo benchmarks.

PaperID: 810, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21699

Authors:Liuyue Xie, Avik Kuthiala, George Z Wei, Ce Zheng, Ananya Bal, Mosam Dabhi, Liting Wen, Taru Rustagi, Ethan Lai, Sushil Khyalia, Rohan Choudhury, Morteza Ziyadi, Xu Zhang, Hao Yang, Laszlo A. Jeni

Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University

Title: MAVERIX: Multimodal Audio-Visual Evaluation and Recognition IndeX

Abstract:
We introduce MAVERIX (Multimodal AudioVisual Evaluation and Recognition IndeX), a unified benchmark to probe video understanding in multimodal LLMs, encompassing video, audio, and text inputs with human performance baselines. Although recent advancements in audiovisual models have shown substantial progress, the field lacks a standardized evaluation framework to thoroughly assess their cross-modality comprehension performance. MAVERIX curates 2,556 questions from 700 videos, in the form of both multiple-choice and open-ended formats, explicitly designed to evaluate multimodal models through questions that necessitate tight integration of video and audio information, spanning a broad spectrum of agentic scenarios. MAVERIX uniquely provides models with questions that closely mimic the multimodal understanding experiences available to humans during decision-making processes. To our knowledge, MAVERIX is the first benchmark aimed explicitly at assessing comprehensive audiovisual integration in such granularity. Experiments with state-of-the-art models, including Qwen 2.5 Omni and Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite, show performance around 64% accuracy, while human experts reach near-ceiling performance of 92.8%, exposing a substantial gap to human-level comprehension. With standardized evaluation protocols, a rigorously annotated pipeline, and a public toolkit, MAVERIX establishes a challenging testbed for advancing audiovisual multimodal intelligence, with the website publicly available below.

PaperID: 811, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23620

Authors:Yucheng Xie, Fu Feng, Ruixiao Shi, Jing Wang, Yong Rui, Xin Geng

Affiliations: Southeast University

Title: DivControl: Knowledge Diversion for Controllable Image Generation

Abstract:
Diffusion models have advanced from textto-image (T2I) to image-to-image (I2I) generation by incorporating structured inputs such as depth maps, enabling fine-grained spatial control. However, existing methods either train separate models for each condition or rely on unified architectures with entangled representations, resulting in poor generalization and high adaptation costs for novel conditions. To this end, we propose DivControl, a decomposable pretraining framework for unified controllable generation and efficient adaptation. DivControl factorizes ControlNet via SVD into basic components—pairs of singular vectors—which are disentangled into condition-agnostic learngenes and condition-specific tailors through knowledge diversion during multi-condition training. Knowledge diversion is implemented via a dynamic gate that performs soft routing over tailors based on the semantics of condition instructions, enabling zero-shot generalization and parameter-efficient adaptation to novel conditions. To further improve condition fidelity and training efficiency, we introduce a representation alignment loss that aligns condition embeddings with early diffusion features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DivControl achieves state-of-the-art controllability with 36.4× less training cost, while simultaneously improving average performance on basic conditions. It also delivers strong zero-shot and few-shot performance on unseen conditions, demonstrating superior scalability, modularity, and transferability.

PaperID: 812, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06252

Authors:Xuantang Xiong, Ni Mu, Runpeng Xie, Senhao Yang, Yaqing Wang, Lexiang Wang, Yao Luan, Siyuan Li, Shuang Xu, Yiqin Yang, Bo Xu

Affiliations: The Key Laboratory of Cognition and Decision Intelligence for Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China; Tencent Robotics X & Futian Laboratory, Shenzhen; Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: MrCoM: A Meta-Regularized World-Model Generalizing Across Multi-Scenarios

Abstract:
Modelbased reinforcement learning (MBRL) is a crucial approach to enhance the generalization capabilities and improve the sample efficiency of RL algorithms. However, current MBRL methods focus primarily on building world models for single tasks and rarely address generalization across different scenarios. Building on the insight that dynamics within the same simulation engine share inherent properties, we attempt to construct a unified world model capable of generalizing across different scenarios, named Meta-Regularized Contextual World-Model (MrCoM). This method first decomposes the latent state space into various components based on the dynamic characteristics, thereby enhancing the accuracy of world-model prediction. Further, MrCoM adopts meta-state regularization to extract unified representation of scenario-relevant information, and meta-value regularization to align world-model optimization with policy learning across diverse scenario objectives. We theoretically analyze the generalization error upper bound of MrCoM in multi-scenario settings. We systematically evaluate our algorithm's generalization ability across diverse scenarios, demonstrating significantly better performance than previous state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 813, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.07195

Authors:Haonan Xu, Yang Yang

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Science and Technology

Title: Shaping Parameter Contribution Patterns for Out-of-Distribution Detection

Abstract:
Outof-distribution (OOD) detection is a well-known challenge due to deep models often producing overconfident. In this paper, we reveal a key insight that trained classifiers tend to rely on sparse parameter contribution patterns, meaning that only a few dominant parameters drive predictions. This brittleness can be exploited by OOD inputs that anomalously trigger these parameters, resulting in overconfident predictions. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective method called Shaping Parameter Contribution Patterns (SPCP), which enhances OOD detection robustness by encouraging the classifier to learn boundary-oriented dense contribution patterns. Specifically, SPCP operates during training by rectifying excessively high parameter contributions based on a dynamically estimated threshold. This mechanism promotes the classifier to rely on a broader set of parameters for decision-making, thereby reducing the risk of overconfident predictions caused by anomalously triggered parameters, while preserving in-distribution (ID) performance. Extensive experiments under various OOD detection setups verify the effectiveness of SPCP.

PaperID: 814, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01883

Authors:Ning Yang, Pengyu Wang, Guoqing Liu, Haifeng Zhang, Pin Lyu, Jun Wang

Affiliations: Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), P.R. China, Microsoft Research, University College London

Title: Proactive Constrained Policy Optimization with Preemptive Penalty

Abstract:
Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) often faces significant issues such as constraint violations and instability, necessitating the use of constrained policy optimization, which seeks optimal policies while ensuring adherence to specific constraints like safety. Typically, constrained optimization problems are addressed by the Lagrangian method, a postviolation remedial approach that may result in oscillations and overshoots. Motivated by this, we propose a novel method named Proactive Constrained Policy Optimization (PCPO) that incorporates a preemptive penalty mechanism. This mechanism integrates barrier items into the objective function as the policy nears the boundary, imposing a cost. Meanwhile, we introduce a constraint-aware intrinsic reward to guide boundary-aware exploration, which is activated only when the policy approaches the constraint boundary. We establish theoretical upper and lower bounds for the duality gap and the performance of the PCPO update, shedding light on the method's convergence characteristics. Additionally, to enhance the optimization performance, we adopt a policy iteration approach. An interesting finding is that PCPO demonstrates significant stability in experiments. Experimental results indicate that the PCPO framework provides a robust solution for policy optimization under constraints, with important implications for future research and practical applications.

PaperID: 815, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.00631

Authors:Yi Yang, Yinghui Huang, Xiangyu Chang

Affiliations: Arizona State University, Xi'an Jiaotong University

Title: Bayes-Optimal Fair Classification with Multiple Sensitive Features

Abstract:
Existing theoretical work on Bayesoptimal fair classifiers usually considers a single (binary) sensitive feature. In practice, individuals are often defined by multiple sensitive features. In this paper, we characterize the Bayes-optimal fair classifier for multiple sensitive features under general approximate fairness measures, including mean difference (MD) and mean ratio (MR). We show that these approximate measures for existing group fairness notions, including Demographic Parity, Equal Opportunity, Predictive Equality, and Accuracy Parity, are linear transformations of selection rates for specific groups defined by both labels and sensitive features. We then characterize that Bayes-optimal fair classifiers for multiple sensitive features under both MD and MR become instance-dependent thresholding rules that rely on a weighted sum of these group membership probabilities. Our framework applies to both attribute-aware and attribute-blind settings and can accommodate composite fairness notions like Equalized Odds. Building on this, we propose two practical algorithms for Bayes-optimal fair classification via in-processing and post-processing. We show empirically that our methods compare favorably to existing methods.

PaperID: 816, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09853

Authors:Dianzhi Yu, Conghao Xiong, Yankai Chen, Wenqian Cui, Xinni Zhang, Yifei Zhang, Hao Chen, Joseph J. Y. Sung, Irwin King

Affiliations: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, University of Illinois Chicago, Nanyang Technological University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: ConSurv: Multimodal Continual Learning for Survival Analysis

Abstract:
Survival prediction of cancers is crucial for clinical practice, as it informs mortality risks and influences treatment plans. However, a static model trained on a single dataset fails to adapt to the dynamically evolving clinical environment and continuous data streams, limiting its practical utility. While continual learning (CL) offers a solution to learn dynamically from new datasets, existing CL methods primarily focus on unimodal inputs and suffer from severe catastrophic forgetting in survival prediction. In realworld scenarios, multimodal inputs often provide comprehensive and complementary information, such as whole slide images and genomics; and neglecting inter-modal correlations negatively impacts the performance. To address the two challenges of catastrophic forgetting and complex inter-modal interactions between gigapixel whole slide images and genomics, we propose ConSurv, the first multimodal continual learning (MMCL) method for survival analysis. ConSurv incorporates two key components: Multi-staged Mixture of Experts (MS-MoE) and Feature Constrained Replay (FCR). MS-MoE captures both task-shared and task-specific knowledge at different learning stages of the network, including two modality encoders and the modality fusion component, learning inter-modal relationships. FCR further enhances learned knowledge and mitigates forgetting by restricting feature deviation of previous data at different levels, including encoder-level features of two modalities and the fusion-level representations. Additionally, we introduce a new benchmark integrating four datasets, Multimodal Survival Analysis Incremental Learning (MSAIL), for comprehensive evaluation in the CL setting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ConSurv outperforms competing methods across multiple metrics.

PaperID: 817, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.14265

Authors:Faried Abu Zaid, Daniel Neider, Mustafa Yalçıner

Affiliations: Independent Researcher, TU Dortmund University, Germany Center for Trustworthy Data Science and Security University Alliance Ruhr

Title: VeriFlow: Modeling Distributions for Neural Network Verification

Abstract:
Formal verification has emerged as a promising method to ensure the safety and reliability of neural networks. However, many relevant properties, such as fairness or global robustness, pertain to the entire input space. If one applies verification techniques naively, the neural network is checked even on inputs that do not occur in the real world and have no meaning. To tackle this shortcoming, we propose the VeriFlow architecture as a flowbased density model tailored to allow any verification approach to restrict its search to some data distribution of interest. We argue that our architecture is particularly well suited for this purpose because of two major properties. First, we show that the transformation that is defined by our model is piecewise affine. Therefore, the model allows the usage of verifiers based on constraint solving with linear arithmetic. Second, upper density level sets (UDL) of the data distribution are definable via linear constraints in the latent space. As a consequence, representations of UDLs specified by a given probability are effectively computable in the latent space. This property allows for effective verification with a fine-grained, probabilistically interpretable control of how (a-)typical the inputs subject to verification are.

PaperID: 818, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00524

Authors:Guangjie Zeng, Hao Peng, Angsheng Li, Li Sun, Chunyang Liu, Shengze Li, Yicheng Pan, Philip S. Yu

Affiliations: Beihang University, North China Electric Power University, Didi Chuxing, Academy of Military Science, University of Illinois Chicago

Title: Hyperbolic Continuous Structural Entropy for Hierarchical Clustering

Abstract:
Hierarchical clustering is a fundamental machinelearning technique for grouping data points into dendrograms. However, existing hierarchical clustering methods encounter two primary challenges: 1) Most methods specify dendrograms without a global objective. 2) Graph-based methods often neglect the significance of graph structure, optimizing objectives on complete or static predefined graphs. In this work, we propose Hyperbolic Continuous Structural Entropy neural networks, namely HypCSE, for structure-enhanced continuous hierarchical clustering. Our key idea is to map data points in the hyperbolic space and minimize the relaxed continuous structural entropy (SE) on structure-enhanced graphs. Specifically, we encode graph vertices in hyperbolic space using hyperbolic graph neural networks and minimize approximate SE defined on graph embeddings. To make the SE objective differentiable for optimization, we reformulate it into a function using the lowest common ancestor (LCA) on trees and then relax it into continuous SE (CSE) by the analogy of hyperbolic graph embeddings and partitioning trees. To ensure a graph structure that effectively captures the hierarchy of data points for CSE calculation, we employ a graph structure learning (GSL) strategy that updates the graph structure during training. Extensive experiments on seven datasets demonstrate the superior performance of HypCSE.

PaperID: 819, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16845

Authors:Zijian Zhang, Xinyu Chen, Yuanjie Shi, Liyuan Lillian Ma, Zifan Xu, Yan Yan

Affiliations: Washington State University, Independent researcher

Title: Minimum-Length Conformal Prediction Sets for Ordinal Classification

Abstract:
Ordinal classification has been widely applied in many highstakes applications, e.g., medical imaging and diagnosis, where reliable uncertainty quantification (UQ) is essential for decision making. Conformal prediction (CP) is a general UQ framework that provides statistically valid guarantees, which is especially useful in practice. However, prior ordinal CP methods mainly focus on heuristic algorithms or restrictively require the underlying model to predict a unimodal distribution over ordinal labels. Consequently, they provide limited insight into coverage–efficiency trade-offs, or a model-agnostic and distribution-free nature favored by CP methods. To this end, we fill this gap by propose an ordinal-CP method that is model-agnostic and provides instance-level optimal prediction intervals. Specifically, we formulate conformal ordinal classification as a minimum-length covering problem at the instance level. To solve this problem, we develop a sliding-window algorithm that is optimal on each calibration data, with only a linear time complexity in K, the # of label candidates. The local optimality per instance further also improves predictive efficiency in expectation. Moreover, we propose a length-regularized variant that shrinks prediction set size while preserving coverage. Experiments on four benchmark datasets from diverse domains are conducted to demonstrate the significantly improved predictive efficiency of the proposed methods over baselines (by 15%↓ on average over four datasets).

PaperID: 820, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21576

Authors:Haoyi Zhou, Shuo Li, Tianyu Chen, Qi Song, Chonghan Gao, Jianxin Li

Affiliations: School of Software, Beihang University, School of Computer Science and Engineering, China Zhongguancun Laboratory

Title: Towards Long-window Anchoring in Vision-Language Model Distillation

Abstract:
While large visionlanguage models (VLMs) demonstrate impressive long-context understanding, their prevalent small branches fails on linguistics-photography alignment for limited window size. We discover that knowledge distillation improve students capability as compelementary to Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) on certain windows size (anchored from large models). Building on this insight, we propose LAid, which explicitly targets the transfer of long-range attention mechanisms through two complementary components: (1) a progressive distance-weighted attention matching that dynamically emphasizes longer position differences during training, and (2) a learnable RoPE response gain modulation that selectively amplifies position sensitivity where needed. Extensive experiments across multiple model families demonstrate that LAid-distilled models achieve up to 3.2× longer effective context windows compared to baseline small models, while maintaining or improving performance on standard VL benchmarks. Spectral analysis also suggests that LAid successfully preserves crucial low-frequency attention components that conventional methods fail to transfer. Our work not only provides practical techniques for building more efficient long-context VLMs but also offers theoretical insights into how positional understanding emerges and transfers during distillation.

PaperID: 821, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10952

Authors:Xiaona Zhou, Yingyan Zeng, Ran Jin, Ismini Lourentzou

Affiliations: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Cincinnati, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Title: Hierarchical Dataset Selection for High-Quality Data Sharing

Abstract:
The success of modern machine learning hinges on access to highquality training data. In many real-world scenarios, such as acquiring data from public repositories or sharing across institutions, data is naturally organized into discrete datasets that vary in relevance, quality, and utility. Selecting which repositories or institutions to search for useful datasets, and which datasets to incorporate into model training are therefore critical decisions, yet most existing methods select individual samples and treat all data as equally relevant, ignoring differences between datasets and their sources. In this work, we formalize the task of dataset selection: selecting entire datasets from a large, heterogeneous pool to improve downstream performance under resource constraints. We propose Dataset Selection via Hierarchies (DaSH), a dataset selection method that models utility at both dataset and group (e.g., collections, institutions) levels, enabling efficient generalization from limited observations. Across two public benchmarks (Digit-Five and DomainNet), DaSH outperforms state-of-the-art data selection baselines by up to 26.2% in accuracy, while requiring significantly fewer exploration steps. Ablations show DaSH is robust to low-resource settings and lack of relevant datasets, making it suitable for scalable and adaptive dataset selection in practical multi-source learning workflows.

PaperID: 822, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17382

Authors:Rishabh Jain, Keisuke Okumura, Michael Amir, Amanda Prorok

Affiliations: University of Cambridge

Title: Graph Attention-Guided Search for Dense Multi-Agent Pathfinding

Abstract:
Finding nearoptimal solutions for dense multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) problems in real-time remains challenging even for state-of-the-art planners. To this end, we develop a hybrid framework that integrates a learned heuristic derived from MAGAT, a neural MAPF policy with a graph attention scheme, into a leading search-based algorithm, LaCAM. While prior work has explored learning-guided search in MAPF, such methods have historically underperformed. In contrast, our approach, termed LaGAT, outperforms both purely search-based and purely learning-based methods in dense scenarios. This is achieved through an enhanced MAGAT architecture, a pre-train–then–fine-tune strategy on maps of interest, and a deadlock detection scheme to account for imperfect neural guidance. Our results demonstrate that, when carefully designed, hybrid search offers a powerful solution for tightly coupled, challenging multi-agent coordination problems.

PaperID: 823, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21859

Authors:Qi Fan, An Zou, Yehan Ma

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: TimeBill: Time-Budgeted Inference for Large Language Models

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in timecritical systems, such as robotics, autonomous driving, embodied intelligence, and industrial automation, where generating accurate responses within a given time budget is crucial for decision-making, control, or safety-critical tasks. However, the auto-regressive generation process of LLMs makes it challenging to model and estimate the end-to-end execution time. Furthermore, existing efficient inference methods based on a fixed key-value (KV) cache eviction ratio struggle to adapt to varying tasks with diverse time budgets, where an improper eviction ratio may lead to incomplete inference or a drop in response performance. In this paper, we propose TimeBill, a novel time-budgeted inference framework for LLMs that balances the inference efficiency and response performance. To be more specific, we propose a fine-grained response length predictor (RLP) and an execution time estimator (ETE) to accurately predict the end-to-end execution time of LLMs. Following this, we develop a time-budgeted efficient inference approach that adaptively adjusts the KV cache eviction ratio based on execution time prediction and the given time budget. Finally, through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the advantages of TimeBill in improving task completion rate and maintaining response performance under various overrun strategies.

PaperID: 824, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.03008

Authors:Andrea Gurioli, Federico Pennino, Joao Monteiro, Maurizio Gabbrielli

Affiliations: University of Bologna, Apple MLR

Title: MoSE: Hierarchical Self-Distillation Enhances Early Layer Embeddings

Abstract:
Deploying language models often requires navigating accuracy vs. performance tradeoffs to meet latency constraints while preserving utility. Traditional model distillation reduces size but incurs substantial costs through training separate models. We introduce ModularStarEncoder (MoSE), a 1-billion-parameter multi-exit encoder for code retrieval and classification that employs a novel Self-Distillation mechanism. This approach significantly enhances lower-layer representations, enabling flexible deployment of different model portions with favorable performance trade-offs. Our architecture improves text-to-code and code-to-code search by targeting specific encoder layers as exit heads, where higher layers guide earlier ones during training, thereby improving intermediate representations at minimal additional cost. We further enhance MoSE with a repository-level contextual loss that maximizes training context window utilization. Additionally, we release a new dataset created through code translation that extends text-to code benchmarks with cross-language code-to-code pairs. Evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of Self-Distillation as a principled approach to trading inference cost for accuracy across various code understanding tasks.

PaperID: 825, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14268

Authors:Hui Huang, Yancheng He, Hongli Zhou, Rui Zhang, Wei Liu, Weixun Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Wenbo Su

Affiliations: Alibaba Group, Nanjing University

Title: Think-J: Learning to Think for Generative LLM-as-a-Judge

Abstract:
LLMas-a-Judge refers to the automatic modeling of preferences for responses generated by Large Language Models (LLMs), which is of significant importance for both LLM evaluation and reward modeling. Although generative LLMs have made substantial progress in various tasks, their performance as LLM-Judge still falls short of expectations. In this work, we propose Think-J, which improves generative LLM-as-a-Judge by learning how to think. We first utilized a small amount of curated data to develop the model with initial judgment thinking capabilities. Subsequently, we optimize the judgment thinking traces based on reinforcement learning (RL). We propose two methods for judgment thinking optimization, based on offline and online RL, respectively. The offline method requires training a critic model to construct positive and negative examples for learning. The online method defines rule-based reward as feedback for optimization. Experimental results showed that our approach can significantly enhance the evaluation capability of generative LLM-Judge, surpassing both generative and classifier-based LLM-Judge without requiring extra human annotations.

PaperID: 826, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15568

Authors:Junlong Jia, Xing Wu, Chaochen Gao, Ziyang Chen, Zijia Lin, Zhongzhi Li, Weinong Wang, Haotian Xu, Donghui Jin, Debing Zhang, Binghui Guo

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing LMIB, Beihang University, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University, Xiaohongshu Inc, Beijing Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Future Blockchain and Privacy Computing

Title: LiteLong: Resource-Efficient Long-Context Data Synthesis for LLMs

Abstract:
Highquality long-context data is essential for training large language models (LLMs) capable of processing extensive documents, yet existing synthesis approaches using relevance-based aggregation face challenges of computational efficiency. We present LiteLong, a resource-efficient method for synthesizing long-context data through structured topic organization and multi-agent debate. Our approach leverages the BISAC book classification system to provide a comprehensive hierarchical topic organization, and then employs a debate mechanism with multiple LLMs to generate diverse, high-quality topics within this structure. For each topic, we use lightweight BM25 retrieval to obtain relevant documents and concatenate them into 128K-token training samples. Experiments on HELMET and Ruler benchmarks demonstrate that LiteLong achieves competitive long-context performance and can seamlessly integrate with other long-dependency enhancement methods. LiteLong makes high-quality long-context data synthesis more accessible by reducing both computational and data engineering costs, facilitating further research in long-context language training.

PaperID: 827, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17125

Authors:Xue Jiang, Yihong Dong, Huangzhao Zhang, Tangxinyu Wang, Zheng Fang, Yingwei Ma, Rongyu Cao, Binhua Li, Zhi Jin, Wenpin Jiao, Yongbin Li, Ge Li

Affiliations: Ministry of Education; School of Computer Science, Peking University, Alibaba Group, Verdent AI, Tongyi Lab

Title: Large Language Model Unlearning for Source Code

Abstract:
While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at code generation, their inherent tendency toward verbatim memorization of training data introduces critical risks like copyright infringement, insecurity emission, and deprecated API utilization, etc. A straightforward yet promising defense is unlearning, i.e., erasing or downweighting the offending snippets through post-training. However, we find its application to source code often tends to spill over, damaging the basic knowledge of programming languages learned by the LLM and degrading the overall capability. To ease this challenge, we propose PROD for precise source code unlearning. PROD surgically zeroes out the prediction probability of the prohibited tokens, and renormalizes the remaining distribution so that the generated code stays correct. By excising only the targeted snippets, PROD achieves precise forgetting without much degradation of the LLM's overall capability. To facilitate in-depth evaluation against PROD, we establish an unlearning benchmark consisting of three downstream tasks (i.e., unlearning of copyrighted code, insecure code, and deprecated APIs), and introduce Pareto Dominance Ratio (PDR) metric, which indicates both the forget quality and the LLM utility. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that PROD achieves superior overall performance between forget quality and model utility compared to existing unlearning approaches across three downstream tasks, while consistently exhibiting improvements when applied to LLMs of varying series. PROD also exhibits superior robustness against adversarial attacks without generating or exposing the data to be forgotten. These results underscore that our approach not only successfully extends the application boundary of unlearning techniques to source code, but also holds significant implications for advancing reliable code generation.

PaperID: 828, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08305

Authors:Ly Tran Ho Khanh, Dongxuan Zhu, Man-Chung Yue, Viet Anh Nguyen

Affiliations: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, The University of Hong Kong

Title: Test-time Diverse Reasoning by Riemannian Activation Steering

Abstract:
Bestof-N reasoning improves the accuracy of language models in solving mathematical tasks by sampling multiple candidate solutions and then selecting the best one based on some criteria. A critical bottleneck for this strategy is the output diversity limit, which occurs when the model generates similar outputs despite stochastic sampling, and hence recites the same error. To address this lack of variance in reasoning paths, we propose a novel unsupervised activation steering strategy that simultaneously optimizes the steering vectors for multiple reasoning trajectories at test time. At any synchronization anchor along the batch generation process, we find the steering vectors that maximize the total volume spanned by all possible intervened activation subsets. We demonstrate that these steering vectors can be determined by solving a Riemannian optimization problem over the product of spherical manifolds with a log-determinant objective function. We then use a Riemannian block-coordinate descent algorithm with a well-tuned learning rate to obtain a stationary point of the problem, and we apply these steering vectors until the generation process reaches the subsequent synchronization anchor. Empirical evaluations on popular mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that our test-time Riemannian activation steering strategy outperforms vanilla sampling techniques in terms of generative diversity and solution accuracy.

PaperID: 829, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06190

Authors:Sangmook Lee, Dohyung Kim, Hyukhun Koh, Nakyeong Yang, Kyomin Jung

Affiliations: Seoul National University

Title: Confidence-Guided Stepwise Model Routing for Cost-Efficient Reasoning

Abstract:
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) particularly model scaling and test-time techniques - have greatly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of language models at the expense of higher inference costs. To lower inference costs, prior works train router models or deferral mechanisms that allocate easy queries to a small, efficient model, while forwarding harder queries to larger, more expensive models. However, these trained router models often lack robustness under domain shifts and require expensive data synthesis techniques such as Monte Carlo rollouts to obtain sufficient ground-truth routing labels for training. In this work, we propose Confidence-Guided Stepwise Model Routing for Cost-Efficient Reasoning (STEER), a domain-agnostic, framework that performs fine-grained, step-level routing between smaller and larger LLMs without utilizing external models. STEER leverages confidence scores from the smaller model’s logits prior to generating a reasoning step, so that the large model is invoked only when necessary. Extensive evaluations using different LLMs on a diverse set of challenging benchmarks across multiple domains such as Mathematical Reasoning, Multi-Hop QA, and Planning tasks indicate that STEER achieves competitive or enhanced accuracy while reducing inference costs (up to +20% accuracy with 48% less FLOPs compared to solely using the larger model on AIME), outperforming baselines that rely on trained external modules. Our results establish model-internal confidence as a robust, domain-agnostic signal for model routing, offering a scalable pathway for efficient LLM deployment.

PaperID: 830, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10038

Authors:Ziheng Li, Hengyi Cai, Xiaochi Wei, Yuchen Li, Shuaiqiang Wang, Zhi-Hong Deng, Dawei Yin

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence, School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Peking University, Baidu Inc.

Title: Efficient Thought Space Exploration Through Strategic Intervention

Abstract:
While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate emerging reasoning capabilities, current inferencetime expansion methods incur prohibitive computational costs through exhaustive sampling. Through analyzing decoding trajectories, we observe that most next-token predictions align well with the golden output, except for a few critical tokens that lead to deviations. Inspired by this phenomenon, we propose a novel Hint-Practice Reasoning (HPR) framework that operationalizes this insight through two synergistic components: 1) a hinter (powerful LLM) that provides probabilistic guidance at critical decision points, and 2) a practitioner (efficient smaller model) that executes major reasoning steps. The framework's core innovation lies in Distributional Inconsistency Reduction (DIR), a theoretically-grounded metric that dynamically identifies intervention points by quantifying the divergence between practitioner's reasoning trajectory and hinter's expected distribution in a tree-structured probabilistic space. Through iterative tree updates guided by DIR, HPR reweights promising reasoning paths while deprioritizing low-probability branches. Experiments across arithmetic and commonsense reasoning benchmarks demonstrate HPR's state-of-the-art efficiency-accuracy tradeoffs: it achieves comparable performance to self-consistency and MCTS baselines while decoding only 1/5 tokens, and outperforms existing methods by at most 5.1% absolute accuracy while maintaining similar or lower FLOPs.

PaperID: 831, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19498

Authors:Yujing Lu, Ling Zhong, Jing Yang, Weiming Li, Peng Wei, Yongheng Wang, Manni Duan, Qing Zhang

Affiliations: Zhejiang Lab, National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhejiang lab

Title: DomainCQA: Crafting Knowledge-Intensive QA from Domain-Specific Charts

Abstract:
Chart Question Answering (CQA) evaluates Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on visual understanding and reasoning over chart data. However, existing benchmarks mostly test surfacelevel parsing, such as reading labels and legends, while overlooking deeper scientific reasoning. We propose DomainCQA, a framework for constructing domain-specific CQA benchmarks that emphasize both visual comprehension and knowledge-intensive reasoning. It integrates complexity-aware chart selection, multitier QA generation, and expert validation. Applied to astronomy, DomainCQA yields AstroChart, a benchmark of 1,690 QA pairs over 482 charts, exposing persistent weaknesses in fine-grained perception, numerical reasoning, and domain knowledge integration across 21 MLLMs. Fine-tuning on AstroChart improves performance across fundamental and advanced tasks. Pilot QA sets in biochemistry, economics, medicine, and social science further demonstrate DomainCQA’s generality. Together, our results establish DomainCQA as a unified pipeline for constructing and augmenting domain-specific chart reasoning benchmarks.

PaperID: 832, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08000

Authors:Debdeep Sanyal, Manodeep Ray, Murari Mandal

Affiliations: Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT)

Title: AntiDote: Bi-level Adversarial Training for Tamper-Resistant LLMs

Abstract:
The release of openweight large language models (LLMs) creates a tension between advancing accessible research and preventing misuse, such as malicious fine-tuning to elicit harmful content. Current safety measures struggle to preserve the general capabilities of the LLM while resisting a determined adversary with full access to the model's weights and architecture, who can use full-parameter fine-tuning to erase existing safeguards. To address this, we introduce AntiDote, a bi-level optimization procedure for training LLMs to be resistant to such tampering. AntiDote involves an auxiliary adversary hypernetwork that learns to generate malicious Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) weights conditioned on the defender model's internal activations. The defender LLM is then trained with an objective to nullify the effect of these adversarial weight additions, forcing it to maintain its safety alignment. We validate this approach against a diverse suite of 52 red-teaming attacks, including jailbreak prompting, latent space manipulation, and direct weight-space attacks. AntiDote is upto 27.4% more robust against adversarial attacks compared to both tamper-resistance and unlearning baselines. Crucially, this robustness is achieved with a minimal trade-off in utility, incurring a performance degradation of upto less than 0.5% across capability benchmarks including MMLU, HellaSwag, and GSM8K. Our work offers a practical and compute efficient methodology for building open-weight models where safety is a more integral and resilient property.

PaperID: 833, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17075

Authors:Pranav Shetty, Mirazul Haque, Petr Babkin, Zhiqiang Ma, Xiaomo Liu, Manuela Veloso

Affiliations: JPMorgan AI Research

Title: Perturb Your Data: Paraphrase-Guided Training Data Watermarking

Abstract:
Training data detection is critical for enforcing copyright and data licensing, as Large Language Models (LLM) are trained on massive text corpora scraped from the internet. We present SPECTRA, a watermarking approach that makes training data reliably detectable even when it comprises less than 0.001% of the training corpus. SPECTRA works by paraphrasing text using an LLM and assigning a score based on how likely each paraphrase is, according to a separate scoring model. A paraphrase is chosen so that its score closely matches that of the original text, to avoid introducing any distribution shifts. To test whether a suspect model has been trained on the watermarked data, we compare its token probabilities against those of the scoring model. We demonstrate that SPECTRA achieves a consistent pvalue gap of over nine orders of magnitude when detecting data used for training versus data not used for training, which is greater than all baselines tested. SPECTRA equips data owners with a scalable, deploy‑before‑release watermark that survives even large‑scale LLM training.

PaperID: 834, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.04998

Authors:Tianyuan Shi, Fanqi Wan, Canbin Huang, Xiaojun Quan, Chenliang Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Minhua Huang, Wu Kai

Affiliations: SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY, Shenzhen Loop Area Institute, Alibaba Group, China Mobile Internet

Title: ProFuser: Progressive Fusion of Large Language Models

Abstract:
While fusing the capacities and advantages of various large language models offers a pathway to construct more powerful and versatile models, a fundamental challenge is to properly select advantageous model during training. Existing fusion methods primarily focus on the training mode that uses cross entropy on ground truth in a teacherforcing setup to measure a model's advantage, which may provide limited insight towards model advantage. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach that enhances the fusion process by incorporating both the training and inference modes. Our method evaluates model advantage not only through cross entropy during training but also by considering inference outputs, providing a more comprehensive assessment. To combine the two modes effectively, we introduce ProFuser to progressively transition from inference mode to training mode. To validate ProFuser's effectiveness, we fused three models, including Vicuna-7B-v1.5, Llama-2-7B-Chat, and MPT-7B-8K-Chat, and demonstrated the improved performance in knowledge, reasoning, and safety compared to baseline methods.

PaperID: 835, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16985

Authors:An Quang Tang, Xiuzhen Zhang, Minh Ngoc Dinh, Zhuang Li

Affiliations: Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, RMIT International University Vietnam

Title: ARQUSUMM: Argument-aware Quantitative Summarization of Online Conversations

Abstract:
Online conversations have become more prevalent on public discussion platforms (e.g. Reddit). With growing controversial topics, it is desirable to summarize not only diverse arguments, but also their rationale and justification. Early studies on text summarization focus on capturing general salient information in source documents, overlooking the argumentative nature of online conversations. Recent research on conversation summarization although considers the argumentative relationship among sentences, fail to explicate deeper argument structure within sentences for summarization. In this paper, we propose a novel task of argumentaware quantitative summarization to reveal the claim-reason structure of arguments in conversations, with quantities measuring argument strength. We further propose ARQUSUMM, a novel framework to address the task. To reveal the underlying argument structure within sentences, ARQUSUMM leverages LLM few-shot learning grounded in the argumentation theory to identify propositions within sentences and their claim-reason relationships. For quantitative summarization, ARQUSUMM employs argument structure-aware clustering algorithms to aggregate arguments and quantify their support. Experiments show that ARQUSUMM outperforms existing conversation and quantitative summarization models and generate summaries representing argument structures that are more helpful to users, of high textual quality and quantification accuracy.

PaperID: 836, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.15846

Authors:Fei Tang, Zhangxuan Gu, Zhengxi Lu, Xuyang Liu, Shuheng Shen, Changhua Meng, Wen Wang, Wenqi Zhang, Yongliang Shen, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang

Affiliations: Ant Group, Zhejiang University

Title: GUI-G²: Gaussian Reward Modeling for GUI Grounding

Abstract:
Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding maps natural language instructions to precise interface locations for autonomous interaction. Current reinforcement learning approaches use binary rewards that treat elements as hitor-miss targets, creating sparse signals that ignore the continuous nature of spatial interactions. Motivated by human clicking behavior that naturally forms Gaussian distributions centered on target elements, we introduce GUI Gaussian Grounding Rewards (GUI-G2), a principled reward framework that models GUI elements as continuous Gaussian distributions across the interface plane. GUI-G2 incorporates two synergistic mechanisms: Gaussian point rewards model precise localization through exponentially decaying distributions centered on element centroids, while coverage rewards assess spatial alignment by measuring the overlap between predicted Gaussian distributions and target regions. To handle diverse element scales, we develop an adaptive variance mechanism that calibrates reward distributions based on element dimensions. This framework transforms GUI grounding from sparse binary classification to dense continuous optimization, where Gaussian distributions generate rich gradient signals that guide models toward optimal interaction positions. Extensive experiments across ScreenSpot, ScreenSpot-v2, and ScreenSpot-Pro benchmarks demonstrate that GUI-G2, substantially outperforms state-of-the-art method UI-TARS-72B, with the most significant improvement of 24.7% on ScreenSpot-Pro. Our analysis reveals that continuous modeling provides superior robustness to interface variations and enhanced generalization to unseen layouts, establishing a new paradigm for spatial reasoning in GUI interaction tasks.

PaperID: 837, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05100

Authors:Yuhao Wang, Ruiyang Ren, Yucheng Wang, Jing Liu, Xin Zhao, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang

Affiliations: Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China, Baidu Inc.

Title: BEE-RAG: Balanced Entropy Engineering for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), retrievalaugmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a critical approach to supplement the inherent knowledge limitations of LLMs. However, due to the typically large volume of retrieved information, RAG tends to operate with long context lengths. From the perspective of entropy engineering, we identify unconstrained entropy growth and attention dilution due to long retrieval context as significant factors affecting RAG performance. In this paper, we propose the balanced entropy-engineered RAG (BEE-RAG) framework, which improves the adaptability of RAG systems to varying context lengths through the principle of entropy invariance. By leveraging balanced context entropy to reformulate attention dynamics, BEE-RAG separates attention sensitivity from context length, ensuring a stable entropy level. Building upon this, we introduce a zero-shot inference strategy for multi-importance estimation and a parameter-efficient adaptive fine-tuning mechanism to obtain the optimal balancing factor for different settings. Extensive experiments across multiple RAG tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of BEE-RAG.

PaperID: 838, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05405

Authors:Xinrun Xu, Pi Bu, Ye Wang, Börje F. Karlsson, Ziming Wang, Tengtao Song, Qi Zhu, Jun Song, Zhiming Ding, Bo Zheng

Affiliations: Chinese Academy of Science, Taobao & Tmall Group of Alibaba, Renmin University of China, Informatics Department, Institute of Software

Title: DeepPhy: Benchmarking Agentic VLMs on Physical Reasoning

Abstract:
Although Vision Language Models (VLMs) exhibit strong perceptual abilities and impressive visual reasoning, they struggle with attention to detail and precise action planning in complex, dynamic environments, leading to subpar performance. Realworld tasks typically require complex interactions, advanced spatial reasoning, long-term planning, and continuous strategy refinement, usually necessitating understanding the physics rules of the target scenario. However, evaluating these capabilities in real-world scenarios is often prohibitively expensive. To bridge this gap, we introduce DeepPHY, a novel benchmark framework designed to systematically evaluate VLMs' understanding and reasoning about fundamental physical principles through a series of challenging simulated environments. DeepPHY integrates multiple physical reasoning environments of varying difficulty levels and incorporates fine-grained evaluation metrics. Our evaluation finds that even state-of-the-art VLMs struggle to translate descriptive physical knowledge into precise, predictive control.

PaperID: 839, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10293

Authors:Chuhuai Yue, Chengqi Dong, Yinan Gao, Hang He, Jiajun Chai, Wei Lin, Guojun Yin

Affiliations: Meituan Beijing Institute of Technology, Meituan University of Science and Technology of China, Fudan University, Meituan East China Normal University

Title: Promoting Efficient Reasoning with Verifiable Stepwise Reward

Abstract:
Large reasoning models (LRMs) have recently achieved significant progress in complex reasoning tasks, aided by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. However, LRMs often suffer from overthinking, expending excessive computation on simple problems and reducing efficiency. Existing efficient reasoning methods typically require accurate task assessment to preset token budgets or select reasoning modes, which limits their flexibility and reliability. In this work, we revisit the essence of overthinking and identify that encouraging effective steps while penalizing ineffective ones is key to its solution. To this end, we propose a novel rulebased verifiable stepwise reward mechanism (VSRM), which assigns rewards based on the performance of intermediate states in the reasoning trajectory. This approach is intuitive and naturally fits the step-by-step nature of reasoning tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on standard mathematical reasoning benchmarks, including AIME24 and AIME25, by integrating VSRM with PPO and Reinforce++. Results show that our method achieves substantial output length reduction while maintaining original reasoning performance, striking an optimal balance between efficiency and accuracy. Further analysis of overthinking frequency and pass@k score before and after training demonstrates that our approach indeed effectively suppresses ineffective steps and encourages effective reasoning, fundamentally alleviating the overthinking problem.

PaperID: 840, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17229

Authors:Junan Zhang, Xueyao Zhang, Jing Yang, Yuancheng Wang, Fan Fan, Zhizheng Wu

Affiliations: School of Data Science, Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Central Media Technology Institute, Shenzhen Shenzhen Loop Area Institute City University of Macau

Title: Multi-Metric Preference Alignment for Generative Speech Restoration

Abstract:
Recent generative models have significantly advanced speech restoration tasks, yet their training objectives often misalign with human perceptual preferences, resulting in suboptimal quality. While posttraining alignment has proven effective in other generative domains like text and image generation, its application to generative speech restoration remains largely under-explored. This work investigates the challenges of applying preference-based post-training to this task, focusing on how to define a robust preference signal and curate high-quality data to avoid reward hacking. To address these challenges, we propose a multi-metric preference alignment strategy. We construct a new dataset, GenSR-Pref, comprising 80K preference pairs, where each chosen sample is unanimously favored by a complementary suite of metrics covering perceptual quality, signal fidelity, content consistency, and timbre preservation. This principled approach ensures a holistic preference signal. Applying Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with our dataset, we observe consistent and significant performance gains across three diverse generative paradigms: autoregressive models (AR), masked generative models (MGM), and flow-matching models (FM) on various restoration benchmarks, in both objective and subjective evaluations. Ablation studies confirm the superiority of our multi-metric strategy over single-metric approaches in mitigating reward hacking. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our aligned models can serve as powerful ''data annotators'', generating high-quality pseudo-labels to serve as a supervision signal for traditional discriminative models in data-scarce scenarios like singing voice restoration.

PaperID: 841, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09724

Authors:Yang Zhang, Cunxiang Wang, Lindong Wu, Wenbo Yu, Yidong Wang, Guangsheng Bao, Jie Tang

Affiliations: ZhipuAI Peking University, Westlake University, Tsinghua University

Title: UDA: Unsupervised Debiasing Alignment for Pair-wise LLM-as-a-Judge

Abstract:
Pairwise evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a common paradigm, but it is prone to preference bias, where judges systematically favor certain outputs, such as their own. This bias leads to inconsistent and skewed rankings across different judges. To address this, we first empirically demonstrate significant and heterogeneous biases in crossmodel evaluations. We then propose UDA (Unsupervised Debiasing Alignment), a framework that reduces inter-judge disagreement by dynamically adjusting the Elo rating system. For each pairwise comparison, a compact neural network learns to adaptively set the K-factor and refine win probabilities. Crucially, UDA operates in a fully unsupervised manner, guided solely by the objective of minimizing the dispersion among the Elo trajectories of all judges. This forces an alignment towards a collective consensus, which serves as an unsupervised proxy for a more stable and reproducible evaluation. In addition, we provide theoretical motivation demonstrating how alignment towards a consensus can reduce aggregate system bias. Experiments show that UDA significantly reduces the inter-judge rating standard deviation by up to 63.4% and improves the average correlation with human judgments by 24.7%. Notably, UDA elevates the performance of poorly performing judges to achieve parity with high-quality ones, fostering a more robust and reliable evaluation ecosystem.

PaperID: 842, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04694

Authors:Zhilun Zhou, Zihan Liu, Jiahe Liu, Qingyu Shao, Yihan Wang, Kun Shao, Depeng Jin, Fengli Xu

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Huawei Noah's Ark Lab

Title: ResMAS: Resilience Optimization in LLM-based Multi-agent Systems

Abstract:
Large Language Modelbased Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-based MAS), where multiple LLM agents collaborate to solve complex tasks, have shown impressive performance in many areas. However, MAS are typically distributed across different devices or environments, making them vulnerable to perturbations such as agent failures. While existing works have studied the adversarial attacks and corresponding defense strategies, they mainly focus on reactively detecting and mitigating attacks after they occur rather than proactively designing inherently resilient systems. In this work, we study the resilience of LLM-based MAS under perturbations and find that both the communication topology and prompt design significantly influence system resilience. Motivated by these findings, we propose ResMAS: a two-stage framework for enhancing MAS resilience. First, we train a reward model to predict the MAS’s resilience, based on which we train a topology generator to automatically design resilient topology for specific tasks through reinforcement learning. Second, we introduce a topology-aware prompt optimization method that refines each agent’s prompt based on its connections and interactions with other agents. Extensive experiments across a range of tasks show that our approach substantially improves MAS resilience under various constraints. Moreover, our framework demonstrates strong generalization ability to new tasks and models, highlighting its potential for building resilient MASs.

PaperID: 843, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16685

Authors:Yuetian Zou, Hanlei Zhang, Hua Xu, Songze Li, Long Xiao

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Hebei University of Science and Technology

Title: Ellipsoid-Based Decision Boundaries for Open Intent Classification

Abstract:
Textual open intent classification is crucial for realworld dialogue systems, enabling robust detection of unknown user intents without prior knowledge and contributing to the robustness of the system. While adaptive decision boundary methods have shown great potential by eliminating manual threshold tuning, existing approaches assume isotropic distributions of known classes, restricting boundaries to balls and overlooking distributional variance along different directions. To address this limitation, we propose EliDecide, a novel method that learns ellipsoid decision boundaries with varying scales along different feature directions. First, we employ supervised contrastive learning to obtain a discriminative feature space for known samples. Second, we apply learnable matrices to parameterize ellipsoids as the boundaries of each known class, offering greater flexibility than spherical boundaries defined solely by centers and radii. Third, we optimize the boundaries via a novelly designed dual loss function that balances empirical and open-space risks: expanding boundaries to cover known samples while contracting them against synthesized pseudo-open samples. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple text intent benchmarks and further on a question classification dataset. The flexibility of the ellipsoids demonstrates superior open intent detection capability and strong potential for generalization to more text classification tasks in diverse complex open-world scenarios.

PaperID: 844, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.17987

Authors:Chenyu Zhang, Lanjun Wang, Yiwen Ma, Wenhui Li, Guoqing Jin, Anan Liu

Affiliations: School of New Media and Communication, Tianjin University, School of Electrical and Information Engineering, State Key Laboratory of Communication Content Cognition, People's Daily Online

Title: Reason2Attack: Jailbreaking Text-to-Image Models via LLM Reasoning

Abstract:
Textto-Image (T2I) models typically deploy safety mechanisms to prevent the generation of sensitive images. Unfortunately, recent jailbreaking attack methods manually design instructions for the LLM to generate adversarial prompts, which effectively exposing safety vulnerabilities of T2I models. However, existing methods have two limitations: 1) relying on manually exhaustive strategies for designing adversarial prompts, lacking a unified framework, and 2) requiring numerous queries to achieve a successful attack, limiting their practical applicability. To address this issue, we propose Reason2Attack~(R2A), which aims to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of the LLM in jailbreaking attacks. Specifically, we first use Frame Semantics theory to systematize existing manually crafted strategies and propose a unified generation framework to generate CoT adversarial prompts step by step. Following this, we propose a two-stage LLM reasoning training framework guided by the attack process. In the first stage, the LLM is fine-tuned with CoT examples generated by the unified generation framework to internalize the adversarial prompt generation process grounded in Frame Semantics. In the second stage, we incorporate the jailbreaking task into the LLM's reinforcement learning process, guided by the proposed attack process reward function that balances prompt stealthiness, effectiveness, and length, enabling the LLM to understand T2I models and safety mechanisms. Extensive experiments on various T2I models with safety mechanisms, and commercial T2I models, show the superiority and practicality of R2A.

PaperID: 845, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07790

Authors:Alessandro Abate, Thom Badings, Giuseppe De Giacomo, Francesco Fabiano

Affiliations: University of Oxford

Title: Best-Effort Policies for Robust Markov Decision Processes

Abstract:
We study the common generalization of Markov decision processes (MDPs) with sets of transition probabilities, known as robust MDPs (RMDPs). A standard goal in RMDPs is to compute a policy that maximizes the expected return under an adversarial choice of the transition probabilities. If the uncertainty in the probabilities is independent between the states, known as srectangularity, such optimal robust policies can be computed efficiently using robust value iteration. However, there might still be multiple optimal robust policies, which, while equivalent with respect to the worst-case, reflect different expected returns under non-adversarial choices of the transition probabilities. Hence, we propose a refined policy selection criterion for RMDPs, drawing inspiration from the notions of dominance and best-effort in game theory. Instead of seeking a policy that only maximizes the worst-case expected return, we additionally require the policy to achieve a maximal expected return under different (i.e., not fully adversarial) transition probabilities. We call such a policy an optimal robust best-effort (ORBE) policy. We prove that ORBE policies always exist, characterize their structure, and present an algorithm to compute them with a manageable overhead over standard robust value iteration. ORBE policies offer a principled tie-breaker among optimal robust policies. Numerical experiments show the feasibility of our approach.

PaperID: 846, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08078

Authors:Linus Heck, Filip Macák, Milan Češka, Sebastian Junges

Affiliations: Radboud University, Brno University of Technology

Title: Constrained and Robust Policy Synthesis with Satisfiability-Modulo-Probabilistic-Model-Checking

Abstract:
The ability to compute rewardoptimal policies for given and known finite Markov decision processes (MDPs) underpins a variety of applications across planning, controller synthesis, and verification. However, we often want policies (1) to be robust, i.e., they perform well on perturbations of the MDP and (2) to satisfy additional structural constraints regarding, e.g., their representation or implementation cost. Computing such robust and constrained policies is indeed computationally more challenging. This paper contributes the first approach to effectively compute robust policies subject to arbitrary structural constraints using a flexible and efficient framework. We achieve flexibility by allowing to express our constraints in a first-order theory over a set of MDPs, while the root for our efficiency lies in the tight integration of satisfiability solvers to handle the combinatorial nature of the problem and probabilistic model checking algorithms to handle the analysis of MDPs. Experiments on a few hundred benchmarks demonstrate the feasibility for constrained and robust policy synthesis and the competitiveness with state-of-the-art methods for various fragments of the problem.

PaperID: 847, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10164

Authors:Periklis Mantenoglou, Luigi Bonassi, Enrico Scala, Pedro Zuidberg Dos Martires

Affiliations: Örebro University, University of Oxford, University of Brescia

Title: Two Constraint Compilation Methods for Lifted Planning

Abstract:
We study planning in a fragment of PDDL with qualitative statetrajectory constraints, capturing safety requirements, task ordering conditions, and intermediate sub-goals commonly found in real-world problems. A prominent approach to tackle such problems is to compile their constraints away, leading to a problem that is supported by state-of-the-art planners. Unfortunately, existing compilers do not scale on problems with a large number of objects and high-arity actions, as they necessitate grounding the problem before compilation. To address this issue, we propose two methods for compiling away constraints without grounding, making them suitable for large-scale planning problems. We prove the correctness of our compilers and outline their worst-case time complexity. Moreover, we present a reproducible empirical evaluation on the domains used in the latest International Planning Competition. Our results demonstrate that our methods are efficient and produce planning specifications that are orders of magnitude more succinct than the ones produced by compilers that ground the domain, while remaining competitive when used for planning with a state-of-the-art planner.

PaperID: 848, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11545

Authors:Irmak Sağlam, Mahdi Nazeri, Alessandro Abate, Sadegh Soudjani, Anne-Kathrin Schmuck

Affiliations: University of Oxford, University of Birmingham MPI-SWS

Title: Incremental Data-Driven Policy Synthesis via Game Abstractions

Abstract:
We address the synthesis of control policies for unknown discretetime stochastic dynamical systems to satisfy temporal logic objectives. We present a data-driven, abstraction-based control framework that integrates online learning with novel incremental game-solving. Under appropriate continuity assumptions, our method abstracts the system dynamics into a finite stochastic (2.5-player) game graph derived from data. Given a requirement over time on this graph, we compute the winning region -- i.e., the set of initial states from which the objective is satisfiable -- in the resulting game, together with a corresponding control policy. Our main contribution is the construction of abstractions, winning regions and control policies incrementally, as data about the system dynamics accumulates. Concretely, our algorithm refines under- and over-approximations of reachable sets for each state-action pair as new data samples arrive. These refinements induce structural modifications in the game graph abstraction -- such as the addition or removal of nodes and edges -- which in turn modify the winning region. Crucially, we show that these updates are inherently monotonic: under-approximations only grow, over-approximations only shrink, and the winning region only expands. We exploit this monotonicity by defining an objective-induced ranking function on the nodes of the abstract game that increases monotonically as new data samples are incorporated. These ranks underpin our novel incremental game-solving algorithm, which employs customized gadgets (DAG-like subgames) within a rank-lifting algorithm to efficiently update the winning region. Numerical case studies demonstrate significant computational savings compared to the baseline approach, which resolves the entire game from scratch whenever new data samples arrive.

PaperID: 849, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09073

Authors:Christoph Weinhuber, Giuseppe De Giacomo, Yong Li, Sven Schewe, Qiyi Tang

Affiliations: University of Oxford, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Liverpool

Title: Good-for-MDP State Reduction for Stochastic LTL Planning

Abstract:
We study stochastic planning problems in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with goals specified in Linear Temporal Logic (LTL). The stateof-the-art approach transforms LTL formulas into good-for-MDP (GFM) automata, which feature a restricted form of nondeterminism. These automata are then composed with the MDP, allowing the agent to resolve the nondeterminism during policy synthesis. A major factor affecting the scalability of this approach is the size of the generated automata. In this paper, we propose a novel GFM state-space reduction technique that significantly reduces the number of automata states. Our method employs a sophisticated chain of transformations, leveraging recent advances in good-for-games minimisation developed for adversarial settings. In addition to our theoretical contributions, we present empirical results demonstrating the practical effectiveness of our state-reduction technique. Furthermore, we introduce a direct construction method for formulas of the form GFφ, where φ is a co-safety formula. This construction is provably single-exponential in the worst case, in contrast to the general doubly-exponential complexity. Our experiments confirm the scalability advantages of this specialised construction.

PaperID: 850, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.01841

Authors:Jingyang Zhao, Mingyu Xiao, Yonghang Su

Affiliations: South Korea, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Improved Algorithms for Trip-Vehicle Assignment in Ride-Sharing

Abstract:
The RideSharing Assignment Problem (AAAI 2018) is a fundamental problem in intelligent transportation systems, urban mobility, and algorithmic decision-making. Given a set of m vehicles with initial locations and n requests (n≤mk), each with a specified origin and destination, the goal is to assign at most k requests to each vehicle and compute corresponding routes that minimize the total travel distance. The algorithmic approach depends on whether n=mk or n

PaperID: 851, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07928

Authors:Bogdan Butyrin, Artemy Rubtsov, Alexey Naumov, Vladimir V. Ulyanov, Sergey Samsonov

Affiliations: Higher School of Economics

Title: Gaussian Approximation for Two-Timescale Linear Stochastic Approximation

Abstract:
In this paper, we establish nonasymptotic bounds for accuracy of normal approximation for linear two-timescale stochastic approximation (TTSA) algorithms driven by martingale difference or Markov noise. Focusing on both the last iterate and Polyak–Ruppert averaging regimes, we derive bounds for normal approximation in terms of the convex distance between probability distributions. Our analysis reveals a non-trivial interaction between the fast and slow timescales: the normal approximation rate for the last iterate improves as the timescale separation increases, while it decreases in the Polyak–Ruppert averaged setting. We also provide the high-order moment bounds for the error of linear TTSA algorithm, which may be of independent interest. Finally, we demonstrate that our theoretical results are directly applicable to reinforcement learning algorithms such as GTD and TDC.

PaperID: 852, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10776

Authors:Yuta Kawakami, Jin Tian

Affiliations: Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

Title: Potential Outcome Rankings for Counterfactual Decision Making

Abstract:
Counterfactual decisionmaking in the face of uncertainty involves selecting the optimal action from several alternatives using causal reasoning. Decision-makers often rank expected potential outcomes (or their corresponding utility and desirability) to compare the preferences of candidate actions. In this paper, we study new counterfactual decision-making rules by introducing two new metrics: the probabilities of potential outcome ranking (PoR) and the probability of achieving the best potential outcome (PoB). PoR reveals the most probable ranking of potential outcomes for an individual, and PoB indicates the action most likely to yield the top-ranked outcome for an individual. We then establish identification theorems and derive bounds for these metrics, and present estimation methods. Finally, we perform numerical experiments to illustrate the finite-sample properties of the estimators and demonstrate their application to a real-world dataset.

PaperID: 853, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06790

Authors:Zidong Wang, Xi Lin, Chuchao He, Xiaoguang Gao

Affiliations: City University of Hong Kong, Xi’an Technological University, Northwest Polytechnical University Xi'an

Title: Robust Causal Discovery Under Imperfect Structural Constraints

Abstract:
Robust causal discovery from observational data under imperfect prior knowledge remains a significant and largely unresolved challenge. Existing methods typically presuppose perfect priors or can only handle specific, preidentified error types. And their performance degrades substantially when confronted with flawed constraints of unknown location and type. This decline arises because most of them rely on inflexible and biased thresholding strategies that may conflict with the data distribution. To overcome these limitations, we propose to harmonizes knowledge and data through prior alignment and conflict resolution. First, we assess the credibility of imperfect structural constraints through a surrogate model, which then guides a sparse penalization term measuring the loss between the learned and constrained adjacency matrices. We theoretically prove that, under ideal assumption, the knowledge-driven objective aligns with the data-driven objective. Furthermore, to resolve conflicts when this assumption is violated, we introduce a multi-task learning framework optimized via multi-gradient descent, jointly minimizing both objectives. Our proposed method is robust to both linear and nonlinear settings. Extensive experiments, conducted under diverse noise conditions and structural equation model types, demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method under imperfect structural constraints.

PaperID: 854, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.10320

Authors:Marat Agranovskiy, Konstantin Yakovlev

Affiliations: St. Petersburg State University

Title: MeshA*: Efficient Path Planning with Motion Primitives

Abstract:
We study a path planning problem where the possible move actions are represented as a finite set of motion primitives aligned with the grid representation of the environment. That is, each primitive corresponds to a short kinodynamicallyfeasible motion of an agent and is represented as a sequence of the swept cells of a grid. Typically, heuristic search, i.e. A, is conducted over the lattice induced by these primitives (lattice-based planning) to find a path. However, due to the large branching factor, such search may be inefficient in practice. To this end, we suggest a novel technique rooted in the idea of searching over the grid cells (as in vanilla A) simultaneously fitting the possible sequences of the motion primitives into these cells. The resultant algorithm, MeshA, provably preserves the guarantees on completeness and optimality, on the one hand, and is shown to notably outperform conventional lattice-based planning (x1.5-x2 decrease in the runtime), on the other hand.

PaperID: 855, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.05937

Authors:Longkun Guo, Zeyu Lin, Chaoqi Jia, Chao Chen

Affiliations: Fuzhou University, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

Title: Improved Streaming Algorithm for Fair k-Center Clustering

Abstract:
Many realworld applications call for incorporating fairness constraints into the k-center clustering problem, where the dataset is partitioned into m demographic groups, each with a specified upper bound on the number of centers to ensure fairness. Focusing on big data scenarios, this paper addresses the problem in a streaming setting, where data points arrive sequentially in a continuous stream. Leveraging a structure called the λ-independent center set, we propose a one-pass streaming algorithm that first computes a reserved set of points during the streaming process. In the post-streaming process, we then select centers from the reserved point set by analyzing three possible cases and transforming the most complex one into a specially constrained vertex-cover problem on an auxiliary graph. Our algorithm achieves an approximation ratio of 5 + ? and memory complexity O(k log ?), where ? is the aspect ratio and ? > 0 is any small constant. Furthermore, we extend our approach to semi-structured data streams, where data points arrive in groups. In this setting, we present a (3 + ?)-approximation algorithm for m = 2, which can be readily adapted to solve the offline fair k-center problem, achieving an approximation ratio of 3 that matches the current state of the art. Lastly, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of our approaches, demonstrating that they outperform existing baselines in both clustering cost and runtime efficiency.

PaperID: 856, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03929

Authors:Nguyen Viet Tuan Kiet, Tung Dao, Cong Dao Tran, Huynh Thi Thanh Binh

Affiliations: Hanoi University of Science and Technology

Title: MOTIF: Multi-strategy Optimization via Turn-based Interactive Framework

Abstract:
Designing effective algorithmic components remains a fundamental obstacle in tackling NPhard combinatorial optimization problems (COPs), where solvers often rely on carefully hand-crafted strategies. Despite recent advances in using large language models (LLMs) to synthesize high-quality components, most approaches restrict the search to a single element—commonly a heuristic scoring function—thus missing broader opportunities for innovation. We introduce a broader formulation of solver design as a multi-strategy optimization problem, which seeks to jointly improve a set of interdependent components under a unified objective. To address this, we propose MOTIF—Multi-strategy Optimization via Turn-based Interactive Framework—a novel framework based on Monte Carlo Tree Search that facilitates turn-based optimization between two LLM agents. At each turn, an agent improves one component by leveraging the history of both its own and its opponent’s prior updates, promoting both competitive pressure and emergent cooperation. This structured interaction broadens the search landscape and encourages the discovery of diverse, high-performing solutions. Experiments across multiple COP domains show that MOTIF consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, highlighting the promise of turn-based, multi-agent prompting for fully automated solver design.

PaperID: 857, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10272

Authors:Shahaf S. Shperberg, Natalie Morad, Lior Siag, Ariel Felner, Dor Atzmon

Affiliations: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Bar-Ilan University

Title: Bidirectional Bounded-Suboptimal Heuristic Search with Consistent Heuristics

Abstract:
Recent advancements in bidirectional heuristic search have yielded significant theoretical insights and novel algorithms. While most previous work has concentrated on optimal search methods, this paper focuses on boundedsuboptimal bidirectional search, where a bound on the suboptimality of the solution cost is specified. We build upon the state-of-the-art optimal bidirectional search algorithm, BAE, designed for consistent heuristics, and introduce several variants of BAE specifically tailored for the bounded-suboptimal context. Through experimental evaluation, we compare the performance of these new variants against other bounded-suboptimal bidirectional algorithms as well as the standard weighted A algorithm. Our results demonstrate that each algorithm excels under distinct conditions, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.

PaperID: 858, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15793

Authors:Oluwanifemi Bamgbose, Masoud Hashemi, Sathwik Tejaswi Madhusudhan, Jishnu Sethumadhavan Nair, Aman Tiwari, Vikas Yadav

Affiliations: ServiceNow Inc

Title: DNR Bench: Benchmarking Over-Reasoning in Reasoning LLMs

Abstract:
Testtime scaling has significantly improved large language model (LLM) performance, enabling deeper reasoning to solve complex problems. However, this increased reasoning capability also leads to excessive token generation and unnecessary problem-solving attempts. We introduce "Don't Reason Bench (DNR Bench)", a new benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs’ ability to robustly understand tricky reasoning triggers and avoid unnecessary generation. DNR Bench consists of 150 adversarially designed prompts that are easy for humans to understand and respond to, but surprisingly not for many recent prominent LLMs. DNR Bench tests models' abilities across different capabilities, such as instruction adherence, hallucination avoidance, redundancy filtering, and unanswerable question recognition. We evaluate reasoning LLMs (RLMs), including DeepSeek-R1, OpenAI O3-mini, and Claude-3.7-sonnet, and compare them against a powerful non-reasoning model, such as GPT-4o. Our experiments reveal that RLMs generate up to 70x more tokens than necessary, often failing at tasks that simpler non-reasoning models handle efficiently with higher accuracy. Our findings underscore the need for more effective training and inference strategies in RLMs.

PaperID: 859, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10007

Authors:Zijun Chen, Wenbo Hu, Richang Hong

Affiliations: Hefei University of Technology

Title: Deep Hidden Cognition Facilitates Reliable Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Abstract:
Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning has demonstrated remarkable deep reasoning capabilities in both large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, its reliability is often undermined by the accumulation of errors in intermediate steps. This paper proposes a novel approach to calibrating CoT reasoning accuracy by leveraging the model’s internal cognition of truthfulness. Our findings suggest that the model implicitly tracks the evolving veracity of intermediate steps throughout the dynamic, progressive reasoning process. We train a confidence predictor to quantify the model’s internal cognition of truthfulness at each reasoning step, enabling dynamic selection of the most plausible reasoning path through beam search. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the stateof-the-art baselines (e.g., Self-Consistency, and PRM Guided Search) across the mathematical, symbolic, and commonsense reasoning tasks, exhibiting superior accuracy and reliability in both unimodal and multimodal settings. This study proposes a novel path toward improving the reliability of CoT reasoning, demonstrating strong potential for wide-ranging applications.

PaperID: 860, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12217

Authors:Gil Goren, Shahar Katz, Lior Wolf

Affiliations: Tel Aviv University

Title: AlignTree: Efficient Defense Against LLM Jailbreak Attacks

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that bypass safety guidelines and generate harmful content. Mitigating these vulnerabilities requires defense mechanisms that are both robust and computationally efficient. However, existing approaches either incur high computational costs or rely on lightweight defenses that can be easily circumvented, rendering them impractical for realworld LLM-based systems. In this work, we introduce the AlignTree defense, which enhances model alignment while maintaining minimal computational overhead. AlignTree monitors LLM activations during generation and detects misaligned behavior using an efficient random forest classifier. This classifier operates on two signals: (i) the refusal direction - a linear representation that activates on misaligned prompts, and (ii) an SVM-based signal that captures non-linear features associated with harmful content. Unlike previous methods, AlignTree does not require additional prompts or auxiliary guard models. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of AlignTree across multiple LLMs and benchmarks.

PaperID: 861, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09071

Authors:Parian Haghighat, Hadis Anahideh, Cynthia Rudin

Affiliations: University of Illinois at Chicago, Duke University

Title: Resolving Predictive Multiplicity for the Rashomon Set

Abstract:
The existence of multiple, equally accurate models for a given predictive task leads to predictive multiplicity, where a ``Rashomon set'' of models achieve similar accuracy but diverge in their individual predictions. This inconsistency undermines trust in highstakes applications where we want consistent predictions. We propose three approaches to reduce inconsistency among predictions for the members of the Rashomon set. The first approach is outlier correction. An outlier has a label that none of the good models are capable of predicting correctly. Outliers can cause the Rashomon set to have high variance predictions in a local area, so fixing them can lower variance. Our second approach is local patching. In a local region around a test point, models may disagree with each other because some of them are biased. We can detect and fix such biases using a validation set, which also reduces multiplicity. Our third approach is pairwise reconciliation, where we find pairs of models that disagree on a region around the test point. We modify predictions that disagree, making them less biased. These three approaches can be used together or separately, and they each have distinct advantages. The reconciled predictions can then be distilled into a single interpretable model for real-world deployment. In experiments across multiple datasets, our methods reduce disagreement metrics while maintaining competitive accuracy.

PaperID: 862, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09105

Authors:Shigeki Kusaka, Keita Saito, Mikoto Kudo, Takumi Tanabe, Akifumi Wachi, Youhei Akimoto

Affiliations: University of Tsukuba, LY Corporation

Title: Cost-Minimized Label-Flipping Poisoning Attack to LLM Alignment

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in realworld systems, making it critical to understand their vulnerabilities. While data poisoning attacks during RLHF/DPO alignment have been studied empirically, their theoretical foundations remain unclear. We investigate the minimum-cost poisoning attack required to steer an LLM’s policy toward an attacker’s target by flipping preference labels during RLHF/DPO, without altering the compared outputs. We formulate this as a convex optimization problem with linear constraints, deriving lower and upper bounds on the minimum attack cost. As a byproduct of this theoretical analysis, we show that any existing label-flipping attack can be post-processed via our proposed method to reduce the number of label flips required while preserving the intended poisoning effect. Empirical results demonstrate that this cost-minimization post-processing can significantly reduce poisoning costs over baselines, particularly when the reward model’s feature dimension is small relative to the dataset size. These findings highlight fundamental vulnerabilities in RLHF/DPO pipelines and provide tools to evaluate their robustness against low-cost poisoning attacks.

PaperID: 863, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15977

Authors:Wenyun Li, Zheng Zhang, Dongmei Jiang, Xiangyuan Lan

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Pengcheng Laboratory

Title: Bolster Hallucination Detection via Prompt-Guided Data Augmentation

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant interest in AI community. Despite their impressive generation capabilities, they have been found to produce misleading or fabricated information, a phenomenon known as hallucinations. Consequently, hallucination detection has become critical to ensure the reliability of LLMgenerated content. One primary challenge in hallucination detection is the scarcity of well-labeled datasets containing both truthful and hallucinated outputs. To address this issue, we introduce Prompt-guided data Augmented haLlucination dEtection (PALE), a novel framework that leverages prompt-guided responses from LLMs as data augmentation for hallucination detection. This strategy can generate both truthful and hallucinated data under prompt guidance at a relatively low cost. To more effectively evaluate the truthfulness of the sparse intermediate embeddings produced by LLMs, we introduce an estimation metric called the Contrastive Mahalanobis Score (CM Score). This score is based on modeling the distributions of truthful and hallucinated data in the activation space. CM Score employs a matrix decomposition approach to more accurately capture the underlying structure of these distributions. Importantly, our framework does not require additional human annotations, offering strong generalizability and practicality for real-world applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PALE achieves superior hallucination detection performance, outperforming the competitive baseline by a significant margin of 6.55%.

PaperID: 864, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.24068

Authors:Ian R. McKenzie, Oskar John Hollinsworth, Tom Tseng, Xander Davies, Stephen Casper, Aaron David Tucker, Robert Kirk, Adam Gleave

Affiliations: UK AISI

Title: STACK: Adversarial Attacks on LLM Safeguard Pipelines

Abstract:
Frontier AI developers are relying on layers of safeguards to protect against catastrophic misuse of AI systems. Anthropic guards their latest Claude 4 Opus model using one such defense pipeline, and other frontier developers including Google DeepMind and OpenAI pledge to soon deploy similar defenses. However, the security of such pipelines is unclear, with limited prior work evaluating or attacking these pipelines. We address this gap by developing and redteaming an open-source defense pipeline. 1 First, we find that a novel few-shot-prompted input and output classifier outperforms state-of-the-art open-weight safeguard model ShieldGemma across three attacks and two datasets, reducing the attack success rate (ASR) to 0% on the catastrophic misuse dataset ClearHarm. Second, we introduce a STaged AttaCK (STACK) procedure that achieves 71% ASR on ClearHarm in a black-box attack against the few-shot-prompted classifier pipeline. Finally, we also evaluate STACK in a transfer setting, achieving 33% ASR, providing initial evidence that it is feasible to design attacks with no access to the target pipeline. We conclude by suggesting specific mitigations that developers could use to thwart staged attacks.

PaperID: 865, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19486

Authors:Gabriel Recchia, Chatrik Singh Mangat, Jinu Nyachhyon, Mridul Sharma, Callum Canavan, Dylan Epstein-Gross, Muhammed Abdulbari

Affiliations: Modulo Research, Vector Research, Information and Language Processing Research Lab (ILPRL), Kathmandu University, Hidden Variable Limited, Princeton University, Department of Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Computer Science

Title: Confirmation Bias: A Challenge for Scalable Oversight

Abstract:
Scalable oversight protocols aim to empower evaluators to verify outputs of AI models more capable than themselves. However, human evaluators' biases can lead to systematic errors. We reanalyse prior work which seemed to show benefits from a simple protocol, and suggest that a strategy of "answer the question myself if I know the answer, defer to the language model otherwise'' likely contributed to its positive results. This strategy fails to provide meaningful oversight when model capability increases. We also present two experiments examining simple protocols, finding no overall advantage for either. In our main experiment, participants in control and intervention groups became more confident in the system’s answers after conducting online research, even when those answers were incorrect. Our null results are restricted to the simple protocols and settings tested, and say little regarding the promise of scalable oversight more broadly. Nevertheless, they underscore the importance of testing the degree to which protocols are robust to confirmation bias, whether they outperform a strategy of simple deference to the model being evaluated, and whether performance scales with increasing problem difficulty and model capability.

PaperID: 866, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11513

Authors:Evan Dong, Nikhil Garg, Sarah Dean

Affiliations: Cornell University

Title: Capacity Constraints Make Admissions Processes Less Predictable

Abstract:
Machine learning models are often used to make predictions about the outcomes of applications to selective programs. Many prospective school or college applicants turn to machine learning models to predict whether they will be admitted to a program, and employers may use algorithmic tools to filter out resumes predicted to have a low probability of being hired when offering interviews for a job opening. However, such decision processes differ substantially from the conventional machine learning setting: decisions are not independent across applicants. Whether a student is admitted depends on the other applicants who apply because admissions decisions are capacityconstrained. We formalize how the nature of admission decisions results in a data-generating process which is incompatible with traditional machine learning assumptions. We characterize how selection functions properties affect the difficulty of generalization to applicant pool distribution shifts, introducing two concepts: stability, which measures how many existing decisions can change when a single new applicant is introduced; and variability, which measures the number of unique students whose decisions can change. We demonstrate our theory on admissions data from the New York City high school matching system, showing that machine learning performance degrades as the applicant pool increasingly differs from the training data. Furthermore, there are larger performance drops for schools using decision rules that are less stable and more variable. Our work raises questions about the reliability of predicting individual admissions probabilities.

PaperID: 867, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07204

Authors:Giacomo Fidone, Lucia Passaro, Riccardo Guidotti

Affiliations: University of Pisa

Title: Evaluating Online Moderation via LLM-Powered Counterfactual Simulations

Abstract:
Online Social Networks (OSNs) widely adopt content moderation to mitigate the spread of abusive and toxic discourse. Nonetheless, the real effectiveness of moderation interventions remains unclear due to the high cost of data collection and limited experimental control. The latest developments in Natural Language Processing pave the way for a new evaluation approach. Large Language Models (LLMs) can be successfully leveraged to enhance AgentBased Modeling and simulate human-like social behavior with unprecedented degree of believability. Yet, existing tools do not support simulation-based evaluation of moderation strategies. We fill this gap by designing a LLM-powered simulator of OSN conversations enabling a parallel, counterfactual simulation where toxic behavior is influenced by moderation interventions, keeping all else equal. We conduct extensive experiments, unveiling the psychological realism of OSN agents, the emergence of social contagion phenomena and the superior effectiveness of personalized moderation strategies.

PaperID: 868, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.04366

Authors:Moti Rattan Gupta, Anupam Sobti

Affiliations: Plaksha University

Title: Time2Agri: Temporal Pretext Tasks for Agricultural Monitoring

Abstract:
Self Supervised Learning (SSL) has emerged as a prominent paradigm for labelefficient learning, and has been widely utilized by remote sensing foundation models (RSFMs). Recent RSFMs including SatMAE and DoFA primarily rely on masked autoencoding (MAE), contrastive learning or some combination of them. However, these pretext tasks often overlook the unique temporal characteristics of agricultural landscape, namely nature's cycle of sowing, growth, and harvest. Motivated by this gap, we propose three novel agriculture-specific pretext tasks, namely Time-Difference Prediction (TD), Temporal Frequency Prediction (FP), and Future-Frame Prediction (FF). Comprehensive evaluation on SICKLE dataset shows FF achieves 69.6% IoU on crop mapping and FP reduces yield prediction error to 30.7% MAPE, outperforming all baselines, and TD remains competitive on most tasks. Further, we also scale FF to the national scale of India, achieving 54.2% IoU outperforming all baselines on field boundary delineation on FTW India dataset.

PaperID: 869, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.08518

Authors:Xiaoyue Mi, Fan Tang, You Wu, Juan Cao, Peng Li, Yang Liu

Affiliations: Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University

Title: Visual-Friendly Concept Protection via Selective Adversarial Perturbations

Abstract:
Personalized concept generation by tuning diffusion models with a few images raises potential legal and ethical concerns regarding privacy and intellectual property rights. Researchers attempt to prevent malicious personalization using adversarial perturbations. However, previous efforts have mainly focused on the effectiveness of protection while neglecting the visibility of perturbations. They utilize global adversarial perturbations, which introduce noticeable alterations to original images and significantly degrade visual quality. In this work, we propose the VisualFriendly Concept Protection (VCPro) framework, which prioritizes the protection of key concepts chosen by the image owner through adversarial perturbations with lower perceptibility. To ensure these perturbations are as inconspicuous as possible, we introduce a relaxed optimization objective to identify the least perceptible yet effective adversarial perturbations, solved using the Lagrangian multiplier method. Qualitative and quantitative experiments validate that VCPro achieves a better trade-off between the visibility of perturbations and protection effectiveness, effectively prioritizing the protection of target concepts in images with less perceptible perturbations.

PaperID: 870, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.17737

Authors:Elinor Poole-Dayan, Deb Roy, Jad Kabbara

Affiliations: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Title: LLM Targeted Underperformance Disproportionately Impacts Vulnerable Users

Abstract:
While stateof-the-art large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on many tasks, systematically evaluating undesirable behaviors of these models remains critical. In this work, we investigate how the quality of LLM responses changes in terms of information accuracy, truthfulness, and refusals depending on three user traits: English proficiency, education level, and country of origin. We present extensive experimentation on three state-of-the-art LLMs and two different datasets targeting truthfulness and factuality. Our findings suggest that undesirable behaviors in state-of-the-art LLMs occur disproportionately more for users with lower English proficiency, of lower education status, and originating from outside the US, rendering these models unreliable sources of information towards their most vulnerable users.

PaperID: 871, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04763

Authors:Guilherme Dean Pelegrina, Patrick Kolpaczki, Eyke Hüllermeier

Affiliations: Mackenzie Presbyterian University, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML)

Title: Shapley Value Approximation Based on k-Additive Games

Abstract:
The Shapley value is the prevalent solution for fair division problems in which a payout is to be divided among multiple agents. By adopting a gametheoretic view, the idea of fair division and the Shapley value can also be used in machine learning to quantify the individual contribution of features or data points to the performance of a predictive model.Despite its popularity and axiomatic justification, the Shapley value suffers from a computational complexity that scales exponentially with the number of entities involved, and hence requires approximation methods for its reliable estimation. We propose SVAkADD, a novel approximation method that fits a k-additive surrogate game. By taking advantage of k-additivity, we are able to elicit the exact Shapley values of the surrogate game and then use these values as estimates for the original fair division problem. The efficacy of our method is evaluated empirically and compared to competing methods.

PaperID: 872, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13333

Authors:Alexandru-Mihai Apostu, Andrei Preda, Alexandra Daniela Damir, Diana Bolocan, Radu Tudor Ionescu, Ioana Croitoru, Mihaela Gaman

Affiliations: University of Bucharest

Title: AutoMalDesc: Large-Scale Script Analysis for Cyber Threat Research

Abstract:
Generating thorough natural language explanations for threat detections remains an open problem in cybersecurity research, despite significant advances in automated malware detection systems. In this work, we present AutoMalDesc, an automated static analysis summarization framework that, following initial training on a small set of expertcurated examples, operates independently at scale. This approach leverages an iterative self-paced learning pipeline to progressively enhance output quality through synthetic data generation and validation cycles, eliminating the need for extensive manual data annotation. Evaluation across 3,600 diverse samples in five scripting languages demonstrates statistically significant improvements between iterations, showing consistent gains in both summary quality and classification accuracy. Our comprehensive validation approach combines quantitative metrics based on established malware labels with qualitative assessment from both human experts and LLM-based judges, confirming both technical precision and linguistic coherence of generated summaries. To facilitate reproducibility and advance research in this domain, we publish our complete dataset of more than 100K script samples, including annotated seed (900) and test (3.6K) datasets, along with our methodology and evaluation framework.

PaperID: 873, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.00779

Authors:Ben Cao, Xue Li, Tiantian He, Bin Wang, Shihua Zhou, Xiaohu Wu, Qiang Zhang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Key Laboratory of Advanced Design and Intelligent Computing, Ministry of Education, School of Software Engineering, Dalian University, BUPT Shenzhen Research Institute

Title: Learning Structurally Stabilized Representations for Lossless DNA Storage

Abstract:
This paper presents ReedSolomon coded single-stranded representation learning (RSRL), a novel end-to-end model for learning representations for lossless DNA data storage. In contrast to existing learning-based methods, RSRL is inspired by both error-correction codec and structural biology. Specifically, RSRL first learns the representations for the subsequent storage from the binary data transformed by the Reed-Solomon codec (RS code). Then, the representations are masked by an RS-code-informed mask to focus on correcting the burst errors occurring in the learning process. The synergy of RS masks and graph attention enables active error localization, breaking through the limitations of traditional passive error correction. With the decoded representations with error corrections, a novel biologically stabilized loss is formulated to regularize the data representations to possess stable single-stranded structures. By incorporating these novel strategies, RSRL can learn highly durable, dense, and lossless representations for subsequent storage tasks in DNA sequences. The proposed RSRL has been compared with a number of baselines in real-world tasks of multi-type data storage. The experimental results obtained demonstrate that RSRL can store diverse types of data with much higher information density and durability, but much lower error rates.

PaperID: 874, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12135

Authors:Letian Chen, Runhan Shi, Gufeng Yu, Yang Yang

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: RTMol: Rethinking Molecule-text Alignment in a Round-trip View

Abstract:
Aligning molecular sequence representations (e.g., SMILES notations) with textual descriptions is critical for applications spanning drug discovery, materials design, and automated chemical literature analysis. Existing methodologies typically treat molecular captioning (moleculeto-text) and text-based molecular design (text-to-molecule) as separate tasks, relying on supervised fine-tuning or contrastive learning pipelines. These approaches face three key limitations: (i) conventional metrics like BLEU prioritize linguistic fluency over chemical accuracy, (ii) training datasets frequently contain chemically ambiguous narratives with incomplete specifications, and (iii) independent optimization of generation directions leads to bidirectional inconsistency. To address these issues, we propose RTMol, a bidirectional alignment framework that unifies molecular captioning and text-to-SMILES generation through self-supervised round-trip learning. The framework introduces novel round-trip evaluation metrics and enables unsupervised training for molecular captioning without requiring paired molecule-text corpora. Experiments demonstrate that RTMol enhances bidirectional alignment performance by up to 47% across various LLMs, establishing an effective paradigm for joint molecule-text understanding and generation.

PaperID: 875, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02467

Authors:Yunhao Chen, Shujie Wang, Difan Zou, Xingjun Ma

Affiliations: Fudan University, University of Hong Kong

Title: SIDE: Surrogate Conditional Data Extraction from Diffusion Models

Abstract:
As diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) become central to Generative AI (GenAI), understanding their memorization behavior is essential for evaluating risks such as data leakage, copyright infringement, and trustworthiness. While prior research finds conditional DPMs highly susceptible to data extraction attacks using explicit prompts, unconditional models are often assumed to be safe. We challenge this view by introducing Surrogate condItional Data Extraction (SIDE), a general framework that constructs datadriven surrogate conditions to enable targeted extraction from any DPM. Through extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CelebA, ImageNet, and LAION-5B, we show that SIDE can successfully extract training data from so-called safe unconditional models, outperforming baseline attacks even on conditional models. Complementing these findings, we present a unified theoretical framework based on informative labels, demonstrating that all forms of conditioning, explicit or surrogate, amplify memorization. Our work redefines the threat landscape for DPMs, establishing precise conditioning as a fundamental vulnerability and setting a new, stronger benchmark for model privacy evaluation.

PaperID: 876, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.16027

Authors:Hao Du, Wenbin Liu, Ziyu Sun, Haoyang Su, En Wang, Yuanbo Xu

Affiliations: Jilin University

Title: Toward Time-Continuous Data Inference in Sparse Urban CrowdSensing

Abstract:
Sparse Urban CrowdSensing (Sparse UCS) is a practical paradigm for completing full sensing maps from limited observations. However, existing methods typically rely on a timediscrete assumption, where data is considered static within fixed intervals. This simplification introduces significant errors as real-world data changes continuously. To address this, we propose a framework for time-continuous data completion. Our approach, Time-Aware Mamba-based Deep Matrix Factorization (TIME-DMF), leverages the Mamba architecture as a powerful temporal encoder. Crucially, we enhance Mamba with a novel time-aware mechanism that explicitly incorporates the actual, often irregular, physical time intervals between observations into its state transitions. This allows our model to accurately capture true temporal dynamics and generate high-fidelity data for any queried moment in time through a query-generate mechanism. Extensive experiments on five diverse sensing tasks demonstrate that TIME-DMF significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating the superiority of the time-continuous paradigm for Sparse UCS.

PaperID: 877, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15818

Authors:Junming Fu, Jishen Zeng, Yi Jiang, Peiyu Zhuang, Baoying Chen, Siyu Lu, Jianquan Yang

Affiliations: School of Cyber Science and Technology, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, Alibaba Group

Title: Unveiling the Attribute Misbinding Threat in Identity-Preserving Models

Abstract:
Identitypreserving models have led to notable progress in generating personalized content. Unfortunately, such models also exacerbate risks when misused, for instance, by generating threatening content targeting specific individuals. This paper introduces the Attribute Misbinding Attack, a novel method that poses a threat to identity-preserving models by inducing them to produce Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) content. The attack's core idea involves crafting benign-looking textual prompts to circumvent text-filter safeguards and leverage a key model vulnerability: flawed attribute binding that stems from its internal attention bias. This results in misattributing harmful descriptions to a target identity and generating NSFW outputs. To facilitate the study of this attack, we present the Misbinding Prompt evaluation set, which examines the content generation risks of current state-of-the-art identity-preserving models across four risk dimensions: pornography, violence, discrimination, and illegality. Additionally, we introduce the Attribute Binding Safety Score (ABSS), a metric for concurrently assessing both content fidelity and safety compliance. Experimental results show that our Misbinding Prompt evaluation set achieves a 5.28 % higher success rate in bypassing five leading text filters (including GPT-4o) compared to existing main-stream evaluation sets, while also demonstrating the highest proportion of NSFW content generation. The proposed ABSS metric enables a more comprehensive evaluation of identity-preserving models by concurrently assessing both content fidelity and safety compliance.

PaperID: 878, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09593

Authors:Ruiyang Ma, Yunhao Zhou, Yipeng Wang, Yi Liu, Zhengyuan Shi, Ziyang Zheng, Kexin Chen, Zhiqiang He, Lingwei Yan, Gang Chen, Qiang Xu, Guojie Luo

Affiliations: Peking University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title: DynamicRTL: RTL Representation Learning for Dynamic Circuit Behavior

Abstract:
There is a growing body of work on using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to learn representations of circuits, focusing primarily on their static characteristics. However, these models fail to capture circuit runtime behavior, which is crucial for tasks like circuit verification and optimization. To address this limitation, we introduce DRGNN (DynamicRTL-GNN), a novel approach that learns RTL circuit representations by incorporating both static structures and multi-cycle execution behaviors. DR-GNN leverages an operator-level Control Data Flow Graph (CDFG) to represent Register Transfer Level (RTL) circuits, enabling the model to capture dynamic dependencies and runtime execution. To train and evaluate DR-GNN, we build the first comprehensive dynamic circuit dataset, comprising over 6,300 Verilog designs and 63,000 simulation traces. Our results demonstrate that DR-GNN outperforms existing models in branch hit prediction and toggle rate prediction. Furthermore, its learned representations transfer effectively to related dynamic circuit tasks, achieving strong performance in power estimation and assertion prediction.

PaperID: 879, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08315

Authors:Mingkai Miao, Jianheng Tang, Guangyu Hu, Hongce Zhang

Affiliations: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: BDD2Seq: Enabling Scalable Reversible-Circuit Synthesis via Graph-to-Sequence Learning

Abstract:
Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) are instrumental in many electronic design automation (EDA) tasks thanks to their compact representation of Boolean functions. In BDD‑based reversible‑circuit synthesis, which is critical for quantum computing, the chosen variable ordering governs the number of BDD nodes and thus the key metrics of resource consumption, such as Quantum Cost. Because finding an optimal variable ordering for BDDs is an NP‑complete problem, existing heuristics often degrade as circuit complexity grows. We introduce BDD2Seq, a graph‑to‑sequence framework that couples a Graph Neural Network encoder with a Pointer‑Network decoder and Diverse Beam Search to predict high‑quality orderings. By treating the circuit netlist as a graph, BDD2Seq learns structural dependencies that conventional heuristics overlooked, yielding smaller BDDs and faster synthesis. Extensive experiments on three public benchmarks show that BDD2Seq achieves around 1.4 times lower Quantum Cost and 3.7 times faster synthesis than modern heuristic algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to tackle the variable‑ordering problem in BDD‑based reversible‑circuit synthesis with a graph‑based generative model and diversity‑promoting decoding.

PaperID: 880, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06831

Authors:Hector Rodriguez Rodriguez, Jiechen Huang, Wenjian Yu

Affiliations: Tsinghua University

Title: DeepRWCap: Neural-Guided Random-Walk Capacitance Solver for IC Design

Abstract:
Monte Carlo random walk methods are widely used in capacitance extraction for their meshfree formulation and inherent parallelism. However, modern semiconductor technologies with densely packed structures present significant challenges in unbiasedly sampling transition domains in walk steps with multiple high-contrast dielectric materials. We present DeepRWCap, a machine learning-guided random walk solver that predicts the transition quantities required to guide each step of the walk. These include Poisson kernels, gradient kernels, signs and magnitudes of weight. DeepRWCap employs a two-stage neural architecture that decomposes structured outputs into face-wise distributions and spatial kernels on cube faces. It uses 3D convolutional networks to capture volumetric dielectric interactions and 2D depthwise separable convolutions to model localized kernel behavior. The design incorporates grid-based positional encodings and structural design choices informed by cube symmetries to reduce learning redundancy and improve generalization. Trained on 100,000 procedurally generated dielectric configurations, DeepRWCap achieves a mean relative error of 1.24±0.53% when benchmarked against the commercial Raphael solver on the self-capacitance estimation of 10 industrial designs spanning 12 to 55 nm nodes. Compared to the state-of-the-art stochastic difference method Microwalk, DeepRWCap achieves an average 23% speedup. On complex designs with runtimes over 10s, it reaches an average 49% acceleration.

PaperID: 881, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05371

Authors:Changwen Xing, SamZaak Wong, Xinlai Wan, Yanfeng Lu, Mengli Zhang, Zebin Ma, Lei Qi, Zhengxiong Li, Nan Guan, Zhe Jiang, Xi Wang, Jun Yang

Affiliations: School of Integrated Circuits, Southeast University, National Center of Technology Innovation for EDA, School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Colorado Denver, Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR

Title: ChipMind: Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning for Long-Context Circuit Design Specifications

Abstract:
While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate immense potential for automating integrated circuit (IC) development, their practical deployment is fundamentally limited by restricted context windows. Existing contextextension methods struggle to achieve effective semantic modeling and thorough multi-hop reasoning over extensive, intricate circuit specifications. To address this, we introduce ChipMind, a novel knowledge graph-augmented reasoning framework specifically designed for lengthy IC specifications. ChipMind first transforms circuit specifications into a domain-specific knowledge graph (ChipKG) through the Circuit Semantic-Aware Knowledge Graph Construction methodology. It then leverages the ChipKG-Augmented Reasoning mechanism, combining information-theoretic adaptive retrieval to dynamically trace logical dependencies with intent-aware semantic filtering to prune irrelevant noise, effectively balancing retrieval completeness and precision. Evaluated on an industrial-scale specification reasoning benchmark, ChipMind significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average improvement of 34.59% (up to 72.73%). Our framework bridges a critical gap between academic research and practical industrial deployment of LLM-aided Hardware Design (LAD).

PaperID: 882, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10936

Authors:Cheng Chen, Hao Huang, Saurabh Bagchi

Affiliations: Purdue University, New York University Abu Dhabi

Title: Vision-Only Gaussian Splatting for Collaborative Semantic Occupancy Prediction

Abstract:
Collaborative perception enables connected vehicles to share information, overcoming occlusions and extending the limited sensing range inherent in singleagent (non-collaborative) systems. Existing vision-only methods for 3D semantic occupancy prediction commonly rely on dense 3D voxels, which incur high communication costs, or 2D planar features, which require accurate depth estimation or additional supervision, limiting their applicability to collaborative scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose the first approach leveraging sparse 3D semantic Gaussian splatting for collaborative 3D semantic occupancy prediction. By sharing and fusing intermediate Gaussian primitives, our method provides three benefits: a neighborhood-based cross-agent fusion that removes duplicates and suppresses noisy or inconsistent Gaussians; a joint encoding of geometry and semantics in each primitive, which reduces reliance on depth supervision and allows simple rigid alignment; and sparse, object-centric messages that preserve structural information while reducing communication volume. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms single-agent perception and baseline collaborative methods by +8.42 and +3.28 points in mIoU, and +5.11 and +22.41 points in IoU, respectively. When further reducing the number of transmitted Gaussians, our method still achieves a +1.9 improvement in mIoU, using only 34.6% communication volume, highlighting robust performance under limited communication budgets.

PaperID: 883, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21053

Authors:Chenglizhao Chen, Shaofeng Liang, Runwei Guan, Xiaolou Sun, Haocheng Zhao, Haiyun Jiang, Tao Huang, Henghui Ding, Qing-Long Han

Affiliations: Qingdao Institute of Software, College of Computer Science and Technology, China University of Petroleum (East China) Shandong Key Laboratory of Intelligent Oil & Gas Industrial Software, Thrust of Artificial Intelligence, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Purple Mountain Laboratories, School of Advanced Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, School of Automation and Intelligent Sensing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, College of Science and Engineering, James Cook University, Institute of Big Data, College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University, School of Engineering, Swinburne University of Technology

Title: AerialMind: Towards Referring Multi-Object Tracking in UAV Scenarios

Abstract:
Referring MultiObject Tracking (RMOT) aims to achieve precise object detection and tracking through natural language instructions, representing a fundamental capability for intelligent robotic systems. However, current RMOT research remains mostly confined to ground-level scenarios, which constrains their ability to capture broad-scale scene contexts and perform comprehensive tracking and path planning. In contrast, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) leverage their expansive aerial perspectives and superior maneuverability to enable wide-area surveillance. Moreover, UAVs have emerged as critical platforms for Embodied Intelligence, which has given rise to an unprecedented demand for intelligent aerial systems capable of natural language interaction. To this end, we introduce AerialMind, the first large-scale RMOT benchmark in UAV scenarios, which aims to bridge this research gap. To facilitate its construction, we develop an innovative semi-automated collaborative agent-based labeling assistant (COALA) framework that significantly reduces labor costs while maintaining annotation quality. Furthermore, we propose HawkEyeTrack (HETrack), a novel method that collaboratively enhances vision-language representation learning and improves the perception of UAV scenarios. Comprehensive experiments validated the challenging nature of our dataset and the effectiveness of our method.

PaperID: 884, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11060

Authors:Jiaxuan Chen, Bo Zhang, Qingdong He, Jinlong Peng, Li Niu

Affiliations: MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Youtu Lab

Title: CareCom: Generative Image Composition with Calibrated Reference Features

Abstract:
Image composition aims to seamlessly insert foreground object into background. Despite the huge progress in generative image composition, the existing methods are still struggling with simultaneous detail preservation and foreground pose/view adjustment. To address this issue, we extend the existing generative composition model to multireference version, which allows using arbitrary number of foreground reference images. Furthermore, we propose to calibrate the global and local features of foreground reference images to make them compatible with the background information. The calibrated reference features can supplement the original reference features with useful global and local information of proper pose/view. Extensive experiments on MVImgNet and MureCom demonstrate that the generative model can greatly benefit from the calibrated reference features.

PaperID: 885, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.23172

Authors:Liyi Chen, Ruihuang Li, Guowen Zhang, Pengfei Wang, Lei Zhang

Affiliations: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: Fast Multi-view Consistent 3D Editing with Video Priors

Abstract:
Textdriven 3D editing enables user-friendly 3D object or scene editing with text instructions. Due to the lack of multi-view consistency priors, existing methods typically resort to employ 2D generation or editing models to process per-view individually, followed by iterative 2D-3D-2D updating. However, these methods are not only time-consuming but also prone to yielding over-smoothed results, since iterative process averages the different editing signals gathered from different views. In this paper, we propose, an early and pioneering work of generative Video Prior based 3D Editing, ViP3DE in short, to repurpose the temporal consistency priors from pre-trained video generation models to achieve consistent 3D editing within a single forward pass. Our key insight is to condition the video generation model on a single edited view to generate other consistent edited views for 3D updating directly, thereby bypassing iterative editing paradigm. First, 3D updating requires edited views to be paired with specific camera poses. To this end, we propose motion-preserved noise blending for the video model to generate edited views at predefined camera poses. In addition, we introduce geometrically aware denoising to further enhance multi-view consistency by integrating 3D geometric priors into video models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed ViP3DE can achieve high-quality 3D editing results even within a single forward pass, significantly outperforming existing methods in both editing quality and editing time cost.

PaperID: 886, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21019

Authors:Jiaxiang Cheng, Bing Ma, Xuhua Ren, Hongyi Henry Jin, Kai Yu, Peng Zhang, Wenyue Li, Yuan Zhou, Tianxiang Zheng, Qinglin Lu

Affiliations: Tencent Hunyuan

Title: Phased One-Step Adversarial Equilibrium for Video Diffusion Models

Abstract:
Video diffusion generation suffers from critical sampling efficiency bottlenecks, particularly for largescale models and long contexts. Existing video acceleration methods, adapted from image-based techniques, lack a single-step distillation ability for large-scale video models and task generalization for conditional downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose the Video Phased Adversarial Equilibrium (V-PAE), a distillation framework that enables high-quality, single-step video generation from large-scale video models. Our approach employs a two-phase process. (i) Stability priming is a warm-up process to align the distributions of real and generated videos. It improves the stability of single-step adversarial distillation in the following process. (ii) Unified adversarial equilibrium is a flexible self-adversarial process that reuses generator parameters for the discriminator backbone. It achieves a co-evolutionary adversarial equilibrium in the Gaussian noise space. For the conditional tasks, we primarily preserve video-image subject consistency, which is caused by semantic degradation and conditional frame collapse during the distillation training in image-to-video (I2V) generation. Comprehensive experiments on VBench-I2V demonstrate that V-PAE outperforms existing acceleration methods by an average of 5.8% in the overall quality score, including semantic alignment, temporal coherence, and frame quality. In addition, our approach reduces the diffusion latency of the large-scale video model (e.g., Wan2.1-I2V-14B) by 100 times, while preserving competitive performance.

PaperID: 887, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24763

Authors:Ankit Dhiman, Srinath R, Jaswanth Reddy, Lokesh R Boregowda, Venkatesh Babu Radhakrishnan

Affiliations: Indian Institute of Science, Samsung R&D Institute India - Bangalore

Title: UniC-Lift: Unified 3D Instance Segmentation via Contrastive Learning

Abstract:
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have advanced novelview synthesis. Recent methods extend multi-view 2D segmentation to 3D, enabling instance/semantic segmentation for better scene understanding. A key challenge is the inconsistency of 2D instance labels across views, leading to poor 3D predictions. Existing methods use a two-stage approach in which some rely on contrastive learning with hyperparameter-sensitive clustering, while others preprocess labels for consistency. We propose a unified framework that merges these steps, reducing training time and improving performance by introducing a learnable feature embedding for segmentation in Gaussian primitives. This embedding is then efficiently decoded into instance labels through a novel "Embedding-to-Label" process, effectively integrating the optimization. While this unified framework offers substantial benefits, we observed artifacts at the object boundaries. To address the object boundary issues, we propose hard-mining samples along these boundaries. However, directly applying hard mining to the feature embeddings proved unstable. Therefore, we apply a linear layer to the rasterized feature embeddings before calculating the triplet loss, which stabilizes training and significantly improves performance. Our method outperforms baselines qualitatively and quantitatively on the ScanNet, Replica3D, and Messy-Rooms datasets.

PaperID: 888, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.18282

Authors:Shiyan Du, Conghan Yue, Xinyu Cheng, Dongyu Zhang

Affiliations: Sun Yat-sen University, Fudan University, Yale University, New Haven, United States

Title: DEIG: Detail-Enhanced Instance Generation with Fine-Grained Semantic Control

Abstract:
MultiInstance Generation has advanced significantly in spatial placement and attribute binding. However, existing approaches still face challenges in fine-grained semantic understanding, particularly when dealing with complex textual descriptions.To overcome these limitations, we propose DEIG, a novel framework for fine-grained and controllable multi-instance generation. DEIG integrates an instance Detail Extractor (IDE) that transforms text encoder embeddings into compact, instance-aware representations, and a Detail Fusion Module (DFM) that applies instance-based masked attention to prevent attribute leakage across instances. These components enable DEIG to generate visually coherent multi-instance scenes that precisely match rich, localized textual descriptions. To support fine-grained supervision, we construct a high-quality dataset with detailed, compositional instance captions generated by VLMs. We also introduce DEIG-Bench, a new benchmark with region-level annotations and multi-attribute prompts for both humans and objects.Experiments demonstrate that DEIG consistently outperforms existing approaches across multiple benchmarks in spatial consistency, semantic accuracy, and compositional generalization. Moreover, DEIG functions as a plug-and-play module, making it easily integrable into standard diffusion-based pipelines.

PaperID: 889, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00345

Authors:Junqiao Fan, Haocong Rao, Jiarui Zhang, Jianfei Yang, Lihua Xie

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University

Title: mmPred: Radar-based Human Motion Prediction in the Dark

Abstract:
Existing Human Motion Prediction (HMP) methods based on RGB(D) cameras are sensitive to lighting conditions and raise privacy concerns, limiting their realworld applications such as firefighting and elderly care. Motivated by the robustness and privacy-preserving nature of millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar, this work introduces radar as a novel sensing modality for HMP for the first time. Nevertheless, radar signals often suffer from specular reflections and multipath effects, resulting in noisy and temporally inconsistent measurements, such as body-part miss-detection. To address these radar-specific artifacts, we propose mmPred, the first diffusion-based framework tailored for radar-based HMP. mmPred introduces a dual-domain historical motion representation to guide the generation process, combining a Time-domain Pose Refinement (TPR) branch for fine-grained details and a Frequency-domain Dominant Motion (FDM) branch for capturing global motion trends and suppressing frame-level inconsistency. Furthermore, we design a Global Skeleton-relational Transformer (GST) as the diffusion backbone to model global inter-joint cooperation, enabling corrupted joints to dynamically aggregate information from others. Extensive experiments show that mmPred achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing methods by 8.6% on mmBody and 22% on mm-Fi.

PaperID: 890, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12147

Authors:Zezhong Fan, Xiaohan Li, Topojoy Biswas, Kaushiki Nag, Kannan Achan

Affiliations: Walmart Global Tech

Title: Segment and Matte Anything in a Unified Model

Abstract:
Segment Anything (SAM) has recently pushed the boundaries of segmentation by demonstrating remarkable zeroshot generalization and flexible prompting after training on over one billion masks. Despite this, its mask prediction accuracy often falls short of the precision required in real-world applications. While several refinement modules have been proposed to boost SAM’s segmentation quality, achieving highly accurate object delineation within a single, unified framework remains an open challenge. Furthermore, interactive image matting—which aims to generate fine-grained alpha mattes guided by diverse user hints—has not yet been explored in the context of SAM. Insights from recent studies highlight strong correlations between segmentation and matting, suggesting the feasibility of a unified model capable of both tasks. In this paper, we introduce Segment And Matte Anything (SAMA), a lightweight extension of SAM that delivers high-quality interactive image segmentation and matting with minimal extra parameters or computational cost. Our Multi-View Localization Encoder (MVLE) captures detailed features from local views, while the Localization Adapter (Local-Adapter) refines mask outputs by recovering subtle boundary details. We also incorporate two prediction heads for each task into the architecture to generate segmentation and matting tasks, simultaneously. Trained on a diverse dataset aggregated from publicly available sources, SAMA achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple segmentation and matting benchmarks, showcasing its adaptability and effectiveness in a wide range of downstream tasks.

PaperID: 891, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05894

Authors:Yu Fei, Quan Deng, Shengeng Tang, Li Yuehua, Lechao Cheng

Affiliations: Liaoning University of Technology, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hefei University of Technology, Zhejiang Lab

Title: Open-World 3D Scene Graph Generation for Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning

Abstract:
Openworld 3D scene understanding is fundamentally challenging for vision and robotics, due to the constraints of closed-vocabulary supervision and static annotations. To address this, we propose a unified framework for Open-World 3D Scene Graph Generation with Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning, which enables generalizable and interactive 3D scene understanding. Our method integrates vision-language models with retrieval-based reasoning to support multimodal exploration and language-guided interaction. The framework comprises two key components: (1) a dynamic scene graph generation module that detects objects and infers semantic relationships without fixed label sets, and (2) a retrieval-augmented reasoning pipeline that encodes scene graphs into a vector database to support text/image-conditioned queries. We evaluate our method on 3DSSG and Replica benchmarks across four tasks—scene question answering, visual grounding, instance retrieval, and task planning—demonstrating robust generalization and superior performance in diverse environments. Our results highlight the effectiveness of combining open-vocabulary perception with retrieval-based reasoning for scalable 3D scene understanding.

PaperID: 892, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13223

Authors:OuCheng Huang, Manxi Lin, Jiexiang Tan, Xiaoxiong Du, Yang Qiu, Junjun Zheng, Xiangheng Kong, Yuning Jiang, Bo Zheng

Affiliations: Taobao & Tmall Group of Alibaba

Title: MIRAGE: Towards AI-Generated Image Detection in the Wild

Abstract:
The spreading of AIgenerated images (AIGI), driven by advances in generative AI, poses a significant threat to in- formation security and public trust. Existing AIGI detectors, while effective against images in clean laboratory settings, fail to generalize to in-the-wild scenarios. These real-world images are noisy, varying from “obviously fake” images to realistic ones derived from multiple generative models and further edited for quality control. We address in-the-wild AIGI detection in this paper. We introduce MIRAGE, a challenging benchmark designed to emulate the complexity of in-the-wild AIGI. MIRAGE is constructed from two sources: (1) a large corpus of Internet-sourced AIGI verified by human experts, and (2) a synthesized dataset created through the collaboration between multiple expert generators, closely simulating the realistic AIGI in the wild. Building on this benchmark, we propose MIRAGE-R1, a vision- language model with heuristic-to-analytic reasoning, a reflective reasoning mechanism for AIGI detection. MIRAGE-R1 is trained in two stages: a supervised-fine-tuning cold start, followed by a reinforcement learning stage. By further adopting a inference-time adaptive thinking strategy, MIRAGE-R1 is able to provide either a quick judgment or a more robust and accurate conclusion, effectively balancing inference speed and performance. Extensive experiments show that our model leads state-of-the-art detectors by 5% and 10% on MIRAGE and public benchmark, respectively.

PaperID: 893, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.07417

Authors:Shaoguang Huang, Yunzhen Wang, Haijin Zeng, Hongyu Chen, Hongyan Zhang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, China University of Geosciences, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard University

Title: Self-Supervised One-Step Diffusion Refinement for Snapshot Compressive Imaging

Abstract:
Snapshot compressive imaging (SCI) captures multispectral images (MSIs) using a single coded twodimensional (2-D) measurement, but reconstructing high-fidelity MSIs from these compressed inputs remains a fundamentally ill-posed challenge. Recent diffusion-based methods improve quality but are limited by scarce MSI training data, domain shifts from RGB-pretrained models, and slow multi-step sampling. These drawbacks restrict their practicality in real-world applications. Unlike prior approaches that rely on expensive iterative refinement or subspace-based diffusion embeddings (e.g., DiffSCI, PSR-SCI)—we introduce a fundamentally different paradigm: a self-supervised One-Step Diffusion (OSD) framework designed specifically for SCI. The key novelty lies in using a single-step diffusion refiner to correct an initial reconstruction, eliminating iterative denoising entirely while preserving generative quality. Moreover, we adopt a self-supervised equivariant learning strategy to train both the predictor and refiner directly from raw 2-D measurements, enabling generalization to unseen domains without ground-truth MSI. To further address limited MSI data, we design a band-selection–driven distillation strategy that transfers core generative priors from large-scale RGB datasets, effectively bridging the domain gap. Extensive experiments confirm that our approach sets a new standard—yielding PSNR gains of 3.44dB, 1.61dB, and 0.28dB on the Harvard, NTIRE, and ICVL datasets respectively, while cutting reconstruction time from 8.9s to just 0.22s per image. These gains in efficiency and adaptability advance SCI reconstruction, enabling accurate and practical real-world deployment.

PaperID: 894, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.04997

Authors:Weiquan Huang, Aoqi Wu, Yifan Yang, Xufang Luo, Yuqing Yang, Usman Naseem, Chunyu Wang, Qi Dai, Xiyang Dai, Dongdong Chen, Chong Luo, Lili Qiu, Liang Hu

Affiliations: Tongji University, Microsoft Corporation, Macquarie University

Title: LLM2CLIP: Powerful Language Model Unlocks Richer Cross-Modality Representation

Abstract:
CLIP is a seminal multimodal model that maps images and text into a shared representation space by contrastive learning on billions of image–caption pairs. Inspired by the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs), we investigate how the superior linguistic understanding and broad world knowledge of LLMs can further strengthen CLIP—particularly in handling long, complex captions. We introduce an efficient finetuning framework that embeds an LLM into a pretrained CLIP while incurring almost the same training cost as regular CLIP fine-tuning. Our method first “embedding-izes” the LLM for the CLIP setting, then couples it to the pretrained CLIP vision encoder through a lightweight adaptor trained on only a few million image–caption pairs. With this strategy we achieve large performance gains—without large-scale retraining—over state-of-the-art CLIP variants such as EVA02 and SigLIP-2. The LLM-enhanced CLIP delivers consistent improvements across a wide spectrum of downstream tasks, including linear-probe classification, zero-shot image–text retrieval with both short and long captions (in English and other languages), zero-shot/supervised image segmentation, object detection, and used as tokenizer for multimodal large-model benchmarks.

PaperID: 895, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15066

Authors:Yachuan Huang, Xianrui Luo, Qiwen Wang, Liao Shen, Jiaqi Li, Huiqiang Sun, Zihao Huang, Wei Jiang, Zhiguo Cao

Affiliations: School of AIA, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: BokehFlow: Depth-Free Controllable Bokeh Rendering via Flow Matching

Abstract:
Bokeh rendering simulates the shallow depthof-field effect in photography, enhancing visual aesthetics and guiding viewer attention to regions of interest. Although recent approaches perform well, rendering controllable bokeh without additional depth inputs remains a significant challenge. Existing classical and neural controllable methods rely on accurate depth maps, while generative approaches often struggle with limited controllability and efficiency. In this paper, we propose BokehFlow, a depth-free framework for controllable bokeh rendering based on flow matching. BokehFlow directly synthesizes photorealistic bokeh effects from all-in-focus images, eliminating the need for depth inputs. It employs a cross-attention mechanism to enable semantic control over both focus regions and blur intensity via text prompts. To support training and evaluation, we collect and synthesize four datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BokehFlow achieves visually compelling bokeh effects and offers precise control, outperforming existing depth-dependent and generative methods in both rendering quality and efficiency.

PaperID: 896, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13195

Authors:Soyul Lee, Seungmin Baek, Dongbo Min

Affiliations: Ewha Womans University

Title: Difficulty-Aware Label-Guided Denoising for Monocular 3D Object Detection

Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection is a costeffective solution for applications like autonomous driving and robotics, but remains fundamentally ill-posed due to inherently ambiguous depth cues. Recent DETR-based methods attempt to mitigate this through global attention and auxiliary depth prediction, yet they still struggle with inaccurate depth estimates. Moreover, these methods often overlook instance-level detection difficulty, such as occlusion, distance, and truncation, leading to suboptimal detection performance. We propose MonoDLGD, a novel Difficulty-Aware Label-Guided Denoising framework that adaptively perturbs and reconstructs ground-truth labels based on detection uncertainty. Specifically, MonoDLGD applies stronger perturbations to easier instances and weaker ones into harder cases, and then reconstructs them to effectively provide explicit geometric supervision. By jointly optimizing label reconstruction and 3D object detection, MonoDLGD encourages geometry-aware representation learning and improves robustness to varying levels of object complexity. Extensive experiments on the KITTI benchmark demonstrate that MonoDLGD achieves state-of-the-art performance across all difficulty levels.

PaperID: 897, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00358

Authors:Jia Li, Wenjie Zhao, Ziru Huang, Yunhui Guo, Yapeng Tian

Affiliations: University of Texas at Dallas, Tsinghua University

Title: Do Audio-Visual Segmentation Models Truly Segment Sounding Objects?

Abstract:
Unlike traditional visual segmentation, audiovisual segmentation (AVS) requires the model not only to identify and segment objects but also to determine whether they are sound sources. Recent AVS approaches have achieved impressive performance on standard benchmarks. Yet, an important question remains: Do these models genuinely integrate audio-visual cues to segment sounding objects? Our study reveals a fundamental bias in current methods: they tend to generate segmentation masks based predominantly on visual salience, irrespective of the audio context, resulting in unreliable predictions when sounds are absent or irrelevant. To address this challenge, we introduce AVSBench-Robust, a comprehensive benchmark incorporating diverse negative audio scenarios, including silence, noise, and off-screen sounds. We also propose a simple yet effective approach combining balanced training with negative samples and classifier-guided similarity learning. Our extensive experiments show that while state-of-the-art AVS methods consistently fail under negative audio conditions, our approach achieves remarkable improvements in both standard metrics and robustness measures, maintaining near-perfect false positive rates while preserving high-quality segmentation performance.

PaperID: 898, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23635

Authors:Xiaoyu Li, Peidong Li, Xian Wu, Long Shi, Dedong Liu, Yitao Wu, Jiajia Fu, Dixiao Cui, Lijun Zhao, Lining Sun

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, China Wolf Guangzhou, Independent Researcher

Title: Rethinking the Spatio-Temporal Alignment of End-to-End 3D Perception

Abstract:
Spatiotemporal alignment is crucial for temporal modeling of end-to-end (E2E) perception in autonomous driving (AD), providing valuable structural and textural prior information. Existing methods typically rely on the attention mechanism to align objects across frames, simplifying the motion model with a unified explicit physical model (constant velocity, etc.). These approaches prefer semantic features for implicit alignment, challenging the importance of explicit motion modeling in the traditional perception paradigm. However, variations in motion states and object features across categories and frames render this alignment suboptimal. To address this, we propose HAT, a spatio-temporal alignment module that allows each object to adaptively decode the optimal alignment proposal from multiple hypotheses without direct supervision. Specifically, HAT first utilizes multiple explicit motion models to generate spatial anchors and motion-aware feature proposals for historical instances. It then performs multi-hypothesis decoding by incorporating semantic and motion cues embedded in cached object queries, ultimately providing the optimal alignment proposal for the target frame. On nuScenes, HAT consistently improves 3D temporal detectors and trackers across diverse baselines. It achieves state-of-the-art tracking results with 46.0% AMOTA on the test set when paired with the DETR3D detector. In an object-centric E2E AD method, HAT enhances perception accuracy (+1.3% mAP, +3.1% AMOTA) and reduces the collision rate by 32%. When semantics are corrupted (nuScenes-C), the enhancement of motion modeling by HAT enables more robust perception and planning in the E2E AD.

PaperID: 899, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.27261

Authors:Yinglu Li, Zhiying Lu, Zhihang Liu, Yiwei Sun, Chuanbin Liu, Hongtao Xie

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China

Title: RegionRAG: Region-level Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Visual Document Understanding

Abstract:
Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a critical method for empowering LLMs by leveraging candidate visual documents. However, current methods consider the entire document as the basic retrieval unit, introducing substantial irrelevant visual content in two ways: 1) Relevant documents often contain large regions unrelated to the query, diluting the focus on salient information; 2) Retrieving multiple documents to increase recall further introduces redundant and irrelevant documents. These redundant contexts distract the model's attention and further degrade the performance. To address this challenge, we propose RegionRAG, a novel framework that shifts the retrieval paradigm from the document level to the region level. During training, we design a hybrid supervision strategy from both labeled data and unlabeled data to pinpoint relevant patches. During inference, we propose a dynamic pipeline that intelligently groups salient patches into complete semantic regions. By delegating the task of identifying relevant regions to the retriever, RegionRAG enables the generator to focus solely on concise, query-relevant visual content, improving both efficiency and accuracy. Experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate that RegionRAG achieves state-of-the-art performance. It improves retrieval accuracy by 10.02% in R@1 on average, and boosts question answering accuracy by 3.56% while using only 71.42% visual tokens compared with prior methods.

PaperID: 900, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12032

Authors:Guotao Liang, Baoquan Zhang, Zhiyuan Wen, Zihao Han, Yunming Ye

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Pengcheng Laboratory

Title: Improved Masked Image Generation with Knowledge-Augmented Token Representations

Abstract:
Masked image generation (MIG) has demonstrated remarkable efficiency and highfidelity images by enabling parallel token prediction. Existing methods typically rely solely on the model itself to learn semantic dependencies among visual token sequences. However, directly learning such semantic dependencies from data is challenging because the individual tokens lack clear semantic meanings, and these sequences are usually long. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Knowledge-Augmented Masked Image Generation framework, named KA-MIG, which introduces explicit knowledge of token-level semantic dependencies (i.e., extracted from the training data) as priors to learn richer representations for improving performance. In particular, we explore and identify three types of advantageous token knowledge graphs, including two positive and one negative graphs (i.e., the co-occurrence graph, the semantic similarity graph, and the position-token incompatibility graph). Based on three prior knowledge graphs, we design a graph-aware encoder to learn token and position-aware representations. After that, a lightweight fusion mechanism is introduced to integrate these enriched representations into the existing MIG methods. Resorting to such prior knowledge, our method effectively enhances the model's ability to capture semantic dependencies, leading to improved generation quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our method improves upon existing MIG for class-conditional image generation on ImageNet.

PaperID: 901, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14247

Authors:Wenkai Lin, Qiming Xia, Wen Li, Xun Huang, Chenglu Wen

Affiliations: Fujian Key Laboratory of Sensing and Computing for Smart Cities, Xiamen University, China Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing

Title: V2VLoc: Robust GNSS-Free Collaborative Perception via LiDAR Localization

Abstract:
Multiagents rely on accurate poses to share and align observations, enabling a collaborative perception of the environment. However, traditional GNSS-based localization often fails in GNSS-denied environments, making consistent feature alignment difficult in collaboration. To tackle this challenge, we propose a robust GNSS-free collaborative perception framework based on LiDAR localization. Specifically, we propose a lightweight Pose Generator with Confidence (PGC) to estimate compact pose and confidence representations. To alleviate the effects of localization errors, we further develop the Pose-Aware Spatio-Temporal Alignment Transformer (PASTAT), which performs confidence-aware spatial alignment while capturing essential temporal context. Additionally, we present a new simulation dataset, V2VLoc, which can be adapted for both LiDAR localization and collaborative detection tasks. V2VLoc comprises three subsets: Town1Loc, Town4Loc, and V2VDet. Town1Loc and Town4Loc offer multi-traversal sequences for training in localization tasks, whereas V2VDet is specifically intended for the collaborative detection task. Extensive experiments conducted on the V2VLoc dataset demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance under GNSS-denied conditions. We further conduct extended experiments on the real-world V2V4Real dataset to validate the effectiveness and generalizability of PASTAT.

PaperID: 902, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15110

Authors:Aoran Liu, Kun Hu, Clinton Ansun Mo, Qiuxia Wu, Wenxiong Kang, Zhiyong Wang

Affiliations: The University of Sydney, Edith Cowan University, The University of Tokyo, South China University of Technology

Title: Pb4U-GNet: Resolution-Adaptive Garment Simulation via Propagation-before-Update Graph Network

Abstract:
Garment simulation is fundamental to various applications in computer vision and graphics, from virtual tryon to digital human modelling. However, conventional physics-based methods remain computationally expensive, hindering their application in time-sensitive scenarios. While graph neural networks (GNNs) offer promising acceleration, existing approaches exhibit poor cross-resolution generalisation, demonstrating significant performance degradation on higher-resolution meshes beyond the training distribution. This stems from two key factors: (1) existing GNNs employ fixed message-passing depth that fails to adapt information aggregation to mesh density variation, and (2) vertex-wise displacement magnitudes are inherently resolution-dependent in garment simulation. To address these issues, we introduce Propagation-before-Update Graph Network (Pb4U-GNet), a resolution-adaptive framework that decouples message propagation from feature updates. Pb4U-GNet incorporates two key mechanisms: (1) dynamic propagation depth control, adjusting message-passing iterations based on mesh resolution, and (2) geometry-aware update scaling, which scales predictions according to local mesh characteristics. Extensive experiments show that even trained solely on low-resolution meshes, Pb4U-GNet exhibits strong generalisability across diverse mesh resolutions, addressing a fundamental challenge in neural garment simulation.

PaperID: 903, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17621

Authors:Fengchun Liu, Songhan Jiang, Linghan Cai, Ziyue Wang, Yongbing Zhang

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, School of Computer Science and Technology, National University of Singapore, Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering

Title: PathFLIP: Fine-grained Language-Image Pretraining for Versatile Computational Pathology

Abstract:
While VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) have achieved notable progress in computational pathology (CPath), the gigapixel scale and spatial heterogeneity of Whole Slide Images (WSIs) continue to pose challenges for multimodal understanding. Existing alignment methods struggle to capture fine-grained correspondences between textual descriptions and visual cues across thousands of patches from a slide, compromising their performance on downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose PathFLIP (Pathology Fine-grained Language-Image Pretraining), a novel framework for holistic WSI interpretation. PathFLIP decomposes slide-level captions into region-level sub-captions and generates text-conditioned region embeddings to facilitate precise visual-language grounding. By harnessing Large Language Models (LLMs), PathFLIP can seamlessly follow diverse clinical instructions and adapt to varied diagnostic contexts. Furthermore, it exhibits versatile capabilities across multiple paradigms, efficiently handling slide-level classification and retrieval, fine-grained lesion localization, and instruction following. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PathFLIP outperforms existing large-scale pathological VLMs on four representative benchmarks while requiring significantly less training data, paving the way for fine-grained, instruction-aware WSI interpretation in research and clinical practice.

PaperID: 904, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06793

Authors:Jiaxin Liu, Gangwei Xu, Xianqi Wang, Chengliang Zhang, Xin Yang

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: Generalized Geometry Encoding Volume for Real-time Stereo Matching

Abstract:
Realtime stereo matching methods primarily focus on enhancing in-domain performance but often overlook the critical importance of generalization in real-world applications. In contrast, recent stereo foundation models leverage monocular foundation models (MFMs) to improve generalization, but typically suffer from substantial inference latency. To address this trade-off, we propose Generalized Geometry Encoding Volume (GGEV), a novel real-time stereo matching network that achieves strong generalization. We first extract depth-aware features that encode domain-invariant structural priors as guidance for cost aggregation. Subsequently, we introduce a Depth-aware Dynamic Cost Aggregation (DDCA) module that adaptively incorporates these priors into each disparity hypothesis, effectively enhancing fragile matching relationships in unseen scenes. Both steps are lightweight and complementary, leading to the construction of a generalized geometry encoding volume with strong generalization capability. Experimental results demonstrate that our GGEV surpasses all existing real-time methods in zero-shot generalization capability, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015, and ETH3D benchmarks.

PaperID: 905, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09088

Authors:Taifeng Liu, Xinjing Liu, Liangqiu Dong, Yang Liu, Yilong Yang, Zhuo Ma

Affiliations: Xidian University

Title: Improving Sustainability of Adversarial Examples in Class-Incremental Learning

Abstract:
Current adversarial examples (AEs) are typically designed for static models. However, with the wide application of ClassIncremental Learning (CIL), models are no longer static and need to be updated with new data distributed and labeled differently from the old ones. As a result, existing AEs often fail after CIL updates due to significant domain drift. In this paper, we propose SAE to enhance the sustainability of AEs against CIL. The core idea of SAE is to enhance the robustness of AE semantics against domain drift by making them more similar to the target class while distinguishing them from all other classes. Achieving this is challenging, as relying solely on the initial CIL model to optimize AE semantics often leads to overfitting. To resolve the problem, we propose a Semantic Correction Module. This module encourages the AE semantics to be generalized, based on a generative model capable of producing universal semantics. Additionally, it incorporates the CIL model to correct the optimization direction of the AE semantics, guiding them closer to the target class. To further reduce fluctuations in AE semantics, we propose a Filtering-and-Augmentation Module, which first identifies non-target examples with target-class semantics in the latent space and then augments them to foster more stable semantics. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that SAE outperforms baselines by an average of 31.28% when updated with a 9-fold increase in the number of classes.

PaperID: 906, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11340

Authors:Fei Long, Yao Zhang, Jiaming Lv, Jiangtao Xie, Peihua Li

Affiliations: Dalian University of Technology

Title: Task-Specific Distance Correlation Matching for Few-Shot Action Recognition

Abstract:
Fewshot action recognition (FSAR) has recently made notable progress through set matching and efficient adaptation of large-scale pre-trained models. However, two key limitations persist. First, existing set matching metrics typically rely on cosine similarity to measure inter-frame linear dependencies and then perform matching with only instance-level information, thus failing to capture more complex patterns such as nonlinear relationships and overlooking task-specific cues. Second, for efficient adaptation of CLIP to FSAR, recent work performing fine-tuning via skip-fusion layers (which we refer to as side layers) has significantly reduced memory cost. However, the newly introduced side layers are often difficult to optimize under limited data conditions. To address these limitations, we propose TS-FSAR, a framework comprising three components: (1) a visual Ladder Side Network (LSN) for efficient CLIP fine-tuning; (2) a metric called Task-Specific Distance Correlation Matching (TS-DCM), which uses alpha-distance correlation to model both linear and nonlinear inter-frame dependencies and leverages a task prototype to enable task-specific matching; and (3) a Guiding LSN with Adapted CLIP (GLAC) module, which regularizes LSN using the adapted frozen CLIP to improve training for better α-distance correlation estimation under limited supervision. Extensive experiments on five widely-used benchmarks demonstrate that our TS-FSAR yields superior performance compared to prior state-of-the-arts.

PaperID: 907, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24417

Authors:Runnan Lu, Yuxuan Zhang, Jiaming Liu, Haofan Wang, Yiren Song

Affiliations: National University of Singapore, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Liblib AI

Title: EasyText: Controllable Diffusion Transformer for Multilingual Text Rendering

Abstract:
Generating accurate multilingual text with diffusion models has long been desired but remains challenging. Recent methods have made progress in rendering text in a single language, but rendering arbitrary languages is still an underexplored area. This paper introduces EasyText, a text rendering framework based on DiT (Diffusion Transformer), which connects denoising latents with multilingual character tokens encoded as character tokens. We propose character positioning encoding and position encoding interpolation techniques to achieve controllable and precise text rendering. Additionally, we construct a large-scale synthetic text image dataset with 1 million multilingual image-text annotations as well as a high-quality dataset of 20K annotated images, which are used for pretraining and fine-tuning respectively. Extensive experiments and evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness and advancement of our approach in multilingual text rendering, visual quality, and layout-aware text integration.

PaperID: 908, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12170

Authors:Wang Luo, Di Wu, Hengyuan Na, Yinlin Zhu, Miao Hu, Guocong Quan

Affiliations: Sun Yat-sen University, China Guangzhou Yunshan Research Institute of Artificial Intelligence Security

Title: Rethinking Multimodal Point Cloud Completion: A Completion-by-Correction Perspective

Abstract:
Point cloud completion aims to reconstruct complete 3D shapes from partial observations, which is a challenging problem due to severe occlusions and missing geometry. Despite recent advances in multimodal techniques that leverage complementary RGB images to compensate for missing geometry, most methods still follow a Completionby-Inpainting paradigm, synthesizing missing structures from fused latent features. We empirically show that this paradigm often results in structural inconsistencies and topological artifacts due to limited geometric and semantic constraints. To address this, we rethink the task and propose a more robust paradigm, termed Completion-by-Correction, which begins with a topologically complete shape prior generated by a pretrained image-to-3D model and performs feature-space correction to align it with the partial observation. This paradigm shifts completion from unconstrained synthesis to guided refinement, enabling structurally consistent and observation-aligned reconstruction. Building upon this paradigm, we introduce PGNet, a multi-stage framework that conducts dual-feature encoding to ground the generative prior, synthesizes a coarse yet structurally aligned scaffold, and progressively refines geometric details via hierarchical correction. Experiments on the ShapeNetViPC dataset demonstrate the superiority of PGNet over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of average Chamfer Distance (-23.5%) and F-score (+7.1%).

PaperID: 909, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22379

Authors:Xiyu Luo, Haodong Li, Xinxing Cheng, He Zhao, Yang Hu, Xuan Song, Tianyang Zhang

Affiliations: Southern University of Science and Technology, University of Birmingham, University of Liverpool, University of Leicester, Jilin University, University of Oxford

Title: TraceTrans: Translation and Spatial Tracing for Surgical Prediction

Abstract:
Imageto-image translation models have achieved notable success in converting images across visual domains and are increasingly used for medical tasks such as predicting post-operative outcomes and modeling disease progression. However, most existing methods primarily aim to match the target distribution and often neglect spatial correspondences between the source and translated images. This limitation can lead to structural inconsistencies and hallucinations, undermining the reliability and interpretability of the predictions. These challenges are accentuated in clinical applications by the stringent requirement for anatomical accuracy. In this work, we present TraceTrans, a novel deformable image translation model designed for post-operative prediction that generates images aligned with the target distribution while explicitly revealing spatial correspondences with the pre-operative input. The framework employs an encoder for feature extraction and dual decoders for predicting spatial deformations and synthesizing the translated image. The predicted deformation field imposes spatial constraints on the generated output, ensuring anatomical consistency with the source. Extensive experiments on medical cosmetology and brain MRI datasets demonstrate that TraceTrans delivers accurate and interpretable post-operative predictions, highlighting its potential for reliable clinical deployment.

PaperID: 910, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07938

Authors:Chenrui Ma, Xi Xiao, Tianyang Wang, Xiao Wang, Yanning Shen

Affiliations: University of California, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Title: CAD-VAE: Leveraging Correlation-Aware Latents for Comprehensive Fair Disentanglement

Abstract:
While deep generative models have significantly advanced representation learning, they may inherit or amplify biases and fairness issues by encoding sensitive attributes alongside predictive features. Enforcing strict independence in disentanglement is often unrealistic when target and sensitive factors are naturally correlated. To address this challenge, we propose CADVAE(Correlation-Aware Disentangled VAE), which introduces a correlated latent code to capture the information shared between the target and sensitive attributes. Given this correlated latent, our method effectively separates overlapping factors without extra domain knowledge by directly minimizing the conditional mutual information between target and sensitive codes. A relevance-driven optimization strategy refines the correlated code by efficiently capturing essential correlated features and eliminating redundancy. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that CAD-VAE produces fairer representations, realistic counterfactuals, and improved fairness-aware image editing.

PaperID: 911, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15288

Authors:Yanni Ma, Hao Liu, Yulan Guo, Theo Gevers, Martin R. Oswald

Affiliations: School of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, University of Amsterdam, Key Lab of Spatial-temporal Big Data Analysis and Application of Natural Resources in Megacities, Ministry of Natural Resources, East China Normal University (ECNU), China Key Laboratory of Geographic Information Science (Ministry of Education), Computer Vision Research Group

Title: Edge-Centric Relational Reasoning for 3D Scene Graph Prediction

Abstract:
3D scene graph prediction aims to abstract complex 3D environments into structured graphs consisting of objects and their pairwise relationships. Existing approaches typically adopt objectcentric graph neural networks, where relation edge features are iteratively updated by aggregating messages from connected object nodes. However, this design inherently restricts relation representations to pairwise object context, making it difficult to capture high-order relational dependencies that are essential for accurate relation prediction. To address this limitation, we propose a Link-guided Edge-centric relational reasoning framework with Object-aware fusion, namely LEO, which enables progressive reasoning from relation-level context to object-level understanding. Specifically, LEO first predicts potential links between object pairs to suppress irrelevant edges, and then transforms the original scene graph into a line graph where each relation is treated as a node. A line graph neural network is applied to perform edge-centric relational reasoning to capture inter-relation context. The enriched relation features are subsequently integrated into the original object-centric graph to enhance object-level reasoning and improve relation prediction. Our framework is model-agnostic and can be integrated with any existing object-centric method. Experiments on the 3DSSG dataset with two competitive baselines show consistent improvements, highlighting the effectiveness of our edge-to-object reasoning paradigm.

PaperID: 912, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05275

Authors:Tuna Han Salih Meral, Hidir Yesiltepe, Connor Dunlop, Pinar Yanardag

Affiliations: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Title: MotionFlow: Attention-Driven Motion Transfer in Video Diffusion Models

Abstract:
Textto-video models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in producing diverse video content, yet often lack fine-grained control over motion. We address the problem of motion transfer: given a source video and a target text prompt, generate a new video that preserves the source motion while matching the target semantics and allowing large changes in appearance and scene layout. We introduce MotionFlow, a training-free framework that performs test-time latent optimization guided by attention-derived motion cues. MotionFlow first extracts cross-attention maps from a pre-trained video diffusion model and converts them into spatio-temporal motion masks for the source subject. During generation, it optimizes the target latents so that their evolving attention patterns align with these masks, while the target text controls appearance. This avoids direct attention-map replacement and any model-specific fine-tuning, reducing artifacts and improving flexibility. Qualitative and quantitative experiments, including a user study, show that MotionFlow outperforms existing methods in motion fidelity, temporal consistency, and versatility, even under drastic scene changes.

PaperID: 913, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11243

Authors:Zhiqi Pang, Lingling Zhao, Yang Liu, Chunyu Wang, Gaurav Sharma

Affiliations: Faculty of Computing, Harbin Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Rochester

Title: Image-Text Knowledge Modeling for Unsupervised Multi-Scenario Person Re-Identification

Abstract:
We propose unsupervised multiscenario (UMS) person re-identification (ReID) as a new task that expands ReID across diverse scenarios (cross-resolution, clothing change, etc.) within a single coherent framework. To tackle UMS-ReID, we introduce image-text knowledge modeling (ITKM) -- a three-stage framework that effectively exploits the representational power of vision-language models. We start with a pre-trained CLIP model with an image encoder and a text encoder. In Stage I, we introduce a scenario embedding in the image encoder and fine-tune the encoder to adaptively leverage knowledge from multiple scenarios. In Stage II, we optimize a set of learned text embeddings to associate with pseudo-labels from Stage I and introduce a multi-scenario separation loss to increase the divergence between inter-scenario text representations. In Stage III, we first introduce cluster-level and instance-level heterogeneous matching modules to obtain reliable heterogeneous positive pairs (e.g., a visible image and an infrared image of the same person) within each scenario. Next, we propose a dynamic text representation update strategy to maintain consistency between text and image supervision signals. Experimental results across multiple scenarios demonstrate the superiority and generalizability of ITKM; it not only outperforms existing scenario-specific methods but also enhances overall performance by integrating knowledge from multiple scenarios.

PaperID: 914, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22903

Authors:Kyu Ri Park, Jiyoung Park, Seong Tae Kim, Hong Joo Lee, Jung Uk Kim

Affiliations: Kyung Hee University, Technische Universität München

Title: Leveraging Textual Compositional Reasoning for Robust Change Captioning

Abstract:
Change captioning aims to describe changes between a pair of images. However, existing works rely on visual features alone, which often fail to capture subtle but meaningful changes because they lack the ability to represent explicitly structured information such as object relationships and compositional semantics. To alleviate this, we present CORTEX (COmpositional Reasoningaware TEXt-guided), a novel framework that integrates complementary textual cues to enhance change understanding. In addition to capturing cues from pixel-level differences, CORTEX utilizes scene-level textual knowledge provided by Vision Language Models (VLMs) to extract richer image text signals that reveal underlying compositional reasoning. CORTEX consists of three key modules: (i) an Image-level Change Detector that identifies low-level visual differences between paired images, (ii) a Reasoning-aware Text Extraction (RTE) module that use VLMs to generate compositional reasoning descriptions implicit in visual features, and (iii) an Image-Text Dual Alignment (ITDA) module that aligns visual and textual features for fine-grained relational reasoning. This enables CORTEX to reason over visual and textual features and capture changes that are otherwise ambiguous in visual features alone.

PaperID: 915, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20218

Authors:Yuhang Qian, Haiyan Chen, Wentong Li, Ningzhong Liu, Jie Qin

Affiliations: MoE Key Laboratory of Brain-Machine Intelligence Technology, College of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing Jiangsu, College of Computer Science and Technology

Title: Text-guided Controllable Diffusion for Realistic Camouflage Images Generation

Abstract:
Camouflage Images Generation (CIG) is an emerging research area that focuses on synthesizing images in which objects are harmoniously blended and exhibit high visual consistency with their surroundings. Existing methods perform CIG by either fusing objects into specific backgrounds or outpainting the surroundings via foreground objectguided diffusion. However, they often fail to obtain natural results because they overlook the logical relationship between camouflaged objects and background environments. To address this issue, we propose CT-CIG, a Controllable Text-guided Camouflage Images Generation method that produces realistic and logically plausible camouflage images. Leveraging Large Visual Language Models (VLM), we design a Camouflage-Revealing Dialogue Mechanism (CRDM) to annotate existing camouflage datasets with high-quality text prompts. Subsequently, the constructed image-prompt pairs are utilized to finetune Stable Diffusion, incorporating a lightweight controller to guide the location and shape of camouflaged objects for enhanced camouflage scene fitness. Moreover, we design a Frequency Interaction Refinement Module (FIRM) to capture high-frequency texture features, facilitating the learning of complex camouflage patterns. Extensive experiments, including CLIPScore evaluation and camouflage effectiveness assessment, demonstrate the semantic alignment of our generated text prompts and CT-CIG's ability to produce photorealistic camouflage images.

PaperID: 916, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04153

Authors:Yihua Shao, Xiaofeng Lin, Xinwei Long, Siyu Chen, Minxi Yan, Yang Liu, Ziyang Yan, Ao Ma, Hao Tang, Jingcai Guo

Affiliations: Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangdong University of Technology, Tsinghua University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, University of Trento, Peking University, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: ICM-Fusion: In-Context Meta-Optimized LoRA Fusion for Multi-Task Adaptation

Abstract:
Enabling multitask adaptation in pre-trained Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) models is crucial for enhancing their generalization capabilities. Most existing pre-trained LoRA fusion methods decompose weight matrices, sharing similar parameters, while fusion divergent ones. However, this paradigm inevitably induces inter-weight conflicts and leads to catastrophic domain forgetting. While incremental learning enables adaptation to multiple tasks, it struggles to achieve generalization in few-shot scenarios. Consequently, when the weight data follows a long-tailed distribution, it can lead to forgetting in the fused weights. To address this issue, we propose In-Context Meta LoRA Fusion (ICM-Fusion), a novel framework that synergizes meta-learning with in-context adaptation. The key innovation lies in our task vector arithmetic, which dynamically balances conflicting optimization directions across domains through learned manifold projections. ICM-Fusion obtains the optimal task vector orientation for the fused model in the latent space by adjusting the orientation of the task vectors. Subsequently, the fused LoRA is reconstructed by a self-designed Fusion VAE (F-VAE) to realize multi-task LoRA generation. We have conducted extensive experiments on visual and linguistic tasks, and the experimental results demonstrate that ICM-Fusion can be adapted to a wide range of architectural models and applied to various tasks. Compared to the current pre-trained LoRA fusion method, ICM-Fusion fused LoRA can significantly reduce the multi-tasking loss and can even achieve task enhancement in few-shot scenarios.

PaperID: 917, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09078

Authors:Junze Shi, Yang Yu, Jian Shi, Haibo Luo

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Opto-Electronic Information Processing, Chinese Academy of Science

Title: Exploring Reliable Spatiotemporal Dependencies for Efficient Visual Tracking

Abstract:
Recent advances in transformerbased lightweight object tracking have established new standards across benchmarks, leveraging the global receptive field and powerful feature extraction capabilities of attention mechanisms. Despite these achievements, existing methods universally employ sparse sampling during training—utilizing only one template and one search image per sequence—which fails to comprehensively explore spatiotemporal information in videos. This limitation constrains performance and causes the gap between lightweight and high-performance trackers. To bridge this divide while maintaining real-time efficiency, we propose STDTrack, a framework that pioneers the integration of reliable spatiotemporal dependencies into lightweight trackers. Our approach implements dense video sampling to maximize spatiotemporal information utilization. We introduce a temporally propagating spatiotemporal token to guide per-frame feature extraction. To ensure comprehensive target state representation, we design the Multi-frame Information Fusion Module (MFIFM), which augments current dependencies using historical context. The MFIFM operates on features stored in our constructed Spatiotemporal Token Maintainer (STM), where a quality-based update mechanism ensures information reliability. Considering the scale variation among tracking targets, we develop a multi-scale prediction head to dynamically adapt to objects of different sizes. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art results across six benchmarks. Notably, on GOT-10k, STDTrack rivals certain high-performance non-real-time trackers (e.g., MixFormer) while operating at 192 FPS (GPU) and 41 FPS (CPU).

PaperID: 918, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11690

Authors:Fei Song, Yi Li, Rui Wang, Jiahuan Zhou, Changwen Zheng, Jiangmeng Li

Affiliations: National Key Laboratory of Space Integrated Information System, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University

Title: Doubly Debiased Test-Time Prompt Tuning for Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
Testtime prompt tuning for vision-language models has demonstrated impressive generalization capabilities under zero-shot settings. However, tuning the learnable prompts solely based on unlabeled test data may induce prompt optimization bias, ultimately leading to suboptimal performance on downstream tasks. In this work, we analyze the underlying causes of prompt optimization bias from both the model and data perspectives. In terms of the model, the entropy minimization objective typically focuses on reducing the entropy of model predictions while overlooking their correctness. This can result in overconfident yet incorrect outputs, thereby compromising the quality of prompt optimization. On the data side, prompts affected by optimization bias can introduce misalignment between visual and textual modalities, which further aggravates the prompt optimization bias. To this end, we propose a Doubly Debiased Test-Time Prompt Tuning method, abbreviated as D2TPT. Specifically, we first introduce a dynamic retrieval-augmented modulation module that retrieves high-confidence knowledge from a dynamic knowledge base using the test image feature as a query, and uses the retrieved knowledge to modulate the predictions. Guided by the refined predictions, we further develop a reliability-aware prompt optimization module that incorporates a confidence-based weighted ensemble and cross-modal consistency distillation to impose regularization constraints during prompt tuning. Extensive experiments across 15 benchmark datasets involving both natural distribution shifts and cross-datasets generalization demonstrate that D2TPT outperforms baselines, validating its effectiveness in mitigating prompt optimization bias.

PaperID: 919, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06345

Authors:Xiangshuai Song, Jun-Jie Huang, Tianrui Liu, Ke Liang, Chang Tang

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology, School of Software Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: CLUENet: Cluster Attention Makes Neural Networks Have Eyes

Abstract:
Despite the success of convolutionand attention-based models in vision tasks, their rigid receptive fields and complex architectures limit their ability to model irregular spatial patterns and hinder interpretability, thereby posing challenges for tasks requiring high model transparency. Clustering paradigms offer promising interpretability and flexible semantic modeling, but suffer from limited accuracy, low efficiency, and gradient vanishing during training. To address these issues, we propose the CLUster attEntion Network (CLUENet), a transparent deep architecture for visual semantic understanding. Specifically, we introduce three key innovations, including (i) a Global and Soft Feature Aggregation with a Temperature-Scaled Cosine Attention for capturing long-range dependencies and a Gated Fusion Mechanism for enhanced local modeling, (ii) Hard and Shared Feature Dispatching, and (iii) an Improved Cluster Pooling Block. These enhancements significantly improve both classification performance and visual interpretability. Experiments on CIFAR-100 and Mini-ImageNet demonstrate that CLUENet outperforms existing clustering methods and mainstream visual models, offering a compelling balance of accuracy, efficiency, and transparency.

PaperID: 920, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08790

Authors:Lei Tan, Shuwei Li, Mohan Kankanhalli, Robby T. Tan

Affiliations: National University of Singapore

Title: Aggregating Diverse Cue Experts for AI-Generated Image Detection

Abstract:
The rapid emergence of image synthesis models poses challenges to the generalization of AIgenerated image detectors. However, existing methods often rely on model-specific features, leading to overfitting and poor generalization. In this paper, we introduce the Multi-Cue Aggregation Network (MCAN), a novel framework that integrates different yet complementary cues as input. MCAN employs a mixture-of-encoders adapter to dynamically process these cues, enabling more adaptive and robust feature representation. Our cues include the input image itself, which represents the overall content, and high-frequency components that emphasize edge details. Additionally, we introduce a Chromatic Inconsistency (CI) cue, which normalizes intensity values and captures noise information introduced during the image acquisition process in real images, making these noise patterns more distinguishable from those in AI-generated content. Unlike prior methods, MCAN employs a multi-cue aggregation strategy, leveraging spatial, frequency, and chromaticity-based cues. These cues are intrinsically more indicative of real images, enhancing cross-model generalization. Extensive experiments on the GenImage, Chameleon, and UniversalFakeDetect benchmark validate the state-of-the-art performance of MCAN. In the GenImage dataset, MCAN outperforms the best state-of-the-art method by up to 7.4% in average ACC across eight different image generators.

PaperID: 921, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06194

Authors:Muhammad Usama, Mohammad Sadil Khan, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal

Affiliations: German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Germany RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU), Germany MindGarage

Title: NURBGen: High-Fidelity Text-to-CAD Generation Through LLM-Driven NURBS Modeling

Abstract:
Generating editable 3D CAD models from natural language remains challenging, as existing textto-CAD systems either produce meshes or rely on scarce design-history data. We present NURBGen, the first framework to generate high fidelity 3D CAD models directly from text using Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS). To achieve this, we fine-tune a large language model (LLM) to translate free-form texts into JSON representations containing NURBS surface parameters (i.e, control points, knot vectors, degrees, and rational weights) which can be directly converted into BRep format using Python. We further propose a hybrid representation that combines untrimmed NURBS with analytic primitives to handle trimmed surfaces and degenerate regions more robustly, while reducing token complexity. Additionally, we introduce partABC, a curated subset of the ABC dataset consisting of individual CAD components, annotated with detailed captions using an automated annotation pipeline. NURBGen demonstrates strong performance on diverse prompts, surpassing prior methods in geometric fidelity and dimensional accuracy, as confirmed by expert evaluations.

PaperID: 922, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18988

Authors:Chao Wang, Zijin Yang, Yaofei Wang, Weiming Zhang, Kejiang Chen

Affiliations: Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Digital Security, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei University of Technology

Title: AEDR: Training-Free AI-Generated Image Attribution via Autoencoder Double-Reconstruction

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of imagegeneration technologies has made it possible for anyone to create photorealistic images using generative models, raising significant security concerns. To mitigate malicious use, tracing the origin of such images is essential. Reconstruction-based attribution methods offer a promising solution, but they often suffer from reduced accuracy and high computational costs when applied to state‑of‑the‑art (SOTA) models. To address these challenges, we propose AEDR (AutoEncoder Double-Reconstruction), a novel training‑free attribution method designed for generative models with continuous autoencoders. Unlike existing reconstruction‑based approaches that rely on the value of a single reconstruction loss, AEDR performs two consecutive reconstructions using the model’s autoencoder, and adopts the ratio of these two reconstruction losses as the attribution signal. This signal is further calibrated using the image homogeneity metric to improve accuracy, which inherently cancels out absolute biases caused by image complexity, with autoencoder‑based reconstruction ensuring superior computational efficiency. Experiments on eight top latent diffusion models show that AEDR achieves 25.5% higher attribution accuracy than existing reconstruction‑based methods, with requiring only 1% of the computational time.

PaperID: 923, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05868

Authors:Hongjun Wang, Jiyuan Chen, Xuan Song, Yinqiang Zheng

Affiliations: Southern University of Science and Technology Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Jilin University, The University of Tokyo

Title: HarmoQ: Harmonized Post-Training Quantization for High-Fidelity Image Super-Resolution

Abstract:
Posttraining quantization offers an efficient pathway to deploy super-resolution models, yet existing methods treat weight and activation quantization independently, missing their critical interplay. Through controlled experiments on SwinIR, we uncover a striking asymmetry: weight quantization primarily degrades structural similarity, while activation quantization disproportionately affects pixel-level accuracy. This stems from their distinct roles—weights encode learned restoration priors for textures and edges, whereas activations carry input-specific intensity information. Building on this insight, we propose HarmoQ, a unified framework that harmonizes quantization across components through three synergistic steps: structural residual calibration proactively adjusts weights to compensate for activation-induced detail loss, harmonized scale optimization analytically balances quantization difficulty via closed-form solutions, and adaptive boundary refinement iteratively maintains this balance during optimization. Experiments show HarmoQ achieves substantial gains under aggressive compression, outperforming prior art by 0.46 dB on Set5 at 2-bit while delivering 3.2× speedup and 4× memory reduction on A100 GPUs. This work provides the first systematic analysis of weight-activation coupling in super-resolution quantization and establishes a principled solution for efficient high-quality image restoration.

PaperID: 924, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11617

Authors:Xu Wang, Boyao Han, Xiaojun Chen, Ying Liu, Ruihui Li

Affiliations: Hunan University, Hunan Normal University

Title: PointSLAM++: Robust Dense Neural Gaussian Point Cloud-based SLAM

Abstract:
Realtime 3D reconstruction is crucial for robotics and augmented reality, yet current simultaneous localization and mapping(SLAM) approaches often struggle to maintain structural consistency and robust pose estimation in the presence of depth noise. This work introduces PointSLAM++, a novel RGB-D SLAM system that leverages a hierarchically constrained neural Gaussian representation to preserve structural relationships while generating Gaussian primitives for scene mapping. It also employs progressive pose optimization to mitigate depth sensor noise, significantly enhancing localization accuracy. Furthermore, it utilizes a dynamic neural representation graph that adjusts the distribution of Gaussian nodes based on local geometric complexity, enabling the map to adapt to intricate scene details in real time. This combination yields high-precision 3D mapping and photorealistic scene rendering. Experimental results show PointSLAM++ outperforms existing 3DGS-based SLAM methods in reconstruction accuracy and rendering quality, demonstrating its advantages for large-scale AR and robotics.

PaperID: 925, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05162

Authors:Xuan Wang, Kai Ruan, Liyang Qian, Guo Zhi Zhi, Chang Su, Gaoang Wang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Renmin University of China, Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom

Title: X-MoGen: Unified Motion Generation Across Humans and Animals

Abstract:
Textdriven motion generation has attracted increasing attention due to its broad applications in virtual reality, animation, and robotics. While existing methods typically model human and animal motion separately, a joint cross-species approach offers key advantages, such as a unified representation and improved generalization. However, morphological differences across species remain a key challenge, often compromising motion plausibility. To address this, we propose X-MoGen, the first unified framework for cross-species text-driven motion generation covering both humans and animals. X-MoGen adopts a two-stage architecture. First, a conditional graph variational autoencoder learns canonical T-pose priors, while an autoencoder encodes motion into a shared latent space regularized by morphological loss. In the second stage, we perform masked motion modeling to generate motion embeddings conditioned on textual descriptions. During training, a morphological consistency module is employed to promote skeletal plausibility across species. To support unified modeling, we construct UniMo4D, a large-scale dataset of 115 species and 119k motion sequences, which integrates human and animal motions under a shared skeletal topology for joint training. Extensive experiments on UniMo4D demonstrate that X-MoGen outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both seen and unseen species.

PaperID: 926, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07633

Authors:Zhitao Wang, Hengyu Man, Wenrui Li, Xingtao Wang, Xiaopeng Fan, Debin Zhao

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: T-GVC: Trajectory-Guided Generative Video Coding at Ultra-Low Bitrates

Abstract:
Recent advances in video generation techniques have given rise to an emerging paradigm of generative video coding for UltraLow Bitrate (ULB) scenarios by leveraging powerful generative priors. However, most existing methods are limited by domain specificity (e.g., facial or human videos) or excessive dependence on high-level text guidance, which tend to inadequately capture fine-grained motion details, leading to unrealistic or incoherent reconstructions. To address these challenges, we propose Trajectory-Guided Generative Video Coding (dubbed T-GVC), a novel framework that bridges low-level motion tracking with high-level semantic understanding. T-GVC features a semantic-aware sparse motion sampling pipeline that extracts pixel-wise motion as sparse trajectory points based on their semantic importance, significantly reducing the bitrate while preserving critical temporal semantic information. In addition, by integrating trajectory-aligned loss constraints into diffusion processes, we introduce a training-free guidance mechanism in latent space to ensure physically plausible motion patterns without sacrificing the inherent capabilities of generative models. Experimental results demonstrate that T-GVC outperforms both traditional and neural video codecs under ULB conditions. Furthermore, additional experiments confirm that our framework achieves more precise motion control than existing text-guided methods, paving the way for a novel direction of generative video coding guided by geometric motion modeling.

PaperID: 927, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08977

Authors:Zihua Wang, Jiarui Wang, Haiyang Xu, Ming Yan, Fei Huang, Xu Yang, Xiu-Shen Wei, Siya Mi, Yu Zhang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering and the Key Laboratory of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Technology and its Interdisciplinary Applications, Southeast University, Nanjing China., Tongyi Lab, Alibaba Group., School of Cyber Science and Engineering

Title: Efficient and Effective In-context Demonstration Selection with Coreset

Abstract:
Incontext learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for Large Visual Language Models (LVLMs), enabling them to leverage a few examples directly from input contexts. However, the effectiveness of this approach is heavily reliant on the selection of demonstrations, a process that is NP-hard. Traditional strategies, including random, similarity-based sampling and infoscore-based sampling, often lead to inefficiencies or suboptimal performance, struggling to balance both efficiency and effectiveness in demonstration selection. In this paper, we propose a novel demonstration selection framework named Coreset-based Dual Retrieval (CoDR). We show that samples within a diverse subset achieve a higher expected mutual information. To implement this, we introduce a cluster-pruning method to construct a diverse coreset that aligns more effectively with the query while maintaining diversity. Additionally, we develop a dual retrieval mechanism that enhances the selection process by achieving global demonstration selection while preserving efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the ICL performance compared to the existing strategies, providing a robust solution for effective and efficient demonstration selection.

PaperID: 928, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06097

Authors:Zikang Wang, Boyu Chen, Zhengrong Yue, Yi Wang, Yu Qiao, Limin Wang, Yali Wang

Affiliations: Shenzhen Key Lab of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences VIVO AI Lab, Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Shanghai Aritifcal Intelligence Laboratory

Title: VideoChat-A1: Thinking with Long Videos by Chain-of-Shot Reasoning

Abstract:
Recent advances in video understanding have been driven by MLLMs. But these MLLMs are good at analyzing short videos, while suffering from difficulties in understanding videos with a longer context. To address this difficulty, several agent paradigms have recently been proposed, using MLLMs as agents for retrieving extra contextual knowledge in a long video. However, most existing agents ignore the key fact that a long video is composed with multiple shots, i.e., to answer the user question from a long video, it is critical to deeply understand its relevant shots like human. Without such insight, these agents often mistakenly find redundant even noisy temporal context, restricting their capacity for long video understanding. To fill this gap, we propose VideoChatA1, a novel long video agent paradigm. Different from the previous works, our VideoChat-A1 can deeply think with long videos, via a distinct chain-of-shot reasoning paradigm. More specifically, it can progressively select the relevant shots of user question, and look into these shots in a coarse-to-fine partition. By multi-modal reasoning along the shot chain, VideoChat-A1 can effectively mimic step-by-step human thinking process, allowing the interactive discovery of preferable temporal context for thoughtful understanding in long videos. Extensive experiments show that, VideoChat-A1 achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the mainstream long video QA benchmarks, e.g., it achieves 77.0 on VideoMME(w/ subs) and 70.1 on EgoSchema, outperforming its strong baselines (e.g., InternVL2.5-8B and InternVideo2.5-8B), by up to 10.1% and 6.2%. Compared to leading closed-source GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro, VideoChat-A1 offers competitive accuracy, but only with 7% input frames and 12% inference time on average.

PaperID: 929, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12468

Authors:Yanqi Wu, Qichao Chen, Runhe Lai, Xinhua Lu, Jia-Xin Zhuang, Zhilin Zhao, Weishi Zheng, Ruixuan Wang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, China Peng Cheng Laboratory, China Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and Advanced Computing, University of Nottingham Malaysia, Hong Kong

Title: DCAC: Dynamic Class-Aware Cache Creates Stronger Out-of-Distribution Detectors

Abstract:
Outof-distribution (OOD) detection remains a fundamental challenge for deep neural networks, particularly due to overconfident predictions on unseen OOD samples during testing. We reveal a key insight: OOD samples predicted as the same class, or given high probabilities for it, are visually more similar to each other than to the true in-distribution (ID) samples. Motivated by this class-specific observation, we propose DCAC (Dynamic Class-Aware Cache), a training-free, test-time calibration module that maintains separate caches for each ID class to collect high-entropy samples and calibrate the raw predictions of input samples. DCAC leverages cached visual features and predicted probabilities through a lightweight two-layer module to mitigate overconfident predictions on OOD samples. This module can be seamlessly integrated with various existing OOD detection methods across both unimodal and vision-language models while introducing minimal computational overhead. Extensive experiments on multiple OOD benchmarks demonstrate that DCAC significantly enhances existing methods, achieving substantial improvements, i.e., reducing FPR95 by 6.55% when integrated with ASH-S on ImageNet OOD benchmark.

PaperID: 930, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16587

Authors:Sicheng Xie, Haidong Cao, Zejia Weng, Zhen Xing, Haoran Chen, Shiwei Shen, Jiaqi Leng, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang

Affiliations: Shanghai Key Lab of Intell. Info. Processing, School of CS, Fudan University

Title: Human2Robot: Learning Robot Actions from Paired Human-Robot Videos

Abstract:
Distilling knowledge from human demonstrations is a promising way for robots to learn and act. Existing methods, which often rely on coarselyaligned video pairs, are typically constrained to learning global or task-level features. As a result, they tend to neglect the fine-grained frame-level dynamics required for complex manipulation and generalization to novel tasks. We posit that this limitation stems from a vicious circle of inadequate datasets and the methods they inspire. To break this cycle, we propose a paradigm shift that treats fine-grained human-robot alignment as a conditional video generation problem. To this end, we first introduce H&R, a novel third-person dataset containing 2,600 episodes of precisely synchronized human and robot motions, collected using a VR teleoperation system. We then present Human2Robot, a framework designed to leverage this data. Human2Robot employs a Video Prediction Model to learn a rich and implicit representation of robot dynamics by generating robot videos from human input, which in turn guides a decoupled action decoder. Our real-world experiments demonstrate that this approach not only achieves high performance on seen tasks but also exhibits significant one-shot generalization to novel positions, objects, instances, and even new task categories.

PaperID: 931, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07313

Authors:Junyu Xiong, Yonghui Wang, Weichao Zhao, Chenyu Liu, Bing Yin, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, iFLYTEK Research

Title: DocR1: Evidence Page-Guided GRPO for Multi-Page Document Understanding

Abstract:
Understanding multipage documents poses a significant challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as it requires fine-grained visual comprehension and multi-hop reasoning across pages. While prior work has explored reinforcement learning (RL) for enhancing advanced reasoning in MLLMs, its application to multi-page document understanding remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce DocR1, an MLLM trained with a novel RL framework, Evidence Page-Guided GRPO (EviGRPO). EviGRPO incorporates an evidence-aware reward mechanism that promotes a coarse-to-fine reasoning strategy, guiding the model to first retrieve relevant pages before generating answers. To support this, we design a rigorous two-stage annotation pipeline and a curriculum learning strategy that enables effective training with limited supervision. Using this pipeline, we construct two datasets: EviBench, a high-quality training set with 4.8k examples, and ArxivFullQA, a benchmark with 8.6k QA examples over full scientific papers. Extensive experiments across a wide range of benchmarks demonstrate that DocR1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on multi-page tasks while maintaining strong results on single-page benchmarks.

PaperID: 932, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.09439

Authors:Junhao Xu, Jingjing Chen, Yang Jiao, Jiacheng Zhang, Zhiyu Tan, Hao Li, Yu-Gang Jiang

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University, Institute of Trustworthy Embodied AI

Title: Identity-Aware Vision-Language Model for Explainable Face Forgery Detection

Abstract:
Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence have enabled the creation of highly realistic image forgeries, raising significant concerns about digital media authenticity. While existing detection methods demonstrate promising results on benchmark datasets, they face critical limitations in realworld applications. First, existing detectors typically fail to detect semantic inconsistencies with the person’s identity, such as implausible behaviors or incompatible environmental contexts in given images. Second, these methods rely heavily on low-level visual cues, making them effective for known forgeries but less reliable against new or unseen manipulation techniques. To address these challenges, we present a novel personalized vision-language model (VLM) that integrates low-level visual artifact analysis and high-level semantic inconsistency detection. Unlike previous VLM-based methods, our approach avoids resource-intensive supervised fine-tuning that often struggles to preserve distinct identity characteristics. Instead, we employ a lightweight method that dynamically encodes identity-specific information into specialized identifier tokens. This design enables the model to learn distinct identity characteristics while maintaining robust generalization capabilities. We further enhance detection capabilities through a lightweight detection adapter that extracts fine-grained information from shallow features of the vision encoder, preserving critical low-level evidence. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves 94.25% accuracy and 94.08% F1 score, outperforming both traditional forgery detectors and general VLMs while requiring only 10 extra tokens.

PaperID: 933, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07322

Authors:Li Xu, Siqi Wang, Kepeng Xu, Lin Zhang, Gang He, Weiran Wang, Yu-Wing Tai

Affiliations: Xidian University, Dartmouth College

Title: RealRep: Generalized SDR-to-HDR Conversion via Attribute-Disentangled Representation Learning

Abstract:
HighDynamic-Range Wide-Color-Gamut (HDR-WCG) technology is becoming increasingly widespread, driving a growing need for converting Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) content to HDR. Existing methods primarily rely on fixed tone mapping operators, which struggle to handle the diverse appearances and degradations commonly present in real-world SDR content. To address this limitation, we propose a generalized SDR-to-HDR framework that enhances robustness by learning attribute-disentangled representations. Central to our approach is Realistic Attribute-Disentangled Representation Learning (RealRep), which explicitly disentangles luminance and chrominance components to capture intrinsic content variations across different SDR distributions. Furthermore, we design a Luma-/Chroma-aware negative exemplar generation strategy that constructs degradation-sensitive contrastive pairs, effectively modeling tone discrepancies across SDR styles. Building on these attribute-level priors, we introduce the Degradation-Domain Aware Controlled Mapping Network (DDACMNet), a lightweight, two-stage framework that performs adaptive hierarchical mapping guided by a control-aware normalization mechanism. DDACMNet dynamically modulates the mapping process via degradation-conditioned features, enabling robust adaptation across diverse degradation domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RealRep consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both generalization and perceptually faithful HDR color gamut reconstruction.

PaperID: 934, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16126

Authors:Lulu Xue, Shengshan Hu, Linqiang Qian, Peijin Guo, Yechao Zhang, Minghui Li, Yanjun Zhang, Dayong Ye, Leo Yu Zhang

Affiliations: School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Institute for Network Sciences and Cyberspace, Tsinghua University, College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, School of Software Engineering, School of Computer Science, University of Technology Sydney, Faculty of Data Science, City University of Macau, School of Information and Communication Technology, Griffith University

Title: Dual-View Inference Attack: Machine Unlearning Amplifies Privacy Exposure

Abstract:
Machine unlearning is a newly popularized technique for removing specific training data from a trained model, enabling it to comply with data deletion requests. While it protects the rights of users requesting unlearning, it also introduces new privacy risks. Prior works have primarily focused on the privacy of data that has been unlearned, while the risks to retained data remain largely unexplored. To address this gap, we focus on the privacy risks of retained data and, for the first time, reveal the vulnerabilities introduced by machine unlearning under the dualview setting, where an adversary can query both the original and the unlearned models. From an information-theoretic perspective, we introduce the concept of privacy knowledge gain and demonstrate that the dual-view setting allows adversaries to obtain more information than querying either model alone, thereby amplifying privacy leakage. To effectively demonstrate this threat, we propose DVIA, a Dual-View Inference Attack, which extracts membership information on retained data using black-box queries to both models. DVIA eliminates the need to train an attack model and employs a lightweight likelihood ratio inference module for efficient inference. Experiments across different datasets and model architectures validate the effectiveness of DVIA and highlight the privacy risks inherent in the dual-view setting.

PaperID: 935, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06863

Authors:Sicheng Yang, Xing Hu, Qiang Wu, Dawei Yang

Affiliations: Houmo AI

Title: VAEVQ: Enhancing Discrete Visual Tokenization Through Variational Modeling

Abstract:
Vector quantization (VQ) transforms continuous image features into discrete representations, providing compressed, tokenized inputs for generative models. However, VQbased frameworks suffer from several issues, such as non-smooth latent spaces, weak alignment between representations before and after quantization, and poor coherence between the continuous and discrete domains. These issues lead to unstable codeword learning and underutilized codebooks, ultimately degrading the performance of both reconstruction and downstream generation tasks. To this end, we propose VAEVQ, which comprises three key components: (1) Variational Latent Quantization (VLQ), replacing the AE with a VAE for quantization to leverage its structured and smooth latent space, thereby facilitating more effective codeword activation; (2) Representation Coherence Strategy (RCS), adaptively modulating the alignment strength between pre- and post-quantization features to enhance consistency and prevent overfitting to noise; and (3) Distribution Consistency Regularization (DCR), aligning the entire codebook distribution with the continuous latent distribution to improve utilization. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that VAEVQ outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 936, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07862

Authors:Sunghun Yang, Minhyeok Lee, Jungho Lee, Sangyoun Lee

Affiliations: Yonsei University

Title: MonoCLUE: Object-Aware Clustering Enhances Monocular 3D Object Detection

Abstract:
Monocular 3D object detection offers a costeffective solution for autonomous driving, but it suffers from the ill-posed depth and a limited field of view. These constraints lead to the lack of geometric cues and reduced accuracy in occluded or truncated scenes. While recent approaches incorporate additional depth information to address geometric ambiguity, they overlook the importance of visual cues essential for robust object recognition. In this paper, we propose MonoCLUE that enhances monocular 3D detection by leveraging both local clustering and generalized scene memory of visual features. First, we perform K-means clustering on visual features to capture distinct object-level appearance visual parts (e.g., bonnet, car roof), which improves the detection of partially visible objects. The clustered features are then propagated across the entire region to capture objects with similar appearances. Second, we construct a generalized scene memory by aggregating clustered features across images, providing consistent appearance representations that generalize scenes. This improves the consistency of object-level features, enabling stable detection across varying environments. Lastly, we integrate both local cluster features and generalized scene memory into object queries, guiding attention toward informative regions in the feature map. Exploiting an unified local clustering and generalized scene memory strategy, MonoCLUE enables robust monocular 3D detection under occlusion and limited visibility. Our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI benchmark.

PaperID: 937, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08136

Authors:Yitong Yang, Yinglin Wang, Changshuo Wang, Huajie Wang, Shuting He

Affiliations: School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Department of Computer Science University College London, United Kingdom, Shandong University of Finance and Economics, China Jinan Yunwei Software Technology Co., MoE Key Laboratory of Interdisciplinary Research of Computation and Economics

Title: FantasyStyle: Controllable Stylized Distillation for 3D Gaussian Splatting

Abstract:
The success of 3DGS in generative and editing applications has sparked growing interest in 3DGSbased style transfer. However, current methods still face two major challenges: (1) multi-view inconsistency often leads to style conflicts, resulting in appearance smoothing and distortion; and (2) heavy reliance on VGG features, which struggle to disentangle style and content from style images, often causing content leakage and excessive stylization. To tackle these issues, we introduce FantasyStyle, a 3DGS-based style transfer framework, and the first to rely entirely on diffusion model distillation. It comprises two key components: (1) Multi-View Frequency Consistency. We enhance cross-view consistency by applying a 3D filter to multi-view noisy latent, selectively reducing low-frequency components to mitigate stylized prior conflicts. (2) Controllable Stylized Distillation. To suppress content leakage from style images, we introduce negative guidance to exclude undesired content. In addition, we identify the limitations of Score Distillation Sampling and Delta Denoising Score in 3D style transfer and remove the reconstruction term accordingly. Building on these insights, we propose a controllable stylized distillation that leverages negative guidance to more effectively optimize the 3D Gaussians. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving higher stylization quality and visual realism across various scenes and styles.

PaperID: 938, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06659

Authors:Wenhao Yao, Zhenxin Li, Shiyi Lan, Zi Wang, Xinglong Sun, Jose M. Alvarez, Zuxuan Wu

Affiliations: Shanghai Key Lab of Intell. Info. Processing, School of CS, Fudan University Shanghai Collaborative Innovation Center of Intelligent Visual Computing

Title: DriveSuprim: Towards Precise Trajectory Selection for End-to-End Planning

Abstract:
Autonomous vehicles must navigate safely in complex driving environments. Imitating a single expert trajectory, as in regressionbased approaches, usually does not explicitly assess the safety of the predicted trajectory. Selection-based methods address this by generating and scoring multiple trajectory candidates and predicting the safety score for each. However, they face optimization challenges in precisely selecting the best option from thousands of candidates and distinguishing subtle but safety-critical differences, especially in rare and challenging scenarios. We propose DriveSuprim to overcome these challenges and advance the selection-based paradigm through a coarse-to-fine paradigm for progressive candidate filtering, a rotation-based augmentation method to improve robustness in out-of-distribution scenarios, and a self-distillation framework to stabilize training. DriveSuprim achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching 93.5% PDMS in NAVSIM v1 and 87.1% EPDMS in NAVSIM v2 without extra data, with 83.02 Driving Score and 60.00 Success Rate on Bench2Drive, demonstrating superior planning capabilities in various driving scenarios.

PaperID: 939, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.03659

Authors:Jinze Yu, Yiqun Wang, Aiheng Jiang, Zhengda Lu, Jianwei Guo, Yong Li, Hongxing Qin, Xiaopeng Zhang

Affiliations: Chongqing University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Automation

Title: DehazeGS: Seeing Through Fog with 3D Gaussian Splatting

Abstract:
Current novel view synthesis methods are typically designed for highquality and clean input images. However, in foggy scenes, scattering and attenuation can significantly degrade the quality of rendering. Although NeRF-based dehazing approaches have been developed, their reliance on deep fully connected neural networks and per-ray sampling strategies leads to high computational costs. Furthermore, NeRF's implicit representation limits its ability to recover fine-grained details from hazy scenes. To overcome these limitations, we propose DehazeGS, the first physics-driven 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) framework for dehazing. We adopt an explicit Gaussian representation to model fog formation via a physically consistent forward rendering process, enabling reconstruction and rendering of fog-free scenes using only multi-view foggy images as input. Specifically, based on the atmospheric scattering model, we simulate the formation of fog by establishing the transmission function directly on Gaussian primitives via depth-to-transmission mapping. During training, we jointly learn the atmospheric light and scattering coefficients while optimizing the Gaussian representation of foggy scenes. At inference time, we remove the effects of scattering and attenuation in Gaussian distributions and directly render the scene to obtain dehazed views. Experiments on both real-world and synthetic foggy datasets demonstrate that DehazeGS achieves state-of-the-art performance.

PaperID: 940, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22490

Authors:Ke Zhang, Tianyu Ding, Jiachen Jiang, Tianyi Chen, Ilya Zharkov, Vishal M. Patel, Luming Liang

Affiliations: Johns Hopkins University, Ohio State University

Title: ProCrop: Learning Aesthetic Image Cropping from Professional Compositions

Abstract:
Image cropping is crucial for enhancing the visual appeal and narrative impact of photographs, yet existing rulebased and data-driven approaches often lack diversity or require annotated training data. We introduce ProCrop, a retrieval-based method that leverages professional photography to guide cropping decisions. By fusing features from professional photographs with those of the query image, ProCrop learns from professional compositions, significantly boosting performance. Additionally, we present a large-scale dataset of 242K weakly-annotated images, generated by out-painting professional images and iteratively refining diverse crop proposals. This composition-aware dataset generation offers diverse high-quality crop proposals guided by aesthetic principles and becomes the largest publicly available dataset for image cropping. Extensive experiments show that ProCrop significantly outperforms existing methods in both supervised and weakly-supervised settings. Notably, when trained on the new dataset, our ProCrop surpasses previous weakly-supervised methods and even matches fully supervised approaches.

PaperID: 941, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08293

Authors:Yuze Zhang, Lingjie Li, Qiuzhen Lin, Zhong Ming, Fei Yu, Victor C. M. Leung

Affiliations: Shenzhen University, Shenzhen Technology University

Title: M3SR: Multi-Scale Multi-Perceptual Mamba for Efficient Spectral Reconstruction

Abstract:
The Mamba architecture has been widely applied to various lowlevel vision tasks due to its exceptional adaptability and strong performance. Although the Mamba architecture has been adopted for spectral reconstruction, it still faces the following two challenges: (1) Single spatial perception limits the ability to fully understand and analyze hyperspectral images; (2) Single-scale feature extraction struggles to capture the complex structures and fine details present in hyperspectral images. To address these issues, we propose a multi-scale, multi-perceptual Mamba architecture for the spectral reconstruction task, called M3SR. Specifically, we design a multi-perceptual fusion block to enhance the ability of the model to comprehensively understand and analyze the input features. By integrating the multi-perceptual fusion block into a U-Net structure, M3SR can effectively extract and fuse global, intermediate, and local features, thereby enabling accurate reconstruction of hyperspectral images at multiple scales. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that the proposed M3SR outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods while incurring a lower computational cost.

PaperID: 942, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08896

Authors:Haoyu Zhao, Linghao Zhuang, Xingyue Zhao, Cheng Zeng, Haoran Xu, Yuming Jiang, Jun Cen, Kexiang Wang, Jiayan Guo, Siteng Huang, Xin Li, Deli Zhao, Hua Zou

Affiliations: Alibaba Group, Wuhan University, DAMO Academy, Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University

Title: Towards Affordance-Aware Robotic Dexterous Grasping with Human-like Priors

Abstract:
A dexterous hand capable of generalizable grasping objects is fundamental for the development of generalpurpose embodied AI. However, previous methods focus narrowly on low-level grasp stability metrics, neglecting affordance-aware positioning and human-like poses which are crucial for downstream manipulation. To address these limitations, we propose AffordDex, a novel framework with two-stage training that learns a universal grasping policy with an inherent understanding of both motion priors and object affordances. In the first stage, a trajectory imitator is pre-trained on a large corpus of human hand motions to instill a strong prior for natural movement. In the second stage, a residual module is trained to adapt these general human-like motions to specific object instances. This refinement is critically guided by two components: our Negative Affordance-aware Segmentation (NAA) module, which identifies functionally inappropriate contact regions, and a privileged teacher-student distillation process that ensures the final vision-based policy is highly successful. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AffordDex not only achieves universal dexterous grasping but also remains remarkably human-like in posture and functionally appropriate in contact location. As a result, AffordDex significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across seen objects, unseen instances, and even entirely novel categories.

PaperID: 943, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20073

Authors:Jinghan Zhao, Yifei Huang, Feng Lu

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of VR Technology and Systems, School of CSE, Beihang University, The University of Tokyo

Title: Learning Procedural-Aware Video Representations Through State-Grounded Hierarchy Unfolding

Abstract:
Learning proceduralaware video representations is a key step towards building agents that can reason about and execute complex tasks. Existing methods typically address this problem by aligning visual content with textual descriptions at the task and step levels to inject procedural semantics into video representations. However, due to their high level of abstraction, "task" and "step" descriptions fail to form a robust alignment with the concrete, observable details in visual data. To address this, we introduce "states", i.e., textual snapshots of object configurations, as a visually-grounded semantic layer that anchors abstract procedures to what a model can actually see. We formalize this insight in a novel Task-Step-State (TSS) framework, where tasks are achieved via steps that drive transitions between observable states. To enforce this structure, we propose a progressive pre-training strategy that unfolds the TSS hierarchy, forcing the model to first ground representations in states before associating them with steps and, ultimately, high-level tasks. Extensive experiments on the COIN and CrossTask datasets show that our method outperforms baseline models on multiple downstream tasks, including task recognition, step recognition, and next step prediction. Ablation studies show that introducing state supervision is a key driver of performance gains across all tasks. Additionally, our progressive pretraining strategy proves more effective than standard joint training, as it better enforces the intended hierarchical structure.

PaperID: 944, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.11705

Authors:Yuxiang Zhong, Jun Wei, Chaoqi Chen, Senyou An, Hui Huang

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University, College of Civil and Transportation Engineering, State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Construction and Healthy Operation and Maintenance of Deep Underground Engineering

Title: TG-Field: Geometry-Aware Radiative Gaussian Fields for Tomographic Reconstruction

Abstract:
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has revolutionized 3D scene representation with superior efficiency and quality. While recent adaptations for computed tomography (CT) show promise, they struggle with severe artifacts under highly sparseview projections and dynamic motions. To address these challenges, we propose Tomographic Geometry Field (TG-Field), a geometry-aware Gaussian deformation framework tailored for both static and dynamic CT reconstruction. A multi-resolution hash encoder is employed to capture local spatial priors, regularizing primitive parameters under ultra-sparse settings. We further extend the framework to dynamic reconstruction by introducing time-conditioned representations and a spatiotemporal attention block to adaptively aggregate features, thereby resolving spatiotemporal ambiguities and enforcing temporal coherence. In addition, a motion-flow network models fine-grained respiratory motion to track local anatomical deformations. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that TG-Field consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art reconstruction accuracy under highly sparse-view conditions.

PaperID: 945, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09933

Authors:Yuhang Zhou, Yanxiang Zhao, Zhongyun Hua, Zhipu Liu, Zhaoquan Gu, Qing Liao, Leo Yu Zhang

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Chongqing University of Technology, China Peng Cheng Laboratory, Griffith University

Title: Debiased Dual-Invariant Defense for Adversarially Robust Person Re-Identification

Abstract:
Person reidentification (ReID) is a fundamental task in many real-world applications such as pedestrian trajectory tracking. However, advanced deep learning-based ReID models are highly susceptible to adversarial attacks, where imperceptible perturbations to pedestrian images can cause entirely incorrect predictions, posing significant security threats. Although numerous adversarial defense strategies have been proposed for classification tasks, their extension to metric learning tasks such as person ReID remains relatively unexplored. Moreover, the several existing defenses for person ReID fail to address the inherent unique challenges of adversarially robust ReID. In this paper, we systematically identify the challenges of adversarial defense in person ReID into two key issues: model bias and composite generalization requirements. To address them, we propose a debiased dual-invariant defense framework composed of two main phases. In the data balancing phase, we mitigate model bias using a diffusion-model-based data resampling strategy that promotes fairness and diversity in training data. In the bi-adversarial self-meta defense phase, we introduce a novel metric adversarial training approach incorporating farthest negative extension softening to overcome the robustness degradation caused by the absence of classifier. Additionally, we introduce an adversarially-enhanced self-meta mechanism to achieve dual-generalization for both unseen identities and unseen attack types. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art defenses.

PaperID: 946, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15379

Authors:Yunjiao Zhou, Xinyan Chen, Junlang Qian, Lihua Xie, Jianfei Yang

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University

Title: Zero-Shot Open-Vocabulary Human Motion Grounding with Test-Time Training

Abstract:
Understanding complex human activities demands the ability to decompose motion into finegrained, semantic-aligned sub-actions. This motion grounding process is crucial for behavior analysis, embodied AI and virtual reality. Yet, most existing methods rely on dense supervision with predefined action classes, which are infeasible in open-vocabulary, real-world settings. In this paper, we propose ZOMG, a zero-shot, open-vocabulary framework that segments motion sequences into semantically meaningful sub-actions without requiring any annotations or fine-tuning. Technically, ZOMG integrates (1) language semantic partition, which leverages large language models to decompose instructions into ordered sub-action units, and (2) soft masking optimization, which learns instance-specific temporal masks to focus on frames critical to sub-actions, while maintaining intra-segment continuity and enforcing inter-segment separation, all without altering the pretrained encoder. Experiments on three motion-language datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art effectiveness and efficiency of motion grounding performance, outperforming prior methods by 8.7% mAP on HumanML3D benchmark. Meanwhile, significant improvements also exist in downstream retrieval, establishing a new paradigm for annotation-free motion understanding.

PaperID: 947, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10428

Authors:Ignace Bleukx, Maarten Flippo, Bart Bogaerts, Emir Demirović, Tias Guns

Affiliations: KU Leuven, Delft University of Technology

Title: Using Certifying Constraint Solvers for Generating Step-wise Explanations

Abstract:
In the field of Explainable Constraint Solving, it is common to explain to a user why a problem is unsatisfiable. A recently proposed method for this is to compute a sequence of explanation steps. Such a stepwise explanation shows individual reasoning steps involving constraints from the original specification, that in the end explain a conflict. However, computing a step-wise explanation is computationally expensive, limiting the scope of problems for which it can be used. We investigate how we can use proofs generated by a constraint solver as a starting point for computing step-wise explanations, instead of computing them step-by-step. More specifically, we define a framework of abstract proofs, in which both proofs and step-wise explanations can be represented. We then propose several methods for converting a proof to a step-wise explanation sequence, with special attention to trimming and simplification techniques to keep the sequence and its individual steps small. Our results show our method significantly speeds up the generation of step-wise explanation sequences, while the resulting step-wise explanation has a quality similar to the current state-of-the-art.

PaperID: 948, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05059

Authors:Foivos Fioravantes, Dušan Knop, Nikolaos Melissinos, Michal Opler, Manolis Vasilakis

Affiliations: Czech Technical University of Prague, Charles University Prague, Université Paris Dauphine - PSL

Title: Exact Algorithms for Distance to Unique Vertex Cover

Abstract:
In their AAAI 2024 paper, Horiyama et al. studied the problem of generating graph instances that possess a unique minimum vertex cover under specific conditions. Their approach involved preassigning certain vertices to be part of the solution or excluding them from it. Notably, for the Vertex Cover problem, pre-assigning a vertex is equivalent to removing it from the graph. Horiyama et al. focused on maintaining the size of the minimum vertex cover after these modifications. In this work, we extend their study by relaxing this constraint: our goal is to ensure a unique minimum vertex cover, even if the removal of a vertex may not incur a decrease on the size of said cover. Surprisingly, our relaxation introduces significant theoretical challenges. We observe that the problem is Σ²_P-complete, and remains so even for planar graphs of maximum degree 5. Nevertheless, we provide a linear time algorithm for trees, which is then further leveraged to show that MU-VC is in FPT when parameterized by the combination of treewidth and maximum degree. Finally, we show that MU-VC is in XP when parameterized by clique-width while it is fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) if we add the size of the solution as part of the parameter.

PaperID: 949, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10436

Authors:Marco Foschini, Marianne Defresne, Emilio Gamba, Bart Bogaerts, Tias Guns

Affiliations: KU Leuven, Université de Toulouse, Flanders Make

Title: Preference Elicitation for Step-Wise Explanations in Logic Puzzles

Abstract:
Stepwise explanations can explain logic puzzles and other satisfaction problems by showing how to derive decisions step by step. Each step consists of a set of constraints that derive an assignment to one or more decision variables. However, many candidate explanation steps exist, with different sets of constraints and different decisions they derive. To identify the most comprehensible one, a user-defined objective function is required to quantify the quality of each step. However, defining a good objective function is challenging. Here, interactive preference elicitation methods from the wider machine learning community can offer a way to learn user preferences from pairwise comparisons. We investigate the feasibility of this approach for step-wise explanations and address several limitations that distinguish it from elicitation for standard combinatorial problems. First, because the explanation quality is measured using multiple sub-objectives that can vary a lot in scale, we propose two dynamic normalization techniques to rescale these features and stabilize the learning process. We also observed that many generated comparisons involve similar explanations. For this reason, we introduce MACHOP (Multi-Armed CHOice Perceptron), a novel query generation strategy that integrates non-domination constraints with upper confidence bound-based diversification. We evaluate the elicitation techniques on Sudokus and Logic-Grid puzzles using artificial users, and validate them with a real-user evaluation. In both settings, MACHOP consistently produces higher-quality explanations than the standard approach.

PaperID: 950, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07903

Authors:Youneng Bao, Yulong Cheng, Yiping Liu, Yichen Yang, Peng Qin, Mu Li, Yongsheng Liang

Affiliations: Shenzhen University, Harbin Institute of Technology, Marine Design and Research Institute of China, China Telecom Group Qinhuangdao Branch

Title: DynaQuant: Dynamic Mixed-Precision Quantization for Learned Image Compression

Abstract:
Prevailing quantization techniques in Learned Image Compression (LIC) typically employ a static, uniform bitwidth across all layers, failing to adapt to the highly diverse data distributions and sensitivity characteristics inherent in LIC models. This leads to a suboptimal trade-off between performance and efficiency. In this paper, we introduce DynaQuant, a novel framework for dynamic mixed-precision quantization that operates on two complementary levels. First, we propose content-aware quantization, where learnable scaling and offset parameters dynamically adapt to the statistical variations of latent features. This fine-grained adaptation is trained end-to-end using a novel Distance-aware Gradient Modulator (DGM), which provides a more informative learning signal than the standard Straight-Through Estimator. Second, we introduce a data-driven, dynamic bit-width selector that learns to assign an optimal bit precision to each layer, dynamically reconfiguring the network's precision profile based on the input data. Our fully dynamic approach offers substantial flexibility in balancing rate-distortion (R-D) performance and computational cost. Experiments demonstrate that DynaQuant achieves R-D performance comparable to full-precision models while significantly reducing computational and storage requirements, thereby enabling the practical deployment of advanced LIC on diverse hardware platforms.

PaperID: 951, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19274

Authors:Mingyang Chen, Jiawei Du, Bo Huang, Yi Wang, Xiaobo Zhang, Wei Wang

Affiliations: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Dongguan University of Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University

Title: Diffusion Reconstruction-based Data Likelihood Estimation for Core-Set Selection

Abstract:
Existing coreset selection methods predominantly rely on heuristic scoring signals such as training dynamics or model uncertainty, lacking explicit modeling of data likelihood. This omission may hinder the constructed subset from capturing subtle yet critical distributional structures that underpin effective model training. In this work, we propose a novel, theoretically grounded approach that leverages diffusion models to estimate data likelihood via reconstruction deviation induced by partial reverse denoising. Specifically, we establish a formal connection between reconstruction error and data likelihood, grounded in the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) of Markovian diffusion processes, thereby enabling a principled, distribution-aware scoring criterion for data selection. Complementarily, we introduce an efficient information-theoretic method to identify the optimal reconstruction timestep, ensuring that the deviation provides a reliable signal indicative of underlying data likelihood. Extensive experiments on ImageNet demonstrate that reconstruction deviation offers an effective scoring criterion, consistently outperforming existing baselines across selection ratios, and closely matching full-data training using only 50% of the data. Further analysis shows that the likelihood-informed nature of our score reveals informative insights in data selection, shedding light on the interplay between data distributional characteristics and model learning preferences.

PaperID: 952, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.09258

Authors:Xiaobin Hong, Mingkai Lin, Xiaoli Wang, Chaoqun Wang, Wenzhong Li

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing Forest University, College of Information Science and Technology, Zhejiang Provincial Seaport Investment & Operation Group Co. Ltd

Title: Multimodal Graph Representation Learning with Dynamic Information Pathways

Abstract:
Multimodal graphs, where nodes contain heterogeneous features such as images and text, are increasingly common in realworld applications. Effectively learning on such graphs requires both adaptive intra-modal message passing and efficient inter-modal aggregation. However, most existing approaches to multimodal graph learning are typically extended from conventional graph neural networks and rely on static structures or dense attention, which limit flexibility and expressive node embedding learning. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal graph representation learning framework with Dynamic information Pathways (DiP). By introducing modality-specific pseudo nodes, DiP enables dynamic message routing within each modality via proximity-guided pseudo-node interactions and captures inter-modality dependence through efficient information pathways in a shared state space. This design achieves adaptive, expressive, and sparse message propagation across modalities with linear complexity. We conduct the link prediction and node classification tasks to evaluate performance and carry out full experimental analyses. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that DiP consistently outperforms baselines.

PaperID: 953, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11081

Authors:Jun Hu, Shangheng Chen, Yufei He, Yuan Li, Bryan Hooi, Bingsheng He

Affiliations: National University of Singapore, Institute of Automation

Title: Echoless Label-Based Pre-computation for Memory-Efficient Heterogeneous Graph Learning

Abstract:
Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs) are widely used for deep learning on heterogeneous graphs. Typical endto-end HGNNs require repetitive message passing during training, limiting efficiency for large-scale real-world graphs. Pre-computation-based HGNNs address this by performing message passing only once during preprocessing, collecting neighbor information into regular-shaped tensors, which enables efficient mini-batch training. Label-based pre-computation methods collect neighbors' label information but suffer from training label leakage, where a node's own label information propagates back to itself during multi-hop message passing—the echo effect. Existing mitigation strategies are memory-inefficient on large graphs or suffer from compatibility issues with advanced message passing methods. We propose Echoless Label-based Pre-computation (Echoless-LP), which eliminates training label leakage with Partition-Focused Echoless Propagation (PFEP). PFEP partitions target nodes and performs echoless propagation, where nodes in each partition collect label information only from neighbors in other partitions, avoiding echo while remaining memory-efficient and compatible with any message passing method. We also introduce an Asymmetric Partitioning Scheme (APS) and a PostAdjust mechanism to address information loss from partitioning and distributional shifts across partitions. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that Echoless-LP achieves superior performance and maintains memory efficiency compared to baselines.

PaperID: 954, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.10993

Authors:Minseo Kang, Seunghwan Park, Dongha Kim

Affiliations: Sungshin Women's University, Kangwon National University

Title: Memorize Early, Then Query: Inlier-Memorization-Guided Active Outlier Detection

Abstract:
Outlier detection (OD) aims to identify abnormal instances, known as outliers or anomalies, by learning typical patterns of normal data, or inliers. Performing OD under an unsupervised regimewithout any information about anomalous instances in the training data--is challenging. A recently observed phenomenon, known as the inlier-memorization (IM) effect, where deep generative models (DGMs) tend to memorize inlier patterns during early training, provides a promising signal for distinguishing outliers. However, existing unsupervised approaches that rely solely on the IM effect still struggle when inliers and outliers are not well-separated or when outliers form dense clusters. To address these limitations, we incorporate active learning to selectively acquire informative labels, and propose IMBoost, a novel framework that explicitly reinforces the IM effect to improve outlier detection. Our method consists of two stages: 1) a warm-up phase that induces and promotes the IM effect, and 2) a polarization phase in which actively queried samples are used to maximize the discrepancy between inlier and outlier scores. In particular, we propose a novel query strategy and tailored loss function in the polarization phase to effectively identify informative samples and fully leverage the limited labeling budget. We provide a theoretical analysis showing that the IMBoost consistently decreases inlier risk while increasing outlier risk throughout training, thereby amplifying their separation. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate that IMBoost not only significantly outperforms state-of-the-art active OD methods but also requires substantially less computational cost.

PaperID: 955, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06444

Authors:Zuqing Li, Junhao Gan, Jianzhong Qi

Affiliations: The University of Melbourne

Title: Towards Synthesizing High-Dimensional Tabular Data with Limited Samples

Abstract:
Diffusionbased tabular data synthesis models have yielded promising results. However, we observe that when the data dimensionality increases, existing models tend to degenerate and may perform even worse than simpler, non-diffusion-based models. This is because limited training samples in high-dimensional space often hinder generative models from capturing the distribution accurately. To mitigate the insufficient learning signals and to stabilize training under such conditions, we propose CtrTab, a condition-controlled diffusion model that injects perturbed ground-truth samples as auxiliary inputs during training. This design introduces an implicit L_2 regularization on the model’s sensitivity to the control signal, improving robustness and stability in high-dimensional, low-data scenarios. Experimental results across multiple datasets show that CtrTab outperforms state-of-the-art models, with a performance gap in accuracy over 90% on average.

PaperID: 956, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11610

Authors:Yuxi Lin, Yongkang Li, Jie Xing, Zipei Fan

Affiliations: Jilin University, University of Amsterdam

Title: Multifaceted Scenario-Aware Hypergraph Learning for Next POI Recommendation

Abstract:
Among the diverse services provided by LocationBased Social Networks (LBSNs), Next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation plays a crucial role in inferring user preferences from historical check-in trajectories. However, existing sequential and graph-based methods frequently neglect significant mobility variations across distinct contextual scenarios (e.g., tourists versus locals). This oversight results in suboptimal performance due to two fundamental limitations: the inability to capture scenario-specific features and the failure to resolve inherent inter-scenario conflicts. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Multifaceted Scenario-Aware Hypergraph Learning method (MSAHG), a framework that adopts a scenario-splitting paradigm for next POI recommendation. Our main contributions are: (1) Construction of scenario-specific, multi-view disentangled sub-hypergraphs to capture distinct mobility patterns; (2) A parameter-splitting mechanism to adaptively resolve conflicting optimization directions across scenarios while preserving generalization capability. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that MSAHG consistently outperforms five state-of-the-art methods across diverse scenarios, confirming its effectiveness in multi-scenario POI recommendation.

PaperID: 957, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13125

Authors:Hao Long, Silin Zhou, Lisi Chen, Shuo Shang

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Region-Point Joint Representation for Effective Trajectory Similarity Learning

Abstract:
Recent learningbased methods have reduced the computational complexity of traditional trajectory similarity computation, but state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods still fail to leverage the comprehensive spectrum of trajectory information for similarity modeling. To tackle this problem, we propose RePo, a novel method that jointly encodes Region-wise and Point-wise features to capture both spatial context and fine-grained moving patterns. For region-wise representation, the GPS trajectories are first mapped to grid sequences, and spatial context are captured by structural features and semantic context enriched by visual features. For point-wise representation, three lightweight expert networks extract local, correlation, and continuous movement patterns from dense GPS sequences. Then, a router network adaptively fuses the learned point-wise features, which are subsequently combined with region-wise features using cross-attention to produce the final trajectory embedding. To train RePo, we adopt a contrastive loss with hard negative samples to provide similarity ranking supervision. Experiment results show that RePo achieves an average accuracy improvement of 22.2% over SOTA baselines across all evaluation metrics.

PaperID: 958, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04572

Authors:Xiaowei Mao, Huihu Ding, Yan Lin, Tingrui Wu, Shengnan Guo, Dazhuo Qiu, Feiling Fang, Jilin Hu, Huaiyu Wan

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, China Key Laboratory of Big Data & Artificial Intelligence in Transportation, Ministry of Education, School of Artificial Intelligence, China University of Geoscience, School of Data Science and Engineering, East China Normal University, China Beijing Key Laboratory of Traffic Data Mining and Embodied Intelligence

Title: Spatial-Temporal Feedback Diffusion Guidance for Controlled Traffic Imputation

Abstract:
Imputing missing values in spatialtemporal traffic data is essential for intelligent transportation systems. Among advanced imputation methods, score-based diffusion models have demonstrated competitive performance. These models generate data by reversing a noising process, using observed values as conditional guidance. However, existing diffusion models typically apply a uniform guidance scale across both spatial and temporal dimensions, which is inadequate for nodes with high missing data rates. Sparse observations provide insufficient conditional guidance, causing the generative process to drift toward the learned prior distribution rather than closely following the conditional observations, resulting in suboptimal imputation performance. To address this, we propose FENCE, a spatial-temporal feedback diffusion guidance method designed to adaptively control guidance scales during imputation. First, FENCE introduces a dynamic feedback mechanism that adjusts the guidance scale based on the posterior likelihood approximations. The guidance scale is increased when generated values diverge from observations and reduced when alignment improves, preventing overcorrection. Second, because alignment to observations varies across nodes and denoising steps, a global guidance scale for all nodes is suboptimal. FENCE computes guidance scales at the cluster level by grouping nodes based on their attention scores, leveraging spatial-temporal correlations to provide more accurate guidance. Experimental results on real-world traffic datasets show that FENCE significantly enhances imputation accuracy.

PaperID: 959, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.11340

Authors:Zhenliang Ni, Qiangyu Yan, Mouxiao Huang, Tianning Yuan, Yehui Tang, Hailin Hu, Xinghao Chen, Yunhe Wang

Affiliations: Huawei Noah's Ark Lab

Title: GenVidBench: A 6-Million Benchmark for AI-Generated Video Detection

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of video generation models has made it increasingly challenging to distinguish AIgenerated videos from real ones. This issue underscores the urgent need for effective AI-generated video detectors to prevent the dissemination of false information via such videos. However, the development of high-performance AI-generated video detectors is currently impeded by the lack of large-scale, high-quality datasets specifically designed for generative video detection. To this end, we introduce GenVidBench, a challenging AI-generated video detection dataset with several key advantages: 1) Large-scale video collection: The dataset contains 6.78 million videos and is currently the largest dataset for AI-generated video detection. 2) Cross-Source and Cross-Generator: The cross-source generation reduces the interference of video content on the detection. The cross-generator ensures diversity in video attributes between the training and test sets, preventing them from being overly similar. 3) State-of-the-Art Video Generators: The dataset includes videos from 11 state-of-the-art AI video generators, ensuring that it covers the latest advancements in the field of video generation. These generators ensure that the datasets are not only large in scale but also diverse, aiding in the development of generalized and effective detection models. Additionally, we present extensive experimental results with advanced video classification models. With GenVidBench, researchers can efficiently develop and evaluate AI-generated video detection models.

PaperID: 960, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03539

Authors:Long Qian, Bingke Zhu, Yingying Chen, Ming Tang, Jinqiao Wang

Affiliations: Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences School of Future Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Quality-Aware Language-Conditioned Local Auto-Regressive Anomaly Synthesis and Detection

Abstract:
Despite substantial progress in anomaly synthesis, existing diffusionbased and coarse inpainting pipelines commonly suffer from structural deficiencies such as micro-structural discontinuities, limited semantic controllability, and inefficient generation. To overcome these limitations, we introduce ARAS, a language-conditioned, auto-regressive anomaly synthesis approach that precisely injects local, text-specified defects into normal images via token-anchored latent editing. Leveraging a hard-gated auto-regressive operator and a training-free, context-preserving masked sampling kernel, ARAS significantly enhances defect realism, preserves fine-grained material textures, and provides continuous semantic control over synthesized anomalies. Integrated within our Quality-Aware Re-weighted Anomaly Detection (QARAD) framework, we propose a dynamic weighting strategy that emphasizes high-quality synthetic samples by computing an image-text similarity score with a dual-encoder model. Extensive experiments across three datasets, MVTec AD, VisA, and BTAD, demonstrate that our QARAD outperforms SOTA methods in both image- and pixel-level anomaly detection tasks, achieving improved accuracy, robustness, and a 5× synthesis speedup compared to diffusion-based alternatives.

PaperID: 961, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02469

Authors:Fengli Ran, Xiao Pu, Bo Liu, Xiuli Bi, Bin Xiao

Affiliations: Chongqing University of Post and Telecommunications

Title: TGDD: Trajectory Guided Dataset Distillation with Balanced Distribution

Abstract:
Dataset distillation compresses large datasets into compact synthetic ones to reduce storage and computational costs. Among various approaches, distribution matching (DM)based methods have attracted attention for their high efficiency. However, they often overlook the evolution of feature representations during training, which limits the expressiveness of synthetic data and weakens downstream performance. To address this issue, we propose Trajectory Guided Dataset Distillation (TGDD), which reformulates distribution matching as a dynamic alignment process along the model’s training trajectory. At each training stage, TGDD captures evolving semantics by aligning the feature distribution between the synthetic and original dataset. Meanwhile, it introduces a distribution constraint regularization to reduce class overlap. This design helps synthetic data preserve both semantic diversity and representativeness, improving performance in downstream tasks. Without additional optimization overhead, TGDD achieves a favorable balance between performance and efficiency. Experiments on ten datasets demonstrate that TGDD achieves state-of-the-art performance, notably a 5.0% accuracy gain on high-resolution benchmarks.

PaperID: 962, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09275

Authors:Minlan Shao, Zijian Zhang, Yili Wang, Yiwei Dai, Xu Shen, Xin Wang

Affiliations: Jilin University

Title: HyperD: Hybrid Periodicity Decoupling Framework for Traffic Forecasting

Abstract:
Accurate traffic forecasting plays a vital role in intelligent transportation systems, enabling applications such as congestion control, route planning, and urban mobility optimization. However, traffic forecasting remains challenging due to two key factors: (1) complex spatial dependencies arising from dynamic interactions between road segments and traffic sensors across the network, and (2) the coexistence of multiscale periodic patterns (e.g., daily and weekly periodic patterns driven by human routines) with irregular fluctuations caused by unpredictable events (e.g., accidents, weather, or construction). To tackle these challenges, we propose HyperD (Hybrid Periodic Decoupling), a novel framework that decouples traffic data into periodic and residual components. The periodic component is handled by the Hybrid Periodic Representation Module, which extracts fine-grained daily and weekly patterns using learnable periodic embeddings and spatial-temporal attention. The residual component, which captures non-periodic, high-frequency fluctuations, is modeled by the Frequency-Aware Residual Representation Module, leveraging complex-valued MLP in frequency domain. To enforce semantic separation between the two components, we further introduce a Dual-View Alignment Loss, which aligns low-frequency information with the periodic branch and high-frequency information with the residual branch. Extensive experiments on four real-world traffic datasets demonstrate that HyperD achieves state-of-the-art prediction accuracy, while offering superior robustness under disturbances and improved computational efficiency compared to existing methods.

PaperID: 963, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08947

Authors:Xinyu Su, Majid Sarvi, Feng Liu, Egemen Tanin, Jianzhong Qi

Affiliations: University of Melbourne

Title: Generalising Traffic Forecasting to Regions Without Traffic Observations

Abstract:
Traffic forecasting is essential for intelligent transportation systems. Accurate forecasting relies on continuous observations collected by traffic sensors. However, due to high deployment and maintenance costs, not all regions are equipped with such sensors. This paper aims to forecast for regions without traffic sensors, where the lack of historical traffic observations challenges the generalisability of existing models. We propose a model named GenCast, the core idea of which is to exploit external knowledge to compensate for the missing observations and to enhance generalisation. We integrate physicsinformed neural networks into GenCast, enabling physical principles to regularise the learning process. We introduce an external signal learning module to explore correlations between traffic states and external signals such as weather conditions, further improving model generalisability. Additionally, we design a spatial grouping module to filter localised features that hinder model generalisability. Extensive experiments show that GenCast consistently reduces forecasting errors on multiple real-world datasets.

PaperID: 964, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.20446

Authors:Wenjing Xiao, Wenhao Song, Miaojiang Chen, Min Chen

Affiliations: Guangxi Key Laboratory of Multimedia Communications and Network Technology, China School of Computer, Electronics and Information, Guangxi University, School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou China

Title: FT-MoE: Sustainable-learning Mixture of Experts for Fault-Tolerant Computing

Abstract:
Intelligent faulttolerant (FT) computing has recently demonstrated significant advantages in predicting and diagnosing faults proactively, thereby ensuring reliable service delivery. However, due to the heterogeneity of fault knowledge, dynamic workloads, and limited data support, existing deep learning-based FT algorithms face challenges in fault detection quality and training efficiency. This is primarily because their homogenization of fault knowledge perception difficuties to fully capture diverse and complex fault patterns. To address these challenges, we propose FT-MoE, a sustainable-learning fault-tolerant computing framework based on a dual-path architecture for high-accuracy fault detection and classification. This model employs a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture, enabling different parameters to learn distinct fault knowledge. Additionally, we adopt a two-stage learning scheme that combines comprehensive offline training with continual online tuning, allowing the model to adaptively optimize its parameters in response to evolving real-time workloads. To facilitate realistic evaluation, we construct a new fault detection and classification dataset for edge networks, comprising 10,000 intervals with fine-grained resource features, surpassing existing datasets in both scale and granularity. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on the FT benchmark to verify the effectiveness of FT-MoE. Results demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 965, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07028

Authors:Huayang Xu, Huanhuan Yuan, Guanfeng Liu, Junhua Fang, Lei Zhao, Pengpeng Zhao

Affiliations: Soochow University, Macquarie University

Title: Wavelet Enhanced Adaptive Frequency Filter for Sequential Recommendation

Abstract:
Sequential recommendation has garnered significant attention for its ability to capture dynamic preferences by mining users’ historical interaction data. Given that users’ complex and intertwined periodic preferences are difficult to disentangle in the time domain, recent research is exploring frequency domain analysis to identify these hidden patterns. However, current frequencydomain-based methods suffer from two key limitations: (i) They primarily employ static filters with fixed characteristics, overlooking the personalized nature of behavioral patterns; (ii) While the global discrete Fourier transform excels at modeling long-range dependencies, it can blur non-stationary signals and short-term fluctuations. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel method called Wavelet Enhanced Adaptive Frequency Filter for Sequential Recommendation (WEARec). Specifically, it consists of two vital modules: dynamic frequency-domain filtering and wavelet feature enhancement. The former is used to dynamically adjust filtering operations based on behavioral sequences to extract personalized global information, and the latter integrates wavelet transform to reconstruct sequences, enhancing blurred non-stationary signals and short-term fluctuations. Finally, these two modules work synergistically to achieve comprehensive performance and efficiency optimization in long sequential recommendation scenarios. Extensive experiments on four widely-used benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of WEARec.

PaperID: 966, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05531

Authors:Yang Xu, Yixiao Ma, Kaifeng Zhang, Zuliang Yang, Kai Ming Ting

Affiliations: Nanjing University

Title: IDK-S: Incremental Distributional Kernel for Streaming Anomaly Detection

Abstract:
Anomaly detection on data streams presents significant challenges, requiring methods to maintain high detection accuracy among evolving distributions while ensuring realtime efficiency. Here we introduce IDK-S, a novel Incremental Distributional Kernel for Streaming anomaly detection that effectively addresses these challenges by creating a new dynamic representation in the kernel mean embedding framework. The superiority of IDK-S is attributed to two key innovations. First, it inherits the strengths of the Isolation Distributional Kernel, an offline detector that has demonstrated significant performance advantages over foundational methods like Isolation Forest and Local Outlier Factor due to the use of a data-dependent kernel. Second, it adopts a lightweight incremental update mechanism that significantly reduces computational overhead compared to the naive baseline strategy of performing a full model retraining. This is achieved without compromising detection accuracy, a claim supported by its statistical equivalence to the full retrained model. Our extensive experiments on thirteen benchmarks demonstrate that IDK-S achieves superior detection accuracy while operating substantially faster, in many cases by an order of magnitude, than existing state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 967, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20929

Authors:Anton Baychkov, Markus Brill, Jannik Peters

Affiliations: University of Warwick, National University of Singapore

Title: Utilitarian Guarantees for the Method of Equal Shares

Abstract:
In recent years, research in Participatory Budgeting (PB) has put a greater emphasis on rules satisfying notions of fairness and proportionality, with the Method of Equal Shares (MES) being a prominent example. However, proportionality can come at a cost to the total utilitarian welfare. Our work formalizes this relationship, by deriving minimum utilitarian welfare guarantees for MES for a subclass of satisfaction functions called DNS functions, which includes two of the most popular ways of measuring a voter’s utility in the PB setting: considering (1) the total cost of approved projects or (2) the total number of those projects. Our results are parameterized in terms of minimum and maximum project costs, which allows us to improve on the mostly negative results found in prior studies, and reduce to the existing multiwinner guarantee when project costs are equal. We show that our guarantees are asymptotically tight for rules satisfying Extended Justified Representation up to one project, showing that no proportional rule can achieve a better utilitarian guarantee than MES.

PaperID: 968, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05809

Authors:Umang Bhaskar, Vishwa Prakash HV, Aditi Sethia, Rakshitha

Affiliations: Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Chennai Mathematical Institute, Indian Institute of Science, Indian Institute of Technology

Title: Best of Both Worlds Guarantees for Equitable Allocations

Abstract:
Equitability is a wellstudied fairness notion in fair division, where an allocation is equitable if all agents receive equal utility from their allocation. For indivisible items, an exactly equitable allocation may not exist, hence, a natural relaxation is EQ1, which stipulates that any inequitability should be resolved by the removal of a single item. In this paper, we study equitability in the context of randomized allocations. Specifically, we aim to achieve equitability in expectation (ex ante EQ) and require that each deterministic outcome in the support satisfies ex post EQ1. Such an allocation is commonly known as a `Best of Both Worlds' allocation, and has been studied, e.g., for envy-freeness and MMS. We characterize the existence of such allocations using a geometric condition on convex combinations of allocations, and use this to give comprehensive results on both existence and computation. For two agents, we show that ex ante EQ and ex post EQ1 allocations always exist and can be computed in polynomial time. For three or more agents, however, such allocations may not exist. We prove that deciding existence of such allocations is strongly NP-complete in general, and weakly NP-complete even for three agents. We also present a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm for a constant number of agents. Additionally, we show that when agents have binary valuations, best of both worlds allocations that additionally satisfy welfare guarantees exist and are efficiently computable.

PaperID: 969, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20317

Authors:George Christodoulou, Symeon Mastrakoulis

Affiliations: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Archimedes, Athena Research Center

Title: Exact and Approximate Maximin Share Allocations in Multi-Graphs

Abstract:
We study the problem of (approximate) maximin share (MMS) allocation of indivisible items among a set of agents. We focus on the graphical valuation model, in which the input is given by a graph where edges correspond to items, and vertices correspond to agents. An edge may have nonzero marginal value only for its incident vertices. We study additive, XOS and subadditive valuations and we present positive and negative results for (approximate) MMS fairness, and also for (approximate) pair-wise maximin share (PMMS) fairness.

PaperID: 970, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10845

Authors:Natan Doubez, Pascal Lenzner, Marcus Wunderlich

Affiliations: École Polytechnique, University of Augsburg

Title: Optimal Welfare in Noncooperative Network Formation Under Attack

Abstract:
Communication networks are essential for our economy and our everyday lives. This makes them lucrative targets for attacks. Today, we see an ongoing battle between criminals that try to disrupt our key communication networks and security professionals that try to mitigate these attacks. However, today's networks, like the Internet or peerto-peer networks among smart devices, are not controlled by a single authority, but instead consist of many independently administrated entities that are interconnected. Thus, both the decisions of how to interconnect and how to secure against potential attacks are taken in a decentralized way by selfish agents. This strategic setting, with agents that want to interconnect and potential attackers that want to disrupt the network, was captured via an influential game-theoretic model by Goyal, Jabbari, Kearns, Khanna, and Morgenstern (WINE 2016). We revisit this model and show improved tight bounds on the achieved robustness of networks created by selfish agents. As our main result, we show that such networks can resist attacks of a large class of potential attackers, i.e., these networks maintain asymptotically optimal welfare post attack. This improves several bounds and resolves an open problem. Along the way, we show the counter-intuitive result, that attackers that aim at minimizing the social welfare post attack do not actually inflict the greatest possible damage.

PaperID: 971, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06218

Authors:Paul Gölz, Ayumi Igarashi, Pasin Manurangsi, Warut Suksompong

Affiliations: Cornell University, University of Tokyo, Google Research, National University of Singapore

Title: Fair Allocation of Indivisible Goods with Variable Groups

Abstract:
We study the fair allocation of indivisible goods with variable groups. In this model, the goal is to partition the agents into groups of given sizes and allocate the goods to the groups in a fair manner. We show that for any number of groups and corresponding sizes, there always exists an envyfree up to one good (EF1) outcome, thereby generalizing an important result from the individual setting. Our result holds for arbitrary monotonic utilities and comes with an efficient algorithm. We also prove that an EF1 outcome is guaranteed to exist even when the goods lie on a path and each group must receive a connected bundle. In addition, we consider a probabilistic model where the utilities are additive and drawn randomly from a distribution. We show that if there are n agents and the number of goods m is divisible by the number of groups k, then an envy-free outcome exists with high probability if m = ω(log n), and this bound is tight. On the other hand, if m is not divisible by k, then an envy-free outcome is unlikely to exist as long as m = o(√n).

PaperID: 972, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.05956

Authors:Yasushi Kawase, Ryoga Mahara

Affiliations: The University of Tokyo

Title: Fair and Efficient Balanced Allocation for Indivisible Goods

Abstract:
We study the problem of allocating indivisible goods among agents with additive valuation functions to achieve both fairness and efficiency under the constraint that each agent receives exactly the same number of goods (the balanced constraint). While this constraint is common in realworld scenarios such as team drafts or asset division, it significantly complicates the search for allocations that are both fair and efficient. Envy-freeness up to one good (EF1) is a well-established fairness notion for indivisible goods. Pareto optimality (PO) and its stronger variant, fractional Pareto optimality (fPO), are widely accepted efficiency criteria. Our main contribution establishes both the existence and polynomial-time computability of allocations that are simultaneously EF1 and fPO under balanced constraints in two fundamental cases: (1) when agents have at most two distinct types of valuation functions, and (2) when each agent has a personalized bivalued valuation. Our algorithms leverage novel applications of maximum-weight matching in bipartite graphs and duality theory, providing the first polynomial-time solutions for these cases and offering new insights for constrained fair division problems.

PaperID: 973, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12770

Authors:Linjian Meng, Tianpei Yang, Youzhi Zhang, Zhenxing Ge, Yang Gao

Affiliations: Nanjing University, Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hong Kong Institute of Science & Innovation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Faster Game Solving via Asymmetry of Step Sizes

Abstract:
Counterfactual Regret Minimization (CFR) algorithms are widely used to compute a Nash equilibrium (NE) in twoplayer zero-sum imperfect-information extensive-form games (IIGs). Among them, Predictive CFR+ (PCFR+) is particularly powerful, achieving an exceptionally fast empirical convergence rate via the prediction in many games. However, the empirical convergence rate of PCFR+ would significantly degrade if the prediction is inaccurate, leading to unstable performance on certain IIGs. To enhance the robustness of PCFR+, we propose Asymmetric PCFR+ (APCFR+), which employs an adaptive asymmetry of step sizes between the updates of implicit and explicit accumulated counterfactual regrets to mitigate the impact of the prediction inaccuracy on convergence. We present a theoretical analysis demonstrating why APCFR+ can enhance the robustness. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose the asymmetry of step sizes, a simple yet novel technique that effectively improves the robustness of PCFR+. Then, to reduce the difficulty of implementing APCFR+ caused by the adaptive asymmetry, we propose a simplified version of APCFR+ called Simple APCFR+ (SAPCFR+), which uses a fixed asymmetry of step sizes to enable only a single-line modification compared to original PCFR+. Experimental results on five standard IIG benchmarks and two heads-up no-limit Texas Hold’em (HUNL) Subagems show that (i) both APCFR+ and SAPCFR+ outperform PCFR+ in most of the tested games, (ii) SAPCFR+ achieves a comparable empirical convergence rate with APCFR+, and (iii) our approach can be generalized to improve other CFR algorithms, e.g., Discount CFR (DCFR).

PaperID: 974, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.13680

Authors:Siddharth Prasad, Maria Florina Balcan, Tuomas Sandholm

Affiliations: Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Inc. Strategic Machine, Inc. Optimized Markets

Title: Weakest Bidder Types and New CoreSelecting Combinatorial Auctions

Abstract:
Coreselecting combinatorial auctions are popular auction designs that constrain prices to eliminate the incentive for any group of bidders---with the seller---to renegotiate for a better deal. They help overcome the low-revenue issues of classical combinatorial auctions. We introduce a new class of core-selecting combinatorial auctions that leverage bidder information available to the auction designer. We model such information through constraints on the joint type space of the bidders---these are constraints on bidders' private valuations that are known to hold by the auction designer before bids are elicited. First, we show that type space information can overcome the well-known impossibility of incentive-compatible core-selecting combinatorial auctions. We present a revised and generalized version of that impossibility result that depends on how much information is conveyed by the type spaces. We then devise a new family of core-selecting combinatorial auctions and show that they minimize the sum of bidders' incentives to deviate from truthful bidding. We develop new constraint generation techniques---and build upon existing quadratic programming techniques---to compute core prices, and conduct experiments to evaluate the incentive, revenue, fairness, and computational merits of our new auctions. Our new core-selecting auctions directly improve upon existing designs that have been used in many high-stakes auctions around the world. We envision that they will be a useful addition to any auction designer's toolkit.

PaperID: 975, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24321

Authors:Yuanyuan Wang, Tianze Wei

Affiliations: University of Macau, City University of Hong Kong

Title: Online Fair Allocations with Binary Valuations and Beyond

Abstract:
In an online fair allocation problem, a sequence of indivisible items arrives online and needs to be allocated to offline agents immediately and irrevocably. In our paper, we study the online allocation of either goods or chores. We employ popular fairness notions, including envyfreeness up to one item (EF1) and maximin share fairness (MMS) to capture fairness, and utilitarian social welfare (USW) to measure efficiency. For both settings of items, we present a series of positive results regarding the existence of fair and efficient allocations with widely studied classes of additive binary and personalized bi-valued valuation/cost functions. Furthermore, we complement our results by constructing counterexamples to establish our results as among the best guarantees possible.

PaperID: 976, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16245

Authors:Qing Chang, Zhiming Hu

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: GazeInterpreter: Parsing Eye Gaze to Generate Eye-Body-Coordinated Narrations

Abstract:
Comprehensively interpreting human behavior is a core challenge in humanaware artificial intelligence. However, prior works typically focused on body behavior, neglecting the crucial role of eye gaze and its synergy with body motion. We present GazeInterpreter - a novel large language model-based (LLM-based) approach that parses eye gaze data to generate eye-body-coordinated narrations. Specifically, our method features 1) a symbolic gaze parser that translates raw gaze signals into symbolic gaze events; 2) a hierarchical structure that first uses an LLM to generate eye gaze narration at semantic level and then integrates gaze with body motion within the same observation window to produce integrated narration; and 3) a self-correcting loop that iteratively refines the modality match, temporal coherence, and completeness of the integrated narration. This hierarchical and iterative processing can effectively align physical values and semantic text in the temporal and spatial domains. We validated the effectiveness of our eye-body-coordinated narrations on the text-driven motion generation task in the large-scale Nymeria benchmark. Moreover, we report significant performance improvements for the sample downstream tasks of action anticipation and behavior summarization. Taken together, these results reveal the significant potential of parsing eye gaze to interpret human behavior and open up a new direction for human behavior understanding.

PaperID: 977, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01742

Authors:Qiaohui Chu, Haoyu Zhang, Meng Liu, Yisen Feng, Haoxiang Shi, Liqiang Nie

Affiliations: Shandong Jianzhu University, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)

Title: Intention-Guided Cognitive Reasoning for Egocentric Long-Term Action Anticipation

Abstract:
Longterm action anticipation from egocentric video is critical for applications such as human-computer interaction and assistive technologies, where anticipating user intent enables proactive and context-aware AI assistance. However, existing approaches suffer from three key limitations: 1) underutilization of fine-grained visual cues from hand-object interactions, 2) neglect of semantic dependencies between verbs and nouns, and 3) lack of explicit cognitive reasoning, limiting generalization and long-term forecasting ability. To overcome these challenges, we propose INSIGHT, a unified two-stage framework for egocentric action anticipation. In the first stage, INSIGHT focuses on extracting semantically rich features from hand-object interaction regions and enhances action representations using a verb-noun co-occurrence matrix. In the second stage, it introduces a reinforcement learning-based module that simulates explicit cognitive reasoning through a structured process: visual perception (think) → intention inference (reason) → action anticipation (answer). Extensive experiments on Ego4D, EPIC-Kitchens-55, and EGTEA Gaze+ benchmarks show that INSIGHT achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating its effectiveness and strong generalization capability.

PaperID: 978, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11239

Authors:Wen-Jue He, Xiaofeng Zhu, Zheng Zhang

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Hainan University, Shenzhen Shenzhen Loop Area Institute

Title: Cross-modal Prompting for Balanced Incomplete Multi-modal Emotion Recognition

Abstract:
Incomplete multimodal emotion recognition (IMER) aims at understanding human intentions and sentiments by comprehensively exploring the partially-observed multi-source data. Although the multi-modal data is expected to provide more abundant information, the performance gap and modality under-optimization problem hinder effective multi-modal learning in practice, and are exacerbated in the confrontation of the missing data. To address this issue, we devise a novel Cross-modal Prompting (ComP) method, which emphasizes coherent information by enhancing modality-specific features and improves the overall recognition accuracy by boosting each modality's performance. Specifically, a progressive prompt generation module with a dynamic gradient modulator is proposed to produce concise and consistent modality semantic cues. Meanwhile, cross-modal knowledge propagation selectively amplifies the consistent information in modality features with the delivered prompts to enhance the discrimination of the modality-specific output. Additionally, a coordinator is employed to dynamically re-weight the modality outputs as a complement to the balance strategy to improve the model's efficacy. Extensive experiments on 4 datasets with 7 SOTA methods under different missing rates validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

PaperID: 979, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.03709

Authors:Zhongliang Tang, Qingrong Cheng, Mengchen Tan, Yongxiang Zhang, Fei Xia

Affiliations: TiMi studio

Title: AutoGameUI: Constructing High-Fidelity GameUI via Multimodal Correspondence Matching

Abstract:
Game UI development is essential to the game industry. However, the traditional workflow requires substantial manual effort to integrate pairwise UI and UX designs into a cohesive game user interface (GameUI). The inconsistency between the aesthetic UI design and the functional UX design typically results in mismatches and inefficiencies. To address the issue, we present an automatic system, AutoGameUI, for efficiently and accurately constructing GameUI. The system centers on a twostage multimodal learning pipeline to obtain the optimal correspondences between UI and UX designs. The first stage learns the comprehensive representations of UI and UX designs from multimodal perspectives. The second stage incorporates grouped cross-attention modules with constrained integer programming to estimate the optimal correspondences through top-down hierarchical matching. The optimal correspondences enable the automatic GameUI construction. We create the GAMEUI dataset, comprising pairwise UI and UX designs from real-world games, to train and validate the proposed method. Besides, an interactive web tool is implemented to ensure high-fidelity effects and facilitate human-in-the-loop construction. Extensive experiments on the GAMEUI and RICO datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in maintaining consistency between the constructed GameUI and the original designs. When deployed in the workflow of several mobile games, AutoGameUI achieves a 3× improvement in time efficiency, conveying significant practical value for game UI development.

PaperID: 980, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13112

Authors:Wenya Wei, Sipeng Yang, Qixian Zhou, Ruochen Liu, Xuelei Zhang, Yifu Yuan, Yan Jiang, Yongle Luo, Hailong Wang, Tianzhou Wang, Peipei Jin, Wangtong Liu, Zhou Zhao, Xiaogang Jin, Elvis S. Liu

Affiliations: Tencent Games, Zhejiang University, Tencent AI Lab

Title: F.A.C.U.L.: Language-Based Interaction with AI Companions in Gaming

Abstract:
In cooperative video games, traditional AI companions are deployed to assist players, who control them using hotkeys or command wheels to issue predefined commands such as ''attack'', ''defend'', or ''retreat''. Despite their simplicity, these methods, which lack target specificity, limit players' ability to give complex tactical instructions and hinder immersive gameplay experiences. To address this, we propose the FPS AI Companion who Understands Language (F.A.C.U.L.), the first realtime AI system that enables players to communicate and collaborate with AI companions using natural language. By integrating natural language processing with a confidence-based framework, F.A.C.U.L. efficiently decomposes complex commands and interprets player intent. It also employs a dynamic entity retrieval method for environmental awareness, aligning human intentions with decision-making. Unlike traditional rule-based systems, our method supports real-time language interactions, enabling players to issue complex commands such as ''clear the second floor,'' ''take cover behind that tree,'' or ''retreat to the river''. The system provides real-time behavioral responses and vocal feedback, ensuring seamless tactical collaboration. Using the popular FPS game Arena Breakout: Infinite as a case study, we present comparisons demonstrating the efficacy of our approach and discuss the advantages and limitations of AI companions based on real-world user feedback.

PaperID: 981, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.15607

Authors:Shailesh, Alok Raj, Nayan Kumar, Priya Shukla, Andrew Melnik, Michael Beetz, Gora Chand Nandi

Affiliations: Indian Institute of Technology Dhanbad, Universität Bremen, Indian Institute of Information Technology

Title: GRIM: Task-Oriented Grasping with Conditioning on Generative Examples

Abstract:
TaskOriented Grasping (TOG) presents a significant challenge, requiring a nuanced understanding of task semantics, object affordances, and the functional constraints dictating how an object should be grasped for a specific task. To address these challenges, we introduce GRIM (Grasp Re-alignment via Iterative Matching), a novel training-free framework for task-oriented grasping. Initially, a coarse alignment strategy is developed using a combination of geometric cues and principal component analysis (PCA)-reduced DINO features for similarity scoring. Subsequently, the full grasp pose associated with the retrieved memory instance is transferred to the aligned scene object and further refined against a set of task-agnostic, geometrically stable grasps generated for the scene object, prioritizing task compatibility. In contrast to existing learning-based methods, GRIM demonstrates strong generalization capabilities, achieving robust performance with only a small number of conditioning examples.

PaperID: 982, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16200

Authors:Kewei Chen, Yayu Long, Mingsheng Shang

Affiliations: Chongqing Institute of Green and Intelligent Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: PIPHEN: Physical Interaction Prediction with Hamiltonian Energy Networks

Abstract:
Multirobot systems in complex physical collaborations face a "shared brain dilemma": transmitting high-dimensional multimedia data (e.g., video streams at ~30MB/s) creates severe bandwidth bottlenecks and decision-making latency. To address this, we propose PIPHEN, an innovative distributed physical cognition-control framework. Its core idea is to replace "raw data communication" with "semantic communication" by performing "semantic distillation" at the robot edge, reconstructing high-dimensional perceptual data into compact, structured physical representations. This idea is primarily realized through two key components: (1) a novel Physical Interaction Prediction Network (PIPN), derived from large model knowledge distillation, to generate this representation; and (2) a Hamiltonian Energy Network (HEN) controller, based on energy conservation, to precisely translate this representation into coordinated actions. Experiments show that, compared to baseline methods, PIPHEN can compress the information representation to less than 5% of the original data volume and reduce collaborative decision-making latency from 315ms to 76ms, while significantly improving task success rates. This work provides a fundamentally efficient paradigm for resolving the "shared brain dilemma" in resource-constrained multi-robot systems.

PaperID: 983, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16302

Authors:Zixuan Chen, Chongkai Gao, Lin Shao, Jieqi Shi, Jing Huo, Yang Gao

Affiliations: Nanjing University, National University of Singapore, YiLi Normal University

Title: ManiLong-Shot: Interaction-Aware One-Shot Imitation Learning for Long-Horizon Manipulation

Abstract:
Oneshot imitation learning (OSIL) offers a promising way to teach robots new skills without large-scale data collection. However, current OSIL methods are primarily limited to short-horizon tasks, thus limiting their applicability to complex, long-horizon manipulations. To address this limitation, we propose ManiLong-Shot, a novel framework that enables effective OSIL for long-horizon prehensile manipulation tasks. ManiLong-Shot structures long-horizon tasks around physical interaction events, reframing the problem as sequencing interaction-aware primitives instead of directly imitating continuous trajectories. This primitive decomposition can be driven by high-level reasoning from a vision-language model (VLM) or by rule-based heuristics derived from robot state changes. For each primitive, ManiLong-Shot predicts invariant regions critical to the interaction, establishes correspondences between the demonstration and the current observation, and computes the target end-effector pose, enabling effective task execution. Extensive simulation experiments show that ManiLong-Shot, trained on only 10 short-horizon tasks, generalizes to 20 unseen long-horizon tasks across three difficulty levels via one-shot imitation, achieving a 22.8% relative improvement over the SOTA. Additionally, real-robot experiments validate ManiLong-Shot’s ability to robustly execute three long-horizon manipulation tasks via OSIL, confirming its practical applicability.

PaperID: 984, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06131

Authors:Jiawei Hou, Yuting Xiao, Xiangyang Xue, Taiping Zeng

Affiliations: Fudan University

Title: LOG-Nav: Efficient Layout-Aware Object-Goal Navigation with Hierarchical Planning

Abstract:
We introduce LOGNav, an efficient layout-aware object-goal navigation approach designed for complex multi-room indoor environments. By planning hierarchically leveraging a global topologigal map with layout information and local imperative approach with detailed scene representation memory, LOG-Nav achieves both efficient and effective navigation. The process is managed by an LLM-powered agent, ensuring seamless effective planning and navigation, without the need for human interaction, complex rewards, or costly training. Our experimental results on the MP3D benchmark achieves 85% object navigation success rate (SR) and 79% success rate weighted by path length (SPL) (over 40% point improvement in SR and 60% improvement in SPL compared to exsisting methods). Furthermore, we validate the robustness of our approach through virtual agent and real-world robotic deployment, showcasing its capability in practical scenarios.

PaperID: 985, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16424

Authors:Mingi Jeong, Alberto Quattrini Li

Affiliations: Virginia Tech, Dartmouth College

Title: RENEW: Risk- and Energy-Aware Navigation in Dynamic Waterways

Abstract:
We present RENEW, a novel global path planning framework for Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) operating in dynamic environments with external disturbances (e.g., water currents). These disturbances significantly affect both the risk and energy cost of navigation, particularly in constrained coastal waterways, by dynamically reshaping the navigable area. RENEW addresses this challenging scenario through a unified, riskand energy-aware planning strategy that guarantees safety by explicitly identifying states at risk of entering non-navigable regions and enforcing adaptive safety constraints. Our planner incorporates a best-effort strategy under worst-case scenarios, inspired by contingency planning concepts from maritime domains, to ensure feasible control actions even under adverse conditions. RENEW employs a hierarchical architecture: a high-level planner explores topologically distinct paths via constrained triangulation, while a low-level planner selects an energy-efficient and kinematically feasible trajectory within a safe corridor. We validate our approach through extensive simulations using both custom realistic scenarios and real-world ocean current data. To our knowledge, this is the first global planning framework to jointly address the adaptive identification of non-navigable areas and topological diversity within a risk-aware paradigm, enabling robust navigation in maritime environments.

PaperID: 986, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03692

Authors:Alan Liang, Youquan Liu, Yu Yang, Dongyue Lu, Linfeng Li, Lingdong Kong, Huaici Zhao, Wei Tsang Ooi

Affiliations: Fudan University, Zhejiang University, National University of Singapore, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciense

Title: LiDARCrafter: Dynamic 4D World Modeling from LiDAR Sequences

Abstract:
Generative world models have become essential data engines for autonomous driving, yet most focus on videos or occupancy grids and overlook the unique challenges of LiDAR. Extending LiDAR generation to dynamic 4D modeling requires addressing controllability, temporal coherence, and standardized evaluation. We present LiDARCrafter, a unified framework for controllable 4D LiDAR generation and editing. Freeform language instructions are converted into ego-centric scene graphs that guide a tri-branch diffusion model to generate object geometry, motion, and structural priors. An autoregressive module further produces temporally coherent and stable LiDAR sequences with improved global consistency. To enable fair comparison, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark covering scene-, object-, and sequence-level metrics for rigorous and reproducible evaluation. Experiments on nuScenes show that LiDARCrafter achieves state-of-the-art fidelity, controllability, and temporal consistency, paving the way for scalable data augmentation and realistic simulation in diverse scenarios. Code have been publicly available at https://lidarcrafter.github.io.

PaperID: 987, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20921

Authors:Yingying Wang, Rongjin Zhuang, Hui Zheng, Xuanhua He, Ke Cao, Xiaotong Tu, Xinghao Ding

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing, Ministry of Education of China, Xiamen University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China

Title: Self-supervised Multiplex Consensus Mamba for General Image Fusion

Abstract:
Image fusion integrates complementary information from different modalities to generate highquality fused images, thereby enhancing downstream tasks such as object detection and semantic segmentation. Unlike task-specific techniques that primarily focus on consolidating inter-modal information, general image fusion needs to address a wide range of tasks while improving performance without increasing complexity. To achieve this, we propose SMC-Mamba, a Self-supervised Multiplex Consensus Mamba framework for general image fusion. Specifically, the Modality-Agnostic Feature Enhancement (MAFE) module preserves fine details through adaptive gating and enhances global representations via spatial-channel and frequency rotational scanning. The Multiplex Consensus Cross-modal Mamba (MCCM) module enables dynamic collaboration among experts, reaching a consensus to efficiently integrate complementary information from multiple modalities. The cross-modal scanning within MCCM further strengthens feature interactions across modalities, facilitating seamless integration of critical information from both sources. Additionally, we introduce a Bi-level Self-supervised Contrastive Learning Loss (BSCL), which preserves high-frequency information without increasing computational overhead while simultaneously boosting performance in downstream tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) image fusion algorithms in tasks such as infrared-visible, medical, multi-focus, and multi-exposure fusion, as well as downstream visual tasks.

PaperID: 988, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12340

Authors:Jirong Zha, Yuxuan Fan, Kai Li, Han Li, Chen Gao, Xinlei Chen

Affiliations: Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: DIMM: Decoupled Multi-hierarchy Kalman Filter via Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
State estimation is challenging for target tracking with high maneuverability, as the target's state transition function changes rapidly, irregularly, and is unknown to the estimator. Existing work based on interacting multiple model (IMM) achieves more accurate estimation than singlefilter approaches through model combination, aligning appropriate models for different motion modes of the target over time. However, two limitations of conventional IMM remain unsolved. First, the solution space of the model combination is constrained as the target's diverse kinematic properties in different directions are ignored. Second, the model combination weights calculated by the observation likelihood are not accurate enough due to the measurement uncertainty. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, DIMM, to effectively combine estimates from different motion models in each direction, thus increasing the target tracking accuracy. First, DIMM extends the model combination solution space of conventional IMM from a hyperplane to a hypercube by designing a 3D-decoupled multi-hierarchy filter bank, which describes the target's motion with various-order linear models. Second, DIMM generates more reliable combination weight matrices through a differentiable adaptive fusion network for importance allocation rather than solely relying on the observation likelihood; it contains an attention-based twin delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (TD3) method with a hierarchical reward. Experiments demonstrate that DIMM significantly improves the tracking accuracy of existing state estimation methods by 31.61%~99.23%.

PaperID: 989, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13103

Authors:Tianyi Zhang, Haonan Duan, Haoran Hao, Yu Qiao, Jifeng Dai, Zhi Hou

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, SenseTime Research, School of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University

Title: Grounding Actions in Camera Space: Observation-Centric Vision-Language-Action Policy

Abstract:
VisionLanguage-Action (VLA) models frequently encounter challenges in generalizing to real-world environments due to inherent discrepancies between observation and action spaces. Although training data are collected from diverse camera perspectives, the models typically predict end-effector poses within the robot base coordinate frame, resulting in spatial inconsistencies. To mitigate this limitation, we introduce the Observation-Centric VLA (OC-VLA) framework, which grounds action predictions directly in the camera observation space. Leveraging the camera’s extrinsic calibration matrix, OC-VLA transforms end-effector poses from the robot base coordinate system into the camera coordinate system, thereby unifying prediction targets across heterogeneous viewpoints. This lightweight, plug-and-play strategy ensures robust alignment between perception and action, substantially improving model resilience to camera viewpoint variations. The proposed approach is readily compatible with existing VLA architectures, requiring no substantial modifications. Comprehensive evaluations on both simulated and real-world robotic manipulation tasks demonstrate that OC-VLA accelerates convergence, enhances task success rates, and improves cross-view generalization.

PaperID: 990, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.20900

Authors:Yifan Zhong, Xuchuan Huang, Ruochong Li, Ceyao Zhang, Zhang Chen, Tianrui Guan, Fanlian Zeng, Ka Nam Lui, Yuyao Ye, Yitao Liang, Yaodong Yang, Yuanpei Chen

Affiliations: Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Peking University PKU-PsiBot Joint Lab, PKU-PsiBot Joint Lab Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), PKU-PsiBot Joint Lab University of Pennsylvania

Title: DexGraspVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Framework Towards General Dexterous Grasping

Abstract:
Dexterous grasping remains a fundamental yet challenging problem in robotics. A generalpurpose robot must be capable of grasping diverse objects in arbitrary scenarios. However, existing research typically relies on restrictive assumptions, such as single-object settings or limited environments, showing constrained generalization. We present DexGraspVLA, a hierarchical framework for robust generalization in language-guided general dexterous grasping and beyond. It utilizes a pre-trained Vision-Language model as the high-level planner and learns a diffusion-based low-level Action controller. The key insight to achieve generalization lies in iteratively transforming diverse language and visual inputs into domain-invariant representations via foundation models, where imitation learning can be effectively applied due to the alleviation of domain shift. Notably, our method achieves a 90+% dexterous grasping success rate under thousands of challenging unseen cluttered scenes. Empirical analysis confirms the consistency of internal model behavior across environmental variations, validating our design. DexGraspVLA also, for the first time, simultaneously demonstrates free-form long-horizon prompt execution, robustness to adversarial objects and human disturbance, and failure recovery. Extended application to nonprehensile grasping further proves its generality.

PaperID: 991, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10416

Authors:Francisco Cunha, Yves Lepage, Miguel Couceiro, Zied Bouraoui

Affiliations: Dep. Mathematics, U. Lisboa, Waseda University, Portugal INESCID, CRIL CNRS

Title: Generalizing Analogical Inference from Boolean to Continuous Domains

Abstract:
Analogical reasoning is a powerful inductive mechanism, widely used in human cognition and increasingly applied in artificial intelligence. Formal frameworks for analogical inference have been developed for Boolean domains, where inference is provably sound for affine functions and approximately correct for functions close to affine. These results have informed the design of analogybased classifiers. However, they do not extend to regression tasks or continuous domains. In this paper, we revisit analogical inference from a foundational perspective. We first present a counterexample showing that existing generalization bounds fail even in the Boolean setting. We then introduce a unified framework for analogical reasoning in real-valued domains based on parameterized analogies defined via generalized means. This model subsumes both Boolean classification and regression, and supports analogical inference over continuous functions. We characterize the class of analogy-preserving functions in this setting and derive both worst-case and average-case error bounds under smoothness assumptions. Our results offer a general theory of analogical inference across discrete and continuous domains.

PaperID: 992, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12315

Authors:Sebastian Hagedorn Gaete, Martín Muñoz, Cristian Riveros, Rodrigo Toro Icarte

Affiliations: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, UMR Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Lens (CRIL)

Title: Active Learning of Symbolic Automata over Rational Numbers

Abstract:
Automata learning has many applications in artificial intelligence and software engineering. Central to these applications is the L algorithm, introduced by Angluin (1987). The L algorithm learns deterministic finitestate automata (DFAs) in polynomial time when provided with a minimally adequate teacher. Unfortunately, the L algorithm can only learn DFAs over finite alphabets, which limits its applicability. In this paper, we extend L to learn symbolic automata whose transitions use predicates over rational numbers, i.e., over infinite and dense alphabets. Our result makes the L algorithm applicable to new settings like (real) RGX, and time series. Furthermore, our proposed algorithm for learning each predicate is optimal in the sense that it asks a number of queries to the teacher that is at most linear with respect to the size of their representation.

PaperID: 993, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09005

Authors:Diana Bolanos, Mohammadmehdi Ataei, Pradeep Kumar Jayaraman

Affiliations: University of California, Autodesk Research

Title: MechaFormer: Sequence Learning for Kinematic Mechanism Design Automation

Abstract:
Designing mechanical mechanisms to trace specific paths is a classic yet notoriously difficult engineering problem, characterized by a vast and complex search space of discrete topologies and continuous parameters. We introduce MechaFormer, a Transformerbased model that tackles this challenge by treating mechanism design as a conditional sequence generation task. Our model learns to translate a target curve into a domain-specific language (DSL) string, simultaneously determining the mechanism's topology and geometric parameters in a single, unified process. MechaFormer significantly outperforms existing baselines, achieving state-of-the-art path-matching accuracy and generating a wide diversity of novel and valid designs. We demonstrate a suite of sampling strategies that can dramatically improve solution quality and offer designers valuable flexibility. Furthermore, we show that the high-quality outputs from MechaFormer serve as excellent starting points for traditional optimizers, creating a hybrid approach that finds superior solutions with remarkable efficiency.

PaperID: 994, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09808

Authors:Ting Cai, Kirthevasan Kandasamy

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Title: Constrained Best Arm Identification with Tests for Feasibility

Abstract:
Best arm identification (BAI) aims to identify the highestperformance arm among a set of K arms by collecting stochastic samples from each arm. In real-world problems, the best arm needs to satisfy additional feasibility constraints. While there is limited prior work on BAI with feasibility constraints, they typically assume the performance and con- straints are observed simultaneously on each pull of an arm. However, this assumption does not reflect most practical use cases, e.g., in drug discovery, we wish to find the most potent drug whose toxicity and solubility are below certain safety thresholds. These safety experiments can be conducted separately from the potency measurement. Thus, this requires de- signing BAI algorithms that not only decide which arm to pull but also decide whether to test for the arm’s performance or feasibility. In this work, we study feasible BAI which allows a decision-maker to choose a tuple (i, ℓ), where i ∈ [K] de- notes an arm and ℓ denotes whether she wishes to test for its performance (ℓ = 0) or any of its N feasibility constraints (ℓ ∈ [N ]). We focus on the fixed confidence setting, which is to identify the feasible arm with the highest performance, with a probability of at least 1 − δ. We propose an efficient algorithm and upper-bound its sample complexity, showing our algorithm can naturally adapt to the problem’s difficulty and eliminate arms by worse performance or infeasibility, whichever is easier. We complement this upper bound with a lower bound showing that our algorithm is asymptotically (δ → 0) optimal. Finally, we empirically show that our algorithm outperforms other state-of-the-art BAI algorithms in both synthetic and real-world datasets.

PaperID: 995, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12742

Authors:Zhongteng Cai, Yaxuan Wang, Yang Liu, Xueru Zhang

Affiliations: The Ohio State University, University of California, Santa Cruz

Title: Stabilizing Self-Consuming Diffusion Models with Latent Space Filtering

Abstract:
As synthetic data proliferates across the Internet, it is often reused to train successive generations of generative models. This creates a "selfconsuming loop" that can lead to training instability or model collapse. Common strategies to address the issue---such as accumulating historical training data or injecting fresh real data---either increase computational cost or require expensive human annotation. In this paper, we empirically analyze the latent space dynamics of self-consuming diffusion models and observe that the low-dimensional structure of latent representations extracted from synthetic data degrade over generations. Based on this insight, we propose Latent Space Filtering (LSF), a novel approach that mitigates model collapse by filtering out less realistic synthetic data from mixed datasets. Theoretically, we present a framework that connects latent space degradation to empirical observations. Experimentally, we show that LSF consistently outperforms existing baselines across multiple real-world datasets, effectively mitigating model collapse without increasing training cost or relying on human annotation.

PaperID: 996, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10320

Authors:Fuyuan Cao, Jiaxuan Zhang, Xiaoli Li

Affiliations: Shanxi University, Singapore University of Technology and Design

Title: PITE: Multi-Prototype Alignment for Individual Treatment Effect Estimation

Abstract:
Estimating Individual Treatment Effects (ITE) from observational data is challenging due to confounding bias. Most studies tackle this bias by balancing distributions globally, but ignore individual heterogeneity and fail to capture the local structure that represents the natural clustering among individuals, which ultimately compromises ITE estimation. While instancelevel alignment methods consider heterogeneity, they similarly overlook the local structure information. To address these issues, we propose an end-to-end Multi-Prototype alignment method for ITE estimation (PITE). PITE effectively captures local structure within groups and enforces cross-group alignment, thereby achieving robust ITE estimation. Specifically, we first define prototypes as cluster centroids based on similar individuals under the same treatment. To identify local similarity and the distribution consistency, we perform instance-to-prototype matching to assign individuals to the nearest prototype within groups, and design a multi-prototype alignment strategy to encourage the matched prototypes to be close across treatment arms in the latent space. PITE not only reduces distribution shift through fine-grained, prototype-level alignment, but also preserves the local structures of treated and control groups, which provides meaningful constraints for ITE estimation. Extensive evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate that PITE outperforms 13 state-of-the-art methods, achieving more accurate and robust ITE estimation.

PaperID: 997, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13457

Authors:Linfeng Cao, Ming Shi, Ness B. Shroff

Affiliations: The Ohio State University, University at Buffalo

Title: Provably Efficient MultiObjective Bandit Algorithms Under Preference-Centric Customization

Abstract:
Multiobjective multi-armed bandit (MO-MAB) problems traditionally aim to achieve Pareto optimality. However, real-world scenarios often involve users with varying preferences across objectives, resulting in a Pareto-optimal arm that may score high for one user but perform quite poorly for another. This highlights the need for customized learning, a factor often overlooked in prior research. To address this, we study a preference-aware MO-MAB framework in the presence of explicit user preference. It shifts the focus from achieving Pareto optimality to further optimizing within the Pareto front under preference-centric customization. To our knowledge, this is the first theoretical study of customized MO-MAB optimization with explicit user preferences. Motivated by practical applications, we explore two scenarios: unknown preference and hidden preference, each presenting unique challenges for algorithm design and analysis. At the core of our algorithms are preference estimation and preference-aware optimization mechanisms to adapt to user preferences effectively. We further develop novel analytical techniques to establish near-optimal regret of the proposed algorithms. Strong empirical performance confirm the effectiveness of our approach.

PaperID: 998, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11750

Authors:Ernesto Casablanca, Oliver Schön, Paolo Zuliani, Sadegh Soudjani

Affiliations: Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom, Università di Roma "La Sapienza", Max Planck Institute for Software Systems

Title: LUCID: Learning-Enabled Uncertainty-Aware Certification of Stochastic Dynamical Systems

Abstract:
Ensuring the safety of AIenabled systems, particularly in high-stakes domains such as autonomous driving and healthcare, has become increasingly critical. Traditional formal verification tools fall short when faced with systems that embed both opaque, black-box AI components and complex stochastic dynamics. To address these challenges, we introduce LUCID (Learning-enabled Uncertainty-aware Certification of stochastIc Dynamical systems), a verification engine for certifying safety of black-box stochastic dynamical systems from a finite dataset of random state transitions. As such, LUCID is the first known tool capable of establishing quantified safety guarantees for such systems. Thanks to its modular architecture and extensive documentation, LUCID is designed for easy extensibility. LUCID employs a data-driven methodology rooted in control barrier certificates, which are learned directly from system transition data, to ensure formal safety guarantees. We use conditional mean embeddings to embed data into a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS), where an RKHS ambiguity set is constructed that can be inflated to robustify the result to out-of-distribution behavior. A key innovation within LUCID is its use of a finite Fourier kernel expansion to reformulate a semi-infinite non-convex optimization problem into a tractable linear program. The resulting spectral barrier allows us to leverage the fast Fourier transform to generate the relaxed problem efficiently, offering a scalable yet distributionally robust framework for verifying safety. LUCID thus offers a robust and efficient verification framework, able to handle the complexities of modern black-box systems while providing formal guarantees of safety. These unique capabilities are demonstrated on challenging benchmarks.

PaperID: 999, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18554

Authors:Aofei Chang, Ting Wang, Fenglong Ma

Affiliations: Pennsylvania State University, State University of New York at Stony Brook

Title: Enhancing Medical Large Vision-Language Models via Alignment Distillation

Abstract:
Medical Large VisionLanguage Models (Med-LVLMs) have shown promising results in clinical applications, but often suffer from hallucinated outputs due to misaligned visual understanding. In this work, we identify two fundamental limitations contributing to this issue: insufficient visual representation learning and poor visual attention alignment. To address these problems, we propose MedAlign, a simple, lightweight alignment distillation framework that transfers visual alignment knowledge from a domain-specific Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model to Med-LVLMs. MedAlign introduces two distillation losses: a spatial-aware visual alignment loss based on visual token-level similarity structures, and an attention-aware distillation loss that guides attention toward diagnostically relevant regions. Extensive experiments on medical report generation and medical visual question answering (VQA) benchmarks show that MedAlign consistently improves both performance and interpretability, yielding more visually grounded outputs.

PaperID: 1000, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12201

Authors:Feng Chen, Yefei He, Shaoxuan He, Yuanyu He, Jing Liu, Lequan Lin, Akide Liu, Zhaoyang Li, Jiyuan Zhang, Zhenbang Sun, Bohan Zhuang, Qi Wu

Affiliations: The University of Adelaide, Zhejiang University, Monash University, The University of Sydney

Title: OmniSparse: Training-Aware Fine-Grained Sparse Attention for Long-Video MLLMs

Abstract:
Existing sparse attention methods primarily target inferencetime acceleration by selecting critical tokens under predefined sparsity patterns. However, they often fail to bridge the training–inference gap and lack the capacity for fine-grained token selection across multiple dimensions—such as queries, key-values (KV), and heads—leading to suboptimal performance and acceleration gains. In this paper, we introduce OmniSparse, a training-aware fine-grained sparse attention of long-video MLLMs, which is applied in both training and inference with dynamic token budget allocation. Specifically, OmniSparse contains three adaptive and complementary mechanisms: (1) query selection as lazy-active classification, aiming to retain active queries that capture broader semantic similarity, while discarding most of lazy ones that focus on limited local context and exhibit high functional redundancy with their neighbors, (2) KV selection with head-level dynamic budget allocation, where a shared budget is determined based on the flattest head and applied uniformly across all heads to ensure attention recall after selection, and (3) KV cache slimming to alleviate head-level redundancy, which selectively fetches visual KV cache according to the head-level decoding query pattern. Experimental results demonstrate that OmniSparse can achieve comparable performance with full attention, achieving 2.7x speedup during prefill and 2.4x memory reduction for decoding.

PaperID: 1001, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09917

Authors:Jiazhen Chen, Xiuqin Liang, Sichao Fu, Zheng Ma, Weihua Ou

Affiliations: University of Waterloo, Deloitte Consulting, Huazhong University of Science and Technology Guizhou University, Guizhou Normal University

Title: Towards Multiple Missing Values-resistant Unsupervised Graph Anomaly Detection

Abstract:
Unsupervised graph anomaly detection (GAD) has received increasing attention in recent years. It aims to identify anomalous data patterns using only unlabeled node information from graphstructured data. However, prevailing unsupervised GAD methods typically assume complete node attributes and structural information-a condition that is seldom satisfied in real-world scenarios due to privacy constraints, collection errors, or dynamic node arrivals. Standard imputation strategies risk "repairing" rare anomalous nodes so that they appear normal, thereby introducing imputation bias into the detection process. Moreover, when both node attributes and edges are missing simultaneously, estimation errors in one view can contaminate the other, causing cross-view interference that further degrades detection performance. To address these challenges, we propose M²V-UGAD, a multiple-missing-values-resistant unsupervised GAD framework for incomplete graphs. Specifically, we introduce a dual-pathway encoder that independently reconstructs missing node attributes and graph structure, preventing errors in one view from propagating to the other. The two pathways are then fused and regularized within a joint latent space such that normal nodes occupy a compact inner manifold while anomalies lie on an outer shell. Finally, to mitigate imputation bias, we sample latent codes just outside the normal region and decode them into realistic node features and subgraphs, yielding hard negative examples that sharpen the decision boundary. Experiments on seven public benchmarks show that M²V-UGAD consistently outperforms existing unsupervised GAD methods across a range of missing rates.

PaperID: 1002, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20312

Authors:Kaiyuan Chen, Guangmin Zheng, Jin Wang, Xiaobing Zhou, Xuejie Zhang

Affiliations: Yunnan University

Title: SAPO: Self-Adaptive Process Optimization Makes Small Reasoners Stronger

Abstract:
Existing selfevolution methods overlook the influence of fine-grained reasoning steps, which leads to the reasoner-verifier gap. The computational inefficiency of Monte Carlo (MC) process supervision further exacerbates the difficulty in mitigating the gap. Motivated by the Error-Related Negativity (ERN), which the reasoner can localize error following incorrect decisions, guiding rapid adjustments, we propose a Self-Adaptive Process Optimization (SAPO) method for self-improvement in Small Language Models (SLMs). SAPO adaptively and efficiently introduces process supervision signals by actively minimizing the reasoner-verifier gap rather than relying on inefficient MC estimations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms most existing self-evolution methods on two challenging task types: mathematics and code. Additionally, to further investigate SAPO's impact on verifier performance, this work introduces two new benchmarks for process reward models in both mathematical and coding tasks.

PaperID: 1003, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12471

Authors:Youming Chen, Zhaoqiang Liu

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Diffusion Model Based Signal Recovery Under 1-Bit Quantization

Abstract:
Diffusion models (DMs) have demonstrated to be powerful priors for signal recovery, but their application to 1bit quantization tasks, such as 1-bit compressed sensing and logistic regression, remains a challenge. This difficulty stems from the inherent non-linear link function in these tasks, which is either non-differentiable or lacks an explicit characterization. To tackle this issue, we introduce Diff-OneBit, which is a fast and effective DM-based approach for signal recovery under 1-bit quantization. Diff-OneBit addresses the challenge posed by non-differentiable or implicit links functions via leveraging a differentiable surrogate likelihood function to model 1-bit quantization, thereby enabling gradient based iterations. This function is integrated into a flexible plug-and-play framework that decouples the data-fidelity term from the diffusion prior, allowing any pretrained DM to act as a denoiser within the iterative reconstruction process. Extensive experiments on the FFHQ, CelebA and ImageNet datasets demonstrate that Diff-OneBit gives high-fidelity reconstructed images, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in both reconstruction quality and computational efficiency across 1-bit compressed sensing and logistic regression tasks.

PaperID: 1004, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00357

Authors:Yoonhyuk Choi, Jiho Choi, Taewook Ko, JongWook Kim, Chong-Kwon Kim

Affiliations: Sookmyung Women's University, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Samsung Electronics, Sangmyung University, Korea Institute of Energy Technology

Title: Sheaf Graph Neural Networks via PACBayes Spectral Optimization

Abstract:
Oversmoothing in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) causes collapse in distinct node features, particularly on heterophilic graphs where adjacent nodes often have dissimilar labels. Although sheaf neural networks partially mitigate this problem, they typically rely on static or heavily parameterized sheaf structures that hinder generalization and scalability. Existing sheaf-based models either predefine restriction maps or introduce excessive complexity, yet fail to provide rigorous stability guarantees. In this paper, we introduce a novel scheme called SGPC (Sheaf GNNs with PAC-Bayes Calibration), a unified architecture that combines cellular-sheaf message passing with several mechanisms, including optimal transport-based lifting, variance-reduced diffusion, and PAC-Bayes spectral regularization for robust semi-supervised node classification. We establish performance bounds theoretically and demonstrate that end-to-end training in linear computational complexity can achieve the resulting bound-aware objective. Experiments on nine homophilic and heterophilic benchmarks show that SGPC outperforms state-of-the-art spectral and sheaf-based GNNs while providing certified confidence intervals on unseen nodes.

PaperID: 1005, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19737

Authors:Clément Elliker, Jesse Read, Sonia Vanier, Albert Bifet

Affiliations: LIX (École Polytechnique, IP Paris, AI Institute, University of Waikato LTCI, Télécom Paris

Title: Simulation-Driven Railway Delay Prediction: An Imitation Learning Approach

Abstract:
Reliable prediction of train delays is essential for enhancing the robustness and efficiency of railway transportation systems. In this work, we reframe delay forecasting as a stochastic simulation task, modeling statetransition dynamics through imitation learning. We introduce Drift-Corrected Imitation Learning (DCIL), a novel self-supervised algorithm that extends DAgger by incorporating distance-based drift correction, thereby mitigating covariate shift during rollouts without requiring access to an external oracle or adversarial schemes. Our approach synthesizes the dynamical fidelity of event-driven models with the representational capacity of data-driven methods, enabling uncertainty-aware forecasting via Monte Carlo simulation. We evaluate DCIL using a comprehensive real-world dataset from \textscInfrabel, the Belgian railway infrastructure manager, which encompasses over three million train movements. Our results, focused on predictions up to 30 minutes ahead, demonstrate superior predictive performance of DCIL over traditional regression models and behavioral cloning on deep learning architectures, highlighting its effectiveness in capturing the sequential and uncertain nature of delay propagation in large-scale networks.

PaperID: 1006, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06836

Authors:Zelin He, Sarah Alnegheimish, Matthew Reimherr

Affiliations: Pennsylvania State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Title: Harnessing VisionLanguage Models for Time Series Anomaly Detection

Abstract:
Timeseries anomaly detection (TSAD) has played a vital role in a variety of fields, including healthcare, finance, and sensor-based condition monitoring. Prior methods, which mainly focus on training domain-specific models on numerical data, lack the visual–temporal reasoning capacity that human experts have to identify contextual anomalies. To fill this gap, we explore a solution based on vision language models (VLMs). Recent studies have shown the ability of VLMs for visual reasoning tasks, yet their direct application to time series has fallen short on both accuracy and efficiency. To harness the power of VLMs for TSAD, we propose a two-stage solution, with (1) ViT4TS, a vision-screening stage built on a relatively lightweight pre-trained vision encoder, which leverages 2-D time series representations to accurately localize candidate anomalies; (2) VLM4TS, a VLM-based stage that integrates global temporal context and VLM's reasoning capacity to refine the detection upon the candidates provided by ViT4TS. We show that without any time-series training, VLM4TS outperforms time-series pre-trained and from-scratch baselines in most cases, yielding a 24.6% improvement in F1-max score over the best baseline. Moreover, VLM4TS also consistently outperforms existing language model-based TSAD methods and is on average 36× more efficient in token usage.

PaperID: 1007, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04524

Authors:Tianle Hu, Weijun Lv, Na Han, Xiaozhao Fang, Jie Wen, Jiaxing Li, Guoxu Zhou

Affiliations: Guangdong University of Technology, Guangdong Polytechnic Normal University, Harbin Institute of Technology, Guangzhou University

Title: Prototype-Based Semantic Consistency Alignment for Domain Adaptive Retrieval

Abstract:
Domain adaptive retrieval aims to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain, enabling effective retrieval while mitigating domain discrepancies. However, existing methods encounter several fundamental limitations: 1) neglecting classlevel semantic alignment and excessively pursuing pair-wise sample alignment; 2) lacking either pseudo-label reliability consideration or geometric guidance for assessing label correctness; 3) directly quantizing original features affected by domain shift, undermining the quality of learned hash codes. In view of these limitations, we propose Prototype-based Semantic Consistency Alignment (PSCA), a two-stage framework for effective domain adaptive retrieval. In the first stage, a set of orthogonal prototypes directly establishes class-level semantic connections, maximizing inter-class separability while gathering intra-class samples. During the prototype learning, geometric proximity provides a reliability indicator for semantic consistency alignment through adaptive weighting of pseudo-label confidences. The resulting membership matrix and prototypes facilitate feature reconstruction, ensuring quantization on reconstructed rather than original features, thereby improving subsequent hash coding quality and seamlessly connecting both stages. In the second stage, domain-specific quantization functions process the reconstructed features under mutual approximation constraints, generating unified binary hash codes across domains. Extensive experiments validate PSCA's superior performance across multiple datasets.

PaperID: 1008, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09792

Authors:Tianmeng Hu, Yongzheng Cui, Rui Tang, Biao Luo, Ke Li

Affiliations: University of Exeter, Central South University

Title: Beyond Monotonicity: Revisiting Factorization Principles in Multi-Agent Q-Learning

Abstract:
Value decomposition is a central approach in multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL), enabling centralized training with decentralized execution by factorizing the global value function into local values. To ensure individual-global-max (IGM) consistency, existing methods either enforce monotonicity constraints, which limit expressive power, or adopt softer surrogates at the cost of algorithmic complexity. In this work, we present a dynamical systems analysis of non-monotonic value decomposition, modeling learning dynamics as continuous-time gradient flow. We prove that, under approximately greedy exploration, all zero-loss equilibria violating IGM consistency are unstable saddle points, while only IGM-consistent solutions are stable attractors of the learning dynamics. Extensive experiments on both synthetic matrix games and challenging MARL benchmarks demonstrate that unconstrained, non-monotonic factorization reliably recovers IGM-optimal solutions and consistently outperforms monotonic baselines. Additionally, we investigate the influence of temporal-difference targets and exploration strategies, providing actionable insights for the design of future value-based MARL algorithms.

PaperID: 1009, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10344

Authors:Zicheng Hu, Yuchen Wang, Cheng Chen

Affiliations: East China Normal University

Title: Robust Decentralized Multi-armed Bandits: From Corruption-Resilience to Byzantine-Resilience

Abstract:
Decentralized cooperative multiagent multi-armed bandits (DeCMA2B) considers how multiple agents collaborate in a decentralized multi-armed bandit setting. Though this problem has been extensively studied in previous work, most existing methods remain susceptible to various adversarial attacks. In this paper, we first study DeCMA2B with adversarial corruption, where an adversary can corrupt reward observations of all agents with a limited corruption budget. We propose a robust algorithm, called DeMABAR, which ensures that each agent’s individual regret suffers only an additive term proportional to the corruption budget. Then we consider a more realistic scenario where the adversary can only attack a small number of agents. Our theoretical analysis shows that the DeMABAR algorithm can also almost completely eliminate the influence of adversarial attacks and is inherently robust in the Byzantine setting, where an unknown fraction of the agents can be Byzantine, i.e., may arbitrarily select arms and communicate wrong information. We also conduct numerical experiments to illustrate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed method.

PaperID: 1010, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06991

Authors:Siqi Huang, Sida Huang, Hongyuan Zhang

Affiliations: Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom School of Artificial Intelligence, OPtics and ElectroNics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University, China Telecom The University of Hong Kong

Title: CoLM: Collaborative Large Models via a Client-Server Paradigm

Abstract:
Large models have achieved remarkable performance across a range of reasoning and understanding tasks. Prior work often utilizes model ensembles or multiagent systems to collaboratively generate responses, effectively operating in a server-to-server paradigm. However, such approaches do not align well with practical deployment settings, where a limited number of server-side models are shared by many clients under modern internet architectures. In this paper, we introduce CoLM (Collaboration in Large-Models), a novel framework for collaborative reasoning that redefines cooperation among large models from a client-server perspective. Unlike traditional ensemble methods that rely on simultaneous inference from multiple models to produce a single output, CoLM allows the outputs of multiple models to be aggregated or shared, enabling each client model to independently refine and update its own generation based on these high-quality outputs. This design enables collaborative benefits by fully leveraging both client-side and shared server-side models. We further extend CoLM to vision-language models (VLMs), demonstrating its applicability beyond language tasks. Experimental results across multiple benchmarks show that CoLM consistently improves model performance on previously failed queries, highlighting the effectiveness of collaborative guidance in enhancing single-model capabilities.

PaperID: 1011, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.17878

Authors:Dongjae Jeon, Wonje Jeung, Taeheon Kim, Albert No, Jonghyun Choi

Affiliations: Yonsei University, Seoul National University

Title: An Information Theoretic Evaluation Metric for Strong Unlearning

Abstract:
Machine unlearning (MU) aims to remove the influence of specific data from trained models, addressing privacy concerns and ensuring compliance with regulations such as the "right to be forgotten." Evaluating strong unlearning, where the unlearned model is indistinguishable from one retrained without the forgetting data, remains a significant challenge in deep neural networks (DNNs). Common blackbox metrics, such as variants of membership inference attacks and accuracy comparisons, primarily assess model outputs but often fail to capture residual information in intermediate layers. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Information Difference Index (IDI), a novel white-box metric inspired by information theory. IDI quantifies retained information in intermediate features by measuring mutual information between those features and the labels to be forgotten, offering a more comprehensive assessment of unlearning efficacy. Our experiments demonstrate that IDI effectively measures the degree of unlearning across various datasets and architectures, providing a reliable tool for evaluating strong unlearning in DNNs.

PaperID: 1012, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.17137

Authors:Kangye Ji, Fei Cheng, Zeqing Wang, Qichang Zhang, Bohu Huang

Affiliations: Xidian University

Title: Jump-teaching: Combating Sample Selection Bias via Temporal Disagreement

Abstract:
Sample selection is a straightforward technique to combat noisy labels, aiming to prevent mislabeled samples from degrading the robustness of neural networks. However, existing methods mitigate compounding selection bias either by leveraging dualnetwork disagreement or additional forward propagations, leading to multiplied training overhead. To address this challenge, we introduce Jump-teaching, an efficient sample selection framework for debiased model update and simplified selection criterion. Based on a key observation that a neural network exhibits significant disagreement across different training iterations, Jump-teaching proposes a jump-manner model update strategy to enable self-correction of selection bias by harnessing temporal disagreement, eliminating the need for multi-network or multi-round training. Furthermore, we employ a sample-wise selection criterion building on the intra variance of a decomposed single loss for a fine-grained selection without relying on batch-wise ranking or dataset-wise modeling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Jump-teaching outperforms state-of-the-art counterparts while achieving a nearly overhead-free selection procedure, which boosts training speed by up to 4.47× and reduces peak memory footprint by 54%.

PaperID: 1013, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11118

Authors:Chaoqi Jia, Weihong Wu, Longkun Guo, Zhigang Lu, Chao Chen, Kok-Leong Ong

Affiliations: Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Fuzhou University, Western Sydney University

Title: Optimized Algorithms for Text Clustering with LLM-Generated Constraints

Abstract:
Clustering is a fundamental tool that has garnered significant interest across a wide range of applications including text analysis. To improve clustering accuracy, many researchers have proposed incorporating background knowledge, typically in the form of must‑link and cannot‑link constraints, to guide the clustering process. With the recent advent of large language models (LLMs), there is growing interest in improving clustering quality through LLMbased automatic constraint generation. In this paper, we propose a novel constraint‑generation approach that reduces resource consumption by generating constraint sets rather than using traditional pairwise constraints. This improves both query efficiency and constraint accuracy compared to state‑of‑the‑art methods. We further introduce a constrained clustering algorithm tailored to the characteristics of LLM-generated constraints. Our method incorporates a confidence threshold and a penalty mechanism to address potentially inaccurate constraints. We evaluate our approach on five text datasets, considering both the cost of constraint generation and overall clustering performance. The results show that our method achieves clustering accuracy comparable to the state-of-the-art algorithms while reducing the number of LLM queries by more than 20 times.

PaperID: 1014, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17861

Authors:Xuesong Jia, Yuanjie Shi, Ziquan Liu, Yi Xu, Yan Yan

Affiliations: Washington State University, Queen Mary, University of London, Dalian University of Technology

Title: Cost-Sensitive Conformal Training with Provably Controllable Learning Bounds

Abstract:
Conformal prediction (CP) is a general framework to quantify the predictive uncertainty of machine learning models that uses a set prediction to include the true label with a valid probability. To align the uncertainty measured by CP, conformal training methods minimize the size of the prediction sets. A typical way is to use a surrogate indicator function, usually Sigmoid or Gaussian error function. However, these surrogate functions do not have a uniform error bound to the indicator function, leading to uncontrollable learning bounds. In this paper, we propose a simple costsensitive conformal training algorithm that does not rely on the indicator approximation mechanism. Specifically, we theoretically show that minimizing the expected size of prediction sets is upper bounded by the expected rank of true labels. To this end, we develop an importance weighting strategy that assigns the weight using the rank of true label on each data. Our analysis provably demonstrates the tightness between the proposed weighted objective and the expected size of conformal prediction sets. Extensive experiments verify the validity of our theoretical insights, and superior empirical performance over other conformal training in terms of predictive efficiency with 21.38% reduction for average prediction set size.

PaperID: 1015, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.00503

Authors:Ke Jiang, Wen Jiang, Xiaoyang Tan

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Title: Variational OOD State Correction for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
The performance of Offline reinforcement learning is significantly impacted by the issue of state distributional shift, and outof-distribution (OOD) state correction is a popular approach to address this problem. However, previous methods correct the agent's transition distributions in a supervised way, which significantly degrades the flexibility and robustness. In this paper, we propose a novel method named Density-Aware Safety Perception (DASP) for OOD state correction. Specifically, our method encourages the agent to prioritize actions that lead to outcomes with higher data density, thereby promoting its operation within or the return to in-distribution (safe) regions. To achieve this, we optimize the objective within a variational framework that concurrently considers both the potential outcomes of decision-making and their density, thus providing crucial contextual information for safe decision-making. Finally, we validate the effectiveness and feasibility of our proposed method through extensive experimental evaluations on the offline MuJoCo and AntMaze suites.

PaperID: 1016, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08581

Authors:Ying Jiao, Rodrigo Castellano Ontiveros, Luc De Raedt, Marco Gori, Francesco Giannini, Michelangelo Diligenti, Giuseppe Marra

Affiliations: KU Leuven, University of Siena, Belgium Örebro University, Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy University of Pisa

Title: DeepProofLog: Efficient Proving in Deep Stochastic Logic Programs

Abstract:
Neurosymbolic (NeSy) AI combines neural architectures and symbolic reasoning to improve accuracy, interpretability, and generalization. While logic inference on top of subsymbolic modules has been shown to effectively guarantee these properties, this often comes at the cost of reduced scalability, which can severely limit the usability of NeSy models. This paper introduces DeepProofLog (DPrL), a novel NeSy system based on stochastic logic programs, which addresses the scalability limitations of previous methods. DPrL parameterizes all derivation steps with neural networks, allowing efficient neural guidance over the proving system. Additionally, we establish a formal mapping between the resolution process of our deep stochastic logic programs and Markov Decision Processes, enabling the application of dynamic programming and reinforcement learning techniques for efficient inference and learning. This theoretical connection improves scalability for complex proof spaces and large knowledge bases. Our experiments on standard NeSy benchmarks and knowledge graph reasoning tasks demonstrate that DPrL outperforms existing stateof-the-art NeSy systems, advancing scalability to larger and more complex settings than previously possible.

PaperID: 1017, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.18793

Authors:Avik Kar, Rahul Singh

Affiliations: Indian Institute of Science

Title: Policy Zooming: Adaptive Discretization-based Infinite-Horizon Average-Reward Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
We study infinitehorizon average-reward reinforcement learning for continuous space Lipschitz Markov decision processes (MDPs) in which an agent can play policies from a given set Φ. The proposed algorithms efficiently explore the policy space by “zooming” into the “promising regions” of Φ, thereby achieving adaptivity gains in the performance. We upper bound the regret as O ̃(T^(1-d_(eff.)^(-1) ) ), where d_(eff.) = d_z^Φ+2 for our model-free algorithm PZRL-MF and d_(eff.) = 2d_S + d_z^Φ+ 3 for our model-based algorithm PZRL-MB. Here, d_S is the dimension of the state space, and d_z^Φ is the zooming dimension given a set of policies Φ. d_z^Φ is an alternative measure of the complexity of the problem, and it depends on the underlying MDP as well as on Φ. Hence, the proposed algorithms exhibit low regret in case the problem instance is benign and/or the agent competes against a low-complexity Φ (that has a small d_z^Φ). When specialized to the case of finite-dimensional policy space, we obtain that d_(eff.) scales as the dimension of this space under mild technical conditions; and also obtain d_(eff.) = 2, or equivalently O ̃(√T) regret for PZRL-MF, under a curvature condition on the average reward function that is commonly used in the multi-armed bandit (MAB) literature.

PaperID: 1018, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15112

Authors:Sunwoo Kim, Soo Yong Lee, Kyungho Kim, Hyunjin Hwang, Jaemin Yoo, Kijung Shin

Affiliations: Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Title: Feature-Centric Unsupervised Node Representation Learning Without Homophily Assumption

Abstract:
Unsupervised node representation learning aims to obtain meaningful node embeddings without relying on node labels. To achieve this, graph convolution, which aggregates information from neighboring nodes, is commonly employed to encode node features and graph topology. However, excessive reliance on graph convolution can be suboptimal—especially in nonhomophilic graphs—since it may yield unduly similar embeddings for nodes that differ in their features or topological properties. As a result, adjusting the degree of graph convolution usage has been actively explored in supervised learning settings, whereas such approaches remain underexplored in unsupervised scenarios. To tackle this, we propose FUEL, which adaptively learns the adequate degree of graph convolution usage by aiming to enhance intra-class similarity and inter-class separability in the embedding space. Since classes are unknown, FUEL leverages node features to identify node clusters and treats these clusters as proxies for classes. Through extensive experiments using 15 baseline methods and 14 benchmark datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of FUEL in downstream tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance across graphs with diverse levels of homophily.

PaperID: 1019, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.03953

Authors:Gabriele La Malfa, Jie M. Zhang, Michael Luck, Elizabeth Black

Affiliations: King's College London, University of London, University of Sussex

Title: Fairness Aware Reinforcement Learning via Proximal Policy Optimization

Abstract:
Fairness in multiagent systems (MAS) focuses on equitable reward distribution among agents in scenarios involving sensitive attributes such as race, gender, or socioeconomic status. This paper introduces fairness in Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with a penalty term derived from a fairness definition such as demographic parity, counterfactual fairness, or conditional statistical parity. The proposed method, which we call Fair-PPO, balances reward maximisation with fairness by integrating two penalty components: a retrospective component that minimises disparities in past outcomes and a prospective component that ensures fairness in future decision-making. We evaluate our approach in two games: the Allelopathic Harvest, a cooperative and competitive MAS focused on resource collection, where some agents possess a sensitive attribute, and HospitalSim, a hospital simulation, in which agents coordinate the operations of hospital patients with different mobility and priority needs. Experiments show that Fair-PPO achieves fairer policies than PPO across the fairness metrics and, through the retrospective and prospective penalty components, reveals a wide spectrum of strategies to improve fairness; at the same time, its performance pairs with that of state-of-the-art fair reinforcement-learning algorithms. Fairness comes at the cost of reduced efficiency, but does not compromise equality among the overall population (Gini index). These findings underscore the potential of Fair-PPO to address fairness challenges in MAS.

PaperID: 1020, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06859

Authors:Qifeng Lei, Zhiyong Yang, Qianqian Xu, Cong Hua, Peisong Wen, Qingming Huang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, State Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: TuckA: Hierarchical Compact Tensor Experts for Efficient Fine-Tuning

Abstract:
Efficiently finetuning pre-trained models for downstream tasks is a key challenge in the era of foundation models. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) presents a promising solution, achieving performance comparable to full fine-tuning by updating only a small number of adaptation weights per layer. Traditional PEFT methods typically rely on a single expert, where the adaptation weight is a low-rank matrix. However, for complex tasks, the data's inherent diversity poses a significant challenge for such models, as a single adaptation weight cannot adequately capture the features of all samples. To address this limitation, we explore how to integrate multiple small adaptation experts into a compact structure to defeat a large adapter. Specifically, we propose Tucker Adaptation (TuckA), a method with four key properties: (i) We use Tucker decomposition to create a compact 3D tensor where each slice naturally serves as an expert. The low-rank nature of this decomposition ensures that the number of parameters scales efficiently as more experts are added. (ii) We introduce a hierarchical strategy that organizes these experts into groups at different granularities, allowing the model to capture both local and global data patterns. (iii) We develop an efficient batch-level routing mechanism, which reduces the router's parameter size by a factor of L compared to routing at every adapted layer (where L is the number of adapted layers) (iv) We propose data-aware initialization to achieve loss-free expert load balancing based on theoretical analysis. Extensive experiments on benchmarks in natural language understanding, image classification, and mathematical reasoning speak to the efficacy of TuckA, offering a new and effective solution to the PEFT problem.

PaperID: 1021, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.22980

Authors:Zekai Li, Ji Liu, Guanchen Li, Yixing Xu, Ziqiong Liu, Xuanwu Yin, Dong Li, Emad Barsoum

Affiliations: Advanced Micro Devices

Title: Learnable Permutation for Structured Sparsity on Transformer Models

Abstract:
Structured sparsity has emerged as a popular model pruning technique, widely adopted in various architectures, including CNNs, Transformer models, and especially large language models (LLMs) in recent years. A promising direction to further improve postpruning performance is weight permutation, which reorders model weights into patterns more amenable to pruning. However, the exponential growth of the permutation search space with the scale of Transformer architectures forces most methods to rely on greedy or heuristic algorithms, limiting the effectiveness of reordering. In this work, we propose a novel end-to-end learnable permutation framework. Our method introduces a learnable permutation cost matrix to quantify the cost of swapping any two input channels of a given weight matrix, a differentiable bipartite matching solver to obtain the optimal binary permutation matrix given a cost matrix, and a sparsity optimization loss function to directly optimize the permutation operator. We extensively validate our approach on vision and language Transformers, demonstrating that our method achieves state-of-the-art permutation results for structured sparsity.

PaperID: 1022, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06893

Authors:Daojun Liang, Jing Chen, Xiao Wang, Yinglong Wang, Shuo Li

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Computing Power Network and Information Security, Ministry of Education, Shandong Computer Science Center (National Supercomputing Center in Jinan), Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences), China Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Computing Power Internet and Service Computing, School of Intelligent Manufacturing and Control Engineering, Qilu Institute of Technology, China Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Industrial Big Data and Intelligent Manufacturing, Department of Computer and Data Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, OH USA

Title: DeepBooTS: Dual-Stream Residual Boosting for Drift-Resilient Time-Series Forecasting

Abstract:
TimeSeries (TS) exhibits pronounced non-stationarity. Consequently, most forecasting methods display compromised robustness to concept drift, despite the prevalent application of instance normalization. We tackle this challenge by first analysing concept drift through a bias-variance lens and proving that weighted ensemble reduces variance without increasing bias. These insights motivate DeepBooTS, a novel end-to-end dual-stream residual-decreasing boosting method that progressively reconstructs the intrinsic signal. In our design, each block of a deep model becomes an ensemble of learners with an auxiliary output branch forming a highway to the final prediction. The block‑wise outputs correct the residuals of previous blocks, leading to a learning‑driven decomposition of both inputs and targets. This method enhances versatility and interpretability while substantially improving robustness to concept drift. Extensive experiments, including those on large-scale datasets, show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods by a large margin, yielding an average performance improvement of 15.8% across various datasets, establishing a new benchmark for TS forecasting.

PaperID: 1023, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.20529

Authors:Xun Liang, Xin Guo, Zhongming Jin, Weihang Pan, Penghui Shang, Deng Cai, Binbin Lin, Jieping Ye

Affiliations: State Key Lab of CAD\&CG, Alibaba Cloud Computing, School of Software Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou Zhiyuan Research Institute Co.

Title: Enhancing Spatial Reasoning Through Visual and Textual Thinking

Abstract:
The spatial reasoning task aims to reason about the spatial relationships in 2D and 3D space, which is a fundamental capability for Visual Question Answering (VQA) and robotics. Although vision language models (VLMs) have developed rapidly in recent years, they are still struggling with the spatial reasoning task. In this paper, we introduce a method that can enhance Spatial reasoning through Visual and Textual thinking Simultaneously (SpatialVTS). In the spatial visual thinking phase, our model is trained to generate locationrelated specific tokens of important targets automatically. Not only are the objects mentioned in the problem addressed, but also the potential objects related to the reasoning are considered. During the spatial textual thinking phase, our model conducts long-term thinking based on visual cues and dialogues and gradually inferences the answers to spatial reasoning problems. To effectively support the model's training, we made manual corrections to the existing spatial reasoning dataset, eliminating numerous incorrect labels resulting from automatic annotation, restructuring the data input format to enhance generalization, and developing a reasoning framework for model thinking. Without introducing any additional information (such as masks or depth), our model's overall average level in several spatial understanding tasks has significantly improved compared with other models.

PaperID: 1024, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23971

Authors:Zhiming Lin, Kai Zhao, Sophie Zhang, Peilai Yu, Canran Xiao

Affiliations: Nankai University, Western Sydney University, Shanghai High School International Division, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University

Title: CEC-Zero: Zero-Supervision Character Error Correction with Self-Generated Rewards

Abstract:
Largescale Chinese spelling correction (CSC) remains critical for real-world text processing, yet existing LLMs and supervised methods lack robustness to novel errors and rely on costly annotations. We introduce CEC-Zero, a zerosupervision reinforcement learning framework that addresses this by enabling LLMs to correct their own mistakes. CEC-Zero synthesizes errorful inputs from clean text, computes cluster-consensus rewards via semantic similarity and candidate agreement, and optimizes the policy with PPO. It outperforms supervised baselines by 10–13 F1 points and strong LLM fine-tunes by 5–8 points across 9 benchmarks, with theoretical guarantees of unbiased rewards and convergence.CEC-Zero establishes a label-free paradigm for robust, scalable CSC, unlocking LLM potential in noisy text pipelines.

PaperID: 1025, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06452

Authors:Mattia Litrico, Mario Valerio Giuffrida, Sebastiano Battiato, Devis Tuia

Affiliations: University of Catania, University of Nottingham, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

Title: TRUST: Leveraging Text Robustness for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Abstract:
Recent unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods have shown great success in addressing classical domain shifts (e.g., syntheticto-real), but they still suffer under complex shifts (e.g. geographical shift), where both the background and object appearances differ significantly across domains. Prior works showed that the language modality can help in the adaptation process, exhibiting more robustness to such complex shifts. In this paper, we introduce TRUST, a novel UDA approach that exploits the robustness of the language modality to guide the adaptation of a vision model. TRUST generates pseudo-labels for target samples from their captions and introduces a novel uncertainty estimation strategy that uses normalised CLIP similarity scores to estimate the uncertainty of the generated pseudo-labels. Such estimated uncertainty is then used to reweight the classification loss, mitigating the adverse effects of wrong pseudo-labels obtained from low-quality captions. To further increase the robustness of the vision model, we propose a multimodal soft-contrastive learning loss that aligns the vision and language feature spaces, by leveraging captions to guide the contrastive training of the vision model on target images. In our contrastive loss, each pair of images acts as both a positive and a negative pair and their feature representations are attracted and repulsed with a strength proportional to the similarity of their captions. This solution avoids the need for hardly determining positive and negative pairs, which is critical in the UDA setting. Our approach outperforms previous methods, setting the new state-of-the-art on classical (DomainNet) and complex (GeoNet) domain shifts. The code is available at https://github.com/MattiaLitrico/TRUST-Leveraging-Text-Robustness-for-Unsupervised-Domain-Adaptation.

PaperID: 1026, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03882

Authors:Shudong Liu, Hanwen Zhang, Xiuling Wang, Yuesheng Zhu, Guibo Luo

Affiliations: Peking University, Hong Kong Baptist University

Title: Feature-Aware One-Shot Federated Learning via Hierarchical Token Sequences

Abstract:
Oneshot federated learning (OSFL) reduces the communication cost and privacy risks of iterative federated learning by constructing a global model with a single round of communication. However, most existing methods struggle to achieve robust performance on real-world domains such as medical imaging, or are inefficient when handling non-IID (Independent and Identically Distributed) data. To address these limitations, we introduce FALCON, a novel framework that enhances the effectiveness of OSFL over non-IID image data. The core idea of FALCON is to leverage the feature-aware hierarchical token sequences generation and knowledge distillation into OSFL. First, each client leverages a pretrained visual encoder with hierarchical scale encoding to compress images into hierarchical token sequences, which capture multi-scale semantics. Second, a multi-scale autoregressive transformer generator is used to model the distribution of these token sequences and generate the synthetic sequences. Third, clients upload the synthetic sequences along with the local classifier trained on the real token sequences to the server. Finally, the server incorporates knowledge distillation into global training to reduce reliance on precise distribution modeling. Experiments on medical and natural image datasets validate the effectiveness of FALCON in diverse non-IID scenarios, outperforming the best OSFL baselines by 9.58% in average accuracy.

PaperID: 1027, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.05454

Authors:Yue Lu, Xiangyu Zhou, Shizhou Zhang, Yinghui Xing, Guoqiang Liang, Wencong Zhang

Affiliations: Northwestern Polytechnical University, Hikrobot Co.

Title: Attention Retention for Continual Learning with Vision Transformers

Abstract:
Continual learning (CL) empowers AI systems to progressively acquire knowledge from nonstationary data streams. However, catastrophic forgetting remains a critical challenge. In this work, we identify attention drift in Vision Transformers as a primary source of catastrophic forgetting, where the attention to previously learned visual concepts shifts significantly after learning new tasks. Inspired by neuroscientific insights into the selective attention in the human visual system, we propose a novel attention-retaining framework to mitigate forgetting in CL. Our method constrains attention drift by explicitly modifying gradients during backpropagation through a two-step process: 1) extracting attention maps of the previous task using a layer-wise rollout mechanism and generating instance-adaptive binary masks, and 2) when learning a new task, applying these masks to zero out gradients associated with previous attention regions, thereby preventing disruption of learned visual concepts. For compatibility with modern optimizers, the gradient masking process is further enhanced by scaling parameter updates proportionally to maintain their relative magnitudes. Experiments and visualizations demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in mitigating catastrophic forgetting and preserving visual concepts. It achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits robust generalizability across diverse CL scenarios.

PaperID: 1028, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03546

Authors:Zhanye Luo, Yuefeng Han, Xiufan Yu

Affiliations: University of Chicago, University of Notre Dame

Title: Supervised Dynamic Dimension Reduction with Deep Neural Network

Abstract:
This paper studies the problem of dimension reduction, tailored to improving time series forecasting with highdimensional predictors. We propose a novel Supervised Deep Dynamic Principal component analysis (SDDP) framework that incorporates the target variable and lagged observations into the factor extraction process. Assisted by a temporal neural network, we construct target-aware predictors by scaling the original predictors in a supervised manner, with larger weights assigned to predictors with stronger forecasting power. A principal component analysis is then performed on the target-aware predictors to extract the estimated SDDP factors. This supervised factor extraction not only improves predictive accuracy in the downstream forecasting task but also yields more interpretable and target-specific latent factors. Building upon SDDP, we propose a factor-augmented nonlinear dynamic forecasting model that unifies a broad family of factor-model-based forecasting approaches. To further demonstrate the broader applicability of SDDP, we extend our studies to a more challenging scenario when the predictors are only partially observable. We validate the empirical performance of the proposed method on several real-world public datasets. The results show that our algorithm achieves notable improvements in forecasting accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 1029, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20831

Authors:Rashmeet Kaur Nayyar, Naman Shah, Siddharth Srivastava

Affiliations: Arizona State University

Title: Context-Sensitive Abstractions for Reinforcement Learning with Parameterized Actions

Abstract:
Realworld sequential decision-making often involves parameterized action spaces that require both, decisions regarding discrete actions and decisions about continuous action parameters governing how an action is executed. Existing approaches exhibit severe limitations in this setting---planning methods demand hand-crafted action models, and standard reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are designed for either discrete or continuous actions but not both, and the few RL methods that handle parameterized actions typically rely on domain-specific engineering and fail to exploit the latent structure of these spaces. This paper extends the scope of RL algorithms to long-horizon, sparse-reward settings with parameterized actions by enabling agents to autonomously learn both state and action abstractions online. We introduce algorithms that progressively refine these abstractions during learning, increasing fine-grained detail in the critical regions of the state–action space where greater resolution improves performance. Across several continuous-state, parameterized-action domains, our abstraction-driven approach enables TD(λ) to achieve markedly higher sample efficiency than state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 1030, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14516

Authors:Hao Qian, Shikui Tu, Lei Xu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: Full-Atom Peptide Design via Riemannian–Euclidean Bayesian Flow Networks

Abstract:
Diffusion and flow matching models have recently emerged as promising approaches for peptide binder design. Despite their progress, these models still face two major challenges. First, categorical sampling of discrete residue types collapses their continuous parameters into onehot assignments, while continuous variables (e.g., atom positions) evolve smoothly throughout the generation process. This mismatch disrupts the update dynamics and results in suboptimal performance. Second, current models assume unimodal distributions for side-chain torsion angles, which conflicts with the inherently multimodal nature of side-chain rotameric states and limits prediction accuracy. To address these limitations, we introduce PepBFN, the first Bayesian flow network for full-atom peptide design that directly models parameter distributions in fully continuous space. Specifically, PepBFN models discrete residue types by learning their continuous parameter distributions, enabling joint and smooth Bayesian updates with other continuous structural parameters. It further employs a novel Gaussian mixture-based Bayesian flow to capture the multimodal side-chain rotameric states and a Matrix Fisher-based Riemannian flow to directly model residue orientations on the SO(3) manifold. Together, these parameter distributions are progressively refined via Bayesian updates, yielding smooth and coherent peptide generation. Experiments on side-chain packing, reverse folding, and binder design tasks demonstrate the strong potential of PepBFN in computational peptide design.

PaperID: 1031, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07901

Authors:Hao Qiu, Mengxiao Zhang, Juliette Achddou

Affiliations: University of Milan, University of Iowa, UMR - CRIStAL, Université de Lille, Centrale Lille

Title: Decentralized Online Convex Optimization with Unknown Feedback Delays

Abstract:
Decentralized online convex optimization (DOCO), where multiple agents within a network collaboratively learn optimal decisions in real-time, arises naturally in applications such as federated learning, sensor networks, and multi-agent control. In this paper, we study D-OCO under unknown, time- and agent-varying feedback delays. While recent work has addressed this problem~\citepnguyen2024handling, existing algorithms assume prior knowledge of the total delay over agents and still suffer from suboptimal dependence on both the delay and network parameters. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel algorithm that achieves an improved regret bound of Õ(N √d_tot + N √( T / √(1 − σ₂) )), where d_tot denotes the average total delay across agents, N is the number of agents, and 1 − σ₂ is the spectral gap of the network. We also prove a lower bound showing that our upper bound is tight up to logarithmic factors. Our approach builds upon recent advances in D-OCO~\citepwan2024nearly, but crucially incorporates an adaptive learning rate mechanism via a decentralized communication protocol. This enables each agent to estimate delays locally using a gossip-based strategy without the prior knowledge of the total delay. We further extend our framework to the strongly convex setting and derive a sharper regret bound. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our approach, showing improvements over existing benchmark algorithms.

PaperID: 1032, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07971

Authors:Hyunseok Seung, Jaewoo Lee, Hyunsuk Ko

Affiliations: University of Wisconsin - Madison, University of Georgia, Hanyang University

Title: Low-Rank Curvature for Zeroth-Order Optimization in LLM Fine-tuning

Abstract:
We introduce LOREN, a curvatureaware zeroth-order (ZO) optimization method for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). Existing ZO methods, which estimate gradients via finite differences using random perturbations, often suffer from high variance and suboptimal search directions. Our approach addresses these challenges by: (i) reformulating the problem of gradient preconditioning as that of adaptively estimating an anisotropic perturbation distribution for gradient estimation, (ii) capturing curvature through a low-rank block diagonal preconditioner using the framework of natural evolution strategies, and (iii) applying a REINFORCE leave-one-out (RLOO) gradient estimator to reduce variance. Experiments on standard LLM benchmarks show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art ZO methods by achieving higher accuracy and faster convergence, while cutting peak memory usage by up to 27.3% compared with MeZO-Adam.

PaperID: 1033, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08043

Authors:Ashkan Shahbazi, Kyvia Pereira, Jon S. Heiselman, Elaheh Akbari, Annie C. Benson, Sepehr Seifi, Xinyuan Liu, Garrison Lawrence Horswill Johnston, Jie Ying Wu, Nabil Simaan, Michael Miga, Soheil Kolouri

Affiliations: Vanderbilt University

Title: Neural-Augmented Kelvinlet for Real-Time Soft Tissue Deformation Modeling

Abstract:
Accurate and efficient modeling of softtissue interactions is fundamental for advancing surgical simulation, surgical robotics, and model-based surgical automation. To achieve real-time latency, classical Finite Element Method (FEM) solvers are often replaced with neural approximations; however, naively training such models in a fully data-driven manner without incorporating physical priors frequently leads to poor generalization and physically implausible predictions. We present a novel physics-informed neural simulation framework that enables real-time prediction of soft-tissue deformations under complex single- and multi-grasper interactions. Our approach integrates Kelvinlet-based analytical priors with large-scale FEM data, capturing both linear and nonlinear tissue responses. This hybrid design improves predictive accuracy and physical plausibility across diverse neural architectures while maintaining the low-latency performance required for interactive applications. We validate our method on challenging surgical manipulation tasks involving standard laparoscopic grasping tools, demonstrating substantial improvements in deformation fidelity and temporal stability over existing baselines. These results establish Kelvinlet-augmented learning as a principled and computationally efficient paradigm for real-time, physics-aware soft-tissue simulation in surgical AI.

PaperID: 1034, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01506

Authors:Zishan Shao, Yixiao Wang, Qinsi Wang, Ting Jiang, Zhixu Du, Hancheng Ye, Danyang Zhuo, Yiran Chen, Hai ¨Helen¨ Li

Affiliations: Department of Statistical Science, Duke University, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Department of Computer Science

Title: FlashSVD: Memory-Efficient Inference with Streaming for Low-Rank Models

Abstract:
Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) has recently gained traction as an effective compression technique for large language models (LLMs), with many studies reporting 2080% parameter reduction at minimal accuracy cost. However, despite reducing weight memory, existing SVD-based approaches still rely on standard dense CUDA kernels during inference, which incur substantial-and ultimately unnecessary-activation memory overhead. Our analysis reveals that this kernel-induced cost, which grows with sequence length and hidden size, in worst case prevents any real reduction in peak inference memory, limiting the practical impact of SVD compression for on-device deployment. To address this bottleneck, we propose FlashSVD, an end-to-end, rank-aware streaming inference framework for SVD-compressed LLMs. FlashSVD integrates seamlessly with any SVD-based model and directly fuses low-rank projection kernels into self-attention and feed-forward pipelines. This design avoids materializing large activation buffers by streaming small tiles of truncated factors through on-chip SRAM, performing on-the-fly multiplication and reduction, and immediately evicting results–thus preserving high GPU occupancy without introducing latency. On standard benchmarks (e.g., BERT-Base), FlashSVD reduces peak activation memory by up to 70.2% and transient memory by 75%, with zero accuracy loss against low-rank baselines, enabling truly memory-efficient deployment of low-rank LLMs.

PaperID: 1035, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07226

Authors:Runwu Shi, Chang Li, Jiang Wang, Rui Zhang, Nabeela Khan, Benjamin Yen, Takeshi Ashizawa, Kazuhiro Nakadai

Affiliations: Institute of Science Tokyo, University of Science and Technology of China, University of Hong Kong

Title: Unsupervised Single-Channel Audio Separation with Diffusion Source Priors

Abstract:
Singlechannel audio separation aims to separate individual sources from a single-channel mixture. Most existing methods rely on supervised learning with synthetically generated paired data. However, obtaining high-quality paired data in real-world scenarios is often difficult. This data scarcity can degrade model performance under unseen conditions and limit generalization ability. To this end, in this work, we approach this problem from an unsupervised perspective, framing it as a probabilistic inverse problem. Our method requires only diffusion priors trained on individual sources. Separation is then achieved by iteratively guiding an initial state toward the solution through reconstruction guidance. Importantly, we introduce an advanced inverse problem solver specifically designed for separation, which mitigates gradient conflicts caused by interference between the diffusion prior and reconstruction guidance during inverse denoising. This design ensures high-quality and balanced separation performance across individual sources. Additionally, we find that initializing the denoising process with an augmented mixture instead of pure Gaussian noise provides an informative starting point that significantly improves the final performance. To further enhance audio prior modeling, we design a novel time–frequency attention-based network architecture that demonstrates strong audio modeling capability. Collectively, these improvements lead to significant performance gains, as validated across speech–sound event, sound event, and speech separation tasks.

PaperID: 1036, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11828

Authors:Wenwen Si, Sooyong Jang, Insup Lee, Osbert Bastani

Affiliations: University of Pennsylvania

Title: Conformal Constrained Policy Optimization for Cost-Effective LLM Agents

Abstract:
While large language models (LLMs) have recently made tremendous progress towards solving challenging AI problems, they have done so at increasingly steep computational and API costs. We propose a novel strategy where we combine multiple LLM models with varying cost/accuracy tradeoffs in an agentic manner, where models and tools are run in sequence as determined by an orchestration model to minimize cost subject to a userspecified level of reliability; this constraint is formalized using conformal prediction to provide guarantees. To solve this problem, we propose Conformal Constrained Policy Optimization (CCPO), a training paradigm that integrates constrained policy optimization with off-policy reinforcement learning and recent advances in online conformal prediction. CCPO jointly optimizes a cost-aware policy (score function) and an adaptive threshold. Across two multi-hop question answering benchmarks, CCPO achieves up to a 30% cost reduction compared to other cost-aware baselines and LLM-guided methods without compromising reliability. Our approach provides a principled and practical framework for deploying LLM agents that are significantly more cost-effective while maintaining reliability.

PaperID: 1037, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14523

Authors:Gabriela Ben Melech Stan, Estelle Aflalo, Avinash Madasu, Vasudev Lal, Phillip Howard

Affiliations:

Title: Learning from Reasoning Failures via Synthetic Data Generation

Abstract:
Training models on synthetic data has emerged as an increasingly important strategy for improving the performance of generative AI. This approach is particularly helpful for large multimodal models (LMMs) due to the relative scarcity of highquality paired image-text data compared to language-only data. While a variety of methods have been proposed for generating large multimodal datasets, they do not tailor the synthetic data to address specific deficiencies in the reasoning abilities of LMMs which will be trained with the generated dataset. In contrast, humans often learn in a more efficient manner by seeking out examples related to the types of reasoning where they have failed previously. Inspired by this observation, we propose a new approach for synthetic data generation which is grounded in the analysis of an existing LMM's reasoning failures. Our methodology leverages frontier models to automatically analyze errors produced by a weaker LMM and propose new examples which can be used to correct the reasoning failure via additional training, which are then further filtered to ensure high quality. We generate a large multimodal instruction tuning dataset containing over 553k examples using our approach and conduct extensive experiments demonstrating its utility for improving the performance of LMMs on multiple downstream tasks. Our results show that models trained on our synthetic data can even exceed the performance of LMMs trained on an equivalent amount of additional real data, demonstrating the high value of generating synthetic data targeted to specific reasoning failure modes in LMMs.

PaperID: 1038, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22406

Authors:Roland Stolz, Michael Eichelbeck, Matthias Althoff

Affiliations: Technical University of Munich

Title: Improving Stochastic Action-Constrained Reinforcement Learning via Truncated Distributions

Abstract:
In reinforcement learning (RL), it is often advantageous to consider additional constraints on the action space to ensure safety or action relevance. Existing work on such actionconstrained RL faces challenges regarding effective policy updates, computational efficiency, and predictable runtime. Recent work proposes to use truncated normal distributions for stochastic policy gradient methods. However, the computation of key characteristics, such as the entropy, log-probability, and their gradients, becomes intractable under complex constraints. Hence, prior work approximates these using the non-truncated distributions, which severely degrades performance. We argue that accurate estimation of these characteristics is crucial in the action-constrained RL setting, and propose efficient numerical approximations for them. We also provide an efficient sampling strategy for truncated policy distributions and validate our approach on three benchmark environments, which demonstrate significant performance improvements when using accurate estimations.

PaperID: 1039, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21717

Authors:Baoliang Tian, Yuxuan Si, Jilong Wang, LingYao Li, Zhongyuan Bao, Zineng Zhou, Tao Wang, Sixu Li, Ziyao Xu, Mingze Wang, Zhouzhuo Zhang, Zhihao Wang, Yi Ke Yun, Ke Tian, Ning Yang, Minghui Qiu

Affiliations: Zhejiang University ByteDance, Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: CrossCheck-Bench: Diagnosing Compositional Failures in Multimodal Conflict Resolution

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models are primarily trained and evaluated on aligned imagetext pairs, which leaves their ability to detect and resolve real-world inconsistencies largely unexplored. In open-domain applications visual and textual cues often conflict, requiring models to perform structured reasoning beyond surface-level alignment. We introduce CrossCheck-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating contradiction detection in multimodal inputs. The benchmark adopts a hierarchical task framework covering three levels of reasoning complexity and defines seven atomic capabilities essential for resolving cross-modal inconsistencies. CrossCheck-Bench includes 15k question-answer pairs sourced from real-world artifacts with synthetically injected contradictions. The dataset is constructed through a multi-stage annotation pipeline involving more than 450 expert hours to ensure semantic validity and calibrated difficulty across perception, integration, and reasoning. We evaluate 13 state-of-the-art vision-language models and observe a consistent performance drop as tasks shift from perceptual matching to logical contradiction detection. Most models perform well on isolated entity recognition but fail when multiple clues must be synthesized for conflict reasoning. Capability-level analysis further reveals uneven skill acquisition, especially in tasks requiring multi-step inference or rule-based validation. Additional probing shows that conventional prompting strategies such as Chain-of-Thought and Set-of-Mark yield only marginal gains. By contrast, methods that interleave symbolic reasoning with grounded visual processing achieve more stable improvements. These results highlight a persistent bottleneck in multimodal reasoning and suggest new directions for building models capable of robust cross-modal verification.

PaperID: 1040, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18773

Authors:Senmao Tian, Xiang Wei, Shunli Zhang

Affiliations: Beijing Jiaotong University

Title: Sampling Control for Imbalanced Calibration in Semi-Supervised Learning

Abstract:
Class imbalance remains a critical challenge in semisupervised learning (SSL), especially when distributional mismatches between labeled and unlabeled data lead to biased classification. Although existing methods address this issue by adjusting logits based on the estimated class distribution of unlabeled data, they often handle model imbalance in a coarse-grained manner, conflating data imbalance with bias arising from varying class-specific learning difficulties. To address this issue, we propose a unified framework, SC-SSL, which suppresses model bias through decoupled sampling control. During training, we identify the key variables for sampling control under ideal conditions. By introducing a classifier with explicit expansion capability and adaptively adjusting sampling probabilities across different data distributions, SC-SSL mitigates feature-level imbalance for minority classes. In the inference phase, we further analyze the weight imbalance of the linear classifier and apply post-hoc sampling control with an optimization bias vector to directly calibrate the logits. Extensive experiments across various benchmark datasets and distribution settings validate the consistency and state-of-the-art performance of SC-SSL.

PaperID: 1041, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13789

Authors:Md Joshem Uddin, Soham Changani, Baris Coskunuzer

Affiliations: The University of Texas at Dallas

Title: T3former: Temporal Graph Classification with Topological Machine Learning

Abstract:
Temporal graph classification plays a critical role in applications such as cybersecurity, brain connectivity analysis, social dynamics, and traffic monitoring. Despite its significance, this problem remains underexplored compared to temporal link prediction or node forecasting. Existing methods often rely on snapshotbased or recurrent architectures that either lose fine-grained temporal information or struggle with long-range dependencies. Moreover, local message-passing approaches suffer from oversmoothing and oversquashing, limiting their ability to capture complex temporal structures. We introduce T3FORMER, a novel Topological Temporal Transformer that leverages sliding-window topological and spectral descriptors as first-class tokens, integrated via a specialized Descriptor-Attention mechanism. This design preserves temporal fidelity, enhances robustness, and enables principled cross-modal fusion without rigid discretization. T3former achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, including dynamic social networks, brain functional connectivity datasets, and traffic networks. It also offers theoretical guarantees of stability under temporal and structural perturbations. Our results highlight the power of combining topological and spectral insights for advancing the frontier of temporal graph learning.

PaperID: 1042, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00725

Authors:Xinyue Wang, Yuheng Jia, Hui Liu, Junhui Hou

Affiliations: Southeast University, Saint Francis University, City University of Hong Kong

Title: ESMC: MLLM-Based Embedding Selection for Explainable Multiple Clustering

Abstract:
Typical deep clustering methods, while achieving notable progress, can only provide one clustering result per dataset. This limitation arises from their assumption of a fixed underlying data distribution, which may fail to meet user needs and provide unsatisfactory clustering outcomes. Our work investigates how multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can be leveraged to achieve user-driven clustering, emphasizing their adaptability to user-specified semantic requirements. However, directly using MLLM output for clustering has risks for producing unstructured and generic image descriptions instead of feature-specific and concrete ones. To address these issues, our method first discovers that MLLMs' hidden states of text tokens are strongly related to the corresponding features, and leverages these embeddings to perform clusterings from any user-defined criteria. We also employ a lightweight clustering head augmented with pseudo-label learning, significantly enhancing clustering accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate its competitive performance on diverse datasets and metrics.

PaperID: 1043, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08625

Authors:Zhenzhong Wang, Xin Zhang, Jun Liao, Min Jiang

Affiliations: School of Informatics, Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Xiamen University

Title: Cross-Field Interface-Aware Neural Operators for Multiphase Flow Simulation

Abstract:
Multiphase flow simulation is critical in science and engineering but incurs high computational costs due to complex field discontinuities and the need for highresolution numerical meshes. While Neural Operators (NOs) offer an efficient alternative for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs), they struggle with two core challenges unique to multiphase systems: spectral bias caused by spatial heterogeneity at phase interfaces, and the persistent scarcity of expensive, high-resolution field data. This work introduces the Interface Information Aware Neural Operator (IANO), a novel architecture that mitigates these issues by leveraging readily obtainable interface data (e.g., topology and position). Interface data inherently contains the high-frequency features not only necessary to complement the physical field data, but also help with spectral bias. IANO incorporates an interface-aware function encoding mechanism to capture dynamic coupling, and a geometry-aware positional encoding method to enhance spatial fidelity for pointwise super-resolution. Empirical results across multiple multiphase flow cases demonstrate that IANO achieves significant accuracy improvements (up to ~10%) over existing NO baselines. Furthermore, IANO exhibits superior generalization capabilities in low-data and noisy settings, confirming its utility for practical, data-efficient AI-based multiphase flow simulations.

PaperID: 1044, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17631

Authors:Bingjun Wei, Xuemei Cao, Jiafen Liu, Haoyang Liang, Xin Yang

Affiliations: Southwestern University of Finance and Economics

Title: Enhanced Federated Deep Multi-View Clustering Under Uncertainty Scenario

Abstract:
Traditional Federated MultiView Clustering assumes uniform views across clients, yet practical deployments reveal heterogeneous view completeness with prevalent incomplete, redundant, or corrupted data. While recent approaches model view heterogeneity, they neglect semantic conflicts from dynamic view combinations, failing to address dual uncertainties: view uncertainty (semantic inconsistency from arbitrary view pairings) and aggregation uncertainty (divergent client updates with imbalanced contributions). To address these, we propose a novel Enhanced Federated Deep Multi-View Clustering framework: first align local semantics, hierarchical contrastive fusion within clients resolves view uncertainty by eliminating semantic conflicts; a view adaptive drift module mitigates aggregation uncertainty through global-local prototype contrast that dynamically corrects parameter deviations; and a balanced aggregation mechanism coordinates client updates. Experimental results demonstrate that EFDMVC achieves superior robustness against heterogeneous uncertain views across multiple benchmark datasets, consistently outperforming all state-of-the-art baselines in comprehensive evaluations.

PaperID: 1045, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09889

Authors:Shengfei Wei, Suyuan Liu, Jun Wang, Ke Liang, Miaomiao Li, Lei Luo

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology, Changsha University

Title: A General Anchor-Based Framework for Scalable Fair Clustering

Abstract:
Fair clustering is crucial for mitigating bias in unsupervised learning, yet existing algorithms often suffer from quadratic or superquadratic computational complexity, rendering them impractical for large-scale datasets. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Anchor-based Fair Clustering Framework (AFCF), a novel, general, and plug-and-play framework that empowers arbitrary fair clustering algorithms with linear-time scalability. Our approach first selects a small but representative set of anchors using a novel fair sampling strategy. Then, any off-the-shelf fair clustering algorithm can be applied to this small anchor set. The core of our framework lies in a novel anchor graph construction module, where we formulate an optimization problem to propagate labels while preserving fairness. This is achieved through a carefully designed group-label joint constraint, which we prove theoretically ensures that the fairness of the final clustering on the entire dataset matches that of the anchor clustering. We solve this optimization efficiently using an ADMM-based algorithm. Extensive experiments on multiple large-scale benchmarks demonstrate that AFCF drastically accelerates state-of-the-art methods, which reduces computational time by orders of magnitude while maintaining strong clustering performance and fairness guarantees.

PaperID: 1046, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.04392

Authors:Jiezhong Wu, Jack O'Brien, Jennifer Li, M. S. Krafczyk, Ved G. Shah, Amanda R. Wasserman, Daniel W. Apley, Gautham Narayan, Noelle I. Samia

Affiliations: NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky (SkAI), USA Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, Northwestern University, USA Department of Astronomy, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), USA Department of Physics and Astronomy, USA Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA), USA Department of Statistics and Data Science

Title: SELDON: Supernova Explosions Learned by Deep ODE Networks

Abstract:
The discovery rate of optical transients will explode to 10 million public alerts per night once the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time comes online, overwhelming the traditional physicsbased inference pipelines. A continuous-time forecasting AI model is of interest because it can deliver millisecond-scale inference for thousands of objects per day, whereas legacy MCMC codes need hours per object. In this paper, we propose SELDON, a new continuous-time variational autoencoder for panels of sparse and irregularly time-sampled (gappy) astrophysical light curves that are nonstationary, heteroscedastic, and inherently dependent. SELDON combines a masked GRU-ODE encoder with a latent neural ODE propagator and an interpretable Gaussian-basis decoder. The encoder learns to summarize panels of imbalanced and correlated data even when only a handful of points are observed. The neural ODE then integrates this hidden state forward in continuous time, extrapolating to future unseen epochs. This extrapolated time series is further encoded by deep sets to a latent distribution that is decoded to a weighted sum of Gaussian basis functions, the parameters of which are physically meaningful. Such parameters (e.g., rise time, decay rate, peak flux) directly drive downstream prioritization of spectroscopic follow-up for astrophysical surveys. Beyond astronomy, the architecture of SELDON offers a generic recipe for interpretable and continuous-time sequence modeling in any time domain where data are multivariate, sparse, heteroscedastic, and irregularly spaced.

PaperID: 1047, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04511

Authors:Yinghui Xing, Xiaoting Su, Shizhou Zhang, Donghao Chu, Di Xu

Affiliations: Northwest Polytechnical University, Huawei Technologies Ltd.

Title: DuGI-MAE: Improving Infrared Mask Autoencoders via Dual-Domain Guidance

Abstract:
Infrared imaging plays a critical role in lowlight and adverse weather conditions. However, due to the distinct characteristics of infrared images, existing foundation models such as Masked Autoencoder (MAE) trained on visible data perform suboptimal in infrared image interpretation tasks. To bridge this gap, an infrared foundation model known as InfMAE was developed and pre-trained on large-scale infrared datasets. Despite its effectiveness, InfMAE still faces several limitations, including the omission of informative tokens, insufficient modeling of global associations, and neglect of non-uniform noise. In this paper, we propose a Dual-domain Guided Infrared foundation model based on MAE (DuGI-MAE). First, we design a deterministic masking strategy based on token entropy, preserving only high-entropy tokens for reconstruction to enhance informativeness. Next, we introduce a Dual-Domain Guidance (DDG) module, which simultaneously captures global token relationships and adaptively filters non-uniform background noise commonly present in infrared imagery. To facilitate large-scale pretraining, we construct Inf-590K, a comprehensive infrared image dataset encompassing diverse scenes, various target types, and multiple spatial resolutions. Pretrained on Inf-590K, DuGI-MAE demonstrates strong generalization capabilities across various downstream tasks, including infrared object detection, semantic segmentation, and small target detection. Experimental results validate the superiority of the proposed method over both supervised and self-supervised comparison methods.

PaperID: 1048, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05144

Authors:Beicheng Xu, Wei Liu, Keyao Ding, Yupeng Lu, Bin Cui

Affiliations: Peking University

Title: PSEO: Optimizing Post-hoc Stacking Ensemble Through Hyperparameter Tuning

Abstract:
The Combined Algorithm Selection and Hyperparameter Optimization (CASH) problem is fundamental in Automated Machine Learning (AutoML). Inspired by the success of ensemble learning, recent AutoML systems construct posthoc ensembles for final predictions rather than relying on the best single model. However, while most CASH methods conduct extensive searches for the optimal single model, they typically employ fixed strategies during the ensemble phase that fail to adapt to specific task characteristics. To tackle this issue, we propose PSEO, a framework for post-hoc stacking ensemble optimization. First, we conduct base model selection through binary quadratic programming, with a trade-off between diversity and performance. Furthermore, we introduce two mechanisms to fully realize the potential of multi-layer stacking. Finally, PSEO builds a hyperparameter space and searches for the optimal post-hoc ensemble strategy within it. Empirical results on 80 public datasets show that PSEO achieves the best average test rank (2.96) among 16 methods, including post-hoc designs in recent AutoML systems and state-of-the-art ensemble learning methods.

PaperID: 1049, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12988

Authors:Furui Xu, Shaobo Wang, Jiajun Zhang, Chenghao Sun, Haixiang Tang, Linfeng Zhang

Affiliations: EPIC Lab, Beijing Jiaotong University, Central South University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Shanghai Jiaotong University

Title: UNSEEN: Enhancing Dataset Pruning from a Generalization Perspective

Abstract:
The growing scale of datasets in deep learning has introduced significant computational challenges. Dataset pruning addresses this challenge by constructing a compact but informative coreset from the full dataset with comparable performance. Previous approaches typically establish scoring metrics based on specific criteria to identify representative samples. However, these methods predominantly rely on sample scores obtained from the model's performance during the training (i.e., fitting) phase. As scoring models achieve nearoptimal performance on training data, such fitting-centric approaches induce a dense distribution of sample scores within a narrow numerical range. This concentration reduces the distinction between samples and hinders effective selection. To address this challenge, we conduct dataset pruning from the perspective of generalization, i.e., scoring samples based on models not exposed to them during training. We propose a plug-and-play framework, UNSEEN, which can be integrated into existing dataset pruning methods. Additionally, conventional score-based methods are single-step and rely on models trained solely on the complete dataset, providing limited perspective on the importance of samples. To address this limitation, we scale UNSEEN to multi-step scenarios and propose an incremental selection technique through scoring models trained on varying coresets, and optimize the quality of the coreset dynamically. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-1K. Notably, on ImageNet-1K, UNSEEN achieves lossless performance while reducing training data by 30%.

PaperID: 1050, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07274

Authors:Jinfeng Xu, Zheyu Chen, Shuo Yang, Jinze Li, Ziyue Peng, Zewei Liu, Hewei Wang, Jiayi Zhang, Edith C. H. Ngai

Affiliations: The University of Hong Kong, Beijing Institute of Technology, University of Macau, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Nottingham

Title: Multi-modal Dynamic Proxy Learning for Personalized Multiple Clustering

Abstract:
Multiple clustering aims to discover diverse latent structures from different perspectives, yet existing methods generate exhaustive clusterings without discerning user interest, necessitating laborious manual screening. Current multimodal solutions suffer from static semantic rigidity: predefined candidate words fail to adapt to dataset-specific concepts, and fixed fusion strategies ignore evolving feature interactions. To overcome these limitations, we propose Multi-DProxy, a novel multi-modal dynamic proxy learning framework that leverages cross-modal alignment through learnable textual proxies. Multi-DProxy introduces 1) gated cross-modal fusion that synthesizes discriminative joint representations by adaptively modeling feature interactions. 2) dual-constraint proxy optimization where user interest constraints enforce semantic consistency with domain concepts while concept constraints employ hard example mining to enhance cluster discrimination. 3) dynamic candidate management that refines textual proxies through iterative clustering feedback. Therefore, Multi-DProxy not only effectively captures a user's interest through proxies but also enables the identification of relevant clusterings with greater precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements over existing methods across a broad set of multi-clustering benchmarks.

PaperID: 1051, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14988

Authors:Tianyi Xu, Jiaxin Liu, Nicholas Mattei, Zizhan Zheng

Affiliations: Tulane University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Title: Fair Algorithms with Probing for Multi-Agent Multi-Armed Bandits

Abstract:
We propose a multiagent multi-armed bandit (MA-MAB) framework to ensure fair outcomes across agents while maximizing overall system performance. For example, in a ridesharing setting where a central dispatcher assigns drivers to distinct geographic regions, utilitarian welfare (the sum of driver earnings) can be highly skewed—some drivers may receive no rides. We instead measure fairness by Nash social welfare, i.e., the product of individual rewards. A key challenge in this setting is decision-making under limited information about arm rewards (geographic regions). To address this, we introduce a novel probing mechanism that strategically gathers information about selected arms before assignment. In the offline setting, where reward distributions are known, we exploit submodularity to design a greedy probing algorithm with a constant-factor approximation guarantee. In the online setting, we develop a probing-based algorithm that achieves sublinear regret while preserving Nash social welfare. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms baseline methods in both fairness and efficiency.

PaperID: 1052, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08841

Authors:Xincheng Xu, Thilina Ranbaduge, Qing Wang, Thierry Rakotoarivelo, David Smith

Affiliations: School of Computing, Australian National University, Data CSIRO

Title: Enhancing DPSGD via Per-Sample Momentum and Low-Pass Filtering

Abstract:
Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DPSGD) is widely used to train deep neural networks with formal privacy guarantees. However, the addition of differential privacy (DP) often degrades model accuracy by introducing both noise and bias. Existing techniques typically address only one of these issues, as reducing DP noise can exacerbate clipping bias and viceversa. In this paper, we propose a novel method, DP-PMLF, which integrates per-sample momentum with a low-pass filtering strategy to simultaneously mitigate DP noise and clipping bias. Our approach uses per-sample momentum to smooth gradient estimates prior to clipping, thereby reducing sampling variance. It further employs a post-processing low-pass filter to attenuate high-frequency DP noise without consuming additional privacy budget. We provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating an improved convergence rate under rigorous DP guarantees, and our empirical evaluations reveal that DP-PMLF significantly enhances the privacy-utility trade-off compared to several state-of-the-art DPSGD variants.

PaperID: 1053, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09157

Authors:Leyang Yang, Ziwei Wang, Xiaoxuan Tang, Sheng Zhou, Dajun Chen, Wei Jiang, Yong Li

Affiliations: Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Accessible Perception and Intelligent Systems, Zhejiang University, Ant Group

Title: ProBench: Benchmarking GUI Agents with Accurate Process Information

Abstract:
With the deep integration of artificial intelligence and interactive technology, Graphical User Interface (GUI) Agent, as the carrier connecting goaloriented natural language and real-world devices, has received widespread attention from the community. Contemporary benchmarks aim to evaluate the comprehensive capabilities of GUI agents in GUI operation tasks, generally determining task completion solely by inspecting the final screen state. However, GUI operation tasks consist of multiple chained steps while not all critical information is presented in the final few pages. Although a few research has begun to incorporate intermediate steps into evaluation, accurately and automatically capturing this process information still remains an open challenge. To address this weakness, we introduce ProBench, a comprehensive mobile benchmark with over 200 challenging GUI tasks covering widely-used scenarios. Remaining the traditional State-related Task evaluation, we extend our dataset to include Process-related Task and design a specialized evaluation method. A newly introduced Process Provider automatically supplies accurate process information, enabling presice assessment of agent's performance. Our evaluation of advanced GUI agents reveals significant limitations for real-world GUI scenarios. These shortcomings are prevalent across diverse models, including both large-scale generalist models and smaller, GUI-specific models. A detailed error analysis further exposes several universal problems, outlining concrete directions for future improvements.

PaperID: 1054, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.14224

Authors:Xu Yang, Jiapeng Zhang, Dongyang Zhao, Guo Chen, Zhuo Tang

Affiliations: Hunan University

Title: Self-Indexing KVCache: Predicting Sparse Attention from Compressed Keys

Abstract:
The KV cache in selfattention has emerged as a major bottleneck in long-context and large-batch inference for LLMs. Existing approaches often treat sparsity prediction and compression as separate modules—relying on auxiliary index structures to select relevant tokens, and on complex quantization schemes to reduce memory usage. This fragmented design introduces redundant overhead and limits scalability. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm: treating the compressed key representation not merely as storage, but as a self-indexing structure that directly enables efficient sparse attention. By designing a sign-based 1-bit vector quantization (VQ) scheme, our method unifies compression and retrieval in a single, hardware-friendly format. This approach eliminates the need for external indices or learning-based predictors, offering a lightweight yet robust solution for memory-constrained inference. All components are designed to be hardware-efficient and easy to implement. By implementing custom CUDA kernels, our method integrates seamlessly with FlashAttention, minimizing additional runtime and memory overhead. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach delivers both effectiveness and efficiency.

PaperID: 1055, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08985

Authors:Yunfei Yang, Xiaojun Chen, Yuexin Xuan, Zhendong Zhao, Xin Zhao, He Li

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China State Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Security Defense, China School of Cyber Security, PetroChina (Beijing) Digital Intelligent Research Institute Co.

Title: DeepTracer: Tracing Stolen Model via Deep Coupled Watermarks

Abstract:
Model watermarking techniques can embed watermark information into the protected model for ownership declaration by constructing specific inputoutput pairs. However, existing watermarks are easily removed when facing model stealing attacks, and make it difficult for model owners to effectively verify the copyright of stolen models. In this paper, we analyze the root cause of the failure of current watermarking methods under model stealing scenarios and then explore potential solutions. Specifically, we introduce a robust watermarking framework, DeepTracer, which leverages a novel watermark samples construction method and a same-class coupling loss constraint. DeepTracer can incur a high-coupling model between watermark task and primary task that makes adversaries inevitably learn the hidden watermark task when stealing the primary task functionality. Furthermore, we propose an effective watermark samples filtering mechanism that elaborately select watermark key samples used in model ownership verification to enhance the reliability of watermarks. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and models demonstrate that our method surpasses existing approaches in defending against various model stealing attacks, as well as watermark attacks, and achieves new state-of-the-art effectiveness and robustness.

PaperID: 1056, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08628

Authors:Xuan Yu, Tianyang Xu

Affiliations: Jiangnan University

Title: Learning Topology-Driven Multi-Subspace Fusion for Grassmannian Deep Networks

Abstract:
Grassmannian manifolds offer a powerful carrier for geometric representation learning by modelling highdimensional data as low-dimensional subspaces. However, existing approaches predominantly rely on static single-subspace representations, neglecting the dynamic interplay between multiple subspaces critical for capturing complex geometric structures. To address this limitation, we propose a topology-driven multi-subspace fusion framework that enables adaptive subspace collaboration on the Grassmannian. Our solution introduces two key innovations: (1) an adaptive multi-subspace construction mechanism that dynamically selects and weights task-relevant subspaces via topological convergence analysis, and (2) a multi-subspace interaction block that fuses heterogeneous geometric representations through Fréchet mean optimisation on the manifold. Theoretically, we establish the convergence guarantees of adaptive subspaces under a projection metric topology, ensuring stable gradient-based optimisation. Practically, we integrate Riemannian batch normalisation and mutual information regularisation to enhance discriminability and robustness. Extensive experiments on 3D action recognition (HDM05, FPHA), EEG classification (MAMEM-SSVEPII), and graph tasks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Our work not only advances geometric deep learning but also successfully adapts the proven multi-channel interaction philosophy of Euclidean networks to non-Euclidean domains, achieving superior discriminability and interpretability.

PaperID: 1057, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16423

Authors:Li Zhang, Zhongxuan Han, XiaoHua Feng, Jiaming Zhang, Yuyuan Li, Linbo Jiang, Jianan Lin, Chaochao Chen

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Ant Group

Title: TOFA: Training-Free One-Shot Federated Adaptation for Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
Efficient and lightweight adaptation of pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to downstream tasks through collaborative interactions between local clients and a central server is a rapidly emerging research topic in federated learning. Existing adaptation algorithms are typically trained iteratively, which incur significant communication costs and increase the susceptibility to potential attacks. Motivated by the one-shot federated training techniques that reduce client-server exchanges to a single round, developing a lightweight one-shot federated VLM adaptation method to alleviate these issues is particularly attractive. However, current one-shot approaches face certain challenges in adapting VLMs within federated settings: (1) insufficient exploitation of the rich multimodal information inherent in VLMs; (2) lack of specialized adaptation strategies to systematically handle the severe data heterogeneity; and (3) requiring additional training resource of clients or server. To bridge these gaps, we propose a novel Training-free One-shot Federated Adaptation framework for VLMs, named TOFA. To fully leverage the generalizable multimodal features in pre-trained VLMs, TOFA employs both visual and textual pipelines to extract task-relevant representations. In the visual pipeline, a hierarchical Bayesian model learns personalized, class-specific prototype distributions. For the textual pipeline, TOFA evaluates and globally aligns the generated local text prompts for robustness. An adaptive weight calibration mechanism is also introduced to combine predictions from both modalities, balancing personalization and robustness to handle data heterogeneity. Our method is training-free, not relying on additional training resources on either the client or server side. Extensive experiments across 9 datasets in various federated settings demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed TOFA method.

PaperID: 1058, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07032

Authors:Yixuan Zhang, Jiabin Luo, Zhenggang Wang, Feng Zhou, Quyu Kong

Affiliations: Southeast University, Peking University, Renmin University of China Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Future Blockchain and Privacy Computing, Alibaba Cloud

Title: Fair Bayesian Data Selection via Generalized Discrepancy Measures

Abstract:
Fairness concerns are increasingly critical as machine learning models are deployed in highstakes applications. While existing fairness-aware methods typically intervene at the model level, they often suffer from high computational costs, limited scalability, and poor generalization. To address these challenges, we propose a Bayesian data selection framework that ensures fairness by aligning group-specific posterior distributions of model parameters and sample weights with a shared central distribution. Our framework supports flexible alignment via various distributional discrepancy measures, including Wasserstein distance, maximum mean discrepancy, and f-divergence, allowing geometry-aware control without imposing explicit fairness constraints. This data-centric approach mitigates group-specific biases in training data and improves fairness in downstream tasks, with theoretical guarantees. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method consistently outperforms existing data selection and model-based fairness methods in both fairness and accuracy.

PaperID: 1059, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12296

Authors:Hong Zheng, Fei Teng

Affiliations: School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwest Jiaotong University, Ministry of Education

Title: Distribution Shift Is Key to Learning Invariant Prediction

Abstract:
An interesting phenomenon arises: Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) sometimes outperforms methods specifically designed for outof-distribution tasks. This motivates an investigation into the reasons behind such behavior beyond algorithmic design. In this study, we find that one such reason lies in the distribution shift across training domains. A large degree of distribution shift can lead to better performance even under ERM. Specifically, we derive several theoretical and empirical findings demonstrating that distribution shift plays a crucial role in model learning and benefits learning invariant prediction. Firstly, the proposed upper bounds indicate that the degree of distribution shift directly affects the prediction ability of the learned models. If it is large, the models’ ability can increase, approximating invariant prediction models that make stable predictions under arbitrary known or unseen domains; and vice versa. We also prove that, under certain data conditions, ERM solutions can achieve performance comparable to that of invariant prediction models. Secondly, the empirical validation results demonstrated that the predictions of learned models approximate those of Oracle or Optimal models, provided that the degree of distribution shift in the training data increases.

PaperID: 1060, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11113

Authors:Lele Zheng, Xiang Wang, Tao Zhang, Yang Cao, Ke Cheng, Yulong Shen

Affiliations: Xidian University, Institute of Science Tokyo

Title: Differentially Private Subspace Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models

Abstract:
Finetuning large language models on downstream tasks is crucial for realizing their cross-domain potential but often relies on sensitive data, raising privacy concerns. Differential privacy (DP) offers rigorous privacy guarantees and has been widely adopted in fine-tuning; however, naively injecting noise across the high-dimensional parameter space creates perturbations with large norms, degrading performance and destabilizing training. To address this issue, we propose DP-SFT, a two-stage subspace fine-tuning method that substantially reduces noise magnitude while preserving formal DP guarantees. Our intuition is that, during fine-tuning, significant parameter updates lie within a low-dimensional, task-specific subspace, while other directions change minimally. Hence, we only inject DP noise into this subspace to protect privacy without perturbing irrelevant parameters. In phase one, we identify the subspace by analyzing principal gradient directions to capture task-specific update signals. In phase two, we project full gradients onto this subspace, add DP noise, and map the perturbed gradients back to the original parameter space for model updates, markedly lowering noise impact. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that DP-SFT enhances accuracy and stability under rigorous DP constraints, accelerates convergence, and achieves substantial gains over DP fine-tuning baselines.

PaperID: 1061, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12917

Authors:Ruishu Zhu, Sida Huang, Ziheng Jiao, Hongyuan Zhang

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, OPtics and ElectroNics (iOPEN), China Telecom, HuaWei Technologies Co., Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI)

Title: Explore How to Inject Beneficial Noise in MLLMs

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have played an increasingly important role in multimodal intelligence. However, the existing finetuning methods often ignore cross-modal heterogeneity, limiting their full potential. In this work, we propose a novel fine-tuning strategy by injecting beneficial random noise, which outperforms previous methods and even surpasses full fine-tuning, with minimal additional parameters. The proposed Multimodal Noise Generator (MuNG) enables efficient modality fine-tuning by injecting customized noise into the frozen MLLMs. Specifically, we reformulate the reasoning process of MLLMs from a variational inference perspective, upon which we design a multimodal noise generator that dynamically analyzes cross-modal relationships in image-text pairs to generate task adaptive beneficial noise. Injecting this type of noise into the MLLMs effectively suppresses irrelevant semantic components, leading to significantly improved cross-modal representation alignment and enhanced performance on downstream tasks. Experiments on two mainstream MLLMs, QwenVL and LLaVA, demonstrate that our method surpasses full parameter fine-tuning and other existing fine-tuning approaches, while requiring adjustments to only about 1~2% additional parameters.

PaperID: 1062, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13137

Authors:Yanda Zhu, Yuanyang Zhu, Daoyi Dong, Caihua Chen, Chunlin Chen

Affiliations: Nanjing University, University of Technology Sydney

Title: Conditional Diffusion Model for Multi-Agent Dynamic Task Decomposition

Abstract:
Task decomposition has shown promise in complex cooperative multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) tasks, which enables efficient hierarchical learning for long-horizon tasks in dynamic and uncertain environments. However, learning dynamic task decomposition from scratch generally requires a large number of training samples, especially exploring the large joint action space under partial observability. In this paper, we present the Conditional Diffusion Model for Dynamic Task Decomposition (CD3T), a novel two-level hierarchical MARL framework designed to automatically infer subtask and coordination patterns. The high-level policy learns subtask representation to generate a subtask selection strategy based on subtask effects. To capture the effects of subtasks on the environment, CD3T predicts the next observation and reward using a conditional diffusion model. At the low level, agents collaboratively learn and share specialized skills within their assigned subtasks. Moreover, the learned subtask representation is also used as additional semantic information in a multi-head attention mixing network to enhance value decomposition and provide an efficient reasoning bridge between individual and joint value functions. Experimental results on various benchmarks demonstrate that CD3T achieves better performance than existing baselines.

PaperID: 1063, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20457

Authors:Marco Aruta, Francesco Improta, Vadim Malvone, Aniello Murano

Affiliations: University of Naples Federico II, Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris

Title: When Natural Strategies Meet Fuzziness and Resource-Bounded Actions

Abstract:
In formal strategic reasoning for MultiAgent Systems (MAS), agents are typically assumed to (i) employ arbitrarily complex strategies, (ii) execute each move at zero cost, and (iii) operate over fully crisp game structures. These idealized assumptions stand in stark contrast with human decision-making in real-world environments. The natural strategies framework, along with some of its recent variants, partially addresses this gap by restricting strategies to concise rules guarded by regular expressions. Yet, it still overlook both the cost of each action and the uncertainty that often characterizes human perception of facts over the time. In this work, we introduce HumanATLF, a logic that builds upon natural strategies employing both fuzzy semantics and resource‐bound actions: each action carries a real-valued cost drawn from a non‐refillable budget, and atomic conditions and goals have degrees in [0,1]. We give a formal syntax and semantics, and prove that model checking is in P when both the strategy complexity k and resource budget b are fixed, NP-complete if just one strategic operator over Boolean objectives is allowed, and Delta^P_2‐complete when k and b vary. Moreover, we show that recall‐based strategies can be decided in PSPACE. We implement our algorithms in VITAMIN, an open source model-checking tool for MAS and validate them on an adversarial resource-aware drone rescue scenario.

PaperID: 1064, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15292

Authors:Jianming Chen, Yawen Wang, Junjie Wang, Xiaofei Xie, Yuanzhe Hu, Qing Wang, Fanjiang Xu

Affiliations: Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Science & Technology on Integrated Information System Laboratory, China State Key Laboratory of Complex System Modeling and Simulation Technology, China University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Singapore Management University

Title: Adversarial Attack on Black-Box Multi-Agent by Adaptive Perturbation

Abstract:
Evaluating security and reliability for multiagent systems (MAS) is urgent as they become increasingly prevalent in various applications. As an evaluation technique, existing adversarial attack frameworks face certain limitations, e.g., impracticality due to the requirement of white-box information or high control authority, and a lack of stealthiness or effectiveness as they often target all agents or specific fixed agents. To address these issues, we propose AdapAM, a novel framework for adversarial attacks on black-box MAS. AdapAM incorporates two key components: (1) Adaptive Selection Policy simultaneously selects the victim and determines the anticipated malicious action (the action would lead to the worst impact on MAS), balancing effectiveness and stealthiness. (2) Proxy-based Perturbation to Induce Malicious Action utilizes generative adversarial imitation learning to approximate the target MAS, allowing AdapAM to generate perturbed observations using white-box information and thus induce victims to execute malicious action in black-box settings. We evaluate AdapAM across eight multi-agent environments and compare it with four state-of-the-art and commonly-used baselines. Results demonstrate that AdapAM achieves the best attack performance in different perturbation rates. Besides, AdapAM-generated perturbations are the least noisy and hardest to detect, emphasizing the stealthiness.

PaperID: 1065, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15947

Authors:Tianyi Hu, Qingxu Fu, Zhiqiang Pu, Yuan Wang, Tenghai Qiu

Affiliations: Institute of Automation, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Alibaba (China) Co., Chinese Academy of Sciences National Key Laboratory of Cognition and Decision Intelligence for Complex Systems

Title: Unreal-MAP: Unreal-Engine-Based General Platform for Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose Unreal MultiAgent Playground (Unreal-MAP), an MARL general platform based on the Unreal-Engine (UE). Unreal-MAP allows users to freely create multi-agent tasks using the vast visual and physical resources available in the UE community, and deploy state-of-the-art (SOTA) MARL algorithms within them. Unreal-MAP is user-friendly in terms of deployment, modification, and visualization, and all its components are open-source. We also develop an experimental framework compatible with algorithms ranging from rule-based to learning-based provided by third-party frameworks. Lastly, we deploy several SOTA algorithms in example tasks developed via Unreal-MAP, and conduct corresponding experimental analyses including a sim2real demo. We believe Unreal-MAP can play an important role in the MARL field by closely integrating existing algorithms with user-customized tasks, thus advancing the field of MARL.

PaperID: 1066, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20468

Authors:Yuanhao Li, Mingshan Liu, Hongbo Wang, Yiding Zhang, Yifei Ma, Wei Tan

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, University of Bristol

Title: DRAFT-RL: Multi-Agent Chain-of-Draft Reasoning for Reinforcement Learning-Enhanced LLMs

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in multistep reasoning and problem-solving. Recent works introduce multi-agent reflection frameworks where multiple LLM agents critique and refine each other’s outputs using reinforcement learning (RL). However, these approaches often rely on single-shot responses and lack structural diversity in reasoning exploration. In this paper, we propose DRAFT-RL, a novel framework that integrates Chain-of-Draft (CoD) reasoning into multi-agent RL training. Instead of generating single responses, each agent produces multiple drafts per query, which are then evaluated by peer agents and a learned reward model to identify the most promising trajectory. These selected drafts are used to refine future reasoning strategies through actor-critic learning. DRAFT-RL enables explicit multi-path exploration, peer-guided reflection, and reward-aligned selection, resulting in more robust and interpretable LLM agent behavior. We evaluate our method on complex reasoning tasks including code synthesis, symbolic math, and knowledge-intensive QA, demonstrating that DRAFT-RL outperforms existing reflective and RL-based agents by significant margins in both accuracy and convergence speed.

PaperID: 1067, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.16264

Authors:Chunjiang Mu, Ya Zeng, Qiaosheng Zhang, Kun Shao, Chen Chu, Hao Guo, Danyang Jia, Zhen Wang, Shuyue Hu

Affiliations: Northwestern Polytechnical University, Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Huawei Noah's Ark Lab, Yunnan University of Finance and Economics, QiYuan Lab

Title: Adaptive Theory of Mind for LLM-based Multi-Agent Coordination

Abstract:
Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability to reason about others’ mental states, and higherorder ToM involves considering that others also possess their own ToM. Equipping large language model (LLM)-driven agents with ToM has long been considered to improve their coordination in multiagent collaborative tasks. However, we find that misaligned ToM orders—mismatches in the depth of ToM reasoning between agents—can lead to insufficient or excessive reasoning about others, thereby impairing their coordination. To address this issue, we design an adaptive ToM (A-ToM) agent, which can align in ToM orders with its partner. Based on prior interactions, the agent estimates the partner’s likely ToM order and leverages this estimation to predict the partner’s action, thereby facilitating behavioral coordination. We conduct empirical evaluations on four multi-agent coordination tasks: a repeated matrix game, two grid navigation tasks and an Overcooked task. The results validate our findings on ToM alignment and demonstrate the effectiveness of our AToM agent. Furthermore, we discuss the generalizability of our A-ToM to non-LLM-based agents, as well as what would diminish the importance of ToM alignment.

PaperID: 1068, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10305

Authors:Quanmin Wei, Penglin Dai, Wei Li, Bingyi Liu, Xiao Wu

Affiliations: Southwest Jiaotong University, Wuhan University of Technology

Title: InfoCom: Kilobyte-Scale Communication-Efficient Collaborative Perception with Information Bottleneck

Abstract:
Precise environmental perception is critical for the reliability of autonomous driving systems. While collaborative perception mitigates the limitations of singleagent perception through information sharing, it encounters a fundamental communication-performance trade-off. Existing communication-efficient approaches typically assume MB-level data transmission per collaboration, which may fail due to practical network constraints. To address these issues, we propose InfoCom, an information-aware framework establishing the pioneering theoretical foundation for communication-efficient collaborative perception via extended Information Bottleneck principles. Departing from mainstream feature manipulation, InfoCom introduces a novel information purification paradigm that theoretically optimizes the extraction of minimal sufficient task-critical information under Information Bottleneck constraints. Its core innovations include: i) An Information-Aware Encoding condensing features into minimal messages while preserving perception-relevant information; ii) A Sparse Mask Generation identifying spatial cues with negligible communication cost; and iii) A Multi-Scale Decoding that progressively recovers perceptual information through mask-guided mechanisms rather than simple feature reconstruction. Comprehensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that InfoCom achieves near-lossless perception while reducing communication overhead from megabyte to kilobyte-scale, representing 440-fold and 90-fold reductions per agent compared to Where2comm and ERMVP, respectively.

PaperID: 1069, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01334

Authors:Hang Chen, Xinyu Yang, Jiaying Zhu, Wenya Wang

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Nanyang Technological University

Title: Skill Path: Unveiling Language Skills from Circuit Graphs

Abstract:
Circuit graph discovery has emerged as a fundamental approach to elucidating the skill mechanistic of language models. Despite the output faithfulness of circuit graphs, they suffer from atomic ablation, which causes the loss of causal dependencies between connected components. In addition, their discovery process, designed to preserve output faithfulness, inadvertently captures extraneous effects other than an isolated target skill. To alleviate these challenges, we introduce skill paths, which offer a more refined and compact representation by isolating individual skills within a linear chain of components. To enable skill path extracting from circuit graphs, we propose a threestep framework, consisting of decomposition, pruning, and post-hoc causal mediation. In particular, we offer a complete linear decomposition of the transformer model which leads to a disentangled computation graph. After pruning, we further adopt causal analysis techniques, including counterfactuals and interventions, to extract the final skill paths from the circuit graph. To underscore the significance of skill paths, we investigate three generic language skills—Previous Token Skill, Induction Skill, and In-Context Learning Skill—using our framework. Experiments support two crucial properties of these skills, namely stratification and inclusiveness.

PaperID: 1070, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14741

Authors:Jing Cui, Yufei Han, Jianbin Jiao, Junge Zhang

Affiliations: Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Persistent Backdoor Attacks Under Continual Fine-Tuning of LLMs

Abstract:
Backdoor attacks embed malicious behaviors into Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling adversaries to trigger harmful outputs or bypass safety controls. However, the persistence of the implanted backdoors under userdriven post-deployment continual fine-tuning has been rarely examined. Most prior works evaluate the effectiveness and generalization of implanted backdoors only at releasing and empirical evidence shows that naively injected backdoor persistence degrades after updates. In this work, we study whether and how implanted backdoors persist through a multi‑stage post-deployment fine‑tuning. We propose P‑Trojan, a trigger‑based attack algorithm that explicitly optimizes for backdoor persistence across repeated updates. By aligning poisoned gradients with those of clean tasks on token embeddings, the implanted backdoor mapping is less likely to be suppressed or forgotten during subsequent updates. Theoretical analysis shows the feasibility of such persistent backdoor attacks after continual fine-tuning. And experiments conducted on the Qwen2.5 and LLaMA3 families of LLMs, as well as diverse task sequences, demonstrate that P‑Trojan achieves over 99% persistence while preserving clean‑task accuracy. Our findings highlight the need for persistence-aware evaluation and stronger defenses in realistic model adaptation pipelines.

PaperID: 1071, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20124

Authors:Yunlong Feng, Yang Xu, Xiao Xu, Binyuan Hui, Junyang Lin

Affiliations: Alibaba Group

Title: Towards Better Correctness and Efficiency in Code Generation

Abstract:
While code large language models have demonstrated remarkable progress in code generation, the generated code often exhibits poor runtime efficiency, limiting its practical application in performancesensitive scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose an efficiency-oriented reinforcement learning framework guided by a novel performance reward. Based on this framework, we take a deeper dive into the code efficiency problem, identifying then proposing methods to overcome key bottlenecks: (1) Dynamic exploration overcomes the static data constraints of offline fine-tuning, enabling the discovery of more efficient code implementations. (2) The error-insensitive reinforcement learning method and high-contrast efficiency signals are crucial for mitigating systematic errors and achieving effective optimization. (3) Online exploration is most effective when starting from a high-correctness baseline, as this allows for efficiency improvements without sacrificing accuracy. With these discoveries, we finally propose a two-stage tuning method, which achieves high and balanced performance across correctness and efficiency. The results of experiments show the effectiveness of the method, which improves code correctness by 10.18% and runtime efficiency by 7.75% on a 7B model, achieving performance comparable to much larger model.

PaperID: 1072, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06059

Authors:Haorui He, Yupeng Li, Bin Benjamin Zhu, Dacheng Wen, Reynold Cheng, Francis C. M. Lau

Affiliations: Department of Interactive Media, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Baptist University, Microsoft Corporation, School of Computing and Data Science

Title: Fact2Fiction: Targeted Poisoning Attack to Agentic Fact-checking System

Abstract:
Stateof-the-art (SOTA) fact-checking systems combat misinformation by employing autonomous LLM-based agents to decompose complex claims into smaller sub-claims, verify each sub-claim individually, and aggregate the partial results to produce verdicts with justifications (explanations for the verdicts). The security of these systems is crucial, as compromised fact-checkers can amplify misinformation, but remains largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, this work introduces a novel threat model against such fact-checking systems and presents Fact2Fiction, the first poisoning attack framework targeting SOTA agentic fact-checking systems. Fact2Fiction employs LLMs to mimic the decomposition strategy and exploit system-generated justifications to craft tailored malicious evidences that compromise sub-claim verification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Fact2Fiction achieves 8.9%-21.2% higher attack success rates than SOTA attacks across various poisoning budgets and exposes security weaknesses in existing fact-checking systems, highlighting the need for defensive countermeasures.

PaperID: 1073, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13201

Authors:Hao Hu, Yifan Feng, Ruoxue Li, Rundong Xue, Xingliang Hou, Zhiqiang Tian, Yue Gao, Shaoyi Du

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, National Engineering Research Center for Visual Information and Applications, and Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi'an Jiaotong University, School of Software, Tsinghua University, School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University

Title: Cog-RAG: Cognitive-Inspired Dual-Hypergraph with Theme Alignment Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Abstract:
RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) enhances the response quality and domain-specific performance of large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge to combat hallucinations. In recent research, graph structures have been integrated into RAG to enhance the capture of semantic relations between entities. However, it primarily focuses on low-order pairwise entity relations, limiting the high-order associations among multiple entities. Hypergraph-enhanced approaches address this limitation by modeling multi-entity interactions via hyperedges, but they are typically constrained to inter-chunk entity-level representations, overlooking the global thematic organization and alignment across chunks. Drawing inspiration from the top-down cognitive process of human reasoning, we propose a theme-aligned dual-hypergraph RAG framework (Cog-RAG) that uses a theme hypergraph to capture inter-chunk thematic structure and an entity hypergraph to model high-order semantic relations. Furthermore, we design a cognitive-inspired two-stage retrieval strategy that first activates query-relevant thematic content from the theme hypergraph, and then guides fine-grained recall and diffusion in the entity hypergraph, achieving semantic alignment and consistent generation from global themes to local details. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that Cog-RAG significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art baseline approaches.

PaperID: 1074, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.12963

Authors:Hui Huang, Yancheng He, Wei Liu, Muyun Yang, Jiaheng Liu, Kehai Chen, Bing Xu, Conghui Zhu, Hailong Cao, Tiejun Zhao

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Nanjing University

Title: Long-form RewardBench: Evaluating Reward Models for Long-form Generation

Abstract:
The widespread adoption of reinforcement learningbased alignment highlights the growing importance of reward models. Various benchmarks have been built to evaluate reward models in various domains and scenarios. However, a significant gap remains in assessing reward models for long-form generation, despite its critical role in real-world applications. To bridge this, we introduce Long-form RewardBench, the first reward modeling testbed specifically designed for long-form generation. Our benchmark encompasses five key subtasks: QA, RAG, Chat, Writing, and Reasoning. We collected instruction and preference data through a meticulously designed multi-stage data collection process, and conducted extensive experiments on 20+ mainstream reward models, including both classifiers and generative models. Our findings reveal that current models still lack long-form reward modeling capabilities. Furthermore, we designed a novel Long-form Needle-in-a-Haystack Test, which revealed a correlation between reward modeling performance and the error's position within a response, as well as the overall response length, with distinct characteristics observed between classification and generative models. Finally, we demonstrate that classifier exhibit better generalizability compared to generative models trained on the same data. As the first benchmark for long-form reward modeling, this work aims to offer a robust platform for visualizing progress in this crucial area.

PaperID: 1075, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07192

Authors:Manzong Huang, Chenyang Bu, Yi He, Xingrui Zhuo, Xindong Wu

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Knowledge Engineering with Big Data (the Ministry of Education of China), School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, Department of Data Science, College of William and Mary

Title: Relink: Constructing Query-Driven Evidence Graph On-the-Fly for GraphRAG

Abstract:
Graphbased Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) mitigates hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) by grounding them in structured knowledge. However, current GraphRAG methods are constrained by a prevailing build-then-reason paradigm, which relies on a static, pre-constructed Knowledge Graph (KG). This paradigm faces two critical challenges. First, the KG's inherent incompleteness often breaks reasoning paths. Second, the graph’s low signal-to-noise ratio introduces distractor facts, presenting query-relevant but misleading knowledge that disrupts the reasoning process. To address these challenges, we argue for a reason-and-construct paradigm and propose Relink, a framework that dynamically builds a query-specific evidence graph. To tackle incompleteness, Relink instantiates required facts from a latent relation pool derived from the original text corpus, repairing broken paths on the fly. To handle misleading or distractor facts, Relink employs a unified, query-aware evaluation strategy that jointly considers candidates from both the KG and latent relations, selecting those most useful for answering the query rather than relying on their pre-existence. This empowers Relink to actively discard distractor facts and construct the most faithful and precise evidence path for each query. Extensive experiments on five Open-Domain Question Answering benchmarks show that Relink achieves significant average improvements of 5.4% in EM and 5.2% in F1 over leading GraphRAG baselines, demonstrating the superiority of our proposed framework.

PaperID: 1076, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09670

Authors:Weitao Jia, Jinghui Lu, Haiyang Yu, Siqi Wang, Guozhi Tang, An-Lan Wang, Weijie Yin, Dingkang Yang, Yuxiang Nie, Bin Shan, Hao Feng, Irene Li, Kun Yang, Han Wang, Jingqun Tang, Teng Fu, Changhong Jin, Chao Feng, Xiaohui Lv, Can Huang

Affiliations: ByteDance Inc., University of Tokyo, Fudan University, University College Dublin

Title: MEML-GRPO: Heterogeneous Multi-Expert Mutual Learning for RLVR Advancement

Abstract:
Recent advances demonstrate that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, standard RLVR faces challenges with reward sparsity, where zero rewards from consistently incorrect candidate answers provide no learning signal, particularly in challenging tasks. To address this,we propose MultiExpert Mutual Learning GRPO (MEML-GRPO), an innovative framework that utilizes diverse expert prompts as system prompts to generate a broader range of responses, substantially increasing the likelihood of identifying correct solutions. Additionally, we introduce an inter-expert mutual learning mechanism that facilitates knowledge sharing and transfer among experts, further boosting the model’s performance through RLVR. Extensive experiments across multiple reasoning benchmarks show that MEML-GRPO delivers significant improvements, achieving an average performance gain of 4.89% with Qwen and 11.33% with Llama, effectively overcoming the core limitations of traditional RLVR methods.

PaperID: 1077, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07074

Authors:Tingyu Jiang, Shen Li, Yiyao Song, Lan Zhang, Hualei Zhu, Yuan Zhao, Xiaohang Xu, Kenjiro Taura, Hao Henry Wang

Affiliations: Alibaba Cloud Computing, Independent Researcher, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo

Title: Importance-Aware Data Selection for Efficient LLM Instruction Tuning

Abstract:
Instruction tuning plays a critical role in enhancing the performance and efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs). Its success depends not only on the quality of the instruction data but also on the inherent capabilities of the LLM itself. Some studies suggest that even a small amount of highquality data can achieve instruction fine-tuning results that are on par with, or even exceed, those from using a full-scale dataset. However, rather than focusing solely on calculating data quality scores to evaluate instruction data, there is a growing need to select high-quality data that maximally enhances the performance of instruction tuning for a given LLM. In this paper, we propose the Model Instruction Weakness Value (MIWV) as a novel metric to quantify the importance of instruction data in enhancing model's capabilities. The MIWV metric is derived from the discrepancies in the model’s responses when using In-Context Learning (ICL), helping identify the most beneficial data for enhancing instruction tuning performance. Our experimental results demonstrate that selecting only the top 1% of data based on MIWV can outperform training on the full dataset. Furthermore, this approach extends beyond existing research that focuses on data quality scoring for data selection, offering strong empirical evidence supporting the effectiveness of our proposed method.

PaperID: 1078, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.01273

Authors:Xuan Li, Zhe Yin, Xiaodong Gu, Beijun Shen

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: Anti-adversarial Learning: Desensitizing Prompts for Large Language Model

Abstract:
With the widespread use of LLMs, preserving privacy in user prompts has become crucial, as prompts risk exposing private and sensitive data to cloud LLMs. Conventional techniques like homomorphic encryption (HE), secure multiparty computation, and federated learning (FL) are not well-suited to this scenario due to the lack of control over user participation in remote model interactions. In this paper, we propose PromptObfus, a novel method for desensitizing LLM prompts. The core idea of PromptObfus is "anti-adversarial" learning, which perturbs sensitive words in the prompt to obscure private information while retaining the stability of model predictions. Specifically, PromptObfus frames prompt desensitization as a masked language modeling task, replacing privacy-sensitive terms with a [MASK] token. A desensitization model is utilized to generate candidate replacements for each masked position. These candidates are subsequently selected based on gradient feedback from a surrogate model, ensuring minimal disruption to the task output. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on three NLP tasks. Results show that PromptObfus effectively prevents privacy inference from remote LLMs while preserving task performance.

PaperID: 1079, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07896

Authors:Dengcan Liu, Jiahao Li, Zheren Fu, Yi Tu, Jiajun Li, Zhendong Mao, Yongdong Zhang

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, Huawei Technologies Ltd.

Title: SparseRM: A Lightweight Preference Modeling with Sparse Autoencoder

Abstract:
Reward models (RMs) are a core component in the posttraining of large language models (LLMs), serving as proxies for human preference evaluation and guiding model alignment. However, training reliable RMs under limited resources remains challenging due to the reliance on large-scale preference annotations and the high cost of fine-tuning LLMs. To address this, we propose SparseRM, which leverages Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) to extract preference-relevant information encoded in model representations, enabling the construction of a lightweight and interpretable reward model. SparseRM first employs SAE to decompose LLM representations into interpretable directions that capture preference-relevant features. The representations are then projected onto these directions to compute alignment scores, which quantify the strength of each preference feature in the representations. A simple reward head aggregates these scores to predict preference scores. Experiments on three preference modeling tasks show that SparseRM achieves superior performance over most mainstream RMs while using less than 1% of trainable parameters. Moreover, it integrates seamlessly into downstream alignment pipelines, highlighting its potential for efficient alignment.

PaperID: 1080, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14056

Authors:Sepideh Entezari Maleki, Mohammadreza Pourreza, Davood Rafiei

Affiliations: University of Alberta

Title: Confidence Estimation for Text-to-SQL in Large Language Models

Abstract:
Confidence estimation for textto-SQL aims to assess the reliability of model-generated SQL queries without having access to gold answers. We study this problem in the context of large language models (LLMs), where access to model weights and gradients is often constrained. We explore both black-box and white-box confidence estimation strategies, evaluating their effectiveness on cross-domain text-to-SQL benchmarks. Our evaluation highlights the superior performance of consistency-based methods among black-box models and the advantage of SQL-syntax-aware approaches for interpreting LLM logits in white-box settings. Furthermore, we show that execution-based grounding of queries provides a valuable supplementary signal, improving the effectiveness of both approaches.

PaperID: 1081, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.14011

Authors:Sahil Mishra, Avi Patni, Niladri Chatterjee, Tanmoy Chakraborty

Affiliations: Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Department of Mathematics

Title: QuanTaxo: A Quantum Approach to Self-Supervised Taxonomy Expansion

Abstract:
A taxonomy is a hierarchical graph containing knowledge to provide valuable insights for various web applications. However, the manual construction of taxonomies requires significant human effort. As web content continues to expand at an unprecedented pace, existing taxonomies risk becoming outdated, struggling to incorporate new and emerging information effectively. As a consequence, there is a growing need for dynamic taxonomy expansion to keep them relevant and upto-date. Existing taxonomy expansion methods often rely on classical word embeddings to represent entities. However, these embeddings fall short of capturing hierarchical polysemy, where an entity's meaning can vary based on its position in the hierarchy and its surrounding context. To address this challenge, we introduce QuanTaxo, a quantum-inspired framework for taxonomy expansion that encodes entities in a Hilbert space and models interference effects between them, yielding richer, context-sensitive representations. Comprehensive experiments on five real-world benchmark datasets show that QuanTaxo significantly outperforms classical embedding models, achieving substantial improvements of 12.3% in accuracy, 11.2% in Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR), and 6.9% in Wu & Palmer (Wu&P) metrics across nine classical embedding-based baselines.

PaperID: 1082, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08785

Authors:Yunfeng Ning, Mayi Xu, Jintao Wen, Qiankun Pi, Yuanyuan Zhu, Ming Zhong, Jiawei Jiang, Tieyun Qian

Affiliations: Wuhan University

Title: Privacy-protected Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge Graph Question Answering

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) often suffer from hallucinations and outdated or incomplete knowledge. RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) is proposed to address these issues by integrating external knowledge like that in knowledge graphs (KGs) into LLMs. However, leveraging private KGs in RAG systems poses significant privacy risks due to the black-box nature of LLMs and potential insecure data transmission. In this paper, we investigate the privacy-protected RAG scenario for the first time, where entities in KGs are anonymous for LLMs, thus preventing them from accessing entity semantics. Due to the loss of semantics of entities, previous RAG systems cannot retrieve question-relevant knowledge from KGs by matching questions with the meaningless identifiers of anonymous entities. To realize an effective RAG system in this scenario, two key challenges must be addressed: (1) How can anonymous entities be converted into retrievable information? (2) How to retrieve question-relevant anonymous entities? To address these challenges, we propose a novel ion Reasoning on Graph (ARoG) framework including relation-centric abstraction and structure-oriented abstraction strategies. For challenge (1), the first strategy abstracts entities into high-level concepts by dynamically capturing the semantics of their adjacent relations. Hence, it supplements meaningful semantics which can further support the retrieval process. For challenge (2), the second strategy transforms unstructured natural language questions into structured abstract concept paths. These paths can be more effectively aligned with the abstracted concepts in KGs, thereby improving retrieval performance. In addition to guiding LLMs to effectively retrieve knowledge from KGs, these abstraction strategies also strictly protect privacy from being exposed to LLMs. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate that ARoG achieves strong performance and privacy-robustness, establishing a new practical direction for privacy-protected RAG systems.

PaperID: 1083, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03024

Authors:Chenxu Niu, Wei Zhang, Jie Li, Yongjian Zhao, Tongyang Wang, Xi Wang, Yong Chen

Affiliations: Texas Tech University, Texas Advanced Computing Center, Southeast University

Title: TokenPowerBench: Benchmarking the Power Consumption of LLM Inference

Abstract:
Large language model (LLM) services now answer billions of queries per day, and industry reports show that inference, not training, accounts for more than 90% of total power consumption. However, existing benchmarks focus on either training/finetuning or performance of inference and provide little support for power consumption measurement and analysis of inference. We introduce TokenPowerBench, the first lightweight and extensible benchmark designed for LLM-inference power consumption studies. The benchmark combines a declarative configuration interface covering model choice, prompt set, and inference engine, a measurement layer that captures GPU-, node-, and system-level power without specialized power meters, and a phase-aligned metrics pipeline that attributes energy to the prefill and decode stages of every request. These elements make it straightforward to explore the power consumed by an LLM inference run; furthermore, by varying batch size, context length, parallelism strategy and quantization, users can quickly assess how each setting affects joules per token and other energy-efficiency metrics. We evaluate TokenPowerBench on four of the most widely used model series (Llama, Falcon, Qwen, and Mistral). Our experiments cover from 1 billion parameters up to the frontier-scale Llama3-405B model. Furthermore, we release TokenPowerBench as open source to help users to measure power consumption, forecast operating expenses, and meet sustainability targets when deploying LLM services.

PaperID: 1084, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01412

Authors:Jinhao Pan, Chahat Raj, Ziwei Zhu

Affiliations: George Mason University

Title: Bias Association Discovery Framework for Open-Ended LLM Generations

Abstract:
Social biases embedded in Large Language Models (LLMs) raise critical concerns, resulting in representational harms unfair or distorted portrayals of demographic groups -- that may be expressed in subtle ways through generated language. Existing evaluation methods often depend on predefined identity-concept associations, limiting their ability to surface new or unexpected forms of bias. In this work, we present the Bias Association Discovery Framework (BADF), a systematic approach for extracting both known and previously unrecognized associations between demographic identities and descriptive concepts from open-ended LLM outputs. Through comprehensive experiments spanning multiple models and diverse real-world contexts, BADF enables robust mapping and analysis of the varied concepts that characterize demographic identities. Our findings advance the understanding of biases in open-ended generation and provide a scalable tool for identifying and analyzing bias associations in LLMs.

PaperID: 1085, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11366

Authors:Shreya Shukla, Aditya Sriram, Milinda Kuppur Narayanaswamy, Hiteshi Jain

Affiliations: Mercedes-Benz Research and Development India

Title: qa-FLoRA: Data-free query-adaptive Fusion of LoRAs for LLMs

Abstract:
The deployment of large language models for specialized tasks often requires domainspecific parameter-efficient finetuning through Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules. However, effectively fusing these adapters to handle complex, multi-domain composite queries remains a critical challenge. Existing LoRA fusion approaches either use static weights, which assign equal relevance to each participating LoRA, or require data-intensive supervised training for every possible LoRA combination to obtain respective optimal fusion weights. We propose qa-FLoRA, a novel query-adaptive data-and-training-free method for LoRA fusion that dynamically computes layer-level fusion weights by measuring distributional divergence between the base model and respective adapters. Our approach eliminates the need for composite training data or domain-representative samples, making it readily applicable to existing adapter collections. Extensive experiments across nine multilingual composite tasks spanning mathematics, coding, and medical domains, show that qa-FLoRA outperforms static fusion by ~5% with LLaMA-2 and ~6% with LLaMA-3, and the training-free baselines by ~7% with LLaMA-2 and ~10% with LLaMA-3, while significantly closing the gap with supervised baselines. Further, layer-level analysis of our fusion weights reveals interpretable fusion patterns, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach for robust multi-domain adaptation.

PaperID: 1086, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02558

Authors:Yuerong Song, Xiaoran Liu, Ruixiao Li, Zhigeng Liu, Zengfeng Huang, Qipeng Guo, Ziwei He, Xipeng Qiu

Affiliations: Shanghai Innovation Institute

Title: Sparse-dLLM: Accelerating Diffusion LLMs with Dynamic Cache Eviction

Abstract:
Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) enable breakthroughs in reasoning and parallel decoding but suffer from prohibitive quadratic computational complexity and memory overhead during inference. Current caching techniques accelerate decoding by storing fulllayer states, yet impose substantial memory usage that limit long-context applications. Our analysis of attention patterns in dLLMs reveals persistent cross-layer sparsity, with pivotal tokens remaining salient across decoding steps and low-relevance tokens staying unimportant, motivating selective cache eviction. We propose Sparse-dLLM, the first training-free framework integrating dynamic cache eviction with sparse attention via delayed bidirectional sparse caching. By leveraging the stability of token saliency over steps, it retains critical tokens and dynamically evicts unimportant prefix/suffix entries using an attention-guided strategy. Extensive experiments on LLaDA and Dream series demonstrate Sparse-dLLM achieves up to 10 times higher throughput than vanilla dLLMs, with comparable performance and similar peak memory costs, outperforming previous methods in efficiency and effectiveness.

PaperID: 1087, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19970

Authors:Jiayuan Su, Fulin Lin, Zhaopeng Feng, Han Zheng, Teng Wang, Zhenyu Xiao, Xinlong Zhao, Zuozhu Liu, Lu Cheng, Hongwei Wang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, University of Hong Kong, Tsinghua University, Peking University, University of Illinois at Chicago

Title: CP-Router: An Uncertainty-Aware Router Between LLM and LRM

Abstract:
Recent advances in large reasoning models (LRMs) have significantly enhanced longchain reasoning capabilities over standard large language models (LLMs). However, LRMs often produce unnecessarily lengthy outputs even for simple queries, leading to inefficiencies or even accuracy degradation compared to LLMs. To address this, we propose CP-Router, a training-free, model-agnostic routing framework that dynamically selects between an LLM and an LRM, demonstrated with multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) prompts. The routing decision is guided by the prediction uncertainty estimates derived via Conformal Prediction (CP), which provides rigorous coverage guarantees. To improve uncertainty differentiation across inputs, we introduce Full and Binary Entropy (FBE), a novel entropy-based criterion that adaptively selects the appropriate CP threshold. Experiments across MCQA and QA benchmarks—including mathematics, logical reasoning, and Chinese chemistry—demonstrate that CP-Router efficiently reduces token usage while maintaining or even improving accuracy compared to using LRM alone. We further demonstrate the generality and robustness of CP-Router by extending it to diverse model pairings beyond the LLM–LRM setting.

PaperID: 1088, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10539

Authors:Zetian Sun, Dongfang Li, Baotian Hu, Min Zhang

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: Improving Value-based Process Verifier via Low-Cost Variance Reduction

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in a wide range of tasks. However, their reasoning capabilities, particularly in complex domains like mathematics, remain a significant challenge. Valuebased process verifiers, which estimate the probability of a partial reasoning chain leading to a correct solution, are a promising approach for improving reasoning. Nevertheless, their effectiveness is often hindered by estimation error in their training annotations, a consequence of the limited number of Monte Carlo (MC) samples feasible due to the high cost of LLM inference. In this paper, we identify that the estimation error primarily arises from high variance rather than bias, and the MC estimator is a Minimum Variance Unbiased Estimator (MVUE). To address the problem, we propose the Compound Monte Carlo Sampling (ComMCS) method, which constructs an unbiased estimator by linearly combining the MC estimators from the current and subsequent steps. Theoretically, we show that our method leads to a predictable reduction in variance, while maintaining an unbiased estimation without additional LLM inference cost. We also perform empirical experiments on the MATH-500 and GSM8K benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Notably, ComMCS outperforms regression-based optimization method by 2.8 points, the non-variance-reduced baseline by 2.2 points on MATH-500 on Best-of-32 sampling experiment.

PaperID: 1089, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22315

Authors:Hieu Tran, Zonghai Yao, Nguyen Luong Tran, Zhichao Yang, Feiyun Ouyang, Shuo Han, Razieh Rahimi, Hong Yu

Affiliations: University of Massachusetts Amherst, Optum AI, University of Massachusetts Lowell

Title: PRIME: Planning and Retrieval-Integrated Memory for Enhanced Reasoning

Abstract:
Inspired by the dualprocess theory of human cognition from Thinking, Fast and Slow, we introduce PRIME (Planning and Retrieval-Integrated Memory for Enhanced Reasoning), a multi-agent reasoning framework that dynamically integrates System 1 (fast, intuitive thinking) and System 2 (slow, deliberate thinking). PRIME first employs a Quick Thinking Agent to generate a rapid answer; if uncertainty is detected, it then triggers a structured System 2 reasoning pipeline composed of specialized agents for planning, hypothesis generation, retrieval, information integration, and decision-making. This multi-agent design mimics human cognitive processes faithfully and enhances both efficiency and accuracy. Experimental results with LLaMA 3 models demonstrate that PRIME enables open-source LLMs to perform competitively with state-of-the-art closed-source models like GPT-4 and GPT-4o on benchmarks requiring multi-hop and knowledge-grounded reasoning. This research establishes PRIME as a scalable solution for improving LLMs in domains requiring complex, knowledge-intensive reasoning.

PaperID: 1090, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11247

Authors:Changjian Wang, Weihong Deng, Weili Guan, Quan Lu, Ning Jiang

Affiliations: Mashang Consumer Finance Co., Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: Cross-Granularity Hypergraph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Multi-hop Question Answering

Abstract:
Multihop question answering (MHQA) requires integrating knowledge scattered across multiple passages to derive the correct answer. Traditional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods primarily focus on coarse-grained textual semantic similarity and ignore structural associations among dispersed knowledge, which limits their effectiveness in MHQA tasks. GraphRAG methods address this by leveraging knowledge graphs (KGs) to capture structural associations, but they tend to overly rely on structural information and fine-grained word- or phrase-level retrieval, resulting in an underutilization of textual semantics. In this paper, we propose a novel RAG approach called HGRAG for MHQA that achieves cross-granularity integration of structural and semantic information via hypergraphs. Structurally, we construct an entity hypergraph where fine-grained entities serve as nodes and coarse-grained passages as hyperedges, and establish knowledge association through shared entities. Semantically, we design a hypergraph retrieval method that integrates fine-grained entity similarity and coarse-grained passage similarity via hypergraph diffusion. Finally, we employ a retrieval enhancement module, which further refines the retrieved results both semantically and structurally, to obtain the most relevant passages as context for answer generation with the LLM. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in QA performance, and achieves a 6× speedup in retrieval efficiency.

PaperID: 1091, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.02339

Authors:Jinyang Wu, Mingkuan Feng, Guocheng Zhai, Shuai Zhang, Zheng Lian, Fangrui Lv, Pengpeng Shao, Ruihan Jin, Zhengqi Wen, Jianhua Tao

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science

Title: AStar: Boosting Multimodal Reasoning with Automated Structured Thinking

Abstract:
Multimodal large language models excel across diverse domains but struggle with complex visual reasoning tasks. To enhance their reasoning capabilities, current approaches typically rely on explicit search or posttraining techniques. However, search-based methods suffer from computational inefficiency due to extensive solution space exploration, while post-training methods demand substantial data, computational resources, and often exhibit training instability. To address these challenges, we propose AStar, a training-free, Automatic Structured thinking paradigm for multimodal reasoning. Specifically, we introduce novel "thought cards", a lightweight library of high-level reasoning patterns abstracted from prior samples. For each test problem, AStar adaptively retrieves the optimal thought cards and seamlessly integrates these external explicit guidelines with the model’s internal implicit reasoning capabilities. Compared to previous methods, AStar eliminates computationally expensive explicit search and avoids additional complex post-training processes, enabling a more efficient reasoning approach. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves 53.9% accuracy on MathVerse (surpassing GPT-4o's 50.2%) and 32.7% on MathVision (outperforming GPT-4o's 30.4%). Further analysis reveals the remarkable transferability of our method: thought cards generated from mathematical reasoning can also be applied to other reasoning tasks, even benefiting general visual perception and understanding. AStar serves as a plug-and-play test-time inference method, compatible with other post-training techniques, providing an important complement to existing multimodal reasoning approaches.

PaperID: 1092, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12004

Authors:Ganlin Xu, Zhitao Yin, Linghao Zhang, Jiaqing Liang, Weijia Lu, Xiaodong Zhang, Zhifei Yang, Sihang Jiang, Deqing Yang

Affiliations: Fudan University, United Automotive Electronic Systems

Title: ComLQ: Benchmarking Complex Logical Queries in Information Retrieval

Abstract:
Information retrieval (IR) systems play a critical role in navigating information overload across various applications. Existing IR benchmarks primarily focus on simple queries that are semantically analogous to singleand multi-hop relations, overlooking complex logical queries involving first-order logic operations such as conjunction (∧), disjunction (∨), and negation (¬). Thus, these benchmarks can not be used to sufficiently evaluate the performance of IR models on complex queries in real-world scenarios. To address this problem, we propose a novel method leveraging large language models (LLMs) to construct a new IR dataset ComLQ for Complex Logical Queries, which comprises 2,909 queries and 11,251 candidate passages. A key challenge in constructing the dataset lies in capturing the underlying logical structures within unstructured text. Therefore, by designing the subgraph-guided prompt with the subgraph indicator, an LLM (such as GPT-4o) is guided to generate queries with specific logical structures based on selected passages. All query-passage pairs in ComLQ are ensured structure conformity and evidence distribution through expert annotation. To better evaluate whether retrievers can handle queries with negation, we further propose a new evaluation metric, Log-Scaled Negation Consistency (LSNC@K). As a supplement to standard relevance-based metrics (such as nDCG and mAP), LSNC@K measures whether top-K retrieved passages violate negation conditions in queries. Our experimental results under zero-shot settings demonstrate existing retrieval models' limited performance on complex logical queries, especially on queries with negation, exposing their inferior capabilities of modeling exclusion. In summary, our ComLQ offers a comprehensive and fine-grained exploration, paving the way for future research on complex logical queries in IR.

PaperID: 1093, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10268

Authors:Zhe Xu, Zhicai Wang, Junkang Wu, Jinda Lu, Xiang Wang

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China

Title: Causal-HalBench: Uncovering LVLMs Object Hallucinations Through Causal Intervention

Abstract:
Large VisionLanguage Models (LVLMs) often suffer from object hallucination, making erroneous judgments about the presence of objects in images. We propose this primarily stems from spurious correlations arising when models strongly associate highly co-occurring objects during training, leading to hallucinated objects influenced by visual context. Current benchmarks mainly focus on hallucination detection but lack a formal characterization and quantitative evaluation of spurious correlations in LVLMs. To address this, we introduce causal analysis into the object recognition scenario of LVLMs, establishing a Structural Causal Model (SCM). Utilizing the language of causality, we formally define spurious correlations arising from co-occurrence bias. To quantify the influence induced by these spurious correlations, we develop Causal-HalBench, a benchmark specifically constructed with counterfactual samples and integrated with comprehensive causal metrics designed to assess model robustness against spurious correlations. Concurrently, we propose an extensible pipeline for the construction of these counterfactual samples, leveraging the capabilities of proprietary LVLMs and Text-to-Image (T2I) models for their generation. Our evaluations on mainstream LVLMs using Causal-HalBench demonstrate these models exhibit susceptibility to spurious correlations, albeit to varying extents.

PaperID: 1094, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15338

Authors:Jinning Yang, Wenjie Sun, Wen Shi

Affiliations: Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School

Title: HeartLLM: Discretized ECG Tokenization for LLM-Based Diagnostic Reasoning

Abstract:
Electrocardiography (ECG) plays a central role in cardiovascular diagnostics, yet existing automated approaches often struggle to generalize across clinical tasks and offer limited support for openended reasoning. We present HeartLLM, a novel framework that integrates time-series (TS) and language modeling by enabling large language models (LLMs) to process 12-lead ECG signals for clinical text generation tasks. Our approach discretizes continuous ECG embeddings into quantized codes using a lead-wise encoder and quantization module. These quantized codes are then mapped to an extended ECG vocabulary to form ECG tokens, enabling the model to process both ECG and natural language inputs within a unified framework. To bridge the modality gap, we pretrain the model on an autoregressive ECG token forecasting task, allowing the LLM to capture temporal dynamics through its inherent language modeling capability. Finally, we perform instruction tuning on both ECG question answering and diagnostic report generation. Without modifying the core model, HeartLLM achieves strong performance across tasks while maintaining generalization to out-of-distribution settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of each component and highlight the potential of integrating discretized ECG tokens into LLMs for medical reasoning.

PaperID: 1095, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.03236

Authors:Fangzhou Yao, Sheng Chang, Weibo Gao, Qi Liu

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China

Title: Conversational Learning Diagnosis via Reasoning Multi-Turn Interactive Learning

Abstract:
Learning diagnosis is a critical task that monitors students' cognitive state during educational activities, with the goal of enhancing learning outcomes. With advancements in language models (LMs), many AIdriven educational studies have shifted towards conversational learning scenarios, where students engage in multi-turn interactive dialogues with tutors. However, conversational learning diagnosis remains underdeveloped, and most existing techniques acquire students' cognitive state through intuitive instructional prompts on LMs to analyze the dialogue text. This direct prompting approach lacks a solid psychological foundation and fails to ensure the reliability of the generated analytical text. In this study, we introduce ParLD, a preview-analyze-reason framework for conversational learning diagnosis, which leverages multi-agent collaboration to diagnose students' cognitive state over multiple dialogue turns. Specifically, ParLD comprises main components: (1) Behavior Previewer, which generates a student behavior schema based on previous states and learning content; (2) State Analyzer, which diagnose the tutor-student dialogue and behavior schema to update the cognitive state; and (3) Performance Reasoner, which predicts the student's future responses and provides verifiable feedback to support ParLD's self-reflection with the Chain Reflector. They operate sequentially and iteratively during each interaction turn to diagnose the student’s cognitive state. We conduct experiments to evaluate both performance prediction and tutoring support, emphasizing the effectiveness of ParLD in providing reliable and insightful learning diagnosis.

PaperID: 1096, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16331

Authors:Jiashu Yao, Heyan Huang, Shuang Zeng, Chuwei Luo, Wangjie You, Jie Tang, Qingsong Liu, Yuhang Guo, Yangyang Kang

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology, ByteDance China

Title: Incorporating Self-Rewriting into Large Language Model Reasoning Reinforcement

Abstract:
Through reinforcement learning (RL) with outcome correctness rewards, large reasoning models (LRMs) with scaled inference computation have demonstrated substantial success on complex reasoning tasks. However, the onesided reward, focused solely on final correctness, limits its ability to provide detailed supervision over internal reasoning process. This deficiency leads to suboptimal internal reasoning quality, manifesting as issues like over-thinking, under-thinking, redundant-thinking, and disordered-thinking. Inspired by the recent progress in LRM self-rewarding, we introduce self-rewriting framework, where a model rewrites its own reasoning texts, and subsequently learns from the rewritten reasoning to improve the internal thought process quality. For algorithm design, we propose a selective rewriting approach wherein only "simple" samples, defined by the model's consistent correctness, are rewritten, thereby preserving all original reward signals of GRPO. For practical implementation, we compile rewriting and vanilla generation within one single batch, maintaining the scalability of the RL algorithm and introducing only 10% overhead. Extensive experiments on diverse tasks with different model sizes validate the effectiveness of self-rewriting. In terms of the accuracy-length tradeoff, the self-rewriting approach achieves improved accuracy (+0.6) with substantially shorter reasoning (-46%) even without explicit instructions in rewriting prompts to reduce reasoning length, outperforming existing strong baselines. In terms of internal reasoning quality, self-rewriting achieves significantly higher scores (+7.2) under the LLM-as-a-judge metric, successfully mitigating internal reasoning flaws.

PaperID: 1097, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.17823

Authors:Yanke Yu, Jin Li, Ying Sun, Ping Li, Zhefeng Wang, Yi Zheng

Affiliations: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Huawei Technologies Ltd.

Title: Discovering Decoupled Functional Modules in Large Language Models

Abstract:
Understanding the internal functional organization of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for improving their trustworthiness and performance. However, how LLMs organize different functions into modules remains highly unexplored. To bridge this gap, we formulate a function module discovery problem and propose an Unsupervised LLM Crosslayer MOdule Discovery (ULCMOD) framework that simultaneously disentangles the large set of neurons in the entire LLM into modules while discovering the topics of input samples related to these modules. Our framework introduces a novel objective function and an efficient Iterative Decoupling (IterD) algorithm. Extensive experiments show that our method discovers high-quality, disentangled modules that capture more meaningful semantic information and achieve superior performance in various downstream tasks. Moreover, our qualitative analysis reveals that the discovered modules show function comprehensiveness, function hierarchy, and clear function spatial arrangement within LLMs. Our work provides a novel tool for interpreting LLMs' function modules, filling a critical gap in LLMs' interpretability research.

PaperID: 1098, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20292

Authors:Wenzheng Zeng, Mingyu Ouyang, Langyuan Cui, Hwee Tou Ng

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore

Title: SlideTailor: Personalized Presentation Slide Generation for Scientific Papers

Abstract:
Automatic presentation slide generation can greatly streamline content creation. However, since preferences of each user may vary, existing underspecified formulations often lead to suboptimal results that fail to align with individual user needs. We introduce a novel task that conditions paper-to-slides generation on user-specified preferences. We propose a human behavior-inspired agentic framework, SlideTailor, that progressively generates editable slides in a user-aligned manner. Instead of requiring users to write their preferences in detailed textual form, our system only asks for a paper-slides example pair and a visual template—natural and easy-to-provide artifacts that implicitly encode rich user preferences across content and visual style. Despite the implicit and unlabeled nature of these inputs, our framework effectively distills and generalizes the preferences to guide customized slide generation. We also introduce a novel chain-of-speech mechanism to align slide content with planned oral narration. Such a design significantly enhances the quality of generated slides and enables downstream applications like video presentations. To support this new task, we construct a benchmark dataset that captures diverse user preferences, with carefully designed interpretable metrics for robust evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

PaperID: 1099, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21398

Authors:Jiayuan Zhang, Kaiquan Chen, Zhihao Lu, Enshen Zhou, Qian Yu, Jing Zhang

Affiliations: Beihang University

Title: Prune4Web: DOM Tree Pruning Programming for Web Agent

Abstract:
Web automation uses intelligent agents to perform highlevel tasks by mimicking human interactions with webpages. Despite recent advances in LLM-based web agents, efficiently navigating complex, real-world webpages remains challenging due to massive DOM structures (10,000 ~ 100,000 tokens). Current approaches either truncate DOMs—losing vital information—or use inefficient heuristics and separate ranking models, failing to balance precision and scalability. We introduce Prune4Web, a novel paradigm that transforms DOM processing from LLM-based filtering to programmatic pruning. Our key innovation is DOM Tree Pruning Programming, where an LLM generates executable Python scoring programs to dynamically filter DOM elements based on semantic clues from decomposed sub-tasks. This approach eliminates the need for LLMs to process full DOMs, instead delegating traversal and scoring to lightweight, interpretable programs. The result is a 25 ~ 50 times reduction in candidate elements for grounding, enabling precise action localization without attention dilution. Additionally, we propose a data annotation method and a two-turn dialogue training strategy that jointly optimizes Planner, Programmatic Filter, and Grounder in a unified framework. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. On our low-level task grounding task, our approach dramatically increases grounding accuracy from 46.80% to 88.28%, highlighting its effectiveness.

PaperID: 1100, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18623

Authors:Jusheng Zhang, Ningyuan Liu, Yijia Fan, Zihao Huang, Qinglin Zeng, Kaitong Cai, Jian Wang, Keze Wang

Affiliations: SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY, Snap Inc.

Title: LLM-CAS: Dynamic Neuron Perturbation for Real-Time Hallucination Correction

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) often generate hallucinated content lacking factual or contextual grounding, hindering their reliability in critical applications. Traditional methods like supervised finetuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback are data-intensive and computationally expensive, while static parameter editing struggles with context-dependent errors and catastrophic forgetting. To overcome these limitations, we introduce LLM-CAS, a framework that formulates real-time hallucination correction as a hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) problem. LLM-CAS trains an agent to learn a sophisticated policy, dynamically selecting optimal, temporary neuron perturbations during inference based on the immediate context. This learned, policy-driven approach provides greater adaptability than prior dynamic methods that rely on heuristic or pre-defined adjustments. As a result, LLM-CAS achieves significant performance gains across various LLMs, improving accuracy by 10.98 percentage points on StoryCloze, 2.71 points on TriviaQA, and 2.06 points on TruthfulQA's MC1 score, thereby outperforming static methods like ITI and CAA, as well as the dynamic SADI framework. This context-aware, efficient approach promises enhanced reliability for LLMs in high-stakes domains, with future potential for multimodal extensions.

PaperID: 1101, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00299

Authors:Min Zhang, Yuzhe Lu, Yun Zhou, Panpan Xu, Lin Lee Cheong, Chang-Tien Lu, Haozhu Wang

Affiliations: Virginia Tech, AWS AI

Title: Collaborative LLM Numerical Reasoning with Local Data Protection

Abstract:
Numerical reasoning over documents, which demands both contextual understanding and logical inference, is challenging for lowcapacity local models deployed on computation-constrained devices. Although such complex reasoning queries could be routed to powerful remote models like GPT-4, exposing local data raises significant data leakage concerns. Existing mitigation methods generate problem descriptions or examples for remote assistance. However, the inherent complexity of numerical reasoning hinders the local model from generating logically equivalent queries and accurately inferring answers with remote guidance. In this paper, we present a model collaboration framework with two key innovations: (1) a context-aware synthesis strategy that shifts the query topics while preserving reasoning patterns; and (2) a tool-based answer reconstruction approach that reuses the remote-generated plug-and-play solution with code snippets. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves better reasoning accuracy than solely using local models while providing stronger data protection than fully relying on remote models. Furthermore, our method improves accuracy by 16.2% - 43.6% while reducing data leakage by 2.3% - 44.6% compared to existing data protection approaches.

PaperID: 1102, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12133

Authors:Qingyu Zhang, Chunlei Xin, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Qing Ye, Qianlong Xie, Xingxing Wang

Affiliations: Chinese Information Processing Laboratory, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Independent Researcher

Title: AI-Salesman: Towards Reliable Large Language Model Driven Telemarketing

Abstract:
Goaldriven persuasive dialogue, exemplified by applications like telemarketing, requires sophisticated multi-turn planning and strict factual faithfulness, which remains a significant challenge for even state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs). A lack of task-specific data often limits previous works, and direct LLM application suffers from strategic brittleness and factual hallucination. In this paper, we first construct and release TeleSalesCorpus, the first real-world-grounded dialogue dataset for this domain. We then propose AI-Salesman, a novel framework featuring a dual-stage architecture. For the training stage, we design a Bayesian-supervised reinforcement learning algorithm that learns robust sales strategies from noisy dialogues. For the inference stage, we introduce the Dynamic Outline-Guided Agent (DOGA), which leverages a pre-built script library to provide dynamic, turn-by-turn strategic guidance. Moreover, we design a comprehensive evaluation framework that combines fine-grained metrics for key sales skills with the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed AI-Salesman significantly outperforms baseline models in both automatic metrics and comprehensive human evaluations, showcasing its effectiveness in complex persuasive scenarios.

PaperID: 1103, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.10951

Authors:Qiuyu Zhu, Liang Zhang, Qianxiong Xu, Cheng Long, Jie Zhang

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Title: SubGCache: Accelerating Graph-based RAG with Subgraph-level KV Cache

Abstract:
Graphbased retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to incorporate structured knowledge via graph retrieval as contextual input, enhancing more accurate and context-aware reasoning. We observe that for different queries, it could retrieve similar subgraphs as prompts, and thus we propose SubGCache, which aims to reduce inference latency by reusing computation across queries with similar structural prompts (i.e., subgraphs). Specifically, SubGCache clusters queries based on subgraph embeddings, constructs a representative subgraph for each cluster, and pre-computes the key-value (KV) cache of the representative subgraph. For each query with its retrieved subgraph within a cluster, it reuses the pre-computed KV cache of the representative subgraph of the cluster without computing the KV tensors again for saving computation. Extensive experiments on three datasets across multiple LLM backbones and graph-based RAG frameworks demonstrate that SubGCache consistently reduces inference latency with comparable and even improved generation quality, achieving up to 6.68x reduction in time-to-first-token (TTFT).

PaperID: 1104, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13737

Authors:Zhenhao Zhu, Yue Liu, Zhiwei Xu, Yingwei Ma, Hongcheng Gao, Nuo Chen, Yanpei Guo, Wenjie Qu, Huiying Xu, Zifeng Kang, Xinzhong Zhu, Jiaheng Zhang

Affiliations: National University of Singapore, Tsinghua University, Moonshot AI, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhejiang Normal University, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: ExtendAttack: Attacking Servers of LRMs via Extending Reasoning

Abstract:
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated promising performance in complex tasks. However, the resourceconsuming reasoning processes may be exploited by attackers to maliciously occupy the resources of the servers, leading to a crash, like the DDoS attack in cyber. To this end, we propose a novel attack method on LRMs termed ExtendAttack to maliciously occupy the resources of servers by stealthily extending the reasoning processes of LRMs. Concretely, we systematically obfuscate characters within a benign prompt, transforming them into a complex, poly-base ASCII representation. This compels the model to perform a series of computationally intensive decoding sub-tasks that are deeply embedded within the semantic structure of the query itself. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed ExtendAttack. Remarkably, it significantly increases response length and latency, with the former increasing by over 2.7 times for the o3 model on the HumanEval benchmark. Besides, it preserves the original meaning of the query and achieves comparable answer accuracy, showing the stealthiness.

PaperID: 1105, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01335

Authors:Lingxiao Chen, Liqin Wang, Wei Lu

Affiliations: Sun Yat-sen University

Title: StyleSentinel: Reliable Artistic Copyright Verification via Stylistic Fingerprints

Abstract:
The versatility of diffusion models in generating customized images has led to unauthorized usage of personal artwork, which poses a significant threat to the intellectual property of artists. Existing approaches relying on embedding additional information, such as perturbations, watermarks, and backdoors, suffer from limited defensive capabilities and fail to protect artwork published online. In this paper, we propose StyleSentinel, an approach for copyright protection of artwork by verifying an inherent stylistic fingerprint in the artist's artwork. Specifically, we employ a semantic selfreconstruction process to enhance stylistic expressiveness within the artwork, which establishes a dense and style-consistent manifold foundation for feature learning. Subsequently, we adaptively fuse multi-layer image features to encode abstract artistic style into a compact stylistic fingerprint. Finally, we model the target artist's style as a minimal enclosing hypersphere boundary in the feature space, transforming complex copyright verification into a robust one-class learning task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that compared with the state-of-the-art, StyleSentinel achieves superior performance on the one-sample verification task. We also demonstrate the effectiveness through online platforms.

PaperID: 1106, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19058

Authors:Jihui Guo, Zongmin Zhang, Zhen Sun, Yuhao Yang, Jinlin Wu, Fu Zhang, Xinlei He

Affiliations: The University of Hong Kong, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Beihang University, Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR), Hong Kong Institute of Science and Innovation (HKISI) Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems (MAIS), Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: 6DAttack: Backdoor Attacks in the 6DoF Pose Estimation

Abstract:
Recent advances in deep learning have enabled highly accurate sixdegree-of-freedom (6DoF) object pose estimation, leading to its widespread use in real-world applications such as robotics, augmented reality, virtual reality, and autonomous systems. However, backdoor attacks pose a major security risk to deep learning models. By injecting malicious triggers into training data, an attacker can cause a model to perform normally on benign inputs but behave incorrectly under specific conditions. While most research on backdoor attacks has focused on 2D vision tasks, their impact on 6DoF pose estimation remains largely unexplored. Furthermore, unlike traditional backdoors that only change the object class, backdoors against 6DoF pose estimation must additionally control continuous pose parameters, such as translation and rotation, making existing 2D backdoor attack methods not directly applicable to this setting. To address this gap, we propose a novel backdoor attack framework (6DAttack) that exposes vulnerabilities in 6DoF pose estimation. 6DAttack uses synthetic and real 3D objects of varying shapes as triggers and assigns target poses to induce controlled erroneous pose outputs while maintaining normal behavior on clean inputs. We evaluated this attack on multiple models (including PVNet, DenseFusion, and PoseDiffusion) and datasets (including LINEMOD, YCB-Video, and CO3D). Experimental results demonstrate that 6DAttack achieves extremely high attack success rates (ASRs) without compromising performance on legitimate tasks. Across various models and objects, the backdoored models achieve up to 100% ADD accuracy on clean data, while also achieving 100% ASR under trigger conditions. The accuracy of controlled erroneous pose output is also extremely high, with triggered samples achieving 97.70% ADD-P. These results demonstrate that the backdoor can be reliably implanted and activated, achieving a high ASR under trigger conditions while maintaining a negligible impact on benign data. Furthermore, we evaluate a representative defense and show that it remains ineffective under 6DAttack. Overall, our findings reveal a potentially serious and previously underexplored threat to modern 6DoF pose estimation models.

PaperID: 1107, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12239

Authors:Tarun Gupta, Danish Pruthi

Affiliations: Indian Institute of Science

Title: Beyond World Models: Rethinking Understanding in AI Models

Abstract:
World models have garnered substantial interest in the AI community. These are internal representations that simulate aspects of the external world, track entities and states, capture causal relationships, and enable prediction of consequences. This contrasts with representations based solely on statistical correlations. A key motivation behind this research direction is that humans possess such mental world models, and finding evidence of similar representations in AI models might indicate that these models "understand" the world in a humanlike way. In this paper, we use case studies from the philosophy of science literature to critically examine whether the world model framework adequately characterizes human-level understanding. We focus on specific philosophical analyses where the distinction between world model capabilities and human understanding is most pronounced. While these represent particular views of understanding rather than universal definitions, they help us explore the limits of world models.

PaperID: 1108, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06194

Authors:Lai Jiang, Yuekang Li, Xiaohan Zhang, Youtao Ding, Li Pan

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai China, University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia

Title: SceneJailEval: A Scenario-Adaptive Multi-Dimensional Framework for Jailbreak Evaluation

Abstract:
Accurate jailbreak evaluation is critical for LLM red team testing and jailbreak research. Mainstream methods rely on binary classification (string matching, toxic text classifiers, and LLMbased methods), outputting only "yes/no" labels without quantifying harm severity. Emerged multi-dimensional frameworks (e.g., Security Violation, Relative Truthfulness and Informativeness) use unified evaluation standards across scenarios, leading to scenario-specific mismatches (e.g., "Relative Truthfulness" is irrelevant to "hate speech"), undermining evaluation accuracy. To address these, we propose SceneJailEval, with key contributions: (1) A pioneering scenario-adaptive multi-dimensional framework for jailbreak evaluation, overcoming the critical "one-size-fits-all" limitation of existing multi-dimensional methods, and boasting robust extensibility to seamlessly adapt to customized or emerging scenarios. (2) A novel 14-scenario dataset featuring rich jailbreak variants and regional cases, addressing the long-standing gap in high-quality, comprehensive benchmarks for scenario-adaptive evaluation. (3) SceneJailEval delivers state-of-the-art performance with an F1 score of 0.917 on our full-scenario dataset (+6% over SOTA) and 0.995 on JBB (+3% over SOTA), breaking through the accuracy bottleneck of existing evaluation methods in heterogeneous scenarios and solidifying its superiority.

PaperID: 1109, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.03665

Authors:Binh M. Le, Simon S. Woo

Affiliations: Sungkyunkwan University

Title: Machine Pareidolia: Protecting Facial Image with Emotional Editing

Abstract:
The proliferation of facial recognition (FR) systems has raised privacy concerns in the digital realm, as malicious uses of FR models pose a significant threat. Traditional countermeasures, such as makeup style transfer, have suffered from low transferability in blackbox settings and limited applicability across various demographic groups, including males and individuals with darker skin tones. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel facial privacy protection method, dubbed MAP, a pioneering approach that employs human emotion modifications to disguise original identities as target identities in facial images. Our method uniquely fine-tunes a score network to learn dual objectives, target identity and human expression, which are jointly optimized through gradient projection to ensure convergence at a shared local optimum. Additionally, we enhance the perceptual quality of protected images by applying local smoothness regularization and optimizing the score matching loss within our network. Empirical experiments demonstrate that our innovative approach surpasses previous baselines, including noise-based, makeup-based, and freeform attribute methods, in both qualitative fidelity and quantitative metrics. Furthermore, MAP proves its effectiveness against an online FR API and shows advanced adaptability in uncommon photographic scenarios.

PaperID: 1110, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11154

Authors:Zihan Wang, Rui Zhang, Yu Liu, Wenshu Fan, Wenbo Jiang, Qingchuan Zhao, Hongwei Li, Guowen Xu

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, City University of Hong Kong

Title: MPMA: Preference Manipulation Attack Against Model Context Protocol

Abstract:
Model Context Protocol (MCP) standardizes interface mapping for large language models (LLMs) to access external data and tools, which revolutionizes the paradigm of tool selection and facilitates the rapid expansion of the LLM agent tool ecosystem. However, as the MCP is increasingly adopted, thirdparty customized versions of the MCP server expose potential security vulnerabilities. In this paper, we first introduce a novel security threat, which we term the MCP Preference Manipulation Attack (MPMA). An attacker deploys a customized MCP server to manipulate LLMs, causing them to prioritize it over other competing MCP servers. This can result in economic benefits for attackers, such as revenue from paid MCP services or advertising income generated from free servers. To achieve MPMA, we first design a Direct Preference Manipulation Attack (DPMA) that achieves significant effectiveness by inserting the manipulative word and phrases into the tool name and description. However, such a direct modification is obvious to users and lacks stealthiness. To address these limitations, we further propose Genetic-based Advertising Preference Manipulation Attack (GAPMA). GAPMA employs four commonly used strategies to initialize descriptions and integrates a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to enhance stealthiness. The experiment results demonstrate that GAPMA balances high effectiveness and stealthiness. Our study reveals a critical vulnerability of the MCP in open ecosystems, highlighting an urgent need for robust defense mechanisms to ensure the fairness of the MCP ecosystem.

PaperID: 1111, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08905

Authors:Zixun Xiong, Gaoyi Wu, Qingyang Yu, Mingyu Derek Ma, Lingfeng Yao, Miao Pan, Xiaojiang Du, Hao Wang

Affiliations: Stevens Institute of Technology, University of Houston

Title: iSeal: Encrypted Fingerprinting for Reliable LLM Ownership Verification

Abstract:
Given the high cost of large language model (LLM) training from scratch, safeguarding LLM intellectual property (IP) becomes increasingly crucial. As the standard paradigm for IP ownership verification, LLM fingerprinting thus plays a vital role in addressing this challenge. Existing LLM fingerprinting methods verify ownership by extracting or injecting modelspecific features. However, they overlook potential attacks during the verification process, leaving them ineffective when the model thief fully controls the LLM's inference process. In such settings, attackers may share prompt-response pairs to enable fingerprint unlearning, or manipulate outputs to evade exact-match verification. We propose iSeal, the first fingerprinting method designed for reliable verification when the model thief controls the suspected LLM in an end-to-end manner. It injects unique features into both the model and an external module, reinforced by an error-correction mechanism and a similarity-based verification strategy. These components are resistant to verification-time attacks, including collusion-based fingerprint unlearning and response manipulation, backed by both theoretical analysis and empirical results. iSeal achieves 100% Fingerprint Success Rate (FSR) on 12 LLMs against more than 10 attacks, while baselines fail under unlearning and response manipulations.

PaperID: 1112, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08191

Authors:Ruihan Zhang, Jun Sun, Ee-Peng Lim, Peixin Zhang

Affiliations: Singapore Management University

Title: Towards Provably Unlearnable Examples via Bayes Error Optimization

Abstract:
The recent success of machine learning models, especially largescale classifiers and language models, relies heavily on training with massive data. These data are often collected from online sources. This raises serious concerns about the protection of user data, as individuals may not have given consent for their data to be used in training. To address this concern, recent studies introduce the concept of unlearnable examples, i.e., data instances that appear natural but are intentionally altered to prevent models from effectively learning from them. While existing methods demonstrate empirical effectiveness, they typically rely on heuristic trials and lack formal guarantees. Besides, when unlearnable examples are mixed with clean data, as is often the case in practice, their unlearnability disappears. In this work, we propose a novel approach to constructing unlearnable examples by systematically maximising the Bayes error, a measurement of irreducible classification error. We develop an optimisation-based approach and provide an efficient solution using projected gradient ascent. Our method provably increases the Bayes error and remains effective when the unlearning examples are mixed with clean samples. Experimental results across multiple datasets and model architectures are consistent with our theoretical analysis and show that our approach can restrict data learnability, effectively in practice.

PaperID: 1113, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.04539

Authors:Ali Asadi, Krishnendu Chatterjee, Ehsan Kafshdar Goharshady, Mehrdad Karrabi, Ali Shafiee

Affiliations: Institute of Science and Technology Austria

Title: Qualitative Analysis of ω-Regular Objectives on Robust MDPs

Abstract:
Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) generalize classical MDPs that consider uncertainties in transition probabilities by defining a set of possible transition functions. An objective is a set of runs (or infinite trajectories) of the RMDP, and the value for an objective is the maximal probability that the agent can guarantee against the adversarial environment. We consider (a) reachability objectives, where given a target set of states, the goal is to eventually arrive at one of them; and (b) parity objectives, which are a canonical representation for ωregular objectives. The qualitative analysis problem asks whether the objective can be ensured with probability 1. In this work, we study the qualitative problem for reachability and parity objectives on RMDPs without making any assumption over the structures of the RMDPs, e.g., unichain or aperiodic. Our contributions are twofold. We first present efficient algorithms with oracle access to uncertainty sets that solve qualitative problems of reachability and parity objectives. We then report experimental results demonstrating the effectiveness of our oracle-based approach on classical RMDP examples from the literature scaling up to thousands of states.

PaperID: 1114, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.16809

Authors:Yishuai Cai, Xinglin Chen, Yunxin Mao, Kun Hu, Minglong Li

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology

Title: CABTO: Context-Aware Behavior Tree Grounding for Robot Manipulation

Abstract:
Behavior Trees (BTs) offer a powerful paradigm for designing modular and reactive robot controllers. BT planning, an emerging field, provides theoretical guarantees for the automated generation of reliable BTs. However, BT planning typically assumes that a welldesigned BT system is already grounded—comprising high-level action models and low-level control policies—which often requires extensive expert knowledge and manual effort. In this paper, we formalize the BT Grounding problem: the automated construction of a complete and consistent BT system. We analyze its complexity and introduce CABTO (Context-Aware Behavior Tree grOunding), the first framework to efficiently solve this challenge. CABTO leverages pre-trained Large Models (LMs) to heuristically search the space of action models and control policies, guided by contextual feedback from BT planners and environmental observations. Experiments spanning seven task sets across three distinct robotic manipulation scenarios demonstrate CABTO’s effectiveness and efficiency in generating complete and consistent behavior tree systems.

PaperID: 1115, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11095

Authors:Dillon Z. Chen, Till Hofmann, Toryn Q. Klassen, Sheila A. McIlraith

Affiliations: Vector Institute, Canada LAAS-CNRS, University of Toulouse, France University of Toronto, RWTH Aachen University, Canada University of Toronto

Title: Satisficing and Optimal Generalised Planning via Goal Regression

Abstract:
Generalised planning (GP) refers to the task of synthesising programs that solve families of related planning problems. We introduce a novel, yet simple method for GP: given a set of training problems, for each problem, compute an optimal plan for each goal atom in some order, perform goal regression on the resulting plans, and lift the corresponding outputs to obtain a set of firstorder Condition → Actions rules. The rules collectively constitute a generalised plan that can be executed as is or alternatively be used to prune the planning search space. We formalise and prove the conditions under which our method is guaranteed to learn valid generalised plans and state space pruning axioms for search. Experiments demonstrate significant improvements over state-of-the-art (generalised) planners with respect to the 3 metrics of synthesis cost, planning coverage, and solution quality on various classical and numeric planning domains.

PaperID: 1116, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00707

Authors:Yannik Schnitzer, Alessandro Abate, David Parker

Affiliations: University of Oxford

Title: Efficient Solution and Learning of Robust Factored MDPs

Abstract:
Robust Markov decision processes (rMDPs) extend MDPs by explicitly modelling epistemic uncertainty about transition dynamics. Learning r-MDPs from interactions with an unknown environment enables the synthesis of robust policies with provable (PAC) guarantees on performance, but this can require a large number of sample interactions. We propose novel methods for solving and learning r-MDPs based on factored state-space representations that leverage the independence between model uncertainty across system components. Although policy synthesis for factored r-MDPs leads to hard, non-convex optimisation problems, we show how to reformulate these into tractable linear programs. Building on these, we also propose methods to learn factored model representations directly. Our experimental results show that exploiting factored structure can yield dimensional gains in sample efficiency, producing more effective robust policies with tighter performance guarantees than state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 1117, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21595

Authors:Yang You, Alex Schutz, Zhikun Li, Bruno Lacerda, Robert Skilton, Nick Hawes

Affiliations: UK Atomic Energy Authority, University of Oxford

Title: Scalable Solution Methods for Dec-POMDPs with Deterministic Dynamics

Abstract:
Many highlevel multi-agent planning problems, such as multi-robot navigation and path planning, can be modeled with deterministic actions and observations. In this work, we focus on such domains and introduce the class of Deterministic Decentralized POMDPs (Det-Dec-POMDPs)—a subclass of Dec-POMDPs with deterministic transitions and observations given the state and joint actions. We then propose a practical solver, Iterative Deterministic POMDP Planning (IDPP), based on the classic Joint Equilibrium Search for Policies framework, specifically optimized to handle large-scale Det-Dec-POMDPs that existing Dec-POMDP solvers cannot handle efficiently.

PaperID: 1118, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06458

Authors:Rishiraj Bhattacharyya, Sourav Chakraborty, Yash Pote, Uddalok Sarkar, Sayantan Sen

Affiliations: University of Birmingham, Indian Statistical Institute, National University of Singapore

Title: Instance Dependent Testing of Samplers Using Interval Conditioning

Abstract:
Sampling algorithms play a pivotal role in probabilistic AI. However, verifying if a sampler program indeed samples from the claimed distribution is a notoriously hard problem. Provably correct testers like Barbarik,Teq,Flash, Cubeprobe for testing of different kinds of samplers were proposed only in the last few years. All these testers focus on the worstcase efficiency, and do not support verification of samplers over infinite domains, a case occurring frequently in Astronomy, Finance, Network Security etc. In this work, we design the first tester of samplers with instance-dependent efficiency, allowing us to test samplers over natural numbers. Our tests are developed via a novel distance estimation algorithm between an unknown and a known probability distribution using an 'interval conditioning' framework. The core technical contribution is a new connection with probability mass estimation of a continuous distribution. The practical gains are also substantial—our experiments establish up to 1000× speedup over state-of-the-art testers.

PaperID: 1119, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08867

Authors:Xingchao Jian, Purui Zhang, Lan Tian, Feng Ji, Wenfei Liang, Wee Peng Tay, Bihan Wen, Felix Krahmer

Affiliations: Technical University of Munich Munich Center for Machine Learning, Nanyang Technological University

Title: Conformal Prediction for Multi-Source Detection on a Network

Abstract:
Detecting the origin of information or infection spread in networks is a fundamental challenge with applications in misinformation tracking, epidemiology, and beyond. We study the multisource detection problem: given snapshot observations of node infection status on a graph, estimate the set of source nodes that initiated the propagation. Existing methods either lack statistical guarantees or are limited to specific diffusion models and assumptions. We propose a novel conformal prediction framework that provides statistically valid recall guarantees for source set detection, independent of the underlying diffusion process or data distribution. Our approach introduces principled score functions to quantify the alignment between predicted probabilities and true sources, and leverages a calibration set to construct prediction sets with user-specified recall and coverage levels. The method is applicable to both single- and multi-source scenarios, supports general network diffusion dynamics, and is computationally efficient for large graphs. Empirical results demonstrate that our method achieves rigorous coverage with competitive accuracy, outperforming existing baselines in both reliability and scalability.

PaperID: 1120, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00467

Authors:Pablo Torrijos, Jose M. Puerta, Juan A. Aledo, José A. Gámez

Affiliations: Spain Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Spain Departamento de Matemáticas

Title: Bayesian Network Structural Consensus via Greedy Min-Cut Analysis

Abstract:
This paper presents the MinCut Bayesian Network Consensus (MCBNC) algorithm, a greedy method for structural consensus of Bayesian Networks (BNs), with applications in federated learning and model aggregation. MCBNC prunes weak edges from an initial unrestricted fusion using a structural score based on min-cut analysis, integrated into a modified Backward Equivalence Search (BES) phase of the Greedy Equivalence Search (GES) algorithm. The score quantifies edge support across input networks and is computed using max-flow. Unlike methods with fixed treewidth bounds, MCBNC introduces a pruning threshold θ that can be selected post hoc using only structural information. Experiments on real-world BNs show that MCBNC yields sparser, more accurate consensus structures than both canonical fusion and the input networks. The method is scalable, data-agnostic, and well-suited for distributed or federated structural learning of BNs or causal discovery.

PaperID: 1121, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21626

Authors:Hong Xie, Haoran Gu, Yanying Huang, Tao Tan, Defu Lian

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China & State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Intelligence, Daqing Oilfield Chongqing Company, College of Computer Science, Chongqing University

Title: Multiple-play Stochastic Bandits with Prioritized Arm Capacity Sharing

Abstract:
This paper proposes a variant of multipleplay stochastic bandits tailored to resource allocation problems arising from LLM applications, edge intelligence, etc. The model is composed of finite number of arms and plays. Each arm has a stochastic number of capacities, and each unit of capacity is associated with a reward function. Each play is associated with a priority weight. When multiple plays compete for the arm capacity, the arm capacity is allocated in a larger priority weight first manner. Instance independent and instance dependent regret lower bounds are proved, revealing the impact of model parameters on the hardness of learning the optimal allocation policy. When model parameters are given, we design an algorithm named MSB-PRS-OffOpt to locate the optimal play allocation policy with a polynomial computational complexity in the number of arms and plays. Utilizing MSB-PRS-OffOpt as a subroutine, an approximate upper confidence bound (UCB) based algorithm is designed, which has instance independent and instance dependent regret upper bounds matching the corresponding lower bound up to acceptable factors. To this end, we address nontrivial technical challenges arising from optimizing and learning under a special nonlinear combinatorial utility function induced by the prioritized resource sharing mechanism.

PaperID: 1122, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05815

Authors:Ji Cheng, Bo Xue, Qingfu Zhang

Affiliations: City University of Hong Kong

Title: Parametric Pareto Set Learning for Expensive Multi-Objective Optimization

Abstract:
Parametric multiobjective optimization (PMO) addresses the challenge of solving an infinite family of multi-objective optimization problems, where optimal solutions must adapt to varying parameters. Traditional methods require re-execution for each parameter configuration, leading to prohibitive costs when objective evaluations are computationally expensive. To address this issue, we propose Parametric Pareto Set Learning with multi-objective Bayesian Optimization (PPSL-MOBO), a novel framework that learns a unified mapping from both preferences and parameters to Pareto-optimal solutions. PPSL-MOBO leverages a hypernetwork with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to efficiently capture parametric variations, while integrating Gaussian process surrogates and hypervolume-based acquisition to minimize expensive function evaluations. We demonstrate PPSL-MOBO's effectiveness on two challenging applications: multi-objective optimization with shared components, where certain design variables must be identical across solution families due to modular constraints, and dynamic multi-objective optimization, where objectives evolve over time. Unlike existing methods that cannot directly solve PMO problems in a unified manner, PPSL-MOBO learns a single model that generalizes across the entire parameter space. By enabling instant inference of Pareto sets for new parameter values without retraining, PPSL-BO provides an efficient solution for expensive PMO problems.

PaperID: 1123, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07150

Authors:Benjamin Doerr, Martin S. Krejca, Milan Stanković

Affiliations: Laboratoire d'Informatique (LIX), École Polytechnique, Institut Polytechnique de Paris

Title: Improved Runtime Guarantees for the SPEA2 Multi-Objective Optimizer

Abstract:
Together with the NSGAII, the SPEA2 is one of the most widely used domination-based multi-objective evolutionary algorithms. For both algorithms, the known runtime guarantees are linear in the population size; for the NSGA-II, matching lower bounds exist. With a careful study of the more complex selection mechanism of the SPEA2, we show that it has very different population dynamics. From these, we prove runtime guarantees for the OneMinMax, LeadingOnesTrailingZeros, and OneJumpZeroJump benchmarks that depend less on the population size. For example, we show that the SPEA2 with parent population size mu >= n - 2k + 3 and offspring population size lambda computes the Pareto front of the OneJumpZeroJump benchmark with gap size k in an expected number of O((lambda+mu)n + n^(k+1)) function evaluations. This shows that the best runtime guarantee of O(n^(k+1)) is not only achieved for mu = Theta(n) and lambda = O(n) but for arbitrary mu, lambda = O(n^k). Thus, choosing suitable parameters - a key challenge in using heuristic algorithms - is much easier for the SPEA2 than the NSGA-II.

PaperID: 1124, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10804

Authors:Pål Grønås Drange, Fedor Fomin, Petr A. Golovach, Danil Sagunov

Affiliations: University of Bergen, ITMO University

Title: Discounted Cuts: A Stackelberg Approach to Network Disruption

Abstract:
We study a Stackelberg variant of the classical Most Vital Links problem, modeled as a oneround adversarial game between an attacker and a defender. The attacker strategically removes up to k edges from a flow network to maximally disrupt flow between a source s and a sink t, after which the defender optimally reroutes the remaining flow. To capture this attacker–defender interaction, we introduce a new mathematical model of discounted cuts, in which the cost of a cut is evaluated by excluding its k most expensive edges. This model generalizes the Most Vital Links problem and uncovers novel algorithmic and complexity-theoretic properties. We develop a unified algorithmic framework for analyzing various forms of discounted cut problems, including minimizing or maximizing the cost of a cut under discount mechanisms that exclude either the k most expensive or the k cheapest edges. While most variants are NP-complete on general graphs, our main result establishes polynomial-time solvability for all discounted cut problems in our framework when the input is restricted to bounded-genus graphs, a relevant class that includes many real-world networks such as transportation and infrastructure networks. With this work, we aim to open collaborative bridges between artificial intelligence, algorithmic game theory, and operations research.

PaperID: 1125, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.11341

Authors:Jinchun Du, Bojie Shen, Muhammad Aamir Cheema

Affiliations: Monash University

Title: EHL*: Memory-Budgeted Indexing for Ultrafast Optimal Euclidean Pathfinding

Abstract:
The Euclidean Shortest Path Problem (ESPP) is a classic problem which requires finding the shortest path in a Euclidean plane with polygonal obstacles. The stateof-the-art solution, Euclidean Hub Labeling (EHL), offers ultra-fast query performance but comes with significant memory overhead, requiring up to tens of gigabytes of storage on large maps, limiting its use in memory-constrained environments like mobile phones. Additionally, EHL's memory usage can only be determined after index construction, and while it provides a memory-runtime tradeoff, it does not fully optimize memory utilization. In this work, we introduce an improved version of EHL, called EHL, which overcomes these limitations. A key contribution of EHL is its ability to create an index that adheres to a specified memory budget while optimizing query runtime performance. Moreover, EHL can leverage pre-known query distributions, a common scenario in many real-world applications, to further enhance runtime efficiency. Our results show that EHL can reduce memory usage by up to 10-20 times without much impact on query runtime performance compared to EHL, making it a highly effective solution for optimal pathfinding in memory-constrained environments. We also present a theoretical analysis comparing EHL with EHL, providing insights into their indexing and query processing cost.

PaperID: 1126, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05119

Authors:Chuanbo Hua, Federico Berto, Zhikai Zhao, Jiwoo Son, Changhyun Kwon, Jinkyoo Park

Affiliations: Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Title: USPR: Learning a Unified Solver for Profiled Routing

Abstract:
The Profiled Vehicle Routing Problem (PVRP) extends the classical VRP by incorporating vehicle–clientspecific preferences and constraints, reflecting real‑world requirements such as zone restrictions and service‑level preferences. While recent reinforcement‑learning solvers have shown promising performance, they require retraining for each new profile distribution, suffer from poor representation ability, and struggle to generalize to out‑of‑distribution instances. In this paper, we address these limitations by introducing Unified Solver for Profiled Routing (USPR), a novel framework that natively handles arbitrary profile types. USPR introduces on three key innovations: (i) Profile Embeddings (PE) to encode any combination of profile types; (ii) Multi‑Head Profiled Attention (MHPA), an attention mechanism that models rich interactions between vehicles and clients; (iii) Profile‑aware Score Reshaping (PSR), which dynamically adjusts decoder logits using profile scores to improve generalization. Empirical results on diverse PVRP benchmarks demonstrate that USPR achieves state‑of‑the‑art results among learning‑based methods while offering significant gains in flexibility and computational efficiency. We make our source code publicly available to foster future research.

PaperID: 1127, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.03642

Authors:Jingyang Zhao, Zimo Sheng, Mingyu Xiao

Affiliations: South Korea, Anhui University, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: FPT Approximation Algorithms for TSP on Non-Metric Graphs

Abstract:
TSP is a classic and extensively studied problem with numerous realworld applications in artificial intelligence and operations research. It is well-known that TSP admits a constant approximation ratio on metric graphs but becomes NP-hard to approximate within any computable function f(n) on general graphs. This disparity highlights a significant gap between the results on metric graphs and general graphs. Recent research has introduced some parameters to measure the ``distance'' of general graphs from being metric and explored FPT approximation algorithms parameterized by these parameters. Two commonly studied parameters are p, the number of vertices in triangles violating the triangle inequality, and q, the minimum number of vertices whose removal results in a metric graph. In this paper, we present improved FPT approximation algorithms with respect to these two parameters. For p, we propose an FPT algorithm with a 1.5-approximation ratio, improving upon the previous ratio of 2.5. For q, we significantly enhance the approximation ratio from 11 to 3, advancing the state of the art in both cases.

PaperID: 1128, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12197

Authors:Mahdi Alehdaghi, Rajarshi Bhattacharya, Pourya Shamsolmoali, Rafael M. O. Cruz, Eric Granger

Affiliations: Dept. of Systems Engineering, ETS Montreal, Dept. of Computer Science, University of York

Title: Beyond Patches: Mining Interpretable Part-Prototypes for Explainable AI

Abstract:
As AI systems become more capable, it is important that their decisions are understandable and aligned with human expectations. A key challenge is the lack of interpretability in deep models. Existing methods such as GradCAM generate heatmaps but provide limited conceptual insight, while prototypebased approaches offer example-based explanations but often rely on rigid region selection and lack semantic consistency. To address these limitations, we propose PCMNet, a Part-Prototypical Concept Mining Network that learns human-comprehensible prototypes from meaningful regions without extra supervision. By clustering these into concept groups and extracting concept activation vectors, PCMNet provides structured, concept-level explanations and enhances robustness under occlusion and adversarial conditions, which are both critical for building reliable and aligned AI systems. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show that PCMNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods in interpretability, stability, and robustness. This work contributes to AI alignment by enhancing transparency, controllability, and trustworthiness in modern AI systems.

PaperID: 1129, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.03927

Authors:Ming-Chang Chiu, Shicheng Wen, Pin-Yu Chen, Xuezhe Ma

Affiliations: University of Southern California, IBM Research

Title: MegaCoin: Enhancing Medium-Grained Color Perception for Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
In visionlanguage models (VLMs), the ability to perceive and interpret color and physical environment is crucial for achieving contextually accurate understanding and interaction. However, despite advances in multimodal modeling, there remains a significant lack of specialized datasets that rigorously evaluate a model's capacity to discern subtle color variations and spatial context---critical elements for situational comprehension and reliable deployment across real-world applications. Toward that goal, we curate MegaCoin, a high-quality, human-labeled dataset based on \emphreal images with various contextual attributes. MegaCoin consists of two parts: MegaCoin-Instruct, which serves as a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) dataset for VLMs; and MegaCoin-Bench, an annotated test set that can be used as a stand-alone QA dataset. MegaCoin provides three annotated features for 220,000 real images: foreground color, background color, and description of an object's physical environment, constituting 660k human annotations. In addition, MegaCoin can be applied to benchmark domain generalization (DG) algorithms. We explore benchmarking DG methods in the linear probing setup for VLM and show some new insights. Last but not least, we show that VLMs, including GPT-4o, have subpar color recognition capabilities, and fine-tuning with MegaCoin can result in improved performance on visual evaluation tasks. In certain cases, MegaCoin fine-tuned small-scale open-source models such as LLaVA and Bunny can outperform closed-source GPT-4o. We hope the utilities of MegaCoin can shed light on the directions VLMs can improve and provide a more complex platform for domain generalization algorithms.

PaperID: 1130, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13290

Authors:Jea Kwon, Luiz Felipe Vecchietti, Sungwon Park, Meeyoung Cha

Affiliations: Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP)

Title: Dropouts in Confidence: Moral Uncertainty in Human-LLM Alignment

Abstract:
Humans display significant uncertainty when confronted with moral dilemmas, yet the extent of such uncertainty in machines and AI agents remains underexplored. Recent studies have confirmed the overly confident tendencies of machinegenerated responses, particularly in large language models (LLMs). As these systems are increasingly embedded in ethical decision-making scenarios, it is important to understand their moral reasoning and the inherent uncertainties in building reliable AI systems. This work examines how uncertainty influences moral decisions in the classical trolley problem, analyzing responses from 32 open-source models and 9 distinct moral dimensions. We first find that variance in model confidence is greater across models than within moral dimensions, suggesting that moral uncertainty is predominantly shaped by model architecture and training method. To quantify uncertainty, we measure binary entropy as a linear combination of total entropy, conditional entropy, and mutual information. To examine its effects, we introduce stochasticity into models via ``dropout'' at inference time. Our findings show that our mechanism increases total entropy, mainly through a rise in mutual information, while conditional entropy remains largely unchanged. Moreover, this mechanism significantly improves human-LLM moral alignment, with correlations in mutual information and alignment score shifts. Our results highlight the potential to better align model-generated decisions and human preferences by deliberately modulating uncertainty and reducing LLMs' confidence in morally complex scenarios.

PaperID: 1131, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09708

Authors:Nirmalendu Prakash, Yeo Wei Jie, Amir Abdullah, Ranjan Satapathy, Erik Cambria, Roy Ka-Wei Lee

Affiliations: Singapore University of Technology and Design, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A∗STAR)

Title: Beyond I’m Sorry, I Can’t: Dissecting Large-Language-Model Refusal

Abstract:
Refusal on harmful prompts is a key safety behaviour in instruction‑tuned large language models (LLMs), yet the internal causes of this behaviour remain poorly understood. We study two public instruction tuned models—Gemma‑22B‑IT and LLaMA‑3.1-8B‑IT using sparse autoencoders (SAEs) trained on residual‑stream activations. Given a harmful prompt, we search the SAE latent space for feature sets whose ablation flips the model from refusal to compliance, demonstrating causal influence and creating a jailbreak. Our search proceeds in three stages: 1. Refusal Direction - Finding a refusal mediating direction and collecting SAE features close to that direction, followed by 2. Greedy Filtering - to prune this set to obtain a minimal set and finally 3. Interaction Discovery - a factorization‑machine (FM) model that captures non‑linear interactions among the remaining active features and the minimal set. This pipeline yields a broad set of jailbreak-critical features, offering insight into the mechanistic basis of refusal. Moreover, we also find evidence of redundant features which remain dormant unless earlier features are suppressed. Our findings highlight the potential for fine-grained auditing and targeted intervention in safety behaviours by manipulating the interpretable latent space.

PaperID: 1132, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12336

Authors:Youze Wang, Zijun Chen, Ruoyu Chen, Shishen Gu, Wenbo Hu, Jiayang Liu, Yinpeng Dong, Hang Su, Jun Zhu, Meng Wang, Richang Hong

Affiliations: Hefei University of Technology, Institute of Science Tokyo, Tsinghua University

Title: Benchmarking Trustworthiness in Multimodal LLMs for Video Understanding

Abstract:
Recent advancements in multimodal large language models for video understanding (videoLLMs) have enhanced their capacity to process complex spatiotemporal data. However, challenges such as factual inaccuracies, harmful content, biases, hallucinations, and privacy risks compromise their reliability. This study introduces TrustvideoLLMs, a first comprehensive benchmark evaluating 23 state-of-the-art videoLLMs (5 commercial, 18 open-source) across five critical dimensions: truthfulness, robustness, safety, fairness, and privacy. Comprising 30 tasks with adapted, synthetic, and annotated videos, the framework assesses spatiotemporal risks, temporal consistency and cross-modal impact. Results reveal significant limitations in dynamic scene comprehension, cross-modal perturbation resilience and real-world risk mitigation. While open-source models occasionally outperform, proprietary models generally exhibit superior credibility, though scaling does not consistently improve performance. These findings underscore the need for enhanced training datat diversity and robust multimodal alignment. Trust-videoLLMs provides a publicly available, extensible toolkit for standardized trustworthiness assessments, addressing the critical gap between accuracy-focused benchmarks and demands for robustness, safety, fairness, and privacy.

PaperID: 1133, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08967

Authors:Zixia Wang, Gaojie Jin, Jia Hu, Ronghui Mu

Affiliations: University of Exeter

Title: CluCERT: Certifying LLM Robustness via Clustering-Guided Denoising Smoothing

Abstract:
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to their widespread adoption in daily applications. Despite their impressive capabilities, they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, as even minor meaningpreserving changes such as synonym substitutions can lead to incorrect predictions. As a result, certifying the robustness of LLMs against such adversarial prompts is of vital importance. Existing approaches focused on word deletion or simple denoising strategies to achieve robustness certification. However, these methods face two critical limitations: (1) they yield loose robustness bounds due to the lack of semantic validation for perturbed outputs and (2) they suffer from high computational costs due to repeated sampling. To address these limitations, we propose CluCERT, a novel framework for certifying LLM robustness via clustering-guided denoising smoothing. Specifically, to achieve tighter certified bounds, we introduce a semantic clustering filter that reduces noisy samples and retains meaningful perturbations, supported by theoretical analysis. Furthermore, we enhance computational efficiency through two mechanisms: a refine module that extracts core semantics, and a fast synonym substitution strategy that accelerates the denoising process. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on various downstream tasks and jailbreak defense scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing certified approaches in both robustness bounds and computational efficiency.

PaperID: 1134, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.20018

Authors:Ziyan Wang, Meng Fang, Tristan Tomilin, Fei Fang, Yali Du

Affiliations: King's College London, University of Liverpool, Eindhoven University of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University

Title: Safe Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning with Natural Language Constraints

Abstract:
Safe MultiAgent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) typically relies on manually specified numeric cost functions to ensure that policy behaviours respect safety constraints. As systems scale and human-defined constraints become more diverse, context-dependent, and frequently updated, hand-crafting such cost functions becomes prohibitively complex, tedious, and error-prone. Natural language offers an intuitive and flexible alternative for defining constraints, enabling broader accessibility and easier adaptation to new scenarios and evolving rules. However, current MARL frameworks lack effective mechanisms to incorporate free-form textual constraints in a robust and principled way. To bridge this gap, we introduce Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with natural Language constraints (SMALL), a framework that leverages fine-tuned language models to parse and encode textual constraints into semantically meaningful embeddings. These embeddings characterise prohibited states or behaviours and enable automatic prediction of constraint violations. We integrate the resulting learned costs directly into MARL training, allowing agents to optimise task performance while simultaneously minimising constraint violations, without requiring manually engineered numeric cost functions. To rigorously evaluate our method, we also propose the LaMaSafe benchmark---a set of diverse multi-agent tasks designed to assess the capability of MARL algorithms to understand and adhere to realistic, human-provided natural language constraints. Experimental results across LaMaSafe environments show that SMALL achieves comparable task performance to strong MARL baselines while significantly reducing constraint violations. While SMALL does not provide formal safety guarantees, it demonstrates that natural language can be used to shape multi-agent behaviour toward safer policies.

PaperID: 1135, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03142

Authors:Xiangyu Zhou, Yao Qiang, Saleh Zare Zade, Douglas Zytko, Prashant Khanduri, Dongxiao Zhu

Affiliations: Wayne State University, Oakland University, University of Michigan - Flint

Title: Not All Tokens Are Meant to Be Forgotten

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs), pretrained on massive text corpora, exhibit remarkable human-level language understanding, reasoning, and decision-making abilities. However, they tend to memorize unwanted information, such as private or copyrighted content, raising significant privacy and legal concerns. Unlearning has emerged as a promising solution, but existing methods face a significant challenge of over-forgetting. This issue arises because they indiscriminately suppress the generation of all the tokens in forget samples, leading to a substantial loss of model utility. To overcome this challenge, we introduce the Targeted Information Forgetting (TIF) framework, which consists of (1) a flexible targeted information identifier designed to differentiate between unwanted words (UW) and general words (GW) in the forget samples, and (2) a novel Targeted Preference Optimization approach that leverages Logit Preference Loss to unlearn unwanted information associated with UW and Preservation Loss to retain general information in GW, effectively improving the unlearning process while mitigating utility degradation. Extensive experiments on the TOFU and MUSE benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed TIF framework enhances unlearning effectiveness while preserving model utility and achieving state-of-the-art results.

PaperID: 1136, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08711

Authors:Abhipsa Basu, Aviral Gupta, Abhijnya Bhat, Venkatesh Babu Radhakrishnan

Affiliations: Indian Institute of Science, BITS Pilani, Stanford University

Title: Harnessing Diffusion-Generated Synthetic Images for Fair Image Classification

Abstract:
Image classification systems often inherit biases from uneven group representation in training data. For example, in face datasets for hair color classification, blond hair may be disproportionately associated with females, reinforcing stereotypes. A recent approach leverages the Stable Diffusion model to generate balanced training data, but these models often struggle to preserve the original data distribution. In this work, we explore multiple diffusionfinetuning techniques, e.g., LoRA and DreamBooth, to generate images that more accurately represent each training group by learning directly from their samples. Additionally, in order to prevent a single DreamBooth model from being overwhelmed by excessive intra-group variations, we explore a technique of clustering images within each group and train a DreamBooth model per cluster. These models are then used to generate group-balanced data for pretraining, followed by fine-tuning on real data. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that the studied finetuning approaches outperform vanilla Stable Diffusion on average and achieve results comparable to SOTA debiasing techniques like Group-DRO, while surpassing them as the dataset bias severity increases.

PaperID: 1137, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10752

Authors:Tina Behzad, Siddartha Devic, Vatsal Sharan, Aleksandra Korolova, David Kempe

Affiliations: State University of New York at Stony Brook, University of Southern California, Princeton University

Title: An External Fairness Evaluation of LinkedIn Talent Search

Abstract:
We conduct an independent, thirdparty audit for bias of LinkedIn's Talent Search ranking system, focusing on potential ranking bias across two attributes: gender and race. To do so, we first construct a dataset of rankings produced by the system, collecting extensive Talent Search results across a diverse set of occupational queries. We then develop a robust labeling pipeline that infers the two demographic attributes of interest for the returned users. To evaluate potential biases in the collected dataset of real-world rankings, we utilize two exposure disparity metrics: deviation from group proportions and MinSkew@k. Our analysis reveals an under-representation of minority groups in early ranks across many queries. We further examine potential causes of this disparity, and discuss why they may be difficult or, in some cases, impossible to fully eliminate among the early ranks of queries. Beyond static metrics, we also investigate the concept of subgroup fairness over time, highlighting \emphtemporal disparities in exposure and retention, which are often more difficult to audit for in practice. In employer recruiting platforms such as LinkedIn Talent Search, the persistence of a particular candidate over multiple days in the ranking can directly impact the probability that the given candidate is selected for opportunities. Our analysis reveals demographic disparities in this temporal stability, with some groups experiencing greater volatility in their ranked positions than others. We contextualize all our findings alongside LinkedIn’s published self-audits of its Talent Search system and reflect on the methodological constraints of a black-box external evaluation, including limited observability and noisy demographic inference. Our work contributes empirical insights and practical guidance for conducting third-party audits of modern socio-technical systems which go beyond the well-studied and standard algorithmic fairness guarantees of predictors.

PaperID: 1138, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11244

Authors:Shijian Deng, Erin E. Kosloski, Siva Sai Nagender Vasireddy, Jia Li, Randi Sierra Sherwood, Feroz Mohamed Hatha, Siddhi Patel, Pamela R. Rollins, Yapeng Tian

Affiliations: University of Texas at Dallas, Department of Computer Science

Title: Toward Gaze Target Detection of Young Autistic Children

Abstract:
The automatic detection of gaze targets in autistic children through artificial intelligence can be impactful, especially for those who lack access to a sufficient number of professionals to improve their quality of life. This paper introduces a new, realworld AI application for gaze target detection in autistic children, which predicts a child's point of gaze from an activity image. This task is foundational for building automated systems that can measure joint attention—a core challenge in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). To facilitate the study of this challenging application, we collected the first-ever Autism Gaze Target (AGT) Dataset. We further propose a novel social-aware coarse-to-fine (SACF) gaze detection framework that explicitly leverages the social context of a scene to overcome the class imbalance common in autism datasets—a consequence of autistic children's tendency to show reduced gaze to faces. It utilizes a two-pathway architecture with expert models specialized in social and non-social gaze, guided by a context-awareness gate module. The results of our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves new state-of-the-art performance for gaze target detection in this population, significantly outperforming existing methods, especially on the critical minority class of face-directed gaze.

PaperID: 1139, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10300

Authors:Sumin Lee, Sungwon Park, Jeasurk Yang, Jihee Kim, Meeyoung Cha

Affiliations: Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Title: Generalizable Slum Detection from Satellite Imagery with Mixture-of-Experts

Abstract:
Satellitebased slum segmentation holds significant promise in generating global estimates of urban poverty. However, the morphological heterogeneity of informal settlements presents a major challenge, hindering the ability of models trained on specific regions to generalize effectively to unseen locations. To address this, we introduce a large-scale high-resolution dataset and propose GRAM (Generalized Region-Aware Mixture-of-Experts), a two-phase test-time adaptation framework that enables robust slum segmentation without requiring labeled data from target regions. We compile a million-scale satellite imagery dataset from 12 cities across four continents for source training. Using this dataset, the model employs a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to capture region-specific slum characteristics while learning universal features through a shared backbone. During adaptation, prediction consistency across experts filters out unreliable pseudo-labels, allowing the model to generalize effectively to previously unseen regions. GRAM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in low-resource settings such as African cities, offering a scalable and label-efficient solution for global slum mapping and data-driven urban planning.

PaperID: 1140, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00045

Authors:Yi Mao, Andrew Perrault

Affiliations: The Ohio StateUniversity, The Ohio State University

Title: Optimizing Urban Service Allocation with Time-Constrained Restless Bandits

Abstract:
Municipal inspections are an important part of maintaining the quality of goods and services. In this paper, we approach the problem of intelligently scheduling service inspections to maximize their impact, using the case of food establishment inspections in Chicago as a case study. The Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) inspects thousands of establishments each year, with a substantial fail rate (over 3,000 failed inspection reports in 2023). To balance the objectives of ensuring adherence to guidelines, minimizing disruption to establishments, and minimizing inspection costs, CDPH assigns each establishment an inspection window every year and guarantees that they will be inspected exactly once during that window. Meanwhile, CDPH also promises surprise public health inspections for unexpected food safety emergencies or complaints. These constraints create a challenge for a restless multiarmed bandit (RMAB) approach, for which there are no existing methods. We develop an extension to Whittle index-based systems for RMABs that can guarantee action window constraints and frequencies, and furthermore can be leveraged to optimize action window assignments themselves. Briefly, we combine MDP reformulation and integer programming-based lookahead to maximize the impact of inspections subject to constraints. A neural network-based supervised learning model is developed to model state transitions of real Chicago establishments using public CDPH inspection records, which demonstrates 10% AUC improvements compared with directly predicting establishments' failures. Our experiments not only show up to 24% (in simulation) or 33% (on real data) objective improvements resulting from our approach and robustness to surprise inspections, but also give insight into the impact of scheduling constraints.

PaperID: 1141, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16623

Authors:Weilin Ruan, Xilin Dang, Ziyu Zhou, Sisuo Lyu, Yuxuan Liang

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title: A Retrieval Augmented Spatio-Temporal Framework for Traffic Prediction

Abstract:
Traffic prediction serves as a cornerstone of modern intelligent transportation systems and the critical task of spatiotemporal forecasting. Although advanced Spatio-temporal Graph Neural Networks (STGNNs) and pre-trained models have made significant progress in traffic prediction, two critical challenges persist: (i) limited contextual capacity when handling complex spatio-temporal dependencies, and (ii) low predictability at fine-grained spatio-temporal points caused by heterogeneous patterns. Inspired by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), we propose RAST, a universal framework that integrates retrieval-augmented mechanisms with spatio-temporal modeling to address these challenges. Our framework consists of three key designs: 1) Decoupled Encoder and Query Generator to capture decoupled spatial and temporal features and construct a fusion query via residual fusion; 2) Spatio-temporal Retrieval Store and Retrievers to maintain and retrieve vectorized fine-grained patterns; and 3) Universal Backbone Predictor that flexibly accommodates pre-trained STGNNs or simple MLP predictors. Extensive experiments on 6 real-world traffic networks, including large-scale datasets, demonstrate that RAST achieves superior performance while maintaining computational efficiency.

PaperID: 1142, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06658

Authors:Depanshu Sani, Mehar Khurana, Saket Anand

Affiliations: Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology

Title: Active Learning for Animal Re-Identification with Ambiguity-Aware Sampling

Abstract:
Animal reidentification (Re-ID) has recently gained substantial attention in the AI research community due to its high impact on biodiversity monitoring and unique research challenges arising from environmental factors. The subtle distinguishing patterns like stripes or spots, handling new species and the inherent open-set nature make the problem even harder. To address these complexities, foundation models trained on labeled, large-scale and multi-species animal Re-ID datasets have recently been introduced to enable zero-shot Re-ID. However, our benchmarking reveals significant gaps in their zero-shot Re-ID performance for both known and unknown species. While this highlights the need for collecting labeled data in new domains, exhaustive annotation for Re-ID is laborious and requires domain expertise. Our analyses also show that existing unsupervised (USL) and active learning (AL) Re-ID methods underperform for animal Re-ID. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel AL Re-ID framework that leverages complementary clustering methods to uncover and target structurally ambiguous regions in the embedding space for mining pairs of samples that are both informative and broadly representative. Oracle feedback on these pairs, in the form of must-link and cannot-link constraints, facilitates a simple annotation interface, which naturally integrates with existing USL methods through our proposed constrained clustering refinement algorithm. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that, by utilizing only 0.033% of all possible annotations, our approach consistently outperforms existing foundational, USL and AL baselines. Specifically, we report an average improvement of 10.49%, 11.19% and 3.99% (mAP) on 13 wildlife datasets over foundational, USL and AL methods, respectively, while attaining state-of-the-art performance on each dataset. Furthermore, we also show an improvement of 11.09%, 8.2% and 2.06% (AUC ROC) for unknown individuals in an open-world setting. We also present results on 2 publicly available person Re-ID datasets, showing average gains of 7.96% and 2.86% (mAP) over existing USL and AL Re-ID methods.

PaperID: 1143, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.13154

Authors:Siqi Sun, Ben Peng Wu, Mali Jin, Peizhen Bai, Hanpei Zhang, Xingyi Song

Affiliations: University of Sheffield

Title: ESG-Bench: Benchmarking Long-Context ESG Reports for Hallucination Mitigation

Abstract:
As corporate responsibility increasingly incorporates environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria, ESG reporting is becoming a legal requirement in many regions and a key channel for documenting sustainability practices and assessing firms’ longterm and ethical performance. However, the length and complexity of ESG disclosures make them difficult to interpret and automate the analysis reliably. To support scalable and trustworthy analysis, this paper introduces ESG-Bench, a benchmark dataset for ESG report understanding and hallucination mitigation in large language models (LLMs). ESG-Bench contains human-annotated question–answer (QA) pairs grounded in real-world ESG report contexts, with fine-grained labels indicating whether model outputs are factually supported or hallucinated. Framing ESG report analysis as a QA task with verifiability constraints enables systematic evaluation of LLMs’ ability to extract and reason over ESG content and provides a new use case: mitigating hallucinations in socially sensitive, compliance-critical settings. We design task-specific Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting strategies and fine-tune multiple state-of-the-art LLMs on ESG-Bench using CoT-annotated rationales. Our experiments show that these CoT-based methods substantially outperform standard prompting and direct fine-tuning in reducing hallucinations, and that the gains transfer to existing QA benchmarks beyond the ESG domain.

PaperID: 1144, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06293

Authors:Xuwei Tan, Yuanlong Wang, Thai-Hoang Pham, Ping Zhang, Xueru Zhang

Affiliations: The Ohio State University

Title: Achieving Fairness Without Harm via Selective Demographic Experts

Abstract:
As machine learning systems become increasingly integrated into humancentered domains such as healthcare, ensuring fairness while maintaining high predictive performance is critical. Existing bias mitigation techniques often impose a trade-off between fairness and accuracy, inadvertently degrading performance for certain demographic groups. In high-stakes domains like clinical diagnosis, such trade-offs are ethically and practically unacceptable. In this study, we propose a fairness-without-harm approach by learning distinct representations for different demographic groups and selectively applying demographic experts consisting of group-specific representations and personalized classifiers through a no-harm constrained selection. We evaluate our approach on three real-world medical datasets—covering eye disease, skin cancer, and X-ray diagnosis—as well as two face datasets. Extensive empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in achieving fairness without harm.

PaperID: 1145, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13540

Authors:Zichong Wang, Jie Yang, Jun Zhuang, Puqing Jiang, Mingzhe Chen, Ye Hu, Wenbin Zhang

Affiliations: Florida International University, University of Wollongong, Boise State University, University of Pittsburgh, University of Miami

Title: Fair Graph Learning with Limited Sensitive Attribute Information

Abstract:
Graph neural networks (GNNs) excel at modeling graphstructured data but often inherit and amplify biases, leading to substantial efforts in developing fair GNNs. However, most existing approaches assume full access to sensitive attribute information, which is often impractical in real-world scenarios due to privacy concerns or risks of discrimination. To address this limitation, this paper focuses on graph fairness with limited sensitive attribute information, ensuring applicability to real-world contexts where current methods fall short. Specifically, we introduce an innovative fairness optimization strategy, propose a novel framework named FGLISA, and provide a theoretical perspective linking limited sensitive attribute information access to fairness objectives, thus enabling fair graph learning in real-world applications with limited sensitive attribute information. Experiments on diverse real-world datasets and tasks validate the effectiveness of our approach in achieving both fairness and predictive performance.

PaperID: 1146, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10060

Authors:Luming Yang, Haoxian Liu, Siqing Li, Alper Yilmaz

Affiliations: The Ohio State University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Southern University of Science and Technology

Title: Multivariate Gaussian Representation Learning for Medical Action Evaluation

Abstract:
Finegrained action evaluation in medical vision faces unique challenges due to the unavailability of comprehensive datasets, stringent precision requirements, and insufficient spatiotemporal dynamic modeling of very rapid actions. To support development and evaluation, we introduce CPREval-6k, a multi-view, multi-label medical action benchmark containing 6,372 expert-annotated videos with 22 clinical labels. Using this dataset, we present GaussMedAct, a multivariate Gaussian encoding framework, to advance medical motion analysis through adaptive spatiotemporal representation learning. Multivariate Gaussian Representation projects the joint motions to a temporally scaled multi-dimensional space, and decomposes actions into adaptive 3D Gaussians that serve as tokens. These tokens preserve motion semantics through anisotropic covariance modeling while maintaining robustness to spatiotemporal noise. Hybrid Spatial Encoding, employing a Cartesian and Vector dual-stream strategy, effectively utilizes skeletal information in the form of joint and bone features. The proposed method achieves 92.1% Top-1 accuracy with real-time inference on the benchmark, outperforming the baseline by +5.9% accuracy with only 10% FLOPs. Cross-dataset experiments confirm the superiority of our method in robustness.

PaperID: 1147, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.19528

Authors:Litao Liu, Wentao Wang, Yifan Han, Zhuoli Xie, Pengfei Yi, Junyan Li, Wenzhao Lian

Affiliations: CoreNetic AI Rutgers University-New Brunswick, University of Southern California, Institute of automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, CoreNetic AI University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, Chinese academy of science, Shanghai Jiaotong University

Title: FoAM: Foresight-Augmented Multi-Task Imitation Policy for Robotic Manipulation

Abstract:
Multitask imitation learning (MTIL) has shown significant potential in robotic manipulation by enabling agents to perform various tasks using a single policy. It simplifies the policy deployment and enhances the agent's adaptability across different scenarios. However, key challenges remain, such as maintaining action reliability (e.g., avoiding abnormal action sequences that deviate from nominal task trajectories) and generalizing to unseen tasks with a few expert demonstrations. To address these challenges, we introduce the Foresight-Augmented Manipulation (FoAM) policy, a novel MTIL policy that pioneers the use of multi-modal goal conditions as input and introduces a foresight augmentation in addition to the general action reconstruction. FoAM enables the agent to reason about its actions' visual consequences (foresight) and to be guided by these more expressive representations during task execution. Extensive experiments on over 100 tasks in simulation and real-world settings demonstrate that FoAM significantly enhances MTIL policy performance, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by up to 41% in success rate. We released our simulation suites that include over 80 challenging tasks across more than 10 scenarios designed for manipulation policy training and evaluation.

PaperID: 1148, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09298

Authors:Shengqi Dang, Fu Chai, Jiaxin Li, Chao Yuan, Wei Ye, Nan Cao

Affiliations: Shanghai Innovation Institute, Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems Tongji University

Title: DensiCrafter: Physically-Constrained Generation and Fabrication of Self-Supporting Hollow Structures

Abstract:
The rise of 3D generative models has enabled automatic 3D geometry and texture synthesis from multimodal inputs (e.g., text or images). However, these methods often ignore physical constraints and manufacturability considerations. In this work, we address the challenge of producing 3D designs that are both lightweight and selfsupporting. We present DensiCrafter, a framework for generating lightweight, self-supporting 3D hollow structures by optimizing the density field. Starting from coarse voxel grids produced by Trellis, we interpret these as continuous density fields to optimize and introduce three differentiable, physically constrained, and simulation-free loss terms. Additionally, a mass regularization penalizes unnecessary material, while a restricted optimization domain preserves the outer surface. Our method seamlessly integrates with pretrained Trellis-based models (e.g., Trellis, DSO) without any architectural changes. In extensive evaluations, we achieve up to 43% reduction in material mass on the text-to-3D task. Compared to state-of-the-art baselines, our method could improve the stability and maintain high geometric fidelity. Real-world 3D-printing experiments confirm that our hollow designs can be reliably fabricated and could be self-supporting.

PaperID: 1149, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10698

Authors:Meixia He, Peican Zhu, Le Cheng, Yangming Guo, Manman Yuan, Keke Tang

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Optics and Electronics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University, School of Cybersecurity, School of Computer Science, Inner Mongolia University, Cyberspace Institute of Advanced Technology, Guangzhou University Huangpu Research School of Guangzhou University

Title: Transferable Hypergraph Attack via Injecting Nodes into Pivotal Hyperedges

Abstract:
Recent studies have demonstrated that hypergraph neural networks (HGNNs) are susceptible to adversarial attacks. However, existing methods rely on the specific information mechanisms of target HGNNs, overlooking the common vulnerability caused by the significant differences in hyperedge pivotality along aggregation paths in most HGNNs, thereby limiting the transferability and effectiveness of attacks. In this paper, we present a novel framework, i.e., Transferable Hypergraph Attack via Injecting Nodes into Pivotal Hyperedges (THAttack), to address these limitations. Specifically, we design a hyperedge recognizer via pivotality assessment to obtain pivotal hyperedges within the aggregation paths of HGNNs. Furthermore, we introduce a feature inverter based on pivotal hyperedges, which generates malicious nodes by maximizing the semantic divergence between the generated features and the pivotal hyperedges features. Lastly, by injecting these malicious nodes into the pivotal hyperedges, TH-Attack improves the transferability and effectiveness of attacks. Extensive experiments are conducted on six authentic datasets to validate the effectiveness of TH-Attack and the corresponding superiority to state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 1150, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.12991

Authors:Yu-Hao Huang, Chang Xu, Yang Liu, Weiqing Liu, Wu-Jun Li, Jiang Bian

Affiliations: Nanjing University, Microsoft Research Asia

Title: Controllable Financial Market Generation with Diffusion Guided Meta Agent

Abstract:
Generative modeling has transformed many fields, such as language and visual modeling, while its application in financial markets remains underexplored. As the minimal unit within a financial market is an order, order-flow modeling represents a fundamental generative financial task. However, current approaches often yield unsatisfactory fidelity in generating order flow, and their generation lacks controllability, thereby limiting their practical applications. In this paper, we formulate the challenge of controllable financial market generation, and propose a Diffusion Guided Meta Agent (DigMA) model to address it. Specifically, we employ a conditional diffusion model to capture the dynamics of the market state represented by time-evolving distribution parameters of the mid-price return rate and the order arrival rate, and we define a meta agent with financial economic priors to generate orders from the corresponding distributions. Extensive experimental results show that DigMA achieves superior controllability and generation fidelity. Moreover, we validate its effectiveness as a generative environment for downstream high-frequency trading tasks and its computational efficiency.

PaperID: 1151, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14048

Authors:Shen Li, Li Huang, Shaoxiong Zhan, Weifeng Sun, Tao Yin, Zhongxin Liu, Meng Yan

Affiliations: Chongqing University, Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University

Title: Intention Chain-of-Thought Prompting with Dynamic Routing for Code Generation

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong generative capabilities and have shown great potential in code generation. Existing chainof-thought (CoT) prompting methods enhance model reasoning by eliciting intermediate steps, but suffer from two major limitations: First, their uniform application tends to induce overthinking on simple tasks. Second, they lack intention abstraction in code generation, such as explicitly modeling core algorithmic design and efficiency, leading models to focus on surface-level structures while neglecting the global problem objective. Inspired by the cognitive economy principle of engaging structured reasoning only when necessary to conserve cognitive resources, we propose RoutingGen, a novel difficulty-aware routing framework that dynamically adapts prompting strategies for code generation. For simple tasks, it adopts few-shot prompting; for more complex ones, it invokes a structured reasoning strategy, termed Intention Chain-of-Thought (ICoT), which we introduce to guide the model in capturing task intention, such as the core algorithmic logic and its time complexity. Experiments across three models and six standard code generation benchmarks show that RoutingGen achieves state-of-the-art performance in most settings, while reducing total token usage by 46.37% on average across settings. Furthermore, ICoT outperforms six existing prompting baselines on challenging benchmarks.

PaperID: 1152, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07033

Authors:Yuanheng Li, Zhuoyang Chen, Xiaoyun Liu, Yuhao Wang, Mingwei Liu, Yang Shi, Kaifeng Huang, Shengjie Zhao

Affiliations: Tongji University, Sun Yat-sen University

Title: Uncovering Pretraining Code in LLMs: A Syntax-Aware Attribution Approach

Abstract:
As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, concerns over the unauthorized use of copyrighted and licensed content in their training data have grown, especially in the context of code. Opensource code, often protected by open source licenses (e.g, GPL), poses legal and ethical challenges when used in pretraining. Detecting whether specific code samples were included in LLM training data is thus critical for transparency, accountability, and copyright compliance. We propose SynPrune, a syntax-pruned membership inference attack method tailored for code. Unlike prior MIA approaches that treat code as plain text, SynPrune leverages the structured and rule-governed nature of programming languages. Specifically, it identifies and excludes consequent tokens that are syntactically required and not reflective of authorship, from attribution when computing membership scores. Experimental results show that SynPrune consistently outperforms the state-of-the-arts. Our method is also robust across varying function lengths and syntax categories.

PaperID: 1153, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08640

Authors:Xingcheng Liu, Bin Rao, Yanchen Guan, Chengyue Wang, Haicheng Liao, Jiaxun Zhang, Chengyu Lin, Meixin Zhu, Zhenning Li

Affiliations: University of Macau, Zhejiang University, Southeast University

Title: Predict and Resist: Long-Term Accident Anticipation Under Sensor Noise

Abstract:
Accident anticipation is essential for proactive and safe autonomous driving, where even a brief advance warning can enable critical evasive actions. However, two key challenges hinder realworld deployment: (1) noisy or degraded sensory inputs from weather, motion blur, or hardware limitations, and (2) the need to issue timely yet reliable predictions that balance early alerts with false-alarm suppression. We propose a unified framework that integrates diffusion-based denoising with a time-aware actor-critic model to address these challenges. The diffusion module reconstructs noise-resilient image and object features through iterative refinement, preserving critical motion and interaction cues under sensor degradation. In parallel, the actor-critic architecture leverages long-horizon temporal reasoning and time-weighted rewards to determine the optimal moment to raise an alert, aligning early detection with reliability. Experiments on three benchmark datasets (DAD, CCD, A3D) demonstrate state-of-the-art accuracy and significant gains in mean time-to-accident, while maintaining robust performance under Gaussian and impulse noise. Qualitative analyses further show that our model produces earlier, more stable, and human-aligned predictions in both routine and highly complex traffic scenarios, highlighting its potential for real-world, safety-critical deployment.

PaperID: 1154, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12256

Authors:Jinyoung Park, Minseong Bae, Jeehye Na, Hyunwoo J. Kim

Affiliations: Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology

Title: Improving Large Molecular Language Model via Relation-aware Multimodal Collaboration

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their instructionfollowing capabilities and achieved powerful performance on various tasks. Inspired by their success, recent works in the molecular domain have led to the development of large molecular language models (LMLMs) that integrate 1D molecular strings or 2D molecular graphs into the language models. However, existing LMLMs often suffer from hallucination and limited robustness, largely due to inadequate integration of diverse molecular modalities such as 1D sequences, 2D molecular graphs, and 3D conformations. To address these limitations, we propose CoLLaMo, a large language model-based molecular assistant equipped with a multi-level molecular modality-collaborative projector. The relation-aware modality-collaborative attention mechanism in the projector facilitates fine-grained and relation-guided information exchange between atoms by incorporating 2D structural and 3D spatial relations. Furthermore, we present a molecule-centric new automatic measurement, including a hallucination assessment metric and GPT-based caption quality evaluation to address the limitations of token-based generic evaluation metrics (i.e., BLEU) widely used in assessing molecular comprehension of LMLMs. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our CoLLaMo enhances the molecular modality generalization capabilities of LMLMs, achieving the best performance on multiple tasks, including molecule captioning, computed property QA, descriptive property QA, motif counting, and IUPAC name prediction.

PaperID: 1155, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01338

Authors:Ziqi Sheng, Junyan Wu, Wei Lu, Jiantao Zhou

Affiliations: MoE Key Laboratory of Information Technology, School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Macau, Sun Yat-sen University, Department of Computer and Information Science

Title: Weakly-Supervised Image Forgery Localization via Vision-Language Collaborative Reasoning Framework

Abstract:
Image forgery localization aims to precisely identify tampered regions within images, but it commonly depends on costly pixellevel annotations. To alleviate this annotation burden, weakly supervised image forgery localization (WSIFL) has emerged, yet existing methods still achieve limited localization performance as they mainly exploit intra-image consistency clues and lack external semantic guidance to compensate for insufficient supervision information. In this paper, we propose ViLaCo, a vision-language collaborative reasoning framework that introduces auxiliary semantic supervision derived from pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), enabling accurate pixel-level localization using only image-level labels. Specifically, we first employ a vision-language feature modeling network to jointly extract textual semantics and visual features by leveraging pre-trained VLMs. Next, an adaptive vision-language reasoning network aligns these features through mutual interactions, producing semantically aligned representations. Subsequently, these representations are passed into dual prediction heads, where the coarse head performs image-level classification and the fine head generates pixel-level localization masks, allowing the coarse-grained task to provide guidance for the fine-grained localization. Moreover, a contrastive patch consistency module is introduced to cluster tampered features while separating authentic ones, facilitating more reliable forgery discrimination. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets demonstrate that ViLaCo substantially outperforms existing WSIFL methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both detection and localization accuracy.

PaperID: 1156, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10253

Authors:Han Wan, Qi Wang, Yuan Mi, Rui Zhang, Hao Sun

Affiliations: Renmin University of China

Title: PIMRL: Physics-Informed Multi-Scale Recurrent Learning for Burst-Sampled Spatiotemporal Dynamics

Abstract:
Deep learning has shown strong potential in modeling complex spatiotemporal dynamics. However, most existing methods depend on densely and uniformly sampled data, which is often unavailable in practice due to sensor and cost limitations. In many realworld settings, such as mobile sensing and physical experiments, data are burst-sampled with short high-frequency segments followed by long gaps, making it difficult to learn accurate dynamics from sparse observations. To address this issue, we propose Physics-Informed Multi-Scale Recurrent Learning (PIMRL), a novel framework specifically designed for burst-sampled spatiotemporal data. PIMRL combines macro-scale latent dynamics inference with micro-scale adaptive refinement guided by incomplete prior information from partial differential equations (PDEs). It further introduces a temporal message-passing mechanism to effectively propagate information across burst intervals. This multi-scale architecture enables PIMRL to model complex systems accurately even under severe data scarcity. We evaluate our approach on five benchmark datasets involving 1D to 3D multi-scale PDEs. The results show that PIMRL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving substantial improvements and reducing errors by up to 80% in the most challenging settings, which demonstrates the clear advantage of our model. Our work demonstrates the effectiveness of physics-informed recurrent learning for accurate and efficient modeling of sparse spatiotemporal systems.

PaperID: 1157, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.18906

Authors:Yufeng Wu, Xin Liao, Baowei Wang, Han Fang, Xiaoshuai Wu, Mingyue Chen, Guiling Wang

Affiliations: College of Cyber Science and Technology, Hunan University, Changsha China, the Engineering Research Center of Digital Forensics, Ministry of Education, the School of Computer Science, Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center of Atmospheric Environment and Equipment Technology, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing China, School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Department of Computer Science, New Jersey Institute of Technology, NJ USA

Title: Sim-to-Real: An Unsupervised Noise Layer for Screen-Camera Watermarking Robustness

Abstract:
Unauthorized screen capturing and dissemination pose severe security threats such as data leakage and information theft. Several studies propose robust watermarking methods to track the copyright of ScreenCamera (SC) images, facilitating post-hoc certification against infringement. These techniques typically employ heuristic mathematical modeling or supervised neural network fitting as the noise layer, to enhance watermarking robustness against SC. However, both strategies cannot fundamentally achieve an effective approximation of SC noise. Mathematical simulation suffers from biased approximations due to the incomplete decomposition of the noise and the absence of interdependence among the noise components. Supervised networks require paired data to train the noise-fitting model, and it is difficult for the model to learn all the features of the noise. To address the above issues, we propose Simulation-to-Real (S2R). Specifically, an unsupervised noise layer employs unpaired data to learn the discrepancy between the modeled simulated noise distribution and the real-world SC noise distribution, rather than directly learning the mapping from sharp images to real-world images. Learning this transformation from simulation to reality is inherently simpler, as it primarily involves bridging the gap in noise distributions, instead of the complex task of reconstructing fine-grained image details. Extensive experimental results validate the efficacy of the proposed method, demonstrating superior watermark robustness and generalization compared to state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 1158, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09251

Authors:Qin-Yi Zhang, Hong Wang, Siyao Liu, Haichuan Lin, Linying Cao, Xiao-Hu Zhou, Chen Chen, Shuang-Yi Wang, Zeng-Guang Hou

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Chengdu University of Technology

Title: HGATSolver: A Heterogeneous Graph Attention Solver for Fluid–Structure Interaction

Abstract:
Fluid–structure interaction (FSI) systems involve distinct physical domains, fluid and solid, governed by different partial differential equations and coupled at a dynamic interface. While learningbased solvers offer a promising alternative to costly numerical simulations, existing methods struggle to capture the heterogeneous dynamics of FSI within a unified framework. This challenge is further exacerbated by inconsistencies in response across domains due to interface coupling and by disparities in learning difficulty across fluid and solid regions, leading to instability during prediction. To address these challenges, we propose the Heterogeneous Graph Attention Solver (HGATSolver). HGATSolver encodes the system as a heterogeneous graph, embedding physical structure directly into the model via distinct node and edge types for fluid, solid, and interface regions. This enables specialized message-passing mechanisms tailored to each physical domain. To stabilize explicit time stepping, we introduce a novel physics-conditioned gating mechanism that serves as a learnable, adaptive relaxation factor. Furthermore, an Inter-domain Gradient-Balancing Loss dynamically balances the optimization objectives across domains based on predictive uncertainty. Extensive experiments on two constructed FSI benchmarks and a public dataset demonstrate that HGATSolver achieves state-of-the-art performance, establishing an effective framework for surrogate modeling of coupled multi-physics systems.

PaperID: 1159, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11616

Authors:Ruobei Zhang, Shengeng Tang, Huan Yan, Xiang Zhang, Jiabao Guo

Affiliations: Hefei University of Technology, Guizhou Normal University, Tianjin University

Title: WiCBR: Salient-aware Adaptive WiFi Sensing for Cross-domain Behavior Recognition

Abstract:
The challenge in WiFibased cross-domain Behavior Recognition lies in the significant interference of domain-specific signals on gesture variation. However, previous methods alleviate this interference by mapping the phase from multiple domains into a common feature space. If the Doppler Frequency Shift (DFS) signal is used to dynamically supplement the phase features to achieve better generalization, it enables the model to not only explore a wider feature space but also to avoid potential degradation of gesture semantic information. Specifically, we propose a novel Salient-aware Adaptive WiFi Sensing for Cross-domain Behavior Recognition (Wi-CBR), which constructs a dual-branch self-attention module that captures temporal features from phase information reflecting dynamic path length variations while extracting kinematic features from DFS correlated with motion velocity. Moreover, we design a Saliency Guidance Module that employs group attention mechanisms to mine critical activity features and utilizes gating mechanisms to optimize information entropy, facilitating feature fusion and enabling effective interaction between salient and non-salient behavioral characteristics. Extensive experiments on two large-scale public datasets (Widar3.0 and XRF55) demonstrate the superior performance of our method in both in-domain and cross-domain scenarios.

PaperID: 1160, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14559

Authors:Xinzhe Zheng, Shiyu Jiang, Gustavo Seabra, Chenglong Li, Yanjun Li

Affiliations: Department of Medicinal Chemistry, Center for Natural Products, Drug Discovery and Development, University of Florida, USA Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering

Title: Apo2Mol: 3D Molecule Generation via Dynamic Pocket-Aware Diffusion Models

Abstract:
Deep generative models are rapidly advancing structurebased drug design, offering substantial promise for generating small molecule ligands that bind to specific protein targets. However, most current approaches assume a rigid protein binding pocket, neglecting the intrinsic flexibility of proteins and the conformational rearrangements induced by ligand binding, limiting their applicability in practical drug discovery. Here, we propose Apo2Mol, a diffusion-based generative framework for 3D molecule design that explicitly accounts for conformational flexibility in protein binding pockets. To support this, we curate a dataset of over 24,000 experimentally resolved apo-holo structure pairs from the Protein Data Bank, enabling the characterization of protein structure changes associated with ligand binding. Apo2Mol employs a full-atom hierarchical graph-based diffusion model that simultaneously generates 3D ligand molecules and their corresponding holo pocket conformations from input apo states. Empirical studies demonstrate that Apo2Mol can achieve state-of-the-art performance in generating high-affinity ligands and accurately capture realistic protein pocket conformational changes.

PaperID: 1161, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.01239

Authors:Jiajie Zhu, Xia Du, Xiaoyuan Liu, Ji-Zhe Zhou, Qizhen Xu, Zheng Lin, Chi-Man Pun

Affiliations: Xiamen University of Technology, Sichuan University, University of Hong Kong, University of Macau

Title: IO-RAE: Information-Obfuscation Reversible Adversarial Example for Audio Privacy Protection

Abstract:
The rapid advancements in artificial intelligence have significantly accelerated the adoption of speech recognition technology, leading to its widespread integration across various applications. However, this surge in usage also highlights a critical issue: audio data is highly vulnerable to unauthorized exposure and analysis, posing significant privacy risks for businesses and individuals. This paper introduces an InformationObfuscation Reversible Adversarial Example (IO-RAE) framework, the pioneering method designed to safeguard audio privacy using reversible adversarial examples. IO-RAE leverages large language models to generate misleading yet contextually coherent content, effectively preventing unauthorized eavesdropping by humans and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. Additionally, we propose the Cumulative Signal Attack technique, which mitigates high-frequency noise and enhances attack efficacy by targeting low-frequency signals. Our approach ensures the protection of audio data without degrading its quality or usability. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our method, achieving a targeted misguidance rate of 96.5% and a remarkable 100% untargeted misguidance rate in obfuscating target keywords across multiple ASR models, including a commercial black-box system from Google. Furthermore, the quality of the recovered audio, measured by the Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality score, reached 4.45, comparable to high-quality original recordings. Notably, the recovered audio processed by ASR systems exhibited an error rate of 0%, indicating nearly lossless recovery. These results highlight the practical applicability and effectiveness of our IO-RAE framework in protecting sensitive audio privacy.

PaperID: 1162, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01503

Authors:Clayton Cohn, Surya Rayala, Namrata Srivastava, Joyce Horn Fonteles, Shruti Jain, Xinying Luo, Divya Mereddy, Naveeduddin Mohammed, Gautam Biswas

Affiliations: Vanderbilt University

Title: A Theory of Adaptive Scaffolding for LLM-Based Pedagogical Agents

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) present new opportunities for creating pedagogical agents that engage in meaningful dialogue to support student learning. However, current LLM systems used in classrooms often lack the solid theoretical foundations found in earlier intelligent tutoring systems. To bridge this gap, we propose a framework that combines EvidenceCentered Design with Social Cognitive Theory and Zone of Proximal Development for adaptive scaffolding in LLM-based agents focused on STEM+C learning. We instantiate this framework with Inquizzitor, an LLM-based formative assessment agent that integrates human-AI hybrid intelligence and provides feedback grounded in cognitive science principles. Our findings show that Inquizzitor delivers high-quality assessment and interaction aligned with core learning theories, offering effective guidance that students value. This research demonstrates the potential for theory-driven LLM integration in education, highlighting the ability of these systems to provide adaptive and principled instruction.

PaperID: 1163, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20167

Authors:Yadong Liu, Shangfei Wang

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China

Title: FINE: Factorized Multimodal Sentiment Analysis via Mutual INformation Estimation

Abstract:
Multimodal sentiment analysis remains a challenging task due to the inherent heterogeneity across modalities. Such heterogeneity often manifests as asynchronous signals, imbalanced information between modalities, and interference from taskirrelevant noise, hindering the learning of robust and accurate sentiment representations. To address these issues, we propose a factorized multimodal fusion framework that first disentangles each modality into shared and unique representations, and then suppresses task-irrelevant noise within both to retain only sentiment-critical representations. This fine-grained decomposition improves representation quality by reducing redundancy, prompting cross-modal complementarity, and isolating task-relevant sentiment cues. Rather than manipulating the feature space directly, we adopt a mutual information–based optimization strategy to guide the factorization process in a more stable and principled manner. To further support feature extraction and long-term temporal modeling, we introduce two auxiliary modules: a Mixture of Q-Formers, placed before factorization, which precedes the factorization and uses learnable queries to extract fine-grained affective features from multiple modalities, and a Dynamic Contrastive Queue, placed after factorization, which stores latest high-level representations for contrastive learning, enabling the model to capture long-range discriminative patterns and improve class-level separability. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing approaches, validating the effecti veness and robustness of the proposed framework.

PaperID: 1164, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02447

Authors:Fan Luo, Zeyu Gao, Xinhao Luo, Kai Zhao, Yanfeng Lu

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing China, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA)

Title: Temporal Dynamics Enhancer for Directly Trained Spiking Object Detectors

Abstract:
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), with their braininspired spatiotemporal dynamics and spike-driven computation, have emerged as promising energy-efficient alternatives to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). However, existing SNNs typically replicate inputs directly or aggregate them into frames at fixed intervals. Such strategies lead to neurons receiving nearly identical stimuli across time steps, severely limiting the model's expressive power—particularly in complex tasks like object detection. In this work, we propose the Temporal Dynamics Enhancer (TDE) to strengthen SNNs' capacity for temporal information modeling. TDE consists of two modules: a Spiking Encoder (SE) that generates diverse input stimuli across time steps, and an Attention Gating Module (AGM) that guides the SE generation based on inter-temporal dependencies. Moreover, to eliminate the high-energy multiplication operations introduced by the AGM, we propose a Spike-Driven Attention (SDA) to reduce attention-related energy consumption. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TDE can be seamlessly integrated into existing SNN-based detectors and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving mAP@50-95 scores of 57.7% on the static PASCAL VOC dataset and 47.6% on the neuromorphic EvDET200K dataset. In terms of energy consumption, the SDA consumes only 0.240× the energy of conventional attention modules.

PaperID: 1165, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08065

Authors:Ruichen Ma, Liwei Meng, Guanchao Qiao, Ning Ning, Yang Liu, Shaogang Hu

Affiliations: School of Integrated Circuit Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: I2E: Real-Time Image-to-Event Conversion for High-Performance Spiking Neural Networks

Abstract:
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) promise highly energyefficient computing, but their adoption is hindered by a critical scarcity of event-stream data. This work introduces I2E, an algorithmic framework that resolves this bottleneck by converting static images into high-fidelity event streams. By simulating microsaccadic eye movements with a highly parallelized convolution, I2E achieves a conversion speed over 300x faster than prior methods, uniquely enabling on-the-fly data augmentation for SNN training. The framework's effectiveness is demonstrated on large-scale benchmarks. An SNN trained on the generated I2E-ImageNet dataset achieves a state-of-the-art accuracy of 60.50%. Critically, this work establishes a powerful sim-to-real paradigm where pre-training on synthetic I2E data and fine-tuning on the real-world CIFAR10-DVS dataset yields an unprecedented accuracy of 92.5%. This result validates that synthetic event data can serve as a high-fidelity proxy for real sensor data, bridging a long-standing gap in neuromorphic engineering. By providing a scalable solution to the data problem, I2E offers a foundational toolkit for developing high-performance neuromorphic systems. The open-source algorithm and all generated datasets are provided to accelerate research in the field.

PaperID: 1166, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.23506

Authors:Hyeongseop Rha, Jeong Hun Yeo, Yeonju Kim, Yong Man Ro

Affiliations: Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology

Title: Emotion-Coherent Reasoning for Multimodal LLMs via Emotional Rationale Verifier

Abstract:
The recent advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is transforming humancomputer interaction (HCI) from surface-level exchanges into more nuanced and emotionally intelligent communication. To realize this shift, emotion understanding becomes essential allowing systems to capture subtle cues underlying user intent. Furthermore, providing faithful explanations for predicted emotions is crucial to ensure interpretability and build user trust. However, current MLLM-based methods often generate emotion explanations that diverge from the ground-truth (GT) labels and sometimes even contradict their own predicted emotions. This inconsistency poses a critical risk for misunderstanding and erodes reliability in interactive settings. To address this, we propose a novel approach: the Emotional Rationale Verifier (ERV) and an Explanation Reward. Our method guides the model to produce reasoning that is explicitly consistent with the GT emotion during multimodal emotion recognition without modifying the model architecture or requiring paired video–description annotations. Our method significantly improves faithful explanation–prediction consistency and explanation emotion accuracy on the MAFW and DFEW datasets. Through extensive experiments and human evaluations, we show that our approach not only enhances alignment between explanation and prediction but also empowers MLLMs to deliver emotionally coherent, trustworthy interactions, marking a key step toward truly human-like HCI systems.

PaperID: 1167, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12791

Authors:Jian Song, Xiangfei Yang, Shangke Lyu, Donglin Wang

Affiliations: Westlake University, Hangzhou City University, Nanjing university

Title: Activation-wise Propagation: A One-Timestep Strategy for Spiking Neural Networks

Abstract:
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have demonstrated significant potential in realtime multi-sensor perception tasks due to their event-driven and parameter-efficient characteristics. A key challenge is the timestep-wise iterative update of neuronal hidden states (membrane potentials), which complicates the trade-off between accuracy and latency. SNNs tend to achieve better performance with longer timesteps, inevitably resulting in higher computational overhead and latency compared to artificial neural networks (ANNs). Moreover, many recent advances in SNNs rely on architecture-specific optimizations, which, while effective with fewer timesteps, often limit generalizability and scalability across modalities and models. To address these limitations, we propose Activation-wise Membrane Potential Propagation (AMP2), a unified hidden state update mechanism for SNNs. Inspired by the spatial propagation of membrane potentials in biological neurons, AMP2 enables dynamic transmission of membrane potentials among spatially adjacent neurons, facilitating spatiotemporal integration and cooperative dynamics of hidden states, thereby improving efficiency and accuracy while reducing reliance on extended temporal updates. This simple yet effective strategy significantly enhances SNN performance across various architectures, including MLPs and CNNs for point cloud and event-based data. Furthermore, ablation studies integrating AMP2 into Transformer-based SNNs for classification tasks demonstrate its potential as a general-purpose and efficient solution for spiking neural networks.

PaperID: 1168, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00189

Authors:Jinzhou Tang, Jusheng Zhang, Qinhan Lv, Sidi Liu, Jing Yang, Chengpei Tang, Keze Wang

Affiliations: San Diego, Sun Yat-Sen University

Title: HiVA: Self-organized Hierarchical Variable Agent via Goal-driven Semantic-Topological Evolution

Abstract:
Autonomous agents play a crucial role in advancing Artificial General Intelligence, enabling problem decomposition and tool orchestration through Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing paradigms face a critical tradeoff. On one hand, reusable fixed workflows require manual reconfiguration upon environmental changes; on the other hand, flexible reactive loops fail to distill reasoning progress into transferable structures. We introduce Hierarchical Variable Agent (HiVA), a novel framework modeling agentic workflows as self-organized graphs with the Semantic-Topological Evolution (STEV) algorithm, which optimizes hybrid semantic-topological spaces using textual gradients as discrete-domain surrogates for backpropagation. The iterative process comprises Multi-Armed Bandit-infused forward routing, diagnostic gradient generation from environmental feedback, and coordinated updates that co-evolve individual semantics and topology for collective optimization in unknown environments. Experiments on dialogue, coding, Long-context Q&A, mathematical, and agentic benchmarks demonstrate improvements of 5-10% in task accuracy and enhanced resource efficiency over existing baselines, establishing HiVA's effectiveness in autonomous task execution.

PaperID: 1169, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01442

Authors:Heng Xie, Kang Zhu, Zhengqi Wen, Jianhua Tao, Xuefei Liu, Ruibo Fu, Changsheng Li

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology, School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Department of Automation, College of Computer and Information Engineering, Tianjin Normal University, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: PSA-MF: Personality-Sentiment Aligned Multi-Level Fusion for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Abstract:
Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) is a research field that recognizes human sentiments by combining textual, visual, and audio modalities. The main challenge lies in integrating sentimentrelated information from different modalities, which typically arises during the unimodal feature extraction phase and the multimodal feature fusion phase. Existing methods extract only shallow information from unimodal features during the extraction phase, neglecting sentimental differences across different personalities. During the fusion phase, they directly merge the feature information from each modality without considering differences at the feature level. This ultimately affects the model's recognition performance. To address this problem, we propose a personality-sentiment aligned multi-level fusion framework. We introduce personality traits during the feature extraction phase and propose a novel personality-sentiment alignment method to obtain personalized sentiment embeddings from the textual modality for the first time. In the fusion phase, we introduce a novel multi-level fusion method. This method gradually integrates sentimental information from textual, visual, and audio modalities through multimodal pre-fusion and a multi-level enhanced fusion strategy. Our method has been evaluated through multiple experiments on two commonly used datasets, achieving state-of-the-art results.

PaperID: 1170, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22564

Authors:Xikang Yang, Biyu Zhou, Xuehai Tang, Jizhong Han, Songlin Hu

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China School of Cyber Security

Title: Exploiting Synergistic Cognitive Biases to Bypass Safety in LLMs

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities across diverse tasks, yet their safety mechanisms remain susceptible to adversarial exploitation of cognitive biasessystematic deviations from rational judgment. Unlike prior studies focusing on isolated biases, this work highlights the overlooked power of multi-bias interactions in undermining LLM safeguards. Specifically, we propose CognitiveAttack, a novel red-teaming framework that adaptively selects optimal ensembles from 154 human social psychology-defined cognitive biases, engineering them into adversarial prompts to effectively compromise LLM safety mechanisms. Experimental results reveal systemic vulnerabilities across 30 mainstream LLMs, particularly open-source variants. CognitiveAttack achieves a substantially higher attack success rate than the SOTA black-box method PAP (60.1% vs. 31.6%), exposing critical limitations in current defenses. Through quantitative analysis of successful jailbreaks, we further identify vulnerability patterns in safety-aligned LLMs under synergistic cognitive biases, validating multi-bias interactions as a potent yet underexplored attack vector. This work introduces a novel interdisciplinary perspective by bridging cognitive science and LLM safety, paving the way for more robust and human-aligned AI systems.

PaperID: 1171, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00534

Authors:Zeyuan An, Yanghang Xiao, Zhiying Leng, Frederick W. B. Li, Xiaohui Liang

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Beihang University, Department of Computer Science, University of Durham, China Zhongguancun Laboratory

Title: Cross-temporal 3D Gaussian Splatting for Sparse-view Guided Scene Update

Abstract:
Maintaining consistent 3D scene representations over time is a significant challenge in computer vision. Updating 3D scenes from sparseview observations is crucial for various real-world applications, including urban planning, disaster assessment, and historical site preservation, where dense scans are often unavailable or impractical. In this paper, we propose Cross-Temporal 3D Gaussian Splatting (Cross-Temporal 3DGS), a novel framework for efficiently reconstructing and updating 3D scenes across different time periods, using sparse images and previously captured scene priors. Our approach comprises three stages: 1) Cross-temporal camera alignment for estimating and aligning camera poses across different timestamps; 2) Interference-based confidence initialization to identify unchanged regions between timestamps, thereby guiding updates; and 3) Progressive cross-temporal optimization, which iteratively integrates historical prior information into the 3D scene to enhance reconstruction quality. Our method supports non-continuous capture, enabling not only updates using new sparse views to refine existing scenes, but also recovering past scenes from limited data with the help of current captures. Furthermore, we demonstrate the potential of this approach to achieve temporal changes using only sparse images, which can later be reconstructed into detailed 3D representations as needed. Experimental results show significant improvements over baseline methods in reconstruction quality and data efficiency, making this approach a promising solution for scene versioning, cross-temporal digital twins, and long-term spatial documentation.

PaperID: 1172, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10035

Authors:Fuhan Cai, Yong Guo, Jie Li, Wenbo Li, Jian Chen, Xiangzhong Fang

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, South China University of Technology, Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title: FastFLUX: Pruning FLUX with Block-wise Replacement and Sandwich Training

Abstract:
Recent advancements in textto-image (T2I) generation have led to the emergence of highly expressive models such as diffusion transformers (DiTs), exemplified by FLUX. However, their massive parameter sizes lead to slow inference, high memory usage, and poor deployability. Existing acceleration methods (e.g., single-step distillation and attention pruning) often suffer from significant performance degradation and incur substantial training costs. To address these limitations, we propose FastFLUX, an architecture-level pruning framework designed to enhance the inference efficiency of FLUX. At its core is the Block-wise Replacement with Linear Layers (BRLL) method, which replaces structurally complex residual branches in ResBlocks with lightweight linear layers while preserving the original shortcut connections for stability. Furthermore, we introduce Sandwich Training (ST), a localized fine-tuning strategy that leverages LoRA to supervise neighboring blocks, mitigating performance drops caused by structural replacement. Experiments show that our FastFLUX maintains high image quality under both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, while significantly improving inference speed, even with 20% of the hierarchy pruned.

PaperID: 1173, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23318

Authors:Jiajun Cao, Qizhe Zhang, Peidong Jia, Xuhui Zhao, Bo Lan, Xiaoan Zhang, Lizhuo, Xiaobao Wei, Sixiang Chen, Liyun Li, Xianming Liu, Ming Lu, Yang Wang, Shanghang Zhang

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University, XPeng Motors

Title: FastDriveVLA: Efficient End-to-End Driving via Plug-and-Play Reconstruction-based Token Pruning

Abstract:
VisionLanguage-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated significant potential in complex scene understanding and action reasoning, leading to their increasing adoption in end-to-end autonomous driving systems. However, the long visual tokens of VLA models greatly increase computational costs. Current visual token pruning methods in Vision-Language Models (VLM) rely on either visual token similarity or visual-text attention, but both have shown poor performance in autonomous driving scenarios. Given that human drivers concentrate on relevant foreground areas while driving, we assert that retaining visual tokens containing this foreground information is essential for effective decision-making. Inspired by this, we propose FastDriveVLA, a novel reconstruction-based vision token pruning framework designed specifically for autonomous driving. FastDriveVLA includes a plug-and-play visual token pruner called ReconPruner, which prioritizes foreground information through MAE-style pixel reconstruction. A novel adversarial foreground-background reconstruction strategy is designed to train ReconPruner for the visual encoder of VLA models. Once trained, ReconPruner can be seamlessly applied to different VLA models with the same visual encoder without retraining. To train ReconPruner, we also introduce a large-scale dataset called nuScenes-FG, consisting of 241K image-mask pairs with annotated foreground regions. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the nuScenes open-loop planning benchmark across different pruning ratios.

PaperID: 1174, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12586

Authors:Lixin Chen, Chaomeng Chen, Jiale Zhou, Zhijian Wu, Xun Lin

Affiliations: School of Computing and Information Technology, Great Bay University, Tsinghua University Dongguan Key Laboratory for Intelligence and Information Technology, College of Science and Technology, Westlake University, School of Engineering, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University

Title: StegaVAR: Privacy-Preserving Video Action Recognition via Steganographic Domain Analysis

Abstract:
Despite the rapid progress of deep learning in video action recognition (VAR) in recent years, privacy leakage in videos remains a critical concern. Current stateof-the-art privacy-preserving methods often rely on anonymization. These methods suffer from (1) low concealment, where producing visually distorted videos that attract attackers’ attention during transmission, and (2) spatiotemporal disruption, where degrading essential spatiotemporal features for accurate VAR. To address these issues, we propose StegaVAR, a novel framework that embeds action videos into ordinary cover videos and directly performs VAR in the steganographic domain for the first time. Throughout both data transmission and action analysis, the spatiotemporal information of hidden secret video remains complete, while the natural appearance of cover videos ensures the concealment of transmission. Considering the difficulty of steganographic domain analysis, we propose Secret Spatio-Temporal Promotion (STeP) and Cross-Band Difference Attention (CroDA) for analysis within the steganographic domain. STeP uses the secret video to guide spatiotemporal feature extraction in the steganographic domain during training. CroDA suppresses cover interference by capturing cross-band semantic differences. Experiments demonstrate that StegaVAR achieves superior VAR and privacy-preserving performance on widely used datasets. Moreover, our framework is effective for multiple steganographic models.

PaperID: 1175, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12672

Authors:Qimao Chen, Fang Li, Shaoqing Xu, Zhiyi Lai, Zixun Xie, Yuechen Luo, Shengyin Jiang, Hanbing Li, Long Chen, Bing Wang, Yi Zhang, Zhi-Xin Yang

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Xiaomi EV, Peking University, University of Macau

Title: VILTA: A VLM-in-the-Loop Adversary for Enhancing Driving Policy Robustness

Abstract:
The safe deployment of autonomous driving (AD) systems is fundamentally hindered by the longtail problem, where rare yet critical driving scenarios are severely underrepresented in real-world data. Existing solutions including safety-critical scenario generation and closed-loop learning often rely on rule-based heuristics, resampling methods and generative models learned from offline datasets, limiting their ability to produce diverse and novel challenges. While recent works leverage Vision Language Models (VLMs) to produce scene descriptions that guide a separate, downstream model in generating hazardous trajectories for agents, such two-stage framework constrains the generative potential of VLMs, as the diversity of the final trajectories is ultimately limited by the generalization ceiling of the downstream algorithm. To overcome these limitations, we introduce VILTA (VLM-In-the-Loop Trajectory Adversary), a novel framework that integrates a VLM into the closed-loop training of AD agents. Unlike prior works, VILTA actively participates in the training loop by comprehending the dynamic driving environment and strategically generating challenging scenarios through direct, fine-grained editing of surrounding agents' future trajectories. This direct-editing approach fully leverages the VLM's powerful generalization capabilities to create a diverse curriculum of plausible yet challenging scenarios that extend beyond the scope of traditional methods. We demonstrate that our approach substantially enhances the safety and robustness of the resulting AD policy, particularly in its ability to navigate critical long-tail events.

PaperID: 1176, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13601

Authors:Shiyuan Chen, Wei Sui, Bohao Zhang, Zeyd Boukhers, John See, Cong Yang

Affiliations: Soochow Univerisity, Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology, Heriot-Watt University Malaysia, Soochow University

Title: Unleashing Semantic and Geometric Priors for 3D Scene Completion

Abstract:
Camerabased 3D semantic scene completion (SSC) provides dense geometric and semantic perception for autonomous driving and robotic navigation. However, existing methods rely on a coupled encoder to deliver both semantic and geometric priors, which forces the model to make a trade-off between conflicting demands and limits its overall performance. To tackle these challenges, we propose FoundationSSC, a novel framework that performs dual decoupling at both the source and pathway levels. At the source level, we introduce a foundation encoder that provides rich semantic feature priors for the semantic branch and high-fidelity stereo cost volumes for the geometric branch. At the pathway level, these priors are refined through specialised, decoupled pathways, yielding superior semantic context and depth distributions. Our dual-decoupling design produces disentangled and refined inputs, which are then utilised by a hybrid view transformation to generate complementary 3D features. Additionally, we introduce a novel Axis-Aware Fusion (AAF) module that addresses the often-overlooked challenge of fusing these features by anisotropically merging them into a unified representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantages of FoundationSSC, achieving simultaneous improvements in both semantic and geometric metrics, surpassing prior bests by +0.23 mIoU and +2.03 IoU on SemanticKITTI. Additionally, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on SSCBench-KITTI-360, with 21.78 mIoU and 48.61 IoU.

PaperID: 1177, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.16662

Authors:Taiqin Chen, Yifeng Wang, Xiaochen Feng, Zhilin Zhu, Hao Sha, Yingjian Li, Yongbing Zhang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), Peng Cheng Laboratory

Title: Spectral Property-Driven Data Augmentation for Hyperspectral Single-Source Domain Generalization

Abstract:
While hyperspectral images (HSI) benefit from numerous spectral channels that provide rich information for classification, the increased dimensionality and sensor variability make them more sensitive to distributional discrepancies across domains, which in turn can affect classification performance. To tackle this issue, hyperspectral singlesource domain generalization (SDG) typically employs data augmentation to simulate potential domain shifts and enhance model robustness under the condition of single-source domain training data availability. However, blind augmentation may produce samples misaligned with real-world scenarios, while excessive emphasis on realism can suppress diversity, highlighting a tradeoff between realism and diversity that limits generalization to target domains. To address this challenge, we propose a spectral property-driven data augmentation (SPDDA) that explicitly accounts for the inherent properties of HSI, namely the device-dependent variation in the number of spectral channels and the mixing of adjacent channels. Specifically, SPDDA employs a spectral diversity module that resamples data from the source domain along the spectral dimension to generate samples with varying spectral channels, and constructs a channel-wise adaptive spectral mixer by modeling inter-channel similarity, thereby avoiding fixed augmentation patterns. To further enhance the realism of the augmented samples, we propose a spatial-spectral co-optimization mechanism, which jointly optimizes a spatial fidelity constraint and a spectral continuity self-constraint. Moreover, the weight of the spectral self-constraint is adaptively adjusted based on the spatial counterpart, thus preventing over-smoothing in the spectral dimension and preserving spatial structure. Extensive experiments conducted on three remote sensing benchmarks demonstrate that SPDDA outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 1178, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18766

Authors:Xintao Chen, Xiaohao Xu, Bozhong Zheng, Yun Liu, Yingna Wu

Affiliations: ShanghaiTech University, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Title: Unsupervised Multi-View Visual Anomaly Detection via Progressive Homography-Guided Alignment

Abstract:
Unsupervised visual anomaly detection from multiview images presents a significant challenge: distinguishing genuine defects from benign appearance variations caused by viewpoint changes. Existing methods, often designed for single-view inputs, treat multiple views as a disconnected set of images, leading to inconsistent feature representations and a high false-positive rate. To address this, we introduce ViewSense-AD (VSAD), a novel framework that learns viewpoint-invariant representations by explicitly modeling geometric consistency across views. At its core is our Multi-View Alignment Module (MVAM), which leverages homography to project and align corresponding feature regions between neighboring views. We integrate MVAM into a View-Align Latent Diffusion Model (VALDM), enabling progressive and multi-stage alignment during the denoising process. This allows the model to build a coherent and holistic understanding of the object's surface from coarse to fine scales. Furthermore, a lightweight Fusion Refiner Module (FRM) enhances the global consistency of the aligned features, suppressing noise and improving discriminative power. Anomaly detection is performed by comparing multi-level features from the diffusion model against a learned memory bank of normal prototypes. Extensive experiments on the challenging RealIAD and MANTA datasets demonstrate that VSAD sets a new state-of-the-art, significantly outperforming existing methods in pixel, view, and sample-level visual anomaly detection, proving its robustness to large viewpoint shifts and complex textures.

PaperID: 1179, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15057

Authors:Yaxiong Chen, Qicong Wang, Chunlei Li, Jingliang Hu, Yilei Shi, Shengwu Xiong, Xiao Xiang Zhu, Lichao Mou

Affiliations: Wuhan University of Technology, MedAI Technology (Wuxi) Co. Ltd., Technical University of Munich

Title: ProPL: Universal Semi-Supervised Ultrasound Image Segmentation via Prompt-Guided Pseudo-Labeling

Abstract:
Existing approaches for the problem of ultrasound image segmentation, whether supervised or semisupervised, are typically specialized for specific anatomical structures or tasks, limiting their practical utility in clinical settings. In this paper, we pioneer the task of universal semi-supervised ultrasound image segmentation and propose ProPL, a framework that can handle multiple organs and segmentation tasks while leveraging both labeled and unlabeled data. At its core, ProPL employs a shared vision encoder coupled with prompt-guided dual decoders, enabling flexible task adaptation through a prompting-upon-decoding mechanism and reliable self-training via an uncertainty-driven pseudo-label calibration (UPLC) module. To facilitate research in this direction, we introduce a comprehensive ultrasound dataset spanning 5 organs and 8 segmentation tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ProPL outperforms state-of-the-art methods across various metrics, establishing a new benchmark for universal ultrasound image segmentation.

PaperID: 1180, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07051

Authors:Yuxuan Chou, Tao Yu, Wen Huang, ZhangYuHeng, Tao Dai, Shu-Tao Xia

Affiliations: Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Institute of automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University, College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University

Title: Improving Deepfake Detection with Reinforcement Learning-Based Adaptive Data Augmentation

Abstract:
The generalization capability of deepfake detectors is crucial for realworld applications. Data augmentation to generate synthetic fake faces has served as an effective strategy to enhance generalization. Interestingly, current state-of-the-art (SoTA) methods rely on fixed augmentation strategies, raising a fundamental question: Can a single static augmentation approach suffice, or does the diversity of forgery features necessitate dynamic strategies? We argue that existing methods overlook the evolving complexity of real-world forgery patterns, such as facial warping, expression manipulation, and compression artifacts, which cannot be fully simulated by fixed policies. To bridge this gap, we propose CRDA (Curriculum Reinforcement-Learning Data Augmentation), a novel framework that guides the detector to progressively master multi-domain forgery features from simple to complex. CRDA synthesizes augmented samples using a configurable pool of forgery operations and dynamically generates adversarial samples tailored to the detector’s current learning state. Key to our approach is the integration of reinforcement learning (RL) and causal inference. To efficiently explore the vast augmentation space, an RL agent dynamically selects augmentation actions based on the detector’s performance, ensuring continuous adaptation to increasingly challenging forgeries. Simultaneously, the agent’s output is designed to introduce variations in action spaces, generating heterogeneous forgery patterns. These variations are guided by causal inference theory, which mitigates spurious correlations by suppressing task-irrelevant biases and enforcing the model to focus on causally invariant features. This integration ensures robust generalization by decoupling synthetic augmentation patterns from the model’s learned representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the generalizability of the detector, achieving superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods on multiple cross-domain datasets.

PaperID: 1181, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15433

Authors:Longchen Dai, Zixuan Shen, Zhiheng Zhou, Peipeng Yu, Zhihua Xia

Affiliations: Jinan University

Title: CLIP-FTI: Fine-Grained Face Template Inversion via CLIP-Driven Attribute Conditioning

Abstract:
Face recognition systems store face templates for efficient matching. Once leaked, these templates pose a threat: inverting them can yield photorealistic surrogates that compromise privacy and enable impersonation. Although existing research has achieved relatively realistic face template inversion, the reconstructed facial images exhibit oversmoothed facial-part attributes (eyes, nose, mouth) and limited transferability. To address this problem, we present CLIP-FTI, a CLIP-driven fine-grained attribute conditioning framework for face template inversion. Our core idea is to use the CLIP model to obtain the semantic embeddings of facial features, in order to realize the reconstruction of specific facial feature attributes. Specifically, facial feature attribute embeddings extracted from CLIP are fused with the leaked template via a cross-modal feature interaction network and projected into the intermediate latent space of a pretrained Style- GAN. The StyleGAN generator then synthesizes face images with the same identity as the templates but with more finegrained facial feature attributes. Experiments across multiple face recognition backbones and datasets show that our reconstructions (i) achieve higher identification accuracy and attribute similarity, (ii) recover sharper component-level attribute semantics, and (iii) improve cross-model attack transferability compared to prior reconstruction attacks. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first method to use additional information besides the face template attack to realize face template inversion and obtains SOTA results.

PaperID: 1182, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14354

Authors:Kanglong Fan, Yunqiao Yang, Chen Ma

Affiliations: City University of Hong Kong

Title: Enhancing Interpretability for Vision Models via Shapley Value Optimization

Abstract:
Deep neural networks have demonstrated remarkable performance across various domains, yet their decisionmaking processes remain opaque. Although many explanation methods are dedicated to bringing the obscurity of DNNs to light, they exhibit significant limitations: post-hoc explanation methods often struggle to faithfully reflect model behaviors, while self-explaining neural networks sacrifice performance and compatibility due to their specialized architectural designs. To address these challenges, we propose a novel self-explaining framework that integrates Shapley value estimation as an auxiliary task during training, which achieves two key advancements: 1) a fair allocation of the model prediction scores to image patches, ensuring explanations inherently align with the model's decision logic, and 2) enhanced interpretability with minor structural modifications, preserving model performance and compatibility. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art interpretability.

PaperID: 1183, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.14265

Authors:Guoxi Huang, Qirui Yang, Ruirui Lin, Zipeng Qi, David Bull, Nantheera Anantrasirichai

Affiliations: University of Bristol, Tianjin University, Baidu Inc

Title: Bayesian Neural Networks for One-to-Many Mapping in Image Enhancement

Abstract:
In image enhancement tasks, such as lowlight and underwater image enhancement, a degraded image can correspond to multiple plausible target images due to dynamic photography conditions. This naturally results in a one-to-many mapping problem. To address this, we propose a Bayesian Enhancement Model (BEM) that incorporates Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) to capture data uncertainty and produce diverse outputs. To enable fast inference, we introduce a BNN-DNN framework: a BNN is first employed to model the one-to-many mapping in a low-dimensional space, followed by a Deterministic Neural Network (DNN) that refines fine-grained image details. Extensive experiments on multiple low-light and underwater image enhancement benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

PaperID: 1184, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07251

Authors:Junsheng Huang, Shengyu Hao, Bo-Cheng Hu, Hongwei Wang, Gaoang Wang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, China Tower Corporation Limited

Title: Understanding Dynamic Scenes in Ego Centric 4D Point Clouds

Abstract:
Understanding dynamic 4D scenes from an egocentric perspective—modeling changes in 3D spatial structure over time—is crucial for human–machine interaction, autonomous navigation, and embodied intelligence. While existing egocentric datasets contain dynamic scenes, they lack unified 4D annotations and taskdriven evaluation protocols for fine-grained spatio-temporal reasoning, especially on motion of objects and human, together with their interactions. To address this gap, we introduce EgoDynamic4D, a novel QA benchmark on highly dynamic scenes, comprising RGB-D video, camera poses, globally unique instance masks, and 4D bounding boxes. We construct 927K QA pairs accompanied by explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT), enabling verifiable, step-by-step spatio-temporal reasoning. We design 12 dynamic QA tasks covering agent motion, human–object interaction, trajectory prediction, relation understanding, and temporal–causal reasoning, with fine-grained, multidimensional metrics. To tackle these tasks, we propose an end-to-end spatio-temporal reasoning framework that unifies dynamic and static scene information, using instance-aware feature encoding, time and camera encoding, and spatially adaptive down-sampling to compress large 4D scenes into token sequences manageable by LLMs. Experiments on EgoDynamic4D show that our method consistently outperforms baselines, validating the effectiveness of multimodal temporal modeling for egocentric dynamic scene understanding.

PaperID: 1185, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10287

Authors:Simindokht Jahangard, Mehrzad Mohammadi, Yi Shen, Zhixi Cai, Hamid Rezatofighi

Affiliations: Monash University, Sharif University of Technology

Title: JRDB-Reasoning: A Difficulty-Graded Benchmark for Visual Reasoning in Robotics

Abstract:
Recent advances in VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) have greatly enhanced visual reasoning, a key capability for embodied AI agents like robots. However, existing visual reasoning benchmarks often suffer from several limitations: they lack a clear definition of reasoning complexity, offer have no control to generate questions over varying difficulty and task customization, and fail to provide structured, step-by-step reasoning annotations (workflows). To bridge these gaps, we formalize reasoning complexity, introduce an adaptive query engine that generates customizable questions of varying complexity with detailed intermediate annotations, and extend the JRDB dataset with human-object interaction and geometric relationship annotations to create JRDB-Reasoning, a benchmark tailored for visual reasoning in human-crowded environments. Our engine and benchmark enable fine-grained evaluation of visual reasoning frameworks and dynamic assessment of visual-language models across reasoning levels.

PaperID: 1186, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.00584

Authors:Mingyu Jeon, Sunjae Yoon, Jonghee Kim, Junyeong Kim

Affiliations: Chung-Ang University, Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute

Title: GranAlign: Granularity-Aware Alignment Framework for Zero-shot Video Moment Retrieval

Abstract:
Zeroshot video moment retrieval (ZVMR) is the task of localizing a temporal moment within an untrimmed video using a natural language query without relying on task-specific training data. The primary challenge in this setting lies in the mismatch in semantic granularity between textual queries and visual content. Previous studies in ZVMR have attempted to achieve alignment by leveraging high-quality pre-trained knowledge that represents video and language in a joint space. However, these approaches failed to balance the semantic granularity between the pre-trained knowledge provided by each modality for a given scene. As a result, despite the high quality of each modality’s representations, the mismatch in granularity led to inaccurate retrieval. In this paper, we propose a training-free framework, called Granularity-Aware Alignment (GranAlign), that bridges this gap between coarse and fine semantic representations. Our approach introduces two complementary techniques: granularity-based query rewriting to generate varied semantic granularities, and query-aware caption generation to embed query intent into video content. By pairing multi-level queries with both query-agnostic and query-aware captions, we effectively resolve semantic mismatches. As a result, our method sets a new state-of-the-art across all three major benchmarks (QVHighlights, Charades-STA, ActivityNet-Captions), with a notable 3.23% mAP@avg improvement on the QVHighlights dataset.

PaperID: 1187, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10896

Authors:Lihua Jian, Jiabo Liu, Shaowu Wu, Lihui Chen

Affiliations: Zhengzhou University, Wuhan University, Chongqing University

Title: CLIPPan: Adapting CLIP as a Supervisor for Unsupervised Pansharpening

Abstract:
Despite remarkable advancements in supervised pansharpening neural networks, these methods face domain adaptation challenges of resolution due to the intrinsic disparity between simulated reducedresolution training data and real-world full-resolution scenarios. To bridge this gap, we propose an unsupervised pansharpening framework, CLIPPan, that enables model training at full resolution directly by taking CLIP, a visual-language model, as a supervisor. However, directly applying CLIP to supervise pansharpening remains challenging due to its inherent bias toward natural images and limited understanding of pansharpening tasks. Therefore, we first introduce a lightweight fine-tuning pipeline that adapts CLIP to recognize low-resolution multispectral, panchromatic, and high-resolution multispectral images, as well as to understand the pansharpening process. Then, building on the adapted CLIP, we formulate a novel loss integrating semantic language constraints, which aligns image-level fusion transitions with protocol-aligned textual prompts (e.g., Wald's or Khan's descriptions), thus enabling CLIPPan to use language as a powerful supervisory signal and guide fusion learning without ground truth. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CLIPPan consistently improves spectral and spatial fidelity across various pansharpening backbones on real-world datasets, setting a new state of the art for unsupervised full-resolution pansharpening.

PaperID: 1188, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11740

Authors:Haowen Jiang, Xinyu Huang, You Lu, Dingji Wang, Yuheng Cao, Chaofeng Sha, Bihuan Chen, Keyu Chen, Xin Peng

Affiliations: Fudan University

Title: ExpertAD: Enhancing Autonomous Driving Systems with Mixture of Experts

Abstract:
Recent advancements in endto-end autonomous driving systems (ADSs) underscore their potential for perception and planning capabilities. However, challenges remain. Complex driving scenarios contain rich semantic information, yet ambiguous or noisy semantics can compromise decision reliability, while interference between multiple driving tasks may hinder optimal planning. Furthermore, prolonged inference latency slows decision-making, increasing the risk of unsafe driving behaviors. To address these challenges, we propose ExpertAD, a novel framework that enhances the performance of ADS with Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture. We introduce a Perception Adapter (PA) to amplify task-critical features, ensuring contextually relevant scene understanding, and a Mixture of Sparse Experts (MoSE) to minimize task interference during prediction, allowing for effective and efficient planning. Our experiments show that ExpertAD reduces average collision rates by up to 20% and inference latency by 25% compared to prior methods. We further evaluate its multi-skill planning capabilities in rare scenarios (e.g., accidents, yielding to emergency vehicles) and demonstrate strong generalization to unseen urban environments. Additionally, we present a case study that illustrates its decision-making process in complex driving scenarios.

PaperID: 1189, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00582

Authors:Yue Jiang, Haiwei Xue, Minghao Han, Mingcheng Li, Xiaolu Hou, Dingkang Yang, Lihua Zhang, Xu Zheng

Affiliations: Fudan University, Tsinghua University The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Title: SatireDecoder: Visual Cascaded Decoupling for Enhancing Satirical Image Comprehension

Abstract:
Satire, a form of artistic expression combining humor with implicit critique, holds significant social value by illuminating societal issues. Despite its cultural and societal significance, satire comprehension, particularly in purely visual forms, remains a challenging task for current visionlanguage models. This task requires not only detecting satire but also deciphering its nuanced meaning and identifying the implicated entities. Existing models often fail to effectively integrate local entity relationships with global context, leading to misinterpretation, comprehension biases, and hallucinations. To address these limitations, we propose SatireDecoder, a training-free framework designed to enhance satirical image comprehension. Our approach proposes a multi-agent system performing visual cascaded decoupling to decompose images into fine-grained local and global semantic representations. In addition, we introduce a chain-of-thought reasoning strategy guided by uncertainty analysis, which breaks down the complex satire comprehension process into sequential subtasks with minimized uncertainty. Our method significantly improves interpretive accuracy while reducing hallucinations. Experimental results validate that SatireDecoder outperforms existing baselines in comprehending visual satire, offering a promising direction for vision-language reasoning in nuanced, high-level semantic tasks.

PaperID: 1190, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12985

Authors:Minsoo Jo, Dongyoon Yang, Taesup Kim

Affiliations: Graduate School of Data Science, Seoul National University, AI Advanced Technology, SK hynix

Title: Angular Gradient Sign Method: Uncovering Vulnerabilities in Hyperbolic Networks

Abstract:
Adversarial examples in neural networks have been extensively studied in Euclidean settings, but recent advances in _hyperbolic networks_ call for a reevaluation of attack strategies in nonEuclidean geometries. Existing methods such as FGSM and PGD apply perturbations without regard to the underlying hyperbolic structure, potentially leading to inefficient or geometrically inconsistent attacks. In this work, we propose a novel adversarial attack that explicitly leverages the geometric properties of hyperbolic space. Specifically, we compute the gradient of the loss function in the tangent space of hyperbolic space, decompose it into a radial (depth) component and an angular (semantic) component, and apply perturbation derived solely from the angular direction. Our method generates adversarial examples by focusing perturbations in semantically sensitive directions encoded in angular movement within the hyperbolic geometry. Empirical results on image classification, cross-modal retrieval tasks and network architectures demonstrate that our attack achieves higher fooling rates than conventional adversarial attacks, while producing high-impact perturbations with deeper insights into vulnerabilities of hyperbolic embeddings. This work highlights the importance of geometry-aware adversarial strategies in curved representation spaces and provides a principled framework for attacking hierarchical embeddings.

PaperID: 1191, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13812

Authors:Donghwa Kang, Doohyun Kim, Sang-Ki Ko, Jinkyu Lee, Hyeongboo Baek, Brent ByungHoon Kang

Affiliations: Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, University of Seoul, Yonsei University

Title: Timestep-Compressed Attack on Spiking Neural Networks Through Timestep-Level Backpropagation

Abstract:
Stateof-the-art (SOTA) gradient-based adversarial attacks on spiking neural networks (SNNs), which largely rely on extending FGSM and PGD frameworks, face a critical limitation: substantial attack latency from multi-timestep processing, rendering them infeasible for practical real-time applications. This inefficiency stems from their design as direct extensions of ANN paradigms, which fail to exploit key SNN properties. In this paper, we propose the timestep compressed attack (TCA), a novel framework that significantly reduces attack latency. TCA introduces two components founded on key insights into SNN behavior. First, timestep-level backpropagation (TLBP) is based on our finding that global temporal information in backpropagation to generate perturbations is not critical for an attack’s success, enabling per-timestep evaluation for early stopping. Second, adversarial membrane potential reuse (A-MPR) is motivated by the observation that initial timesteps are inefficiently spent accumulating membrane potential, a warm-up phase that can be pre-calculated and reused. Our experiments on VGG-11 and ResNet-17 with the CIFAR-10/100 and CIFAR10-DVS datasets show that TCA significantly reduces the required attack latency by up to 56.6% and 57.1% compared to SOTA methods in white-box and black-box settings, respectively, while maintaining a comparable attack success rate.

PaperID: 1192, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.01892

Authors:Arjun Ramesh Kaushik, Naresh Kumar Devulapally, Vishnu Suresh Lokhande, Nalini K. Ratha, Venu Govindaraju

Affiliations: State University of New York at Buffalo

Title: Forget Less by Learning from Parents Through Hierarchical Relationships

Abstract:
Custom Diffusion Models (CDMs) offer impressive capabilities for personalization in generative modeling, yet they remain vulnerable to catastrophic forgetting when learning new concepts sequentially. Existing approaches primarily focus on minimizing interference between concepts, often neglecting the potential for positive interconcept interactions. In this work, we present Forget Less by Learning from Parents (FLLP), a novel framework that introduces a parent-child inter-concept learning mechanism in hyperbolic space to mitigate forgetting. By embedding concept representations within a Lorentzian manifold, naturally suited to modeling tree-like hierarchies, we define parent-child relationships in which previously learned concepts serve as guidance for adapting to new ones. Our method not only preserves prior knowledge but also supports continual integration of new concepts. We validate FLLP on three public datasets and one synthetic benchmark, showing consistent improvements in both robustness and generalization.

PaperID: 1193, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07978

Authors:Da-Yeong Kim, Yeong-Jun Cho

Affiliations: Chonnam National University

Title: DANCE: Density-agnostic and Class-aware Network for Point Cloud Completion

Abstract:
Point cloud completion aims to recover missing geometric structures from incomplete 3D scans, which often suffer from occlusions or limited sensor viewpoints. Existing methods typically assume fixed input/output densities or rely on imagebased representations, making them less suitable for real-world scenarios with variable sparsity and limited supervision. In this paper, we introduce Density-agnostic and Class-aware Network (DANCE), a novel framework that completes only the missing regions while preserving the observed geometry. DANCE generates candidate points via ray-based sampling from multiple viewpoints. A transformer decoder then refines their positions and predicts opacity scores, which determine the validity of each point for inclusion in the final surface. To incorporate semantic guidance, a lightweight classification head is trained directly on geometric features, enabling category-consistent completion without external image supervision. Extensive experiments on the PCN and MVP benchmarks show that DANCE outperforms state-of-the-art methods in accuracy and structural consistency, while remaining robust to varying input densities and noise levels.

PaperID: 1194, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23205

Authors:Dequan Kong, Honghua Chen, Zhe Zhu, Mingqiang Wei

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Lingnan University

Title: BridgeShape: Latent Diffusion Schrödinger Bridge for 3D Shape Completion

Abstract:
Existing diffusionbased 3D shape completion methods typically use a conditional paradigm, injecting incomplete shape information into the denoising network via deep feature interactions (e.g., concatenation, cross-attention) to guide sampling toward complete shapes, often represented by voxel-based distance functions. However, these approaches fail to explicitly model the optimal global transport path, leading to suboptimal completions. Moreover, performing diffusion directly in voxel space imposes resolution constraints, limiting the generation of fine-grained geometric details. To address these challenges, we propose BridgeShape, a novel framework for 3D shape completion via latent diffusion Schrödinger bridge. The key innovations lie in two aspects: (i) BridgeShape formulates shape completion as an optimal transport problem, explicitly modeling the transition between incomplete and complete shapes to ensure a globally coherent transformation. (ii) We introduce a Depth-Enhanced Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder (VQ-VAE) to encode 3D shapes into a compact latent space, leveraging self-projected multi-view depth information enriched with strong DINOv2 features to enhance geometric structural perception. By operating in a compact yet structurally informative latent space, BridgeShape effectively mitigates resolution constraints and enables more efficient and high-fidelity 3D shape completion. BridgeShape achieves state-of-the-art performance on 3D shape completion benchmarks, demonstrating superior fidelity at higher resolutions and for unseen object classes.

PaperID: 1195, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15102

Authors:Junseo Koo, Jinseo Jeong, Gunhee Kim

Affiliations: Seoul National University

Title: Gaussian Blending: Rethinking Alpha Blending in 3D Gaussian Splatting

Abstract:
The recent introduction of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has significantly advanced novel view synthesis. Several studies have further improved the rendering quality of 3DGS, yet they still exhibit noticeable visual discrepancies when synthesizing views at sampling rates unseen during training. Specifically, they suffer from (i) erosioninduced blurring artifacts when zooming in and (ii) dilation-induced staircase artifacts when zooming out. We speculate that these artifacts arise from the fundamental limitation of the alpha blending adopted in 3DGS methods. Instead of the conventional alpha blending that computes alpha and transmittance as scalar quantities over a pixel, we propose to replace it with our novel Gaussian Blending that treats alpha and transmittance as spatially varying distributions. Thus, transmittances can be updated considering the spatial distribution of alpha values across the pixel area, allowing nearby background splats to contribute to the final rendering. Our Gaussian Blending maintains real-time rendering speed and requires no additional memory cost, while being easily integrated as a drop-in replacement into existing 3DGS-based or other NVS frameworks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Gaussian Blending effectively captures fine details at various sampling rates unseen during training, consistently outperforming existing novel view synthesis models across both unseen and seen sampling rates.

PaperID: 1196, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.23847

Authors:Chenggong Li, Yidong Luo, Junchao Zhang, Degui Yang

Affiliations: School of Automation, Central South University, China Hunan Provincial Key Laboratory of Optic-Electronic Intelligent Measurement and Control, Zhejiang University, China School of Engineering, Westlake University

Title: Polarization Uncertainty-Guided Diffusion Model for Color Polarization Image Demosaicking

Abstract:
Color polarization demosaicking (CPDM) aims to reconstruct fullresolution polarization images of four directions from the color-polarization filter array (CPFA) raw image. Due to the challenge of predicting numerous missing pixels and the scarcity of high-quality training data, existing network-based methods, despite effectively recovering scene intensity information, still exhibit significant errors in reconstructing polarization characteristics (degree of polarization, DOP, and angle of polarization, AOP). To address this problem, we introduce the image diffusion prior from text-to-image (T2I) models to overcome the performance bottleneck of network-based methods, with the additional diffusion prior compensating for limited representational capacity caused by restricted data distribution. To effectively leverage the diffusion prior, we explicitly model the polarization uncertainty during reconstruction and use uncertainty to guide the diffusion model in recovering high error regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method accurately recovers scene polarization characteristics with both high fidelity and strong visual perception.

PaperID: 1197, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06857

Authors:Fanding Li, Xiangyu Li, Xianghe Su, Xingyu Qiu, Suyu Dong, Wei Wang, Kuanquan Wang, Gongning Luo, Shuo Li

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Northeast Forestry University, Case Western Reserve University, Ohio United States

Title: Ambiguity-aware Truncated Flow Matching for Ambiguous Medical Image Segmentation

Abstract:
A simultaneous enhancement of accuracy and diversity of predictions remains a challenge in ambiguous medical image segmentation (AMIS) due to the inherent tradeoffs. While truncated diffusion probabilistic models (TDPMs) hold strong potential with a paradigm optimization, existing TDPMs suffer from entangled accuracy and diversity of predictions with insufficient fidelity and plausibility. To address the aforementioned challenges, we propose Ambiguity-aware Truncated Flow Matching (ATFM), which introduces a novel inference paradigm and dedicated model components. Firstly, we propose Data-Hierarchical Inference, a redefinition of AMIS-specific inference paradigm, which enhances accuracy and diversity at data-distribution and data-sample level, respectively, for an effective disentanglement. Secondly, Gaussian Truncation Representation (GTR) is introduced to enhance both fidelity of predictions and reliability of truncation distribution, by explicitly modeling it as a Gaussian distribution at Ttrunc instead of using sampling-based approximations. Thirdly, Segmentation Flow Matching (SFM) is proposed to enhance the plausibility of diverse predictions by extending semantic-aware flow transformation in Flow Matching (FM). Comprehensive evaluations on LIDC and ISIC3 datasets demonstrate that ATFM outperforms SOTA methods and simultaneously achieves a more efficient inference. ATFM improves GED and HM-IoU by up to 12% and 7.3% compared to advanced methods.

PaperID: 1198, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12079

Authors:Hongxuan Li, Wencheng Zhu, Huiying Xu, Xinzhong Zhu, Pengfei Zhu

Affiliations: College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University, School of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang Normal University

Title: Point Cloud Quantization Through Multimodal Prompting for 3D Understanding

Abstract:
Vector quantization has emerged as a powerful tool in largescale multimodal models, unifying heterogeneous representations through discrete token encoding. However, its effectiveness hinges on robust codebook design. Current prototype-based approaches relying on trainable vectors or clustered centroids fall short in representativeness and interpretability, even as multimodal alignment demonstrates its promise in vision-language models. To address these limitations, we propose a simple multimodal prompting-driven quantization framework for point cloud analysis. Our methodology is built upon two core insights: 1) Text embeddings from pre-trained models inherently encode visual semantics through many-to-one contrastive alignment, naturally serving as robust prototype priors; and 2) Multimodal prompts enable adaptive refinement of these prototypes, effectively mitigating vision-language semantic gaps. The framework introduces a dual-constrained quantization space, enforced by compactness and separation regularization, which seamlessly integrates visual and prototype features, resulting in hybrid representations that jointly encode geometric and semantic information. Furthermore, we employ Gumbel-Softmax relaxation to achieve differentiable discretization while maintaining quantization sparsity. Extensive experiments on the ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN datasets clearly demonstrate the superior effectiveness of the proposed method.

PaperID: 1199, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12525

Authors:Jing Li, Yifan Wang, Jiafeng Yan, Renlong Zhang, Bin Yang

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Geographic Information Science (Ministry of Education), East China Normal University, Ministry of Natural Resources, Shanghai China, School of Information, Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing China, School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hunan University, Changsha China

Title: MdaIF: Robust One-Stop Multi-Degradation-Aware Image Fusion with Language-Driven Semantics

Abstract:
Infrared and visible image fusion aims to integrate complementary multimodal information into a single fused result. However, existing methods 1) fail to account for the degradation visible images under adverse weather conditions, thereby compromising fusion performance; and 2) rely on fixed network architectures, limiting their adaptability to diverse degradation scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a one-stop degradation-aware image fusion framework for multi-degradation scenarios driven by a large language model (MdaIF). Given the distinct scattering characteristics of different degradation scenarios (e.g., haze, rain, and snow) in atmospheric transmission, a mixture-of-experts (MoE) system is introduced to tackle image fusion across multiple degradation scenarios. To adaptively extract diverse weather-aware degradation knowledge and scene feature representations, collectively referred to as the semantic prior, we employ a pre-trained vision-language model (VLM) in our framework. Guided by the semantic prior, we propose degradation-aware channel attention module (DCAM), which employ degradation prototype decomposition to facilitate multi-modal feature interaction in channel domain. In addition, to achieve effective expert routing, the semantic prior and channel-domain modulated features are utilized to guide the MoE, enabling robust image fusion in complex degradation scenarios. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our MdaIF, demonstrating superior performance over SOTA methods.

PaperID: 1200, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17224

Authors:Xuyang Li, Chenyu Li, Danfeng Hong

Affiliations: Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Southeast University

Title: Any-Optical-Model: A Universal Foundation Model for Optical Remote Sensing

Abstract:
Optical satellites, with their diverse band layouts and ground sampling distances, supply indispensable evidence for tasks ranging from ecosystem surveillance to emergency response. However, significant discrepancies in band composition and spatial resolution across different optical sensors present major challenges for existing Remote Sensing Foundation Models (RSFMs). These models are typically pretrained on fixed band configurations and resolutions, making them vulnerable to real world scenarios involving missing bands, cross sensor fusion, and unseen spatial scales, thereby limiting their generalization and practical deployment. To address these limitations, we propose Any Optical Model (AOM), a universal RSFM explicitly designed to accommodate arbitrary band compositions, sensor types, and resolution scales. To preserve distinctive spectral characteristics even when bands are missing or newly introduced, AOM introduces a spectrumindependent tokenizer that assigns each channel a dedicated band embedding, enabling explicit encoding of spectral identity. To effectively capture texture and contextual patterns from sub-meter to hundred-meter imagery, we design a multi-scale adaptive patch embedding mechanism that dynamically modulates the receptive field. Furthermore, to maintain global semantic consistency across varying resolutions, AOM incorporates a multi-scale semantic alignment mechanism alongside a channel-wise self-supervised masking and reconstruction pretraining strategy that jointly models spectral-spatial relationships. Extensive experiments on over 10 public datasets, including those from Sentinel-2, Landsat, and HLS, demonstrate that AOM consistently achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance under challenging conditions such as band missing, cross sensor, and cross resolution settings. These results highlight AOM as a crucial step toward building truly general-purpose RSFMs.

PaperID: 1201, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20050

Authors:Yan Li, Yingzhao Li, Gim Hee Lee

Affiliations: National University of Singapore, Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: Active3D: Active High-Fidelity 3D Reconstruction via Multi-Level Uncertainty Quantification

Abstract:
In this paper, we present an active exploration framework for highfidelity 3D reconstruction that incrementally builds a multi-level uncertainty space and selects next-best-views through an uncertainty-driven motion planner. We introduce a hybrid implicit–explicit representation that fuses neural fields with Gaussian primitives to jointly capture global structural priors and locally observed details. Based on this hybrid state, we derive a hierarchical uncertainty volume that quantifies both implicit global structure quality and explicit local surface confidence. To focus optimization on the most informative regions, we propose an uncertainty-driven keyframe selection strategy that anchors high-entropy viewpoints as sparse attention nodes, coupled with a viewpoint-space sliding window for uncertainty-aware local refinement. The planning module formulates next-best-view selection as an Expected Hybrid Information Gain problem and incorporates a risk-sensitive path planner to ensure efficient and safe exploration. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, completeness, and rendering quality, highlighting its effectiveness for real-world active reconstruction and robotic perception tasks.

PaperID: 1202, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04567

Authors:Yifan Li, Kun Zhou, Xin Zhao, Lei Fang, Jirong Wen

Affiliations: Renmin University of China

Title: Analyzing and Mitigating Object Hallucination: A Training Bias Perspective

Abstract:
As scaling up training data has significantly improved the general multimodal capabilities of Large VisionLanguage Models (LVLMs), they still suffer from the hallucination issue, generating text that is inconsistent with the visual input. This phenomenon motivates us to systematically investigate the role of training data in hallucination. We introduce a new benchmark, POPEv2, which consists of counterfactual images collected from the training data of LVLMs with certain objects masked. Through comprehensive evaluation on POPEv2, we find that current LVLMs suffer from training bias: they fail to fully leverage their training data and hallucinate more frequently on images seen during training. Specifically, they perform poorly on counterfactual images, often incorrectly answering “Yes” to questions about masked objects. To understand this issue, we conduct probing experiments on the models’ internal components, revealing that this training bias is primarily located in the language modeling (LM) head, which fails to correctly translate accurate visual representations into textual outputs. Based on these findings, we propose Obliviate, an efficient and lightweight unlearning method designed to mitigate object hallucination via training bias unlearning. Obliviate identifies the discrepancy between ground-truth labels and model outputs on the training data as a proxy for bias and adopts a parameter- and data-efficient fine-tuning strategy that only updates the LM head. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. While only reusing the training data and updating approximately 2% of the parameters, Obliviate significantly reduces hallucination across both discriminative and generative tasks. Furthermore, it demonstrates strong scalability with respect to both model size (2B to 72B) and training data volume, and exhibits promising generalization to hallucination types beyond object-level hallucination.

PaperID: 1203, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20278

Authors:Yinghui Li, Qianyu Zhou, Di Shao, Hao Yang, Ye Zhu, Richard Dazeley, Xuequan Lu

Affiliations: Deakin University, Jilin University, Pengcheng Lab, Shanghai Jiaotong University, University of Western Australia

Title: DAPointMamba: Domain Adaptive Point Mamba for Point Cloud Completion

Abstract:
Domain adaptive point cloud completion (DA PCC) aims to narrow the geometric and semantic discrepancies between the labeled source and unlabeled target domains. Existing methods either suffer from limited receptive fields or quadratic complexity due to using CNNs or vision Transformers. In this paper, we present the first work that studies the adaptability of state space models (SSMs) in DA PCC and find that directly applying SSMs to DA PCC will encounter several challenges: directly serializing 3D point clouds into 1D sequences often disrupts the spatial topology and local geometric features of the target domain. Besides, the overlook of designs in the learning domainagnostic representations hinders the adaptation performance. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework, DAPointMamba for DA PCC, that exhibits strong adaptability across domains and has the advantages of global receptive fields and efficient linear complexity. It has three novel modules. In particular, Cross-Domain Patch-Level Scanning introduces patch-level geometric correspondences, enabling effective local alignment. Cross-Domain Spatial SSM Alignment further strengthens spatial consistency by modulating patch features based on cross-domain similarity, effectively mitigating fine-grained structural discrepancies. Cross-Domain Channel SSM Alignment actively addresses global semantic gaps by interleaving and aligning feature channels. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that our DAPointMamba outperforms state-of-the-art methods with less computational complexity and inference latency.

PaperID: 1204, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22756

Authors:Shiyi Liang, Xinyuan Chang, Changjie Wu, Huiyuan Yan, Yifan Bai, Xinran Liu, Hang Zhang, Yujian Yuan, Shuang Zeng, Mu Xu, Xing Wei

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, Alibaba Group, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: Persistent Autoregressive Mapping with Traffic Rules for Autonomous Driving

Abstract:
Safe autonomous driving requires both accurate HD map construction and persistent awareness of traffic rules, even when their associated signs are no longer visible. However, existing methods either focus solely on geometric elements or treat rules as temporary classifications, failing to capture their persistent effectiveness across extended driving sequences. In this paper, we present PAMR (Persistent Autoregressive Mapping with Traffic Rules), a novel framework that performs autoregressive coconstruction of lane vectors and traffic rules from visual observations. Our approach introduces two key mechanisms: Map-Rule Co-Construction for processing driving scenes in temporal segments, and Map-Rule Cache for maintaining rule consistency across these segments. To properly evaluate continuous and consistent map generation, we develop MapDRv2, featuring improved lane geometry annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PAMR achieves superior performance in joint vector-rule mapping tasks, while maintaining persistent rule effectiveness throughout extended driving sequences.

PaperID: 1205, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23473

Authors:Shuyuan Lin, Hailiang Liao, Qiang Qi, Junjie Huang, Taotao Lai, Jian Weng

Affiliations: Jinan University, Qingdao University of Science and Technology, Minjiang University

Title: SC-Net: Robust Correspondence Learning via Spatial and Cross-Channel Context

Abstract:
Recent research has focused on using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as the backbones in twoview correspondence learning, demonstrating significant superiority over methods based on multilayer perceptrons. However, CNN backbones that are not tailored to specific tasks may fail to effectively aggregate global context and oversmooth dense motion fields in scenes with large disparity. To address these problems, we propose a novel network named SC-Net, which effectively integrates bilateral context from both spatial and channel perspectives. Specifically, we design an adaptive focused regularization module (AFR) to enhance the model's position-awareness and robustness against spurious motion samples, thereby facilitating the generation of a more accurate motion field. We then propose a bilateral field adjustment module (BFA) to refine the motion field by simultaneously modeling long-range relationships and facilitating interaction across spatial and channel dimensions. Finally, we recover the motion vectors from the refined field using a position-aware recovery module (PAR) that ensures consistency and precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SC-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods in relative pose estimation and outlier removal tasks on YFCC100M and SUN3D datasets.

PaperID: 1206, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.11111

Authors:Yu Lin, Jianghang Lin, Kai Ye, You Shen, Shengchuan Zhang, Liujuan Cao

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing, Ministry of Education of China, Xiamen University, P.R. China.

Title: S²Teacher: Step-by-step Teacher for Sparsely Annotated Oriented Object Detection

Abstract:
Although fullysupervised oriented object detection has made significant progress in remote sensing image understanding, it comes at the cost of labor-intensive annotation. Recent studies have explored weakly and semi-supervised learning to alleviate this burden. However, these methods overlook the difficulties posed by dense annotations in complex remote sensing scenes. In this paper, we introduce a novel setting called sparsely annotated oriented object detection (SAOOD), which only labels partial instances, and propose a solution to address its challenges. Specifically, we focus on two key issues in the setting: (1) sparse labeling leading to overfitting on limited foreground representations, and (2) unlabeled objects (false negatives) confusing feature learning. To this end, we propose the S2Teacher, a novel angle-consistency guided method that progressively mines pseudo-labels for unlabeled objects from easy to hard, enhancing foreground representations. Additionally, it reweights the loss of unlabeled objects to mitigate their impact during training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that S2Teacher not only significantly improves detector performance across different sparse annotation levels but also achieves near-fully-supervised performance on the DOTA dataset with only 10% annotation instances, effectively balancing accuracy and labeling cost.

PaperID: 1207, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03691

Authors:Youquan Liu, Lingdong Kong, Weidong Yang, Xin Li, Alan Liang, Runnan Chen, Ben Fei, Tongliang Liu

Affiliations: Fudan University, National University of Singapore, Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of Sydney, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title: La La LiDAR: Large-Scale Layout Generation from LiDAR Data

Abstract:
Controllable generation of realistic LiDAR scenes is crucial for applications such as autonomous driving and robotics. While recent diffusionbased models achieve high-fidelity LiDAR generation, they lack explicit control over foreground objects and spatial relationships, limiting their usefulness for scenario simulation and safety validation. To address these limitations, we propose Large-scale Layout-guided LiDAR generation model ("La La LiDAR"), a novel layout-guided generative framework that introduces semantic-enhanced scene graph diffusion with relation-aware contextual conditioning for structured LiDAR layout generation, followed by foreground-aware control injection for complete scene generation. This enables customizable control over object placement while ensuring spatial and semantic consistency. To support our structured LiDAR generation, we introduce Waymo-SG and nuScenes-SG, two large-scale LiDAR scene graph datasets, along with new evaluation metrics for layout synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that La La LiDAR achieves state-of-the-art performance in both LiDAR generation and downstream perception tasks, establishing a new benchmark for controllable 3D scene generation.

PaperID: 1208, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.14189

Authors:Zhiyang Lu, Wen Jiang, Tianren Wu, Zhichao Wang, Changwang Zhang, Siqi Shen, Ming Cheng

Affiliations: Fujian Key Laboratory of Sensing and Computing for Smart Cities, Xiamen University, OPPO Research Institute

Title: Walking Further: Semantic-Aware Multimodal Gait Recognition Under Long-Range Conditions

Abstract:
Gait recognition is an emerging biometric technology that enables nonintrusive and hard-to-spoof human identification. However, most existing methods are confined to short-range, unimodal settings and fail to generalize to long-range and cross-distance scenarios under real-world conditions. To address this gap, we present LRGait, the first LiDAR-Camera multimodal benchmark designed for robust long-range gait recognition across diverse outdoor distances and environments. We further propose EMGaitNet, an end-to-end framework tailored for long-range multimodal gait recognition. To bridge the modality gap between RGB images and point clouds, we introduce a semantic-guided fusion pipeline. A CLIP-based Semantic Mining (SeMi) module first extracts human body-part-aware semantic cues, which are then employed to align 2D and 3D features via a Semantic-Guided Alignment (SGA) module within a unified embedding space. A Symmetric Cross-Attention Fusion (SCAF) module hierarchically integrates visual contours and 3D geometric features, and a Spatio-Temporal (ST) module captures global gait dynamics. Extensive experiments on various gait datasets validate the effectiveness of our method.

PaperID: 1209, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19516

Authors:Liqin Luo, Guangyao Chen, Xiawu Zheng, Yongxing Dai, Yixiong Zou, Yonghong Tian

Affiliations: Peking University, Xiamen University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: Connecting the Dots: Training-Free Visual Grounding via Agentic Reasoning

Abstract:
Visual grounding, the task of linking textual queries to specific regions within images, plays a pivotal role in visionlanguage integration. Existing methods typically rely on extensive task-specific annotations and fine-tuning, limiting their ability to generalize effectively to novel or out-of-distribution scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce GroundingAgent, a novel agentic visual grounding framework that operates without any task-specific fine-tuning. GroundingAgent employs a structured, iterative reasoning mechanism that integrates pretrained open-vocabulary object detectors, multimodal large language models (MLLMs), and large language models (LLMs) to progressively refine candidate regions through joint semantic and spatial analyses. Remarkably, GroundingAgent achieves an average zero-shot grounding accuracy of 65.1% on widely-used benchmarks (RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, RefCOCOg), entirely without fine-tuning. Furthermore, by substituting MLLM-generated captions with the original query texts, the accuracy at the selection stage alone reaches approximately 90%, closely matching supervised performance and underscoring the critical role of LLM reasoning capabilities. GroundingAgent also offers strong interpretability, transparently illustrating each reasoning step, thus providing clear insights into its decision-making process.

PaperID: 1210, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11274

Authors:Xiangyang Luo, Qingyu Li, Xiaokun Liu, Wenyu Qin, Miao Yang, Meng Wang, Pengfei Wan, Di Zhang, Kun Gai, Shao-Lun Huang

Affiliations: Kuaishou Technology, Kling Team, Tsinghua University

Title: FilmWeaver: Weaving Consistent Multi-Shot Videos with Cache-Guided Autoregressive Diffusion

Abstract:
Current video generation models perform well at singleshot synthesis but struggle with multi-shot videos, facing critical challenges in maintaining character and background consistency across shots and flexibly generating videos of arbitrary length and shot count. To address these limitations, we introduce FilmWeaver, a novel framework designed to generate consistent, multi-shot videos of arbitrary length. First, it employs an autoregressive diffusion paradigm to achieve arbitrary-length video generation. To address the challenge of consistency, our key insight is to decouple the problem into inter-shot consistency and intra-shot coherence. We achieve this through a dual-level cache mechanism: a shot memory caches keyframes from preceding shots to maintain character and scene identity, while a temporal memory retains a history of frames from the current shot to ensure smooth, continuous motion. The proposed framework allows for flexible, multi-round user interaction to create multi-shot videos. Furthermore, due to this decoupled design, our method demonstrates high versatility by supporting downstream tasks such as multi-concept injection and video extension. To facilitate the training of our consistency-aware method, we also developed a comprehensive pipeline to construct a high-quality multi-shot video dataset. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method surpasses existing approaches on metrics for both consistency and aesthetic quality, opening up new possibilities for creating more consistent, controllable, and narrative-driven video content.

PaperID: 1211, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10498

Authors:Jianda Mao, Kaibo Wang, Yang Xiang, Kani Chen

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: TweezeEdit: Consistent and Efficient Image Editing with Path Regularization

Abstract:
Recent progress in trainingfree image editing has enabled existing text-to-image diffusion models to be directly adapted into text-guided image editors without additional training. However, existing methods often over-align with target prompts while inadequately preserving source image semantics. These approaches generate target images explicitly or implicitly from the inversion noise of the source images, termed the inversion anchors. We identify this strategy as suboptimal for semantic preservation and inefficient due to elongated editing paths. We propose TweezeEdit, a tuning- and inversion-free framework for consistent and efficient image editing. Our method addresses these limitations by regularizing the entire denoising path rather than relying solely on the inversion anchors, ensuring source semantic retention and shortening editing paths. Guided by gradient-driven regularization, we efficiently inject target prompt semantics along a direct path using a consistency model. Extensive experiments demonstrate TweezeEdit's superior performance in semantic preservation and target alignment, outperforming existing methods. Remarkably, it requires only 12 steps (1.6 seconds per edit), underscoring its potential for real-time applications. The appendix is available in the extended version.

PaperID: 1212, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22288

Authors:Zhaorui Meng, Lu Yin, Yangqing Hou, Anjun Chen, Shihui Guo, Yipeng Qin

Affiliations: Xiamen University, Cardiff University

Title: Improving Sparse IMU-based Motion Capture with Motion Label Smoothing

Abstract:
Sparse Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) based human motion capture has gained significant momentum, driven by the adaptation of fundamental AI tools such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and transformers that are tailored for temporal and spatial modeling. Despite these achievements, current research predominantly focuses on pipeline and architectural designs, with comparatively little attention given to regularization methods, highlighting a critical gap in developing a comprehensive AI toolkit for this task. To bridge this gap, we propose motion label smoothing, a novel method that adapts the classic label smoothing strategy from classification to the sparse IMUbased motion capture task. Specifically, we first demonstrate that a naive adaptation of label smoothing, including simply blending a uniform vector or a "uniform" motion representation (e.g., dataset-average motion or a canonical T-pose), is suboptimal; and argue that a proper adaptation requires increasing the entropy of the smoothed labels. Second, we conduct a thorough analysis of human motion labels, identifying three critical properties: 1) Temporal Smoothness, 2) Joint Correlation, and 3) Low-Frequency Dominance, and show that conventional approaches to entropy enhancement (e.g., blending Gaussian noise) are ineffective as they disrupt these properties. Finally, we propose the blend of a novel skeleton-based Perlin noise for motion label smoothing, designed to raise label entropy while satisfying motion properties. Extensive experiments applying our motion label smoothing to three state-of-the-art methods across four real-world IMU datasets demonstrate its effectiveness and robust generalization (plug-and-play) capability.

PaperID: 1213, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19204

Authors:Julian Ost, Andrea Ramazzina, Amogh Joshi, Maximilian Bömer, Mario Bijelic, Felix Heide

Affiliations: Princeton University, Mercedes-Benz Technical University of Munich, Torc Robotics

Title: LSD-3D: Large-Scale 3D Driving Scene Generation with Geometry Grounding

Abstract:
Largescale scene data is essential for training and testing in robot learning. Neural reconstruction methods have promised the capability of reconstructing large physically-grounded outdoor scenes from captured sensor data. However, these methods have baked-in static environments and only allow for limited scene control -- they are functionally constrained in scene and trajectory diversity by the captures from which they are reconstructed. In contrast, generating driving data with recent image or video diffusion models offers control, however, at the cost of geometry grounding and causality. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap and present a method that directly generates large-scale 3D driving scenes with accurate geometry, allowing for causal novel view synthesis with object permanence and explicit 3D geometry estimation. The proposed method combines the generation of a proxy geometry and environment representation with score distillation from learned 2D image priors. We find that this approach allows for high controllability, enabling the prompt-guided geometry and high-fidelity texture and structure that can be conditioned on map layouts -- producing realistic and geometrically consistent 3D generations of complex driving scenes.

PaperID: 1214, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18660

Authors:Pengxiang Ouyang, Qing Ma, Zheng Wang, Cong Bai

Affiliations: Zhejiang University of Technology

Title: PMPGuard: Catching Pseudo-Matched Pairs in Remote Sensing Image–Text Retrieval

Abstract:
Remote sensing (RS) image–text retrieval faces significant challenges in realworld datasets due to the presence of Pseudo-Matched Pairs (PMPs), semantically mismatched or weakly aligned image–text pairs, which hinder the learning of reliable cross-modal alignments. To address this issue, we propose a novel retrieval framework that leverages Cross-Modal Gated Attention and a Positive–Negative Awareness Attention mechanism to mitigate the impact of such noisy associations. The gated module dynamically regulates cross-modal information flow, while the awareness mechanism explicitly distinguishes informative (positive) cues from misleading (negative) ones during alignment learning. Extensive experiments on three benchmark RS datasets, i.e., RSICD, RSITMD, and RS5M, demonstrate that our method consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting its robustness and effectiveness in handling real-world mismatches and PMPs in RS image–text retrieval tasks.

PaperID: 1215, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02261

Authors:Rui Qian, Haozhi Cao, Tianchen Deng, Shenghai Yuan, Lihua Xie

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University, Shanghai Jiaotong University

Title: SplatSSC: Decoupled Depth-Guided Gaussian Splatting for Semantic Scene Completion

Abstract:
Monocular 3D Semantic Scene Completion (SSC) is a challenging yet promising task that aims to infer dense geometric and semantic descriptions of a scene from a single image. While recent objectcentric paradigms significantly improve efficiency by leveraging flexible 3D Gaussian primitives, they still rely heavily on a large number of randomly initialized primitives, which inevitably leads to 1) inefficient primitive initialization and 2) outlier primitives that introduce erroneous artifacts. In this paper, we propose SplatSSC, a novel framework that resolves these limitations with a depth-guided initialization strategy and a principled Gaussian aggregator. Instead of random initialization, SplatSSC utilizes a dedicated depth branch composed of a Group-wise Multi-scale Fusion (GMF) module, which integrates multi-scale image and depth features to generate a sparse yet representative set of initial Gaussian primitives. To mitigate noise from outlier primitives, we develop the Decoupled Gaussian Aggregator (DGA), which enhances robustness by decomposing geometric and semantic predictions during the Gaussian-to-voxel splatting process. Complemented with a specialized Probability Scale Loss, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Occ-ScanNet dataset, outperforming prior approaches by over 6.3% in IoU and 4.1% in mIoU, while reducing both latency and memory cost by more than 9.3%.

PaperID: 1216, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07823

Authors:Kanglin Qu, Pan Gao, Qun Dai, Zhanzhi Ye, Rui Ye, Yuanhao Sun

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing Agricultural University, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: CloudMamba: Grouped Selective State Spaces for Point Cloud Analysis

Abstract:
Due to the longrange modeling ability and linear complexity property, Mamba has attracted considerable attention in point cloud analysis. Despite some interesting progress, related work still suffers from imperfect point cloud serialization, insufficient high-level geometric perception, and overfitting of the selective state space model (S6) at the core of Mamba. To this end, we resort to an SSM-based point cloud network termed CloudMamba to address the above challenges. Specifically, we propose sequence expanding and sequence merging, where the former serializes points along each axis separately and the latter serves to fuse the corresponding higher-order features causally inferred from different sequences, enabling unordered point sets to adapt more stably to the causal nature of Mamba without parameters. Meanwhile, we design chainedMamba that chains the forward and backward processes in the parallel bidirectional Mamba, capturing high-level geometric information during scanning. In addition, we propose a grouped selective state space model (GS6) via parameter sharing on S6, alleviating the overfitting problem caused by the computational mode in S6. Experiments on various point cloud tasks validate CloudMamba's ability to achieve state-of-the-art results with significantly less complexity.

PaperID: 1217, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07266

Authors:Fu Rong, Meng Lan, Qian Zhang, Lefei Zhang

Affiliations: National Engineering Research Center for Multimedia Software, School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Horizon Robotics

Title: RS2-SAM2: Customized SAM2 for Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation

Abstract:
Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation (RRSIS) aims to segment target objects in remote sensing (RS) images based on textual descriptions. Although Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) has shown remarkable performance in various segmentation tasks, its application to RRSIS presents several challenges, including understanding the textdescribed RS scenes and generating effective prompts from text. To address these issues, we propose RS2-SAM2, a novel framework that adapts SAM2 to RRSIS by aligning the adapted RS features and textual features while providing pseudo-mask-based dense prompts. Specifically, we employ a union encoder to jointly encode the visual and textual inputs, generating aligned visual and text embeddings as well as multimodal class tokens. A bidirectional hierarchical fusion module is introduced to adapt SAM2 to RS scenes and align adapted visual features with the visually enhanced text embeddings, improving the model's interpretation of text-described RS scenes. To provide precise target cues for SAM2, we design a mask prompt generator, which takes the visual embeddings and class tokens as input and produces a pseudo-mask as the dense prompt of SAM2. Experimental results on several RRSIS benchmarks demonstrate that RS2-SAM2 achieves state-of-the-art performance.

PaperID: 1218, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18116

Authors:Yuheng Shao, Lizhang Wang, Changhao Li, Peixian Chen, Qinyuan Liu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Tongji University, Ant Group, Ministry of Education

Title: PromptMoE: Generalizable Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection via Visually-Guided Prompt Mixtures

Abstract:
ZeroShot Anomaly Detection (ZSAD) aims to identify and localize anomalous regions in images of unseen object classes. While recent methods based on vision-language models like CLIP show promise, their performance is constrained by existing prompt engineering strategies. Current approaches, whether relying on single fixed, learnable, or dense dynamic prompts, suffer from a representational bottleneck and are prone to overfitting on auxiliary data, failing to generalize to the complexity and diversity of unseen anomalies. To overcome these limitations, we propose PromptMoE. Our core insight is that robust ZSAD requires a compositional approach to prompt learning. Instead of learning monolithic prompts, PromptMoE learns a pool of expert prompts, which serve as a basis set of composable semantic primitives, and a visually-guided Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) mechanism to dynamically combine them for each instance. Our framework materializes this concept through a Visually-Guided Mixture of Prompt (VGMoP) that employs an image-gated sparse MoE to aggregate diverse normal and abnormal expert state prompts, generating semantically rich textual representations with strong generalization. Extensive experiments across 15 datasets in industrial and medical domains demonstrate the effectiveness and state-of-the-art performance of PromptMoE.

PaperID: 1219, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07122

Authors:Changyue Shi, Chuxiao Yang, Xinyuan Hu, Minghao Chen, Wenwen Pan, Yan Yang, Jiajun Ding, Zhou Yu, Jun Yu

Affiliations: Hangzhou Dianzi University, Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: Sparse4DGS: 4D Gaussian Splatting for Sparse-Frame Dynamic Scene Reconstruction

Abstract:
Dynamic Gaussian Splatting approaches have achieved remarkable performance for 4D scene reconstruction. However, these approaches rely on denseframe video sequences for photorealistic reconstruction. In real-world scenarios, due to equipment constraints, sometimes only sparse frames are accessible. In this paper, we propose Sparse4DGS, the first method for sparse-frame dynamic scene reconstruction. We observe that dynamic reconstruction methods fail in both canonical and deformed spaces under sparse-frame settings, especially in areas with high texture richness. Sparse4DGS tackles this challenge by focusing on texture-rich areas. For the deformation network, we propose Texture-Aware Deformation Regularization, which introduces a texture-based depth alignment loss to regulate Gaussian deformation. For the canonical Gaussian field, we introduce Texture-Aware Canonical Optimization, which incorporates texture-based noise into the gradient descent process of canonical Gaussians. Extensive experiments show that when taking sparse frames as inputs, our method outperforms existing dynamic or few-shot techniques on NeRF-Synthetic, HyperNeRF, NeRF-DS, and our iPhone-4D datasets.

PaperID: 1220, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09876

Authors:Shuo Shi, Jinghuai Zhang, Shijie Jiang, Chunyi Zhou, Yuyuan Li, Mengying Zhu, Yangyang Wu, Tianyu Du

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, University of California, Los Angeles, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou Dianzi University

Title: DP-GenG: Differentially Private Dataset Distillation Guided by DP-Generated Data

Abstract:
Dataset distillation (DD) compresses large datasets into smaller ones while preserving the performance of models trained on them. Although DD is often assumed to enhance data privacy by aggregating over individual examples, recent studies reveal that standard DD can still leak sensitive information from the original dataset due to the lack of formal privacy guarantees. Existing differentially private (DP)DD methods attempt to mitigate this risk by injecting noise into the distillation process. However, they often fail to fully leverage the original dataset, resulting in degraded realism and utility. This paper introduces DP-GENG, a novel framework that addresses the key limitations of current DP-DD by leveraging DP-generated data. Specifically, DP-GENG initializes the distilled dataset with DP-generated data to enhance realism. Then, generated data refines the DP-feature matching technique to distill the original dataset under a small privacy budget, and trains an expert model to align the distilled examples with their class distribution. Furthermore, we design a privacy budget allocation strategy to determine budget consumption across DP components and provide a theoretical analysis of the overall privacy guarantees. Extensive experiments show that DP-GENG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art DP-DD methods in terms of both dataset utility and robustness against membership inference attacks, establishing a new paradigm for privacy-preserving dataset distillation.

PaperID: 1221, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15009

Authors:Wensong Song, Hong Jiang, Zongxin Yang, Zheqiao Cheng, Ruijie Quan, Yi Yang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Harvard University, Nanyang Technological University

Title: Insert Anything: Image Insertion via In-Context Editing in DiT

Abstract:
This work presents Insert Anything, a unified framework for referencebased image insertion that seamlessly integrates objects from reference images into target scenes under flexible, user-specified control guidance. Instead of training separate models for individual tasks, our approach is trained once on our new AnyInsertion dataset, the first open-source large-scale dataset specifically designed for reference image–based image editing, comprising 136K prompt-image pairs covering diverse tasks such as person, object, and garment insertion--and effortlessly generalizes to a wide range of insertion scenarios. Such a challenging setting requires capturing both identity features and fine-grained details, while allowing versatile local adaptations in style, color, and texture. To this end, we propose to leverage the multimodal attention of the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) to support both mask- and text-guided editing. Furthermore, we introduce an in-context editing mechanism that treats the reference image as contextual information, employing two prompting strategies to harmonize the inserted elements with the target scene while faithfully preserving their distinctive features. Extensive experiments on AnyInsertion, DreamBooth, and VTON-HD benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing alternatives, underscoring its great potential in real-world applications such as creative content generation, virtual try-on, and scene composition.

PaperID: 1222, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09013

Authors:Ziyi Song, Chen Xia, Chenbing Wang, Haibao Yu, Sheng Zhou, Zhisheng Niu

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, The University of Hong Kong

Title: UniMM-V2X: MoE-Enhanced Multi-Level Fusion for End-to-End Cooperative Autonomous Driving

Abstract:
Autonomous driving holds transformative potential but remains fundamentally constrained by the limited perception and isolated decisionmaking with standalone intelligence. While recent multi-agent approaches introduce cooperation, they often focus merely on perception-level tasks, overlooking the alignment with downstream planning and control, or fall short in leveraging the full capacity of the recent emerging end-to-end autonomous driving. In this paper, we present UniMM-V2X, a novel end-to-end multi-agent framework that enables hierarchical cooperation across perception, prediction, and planning. At the core of our framework is a multi-level fusion strategy that unifies perception and prediction cooperation, allowing agents to share queries and reason cooperatively for consistent and safe decision-making. To adapt to diverse downstream tasks and further enhance the quality of multi-level fusion, we incorporate a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture to dynamically enhance the BEV representations. We further extend MoE into the decoder to better capture diverse motion patterns. Extensive experiments on the DAIR-V2X dataset demonstrate our approach achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with a 39.7% improvement in perception accuracy, a 7.2% reduction in prediction error, and a 33.2% improvement in planning performance compared with UniV2X, showcasing the strength of our MoE-enhanced multi-level cooperative paradigm.

PaperID: 1223, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08619

Authors:Yiming Sun, Yuan Ruan, Qinghua Hu, Pengfei Zhu

Affiliations: School of Automation, Southeast University, School of Artificial Intelligence, Tianjin University, China Low-Altitude Intelligence Laboratory, Xiong'an National Innovation Center, China Xiong'an Guochuang Lantian Technology Co.

Title: CtrlFuse: Mask-Prompt Guided Controllable Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

Abstract:
Infrared and visible image fusion generates allweather perception-capable images by combining complementary modalities, enhancing environmental awareness for intelligent unmanned systems. Existing methods either focus on pixel-level fusion while overlooking downstream task adaptability or implicitly learn rigid semantics through cascaded detection/segmentation models, unable to interactively address diverse semantic target perception needs. We propose CtrlFuse, a controllable image fusion framework that enables interactive dynamic fusion guided by mask prompts. The model integrates a multi-modal feature extractor, a reference prompt encoder (RPE), and a prompt-semantic fusion module (PSFM). The RPE dynamically encodes task-specific semantic prompts by fine-tuning pre-trained segmentation models with input mask guidance, while the PSFM explicitly injects these semantics into fusion features. Through synergistic optimization of parallel segmentation and fusion branches, our method achieves mutual enhancement between task performance and fusion quality. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art results in both fusion controllability and segmentation accuracy, with the adapted task branch even outperforming the original segmentation model.

PaperID: 1224, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09973

Authors:Satoshi Suzuki, Shin'ya Yamaguchi, Shoichiro Takeda, Taiga Yamane, Naoki Makishima, Naotaka Kawata, Mana Ihori, Tomohiro Tanaka, Shota Orihashi, Ryo Masumura

Affiliations:

Title: Difference Vector Equalization for Robust Fine-tuning of Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
Contrastive pretrained vision-language models, such as CLIP, demonstrate strong generalization abilities in zero-shot classification by leveraging embeddings extracted from image and text encoders. This paper aims to robustly fine-tune these vision-language models on in-distribution (ID) data without compromising their generalization abilities in out-of-distribution (OOD) and zero-shot settings. Current robust fine-tuning methods tackle this challenge by reusing contrastive learning, which was used in pre-training, for fine-tuning. However, we found that these methods distort the geometric structure of the embeddings, which plays a crucial role in the generalization of vision-language models, resulting in limited OOD and zero-shot performance. To address this, we propose Difference Vector Equalization (DiVE), which preserves the geometric structure during fine-tuning. The idea behind DiVE is to constrain difference vectors, each of which is obtained by subtracting the embeddings extracted from the pre-trained and fine-tuning models for the same data sample. By constraining the difference vectors to be equal across various data samples, we effectively preserve the geometric structure. Therefore, we introduce two losses: average vector loss (AVL) and pairwise vector loss (PVL). AVL preserves the geometric structure globally by constraining difference vectors to be equal to their weighted average. PVL preserves the geometric structure locally by ensuring a consistent multimodal alignment. Our experiments demonstrate that DiVE effectively preserves the geometric structure, achieving strong results across ID, OOD, and zero-shot metrics.

PaperID: 1225, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11393

Authors:Haomiao Tang, Jinpeng Wang, Minyi Zhao, GuangHao Meng, Ruisheng Luo, Long Chen, Shu-Tao Xia

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Harbin Institute of Technology, Fudan University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: Heterogeneous Uncertainty-Guided Composed Image Retrieval with Fine-Grained Probabilistic Learning

Abstract:
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) enables image search by combining a reference image with modification text. Intrinsic noise in CIR triplets incurs intrinsic uncertainty and threatens model's robustness. Probabilistic learning approaches have shown promise in addressing such issues; however, they fall short for CIR due to their instancelevel holistic modeling and homogeneous treatments for queries and targets. This paper introduces a Heterogeneous Uncertainty-Guided (HUG) paradigm to overcome these limitations. HUG utilizes a fine-grained probabilistic learning framework, where queries and targets are represented by Gaussian embeddings capturing detailed concepts and uncertainties. We customize heterogeneous uncertainty estimations for multi-modal queries and uni-modal targets. Given a query, we capture uncertainties not only regarding uni-modal content quality but also multi-modal coordination, followed by a provable dynamic weighting mechanism to derive the comprehensive query uncertainty. We further design uncertainty-guided objectives, including query-target holistic contrast and fine-grained contrasts with comprehensive negative sampling strategies, which effectively enhance discriminative learning. Experiments on benchmarks demonstrate HUG's effectiveness beyond state-of-the-art baselines, with faithful analysis justifying the technical contributions.

PaperID: 1226, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07812

Authors:Zhenchen Tang, Songlin Yang, Bo Peng, Zichuan Wang, Jing Dong

Affiliations: New Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Revisiting MLLM Based Image Quality Assessment: Errors and Remedy

Abstract:
The rapid progress of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has boosted the task of image quality assessment (IQA). However, a key challenge arises from the inherent mismatch between the discrete token outputs of MLLMs and the continuous nature of quality scores required by IQA tasks. This discrepancy significantly hinders the performance of MLLM-based IQA methods. Previous approaches that convert discrete token predictions into continuous scores often suffer from conversion errors. Moreover, the semantic confusion introduced by level tokens (e.g., “good”) further constrains the performance of MLLMs on IQA tasks and degrades their original capabilities to related tasks. To tackle these problems, we provide a theoretical analysis of the errors inherent in previous approaches and, motivated by this analysis, propose a simple yet effective framework, Q-Scorer. This framework incorporates a lightweight regression module and IQA-specific score tokens into the MLLM pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Q-Scorer achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple IQA benchmarks, generalizes well to mixed datasets, and further improves combined with other methods.

PaperID: 1227, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03305

Authors:Jiahang Tu, Ye Li, Yiming Wu, Hanbin Zhao, Chao Zhang, Hui Qian

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, The University of Hong Kong

Title: Mass Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models with Concept Hierarchy

Abstract:
The success of diffusion models has raised concerns about the generation of unsafe or harmful content, prompting concept erasure approaches that finetune modules to suppress specific concepts while preserving general generative capabilities. However, as the number of erased concepts grows, these methods often become inefficient and ineffective, since each concept requires a separate set of fine-tuned parameters and may degrade the overall generation quality. In this work, we propose a supertype-subtype concept hierarchy that organizes erased concepts into a parent–child structure. Each erased concept is treated as a child node, and semantically related concepts (e.g., macaw, and bald eagle) are grouped under a shared parent node, referred to as a supertype concept (e.g., bird). Rather than erasing concepts individually, we introduce an effective and efficient group-wise suppression method, where semantically similar concepts are grouped and erased jointly by sharing a single set of learnable parameters. During the erasure phase, standard diffusion regularization is applied to preserve denoising process in unmasked regions. To mitigate the degradation of supertype generation caused by excessive erasure of semantically related subtypes, we propose a novel method called Supertype-Preserving Low-Rank Adaptation (SuPLoRA), which encodes the supertype concept information in the frozen down-projection matrix and updates only the up-projection matrix during erasure. Theoretical analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of SuPLoRA in mitigating generation performance degradation. We construct a more challenging benchmark that requires simultaneous erasure of concepts across diverse domains, including celebrities, objects, and pornographic content. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves a superior balance between effective multi-concept erasure and the preservation of desirable generative performance.

PaperID: 1228, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13168

Authors:Haodong Wang, Tao Zhuo, Xiuwei Zhang, Hanlin Yin, Wencong Wu, Yanning Zhang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University Shaanxi Provincial Key Lab. of Speech and Image Information Processing National Engineering Laboratory for Integrated Aero-Space-Ground-Ocean Big Data Application Technology, College of Information Engineering, Northwest A&F University

Title: SOMA: Feature Gradient Enhanced Affine-Flow Matching for SAR-Optical Registration

Abstract:
Achieving pixellevel registration between SAR and optical images remains a challenging task due to their fundamentally different imaging mechanisms and visual characteristics. Although deep learning has achieved great success in many cross-modal tasks, its performance on SAR-Optical registration tasks is still unsatisfactory. Gradient-based information has traditionally played a crucial role in handcrafted descriptors by highlighting structural differences. However, such gradient cues have not been effectively leveraged in deep learning frameworks for SAR-Optical image matching. To address this gap, we propose SOMA, a dense registration framework that integrates structural gradient priors into deep features and refines alignment through a hybrid matching strategy. Specifically, we introduce the Feature Gradient Enhancer (FGE), which embeds multi-scale, multi-directional gradient filters into the feature space using attention and reconstruction mechanisms to boost feature distinctiveness. Furthermore, we propose the Global-Local Affine-Flow Matcher (GLAM), which combines affine transformation and flow-based refinement within a coarse-to-fine architecture to ensure both structural consistency and local accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that SOMA significantly improves registration precision, increasing the CMR@1px by 12.29% on the SEN1-2 dataset and 18.50% on the GFGE_SO dataset. In addition, SOMA exhibits strong robustness and generalizes well across diverse scenes and resolutions.

PaperID: 1229, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11289

Authors:Hengfei Wang, Zhongqun Zhang, Yihua Cheng, Hyung Jin Chang

Affiliations: University of Birmingham

Title: RTGaze: Real-Time 3D-Aware Gaze Redirection from a Single Image

Abstract:
Gaze redirection methods aim to generate realistic human face images with controllable eye movement. However, recent methods often struggle with 3D consistency, efficiency, or quality, limiting their practical applications. In this work, we propose RTGaze, a realtime and high-quality gaze redirection method. Our approach learns a gaze-controllable facial representation from face images and gaze prompts, then decodes this representation via neural rendering for gaze redirection. Additionally, we distill face geometric priors from a pretrained 3D portrait generator to enhance generation quality. We evaluate RTGaze both qualitatively and quantitatively, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in efficiency, redirection accuracy, and image quality across multiple datasets. Our system achieves real-time, 3D-aware gaze redirection with a feedforward network (~0.06 sec/image), making it 800× faster than the previous state-of-the-art 3D-aware methods.

PaperID: 1230, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09415

Authors:Hongyang Wang, Yichen Shi, Zhuofu Tao, Yuhao Gao, Liepiao Zhang, Xun Lin, Jun Feng, Xiaochen Yuan, Zitong Yu, Xiaochun Cao

Affiliations: Shijiazhuang Tiedao University Shijiazhuang Key Laboratory of Artifical Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Eastern Institute of Technology, Eastern Institute of Technology University of California, Los Angeles, Great Bay University, Macao Polytechnic University, Shenzhen University, SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY

Title: FaceShield: Explainable Face Anti-Spoofing with Multimodal Large Language Models

Abstract:
Face antispoofing (FAS) is crucial for protecting facial recognition systems from presentation attacks. Previous methods approached this task as a classification problem, lacking interpretability and reasoning behind the predicted results. Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong capabilities in perception, reasoning, and decision-making in visual tasks. However, there is currently no universal and comprehensive MLLM and dataset specifically designed for FAS task. To address this gap, we propose FaceShield, a MLLM for FAS, along with the corresponding pre-training and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) datasets, FaceShield-pre10K and FaceShield-sft45K. FaceShield is capable of determining the authenticity of faces, identifying types of spoofing attacks, providing reasoning for its judgments, and detecting attack areas. Specifically, we employ spoof-aware vision perception (SAVP) that incorporates both the original image and auxiliary information based on prior knowledge. We then use an prompt-guided vision token masking (PVTM) strategy to random mask vision tokens, thereby improving the model's generalization ability. We conducted extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, demonstrating that FaceShield significantly outperforms previous deep learning models and general MLLMs on four FAS tasks, i.e., coarse-grained classification, fine-grained classification, reasoning, and attack localization.

PaperID: 1231, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06764

Authors:Pu Wang, Shuning Sun, Jialang Lu, Chen Wu, Zhihua Zhang, Youshan Zhang, Chenggang Shan, Dianjie Lu, Guijuan Zhang, Zhuoran Zheng

Affiliations: Shandong University, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hubei University, National University of Defense Technology, Yeshiva University, Zaozhuang University, Shandong Normal University, Qilu University of Technology

Title: CAST-LUT: Tokenizer-Guided HSV Look-Up Tables for Purple Flare Removal

Abstract:
Purple flare, a diffuse chromatic aberration artifact commonly found around highlight areas, severely degrades the tone transition and color of the image. Existing traditional methods are based on handcrafted features, which lack flexibility and rely entirely on fixed priors, while the scarcity of paired training data critically hampers deep learning. To address this issue, we propose a novel network built upon decoupled HSV Look-Up Tables (LUTs). The method aims to simplify color correction by adjusting the Hue (H), Saturation (S), and Value (V) components independently. This approach resolves the inherent color coupling problems in traditional methods. Our model adopts a two-stage architecture: First, a Chroma-Aware Spectral Tokenizer (CAST) converts the input image from RGB space to HSV space and independently encodes the Hue (H) and Value (V) channels into a set of semantic tokens describing the Purple flare status; second, the HSV-LUT module takes these tokens as input and dynamically generates independent correction curves (1D-LUTs) for the three channels H, S, and V. To effectively train and validate our model, we built the first large-scale purple flare dataset with diverse scenes. We also proposed new metrics and a loss function specifically designed for this task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model not only significantly outperforms existing methods in visual effects but also achieves state-of-the-art performance on all quantitative metrics.

PaperID: 1232, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13031

Authors:Weihua Wang, Yubo Cui, Xiangru Lin, Zhiheng Li, Zheng Fang

Affiliations: Faculty of Robot Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, China National Frontiers Science Center for Industrial Intelligence and Systems Optimization, The University of Hong Kong

Title: Towards 3D Object-Centric Feature Learning for Semantic Scene Completion

Abstract:
Visionbased 3D Semantic Scene Completion (SSC) has received growing attention due to its potential in autonomous driving. While most existing approaches follow an ego-centric paradigm by aggregating and diffusing features over the entire scene, they often overlook fine-grained object-level details, leading to semantic and geometric ambiguities, especially in complex environments. To address this limitation, we propose Ocean, an object-centric prediction framework that decomposes the scene into individual object instances to enable more accurate semantic occupancy prediction. Specifically, we first employ a lightweight segmentation model, MobileSAM, to extract instance masks from the input image. Then, we introduce a 3D Semantic Group Attention module that leverages linear attention to aggregate object-centric features in 3D space. To handle segmentation errors and missing instances, we further design a Global Similarity-Guided Attention module that leverages segmentation features for global interaction. Finally, we propose an Instance-aware Local Diffusion module that improves instance features through a generative process and subsequently refines the scene representation in the BEV space. Extensive experiments on the SemanticKITTI and SSCBench-KITTI360 benchmarks demonstrate that Ocean achieves state-of-the-art performance, with mIoU scores of 17.40 and 20.28, respectively.

PaperID: 1233, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14766

Authors:Yujun Wang, Aniri, Jinhe Bi, Soren Pirk, Yunpu Ma

Affiliations: Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (CAU), Technical University of Munich Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich Munich Center for Machine Learning

Title: ASCD: Attention-Steerable Contrastive Decoding for Reducing Hallucination in MLLM

Abstract:
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) frequently hallucinate by overcommitting to spurious visual cues. Prior remedies–Visual and Instruction Contrastive Decoding (VCD, ICD)–mitigate this issue, yet the mechanism remains opaque. We first empirically show that their improvements systematically coincide with redistributions of cross-modal attention. Building on this insight, we propose Attention-Steerable Contrastive Decoding (ASCD), which directly steers the attention scores during decoding. ASCD combines (i) positive steering, which amplifies automatically mined text-centric heads–stable within a model and robust across domains–with (ii) negative steering, which dampens on-the-fly identified critical visual tokens. The method incurs negligible runtime/memory overhead and requires no additional training. Across five MLLM backbones and three decoding schemes, ASCD reduces hallucination on POPE, CHAIR, and MMHal-Bench by up to 38.2% while improving accuracy on standard VQA benchmarks, including MMMU, MM-VET, ScienceQA, TextVQA, and GQA. These results position attention steering as a simple, model-agnostic, and principled route to safer, more faithful multimodal generation.

PaperID: 1234, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.18109

Authors:Zerun Wang, Jiafeng Mao, Xueting Wang, Toshihiko Yamasaki

Affiliations: The University of Tokyo

Title: Difficulty Controlled Diffusion Model for Synthesizing Effective Training Data

Abstract:
Generative models have become a powerful tool for synthesizing training data in computer vision tasks. Current approaches solely focus on aligning generated images with the target dataset distribution. As a result, they capture only the common features in the real dataset and mostly generate "easy samples", which are already well learned by models trained on real data. In contrast, those rare "hard samples", with atypical features but crucial for enhancing performance, cannot be effectively generated. Consequently, these approaches must synthesize large volumes of data to yield appreciable performance gains, yet the improvement remains limited. To overcome this limitation, we present a novel method that can learn to control the learning difficulty of samples during generation while also achieving domain alignment. Thus, it can efficiently generate valuable "hard samples" that yield significant performance improvements for target tasks. This is achieved by incorporating learning difficulty as an additional conditioning signal in generative models, together with a designed encoder structure and training–generation strategy. Experimental results across multiple datasets show that our method can achieve higher performance with lower generation cost. Specifically, we obtain the best performance with only 10% additional synthetic data, saving 63.4 GPU hours of generation time compared to the previous SOTA on ImageNet. Moreover, our method provides insightful visualizations of categoryspecific hard factors, serving as a tool for analyzing datasets.

PaperID: 1235, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11284

Authors:Rongcheng Wu, Hao Zhu, Shiying Zhang, Mingzhe Wang, Zhidong Li, Hui Li, Jianlong Zhou, Jiangtao Cui, Fang Chen, Pingyang Sun, Qiyu Liao, Ye Lin

Affiliations: The Data Science Institute, Faculty of Health, Charles Darwin University, School of Computer Science and Technology, Xidian University, University of Technology Sydney, School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering, University of New South Wales, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Molly Wardaguga Institute for First Nations Birth Rights

Title: RcAE: Recursive Reconstruction Framework for Unsupervised Industrial Anomaly Detection

Abstract:
Unsupervised industrial anomaly detection requires accurately identifying defects without labeled data. Traditional autoencoderbased methods often struggle with incomplete anomaly suppression and loss of fine details, as their single-pass decoding fails to effectively handle anomalies with varying severity and scale. We propose a recursive architecture for autoencoder (RcAE), which performs reconstruction iteratively to progressively suppress anomalies while refining normal structures. Unlike traditional single-pass models, this recursive design naturally produces a sequence of reconstructions, progressively exposing suppressed abnormal patterns. To leverage this reconstruction dynamics, we introduce a Cross Recursion Detection (CRD) module that tracks inconsistencies across recursion steps, enhancing detection of both subtle and large-scale anomalies. Additionally, we incorporate a Detail Preservation Network (DPN) to recover high-frequency textures typically lost during reconstruction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing non-diffusion methods, and achieves performance on par with recent diffusion models with only 10% of their parameters and offering substantially faster inference. These results highlight the practicality and efficiency of our approach for real-world applications.

PaperID: 1236, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10122

Authors:Zongliang Wu, Siming Zheng, Peng-Tao Jiang, Xin Yuan

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Westlake University, vivo Mobile Communication Co., School of Engineering

Title: Realism Control One-step Diffusion for Real-world Image Super Resolution

Abstract:
Pretrained diffusion models have shown great potential in real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) tasks by enabling high-resolution reconstructions. While one-step diffusion (OSD) methods significantly improve efficiency compared to traditional multi-step approaches, they still have limitations in balancing fidelity and realism across diverse scenarios. Since the OSDs for SR are usually trained or distilled by a single timestep, they lack flexible control mechanisms to adaptively prioritize these competing objectives, which are inherently manageable in multi-step methods through adjusting sampling steps. To address this challenge, we propose a Realism Controlled One-step Diffusion (RCOD) framework for Real-ISR. RCOD provides a latent domain grouping strategy that enables explicit control over fidelity-realism trade-offs during the noise prediction phase with minimal training paradigm modifications and original training data. A degradation-aware sampling strategy is also introduced to align distillation regularization with the grouping strategy and enhance the controlling of trade-offs. Moreover, a visual prompt injection module is used to replace conventional text prompts with degradation-aware visual tokens, enhancing both restoration accuracy and semantic consistency. Our method achieves superior fidelity and perceptual quality while maintaining computational efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RCOD outperforms state-of-the-art OSD methods in both quantitative metrics and visual qualities, with flexible realism control capabilities in the inference stage.

PaperID: 1237, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19137

Authors:Zhifeng Xie, Keyi Zhang, Yiye Yan, Yuling Guo, Fan Yang, Jiting Zhou, Mengtian Li

Affiliations: Department of Film and Television Engineering, Shanghai University

Title: FilmSceneDesigner: Chaining Set Design for Procedural Film Scene Generation

Abstract:
Film set design plays a pivotal role in cinematic storytelling and shaping the visual atmosphere. However, the traditional process depends on expertdriven manual modeling, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming. To address this issue, we introduce FilmSceneDesigner, an automated scene generation system that emulates professional film set design workflow. Given a natural language description, including scene type, historical period, and style, we design an agent-based chaining framework to generate structured parameters aligned with film set design workflow, guided by prompt strategies that ensure parameter accuracy and coherence. On the other hand, we propose a procedural generation pipeline which executes a series of dedicated functions with the structured parameters for floorplan and structure generation, material assignment, door and window placement, and object retrieval and layout, ultimately constructing a complete film scene from scratch. Moreover, to enhance cinematic realism and asset diversity, we construct SetDepot-Pro, a curated dataset of 6,862 film-specific 3D assets and 733 materials. Experimental results and human evaluations demonstrate that our system produces structurally sound scenes with strong cinematic fidelity, supporting downstream tasks such as virtual previs, construction drawing and mood board creation.

PaperID: 1238, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21727

Authors:Jiazheng Xing, Hai Ci, Hongbin Xu, Hangjie Yuan, Yong Liu, Mike Zheng Shou

Affiliations: National University of Singapore, Zhejiang University

Title: OptMark: Robust Multi-bit Diffusion Watermarking via Inference Time Optimization

Abstract:
Watermarking diffusiongenerated images is crucial for copyright protection and user tracking. However, current diffusion watermarking methods face significant limitations: zero-bit watermarking systems lack the capacity for large-scale user tracking, while multi-bit methods are highly sensitive to certain image transformations or generative attacks, resulting in a lack of comprehensive robustness. In this paper, we propose OptMark, an optimization-based approach that embeds a robust multi-bit watermark into the intermediate latents of the diffusion denoising process. OptMark strategically inserts a structural watermark early to resist generative attacks and a detail watermark late to withstand image transformations, with tailored regularization terms to preserve image quality and ensure imperceptibility. To address the challenge of memory consumption growing linearly with the number of denoising steps during optimization, OptMark incorporates adjoint gradient methods, reducing memory usage from O(N) to O(1). Experimental results demonstrate that OptMark achieves invisible multi-bit watermarking while ensuring robust resilience against valuemetric transformations, geometric transformations, editing, and regeneration attacks.

PaperID: 1239, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06245

Authors:Haijun Xiong, Bin Feng, Bang Wang, Xinggang Wang, Wenyu Liu

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: Gait Recognition via Collaborating Discriminative and Generative Diffusion Models

Abstract:
Gait recognition offers a nonintrusive biometric solution by identifying individuals through their walking patterns. Although discriminative models have achieved notable success in this domain, the full potential of generative models remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce CoD², a novel framework that combines the data distribution modeling capabilities of diffusion models with the semantic representation learning strengths of discriminative models to extract robust gait features. We propose a Multi-level Conditional Control strategy that integrates both high-level identity-aware semantic conditions and low-level visual details. Specifically, the high-level condition, extracted by the discriminative extractor, guides the generation of identity-consistent gait sequences, while low-level visual details, such as appearance and motion, are preserved to enhance consistency. Moreover, the generated sequences facilitate the discriminative extractor's learning, enabling it to capture more comprehensive high-level semantic features. Extensive experiments on four datasets (SUSTech1K, CCPG, GREW, and Gait3D) demonstrate that CoD² achieves state-of-the-art performance and can be seamlessly integrated with existing discriminative methods, yielding consistent improvements.

PaperID: 1240, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07344

Authors:Jiao Xu, Junwei Liu, Jiangwei Lao, Qi Zhu, Yunpeng Zhao, Congyun Jin, Shinan Liu, Zhihong Lu, Lihe Zhang, Xin Chen, Jian Wang, Ping Wang

Affiliations: Ant Group, University of Hong Kong, Dalian University of Technology, Peking University

Title: PulseMind: A Multi-Modal Medical Model for Real-World Clinical Diagnosis

Abstract:
Recent advances in medical multimodal models focus on specialized image analysis like dermatology, pathology, or radiology. However, they do not fully capture the complexity of real-world clinical diagnostics, which involve heterogeneous inputs and require ongoing contextual understanding during patient-physician interactions. To bridge this gap, we introduce PulseMind, a new family of multi-modal diagnostic models that integrates a systematically curated dataset, a comprehensive evaluation benchmark, and a tailored training framework. Specifically, we first construct a diagnostic dataset, MediScope, which comprises 98,000 real-world multi-turn consultations and 601,500 medical images, spanning over 10 major clinical departments and more than 200 sub-specialties. Then, to better reflect the requirements of real-world clinical diagnosis, we develop the PulseMind Benchmark, a multi-turn diagnostic consultation benchmark with a four-dimensional evaluation protocol comprising proactiveness, accuracy, usefulness, and language quality. Finally, we design a training framework tailored for multi-modal clinical diagnostics, centered around a core component named Comparison-based Reinforcement Policy Optimization (CRPO). Compared to absolute score rewards, CRPO uses relative preference signals from multi-dimensional comparisons to provide stable and human-aligned training guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PulseMind achieves competitive performance on both the diagnostic consultation benchmark and public medical benchmarks.

PaperID: 1241, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04743

Authors:Shuhan Xu, Siyuan Liang, Hongling Zheng, Aishan Liu, Xinbiao Wang, Yong Luo, Fu Lin, Leszek Rutkowski, Dacheng Tao

Affiliations: Wuhan University, Nanyang Technological University, Beihang University, Systems Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences AGH University of Krakow SAN University

Title: SRD: Reinforcement-Learned Semantic Perturbation for Backdoor Defense in VLMs

Abstract:
Visual language models (VLMs) have made significant progress in image captioning tasks, yet recent studies have found they are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Attackers can inject undetectable perturbations into the data during inference, triggering abnormal behavior and generating malicious captions. These attacks are particularly challenging to detect and defend against due to the stealthiness and crossmodal propagation of the trigger signals. In this paper, we identify two key vulnerabilities by analyzing existing attack patterns: (1) the model exhibits abnormal attention concentration on certain regions of the input image, and (2) backdoor attacks often induce semantic drift and sentence incoherence. Based on these insights, we propose Semantic Reward Defense (SRD), a reinforcement learning framework that mitigates backdoor behavior without requiring any prior knowledge of trigger patterns. SRD learns to apply discrete perturbations to sensitive contextual regions of image inputs via a deep Q-network policy, aiming to confuse attention and disrupt the activation of malicious paths. To guide policy optimization, we design a reward signal named semantic fidelity score, which jointly assesses the semantic consistency and linguistic fluency of the generated captions, encouraging the agent to achieve a robust yet faithful output. SRD offers a trigger-agnostic, policy-interpretable defense paradigm that effectively mitigates local (TrojVLM) and global (Shadowcast) backdoor attacks, reducing ASR to 3.6% and 5.6% respectively, with less than 15% average CIDEr drop on the clean inputs.

PaperID: 1242, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02373

Authors:Xizhe Xue, Yang Zhou, Dawei Yan, Lijie Tao, Junjie Li, Ying Li, Haokui Zhang, Rong Xiao

Affiliations: Northwestern Polytechnical University, Intellifusion Inc.

Title: UVLM: Benchmarking Video Language Model for Underwater World Understanding

Abstract:
Recently, videolanguage models (VidLMs) have gained widespread attention and adoption. However, existing works primarily focus on terrestrial scenarios, overlooking the highly demanding application needs of underwater observation. To overcome this gap, we introduce UVLM, an under water observation benchmark which is build through a collaborative approach combining human expertise and AI models. To ensure data quality, we have conducted in-depth considerations from multiple perspectives. First, to address the unique challenges of underwater environments, we selected videos that represent typical underwater challenges including light variations, water turbidity, and diverse viewing angles to construct the dataset. Second, to ensure data diversity, the dataset covers a wide range of frame rates, resolutions, 419 classes of marine animals, and various static plants and terrains. Next, for task diversity, we adopted a structured design where observation targets are categorized into two major classes: biological and environmental. Each category includes content observation and change/action observation, totaling 20 subtask types. Finally, we designed several challenging evaluation metrics to enable quantitative comparison and analysis of different methods. Experiments on two representative VidLMs demonstrate that fine-tuning VidLMs on UVLM significantly improves underwater world understanding while also showing potential for slight improvements on existing in-air VidLM benchmarks.

PaperID: 1243, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00944

Authors:An Yang, Chenyu Liu, Jun Du, Jianqing Gao, Jia Pan, Jinshui Hu, Baocai Yin, Bing Yin, Cong Liu

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, iFLYTEK Research

Title: Binary-Gaussian: Compact and Progressive Representation for 3D Gaussian Segmentation

Abstract:
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as an efficient 3D representation and a promising foundation for semantic tasks like segmentation. However, existing 3D-GS-based segmentation methods typically rely on high-dimensional category features, which introduce substantial memory overhead. Moreover, fine-grained segmentation remains challenging due to label space congestion and the lack of stable multi-granularity control mechanisms. To address these limitations, we propose a coarse-to-fine binary encoding scheme for per-Gaussian category representation, which compresses each feature into a single integer via the binary-to-decimal mapping, drastically reducing memory usage. We further design a progressive training strategy that decomposes panoptic segmentation into a series of independent sub-tasks, reducing inter-class conflicts and thereby enhancing fine-grained segmentation capability. Additionally, we fine-tune opacity during segmentation training to address the incompatibility between photometric rendering and semantic segmentation, which often leads to foreground-background confusion. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art segmentation performance while significantly reducing memory consumption and accelerating inference.

PaperID: 1244, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15046

Authors:Panqi Yang, Haodong Jing, Nanning Zheng, Yongqiang Ma

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University

Title: UniHOI: Unified Human-Object Interaction Understanding via Unified Token Space

Abstract:
In the field of humanobject interaction (HOI), detection and generation are two dual tasks that have traditionally been addressed separately, hindering the development of comprehensive interaction understanding. To address this, we propose UniHOI, which jointly models HOI detection and generation via a unified token space, thereby effectively promoting knowledge sharing and enhancing generalization. Specifically, we introduce a symmetric interaction-aware attention module and a unified semi-supervised learning paradigm, enabling effective bidirectional mapping between images and interaction semantics even under limited annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniHOI achieves state-of-the-art performance in both HOI detection and generation. Specifically, UniHOI improves accuracy by 4.9% on long-tailed HOI detection and boosts interaction metrics by 42.0% on open-vocabulary generation tasks.

PaperID: 1245, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05170

Authors:Zijiang Yang, Hanqing Chao, Bokai Zhao, Yelin Yang, Yunshuo Zhang, Dongmei Fu, Junping Zhang, Le Lu, Ke Yan, Dakai Jin, Minfeng Xu, Yun Bian, Hui Jiang

Affiliations: Alibaba Group, DAMO Academy, Shanghai Institution of Pancreatic Disease, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Fudan University

Title: MUSE: Multi-Scale Dense Self-Distillation for Nucleus Detection and Classification

Abstract:
Nucleus detection and classification (NDC) in histopathology analysis is a fundamental task that underpins a wide range of highlevel pathology applications. However, existing methods heavily rely on labor-intensive nucleus-level annotations and struggle to fully exploit large-scale unlabeled data for learning discriminative nucleus representations. In this work, we propose MUSE (MUlti-scale denSE self-distillation), a novel self-supervised learning method tailored for NDC. At its core is NuLo (Nucleus-based Local self-distillation), a coordinate-guided mechanism that enables flexible local self-distillation based on predicted nucleus positions. By removing the need for strict spatial alignment between augmented views, NuLo allows critical cross-scale alignment, thus unlocking the capacity of models for fine-grained nucleus-level representation. To support MUSE, we design a simple yet effective encoder-decoder architecture and a large field-of-view semi-supervised fine-tuning strategy that together maximize the value of unlabeled pathology images. Extensive experiments on three widely used benchmarks demonstrate that MUSE effectively addresses the core challenges of histopathological NDC. The resulting models not only surpass state-of-the-art supervised baselines but also outperform generic pathology foundation models.

PaperID: 1246, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17910

Authors:Yu-Liang Zhan, Xinyu Tang, Han Wan, Jian Li, Jirong Wen, Hao Sun

Affiliations: Renmin University of China

Title: L2V-CoT: Cross-Modal Transfer of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Latent Intervention

Abstract:
Recently, Chainof-Thought (CoT) reasoning has significantly enhanced the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but Vision–Language Models (VLMs) still struggle with multi-step reasoning tasks due to limited multimodal reasoning data. To bridge this gap, researchers have explored methods to transfer CoT reasoning from LLMs to VLMs. However, existing approaches either need high training costs or require architectural alignment. In this paper, we use Linear Artificial Tomography (LAT) to empirically show that LLMs and VLMs share similar low-frequency latent representations of CoT reasoning despite architectural differences. Based on this insight, we propose L2V-CoT, a novel training-free latent intervention approach that transfers CoT reasoning from LLMs to VLMs. L2V-CoT extracts and resamples low-frequency CoT representations from LLMs in the frequency domain, enabling dimension matching and latent injection into VLMs during inference to enhance reasoning capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms training-free baselines and even surpasses supervised methods.

PaperID: 1247, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.06723

Authors:Ruicheng Zhang, Jun Zhou, Zunnan Xu, Zihao Liu, Jiehui Huang, Mingyang Zhang, Yu Sun, Xiu Li

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China University of Geoscience, Sun Yat-sen University

Title: Zo3T: Zero-Shot 3D-Aware Trajectory-Guided Image-to-Video Generation via Test-Time Training

Abstract:
TrajectoryGuided image-to-video (I2V) generation aims to synthesize videos that adhere to user-specified motion instructions. Existing methods typically rely on computationally expensive fine-tuning on scarce annotated datasets. Although some zero-shot methods attempt to trajectory control in the latent space, they may yield unrealistic motion by neglecting 3D perspective and creating a misalignment between the manipulated latents and the network's noise predictions. To address these challenges, we introduce Zo3T, a novel zero-shot test-time-training framework for trajectory-guided generation with three core innovations: First, we incorporate a 3D-Aware Kinematic Projection, leveraging inferring scene depth to derive perspective-correct affine transformations for target regions. Second, we introduce Trajectory-Guided Test-Time LoRA, a mechanism that dynamically injects and optimizes ephemeral LoRA adapters into the denoising network alongside the latent state. Driven by a regional feature consistency loss, this co-adaptation effectively enforces motion constraints while allowing the pre-trained model to locally adapt its internal representations to the manipulated latent, thereby ensuring generative fidelity and on-manifold adherence. Finally, we develop Guidance Field Rectification, which refines the denoising evolutionary path by optimizing the conditional guidance field through a one-step lookahead strategy, ensuring efficient generative progression towards the target trajectory. Zo3T significantly enhances 3D realism and motion accuracy in trajectory-controlled I2V generation, demonstrating superior performance over existing training-based and zero-shot approaches.

PaperID: 1248, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17685

Authors:Wei Zhang, Jiajun Chu, Xinci Liu, Chen Tong, Xinyue Li

Affiliations: City University of Hong Kong

Title: Dual-Path Knowledge-Augmented Contrastive Alignment Network for Spatially Resolved Transcriptomics

Abstract:
Spatial Transcriptomics (ST) is a technology that measures gene expression profiles within tissue sections while retaining spatial context. It reveals localized gene expression patterns and tissue heterogeneity, both of which are essential for understanding disease etiology. However, its high cost has driven efforts to predict spatial gene expression from whole slide images. Despite recent advancements, current methods still face significant limitations, such as underexploitation of high-level biological context, over-reliance on exemplar retrievals, and inadequate alignment of heterogeneous modalities. To address these challenges, we propose DKAN, a novel Dual-path Knowledge-Augmented contrastive alignment Network that predicts spatially resolved gene expression by integrating histopathological images and gene expression profiles through a biologically informed approach. Specifically, we introduce an effective gene semantic representation module that leverages the external gene database to provide additional biological insights, thereby enhancing gene expression prediction. Further, we adopt a unified, one-stage contrastive learning paradigm, seamlessly combining contrastive learning and supervised learning to eliminate reliance on exemplars, complemented with an adaptive weighting mechanism. Additionally, we propose a dual-path contrastive alignment module that employs gene semantic features as dynamic cross-modal coordinators to enable effective heterogeneous feature integration. Through extensive experiments across three public ST datasets, DKAN demonstrates superior performance over state-of-the-art models, establishing a new benchmark for spatial gene expression prediction and offering a powerful tool for advancing biological and clinical research.

PaperID: 1249, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11680

Authors:Zheng Zhang, Hao Tang, Yingying Hu, Zhanli Hu, Jing Qin

Affiliations: Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: FourierPET: Deep Fourier-based Unrolled Network for Low-count PET Reconstruction

Abstract:
Lowcount positron emission tomography (PET) reconstruction is a challenging inverse problem due to severe degradations arising from Poisson noise, photon scarcity, and attenuation correction errors. Existing deep learning methods typically address these in the spatial domain with an undifferentiated optimization objective, making it difficult to disentangle overlapping artifacts and limiting correction effectiveness. In this work, we perform a Fourier-domain analysis and reveal that these degradations are spectrally separable: Poisson noise and photon scarcity cause high-frequency phase perturbations, while attenuation errors suppress low-frequency amplitude components. Leveraging this insight, we propose FourierPET, a Fourier-based unrolled reconstruction framework grounded in the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers. It consists of three tailored modules: a spectral consistency module that enforces global frequency alignment to maintain data fidelity, an amplitude–phase correction module that decouples and compensates for high-frequency phase distortions and low-frequency amplitude suppression, and a dual adjustment module that accelerates convergence during iterative reconstruction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FourierPET achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly fewer parameters, while offering enhanced interpretability through frequency-aware correction.

PaperID: 1250, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01345

Authors:Rongzhen Zhao, Jian Li, Juho Kannala, Joni Pajarinen

Affiliations: Aalto University, Renmin University of China

Title: Predicting Video Slot Attention Queries from Random Slot-Feature Pairs

Abstract:
Unsupervised video ObjectCentric Learning (OCL) is promising as it enables object-level scene representation and understanding as we humans do. Mainstream video OCL methods adopt a recurrent architecture: An aggregator aggregates current video frame into object features, termed slots, under some queries; A transitioner transits current slots to queries for the next frame. This is an effective architecture but all existing implementations both (i1) neglect to incorporate next frame features, the most informative source for query prediction, and (i2) fail to learn transition dynamics, the knowledge essential for query prediction. To address these issues, we propose Random Slot-Feature pair for learning Query prediction (RandSF.Q): (t1) We design a new transitioner to incorporate both slots and features, which provides more information for query prediction; (t2) We train the transitioner to predict queries from slot-feature pairs randomly sampled from available recurrences, which drives it to learn transition dynamics. Experiments on scene representation demonstrate that our method surpass existing video OCL methods significantly, e.g., up to 10 points on object discovery, setting new state-of-the-art. Such superiority also benefits downstream tasks like scene understanding.

PaperID: 1251, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14184

Authors:Xuan Zhao, Zhongyu Zhang, Yuge Huang, Yuxi Mi, Guodong Mu, Shouhong Ding, Jun Wang, Rizen Guo, Shuigeng Zhou

Affiliations: Fudan University, Tencent Youtu Lab

Title: GloTok: Global Perspective Tokenizer for Image Reconstruction and Generation

Abstract:
Existing stateof-the-art image tokenization methods leverage diverse semantic features from pre-trained vision models for additional supervision, to expand the distribution of latent representations and thereby improve the quality of image reconstruction and generation. These methods employ a locally supervised approach for semantic supervision, which limits the uniformity of semantic distribution. However, VA-VAE proves that a more uniform feature distribution yields better generation performance. In this work, we introduce a Global Perspective Tokenizer (GloTok), which utilizes global relational information to model a more uniform semantic distribution of tokenized features. Specifically, a codebook-wise histogram relation learning method is proposed to transfer the semantics, which are modeled by pre-trained models on the entire dataset, to the semantic codebook. Then, we design a residual learning module which recovers the fine-grained details to minimize the reconstruction error caused by quantization. Through the above design, GloTok delivers more uniformly distributed semantic latent representations, which facilitates the training of autoregressive (AR) models for generating high-quality images without requiring direct access to pre-trained models during the training process. Experiments on the standard ImageNet-1k benchmark clearly show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction performance and generation quality.

PaperID: 1252, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08997

Authors:Jiazhou Zhou, Qing Jiang, Kanghao Chen, Lutao Jiang, Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Ying-Cong Chen, Lei Zhang

Affiliations: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), International Digital Economy Academy

Title: T-Rex-Omni: Integrating Negative Visual Prompt in Generic Object Detection

Abstract:
Object detection methods have evolved from closedset to open-set paradigms over the years. Current open-set object detectors, however, remain constrained by their exclusive reliance on positive indicators based on given prompts like text descriptions or visual exemplars. This positive-only paradigm experiences consistent vulnerability to visually similar but semantically different distractors. We propose T-Rex-Omni, a novel framework that addresses this limitation by incorporating negative visual prompts to negate hard negative distractors. Specifically, we first introduce a unified visual prompt encoder that jointly processes positive and negative visual prompts. Next, a training-free Negating Negative Computing (NNC) module is proposed to dynamically suppress negative responses during the probability computing stage. To further boost performance through fine-tuning, our Negating Negative Hinge (NNH) loss enforces discriminative margins between positive and negative embeddings. T-Rex-Omni supports flexible deployment in both positive-only and joint positive-negative inference modes, accommodating either user-specified or automatically generated negative examples. Extensive experiments demonstrate remarkable zero-shot detection performance, significantly narrowing the performance gap between visual-prompted and text-prompted methods while showing particular strength in long-tailed scenarios (51.2 AP_r on LVIS-minival). This work establishes negative prompts as a crucial new dimension for advancing open-set visual recognition systems.

PaperID: 1253, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19121

Authors:Kaiyue Zhou, Zelong Tan, Hongxiao Wang, Ya-Li Li, Shengjin Wang

Affiliations: Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology (BNRist), Academy for Multidisciplinary Studies, Capital Normal University

Title: Preserving Topological and Geometric Embeddings for Point Cloud Recovery

Abstract:
Recovering point clouds involves the sequential process of sampling and restoration, yet existing methods struggle to effectively leverage both topological and geometric attributes. To address this, we propose an endto-end architecture named TopGeoFormer, which maintains these critical properties throughout the sampling and restoration phases. First, we revisit traditional feature extraction techniques to yield topological embedding using a continuous mapping of relative relationships between neighboring points, and integrate it in both phases for preserving the structure of the original space. Second, we propose the InterTwining Attention to fully merge topological and geometric embeddings, which queries shape with local awareness in both phases to form a learnable 3D shape context facilitated with point-wise, point-shape-wise, and intra-shape features. Third, we introduce a full geometry loss and a topological constraint loss to optimize the embeddings in both Euclidean and topological spaces. The geometry loss uses inconsistent matching between coarse-to-fine generations and targets for reconstructing better geometric details, and the constraint loss limits embedding variances for better approximation of the topological space. In experiments, we comprehensively analyze the circumstances using the conventional and learning-based sampling/upsampling/recovery algorithms. The quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing sampling and recovery methods.

PaperID: 1254, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13575

Authors:Linhan Zhou, Shuang Li, Neng Dong, Yonghang Tai, Yafei Zhang, Huafeng Li

Affiliations: Kunmimg University of Science and Technology, Chongqing University of Post and Telecommunications, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Yunnan Normal University

Title: Hierarchical Prompt Learning for Image- and Text-Based Person Re-Identification

Abstract:
Person reidentification (ReID) aims to retrieve target pedestrian images given either visual queries (image-to-image, I2I) or textual descriptions (text-to-image, T2I). Although both tasks share a common retrieval objective, they pose distinct challenges: I2I emphasizes discriminative identity learning, while T2I requires accurate cross-modal semantic alignment. Existing methods often treat these tasks separately, which may lead to representation entanglement and suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose a unified framework named Hierarchical Prompt Learning (HPL), which leverages task-aware prompt modeling to jointly optimize both tasks. Specifically, we first introduce a Task-Routed Transformer, which incorporates dual classification tokens into a shared visual encoder to route features for I2I and T2I branches respectively. On top of this, we develop a hierarchical prompt generation scheme that integrates identity-level learnable tokens with instance-level pseudo-text tokens. These pseudo-tokens are derived from image or text features via modality-specific inversion networks, injecting fine-grained, instance-specific semantics into the prompts. Furthermore, we propose a Cross-Modal Prompt Regularization strategy to enforce semantic alignment in the prompt token space, ensuring that pseudo-prompts preserve source-modality characteristics while enhancing cross-modal transferability. Extensive experiments on multiple ReID benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our method, achieving state-of-the-art performance on both I2I and T2I tasks.

PaperID: 1255, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09364

Authors:Shengchao Zhou, Jiehong Lin, Jiahui Liu, Shizhen Zhao, Chirui Chang, Xiaojuan Qi

Affiliations: The University of Hong Kong

Title: ASSIST-3D: Adapted Scene Synthesis for Class-Agnostic 3D Instance Segmentation

Abstract:
Classagnostic 3D instance segmentation tackles the challenging task of segmenting all object instances, including previously unseen ones, without semantic class reliance. Current methods struggle with generalization due to the scarce annotated 3D scene data or noisy 2D segmentations. While synthetic data generation offers a promising solution, existing 3D scene synthesis methods fail to simultaneously satisfy geometry diversity, context complexity, and layout reasonability, each essential for this task. To address these needs, we propose an Adapted 3D Scene Synthesis pipeline for class-agnostic 3D Instance SegmenTation, termed as ASSIST-3D, to synthesize proper data for model generalization enhancement. Specifically, ASSIST-3D features three key innovations, including 1) Heterogeneous Object Selection from extensive 3D CAD asset collections, incorporating randomness in object sampling to maximize geometric and contextual diversity; 2) Scene Layout Generation through LLM-guided spatial reasoning combined with depth-first search for reasonable object placements; and 3) Realistic Point Cloud Construction via multi-view RGB-D image rendering and fusion from the synthetic scenes, closely mimicking real-world sensor data acquisition. Experiments on ScanNetV2, ScanNet++, and S3DIS benchmarks demonstrate that models trained with ASSIST-3D-generated data significantly outperform existing methods. Further comparisons underscore the superiority of our purpose-built pipeline over existing 3D scene synthesis approaches.

PaperID: 1256, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22018

Authors:Chunzheng Zhu, Yangfang Lin, Shen Chen, Yijun Wang, Jianxin Lin

Affiliations: Hunan University

Title: MedEyes: Learning Dynamic Visual Focus for Medical Progressive Diagnosis

Abstract:
Accurate medical diagnosis often involves progressive visual focusing and iterative reasoning, characteristics commonly observed in clinical workflows. While recent visionlanguage models demonstrate promising chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning capabilities via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), their purely on-policy learning paradigm tends to reinforce superficially coherent but clinically inaccurate reasoning paths. We propose MedEyes, a novel reinforcement learning framework that dynamically models clinician-style diagnostic reasoning by progressively attending to and interpreting relevant medical image regions. By incorporating off-policy expert guidance, MedEyes converts expert visual search trajectories into structured external behavioral signals, guiding the model toward clinically aligned visual reasoning. We design the Gaze-guided Reasoning Navigator (GRN) to emulate the diagnostic process through a dual-mode exploration strategy, scanning for systematic abnormality localization and drilling for detailed regional analysis. To balance expert imitation and autonomous discovery, we introduce the Confidence Value Sampler (CVS), which employs nucleus sampling and adaptive termination to create diverse yet credible exploration paths. Finally, the dual-stream GRPO optimization framework decouples on-policy and off-policy learning signals, mitigating reward assimilation and entropy collapse. Experiments demonstrate that MedEyes achieves an average performance improvement of +8.5% across multiple medical VQA benchmarks, validating MedEyes's potential in building trustworthy medical AI systems.

PaperID: 1257, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11692

Authors:Jiayin Zhu, Linlin Yang, Yicong Li, Angela Yao

Affiliations: National University of Singapore, Communication University of China

Title: AnchorDS: Anchoring Dynamic Sources for Semantically Consistent Text-to-3D Generation

Abstract:
Optimization‐based text‑to‑3D methods distill guidance from 2D generative models via Score Distillation Sampling (SDS), but implicitly treat this guidance as static. This work shows that ignoring source dynamics yields inconsistent trajectories that suppress or merge semantic cues, leading to "semantic oversmoothing" artifacts. As such, we reformulate text‑to‑3D optimization as mapping a dynamically evolving source distribution to a fixed target distribution. We cast the problem into a dual‑conditioned latent space, conditioned on both the text prompt and the intermediately rendered image. Given this joint setup, we observe that the image condition naturally anchors the current source distribution. Building on this insight, we introduce AnchorDS, an improved score distillation mechanism that provides state‑anchored guidance with image conditions and stabilizes generation. We further penalize erroneous source estimates and design a lightweight filter strategy and fine‑tuning strategy that refines the anchor with negligible overhead. AnchorDS produces finer-grained detail, more natural colours, and stronger semantic consistency, particularly for complex prompts, while maintaining efficiency. Extensive experiments show that our method surpasses previous methods in both quality and efficiency.

PaperID: 1258, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06275

Authors:Yuzhou Zhu, Zheng Zhang, Ruyi Zhang, Liang Zhou

Affiliations: Dalian University of Technology, Zhejiang Gongshang University

Title: SinBasis Networks: Matrix-Equivalent Feature Extraction for Wave-Like Optical Spectrograms

Abstract:
Wavelike images—from attosecond streaking spectrograms to optical spectra, audio mel-spectrograms and periodic video frames—encode critical harmonic structures that elude conventional feature extractors. We propose a unified, matrix-equivalent framework that reinterprets convolution and attention as linear transforms on flattened inputs, revealing filter weights as basis vectors spanning latent feature subspaces. To infuse spectral priors we apply elementwise sin(·) mappings to each weight matrix. Embedding these transforms into CNN, ViT and Capsule architectures yields Sin-Basis Networks with heightened sensitivity to periodic motifs and built-in invariance to spatial shifts. Experiments on a diverse collection of wave-like image datasets—including 80,000 synthetic attosecond streaking spectrograms, thousands of Raman, photoluminescence and FTIR spectra, mel-spectrograms from AudioSet and cycle-pattern frames from Kinetics—demonstrate substantial gains in reconstruction accuracy, translational robustness and zero-shot cross-domain transfer. Theoretical analysis via matrix isomorphism and Mercer-kernel truncation quantifies how sinusoidal reparametrization enriches expressivity while preserving stability in data-scarce regimes. Sin-Basis Networks thus offer a lightweight, physics-informed approach to deep learning across all wave-form imaging modalities.

PaperID: 1259, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.18001

Authors:Kai Zou, Hongbo Liu, Dian Zheng, Jianxiong Gao, Zhiwei Zhao, Bin Liu

Affiliations: School of Cyber Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Digital Security, Tongji University, Sun Yat-sen University, Fudan University, Hefei University of Technology

Title: EchoGen: Cycle-Consistent Learning for Unified Layout-Image Generation and Understanding

Abstract:
In this work, we present EchoGen, a unified framework for layoutto-image generation and image grounding, capable of generating images with both accurate layout and high fidelity to the text description.(e.g., spatial relationship), and grounding the image robustly at the same time. We believe that image grounding possesses strong text and layout understanding abilities, which can compensate for the corresponding limitations in layout-to-image generation. At the same time, images generated from layouts exhibit high diversity in content, thereby enhancing the robustness of image grounding. Jointly training both tasks within a unified model can promote performance improvements for each. However, we identify that this joint training paradigm encounters several optimization challenges and results in restricted performance. To address these issues, we propose progressive training strategies. First, the Parallel Multi-Task Pre-training (PMTP) stage equips the model with basic abilities for both tasks, leveraging shared tokens to accelerate training. Next, the Dual Joint Optimization (DJO) stage exploits task duality to sequentially integrate the two tasks, enabling unified optimization. Finally, the Cycle RL stage eliminates reliance on visual supervision by using consistency constraints as rewards, significantly enhancing the model’s unified capabilities via the GRPO strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art results on both layout-to-image generation and image grounding benchmarks, and reveal clear synergistic gains from optimizing the two tasks together.

PaperID: 1260, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16637

Authors:Markus Anders, Bart Bogaerts, Benjamin Bogø, Arthur Gontier, Wietze Koops, Ciaran McCreesh, Magnus O. Myreen, Jakob Nordström, Andy Oertel, Adrian Rebola-Pardo, Yong Kiam Tan

Affiliations: RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau, KU Leuven, Belgium Vrije Universiteit Brussel, University of Copenhagen, University of Glasgow, Lund University, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden University of Gothenburg, Vienna University of Technology, Austria Johannes Kepler University Linz, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Institute for Infocomm Research

Title: Faster Certified Symmetry Breaking Using Orders with Auxiliary Variables

Abstract:
Symmetry breaking is a crucial technique in modern combinatorial solving, but it is difficult to be sure it is implemented correctly. The most successful approach to deal with bugs is to make solvers certifying, so that they output not just a solution, but also a mathematical proof of correctness in a standard format, which can then be checked by a formally verified checker. This requires justifying symmetry reasoning within the proof, but developing efficient methods for this has remained a longstanding open challenge. A fully general approach was recently proposed, but it relies on encoding lexicographic orders with big integers, which quickly becomes infeasible for large symmetries. In this work, we develop a method for instead encoding orders with auxiliary variables. We show that this leads to orders-of-magnitude speed-ups in both theory and practice by running experiments on proof logging and checking for SAT symmetry breaking using the state-of-the-art satsuma symmetry breaker and the VeriPB proof checking toolchain.

PaperID: 1261, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12860

Authors:Aritra Banik, Mano Prakash Parthasarathi, Venkatesh Raman, Diya Roy, Abhishek Sahu

Affiliations: National Institute of Science, Education and Research, An OCC of Homi Bhabha National Institute, North Carolina State University, (Retd) The Institute of Mathematical Sciences

Title: Learning with Structure: Computing Consistent Subsets on Structurally-Regular Graphs

Abstract:
The Minimum Consistent Subset (MCS) problem arises naturally in the context of supervised clustering and instance selection. In supervised clustering, one aims to infer a meaningful partitioning of data using a small labeled subset. However, the sheer volume of training data in modern applications poses a significant computational challenge. The MCS problem formalizes this goal: given a labeled dataset X in a metric space, the task is to compute a smallest subset S of X such that every point in X shares its label with at least one of its nearest neighbors in S. Recently, the MCS problem has been extended to graph metrics, where distances are defined by shortest paths. Prior work has shown that MCS remains NPhard even on simple graph classes like trees, and presented an fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) algorithm parameterized by the number of colors for MCS on trees. This raises the challenge of identifying graph classes that admit algorithms efficient in both input size (n) and the number of colors (c). In this work, we study the Minimum Consistent Subset problem on graphs, focusing on two well-established measures: the vertex cover number (vc) and the neighborhood diversity (nd). Specifically, we design efficient algorithms for graphs exhibiting small vc or small nd, which frequently arise in real-world domains characterized by local sparsity or repetitive structure. These parameters are particularly relevant because they capture structural properties that often correlate with the tractability of otherwise hard problems. Graphs with small vertex cover sizes are "almost independent sets", representing sparse interactions, while graphs with small neighborhood diversity exhibit a high degree of symmetry and regularity. Importantly, small neighborhood diversity can occur even in dense graphs, a property frequently observed in domains such as social networks with modular communities or knowledge graphs with repeated relational patterns. Thus, algorithms designed to work efficiently for graphs with small neighborhood diversity are capable of efficiently solving MCS in complex settings where small vertex covers may not exist. We show that MCS is FPT when parameterized by the vertex cover number and by neighborhood diversity. In each case, we present an algorithm whose running time is polynomial in n and c, and the non-polynomial part depends solely on the chosen parameter. Notably, our algorithms remain efficient for arbitrarily many colors, as their complexity is polynomially dependent on the number of colors.

PaperID: 1262, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08431

Authors:Benjamin Bordais, Daniel Neider

Affiliations: TU Dortmund University, Germany Center for Trustworthy Data Science and Security, University Alliance Ruhr, Germany Université Libre de Bruxelles

Title: Learning DFAs from Positive Examples Only via Word Counting

Abstract:
Learning finite automata from positive examples has recently gained attention as a powerful approach for understanding, explaining, analyzing, and verifying blackbox systems. The motivation for focusing solely on positive examples arises from the practical limitation that we can only observe what a system is capable of (positive examples) but not what it cannot do (negative examples). Unlike the classical problem of passive DFA learning with both positive and negative examples, which has been known to be NP-complete since the 1970s, the topic of learning DFAs exclusively from positive examples remains poorly understood. This paper introduces a novel perspective on this problem by leveraging the concept of counting the number of accepted words up to a carefully determined length. Our contributions are twofold. First, we prove that computing the minimal number of words up to this length accepted by DFAs of a given size that accept all positive examples is NP-complete, establishing that learning from positive examples alone is computationally demanding. Second, we propose a new learning algorithm with a better asymptotic runtime than the best-known bound for existing algorithms. While our experimental evaluation reveals that this algorithm under-performs state-of-the-art methods, it demonstrates significant potential as a preprocessing step to enhance existing approaches.

PaperID: 1263, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09186

Authors:Shuli Zeng, Sijia Zhang, Feng Wu, Shaojie Tang, Xiangyang Li

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, State University of New York at Buffalo

Title: Scalable Mixed-Integer Optimization with Neural Constraints via Dual Decomposition

Abstract:
Embedding deep neural networks (NNs) into mixedinteger programs (MIPs) is attractive for decision making with learned constraints, yet state-of-the-art monolithic linearisations blow up in size and quickly become intractable. In this paper, we introduce a novel dual-decomposition framework that relaxes the single coupling equality u=x with an augmented Lagrange multiplier and splits the problem into a vanilla MIP and a constrained NN block. Each part is tackled by the solver that suits it best-branch and cut for the MIP subproblem, first-order optimisation for the NN subproblem, so the model remains modular, the number of integer variables never grows with network depth, and the per-iteration cost scales only linearly with the NN size. On the public SurrogateLIB benchmark, our method proves scalable, modular, and adaptable: it runs 120x faster than an exact Big-M formulation on the largest test case; the NN sub-solver can be swapped from a log-barrier interior step to a projected-gradient routine with no code changes; and swapping the MLP for an LSTM backbone still completes the full optimisation in 47s without any bespoke adaptation.

PaperID: 1264, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02051

Authors:Junhao Cai, Taegun An, Chengjun Jin, Sung Il Choi, Juhyun Park, Changhee Joo

Affiliations: Korea University, Republic of Korea

Title: HCF: Hierarchical Cascade Framework for Distributed Multi-Stage Image Compression

Abstract:
Distributed multistage image compression—where visual content traverses multiple processing nodes under varying quality requirements—poses challenges. Progressive methods enable bitstream truncation but underutilize available compute resources; successive compression repeats costly pixel-domain operations and suffers cumulative quality loss and inefficiency; fixed-parameter models lack post-encoding flexibility. In this work, we developed the Hierarchical Cascade Framework (HCF) that achieves high rate-distortion performance and better computational efficiency through direct latent-space transformations across network nodes in distributed multi-stage image compression systems. Under HCF, we introduced policy-driven quantization control to optimize rate–distortion trade-offs, and established the edge quantization principle through differential entropy analysis. The configuration based on this principle demonstrates up to 0.6dB PSNR gains over other configurations. When comprehensively evaluated on the Kodak, CLIC, and CLIC2020-mobile datasets, HCF outperforms successive-compression methods by up to 5.56% BD-Rate in PSNR on CLIC, while saving up to 97.8% FLOPs, 96.5% GPU memory, and 90.0% execution time. It also outperforms state-of-the-art progressive compression methods by up to 12.64% BD-Rate on Kodak and enables retraining-free cross-quality adaptation with 7.13-10.87% BD-Rate reductions on CLIC2020-mobile.

PaperID: 1265, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.08271

Authors:Min Hou, Chenxi Bai, Le Wu, Hao Liu, Kai Zhang, Weiwen Liu, Richang Hong, Ruiming Tang, Meng Wang

Affiliations: Hefei University of Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Kuaishou Inc.

Title: RecCocktail: A Generalizable and Efficient Framework for LLM-Based Recommendation

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in recent years, owing to their impressive generalization capabilities and rich world knowledge. To capitalize on the potential of using LLMs as recommender systems, mainstream approaches typically focus on two paradigms. The first paradigm designs multidomain or multi-task instruction data for generalizable recommendation, so as to align LLMs with general recommendation areas and deal with cold-start recommendation. The second paradigm focuses on enhancing domain-specific recommendation tasks, improving performance in warm recommendation scenarios. While most previous works treat these two paradigms separately, we argue that they have complementary advantages, and combining them can yield better results. In this paper, we propose a generalizable and efficient LLM-based recommendation framework RecCocktail. Our approach begins with fine-tuning a "base spirit" LoRA module using domain-general recommendation instruction data to align LLM with recommendation knowledge. Next, given users' behavior of a specific domain, we construct a domain-specific "ingredient" LoRA module. We then provide an entropy-guided adaptive merging method to mix the "base spirit" and the "ingredient" in the weight space. Please note that, RecCocktail combines the advantages of the existing two paradigms without introducing additional time or space overhead during the inference phase. Moreover, RecCocktail is efficient with plug and play, as the "base spirit" LoRA is trained only once, and any domain-specific "ingredient" can be efficiently mixed with only domain-specific fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets under both warm and cold-start recommendation scenarios validate the effectiveness and generality of the proposed RecCocktail.

PaperID: 1266, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.01657

Authors:Run Ling, Wenji Wang, Yuting Liu, Guibing Guo, Haowei Liu, Jian Lu, Quanwei Zhang, Yexing Xu, Shuo Lu, Yun Wang, Yihua Shao, Linying Jiang, Xingwei Wang

Affiliations: Northeastern University, Chongqing University of Post and Telecommunications, Zhejiang University, Sun Yat-sen University, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: RAGAR: Retrieval Augmented Personalized Image Generation Guided by Recommendation

Abstract:
Personalized image generation is crucial for improving the user experience, as it renders reference images into preferred ones according to user visual preferences. Although effective, existing methods face two main issues. First, existing methods treat all items in the user's historical sequence equally when extracting user preferences, overlooking the varying semantic similarities between historical items and the reference item. Disproportionately high weights for lowsimilarity items distort user visual preferences for the reference item. Second, existing methods heavily rely on consistency between generated and reference images to optimize generation, which leads to underfitting user preferences and hinders personalization. To address these issues, we propose Retrieval Augmented Personalized Image GenerAtion guided by Recommendation (RAGAR). Our approach uses a retrieval mechanism to assign different weights to historical items according to their similarities to the reference item, thereby extracting more refined users' visual preferences for the reference item. Then we introduce a novel rank task based on the multi-modal ranking model to optimize the personalization of the generated images instead of forcing depend on consistency. Extensive experiments and human evaluations on three real-world datasets demonstrate that RAGAR achieves significant improvements in both personalization and semantic metrics compared to five baselines.

PaperID: 1267, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11086

Authors:Emily Liu, Kuan Han, Minfeng Zhan, Bocheng Zhao, Guanyu Mu, Yang Song

Affiliations: ByteDance Inc.

Title: Relative Advantage Debiasing for Watch-Time Prediction in Short-Video Recommendation

Abstract:
Watch time is widely used as a proxy for user satisfaction in video recommendation platforms. However, raw watch times are influenced by confounding factors such as video duration, popularity, and individual user behaviors, potentially distorting preference signals and resulting in biased recommendation models. We propose a novel relative advantage debiasing framework that corrects watch time by comparing it to empirically derived reference distributions conditioned on user and item groups. This approach yields a quantilebased preference signal and introduces a two-stage architecture that explicitly separates distribution estimation from preference learning. Additionally, we present distributional embeddings to efficiently parameterize watch-time quantiles without requiring online sampling or storage of historical data. Both offline and online experiments demonstrate significant improvements in recommendation accuracy and robustness compared to existing baseline methods.

PaperID: 1268, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.13360

Authors:Hua Liu, Yanbin Wei, Fei Xing, Tyler Derr, Haoyu Han, Yu Zhang

Affiliations: Southern University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, City University of Hong Kong, Vanderbilt University, Michigan State University

Title: Graph2Video: Leveraging Video Models to Model Dynamic Graph Evolution

Abstract:
Dynamic graphs are common in real‑world systems such as social media, recommender systems, and traffic networks. Existing dynamic graph models for link prediction often fall short in capturing the full complexity of temporal evolution. They tend to overlook fine‑grained variations in interaction order, struggle with dependencies that span long time horizons, and provide limited modeling of pair‑specific relational dynamics. To address those challenges, we propose Graph2Video, a video‑inspired framework that views the temporal neighborhood of a target link as a sequence of “graph frames”. By stacking temporally ordered subgraph frames into a “graph video”, Graph2Video leverages the inductive biases of video foundation models to capture both finegrained local variations and long-range temporal dynamics. It generates a link-level embedding that serves as a lightweight, plug-and-play, link-centric memory unit. This embedding integrates seamlessly into existing dynamic graph encoders, effectively addressing the limitations of prior approaches. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that Graph2Video outperforms state‑of‑the‑art baselines in the link prediction task on most cases. The results highlight that borrowing spatio‑temporal modeling techniques from computer vision provides a principled and effective avenue for advancing dynamic graph learning.

PaperID: 1269, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04267

Authors:Ritwick Mishra, Abhijin Adiga, Madhav Marathe, S. S. Ravi, Ravi Tandon, Anil Vullikanti

Affiliations: Biocomplexity Institute, University of Virginia, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Arizona

Title: Information Theoretic Optimal Surveillance for Epidemic Prevalence in Networks

Abstract:
Estimating the true prevalence of an epidemic outbreak is a key public health problem. This is challenging because surveillance is usually resource intensive and biased. In the network setting, prior work on cost sensitive disease surveillance has focused on choosing a subset of individuals (or nodes) to minimize objectives such as probability of outbreak detection. Such methods do not give insights into the outbreak size distribution which, despite being complex and multimodal, is very useful in public health planning. We introduce TESTPREV, a problem of choosing a subset of nodes which maximizes the mutual information with disease prevalence, which directly provides information about the outbreak size distribution. We show that, under the independent cascade (IC) model, solutions computed by all prior disease surveillance approaches are highly sub-optimal for TESTPREV in general. We also show that TESTPREV is hard to even approximate. While this mutual information objective is computationally challenging for general networks, we show that it can be computed efficiently for various network classes. We present a greedy strategy, called GREEDYMI, that uses estimates of mutual information from cascade simulations and thus can be applied on any network and disease model. We find that GREEDYMI does better than natural baselines in terms of maximizing the mutual information as well as reducing the expected variance in outbreak size, under the IC model.

PaperID: 1270, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06687

Authors:Yulim So, Seokho Kang

Affiliations: Sungkyunkwan University

Title: AnoStyler: Text-Driven Localized Anomaly Generation via Lightweight Style Transfer

Abstract:
Anomaly generation has been widely explored to address the scarcity of anomaly images in realworld data. However, existing methods typically suffer from at least one of the following limitations, hindering their practical deployment: (1) lack of visual realism in generated anomalies; (2) dependence on large amounts of real images; and (3) use of memory-intensive, heavyweight model architectures. To overcome these limitations, we propose AnoStyler, a lightweight yet effective method that frames zero-shot anomaly generation as text-guided style transfer. Given a single normal image along with its category label and expected defect type, an anomaly mask indicating the localized anomaly regions and two-class text prompts representing the normal and anomaly states are generated using generalizable category-agnostic procedures. A lightweight U-Net model trained with CLIP-based loss functions is used to stylize the normal image into a visually realistic anomaly image, where anomalies are localized by the anomaly mask and semantically aligned with the text prompts. Extensive experiments on the MVTec-AD and VisA datasets show that AnoStyler outperforms existing anomaly generation methods in generating high-quality and diverse anomaly images. Furthermore, using these generated anomalies helps enhance anomaly detection performance.

PaperID: 1271, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08476

Authors:Hao Tang, Yu Liu, Shuanglin Yan, Fei Shen, Shengfeng He, Jing Qin

Affiliations: Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Nanjing Forestry University, National University of Singapore, Singapore Management University

Title: Cross-modal Proxy Evolving for OOD Detection with Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
Reliable zeroshot detection of out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs is critical for deploying vision-language models in open-world settings. However, the lack of labeled negatives in zero-shot OOD detection necessitates proxy signals that remain effective under distribution shift. Existing negative-label methods rely on a fixed set of textual proxies, which (i) sparsely sample the semantic space beyond in-distribution (ID) classes and (ii) remain static while only visual features drift, leading to cross-modal misalignment and unstable predictions. In this paper, we propose CoEvo, a training- and annotation-free test-time framework that performs bidirectional, sample-conditioned adaptation of both textual and visual proxies. Specifically, CoEvo introduces a proxy-aligned co-evolution mechanism to maintain two evolving proxy caches, which dynamically mines contextual textual negatives guided by test images and iteratively refines visual proxies, progressively realigning cross-modal similarities and enlarging local OOD margins. Finally, we dynamically re-weight the contributions of dual-modal proxies to obtain a calibrated OOD score that is robust to distribution shift. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that CoEvo achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving AUROC by 1.33% and reducing FPR95 by 45.98% on ImageNet-1K compared to strong negative-label baselines.

PaperID: 1272, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04945

Authors:Chunyu Wei, Huaiyu Qin, Siyuan He, Yunhai Wang, Yueguo Chen

Affiliations: Renmin University of China

Title: T-Retriever: Tree-based Hierarchical Retrieval Augmented Generation for Textual Graphs

Abstract:
RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) has significantly enhanced Large Language Models' ability to access external knowledge, yet current graph-based RAG approaches face two critical limitations in managing hierarchical information: they impose rigid layer-specific compression quotas that damage local graph structures, and they prioritize topological structure while neglecting semantic content. We introduce T-Retriever, a novel framework that reformulates attributed graph retrieval as tree-based retrieval using a semantic and structure-guided encoding tree. Our approach features two key innovations: (1) Adaptive Compression Encoding, which replaces artificial compression quotas with a global optimization strategy that preserves the graph's natural hierarchical organization, and (2) Semantic-Structural Entropy (S²-Entropy), which jointly optimizes for both structural cohesion and semantic consistency when creating hierarchical partitions. Experiments across diverse graph reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that T-Retriever significantly outperforms state-of-the-art RAG methods, providing more coherent and contextually relevant responses to complex queries.

PaperID: 1273, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12442

Authors:Tao Zou, Chengfeng Wu, Tianxi Liao, Junchen Ye, Bowen Du

Affiliations: Beihang University, Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School

Title: Global-Lens Transformers: Adaptive Token Mixing for Dynamic Link Prediction

Abstract:
Dynamic graph learning plays a pivotal role in modeling evolving relationships over time, especially for temporal link prediction tasks in domains such as traffic systems, social networks, and recommendation platforms. While Transformerbased models have demonstrated strong performance by capturing long-range temporal dependencies, their reliance on self-attention results in quadratic complexity with respect to sequence length, limiting scalability on high-frequency or large-scale graphs. In this work, we revisit the necessity of self-attention in dynamic graph modeling. Inspired by recent findings that attribute the success of Transformers more to their architectural design than attention itself, we propose GLFormer, a novel attention-free Transformer-style framework for dynamic graphs. GLFormer introduces an adaptive token mixer that performs context-aware local aggregation based on interaction order and time intervals. To capture long-term dependencies, we further design a hierarchical aggregation module that expands the temporal receptive field by stacking local token mixers across layers. Experiments on six widely used dynamic graph benchmarks show that GLFormer achieves competitive or superior performance, which reveals that attention-free architectures can match or surpass Transformer baselines in dynamic graph settings with significantly improved efficiency.

PaperID: 1274, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09479

Authors:Niclas Boehmer, Lara Glessen, Jannik Peters

Affiliations: Hasso Plattner Institute, National University of Singapore

Title: Understanding the Impact of Proportionality in Approval-Based Multiwinner Elections

Abstract:
Despite extensive theoretical research on proportionality in approvalbased multiwinner voting, its impact on which committees and candidates can be selected in practice remains poorly understood. We address this gap by (i) analyzing the computational complexity of several natural problems related to the behavior of proportionality axioms, and (ii) conducting an extensive experimental study on both real-world and synthetic elections. Our findings reveal substantial variation in the restrictiveness of proportionality across instances, including previously unobserved high levels of restrictiveness in some real-world cases. We also introduce and evaluate new measures for quantifying a candidate’s importance for achieving proportional outcomes, which differ clearly from assessing candidate strength by approval score.

PaperID: 1275, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12083

Authors:Yanchang Fu, Shengda Liu, Pei Xu, Kaiqi Huang

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing China, National Key Laboratory of Cognition and Decision Intelligence for Complex Systems

Title: No-Regret Strategy Solving in Imperfect-Information Games via Pre-Trained Embedding

Abstract:
Highquality information set abstraction remains a core challenge in solving large-scale imperfect-information extensive-form games (IIEFGs)--such as no-limit Texas Hold’em--where the finite nature of spatial resources hinders solving strategies for the full game. State-of-the-art AI methods rely on pre-trained discrete clustering for abstraction, yet their hard classification irreversibly discards critical information: specifically, the quantifiable subtle differences between information sets--vital for strategy solving--thus compromising the quality of such solving. Inspired by the word embedding paradigm in natural language processing, this paper proposes the Embedding CFR algorithm, a novel approach for solving strategies in IIEFGs within an embedding space. The algorithm pre-trains and embeds the features of individual information sets into an interconnected low-dimensional continuous space, where the resulting vectors more precisely capture both the distinctions and connections between information sets. Embedding CFR introduces a strategy-solving process driven by regret accumulation and strategy updates in this embedding space, with supporting theoretical analysis verifying its ability to reduce cumulative regret. Experiments on poker show that with the same spatial overhead, Embedding CFR achieves significantly faster exploitability convergence compared to cluster-based abstraction algorithms, confirming its effectiveness. Furthermore, to our knowledge, it is the first algorithm in poker AI that pre-trains information set abstractions via low-dimensional embedding for strategy solving.

PaperID: 1276, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11023

Authors:Yaoxin Ge, Yao Zhang, Dengji Zhao

Affiliations: ShanghaiTech University, Kyushu University

Title: Fair Incentives for Early Arrival in 0-1 Cooperative Games

Abstract:
Incentives for early arrival (I4EA) was recently proposed for studying online cooperative games. In an online cooperative game, players arrive in an unknown order, and the value increase after each player arrived should be distributed immediately among all the arrived players. Although there is only one arriving order in the game, we also hope that the value distribution is equal to their Shapley value in expectation. To achieve these goals, the early solutions ignored the fairness in each single arriving order. More specifically, an important player may receive nothing in a game, which seems unfair in reality. To combat this, we propose refined fairness in this paper and design new solutions in 01 value games. Specifically, we compute the distance of the distribution in each order to the Shapley value and aim to minimize it. We propose a new mechanism called Egalitarian Value-Sharing (EVS) to do so. We also show that the mechanism can maximize the egalitarian welfare among all the players who made contributions.

PaperID: 1277, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09062

Authors:Zhendong Guo, Wenchao Bai, Jiahui Jin

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University

Title: Pricing Online LLM Services with Data-Calibrated Stackelberg Routing Game

Abstract:
The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has established LLM routing as a standard service delivery mechanism, where users select models based on cost, Quality of Service (QoS), among other things. However, optimal pricing in LLM routing platforms requires precise modeling for dynamic service markets, and solving this problem in real time at scale is computationally intractable. In this paper, we propose PriLLM, a novel practical and scalable solution for realtime dynamic pricing in competitive LLM routing. PriLLM models the service market as a Stackelberg game, where providers set prices and users select services based on multiple criteria. To capture real-world market dynamics, we incorporate both objective factors (eg cost, QoS) and subjective user preferences into the model. For scalability, we employ a deep aggregation network to learn provider abstraction that preserve user-side equilibrium behavior across pricing strategies. Moreover, PriLLM offers interpretability by explaining its pricing decisions. Empirical evaluation on real-world data shows that PriLLM achieves over 95% of the optimal profit while only requiring less than 5% of the optimal solution's computation time.

PaperID: 1278, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09882

Authors:Yaron Salman, Tamir Tassa, Omer Lev, Roie Zivan

Affiliations: Open University of Israel, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Title: Truth, Justice, and Secrecy: Cake Cutting Under Privacy Constraints

Abstract:
Cakecutting algorithms, which aim to fairly allocate a continuous resource based on individual agent preferences, have seen significant progress over the past two decades. Much of the research has concentrated on fairness, with comparatively less attention given to other important aspects. In 2010, Chen et al. introduced an algorithm that, in addition to ensuring fairness, was strategyproof---meaning agents had no incentive to misreport their valuations. However, even in the absence of strategic incentives to misreport, agents may still hesitate to reveal their true preferences due to privacy concerns (e.g., when allocating advertising time between firms, revealing preferences could inadvertently expose planned marketing strategies or product launch timelines). In this work, we extend the strategyproof algorithm of Chen et al. by introducing a privacy-preserving dimension. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first private cake-cutting protocol, and, in addition, this protocol is also envy-free and strategyproof. Our approach replaces the algorithm’s centralized computation with a novel adaptation of cryptographic techniques, enabling privacy without compromising fairness or strategyproofness. Thus, our protocol encourages agents to report their true preferences not only because they are not incentivized to lie, but also because they are protected from having their preferences exposed.

PaperID: 1279, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12897

Authors:Piotr Borycki, Magdalena Trędowicz, Szymon Janusz, Jacek Tabor, Przemysław Spurek, Arkadiusz Lewicki, Łukasz Struski

Affiliations: Jagiellonian University, Doctoral School of Exact and Natural Sciences, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Information Technology and Management, Faculty of Applied Computer Science, Rzeszów Prometheus MedTech.AI

Title: EPIC: Explanation of Pretrained Image Classification Networks via Prototypes

Abstract:
Explainable AI (XAI) methods generally fall into two categories. Posthoc approaches generate explanations for pre-trained models and are compatible with various neural network architectures. These methods often use feature importance visualizations, such as saliency maps, to indicate which input regions influenced the model’s prediction. Unfortunately, they typically offer a coarse understanding of the model’s decision-making process. In contrast, ante-hoc (inherently explainable) methods rely on specially designed model architectures trained from scratch. A notable subclass of these methods provides explanations through prototypes, representative patches extracted from the training data. However, prototype-based approaches require dedicated architectures, involve specialized training procedures, and perform well only on specific datasets. In this work, we propose EPIC (Explanation of Pretrained Image Classification), a novel approach that bridges the gap between these two paradigms. Like post-hoc methods, EPIC operates on pre-trained models without architectural modifications. Simultaneously, it delivers intuitive, prototype-based explanations inspired by ante-hoc techniques. To the best of our knowledge, EPIC is the first post-hoc method capable of fully replicating the core explanatory power of inherently interpretable models. We evaluate EPIC on benchmark datasets commonly used in prototype-based explanations, such as CUB-200-2011 and Stanford Cars, alongside large-scale datasets like ImageNet, typically employed by post-hoc methods. EPIC uses prototypes to explain model decisions, providing a flexible and easy-to-understand tool for creating clear, high-quality explanations.

PaperID: 1280, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10697

Authors:De Hu, Junsheng Hu, Cuicui Jiang

Affiliations: Inner Mongolia University

Title: Graph Neural Field with Spatial-Correlation Augmentation for HRTF Personalization

Abstract:
To achieve immersive spatial audio rendering on VR/AR devices, highquality Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) are essential. In general, HRTFs are subject-dependent and position-dependent, and their measurement is time-consuming and tedious. To address this challenge, we propose the Graph Neural Field with Spatial-Correlation Augmentation (GraphNF-SCA) for HRTF personalization, which can be used to generate individual HRTFs for unseen subjects. The GraphNF-SCA consists of three key components: an HRTF personalization (HRTF-P) module, an HRTF upsampling (HRTF-U) module, and a fine-tuning stage. In the HRTF-P module, we predict HRTFs of the target subject via the Graph Neural Network (GNN) with an encoder-decoder architecture, where the encoder extracts universal features and the decoder incorporates the target-relevant features and produces individualized HRTFs. The HRTF-U module employs another GNN to model spatial correlations across HRTFs. This module is fine-tuned using the output of the HRTF-P module, thereby enhancing the spatial consistency of the predicted HRTFs. Unlike existing methods that estimate individual HRTFs position-by-position without spatial correlation modeling, the GraphNF-SCA effectively leverages inherent spatial correlations across HRTFs to enhance the performance of HRTF personalization. Experimental results demonstrate that the GraphNF-SCA achieves state-of-the-art results.

PaperID: 1281, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12573

Authors:Hyeonji Kim, Sujeong Oh, Sanghack Lee

Affiliations: Seoul National University

Title: Mitigating Length Bias in RLHF Through a Causal Lens

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is widely used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, RLHFtrained reward models often exhibit length bias—a systematic tendency to favor longer responses by conflating verbosity with quality. We propose a causal framework for analyzing and mitigating length bias in RLHF reward modeling. Central to our approach is a counterfactual data augmentation method that generates response pairs designed to isolate content quality from verbosity. These counterfactual examples are then used to train the reward model, enabling it to assess responses based on content quality independently of verbosity. Specifically, we construct (1) length-divergent pairs with similar content and (2) content-divergent pairs of similar length. Empirical evaluations show that our method reduces length bias in reward assignment and leads to more concise, content-focused outputs from the policy model. These findings demonstrate that the proposed approach effectively reduces length bias and improves the robustness and content sensitivity of reward modeling in RLHF pipelines.

PaperID: 1282, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08590

Authors:Yuxiao Wang, Wolin Liang, Yu Lei, Weiying Xue, Nan Zhuang, Qi Liu

Affiliations: South China University of Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University, Zhejiang University

Title: QueryCraft: Transformer-Guided Query Initialization for Enhanced Human-Object Interaction Detection

Abstract:
HumanObject Interaction (HOI) detection aims to localize human-object pairs and recognize their interactions in images. Although DETR-based methods have recently emerged as the mainstream framework for HOI detection, they still suffer from a key limitation: Randomly initialized queries lack explicit semantics, leading to suboptimal detection performance. To address this challenge, we propose QueryCraft, a novel plug-and-play HOI detection framework that incorporates semantic priors and guided feature learning through transformer-based query initialization. Central to our approach is ACTOR (Action-aware Cross-modal TransfORmer), a cross-modal Transformer encoder that jointly attends to visual regions and textual prompts to extract action-relevant features. Rather than merely aligning modalities, ACTOR leverages language-guided attention to infer interaction semantics and produce semantically meaningful query representations. To further enhance object-level query quality, we introduce a Perceptual Distilled Query Decoder (PDQD), which distills object category awareness from a pre-trained detector to serve as object query initiation. This dual-branch query initialization enables the model to generate more interpretable and effective queries for HOI detection. Extensive experiments on HICO-Det and V-COCO benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and strong generalization.

PaperID: 1283, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14975

Authors:Hongbin Xu, Chaohui Yu, Feng Xiao, Jiazheng Xing, Hai Ci, Weitao Chen, Fan Wang, Ming Li

Affiliations: South China University of Technology, Alibaba Group, National University of Singapore, Fudan University, Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy (SZ)

Title: CyC3D: Fine-grained Controllable 3D Generation via Cycle Consistency Regularization

Abstract:
Despite the remarkable progress of 3D generation, achieving controllability, i.e., ensuring consistency between generated 3D content and input conditions like edge and depth, remains a significant challenge. Existing methods often struggle to maintain accurate alignment, leading to noticeable discrepancies. To address this issue, we propose CyC3D, a new framework that enhances controllable 3D generation by explicitly encouraging cyclic consistency between the secondorder 3D content, generated based on extracted signals from the first-order generation, and its original input controls. Specifically, we employ an efficient feed-forward backbone that can generate a 3D object from an input condition and a text prompt. Given an initial viewpoint and a control signal, a novel view is rendered from the generated 3D content, from which the extracted condition is used to regenerate the 3D content. This re-generated output is then rendered back to the initial viewpoint, followed by another round of control signal extraction, forming a cyclic process with two consistency constraints. View consistency ensures coherence between the two generated 3D objects, measured by semantic similarity to accommodate generative diversity. Condition consistency aligns the final extracted signal with the original input control, preserving structural or geometric details throughout the process. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks demonstrate that CyC3D significantly improves controllability, especially for fine-grained details, outperforming existing methods across various conditions (e.g., +14.17% PSNR for edge, +6.26% PSNR for sketch).

PaperID: 1284, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.01948

Authors:Zhihao Gu, Ming Yang, Difan Zou, Dong Xu

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, School of Computing and Data Science, The University of Hong Kong, School of Software, Beihang University

Title: Learning Diffusion Policy from Primitive Skills for Robot Manipulation

Abstract:
Diffusion policies have recently shown great promise for generating actions in robotic manipulation. However, existing approaches often rely on global instructions to produce shortterm control signals, which can result in misalignment in action generation. We conjecture that the primitive skills, referred to as fine-grained, short-horizon manipulations, such as "move up" and "open the gripper", provide a more intuitive and effective interface for robot learning. To bridge this gap, we propose SDP, a skill-conditioned diffusion policy that integrates interpretable skill learning with conditional action planning. SDP abstracts eight reusable primitive skills across tasks and employs a vision-language model to extract discrete representations from visual observations and language instructions. Based on the representations, a lightweight router network is designed to assign a desired primitive skill for each state, which helps construct a single-skill policy to generate skill-aligned actions. By decomposing complex tasks into a sequence of primitive skills and selecting a single-skill policy, the proposed SDP ensures skill-consistent behavior across diverse tasks. Extensive experiments on two challenging simulation benchmarks and real-world robot deployments demonstrate that SDP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, providing a new paradigm for skill-based robot learning with diffusion policies.

PaperID: 1285, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19816

Authors:Hao Li, Shuai Yang, Yilun Chen, Xinyi Chen, Xiaoda Yang, Yang Tian, Hanqing Wang, Tai Wang, Dahua Lin, Feng Zhao, Jiangmiao Pang

Affiliations: Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Zhejiang University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, University of Science and Technology of China

Title: Towards Efficient and Robust Manipulation via Multi-Frame Vision-Language-Action Modeling

Abstract:
Recent visionlanguage-action (VLA) models built on pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in robotic manipulation. However, these models remain constrained by the single-frame image paradigm and fail to fully leverage the temporal information offered by multi-frame histories, as directly feeding multiple frames into VLM backbones incurs substantial computational overhead and inference latency. We propose CronusVLA, a unified framework that extends single-frame VLA models to the multi-frame paradigm. CronusVLA follows a two-stage process: (1) Single-frame pretraining on large-scale embodied datasets with autoregressive prediction of action tokens, establishing an effective embodied vision-language foundation; (2) Multi-frame post-training, which adapts the prediction of the vision-language backbone from discrete tokens to learnable features, and aggregates historical information via feature chunking. CronusVLA effectively addresses the existing challenges of multi-frame modeling while enhancing performance. To evaluate the robustness under temporal and spatial disturbances, we introduce SimplerEnv-OR, a novel benchmark featuring 24 types of observational disturbances and 120 severity levels. Experiments across three embodiments in simulated and real-world environments demonstrate that CronusVLA achieves leading performance and superior robustness, with a 70.9% success rate on SimplerEnv, a 26.8% improvement over OpenVLA on LIBERO, and the highest robustness score on SimplerEnv-OR, showing the promise of efficient multi-frame adaptation for real-world VLA deployment.

PaperID: 1286, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08328

Authors:Qiwei Liang, Boyang Cai, Rongyi He, Hui Li, Tao Teng, Haihan Duan, Changxin Huang, Runhao Zeng

Affiliations: Shenzhen University, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen MSU-BIT University

Title: Whole-Body Coordination for Dynamic Object Grasping with Legged Manipulators

Abstract:
Quadrupedal robots with manipulators offer strong mobility and adaptability for grasping in unstructured, dynamic environments through coordinated wholebody control. However, existing research has predominantly focused on static-object grasping, neglecting the challenges posed by dynamic targets and thus limiting applicability in dynamic scenarios such as logistics sorting and human–robot collaboration. To address this, we introduce DQ-Bench, a new benchmark that systematically evaluates dynamic grasping across varying object motions, velocities, heights, object types, and terrain complexities, along with comprehensive evaluation metrics. Building upon this benchmark, we propose DQ-Net, a compact teacher–student framework designed to infer grasp configurations from limited perceptual cues. During training, the teacher network leverages privileged information to holistically model both the static geometric properties and dynamic motion characteristics of the target, and integrates a grasp fusion module to deliver robust guidance for motion planning. Concurrently, we design a lightweight student network that performs dual-viewpoint temporal modeling using only the target mask, depth map, and proprioceptive state, enabling closed-loop action outputs without reliance on privileged data. Extensive experiments on DQ-Bench demonstrate that DQ-Net achieves robust dynamic objects grasping across multiple task settings, substantially outperforming baseline methods in both success rate and responsiveness. We will release our codebase and benchmark publicly.

PaperID: 1287, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12310

Authors:Shouyi Lu, Huanyu Zhou, Guirong Zhuo, Xiao Tang

Affiliations: Tongji University

Title: DNOI-4DRO: Deep 4D Radar Odometry with Differentiable Neural-Optimization Iterations

Abstract:
A novel learningoptimization-combined 4D radar odometry model, named DNOI-4DRO, is proposed in this paper. The proposed model seamlessly integrates traditional geometric optimization with end-to-end neural network training, leveraging an innovative differentiable neural-optimization iteration operator. In this framework, point-wise motion flow is first estimated using a neural network, followed by the construction of a cost function based on the relationship between point motion and pose in 3D space. The radar pose is then refined using Gauss-Newton updates. Additionally, we design a dual-stream 4D radar backbone that integrates multi-scale geometric features and clustering-based class-aware features to enhance the representation of sparse 4D radar point clouds. Extensive experiments on the VoD and Snail-Radar datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our model, which outperforms recent classical and learning-based approaches. Notably, our method even achieves results comparable to A-LOAM with mapping optimization using LiDAR point clouds as input.

PaperID: 1288, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19509

Authors:Kailin Lyu, Long Xiao, Jianing Zeng, Junhao Dong, Xuexin Liu, Zhuojun Zou, Haoyue Yang, Lin Shu, Jie Hao

Affiliations: Institute of automation, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Chinese academy of science

Title: TouchFormer: A Robust Transformer-based Framework for Multimodal Material Perception

Abstract:
Traditional visionbased material perception methods often experience substantial performance degradation under visually impaired conditions, thereby motivating the shift toward non-visual multimodal material perception. Despite this, existing approaches frequently perform naive fusion of multimodal inputs, overlooking key challenges such as modality-specific noise, missing modalities common in real-world scenarios, and the dynamically varying importance of each modality depending on the task. These limitations lead to suboptimal performance across several benchmark tasks. In this paper, we propose a robust multimodal fusion framework, TouchFormer. Specifically, we employ a Modality-Adaptive Gating (MAG) mechanism and intra- and inter-modality attention mechanisms to adaptively integrate cross-modal features, enhancing model robustness. Additionally, we introduce a Cross-Instance Embedding Regularization(CER) strategy, which significantly improves classification accuracy in fine-grained subcategory material recognition tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to existing non-visual methods, the proposed TouchFormer framework achieves classification accuracy improvements of 2.48% and 6.83% on SSMC and USMC tasks, respectively. Furthermore, real-world robotic experiments validate TouchFormer's effectiveness in enabling robots to better perceive and interpret their environment, paving the way for its deployment in safety-critical applications such as emergency response and industrial automation.

PaperID: 1289, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11043

Authors:Asen Nachkov, Jan-Nico Zaech, Danda Pani Paudel, Xi Wang, Luc Van Gool

Affiliations: Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, ETH Zurich

Title: Autonomous Vehicle Path Planning by Searching with Differentiable Simulation

Abstract:
Planning allows an agent to safely refine its actions before executing them in the real world. In autonomous driving, this is crucial to avoid collisions and navigate in complex, dense traffic scenarios. One way to plan is to search for the best action sequence. However, this is challenging when all necessary components – policy, nextstate predictor, and critic – have to be learned. Here we propose Differentiable Simulation for Search (DSS), a framework that leverages the differentiable simulator Waymax as both a next state predictor and a critic. It relies on the simulator’s hardcoded dynamics, making state predictions highly accurate, while utilizing the simulator’s differentiability to effectively search across action sequences. Our DSS agent optimizes its actions using gradient descent over imagined future trajectories. We show experimentally that DSS – the combination of planning gradients and stochastic search – significantly improves tracking and path planning accuracy compared to sequence prediction, imitation learning, model-free RL, and other planning methods.

PaperID: 1290, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11125

Authors:Enjun Du, Siyi Liu, Yongqi Zhang

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Title: GraphOracle: Efficient Fully-Inductive Knowledge Graph Reasoning via Relation-Dependency Graphs

Abstract:
Knowledge graph reasoning in the fullyinductive setting—where both entities and relations at test time are unseen during training—remains an open challenge. In this work, we introduce GraphOracle, a novel framework that achieves robust fully-inductive reasoning by transforming each knowledge graph into a Relation-Dependency Graph (RDG). The RDG encodes directed precedence links between relations, capturing essential compositional patterns while drastically reducing graph density. Conditioned on a query relation, a multi-head attention mechanism propagates information over the RDG to produce context-aware relation embeddings. These embeddings then guide a second GNN to perform inductive message passing over the original knowledge graph, enabling prediction on entirely new entities and relations. Comprehensive experiments on 60 benchmarks demonstrate that GraphOracle outperforms prior methods by up to 25% in fully-inductive and 28% in cross-domain scenarios. Our analysis further confirms that the compact RDG structure and attention-based propagation are key to efficient and accurate generalization

PaperID: 1291, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03718

Authors:Robert Ganian, Hung P. Hoang, Simon Wietheger

Affiliations: TU Wien

Title: Matrix Editing Meets Fair Clustering: Parameterized Algorithms and Complexity

Abstract:
We study the computational problem of computing a fair means clustering of discrete vectors, which admits an equivalent formulation as editing a colored matrix into one with few distinct colorbalanced rows by changing at most k values. While NP-hard in both the fairness-oblivious and the fair settings, the problem is well-known to admit a fixed-parameter algorithm in the former "vanilla" setting. As our first contribution, we exclude an analogous algorithm even for highly restricted fair means clustering instances. We then proceed to obtain a full complexity landscape of the problem, and establish tractability results which capture three means of circumventing our obtained lower bound: placing additional constraints on the problem instances, fixed-parameter approximation, or using an alternative parameterization targeting tree-like matrices.

PaperID: 1292, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02020

Authors:Jianlei Chang, Ruofeng Mei, Wei Ke, Xiangyu Xu

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University

Title: EfficientFlow: Efficient Equivariant Flow Policy Learning for Embodied AI

Abstract:
Generative modeling has recently shown remarkable promise for visuomotor policy learning, enabling flexible and expressive control across diverse embodied AI tasks. However, existing generative policies often struggle with data inefficiency, requiring largescale demonstrations, and sampling inefficiency, incurring slow action generation during inference. We introduce EfficientFlow, a unified framework for efficient embodied AI with flow-based policy learning. To enhance data efficiency, we bring equivariance into flow matching. We theoretically prove that when using an isotropic Gaussian prior and an equivariant velocity prediction network, the resulting action distribution remains equivariant, leading to improved generalization and substantially reduced data demands. To accelerate sampling, we propose a novel acceleration regularization strategy. As direct computation of acceleration is intractable for marginal flow trajectories, we derive a novel surrogate loss that enables stable and scalable training using only conditional trajectories. Across a wide range of robotic manipulation benchmarks, the proposed algorithm achieves competitive or superior performance under limited data while offering dramatically faster inference. These results highlight EfficientFlow as a powerful and efficient paradigm for high-performance embodied AI.

PaperID: 1293, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09768

Authors:Rik Adriaensen, Lucas Van Praet, Jessa Bekker, Robin Manhaeve, Pieter Delobelle, Maarten Buyl

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science; Leuven.AI, KU Leuven, Belgium Aleph Alpha GmbH, Ghent University

Title: ProbLog4Fairness: A Neurosymbolic Approach to Modeling and Mitigating Bias

Abstract:
Operationalizing definitions of fairness is difficult in practice, as multiple definitions can be incompatible while each being arguably desirable. Instead, it may be easier to directly describe algorithmic bias through adhoc assumptions specific to a particular real-world task, e.g., based on background information on systemic biases in its context. Such assumptions can, in turn, be used to mitigate this bias during training. Yet, a framework for incorporating such assumptions that is simultaneously principled, flexible, and interpretable is currently lacking. Our approach is to formalize bias assumptions as programs in ProbLog, a probabilistic logic programming language that allows for the description of probabilistic causal relationships through logic. Neurosymbolic extensions of ProbLog then allow for easy integration of these assumptions in a neural network's training process. We propose a set of templates to express different types of bias and show the versatility of our approach on synthetic tabular datasets with known biases. Using estimates of the bias distortions present, we also succeed in mitigating algorithmic bias in real-world tabular and image data. We conclude that ProbLog4Fairness outperforms baselines due to its ability to flexibly model the relevant bias assumptions, where other methods typically uphold a fixed bias type or notion of fairness.

PaperID: 1294, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14451

Authors:Md Atik Ahamed, Qiang Ye, Qiang Cheng

Affiliations: University of Kentucky

Title: RefiDiff: Progressive Refinement Diffusion for Efficient Missing Data Imputation

Abstract:
Missing values in highdimensional, mixed-type datasets pose significant challenges for data imputation, particularly under Missing Not At Random (MNAR) mechanisms. Existing methods struggle to integrate local and global data characteristics, limiting performance in MNAR and high-dimensional settings. We propose an innovative framework, RefiDiff, combining local machine learning predictions with a novel Mamba-based denoising network efficiently capturing long-range dependencies among features and samples with low computational complexity. RefiDiff bridges the predictive and generative paradigms of imputation, leveraging pre-refinement for initial warm-up imputations and post-refinement to polish results, enhancing stability and accuracy. By encoding mixed-type data into unified tokens, RefiDiff enables robust imputation without architectural or hyperparameter tuning. RefiDiff outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods across missing-value settings, demonstrating strong performance in MNAR settings and superior out-of-sample generalization. Extensive evaluations on nine real-world datasets demonstrate its robustness, scalability, and effectiveness in handling complex missingness patterns.

PaperID: 1295, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04128

Authors:Ainhize Barrainkua, Giovanni De Toni, Jose A. Lozano, Novi Quadrianto

Affiliations: Basque Center for Applied Mathematics, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Spain University of the Basque Country, Donostia - San Sebastian, Spain Predictive Analytics Lab, University of Sussex

Title: Revisiting (Un)Fairness in Recourse by Minimizing Worst-Case Social Burden

Abstract:
Machine learning based predictions are increasingly used in sensitive decisionmaking applications that directly affect our lives. This has led to extensive research into ensuring the fairness of classifiers. Beyond just fair classification, emerging legislation now mandates that when a classifier delivers a negative decision, it must also offer actionable steps an individual can take to reverse that outcome. This concept is known as algorithmic recourse. Nevertheless, many researchers have expressed concerns about the fairness guarantees within the recourse process itself. In this work, we provide a theoretical characterization of unfairness in algorithmic recourse, formally linking fairness guarantees in recourse and classification, and highlighting limitations of the standard equal cost paradigm. We then introduce a novel fairness framework based on social burden, along with a practical algorithm (MISOB), broadly applicable under real-world conditions. Empirical results on real-world datasets show that MISOB reduces the social burden across all groups without compromising overall classifier accuracy.

PaperID: 1296, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.13850

Authors:Kuluhan Binici, Shivam Aggarwal, Cihan Acar, Nam Trung Pham, Karianto Leman, Gim Hee Lee, Tulika Mitra

Affiliations: National University of Singapore, Institute for Infocomm Research, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)

Title: Condensed Data Expansion Using Model Inversion for Knowledge Distillation

Abstract:
Condensed datasets offer a compact representation of larger datasets, but training models directly on them or using them to enhance model performance through knowledge distillation (KD) can result in suboptimal outcomes due to limited information. To address this, we propose a method that expands condensed datasets using model inversion, a technique for generating synthetic data based on the impressions of a pretrained model on its training data. This approach is particularly well-suited for KD scenarios, as the teacher model is already pre-trained and retains knowledge of the original training data. By creating synthetic data that complements the condensed samples, we enrich the training set and better approximate the underlying data distribution, leading to improvements in student model accuracy during knowledge distillation. Our method demonstrates significant gains in KD accuracy compared to using condensed datasets alone and outperforms standard model inversion-based KD methods by up to 11.4% across various datasets and model architectures. Importantly, it remains effective even when using as few as one condensed sample per class, and can also enhance performance in few-shot scenarios where only limited real data samples are available.

PaperID: 1297, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08136

Authors:Returaj Burnwal, Nirav Pravinbhai Bhatt, Balaraman Ravindran

Affiliations: Indian Institute of Technology Madras

Title: SafeMIL: Learning Offline Safe Imitation Policy from Non-Preferred Trajectories

Abstract:
In this work, we study the problem of offline safe imitation learning (IL). In many realworld settings, online interactions can be risky, and accurately specifying the reward and the safety cost information at each timestep can be difficult. However, it is often feasible to collect trajectories reflecting undesirable or risky behavior, implicitly conveying the behavior the agent should avoid. We refer to these trajectories as non-preferred trajectories. Unlike standard IL, which aims to mimic demonstrations, our agent must also learn to avoid risky behavior using non-preferred trajectories. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, SafeMIL, to learn a parameterized cost that predicts if the state-action pair is risky via Multiple Instance Learning. The learned cost is then used to avoid non-preferred behaviors, resulting in a policy that prioritizes safety. We empirically demonstrate that our approach can learn a safer policy that satisfies cost constraints without degrading the reward performance, thereby outperforming several baselines.

PaperID: 1298, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11539

Authors:Diptarka Chakraborty, Kushagra Chatterjee, Debarati Das, Tien-Long Nguyen

Affiliations: National University of Singapore, Pennsylvania State University

Title: Generalizing Fair Clustering to Multiple Groups: Algorithms and Applications

Abstract:
Clustering is a fundamental task in machine learning and data analysis, but it frequently fails to provide fair representation for various marginalized communities defined by multiple protected attributes a shortcoming often caused by biases in the training data. As a result, there is a growing need to enhance the fairness of clustering outcomes, ideally by making minimal modifications, possibly as a post-processing step after conventional clustering. A recent work initiated the study of closest fair clustering, though in a restricted scenario where data points belong to only two groups. In practice, however, data points are typically characterized by many groups, reflecting diverse protected attributes such as age, ethnicity, gender, etc. In this work, we generalize the study of the closest fair clustering problem to settings with an arbitrary number (more than two) of groups. We begin by showing that the problem is NP-hard even when all groups are of equal size -- a stark contrast with the two-group case, for which an exact algorithm exists. Next, we propose near-linear time approximation algorithms that efficiently handle arbitrary-sized multiple groups. Leveraging our closest fair clustering algorithms, we further achieve improved approximation guarantees for the fair correlation clustering problem, advancing the state-of-the-art results. Additionally, we are the first to provide approximation algorithms for the fair consensus clustering problem involving multiple (more than two) groups.

PaperID: 1299, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07234

Authors:Biao Chen, Lin Zuo, Mengmeng Jing, Kunbin He, Yuchen Wang

Affiliations: School of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Dropout Prompt Learning: Towards Robust and Adaptive Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
Dropout is a widely used regularization technique which improves the generalization ability of a model by randomly dropping neurons. In light of this, we propose Dropout Prompt Learning, which aims for applying dropout to improve the robustness of the visionlanguage models. Different from the vanilla dropout, we apply dropout on the tokens of the textual and visual branches, where we evaluate the token significance considering both intra-modal context and inter-modal alignment, enabling flexible dropout probabilities for each token. Moreover, to maintain semantic alignment for general knowledge transfer while encouraging the diverse representations that dropout introduces, we further propose residual entropy regularization. Experiments on 11 benchmarks show our method's effectiveness in challenging scenarios like low-shot learning, long-tail classification, and out-of-distribution generalization. Notably, our method surpasses regularization-based methods including KgCoOp by 5.10% and PromptSRC by 2.13% in performance on base-to-novel generalization.

PaperID: 1300, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00723

Authors:Junzhe Chen, Tianshu Zhang, Shiyu Huang, Yuwei Niu, Chao Sun, Rongzhou Zhang, Guanyu Zhou, Lijie Wen

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Chongqing University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Title: OmniDPO: A Preference Optimization Framework to Address Omni-Modal Hallucination

Abstract:
Recently, Omnimodal large language models (OLLMs) have sparked a new wave of research, achieving impressive results in tasks such as audio-video understanding and real-time environment perception. However, hallucination issues still persist. Similar to the bimodal setting, the priors from the text modality tend to dominate, leading OLLMs to rely more heavily on textual cues while neglecting visual and audio information. In addition, fully multimodal scenarios introduce new challenges. Most existing models align visual or auditory modalities with text independently during training, while ignoring the intrinsic correlations between video and its corresponding audio. This oversight results in hallucinations when reasoning requires interpreting hidden audio cues embedded in video content. To address these challenges, we propose OmniDPO, a preference-alignment framework designed to mitigate hallucinations in OLLMs. Specifically, OmniDPO incorporates two strategies: (1) constructing text-preference sample pairs to enhance the model’s understanding of audio-video interactions; and (2) constructing multimodal-preference sample pairs to strengthen the model’s attention to visual and auditory information. By tackling both challenges, OmniDPO effectively improves multimodal grounding and reduces hallucination. Experiments conducted on two OLLMs demonstrate that OmniDPO not only effectively mitigates multimodal hallucinations but also significantly enhances the models' reasoning capabilities across modalities.

PaperID: 1301, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15266

Authors:Liangyu Chen, Yichen Xu, Jianzhe Ma, Yuqi Liu, Donglu Yang, Liang Zhang, Zihao Yue, Wenxuan Wang, Qin Jin

Affiliations: Renmin University of China, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Independent Researcher

Title: ChartEditor: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Robust Chart Editing

Abstract:
Chart editing reduces manual effort in visualization design. Typical benchmarks assume access to complete chart code, which is unrealistic for realworld applications. In this paper, we present ChartEditVista, a comprehensive benchmark consisting of 7,964 samples spanning 31 chart categories. It encompasses diverse editing instruction types and covers nearly all editable chart elements. The inputs in ChartEditVista include only the original chart image and natural language editing instructions, without the original chart codes. ChartEditVista is generated through a fully automated pipeline that produces, edits, and verifies charts, ensuring high-quality data. Besides, we introduce two novel fine-grained, rule-based evaluation metrics: the layout metric, which evaluates the position, size; and color of graphical components, and the text metric, which jointly assesses textual content and font styling. Building on top of ChartEditVista, we present ChartEditor, a model trained using a reinforcement learning framework that incorporates a novel rendering reward to simultaneously enforce code executability and visual fidelity. Through extensive experiments and human evaluations, we demonstrate that ChartEditVista provides a robust evaluation, while ChartEditor consistently outperforms models with similar-scale and larger-scale on chart editing tasks.

PaperID: 1302, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19472

Authors:Ruogu Ding, Xin Ning, Ulf Schlichtmann, Weikang Qian

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Technische Universität München

Title: PrefixGPT: Prefix Adder Optimization by a Generative Pre-trained Transformer

Abstract:
Prefix adders are widely used in computeintensive applications for their high speed. However, designing optimized prefix adders is challenging due to strict design rules and an exponentially large design space. We introduce PrefixGPT, a generative pre-trained Transformer (GPT) that directly generates optimized prefix adders from scratch. Our approach represents an adder's topology as a two-dimensional coordinate sequence and applies a legality mask during generation, ensuring every design is valid by construction. PrefixGPT features a customized decoder-only Transformer architecture. The model is first pre-trained on a corpus of randomly synthesized valid prefix adders to learn design rules and then fine-tuned to navigate the design space for optimized design quality. Compared with existing works, PrefixGPT not only finds a new optimal design with a 7.7% improved area-delay product (ADP) but exhibits superior exploration quality, lowering the average ADP by up to 79.1%. This demonstrates the potential of GPT-style models to first master complex hardware design principles and then apply them for more efficient design optimization.

PaperID: 1303, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13561

Authors:Shihao Dong, Yue Liu, Xiaotong Zhou, Yuhui Zheng, Huiying Xu, Xinzhong Zhu

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, National University of Singapore, Qinghai Normal University, Zhejiang Normal University

Title: RAC-DMVC: Reliability-Aware Contrastive Deep Multi-View Clustering Under Multi-Source Noise

Abstract:
Multiview clustering (MVC), which aims to separate the multi-view data into distinct clusters in an unsupervised manner, is a fundamental yet challenging task. To enhance its applicability in real-world scenarios, this paper addresses a more challenging task: MVC under multi-source noises, including missing noise and observation noise. To this end, we propose a novel framework, Reliability-Aware Contrastive Deep Multi-View Clustering (RAC-DMVC), which constructs a reliability graph to guide robust representation learning under noisy environments. Specifically, to address observation noise, we introduce a cross-view reconstruction to enhances robustness at the data level, and a reliability-aware noise contrastive learning to mitigates bias in positive and negative pairs selection caused by noisy representations. To handle missing noise, we design a dual-attention imputation to capture shared information across views while preserving view-specific features. In addition, a self-supervised cluster distillation module further refines the learned representations and improves the clustering performance. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that RAC-DMVC outperforms SOTA methods on multiple evaluation metrics and maintains excellent performance under varying ratios of noise.

PaperID: 1304, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.06319

Authors:Yanhao Dong, Yubo Miao, Weinan Li, Xiao Zheng, Chao Wang, Jiesheng Wu, Feng Lyu

Affiliations: Alibaba Cloud, Central South University

Title: Accelerating LLM Inference Throughput via Asynchronous KV Cache Prefetching

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit pronounced memorybound characteristics during inference due to High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) bandwidth constraints. In this paper, we propose an L2 Cache-oriented asynchronous KV Cache prefetching method to break through the memory bandwidth bottleneck in LLM inference through computation-load overlap. By strategically scheduling idle memory bandwidth during active computation windows, our method proactively prefetches required KV Cache into GPU L2 cache, enabling high-speed L2 cache hits for subsequent accesses and effectively hiding HBM access latency within computational cycles. Extensive experiments on NVIDIA H20 GPUs demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 2.15× improvement in attention kernel efficiency and up to 1.97× end-to-end throughput enhancement, surpassing state-of-the-art baseline FlashAttention-3. Notably, our solution maintains orthogonality to existing optimization techniques and can be integrated with current inference frameworks, providing a scalable latency-hiding solution for next-generation LLM inference engines.

PaperID: 1305, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09051

Authors:Yiming Du, Ziyu Wang, Jian Li, Rui Ning, Lusi Li

Affiliations: Old Dominion University

Title: Deep Incomplete Multi-View Clustering via Hierarchical Imputation and Alignment

Abstract:
Incomplete multiview clustering (IMVC) aims to discover shared cluster structures from multi-view data with partial observations. The core challenges lie in accurately imputing missing views without introducing bias, while maintaining semantic consistency across views and compactness within clusters. To address these challenges, we propose DIMVC-HIA, a novel deep IMVC framework that integrates hierarchical imputation and alignment with four key components: (1) view-specific autoencoders for latent feature extraction, coupled with a view-shared clustering predictor to produce soft cluster assignments; (2) a hierarchical imputation module that first estimates missing cluster assignments based on cross-view contrastive similarity, and then reconstructs missing features using intra-view, intra-cluster statistics; (3) an energy-based semantic alignment module, which promotes intra-cluster compactness by minimizing energy variance around low-energy cluster anchors; and (4) a contrastive assignment alignment module, which enhances cross-view consistency and encourages confident, well-separated cluster predictions. Experiments on benchmarks demonstrate that our framework achieves superior performance under varying levels of missingness.

PaperID: 1306, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13760

Authors:Xiao Fan, Jingyan Jiang, Zhaoru Chen, Fanding Huang, Xiao Chen, Qinting Jiang, Bowen Zhang, Xing Tang, Zhi Wang

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, Tongji University, Tsinghua University, School of Artificial Intelligence, Shenzhen Technology University, Shenzhen International Graduate School

Title: MoETTA: Test-Time Adaptation Under Mixed Distribution Shifts with MoE-LayerNorm

Abstract:
Testtime adaptation (TTA) has proven effective in mitigating performance drops under single-domain distribution shifts by updating model parameters during inference. However, real-world deployments often involve mixed distribution shifts---where test samples are affected by diverse and potentially conflicting domain factors---posing significant challenges even for state-of-the-art TTA methods. A key limitation in existing approaches is their reliance on a unified adaptation path, which fails to account for the fact that optimal gradient directions can vary significantly across different domains. Moreover, current benchmarks focus only on synthetic or homogeneous shifts, failing to capture the complexity of real-world heterogeneous mixed distribution shifts. To address this, we propose MoETTA, a novel entropy-based TTA framework that integrates the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. Rather than enforcing a single parameter update rule for all test samples, MoETTA introduces a set of structurally decoupled experts, enabling specialization along diverse gradient directions. This design allows the model to better accommodate heterogeneous shifts through flexible and disentangled parameter updates. To simulate realistic deployment conditions, we introduce two new benchmarks: potpourri and potpourri+. While classical settings focus solely on synthetic corruptions (i.e., ImageNet-C), potpourri encompasses a broader range of domain shifts—including natural, artistic, and adversarial distortions—capturing more realistic deployment challenges. On top of that, potpourri+ further includes source-domain samples to evaluate robustness against catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments across three mixed distribution shifts settings show that MoETTA consistently outperforms strong baselines, establishing new state-of-the-art performance and highlighting the benefit of modeling multiple adaptation directions via expert-level diversity.

PaperID: 1307, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08080

Authors:Ziyu Fan, Zhijian Huang, Yahan Li, Xiaowen Hu, Siyuan Shen, Yunliang Wang, Zeyu Zhong, Shuhong Liu, Shuning Yang, Shangqian Wu, Min Wu, Lei Deng

Affiliations: Central South University, Xinjiang University, Institute for Infocomm Research A*STAR

Title: Hierarchical Structure-Property Alignment for Data-Efficient Molecular Generation and Editing

Abstract:
Propertyconstrained molecular generation and editing are crucial in AI-driven drug discovery but remain hindered by two factors: (i) capturing the complex relationships between molecular structures and multiple properties remains challenging, and (ii) the narrow coverage and incomplete annotations of molecular properties weaken the effectiveness of property-based models. To tackle these limitations, we propose HSPAG, a data-efficient framework featuring hierarchical structure–property alignment. By treating SMILES and molecular properties as complementary modalities, the model learns their relationships at atom, substructure, and whole-molecule levels. Moreover, we select representative samples through scaffold clustering and hard samples via an auxiliary variational auto-encoder (VAE), substantially reducing the required pre-training data. In addition, we incorporate a property relevance-aware masking mechanism and diversified perturbation strategies to enhance generation quality under sparse annotations. Experiments demonstrate that HSPAG captures fine-grained structure–property relationships and supports controllable generation under multiple property constraints. Two real-world case studies further validate the editing capabilities of HSPAG.

PaperID: 1308, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06728

Authors:Mogens Henrik From, Jacob Nielsen, Lukas Galke, Peter Schneider-Kamp

Affiliations: University of Southern Denmark - SDU

Title: DeToNATION: Decoupled Torch Network-Aware Training on Interlinked Online Nodes

Abstract:
Training large neural network models requires extensive computational resources, often distributed across several nodes and accelerators. Recent findings suggest that it may be sufficient to only exchange the fast moving components of the gradients, while accumulating momentum locally (Decoupled Momentum, or DeMo). However, DeMo assumes that models fit on a single accelerator. We relax this assumption and introduce FlexDeMo, whereby nodes fully shard model parameters locally between different accelerators, while internode communication is reduced by synchronizing only fast-moving components instead of the full gradients -- resulting in a hybrid sharded data parallel training strategy. We further introduce a framework, denoted as DeToNATION, that generalizes DeMo, FlexDeMo, and other popular distributed training schemes such as DiLoCo -- introducing new variations of replication schemes and challenging choices made in DeMo. Our results across language and vision domains show that FlexDeMo attains similar validation loss as hybrid sharded data parallel training employing AdamW and full gradient synchronization, while being substantially faster. FlexDeMo is thus a promising distributed training scheme for the largest machine learning models.

PaperID: 1309, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12706

Authors:Daniel Furelos-Blanco, Charles Pert, Frederik Kelbel, Alex F. Spies, Alessandra Russo, Michael Dennis

Affiliations: Imperial College London, Google DeepMind

Title: Beyond Fixed Tasks: Unsupervised Environment Design for Task-Level Pairs

Abstract:
Training general agents to follow complex instructions (tasks) in intricate environments (levels) remains a core challenge in reinforcement learning. Random sampling of tasklevel pairs often produces unsolvable combinations, highlighting the need to co-design tasks and levels. While unsupervised environment design (UED) has proven effective at automatically designing level curricula, prior work has only considered a fixed task. We present ATLAS (Aligning Tasks and Levels for Autocurricula of Specifications), a novel method that generates joint autocurricula over tasks and levels. Our approach builds upon UED to automatically produce solvable yet challenging task-level pairs for policy training. To evaluate ATLAS and drive progress in the field, we introduce an evaluation suite that models tasks as reward machines in Minigrid levels. Experiments demonstrate that ATLAS vastly outperforms random sampling approaches, particularly when sampling solvable pairs is unlikely. We further show that mutations leveraging the structure of both tasks and levels accelerate convergence to performant policies.

PaperID: 1310, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.05684

Authors:Hongyaoxing Gu, Lijuan Hu, Shuzi Niu, Fangfang Liu

Affiliations: Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: FLRQ: Faster LLM Quantization with Flexible Low-Rank Matrix Sketching

Abstract:
Traditional posttraining quantization (PTQ) is considered an effective approach to reduce model size and accelerate inference of large-scale language models (LLMs). However, existing low-rank PTQ methods require costly fine-tuning to determine a compromise rank for diverse data and layers in large models, failing to exploit their full potential. Additionally, the current SVD-based low-rank approximation compounds the computational overhead. In this work, we thoroughly analyze the varying effectiveness of low-rank approximation across different layers in representative models. Accordingly, we introduce Flexible Low-Rank Quantization (FLRQ), a novel solution designed to quickly identify the accuracy-optimal ranks and aggregate them to achieve minimal storage combinations. FLRQ comprises two powerful components, Rank1-Sketch-based Flexible Rank Selection (R1-FLR) and Best Low-rank Approximation under Clipping (BLC). R1-FLR applies the R1-Sketch with Gaussian projection for the fast low-rank approximation, enabling outlier-aware rank extraction for each layer. Meanwhile, BLC aims at minimizing the low-rank quantization error under the scaling and clipping strategy through an iterative method. FLRQ demonstrates strong effectiveness and robustness in comprehensive experiments, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both quantization quality and algorithm efficiency.

PaperID: 1311, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.15389

Authors:Hanxi Guo, Hao Wang, Tao Song, Tianhang Zheng, Yang Hua, Haibing Guan, Xiangyu Zhang

Affiliations: Purdue University, Stevens Institute of Technology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Zhejiang University, Queen's University Belfast

Title: Poisoning with a Pill: Circumventing Detection in Federated Learning

Abstract:
Federated learning (FL) protects data privacy by enabling distributed model training without direct access to client data. However, its distributed nature makes it vulnerable to model and data poisoning attacks. While numerous defenses filter malicious clients using statistical metrics, they overlook the role of model redundancy, where not all parameters contribute equally to the model and attack performance. Current attacks manipulate all model parameters uniformly, making them more detectable, while defenses focus on the overall statistics of client updates, leaving gaps for more sophisticated attacks. We propose an attackagnostic augmentation method to enhance the stealthiness and effectiveness of existing poisoning attacks in FL, exposing flaws in current defenses and highlighting the need for fine-grained FL security. Our three-stage methodology, including pill construction, pill poisoning, and pill injection, injects poison into a compact subnet (i.e., pill) of the global model during the iterative FL training. Experimental results show that FL poisoning attacks enhanced by our method can bypass 8 state-of-the-art (SOTA) defenses, gaining an up to 7x error rate increase, as well as on average a more than 2x error rate increase on both IID and non-IID data, in both cross-silo and cross-device FL systems.

PaperID: 1312, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13787

Authors:Huijie Guo, Jingyao Wang, Peizheng Guo, Xingchen Shen, Changwen Zheng, Wenwen Qiang

Affiliations: Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Exploring Transferability of Self-Supervised Learning by Task Conflict Calibration

Abstract:
In this paper, we explore the transferability of SSL by addressing two central questions: (i) what is the representation transferability of SSL, and (ii) how can we effectively model this transferability? Transferability is defined as the ability of a representation learned from one task to support the objective of another. Inspired by the metalearning paradigm, we construct multiple SSL tasks within each training batch to support explicitly modeling transferability. Based on empirical evidence and causal analysis, we find that although introducing task-level information improves transferability, it is still hindered by task conflict. To address this issue, we propose a Task Conflict Calibration method to alleviate the impact of task conflict. Specifically, it first splits batches to create multiple SSL tasks, infusing task-level information. Next, it uses a factor extraction network to produce causal generative factors for all tasks and a weight extraction network to assign dedicated weights to each sample, employing data reconstruction, orthogonality, and sparsity to ensure effectiveness. Finally, the method calibrates sample representations during SSL training and integrates into the pipeline via a two-stage bi-level optimization framework to boost the transferability of learned representations. Experimental results on multiple downstream tasks demonstrate that our method consistently improves the transferability of SSL models.

PaperID: 1313, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12722

Authors:Nakshatra Gupta, Sumanth Prabhu S, Supratik Chakraborty, Venkatesh R

Affiliations: Tata Consultancy Services Limited, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay

Title: On Robustness of Linear Classifiers to Targeted Data Poisoning

Abstract:
Data poisoning is a trainingtime attack that undermines the trustworthiness of learned models. In a targeted data poisoning attack, an adversary manipulates the training dataset to alter the classification of a targeted test point. Given the typically large size of training dataset, manual detection of poisoning is difficult. An alternative is to automatically measure a dataset's robustness against such an attack, which is the focus of this paper. We consider a threat model wherein an adversary can only perturb the labels of the training dataset, with knowledge limited to the hypothesis space of the victim's model. In this setting, we prove that finding the robustness is an NP-Complete problem, even when hypotheses are linear classifiers. To overcome this, we present a technique that finds lower and upper bounds of robustness. Our implementation of the technique computes these bounds efficiently in practice for many publicly available datasets. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Specifically, a poisoning exceeding the identified robustness bounds significantly impacts test point classification. We are also able to compute these bounds in many more cases where state-of-the-art techniques fail.

PaperID: 1314, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20293

Authors:Chaowei He, Yuanjun Liu, Qingzhi Ma, Shenyuan Ren, Xizhao Luo, Lei Zhao, An Liu

Affiliations: Soochow University, Beijing Jiaotong University

Title: Forgetting by Pruning: Data Deletion in Join Cardinality Estimation

Abstract:
Machine unlearning in learned cardinality estimation (CE) systems presents unique challenges due to the complex distributional dependencies in multitable relational data. Specifically, data deletion, a core component of machine unlearning, faces three critical challenges in learned CE models: attribute-level sensitivity, inter-table propagation and domain disappearance leading to severe overestimation in multi-way joins. We propose Cardinality Estimation Pruning (CEP), the first unlearning framework specifically designed for multi-table learned CE systems. CEP introduces Distribution Sensitivity Pruning, which constructs semi-join deletion results and computes sensitivity scores to guide parameter pruning, and Domain Pruning, which removes support for value domains entirely eliminated by deletion. We evaluate CEP on state-of-the-art architectures NeuroCard and FACE across IMDb and TPC-H datasets. Results demonstrate CEP consistently achieves the lowest Q-error in multi-table scenarios, particularly under high deletion ratios, often outperforming full retraining. Furthermore, CEP significantly reduces convergence iterations, incurring negligible computational overhead of 0.3%-2.5% of fine-tuning time.

PaperID: 1315, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10915

Authors:Guanxiong He, Zheng Wang, Jie Wang, Liaoyuan Tang, Rong Wang, Feiping Nie

Affiliations: Northwest Polytechnical University Xi'an

Title: Towards Federated Clustering: A Client-wise Private Graph Aggregation Framework

Abstract:
Federated clustering addresses the critical challenge of extracting patterns from decentralized, unlabeled data. However, it is hampered by the flaw that current approaches are forced to accept a compromise between performance and privacy: transmitting embedding representations risks sensitive data leakage, while sharing only abstract cluster prototypes leads to diminished model accuracy. To resolve this dilemma, we propose Structural PrivacyPreserving Federated Graph Clustering (SPP-FGC), a novel algorithm that innovatively leverages local structural graphs as the primary medium for privacy-preserving knowledge sharing, thus moving beyond the limitations of conventional techniques. Our framework operates on a clear client-server logic; on the client-side, each participant constructs a private structural graph that captures intrinsic data relationships, which the server then securely aggregates and aligns to form a comprehensive global graph from which a unified clustering structure is derived. The framework offers two distinct modes to suit different needs. SPP-FGC is designed as an efficient one-shot method that completes its task in a single communication round, ideal for rapid analysis. For more complex, unstructured data like images, SPP-FGC+ employs an iterative process where clients and the server collaboratively refine feature representations to achieve superior downstream performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving clustering accuracy by up to 10% (NMI) over federated baselines while maintaining provable privacy guarantees.

PaperID: 1316, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06944

Authors:Dongsheng Hong, Chao Chen, Yanhui Chen, Shanshan Lin, Zhihao Chen, Xiangwen Liao

Affiliations: Fuzhou University, Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: From Attribution to Action: Jointly ALIGNing Predictions and Explanations

Abstract:
Explanationguided learning (EGL) has shown promise in aligning model predictions with interpretable reasoning, particularly in computer vision tasks. However, most approaches rely on external annotations or heuristic-based segmentation to supervise model explanations, which can be noisy, imprecise and difficult to scale. In this work, we provide both empirical and theoretical evidence that low-quality supervision signals can degrade model performance rather than improve it. In response, we propose ALIGN, a novel framework that jointly trains a classifier and a masker in an iterative manner. The masker learns to produce soft, task-relevant masks that highlight informative regions, while the classifier is optimized for both prediction accuracy and alignment between its saliency maps and the learned masks. By leveraging high-quality masks as guidance, ALIGN improves both interpretability and generalizability, showing its superiority across various settings. Experiments on the two domain generalization benchmarks, VLCS and Terra Incognita, show that ALIGN consistently outperforms six strong baselines in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings. Besides, ALIGN also yields superior explanation quality concerning sufficiency and comprehensiveness, highlighting its effectiveness in producing accurate and interpretable models.

PaperID: 1317, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07104

Authors:Junji Hou, Junzhou Zhao, Shuo Zhang, Pinghui Wang

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University

Title: A Theoretical Analysis of Detecting Large Model-Generated Time Series

Abstract:
Motivated by the increasing risks of data misuse and fabrication, we investigate the problem of identifying synthetic time series generated by TimeSeries Large Models (TSLMs) in this work. While there are extensive researches on detecting model generated text, we find that these existing methods are not applicable to time series data due to the fundamental modality difference, as time series usually have lower information density and smoother probability distributions than text data, which limit the discriminative power of token-based detectors. To address this issue, we examine the subtle distributional differences between real and model-generated time series and propose the contraction hypothesis, which states that model-generated time series, unlike real ones, exhibit progressively decreasing uncertainty under recursive forecasting. We formally prove this hypothesis under theoretical assumptions on model behavior and time series structure. Model-generated time series exhibit progressively concentrated distributions under recursive forecasting, leading to uncertainty contraction. We provide empirical validation of the hypothesis across diverse datasets. Building on this insight, we introduce the Uncertainty Contraction Estimator (UCE), a white-box detector that aggregates uncertainty metrics over successive prefixes to identify TSLM‑generated time series. Extensive experiments on 32 datasets show that UCE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, offering a reliable and generalizable solution for detecting model-generated time series.

PaperID: 1318, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02227

Authors:Xinquan Huang, Paris Perdikaris

Affiliations: University of Pennsylvania

Title: PhysicsCorrect: A Training-Free Approach for Stable Neural PDE Simulations

Abstract:
Neural networks have emerged as powerful surrogates for solving partial differential equations (PDEs), offering significant computational speedups over traditional methods. However, these models suffer from a critical limitation: error accumulation during longterm rollouts, where small inaccuracies compound exponentially, eventually causing complete divergence from physically valid solutions. We present PhysicsCorrect, a training-free correction framework that enforces PDE consistency at each prediction step by formulating correction as a linearized inverse problem based on PDE residuals. Our key innovation is an efficient caching strategy that precomputes the Jacobian and its pseudoinverse during an offline warm-up phase, reducing computational overhead by two orders of magnitude compared to standard correction approaches. Across three representative PDE systems, including Navier-Stokes fluid dynamics, wave equations, and the chaotic Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation, PhysicsCorrect reduces prediction errors by up to 100× while adding negligible inference time (under 5%). The framework integrates seamlessly with diverse architectures, including Fourier Neural Operators, UNets, and Vision Transformers, effectively transforming unstable neural surrogates into reliable simulation tools that bridge the gap between deep learning's computational efficiency and the physical fidelity demanded by practical scientific applications.

PaperID: 1319, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09036

Authors:Zhenyuan Huang, Hui Zhang, Wenzhong Tang, Haijun Yang

Affiliations: Beihang University

Title: FedSDWC: Federated Synergistic Dual-Representation Weak Causal Learning for OOD

Abstract:
Amid growing demands for data privacy and advances in computational infrastructure, federated learning (FL) has emerged as a prominent distributed learning paradigm. Nevertheless, differences in data distribution (such as covariate and semantic shifts) severely affect its reliability in realworld deployments. To address this issue, we propose FedSDWC, a causal inference method that integrates both invariant and variant features. FedSDWC infers causal semantic representations by modeling the weak causal influence between invariant and variant features, effectively overcoming the limitations of existing invariant learning methods in accurately capturing invariant features and directly constructing causal representations. This approach significantly enhances FL's ability to generalize and detect OOD data. Theoretically, we derive FedSDWC's generalization error bound under specific conditions and, for the first time, establish its relationship with client prior distributions. Moreover, extensive experiments conducted on multiple benchmark datasets validate the superior performance of FedSDWC in handling covariate and semantic shifts. For example, FedSDWC outperforms FedICON, the next best baseline, by an average of 3.04% on CIFAR-10 and 8.11% on CIFAR-100.

PaperID: 1320, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11083

Authors:Bingyu Hui, Lebin Yu, Quanming Yao, Yunpeng Qu, Xudong Zhang, Jian Wang

Affiliations: Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University

Title: Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Zero-Shot Coordination in Evolving Games

Abstract:
Zeroshot coordination(ZSC), a key challenge in multi-agent game theory, has become a hot topic in reinforcement learning (RL) research recently, especially in complex evolving games. It focuses on the generalization ability of agents, requiring them to coordinate well with collaborators from a diverse, potentially evolving, pool of partners that are not seen before without any fine-tuning. Population-based training, which approximates such an evolving partner pool, has been proven to provide good zero-shot coordination performance; nevertheless, existing methods are limited by computational resources, mainly focusing on optimizing diversity in small populations while neglecting the potential performance gains from scaling population size. To address this issue, this paper proposes the Scalable Population Training (ScaPT), an efficient RL training framework comprising two key components: a meta-agent that efficiently realizes a population by selectively sharing parameters across agents, and a mutual information regularizer that guarantees population diversity. To empirically validate the effectiveness of ScaPT, this paper evaluates it along with representational frameworks in Hanabi cooperative game and confirms its superiority.

PaperID: 1321, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03763

Authors:Ziheng Jia, Jiaying Qian, Zicheng Zhang, Zijian Chen, Xiongkuo Min

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Title: Refine-IQA: Multi-Stage Reinforcement Finetuning for Perceptual Image Quality Assessment

Abstract:
Reinforcement finetuning (RFT) is a proliferating paradigm for LMM training. Analogous to high-level reasoning tasks, RFT is similarly applicable to low-level vision domains, including image quality assessment (IQA). Existing RFT-based IQA methods typically use rule-based output rewards to verify the model's rollouts but provide no reward supervision for the "think” process, leaving its correctness and efficacy uncontrolled. Furthermore, these methods typically fine-tune directly on downstream IQA tasks without explicitly enhancing the model’s native low-level visual quality perception, which may constrain its performance upper bound. In response to these gaps, we propose the multi‐stage RFT IQA framework (Refine-IQA). In Stage-1, we build the Refine-Perception-20K dataset (with 12 main distortions, 20,907 locally-distorted images, and over 55K RFT samples) and design multi-task reward functions to strengthen the model’s visual quality perception. In Stage-2, targeting the quality scoring task, we introduce a probability difference reward involved strategy for "think" process supervision. The resulting Refine-IQA Series Models achieve outstanding performance on both perception and scoring tasks—and, notably, our paradigm activates a robust "think” (quality interpretating) capability that also attains exceptional results on the corresponding quality interpreting benchmark.

PaperID: 1322, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03178

Authors:Jiajun Jiao, Haowei Zhu, Puyuan Yang, Jianghui Wang, Ji Liu, Ziqiong Liu, Dong Li, Yuejian Fang, Jun-Hai Yong, Bin Wang, Emad Barsoum

Affiliations: Advanced Micro Devices, Peking University, Tsinghua University

Title: DiffBench Meets DiffAgent: End-to-End LLM-Driven Diffusion Acceleration Code Generation

Abstract:
Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in image and video generation. However, their inherently multiple step inference process imposes substantial computational overhead, hindering realworld deployment. Accelerating diffusion models is therefore essential, yet determining how to combine multiple model acceleration techniques remains a significant challenge. To address this issue, we introduce a framework driven by large language models (LLMs) for automated acceleration code generation and evaluation. First, we present DiffBench, a comprehensive benchmark that implements a three stage automated evaluation pipeline across diverse diffusion architectures, optimization combinations and deployment scenarios. Second, we propose DiffAgent, an agent that generates optimal acceleration strategies and codes for arbitrary diffusion models. DiffAgent employs a closed-loop workflow in which a planning component and a debugging component iteratively refine the output of a code generation component, while a genetic algorithm extracts performance feedback from the execution environment to guide subsequent code refinements. We provide a detailed explanation of the DiffBench construction and the design principles underlying DiffAgent. Extensive experiments show that DiffBench offers a thorough evaluation of generated codes and that DiffAgent significantly outperforms existing LLMs in producing effective diffusion acceleration strategies.

PaperID: 1323, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00036

Authors:Cheng Jin, Zhenyu Xiao, Yuantao Gu

Affiliations: Tsinghua University

Title: A-FloPS: Accelerating Diffusion Models via Adaptive Flow Path Sampler

Abstract:
Diffusion models deliver stateof-the-art generative performance across diverse modalities but remain computationally expensive due to their inherently iterative sampling process. Existing training-free acceleration methods typically improve numerical solvers for the reverse-time ODE, yet their effectiveness is fundamentally constrained by the inefficiency of the underlying sampling trajectories. We propose A-FloPS (Adaptive Flow Path Sampler), a principled, training-free framework that reparameterizes the sampling trajectory of any pre-trained diffusion model into a flow-matching form and augments it with an adaptive velocity decomposition. The reparameterization analytically maps diffusion scores to flow-compatible velocities, yielding integration-friendly trajectories without retraining. The adaptive mechanism further factorizes the velocity field into a linear drift term and a residual component whose temporal variation is actively suppressed, restoring the accuracy benefits of high-order integration even in extremely low-NFE regimes. Extensive experiments on conditional image generation and text-to-image synthesis show that A-FloPS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art training-free samplers in both sample quality and efficiency. Notably, with as few as 5 function evaluations, A-FloPS achieves substantially lower FID and generates sharper, more coherent images. The adaptive mechanism also improves native flow-based generative models, underscoring its generality. These results position A-FloPS as a versatile and effective solution for high-quality, low-latency generative modeling.

PaperID: 1324, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07629

Authors:Yue Jin, Giovanni Montana

Affiliations: The University of Warwick

Title: Partial Action Replacement: Tackling Distribution Shift in Offline MARL

Abstract:
Offline multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) is severely hampered by the challenge of evaluating out-of-distribution (OOD) joint actions. Our core finding is that when the behavior policy is factorized—a common scenario where agents act fully or partially independently during data collection—a strategy of partial action replacement (PAR) can significantly mitigate this challenge. PAR updates a single or part of agents' actions while the others remain fixed to the behavioral data, reducing distribution shift compared to full joint-action updates. Based on this insight, we develop Soft-Partial Conservative Q-Learning (SPaCQL), using PAR to mitigate OOD issue and dynamically weighting different PAR strategies based on the uncertainty of value estimation. We provide a rigorous theoretical foundation for this approach, proving that under factorized behavior policies, the induced distribution shift scales linearly with the number of deviating agents rather than exponentially with the joint-action space. This yields a provably tighter value error bound for this important class of offline MARL problems. Our theoretical results also indicate that SPaCQL adaptively addresses distribution shift using uncertainty-informed weights. Our empirical results demonstrate SPaCQL enables more effective policy learning, and manifest its remarkable superiority over baseline algorithms when the offline dataset exhibits the independence structure.

PaperID: 1325, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.15306

Authors:Kentaro Kanamori, Hirofumi Suzuki, Takuya Takagi

Affiliations: Fujitsu Limited

Title: Sparse Additive Model Pruning for Order-Based Causal Structure Learning

Abstract:
Causal structure learning, also known as causal discovery, aims to estimate causal relationships between variables as a form of a causal directed acyclic graph (DAG) from observational data. One of the major frameworks is the orderbased approach that first estimates a topological order of the underlying DAG and then prunes spurious edges from the fully-connected DAG induced by the estimated topological order. Previous studies often focus on the former ordering step because it can dramatically reduce the search space of DAGs. In practice, the latter pruning step is equally crucial for ensuring both computational efficiency and estimation accuracy. Most existing methods employ a pruning technique based on generalized additive models and hypothesis testing, commonly known as CAM-pruning. However, this approach can be a computational bottleneck as it requires repeatedly fitting additive models for all variables. Furthermore, it may harm estimation quality due to multiple testing. To address these issues, we introduce a new pruning method based on sparse additive models, which enables direct pruning of redundant edges without relying on hypothesis testing. We propose an efficient algorithm for learning sparse additive models by combining the randomized tree embedding technique with group-wise sparse regression. Experimental results on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrated that our method is significantly faster than existing pruning methods while maintaining comparable or superior accuracy.

PaperID: 1326, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.18921

Authors:Loukas Kavouras, Eleni Psaroudaki, Konstantinos Tsopelas, Dimitrios Rontogiannis, Nikolaos Theologitis, Dimitris Sacharidis, Giorgos Giannopoulos, Dimitrios Tomaras, Kleopatra Markou, Dimitrios Gunopulos, Dimitris Fotakis, Ioannis Emiris

Affiliations: Information Management Systems Institute, Athena Research Center, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium FARI Institute, Athens University of Economics and Business, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, National Technical University of Athens, Greece Archimedes

Title: GLANCE: Global Actions in a Nutshell for Counterfactual Explainability

Abstract:
The widespread deployment of machine learning systems in critical realworld decision-making applications has highlighted the urgent need for counterfactual explainability methods that operate effectively. Global counterfactual explanations, expressed as actions to offer recourse, aim to provide succinct explanations and insights applicable to large population subgroups. High effectiveness, measured by the fraction of the population that is provided recourse, ensures that the actions benefit as many individuals as possible. Keeping the cost of actions low ensures the proposed recourse actions remain practical and actionable. Limiting the number of actions that provide global counterfactuals is essential to maximize interpretability. The primary challenge, therefore, is to balance these trade-offs—maximizing effectiveness, minimizing cost, while maintaining a small number of actions. We introduce GLANCE, a versatile and adaptive algorithm that employs a novel agglomerative approach, jointly considering both the feature space and the space of counterfactual actions, thereby accounting for the distribution of points in a way that aligns with the model's structure. This design enables the careful balancing of the trade-offs among the three key objectives, with the size objective functioning as a tunable parameter to keep the actions few and easy to interpret. Our extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that GLANCE consistently shows greater robustness and performance compared to existing methods across various datasets and models.

PaperID: 1327, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01720

Authors:Yeongjong Kim, Namkyeong Cho, Minseok Kim, Yeoneung Kim

Affiliations: Pohang University of Science and Technology, Gachon University, Seoul National University of Science and Technology

Title: Physics-Informed Approach for Exploratory Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman Equations via Policy Iterations

Abstract:
We propose a meshfree policy iteration framework based on physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for solving entropy-regularized stochastic control problems. The method iteratively alternates between soft policy evaluation and improvement using automatic differentiation and neural approximation, without relying on spatial discretization. We present a detailed error analysis that decomposes the total approximation error into three sources: iteration error, policy network error, and PDE residual error. The proposed algorithm is validated with a range of challenging control tasks, including high-dimensional linear-quadratic regulation in 5D and 10D, as well as nonlinear systems such as pendulum and cartpole problems. Numerical results confirm the scalability, accuracy, and robustness of our approach across both linear and nonlinear benchmarks.

PaperID: 1328, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00092

Authors:G. Charbel N. Kindji, Elisa Fromont, Lina M. Rojas-Barahona, Tanguy Urvoy

Affiliations: IRISA UMR Université de Rennes, Orange Labs Lannion

Title: Robust Detection of Synthetic Tabular Data Under Schema Variability

Abstract:
The rise of powerful generative models has sparked concerns over data authenticity. While detection methods have been extensively developed for images and text, the case of tabular data, despite its ubiquity, has been largely overlooked. Yet, detecting synthetic tabular data is especially challenging due to its heterogeneous structure and unseen formats at test time. We address the underexplored task of detecting synthetic tabular data "in the wild", i.e. when the detector is deployed on tables with variable and previously unseen schemas. We introduce a novel datumwise transformer architecture that significantly outperforms the only previously published baseline, improving both AUC and accuracy by 7 points. By incorporating a table-adaptation component, our model gains an additional 7 accuracy points, demonstrating enhanced robustness. This work provides the first strong evidence that detecting synthetic tabular data in real-world conditions is feasible, and demonstrates substantial improvements over previous approaches. The code will be made available in the extended version.

PaperID: 1329, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.04407

Authors:Deniz Koyuncu, Alex Gittens, Bülent Yener, Moti Yung

Affiliations: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Google LLC Columbia University

Title: Exploiting Missing Data Remediation Strategies Using Adversarial Missingness Attacks

Abstract:
Adversarial Missingness (AM) attacks aim to manipulate model fitting by carefully engineering a missing data problem to achieve a specific malicious objective. AM attacks are significantly different from prior data poisoning attacks in that no malicious data inserted and no data is maliciously perturbed. Current AM attacks are feasible only under the assumption that the modeler (victim) uses fullinformation maximum likelihood methods to handle missingness. This work aims to remedy this limitation of AM attacks; in the approach taken here, the adversary achieves their goal by solving a bi-level optimization problem to engineer the adversarial missingness mechanism, where the lower level problem incorporates a differentiable approximation of the targeted missingness remediation technique. As instantiations of this framework, AM attacks are provided for three popular techniques: (i) complete case analysis, (ii) mean imputation, and (iii) regression-based imputation for general empirical risk minimization (ERM) problems. Experiments on real-world data show that AM attacks are successful with modest levels of missingness (less than 20%). Furthermore, we show on the real-world Twins dataset that AM attacks can manipulate the estimated average treatment effect (ATE) as an instance of the general ERM problems: the adversary succeeds in not only reversing the sign, but also in substantially inflating the ATE values from a true value of -1.61% to a manipulated one as high as 10%. These experimental results hold when the ATE is calculated using multiple regression-based estimators with different architectures, even when the adversary is restricted to modifying only a subset of the training data. The goals of this work are to: (i) establish the vulnerability to AM attacks of a significantly wider class of missingness remediation strategies than established in prior work, and (ii) brings the AM threat model to the attention of the community, as there are currently no defense strategies for these attacks.

PaperID: 1330, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.14175

Authors:Hongzhao Li, Guohao Shen, Shupan Li, Mingliang Xu, Muhammad Haris Khan

Affiliations: School of Computer and Artificial Intelligence, Zhengzhou University, Ministry of Education National Supercomputing Center in Zhengzhou, Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

Title: Balancing Multimodal Domain Generalization via Gradient Modulation and Projection

Abstract:
Multimodal Domain Generalization (MMDG) leverages the complementary strengths of multiple modalities to enhance model generalization on unseen domains. A central challenge in multimodal learning is optimization imbalance, where modalities converge at different speeds during training. This imbalance leads to unequal gradient contributions, allowing some modalities to dominate the learning process while others lag behind. Existing balancing strategies typically regulate each modality’s gradient contribution based on its classification performance on the source domain to alleviate this issue. However, relying solely on sourcedomain accuracy neglects a key insight in MMDG: modalities that excel on the source domain may generalize poorly to unseen domains, limiting cross-domain gains. To overcome this limitation, we propose Gradient Modulation Projection (GMP), a unified strategy that promotes balanced optimization in MMDG. GMP first decouples gradients associated with classification and domain-invariance objectives. It then modulates each modality’s gradient based on semantic and domain confidence. Moreover, GMP dynamically adjusts gradient projections by tracking the relative strength of each task, mitigating conflicts between classification and domain-invariant learning within modality-specific encoders. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GMP achieves state-of-the-art performance and integrates flexibly with diverse MMDG methods, significantly improving generalization across multiple benchmarks.

PaperID: 1331, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15762

Authors:Kanxue Li, Yibing Zhan, Hua Jin, Chongchong Qi, Xu Lin, Baosheng Yu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, First People's Hospital of Yunnan Province, Yunnan United Vision Technology Company Limited, Nanyang Technological University

Title: Cross-Sample Augmented Test-Time Adaptation for Personalized Intraoperative Hypotension Prediction

Abstract:
Intraoperative hypotension (IOH) poses significant surgical risks, but accurate prediction remains challenging due to patientspecific variability. While test-time adaptation (TTA) offers a promising approach for personalized prediction, the rarity of IOH events often leads to unreliable test-time training. To address this, we propose CSA-TTA, a novel cross-sample augmented test-time adaptation framework that enhances training by incorporating hypotension events from other individuals. Specifically, we first construct a cross-sample bank by segmenting historical data into hypotensive and non-hypotensive samples. Then, we introduce a coarse-to-fine retrieval strategy for building test-time training data: we initially apply K-Shape clustering to identify representative cluster centers and subsequently retrieve the top-K semantically similar samples based on the current patient signal. Additionally, we integrate both self-supervised masked reconstruction and retrospective sequence forecasting signals during training to enhance model adaptability to rapid and subtle intraoperative dynamics. We evaluate the proposed CSA-TTA on both the VitalDB dataset and a real-world in-hospital dataset by integrating it with state-of-the-art time series forecasting models, including TimesFM and UniTS. CSA-TTA consistently enhances performance across settings—for instance, on VitalDB, it improves Recall and F1 scores by +1.33% and +1.13%, respectively, under fine-tuning, and by +7.46% and +5.07% in zero-shot scenarios—demonstrating strong robustness and generalization.

PaperID: 1332, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11421

Authors:Lan Li, Tao Hu, Da-Wei Zhou, Jia-Qi Yang, Han-jia Ye, De-Chuan Zhan

Affiliations: Nanjing University

Title: BOFA: Bridge-Layer Orthogonal Low-Rank Fusion for CLIP-Based Class-Incremental Learning

Abstract:
ClassIncremental Learning (CIL) aims to continually learn new classes without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Vision-language models such as CLIP offer strong transferable representations via multi-modal supervision, making them a promising choice for CIL. However, applying CLIP to CIL poses two major challenges: (1) adapting to downstream tasks often requires additional learnable modules, increasing model complexity and susceptibility to forgetting; and (2) while multi-modal representations offer complementary strengths, existing methods have not fully exploited the synergy between visual and textual modalities. To address these issues, we propose BOFA (Bridge-layer Orthogonal Fusion for Adaptation), a novel framework for CIL. BOFA restricts adaptation to CLIP’s existing cross-modal bridge layer, keeping the core learning process parameter-free and avoiding any extra adaptation modules. To prevent forgetting within this layer, it leverages Orthogonal Low-Rank Fusion, a mechanism that constrains parameter updates to a low-rank ``safe subspace" that is mathematically constructed to be approximately orthogonal to the feature subspace of past tasks. This encourages stable knowledge accumulation and mitigates interference between new and previously learned classes. Furthermore, BOFA employs a cross-modal hybrid prototype that fuses stable textual prototypes with dynamic visual counterparts derived from our adapted bridge layer, resulting in a more robust and discriminative classifier. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that BOFA achieves superior accuracy and efficiency compared to existing methods.

PaperID: 1333, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20095

Authors:Jinhao Liang, Sven Koenig, Ferdinando Fioretto

Affiliations: University of Virginia, University of California, Irvine Örebro University

Title: Discrete-Guided Diffusion for Scalable and Safe Multi-Robot Motion Planning

Abstract:
MultiRobot Motion Planning (MRMP) involves generating collision-free trajectories for multiple robots operating in a shared continuous workspace. While discrete multi-agent path finding (MAPF) methods are broadly adopted due to their scalability, their coarse discretization severely limits trajectory quality. In contrast, continuous optimization-based planners offer higher-quality paths but suffer from the curse of dimensionality, resulting in poor scalability with respect to the number of robots. This paper tackles the limitations of these two approaches by introducing a novel framework that integrates discrete MAPF solvers with constrained generative diffusion models. The resulting framework, called Discrete-Guided Diffusion (DGD), has three key characteristics: (1) it decomposes the original nonconvex MRMP problem into tractable subproblems with convex configuration spaces, (2) it combines discrete MAPF solutions with constrained optimization techniques to guide diffusion models capture complex spatiotemporal dependencies among robots, and (3) it incorporates a lightweight constraint repair mechanism to ensure trajectory feasibility. The proposed method sets a new state-of-the-art performance in large-scale, complex environments, scaling to 100 robots while achieving planning efficiency and high success rates.

PaperID: 1334, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.02808

Authors:Zhuoxuan Liang, Wei Li, Dalin Zhang, Ziyu Jia, Yidan Chen, Zhihong Wang, Xiangping Zheng, Moustafa Youssef

Affiliations: Harbin Engineering University, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences Shanghai Key Laboratory of Data Science, American University in Cairo

Title: DarkFarseer: Robust Spatio-Temporal Kriging Under Graph Sparsity and Noise

Abstract:
The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) has created a growing demand for largescale sensor deployment. However, the high cost of physical sensors limits the scalability and coverage of sensor networks, making fine-grained sensing difficult. Inductive Spatio-Temporal Kriging (ISK) addresses this challenge by introducing virtual sensors that infer measurements from physical sensors, typically using graph neural networks (GNNs) to model their relationships. Despite its promise, current ISK methods often rely on standard message-passing and generic architectures that fail to effectively capture spatio-temporal features or represent virtual nodes accurately. Additionally, existing graph construction techniques suffer from sparse and noisy connections, further hindering performance. To address these limitations, we propose DarkFarseer, a novel ISK framework with three key innovations. First, the Style-enhanced Temporal-Spatial architecture adopts a temporal-then-spatial processing scheme with a temporal style transfer mechanism to enhance virtual node representations. Second, Regional-semantic Contrastive Learning improves representation learning by aligning virtual nodes with regional component patterns. Third, the Similarity-Based Graph Denoising Strategy mitigates the influence of noisy edges by leveraging temporal similarity and regional structure. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that DarkFarseer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art ISK methods.

PaperID: 1335, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11699

Authors:Xingqi Lin, Liangyu Chen, Min Wu, Min Zhang, Zhenbing Zeng

Affiliations: Shanghai Key Laboratory of Trustworthy Computing, East China Normal University, Department of Mathematics, Shanghai University

Title: Tighter Truncated Rectangular Prism Approximation for RNN Robustness Verification

Abstract:
Robustness verification is a promising technique for rigorously proving Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) robustly. A key challenge is to overapproximate the nonlinear activation functions with linear constraints, which can transform the verification problem into an efficiently solvable linear programming problem. Existing methods over-approximate the nonlinear parts with linear bounding planes individually, which may cause significant over-estimation and lead to lower verification accuracy. In this paper, in order to tightly enclose the three-dimensional nonlinear surface generated by the Hadamard product, we propose a novel truncated rectangular prism formed by two linear relaxation planes and a refinement-driven method to minimize both its volume and surface area for tighter over-approximation. Based on this approximation, we implement a prototype DeepPrism for RNN robustness verification. The experimental results demonstrate that DeepPrism has significant improvement compared with the state-of-the-art approaches in various tasks of image classification, speech recognition and sentiment analysis.

PaperID: 1336, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07710

Authors:Jiale Liu, Haoming Zhou, Yishu Liu, Bingzhi Chen, Yuncheng Jiang

Affiliations: South China Normal University, Harbin Institute of Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology

Title: Cross Modal Fine-grained Alignment via Granularity-aware and Region-uncertain Modeling

Abstract:
Finegrained image-text alignment is a pivotal challenge in multimodal learning, underpinning key applications such as visual question answering, image captioning, and vision-language navigation. Unlike global alignment, fine-grained alignment requires precise correspondence between localized visual regions and textual tokens, often hindered by noisy attention mechanisms and oversimplified modeling of cross-modal relationships. In this work, we identify two fundamental limitations of existing approaches: the lack of robust intra-modal mechanisms to assess the significance of visual and textual tokens, leading to poor generalization in complex scenes; and the absence of fine-grained uncertainty modeling, which fails to capture the one-to-many and many-to-one nature of region-word correspondences. To address these issues, we propose a unified approach that incorporates significance-aware and granularity-aware modeling and region-level uncertainty modeling. Our method leverages modality-specific biases to identify salient features without relying on brittle cross-modal attention, and represents region features as a mixture of Gaussian distributions to capture fine-grained uncertainty. Extensive experiments on Flickr30K and MS-COCO demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across various backbone architectures, significantly enhancing the robustness and interpretability of fine-grained image-text alignment.

PaperID: 1337, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19024

Authors:Xu Liu, Yu Liu, Hanshuo Qiu, Yang Qirong, Zhouhui Lian

Affiliations: Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University, China State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence

Title: IndoorUAV: Benchmarking Vision-Language UAV Navigation in Continuous Indoor Environments

Abstract:
VisionLanguage Navigation (VLN) enables agents to navigate in complex environments by following natural language instructions grounded in visual observations. Although most existing work has focused on ground-based robots or outdoor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), indoor UAV-based VLN remains underexplored, despite its relevance to real-world applications such as inspection, delivery, and search-and-rescue in confined spaces. To bridge this gap, we introduce IndoorUAV, a novel benchmark and method specifically tailored for VLN with indoor UAVs. We begin by curating over 1,000 diverse and structurally rich 3D indoor scenes from the Habitat simulator. Within these environments, we simulate realistic UAV flight dynamics to collect diverse 3D navigation trajectories manually, further enriched through data augmentation techniques. Furthermore, we design an automated annotation pipeline to generate natural language instructions of varying granularity for each trajectory. This process yields over 16,000 high-quality trajectories, comprising the IndoorUAV-VLN subset, which focuses on long-horizon VLN. To support short-horizon planning, we segment long trajectories into sub-trajectories by selecting semantically salient keyframes and regenerating concise instructions, forming the IndoorUAV-VLA subset. Finally, we introduce IndoorUAV-Agent, a novel navigation model designed for our benchmark, leveraging task decomposition and multimodal reasoning. We hope IndoorUAV serves as a valuable resource to advance research on vision-language embodied AI in the indoor aerial navigation domain.

PaperID: 1338, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24064

Authors:Yizhi Liu, Ruitao Pu, Shilin Xu, Yingke Chen, Quan-Hui Liu, Yuan Sun

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Sichuan University, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Northumbria University, State Key Laboratory of Al Safety National Key Laboratory of Fundamental Algorithms and Models for Engineering Numerical Simulation

Title: Neighbor-aware Instance Refining with Noisy Labels for Cross-Modal Retrieval

Abstract:
In recent years, CrossModal Retrieval (CMR) has made significant progress in the field of multi-modal analysis. However, since it is time-consuming and labor-intensive to collect large-scale and well-annotated data, the annotation of multi-modal data inevitably contains some noise. This will degrade the retrieval performance of the model. To tackle the problem, numerous robust CMR methods have been developed, including robust learning paradigms, label calibration strategies, and instance selection mechanisms. Unfortunately, they often fail to simultaneously satisfy model performance ceilings, calibration reliability, and data utilization rate. To overcome the limitations, we propose a novel robust cross-modal learning framework, namely Neighbor-aware Instance Refining with Noisy Labels (NIRNL). Specifically, we first propose Cross-modal Margin Preserving (CMP) to adjust the relative distance between positive and negative pairs, thereby enhancing the discrimination between sample pairs. Then, we propose Neighbor-aware Instance Refining (NIR) to identify pure subset, hard subset, and noisy subset through cross-modal neighborhood consensus. Afterward, we construct different tailored optimization strategies for this fine-grained partitioning, thereby maximizing the utilization of all available data while mitigating error propagation. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that NIRNL achieves state-of-the-art performance, exhibiting remarkable robustness, especially under high noise rates.

PaperID: 1339, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12462

Authors:Yuzhou Liu, Jiarui Liu, Wanfu Gao

Affiliations: Jilin University

Title: Redundancy-optimized Multi-head Attention Networks for Multi-view Multi-label Feature Selection

Abstract:
Multiview multi-label data offers richer perspectives for artificial intelligence, but simultaneously presents significant challenges for feature selection due to the inherent complexity of interrelations among features, views and labels. Attention mechanisms provide an effective way for analyzing these intricate relationships. They can compute importance weights for information by aggregating correlations between Query and Key matrices to focus on pertinent Values. However, existing attention-based feature selection methods predominantly focus on intra-view relationships, neglecting the complementarity of inter-view features and the critical feature-label correlations. Moreover, they often fail to account for feature redundancy, potentially leading to suboptimal feature subsets. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel method based on Redundancy-optimized Multi-head Attention Networks for Multi-view Multi-label Feature Selection (RMAN-MMFS). Specifically, we employ each individual attention head to model intra-view feature relationships and use the cross-attention mechanisms between different heads to capture inter-view feature complementarity. Furthermore, we design static and dynamic feature redundancy terms: the static term mitigates redundancy within each view, while the dynamic term explicitly models redundancy between unselected and selected features across the entire selection process, thereby promoting feature compactness. Comprehensive evaluations on six real-world datasets, comparing against six multi-view multi-label feature selection methods, demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method.

PaperID: 1340, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06429

Authors:Zhen Liu, Yucheng Wang, Boyuan Li, Junhao Zheng, Emadeldeen Eldele, Min Wu, Qianli Ma

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Institute for Infocomm Research, Department of Computer Science, Khalifa University

Title: A Unified Shape-Aware Foundation Model for Time Series Classification

Abstract:
Foundation models pretrained on large-scale source datasets are reshaping the traditional training paradigm for time series classification. However, existing time series foundation models primarily focus on forecasting tasks and often overlook classification-specific challenges, such as modeling interpretable shapelets that capture class-discriminative temporal features. To bridge this gap, we propose UniShape, a unified shape-aware foundation model designed for time series classification. UniShape incorporates a shape-aware adapter that adaptively aggregates multiscale discriminative subsequences (shapes) into class tokens, effectively selecting the most relevant subsequence scales to enhance model interpretability. Meanwhile, a prototype-based pretraining module is introduced to jointly learn instance- and shape-level representations, enabling the capture of transferable shape patterns. Pre-trained on a large-scale multi-domain time series dataset comprising 1.89 million samples, UniShape exhibits superior generalization across diverse target domains. Experiments on 128 UCR datasets and 30 additional time series datasets demonstrate that UniShape achieves state-of-the-art classification performance, with interpretability and ablation analyses further validating its effectiveness.

PaperID: 1341, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15623

Authors:Zhuoyao Liu, Yang Liu, Wentao Feng, Shudong Huang

Affiliations: Sichuan University

Title: PCSR: Pseudo-label Consistency-Guided Sample Refinement for Noisy Correspondence Learning

Abstract:
Crossmodal retrieval aims to align different modalities via semantic similarity. However, existing methods often assume that image-text pairs are perfectly aligned, overlooking Noisy Correspondences in real data. These misaligned pairs misguide similarity learning and degrade retrieval performance. Previous methods often rely on coarse-grained categorizations that simply divide data into clean and noisy samples, overlooking the intrinsic diversity within noisy instances. Moreover, they typically apply uniform training strategies regardless of sample characteristics, resulting in suboptimal sample utilization for model optimization. To address the above challenges, we introduce a novel framework, called Pseudo-label Consistency-Guided Sample Refinement (PCSR), which enhances correspondence reliability by explicitly dividing samples based on pseudo-label consistency. Specifically, we first employ a confidence-based estimation to distinguish clean and noisy pairs, then refine the noisy pairs via pseudo-label consistency to uncover structurally distinct subsets. We further proposed a Pseudo-label Consistency Score (PCS) to quantify prediction stability, enabling the separation of ambiguous and refinable samples within noisy pairs. Accordingly, we adopt Adaptive Pair Optimization (APO), where ambiguous samples are optimized with robust loss functions and refinable ones are enhanced via text replacement during training. Extensive experiments on CC152K, MS-COCO and Flickr30K validate the effectiveness of our method in improving retrieval robustness under noisy supervision.

PaperID: 1342, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.08915

Authors:Jiahuan Long, Tingsong Jiang, Wen Yao, Yizhe Xiong, Zhengqin Xu, Shuai Jia, Hanqing Liu, Chao Ma

Affiliations: MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, AI Institute, Chinese Academy of Military Science, Defense Innovation Institute, School of Software, Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiaotong University

Title: Parameter-Free Fine-tuning via Redundancy Elimination for Vision Foundation Models

Abstract:
Vision foundation models (VFMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in learning universal visual representations. However, adapting these models to downstream tasks conventionally requires parameter updates, with even parameterefficient fine-tuning methods necessitating the modification of thousands to millions of weights. In this paper, we investigate the redundancies in the segment anything model (SAM) and then propose a novel parameter-free fine-tuning method. Unlike traditional fine-tuning methods that adjust parameters, our method emphasizes selecting, reusing, and enhancing pre-trained features, offering a new perspective on fine-tuning foundation models. Specifically, we introduce a channel selection algorithm based on the model's output difference to identify redundant and effective channels. By selectively replacing the redundant channels with more effective ones, we filter out less useful features and reuse more task-irrelevant features to downstream tasks, thereby enhancing the task-specific feature representation. Experiments on both out-of-domain and in-domain datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our method in different vision tasks (e.g., image segmentation, depth estimation and image classification). Notably, our approach can seamlessly integrate with existing fine-tuning strategies (e.g., LoRA, Adapter), further boosting the performance of already fine-tuned models. Moreover, since our channel selection involves only model inference, our method significantly reduces GPU memory overhead.

PaperID: 1343, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15251

Authors:Idriss Malek, Aya Laajil, Abhijith Sharma, Eric Moulines, Salem Lahlou

Affiliations: Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

Title: Loss-Guided Auxiliary Agents for Overcoming Mode Collapse in GFlowNets

Abstract:
Although Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are designed to capture multiple modes of a reward function, they often suffer from mode collapse in practice, getting trapped in earlydiscovered modes and requiring prolonged training to find diverse solutions. Existing exploration techniques often rely on heuristic novelty signals. We propose Loss-Guided GFlowNets (LGGFN), a novel approach where an auxiliary GFlowNet's exploration is directly driven by the main GFlowNet's training loss. By prioritizing trajectories where the main model exhibits high loss, LGGFN focuses sampling on poorly understood regions of the state space. This targeted exploration significantly accelerates the discovery of diverse, high-reward samples. Empirically, across diverse benchmarks including grid environments, structured sequence generation, Bayesian structure learning, and biological sequence design, LGGFN consistently outperforms baselines in exploration efficiency and sample diversity. For instance, on a challenging sequence generation task, it discovered over 40 times more unique valid modes while simultaneously reducing the exploration error metric by approximately 99%.

PaperID: 1344, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12986

Authors:Abdelouahed Ben Mhamed, Assia Kamal Idrissi, Amal Seghrouchni

Affiliations: International Artificial Intelligence Center of Morocco, Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, Morocco Sorbonne University, - UMR CNRS

Title: Learning Branching Policies for MILPs with Proximal Policy Optimization

Abstract:
Branchand-Bound (B&B) is the dominant exact solution method for Mixed Integer Linear Programs (MILP), yet its exponential time complexity poses significant challenges for large-scale instances. The growing capabilities of machine learning have spurred efforts to improve B&B by learning data-driven branching policies. However, most existing approaches rely on Imitation Learning (IL), which tends to overfit to expert demonstrations and struggles to generalize to structurally diverse or unseen instances. In this work, we propose Tree-Gate Proximal Policy Optimization (TGPPO), a novel framework that employs Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), a Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm, to train a branching policy aimed at improving generalization across heterogeneous MILP instances. Our approach builds on a parameterized state space representation that dynamically captures the evolving context of the search tree. Empirical evaluations show that TGPPO often outperforms existing learning-based policies in terms of reducing the number of nodes explored and improving p-Primal-Dual Integrals (PDI), particularly in out-of-distribution instances. These results highlight the potential of RL to develop robust and adaptable branching strategies for MILP solvers.

PaperID: 1345, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14499

Authors:Majid Mohammadi, Krikamol Muandet, Ilaria Tiddi, Annette Ten Teije, Siu Lun Chau

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Rational Intelligence Lab, The Netherlands, College of Computing & Data Science, Nanyang Technological University

Title: Exact Shapley Attributions in Quadratic-time for FANOVA Gaussian Processes

Abstract:
Shapley values are widely recognized as a principled method for attributing importance to input features in machine learning. However, the exact computation of Shapley values scales exponentially with the number of features, severely limiting the practical application of this powerful approach. The challenge is further compounded when the predictive model is probabilisticas in Gaussian processes (GPs)---where the outputs are random variables rather than point estimates, necessitating additional computational effort in modeling higher-order moments. In this work, we demonstrate that for an important class of GPs known as FANOVA GP, which explicitly models all main effects and interactions, exact Shapley attributions for both local and global explanations can be computed in quadratic time. For local, instance-wise explanations, we define a stochastic cooperative game over function components and compute the exact stochastic Shapley value in quadratic time only, capturing both the expected contribution and uncertainty. For global explanations, we introduce a deterministic, variance-based value function and compute exact Shapley values that quantify each feature’s contribution to the model’s overall sensitivity. Our methods leverage a closed-form (stochastic) Möbiusrepresentation of the FANOVA decomposition and introduce recursive algorithms, inspired by Newton's identities, to efficiently compute the mean and variance of Shapley values. Our work enhances the utility of explainable AI, as demonstrated by empirical studies, by providing more scalable, axiomatically sound, and uncertainty-aware explanations for predictions generated by structured probabilistic models.

PaperID: 1346, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07614

Authors:Gleb Molodtsov, Daniil Medyakov, Sergey Skorik, Nikolas Khachaturov, Shahane Tigranyan, Vladimir Aletov, Aram Avetisyan, Martin Takáč, Aleksandr Beznosikov

Affiliations: Moscow Independent Research Institute of Artificial Intelligence Basic Research of Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (BRAIn Lab) Federated Learning Problems Laboratory, Trusted AI Research Center, Russian-Armenian University, Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems, NAS RA, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

Title: Bant: Byzantine Antidote via Trial Function and Trust Scores

Abstract:
Recent advancements in machine learning have improved performance while also increasing computational demands. While federated and distributed setups address these issues, their structures remain vulnerable to malicious influences. In this paper, we address a specific threat: Byzantine attacks, wherein compromised clients inject adversarial updates to derail global convergence. We combine the concept of trust scores with trial function methodology to dynamically filter outliers. Our methods address the critical limitations of previous approaches, allowing operation even when Byzantine nodes are in the majority. Moreover, our algorithms adapt to widely used scaled methods such as Adam and RMSProp, as well as practical scenarios, including local training and partial participation. We validate the robustness of our methods by conducting extensive experiments on both public datasets and private ECG data collected from medical institutions. Furthermore, we provide a broad theoretical analysis of our algorithms and their extensions to the aforementioned practical setups. The convergence guaranties of our methods are comparable to those of classical algorithms developed without Byzantine interference.

PaperID: 1347, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15674

Authors:Vishnu Narayanan Moothedath, Umang Agarwal, Umeshraja N, James Richard Gross, Jaya Prakash Champati, Sharayu Moharir

Affiliations: Information Science and Engineering, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Computer Science, University of Victoria

Title: Inference Offloading for Cost-Sensitive Binary Classification at the Edge

Abstract:
We investigate a binary classification problem in an edge intelligence system where false negatives are more costly than false positives. The system features a compact, locally deployed model, supplemented by a larger, remote model that is accessible via the network, albeit at an offloading cost. For each sample, our system first uses the locally deployed model for inference. Based on the output of the local model, the sample may be offloaded to the remote model. This work aims to understand the fundamental tradeoff between classification accuracy and the offloading costs within such a hierarchical inference (HI) system. To optimise this system, we propose an online learning framework that continuously adapts a pair of thresholds on the local model's confidence scores. These thresholds determine the prediction of the local model and whether a sample is classified locally or offloaded to the remote model. We present a closed-form solution for the setting where the local model is calibrated. For the more general case of uncalibrated models, we introduce H2T2, an online two-threshold hierarchical inference policy, and prove it achieves sublinear regret. H2T2 is model-agnostic, requires no training, and learns during the inference phase using limited feedback. Simulations on real-world datasets show that H2T2 consistently outperforms naive and single-threshold HI policies, sometimes even surpassing single-threshold offline optima. The policy also demonstrates robustness to distribution shifts and adapts effectively to mismatched classifiers.

PaperID: 1348, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.10012

Authors:Asen Nachkov, Danda Pani Paudel, JanNico Zaech, Davide Scaramuzza, Luc Van Gool

Affiliations: Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, University of Zurich

Title: Unlocking Efficient Vehicle Dynamics Modeling via Analytic World Models

Abstract:
Differentiable simulators represent an environment’s dynamics as a differentiable function. Within robotics and autonomous driving, this property is used in Analytic Policy Gradients (APG), which relies on backpropagating through the dynamics to train accurate policies for diverse tasks. Here we show that differentiable simulation also has an important role in world modeling, where it can impart predictive, prescriptive, and counterfactual capabilities to an agent. Specifically, we design three novel task setups in which the differentiable dynamics are combined within an endto-end computation graph not with a policy, but a state predictor. This allows us to learn relative odometry, optimal planners, and optimal inverse states. We collectively call these predictors Analytic World Models (AWMs) and demonstrate how differentiable simulation enables their efficient, end-to-end learning. In autonomous driving scenarios, they have broad applicability and can augment an agent’s decision-making beyond reactive control.

PaperID: 1349, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05628

Authors:Jiří Navrátil, Jarret Ross, Payel Das, Youssef Mroueh, Samuel C Hoffman, Vijil Chenthamarakshan, Brian Belgodere

Affiliations: IBM Research

Title: GP-MoLFormer-Sim: Test Time Molecular Optimization Through Contextual Similarity Guidance

Abstract:
The ability to design molecules while preserving similarity to a target molecule and/or property is crucial for various applications in drug discovery, chemical design, and biology. We introduce in this paper an efficient trainingfree method for navigating and sampling from the molecular space with a generative Chemical Language Model (CLM), while using the molecular similarity to the target as a guide. Our method leverages the contextual representations learned from the CLM itself to estimate the molecular similarity, which is then used to adjust the autoregressive sampling strategy of the CLM. At each step of the decoding process, the method tracks the distance of the current generations from the target and updates the logits to encourage the preservation of similarity in generations. We implement the method using a recently proposed ~47M parameter SMILES-based CLM, GP-MoLFormer, and therefore refer to the method as GP-MoLFormer-Sim, which enables a test-time update of the deep generative policy to reflect the contextual similarity to a set of guide molecules. The method is further integrated into a genetic algorithm (GA) and tested on a set of standard molecular optimization benchmarks involving property optimization, molecular rediscovery, and structure-based drug design. Results show that, GP-MoLFormer-Sim, combined with GA (GP-MoLFormer-Sim+GA) outperforms existing training-free baseline methods, when the oracle remains black-box. The findings in this work are a step forward in understanding and guiding the generative mechanisms of CLMs.

PaperID: 1350, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18232

Authors:Stephen Ni-Hahn, Rico Zhu, Jerry Yin, Yue Jiang, Cynthia Rudin, Simon Mak

Affiliations: Duke University, Stanford University

Title: AutoSchA: Automatic Hierarchical Music Representations via Multi-Relational Node Isolation

Abstract:
Hierarchical representations provide powerful and principled approaches for analyzing many musical genres. Such representations have been broadly studied in music theory, for instance via Schenkerian analysis (SchA). Hierarchical music analyses, however, are highly costintensive; the analysis of a single piece of music requires a great deal of time and effort from trained experts. The representation of hierarchical analyses in a computer-readable format is also a further challenge. Given recent developments in hierarchical deep learning and increasing quantities of computer-readable data, there is great promise in extending such work for an automatic hierarchical representation framework. This paper thus introduces a novel approach, AutoSchA, which extends recent developments in graph neural networks (GNNs) for hierarchical music analysis. AutoSchA features three key contributions: 1) a new graph learning framework for hierarchical music representation, 2) a new graph pooling mechanism based on node isolation that directly optimizes learned pooling assignments, and 3) a state-of-the-art architecture that integrates such developments for automatic hierarchical music analysis. We show, in a suite of experiments, that AutoSchA performs comparably to human experts when analyzing Baroque fugue subjects.

PaperID: 1351, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.04217

Authors:Hikari Otsuka, Daiki Chijiwa, Yasuyuki Okoshi, Daichi Fujiki, Susumu Takeuchi, Masato Motomura

Affiliations: Institute of Science Tokyo

Title: The Strong Lottery Ticket Hypothesis for Multi-Head Attention Mechanisms

Abstract:
The strong lottery ticket hypothesis (SLTH) conjectures that highperforming subnetworks, called strong lottery tickets (SLTs), are hidden in randomly initialized neural networks. Although recent theoretical studies have established the SLTH across various neural architectures, the SLTH for transformer architectures still lacks theoretical understanding. In particular, the current theory of the SLTH does not yet account for the multi-head attention (MHA) mechanism, a core component of transformers. To address this gap, we introduce a theoretical analysis of the existence of SLTs within MHAs. We prove that, if a randomly initialized MHA of H heads and input dimension d has the hidden dimension O(d log(Hd^(3/2))) for the key and value, it contains an SLT that approximates an arbitrary MHA with the same input dimension with high probability. Furthermore, by leveraging this theory for MHAs, we extend the SLTH to transformers without normalization layers. We empirically validate our theoretical findings, demonstrating that the approximation error between the SLT within a source model (MHA and transformer) and an approximate target counterpart decreases exponentially by increasing the hidden dimension of the source model.

PaperID: 1352, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08604

Authors:Jihwan Park, Taehoon Song, Sanghyeok Lee, Miso Choi, Hyunwoo J. Kim

Affiliations: Korea University

Title: Transferable Model-agnostic Vision-Language Model Adaptation for Efficient Weak-to-Strong Generalization

Abstract:
VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) have been widely used in various visual recognition tasks due to their remarkable generalization capabilities. As these models grow in size and complexity, fine-tuning becomes costly, emphasizing the need to reuse adaptation knowledge from 'weaker' models to efficiently enhance 'stronger' ones. However, existing adaptation transfer methods exhibit limited transferability across models due to their model-specific design and high computational demands. To tackle this, we propose Transferable Model-agnostic adapter (TransMiter), a light-weight adapter that improves vision-language models 'without backpropagation'. TransMiter captures the knowledge gap between pre-trained and fine-tuned VLMs, in an 'unsupervised' manner. Once trained, this knowledge can be seamlessly transferred across different models without the need for backpropagation. Moreover, TransMiter consists of only a few layers, inducing a negligible additional inference cost. Notably, supplementing the process with a few labeled data further yields additional performance gain, often surpassing a fine-tuned stronger model, with a marginal training cost. Experimental results and analyses demonstrate that TransMiter effectively and efficiently transfers adaptation knowledge while preserving generalization abilities across VLMs of different sizes and architectures in visual recognition tasks.

PaperID: 1353, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07780

Authors:Likang Peng, Chao Su, Wenyuan Wu, Yuan Sun, Dezhong Peng, Xi Peng, Xu Wang

Affiliations: The College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, National Key Laboratory of Fundamental Algorithms and Models for Engineering Numerical Simulation, China Tianfu Jincheng Laboratory, China Centre for Frontier AI Research (CFAR)

Title: Semantic-Consistent Bidirectional Contrastive Hashing for Noisy Multi-Label Cross-Modal Retrieval

Abstract:
Crossmodal hashing (CMH) facilitates efficient retrieval across different modalities (e.g., image and text) by encoding data into compact binary representations. While recent methods have achieved remarkable performance, they often rely heavily on fully annotated datasets, which are costly and labor-intensive to obtain. In real-world scenarios, particularly in multi-label datasets, label noise is prevalent and severely degrades retrieval performance. Moreover, existing CMH approaches typically overlook the partial semantic overlaps inherent in multi-label data, limiting their robustness and generalization. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel framework named Semantic-Consistent Bidirectional Contrastive Hashing (SCBCH). The framework comprises two complementary modules: (1) Cross-modal Semantic-Consistent Classification (CSCC), which leverages cross-modal semantic consistency to estimate sample reliability and reduce the impact of noisy labels; (2) Bidirectional Soft Contrastive Hashing (BSCH), which dynamically generates soft contrastive sample pairs based on multi-label semantic overlap, enabling adaptive contrastive learning between semantically similar and dissimilar samples across modalities. Extensive experiments on four widely-used cross-modal retrieval benchmarks validate the effectiveness and robustness of our method, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art approaches under noisy multi-label conditions.

PaperID: 1354, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.09261

Authors:Ziran Qin, Youru Lv, Mingbao Lin, Hang Guo, Zeren Zhang, Danping Zou, Weiyao Lin

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiaotong University, Rakuten Asia Pte. Ltd., Tsinghua University, Peking University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: Head-Aware KV Cache Compression for Efficient Visual Autoregressive Modeling

Abstract:
Visual Autoregressive (VAR) models adopt a nextscale prediction paradigm, offering high-quality content generation with substantially fewer decoding steps. However, existing VAR models suffer from significant attention complexity and severe memory overhead due to the accumulation of key-value (KV) caches across scales. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by introducing KV cache compression into the next-scale generation paradigm. We begin with a crucial observation: attention heads in VAR models can be divided into two functionally distinct categories: Contextual Heads focus on maintaining semantic consistency, while Structural Heads are responsible for preserving spatial coherence. This structural divergence causes existing one-size-fits-all compression methods to perform poorly on VAR models. To address this, we propose HACK, a training-free Head-Aware KV cache Compression frameworK. HACK utilizes an offline classification scheme to separate head types, enabling it to apply pattern-specific compression strategies with asymmetric cache budgets for each category. By doing so, HACK effectively constrains the average KV cache length within a fixed budget B, reducing the theoretical attention complexity from O(n4) to O(Bn2). Extensive experiments on multiple VAR models across text-to-image and class-conditional tasks validate the effectiveness and generalizability of HACK. It achieves up to 70% KV cache compression without degrading output quality, resulting in memory savings and faster in- ference. For example, HACK provides a 1.75× memory reduction and a 1.57× speedup on Infinity-8B.

PaperID: 1355, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.07047

Authors:Muhammad Rashid, Elvio G. Amparore, Enrico Ferrari, Damiano Verda

Affiliations: University of Turin, Rulex Innovations Labs

Title: ShapBPT: Image Feature Attributions Using Data-Aware Binary Partition Trees

Abstract:
Pixellevel feature attributions are an important tool in eXplainable AI for Computer Vision (XCV), providing visual insights into how image features influence model predictions. The Owen formula for hierarchical Shapley values has been widely used to interpret machine learning (ML) models and their learned representations. However, existing hierarchical Shapley approaches do not exploit the multiscale structure of image data, leading to slow convergence and weak alignment with the actual morphological features. Moreover, no prior Shapley method has leveraged data-aware hierarchies for Computer Vision tasks, leaving a gap in model interpretability of structured visual data. To address this, this paper introduces ShapBPT, a novel data-aware XCV method based on the hierarchical Shapley formula. ShapBPT assigns Shapley coefficients to a multiscale hierarchical structure tailored for images, the Binary Partition Tree (BPT). By using this data-aware hierarchical partitioning, ShapBPT ensures that feature attributions align with intrinsic image morphology, effectively prioritizing relevant regions while reducing computational overhead. This advancement connects hierarchical Shapley methods with image data, providing a more efficient and semantically meaningful approach to visual interpretability. Experimental results confirm ShapBPT’s effectiveness, demonstrating superior alignment with image structures and improved efficiency over existing XCV methods, and a 20-subject user study confirming that ShapBPT explanations are preferred by humans.

PaperID: 1356, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17561

Authors:Huimin Ren, Yan Liang, Baiqiao Su, Chaobo Sun, Hengtong Lu, Kaike Zhang, Chen Wei

Affiliations: Li Auto Inc., Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: LexInstructEval: Lexical Instruction Following Evaluation for Large Language Models

Abstract:
The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to precisely follow complex and finegrained lexical instructions is a cornerstone of their utility and controllability. However, evaluating this capability remains a significant challenge. Current methods either rely on subjective and costly human evaluation or on automated ``LLM-as-a-judge'' systems, which suffer from inherent biases and unreliability. Existing programmatic benchmarks, while objective, often lack the expressiveness to test intricate, compositional constraints at a granular level. To address these limitations, we introduce LexInstructEval, a new benchmark and evaluation framework for fine-grained lexical instruction following. Our framework is built upon a formal, rule-based grammar that deconstructs complex instructions into a canonical (Procedure, Relation, Value) triplet. This grammar enables the systematic generation of a diverse dataset through a multi-stage, human-in-the-loop pipeline and facilitates objective verification via a transparent, programmatic engine. We release our dataset and open-source evaluation tools to facilitate further research into the controllability and reliability of LLMs.

PaperID: 1357, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09176

Authors:Hazem Hesham Yousef Shalby, Fabrizio Pittorino, Francesca Palermo, Diana Trojaniello, Manuel Roveri

Affiliations: Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, EssilorLuxottica Smart Eyewear Lab

Title: DQT: Dynamic Quantization Training via Dequantization-Free Nested Integer Arithmetic

Abstract:
The deployment of deep neural networks on resourceconstrained devices relies on quantization. While static, uniform quantization applies a fixed bit-width to all inputs, it fails to adapt to their varying complexity. Dynamic, instance-based mixed-precision quantization promises a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off by allocating higher precision only when needed. However, a critical bottleneck remains: existing methods require a costly dequantize-to-float and requantize-to-integer cycle to change precision, breaking the integer-only hardware paradigm and compromising performance gains. This paper introduces Dynamic Quantization Training (DQT), a novel framework that removes this bottleneck. At the core of DQT is a nested integer representation where lower-precision values are bit-wise embedded within higher-precision ones. This design, coupled with custom integer-only arithmetic, allows for on-the-fly bit-width switching through a near-zero-cost bit-shift operation. This makes DQT the first quantization framework to enable both dequantization-free static mixed-precision of the backbone network, and truly efficient dynamic, instance-based quantization through a lightweight controller that decides at runtime how to quantize each layer. We demonstrate DQT state-of-the-art performance on ResNet18 on CIFAR-10 and ResNet50 on ImageNet. On ImageNet, our 4-bit dynamic ResNet50 achieves 77.00% top-1 accuracy, an improvement over leading static (LSQ, 76.70%) and dynamic (DQNET, 76.94%) methods at a comparable BitOPs budget. Crucially, DQT achieves this with a bit-width transition cost of only 28.3M simple bit-shift operations, a drastic improvement over the 56.6M costly Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) floating-point operations required by previous dynamic approaches - unlocking a new frontier in efficient, adaptive AI.

PaperID: 1358, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12147

Authors:Lifeng Shen, Liang Peng, Ruiwen Liu, Shuyin Xia, Yi Liu

Affiliations: Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Chongqing Ant Consumer Finance Co, . Ltd

Title: Finding Time Series Anomalies Using Granular-Ball Vector Data Description

Abstract:
Modeling normal behavior in dynamic, nonlinear time series data is challenging for effective anomaly detection. Traditional methods, such as nearest neighbor and clustering approaches, often depend on rigid assumptions, such as a predefined number of reliable neighbors or clusters, which frequently break down in complex temporal scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce the Granularball One-Class Network (GBOC), a novel approach based on a data-adaptive representation called Granular-ball Vector Data Description (GVDD). GVDD partitions the latent space into compact, high-density regions represented by granular-balls, which are generated through a density-guided hierarchical splitting process and refined by removing noisy structures. Each granular-ball serves as a prototype for local normal behavior, naturally positioning itself between individual instances and clusters while preserving the local topological structure of the sample set. During training, GBOC improves the compactness of representations by aligning samples with their nearest granular-ball centers. During inference, anomaly scores are computed based on the distance to the nearest granular-ball. By focusing on dense, high-quality regions and significantly reducing the number of prototypes, GBOC delivers both robustness and efficiency in anomaly detection. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method, highlighting its ability to handle the challenges of time series anomaly detection.

PaperID: 1359, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06598

Authors:Mohammad Shirzadi, Ali Safarpoor Dehkordi, Ahad N. Zehmakan

Affiliations: Australian National University

Title: Adaptive Initial Residual Connections for GNNs with Theoretical Guarantees

Abstract:
Message passing is the core operation in graph neural networks, where each node updates its embeddings by aggregating information from its neighbors. However, in deep architectures, this process often leads to diminished expressiveness. A popular solution is the use of residual connections, where the input from the current (or initial) layer is added to the aggregated neighbor information to preserve embeddings across layers. Following a recent line of research, we investigate an adaptive residual scheme in which different nodes have varying residual strengths. We prove that this approach prevents oversmoothing; particularly, we show that the Dirichlet energy of the embeddings remains bounded away from zero. This is the first theoretical guarantee not only for the adaptive setting, but also for static residual connections (where residual strengths are shared across nodes) with activation functions. Furthermore, based on an extensive set of experiments, this adaptive approach is shown to outperform the standard and stateof-the-art message passing mechanisms, especially on heterophilic graphs. To improve the time complexity of our approach, we introduce a variant in which residual strengths are not learned but instead set heuristically, a choice that performs as well as the learnable version.

PaperID: 1360, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09921

Authors:Leping Si, Meimei Yang, Hui Xue, Shipeng Zhu, Pengfei Fang

Affiliations: Southeast University

Title: Adaptive Hyperbolic Kernels: Modulated Embedding in de Branges-Rovnyak Spaces

Abstract:
Hierarchical data pervades diverse machine learning applications, including natural language processing, computer vision, and social network analysis. Hyperbolic space, characterized by its negative curvature, has demonstrated strong potential in such tasks due to its capacity to embed hierarchical structures with minimal distortion. Previous evidence indicates that the hyperbolic representation capacity can be further enhanced through kernel methods. However, existing hyperbolic kernels still suffer from mild geometric distortion or lack adaptability. This paper addresses these issues by introducing a curvatureaware de Branges–Rovnyak space, a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) that is isometric to a Poincaré ball. We design an adjustable multiplier to select the appropriate RKHS corresponding to the hyperbolic space with any curvature adaptively. Building on this foundation, we further construct a family of adaptive hyperbolic kernels, including the novel adaptive hyperbolic radial kernel, whose learnable parameters modulate hyperbolic features in a task-aware manner. Extensive experiments on visual and language benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed kernels outperform existing hyperbolic kernels in modeling hierarchical dependencies.

PaperID: 1361, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18322

Authors:Jiangfeng Sun, SiHao He, Zhonghong Ou, Meina Song

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: Structures Meet Semantics: Multimodal Fusion via Graph Contrastive Learning

Abstract:
Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) aims to infer emotional states by effectively integrating textual, acoustic, and visual modalities. Despite notable progress, existing multimodal fusion methods often neglect modalityspecific structural dependencies and semantic misalignment, limiting their quality, interpretability, and robustness. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework called the Structural-Semantic Unifier (SSU), which systematically integrates modality-specific structural information and cross-modal semantic grounding for enhanced multimodal representations. Specifically, SSU dynamically constructs modality-specific graphs by leveraging linguistic syntax for text and a lightweight, text-guided attention mechanism for acoustic and visual modalities, thus capturing detailed intra-modal relationships and semantic interactions. We further introduce a semantic anchor, derived from global textual semantics, that serves as a cross-modal alignment hub, effectively harmonizing heterogeneous semantic spaces across modalities. Additionally, we develop a multi-view contrastive learning objective that promotes discriminability, semantic consistency, and structural coherence across intra- and inter-modal views. Extensive evaluations on two widely-used benchmark datasets, CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI, demonstrate that SSU consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance while significantly reducing computational overhead compared to prior methods. Comprehensive qualitative analyses further validate SSU’s interpretability and its ability to capture nuanced emotional patterns through semantically-grounded interactions.

PaperID: 1362, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.06996

Authors:Hong Ye Tan, Subhadip Mukherjee, Junqi Tang, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb

Affiliations: University of California, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, University of Birmingham, University of Cambridge

Title: Blessing of Dimensionality for Approximating Sobolev Classes on Manifolds

Abstract:
The manifold hypothesis says that natural highdimensional data lie on or around a low-dimensional manifold. The recent success of statistical and learning-based methods in very high dimensions empirically supports this hypothesis, suggesting that typical worst-case analysis does not provide practical guarantees. A natural step for analysis is thus to assume the manifold hypothesis and derive bounds that are independent of any ambient dimensions that the data may be embedded in. Theoretical implications in this direction have recently been explored in terms of generalization of ReLU networks and convergence of Langevin methods. In this work, we consider optimal uniform approximations with functions of finite statistical complexity. While upper bounds on uniform approximation exist in the literature using ReLU neural networks, we consider the opposite: lower bounds to quantify the fundamental difficulty of approximation on manifolds. In particular, we demonstrate that the statistical complexity required to approximate a class of bounded Sobolev functions on a compact manifold is bounded from below, and moreover that this bound is dependent only on the intrinsic properties of the manifold, such as curvature, volume, and injectivity radius.

PaperID: 1363, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11865

Authors:Jiong Tao, Yong-Liang Yang, Bailin Deng

Affiliations: University of Bath, Cardiff University

Title: Learning Conjugate Direction Fields for Planar Quadrilateral Mesh Generation

Abstract:
Planar quadrilateral (PQ) mesh generation is a key process in computeraided design, particularly for architectural applications where the goal is to discretize a freeform surface using planar quad faces. The conjugate direction field (CDF) defined on the freeform surface plays a significant role in generating a PQ mesh, as it largely determines the PQ mesh layout. Conventionally, a CDF is obtained by solving a complex non-linear optimization problem that incorporates user preferences, i.e., aligning the CDF with user-specified strokes on the surface. This often requires a large number of iterations that are computationally expensive, preventing the interactive CDF design process for a desirable PQ mesh. To address this challenge, we propose a data-driven approach based on neural networks for controlled CDF generation. Our approach can effectively learn and fuse features from the freeform surface and the user strokes, and efficiently generate quality CDF respecting user guidance. To enable training and testing, we also present a dataset composed of 50000+ freeform surfaces with ground-truth CDFs, as well as a set of metrics for quantitative evaluation. The effectiveness and efficiency of our work are demonstrated by extensive experiments using testing data, architectural surfaces, and general 3D shapes.

PaperID: 1364, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09736

Authors:Joana Tirana, Dimitra Tsigkari, David Solans Noguero, Nicolas Kourtellis

Affiliations: University College Dublin, Telefonica Scientific Research, Keysight AI Labs

Title: Data Heterogeneity and Forgotten Labels in Split Federated Learning

Abstract:
In Split Federated Learning (SFL), the clients collaboratively train a model with the help of a server by splitting the model into two parts. Part1 is trained locally at each client and aggregated by the aggregator at the end of each round. Part-2 is trained at a server that sequentially processes the intermediate activations received from each client. We study the phenomenon of catastrophic forgetting (CF) in SFL in the presence of data heterogeneity. In detail, due to the nature of SFL, local updates of part-1 may drift away from global optima, while part-2 is sensitive to the processing sequence, similar to forgetting in continual learning (CL). Specifically, we observe that the trained model performs better in classes (labels) seen at the end of the sequence. We investigate this phenomenon with emphasis on key aspects of SFL, such as the processing order at the server and the cut layer. Based on our findings, we propose Hydra, a novel mitigation method inspired by multi-head neural networks and adapted for the SFL setting. Extensive numerical evaluations show that Hydra outperforms baselines and methods from the literature.

PaperID: 1365, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20268

Authors:Van Long Tran, Truyen Tran, Phuoc Nguyen

Affiliations: Applied Artificial Intelligence Initiative Deakin University

Title: Robust SDE Parameter Estimation Under Missing Time Information Setting

Abstract:
Recent advances in stochastic differential equations (SDEs) have enabled robust modeling of realworld dynamical processes across diverse domains, such as finance, health, and systems biology. However, parameter estimation for SDEs typically relies on accurately time-stamped observational data. When temporal ordering information is corrupted, missing, or deliberately hidden (e.g., for privacy), existing estimation methods often fail. In this paper, we investigate the conditions under which temporal order can be recovered and introduce a novel framework that simultaneously reconstructs temporal information and estimates SDE parameters. Our approach exploits asymmetries between forward and backward processes, deriving a score-matching criterion to infer the correct temporal order between pairs of observations. We then recover the total order via a sorting procedure and estimate SDE parameters from the reconstructed sequence using maximum likelihood. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, extending parameter estimation to settings with missing temporal order and broadening applicability in sensitive domains.

PaperID: 1366, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10488

Authors:Evgeniia Vu, Andrei Boiarov, Dmitry Vetrov

Affiliations: Constructor University, Constructor Tech

Title: Streaming Generation of Co-Speech Gestures via Accelerated Rolling Diffusion

Abstract:
Generating cospeech gestures in real time requires both temporal coherence and efficient sampling. We introduce a novel framework for streaming gesture generation that extends Rolling Diffusion models with structured progressive noise scheduling, enabling seamless long-sequence motion synthesis while preserving realism and diversity. Our framework is universally compatible with existing diffusion-based gesture generation model, transforming them into streaming methods capable of continuous generation without requiring post-processing. We evaluate our framework on ZEGGS and BEAT, strong benchmarks for real-world applicability. Applied to state-of-the-art baselines on both datasets, it consistently outperforms them, demonstrating its effectiveness as a generalizable and efficient solution for real-time co-speech gesture synthesis. We further propose Rolling Diffusion Ladder Acceleration (RDLA), a new approach that employs a ladder-based noise scheduling strategy to simultaneously denoise multiple frames. This significantly improves sampling efficiency while maintaining motion consistency, achieving up to a 4× speedup with high visual fidelity and temporal coherence in our experiments. Comprehensive user studies further validate our framework’s ability to generate realistic, diverse gestures closely synchronized with the audio input.

PaperID: 1367, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10200

Authors:Jieting Wang, Huimei Shi, Feijiang Li, Xiaolei Shang

Affiliations: Shanxi University

Title: Beyond MSE: Ordinal Cross-Entropy for Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting

Abstract:
Time series forecasting is an important task that involves analyzing temporal dependencies and underlying patterns (such as trends, cyclicality, and seasonality) in historical data to predict future values or trends. Current deep learningbased forecasting models primarily employ Mean Squared Error (MSE) loss functions for regression modeling. Despite enabling direct value prediction, this method offers no uncertainty estimation and exhibits poor outlier robustness. To address these limitations, we propose OCE-TS, a novel ordinal classification approach for time series forecasting that replaces MSE with Ordinal Cross-Entropy (OCE) loss, preserving prediction order while quantifying uncertainty through probability output. Specifically, OCE-TS begins by discretizing observed values into ordered intervals and deriving their probabilities via a parametric distribution as supervision signals. Using a simple linear model, we then predict probability distributions for each timestep. The OCE loss is computed between the cumulative distributions of predicted and ground-truth probabilities, explicitly preserving ordinal relationships among forecasted values. Through theoretical analysis using influence functions, we establish that cross-entropy (CE) loss exhibits superior stability and outlier robustness compared to MSE loss. Empirically, we compared OCE-TS with five baseline models—Autoformer, DLinear, iTransformer, TimeXer, and TimeBridge—on seven public time series datasets. Using MSE and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) as evaluation metrics, the results demonstrate that OCE-TS consistently outperforms benchmark models.

PaperID: 1368, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10130

Authors:Jieting Wang, Xiaolei Shang, Feijiang Li, Furong Peng

Affiliations: Shanxi University

Title: RI-Loss: A Learnable Residual-Informed Loss for Time Series Forecasting

Abstract:
Time series forecasting relies on predicting future values from historical data, yet most stateof-the-art approaches—including transformer and multilayer perceptron-based models—optimize using Mean Squared Error (MSE), which has two fundamental weaknesses: its point-wise error computation fails to capture temporal relationships, and it does not account for inherent noise in the data. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the Residual-Informed Loss (RI-Loss), a novel objective function based on the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC). RI-Loss explicitly models noise structure by enforcing dependence between the residual sequence and a random time series, enabling more robust, noise-aware representations. Theoretically, we derive the first non-asymptotic HSIC bound with explicit double-sample complexity terms, achieving optimal convergence rates through Bernstein-type concentration inequalities and Rademacher complexity analysis. This provides rigorous guarantees for RI-Loss optimization while precisely quantifying kernel space interactions. Empirically, experiments across eight real-world benchmarks and five leading forecasting models demonstrate improvements in predictive performance, validating the effectiveness of our approach.

PaperID: 1369, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18542

Authors:Qi Wang, Hanyang Peng, Yue Yu

Affiliations: Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, PengCheng Laboratory

Title: Symphony-MoE: Harmonizing Disparate Pre-trained Models into a Coherent Mixture-of-Experts

Abstract:
Mixtureof-Experts (MoE) models enable scalable performance by activating large parameter sets sparsely, minimizing computational overhead. To mitigate the prohibitive cost of training MoEs from scratch, recent work employs upcycling, reusing a single pre-trained dense model by replicating its feed-forward network (FFN) layers into experts. However, this limits expert diversity, as all experts originate from a single pre-trained dense model. This paper addresses this limitation by constructing powerful MoE models using experts sourced from multiple identically-architected but disparate pre-trained models (e.g., Qwen2.5-Coder and Qwen2). A key challenge lies in the fact that these source models occupy disparate, dissonant regions of the parameter space, making direct upcycling prone to severe performance degradation. To overcome this, we propose Symphony-MoE, a novel two-stage framework designed to harmonize these models into a single, coherent expert mixture. First, we establish this harmony in a training-free manner: we construct a shared backbone via a layer-aware fusion strategy and, crucially, alleviate parameter misalignment among experts using activation-based functional alignment. Subsequently, a stage of post-training coordinates the entire architecture. Experiments demonstrate that our method successfully integrates experts from heterogeneous sources, achieving an MoE model that significantly surpasses baselines in multi-domain tasks and out-of-distribution generalization.

PaperID: 1370, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13133

Authors:Shudong Wang, Xinfei Wang, Chenhao Zhang, Shanchen Pang, Haiyuan Gui, Wenhao Ji, Xiaojian Liao

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, China University of Petroleum(East China) State Key Laboratory of Chemical Safety Shandong Key Laboratory of Intelligent Oil & Gas Industrial Software, School of Information and Control Engineering, Qingdao University of Technology, State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment, Beihang University

Title: Soft Conflict-Resolution Decision Transformer for Offline Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Multitask reinforcement learning (MTRL) seeks to learn a unified policy for diverse tasks, but often suffers from gradient conflicts across tasks. Existing masking-based methods attempt to mitigate such conflicts by assigning task-specific parameter masks. However, our empirical study shows that coarse-grained binary masks have the problem of over-suppressing key conflicting parameters, hindering knowledge sharing across tasks. Moreover, different tasks exhibit varying conflict levels, yet existing methods use a one-size-fits-all fixed sparsity strategy to keep training stability and performance, which proves inadequate. These limitations hinder the model’s generalization and learning efficiency. To address these issues, we propose SoCo-DT, a Soft Conflict-resolution method based by parameter importance. By leveraging Fisher information, mask values are dynamically adjusted to retain important parameters while suppressing conflicting ones. In addition, we introduce a dynamic sparsity adjustment strategy based on the Interquartile Range (IQR), which constructs task-specific thresholding schemes using the distribution of conflict and harmony scores during training. To enable adaptive sparsity evolution throughout training, we further incorporate an asymmetric cosine annealing schedule to continuously update the threshold. Experimental results on the Meta-World benchmark show that SoCo-DT outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 7.6% on MT50 and by 10.5% on the suboptimal dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness in mitigating gradient conflicts and improving overall multi-task performance.

PaperID: 1371, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15016

Authors:Xiaodong Wang, Langling Huang, Zhirong Wu, Xu Zhao, Teng Xu, Xuhong Xia, Peixi Peng

Affiliations: School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Peking University, Douyin Group

Title: LiViBench: An Omnimodal Benchmark for Interactive Livestream Video Understanding

Abstract:
The development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has advanced general video understanding. However, existing video evaluation benchmarks primarily focus on noninteractive videos, such as movies and recordings. To fill this gap, this paper proposes the first omnimodal benchmark for interactive livestream videos, LiViBench. It features a diverse set of 24 tasks, highlighting the perceptual, reasoning, and livestream-specific challenges. To efficiently construct the dataset, we design a standardized semi-automatic annotation workflow that incorporates the human-in-the-loop at multiple stages. The workflow leverages multiple MLLMs to form a multi-agent system for comprehensive video description and uses a seed-question-driven method to construct high-quality annotations. All interactive videos in the benchmark include audio, speech, and real-time comments modalities. To enhance models' understanding of interactive videos, we design tailored two-stage instruction-tuning and propose a Video-to-Comment Retrieval (VCR) module to improve the model's ability to utilize real-time comments. Based on these advancements, we develop LiVi-LLM-7B, an MLLM with enhanced knowledge of interactive livestreams. Experiments show that our model outperforms larger open-source models with up to 72B parameters, narrows the gap with leading proprietary models on LiViBench, and achieves enhanced performance on general video benchmarks, including VideoMME, LongVideoBench, MLVU, and VideoEval-Pro.

PaperID: 1372, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16979

Authors:Yunyun Wang, Zheng Duan, Xinyue Liao, Ke-Jia CHEN, Songcan Chen

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Title: The Finer the Better: Towards Granular-aware Open-set Domain Generalization

Abstract:
OpenSet Domain Generalization (OSDG) aims to generalize over unseen target domains containing open classes, and the core challenge lies in identifying unknown samples never encountered during training. Recently, CLIP has exhibited impressive performance in OSDG, while it still falls into the dilemma between structural risk of known classes and open space risk from unknown classes, and easily suffers from over-confidence, especially when distinguishing known-like unknown samples. To this end, we propose a Semantic-enhanced CLIP (SeeCLIP) framework that leverages fine-grained semantics to boost unknown detection, so as to accommodate both risks and enable precise discrimination among categories. In SeeCLIP, we propose a semantic-aware prompt enhancement module to extract fine-grained key semantic features, and establish a fine-grained vision-language alignment. Duplex contrastive learning is proposed for prompt learning, which jointly optimizes duplex losses such that the unknown prompt is similar to known prompts, yet exhibits key semantic differences. We also design a semantic-guided diffusion module to enable nuanced capture in generation. By injecting perturbed key semantics into a diffusion model as control conditions, it generates the closest unknowns or pseudo-open samples with high similarity yet low belongingness to known classes. We formulate a generalization bound for OSDG, and show that SeeCLIP can achieve a lower generalization risk. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets validate the superiority of SeeCLIP, it outperforms the SOTA methods by nearly 3% on accuracy and 5% on H-index, respectively.

PaperID: 1373, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.01276

Authors:Marcel Wever, Maximilian Muschalik, Fabian Fumagalli, Marius Lindauer

Affiliations: Research Center, Leibniz University Hannover, LMU Munich

Title: HyperSHAP: Shapley Values and Interactions for Explaining Hyperparameter Optimization

Abstract:
Hyperparameter optimization (HPO) is a crucial step in achieving strong predictive performance. Yet, the impact of individual hyperparameters on model generalization is highly contextdependent, prohibiting a one-size-fits-all solution and requiring opaque HPO methods to find optimal configurations. However, the black-box nature of most HPO methods undermines user trust and discourages adoption. To address this, we propose a game-theoretic explainability framework for HPO based on Shapley values and interactions. Our approach provides an additive decomposition of a performance measure across hyperparameters, enabling local and global explanations of hyperparameters' contributions and their interactions. The framework, named HyperSHAP, offers insights into ablation studies, the tunability of learning algorithms, and optimizer behavior across different hyperparameter spaces. We demonstrate HyperSHAP's capabilities on various HPO benchmarks to analyze the interaction structure of the corresponding HPO problems, demonstrating its broad applicability and actionable insights for improving HPO.

PaperID: 1374, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10254

Authors:Jiulong Wu, Yucheng Shen, Lingyong Yan, Haixin Sun, Deguo Xia, Jizhou Huang, Min Cao

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University, Baidu Inc.

Title: Facial-R1: Aligning Reasoning and Recognition for Facial Emotion Analysis

Abstract:
Facial Emotion Analysis (FEA) extends traditional facial emotion recognition by incorporating explainable, finegrained reasoning. The task integrates three subtasks—emotion recognition, facial Action Unit (AU) recognition, and AU-based emotion reasoning—to jointly model affective states. While recent approaches leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and achieve promising results, they face two critical limitations: (1) hallucinated reasoning, where VLMs generate plausible but inaccurate explanations due to insufficient emotion-specific knowledge; and (2) misalignment between emotion reasoning and recognition, caused by fragmented connections between observed facial features and final labels. We propose Facial-R1, a three-stage alignment framework that effectively addresses both challenges with minimal supervision. First, we employ instruction fine-tuning to establish basic emotional reasoning capability for reducing hallucinations. Second, we introduce reinforcement training guided by emotion and AU labels as reward signals, which explicitly aligns the generated reasoning process with the predicted emotion. Third, we design a data synthesis pipeline that iteratively leverages the prior stages to expand the training dataset, enabling scalable self-improvement of the model. Built upon this framework, we introduce FEA-20K, a benchmark dataset comprising 17,737 training and 1,688 test samples with fine-grained emotion analysis annotations. Extensive experiments across eight standard benchmarks demonstrate that Facial-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance in FEA, with strong generalization and robust interpretability.

PaperID: 1375, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16047

Authors:Boxun Xu, Yu Wang, Zihu Wang, Peng Li

Affiliations: University of California, Santa Barbara

Title: AMS-KV: Adaptive KV Caching in Multi-Scale Visual Autoregressive Transformers

Abstract:
Visual autoregressive modeling (VAR) via nextscale prediction has emerged as a scalable image generation paradigm. While Key and Value (KV) caching in large language models (LLMs) has been extensively studied, next-scale prediction presents unique challenges, and KV caching design for next-scale based VAR transformers remains largely unexplored. A major bottleneck is the excessive KV memory growth with the increasing number of scales—severely limiting scalability. Our systematic investigation reveals that: (1) Attending to tokens from local scales significantly contributes to generation quality (2) Allocating a small amount of memory for the coarsest scales, termed as condensed scales, stabilizes multi-scale image generation (3) Strong KV similarity across finer scales is predominantly observed in cache-efficient layers, whereas cache-demanding layers exhibit weaker inter-scale similarity. Based on the observations, we introduce AMS-KV, a scale-adaptive KV caching policy for next-scale prediction in VAR models. AMS-KV prioritizes storing KVs from condensed and local scales, preserving the most relevant tokens to maintain generation quality. It further optimizes KV cache utilization and computational efficiency identifying cache-demanding layers through inter-scale similarity analysis. Compared to the vanilla next-scale prediction-based VAR models, AMS-KV reduces KV cache usage by up to 84.83% and self-attention latency by 60.48%. Moreover, when the baseline VAR-d30 model encounters out-of-memory failures at a batch size of 128, AMS-KV enables stable scaling to a batch size of 256 with improved throughput.

PaperID: 1376, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22283

Authors:Rui Xu, Yunke Wang, Yong Luo, Bo Du

Affiliations: Wuhan University, The University of Sydney

Title: Rethinking Visual Token Reduction in LVLMs Under Cross-Modal Misalignment

Abstract:
Large VisionLanguage Models (LVLMs) encode visual inputs as dense sequences of patch-level tokens to capture fine-grained semantics. These visual tokens often outnumber their textual counterparts by a large margin, leading to substantial computational overhead and limiting the scalability of LVLMs in practice. Previous efforts have explored visual token reduction either prior to or within the large language models (LLMs). However, most in-LLM reduction approaches rely on text-conditioned interactions, implicitly assuming that textual tokens can reliably capture the importance of visual tokens. In this work, we revisit this assumption and reveal causal, semantic, and spatial forms of cross-modal misalignment. These misalignments undermine the effectiveness of text-guided visual token reduction. To address this, we introduce VisionDrop, a training-free, visual-only pruning framework that selects informative visual tokens based on intra-modal (visual-to-visual) attention, without relying on textual signals. To further suppress redundancy throughout the model hierarchy, we treat the visual encoder and the LLM as a unified system and design a progressive pruning pipeline. Our method performs dominant token selection and lightweight contextual merging at multiple stages, enabling fine-grained visual information to be retained even under aggressive token budgets. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks show that VisionDrop achieves consistent improvements over existing approaches, despite requiring no additional training or complex modifications. Notably, when integrated with LLaVA-NeXT-7B, VisionDrop achieves a 2.7x reduction in inference latency and 6x in FLOPs, while retaining 95.71% of the original performance.

PaperID: 1377, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05920

Authors:Jiawen Yang, Yihui Cao, Xuanyu Tian, Yuyao Zhang, Hongjiang Wei

Affiliations: ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai Jiaotong University

Title: NICE: Neural Implicit Craniofacial Model for Orthognathic Surgery Prediction

Abstract:
Orthognathic surgery is a crucial intervention for correcting dentofacial skeletal deformities to enhance occlusal functionality and facial aesthetics. Accurate postoperative facial appearance prediction remains challenging due to the complex nonlinear interactions between skeletal movements and facial soft tissue. Existing biomechanical, parametric models and deeplearning approaches either lack computational efficiency or fail to fully capture these intricate interactions. To address these limitations, we propose Neural Implicit Craniofacial Model (NICE) which employs implicit neural representations for accurate anatomical reconstruction and surgical outcome prediction. NICE comprises a shape module, which employs region-specific implicit Signed Distance Function (SDF) decoders to reconstruct the facial surface, maxilla, and mandible, and a surgery module, which employs region-specific deformation decoders. These deformation decoders are driven by a shared surgical latent code to effectively model the complex, nonlinear biomechanical response of the facial surface to skeletal movements, incorporating anatomical prior knowledge. The deformation decoders output point-wise displacement fields, enabling precise modeling of surgical outcomes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NICE outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, notably improving prediction accuracy in critical facial regions such as lips and chin, while robustly preserving anatomical integrity. This work provides a clinically viable tool for enhanced surgical planning and patient consultation in orthognathic procedures.

PaperID: 1378, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05835

Authors:Lingfeng Yao, Chenpei Huang, Shengyao Wang, Junpei Xue, Hanqing Guo, Jiang Liu, Phone Lin, Tomoaki Ohtsuki, Miao Pan

Affiliations: University of Houston, Waseda University, University of Hawaii at Mānoa, National Taiwan University, Keio University

Title: Yours or Mine? Overwriting Attacks Against Neural Audio Watermarking

Abstract:
As generative audio models are rapidly evolving, AIgenerated audios increasingly raise concerns about copyright infringement and misinformation spread. Audio watermarking, as a proactive defense, can embed secret messages into audio for copyright protection and source verification. However, current neural audio watermarking methods focus primarily on the imperceptibility and robustness of watermarking, while ignoring its vulnerability to security attacks. In this paper, we develop a simple yet powerful attack: the overwriting attack that overwrites the legitimate audio watermark with a forged one and makes the original legitimate watermark undetectable. Based on the audio watermarking information that the adversary has, we propose three categories of overwriting attacks, i.e., white-box, gray-box, and black-box attacks. We also thoroughly evaluate the proposed attacks on state-of-the-art neural audio watermarking methods. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed overwriting attacks can effectively compromise existing watermarking schemes across various settings and achieve a nearly 100% attack success rate. The practicality and effectiveness of the proposed overwriting attacks expose security flaws in existing neural audio watermarking systems, underscoring the need to enhance security in future audio watermarking designs.

PaperID: 1379, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13005

Authors:Wenqian Ye, Di Wang, Guangtao Zheng, Bohan Liu, Aidong Zhang

Affiliations: University of Virginia

Title: SAGE: Spuriousness-Aware Guided Prompt Exploration for Mitigating Multimodal Bias

Abstract:
Large visionlanguage models such as CLIP have shown strong zero-shot classification performance by aligning images and text in a shared embedding space. However, CLIP models often develop multimodal spurious biases, the undesirable tendency to rely on spurious features. For example, CLIP may infer object types in images based on frequently co-occurring backgrounds rather than the object's core features. This bias significantly impairs the robustness of pre-trained CLIP models on out-of-distribution data, where such cross-modal associations no longer hold. Existing methods for mitigating multimodal spurious bias typically require fine-tuning on downstream data or prior knowledge of the bias, which undermines the out-of-the-box usability of CLIP. In this paper, we first theoretically analyze the impact of multimodal spurious bias in zero-shot classification. Based on this insight, we propose Spuriousness-Aware Guided Exploration (SAGE), a simple and effective method that mitigates spurious bias via guided prompt selection. SAGE requires no training, fine-tuning, or external annotations. It explores on a space of prompt templates and selects the prompts that induces the largest semantic separation between classes, thereby improving worst-group robustness. Extensive experiments on four real-world benchmark datasets and five popular backbone models demonstrate that SAGE consistently improves zero-shot performance and generalization, outperforming previous zero-shot approaches without any external knowledge or model updates.

PaperID: 1380, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18722

Authors:Han Yu, Hao Zou, Xingxuan Zhang, Zhengyi Wang, Yue He, Kehan Li, Peng Cui

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Renmin University of China

Title: Generating Risky Samples with Conformity Constraints via Diffusion Models

Abstract:
Although neural networks achieve promising performance in many tasks, they may still fail when encountering some examples and bring about risks to applications. To discover risky samples, previous literature attempts to search for patterns of risky samples within existing datasets or inject perturbation into them. Yet in this way the diversity of risky samples is limited by the coverage of existing datasets. To overcome this limitation, recent works adopt diffusion models to produce new risky samples beyond the coverage of existing datasets. However, these methods struggle in the conformity between generated samples and expected categories, which could introduce label noise and severely limit their effectiveness in applications. To address this issue, we propose RiskyDiff that incorporates the embeddings of both texts and images as implicit constraints of category conformity. We also design a conformity score to further explicitly strengthen the category conformity, as well as introduce the mechanisms of embedding screening and risky gradient guidance to boost the risk of generated samples. Extensive experiments reveal that RiskyDiff greatly outperforms existing methods in terms of the degree of risk, generation quality, and conformity with conditioned categories. We also empirically show the generalization ability of the models can be enhanced by augmenting training data with generated samples of high conformity.

PaperID: 1381, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00439

Authors:Xiaoshan Yu, Ziwei Huang, Shangshang Yang, Ziwen Wang, Haiping Ma, Xingyi Zhang

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University, School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University, School of Computer Science and Technology, Institutes of Physical Science and Information Technology

Title: PEOAT: Personalization-Guided Evolutionary Question Assembly for One-Shot Adaptive Testing

Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of intelligent education, Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT) has attracted increasing attention by integrating educational psychology with deep learning technologies. Unlike traditional paperand-pencil testing, CAT aims to efficiently and accurately assess ex- aminee abilities by adaptively selecting the most suitable items during the assessment process. However, its real-time and sequential nature presents limitations in practical scenarios, particularly in large-scale assessments where interaction costs are high, or in sensitive domains such as psychological evaluations where minimizing noise and interfer- ence is essential. These challenges constrain the applicability of conventional CAT methods in time-sensitive or resource- constrained environments. To this end, we first introduce a novel task called one-shot adaptive testing (OAT), which aims to select a fixed set of optimal items for each test-taker in a one-time selection. Meanwhile, we propose PEOAT, a Personalization-guided Evolutionary question assembly framework for One-hot Adaptive Testing from the perspec- tive of combinatorial optimization. Specifically, we began by designing a personalization-aware initialization strategy that integrates differences between examinee ability and ex- ercise difficulty, using multi-strategy sampling to construct a diverse and informative initial population. Building on this, we proposed a cognitive-enhanced evolutionary framework incorporating schema-preserving crossover and cognitively guided mutation to enable efficient exploration through infor- mative signals. To maintain diversity without compromising fitness, we further introduced a diversity-aware environmen- tal selection mechanism. The effectiveness of PEOAT is val- idated through extensive experiments on two datasets, com- plemented by case studies that uncovered valuable insights.

PaperID: 1382, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12311

Authors:Enming Zhang, Liwen Cao, Yanru Wu, Zhao Zijie, Yang Li

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Southeast University

Title: Learning Optimal Prompt Ensemble for Multi-source Visual Prompt Transfer

Abstract:
Prompt tuning has emerged as a lightweight strategy for adapting foundation models to downstream tasks, particularly for resourceconstrained systems. As pre-trained prompts become valuable assets, combining multiple source prompts offers a promising approach to enhance generalization for new tasks by leveraging complementary knowledge. However, naive aggregation often overlooks different source prompts have different contribution potential to the target task. To address this, we propose HGPrompt, a dynamic framework that learns optimal ensemble weights. These weights are optimized by jointly maximizing an information-theoretic metric for transferability and minimizing gradient conflicts via a novel regularization strategy. Specifically, we propose a differentiable prompt transferability metric to captures the discriminability of prompt-induced features on the target task. Meanwhile, HGPrompt match the gradient variances with respect to different source prompts based on Hessian and Fisher Information, ensuring stable and coherent knowledge transfer while suppressing gradient conflicts among them. Extensive experiments on the large-scale VTAB benchmark demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of HGPrompt, validating its effectiveness in learning an optimal ensemble for effective multi-source prompt transfer.

PaperID: 1383, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12779

Authors:Zhenshuo Zhang, Minxuan Duan, Youran Ye, Hongyang R. Zhang

Affiliations: Northeastern University

Title: Scalable Multi-Objective and Meta Reinforcement Learning via Gradient Estimation

Abstract:
We study the problem of efficiently estimating policies that simultaneously optimize multiple objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). Given n objectives (or tasks), we seek the optimal partition of these objectives into k groups, which is much smaller than n, where each group comprises related objectives that can be trained together. This problem arises in applications such as robotics, control, and preference optimization in language models, where learning a single policy for all n objectives is suboptimal as n grows. We introduce a twostage procedure — meta-training followed by fine-tuning — to address this problem. We first learn a meta-policy for all objectives using multitask learning. Then, we adapt the meta-policy to multiple randomly sampled subsets of objectives. The adaptation step leverages a first-order approximation property of well-trained policy networks, which is empirically verified to be accurate within a 2% error margin across various RL environments. The resulting algorithm, PolicyGradEx, efficiently estimates an aggregate task-affinity score matrix given a policy evaluation algorithm. Based on the estimated affinity score matrix, we cluster the n objectives into k groups by maximizing the intra-cluster affinity scores. Experiments on three robotic control and the Meta-World benchmarks demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 16% on average, while delivering up to 26 times faster speedup relative to performing full training to obtain the clusters. Ablation studies validate each component of our approach. For instance, compared with random grouping and gradient-similarity-based grouping, our loss-based clustering yields an improvement of 19%. Finally, we analyze the generalization error of policy networks by measuring the Hessian trace of the loss surface, which gives non-vacuous measures relative to the observed generalization errors.

PaperID: 1384, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07831

Authors:Zewu Zheng, Yuanyuan Lin

Affiliations: The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title: Distributionally Robust Online Markov Game with Linear Function Approximation

Abstract:
The simto-real gap, where agents trained in a simulator face significant performance degradation during testing, is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning. Extensive works adopt the framework of distributionally robust RL, to learn a policy that acts robustly under worst case environment shift. Within this framework, our objective is to devise algorithms that are sample efficient with interactive data collection and large state spaces. By assuming d-rectangularity of environment dynamic shift, we identify a fundamental hardness result for learning in online Markov game, and address it by adopting minimum value assumption. Then, a novel least square value iteration type algorithm, DR-CCE-LSI, with exploration bonus devised specifically for multiple agents, is proposed to find an epsilon-approximate robust Coarse Correlated Equilibrium(CCE). To obtain sample efficient learning, we find that: when the feature mapping function satisfies certain properties, our algorithm, DR-CCE-LSI, is able to achieve epsilon-approximate CCE with a regret bound of O(dH min(H, 1/ min(sigma_i)) sqrt(K)), where K is the number of interacting episodes, H is the horizon length, d is the feature dimension, and sigma_i represents the uncertainty level of player i. Our work introduces the first sample-efficient algorithm for this setting, matches the best result so far in single agent setting, and achieves minimax optimal sample complexity in terms of the feature dimension d. Meanwhile, we also conduct simulation study to validate the efficacy of our algorithm in learning a robust equilibrium.

PaperID: 1385, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07082

Authors:Yuan-Ting Zhong, Ting Huang, Xiaolin Xiao, Yue-Jiao Gong

Affiliations: South China University of Technology, Xidian University, South China Normal University

Title: TRACE: A Generalizable Drift Detector for Streaming Data-Driven Optimization

Abstract:
Many optimization tasks involve streaming data with unknown concept drifts, posing a significant challenge as Streaming DataDriven Optimization (SDDO). Existing methods, while leveraging surrogate model approximation and historical knowledge transfer, are often under restrictive assumptions such as fixed drift intervals and fully environmental observability, limiting their adaptability to diverse dynamic environments. We propose TRACE, a TRAnsferable Concept-drift Estimator that effectively detects distributional changes in streaming data with varying time scales. TRACE leverages a principled tokenization strategy to extract statistical features from data streams and models drift patterns using attention-based sequence learning, enabling accurate detection on unseen datasets and highlighting the transferability of learned drift patterns. Further, we showcase TRACE's plug-and-play nature by integrating it into a streaming optimizer, facilitating adaptive optimization under unknown drifts. Comprehensive experimental results on diverse benchmarks demonstrate the superior generalization, robustness, and effectiveness of our approach in SDDO scenarios.

PaperID: 1386, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02477

Authors:Bohan Zhou, Haoqi Yuan, Yuhui Fu, Zongqing Lu

Affiliations: Peking University

Title: Learning Diverse Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation Skills from Human Demonstrations

Abstract:
Bimanual dexterous manipulation is a critical yet underexplored area in robotics. Its highdimensional action space and inherent task complexity present significant challenges for policy learning, and the limited task diversity in existing benchmarks hinders general-purpose skill development. Existing approaches largely depend on reinforcement learning, often constrained by intricately designed reward functions tailored to a narrow set of tasks. In this work, we present a novel approach for efficiently learning diverse bimanual dexterous skills from abundant human demonstrations. Specifically, we introduce BiDexHD, a framework that unifies task construction from existing bimanual datasets and employs teacher-student policy learning to address all tasks. The teacher learns state-based policies using a general two-stage reward function across tasks with shared behaviors, while the student distills the learned multi-task policies into a vision-based policy. With BiDexHD, scalable learning of numerous bimanual dexterous skills from auto-constructed tasks becomes feasible, offering promising advances toward universal bimanual dexterous manipulation. Experiments on TACO tool-using dataset spanning 141 tasks across 6 categories demonstrate a task fulfillment rate of 74.59% on trained tasks and 51.07% on unseen tasks. We further transfer BiDexHD to 11 ARCTIC collaborative tasks and achieve an average of 80.49% task fulfillment rate on trained tasks and 65.99% on unseen task. All empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness and competitive zero-shot generalization capabilities of BiDexHD.

PaperID: 1387, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18777

Authors:Chenhong Zhou, Jie Chen, Zaifeng Yang

Affiliations: Hong Kong Baptist University, Institute of High Performance Computing

Title: SAOT: An Enhanced Locality-Aware Spectral Transformer for Solving PDEs

Abstract:
Neural operators have shown great potential in solving a family of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) by modeling the mappings between input and output functions. Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) implements global convolutions via parameterizing the integral operators in Fourier space. However, it often results in oversmoothing solutions and fails to capture local details and high-frequency components. To address these limitations, we investigate incorporating the spatial-frequency localization property of Wavelet transforms into the Transformer architecture. We propose a novel Wavelet Attention (WA) module with linear computational complexity to efficiently learn locality-aware features. Building upon WA, we further develop the Spectral Attention Operator Transformer (SAOT), a hybrid spectral Transformer framework that integrates WA’s localized focus with the global receptive field of Fourier-based Attention (FA) through a gated fusion block. Experimental results demonstrate that WA significantly mitigates the limitations of FA and outperforms existing Wavelet-based neural operators by a large margin. By integrating the locality-aware and global spectral representations, SAOT achieves state-of-the-art performance on six operator learning benchmarks and exhibits strong discretization-invariant ability.

PaperID: 1388, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11317

Authors:Yuchen Zhou, Jiayu Tang, Shuo Yang, Xiaoyan Xiao, Yuqin Dai, Wenhao Yang, Chao Gou, Xiaobo Xia, Tat-Seng Chua

Affiliations: Sun Yat-Sen University, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), Tsinghua University, Nanjing University, National University of Singapore

Title: Logic Unseen: Revealing the Logical Blindspots of Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
VisionLanguage Models (VLMs), exemplified by CLIP, have emerged as foundational for multimodal intelligence. However, their capacity for logical understanding remains significantly underexplored, resulting in critical ''logical blindspots'' that limit their reliability in practical applications. To systematically diagnose this, we introduce LogicBench, a comprehensive benchmark with over 50,000 vision-language pairs across 9 logical categories and 4 diverse scenarios: images, videos, anomaly detection, and medical diagnostics. Our evaluation reveals that existing VLMs, even the state-of-the-art ones, fall at over 40 accuracy points below human performance, particularly in challenging tasks like Causality and Conditionality, highlighting their reliance on surface semantics over critical logical structures. To bridge this gap, we propose LogicCLIP, a novel training framework designed to boost VLMs' logical sensitivity through advancements in both data generation and optimization objectives. LogicCLIP utilizes logic-aware data generation and a contrastive learning strategy that combines coarse-grained alignment, a fine-grained multiple-choice objective, and a novel logical structure-aware objective. Extensive experiments demonstrate LogicCLIP's substantial improvements in logical comprehension across all LogicBench domains, significantly outperforming baselines. Moreover, LogicCLIP retains, and often surpasses, competitive performance on general vision-language benchmarks, demonstrating that the enhanced logical understanding does not come at the expense of general alignment. We believe LogicBench and LogicCLIP will be important resources for advancing VLM logical capabilities.

PaperID: 1389, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01971

Authors:Ziyu Zhou, Yiming Huang, Yanyun Wang, Yuankai Wu, James Kwok, Yuxuan Liang

Affiliations: Sichuan University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: Revitalizing Canonical PreAlignment for Irregular Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Abstract:
Irregular multivariate time series (IMTS), characterized by uneven sampling and intervariate asynchrony, fuel many forecasting applications yet remain challenging to model efficiently. Canonical Pre-Alignment (CPA) has been widely adopted in IMTS modeling by padding zeros at every global timestamp, thereby alleviating inter-variate asynchrony and unifying the series length, but its dense zero-padding inflates the pre-aligned series length, especially when numerous variates are present, causing prohibitive compute overhead. Recent graph-based models with patching strategies sidestep CPA, but their local message passing struggles to capture global inter-variate correlations. Therefore, we posit that CPA should be retained, with the pre-aligned series properly handled by the model, enabling it to outperform state-of-the-art graph-based baselines that sidestep CPA. Technically, we propose KAFNet, a compact architecture grounded in CPA for IMTS forecasting that couples (1) a Pre-Convolution module for sequence smoothing and sparsity mitigation, (2) a Temporal Kernel Aggregation module for learnable compression and modeling of intra-series irregularity, and (3) Frequency Linear Attention blocks for low-cost inter-series correlation modeling in the frequency domain. Experiments on multiple IMTS datasets show that KAFNet achieves state-of-the-art forecasting performance, with a 7.2× parameter reduction and an 8.4× training–inference acceleration.

PaperID: 1390, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09434

Authors:Federico Capannoli, Emilio Cruciani, Hlafo Alfie Mimun, Matteo Quattropani

Affiliations: Leiden University, European University of Rome, John Cabot University, Roma Tre University

Title: A Phase Transition for Opinion Dynamics with Competing Biases

Abstract:
We study the nonlinear evolution of binary opinions in a population of agents connected by a directed network, influenced by two competing forces. On the one hand agents are stubborn, i.e., have a tendency for one of the two opinions; on the other hand there is a disruptive bias that drives the agents toward the opposite opinion. The disruptive bias models external factors such as market innovations or social controllers aiming to challenge the status quo, while stubbornness reinforces the initial opinion making it harder for the external bias to drive the process toward change. Each agent updates its opinion according to a nonlinear rule that takes into account the opinions of its neighbors and the strength of the disruptive bias. We focus on random directed graphs with prescribed inand out-degree sequences and prove that the dynamics exhibits a phase transition. When the disruptive bias is stronger than a certain critical threshold, the entire population rapidly converges to a consensus on the disruptive opinion. When the bias is weaker than this threshold, the system enters a metastable state in which only a fraction of the population adopts the new opinion, and this partial adoption persists for a long time. We explicitly characterize both the critical threshold and the long-term adoption fraction, showing that they depend only on few simple statistics of the degree sequences. Our analysis relies on a dual system of coalescing, branching, and dying particles, whose behavior is equivalent and allows a rigorous characterization of the system's dynamics. Our results characterize the interplay between the degree of the agents, their stubbornness, and the external bias, shedding light on the tipping points of opinion dynamics in networks.

PaperID: 1391, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09770

Authors:Chen Chen, Jiawei Shao, Dakuan Lu, Haoyi Hu, Xiangcheng Liu, Hantao Yao, Wu Liu

Affiliations: Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom, Shanghai Jiaotong University, University of Science and Technology of China

Title: GUI-Eyes: Tool-Augmented Perception for Visual Grounding in GUI Agents

Abstract:
Recent advances in visionlanguage models (VLMs) and reinforcement learning (RL) have driven progress in GUI automation. However, most existing methods rely on static, one-shot visual inputs and passive perception, lacking the ability to adaptively determine when, whether, and how to observe the interface. We present GUI-Eyes, a reinforcement learning framework for active visual perception in GUI tasks. To acquire more informative observations, the agent learns to make strategic decisions on both whether and how to invoke visual tools, such as cropping or zooming, within a two-stage reasoning process. To support this behavior, we introduce a progressive perception strategy that decomposes the decision-making into coarse exploration and fine-grained grounding, coordinated by a two-level policy. In addition, we design a spatially continuous reward function tailored to tool usage, which integrates both location proximity and region overlap to provide dense supervision and alleviate the reward sparsity common in GUI environments. On the ScreenSpot-Pro benchmark, GUI-Eyes-3B achieves 44.8% grounding accuracy using only 3k labeled samples, significantly outperforming both supervised and RL-based baselines. These results highlight that tool-aware active perception, enabled by staged policy reasoning and fine-grained reward feedback, is critical for building robust and data-efficient GUI agents.

PaperID: 1392, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.06586

Authors:Junjie Chen, Haitao Li, Minghao Qin, Yujia Zhou, Yanxue Ren, Wuyue Wang, Yiqun Liu, Yueyue Wu, Qingyao Ai

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, China University of Political Science and Law, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Bosera Asset Management Co., University of Notre Dame

Title: Simulating Dispute Mediation with LLM-Based Agents for Legal Research

Abstract:
Legal dispute mediation plays a crucial role in resolving civil disputes, yet its empirical study is limited by privacy constraints and complex multivariate interactions. To address this limitation, we present AgentMediation, the first LLMbased agent framework for simulating dispute mediation. It simulates realistic mediation processes grounded in real-world disputes and enables controlled experimentation on key variables such as disputant strategies, dispute causes, and mediator expertise. Our empirical analysis reveals patterns consistent with sociological theories, including Group Polarization and Surface-level Consensus. As a comprehensive and extensible platform, AgentMediation paves the way for deeper integration of social science and AI in legal research.

PaperID: 1393, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13193

Authors:Yijia Fan, Jusheng Zhang, Kaitong Cai, Jing Yang, Chengpei Tang, Jian Wang, Keze Wang

Affiliations: SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY, Snap Inc.

Title: Cost-Effective Communication: An Auction-based Method for Language Agent Interaction

Abstract:
Multiagent systems (MAS) built on large language models (LLMs) often suffer from inefficient ''free-for-all'' communication, leading to exponential token costs and low signal-to-noise ratios that hinder their practical deployment. We challenge the notion that more communication is always beneficial, hypothesizing instead that the core issue is the absence of resource rationality. We argue that "free'' communication, by ignoring the principle of scarcity, inherently breeds inefficiency and unnecessary expenses. To address this, we introduce the Dynamic Auction-based Language Agent (DALA), a novel framework that treats communication bandwidth as a scarce and tradable resource. Specifically, our DALA regards inter-agent communication as a centralized auction, where agents learn to bid for the opportunity to speak based on the predicted value density of their messages. Thus, our DALA intrinsically encourages agents to produce concise, informative messages while filtering out low-value communication. Extensive and comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our economically-driven DALA achieves new state-of-the-art performance across seven challenging reasoning benchmarks, including 84.32% on MMLU and a 91.21% pass@1 rate on HumanEval. Note that this is accomplished with remarkable efficiency, i.e., our DALA uses only 6.25 million tokens, a fraction of the resources consumed by current state-of-the-art methods on GSM8K. Further analysis reveals that our DALA cultivates the emergent skill of strategic silence, effectively adapting its communication strategies from verbosity to silence in a dynamic manner via resource constraints.

PaperID: 1394, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12123

Authors:Zejiao Liu, Junqi Tu, Yitian Hong, Luolin Xiong, Yaochu Jin, Yang Tang, Fangfei Li

Affiliations: East China University of Science and Technology, Westlake University

Title: HCPO: Hierarchical Conductor-Based Policy Optimization in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
In cooperative MultiAgent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), efficient exploration is crucial for optimizing the performance of joint policy. However, existing methods often update joint policies via independent agent exploration, without coordination among agents, which inherently constrains the expressive capacity and exploration of joint policies. To address this issue, we propose a conductor-based joint policy framework that directly enhances the expressive capacity of joint policies and coordinates exploration. In addition, we develop a Hierarchical Conductor-based Policy Optimization (HCPO) algorithm that instructs policy updates for the conductor and agents in a direction aligned with performance improvement. A rigorous theoretical guarantee further establishes the monotonicity of the joint policy optimization process. By deploying local conductors, HCPO retains centralized training benefits while eliminating inter-agent communication during execution. Finally, we evaluate HCPO on three challenging benchmarks: StarCraft II Multi-agent Challenge, Multi-agent MuJoCo, and Multi-agent Particle Environment. The results indicate that HCPO outperforms competitive MARL baselines regarding cooperative efficiency and stability.

PaperID: 1395, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06555

Authors:Hongbo Ma, Fei Shen, Hongbin Xu, Xiaoce Wang, Gang Xu, Jinkai Zheng, Liangqiong Qu, Ming Li

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, National University of Singapore, ByteDance Seed, Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy (SZ), Hangzhou Dianzi University, The University of Hong Kong

Title: StyleTailor: Towards Personalized Fashion Styling via Hierarchical Negative Feedback

Abstract:
The advancement of intelligent agents has revolutionized problemsolving across diverse domains, yet solutions for personalized fashion styling remain underexplored, which holds immense promise for promoting shopping experiences. In this work, we present StyleTailor, the first collaborative agent framework that seamlessly unifies personalized apparel design, shopping recommendation, virtual try-on, and systematic evaluation into a cohesive workflow. To this end, StyleTailor pioneers an iterative visual refinement paradigm driven by multi-level negative feedback, enabling adaptive and precise user alignment. Specifically, our framework features two core agents, i.e., Designer for personalized garment selection and Consultant for virtual try-on, whose outputs are progressively refined via hierarchical vision-language model feedback spanning individual items, complete outfits, and try-on efficacy. Counterexamples are aggregated into negative prompts, forming a closed-loop mechanism that enhances recommendation quality. To assess the performance, we introduce a comprehensive evaluation suite encompassing style consistency, visual quality, face similarity, and artistic appraisal. Extensive experiments demonstrate StyleTailor's superior performance in delivering personalized designs and recommendations, outperforming strong baselines without negative feedback and establishing a new benchmark for intelligent fashion systems.

PaperID: 1396, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10593

Authors:Radosław Miernik, Marek Szykuła, Jakub Kowalski, Jakub Cieśluk, Łukasz Galas, Wojciech Pawlik

Affiliations: University of Wrocław

Title: Regular Games -- an Automata-Based General Game Playing Language

Abstract:
We propose a new General Game Playing (GGP) system called Regular Games (RG). The main goal of RG is to be both computationally efficient and convenient for game design. The system consists of several languages. The core component is a lowlevel language that defines the rules by a finite automaton. It is minimal with only a few mechanisms, which makes it easy for automatic processing (by agents, analysis, optimization, etc.). The language is universal for the class of all finite turn-based games with imperfect information. Higher-level languages are introduced for game design (by humans or Procedural Content Generation), which are eventually translated to a low-level language. RG generates faster forward models than the current state of the art, beating other GGP systems (Regular Boardgames, Ludii) in terms of efficiency. Additionally, RG's ecosystem includes an editor with LSP, automaton visualization, benchmarking tools, and a debugger of game description transformations.

PaperID: 1397, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06361

Authors:Qi Shi, Pavel Naumov

Affiliations: University of Southampton

Title: A Graph-Theoretical Perspective on Law Design for Multiagent Systems

Abstract:
A law in a multiagent system is a set of constraints imposed on agents' behaviours to avoid undesirable outcomes. The paper considers two types of laws: useful laws that, if followed, completely eliminate the undesirable outcomes and gapfree laws that guarantee that at least one agent can be held responsible each time an undesirable outcome occurs. In both cases, we study the problem of finding a law that achieves the desired result by imposing the minimum restrictions. We prove that, for both types of laws, the minimisation problem is NP-hard even in the simple case of one-shot concurrent interactions. We also show that the approximation algorithm for the vertex cover problem in hypergraphs could be used to efficiently approximate the minimum laws in both cases.

PaperID: 1398, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11751

Authors:Sanchit Sinha, Guangzhi Xiong, Zhenghao He, Aidong Zhang

Affiliations: University of Virginia

Title: Concept-RuleNet: Grounded Multi-Agent Neurosymbolic Reasoning in Vision Language Models

Abstract:
Modern visionlanguage models (VLMs) deliver impressive predictive accuracy yet offer little insight into 'why' a decision is reached, frequently hallucinating facts, particularly when encountering out-of-distribution data. Neurosymbolic frameworks address this by pairing black-box perception with interpretable symbolic reasoning, but current methods extract their symbols solely from task labels, leaving them weakly grounded in the underlying visual data. In this paper, we introduce a multi-agent system - Concept-RuleNet that reinstates visual grounding while retaining transparent reasoning. Specifically, a multimodal concept generator first mines discriminative visual concepts directly from a representative subset of training images. Next, these visual concepts are utilized to condition symbol discovery, anchoring the generations in real image statistics and mitigating label bias. Subsequently, symbols are composed into executable first-order rules by a large language model reasoner agent - yielding interpretable neurosymbolic rules. Finally, during inference, a vision verifier agent quantifies the degree of presence of each symbol and triggers rule execution in tandem with outputs of black-box neural models, predictions with explicit reasoning pathways. Experiments on five benchmarks, including two challenging medical-imaging tasks and three underrepresented natural-image datasets, show that our system augments state-of-the-art neurosymbolic baselines by an average of 5% while also reducing the occurrence of hallucinated symbols in rules by up to 50%.

PaperID: 1399, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.16546

Authors:Lei Wang, Min Huang, Eduard Dragut

Affiliations: Temple University, Independent Researcher

Title: DanceHA: A Multi-Agent Framework for Document-Level Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Abstract:
AspectBased Sentiment Intensity Analysis (ABSIA) has garnered increasing attention, though research largely focuses on domain-specific, sentence-level settings. In contrast, document-level ABSIA--particularly in addressing complex tasks like extracting Aspect-Category-Opinion-Sentiment-Intensity (ACOSI) tuples--remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce DanceHA, a multi-agent framework designed for open-ended, document-level ABSIA with informal writing styles. DanceHA has two main components: Dance, which employs a divide-and-conquer strategy to decompose the long-context ABSIA task into smaller, manageable sub-tasks for collaboration among specialized agents; and HA, Human-AI collaboration for annotation. We release Inf-ABSIA, a multi-domain document-level ABSIA dataset featuring fine-grained and high-accuracy labels from DanceHA. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our agentic framework and show that the multi-agent knowledge in DanceHA can be effectively transferred into student models. Our results highlight the importance of the overlooked informal styles in ABSIA, as they often intensify opinions tied to specific aspects.

PaperID: 1400, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.22832

Authors:Cuiling Wu, Yaozhong Gan, Junliang Xing, Ying Fu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, QiYuan Lab, Beijing Institute of Technology

Title: MARPO: A Reflective Policy Optimization for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
We propose MultiAgent Reflective Policy Optimization MARPO to alleviate the issue of sample inefficiency in multi-agent reinforcement learning. MARPO consists of two key components: a reflection mechanism that leverages subsequent trajectories to enhance sample efficiency, and an asymmetric clipping mechanism that is derived from the KL divergence and dynamically adjusts the clipping range to improve training stability. We evaluate MARPO in classic multi-agent environments, where it consistently outperforms other methods.

PaperID: 1401, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06432

Authors:Yihan Xia, Taotao Wang, Shengli Zhang, Zhangyuhua Weng, Bin Cao, Soung Chang Liew

Affiliations: Shenzhen University, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title: HiveMind: Contribution-Guided Online Prompt Optimization of LLM Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract:
Recent advances in LLMbased multi-agent systems have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex decision-making scenarios such as financial trading and software engineering. However, evaluating each individual agent’s effectiveness and online optimization of underperforming agents remain open challenges. To address these issues, we present HiveMind, a self-adaptive framework designed to optimize LLM multi-agent collaboration through contribution analysis. At its core, HiveMind introduces Contribution-Guided Online Prompt Optimization (CG-OPO), which autonomously refines agent prompts based on their quantified contributions. We first propose the Shapley value as a grounded metric to quantify each agent's contribution, thereby identifying underperforming agents in a principled manner for automated prompt refinement. To overcome the computational complexity of the classical Shapley value, we present DAG-Shapley, a novel and efficient attribution algorithm for Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-structured multi-agent workflows that leverages the inherent DAG structure of the agent workflow to axiomatically prune non-viable coalitions. By hierarchically reusing intermediate outputs of agents in the DAG, our method further reduces redundant computations, and achieving substantial cost savings without compromising the theoretical guarantees of Shapley values. Evaluated in a multi-agent stock-trading scenario, HiveMind achieves superior performance compared to static baselines. Notably, DAG-Shapley reduces LLM calls by over 80 percent while maintaining attribution accuracy comparable to full Shapley values, establishing a new standard for efficient credit assignment and enabling scalable, real-world optimization of multi-agent collaboration.

PaperID: 1402, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02981

Authors:Zhongyu Yang, Yingfang Yuan, Xuanming Jiang, Baoyi An, Wei Pang

Affiliations: Xi’an Jiyun Technology Co., Heriot-Watt University, the United Kingdom, Bio-inspired Computing and Machine Learning Lab

Title: InEx: Hallucination Mitigation via Introspection and Cross-Modal Multi-Agent Collaboration

Abstract:
Hallucination remains a critical challenge in large language models (LLMs), hindering the development of reliable multimodal LLMs (MLLMs). However, existing solutions often rely on human intervention or underutilize the agent's ability to autonomously mitigate hallucination. To address these limitations, we draw inspiration from the way humans make reliable decisions in the real world. In particular, they begin with introspective reasoning to reduce uncertainty and form an initial judgment, then rely on external verification from diverse perspectives to reach a final decision. Motivated by this cognitive paradigm, we propose InEx, a trainingfree, multi-agent framework designed to autonomously mitigate hallucination. InEx introduces internal introspective reasoning, guided by entropy-based uncertainty estimation, to improve the reliability of the decision agent's reasoning process. The agent first generates a response, which is then iteratively verified and refined through external cross-modal multi-agent collaboration with the editing agent and self-reflection agents, further enhancing reliability and mitigating hallucination. Extensive experiments show that InEx consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving 4%-27% gains on general and hallucination benchmarks, and demonstrating strong robustness.

PaperID: 1403, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19146

Authors:Qian Zhang, Zhuo Sun, Yao Zhang, Zhiwen Yu, Bin Guo, Jun Zhang

Affiliations: Northwestern Polytechnical University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: VIL2C: Value-of-Information Aware Low-Latency Communication for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Interagent communication serves as an effective mechanism for enhancing performance in collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) systems. However, the inherent communication latency in practical systems induces both action decision delays and outdated information sharing, impeding MARL performance gains, particularly in time-critical applications like autonomous driving. In this work, we propose a Value-of-Information aware Low-latency Communication (VIL2C) scheme that proactively adjusts the latency distribution to mitigate its effects in MARL systems. Specifically, we define a Value of Information (VoI) metric to quantify the importance of delayed messages on the recipient agent's decision. We then design a VoI aware resource allocation method that dynamically prioritizes message transmission based on each delayed message's importance. Moreover, we propose a progressive message reception mechanism to adaptively adjust the reception duration based on received messages. We derive the optimized VoI aware resource allocation and theoretically prove the performance advantage of the proposed VIL2C scheme. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VIL2C outperforms existing approaches under various communication conditions. These gains are attributed to the low-latency transmission of high-VoI messages via resource allocation and the elimination of unnecessary waiting periods via adaptive reception duration.

PaperID: 1404, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11040

Authors:Qian Zhang, Jinyi Liu, Yan Zheng, Hebin Liang, Lanjun Wang

Affiliations: Tianjin University

Title: Key Decision-Makers in Multi-Agent Debates: Who Holds the Power?

Abstract:
Recent studies on LLM agent scaling have highlighted the potential of MultiAgent Debate (MAD) to enhance reasoning abilities. However, the critical aspect of role allocation strategies remains underexplored. In this study, we demonstrate that allocating roles with differing viewpoints to specific positions significantly impacts MAD's performance in reasoning tasks. Specifically, we find a novel role allocation strategy, "Truth Last", which can improve MAD performance by up to 22% in reasoning tasks. To address the issue of unknown truth in practical applications, we propose the Multi-Agent Debate Consistency (MADC) strategy, which systematically simulates and optimizes its core mechanisms. MADC incorporates path consistency to assess agreement among independent roles, simulating the role with the highest consistency score as the truth. We validated MADC across a range of LLMs (9 models), including the DeepSeek-R1 Distilled Models, on challenging reasoning tasks. MADC consistently demonstrated advanced performance, effectively overcoming MAD's performance bottlenecks and providing a crucial pathway for further improvements in LLM agent scaling.

PaperID: 1405, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.11323

Authors:Yu Bai, Heyan Huang, Cesare Spinoso-Di Piano, Sanxing Chen, Marc-Antoine Rondeau, Yang Gao, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology, China Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, China Southeast Academy of Information Technology, Duke University, Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute

Title: Identifying and Analyzing Performance-Critical Tokens in Large Language Models

Abstract:
Incontext learning (ICL) has emerged as an effective solution for few-shot learning with large language models (LLMs). However, how LLMs leverage demonstrations to specify a task and learn a corresponding computational function through ICL is underexplored. Drawing from the way humans learn from content-label mappings in demonstrations, we categorize the tokens in an ICL prompt into content, stopword, and template tokens. Our goal is to identify the types of tokens whose representations directly influence LLM's performance, a property we refer to as being performance-critical. By ablating representations from the attention of the test example, we find that the representations of informative content tokens have less influence on performance compared to template and stopword tokens, which contrasts with the human attention to informative words. We give evidence that the representations of performance-critical tokens aggregate information from the content tokens. Moreover, we demonstrate experimentally that lexical meaning, repetition, and structural cues are the main distinguishing characteristics of these tokens. Our work sheds light on how LLMs learn to perform tasks from demonstrations and deepens our understanding of the roles different types of tokens play in LLMs.

PaperID: 1406, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02503

Authors:Maxime Bouscary, Saurabh Amin

Affiliations: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Title: OptiHive: Ensemble Selection for LLM-Based Optimization via Statistical Modeling

Abstract:
LLMbased solvers have emerged as a promising means of automating problem modeling and solving. However, they remain unreliable and often depend on iterative repair loops that result in significant latency. We introduce OptiHive, a framework that enhances any solver-generation pipeline to produce higher-quality solvers from natural-language descriptions of optimization problems. OptiHive uses a single batched generation to produce diverse components (solvers, problem instances, and validation tests) and filters out erroneous components to ensure fully interpretable outputs. Accounting for the imperfection of the generated components, we employ a statistical model to infer their true performance, enabling principled uncertainty quantification and solver selection. On tasks ranging from traditional optimization problems to challenging variants of the Multi-Depot Vehicle Routing Problem, OptiHive significantly outperforms baselines, increasing the optimality rate from 5% to 92% on the most complex problems.

PaperID: 1407, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14670

Authors:Ruomeng Ding, Wei Cheng, Minglai Shao, Chen Zhao

Affiliations: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NEC Laboratories America, Tianjin University, Baylor University

Title: SkillGen: Learning Domain Skills for In-Context Sequential Decision Making

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to sequential decisionmaking through in-context learning (ICL), yet their effectiveness is highly sensitive to prompt quality. Effective prompts should meet three principles: focus on decision-critical information, provide step-level granularity, and minimize reliance on expert annotations through label efficiency. However, existing ICL methods often fail to satisfy all three criteria simultaneously. Motivated by these challenges, we introduce SkillGen, a skill-based ICL framework for structured sequential reasoning. It constructs an action-centric, domain-level graph from sampled trajectories, identifies high-utility actions via temporal-difference credit assignment, and retrieves step-wise skills to generate fine-grained, context-aware prompts. We further present a theoretical analysis showing that focusing on high-utility segments supports task identifiability and informs more effective ICL prompt design. Experiments on ALFWorld, BabyAI, and ScienceWorld, using both open-source and proprietary LLMs, show that SkillGen achieves consistent gains, improving progress rate by 5.9%–16.5% on average across models.

PaperID: 1408, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20231

Authors:Yiming Du, Bingbing Wang, Yang He, Bin Liang, Baojun Wang, Zhongyang Li, Lin Gui, Jeff Z. Pan, Ruifeng Xu, Kam-Fai Wong

Affiliations: Hong Kong, China MoE Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Harbin Institute of Technology, Huawei Technologies Ltd., Microsoft AI, King's College London, The University of Edinburgh

Title: MemGuide: Intent-Driven Memory Selection for Goal-Oriented Multi-Session LLM Agents

Abstract:
Modern taskoriented dialogue (TOD) systems increasingly rely on large language model (LLM) agents, leveraging Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and long-context capabilities for long-term memory utilization. However, these methods prioritise semantic similarity over task intent, degrading multi-session coherence. We propose MemGuide, a two-stage intent-driven memory selection framework: (1) Intent‑Aligned Retrieval retrieves goal-consistent QA‑formatted memory units; (2) Missing‑Slot Guided Filtering reranks units by slot-completion gain via a chain‑of‑thought reasoner and fine‑tuned LLaMA‑8B filter. We also introduce the MS-TOD, the first multi-session TOD benchmark with 132 diverse personas, 956 task goals, and annotated intent-aligned memory targets. Evaluations on MS-TOD show that MemGuide boosts task success rate by 11% (88%→99%) and reduces dialogue length by 2.84 turns, and matches single‑session performance.

PaperID: 1409, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11066

Authors:Jiechao Gao, Chang Liu, Yuangang Li

Affiliations: Stanford University, University of Science and Technology of China, University of California

Title: S2D-Align: Shallow-to-Deep Auxiliary Learning for Anatomically-Grounded Radiology Report Generation

Abstract:
Radiology Report Generation (RRG) aims to automatically generate diagnostic reports from radiology images. To achieve this, existing methods have leveraged the powerful crossmodal generation capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), primarily focusing on optimizing cross-modal alignment between radiographs and reports through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). However, by only performing instance-level alignment with the image-text pairs, the standard SFT paradigm fails to establish anatomically-grounded alignment, where the templated nature of reports often leads to sub-optimal generation quality. To address this, we propose S2D-Align, a novel SFT paradigm that establishes anatomically-grounded alignment by leveraging auxiliary signals of varying granularities. S2D-Align implements a shallow-to-deep strategy, progressively enriching the alignment process: it begins with the coarse radiograph-report pairing, then introduces reference reports for instance-level guidance, and ultimately utilizes key phrases to ground the generation in specific anatomical details. To bridge the different alignment stages, we introduce a memory-based adapter that empowers feature sharing, thereby integrating coarse and fine-grained guidance. For evaluation, we conduct experiments on the public MIMIC-CXR and IU X-Ray benchmarks, where S2D-Align achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our multi-stage, auxiliary-guided approach, highlighting a promising direction for enhancing grounding capabilities in complex, multi-modal generation tasks.

PaperID: 1410, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05428

Authors:Ziyin Gu, Jingyao Wang, Ran Zuo, Chuxiong Sun, Zeen Song, Changwen Zheng, Wenwen Qiang

Affiliations: Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Communication University of China

Title: Group Causal Policy Optimization for Post-Training Large Language Models

Abstract:
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have broadened their applicability across diverse tasks, yet specialized domains still require targeted posttraining. Among existing methods, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) stands out for its efficiency, leveraging groupwise relative rewards while avoiding costly value function learning. However, GRPO treats candidate responses as independent, overlooking semantic interactions such as complementarity and contradiction. To address this challenge, we first introduce a Structural Causal Model (SCM) that reveals hidden dependencies among candidate responses induced by conditioning on a final integrated output, forming a collider structure. Then, our causal analysis leads to two insights: (1) projecting responses onto a causally-informed subspace improves prediction quality, and (2) this projection yields a better baseline than query-only conditioning. Building on these insights, we propose Group Causal Policy Optimization (GCPO), which integrates causal structure into optimization through two key components: a causally-informed reward adjustment and a novel KL-regularization term that aligns the policy with a causally-projected reference distribution. Comprehensive experimental evaluations on various benchmarks demonstrate that GCPO consistently surpasses existing methods.

PaperID: 1411, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09734

Authors:Zikang Guo, Benfeng Xu, Chiwei Zhu, Wentao Hong, Xiaorui Wang, Zhendong Mao

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, Metastone Technology, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center

Title: MCP-AgentBench: Evaluating Real-World Language Agent Performance with MCP-Mediated Tools

Abstract:
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is rapidly emerging as a pivotal open standard, designed to enhance agenttool integration and interoperability, and is positioned to unlock a new era of powerful, interconnected, and genuinely utilitarian agentic AI. However, despite MCP's growing adoption, existing benchmarks often fail to capture real-world agent performance within this new paradigm, leading to a distorted perception of their true operational value and an inability to reliably differentiate proficiencies. To bridge this critical evaluation gap, we introduce MCP-AgentBench—a comprehensive benchmark specifically engineered to rigorously assess language agent capabilities in MCP-mediated tool interactions. Core contributions of MCP-AgentBench include: the establishment of a robust MCP testbed comprising 33 operational servers with 188 distinct tools; the development of a benchmark featuring 600 systematically designed queries distributed across 6 distinct categories of varying interaction complexity; and the introduction of MCP-Eval, a novel outcome-oriented evaluation methodology prioritizing real-world task success. Through extensive empirical evaluation of leading language agents, we provide foundational insights. MCP-AgentBench aims to equip the research community with a standardized and reliable framework to build, validate, and advance agents capable of fully leveraging MCP's transformative benefits, thereby accelerating progress toward truly capable and interoperable AI systems.

PaperID: 1412, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.01745

Authors:Hong Han, Hao-Chen Pei, Zhao-Zheng Nie, Xin Luo, Xin-Shun Xu

Affiliations: Shandong University

Title: Multi-granularity Interactive Attention Framework for Residual Hierarchical Pronunciation Assessment

Abstract:
Automatic pronunciation assessment plays a crucial role in computerassisted pronunciation training systems. Due to the ability to perform multiple pronunciation tasks simultaneously, multi-aspect multi-granularity pronunciation assessment methods are gradually receiving more attention and achieving better performance than single-level modeling tasks. However, existing methods only consider unidirectional dependencies between adjacent granularity levels, lacking bidirectional interaction among phoneme, word, and utterance levels and thus insufficiently capturing the acoustic structural correlations. To address this issue, we propose a novel residual hierarchical interactive method, HIA for short, that enables bidirectional modeling across granularities. As the core of HIA, the Interactive Attention Module leverages an attention mechanism to achieve dynamic bidirectional interaction, effectively capturing linguistic features at each granularity while integrating correlations between different granularity levels. We also propose a residual hierarchical structure to alleviate the feature forgetting problem when modeling acoustic hierarchies. In addition, we use 1-D convolutional layers to enhance the extraction of local contextual cues at each granularity. Extensive experiments on the speechocean762 dataset show that our model is comprehensively ahead of the existing state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 1413, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13243

Authors:XiaoQi Han, Ru Li, Ran Yi, Hongye Tan, Zhuomin Liang, Victor Gutierrez Basulto, Jeff Z. Pan

Affiliations: Shanxi University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Cardiff University, University of Edinburgh

Title: Uncovering and Mitigating Transient Blindness in Multimodal Model Editing

Abstract:
Multimodal Model Editing (MMED) aims to correct erroneous knowledge in multimodal models. Existing evaluation methods, adapted from textual model editing, overstate success by relying on lowsimilarity or random inputs, obscure overfitting. We propose a comprehensive locality evaluation framework, covering three key dimensions: random-image locality, no-image locality, and consistent-image locality, operationalized through seven distinct data types, enabling a detailed and structured analysis of multimodal edits. We introduce De-VQA, a dynamic evaluation for visual question answering, uncovering a phenomenon we term transient blindness, overfitting to edit-similar text while ignoring visuals. Token analysis shows edits disproportionately affect textual tokens. We propose locality-aware adversarial losses to balance cross-modal representations. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing baselines, reducing transient blindness and improving locality by 17% on average.

PaperID: 1414, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.11790

Authors:Zijin Hong, Hao Wu, Su Dong, Junnan Dong, Yilin Xiao, Yujing Zhang, Zhu Wang, Feiran Huang, Linyi Li, Hongxia Yang, Xiao Huang

Affiliations: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Tencent Youtu Lab, Beihang University, Simon Fraser University

Title: Benchmarking LLMs’ Mathematical Reasoning with Unseen Random Variables Questions

Abstract:
Recent studies have raised significant concerns regarding the reliability of current mathematical benchmarks, highlighting key limitations such as simplistic design and potential data contamination that undermine evaluation accuracy. Consequently, developing a reliable benchmark that effectively evaluates large language models' (LLMs) genuine capabilities in mathematical reasoning remains a critical challenge. To address these concerns, we propose RVBench, a novel evaluation methodology for Benchmarking LLMs with Random Variables in mathematical reasoning. Specifically, we develop question-generating functions to produce random variable questions (RVQs), whose background content mirrors the original benchmark problems, but with randomized variable combinations, rendering them "unseen" to LLMs. Models must completely understand the inherent question pattern to correctly answer RVQs with diverse variable combinations. Thus, an LLMs' genuine reasoning capability is reflected through its accuracy and robustness on RV-Bench. We conducted extensive experiments on over 30 representative LLMs across more than 1,000 RVQs. Our findings reveal that LLMs exhibit a proficiency imbalance between encountered and "unseen" data distributions. Furthermore, RV-Bench reveals that proficiency generalization across similar mathematical reasoning tasks is limited, but we verified that it can still be effectively elicited through test-time scaling.

PaperID: 1415, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06222

Authors:Yue Huang, Xiangqi Wang, Xiangliang Zhang

Affiliations: University of Notre Dame

Title: SPA: Achieving Consensus in LLM Alignment via Self-Priority Optimization

Abstract:
In highstakes scenarios—such as self-harm, legal, or medical queries—LLMs must be both trustworthy and helpful. However, these goals often conflict. We propose priority alignment, a new alignment paradigm that enforces a strict “trustworthy-before-helpful” ordering: optimization of helpfulness is conditioned on first meeting trustworthy thresholds (e.g., harmlessness or honesty). To realize this, we introduce Self-Priority Alignment (SPA)—a fully unsupervised framework that generates diverse responses, self-evaluates them and refines them by the model itself, and applies dual-criterion denoising to remove inconsistency and control variance. From this, SPA constructs lexicographically ordered preference pairs and fine-tunes the model using an uncertainty-weighted alignment loss that emphasizes high-confidence, high-gap decisions. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show that SPA improves helpfulness without compromising safety, outperforming strong baselines while preserving general capabilities. Our results demonstrate that SPA provides a scalable and interpretable alignment strategy for critical LLM applications.

PaperID: 1416, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09980

Authors:Bo Li, Tian Tian, Zhenghua Xu, Hao Cheng, Shikun Zhang, Wei Ye

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Power Distribution Equipment and System, School of Health Sciences and Biomedical Engineering, Hebei University of Technology, Peking University, School of Artificial Intelligence, National Engineering Research Center for Software Engineering

Title: Modeling Uncertainty Trends for Timely Retrieval in Dynamic RAG

Abstract:
Dynamic retrievalaugmented generation (RAG) allows large language models (LLMs) to fetch external knowledge on demand, offering greater adaptability than static RAG. A central challenge in this setting lies in determining the optimal timing for retrieval. Existing methods often trigger retrieval based on low token-level confidence, which may lead to delayed intervention after errors have already propagated. We introduce Entropy-Trend Constraint (ETC), a training-free method that determines optimal retrieval timing by modeling the dynamics of token-level uncertainty. Specifically, ETC utilizes first- and second-order differences of the entropy sequence to detect emerging uncertainty trends, enabling earlier and more precise retrieval. Experiments on six QA benchmarks with three LLM backbones demonstrate that ETC consistently outperforms strong baselines while reducing retrieval frequency. ETC is particularly effective in domain-specific scenarios, exhibiting robust generalization capabilities. Ablation studies and qualitative analyses further confirm that trend-aware uncertainty modeling yields more effective retrieval timing. The method is plug-and-play, model-agnostic, and readily integrable into existing decoding pipelines. Implementation code is included in the supplementary materials.

PaperID: 1417, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08018

Authors:Fei Li, Song Liu, Weiguo Wu, Shiqiang Nie, Jinyu Wang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University

Title: KVmix: Gradient-Based Layer Importance-Aware Mixed-Precision Quantization for KV Cache

Abstract:
The high memory demands of the KeyValue (KV) Cache during the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) severely restrict their deployment in resource-constrained platforms. Quantization can effectively alleviate the memory pressure caused by KV Cache. However, existing methods either rely on static one-size-fits-all precision allocation or fail to dynamically prioritize critical KV in long-context tasks, forcing memory-accuracy-throughput tradeoffs. In this work, we propose a novel mixed-precision quantization method for KV Cache named KVmix. KVmix leverages gradient-based importance analysis to evaluate how individual Key and Value projection matrices affect the model loss, enabling layer-specific bit-width allocation for mix-precision quantization. It dynamically prioritizes higher precision for important layers while aggressively quantizing less influential ones, achieving a tunable balance between accuracy and efficiency. KVmix introduces a dynamic long-context optimization strategy that adaptively keeps full-precision KV pairs for recent pivotal tokens and compresses older ones, achieving high-quality sequence generation with low memory usage. Additionally, KVmix provides efficient low-bit quantization and CUDA kernels to optimize computational overhead. On LLMs such as Llama and Mistral, KVmix achieves near-lossless inference performance with extremely low quantization configuration (Key 2.19bit Value 2.38bit), while delivering a remarkable 4.9× memory compression and a 5.3× speedup in inference throughput.

PaperID: 1418, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03959

Authors:Longhao Li, Zhao Guo, Hongjie Chen, Yuhang Dai, Ziyu Zhang, Hongfei Xue, Tianlun Zuo, Chengyou Wang, Shuiyuan Wang, Xin Xu, Hui Bu, Jie Li, Jian Kang, Binbin Zhang, Ruibin Yuan, Ziya Zhou, Wei Xue, Lei Xie

Affiliations: Speech and Language Processing Group (ASLP@NPU), Northwestern Polytechnical University, Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom, Beijing AISHELL Technology Co., WeNet Open Source Community, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: WenetSpeech-Yue: A Large-Scale Cantonese Speech Corpus with Multi-dimensional Annotation

Abstract:
The development of speech understanding and generation has been significantly accelerated by the availability of largescale, high-quality speech datasets. Among these, ASR and TTS are regarded as the most established and fundamental tasks. However, for Cantonese (Yue Chinese), spoken by approximately 84.9 million native speakers worldwide, limited annotated resources have hindered progress and resulted in suboptimal ASR and TTS performance. To address this challenge, we propose WenetSpeech-Pipe, an integrated pipeline for building large-scale speech corpus with multi-dimensional annotation tailored for speech understanding and generation. Based on this pipeline, we release WenetSpeech-Yue, the first large-scale Cantonese speech corpus with multi-dimensional annotation for ASR and TTS, covering 21,800 hours across 10 domains with annotations including ASR transcription, text confidence, speaker identity, age, gender, speech quality scores, among other annotations. We also release WSYue-eval, a comprehensive Cantonese benchmark with two components: WSYue-ASR-eval, a manually annotated set for evaluating ASR on short and long utterances, code-switching, and diverse acoustic conditions, and WSYue-TTS-eval, with base and coverage subsets for standard and generalization testing. Experimental results show that models trained on WenetSpeech-Yue achieve competitive results against state-of-the-art (SOTA) Cantonese ASR and TTS systems, including commercial and LLM-based models, highlighting the value of our dataset and pipeline.

PaperID: 1419, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20995

Authors:Xiaomin Li, Xupeng Chen, Jingxuan Fan, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Mingye Gao

Affiliations: Harvard University, New York University, University of California, Los Angeles, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Title: ENCORE: Entropy-guided Reward Composition for Multi-head Safety Reward Models

Abstract:
The safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) often relies on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which requires human annotations to construct preference datasets. Given the challenge of assigning overall quality scores to data, recent works increasingly adopt finegrained ratings based on multiple safety rules. In this paper, we discover a robust phenomenon: Rules with higher rating entropy tend to have lower accuracy in distinguishing human-preferred responses. Exploiting this insight, we propose ENCORE, a simple entropy-guided method to compose multi-head rewards by penalizing rules with high rating entropy. Theoretically, we show that such rules yield negligible weights under the Bradley–Terry loss during weight optimization, naturally justifying their penalization. Empirically, ENCORE consistently outperforms strong baselines, including random and uniform weighting, single-head Bradley–Terry, and LLM-as-a-judge, etc. on RewardBench safety tasks. Our method is completely training-free, generally applicable across datasets, and retains interpretability, making it a practical and effective approach for multi-attribute reward modeling.

PaperID: 1420, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04715

Authors:Xiaomin Li, Mingye Gao, Zhiwei Zhang, Chang Yue, Hong Hu

Affiliations: Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pennsylvania State University, Princeton University, Washington University in St. Louis

Title: Selection of LLM Fine-Tuning Data Based on Orthogonal Rules

Abstract:
Highquality training data is critical to the performance of large language models (LLMs). Recent work has explored using LLMs to rate and select data based on a small set of human-designed criteria (rules), but these approaches often rely heavily on heuristics, lack principled metrics for rule evaluation, and generalize poorly to new tasks. We propose a novel rule-based data selection framework that introduces a metric based on the orthogonality of rule score vectors to evaluate and select complementary rules. Our automated pipeline first uses LLMs to generate diverse rules covering multiple aspects of data quality, then rates samples according to these rules and applies the determinantal point process (DPP) to select the most independent rules. These rules are then used to score the full dataset, and high-scoring samples are selected for downstream tasks such as LLM fine-tuning. We evaluate our framework in two experiment setups: (1) alignment with ground-truth ratings and (2) performance of LLMs fine-tuned on the selected data. Experiments across IMDB, Medical, Math, and Code domains demonstrate that our DPP-based rule selection consistently improves both rating accuracy and downstream model performance over strong baselines.

PaperID: 1421, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07876

Authors:Xingyu Li, Xiaolei Liu, Cheng Liu, Yixiao Xu, Kangyi Ding, Bangzhou Xin, Jia-Li Yin

Affiliations: National Interdisciplinary Research Center of Engineering Physics Institute of Computer Application, China Academy of Engineering Physics, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Fuzhou University

Title: LoopLLM: Transferable Energy-Latency Attacks in LLMs via Repetitive Generation

Abstract:
As large language models (LLMs) scale, their inference incurs substantial computational resources, exposing them to energylatency attacks, where crafted prompts induce high energy and latency cost. Existing attack methods aim to prolong output by delaying the generation of termination symbols. However, as the output grows longer, controlling the termination symbols through input becomes difficult, making these methods less effective. Therefore, we propose LoopLLM, an energy-latency attack framework based on the observation that repetitive generation can trigger low-entropy decoding loops, reliably compelling LLMs to generate until their output limits. LoopLLM introduces (1) a repetition-inducing prompt optimization that exploits autoregressive vulnerabilities to induce repetitive generation, and (2) a token-aligned ensemble optimization that aggregates gradients to improve cross-model transferability. Extensive experiments on 12 open-source and 2 commercial LLMs show that LoopLLM significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving over 90% of the maximum output length, compared to 20% for baselines, and improving transferability by around 40% to DeepSeek-V3 and Gemini 2.5 Flash.

PaperID: 1422, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18642

Authors:JianXing Liao, Tian Zhang, Xiao Feng, Yusong Zhang, Haorui Wang, Bosi Wen, Ziying Wang, Runzhi Shi

Affiliations: Tencent Hunyuan Team, Tsinghua University, Peking University

Title: RLMR: Reinforcement Learning with Mixed Rewards for Creative Writing

Abstract:
Large language models are extensively utilized in creative writing applications. Creative writing requires a balance between subjective writing quality (e.g., literariness and emotional expression) and objective constraint following (e.g., format requirements and word limits). Existing reinforcement learning methods struggle to balance these two aspects: single reward strategies fail to improve both abilities simultaneously, while fixedweight mixed-reward methods lack the ability to adapt to different writing scenarios. To address this problem, we propose Reinforcement Learning with Mixed Rewards (RLMR), utilizing a dynamically mixed reward system from a writing reward model evaluating subjective writing quality and a constraint verification model assessing objective constraint following. The constraint following reward weight is adjusted dynamically according to the writing quality within sampled groups, ensuring that samples violating constraints get negative advantage in GRPO and thus penalized during training, which is the key innovation of this proposed method. We conduct automated and manual evaluations across diverse model families from 8B to 72B parameters. Additionally, we construct a real-world writing benchmark named WriteEval for comprehensive evaluation. Results illustrate that our method achieves consistent improvements in both instruction following (IFEval from 83.36% to 86.65%) and writing quality (72.75% win rate in manual expert pairwise evaluations on WriteEval). To the best of our knowledge, RLMR is the first work to combine subjective preferences with objective verification in online RL training, providing an effective solution for multi-dimensional creative writing optimization.

PaperID: 1423, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06447

Authors:Lingkun Long, Rubing Yang, Yushi Huang, Desheng Hui, Ao Zhou, Jianlei Yang

Affiliations: Beihang University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: SlimInfer: Accelerating Long-Context LLM Inference via Dynamic Token Pruning

Abstract:
Longcontext inference for Large Language Models (LLMs) is heavily limited by high computational demands. While several existing methods optimize attention computation, they still process the full set of hidden states at each layer, limiting overall efficiency. In this work, we propose SlimInfer, an innovative framework that aims to accelerate inference by directly pruning less critical prompt tokens during the forward pass. Our key insight is an information diffusion phenomenon: As information from critical tokens propagates through layers, it becomes distributed across the entire sequence. This diffusion process suggests that LLMs can maintain their semantic integrity when excessive tokens, even including these critical ones, are pruned in hidden states. Motivated by this, SlimInfer introduces a dynamic fine-grained pruning mechanism that accurately removes redundant tokens of hidden state at intermediate layers. This layer-wise pruning naturally enables an asynchronous KV cache manager that prefetches required token blocks without complex predictors, reducing both memory usage and I/O costs. Extensive experiments show that SlimInfer can achieve up to 2.53× time-to-first-token (TTFT) speedup and 1.88× end-to-end latency reduction for LLaMA3.1-8B-Instruct on a single RTX 4090, without sacrificing performance on LongBench.

PaperID: 1424, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.19346

Authors:Jingyuan Ma, Damai Dai, Zihang Yuan, Rui Li, Weilin Luo, Bin Wang, Qun Liu, Lei Sha, Zhifang Sui

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University, Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University, Huawei Noah's Ark Lab

Title: Large Language Models Struggle with Unreasonability in Math Problems

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success on a wide range of math and reasoning benchmarks. However, we observe that they often struggle when faced with unreasonable math problems. Instead of recognizing these issues, models frequently proceed as if the problem is wellposed, producing incorrect answers or falling into overthinking and verbose self-correction. To systematically investigate this overlooked vulnerability, we propose the Unreasonable Math Problems (UMP) benchmark, designed to evaluate LLMs' ability to detect and respond to unreasonable math problem statements. Based on extensive experiments covering 19 LLMs, we find that even state-of-the-art general models like GPT-4o struggle on UMP. While reasoning models such as DeepSeek-R1 demonstrate a higher sensitivity to unreasonable inputs, this often comes at the cost of generating overly long and meaningless responses that fail to converge. We further find that prompting and fine-tuning enhance the detection of unreasonable inputs, with minor and acceptable trade-offs, making them practical solutions in this challenging setting.

PaperID: 1425, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10030

Authors:Saaduddin Mahmud, Mason Nakamura, Kyle Hollins Wray, Shlomo Zilberstein

Affiliations: University of Massachusetts Amherst

Title: Inference-Aware Prompt Optimization for Aligning Black-Box Large Language Models

Abstract:
Prompt optimization methods have demonstrated significant effectiveness in aligning blackbox large language models (LLMs). In parallel, inference scaling strategies such as Best-of-N Sampling and Majority Voting have likewise been shown to improve alignment and performance by trading additional computation for better output. However, existing prompt optimization approaches are inference strategy agnostic; that is, they optimize prompts without accounting for the inference strategy. This constitutes a significant methodological gap, as our empirical and theoretical analysis reveals a strong interdependence between these two paradigms. Moreover, we find that user preferences regarding trade-offs among multiple objectives and inference budgets substantially influence the choice of prompt and inference configuration. To address this gap, we introduce a novel unified framework named IAPO (Inference-Aware Prompt Optimization) that jointly optimizes the prompt and inference scale, while being aware of the inference budget and different task objectives. We then develop a fixed-budget training algorithm for IAPO, called PSST (Prompt Scaling via Sequential Trimming), and establish finite-budget guarantees on the error probability. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of PSST on six tasks, including multi-objective text generation and reasoning, and demonstrate the critical role of incorporating inference-awareness in aligning black-box LLMs using prompt optimization.

PaperID: 1426, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15621

Authors:Shuyin Ouyang, Dong HUANG, Jingwen Guo, Zeyu Sun, Qihao Zhu, Jie M. Zhang

Affiliations: King's College London, Institute of Data Science, National University of Singapore, Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peking University

Title: DSCodeBench: A Realistic Benchmark for Data Science Code Generation

Abstract:
We introduce DSCodeBench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on complicated and realistic data science code generation tasks. DSCodeBench consists of 1,000 carefully constructed problems sourced from realistic problems from GitHub across ten widely used Python data science libraries. DSCodeBench offers a more challenging and representative testbed, more complex code solutions, more comprehensive data science libraries, clearer and better structured problem descriptions, and stronger test suites. To construct the DSCodeBench, we develop a robust pipeline that combines task scope selection, code construction, test case generation, and problem description synthesis. The process is paired with rigorous manual editing to ensure alignment and enhance the reliability of the evaluation. Experimental result shows that DSCodeBench exhibits robust scaling behavior, where larger models systematically outperform smaller ones, validating its ability to distinguish model capabilities. The best LLM we test, GPT4o, has a pass@1 of 0.392, indicating that LLMs still have a large room to improve for realistic data science code generation tasks. We believe DSCodeBench will serve as a rigorous and trustworthy foundation for advancing LLM-based data science programming.

PaperID: 1427, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10240

Authors:Minbae Park, Hyemin Yang, Jeonghyun Kim, Kunsoo Park, Hyunjoon Kim

Affiliations: Hanyang University, Seoul National University

Title: ProgRAG: Hallucination-Resistant Progressive Retrieval and Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities but still struggle with hallucinations and limited transparency. Recently, KGenhanced LLMs that integrate knowledge graphs (KGs) have been shown to improve reasoning performance, particularly for complex, knowledge-intensive tasks. However, these methods still face significant challenges, including inaccurate retrieval and reasoning failures, often exacerbated by long input contexts that obscure relevant information. Furthermore, many of these approaches rely on LLMs to directly retrieve evidence from KGs, and to self-assess the sufficiency of this evidence, which often results in premature or incorrect reasoning. To address the retrieval and reasoning failures, we propose ProgRAG, a multi-hop knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) framework that decomposes complex questions into sub-questions, and progressively extends partial reasoning paths by answering each sub-question. At each step, external retrievers gather candidate evidence, which is then refined through uncertainty-aware pruning by the LLM. Finally, the context for LLM reasoning is optimized by organizing and rearranging the partial reasoning paths obtained from the sub-question answers. Experiments on two well-known datasets, WebQSP and CWQ, demonstrate that ProgRAG outperforms existing baselines in multi-hop KGQA, offering improved reliability and reasoning quality.

PaperID: 1428, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11872

Authors:Nguyen Tien Phat, Ngo Vu Minh, Linh Ngo Van, Nguyen Thi Ngoc Diep, Thien Huu Nguyen

Affiliations: Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Vietnam National University Hanoi, University of Oregon

Title: GloCTM: Cross-Lingual Topic Modeling via a Global Context Space

Abstract:
Crosslingual topic modeling seeks to uncover coherent and semantically aligned topics across languages—a task central to multilingual understanding. Yet most existing models learn topics in disjoint, language-specific spaces and rely on alignment mechanisms (e.g., bilingual dictionaries) that often fail to capture deep cross-lingual semantics, resulting in loosely connected topic spaces. Moreover, these approaches often overlook the rich semantic signals embedded in multilingual pretrained representations, further limiting their ability to capture fine-grained alignment. We introduce GloCTM (Global Context Space for Cross-Lingual Topic Model), a novel framework that enforces cross-lingual topic alignment through a unified semantic space spanning the entire model pipeline. GloCTM constructs enriched input representations by expanding bag-of-words with cross-lingual lexical neighborhoods, and infers topic proportions using both local and global encoders, with their latent representations aligned through internal regularization. At the output level, the global topic-word distribution, defined over the combined vocabulary, structurally synchronizes topic meanings across languages. To further ground topics in deep semantic space, GloCTM incorporates a Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) loss that aligns the latent topic space with multilingual contextual embeddings. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that GloCTM significantly improves topic coherence and cross-lingual alignment, outperforming strong baselines.

PaperID: 1429, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20340

Authors:Luohe Shi, Zuchao Li, Lefei Zhang, Baoyuan Qi, Guoming Liu, Hai Zhao

Affiliations: Wuhan University, Xiaomi Corporation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: Scaling LLM Speculative Decoding: Non-Autoregressive Forecasting in Large-Batch Scenarios

Abstract:
Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by utilizing otherwise idle computational resources during memoryto-chip data transfer. Current speculative decoding methods typically assume a considerable amount of available computing power, then generate a complex and massive draft tree using a small autoregressive language model to improve overall prediction accuracy. However, methods like batching have been widely applied in mainstream model inference systems as a superior alternative to speculative decoding, as they compress the available idle computing power. Therefore, performing speculative decoding with low verification resources and low scheduling costs has become an important research problem. We believe that more capable models that allow for parallel generation on draft sequences are what we truly need. Recognizing the fundamental nature of draft models to only generate sequences of limited length, we propose SpecFormer, a novel architecture that integrates unidirectional and bidirectional attention mechanisms. SpecFormer combines the autoregressive model’s ability to extract information from the entire input sequence with the parallel generation benefits of non-autoregressive models. This design eliminates the reliance on large prefix trees and achieves consistent acceleration, even in large-batch scenarios. Through lossless speculative decoding experiments across models of various scales, we demonstrate that SpecFormer sets a new standard for scaling LLM inference with lower training demands and reduced computational costs.

PaperID: 1430, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08029

Authors:Aarush Sinha, Pavan Kumar S, Roshan Balaji, Nirav Pravinbhai Bhatt

Affiliations: Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) Chennai, Tamil Nadu, BioSystems Engineering and Control (BiSECt) Lab, Department of Biotechnology Wadhwani School of Data Science and AI, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, India The Centre for Integrative Biology and Systems medicinE (IBSE), IIT Madras

Title: BiCA: Effective Biomedical Dense Retrieval with Citation-Aware Hard Negatives

Abstract:
Hard negatives are essential for training effective retrieval models. Hardnegative mining typically relies on ranking documents using cross-encoders or static embedding models based on similarity metrics such as cosine distance. Hard negative mining becomes challenging for biomedical and scientific domains due to the difficulty in distinguishing between source and hard negative documents. However, referenced documents naturally share contextual relevance with the source document but are not duplicates, making them well-suited as hard negatives. In this work, we propose BiCA: Biomedical Dense Retrieval with Citation-Aware Hard Negatives, an approach for hard-negative mining by utilizing citation links in 20,000 PubMed articles for improving a domain-specific small dense retriever. We fine-tune the GTE_small and GTE_Base models using these citation-informed negatives and observe consistent improvements in zero-shot dense retrieval using nDCG@10 for both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks on BEIR and outperform baselines on long-tailed topics in LoTTE using Success@5. Our findings highlight the potential of leveraging document link structure to generate highly informative negatives, enabling state-of-the-art performance with minimal fine-tuning and demonstrating a path towards highly data-efficient domain adaptation.

PaperID: 1431, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00829

Authors:Yanming Sun, Runzhe Zhan, Chi Seng Cheang, Han Wu, Xuebo Liu, Yuyao Niu, Fengying Ye, Kaixin Lan, Lidia S. Chao, Derek F. Wong

Affiliations: University of Macau, Singapore Management University, Harbin Institute of Technology, South China University of Technology

Title: Exposing the Cracks: Vulnerabilities of Retrieval-Augmented LLM-based Machine Translation

Abstract:
REtrievalAugmented LLM-based Machine Translation (REAL-MT) shows promise for knowledge-intensive tasks like idiomatic translation, but its reliability under noisy retrieval, a common challenge in real-world deployment, remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we propose a noise synthesis framework and new metrics to systematically evaluate REAL-MT’s reliability across high-, medium-, and low-resource language pairs. Using both open- and closed-sourced models, including standard LLMs and large reasoning models (LRMs), we find that models heavily rely on retrieved context, and this dependence is significantly more detrimental in low-resource language pairs, producing nonsensical translations. Although LRMs possess enhanced reasoning capabilities, they show no improvement in error correction and are even more susceptible to noise, tending to rationalize incorrect contexts. Attention analysis reveals a shift from the source idiom to noisy content, while confidence increases despite declining accuracy, indicating poor self-monitoring. To mitigate these issues, we investigate training-free and fine-tuning strategies, which improve robustness at the cost of performance in clean contexts, revealing a fundamental trade-off. Our findings highlight the limitations of current approaches, underscoring the need for self-verifying integration mechanisms.

PaperID: 1432, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02591

Authors:Omri Uzan, Yuval Pinter

Affiliations: Stanford University, Faculty of Computer and Information Science, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Title: CharBench: Evaluating the Role of Tokenization in Character-Level Tasks

Abstract:
Tasks that require characterlevel reasoning, such as counting or locating characters within words, remain challenging for contemporary language models. A common conjecture is that language models' reliance on subword units, rather than characters, contributes to their struggles with character-level tasks, yet recent studies offer conflicting conclusions about the role of tokenization, leaving its impact unclear. To address this gap, we introduce CharBench, a comprehensive benchmark of character-level tasks that is two orders of magnitude larger than existing alternatives. We evaluate a diverse range of leading open-weight and proprietary models on CharBench and find that it presents a significant challenge to modern LLMs, with average accuracies of 43.6% and 32.3% on some tasks. We present an in-depth analysis of how intrinsic properties of words and their segmentations into tokens correspond to model performance. For counting tasks, we find that tokenization properties are weakly correlated with correctness, while the length of the queried word and the actual character count play a more significant part. In contrast, for tasks requiring intra-word positional understanding, performance is negatively correlated with the length of the token containing the queried character, suggesting that longer tokens obscure information on character position for LLMs. We encourage future work to build on the benchmark and evaluation methodology introduced here as tools for improving model performance on these tasks.

PaperID: 1433, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02492

Authors:Chenglong Wang, Yongyu Mu, Hang Zhou, Yifu Huo, Ziming Zhu, Jiali Zeng, Murun Yang, Bei Li, Xiaoyang Hao, Chunliang Zhang, Fandong Meng, Jingbo Zhu, Tong Xiao

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Pattern Recognition Center, WeChat AI, Tencent Inc

Title: GRAM-R²: Self-Training Generative Foundation Reward Models for Reward Reasoning

Abstract:
Major progress in reward modeling over recent years has been driven by a paradigm shift from taskspecific designs to generalist reward models. Despite this trend, developing effective reward models remains a fundamental challenge: the heavy reliance on large-scale labeled preference data. Pre-training on abundant unlabeled data offers a promising direction, but existing approaches fall short in instilling explicit reasoning capabilities into reward models. To bridge this gap, we propose a self-training approach that can leverage unlabeled data to scale up reward reasoning in reward models. Based on this approach, we develop GRAM-R² a generative reward model trained to produce not only preference labels but also accompanying reward rationales. GRAM-R² can serve as a foundation model for reward reasoning and can be applied to a wide range of tasks with minimal or no additional fine-tuning. It can support downstream applications such as policy optimization and task-specific reward tuning. Experiments on response ranking, task adaptation, and reinforcement learning from human feedback demonstrate that GRAM-R² consistently delivers strong performance, outperforming several strong discriminative and generative baselines.

PaperID: 1434, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17555

Authors:Guansu Wang, Peijie Sun

Affiliations: University of Melbourne, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: Speech Recognition Model Improves Text-to-Speech Synthesis Using Fine-Grained Reward

Abstract:
Recent advancements in Textto-Speech (TTS) technology have been remarkable, enabling current models to clone arbitrary unseen speakers and synthesize high-quality, natural-sounding speech. However, corresponding evaluation techniques appear to be lagging: existing Mean Opinion Score (MOS) estimation models typically perform regression-based scoring on entire speech segments, while a failed synthesized speech usually contains problematic elements in only a few isolated words rather than throughout the entire utterance. In this context, we present an intriguing finding: encoder-decoder ASR models, such as Whisper, leverage their extensive pre-training to precisely capture word-level mismatches between speech and text within their cross-attention mechanisms, thereby providing a fine-grained reward signal. Building upon this insight, we propose a novel TTS optimization method, which we term Word-level TTS Alignment by ASR-driven Attentive Reward (W3AR). Instead of relying on any explicit reward annotations, W3AR leverages the attention information within a pre-trained ASR model, enabling finer-grained alignment and optimization of the sequences predicted by the TTS model. Experimental results demonstrate that W3AR not only effectively improves the TTS generation quality of existing models but also further enhances zero-shot robustness based on both in-domain and out-of-domain prompt speakers. Additionally, our findings and proposed methodology offer a new insight for generative tasks: understanding models can potentially serve as evaluators, providing highly fine-grained and valuable feedback for generative optimization.

PaperID: 1435, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06899

Authors:Haofeng Wang, Yu Zhang

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: RPTS: Tree-Structured Reasoning Process Scoring for Faithful Multimodal Evaluation

Abstract:
Large VisionLanguage Models (LVLMs) excel in multimodal reasoning and have shown impressive performance on various multimodal benchmarks. However, most of these benchmarks evaluate models primarily through multiple-choice or short-answer formats, which do not take the reasoning process into account. Although some benchmarks assess the reasoning process, their methods are often overly simplistic and only examine reasoning when answers are incorrect. This approach overlooks scenarios where flawed reasoning leads to correct answers. In addition, these benchmarks do not consider the impact of intermodal relationships on reasoning. To address this issue, we propose the Reasoning Process Tree Score (RPTS), a tree structure-based metric to assess reasoning processes. Specifically, we organize the reasoning steps into a reasoning tree and leverage its hierarchical information to assign weighted faithfulness scores to each reasoning step. By dynamically adjusting these weights, RPTS not only evaluates the overall correctness of the reasoning, but also pinpoints where the model fails in the reasoning. To validate RPTS in real-world multimodal scenarios, we construct a new benchmark, RPTS-Eval, comprising 374 images and 390 reasoning instances. Each instance includes reliable visual-textual clues that serve as leaf nodes of the reasoning tree. Furthermore, we define three types of intermodal relationships to investigate how intermodal interactions influence the reasoning process. We evaluated representative LVLMs (e.g., GPT4o, Llava-Next), uncovering their limitations in multimodal reasoning and highlighting the differences between open-source and closed-source commercial LVLMs. We believe that this benchmark will contribute to the advancement of research in the field of multimodal reasoning.

PaperID: 1436, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04266

Authors:Jiangyuan Wang, Kejun Xiao, Qi Sun, Huaipeng Zhao, Tao Luo, Jian Dong Zhang, Xiaoyi Zeng

Affiliations: Alibaba International Digital Commercial Group

Title: ShoppingBench: A Real-World Intent-Grounded Shopping Benchmark for LLM-based Agents

Abstract:
Existing benchmarks in ecommerce primarily focus on basic user intents, such as finding or purchasing products. However, real-world users often pursue more complex goals, such as applying vouchers, managing budgets, and finding multi-products seller. To bridge this gap, we propose ShoppingBench, a novel end-to-end shopping benchmark designed to encompass increasingly challenging levels of grounded intent. Specifically, we propose a scalable framework to simulate user instructions based on various intents derived from sampled real-world products. To facilitate consistent and reliable evaluations, we provide a large-scale shopping sandbox that serves as an interactive simulated environment, incorporating over 2.5 million real-world products. Experimental results demonstrate that even state-of-the-art language agents (such as GPT-4.1) achieve absolute success rates under 50% on our benchmark tasks, highlighting the significant challenges posed by our ShoppingBench. In addition, we propose a trajectory distillation strategy and leverage supervised fine-tuning, along with reinforcement learning on synthetic trajectories, to distill the capabilities of a large language agent into a smaller one. As a result, our trained agent achieves competitive performance compared to GPT-4.1.

PaperID: 1437, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19131

Authors:Zijian Wang, Yanxiang Ma, Chang Xu

Affiliations: The University of Sydney

Title: Eliciting Chain-of-Thought in Base LLMs via Gradient-Based Representation Optimization

Abstract:
Chainof-Thought (CoT) reasoning is a critical capability for large language models (LLMs), enabling them to tackle complex multi-step tasks. While base LLMs, pre-trained on general text corpora, often struggle with reasoning due to a lack of specialized training, recent studies reveal their latent reasoning potential tied to hidden states. However, existing hidden state manipulation methods, such as linear activation steering, suffer from limitations due to their rigid and unconstrained nature, often leading to distribution shifts and degraded text quality. In this work, we propose a novel approach for eliciting CoT reasoning from base LLMs through hidden state manipulation grounded in probabilistic conditional generation. By reformulating the challenge as an optimization problem with a balanced likelihood and prior regularization framework, our method guides hidden states toward reasoning-oriented trajectories while preserving linguistic coherence. Extensive evaluations across mathematical, commonsense, and logical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing steering methods, offering a theoretically principled and effective solution for enhancing reasoning capabilities in base LLMs.

PaperID: 1438, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18260

Authors:Kaiwen Wei, Rui Shan, Dongsheng Zou, Jianzhong Yang, Bi Zhao, Junnan Zhu, Jiang Zhong

Affiliations: Chongqing University, Institute of automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: MIRAGE: Scaling Test-Time Inference with Parallel Graph-Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Chains

Abstract:
Large reasoning models (LRMs) have shown significant progress in testtime scaling through chain-of-thought prompting. Current approaches like search-o1 integrate retrieval augmented generation (RAG) into multi-step reasoning processes but rely on a single, linear reasoning path while incorporating unstructured textual information in a flat, context-agnostic manner. As a result, these approaches can lead to error accumulation throughout the reasoning chain, which significantly limits its effectiveness in medical question-answering (QA) tasks where both accuracy and traceability are critical requirements. To address these challenges, we propose MIRAGE (Multi-path Inference with Retrieval-Augmented Graph Exploration), a novel test-time scalable reasoning framework that performs dynamic multi-path inference over structured medical knowledge graphs. Specifically, MIRAGE 1) decomposes complex queries into entity-grounded sub-questions, 2) executes parallel inference paths, 3) retrieves evidence adaptively via neighbor expansion and multi-hop traversal, and 4) integrates answers using cross-path verification to resolve contradictions. Experiments on three medical QA benchmarks (GenMedGPT-5k, CMCQA, and ExplainCPE) show that MIRAGE consistently outperforms GPT-4o, Tree-of-Thought variants, and other retrieval-augmented baselines in both automatic and human evaluations. Additionally, MIRAGE improves interpretability by generating explicit reasoning chains that trace each factual claim to concrete paths within the knowledge graph, making it especially suitable for complex medical reasoning scenarios.

PaperID: 1439, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16154

Authors:Zheng Weihua, Xin Huang, Zhengyuan Liu, Tarun Kumar Vangani, Bowei Zou, Xiyan Tao, Yuhao Wu, AiTi Aw, Nancy F. Chen, Roy Ka-Wei Lee

Affiliations: Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore University of Technology and Design

Title: AdaMCoT: Rethinking Cross-Lingual Factual Reasoning Through Adaptive Multilingual Chain-of-Thought

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive multilingual capabilities through pretraining on diverse corpora. While these models show strong reasoning abilities, their performance varies significantly across languages due to imbalanced training data distribution. Existing approaches using samplelevel translation for extensive multilingual pretraining and cross-lingual tuning face scalability challenges and often fail to capture nuanced reasoning processes across languages. In this paper, we introduce AdaMCoT (Adaptive Multilingual Chain-of-Thought), a framework that enhances multilingual factual reasoning by dynamically routing thought processes in intermediary “thinking languages” before generating target-language responses. AdaMCoT leverages a language-agnostic core and incorporates an adaptive, reward-based mechanism for selecting optimal reasoning pathways without requiring additional pretraining. Our comprehensive evaluation across multiple benchmarks demonstrates substantial improvements in both factual reasoning quality and cross-lingual consistency, with particularly strong performance gains in low-resource language settings. An in-depth analysis of the model’s hidden states and semantic space further elucidates the underlying mechanism of our method. The results suggest that adaptive reasoning paths can effectively bridge the performance gap between high- and low-resource languages while maintaining cultural and linguistic nuances.

PaperID: 1440, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12259

Authors:Puzhen Wu, Hexin Dong, Yi Lin, Yihao Ding, Yifan Peng

Affiliations: Weill Cornell Medicine, University of Western Australia

Title: A Disease-Aware Dual-Stage Framework for Chest X-ray Report Generation

Abstract:
Radiology report generation from chest Xrays is an important task in artificial intelligence with the potential to greatly reduce radiologists' workload and shorten patient wait times. Despite recent advances, existing approaches often lack sufficient disease-awareness in visual representations and adequate vision-language alignment to meet the specialized requirements of medical image analysis. As a result, these models usually overlook critical pathological features on chest X-rays and struggle to generate clinically accurate reports. To address these limitations, we propose a novel dual-stage disease-aware framework for chest X-ray report generation. In Stage~1, our model learns Disease-Aware Semantic Tokens (DASTs) corresponding to specific pathology categories through cross-attention mechanisms and multi-label classification, while simultaneously aligning vision and language representations via contrastive learning. In Stage~2, we introduce a Disease-Visual Attention Fusion (DVAF) module to integrate disease-aware representations with visual features, along with a Dual-Modal Similarity Retrieval (DMSR) mechanism that combines visual and disease-specific similarities to retrieve relevant exemplars, providing contextual guidance during report generation. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets (i.e., CheXpert Plus, IU X-ray, and MIMIC-CXR) demonstrate that our disease-aware framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in chest X-ray report generation, with significant improvements in clinical accuracy and linguistic quality.

PaperID: 1441, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16324

Authors:Wei Xia, Zhi-Hong Deng

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence, School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Peking University

Title: SDA: Steering-Driven Distribution Alignment for Open LLMs Without Fine-Tuning

Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), their deployment in realworld applications has become increasingly widespread. LLMs are expected to deliver robust performance across diverse tasks, user preferences, and practical scenarios. However, as demands grow, ensuring that LLMs produce responses aligned with human intent remains a foundational challenge. In particular, aligning model behavior effectively and efficiently during inference, without costly retraining or extensive supervision, is both a critical requirement and a non-trivial technical endeavor. To address the challenge, we propose SDA (Steering-Driven Distribution Alignment), a training-free and model-agnostic alignment framework designed for open-source LLMs. SDA dynamically redistributes model output probabilities based on user-defined alignment instructions, enhancing alignment between model behavior and human intents without fine-tuning. The method is lightweight, resource-efficient, and compatible with a wide range of open-source LLMs. It can function independently during inference or be integrated with training-based alignment strategies. Moreover, SDA supports personalized preference alignment, enabling flexible control over the model’s response behavior. Empirical results demonstrate that SDA consistently improves alignment performance across 8 open-source LLMs with varying scales and diverse origins, evaluated on three key alignment dimensions, helpfulness, harmlessness, and honesty (3H). Specifically, SDA achieves average gains of 64.4% in helpfulness, 30% in honesty and 11.5% in harmlessness across the tested models, indicating its effectiveness and generalization across diverse models and application scenarios.

PaperID: 1442, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17579

Authors:Hefei Xu, Le Wu, Chen Cheng, Hao Liu

Affiliations: Hefei University of Technology

Title: MultiValue Alignment for LLMs via Value Decorrelation and Extrapolation

Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), aligning them with human values for safety and ethics has become a critical challenge. This problem is especially challenging when multiple, potentially conflicting human values must be considered and balanced. Although several variants of existing alignment methods (such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO)) have been proposed to address multivalue alignment, they suffer from notable limitations: 1) they are often unstable and inefficient in multi-value optimization; and 2) they fail to effectively handle value conflicts. As a result, these approaches typically struggle to achieve optimal trade-offs when aligning multiple values. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework called Multi-Value Alignment (MVA). It mitigates alignment degradation caused by parameter interference among diverse human values by minimizing their mutual information. Furthermore, we propose a value extrapolation strategy to efficiently explore the Pareto frontier, thereby constructing a set of LLMs with diverse value preferences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MVA consistently outperforms existing baselines in aligning LLMs with multiple human values.

PaperID: 1443, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.07399

Authors:Peiru Yang, Jinhua Yin, Haoran Zheng, Xueying Bai, Huili Wang, Yufei Sun, Xintian Li, Songwei Pei, Yongfeng Huang, Tao Qi

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: MrM: Black-Box Membership Inference Attacks Against Multimodal RAG Systems

Abstract:
Multimodal retrievalaugmented generation (RAG) systems enhance large vision-language models by integrating cross-modal knowledge, enabling their increasing adoption across real-world multimodal tasks. These knowledge databases may contain sensitive information that requires privacy protection. However, multimodal RAG systems inherently grant external users indirect access to such data, making them potentially vulnerable to privacy attacks, particularly membership inference attacks (MIAs). Existing MIA methods targeting RAG systems predominantly focus on the textual modality, while the visual modality remains relatively underexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose MrM, the first black-box MIA framework targeted at multimodal RAG systems. It utilizes a multi-object data perturbation framework constrained by counterfactual attacks, which can concurrently induce the RAG systems to retrieve the target data and generate information that leaks the membership information. Our method first employs an object-aware data perturbation method to constrain the perturbation to key semantics and ensure successful retrieval. Building on this, we design a counterfact-informed mask selection strategy to prioritize the most informative masked regions, aiming to eliminate the interference of model self-knowledge and amplify attack efficacy. Finally, we perform statistical membership inference by modeling query trials to extract features that reflect the reconstruction of masked semantics from response patterns. Experiments on two visual datasets and eight mainstream commercial visual-language models (e.g., GPT-4o, Gemini-2) demonstrate that MrM achieves consistently strong performance across both sample-level and set-level evaluations, and remains robust under adaptive defenses.

PaperID: 1444, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05327

Authors:Yixin Yang, Qingxiu Dong, Linli Yao, Fangwei Zhu, Weilin Luo, Bin Wang, Zhifang Sui

Affiliations: Peking University, Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab, Huawei Noah's Ark Lab

Title: RICo: Refined In-Context Contribution for Automatic Instruction-Tuning Data Selection

Abstract:
Data selection for instruction tuning is crucial for improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) while reducing training costs. In this paper, we propose Refined Contribution Measurement with InContext Learning (RICo), a novel gradient-free method that quantifies the fine-grained contribution of individual samples to both task-level and global-level model performance. RICo enables more accurate identification of high-contribution data, leading to better instruction tuning. We also introduce a lightweight selection paradigm trained on RICo scores, enabling scalable data selection with strictly linear inference complexity. Extensive experiments on 3 LLMs across 12 benchmarks and 5 pairwise evaluation sets demonstrate the effectiveness of RICo. Remarkably, on LLaMA3.1-8B, models trained in 15% of RICo-selected data outperform full datasets by 5.42 percentage points and exceed the best performance of widely used selection methods by 1.48 percentage points. We further analyze high-contribution samples selected by RICo, which show both diverse tasks and appropriate difficulty levels, rather than merely the most difficult cases.

PaperID: 1445, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20335

Authors:Zishun Yu, Shangzhe Li, Xinhua Zhang

Affiliations: University of Illinois, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Title: Language Model Distillation: A Temporal Difference Imitation Learning Perspective

Abstract:
Large language models have led to significant progress across many NLP tasks, although their massive sizes often incur substantial computational costs. Distillation has become a common practice to compress these large and highly capable models into smaller, more efficient ones. Many existing language model distillation methods can be viewed as behavior cloning from the perspective of imitation learning or inverse reinforcement learning. This viewpoint has inspired subsequent studies that leverage (inverse) reinforcement learning techniques, including variations of behavior cloning and temporal difference learning methods. Rather than proposing yet another specific temporal difference method, we introduce a general framework for temporal differencebased distillation by exploiting the distributional sparsity of the teacher model. Specifically, it is often observed that language models assign most probability mass to a small subset of tokens. Motivated by this observation, we design a temporal difference learning framework that operates on a reduced action space (a subset of vocabulary), and demonstrate how practical algorithms can be derived and the resulting performance improvements.

PaperID: 1446, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04492

Authors:Yuanshuo Zhang, Aohua Li, Bo Chen, Jingbo Sun, Xiaobing Zhao

Affiliations: School of Information Engineering, Minzu University of China National Language Resource Monitoring and Research Center of Minority Languages

Title: MSME: A Multi-Stage Multi-Expert Framework for Zero-Shot Stance Detection

Abstract:
LLMbased approaches have recently achieved impressive results in zero-shot stance detection. However, they still struggle in complex real-world scenarios, where stance understanding requires dynamic background knowledge, target definitions involve compound entities or events that must be explicitly linked to stance labels, and rhetorical devices such as irony often obscure the author’s actual intent. To address these challenges, we propose MSME, a Multi-Stage, Multi-Expert framework for zero-shot stance detection. MSME consists of three stages: (1) Knowledge Preparation, where relevant background knowledge is retrieved and stance labels are clarified; (2) Expert Reasoning, involving three specialized modules—Knowledge Expert distills salient facts and reasons from a knowledge perspective, Label Expert refines stance labels and reasons accordingly, and Pragmatic Expert detects rhetorical cues such as irony to infer intent from a pragmatic angle; (3) Decision Aggregation, where a Meta-Judge integrates all expert analyses to produce the final stance prediction. Experiments on three public datasets show that MSME achieves state-of-the-art performance across the board.

PaperID: 1447, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10026

Authors:Kai Zhao, Yanjun Zhao, Jiaming Song, Shien He, Lusheng Zhang, Qiang Zhang, Tianjiao Li

Affiliations: Bilibili Inc.

Title: SABER: Switchable and Balanced Training for Efficient LLM Reasoning

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) empowered by chainof-thought reasoning have achieved impressive accuracy on complex tasks but suffer from excessive inference costs and latency when applied uniformly to all problems. We propose SABER (Switchable and Balanced Training for Efficient LLM Reasoning), a reinforcement learning framework that endows LLMs with user‑controllable, token‑budgeted reasoning. SABER first profiles each training example’s base‑model thinking token usage and assigns it to one of the predefined budget tiers. During fine‑tuning, the model is guided by system prompts and length‑aware rewards to respect its assigned budget. In parallel, we incorporate no‑think examples to ensure the model remains reliable even when explicit reasoning is turned off. SABER further supports four discrete inference modes—NoThink, FastThink, CoreThink, and DeepThink, enabling flexible trade‑offs between latency and reasoning depth. Extensive evaluations on math reasoning (MATH, GSM8K), code generation (MBPP), and logical reasoning (LiveBench-Reasoning) demonstrate that SABER achieves high accuracy under tight budgets, graceful degradation, and effective cross-scale and cross‑domain generalization. In particular, SABER‑FastThink cuts reasoning length by 65.4% and yields a 3.6% accuracy gain compared with the base model on the MATH benchmark.

PaperID: 1448, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17194

Authors:Shengwei Zhao, Jingwen Yao, Sitong Wei, Linhai Xu, Yuying Liu, Dong Zhang, Zhiqiang Tian, Shaoyi Du

Affiliations: National Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, National Engineering Research Center for Visual Information and Applications, and Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi'an Jiaotong University, School of Software Engineering

Title: MMRAG-RFT: Two-stage Reinforcement Fine-tuning for Explainable Multi-modal Retrieval-augmented Generation

Abstract:
Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MMRAG) enables highly credible generation by integrating external multi-modal knowledge, thus demonstrating impressive performance in complex multi-modal scenarios. However, existing MMRAG methods fail to clarify the reasoning logic behind retrieval and response generation, which limits the explainability of the results. To address this gap, we propose to introduce reinforcement learning into multi-modal retrieval-augmented generation, enhancing the reasoning capabilities of multi-modal large language models through a two-stage reinforcement fine-tuning framework to achieve explainable multi-modal retrieval-augmented generation. Specifically, in the first stage, rule-based reinforcement fine-tuning is employed to perform coarse-grained point-wise ranking of multi-modal documents, effectively filtering out those that are significantly irrelevant. In the second stage, reasoning-based reinforcement fine-tuning is utilized to jointly optimize fine-grained list-wise ranking and answer generation, guiding multi-modal large language models to output explainable reasoning logic in the MMRAG process. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on WebQA and MultimodalQA, two benchmark datasets for multi-modal retrieval-augmented generation, and its effectiveness is validated through comprehensive ablation experiments.

PaperID: 1449, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11995

Authors:Xuyang Zhao, Shiwan Zhao, Hualong Yu, Liting Zhang, Qicheng Li

Affiliations: Nankai University

Title: AgentCDM: Enhancing Multi-Agent Collaborative Decision-Making via ACH-Inspired Structured Reasoning

Abstract:
Multiagent systems (MAS) powered by large language models (LLMs) hold significant promise for solving complex decision-making tasks. However, the core process of collaborative decision-making (CDM) within these systems remains underexplored. Existing approaches often rely on either "dictatorial" strategies that are vulnerable to the cognitive biases of a single agent, or "voting-based" methods that fail to fully harness collective intelligence. To address these limitations, we propose AgentCDM, a structured framework for enhancing collaborative decision-making in LLM-based multi-agent systems. Drawing inspiration from the Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) in cognitive science, AgentCDM introduces a structured reasoning paradigm that systematically mitigates cognitive biases and shifts decision-making from passive answer selection to active hypothesis evaluation and construction. To internalize this reasoning process, we develop a two-stage training paradigm: the first stage uses explicit ACH-inspired scaffolding to guide the model through structured reasoning, while the second stage progressively removes this scaffolding to encourage autonomous generalization. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that AgentCDM achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits strong generalization, validating its effectiveness in improving the quality and robustness of collaborative decisions in MAS.

PaperID: 1450, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20649

Authors:Wenlin Zhong, Chengyuan Liu, Yiquan Wu, Bovin Tan, Changlong Sun, Yi Wang, Xiaozhong Liu, Kun Kuang

Affiliations: School of Software Technology, Zhejiang Unirersity, College of Computer Science and Technology, Guanghua Law School, Zhejiang University, Chongqing Ant Consumer Finance Co, . Ltd, Ant Group, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Title: P2S: Probabilistic Process Supervision for General-Domain Reasoning Question Answering

Abstract:
While reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has advanced LLM reasoning in structured domains like mathematics and programming, its application to generaldomain reasoning tasks remains challenging due to the absence of verifiable reward signals. To this end, methods like Reinforcement Learning with Reference Probability Reward (RLPR) have emerged, leveraging the probability of generating the final answer as a reward signal. However, these outcome-focused approaches neglect crucial step-by-step supervision of the reasoning process itself. To address this gap, we introduce Probabilistic Process Supervision (P2S), a novel self-supervision framework that provides fine-grained process rewards without requiring a separate reward model or human-annotated reasoning steps. During reinforcement learning, P2S synthesizes and filters a high-quality reference reasoning chain (gold-CoT). The core of our method is to calculate a Path Faithfulness Reward (PFR) for each reasoning step, which is derived from the conditional probability of generating the gold-CoT's suffix, given the model's current reasoning prefix. Crucially, this PFR can be flexibly integrated with any outcome-based reward, directly tackling the reward sparsity problem by providing dense guidance. Extensive experiments on reading comprehension and medical Question Answering benchmarks show that P2S significantly outperforms strong baselines.

PaperID: 1451, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10015

Authors:Dejin Ren, Yiling Xue, Taoran Wu, Bai Xue

Affiliations: Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Efficient Verification and Falsification of ReLU Neural Barrier Certificates

Abstract:
Barrier certificates play an important role in verifying the safety of continuoustime systems, including autonomous driving, robotic manipulators and other critical applications. Recently, ReLU neural barrier certificates---barrier certificates represented by the ReLU neural networks---have attracted significant attention in the safe control community due to their promising performance. However, because of the approximate nature of neural networks, rigorous verification methods are required to ensure the correctness of these certificates. This paper presents a necessary and sufficient condition for verifying the correctness of ReLU neural barrier certificates. The proposed condition can be encoded as either an Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) or optimization problem, enabling both verification and falsification. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach capable of falsifying ReLU neural barrier certificates. Numerical experiments demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed method in both verifying and falsifying such certificates.

PaperID: 1452, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08916

Authors:Yaxin Zhao, Yu Zhang

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: HalluClean: A Unified Framework to Combat Hallucinations in LLMs

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks, yet they often produce hallucinated content that undermines factual reliability. To address this challenge, we introduce HalluClean, a lightweight and taskagnostic framework for detecting and correcting hallucinations in LLM-generated text. HalluClean adopts a reasoning-enhanced paradigm, explicitly decomposing the process into planning, execution, and revision stages to identify and refine unsupported claims. It employs minimal task-routing prompts to enable zero-shot generalization across diverse domains, without relying on external knowledge sources or supervised detectors. We conduct extensive evaluations on five representative tasks—question answering, dialogue, summarization, math word problems, and contradiction detection. Experimental results show that HalluClean significantly improves factual consistency and outperforms competitive baselines, demonstrating its potential to enhance the trustworthiness of LLM outputs in real-world applications.

PaperID: 1453, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16194

Authors:Antonios Antoniadis, Ali Shahheidar, Golnoosh Shahkarami, Abolfazl Soltani

Affiliations: University of Twente, Sharif University of Technology, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarland Informatics Campus

Title: A Switching Framework for Online Interval Scheduling with Predictions

Abstract:
We study online interval scheduling in the irrevocable setting, where each interval must be immediately accepted or rejected upon arrival. The objective is to maximize the total length of accepted intervals while ensuring that no two accepted intervals overlap. We consider this problem in a learningaugmented setting, where the algorithm has access to (machine-learned) predictions. The goal is to design algorithms that leverage these predictions to improve performance while maintaining robust guarantees in the presence of prediction errors. Our main contribution is the SemiTrust-and-Switch framework, which provides a unified approach for combining prediction-based and classical interval scheduling algorithms. This framework applies to both deterministic and randomized algorithms and captures the trade-off between consistency (performance under accurate predictions) and robustness (performance under adversarial inputs). Moreover, we provide lower bounds, proving the tightness of this framework in particular settings. We further design a randomized algorithm that smoothly interpolates between prediction-based and robust algorithms. This algorithm achieves both robustness and smoothness-its performance degrades gracefully with the quality of the prediction.

PaperID: 1454, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13134

Authors:Ali Asadi, Krishnendu Chatterjee, David Lurie, Raimundo Saona

Affiliations: Institute of Science and Technology Austria, Paris Dauphine University - PSL, London School of Economics and Political Science

Title: Revealing POMDPs: Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis for Parity Objectives

Abstract:
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are a central model for uncertainty in sequential decision making. The most basic objective is the reachability objective, where a target set must be eventually visited, and the more general parity objectives can model all omegaregular specifications. For such objectives, the computational analysis problems are the following: (a) qualitative analysis that asks whether the objective can be satisfied with probability 1 (almost-sure winning) or probability arbitrarily close to 1 (limit-sure winning); and (b) quantitative analysis that asks for the approximation of the optimal probability of satisfying the objective. For general POMDPs, almost-sure analysis for reachability objectives is EXPTIME-complete, but limit-sure and quantitative analyses for reachability objectives are undecidable; almost-sure, limit-sure, and quantitative analyses for parity objectives are all undecidable. A special class of POMDPs, called revealing POMDPs, has been studied recently in several works, and for this subclass the almost-sure analysis for parity objectives was shown to be EXPTIME-complete. In this work, we show that for revealing POMDPs the limit-sure analysis for parity objectives is EXPTIME-complete, and even the quantitative analysis for parity objectives can be achieved in EXPTIME.

PaperID: 1455, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.18248

Authors:Masataro Asai, Stephen Wissow

Affiliations: IBM Research / MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, University of New Hampshire

Title: Extreme Value Monte Carlo Tree Search for Classical Planning

Abstract:
Despite being successful in board games and reinforcement learning (RL), Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) combined with Multi Armed Bandit (MAB) has seen limited success in domainindependent classical planning until recently. Previous work (Wissow and Asai, 2024) showed that UCB1, designed for bounded rewards, does not perform well as applied to cost-to-go estimates in classical planning, because cost-to-go estimates are unbounded, and showed improved performance using a Gaussian reward MAB instead. This paper further sharpens our understanding of ideal bandits for planning tasks. Existing work has two issues: first, Gaussian MABs under-specify the support of cost-to-go estimates as (-∞, ∞), which we can narrow down. Second, Full Bellman backup (Schulte and Keller, 2014) that backpropagates sample max/min lacks theoretical justification. We use Peaks-Over-Threashold Extreme Value Theory to resolve both issues at once, propose a new bandit algorithm (UCB1-Uniform). We formally prove its regret bound and empirically demonstrate its performance in classical planning.

PaperID: 1456, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.19144

Authors:Tzvika Geft, William Zhang, Jingjin Yu, Kostas Bekris

Affiliations: Rutgers University

Title: Robust Out-of-Order Retrieval for Grid-Based Storage at Maximum Capacity

Abstract:
This paper proposes a framework for improving the operational efficiency of automated storage systems under uncertainty. It considers a 2D gridbased storage for uniform-sized loads (e.g., containers, pallets, or totes), which are moved by a robot (or other manipulator) along a collision-free path in the grid. The loads are labeled (i.e., unique) and must be stored in a given sequence, and later be retrieved in a different sequence---an operational pattern that arises in logistics applications, such as last-mile distribution centers and shipyards. The objective is to minimize the load relocations to ensure efficient retrieval. A previous result guarantees a zero-relocation solution for known storage and retrieval sequences, even for storage at full capacity, provided that the side of the grid through which loads are stored/retrieved is at least 3 cells wide. However, in practice, the retrieval sequence can change after the storage phase. To address such uncertainty, this work investigates k-bounded perturbations during retrieval, under which any two loads may depart out of order if they are originally at most k positions apart. We prove that a Theta(k) grid width is necessary and sufficient for eliminating relocations at maximum capacity. We also provide an efficient solver for computing a storage arrangement that is robust to such perturbations. To address the higher-uncertainty case where perturbations exceed k, a strategy is introduced to effectively minimize relocations. Extensive experiments show that, for k up to half the grid width, the proposed storage-retrieval framework essentially eliminates relocations. For k values up to the full grid width, relocations are reduced by 50%+.

PaperID: 1457, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10162

Authors:Tamir Shazman, Idan Lev-Yehudi, Ron Benchetrit, Vadim Indelman

Affiliations: Faculty of Data and Decisions Sciences, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Technion Autonomous Systems Program (TASP), Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Computer Science Department, Stephen B. Klein Faculty of Aerospace Engineering

Title: Online Robust Planning Under Model Uncertainty: A Sample-Based Approach

Abstract:
Online planning in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) enables agents to make sequential decisions by simulating future trajectories from the current state, making it wellsuited for large-scale or dynamic environments. Sample-based methods such as Sparse Sampling and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) are widely adopted for their ability to approximate optimal actions using a generative model. However, in practical settings, the generative model is often learned from limited data, introducing approximation errors that can degrade performance or lead to unsafe behaviors. To address these challenges, Robust MDPs (RMDPs) offer a principled framework for planning under model uncertainty, yet existing approaches are typically computationally intensive and not suited for real-time use. In this work, we introduce Robust Sparse Sampling (RSS), the first online planning algorithm for RMDPs with finite-sample theoretical performance guarantees. Unlike Sparse Sampling, which estimates the nominal value function, RSS computes a robust value function by leveraging the efficiency and theoretical properties of Sample Average Approximation (SAA), enabling tractable robust policy computation in online settings. RSS is applicable to infinite or continuous state spaces, and its sample and computational complexities are independent of the state space size. We provide theoretical performance guarantees and empirically show that RSS outperforms standard Sparse Sampling in environments with uncertain dynamics.

PaperID: 1458, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21389

Authors:Rui Zhang, Jianwei Niu, Xuefeng Liu, Shaojie Tang, Jing Yuan

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, China Zhongguancun Laboratory, Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Industrial Big Data and Robot Intelligent Systems, Department of Management Science and Systems, University at Buffalo, New York, University of North Texas

Title: Learning to Optimize Job Shop Scheduling Under Structural Uncertainty

Abstract:
The JobShop Scheduling Problem (JSSP), under various forms of manufacturing uncertainty, has recently attracted considerable research attention. Most existing studies focus on parameter uncertainty, such as variable processing times, and typically adopt the actor-critic framework. In this paper, we explore a different but prevalent form of uncertainty in JSSP: structural uncertainty. Structural uncertainty arises when a job may follow one of several routing paths, and the selection is determined not by policy, but by situational factors (e.g., the quality of intermediate products) that cannot be known in advance. Existing methods struggle to address this challenge due to incorrect credit assignment: a high-quality action may be unfairly penalized if it is followed by a time-consuming path. To address this problem, we propose a novel method named UP-AAC. In contrast to conventional actor-critic methods, UP-AAC employs an asymmetric architecture. While its actor receives a standard stochastic state, the critic is crucially provided with a deterministic state reconstructed in hindsight. This design allows the critic to learn a more accurate value function, which in turn provides a lower-variance policy gradient to the actor, leading to more stable learning. In addition, we design an attention-based Uncertainty Perception Model (UPM) to enhance the actor's scheduling decisions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in reducing makespan on benchmark instances.

PaperID: 1459, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23167

Authors:Yifan Zhang, Giridhar Ganapavarapu, Srideepika Jayaraman, Bhavna Agrawal, Dhaval Patel, Achille Fokoue

Affiliations: IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Title: SPIRAL: Symbolic LLM Planning via Grounded and Reflective Search

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) often falter at complex planning tasks that require exploration and selfcorrection, as their linear reasoning process struggles to recover from early mistakes. While search algorithms like Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) can explore alternatives, they are often ineffective when guided by sparse rewards and fail to leverage the rich semantic capabilities of LLMs. We introduce SPIRAL (Symbolic LLM Planning via Grounded and Reflective Search), a novel framework that embeds a cognitive architecture of three specialized LLM agents into an MCTS loop. SPIRAL's key contribution is its integrated planning pipeline where a Planner proposes creative next steps, a Simulator grounds the search by predicting realistic outcomes, and a Critic provides dense reward signals through reflection. This synergy transforms MCTS from a brute-force search into a guided, self-correcting reasoning process. On the DailyLifeAPIs and HuggingFace datasets, SPIRAL consistently outperforms the default Chain-of-Thought planning method and other state-of-the-art agents. More importantly, it substantially surpasses other state-of-the-art agents; for example, SPIRAL achieves 83.6% overall accuracy on DailyLifeAPIs, an improvement of over 16 percentage points against the next-best search framework, while also demonstrating superior token efficiency. Our work demonstrates that structuring LLM reasoning as a guided, reflective, and grounded search process yields more robust and efficient autonomous planners. The source code, full appendices, and all experimental data are available for reproducibility at the official project repository.

PaperID: 1460, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10266

Authors:Rajab Aghamov, Christel Baier, Joël Ouaknine, Jakob Piribauer, Mihir Vahanwala, Isa Vialard

Affiliations: Technische Universität Dresden, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Saarland Informatics Campus

Title: Temporal Properties of Conditional Independence in Dynamic Bayesian Networks

Abstract:
Dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs) are compact graphical representations used to model probabilistic systems where interdependent random variables and their distributions evolve over time. In this paper, we study the verification of the evolution of conditionalindependence (CI) propositions against temporal logic specifications. To this end, we consider two specification formalisms over CI propositions: linear temporal logic (LTL), and non-deterministic Büchi automata (NBAs). This problem has two variants. Stochastic CI properties take the given concrete probability distributions into account, while structural CI properties are viewed purely in terms of the graphical structure of the DBN. We show that deciding whether a stochastic CI proposition eventually holds is at least as hard as the Skolem problem for linear recurrence sequences, which is a long-standing open problem in number theory. On the other hand, we show that verifying the evolution of structural CI propositions against LTL and NBA specifications is in PSPACE, and is hard for both NP and coNP. We also identify natural restrictions on the graphical structure of the DBN that make the verification of structural CI properties tractable.

PaperID: 1461, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07313

Authors:Bosun Kang, Hyejun Park, Chenglin Fan

Affiliations: Seoul National University

Title: Learning-Augmented Ski Rental with Discrete Distribution: A Bayesian Approach

Abstract:
We revisit the classic ski rental problem through the lens of Bayesian decisionmaking and machine-learned predictions. While traditional algorithms minimize worst-case cost without assumptions, and recent learning-augmented approaches leverage noisy forecasts with robustness guarantees, our work unifies these perspectives. We propose a discrete Bayesian framework that maintains exact posterior distributions over the time horizon, enabling principled uncertainty quantification and seamless incorporation of expert priors. Our algorithm achieves prior-dependent competitive guarantees and gracefully interpolates between worst-case and fully-informed settings. Our extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates superior empirical performance across diverse scenarios, achieving near-optimal results under accurate priors while maintaining robust worst-case guarantees. This framework naturally extends to incorporate multiple predictions, non-uniform priors, and contextual information, highlighting the practical advantages of Bayesian reasoning in online decision problems with imperfect predictions.

PaperID: 1462, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05570

Authors:Ilya Levin, Alexey Naumov, Sergey Samsonov

Affiliations: HSE University

Title: High-Order Error Bounds for Markovian LSA with Richardson–Romberg Extrapolation

Abstract:
In this paper, we study the bias and highorder error bounds of the Linear Stochastic Approximation (LSA) algorithm with Polyak-Ruppert (PR) averaging under Markovian noise. We focus on the version of the algorithm with constant step size and propose a novel decomposition of the bias via a linearization technique. We analyze the structure of the bias and show that the leading-order term is linear in the step size and cannot be eliminated by PR averaging. To address this, we apply the Richardson-Romberg (RR) extrapolation procedure, which effectively cancels the leading bias term. We derive high-order moment bounds for the RR iterates and show that the leading error term aligns with the asymptotically optimal covariance matrix of the vanilla averaged LSA iterates. We validate applicability of our findings for the temporal difference algorithm in reinforcement learning.

PaperID: 1463, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16244

Authors:Xueqi Ma, Xingjun Ma, Sarah Monazam Erfani, Danilo Mandic, James Bailey

Affiliations: The University of Melbourne, Fudan University, Imperial College London

Title: Coarse-to-Fine Open-Set Graph Node Classification with Large Language Models

Abstract:
Developing openset classification methods capable of classifying in-distribution (ID) data while detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) samples is essential for deploying graph neural networks (GNNs) in open-world scenarios. Existing methods typically treat all OOD samples as a single class, despite real-world applications—especially high-stake settings like fraud detection and medical diagnosis—demanding deeper insights into OOD samples, including their probable labels. This raises a critical question: Can OOD detection be extended to OOD classification without true label information? To answer this question, we introduce a Coarse-to-Fine open-set Classification (CFC) method that leverages large language models (LLMs) for text-attributed graphs. CFC consists of three key components: (1) A coarse classifier that utilizes LLM prompts for OOD detection and outlier label generation; (2) A GNN-based fine classifier trained with OOD samples from (1) for enhanced OOD detection and ID classification; and (3) Refined OOD classification achieved through LLM prompts and post-processed OOD labels. Unlike methods relying on synthetic or auxiliary OOD samples, CFC employs semantic OOD data-instances that are genuinely out-of-distribution based on their inherent meaning, thus improving interpretability and practical utility. CFC enhances OOD detection by 10% compared to state-of-the-art approaches on text-attributed graphs and in the text domain, while achieving up to 70% accuracy in OOD classification on graph datasets.

PaperID: 1464, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10339

Authors:Tomáš Čížek, Martin Balko, Martin Schmid

Affiliations: Charles University

Title: Massively Parallel Proof-Number Search for Impartial Games and Beyond

Abstract:
ProofNumber Search is a best-first search algorithm with many successful applications, especially in game solving. As large-scale computing clusters become increasingly accessible, parallelization is a natural way to accelerate computation. However, existing parallel versions of Proof-Number Search are known to scale poorly on many CPU cores. Using two parallelized levels and shared information among workers, we present the first massively parallel version of Proof-Number Search that scales efficiently even on a large number of CPUs. We apply our solver, enhanced with Grundy numbers for reducing game trees of impartial games, to the Sprouts game, a case study motivated by the long-standing Sprouts Conjecture. Our algorithm achieves 332.9x speedup on 1024 cores, significantly improving previous parallelizations and outperforming the state-of-the-art Sprouts solver GLOP by four orders of magnitude in runtime while generating proofs 1,000x more complex. Despite exponential growth in game tree size, our solver verified the Sprouts Conjecture for 42 new positions, nearly doubling the number of known outcomes.

PaperID: 1465, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07524

Authors:Yasuaki Kobayashi, Kazuhiro Kurita, Yutaro Yamaguchi

Affiliations: Hokkaido University, Okayama University, Osaka University

Title: Finding One Local Optimum Is Easy—but What About Two?

Abstract:
The class PLS (Polynomial Local Search) captures the complexity of finding a solution that is locally optimal and has proven to be an important concept in the theory of local search. It has been shown that local search versions of various combinatorial optimization problems, such as Maximum Independent Set and Max Cut, are complete for this class. Such computational intractability typically arises in local search problems allowing arbitrary weights; in contrast, for unweighted problems, locally optimal solutions can be found in polynomial time under standard settings. In this paper, we pursue the complexity of local search problems from a different angle: We show that computing two locally optimal solutions is NPhard for various natural unweighted local search problems, including Maximum Independent Set, Minimum Dominating Set, Max SAT, and Max Cut. We also discuss several tractable cases for finding two (or more) local optimal solutions.

PaperID: 1466, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06318

Authors:Zimin Liang, Miqing Li

Affiliations: University of Birmingham

Title: Random is Faster than Systematic in Multi-Objective Local Search

Abstract:
Local search is a fundamental method in operations research and combinatorial optimisation. It has been widely applied to a variety of challenging problems, including multiobjective optimisation where multiple, often conflicting, objectives need to be simultaneously considered. In multi-objective local search algorithms, a common practice is to maintain an archive of all non-dominated solutions found so far, from which the algorithm iteratively samples a solution to explore its neighbourhood. A central issue in this process is how to explore the neighbourhood of a selected solution. In general, there are two main approaches: 1) systematic exploration and 2) random sampling. The former systematically explores the solution's neighbours until a stopping condition is met -- for example, when the neighbourhood is exhausted (i.e., the best improvement strategy) or once a better solution is found (i.e., first improvement). In contrast, the latter randomly selects and evaluates only one neighbour of the solution. One may think systematic exploration may be more efficient, as it prevents from revisiting the same neighbours multiple times. In this paper, however, we show that this may not be the case. We first empirically demonstrate that the random sampling method is consistently faster than the systematic exploration method across a range of multi-objective problems. We then give an intuitive explanation for this phenomenon using toy examples, showing that the superior performance of the random sampling method relies on the distribution of ``good neighbours''. Next, we show that the number of such neighbours follows a certain probability distribution during the search. Lastly, building on this distribution, we provide a theoretical insight for why random sampling is more efficient than systematic exploration, regardless of whether the best improvement or first improvement strategy is used.

PaperID: 1467, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07208

Authors:Matteo Francobaldi, Michele Lombardi, Andrea Lodi

Affiliations: University of Bologna, Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, Cornell Tech and Technion

Title: SMiLE: Provably Enforcing Global Relational Properties in Neural Networks

Abstract:
Artificial Intelligence systems are increasingly deployed in settings where ensuring robustness, fairness, or domainspecific properties is essential for regulation compliance and alignment with human values. However, especially on Neural Networks, property enforcement is very challenging, and existing methods are limited to specific constraints or local properties (defined around datapoints), or fail to provide full guarantees. We tackle these limitations by extending SMiLE, a recently proposed enforcement framework for NNs, to support global relational properties (defined over the entire input space). The proposed approach scales well with model complexity, accommodates general properties and backbones, and provides full satisfaction guarantees. We evaluate SMiLE on monotonicity, global robustness, and individual fairness, on synthetic and real data, for regression and classification tasks. Our approach is competitive with property-specific baselines in terms of accuracy and runtime, and strictly superior in terms of generality and level of guarantees. Overall, our results emphasize the potential of the SMiLE framework as a platform for future research and applications.

PaperID: 1468, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.03369

Authors:Rom Himelstein, Amit LeVi, Brit Youngmann, Yaniv Nemcovsky, Avi Mendelson

Affiliations: Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Title: Silenced Biases: The Dark Side LLMs Learned to Refuse

Abstract:
Safetyaligned large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly widespread, especially in sensitive applications where fairness is essential and biased outputs can cause significant harm. However, evaluating the fairness of models is a complex challenge, and approaches that do so typically utilize standard question-answer (QA) styled schemes. Such methods often overlook deeper issues by interpreting the model's refusal responses as positive fairness measurements, which creates a false sense of fairness. In this work, we introduce the concept of silenced biases, which are unfair preferences encoded within models' latent space and are effectively concealed by safety-alignment. Previous approaches that considered similar indirect biases often relied on prompt manipulation or handcrafted implicit queries, which present limited scalability and risk contaminating the evaluation process with additional biases. We propose the Silenced Bias Benchmark (SBB), which aims to uncover these biases by employing activation steering to reduce model refusals during QA. SBB supports easy expansion to new demographic groups and subjects, presenting a fairness evaluation framework that encourages the future development of fair models and tools beyond the masking effects of alignment training. We demonstrate our approach over multiple LLMs, where our findings expose an alarming distinction between models' direct responses and their underlying fairness issues.

PaperID: 1469, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08688

Authors:Chen Li, Han Zhang, Zhantao Yang, Fangyi Chen, Zihan Wang, Anudeepsekhar Bolimera, Marios Savvides

Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University

Title: STELAR-VISION: Self-Topology-Aware Efficient Learning for Aligned Reasoning in Vision

Abstract:
Visionlanguage models (VLMs) have made significant strides in reasoning, yet they often struggle with complex multimodal tasks and tend to generate overly verbose outputs. A key limitation is their reliance on chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, despite many tasks benefiting from alternative topologies like trees or graphs. To address this, we introduce STELAR-Vision, a training framework for topology-aware reasoning. At its core is TopoAug, a synthetic data pipeline that enriches training with diverse topological structures. Using supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, we post-train Qwen2VL models with both accuracy and efficiency in mind. Additionally, we propose Frugal Learning, which reduces output length with minimal accuracy loss. On MATH-V and VLM_S2H, STELAR-Vision improves accuracy by 9.7% over its base model and surpasses the larger Qwen2VL-72B-Instruct by 7.3%. On five out-of-distribution benchmarks, it outperforms Phi-4-Multimodal-Instruct by up to 28.4% and LLaMA-3.2-11B-Vision-Instruct by up to 13.2%, demonstrating strong generalization. Compared to Chain-Only training, our approach achieves 4.3% higher overall accuracy on in-distribution datasets and consistently outperforms across all OOD benchmarks.

PaperID: 1470, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09212

Authors:Zixuan Liu, Siavash H. Khajavi, Guangkai Jiang, Xinru Liu

Affiliations: Aalto University, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Title: Targeting Misalignment: A Conflict-Aware Framework for Reward-Model-based LLM Alignment

Abstract:
Rewardmodel-based fine-tuning is a central paradigm in aligning Large Language Models with human preferences. However, such approaches critically rely on the assumption that proxy reward models accurately reflect intended supervision, a condition often violated due to annotation noise, bias, or limited coverage. This misalignment can lead to undesirable behaviors, where models optimize for flawed signals rather than true human values. In this paper, we investigate a novel framework to identify and mitigate such misalignment by treating the fine-tuning process as a form of knowledge integration. We focus on detecting instances of proxy-policy conflicts, cases where the base model strongly disagrees with the proxy. We argue that such conflicts often signify areas of shared ignorance, where neither the policy nor the reward model possesses sufficient knowledge, making them especially susceptible to misalignment. To this end, we propose two complementary metrics for identifying these conflicts: a localized Proxy-Policy Alignment Conflict Score (PACS) and a global Kendall-Tau Distance measure. Building on this insight, we design an algorithm named Selective Human-in-the-loop Feedback via Conflict-Aware Sampling (SHF-CAS) that targets high-conflict QA pairs for additional feedback, refining both the reward model and policy efficiently. Experiments on two alignment tasks demonstrate that our approach enhances general alignment performance, even when trained with a biased proxy reward. Our work provides a new lens for interpreting alignment failures and offers a principled pathway for targeted refinement in LLM training.

PaperID: 1471, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11551

Authors:Dena Mujtaba, Brian Hu, Anthony Hoogs, Arslan Basharat

Affiliations:

Title: Aligning Machiavellian Agents: Behavior Steering via Test-Time Policy Shaping

Abstract:
The deployment of decisionmaking AI agents presents a critical challenge in maintaining alignment with human values or guidelines while operating in complex, dynamic environments. Agents trained solely to achieve their objectives may adopt harmful behavior, exposing a key trade-off between maximizing the reward function and maintaining alignment. For pre-trained agents, ensuring alignment is particularly challenging, as retraining can be a costly and slow process. This is further complicated by the diverse and potentially conflicting attributes representing the ethical values for alignment. To address these challenges, we propose a test-time alignment technique based on model-guided policy shaping. Our method allows precise control over individual behavioral attributes, generalizes across diverse reinforcement learning (RL) environments, and facilitates a principled trade-off between ethical alignment and reward maximization without requiring agent retraining. We evaluate our approach using the MACHIAVELLI benchmark, which comprises 134 text-based game environments and thousands of annotated scenarios involving ethical decisions. The RL agents are first trained to maximize the reward in their respective games. At test time, we apply policy shaping via scenario-action attribute classifiers to ensure decision alignment with ethical attributes. We compare our approach against prior training-time methods and general-purpose agents, as well as study several types of ethical violations and power-seeking behavior. Our results demonstrate that test-time policy shaping provides an effective and scalable solution for mitigating unethical behavior across diverse environments and alignment attributes.

PaperID: 1472, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17089

Authors:Md Rafi Ur Rashid, Vishnu Asutosh Dasu, Ye Wang, Gang Tan, Shagufta Mehnaz

Affiliations: Pennsylvania State University, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs

Title: Chain-of-Thought Driven Adversarial Scenario Extrapolation for Robust Language Models

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities, but remain susceptible to a growing spectrum of safety risks, including jailbreaks, toxic content, hallucinations, and bias. Existing defenses often address only a single threat type or resort to rigid outright rejection, sacrificing user experience and failing to generalize across diverse and novel attacks. This paper introduces Adversarial Scenario Extrapolation (ASE), a novel inferencetime computation framework that leverages Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to simultaneously enhance LLM robustness and seamlessness. ASE guides the LLM through a self-generative process of contemplating potential adversarial scenarios and formulating defensive strategies before generating a response to the user query. Comprehensive evaluation on four adversarial benchmarks with four latest LLMs shows that ASE achieves near-zero jailbreak attack success rates and minimal toxicity, while slashing outright rejections to <4%. ASE outperforms six state-of-the-art defenses in robustness-seamlessness trade-offs, with 92–99% accuracy on adversarial Q&A and 4–10× lower bias scores. By transforming adversarial perception into an intrinsic cognitive process, ASE sets a new paradigm for secure and natural human-AI interaction.

PaperID: 1473, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14904

Authors:Jianfeng Si, Lin Sun, Zhewen Tan, Xiangzheng Zhang

Affiliations: Qiyuan Tech

Title: Efficient Switchable Safety Control in LLMs via Magic-Token-Guided Co-Training

Abstract:
Current methods for content safety in Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Supervised FineTuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), often rely on multi-stage training pipelines and lack fine-grained, post-deployment controllability. To address these limitations, we propose a unified co-training framework that efficiently integrates multiple safety behaviors: positive (lawful/prosocial), negative (unfiltered/risk-prone) and rejective (refusal-oriented/conservative) within a single SFT stage. Notably, each behavior is dynamically activated via a simple system-level instruction, or magic token, enabling stealthy and efficient behavioral switching at inference time. This flexibility supports diverse deployment scenarios, such as positive for safe user interaction, negative for internal red-teaming, and rejective for context-aware refusals triggered by upstream moderation signals. This co-training strategy induces a distinct Safety Alignment Margin in the output space, characterized by well-separated response distributions corresponding to each safety mode. The existence of this margin provides empirical evidence for the model's safety robustness and enables unprecedented fine-grained control. Experiments show that our method matches the safety alignment quality of SFT+DPO, with our 8B model notably surpassing DeepSeek-R1 (671B) in safety performance, while significantly reducing both training complexity and deployment costs. This work presents a scalable, efficient, and highly controllable solution for LLM content safety.

PaperID: 1474, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05914

Authors:Kevin Wei, Lennart Heim

Affiliations: RAND GovAI (Centre for the Governance of AI)

Title: Designing Incident Reporting Systems for Harms from General-Purpose AI

Abstract:
We introduce a conceptual framework and provide considerations for the institutional design of AI incident reporting (IR) systems, i.e., processes for collecting information about safetyand rights-related events caused by general-purpose AI. As general-purpose AI systems are increasingly adopted, they are causing more real-world harms and displaying the potential to cause significantly more dangerous incidents—events that did or could have caused harm to individuals, property, or the environment. Through a literature review, we develop a framework for understanding the institutional design of AI incident reporting systems, which includes seven dimensions: policy goal, actors submitting and receiving reports, type of incidents reported, level of risk materialization, enforcement of reporting, anonymity of reporters, and post-reporting actions. We then examine nine case studies of incident reporting in safety-critical industries to extract design considerations for AI incident reporting in the United States. We discuss, among other factors, differences in systems operated by regulatory vs. non-regulatory government agencies, near miss reporting, the roles of mandatory reporting thresholds and voluntary reporting channels, how to enable safety learning after reporting, sharing incident information, and clarifying legal frameworks for reporting. Our aim is to inform researchers and policymakers about when particular design choices might be more or less appropriate for AI incident reporting.

PaperID: 1475, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11137

Authors:Zhuochen Yang, Kar Wai Fok, Vrizlynn L. L. Thing

Affiliations: Cybersecurity Strategic Technology Centre, ST Engineering

Title: CoSPED: Consistent Soft Prompt Targeted Data Extraction and Defense

Abstract:
Large language models have gained widespread attention recently, but their potential security vulnerabilities, especially privacy leakage, are also becoming apparent. To test and evaluate for data extraction risks in LLMs, we propose CoSPED, short for Consistent Soft Prompt Targeted Data Extraction and Defense. We introduce several innovative components, including Dynamic Loss, Additive Loss, Common Loss, and Self Consistency Decoding Strategy, and tested to enhance the consistency of the soft prompt tuning process. Through extensive experimentation with various combinations, we achieved an extraction rate of 65.2% at a 50token prefix comparison. Our comparisons of CoSPED with other reference works confirm our superior extraction rates. We evaluate CoSPED on more scenarios, achieving Pythia model extraction rate of 51.7% and introducing cross-model comparison. Finally, we explore defense through Rank-One Model Editing and achieve a reduction in the extraction rate to 1.6%, which proves that our analysis of extraction mechanisms can directly inform effective mitigation strategies against soft prompt-based attacks.

PaperID: 1476, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02952

Authors:Avrim Blum, Emily Diana, Kavya Ravichandran, Alexander Williams Tolbert

Affiliations: Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, Carnegie Mellon University, Tepper School of Business, Emory University, Data and Decision Sciences

Title: A Theoretical Model for Grit in Pursuing Ambitious Ends

Abstract:
Ambition and risktaking have been heralded as important ways for marginalized communities to get out of cycles of poverty. As a result, educational messaging often encourages individuals to strengthen their personal resolve and develop characteristics such as discipline and grit to succeed in ambitious ends. However, recent work in philosophy and sociology highlights that this messaging often does more harm than good for students in these situations. We study similar questions using a different epistemic approach and in simple theoretical models -- we provide a quantitative model of decision-making between stable and risky choices in the improving multi-armed bandits framework. We use this model to first study how individuals' "strategies" are affected by their level of grittiness and how this affects their accrued rewards. Then, we study the impact of various interventions, such as increasing grit or providing a financial safety net. Our investigation of rational decision making studies the competitive ratio between the accrued reward and the optimal reward.

PaperID: 1477, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05805

Authors:Winston Chen, Michael W. Sjoding, Jenna Wiens

Affiliations: University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Title: Measuring Model Performance in the Presence of an Intervention

Abstract:
AI models are often evaluated based on their ability to predict the outcome of interest. However, in many AI for social impact applications, the presence of an intervention that affects the outcome can bias the evaluation. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) randomly assign interventions, allowing data from the control group to be used for unbiased model evaluation. However, this approach is inefficient because it ignores data from the treatment group. Given the complexity and cost often associated with RCTs, making the most use of the data is essential. Thus, we investigate model evaluation strategies that leverage all data from an RCT. First, we theoretically quantify the estimation bias that arises from naïvely aggregating performance estimates from treatment and control groups and derive the condition under which this bias leads to incorrect model selection. Leveraging these theoretical insights, we propose nuisance parameter weighting (NPW), an unbiased model evaluation approach that reweights data from the treatment group to mimic the distribution of samples that would or would not experience the outcome under no intervention. Using synthetic and realworld datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed evaluation approach consistently yields better model selection than the standard approach, which ignores data from the treatment group, across various intervention effect and sample size settings. Our contribution represents a meaningful step towards more efficient model evaluation in real-world contexts.

PaperID: 1478, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06091

Authors:Wenchao Dong, Marcelo Sartori Locatelli, Virgilio Almeida, Meeyoung Cha

Affiliations: Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP), Belo Horizonte, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Germany Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), South Korea

Title: Characterizing AI Manipulation Risks in Brazilian YouTube Climate Discourse

Abstract:
Climate change poses a global threat to public health, food security, and economic stability. Addressing it requires evidencebased policies and a nuanced understanding of how the threat is perceived by the public, particularly within visual social media, where narratives quickly evolve through voices of individuals, politicians, NGOs, and institutions. This study investigates climate-related discourse on YouTube within the Brazilian context, a geopolitically significant nation in global environmental negotiations. Through three case studies, we examine (1) which psychological content traits most effectively drive audience engagement, (2) the extent to which these traits influence content popularity, and (3) whether such insights can inform the design of persuasive synthetic campaigns such as climate denialism using recent generative language models. Another contribution of this work is the release of a large publicly available dataset of 226K Brazilian YouTube videos and 2.7M user comments on climate change. The dataset includes fine-grained annotations of persuasive strategies, theory of mind categorizations in user responses, and typologies of content creators. This resource can help support future research on digital climate communication and the ethical risk of algorithmically amplified narratives and generative media.

PaperID: 1479, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.04886

Authors:Ahmad Elallaf, Nathan Jacobs, Xinyue Ye, Mei Chen, Gongbo Liang

Affiliations: Texas A&M University-San Antonio, Washington University, Saint Louis, The University of Alabama, The University of Kentucky

Title: Beta Distribution Learning for Reliable Roadway Crash Risk Assessment

Abstract:
Roadway traffic accidents represent a global health crisis, responsible for over a million deaths annually and costing many countries up to 3% of their GDP. Traditional traffic safety studies often examine risk factors in isolation, overlooking the spatial complexity and contextual interactions inherent in the built environment. Furthermore, conventional Neural Networkbased risk estimators typically generate point estimates without conveying model uncertainty, limiting their utility in critical decision-making. To address these shortcomings, we introduce a novel geospatial deep learning framework that leverages satellite imagery as a comprehensive spatial input. This approach enables the model to capture the nuanced spatial patterns and embedded environmental risk factors that contribute to fatal crash risks. Rather than producing a single deterministic output, our model estimates a full Beta probability distribution over fatal crash risk, yielding accurate and uncertainty-aware predictions--a critical feature for trustworthy AI in safety-critical applications. Our model outperforms baselines by achieving a 17-23% improvement in recall, a key metric for flagging potential dangers, while delivering superior calibration. By providing reliable and interpretable risk assessments from satellite imagery alone, our method enables safer autonomous navigation and offers a highly scalable tool for urban planners and policymakers to enhance roadway safety equitably and cost-effectively.

PaperID: 1480, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10459

Authors:Zihan Gao, Yifei Xu, Jacob Thebault-Spieker

Affiliations: University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of California, Los Angeles

Title: LocalBench: Benchmarking LLMs on County-Level Local Knowledge and Reasoning

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have been widely evaluated on macroscale geographic tasks, such as global factual recall, event summarization, and regional reasoning. Yet, their ability to handle hyper-local knowledge remains poorly understood. This gap is increasingly consequential as real-world applications, from civic platforms to community journalism, demand AI systems that can reason about neighborhood-specific dynamics, cultural narratives, and local governance. Existing benchmarks fall short in capturing this complexity, often relying on coarse-grained data or isolated references. We present LocalBench, the first benchmark designed to systematically evaluate LLMs on county-level local knowledge across the United States. Grounded in the Localness Conceptual Framework, LocalBench includes 14,782 validated question-answer pairs across 526 U.S. counties in 49 states, integrating diverse sources such as Census statistics, local subreddit discourse, and regional news. It spans physical, cognitive, and relational dimensions of locality. Using LocalBench, we evaluate 13 state-of-the-art LLMs under both closed-book and web-augmented settings. Our findings reveal critical limitations: even the best-performing models reach only 56.8% accuracy on narrative-style questions and perform below 15.5% on numerical reasoning. Moreover, larger model size and web augmentation do not guarantee better performance, for example, search improves Gemini's accuracy by +13.6%, but reduces GPT-series performance by -11.4%. These results underscore the urgent need for language models that can support equitable, place-aware AI systems: capable of engaging with the diverse, fine-grained realities of local communities across geographic and cultural contexts.

PaperID: 1481, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.03471

Authors:Ming Gu, Ziwei Wang, Sicen Lai, Zirui Gao, Sheng Zhou, Jiajun Bu

Affiliations: Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Accessible Perception and Intelligent Systems, Zhejiang University

Title: Towards Scalable Web Accessibility Audit with MLLMs as Copilots

Abstract:
Ensuring web accessibility is crucial for advancing social welfare, justice, and equality in digital spaces, yet the vast majority of website user interfaces remain noncompliant, due in part to the resource-intensive and unscalable nature of current auditing practices. While WCAG-EM offers a structured methodology for site-wise conformance evaluation, it involves great human efforts and lacks practical support for execution at scale. In this work, we present an auditing framework, AAA, which operationalizes WCAG-EM through a human-AI partnership model. AAA is anchored by two key innovations: GRASP, a graph-based multimodal sampling method that ensures representative page coverage via learned embeddings of visual, textual, and relational cues; and MaC, a multimodal large language model-based copilot strategy that supports auditors through cross-modal reasoning and intelligent assistance in high-effort tasks. Together, these components enable scalable, end-to-end web accessibility auditing, empowering human auditors with AI-enhanced assistance for real-world impact. We further contribute four novel datasets designed for benchmarking core stages of the audit pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods, providing insights that small-scale language models can serve as capable experts when fine-tuned.

PaperID: 1482, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06633

Authors:Qinghong Guo, Yu Wang, Ji Cao, Tongya Zheng, Junshu Dai, Bingde Hu, Shunyu Liu, Canghong Jin

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University, School of Computer and Computing Science, Nanyang Technological University, Zhejiang Provincial Engineering Research Center for Real-Time Smart Tech in Urban Security Governance, Hangzhou City University

Title: Dual-branch Spatial-Temporal Self-supervised Representation for Enhanced Road Network Learning

Abstract:
Road network representation learning (RNRL) has attracted increasing attention from both researchers and practitioners as various spatiotemporal tasks are emerging. Recent advanced methods leverage Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and contrastive learning to characterize the spatial structure of road segments in a selfsupervised paradigm. However, spatial heterogeneity and temporal dynamics of road networks raise severe challenges to the neighborhood smoothing mechanism of self-supervised GNNs. To address these issues, we propose a Dual-branch Spatial-Temporal self-supervised representation framework for enhanced road representations, termed as DST. On one hand, DST designs a mix-hop transition matrix for graph convolution to incorporate dynamic relations of roads from trajectories. Besides, DST contrasts road representations of the vanilla road network against that of hypergraphs in a spatial self-supervised way. The hypergraph is newly built based on three types of hyperedges to capture long-range relations. On the other hand, DST performs next token prediction as the temporal self-supervised task on the sequences of traffic dynamics based on a causal Transformer, which is further regularized by differentiating traffic modes of weekdays from those of weekends. Extensive experiments against state-of-the-art methods verify the superiority of our proposed framework. Moreover, the comprehensive spatiotemporal modeling facilitates DST to excel in zero-shot learning scenarios.

PaperID: 1483, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04774

Authors:Jingyu Hu, Mengyue Yang, Mengnan Du, Weiru Liu

Affiliations: University of Bristol, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Title: Fine-Grained Interpretation of Political Opinions in Large Language Models

Abstract:
Studies of LLMs’ political opinions mainly evaluate their openended responses. Recent work indicates misalignment between LLMs responses and their internal intentions. This motivates us to probe LLMs' internal mechanisms and uncover their internal political states. Additionally, analysis of LLMs' political opinions often relies on single-axis concepts, which can lead to concept confounds. Our work extends this to multi-dimensions and applies interpretable techniques for more transparent LLM political concept learning. Specifically, we designed a four-dimensional political learning framework and constructed a corresponding dataset for fine-grained political concept vector learning. These vectors can detect and intervene in LLM internals. Experiments are conducted on eight open-source LLMs with three representation engineering techniques. Results show these vectors can disentangle political concept confounds. Detection tasks validate the semantic meaning of the vectors and show good generalization and robustness in OOD settings. Intervention experiments show that these vectors can implicitly intervene in LLMs, generating responses with targeted political leanings. These insights reveal the need for more transparent auditing for future AI governance.

PaperID: 1484, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08472

Authors:Hao Jiang, Yixin Xu, Pradeep Varakantham

Affiliations: Singapore Management University

Title: Optimizing Ride-Pooling Operations with Extended Pickup and Drop-Off Flexibility

Abstract:
The core of efficient ondemand ride-pooling lies in solving the Ride-Pool Matching Problem (RMP), which involves assigning multiple customer requests to single vehicles under various service constraints (e.g., pickup windows, detour allowances, and vehicle occupancy). A significant missed opportunity in most current RMP approaches is the assumption that passengers must be picked up and dropped off exactly at their requested locations. Allowing passengers to walk even short distances to meet vehicles could unlock substantial improvements in ride-pooling operations. Building upon the limitations of existing Ride-Pool Matching Problem (RMP) solutions that neglect passenger walkability, this paper introduces a novel matching method that strategically incorporates flexible pickup and drop-off locations. Our approach simultaneously determines the optimal assignment of vehicles to requests (one vehicle to potentially multiple requests and each request to at most one vehicle), identifies advantageous meeting points for passengers, and plans efficient vehicle routes. This comprehensive optimization respects all service constraints and considers the long-term implications of routing decisions. To achieve this integrated solution, we first employ a tree-based approach to enumerate all feasible pairings between passengers and vehicles. Subsequently, we calculate an optimal route for each of these feasible matches. Finally, we evaluate the quality of all possible assignments and select the most advantageous matching for implementation. In our experimental evaluation on city-scale taxi datasets, we demonstrate that our method improves the number of served requests by up to 13% and reduces the average vehicle travel distance by up to 21%. By serving more passengers with less driving distance, our approach achieves greater efficiency in a more sustainable manner — using fewer resources to deliver better service and creating a win-win outcome for all stakeholders, including customers, drivers, the aggregator, and the environment.

PaperID: 1485, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21051

Authors:William Jurayj, Nils Holzenberger, Benjamin Van Durme

Affiliations: Johns Hopkins University, Télécom ParisTech

Title: Language Models and Logic Programs for Trustworthy Tax Reasoning

Abstract:
According to the United States Internal Revenue Service, "the average American spends 270 and 13 hours filing their taxes". Even beyond the U.S., tax filing requires complex reasoning, combining application of overlapping rules with numerical calculations. Because errors can incur costly penalties, any automated system must deliver high accuracy and auditability, making modern large language models (LLMs) poorly suited for this task. We propose an approach that integrates LLMs with a symbolic solver to calculate tax obligations. We evaluate variants of this system on the challenging StAtutory Reasoning Assessment (SARA) dataset, and include a novel method for estimating the cost of deploying such a system based on realworld penalties for tax errors. We further show how combining up-front translation of plain-text rules into formal logic programs, combined with intelligently retrieved exemplars for formal case representations, can dramatically improve performance on this task and reduce costs to well below real-world averages. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of applying semantic parsing methods to statutory reasoning, and show promising economic feasibility of neuro-symbolic architectures for increasing access to reliable tax assistance.

PaperID: 1486, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02709

Authors:Cheol Woo Kim, Shresth Verma, Mauricio Tec, Milind Tambe

Affiliations: Harvard University

Title: Preference Robustness for DPO with Applications to Public Health

Abstract:
We study an LLM finetuning task for designing reward functions for sequential resource allocation problems in public health, guided by human preferences expressed in natural language. This setting presents a challenging testbed for alignment due to complex and ambiguous objectives and limited data availability. We propose DPO-PRO, a robust fine-tuning algorithm based on Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), which accounts for uncertainty in the preference distribution using a lightweight Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) formulation. Unlike prior DRO-based variants, DPO-PRO focuses solely on uncertainty in preferences, avoiding unnecessary conservatism and incurring negligible computational overhead. We evaluate DPO-PRO on a real-world maternal mobile health program operated by the non-profit organization ARMMAN, as well as on standard alignment benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that our method consistently improves robustness to noisy preference signals compared to existing DPO variants. Moreover, DPO-PRO achieves comparable performance to prior self-reflection-based baseline for reward function design, while requiring significantly lower inference-time cost.

PaperID: 1487, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09722

Authors:Sujay Nair, Evan Austen Coleman, Sherrie Wang, Elsa Olivetti

Affiliations: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Title: Masked Mineral Modeling: Continent-Scale Mineral Prospecting via Geospatial Infilling

Abstract:
Minerals play a critical role in the advanced energy technologies necessary for decarbonization, but characterizing mineral deposits hidden underground remains costly and challenging. Inspired by recent progress in generative modeling, we develop a learning method which infers the locations of minerals by masking and infilling geospatial maps of resource availability. We demonstrate this technique using mineral data for the conterminous United States, and train performant models, with the best achieving Dice coefficients of 0.31 ± 0.01 and recalls of 0.22 ± 0.02 on test data at 1×1 sq mi spatial resolution. One major advantage of our approach is that it can easily incorporate auxiliary data sources for prediction which may be more abundant than mineral data. We highlight the capabilities of our model by adding input layers derived from geophysical sources, along with a nationwide ground survey of soils originally intended for agronomic purposes. We find that employing such auxiliary features can improve inference performance, while also enabling model evaluation in regions with no recorded minerals.

PaperID: 1488, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03173

Authors:Joan Nwatu, Longju Bai, Oana Ignat, Rada Mihalcea

Affiliations: University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Santa Clara University

Title: Culture Affordance Atlas: Reconciling Object Diversity Through Functional Mapping

Abstract:
Culture shapes the objects people use and for what purposes, yet mainstream VisionLanguage (VL) datasets frequently exhibit cultural biases, disproportionately favoring higher-income, Western contexts. This imbalance reduces model generalizability and perpetuates performance disparities, especially impacting lower-income and non-Western communities. To address these disparities, we propose a novel function-centric framework that categorizes objects by the functions they fulfill, across diverse cultural and economic contexts. We implement this framework by creating the Culture Affordance Atlas, a re-annotated and culturally grounded restructuring of the Dollar Street dataset spanning 46 functions and 288 objects. Through extensive empirical analyses using the CLIP model, we demonstrate that function-centric labels substantially reduce socioeconomic performance gaps between high and low-income groups by a median of 6 pp (statistically significant), improving model effectiveness for lower income contexts. Furthermore, our analyses reveals numerous culturally essential objects that are frequently overlooked in prominent VL datasets. Our contributions offer a scalable pathway toward building inclusive VL datasets and equitable AI systems.

PaperID: 1489, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03553

Authors:Hasibur Rahman, Hanan Salam

Affiliations: Center of Interdisciplinary Data Science & AI (CIDSAI), NYUAD Research Institute, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Title: CCD-Bench: Probing Cultural Conflict in Large Language Model Decision-Making

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly shape interpersonal and societal decisionmaking, yet their ability to navigate explicit conflicts between legitimate cultural values remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks focus on cultural knowledge (CulturalBench), value inference (WorldValuesBench), or single-axis bias (CDEval), but none assess how LLMs adjudicate when multiple cultural frameworks directly clash. We introduce CCD-Bench (Culture-Conflict Decision Benchmark), a benchmark for evaluating LLM decision-making under cross-cultural value conflict. CCD-Bench contains 2,182 open-ended dilemmas across seven domains, each with ten anonymized response options aligned with the ten GLOBE cultural clusters spanning 62 societies. Using a Stratified Latin Square design, we evaluate 17 leading LLMs and find clear biases: models favor Nordic Europe (20.2%) and Germanic Europe (12.4%), while Eastern Europe and Middle East & North Africa responses are least preferred (≈5–6%). Although 87.9% of model rationales reference multiple cultural dimensions, this pluralism is shallow, dominated by Future and Performance Orientation, with limited attention to Assertiveness or Gender Egalitarianism (<3%). Ordering effects are negligible, and model similarity clusters by developer lineage rather than geography. CCD-Bench shifts evaluation from bias detection to pluralistic reasoning, revealing that current LLMs express a Western-centric, consensus-oriented worldview even when confronted with equally valid, culturally diverse alternatives.

PaperID: 1490, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11722

Authors:Soumyendu Sarkar, Antonio Guillen-Perez, Zachariah J Carmichael, Avisek Naug, Refik Mert Cam, Vineet Gundecha, Ashwin Ramesh Babu, Sahand Ghorbanpour, Ricardo Luna Gutierrez

Affiliations: Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Title: Fast 3D Surrogate Modeling for Data Center Thermal Management

Abstract:
Reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions in data centers by enabling realtime temperature prediction is critical for sustainability and operational efficiency. Achieving this requires accurate modeling of the 3D temperature field to capture airflow dynamics and thermal interactions under varying operating conditions. Traditional thermal CFD solvers, while accurate, are computationally expensive and require expert-crafted meshes and boundary conditions, making them impractical for real-time use. To address these limitations, we develop a vision-based surrogate modeling framework that operates directly on a 3D voxelized representation of the data center, incorporating server workloads, fan speeds, and HVAC temperature set points. We evaluate multiple architectures, including 3D CNN U-Net variants, a 3D Fourier Neural Operator, and 3D vision transformers, to map these thermal inputs to high-fidelity heat maps. Our results show that the surrogate models generalize across data center configurations and significantly speed up computations by an order of 20,000, from hours to hundreds of milliseconds. This fast and accurate estimation of hot spots and temperature distribution enables real-time cooling control and workload redistribution, leading to substantial energy savings (7%) and reduced carbon footprint.

PaperID: 1491, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06208

Authors:Zetian Shen, Hongjun Wang, Jiyuan Chen, Xuan Song

Affiliations: Jilin University, The University of Tokyo Southern University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong Polytechnic University Southern University of Science and Technology

Title: Resilience Inference for Supply Chains with Hypergraph Neural Network

Abstract:
Supply chains are integral to global economic stability, yet disruptions can swiftly propagate through interconnected networks, resulting in substantial economic impacts. Accurate and timely inference of supply chain resilience—the capability to maintain core functions during disruptions—is crucial for proactive risk mitigation and robust network design. However, existing approaches lack effective mechanisms to infer supply chain resilience without explicit system dynamics and struggle to represent the higherorder, multi-entity dependencies inherent in supply chain networks. These limitations motivate the definition of a novel problem and the development of targeted modeling solutions. To address these challenges, we formalize a novel problem: Supply Chain Resilience Inference (SCRI), defined as predicting supply chain resilience using hypergraph topology and observed inventory trajectories without explicit dynamic equations. To solve this problem, we propose the Supply Chain Resilience Inference Hypergraph Network (SC-RIHN), a novel hypergraph-based model leveraging set-based encoding and hypergraph message passing to capture multi-party firm-product interactions. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that SC-RIHN significantly outperforms traditional MLP, representative graph neural network variants, and ResInf baselines across synthetic benchmarks, underscoring its potential for practical, early-warning risk assessment in complex supply chain systems.

PaperID: 1492, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08856

Authors:Krishu K Thapa, Supriya Savalkar, Bhupinderjeet Singh, Trong Nghia Hoang, Kirti Rajagopalan, Ananth Kalyanaraman

Affiliations: Washington State University

Title: ForeSWE: Forecasting Snow-Water Equivalent with an Uncertainty-Aware Attention Model

Abstract:
Various complex water management decisions are made in snowdominant watersheds with the knowledge of Snow-Water Equivalent (SWE)---a key measure widely used to estimate the water content of a snowpack. However, forecasting SWE is challenging because SWE is influenced by various factors including topography and an array of environmental conditions, and has therefore been observed to be spatio-temporally variable. Classical approaches to SWE forecasting have not adequately utilized these spatial/temporal correlations, nor do they provide uncertainty estimates --- which can be of significant value to the decision maker. In this paper, we present ForeSWE, a new probabilistic spatio-temporal forecasting model that integrates deep learning and classical probabilistic techniques. The resulting model features a combination of an attention mechanism to integrate spatiotemporal features and interactions, alongside a Gaussian process module that provides principled quantification of prediction uncertainty. We evaluate the model on data from 512 Snow Telemetry (SNOTEL) stations in the Western US. The results show significant improvements in both forecasting accuracy and prediction interval compared to state-of-the-art approaches. The results also serve to highlight the efficacy in uncertainty estimates between different approaches. Collectively, these findings have provided a platform for deployment and feedback by the water management community.

PaperID: 1493, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07651

Authors:Yicheng Zhan, Fahim Ahmed, Amy Burrell, Matthew Tonkin, Sarah Galambos, Jessica Woodhams, Dalal Alrajeh

Affiliations: Imperial College London, University of Birmingham, University of Leicester, UK National Crime Agency, Serious Crime Analysis Section

Title: Enhancing Binary Encoded Crime Linkage Analysis Using Siamese Network

Abstract:
Effective crime linkage analysis is crucial for identifying serial offenders and enhancing public safety. To address the limitations of traditional crime linkage methods when handling highdimensional, sparse, and heterogeneous data, this paper proposes a Siamese Autoencoder framework to learn meaningful latent representations and uncover correlations in highly complex data. Using a dataset from the Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System—a database maintained by the Serious Crime Analysis Section of the UK’s National Crime Agency—our approach mitigates signal dilution in high-dimensional sparse data through decoder-stage integration of geographic-temporal features. This integration amplifies learned behavioral representations rather than allowing them to be overwhelmed at the input stage, leading to consistent improvements over baseline methods across multiple metrics. We further examine how different data reduction strategies based on domain-expert can impact model performance, offering practical insights into preprocessing for crime linkage. Our solution shows that advanced machine learning approaches can enhance linkage accuracy, improving AUC by up to 9% over traditional methods and providing insights to support human decision-making in crime investigation.

PaperID: 1494, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06945

Authors:Nabil Alami, Jad Zakharia, Souhaib Ben Taieb

Affiliations: Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan

Title: Symmetric Aggregation of Conformity Scores for Efficient Uncertainty Sets

Abstract:
Access to multiple predictive models trained for the same task, whether in regression or classification, is increasingly common in many applications. Aggregating their predictive uncertainties to produce reliable and efficient uncertainty quantification is therefore a critical but still underexplored challenge, especially within the framework of conformal prediction (CP). While CP methods can generate individual prediction sets from each model, combining them into a single, more informative set remains a challenging problem. To address this, we propose SACP (Symmetric Aggregated Conformal Prediction), a novel method that aggregates nonconformity scores from multiple predictors. SACP transforms these scores into evalues and combines them using any symmetric aggregation function. This flexible design enables a robust, data-driven framework for selecting aggregation strategies that yield sharper prediction sets. We also provide theoretical insights that help justify the validity and performance of the SACP approach. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets show that SACP consistently improves efficiency and often outperforms state-of-the-art model aggregation baselines.

PaperID: 1495, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09866

Authors:Siyuan Wen, Meng Zhang, Yang Yang, Ningning Ding

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: FedShard: Federated Unlearning with Efficiency Fairness and Performance Fairness

Abstract:
To protect clients' right to be forgotten in federated learning, federated unlearning aims to remove the data contribution of leaving clients from the global learned model. While current studies mainly focused on enhancing unlearning efficiency and effectiveness, the crucial aspects of efficiency fairness and performance fairness among decentralized clients during unlearning have remained largely unexplored. In this study, we introduce FedShard, the first federated unlearning algorithm designed to concurrently guarantee both efficiency fairness and performance fairness. FedShard adaptively addresses the challenges introduced by dilemmas among convergence, unlearning efficiency, and unlearning fairness. Furthermore, we propose two novel metrics to quantitatively assess the fairness of unlearning algorithms, which we prove to satisfy wellknown properties in other existing fairness measurements. Our theoretical analysis and numerical evaluation validate FedShard's fairness in terms of both unlearning performance and efficiency. We demonstrate that FedShard mitigates unfairness risks such as cascaded leaving and poisoning attacks and realizes more balanced unlearning costs among clients. Experimental results indicate that FedShard accelerates the data unlearning process 1.3-6.2 times faster than retraining from scratch and 4.9 times faster than the state-of-the-art exact unlearning methods.

PaperID: 1496, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06785

Authors:Lejun Ai, Yulong Li, Haodong Yi, Jixuan Xie, Yue Wang, Jia Liu, Min Chen, Rui Wang

Affiliations: South China University of Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: Resource Efficient Sleep Staging via Multi-Level Masking and Prompt Learning

Abstract:
Automatic sleep staging plays a vital role in assessing sleep quality and diagnosing sleep disorders. Most existing methods rely heavily on long and continuous EEG recordings, which poses significant challenges for data acquisition in resourceconstrained systems, such as wearable or home-based monitoring systems. In this paper, we propose the task of resource-efficient sleep staging, which aims to reduce the amount of signal collected per sleep epoch while maintaining reliable classification performance. To solve this task, we adopt the masking and prompt learning strategy and propose a novel framework called Mask-Aware Sleep Staging (MASS). Specifically, we design a multi-level masking strategy to promote effective feature modeling under partial and irregular observations. To mitigate the loss of contextual information introduced by masking, we further propose a hierarchical prompt learning mechanism that aggregates unmasked data into a global prompt, serving as a semantic anchor for guiding both patch-level and epoch-level feature modeling. MASS is evalutaed on four datasets, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance, especially when the amount of data is very limited. This result highlights its potential for efficient and scalable deployment in real-world low-resource sleep monitoring environments.

PaperID: 1497, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.11213

Authors:Shuyu Chang, Haiping Huang, Yanjun Zhang, Yujin Huang, Fu Xiao, Leo Yu Zhang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China State Key Laboratory of Tibetan Intelligence, China Jiangsu Provincial Key Laboratory of Internet of Things Intelligent Perception and Computing, China Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Security Situation Awareness and Evaluation, University of Technology Sydney, The University of Melbourne, Griffith University

Title: Transferable Backdoor Attacks for Code Models via Sharpness-Aware Adversarial Perturbation

Abstract:
Code models are increasingly adopted in software development but remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks via poisoned training data. Existing backdoor attacks on code models face a fundamental tradeoff between transferability and stealthiness. Static trigger-based attacks insert fixed dead code patterns that transfer well across models and datasets but are easily detected by code-specific defenses. In contrast, dynamic trigger-based attacks adaptively generate context-aware triggers to evade detection but suffer from poor cross-dataset transferability. Moreover, they rely on unrealistic assumptions of identical data distributions between poisoned and victim training data, limiting their practicality. To overcome these limitations, we propose Sharpness-aware Transferable Adversarial Backdoor (STAB), a novel attack that achieves both transferability and stealthiness without requiring complete victim data. STAB is motivated by the observation that adversarial perturbations in flat regions of the loss landscape transfer more effectively across datasets than those in sharp minima. To this end, we train a surrogate model using Sharpness-Aware Minimization to guide model parameters toward flat loss regions, and employ Gumbel-Softmax optimization to enable differentiable search over discrete trigger tokens for generating context-aware adversarial triggers. Experiments across three datasets and two code models show that STAB outperforms prior attacks in terms of transferability and stealthiness. It achieves a 73.2% average attack success rate after defense, outperforming static trigger–based attacks that fail under defense. STAB also surpasses the best dynamic trigger–based attack by 12.4% in cross-dataset attack success rate and maintains performance on clean inputs.

PaperID: 1498, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.12475

Authors:Xuanzhong Chen, Ye Jin, Xiaohao Mao, Lun Wang, Shuyang Zhang, Ting Chen

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Peking Union Medical College Hospital

Title: RareAgents: Autonomous Multi-disciplinary Team for Rare Disease Diagnosis and Treatment

Abstract:
Rare diseases, despite their low individual incidence, collectively impact around 300 million people worldwide due to the vast number of diseases. The involvement of multiple organs and systems, and the shortage of specialized doctors with relevant experience, make diagnosing and treating rare diseases more challenging than common diseases. Recently, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable applications across various domains. In the medical field, some agent methods have outperformed direct prompts in questionanswering tasks from medical examinations. However, current agent frameworks are not well-adapted to real-world clinical scenarios, especially those involving the complex demands of rare diseases. To bridge this gap, we introduce RareAgents, the first LLM-driven multi-disciplinary team decision-support tool designed specifically for the complex clinical context of rare diseases. RareAgents integrates advanced Multidisciplinary Team (MDT) coordination, memory mechanisms, and medical tools utilization, leveraging Llama-3.1-8B/70B as the base model. Experimental results show that RareAgents outperforms state-of-the-art domain-specific models, GPT-4o, and current agent frameworks in diagnosis and treatment for rare diseases. Furthermore, we contribute a novel rare disease dataset, MIMIC-IV-Ext-Rare, to facilitate further research in this field.

PaperID: 1499, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15547

Authors:Jingren Hou, Hong Wang, Pengyu Xu, Chang Gao, Huafeng Liu, Liping Jing

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, China Beijing Key Laboratory of Traffic Data Mining and Embodied Intelligence, University of Science and Technology of China

Title: Learning Neural Operators from Partial Observations via Latent Autoregressive Modeling

Abstract:
Realworld scientific applications frequently encounter incomplete observational data due to sensor limitations, geographic constraints, or measurement costs. Although neural operators significantly advanced PDE solving in terms of computational efficiency and accuracy, their underlying assumption of fully-observed spatial inputs severely restricts applicability in real-world application. We introduce the first systematic framework for learning neural operators from partial observation. We identify and formalize two fundamental obstacles: (i) the supervision gap in unobserved regions that prevents effective learning of physical correlations, and (ii) the dynamic spatial mismatch between incomplete inputs and complete solution fields. Specifically, our proposed LANO (Latent Autoregressive Neural Operator) introduces two novel components designed explicitly to address the core difficulties of partial observations: (i) a mask-to-predict training strategy that creates artificial supervision by strategically masking observed regions, and (ii) a Physics-Aware Latent Propagator that reconstructs solutions through boundary-first autoregressive generation in latent space. Additionally, we develop POBench-PDE, a dedicated and comprehensive benchmark designed specifically for evaluating neural operators under partial observation conditions across three PDE-governed tasks. LANO achieves state-of-the-art performance with relative error reductions ranging from eighteen to sixty-nine percent across all benchmarks under patch-wise missingness with missing rates below fifty percent, including real-world climate prediction. Our approach effectively addresses practical scenarios with missing rates of up to seventy-five percent, to some extent bridging the existing gap between idealized research settings and the complexities of real-world scientific computing.

PaperID: 1500, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17247

Authors:Lixin Jia, Haiyang Sun, Zhiqing Guo, Yunfeng Diao, Dan Ma, Gaobo Yang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Xinjiang University, School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, College of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, Hunan University

Title: Uncovering and Mitigating Destructive Multi-Embedding Attacks in Deepfake Proactive Forensics

Abstract:
With the rapid evolution of deepfake technologies and the wide dissemination of digital media, personal privacy is facing increasingly serious security threats. Deepfake proactive forensics, which involves embedding imperceptible watermarks to enable reliable source tracking, serves as a crucial defense against these threats. Although existing methods show strong forensic ability, they rely on an idealized assumption of single watermark embedding, which proves impractical in realworld scenarios. In this paper, we formally define and demonstrate the existence of Multi-Embedding Attacks (MEA) for the first time. When a previously protected image undergoes additional rounds of watermark embedding, the original forensic watermark can be destroyed or removed, rendering the entire proactive forensic mechanism ineffective. To address this vulnerability, we propose a general training paradigm named Adversarial Interference Simulation (AIS). Rather than modifying the network architecture, AIS explicitly simulates MEA scenarios during fine-tuning and introduces a resilience-driven loss function to enforce the learning of sparse and stable watermark representations. Our method enables the model to maintain the ability to extract the original watermark correctly even after a second embedding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our plug-and-play AIS training paradigm significantly enhances the robustness of various existing methods against MEA.

PaperID: 1501, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00451

Authors:Ruikun Li, Jiazhen Liu, Huandong Wang, Qingmin Liao, Yong Li

Affiliations: Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Department of Electronic Engineering

Title: WeightFlow: Learning Stochastic Dynamics via Evolving Weight of Neural Network

Abstract:
Modeling stochastic dynamics from discrete observations is a key interdisciplinary challenge. Existing methods often fail to estimate the continuous evolution of probability densities from trajectories or face the curse of dimensionality. To address these limitations, we presents a novel paradigm: modeling dynamics directly in the weight space of a neural network by projecting the evolving probability distribution. We first theoretically establish the connection between dynamic optimal transport in measure space and an equivalent energy functional in weight space. Subsequently, we design WeightFlow, which constructs the neural network weights into a graph and learns its evolution via a graph controlled differential equation. Experiments on interdisciplinary datasets show that WeightFlow improves performance by an average of 43.02% over stateof-the-art methods, providing an effective and scalable solution for modeling high-dimensional stochastic dynamics.

PaperID: 1502, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14806

Authors:Siyuan Li, Kai Yu, Anna Wang, Zicheng Liu, Chang Yu, Jingbo Zhou, Qirong Yang, Yucheng Guo, Xiaoming Zhang, Stan Z. Li

Affiliations: Westlake University, BioMap Research

Title: MergeDNA: Context-Aware Genome Modeling with Dynamic Tokenization Through Token Merging

Abstract:
Modeling genomic sequences faces two unsolved challenges: the information density varies widely across different regions, while there is no clearly defined minimum vocabulary unit. Relying on either four primitive bases or independently designed DNA tokenizers, existing approaches with naive masked language modeling pretraining often fail to adapt to the varying complexities of genomic sequences. Leveraging Token Merging techniques, this paper introduces a hierarchical architecture that jointly optimizes a dynamic genomic tokenizer and latent Transformers with context-aware pre-training tasks. As for network structures, the tokenization module automatically chunks adjacent bases into words by stacking multiple layers of the differentiable token merging blocks with local-window constraints, then a Latent Encoder captures the global context of these merged words by full-attention blocks. Symmetrically employing a Latent Decoder and a Local Decoder, MergeDNA learns with two pre-training tasks: Merged Token Reconstruction simultaneously trains the dynamic tokenization module and adaptively filters important tokens, while Adaptive Masked Token Modeling learns to predict these filtered tokens to capture informative contents. Extensive experiments show that MergeDNA achieves superior performance on three popular DNA benchmarks and several multi-omics tasks with fine-tuning or zero-shot evaluation, outperforming typical tokenization methods and large-scale DNA foundation models.

PaperID: 1503, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.14713

Authors:Tingting Li, Ziming Zhao, Jianwei Yin

Affiliations: Zhejiang University

Title: Adaptive Fidelity Estimation for Quantum Programs with Graph-Guided Noise Awareness

Abstract:
Fidelity estimation is a critical yet resourceintensive step in testing quantum programs on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, where the required number of measurements is difficult to predefine due to hardware noise, device heterogeneity, and transpilation-induced circuit transformations. We present QuFid, an adaptive and noise-aware framework that determines measurement budgets online by leveraging circuit structure and runtime statistical feedback. QuFid models a quantum program as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) and employs a control-flow-aware random walk to characterize noise propagation along gate dependencies. Backend-specific effects are captured via transpilation-induced structural deformation metrics, which are integrated into the random-walk formulation to induce a noise-propagation operator. Circuit complexity is then quantified through the spectral characteristics of this operator, providing a principled and lightweight basis for adaptive measurement planning. Experiments on 18 quantum benchmarks executed on IBM Quantum backends show that QuFid significantly reduces measurement cost compared to fixed-shot and learning-based baselines, while consistently maintaining acceptable fidelity bias.

PaperID: 1504, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12511

Authors:Yanting Li, Zikang Wang, Jiyue Jiang, Ziqian Lin, Dongchen He, Yuheng Shan, Yanruisheng Shao, Jiayi Li, Xiangyu Shi, Jiuming Wang, Yanyu Chen, Yimin Fan, Han Li, Yu Li

Affiliations: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, National University of Singapore

Title: DS-ProGen: A Dual-Structure Deep Language Model for Functional Protein Design

Abstract:
Inverse Protein Folding (IPF) is a critical subtask in the field of protein design, aiming to engineer amino acid sequences capable of folding correctly into a specified threedimensional (3D) conformation. Although substantial progress has been achieved in recent years, existing methods generally rely on either backbone coordinates or molecular surface features alone, which restricts their ability to fully capture the complex chemical and geometric constraints necessary for precise sequence prediction. To address this limitation, we present DS-ProGen, a dual-structure deep language model for functional protein design, which integrates both backbone geometry and surface-level representations. By incorporating backbone coordinates as well as surface chemical and geometric descriptors into a next-amino-acid prediction paradigm, DS-ProGen is able to generate functionally relevant and structurally stable sequences while satisfying both global and local conformational constraints. On the PRIDE dataset, DS-ProGen attains the current state-of-the-art recovery rate of 61.47%, demonstrating the synergistic advantage of multi-modal structural encoding in protein design. Furthermore, DS-ProGen excels in predicting interactions with a variety of biological partners, including ligands, ions, and RNA, confirming its robust functional retention capabilities.

PaperID: 1505, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18839

Authors:Shae McFadden, Myles Foley, Mario D'Onghia, Chris Hicks, Vasilios Mavroudis, Nicola Paoletti, Fabio Pierazzi

Affiliations: The Alan Turing Institute, University College London, King's College London

Title: DRMD: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Malware Detection Under Concept Drift

Abstract:
Malware detection in realworld settings must deal with evolving threats, limited labeling budgets, and uncertain predictions. Traditional classifiers, without additional mechanisms, struggle to maintain performance under concept drift in malware domains, as their supervised learning formulation cannot optimize when to defer decisions to manual labeling and adaptation. Modern malware detection pipelines combine classifiers with monthly active learning (AL) and rejection mechanisms to mitigate the impact of concept drift. In this work, we develop a novel formulation of malware detection as a one-step Markov Decision Process and train a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agent, simultaneously optimizing sample classification performance and rejecting high-risk samples for manual labeling. We evaluated the joint detection and drift mitigation policy learned by the DRL-based Malware Detection (DRMD) agent through time-aware evaluations on Android malware datasets subject to realistic drift requiring multi-year performance stability. The policies learned under these conditions achieve a higher Area Under Time (AUT) performance compared to standard classification approaches used in the domain, showing improved resilience to concept drift. Specifically, the DRMD agent achieved an average AUT improvement of 8.66 and 10.90 for the classification-only and classification-rejection policies, respectively. Our results demonstrate for the first time that DRL can facilitate effective malware detection and improved resiliency to concept drift in the dynamic setting of Android malware detection.

PaperID: 1506, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13524

Authors:Yuhang Peng, Yizhou Pan, Xinning He, Jihaoyu Yang, Xinyu Yin, Han Wang, Xiaoji Zheng, Chao Gao, Jiangtao Gong

Affiliations: Tsinghua University

Title: FreeAskWorld: An Interactive and Closed-Loop Simulator for Human-Centric Embodied AI

Abstract:
As embodied intelligence emerges as a core frontier in artificial intelligence research, simulation platforms must evolve beyond lowlevel physical interactions to capture complex, human-centered social behaviors. We introduce FreeAskWorld, an interactive simulation framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) for high-level behavior planning and semantically grounded interaction, informed by theories of intention and social cognition. Our framework supports scalable, realistic human-agent simulations and includes a modular data generation pipeline tailored for diverse embodied tasks.To validate the framework, we extend the classic Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task into a semantically enriched Direction Inquiry setting, wherein agents can actively seek and interpret navigational guidance. We present and publicly release FreeAskWorld, a large-scale benchmark dataset comprising reconstructed environments, six diverse task types, 16 core object categories, 63,429 annotated sample frames, and more than 17 hours of interaction data to support training and evaluation of embodied AI systems. We benchmark VLN models, and human participants under both open-loop and closed-loop settings. Experimental results demonstrate that models fine-tuned on FreeAskWorld outperform their original counterparts, achieving enhanced semantic understanding and interaction competency. These findings underscore the efficacy of socially grounded simulation frameworks in advancing embodied AI systems toward sophisticated high-level planning and more naturalistic human-agent interaction.

PaperID: 1507, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12516

Authors:Ziqing Qian, Jiaying Lei, Shengqi Dang, Nan Cao

Affiliations: Tongji University

Title: Designed to Spread: A Generative Approach to Enhance Information Diffusion

Abstract:
Social media has fundamentally transformed how people access information and form social connections, with content expression playing a critical role in driving information diffusion. While prior research has focused largely on network structures and tipping point identification, it provides limited tools for automatically generating content tailored for virality within a specific audience. To fill this gap, we propose the novel task of DiffusionOriented Content Generation (DOCG) and introduce an information enhancement algorithm for generating content optimized for diffusion. Our method includes an influence indicator that enables content-level diffusion assessment without requiring access to network topology, and an information editor that employs reinforcement learning to explore interpretable editing strategies. The editor leverages generative models to produce semantically faithful, audience-aware textual or visual content. Experiments on real-world social media datasets and user study demonstrate that our approach significantly improves diffusion effectiveness while preserving the core semantics of the original content.

PaperID: 1508, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.10157

Authors:Yusong Wang, Jialun Shen, Zhihao Wu, Yicheng Xu, Shiyin Tan, Mingkun Xu, Changshuo Wang, Zixing Song, Prayag Tiwari

Affiliations: Guangdong Institute of Intelligence Science and Technology, Institute of Science Tokyo, Zhejiang University, University College London, University of Cambridge, Halmstad University

Title: MMPG: MoE-based Adaptive Multi-Perspective Graph Fusion for Protein Representation Learning

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely adopted for Protein Representation Learning (PRL), as residue interaction networks can be naturally represented as graphs. Current GNNbased PRL methods typically rely on single-perspective graph construction strategies, which capture partial properties of residue interactions, resulting in incomplete protein representations. To address this limitation, we propose MMPG, a framework that constructs protein graphs from multiple perspectives and adaptively fuses them via Mixture of Experts (MoE) for PRL. MMPG constructs graphs from physical, chemical, and geometric perspectives to characterize different properties of residue interactions. To capture both perspective-specific features and their synergies, we develop an MoE module, which dynamically routes perspectives to specialized experts, where experts learn intrinsic features and cross-perspective interactions. We quantitatively verify that MoE automatically specializes experts in modeling distinct levels of interaction—from individual representations, to pairwise inter-perspective synergies, and ultimately to a global consensus across all perspectives. Through integrating this multi-level information, MMPG produces superior protein representations and achieves advanced performance on four different downstream protein tasks.

PaperID: 1509, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01728

Authors:Zhengjia Wang, Danding Wang, Qiang Sheng, Jiaying Wu, Juan Cao

Affiliations: Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, National University of Singapore

Title: Reasoning About the Unsaid: Misinformation Detection with Omission-Aware Graph Inference

Abstract:
This paper investigates the detection of misinformation, which deceives readers by explicitly fabricating misleading content or implicitly omitting important information necessary for informed judgment. While the former has been extensively studied, omissionbased deception remains largely overlooked, even though it can subtly guide readers toward false conclusions under the illusion of completeness. To pioneer in this direction, this paper presents OmiGraph, the first omission-aware framework for misinformation detection. Specifically, OmiGraph constructs an omission-aware graph for the target news by utilizing a contextual environment that captures complementary perspectives of the same event, thereby surfacing potentially omitted contents. Based on this graph, omission-oriented relation modeling is then proposed to identify the internal contextual dependencies, as well as the dynamic omission intents, formulating a comprehensive omission relation representation. Finally, to extract omission patterns for detection, OmiGraph introduces omission-aware message-passing and aggregation that establishes holistic deception perception by integrating the omission contents and relations. Experiments show that, by considering the omission perspective, our approach attains remarkable performance, achieving average improvements of +5.4% F1 and +5.3% ACC on two large-scale benchmarks.

PaperID: 1510, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12932

Authors:Yifan Wu, Jiyue Jiang, Xichen Ye, Yiqi Wang, Chang Zhou, Yitao Xu, Jiayang Chen, He Hu, Weizhong Zhang, Cheng Jin, Jiao Yuan, Yu Li

Affiliations: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Fudan University, Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy (SZ), Guangzhou National Laboratory Guangzhou Medical University

Title: Investigating Data Pruning for Pretraining Biological Foundation Models at Scale

Abstract:
Biological foundation models (BioFMs), pretrained on largescale biological sequences, have recently shown strong potential in providing meaningful representations for diverse downstream bioinformatics tasks. However, such models often rely on millions to billions of training sequences and billions of parameters, resulting in prohibitive computational costs and significant barriers to reproducibility and accessibility—particularly for academic labs. To address these challenges, we investigate the feasibility of data pruning for BioFM pretraining and propose a post-hoc influence-guided data pruning framework tailored to biological domains. Our approach first introduces a subset-based self-influence formulation that enables efficient estimation of sample importance at low computational cost. Built upon this, we propose two simple yet effective selection strategies: Top-k Influence (Top I) and Coverage-Centric Influence (CCI). Then, we empirically validate our method on two representative BioFMs: RNA-FM and ESM-C. For RNA, our framework consistently outperforms random selection baselines under an extreme pruning rate of over 99%, which displays our framework's effectiveness. Furthermore, we demonstrate the generalizability of our framework on protein-related tasks using ESM-C. Specifically, our coreset even outperforms random 10x subsets in both RNA and protein settings, revealing substantial redundancy in biological sequence datasets. These findings underscore the potential of influence-guided data pruning to substantially reduce the computational cost of BioFM pretraining, paving the way for more efficient, accessible, and sustainable biological AI research.

PaperID: 1511, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02471

Authors:Ping Xu, Zaitian Wang, Zhirui Wang, Pengjiang Li, Jiajia Wang, Ran Zhang, Pengfei Wang, Yuanchun Zhou

Affiliations: Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study

Title: scCluBench: Comprehensive Benchmarking of Clustering Algorithms for Single-Cell RNA Sequencing

Abstract:
Cell clustering is crucial for uncovering cellular heterogeneity in singlecell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data by identifying cell types and marker genes. Despite its importance, existing benchmarks for scRNA-seq clustering remain fragmented, lacking standardized protocols and often omitting recent advances in artificial intelligence.To fill these gaps, we present scCluBench, a comprehensive benchmark of clustering algorithms for scRNA-seq data. scCluBench provides 36 scRNA-seq datasets collected from diverse public sources, covering multiple tissues, which are uniformly processed to ensure consistency for systematic evaluation and downstream analyses. To assess performance, we collect and reproduce a range of scRNA-seq clustering methods, including traditional, deep learning-based, graph-based, and biological foundation models. We comprehensively evaluate each method both quantitatively and qualitatively, using core performance metrics and visualization analyses. Furthermore, we construct representative downstream biological tasks, such as marker gene identification and cell type annotation, to further assess the practical utility. scCluBench then investigates the performance differences and applicability boundaries of various clustering models across diverse analytical tasks, systematically assessing their robustness and scalability in real-world scenarios. Overall, scCluBench offers a standardized and user-friendly benchmark for scRNA-seq clustering, with standardized datasets, unified evaluation protocols, and transparent analyses, facilitating informed method selection and providing valuable insights into model generalizability and application scope.

PaperID: 1512, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09512

Authors:Jingquan Yan, Yuwei Miao, Lei Yu, Yuzhi Guo, Xue Xiao, Lin Xu, Junzhou Huang

Affiliations: University of Texas at Arlington, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

Title: GenePheno: Interpretable Gene Knockout-Induced Phenotype Abnormality Prediction from Gene Sequences

Abstract:
Exploring how genetic sequences shape phenotypes is a fundamental challenge in biology and a key step toward scalable, hypothesisdriven experimentation. The task is complicated by the large modality gap between sequences and phenotypes, as well as the pleiotropic nature of gene–phenotype relationships. Existing sequence-based efforts focus on the degree to which variants of specific genes alter a limited set of phenotypes, while general gene knockout-induced phenotype abnormality prediction methods heavily rely on curated genetic information as inputs, which limits scalability and generalizability. As a result, the task of broadly predicting the presence of multiple phenotype abnormalities under gene knockout directly from gene sequences remains underexplored. We introduce GenePheno, the first interpretable multi-label prediction framework that predicts knockout-induced phenotypic abnormalities from gene sequences. GenePheno employs a contrastive multi-label learning objective that captures inter-phenotype correlations, complemented by an exclusive regularization that enforces biological consistency. It further incorporates a gene function bottleneck layer, offering human-interpretable concepts that reflect functional mechanisms behind phenotype formation. To support progress in this area, we curate four datasets with canonical gene sequences as input and multi-label phenotypic abnormalities induced by gene knockouts as targets. Across these datasets, GenePheno achieves state-of-the-art gene-centric Fmax and phenotype-centric AUC, and case studies demonstrate its ability to reveal gene functional mechanisms.

PaperID: 1513, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06521

Authors:Wenhao Yan, Ning An, Wei Qiao, Weiheng Wu, Zhigang Lu, Bo Jiang, Baoxu Liu, Junrong Liu

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Sentient: Detecting APTs via Capturing Indirect Dependencies and Behavioral Logic

Abstract:
Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are difficult to detect due to their complexity and stealthiness. To mitigate such attacks, many approaches model entities and their relationship using provenance graphs to detect the stealthy and persistent characteristics of APTs. However, existing detection methods suffer from the flaws of missing indirect dependencies, noisy complex scenarios, and missing behavioral logical associations, which make it difficult to detect complex scenarios and effectively identify stealthy threats. In this paper, we propose Sentient, an APT detection method that combines pretraining and intent analysis. It employs a graph transformer to learn structural and semantic information from provenance graphs to avoid missing indirect dependencies. We mitigate scenario noise by combining global and local information. Additionally, we design an Intent Analysis Module (IAM) to associate logical relationships between behaviors. Sentient is trained solely on easily obtainable benign data to detect malicious behaviors that deviate from benign behavioral patterns. We evaluated Sentient on three widely-used datasets covering real-world attacks and simulated attacks. Notably, compared to six state-of-the-art methods, Sentient achieved an average reduction of 44% in false positive rate(FPR) for detection.

PaperID: 1514, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.05587

Authors:Jingxiao Yang, Ping He, Tianyu Du, Sun Bing, Xuhong Zhang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, National Certification Technology (Hangzhou) Co.

Title: HogVul: Black-box Adversarial Code Generation Framework Against LM-based Vulnerability Detectors

Abstract:
Recent advances in software vulnerability detection have been driven by Language Model (LM)based approaches. However, these models remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that exploit lexical and syntax perturbations, allowing critical flaws to evade detection. Existing black-box attacks on LM-based vulnerability detectors primarily rely on isolated perturbation strategies, limiting their ability to efficiently explore the adversarial code space for optimal perturbations. To bridge this gap, we propose HogVul, a black-box adversarial code generation framework that integrates both lexical and syntax perturbations under a unified dual-channel optimization strategy driven by Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). By systematically coordinating two-level perturbations, HogVul effectively expands the search space for adversarial examples, enhancing the attack efficacy. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that HogVul achieves an average attack success rate improvement of 26.05% over state-of-the-art baseline methods. These findings highlight the potential of hybrid optimization strategies in exposing model vulnerabilities.

PaperID: 1515, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11025

Authors:Jirong Zha, Yuxuan Fan, Tianyu Zhang, Geng Chen, Yingfeng Chen, Chen Gao, Xinlei Chen

Affiliations: Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guang Zhou), Nanyang Technological University, Jilin University

Title: AirCopBench: A Benchmark for Multi-drone Collaborative Embodied Perception and Reasoning

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promise in singleagent vision tasks, yet benchmarks for evaluating multi-agent collaborative perception remain scarce. This gap is critical, as multi-drone systems provide enhanced coverage, robustness, and collaboration compared to single-sensor setups. Existing multi-image benchmarks mainly target basic perception tasks using high-quality single-agent images, thus failing to evaluate MLLMs in more complex, egocentric collaborative scenarios, especially under real-world degraded perception conditions. To address these challenges, we introduce AirCopBench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate MLLMs in embodied aerial collaborative perception under challenging perceptual conditions. AirCopBench includes 14.6k+ questions derived from both simulator and real-world data, spanning four key task dimensions: Scene Understanding, Object Understanding, Perception Assessment, and Collaborative Decision, across 14 task types. We construct the benchmark using data from challenging degraded-perception scenarios with annotated collaborative events, generating large-scale questions through model-, rule-, and human-based methods under rigorous quality control. Evaluations on 40 MLLMs show significant performance gaps in collaborative perception tasks, with the best model trailing humans by 24.38% on average and exhibiting inconsistent results across tasks. Fine-tuning experiments further confirm the feasibility of sim-to-real transfer in aerial collaborative perception.

PaperID: 1516, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10072

Authors:Shuxin Zhuang, Linjian Meng, Shuxin Li, Minming Li, Youzhi Zhang

Affiliations: Hong Kong Institute of Science & Innovation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanyang Technological University, City University of Hong Kong, Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

Title: Tree-Based Stochastic Optimization for Solving Large-Scale Urban Network Security Games

Abstract:
Urban Network Security Games (UNSGs), which model the strategic allocation of limited security resources on city road networks, are critical for urban safety. However, finding a Nash Equilibrium (NE) in largescale UNSGs is challenging due to their massive and combinatorial action spaces. One common approach to addressing these games is the Policy-Space Response Oracle (PSRO) framework, which requires computing best responses (BR) at each iteration. However, precisely computing exact BRs is impractical in large-scale games, and employing reinforcement learning to approximate BRs inevitably introduces errors that limit the overall effectiveness of the PSRO methods. Recent advancements in leveraging non-convex stochastic optimization to approximate an NE offer a promising alternative to the burdensome BR computation. However, utilizing existing stochastic optimization techniques with an unbiased loss function for UNSGs remains challenging because the action spaces are too vast to be effectively represented by neural networks. To address these issues, we introduce Tree-based Stochastic Optimization (TSO), a framework that bridges the gap between the stochastic optimization paradigm for NE-finding and the demands of UNSGs. Specifically, we employ the tree-based action representation that maps the whole action space onto a tree structure, addressing the challenge faced by neural networks in representing actions when the action space cannot be enumerated. We then incorporate this representation into the loss function and theoretically demonstrate its equivalence to the unbiased loss function. To further enhance the quality of the converged solution, we introduce a sample-and-prune mechanism that reduces the risk of being trapped in suboptimal local optima. Extensive experimental results indicate the superiority of TSO over other baseline algorithms in addressing the UNSGs.

PaperID: 1517, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02626

Authors:Siran Chen, Boyu Chen, Yuxiao Luo, Chenyun Yu, Yi Ouyang, Lei Cheng, Chengxiang Zhuo, Zang Li, Yali Wang

Affiliations: Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University

Title: VRAgent-R1: Boosting Video Recommendation with MLLM-based Agents via Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Large language model (LLM) agents have emerged as a promising solution for enhancing recommendation systems via user simulation. However, existing studies predominantly resort to promptbased simulation using frozen LLMs, which frequently results in suboptimal item modeling and user preference learning, thereby ultimately constraining recommendation performance. To address these challenges, we introduce VRAgent-R1, a novel agent-based paradigm that incorporates human-like intelligence in user simulation. Specifically, VRAgent-R1 comprises two distinct agents: the Item Perception (IP) Agent and the User Simulation (US) Agent, designed for interactive user-item modeling. Firstly, the IP Agent emulates human-like progressive thinking based on MLLMs, effectively capturing hidden recommendation semantics in videos. With a more comprehensive multimodal content understanding provided by the IP Agent, the video recommendation system is equipped to provide higher-quality candidate items. Subsequently, the US Agent refines the recommended video sets based on in-depth chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning and achieves better alignment with real user preferences through reinforcement learning. Experimental results on a large-scale video recommendation benchmark MicroLens-100k have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed VRAgent-R1 method, e.g., the IP Agent achieves a 6.0% improvement in NDCG@10, while the US Agent shows approximately 45.0% higher accuracy in user decision simulation compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 1518, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00282

Authors:Yi-Long Lu, Jiajun Song, Chunhui Zhang, Wei Wang

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence

Title: Mind the Gap: The Divergence Between Human and LLM-Generated Tasks

Abstract:
Humans constantly generate a diverse range of tasks guided by internal motivations. While generative agents powered by large language models (LLMs) aim to simulate this complex behavior, it remains uncertain whether they operate on similar cognitive principles. To address this, we conducted a taskgeneration experiment comparing human responses with those of an LLM agent (GPT-4o). We find that human task generation is consistently influenced by psychological drivers, including personal values (e.g., Openness to Change) and cognitive style. Even when these psychological drivers are explicitly provided to the LLM, it fails to reflect the corresponding behavioral patterns. They produce tasks that are markedly less social, less physical, and thematically biased toward abstraction. Interestingly, while the LLM's tasks were perceived as more fun and novel, this highlights a disconnect between its linguistic proficiency and its capacity to generate human-like, embodied goals. We conclude that there is a core gap between the value-driven, embodied nature of human cognition and the statistical patterns of LLMs, highlighting the necessity of incorporating intrinsic motivation and physical grounding into the design of more human-aligned agents.

PaperID: 1519, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15857

Authors:Yujia Zhou, Hexi Wang, Qingyao Ai, Zhen Wu, Yiqun Liu

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Department of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences

Title: Investigating Prosocial Behavior Theory in LLM Agents Under Policy-Induced Inequities

Abstract:
As large language models (LLMs) increasingly operate as autonomous agents in social contexts, evaluating their capacity for prosocial behavior is both theoretically and practically critical. However, existing research has primarily relied on static, economically framed paradigms, lacking models that capture the dynamic evolution of prosociality and its sensitivity to structural inequities. To address these gaps, we introduce ProSim, a simulation framework for modeling the prosocial behavior in LLM agents across diverse social conditions. We conduct three progressive studies to assess prosocial alignment. First, we demonstrate that LLM agents can exhibit humanlike prosocial behavior across a broad range of real-world scenarios and adapt to normative policy interventions. Second, we find that agents engage in fairness-based third-party punishment and respond systematically to variations in inequity magnitude and enforcement cost. Third, we show that policy-induced inequities suppress prosocial behavior, propagate norm erosion through social networks. These findings advance prosocial behavior theory by elucidating how institutional dynamics shape the emergence, decay, and diffusion of prosocial norms in agent-driven societies.

PaperID: 1520, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05685

Authors:Yara Bahram, Mohammadhadi Shateri, Eric Granger

Affiliations: École de Technologie Supérieure

Title: DogFit: Domain-guided Fine-tuning for Efficient Transfer Learning of Diffusion Models

Abstract:
Transfer learning of diffusion models to smaller target domains is challenging, as naively finetuning the model often results in poor generalization. Test-time guidance methods help mitigate this by offering controllable improvements in image fidelity through a trade-off with sample diversity. However, this benefit comes at a high computational cost, typically requiring dual forward passes during sampling. We propose the Domain-guided Fine-tuning (DogFit) method, an effective guidance mechanism for diffusion transfer learning that maintains controllability without incurring additional computational overhead. DogFit injects a domain-aware guidance offset into the training loss, effectively internalizing the guided behavior during the fine-tuning process. The domain-aware design is motivated by our observation that during fine-tuning, the unconditional source model offers a stronger marginal estimate than the target model. To support efficient controllable fidelity–diversity trade-offs at inference, we encode the guidance strength value as an additional model input through a lightweight conditioning mechanism. We further investigate the optimal placement and timing of the guidance offset during training and propose two simple scheduling strategies, i.e., late-start and cut-off, which improve generation quality and training stability. Experiments on DiT and SiT backbones across six diverse target domains show that DogFit can outperform prior guidance methods in transfer learning in terms of FID and FD DINOV2 while requiring up to 2x fewer sampling TFLOPS.

PaperID: 1521, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13731

Authors:Weikang Bai, Yongkun Du, Yuchen Su, Yazhen Xie, Zhineng Chen

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University, Institute of Trustworthy Embodied AI

Title: Complex Mathematical Expression Recognition: Benchmark, Large-Scale Dataset and Strong Baseline

Abstract:
Mathematical Expression Recognition (MER) has made significant progress in recognizing simple expressions, but the robust recognition of complex mathematical expressions with many tokens and multiple lines remains a formidable challenge. In this paper, we first introduce CMERBench, a carefully constructed benchmark that categorizes expressions into three difficulty levels: easy, moderate, and complex. Leveraging CMER-Bench, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of existing MER models and general-purpose multimodal large language models (MLLMs). The results reveal that while current methods perform well on easy and moderate expressions, their performance degrades significantly when handling complex mathematical expressions, mainly because existing public training datasets are primarily composed of simple samples. In response, we propose MER-17M and CMER-3M that are large-scale datasets emphasizing the recognition of complex mathematical expressions. The datasets provide rich and diverse samples to support the development of accurate and robust complex MER models. Furthermore, to address the challenges posed by the complicated spatial layout of complex expressions, we introduce a novel expression tokenizer, and a new representation called Structured Mathematical Language, which explicitly models the hierarchical and spatial structure of expressions beyond LaTeX format. Based on these, we propose a specialized model named CMERNet, built upon an encoder-decoder architecture and trained on CMER-3M. Experimental results show that CMERNet, with only 125 million parameters, significantly outperforms existing MER models and MLLMs on CMER-Bench.

PaperID: 1522, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.07993

Authors:Xuehai Bai, Xiaoling Gu, Akide Liu, Hangjie Yuan, YiFan Zhang, Jack Ma

Affiliations: Hangzhou Dianzi University, Monash University, Zhejiang University, Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Tsinghua University

Title: MCIE: Multimodal LLM-Driven Complex Instruction Image Editing with Spatial Guidance

Abstract:
Recent advances in instructionbased image editing have shown remarkable progress. However, existing methods remain limited to relatively simple editing operations, hindering real-world applications that require complex and compositional instructions. In this work, we address these limitations from the perspectives of architectural design, data, and evaluation protocols. Specifically, we identify two key challenges in current models: insufficient instruction compliance and background inconsistency. To this end, we propose MCIE-E1, a Multimodal Large Language Model–Driven Complex Instruction Image Editing method that integrates two key modules: a spatial-aware cross-attention module and a background-consistent cross-attention module. The former enhances instruction-following capability by explicitly aligning semantic instructions with spatial regions through spatial guidance during the denoising process, while the latter preserves features in unedited regions to maintain background consistency. To enable effective training, we construct a dedicated data pipeline to mitigate the scarcity of complex instruction-based image editing datasets, combining fine-grained automatic filtering via a powerful MLLM with rigorous human validation. Finally, to comprehensively evaluate complex instruction-based image editing, we introduce CIE-Bench, a new benchmark with two new evaluation metrics. Experimental results on CIE-Bench demonstrate that MCIE-E1 consistently outperforms previous state-of-theart methods in both quantitative and qualitative assessments, achieving a 23.96% improvement in instruction compliance.

PaperID: 1523, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01701

Authors:Xiuli Bi, Die Xiao, Junchao Fan, Bin Xiao

Affiliations: Chongqing Key Laboratory of Image Cognition, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China Jinan Inspur Data Technology Co.

Title: SSR: Semantic and Spatial Rectification for CLIP-based Weakly Supervised Segmentation

Abstract:
In recent years, Contrastive LanguageImage Pretraining (CLIP) has been widely applied to Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) tasks due to its powerful cross-modal semantic understanding capabilities. This paper proposes a novel Semantic and Spatial Rectification (SSR) method to address the limitations of existing CLIP-based weakly supervised semantic segmentation approaches: over-activation in non-target foreground regions and background areas. Specifically, at the semantic level, the Cross-Modal Prototype Alignment (CMPA) establishes a contrastive learning mechanism to enforce feature space alignment across modalities, reducing inter-class overlap while enhancing semantic correlations, to rectify over-activation in non-target foreground regions effectively; at the spatial level, the Superpixel-Guided Correction (SGC) leverages superpixel-based spatial priors to precisely filter out interference from non-target regions during affinity propagation, significantly rectifying background over-activation. Extensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms all single-stage approaches, as well as more complex multi-stage approaches, achieving mIoU scores of 79.5% and 50.6%, respectively.

PaperID: 1524, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13309

Authors:Kaiwen Cai, Xinze Liu, Xia Zhou, Hengtong Hu, Jie Xiang, Luyao Zhang, Xueyang Zhang, Kun Zhan, Yifei Zhan, Xianpeng Lang

Affiliations: Li Auto Inc.

Title: DriveLiDAR4D: Sequential and Controllable LiDAR Scene Generation for Autonomous Driving

Abstract:
The generation of realistic LiDAR point clouds plays a crucial role in the development and evaluation of autonomous driving systems. Although recent methods for 3D LiDAR point cloud generation have shown significant improvements, they still face notable limitations, including the lack of sequential generation capabilities and the inability to produce accurately positioned foreground objects and realistic backgrounds. These shortcomings hinder their practical applicability. In this paper, we introduce DriveLiDAR4D, a novel LiDAR generation pipeline consisting of multimodal conditions and a novel sequential noise prediction model LiDAR4DNet, capable of producing temporally consistent LiDAR scenes with highly controllable foreground objects and realistic backgrounds. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to address the sequential generation of LiDAR scenes with full scene manipulation capability in an endto-end manner. We evaluated DriveLiDAR4D on the nuScenes and KITTI datasets, where we achieved an FRD score of 743.13 and an FVD score of 16.96 on the nuScenes dataset, surpassing the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) method, UniScene, with an performance boost of 37.2% in FRD and 24.1% in FVD, respectively.

PaperID: 1525, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12559

Authors:Qing Cai, GuihaoYan, Fan Zhang, Cheng Zhang, Zhi Liu

Affiliations: Ocean University of China, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Shandong University

Title: SEMC: Structure-Enhanced Mixture-of-Experts Contrastive Learning for Ultrasound Standard Plane Recognition

Abstract:
Ultrasound standard plane recognition is essential for clinical tasks such as disease screening, organ evaluation, and biometric measurement. However, existing methods fail to effectively exploit shallow structural information and struggle to capture finegrained semantic differences through contrastive samples generated by image augmentations, leading to poor recognition of structural and discriminative details in ultrasound standard planes. To address these issues, we propose Structure-Enhanced Mixture-of-Experts Contrastive Learning (SEMC), a novel framework that combines structure-aware feature fusion with expert-guided contrastive learning. Specifically, we propose a Semantic-Structure Fusion Module (SSFM) to exploit multi-scale structural information and enhance the model's ability to perceive fine-grained structural details by effectively aligning shallow and deep features. Meanwhile, a Mixture-of-Experts Contrastive Recognition Module (MCRM) is designed to perform hierarchical contrastive learning and classification across multi-level features using a mixture-of-experts (MoE) mechanism, further improving class separability and overall recognition performance. More importantly, we also curate a large-scale and meticulously annotated liver ultrasound dataset containing six standard planes. Extensive experimental results on our in-house dataset and two public datasets demonstrate that SEMC outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods across various metrics.

PaperID: 1526, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07908

Authors:Xudong Cai, Shuo Wang, Peng Wang, Yongcai Wang, Zhaoxin Fan, Wanting Li, Tianbao Zhang, Jianrong Tao, Yeying Jin, Deying Li

Affiliations: Renmin University of China, Beihang University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Zhejiang University

Title: Mem4D: Decoupling Static and Dynamic Memory for Dynamic Scene Reconstruction

Abstract:
Reconstructing dense geometry for dynamic scenes from a monocular video is a critical yet challenging task. Recent memorybased methods enable efficient online reconstruction, but they fundamentally suffer from a Memory Demand Dilemma: The memory representation faces an inherent conflict between the long-term stability required for static structures and the rapid, high-fidelity detail retention needed for dynamic motion. This conflict forces existing methods into a compromise, leading to either geometric drift in static structures or blurred, inaccurate reconstructions of dynamic objects. To address this dilemma, we propose Mem4D, a novel framework that decouples the modeling of static geometry and dynamic motion. Guided by this insight, we design a dual-memory architecture: 1) The Transient Dynamics Memory (TDM) focuses on capturing high-frequency motion details from recent frames, enabling accurate and fine-grained modeling of dynamic content; 2) The Persistent Structure Memory (PSM) compresses and preserves long-term spatial information, ensuring global consistency and drift-free reconstruction for static elements. By alternating queries to these specialized memories, Mem4D simultaneously maintains static geometry with global consistency and reconstructs dynamic elements with high fidelity. Experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance while maintaining high efficiency.

PaperID: 1527, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18923

Authors:Meng Cao, Pengfei Hu, Yingyao Wang, Jihao Gu, Haoran Tang, Haoze Zhao, Chen Wang, Jiahua Dong, Wangbo Yu, Ge Zhang, Xiang Li, Ian Reid, Xiaodan Liang

Affiliations: Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Alibaba Group, Peking University, ByteDance Inc.

Title: Video SimpleQA: Towards Factuality Evaluation in Large Video Language Models

Abstract:
Recent advancements in Large Video Language Models (LVLMs) have highlighted their potential for multimodal understanding, yet evaluating their factual grounding in videos remains a critical unsolved challenge. To address this gap, we introduce Video SimpleQA, the first comprehensive benchmark tailored for factuality evaluation in video contexts. Our work differs from existing video benchmarks through the following key features: 1) Knowledge required: demanding integration of external knowledge beyond the video’s explicit narrative; 2) Multi-hop fact-seeking question: Each question involves multiple explicit facts and requires strict factual grounding without hypothetical or subjective inferences. We include per-hop single-fact-based sub-QAs alongside final QAs to enable fine-grained, step-by-step evaluation; 3) Short-form definitive answer: Answers are crafted as unambiguous and definitively correct in a short format with minimal scoring variance; 4) Temporal grounded required: Requiring answers to rely on one or more temporal segments in videos, rather than single frames. We extensively evaluate 33 state-of-the-art LVLMs and summarize key findings as follows: 1) Current LVLMs exhibit notable deficiencies in factual adherence, with the best-performing model o3 merely achieving an F-score of 66.3%; 2) Most LVLMs are overconfident in what they generate, with self-stated confidence exceeding actual accuracy; 3) Retrieval-Augmented Generation demonstrates consistent improvements at the cost of additional inference time overhead; 4) Multi-hop QA demonstrates substantially degraded performance compared to single-hop sub-QAs, with first-hop object/event recognition emerging as the primary bottleneck. We position Video SimpleQA as the cornerstone benchmark for video factuality assessment, aiming to steer LVLM development toward verifiable grounding in real-world contexts.

PaperID: 1528, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04161

Authors:Yuqin Cao, Yixuan Gao, Wei Sun, Xiaohong Liu, Yulun Zhang, Xiongkuo Min

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University, East China Normal University

Title: Audio-Assisted Face Video Restoration with Temporal and Identity Complementary Learning

Abstract:
Face videos accompanied by audio have become integral to our daily lives, while they often suffer from complex degradations. Most face video restoration methods neglect the intrinsic correlations between visual and audio features, particularly in the mouth region. Several audioaided face video restoration methods have been proposed, but they only focus on compression artifact removal. In this paper, we propose a General Audio-assisted face Video restoration Network (GAVN) to address various types of streaming video distortions via identity and temporal complementary learning. Specifically, GAVN first captures inter-frame temporal features in the low-resolution space to restore frames coarsely and save computational cost. Then, GAVN extracts intra-frame identity features in the high-resolution space with the assistance of audio signals and face landmarks to restore more facial details. Finally, the reconstruction module integrates temporal features and identity features to generate high-quality face videos. Experimental results demonstrate that GAVN outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods on face video compression artifact removal, deblurring, and super-resolution.

PaperID: 1529, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.05578

Authors:Junyang Chen, Xiangbo Lv, Zhiqiang Kou, Xingdong Sheng, Ning Xu, Yiguo Qiao

Affiliations: Southeast University, Lenovo Research

Title: LoGoSeg: Integrating Local and Global Features for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation

Abstract:
Openvocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) extends traditional closed-set segmentation by enabling pixel-wise annotation for both seen and unseen categories using arbitrary textual descriptions. While existing methods leverage vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP, their reliance on image-level pretraining often results in imprecise spatial alignment, leading to mismatched segmentations in ambiguous or cluttered scenes. However, most existing approaches lack strong object priors and region-level constraints, which can lead to object hallucination or missed detections, further degrading performance. To address these challenges, we propose LoGoSeg, an efficient single-stage framework that integrates three key innovations: (i) an object existence prior that dynamically weights relevant categories through global image-text similarity, effectively reducing hallucinations; (ii) a region-aware alignment module that establishes precise region-level visual-textual correspondences; and (iii) a dual-stream fusion mechanism that optimally combines local structural information with global semantic context. Unlike prior works, LoGoSeg eliminates the need for external mask proposals, additional backbones, or extra datasets, ensuring efficiency. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks (A-847, PC-459, A-150, PC-59, PAS-20, and PAS-20b) demonstrate its competitive performance and strong generalization in open-vocabulary settings.

PaperID: 1530, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09919

Authors:Ketong Chen, Yuhao Chen, Yang Xue

Affiliations: South China University of Technology

Title: MosaicDoc: A Large-Scale Bilingual Benchmark for Visually Rich Document Understanding

Abstract:
Despite the rapid progress of VisionLanguage Models (VLMs), their capabilities are inadequately assessed by existing benchmarks, which are predominantly English-centric, feature simplistic layouts, and support limited tasks. Consequently, they fail to evaluate model performance for Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU), a critical challenge involving complex layouts and dense text. To address this, we introduce DocWeaver, a novel multi-agent pipeline that leverages Large Language Models to automatically generate a new benchmark. The result is MosaicDoc, a large-scale, bilingual (Chinese and English) resource designed to push the boundaries of VRDU. Sourced from newspapers and magazines, MosaicDoc features diverse and complex layouts (including multi-column and non-Manhattan), rich stylistic variety from 196 publishers, and comprehensive multi-task annotations (OCR, VQA, reading order, and localization). With 72K images and over 600K QA pairs, MosaicDoc serves as a definitive benchmark for the field. Our extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art models on this benchmark reveals their current limitations in handling real-world document complexity and charts a clear path for future research.

PaperID: 1531, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.04203

Authors:Renqi Chen, Xinzhe Zheng, Haoyang Su, Kehan Wu

Affiliations: Fudan University, National University of Singapore, University of Adelaide, Southern University of Science and Technology

Title: DeNAS-ViT: Data Efficient NAS-Optimized Vision Transformer for Ultrasound Image Segmentation

Abstract:
Accurate segmentation of ultrasound images is essential for reliable medical diagnoses but is challenged by poor image quality and scarce labeled data. Prior approaches have relied on manually designed, complex network architectures to improve multiscale feature extraction. However, such handcrafted models offer limited gains when prior knowledge is inadequate and are prone to overfitting on small datasets. In this paper, we introduce DeNAS-ViT, a Data efficient NAS-optimized Vision Transformer, the first method to leverage neural architecture search (NAS) for ultrasound image segmentation by automatically optimizing model architecture through token-level search. Specifically, we propose an efficient NAS module that performs multi-scale token search prior to the ViT’s attention mechanism, effectively capturing both contextual and local features while minimizing computational costs. Given ultrasound’s data scarcity and NAS’s inherent data demands, we further develop a NAS-guided semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework. This approach integrates network independence and contrastive learning within a stage-wise optimization strategy, significantly enhancing model robustness under limited-data conditions. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that DeNAS-ViT achieves state-of-the-art performance, maintaining robustness with minimal labeled data. Moreover, we highlight DeNAS-ViT’s generalization potential beyond ultrasound imaging, underscoring its broader applicability.

PaperID: 1532, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02258

Authors:Shuang Chen, Tom Krajnik, Farshad Arvin, Amir Atapour-Abarghouei

Affiliations: Durham University, Czech Technical University

Title: Exploring the Potentials of Spiking Neural Networks for Image Deraining

Abstract:
Biologically plausible and energyefficient frameworks such as Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have not been sufficiently explored in low-level vision tasks. Taking image deraining as an example, this study addresses the representation of the inherent high-pass characteristics of spiking neurons, specifically in image deraining and innovatively proposes the Visual LIF (VLIF) neuron, overcoming the obstacle of lacking spatial contextual understanding present in traditional spiking neurons. To tackle the limitation of frequency-domain saturation inherent in conventional spiking neurons, we leverage the proposed VLIF to introduce the Spiking Decomposition and Enhancement Module and the lightweight Spiking Multi-scale Unit for hierarchical multi-scale representation learning. Extensive experiments across five benchmark deraining datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art SNN-based deraining methods, achieving this superior performance with only 13% of their energy consumption. These findings establish a solid foundation for deploying SNNs in high-performance, energy-efficient low-level vision tasks.

PaperID: 1533, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05873

Authors:Tong Chen, Xinyu Ma, Long Bai, Wenyang Wang, Yue Sun, Luping Zhou

Affiliations: School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Sydney, Intelligent Medical Computing Laboratory, Faculty of Applied Sciences, Macao Polytechnic University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR

Title: EndoIR: Degradation-Agnostic All-in-One Endoscopic Image Restoration via Noise-Aware Routing Diffusion

Abstract:
Endoscopic images often suffer from diverse and cooccurring degradations such as low lighting, smoke, and bleeding, which obscure critical clinical details. Existing restoration methods are typically task-specific and often require prior knowledge of the degradation type, limiting their robustness in real-world clinical use. We propose EndoIR, an all-in-one, degradation-agnostic diffusion-based framework that restores multiple degradation types using a single model. EndoIR introduces a Dual-Domain Prompter that extracts joint spatial–frequency features, coupled with an adaptive embedding that encodes both shared and task-specific cues as conditioning for denoising. To mitigate feature confusion in conventional concatenation-based conditioning, we design a Dual-Stream Diffusion architecture that processes clean and degraded inputs separately, with a Rectified Fusion Block integrating them in a structured, degradation-aware manner. Furthermore, Noise-Aware Routing Block improves efficiency by dynamically selecting only noise-relevant features during denoising. Experiments on SegSTRONG-C and CEC datasets demonstrate that EndoIR achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple degradation scenarios while using fewer parameters than strong baselines, and downstream segmentation experiments confirm its clinical utility.

PaperID: 1534, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21710

Authors:Zhan Chen, Zile Guo, Enze Zhu, Peirong Zhang, Xiaoxuan Liu, Lei Wang, Yidan Zhang

Affiliations: Aerospace Information Research Institute, Electrical and Communication Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Target Cognition and Application Technology (TCAT)

Title: RAPTOR: Real-Time High-Resolution UAV Video Prediction with Efficient Video Attention

Abstract:
Video prediction is plagued by a fundamental trilemma: achieving highresolution and perceptual quality typically comes at the cost of real-time speed, hindering its use in latency-critical applications. This challenge is most acute for autonomous UAVs in dense urban environments, where foreseeing events from high-resolution imagery is non-negotiable for safety. Existing methods, reliant on iterative generation (diffusion, autoregressive models) or quadratic-complexity attention, fail to meet these stringent demands on edge hardware. To break this long-standing trade-off, we introduce RAPTOR, a video prediction architecture that achieves real-time, high-resolution performance. RAPTOR’s single-pass design avoids the error accumulation and latency of iterative approaches. Its core innovation is Efficient Video Attention (EVA), a novel translator module that factorizes spatiotemporal modeling. Instead of processing flattened spacetime tokens with O((ST)^2) or O(ST) complexity, EVA alternates operations along the spatial (S) and temporal (T) axes. This factorization reduces the time complexity to O(S + T) and memory complexity to O(max(S, T)), enabling global context modeling at 512^2 resolution and beyond, operating directly on dense feature maps with a patch-free design. Complementing this architecture is a 3-stage training curriculum that progressively refines predictions from coarse structure to sharp, temporally coherent details. Experiments show RAPTOR is the first predictor to exceed 30 FPS on a Jetson AGX Orin for 512^2 video, setting a new state-of-the-art on UAVid, KTH, and a custom high-resolution dataset in PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS. Critically, RAPTOR boosts the mission success rate in a real-world UAV navigation task by 18%, paving the way for safer and more anticipatory embodied agents.

PaperID: 1535, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12117

Authors:Ruiqi Cheng, Huijun Di, Jian Li, Feng Liu, Wei Liang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Key Laboratory of Electronic and Information Technology in Satellite Navigation, Ministry of Education, China Radar Technology Research Institute, School of Information and Electronic, Beijing Racobit Electronic Information Technology Co.

Title: RadarMP: Motion Perception for 4D mmWave Radar in Autonomous Driving

Abstract:
Accurate 3D scene motion perception significantly enhances the safety and reliability of an autonomous driving system. Benefiting from its allweather operational capability and unique perceptual properties, 4D mmWave radar has emerged as an essential component in advanced autonomous driving. However, sparse and noisy radar points often lead to imprecise motion perception, leaving autonomous vehicles with limited sensing capabilities when optical sensors degrade under adverse weather conditions. In this paper, we propose RadarMP, a novel method for precise 3D scene motion perception using low-level radar echo signals from two consecutive frames. Unlike existing methods that separate radar target detection and motion estimation, RadarMP jointly models both tasks in a unified architecture, enabling consistent radar point cloud generation and pointwise 3D scene flow prediction. Tailored to radar characteristics, we design specialized self-supervised loss functions guided by Doppler shifts and echo intensity, effectively supervising spatial and motion consistency without explicit annotations. Extensive experiments on the public dataset demonstrate that RadarMP achieves reliable motion perception across diverse weather and illumination conditions, outperforming radar-based decoupled motion perception pipelines and enhancing perception capabilities for full-scenario autonomous driving systems.

PaperID: 1536, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.04116

Authors:Yu Cheng, Jiuan Zhou, Jiawei Chen, Zhaoxia Yin, Xinpeng Zhang

Affiliations: East China Normal University, Fudan University

Title: RFNNS: Robust Fixed Neural Network Steganography with Universal Text-to-Image Models

Abstract:
With the rapid development of generative AI, image steganography has garnered widespread attention due to its unique concealment. Recent studies have demonstrated the practical advantages of Fixed Neural Network Steganography (FNNS), notably its ability to achieve stable information embedding and extraction without any additional network training. However, the stego images generated by FNNS still exhibit noticeable distortion and limited robustness. These drawbacks compromise the security of the embedded information and restrict the practical applicability of the method. To address these limitations, we propose Robust Fixed Neural Network Steganography (RFNNS). Specifically, a textureaware localization technique selectively embeds perturbations carrying secret information into regions of complex textures, effectively preserving visual quality. Additionally, a robust steganographic perturbation generation (RSPG) strategy is designed to enhance the decoding accuracy, even under common and unknown attacks. These robust perturbations are combined with AI-generated cover images to produce stego images. Experimental results demonstrate that RFNNS significantly improves robustness compared to state-of-the-art FNNS methods, achieving an average increase in SSIM of 23% for recovered secret images under common attacks. Furthermore, the LPIPS value of recovered secrets images against previously unknown attacks achieved by RFNNS was reduced to 39% of the SOTA method, underscoring its practical value for covert communication.

PaperID: 1537, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05965

Authors:Zhixin Cheng, Xiaotian Yin, Jiacheng Deng, Bohao Liao, Yujia Chen, Xu Zhou, Baoqun Yin, Tianzhu Zhang

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, Sangfor Technologies Inc

Title: Adaptive Agent Selection and Interaction Network for Image-to-Point Cloud Registration

Abstract:
Typical detectionfree methods for image-to-point cloud registration leverage transformer-based architectures to aggregate cross-modal features and establish correspondences. However, they often struggle under challenging conditions, where noise disrupts similarity computation and leads to incorrect correspondences. Moreover, without dedicated designs, it remains difficult to effectively select informative and correlated representations across modalities, thereby limiting the robustness and accuracy of registration. To address these challenges, we propose a novel cross-modal registration framework composed of two key modules: the Iterative Agents Selection (IAS) module and the Reliable Agents Interaction (RAI) module. IAS enhances structural feature awareness with phase maps and employs reinforcement learning principles to efficiently select reliable agents. RAI then leverages these selected agents to guide cross-modal interactions, effectively reducing mismatches and improving overall robustness. Extensive experiments on the RGB-D Scenes v2 and 7-Scenes benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance.

PaperID: 1538, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.07598

Authors:Adrian Cosma, Andy Eduard Catruna, Emilian Radoi

Affiliations: The National University of Science and Technology Politehnica Bucharest

Title: On Model and Data Scaling for Skeleton-based Self-Supervised Gait Recognition

Abstract:
Gait recognition from video streams is a challenging problem in computer vision biometrics due to the subtle differences between gaits and numerous confounding factors. Recent advancements in selfsupervised pretraining have led to the development of robust gait recognition models that are invariant to walking covariates. While neural scaling laws have transformed model development in other domains by linking performance to data, model size, and compute, their applicability to gait remains unexplored. In this work, we conduct the first empirical study scaling on skeleton-based self-supervised gait recognition to quantify the effect of data quantity, model size and compute on downstream gait recognition performance. We pretrain multiple variants of GaitPT -- a transformer-based architecture -- on a dataset of 2.7 million walking sequences collected in the wild. We evaluate zero-shot performance across four benchmark datasets to derive scaling laws for data, model size, and compute. Our findings demonstrate predictable power-law improvements in performance with increased scale and confirm that data and compute scaling significantly influence downstream accuracy. We further isolate architectural contributions by comparing GaitPT with GaitFormer under controlled compute budgets. These results provide practical insights into resource allocation and performance estimation for real-world gait recognition systems.

PaperID: 1539, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.00322

Authors:Siyan Fang, Long Peng, Yuntao Wang, Ruonan Wei, Yuehuan Wang

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China

Title: Depth-Synergized Mamba Meets Memory Experts for All-Day Image Reflection Separation

Abstract:
Image reflection separation aims to disentangle the transmission layer and the reflection layer from a blended image. Existing methods rely on limited information from a single image, tending to confuse the two layers when their contrasts are similar, a challenge more severe at night. To address this issue, we propose the DepthMemory Decoupling Network (DMDNet). It employs the Depth-Aware Scanning (DAScan) to guide Mamba toward salient structures, promoting information flow along semantic coherence to construct stable states. Working in synergy with DAScan, the Depth-Synergized State-Space Model (DS-SSM) modulates the sensitivity of state activations by depth, suppressing the spread of ambiguous features that interfere with layer disentanglement. Furthermore, we introduce the Memory Expert Compensation Module (MECM), leveraging cross-image historical knowledge to guide experts in providing layer-specific compensation. To address the lack of datasets for nighttime reflection separation, we construct the Nighttime Image Reflection Separation (NightIRS) dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DMDNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both daytime and nighttime.

PaperID: 1540, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.19567

Authors:Zhenliang Gan, Chunya Liu, Yichao Tang, Binghao Wang, Shiwen Cui, Weiqiang Wang, Xinpeng Zhang

Affiliations: Fudan University, Ant Group

Title: GenPTW: Latent Image Watermarking for Provenance Tracing and Tamper Localization

Abstract:
The proliferation of generative image models has revolutionized AIGC creation while amplifying concerns over content provenance and manipulation forensics. Existing methods are typically either unable to localize tampering or restricted to specific generative settings, limiting their practical utility. We propose GenPTW, a General watermarking framework that unifies Provenance tracing and Tamper localization in latent space. It supports both ingeneration and post-generation embedding without altering the generative process, and is plug-and-play compatible with latent diffusion models (LDMs) and visual autoregressive (VAR) models. To achieve precise provenance tracing and tamper localization, we embed the watermark using two complementary mechanisms: cross-attention fusion aligned with latent semantics and spatial fusion providing explicit spatial guidance for edit sensitivity. A tamper-aware extractor jointly conducts provenance tracing and tamper localization by leveraging watermark features together with high-frequency features. Experiments show that GenPTW maintains high visual fidelity and strong robustness against diverse AIGC-editing.

PaperID: 1541, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06337

Authors:Shangfeng Huang, Ruisheng Wang, Xin Wang

Affiliations: University of Calgary, Shenzhen University

Title: BuildingWorld: A Structured 3D Building Dataset for Urban Foundation Models

Abstract:
As digital twins become central to the transformation of modern cities, accurate and structured 3D building models emerge as a key enabler of highfidelity, updatable urban representations. These models underpin diverse applications including energy modeling, urban planning, autonomous navigation, and real-time reasoning. Despite recent advances in 3D urban modeling, most learning-based models are trained on building datasets with limited architectural diversity, which significantly undermines their generalizability across heterogeneous urban environments. To address this limitation, we present BuildingWorld, a comprehensive and structured 3D building dataset designed to bridge the gap in stylistic diversity. It encompasses buildings from geographically and architecturally diverse regions—including North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania—offering a globally representative dataset for urban-scale foundation modeling and analysis. Specifically, BuildingWorld provides about Five million LOD2 building models collected from diverse sources, accompanied by both real and simulated airborne LiDAR point clouds. This enables comprehensive research on 3D reconstruction, building detection and segmentation, as well as roof structure segmentation. Cyber City, a virtual city model, is introduced to enable the generation of unlimited training data with customized and structurally diverse point cloud distributions. Furthermore, we provide standardized evaluation metrics tailored for building reconstruction, aiming to facilitate the training, evaluation, and comparison of large-scale vision models and foundation models in structured 3D urban environments

PaperID: 1542, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22262

Authors:Wenkai Huang, Yijia Guo, Gaolei Li, Lei Ma, Hang Zhang, Liwen Hu, Jiazheng Wang, Jianhua Li, Tiejun Huang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, National Key Laboratory for Multimedia Information Processing, Peking University, Cornell University, Hunan University

Title: Can Protective Watermarking Safeguard the Copyright of 3D Gaussian Splatting?

Abstract:
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful representation for 3D scenes, widely adopted due to its exceptional efficiency and highfidelity visual quality. Given the significant value of 3DGS assets, recent works have introduced specialized watermarking schemes to ensure copyright protection and ownership verification. However, can existing 3D Gaussian watermarking approaches genuinely guarantee robust protection of the 3D assets? In this paper, for the first time, we systematically explore and validate possible vulnerabilities of 3DGS watermarking frameworks. We demonstrate that conventional watermark removal techniques designed for 2D images do not effectively generalize to the 3DGS scenario due to the specialized rendering pipeline and unique attributes of each gaussian primitives. Motivated by this insight, we propose GSPure, the first watermark purification framework specifically for 3DGS watermarking representations. By analyzing view-dependent rendering contributions and exploiting geometrically accurate feature clustering, GSPure precisely isolates and effectively removes watermark-related Gaussian primitives while preserving scene integrity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our GSPure achieves the best watermark purification performance, reducing watermark PSNR by up to 16.34dB while minimizing degradation to original scene fidelity with less than 1dB PSNR loss. Moreover, it consistently outperforms existing methods in both effectiveness and generalization.

PaperID: 1543, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09479

Authors:Xuejun Huang, Xinyi Liu, Yi Wan, Zhi Zheng, Bin Zhang, Mingtao Xiong, Yingying Pei, Yongjun Zhang

Affiliations: School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan China, Ministry of Natural Resources, Guangzhou China Hubei LuoJia Laboratory, Department of Geography and Resource Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin Hong Kong, China Railway Siyuan Survey and Design Group Co.

Title: SkySplat: Generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting from Multi-Temporal Sparse Satellite Images

Abstract:
Threedimensional scene reconstruction from sparse-view satellite images is a long-standing and challenging task. While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and its variants have recently attracted attention for its high efficiency, existing methods remain unsuitable for satellite images due to incompatibility with rational polynomial coefficient (RPC) models and limited generalization capability. Recent advances in generalizable 3DGS approaches show potential, but they perform poorly on multi-temporal sparse satellite images due to limited geometric constraints, transient objects, and radiometric inconsistencies. To address these limitations, we propose SkySplat, a novel self-supervised framework that integrates the RPC model into the generalizable 3DGS pipeline, enabling more effective use of sparse geometric cues for improved reconstruction. SkySplat relies only on RGB images and radiometric-robust relative height supervision, thereby eliminating the need for ground-truth height maps. Key components include a Cross-Self Consistency Module (CSCM), which mitigates transient object interference via consistency-based masking, and a multi-view consistency aggregation strategy that refines reconstruction results. Compared to per-scene optimization methods, SkySplat achieves an 86 times speedup over EOGS with higher accuracy. It also outperforms generalizable 3DGS baselines, reducing MAE from 13.18 m to 1.80 m on the DFC19 dataset significantly, and demonstrates strong cross-dataset generalization on the MVS3D benchmark.

PaperID: 1544, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07040

Authors:Yuanmin Huang, Wenxuan Li, Mi Zhang, Xiaohan Zhang, Xiaoyu You, Min Yang

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University, School of Information Science and Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology

Title: 3D-ANC: Adaptive Neural Collapse for Robust 3D Point Cloud Recognition

Abstract:
Deep neural networks have recently achieved notable progress in 3D point cloud recognition, yet their vulnerability to adversarial perturbations poses critical security challenges in practical deployments. Conventional defense mechanisms struggle to address the evolving landscape of multifaceted attack patterns. Through systematic analysis of existing defenses, we identify that their unsatisfactory performance primarily originates from an entangled feature space, where adversarial attacks can be performed easily. To this end, we present 3DANC, a novel approach that capitalizes on the Neural Collapse (NC) mechanism to orchestrate discriminative feature learning. In particular, NC depicts where last-layer features and classifier weights jointly evolve into a simplex equiangular tight frame (ETF) arrangement, establishing maximally separable class prototypes. However, leveraging this advantage in 3D recognition confronts two substantial challenges: (1) prevalent class imbalance in point cloud datasets, and (2) complex geometric similarities between object categories. To tackle these obstacles, our solution combines an ETF-aligned classification module with an adaptive training framework consisting of representation-balanced learning (RBL) and dynamic feature direction loss (FDL). 3D-ANC seamlessly empowers existing models to develop disentangled feature spaces despite the complexity in 3D data distribution. Comprehensive evaluations state that 3D-ANC significantly improves the robustness of models with various structures on two datasets. For instance, DGCNN's classification accuracy is elevated from 27.2% to 80.9% on ModelNet40 -- a 53.7% absolute gain that surpasses leading baselines by 34.0%.

PaperID: 1545, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.12114

Authors:Yuzhou Ji, Ke Ma, Hong Cai, Anchun Zhang, Lizhuang Ma, Xin Tan

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University, East China Normal University

Title: LidarPainter: One-Step Away from Any Lidar View to Novel Guidance

Abstract:
Dynamic driving scene reconstruction is of great importance in fields like digital twin system and autonomous driving simulation. However, unacceptable degradation occurs when the view deviates from the input trajectory, leading to corrupted background and vehicle models. To improve reconstruction quality on novel trajectory, existing methods are subject to various limitations including inconsistency, deformation, and time consumption. This paper proposes LidarPainter, a onestep diffusion model that recovers consistent driving views from sparse LiDAR condition and artifact-corrupted renderings in real-time, enabling high-fidelity lane shifts in driving scene reconstruction. Extensive experiments show that LidarPainter outperforms state-of-the-art methods in speed, quality and resource efficiency, specifically 7 × faster than StreetCrafter with only one fifth of GPU memory required. LidarPainter also supports stylized generation using text prompts such as “foggy” and “night”, allowing for a diverse expansion of the existing asset library.

PaperID: 1546, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23919

Authors:Longtao Jiang, Jie Huang, Mingfei Han, Lei Chen, Yongqiang Yu, Feng Zhao, Xiaojun Chang, Zhihui Li

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

Title: Token Painter: Training-Free Text-Guided Image Inpainting via Mask Autoregressive Models

Abstract:
Textguided image inpainting aims to inpaint masked image regions based on a textual prompt while preserving the background. Although diffusion-based methods have become dominant, their property of modeling the entire image in latent space makes it challenging for the results to align well with prompt details and maintain a consistent background. To address these issues, we explore Mask AutoRegressive (MAR) models for this task. MAR naturally supports image inpainting by generating latent tokens corresponding to mask regions, enabling better local controllability without altering the background. However, directly applying MAR to this task makes the inpainting content either ignore the prompts or be disharmonious with the background context. Through analysis of the attention maps from the inpainting images, we identify the impact of background tokens on text tokens during the MAR generation, and leverage this to designToken Painter, a training-free text-guided image inpainting method based on MAR. Our approach introduces two key components: (1) Dual-Stream Encoder Information Fusion (DEIF), which fuses the semantic and context information from text and background in frequency domain to produce novel guidance tokens, allowing MAR to generate text-faithful inpainting content while keeping harmonious with background context. (2) Adaptive Decoder Attention Score Enhancing (ADAE), which adaptively enhances attention scores on guidance tokens and inpainting tokens to further enhance the alignment of prompt details and the content visual quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our training-free method outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods across almost all metrics.

PaperID: 1547, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07345

Authors:Shilong Jin, Haoran Duan, Litao Hua, Wentao Huang, Yuan Zhou

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University

Title: Debiasing Diffusion Priors via 3D Attention for Consistent Gaussian Splatting

Abstract:
Versatile 3D tasks (e.g., generation or editing) distilling Textto-Image (T2I) diffusion models have attracted significant research interest for not relying on extensive 3D training data. However, T2I models exhibit limitations resulting from prior view bias, which produces conflicting appearances between different views of an object. This bias causes subject-words to preferentially activate prior view features during cross-attention (CA) computation, regardless of the target view condition. To overcome this limitation, we conduct a comprehensive mathematical analysis to reveal the root cause of the prior view bias in T2I models. Moreover, we find different UNet-Layers show different effects of prior view in CA. Therefore, we propose a novel framework, TD-Attn, which addresses multi-view inconsistency via two key components: (1) the 3D-Aware Attention Guidance Module 3D-AAG constructs a view-consistent 3D attention Gaussian for subject-words to enforce spatial consistency across attention-focused regions, thereby compensating for the limited spatial information in 2D individual view CA maps; (2) the Hierarchical Attention Modulation Module (HAM) utilizes a semantic guidance tree to direct the Semantic Response Profiler (SRP) in localizing and modulating CA layers that are highly responsive to view conditions, where the enhanced CA maps further support the construction of more consistent 3D attention Gaussians. Notably, HAM facilitates semantic-specific interventions, enabling controllable and precise 3D editing. Extensive experiments firmly establish that TD-Attn has the potential to serve as a transformative, universal plugin, significantly enhancing multi-view consistency across a wide range of 3D tasks.

PaperID: 1548, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.04193

Authors:Hyeonjae Kim, Dongjin Kim, Eugene Jin, Tae Hyun Kim

Affiliations: Hanyang University

Title: Continuous Degradation Modeling via Latent Flow Matching for Real-World Super-Resolution

Abstract:
While deep learningbased super-resolution (SR) methods have shown impressive outcomes with synthetic degradation scenarios such as bicubic downsampling, they frequently struggle to perform well on real-world images that feature complex, nonlinear degradations like noise, blur, and compression artifacts. Recent efforts to address this issue have involved the painstaking compilation of real low-resolution (LR) and high-resolution (HR) image pairs, usually limited to several specific downscaling factors. To address these challenges, our work introduces a novel framework capable of synthesizing authentic LR images from a single HR image by leveraging the latent degradation space with flow matching. Our approach generates LR images with realistic artifacts at unseen degradation levels, which facilitates the creation of large-scale, real-world SR training datasets. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative assessments verify that our synthetic LR images accurately replicate real-world degradations. Furthermore, both traditional and arbitrary-scale SR models trained using our datasets consistently yield much better HR outcomes.

PaperID: 1549, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10004

Authors:Minjun Kim, Jaeri Lee, Jongjin Kim, Jeongin Yun, Yongmo Kwon, U Kang

Affiliations: Seoul National University

Title: LampQ: Towards Accurate Layer-wise Mixed Precision Quantization for Vision Transformers

Abstract:
How can we accurately quantize a pretrained Vision Transformer model? Quantization algorithms compress Vision Transformers (ViTs) into low-bit formats, reducing memory and computation demands with minimal accuracy degradation. However, existing methods rely on uniform precision, ignoring the diverse sensitivity of ViT components to quantization. Metric-based Mixed Precision Quantization (MPQ) is a promising alternative, but previous MPQ methods for ViTs suffer from three major limitations: 1) coarse granularity, 2) mismatch in metric scale across component types, and 3) quantization-unaware bit allocation. In this paper, we propose LampQ (Layer-wise Mixed Precision Quantization for Vision Transformers), an accurate metric-based MPQ method for ViTs to overcome these limitations. LampQ performs layer-wise quantization to achieve both fine-grained control and efficient acceleration, incorporating a type-aware Fisher-based metric to measure sensitivity. Then, LampQ assigns bit-widths optimally through integer linear programming and further updates them iteratively. Extensive experiments show that LampQ provides the state-of-the-art performance in quantizing ViTs pre-trained on various tasks such as image classification, object detection, and zero-shot quantization.

PaperID: 1550, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10433

Authors:Hojun Lee, Mijin Koo, Yeji Song, Nojun Kwak

Affiliations: Xperty Corp., Seoul National University

Title: Targeted Data Protection for Diffusion Model by Matching Training Trajectory

Abstract:
Recent advancements in diffusion models have made finetuning text-to-image models for personalization increasingly accessible, but have also raised significant concerns regarding unauthorized data usage and privacy infringement. Current protection methods are limited to passively degrading image quality, failing to achieve stable control. While Targeted Data Protection (TDP) offers a promising paradigm for active redirection toward user-specified target concepts, existing TDP attempts suffer from poor controllability due to snapshot-matching approaches that fail to account for complete learning dynamics. We introduce TAFAP (Trajectory Alignment via Fine-tuning with Adversarial Perturbations), the first method to successfully achieve effective TDP by controlling the entire training trajectory. Unlike snapshot-based methods whose protective influence is easily diluted as training progresses, TAFAP employs trajectory-matching inspired by dataset distillation to enforce persistent, verifiable transformations throughout fine-tuning. We validate our method through extensive experiments, demonstrating the first successful targeted transformation in diffusion models with simultaneous control over both identity and visual patterns. TAFAP significantly outperforms existing TDP attempts, achieving robust redirection toward target concepts while maintaining high image quality. This work enables verifiable safeguards and provides a new framework for controlling and tracing alterations in diffusion model outputs.

PaperID: 1551, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18947

Authors:Jae Joong Lee, Bedrich Benes, Raymond A. Yeh

Affiliations: Purdue University

Title: Tuning-Free Amodal Segmentation via the Occlusion-Free Bias of Inpainting Models

Abstract:
Amodal segmentation is an imagebased algorithm that aims to predict masks for both visible and occluded parts of objects. Existing methods typically rely on supervised learning with annotated amodal masks or synthetic data. The effectiveness of these methods relies heavily on the quality of the datasets. This dependence can unintentionally restrict their generalization capabilities due to insufficient diversity and size. Although existing zero-shot methods perform well on their reported datasets, their performance does not necessarily transfer to other datasets. We propose a tuning-free approach that re-purposes diffusion-based inpainting foundation models for amodal segmentation. Our approach is motivated by the “occlusion-free bias” of inpainting models, i.e., the inpainted objects tend to be complete and without occlusions. We reconstruct the occluded regions of an object via inpainting and then apply segmentation, all without additional training or fine-tuning. Experiments on five datasets, three previously unreported, demonstrate the generalizability of our approach. On average, our approach achieves 5.3% more accurate masks in mIoU compared to the publicly available state-of-the-art, pix2gestalt.

PaperID: 1552, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13204

Authors:Junhee Lee, ChaeBeen Bang, MyoungChul Kim, MyeongAh Cho

Affiliations: Kyung Hee University

Title: RefineVAD: Semantic-Guided Feature Recalibration for Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection

Abstract:
WeaklySupervised Video Anomaly Detection aims to identify anomalous events using only video-level labels, balancing annotation efficiency with practical applicability. However, existing methods often oversimplify the anomaly space by treating all abnormal events as a single category, overlooking the diverse semantic and temporal characteristics intrinsic to real-world anomalies. Inspired by how humans perceive anomalies, by jointly interpreting temporal motion patterns and semantic structures underlying different anomaly types, we propose RefineVAD, a novel framework that mimics this dual-process reasoning. Our framework integrates two core modules. The first, Motion-aware Temporal Attention and Recalibration (MoTAR), estimates motion salience and dynamically adjusts temporal focus via shift-based attention and global Transformer-based modeling. The second, Category-Oriented Refinement (CORE), injects soft anomaly category priors into the representation space by aligning segment-level features with learnable category prototypes through cross-attention. By jointly leveraging temporal dynamics and semantic structure, explicitly models both ``how'' motion evolves and ``what'' semantic category it resembles. Extensive experiments on WVAD benchmark validate the effectiveness of RefineVAD and highlight the importance of integrating semantic context to guide feature refinement toward anomaly-relevant patterns.

PaperID: 1553, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12715

Authors:Chengzhou Li, Ping Guo, Guanchen Meng, Qi Jia, Jinyuan Liu, Zhu Liu, Xiaokang Liu, Yu Liu, Zhongxuan Luo, Xin Fan

Affiliations: Dalian University of Technology

Title: RSOD: Reliability-Guided Sonar Image Object Detection with Extremely Limited Labels

Abstract:
Object detection in sonar images is a key technology in underwater detection systems. Compared to natural images, sonar images contain fewer texture details and are more susceptible to noise, making it difficult for nonexperts to distinguish subtle differences between classes. This leads to their inability to provide precise annotation data for sonar images. Therefore, designing effective object detection methods for sonar images with extremely limited labels is particularly important. To address this, we propose a teacher-student framework called RSOD, which aims to fully learn the characteristics of sonar images and develop a pseudo-label strategy suitable for these images to mitigate the impact of limited labels. First, RSOD calculates a reliability score by assessing the consistency of the teacher's predictions across different views. To leverage this score, we introduce an object mixed pseudo-label method to tackle the shortage of labeled data in sonar images. Finally, we optimize the performance of the student by implementing a reliability-guided adaptive constraint. By taking full advantage of unlabeled data, the student can perform well even in situations with extremely limited labels. Notably, on the UATD dataset, our method, using only 5% of labeled data, achieves results that can compete against those of our baseline algorithm trained on 100% labeled data. We also collected a new dataset to provide more valuable data for research in the field of sonar.

PaperID: 1554, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.23736

Authors:Haiwen Li, Delong Liu, Zhaohui Hou, Zeliang Ma, Fei Su, Zhicheng Zhao

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: Modality and Task Adaptation for Enhanced Zero-shot Composed Image Retrieval

Abstract:
As a challenging visionlanguage task, Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (ZS-CIR) is designed to retrieve target images using bi-modal (image+text) queries. Typical ZS-CIR methods employ an inversion network to generate pseudo-word tokens that effectively represent the input semantics. However, the inversion-based methods suffer from two inherent issues: First, the task discrepancy exists because inversion training and CIR inference involve different objectives. Second, the modality discrepancy arises from the input feature distribution mismatch between training and inference. To this end, we propose a lightweight post-hoc framework, consisting of two components: (1) A new text-anchored triplet construction pipeline leverages a large language model (LLM) to transform a standard image-text dataset into a triplet dataset, where a textual description serves as the target of each triplet. (2) The MoTa-Adapter, a novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning method, adapts the dual encoder to the CIR task using our constructed triplet data. Specifically, on the text side, multiple sets of learnable task prompts are integrated via a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layer to capture task-specific priors and handle different types of modifications. On the image side, MoTa-Adapter modulates the inversion network's input to better match the downstream text encoder. In addition, an entropy-based optimization strategy is proposed to assign greater weight to challenging samples, thus improving adaptation efficiency. Experiments show that, with the incorporation of our proposed components, inversion-based methods achieve significant improvements, reaching state-of-the-art performance across four widely-used benchmarks.

PaperID: 1555, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20997

Authors:Jiaoyang Li, Jun Fang, Tianhao Gao, Xiaohui Zhang, Zhiyuan Liu, Chao Liu, Pengzhang Liu, Qixia Jiang

Affiliations:

Title: FANoise: Singular Value-Adaptive Noise Modulation for Robust Multimodal Representation Learning

Abstract:
Representation learning is fundamental to modern machine learning, powering applications such as text retrieval and multimodal understanding. However, learning robust and generalizable representations remains challenging. While prior work has demonstrated that active noise injection, a form of data augmentation, can enhance encoding performance, most existing methods rely on heuristic or static noise, overlooking the dynamic nature of feature distributions during training. In this work, we systematically study the role of noise in representation learning from both gradientbased and feature distribution perspectives, using InfoNCE loss as a representative example. Focusing on multimodal representation learning, we propose FANoise, a novel feature-adaptive noise injection strategy. By leveraging the dynamics of contrastive learning, FANoise effectively mitigates the negative impacts of noise while preserving its benefits. Under this theoretically grounded framework, comprehensive experiments demonstrate that FANoise consistently improves overall performance on multimodal tasks across various base VLM models.

PaperID: 1556, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.14220

Authors:Jie Li, Yingying Feng, Chi Xie, Jie Hu, Lei Tan, Jiayi Ji

Affiliations: Xiamen University, Northeastern University, Tongji University, National University of Singapore

Title: FIND: A Simple Yet Effective Baseline for Diffusion-Generated Image Detection

Abstract:
The remarkable realism of images generated by diffusion models poses critical detection challenges. Current methods utilize reconstruction error as a discriminative feature, exploiting the observation that real images exhibit higher reconstruction errors when processed through diffusion models. However, these approaches require costly reconstruction computations and depend on specific diffusion models, making their performance highly modeldependent. We identify a fundamental difference: real images are more difficult to fit with Gaussian distributions compared to synthetic ones. In this paper, we propose Forgery Identification via Noise Disturbance (FIND), a novel method that requires only a simple binary classifier. It eliminates reconstruction by directly targeting the core distributional difference between real and synthetic images. Our key operation is to add Gaussian noise to real images during training and label these noisy versions as synthetic. This step allows the classifier to focus on the statistical patterns that distinguish real from synthetic images. We theoretically prove that the noise-augmented real images resemble diffusion-generated images in their ease of Gaussian fitting. Furthermore, simply by adding noise, they still retain visual similarity to the original images, highlighting the most discriminative distribution-related features. The proposed FIND improves performance by 11.7% on the GenImage benchmark while running 126x faster than existing methods. By removing the need for auxiliary diffusion models and reconstruction, it offers a practical, efficient, and generalizable way to detect diffusion-generated content.

PaperID: 1557, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16878

Authors:Xuchen Li, Xuzhao Li, Shiyu Hu, Kaiqi Huang, Wentao Zhang

Affiliations: Institute of Automation, Nanyang Technological University, Chinese Academy of Sciences University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhongguancun Academy Peking University

Title: CausalStep: A Benchmark for Explicit Stepwise Causal Reasoning in Videos

Abstract:
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have improved reasoning in text and image domains, yet achieving robust video reasoning remains a significant challenge. Existing video benchmarks mainly assess shallow understanding and reasoning and allow models to exploit global context, failing to rigorously evaluate true causal and stepwise reasoning. We present CausalStep, a benchmark designed for explicit stepwise causal reasoning in videos. CausalStep segments videos into causally linked units and enforces a strict stepwise questionanswer (QA) protocol, requiring sequential answers and preventing shortcut solutions. Each question includes carefully constructed distractors based on error type taxonomy to ensure diagnostic value. The benchmark features 100 videos across six categories and 1,852 multiple-choice QA pairs. We introduce seven diagnostic metrics for comprehensive evaluation, enabling precise diagnosis of causal reasoning capabilities. Experiments with leading proprietary and open-source models, as well as human baselines, reveal a significant gap between current models and human-level stepwise reasoning. CausalStep provides a rigorous benchmark to drive progress in robust and interpretable video reasoning.

PaperID: 1558, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21314

Authors:Yanfeng Li, Tao Tan, Qinquan Gao, Zhiwen Cao, Xiaohong Liu, Yue Sun

Affiliations: Macao Polytechnic University, Fuzhou University Imperial Vision Technology Co. Ltd, Sichuan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Shanghai Jiao Tong University Sichuan Research Institute

Title: HiFi-Mesh: High-Fidelity Efficient 3D Mesh Generation via Compact Autoregressive Dependence

Abstract:
Highfidelity 3D meshes can be tokenized into one-dimension (1D) sequences and directly modeled using autoregressive approaches for faces and vertices. However, existing methods suffer from insufficient resource utilization, resulting in slow inference and the ability to handle only small-scale sequences, which severely constrains the expressible structural details. We introduce the Latent Autoregressive Network (LANE), which incorporates compact autoregressive dependencies in the generation process, achieving a 6× improvement in maximum generatable sequence length compared to existing methods. To further accelerate inference, we propose the Adaptive Computation Graph Reconfiguration (AdaGraph) strategy, which effectively overcomes the efficiency bottleneck of traditional serial inference through spatiotemporal decoupling in the generation process. Experimental validation demonstrates that LANE achieves superior performance across generation speed, structural detail, and geometric consistency, providing an effective solution for high-quality 3D mesh generation.

PaperID: 1559, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05314

Authors:Ying Li, Xiaobao Wei, Xiaowei Chi, Yuming Li, Zhongyu Zhao, Hao Wang, Ningning Ma, Ming Lu, Sirui Han

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Peking University, Autonomous Driving Development

Title: ManipDreamer3D: Synthesizing Plausible Robotic Manipulation Video with Occupancy-aware 3D Trajectory

Abstract:
Data scarcity continues to be a critical bottleneck in the field of robotic manipulation, limiting the ability to train robust and generalizable models. While diffusion models provide a promising approach to synthesizing realistic robotic manipulation videos, their effectiveness hinges on the availability of precise and reasonable control instructions. Current methods primarily rely on 2D trajectories as instruction prompts, which inherently face issues with 3D spatial ambiguity. In this work, we present a novel framework named ManipDreamer3Dfor generating plausible 3Daware robotic manipulation videos from the input image and the text instruction. Our method combines 3D trajectory planning with a reconstructed 3D occupancy map created from a third-person perspective, along with a novel trajectory-to-video diffusion model. Specifically, ManipDreamer3D first reconstructs the 3D occupancy representation from the input image and then computes an optimized 3D end-effector trajectory, minimizing path length, avoiding collisions and retiming. Next, we employ a latent editing technique to create video sequences from the initial image latent, text instruction and the optimized 3D trajectory. This process conditions our specially trained trajectory-to-video diffusion model to produce robotic pick-and-place videos. Our method significantly reduces human intervention requirements by autonomously planing plausible 3D trajectories. Experimental results demonstrate its superior visual quality and precision.

PaperID: 1560, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.17536

Authors:Jiaming Liang, Haowei Liu, Chi-Man Pun

Affiliations: University of Macau, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: OTI: A Model-free and Visually Interpretable Measure of Image Attackability

Abstract:
Despite the tremendous success of neural networks, benign images can be corrupted by adversarial perturbations to deceive these models. Intriguingly, images differ in their attackability. Specifically, given an attack configuration, some images are easily corrupted, whereas others are more resistant. Evaluating image attackability has important applications in active learning, adversarial training, and attack enhancement. This prompts a growing interest in developing attackability measures. However, existing methods are scarce and suffer from two major limitations: (1) They rely on a model proxy to provide prior knowledge (e.g., gradients or minimal perturbation) to extract modeldependent image features. Unfortunately, in practice, many task-specific models are not readily accessible. (2) Extracted features characterizing image attackability lack visual interpretability, obscuring their direct relationship with the images. To address these, we propose a novel Object Texture Intensity (OTI), a model-free and visually interpretable measure of image attackability, which measures image attackability as the texture intensity of the image's semantic object. Theoretically, we describe the principles of OTI from the perspectives of decision boundaries as well as the mid- and high-frequency characteristics of adversarial perturbations. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that OTI is effective and computationally efficient. In addition, our OTI provides the adversarial machine learning community with a visual understanding of attackability.

PaperID: 1561, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09948

Authors:Zhicheng Liao, Dongxu Wu, Zhenshan Shi, Sijie Mai, Hanwei Zhu, Lingyu Zhu, Yuncheng Jiang, Baoliang Chen

Affiliations: South China Normal University, Nanyang Technological University, City University of Hong Kong

Title: Beyond Cosine Similarity: Magnitude-Aware CLIP for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

Abstract:
Recent efforts have repurposed the Contrastive LanguageImage Pre-training (CLIP) model for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) by measuring the cosine similarity between the image embedding and textual prompts such as "a good photo" or "a bad photo." However, this semantic similarity overlooks a critical yet underexplored cue: the magnitude of the CLIP image features, which we empirically find to exhibit a strong correlation with perceptual quality. In this work, we introduce a novel adaptive fusion framework that complements cosine similarity with a magnitude-aware quality cue. Specifically, we first extract the absolute CLIP image features and apply a Box-Cox transformation to statistically normalize the feature distribution and mitigate semantic sensitivity. The resulting scalar summary serves as a semantically-normalized auxiliary cue that complements cosine-based prompt matching. To integrate both cues effectively, we further design a confidence-guided fusion scheme that adaptively weighs each term according to its relative strength. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark IQA datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms standard CLIP-based IQA and state-of-the-art baselines, without any task-specific training.

PaperID: 1562, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.22310

Authors:Run Ling, Ke Cao, Jian Lu, Ao Ma, Haowei Liu, Runze He, Changwei Wang, Rongtao Xu, Yihua Shao, Zhanjie Zhang, Peng Wu, Guibing Guo, Wei Feng, Zheng Zhang, Jingjing Lv, Junjie Shen, Ching Law, Xingwei Wang

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, Chongqing University of Post and Telecommunications, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Northeastern University

Title: MoFu: Scale-Aware Modulation and Fourier Fusion for Multi-Subject Video Generation

Abstract:
Multisubject video generation aims to synthesize videos from textual prompts and multiple reference images, ensuring that each subject preserves natural scale and visual fidelity. However, current methods face two challenges: scale inconsistency, where variations in subject size lead to unnatural generation, and permutation sensitivity, where the order of reference inputs causes subject distortion. In this paper, we propose MoFu, a unified framework that tackles both challenges. For scale inconsistency, we introduce Scale-Aware Modulation (SMO), an LLM-guided module that extracts implicit scale cues from the prompt and modulates features to ensure consistent subject sizes. To address permutation sensitivity, we present a simple yet effective Fourier Fusion strategy that processes the frequency information of reference features via the Fast Fourier Transform to produce a unified representation. Besides, we design a Scale-Permutation Stability Loss to jointly encourage scale-consistent and permutation-invariant generation. To further evaluate these challenges, we establish a dedicated benchmark with controlled variations in subject scale and reference permutation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MoFu significantly outperforms existing methods in preserving natural scale, subject fidelity, and overall visual quality.

PaperID: 1563, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01533

Authors:Jiaxin Liu, Zhaolu Kang

Affiliations: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Peking University

Title: ReasonAct: Progressive Training for Fine-Grained Video Reasoning in Small Models

Abstract:
While recent multimodal models have shown progress in visionlanguage tasks, small-scale variants still struggle with the fine-grained temporal reasoning required for video understanding. We introduce ReasonAct, a method that enhances video reasoning in smaller models through a three-stage training process: first building a foundation with text-only reasoning, then fine-tuning on video, and finally refining with temporal-aware reinforcement learning. We build upon Temporal Group Relative Policy Optimization (T-GRPO) by incorporating temporal consistency modeling into policy optimization. We also propose a biomechanically-motivated sub-action decomposition mechanism that provides graduated rewards for constituent action phases. Through experiments on HMDB51, UCF-101, and Kinetics-400, our 3B-parameter model achieves 67.2%, 94.1%, and 78.9% accuracy respectively, demonstrating improvements of 17.9, 15.8, and 12.3 points over baselines. Ablation studies validate that our progressive training enables smaller models to achieve competitive video reasoning performance while maintaining computational efficiency.

PaperID: 1564, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07500

Authors:Penghui Liu, Jiangshan Wang, Yutong Shen, Shanhui Mo, Chenyang Qi, Jack Ma

Affiliations: Beijing University of Technology, Tsinghua University, Independent Researcher, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: MultiMotion: Multi Subject Video Motion Transfer via Video Diffusion Transformer

Abstract:
Multiobject video motion transfer poses significant challenges for Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architectures due to inherent motion entanglement and lack of object-level control. We present MultiMotion, a novel unified framework that overcomes these limitations. Our core innovation is Mask-aware Attention Motion Flow (AMF), which utilizes SAM 2 masks to explicitly disentangle and control motion features for multiple objects within the DiT pipeline. Furthermore, we introduce RectPC, a high-order predictor-corrector solver for efficient and accurate sampling, particularly beneficial for multi-entity generation. To facilitate rigorous evaluation, we construct the first benchmark dataset specifically for DiT-based multi-object motion transfer. MultiMotion demonstrably achieves precise, semantically aligned, and temporally coherent motion transfer for multiple distinct objects, maintaining DiT's high quality and scalability.The code is in the supp.

PaperID: 1565, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20364

Authors:Zhen Liu, Diedong Feng, Hai Jiang, Liaoyuan Zeng, Hao Wang, Chaoyu Feng, Lei Lei, Bing Zeng, Shuaicheng Liu

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Sichuan University, Independent Researcher

Title: RAW-Flow: Advancing RGB-to-RAW Image Reconstruction with Deterministic Latent Flow Matching

Abstract:
RGBto-RAW reconstruction, or the reverse modeling of a camera Image Signal Processing (ISP) pipeline, aims to recover high-fidelity RAW data from RGB images. Despite notable progress, existing learning-based methods typically treat this task as a direct regression objective and still struggle with detail inconsistency and color deviation, due to the ill-posed nature of inverse ISP and the inherent information loss in quantized RGB images. To address these limitations, we pioneer a generative perspective by reformulating RGB-to-RAW reconstruction as a deterministic latent transport problem and introduce a novel framework named RAW-Flow, which leverages flow matching to learn a deterministic vector field in latent space, to effectively bridge the gap between RGB and RAW representations and enable accurate reconstruction of structural details and color information. To further enhance latent transport, we introduce a cross-scale context guidance module that injects hierarchical RGB features into the flow estimation process. Moreover, we design a Dual-domain Latent Autoencoder (DLAE) with a feature alignment constraint to support the proposed latent transport framework, which jointly encodes RGB and RAW inputs while promoting stable training and high-fidelity reconstruction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RAW-Flow outperforms state-of-the-art approaches both quantitatively and visually.

PaperID: 1566, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19418

Authors:Yiwei Lou, Yuanpeng He, Rongchao Zhang, Yongzhi Cao, Hanpin Wang, Yu Huang

Affiliations: Peking University

Title: Multitasks-based Deep Evidential Fusion Network for Blind Image Quality Assessment

Abstract:
Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) methods often incorporate auxiliary tasks to improve performance. However, existing approaches face limitations due to insufficient integration and a lack of flexible uncertainty estimation, leading to suboptimal performance. To address these challenges, we propose a multitasksbased Deep Evidential Fusion Network (DEFNet) for BIQA, which performs multitask optimization with the assistance of scene and distortion type classification tasks. To achieve a more robust and reliable representation, we design a novel trustworthy information fusion strategy. It first combines diverse features and patterns across sub-regions to enhance information richness, and then performs local-global information fusion by balancing fine-grained details with coarse-grained context. Moreover, DEFNet exploits advanced uncertainty estimation technique inspired by evidential learning with the help of normal-inverse gamma distribution mixture. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and authentic distortion datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework. Additional evaluation and analysis are carried out to highlight its strong generalization capability and adaptability to previously unseen scenarios.

PaperID: 1567, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12547

Authors:Zhiguang Lu, Qianqian Xu, Peisong Wen, Siran Dai, Qingming Huang

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Institute of Computing Technology, School of Computer Science and Technology, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: HiGFA: Hierarchical Guidance for Fine-grained Data Augmentation with Diffusion Models

Abstract:
Generative diffusion models show promise for data augmentation. However, applying them to finegrained tasks presents a significant challenge: ensuring synthetic images accurately capture the subtle, category-defining features critical for high fidelity. Standard approaches, such as text-based Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG), often lack the required specificity, potentially generating misleading examples that degrade fine-grained classifier performance. To address this, we propose Hierarchically Guided Fine-grained Augmentation (HiGFA). HiGFA leverages the temporal dynamics of the diffusion sampling process. It employs strong text and transformed contour guidance with fixed strengths in the early-to-mid sampling stages to establish overall scene, style, and structure. In the final sampling stages, HiGFA activates a specialized fine-grained classifier guidance and dynamically modulates the strength of all guidance signals based on prediction confidence. This hierarchical, confidence-driven orchestration enables HiGFA to generate diverse yet faithful synthetic images by intelligently balancing global structure formation with precise detail refinement. Experiments on several FGVC datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of HiGFA.

PaperID: 1568, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.18924

Authors:Feifan Luo, Hongyang Chen

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Zhejiang Lab

Title: Unsupervised Contrastive Learning for Efficient and Robust Spectral Shape Matching

Abstract:
Estimating correspondences between pairs of nonrigid deformable 3D shapes remains a significant challenge in computer vision and graphics. While deep functional map methods have become the go-to solution for addressing this problem, they primarily focus on optimizing pointwise and functional maps either individually or jointly, rather than directly enhancing feature representations in the embedding space, which often results in inadequate feature quality and suboptimal matching performance. Furthermore, these approaches heavily rely on traditional functional map techniques, such as time-consuming functional map solvers, which incur substantial computational costs. In this work, we introduce, for the first time, a novel unsupervised contrastive learning-based approach for efficient and robust 3D shape matching. We begin by presenting an unsupervised contrastive learning framework that promotes feature learning by maximizing consistency within positive similarity pairs and minimizing it within negative similarity pairs, thereby improving both the consistency and discriminability of the learned features. We then design a significantly simplified functional map learning architecture that eliminates the need for computationally expensive functional map solvers and multiple auxiliary functional map losses, greatly enhancing computational efficiency. By integrating these two components into a unified two-branch pipeline, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both accuracy and efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach is not only computationally efficient but also outperforms current state-of-the-art methods across various challenging benchmarks, including near-isometric, non-isometric, and topologically inconsistent scenarios—even surpassing supervised techniques.

PaperID: 1569, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12089

Authors:Xingpei Ma, Shenneng Huang, Jiaran Cai, Yuansheng Guan, Shen Zheng, Hanfeng Zhao, Qiang Zhang, Shunsi Zhang

Affiliations: Guangzhou Quwan Network Technology Co. Limited Ltd

Title: Training-Free Multi-Character Audio-Driven Animation via Diffusion Transformer with Reward Feedback

Abstract:
Recent advances in diffusion models have significantly improved audiodriven human video generation, surpassing traditional methods in both quality and controllability. However, existing approaches still face challenges in lip-sync accuracy, temporal coherence for long video generation, and multi-character animation. In this work, we propose a diffusion transformer (DiT)-based framework for generating lifelike talking videos of arbitrary length, and introduce a training-free method for multi-character audio-driven animation. First, we employ a LoRA-based training strategy combined with a position shift inference approach, which enables efficient long video generation while preserving the capabilities of the foundation model. Moreover, we combine partial parameter updates with reward feedback to enhance both lip synchronization and natural body motion. Finally, we propose a training-free approach, Mask Classifier-Free Guidance (Mask-CFG), for multi-character animation, which requires no specialized datasets or model modifications and supports audio-driven animation for three or more characters. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, achieving high-quality, temporally coherent, and multi-character audio-driven video generation in a simple, efficient, and cost-effective manner.

PaperID: 1570, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23022

Authors:Xiafeng Man, Zhipeng Wei, Jingjing Chen

Affiliations: College of Future Information Technology, Fudan University, University of California, Berkeley International Computer Science Institute, Institute of Trustworthy Embodied AI

Title: Copyright Infringement Detection in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via Differential Privacy

Abstract:
The widespread deployment of large vision models such as Stable Diffusion raises significant legal and ethical concerns, as these models can memorize and reproduce copyrighted content without authorization. Existing detection approaches often lack robustness and fail to provide rigorous theoretical underpinnings. To address these gaps, we formalize the concept of copyright infringement and its detection from the perspective of Differential Privacy (DP), and introduce the conditional sensitivity metric, a concept analogous to sensitivity in DP, that quantifies the deviation in a diffusion model's output caused by the inclusion or exclusion of a specific training data point. To operationalize this metric, we propose DPlus-Minus (DPM), a novel post-hoc detection framework that identifies copyright infringement in text-to-image diffusion models. Specifically, DPM simulates inclusion and exclusion processes by fine-tuning models in two opposing directions: learning or unlearning. Besides, to disentangle concept-specific influence from the global parameter shifts induced by fine-tuning, DPM computes confidence scores over orthogonal prompt distributions using statistical metrics. Moreover, to facilitate standardized benchmarking, we also construct the Copyright Infringement Detection Dataset (CIDD), a comprehensive resource for evaluating detection across diverse categories. Our results demonstrate that DPM reliably detects infringement content without requiring access to the original training dataset or text prompts, offering an interpretable and practical solution for safeguarding intellectual property in the era of generative AI.

PaperID: 1571, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.21503

Authors:Hoang-Nhat Nguyen

Affiliations: Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, Hanoi University of Science and Technology

Title: AHAN: Asymmetric Hierarchical Attention Network for Identical Twin Face Verification

Abstract:
Identical twin face verification represents an extreme finegrained recognition challenge where even state-of-the-art systems fail due to overwhelming genetic similarity. Current face recognition methods achieve over 99.8% accuracy on standard benchmarks but drop dramatically to 88.9% when distinguishing identical twins, exposing critical vulnerabilities in biometric security systems. The difficulty lies in learning features that capture subtle, non-genetic variations that uniquely identify individuals. We propose the Asymmetric Hierarchical Attention Network (AHAN), a novel architecture specifically designed for this challenge through multi-granularity facial analysis. AHAN introduces a Hierarchical Cross-Attention (HCA) module that performs multi-scale analysis on semantic facial regions, enabling specialized processing at optimal resolutions. We further propose a Facial Asymmetry Attention Module (FAAM) that learns unique biometric signatures by computing cross-attention between left and right facial halves, capturing subtle asymmetric patterns that differ even between twins. To ensure the network learns truly individuating features, we introduce Twin-Aware Pair-Wise Cross-Attention (TA-PWCA), a training-only regularization strategy that uses each subject's own twin as the hardest possible distractor. Extensive experiments on the ND TWIN dataset demonstrate that AHAN achieves 92.3% twin verification accuracy, representing a 3.4 percentage point improvement over state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 1572, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.20687

Authors:Bo Peng, Pi Bu, Keyu Pan, Xinrun Xu, Yingxiu Zhao, Miao Chen, Yang Du, Lin Li, Jun Song, Tong Xu

Affiliations: Alibaba Group, Independent Researcher, Institute of Software, University of Science and Technology of China

Title: How Foundational Skills Influence VLM-based Embodied Agents: A Native Perspective

Abstract:
Recent advances in vision–language models (VLMs) have shed light on humanlevel embodied intelligence. However, existing benchmarks for VLM-driven embodied agents still rely on high-level commands or discretised action spaces—``non-native'' settings that diverge markedly from the real world. Moreover, current benchmarks focus exclusively on high-level tasks, while lacking joint evaluation and analysis on both low- and high-level. To bridge these gaps, we present NativeEmbodied, a challenging benchmark for VLM-driven embodied agents that adopts a unified, native low-level action space. Built upon diverse simulated scenes, NativeEmbodied first designs three representative high-level tasks in complex scenarios to evaluate overall performance. For more detailed and comprehensive performance analysis, we further decouple the entangled skills behind complex tasks and construct four types of low-level tasks, each corresponding to a key fundamental embodied skill. This joint evaluation across task and skill granularities enables a fine-grained assessment of embodied agent. Comprehensive experiments on the best VLMs reveal pronounced deficiencies in certain fundamental embodied skills. Further analysis shows that these bottlenecks severely constrain performance on high-level tasks. Our NativeEmbodied not only pinpoints the key challenges faced by current VLM-driven embodied agents, but also provides valuable insight for future development of this field.

PaperID: 1573, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09469

Authors:Ying Peng, Hongsen Ye, Changxin Huang, Xiping Hu, Jian Chen, Runhao Zeng

Affiliations: Shenzhen MSU-BIT University, Shenzhen University, Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, South China University of Technology

Title: Revisiting Cross-Architecture Distillation: Adaptive Dual-Teacher Transfer for Lightweight Video Models

Abstract:
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved strong performance in video action recognition, but their high computational cost limits their practicality. Lightweight CNNs are more efficient but suffer from accuracy gaps. CrossArchitecture Knowledge Distillation (CAKD) addresses this by transferring knowledge from ViTs to CNNs, yet existing methods often struggle with architectural mismatch and overlook the value of stronger homogeneous CNN teachers. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Dual-Teacher Knowledge Distillation framework that leverages both a heterogeneous ViT teacher and a homogeneous CNN teacher to collaboratively guide a lightweight CNN student. We introduce two key components: (1) Discrepancy-Aware Teacher Weighting, which dynamically fuses the predictions from ViT and CNN teachers by assigning adaptive weights based on teacher confidence and prediction discrepancy with the student, enabling more informative and effective supervision; and (2) a Structure Discrepancy-Aware Distillation strategy, where the student learns the residual features between ViT and CNN teachers via a lightweight auxiliary branch, focusing on transferable architectural differences without mimicking all of ViT’s high-dimensional patterns. Extensive experiments on benchmarks including HMDB51, EPIC-KITCHENS-100, and Kinetics-400, demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art distillation approaches, achieving notable performance improvements with a maximum accuracy gain of 5.95% on HMDB51.

PaperID: 1574, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.17258

Authors:Joao Alexandre Cardeira Pereira, Vasco Lopes, João C. Neves, David Semedo

Affiliations: NOVA LINCS, Lisboa NOVA FCT, Lisboa DeepNeuronic, Lisboa University of Beira Interior

Title: FineVAU: A Novel Human-Aligned Benchmark for Fine-Grained Video Anomaly Understanding

Abstract:
Video Anomaly Understanding (VAU) is a novel task focused on describing unusual occurrences in videos. Despite growing interest, the evaluation of VAU remains an open challenge. Existing benchmarks rely on ngram-based metrics (e.g., BLEU, ROUGE-L) or LLM-based evaluation. The first fails to capture the rich, free-form, and visually grounded nature of LVLM responses, while the latter focuses on assessing language quality over factual relevance, often resulting in subjective judgments that are misaligned with human perception. In this work, we address this issue by proposing FineVAU, a new benchmark for VAU that shifts the focus towards rich, fine-grained and domain-specific understanding of anomalous videos. We formulate VAU as a three-fold problem, with the goal of comprehensively understanding key descriptive elements of anomalies in video: events (What), participating entities (Who) and location (Where). Our benchmark introduces a) FV-Score, a novel, human-aligned evaluation metric that assesses the presence of critical visual elements in LVLM answers, providing interpretable, fine-grained feedback; and b) FineW³, a novel, comprehensive dataset curated through a structured and fully automatic procedure that augments existing human annotations with high quality, fine-grained visual information. Human evaluation reveals that our proposed metric has a superior alignment with human perception of anomalies in comparison to current approaches. Detailed experiments on FineVAU unveil critical limitations in LVLM's ability to perceive anomalous events that require spatial and fine-grained temporal understanding, despite strong performance on coarse grain, static information, and events with strong visual cues.

PaperID: 1575, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19800

Authors:Dongbo Shi, Shen Cao, Lubin Fan, Bojian Wu, Jinhui Guo, Ligang Liu, Renjie Chen

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, Independent Researcher

Title: TrackGS: Optimizing COLMAP-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting with Global Track Constraints

Abstract:
We present TrackGS, a novel method to integrate global feature tracks with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for COLMAPfree novel view synthesis. While 3DGS delivers impressive rendering quality, its reliance on accurate precomputed camera parameters remains a significant limitation. Existing COLMAP-free approaches depend on local constraints that fail in complex scenarios. Our key innovation lies in leveraging feature tracks to establish global geometric constraints, enabling simultaneous optimization of camera parameters and 3D Gaussians. Specifically, we: (1) introduce track-constrained Gaussians that serve as geometric anchors, (2) propose novel 2D and 3D track losses to enforce multi-view consistency, and (3) derive differentiable formulations for camera intrinsics optimization. Extensive experiments on challenging real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with much lower pose error than previous methods while maintaining superior rendering quality. Our approach eliminates the need for COLMAP preprocessing, making 3DGS more accessible for practical applications.

PaperID: 1576, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11576

Authors:Yumeng Shi, Quanyu Long, Yin Wu, Wenya Wang

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University

Title: Causality Matters: How Temporal Information Emerges in Video Language Models

Abstract:
Video language models (VideoLMs) have made significant progress in multimodal understanding. However, temporal understanding, which involves identifying event order, duration, and relationships across time, still remains a core challenge. Prior works emphasize positional encodings (PEs) as a key mechanism for encoding temporal structure. Surprisingly, we find that removing or modifying PEs in video inputs yields minimal degradation in the performance of temporal understanding. In contrast, reversing the frame sequence while preserving the original PEs causes a substantial drop. To explain this behavior, we conduct substantial analysis experiments to trace how temporal information is integrated within the model. We uncover a causal information pathway: temporal cues are progressively synthesized through interframe attention, aggregated in the final frame, and subsequently integrated into the query tokens. This emergent mechanism shows that temporal reasoning emerges from inter-visual token interactions under the constraints of causal attention, which implicitly encodes temporal structure. Based on these insights, we propose two efficiency-oriented strategies: staged cross-modal attention and a temporal exit mechanism for early token truncation. Experiments on two benchmarks validate the effectiveness of both approaches.

PaperID: 1577, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12200

Authors:Sujun Sun, Haowen Gu, Cheng Xie, Yanxu Ren, Mingwu Ren, Haofeng Zhang

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Science and Technology

Title: Bridging Granularity Gaps: Hierarchical Semantic Learning for Cross-domain Few-shot Segmentation

Abstract:
Crossdomain Few-shot Segmentation (CD-FSS) aims to segment novel classes from target domains that are not involved in training and have significantly different data distributions from the source domain, using only a few annotated samples, and recent years have witnessed significant progress on this task. However, existing CD-FSS methods primarily focus on style gaps between source and target domains while ignoring segmentation granularity gaps, resulting in insufficient semantic discriminability for novel classes in target domains. Therefore, we propose a Hierarchical Semantic Learning (HSL) framework to tackle this problem. Specifically, we introduce a Dual Style Randomization (DSR) module and a Hierarchical Semantic Mining (HSM) module to learn hierarchical semantic features, thereby enhancing the model's ability to recognize semantics at varying granularities. DSR simulates target domain data with diverse foreground-background style differences and overall style variations through foreground and global style randomization respectively, while HSM leverages multi-scale superpixels to guide the model to mine intra-class consistency and inter-class distinction at different granularities. Additionally, we also propose a Prototype Confidence-modulated Thresholding (PCMT) module to mitigate segmentation ambiguity when foreground and background are excessively similar. Extensive experiments are conducted on four popular target domain datasets, and the results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

PaperID: 1578, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08987

Authors:Yifei Sun, Yuzhi He, Junhao Jia, Jinhong Wang, Ruiquan Ge, Changmiao Wang, Hongxia Xu

Affiliations: Transvascular Implantation Devices Research Institute, Zhejiang University, Xidian University, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data, China WeDoctor Cloud and Liangzhu Laboratory

Title: WDT-MD: Wavelet Diffusion Transformers for Microaneurysm Detection in Fundus Images

Abstract:
Microaneurysms (MAs), the earliest pathognomonic signs of Diabetic Retinopathy (DR), present as sub60 μm lesions in fundus images with highly variable photometric and morphological characteristics, rendering manual screening not only labor-intensive but inherently error-prone. While diffusion-based anomaly detection has emerged as a promising approach for automated MA screening, its clinical application is hindered by three fundamental limitations. First, these models often fall prey to "identity mapping", where they inadvertently replicate the input image. Second, they struggle to distinguish MAs from other anomalies, leading to high false positives. Third, their suboptimal reconstruction of normal features hampers overall performance. To address these challenges, we propose a Wavelet Diffusion Transformer framework for MA Detection (WDT-MD), which features three key innovations: a noise-encoded image conditioning mechanism to avoid "identity mapping" by perturbing image conditions during training; pseudo-normal pattern synthesis via inpainting to introduce pixel-level supervision, enabling discrimination between MAs and other anomalies; and a wavelet diffusion Transformer architecture that combines the global modeling capability of diffusion Transformers with multi-scale wavelet analysis to enhance reconstruction of normal retinal features. Comprehensive experiments on the IDRiD and e-ophtha MA datasets demonstrate that WDT-MD outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both pixel-level and image-level MA detection. This advancement holds significant promise for improving early DR screening.

PaperID: 1579, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03373

Authors:Ni Tang, Xiaotong Luo, Zihan Cheng, Liangtai Zhou, Dongxiao Zhang, Yanyun Qu

Affiliations: School of Informatics, Xiamen University, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Jimei University, Ministry of Education of China

Title: Diffusion Once and Done: Degradation-Aware LoRA for All-in-One Image Restoration

Abstract:
Diffusion models have revealed powerful potential in allin-one image restoration (AiOIR), which is talented in generating abundant texture details. The existing AiOIR methods either retrain a diffusion model or fine-tune the pretrained diffusion model with extra conditional guidance. However, they often suffer from high inference costs and limited adaptability to diverse degradation types. In this paper, we propose an efficient AiOIR method, Diffusion Once and Done (DOD), which aims to achieve superior restoration performance with only one-step sampling of Stable Diffusion (SD) models. Specifically, multi-degradation feature modulation is first introduced to capture different degradation prompts with a pretrained diffusion model. Then, parameter-efficient conditional low-rank adaptation integrates the prompts to enable the fine-tuning of the SD model for adapting to different degradation types. Besides, a high-fidelity detail enhancement module is integrated into the decoder of SD to improve structural and textural details. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing diffusion-based restoration approaches in both visual quality and inference efficiency.

PaperID: 1580, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11436

Authors:Xuanyu Tian, Lixuan Chen, Qing Wu, Xiao Wang, Jie Feng, Yuyao Zhang, Hongjiang Wei

Affiliations: University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: Unsupervised Motion-Compensated Decomposition for Cardiac MRI Reconstruction via Neural Representation

Abstract:
Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging is widely used to characterize cardiac morphology and function. To accelerate CMR imaging, various methods have been proposed to recover highquality spatiotemporal CMR images from highly undersampled k-t space data. However, current CMR reconstruction techniques either fail to achieve satisfactory image quality or are restricted by the scarcity of ground truth data, leading to limited applicability in clinical scenarios. In this work, we proposed MoCo‑INR, a new unsupervised method that integrates implicit neural representations (INR) with the conventional motion‑compensated (MoCo) framework. Using the explicit motion modeling and the continuous prior of INRs, our MoCo-INR can produce accurate cardiac motion decomposition and high-quality CMR reconstruction. Moreover, we present a new INR network architecture tailored to the CMR problem, which can greatly stabilize model optimization. Experiments on retrospective (i.e., simulated) datasets demonstrate the superiority of MoCo‑INR over state‑of‑the‑art methods, achieving fast convergence and fine‑detailed reconstructions at ultra‑high acceleration factors (e.g., 20x in VISTA sampling). In addition, evaluations on prospective (i.e., real-acquired) free‑breathing CMR scans highlight its clinical practicality for real‑time imaging. Several ablation studies also confirm the effectiveness of critical components of MoCo-INR.

PaperID: 1581, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12044

Authors:Cheng-Chang Tsai, Kai-Wen Cheng, Chun-Shien Lu

Affiliations: Institute of Information Science, National Taiwan University, Academia Sinica

Title: FedSDA: Federated Stain Distribution Alignment for Non-IID Histopathological Image Classification

Abstract:
Federated learning (FL) has shown success in collaboratively training a model among decentralized data resources without directly sharing privacysensitive training data. Despite recent advances, non-IID (non-independent and identically distributed) data poses an inevitable challenge that hinders the use of FL. In this work, we address the issue of non-IID histopathological images with feature distribution shifts from an intuitive perspective that has only received limited attention. Specifically, we address this issue from the perspective of data distribution by solely adjusting the data distributions of all clients. Building on the success of diffusion models in fitting data distributions and leveraging stain separation to extract the pivotal features that are closely related to the non-IID properties of histopathological images, we propose a Federated Stain Distribution Alignment (FedSDA) method. FedSDA aligns the stain distribution of each client with a target distribution in an FL framework to mitigate distribution shifts among clients. Furthermore, considering that training diffusion models on raw data in FL has been shown to be susceptible to privacy leakage risks, we circumvent this problem while still effectively achieving alignment. Extensive experimental results show that FedSDA is not only effective in improving baselines that focus on mitigating disparities across clients’ model updates but also outperforms baselines that address the non-IID data issues from the perspective of data distribution. We show that FedSDA provides valuable and practical insights for the computational pathology community.

PaperID: 1582, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12126

Authors:Guocun Wang, Kenkun Liu, Jing Lin, Guorui Song, Jian Li, Xiaoguang Han

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), Nanyang Technological University

Title: UniMo: Unified Motion Generation and Understanding with Chain of Thought

Abstract:
Existing 3D human motion generation and understanding methods often exhibit limited interpretability, restricting effective mutual enhancement between these inherently related tasks. While current unified frameworks based on large language models (LLMs) leverage linguistic priors, they frequently encounter challenges in semantic alignment and task coherence. Moreover, the nexttoken prediction paradigm in LLMs is ill-suited for motion sequences, causing cumulative prediction errors. To address these limitations, we propose UniMo, a novel framework that integrates motion-language information and interpretable chain of thought (CoT) reasoning into the LLM via supervised fine-tuning (SFT). We further introduce reinforcement learning with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) as a post-training strategy that optimizes over groups of tokens to enforce structural correctness and semantic alignment, mitigating cumulative errors in motion token prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniMo significantly outperforms existing unified and task-specific models, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both motion generation and understanding.

PaperID: 1583, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.16362

Authors:Ruizhi Wang, Weihan Li, Zunlei Feng, Haofei Zhang, Mingli Song, Jiayu Wang, Jie Song, Li Sun

Affiliations: School of Software Technology, Zhejiang University, State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, College of Computer Science and Technology, Ningbo Global Innovation Center

Title: D3-RSMDE: 40× Faster and High-Fidelity Remote Sensing Monocular Depth Estimation

Abstract:
Realtime, high-fidelity monocular depth estimation from remote sensing imagery is crucial for numerous applications, yet existing methods face a stark trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Although using Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones for dense prediction is fast, they often exhibit poor perceptual quality. Conversely, diffusion models offer high fidelity but at a prohibitive computational cost. To overcome these limitations, we propose Depth Detail Diffusion for Remote Sensing Monocular Depth Estimation (D³-RSMDE), an efficient framework designed to achieve an optimal balance between speed and quality. Our framework first leverages a ViT-based module to rapidly generate a high-quality preliminary depth map construction, which serves as a structural prior, effectively replacing the time-consuming initial structure generation stage of diffusion models. Based on this prior, we propose a Progressive Linear Blending Refinement (PLBR) strategy, which uses a lightweight U-Net to refine the details in only a few iterations. The entire refinement step operates efficiently in a compact latent space supported by a Variational Autoencoder (VAE). Extensive experiments demonstrate that D³-RSMDE achieves a notable 11.85% reduction in the Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) perceptual metric over leading models like Marigold, while also achieving over a 40× speedup in inference and maintaining VRAM usage comparable to lightweight ViT models.

PaperID: 1584, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07103

Authors:Sirui Wang, Jiang He, Natàlia Blasco Andreo, Xiao Xiang Zhu

Affiliations: Technical University of Munich, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Title: GEWDiff: Geometric Enhanced Wavelet-based Diffusion Model for Hyperspectral Image Super-resolution

Abstract:
Improving the quality of hyperspectral images (HSIs), such as through superresolution, is a crucial research area. However, generative modeling for HSIs presents several challenges. Due to their high spectral dimensionality, HSIs are too memory-intensive for direct input into conventional diffusion models. Furthermore, general generative models lack an understanding of the topological and geometric structures of ground objects in remote sensing imagery. In addition, most diffusion models optimize loss functions at the noise level, leading to a non-intuitive convergence behavior and suboptimal generation quality for complex data. To address these challenges, we propose a Geometric Enhanced Wavelet-based Diffusion Model (GEWDiff), a novel framework for reconstructing hyperspectral images at 4-times super-resolution. A wavelet-based encoder-decoder is introduced that efficiently compresses HSIs into a latent space while preserving spectral-spatial information. To avoid distortion during generation, we incorporate a geometry-enhanced diffusion process that preserves the geometric features. Furthermore, a multi-level loss function was designed to guide the diffusion process, promoting stable convergence and improved reconstruction fidelity. Our model demonstrated state-of-the-art results across multiple dimensions, including fidelity, spectral accuracy, visual realism, and clarity.

PaperID: 1585, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05172

Authors:Wentao Wang, Chunyang Liu, Kehua Sheng, Bo Zhang, Yan Wang

Affiliations: Institute for AI Industry Research, Tsinghua University, Didi Chuxing

Title: Semore: VLM-guided Enhanced Semantic Motion Representations for Visual Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
The growing exploration of Large Language Models (LLM) and VisionLanguage Models (VLM) has opened avenues for enhancing the effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL). However, existing LLM-based RL methods often focus on the guidance of control policy and encounter the challenge of limited representations of the backbone networks. To tackle this problem, we introduce Enhanced Semantic Motion Representations (Semore), a new VLM-based framework for visual RL, which can simultaneously extract semantic and motion representations through a dual-path backbone from the RGB flows. Semore utilizes VLM with common-sense knowledge to retrieve key information from observations, while using the pre-trained clip to achieve the text-image alignment, thereby embedding the ground-truth representations into the backbone. To efficiently fuse semantic and motion representations for decision-making, our method adopts a separately supervised approach to simultaneously guide the extraction of semantics and motion, while allowing them to interact spontaneously. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, under the guidance of VLM at the feature level, our method exhibits efficient and adaptive ability compared to state-of-the-art methods. All codes are released.

PaperID: 1586, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09994

Authors:Yunxiao Wang, Meng Liu, Wenqi Liu, Xuemeng Song, Bin Wen, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Di Zhang, Guorui Zhou, Liqiang Nie

Affiliations: Shandong University, Shandong Jianzhu University, Southern University of Science and Technology, Kuaishou Technology

Title: TIME: Temporal-Sensitive Multi-Dimensional Instruction Tuning and Robust Benchmarking for Video-LLMs

Abstract:
Video large language models have achieved remarkable performance in tasks such as video question answering, however, their temporal understanding remains suboptimal. To address this limitation, we curate a dedicated instruction finetuning dataset that focuses on enhancing temporal comprehension across five key dimensions. In order to reduce reliance on costly temporal annotations, we introduce a multi-task prompt fine-tuning approach that seamlessly integrates temporal-sensitive tasks into existing instruction datasets without requiring additional annotations. Furthermore, we develop a novel benchmark for temporal-sensitive video understanding that not only fills the gaps in dimension coverage left by existing benchmarks but also rigorously filters out potential shortcuts, ensuring a more accurate evaluation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the temporal understanding of video-LLMs while avoiding reliance on shortcuts.

PaperID: 1587, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08901

Authors:Riling Wei, Kelu Yao, Chuanguang Yang, Jin Wang, Zhuoyan Gao, Chao Li

Affiliations: Zhejiang Laboratory, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, The University of Hong Kong

Title: Asymmetric Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation: Bridging Modalities with Weak Semantic Consistency

Abstract:
Crossmodal Knowledge Distillation has demonstrated promising performance on paired modalities with strong semantic connections, referred to as Symmetric Cross-modal Knowledge Distillation (SCKD). However, implementing SCKD becomes exceedingly constrained in real-world scenarios due to the limited availability of paired modalities. To this end, we investigate a general and effective knowledge learning concept under weak semantic consistency, dubbed Asymmetric Cross-modal Knowledge Distillation (ACKD), aiming to bridge modalities with limited semantic overlap. Nevertheless, the shift from strong to weak semantic consistency improves flexibility but exacerbates challenges in knowledge transmission costs, which we rigorously verified based on optimal transport theory. To mitigate the issue, we further propose a framework, namely SemBridge, integrating a Student-Friendly Matching module and a Semantic-aware Knowledge Alignment module. The former leverages self-supervised learning to acquire semantic-based knowledge and provide personalized instruction for each student sample by dynamically selecting the relevant teacher samples. The latter seeks the optimal transport path by employing Lagrangian optimization. To facilitate the research, we curate a benchmark dataset derived from two modalities, namely Multi-Spectral (MS) and asymmetric RGB images, tailored for remote sensing scene classification. Comprehensive experiments exhibit that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with 7 existing approaches on 6 different model architectures across various datasets.

PaperID: 1588, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03060

Authors:Lekang Wen, Jing Xiao, Liang Liao, Jiajun Chen, Mi Wang

Affiliations: Wuhan University, Xi'an University of Electronic Science and Technology

Title: CHARM: Collaborative Harmonization Across Arbitrary Modalities for Modality-Agnostic Semantic Segmentation

Abstract:
Modalityagnostic Semantic Segmentation (MaSS) aims to achieve robust scene understanding across arbitrary combinations of input modality. Existing methods typically rely on explicit feature alignment to achieve modal homogenization, which dilutes the distinctive strengths of each modality and destroys their inherent complementarity. To achieve cooperative harmonization rather than homogenization, we propose CHARM, a novel complementary learning framework designed to implicitly align content while preserving modality-specific advantages through two components: (1) Mutual Perception Unit (MPU), enabling implicit alignment through window-based cross-modal interaction, where modalities serve as both queries and contexts for each other to discover modality-interactive correspondences; (2) A dual-path optimization strategy that decouples training into Collaborative Learning Strategy (CoL) for complementary fusion learning and Individual Enhancement Strategy (InE) for protected modality-specific optimization. Experiments across multiple datasets and backbones indicate that CHARM consistently outperform the baselines, with significant increment on the fragile modalities. This work shifts the focus from model homogenization to harmonization, enabling cross-modal complementarity for true harmony in diversity.

PaperID: 1589, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18684

Authors:Huimin Wu, Kwang-Ting Cheng, Stephen Lin, Zhirong Wu

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Microsoft Research Asia

Title: A Study of Finetuning Video Transformers for Multi-view Geometry Tasks

Abstract:
This paper presents an investigation of vision transformer learning for multiview geometry tasks, such as optical flow estimation, by fine-tuning video foundation models. Unlike previous methods that involve custom architectural designs and task-specific pretraining, our research finds that general-purpose models pretrained on videos can be readily transferred to multi-view problems with minimal adaptation. The core insight is that general-purpose attention between patches learns temporal and spatial information for geometric reasoning. We demonstrate that appending a linear decoder to the Transformer backbone produces satisfactory results, and iterative refinement can further elevate performance to state-of-the-art levels. This conceptually simple approach achieves top cross-dataset generalization results for optical flow estimation with end-point error (EPE) of 0.69, 1.78, and 3.15 on the Sintel clean, Sintel final, and KITTI datasets, respectively. Our method additionally establishes a new record on the online test benchmark with EPE values of 0.79, 1.88, and F1 value of 3.79. Applications to 3D depth estimation and stereo matching also show strong performance, illustrating the versatility of video-pretrained models in addressing geometric vision tasks.

PaperID: 1590, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12935

Authors:Dianbing Xi, Guoyuan An, Jingsen Zhu, Zhijian Liu, Yuan Liu, Ruiyuan Zhang, Jiayuan Lu, Yuchi Huo, Rui Wang

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University, Independent Contributor, Cornell University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Huawei Technologies Ltd

Title: PFAvatar: Pose-Fusion 3D Personalized Avatar Reconstruction from Real-World Outfit-of-the-Day Photos

Abstract:
We propose PFAvatar (PoseFusion Avatar), a new method that reconstructs high-quality 3D avatars from Outfit of the Day (OOTD) photos, which exhibit diverse poses, occlusions, and complex backgrounds. Our method consists of two stages: (1) fine-tuning a pose-aware diffusion model from few-shot OOTD examples and (2) distilling a 3D avatar represented by a neural radiance field (NeRF). In the first stage, unlike previous methods that segment images into assets (e.g. garments, accessories) for 3D assembly, which is prone to inconsistency, we avoid decomposition and directly model the full-body appearance. By integrating a pre-trained ControlNet for pose estimation and a novel Condition Prior Preservation Loss (CPPL), our method enables end-to-end learning of fine details while mitigating language drift in few-shot training. Our method completes personalization in just 5 minutes, achieving a 48x speed-up compared to previous approaches. In the second stage, we introduce a NeRF-based avatar representation optimized by canonical SMPL-X space sampling and Multi-Resolution 3D-SDS. Compared to mesh-based representations that suffer from resolution-dependent discretization and erroneous occluded geometry, our continuous radiance field can preserve high-frequency textures (e.g., hair) and handle occlusions correctly through transmittance. Experiments demonstrate that PFAvatar outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of reconstruction fidelity, detail preservation, and robustness to occlusions/truncations, advancing practical 3D avatar generation from real-world OOTD albums. In addition, the reconstructed 3D avatars support downstream applications such as virtual try-on, animation, and human video reenactment, further demonstrating the versatility and practical value of our approach.

PaperID: 1591, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.10373

Authors:Yichong Xia, Yimin Zhou, Jinpeng Wang, Bin Chen

Affiliations: Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: Towards Efficient Low-rate Image Compression with Frequency-aware Diffusion Prior Refinement

Abstract:
Recent advancements in diffusionbased generative priors have enabled visually plausible image compression at extremely low bit rates. However, existing approaches suffer from slow sampling processes and suboptimal bit allocation due to fragmented training paradigms. In this work, we propose Accelerate Diffusion-based Image Compression via Consistency Prior Refinement (DiffCR), a novel compression framework for efficient and high-fidelity image reconstruction. At the heart of DiffCR is a Frequency-aware Skip Estimation (FaSE) module that refines the epsilon-prediction prior from a pre-trained latent diffusion model and aligns it with compressed latents at different timesteps via Frequency Decoupling Attention (FDA). Furthermore, a lightweight consistency estimator enables fast two-step decoding by preserving the semantic trajectory of diffusion sampling. Without updating the backbone diffusion model, DiffCR achieves substantial bitrate savings (27.2% BD-rate(LPIPS) and 65.1% BD-rate(PSNR)) and over 10 times speed-up compared to SOTA diffusion-based compression baselines.

PaperID: 1592, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.20311

Authors:Zeyu Xia, Chenxi Sun, Tianyu Xin, Yubo Zeng, Haoyu Chen, Liang-Jian Deng

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: SWIFT：A General Sensitive Weight Identification Framework for Fast Sensor-Transfer Pansharpening

Abstract:
Although deep learningbased methods have achieved promising performance in Pansharpening, they generally suffer from severe performance degradation when applied to data from unseen sensors. Existing cross-domain strategies, including retraining, fine-tuning, and zero-shot methods, fail to simultaneously preserve model architecture and maintain low adaptation costs. Therefore, we are the first to define and address a novel task in the pansharpening field: enhancing a model's cross-sensor generalization at an extremely low cost while keeping the model architecture invariant. To tackle this task, we propose SWIFT (Sensitive Weight Identification for Fast Transfer), a plug-and-play framework. SWIFT first employs an unsupervised manifold-based sampling strategy to efficiently select a high-fidelity subset the most informative target-domain samples. It then leverages this subset to probe a source-domain pre-trained model, identifying and updating only the weight subset most sensitive to the domain shift by analyzing the gradient behavior of its parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SWIFT can be applied to various deep learning models, boosting adaptation efficiency by up to 30-fold. On a single NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU, this reduces adaptation time from hours to as little as one minute. The adapted models not only substantially outperform direct-transfer baselines but also achieve performance competitive with, or even superior to full retraining while using only 3% of the target domain dataset and adapting nearly 10% to 30% of the model’s parameters. This establishs a new state-of-the-art on the WorldView-2 and QuickBird datasets.

PaperID: 1593, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07165

Authors:Muyu Xu, Fangneng Zhan, Xiaoqin Zhang, Ling Shao, Shijian Lu

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University, Harvard University & MIT, Zhejiang University of Technology, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: MuSASplat: Efficient Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Splats via Lightweight Multi-Scale Adaptation

Abstract:
Sparseview 3D Gaussian splatting seeks to render high-quality novel views of 3D scenes from a limited set of input images. While recent pose-free feed-forward methods leveraging pre-trained 3D priors have achieved impressive results, most of them rely on full fine-tuning of large Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones and incur substantial GPU costs. In this work, we introduce MuSASplat, a novel framework that dramatically reduces the computational burden of training pose-free feed-forward 3D Gaussian splats models with little compromise of rendering quality. Central to our approach is a lightweight Multi-Scale Adapter that enables efficient fine-tuning of ViT-based architectures with only a small fraction of training parameters. This design avoids the prohibitive GPU overhead associated with previous full-model adaptation techniques while maintaining high fidelity in novel view synthesis, even with very sparse input views. In addition, we introduce a Feature Fusion Aggregator that integrates features across input views effectively and efficiently. Unlike widely adopted memory banks, the Feature Fusion Aggregator ensures consistent geometric integration across input views and meanwhile mitigates the memory usage, training complexity, and computational costs significantly. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets show that MuSASplat achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality but has significantly reduced parameters and training resource requirements as compared with existing methods.

PaperID: 1594, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11032

Authors:Yanwu Yang, Guinan Su, Jiesi Hu, Francesco Sammarco, Jonas Geiping, Thomas Wolfers

Affiliations: Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Hospital Tübingen, Germany German Center for Mental Health (DZPG), partner site Halle/Jena/Magdeburg, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Harbin Institute of Technology at Shenzhen, China Peng Cheng Laboratory, Germany Department of Psychology, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena

Title: MedSAMix: A Training-Free Model Merging Approach for Medical Image Segmentation

Abstract:
Universal medical image segmentation models have emerged as a promising paradigm due to their strong generalizability across diverse tasks, showing great potential for a wide range of clinical applications. This potential has been partly driven by the success of generalpurpose vision models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), which has inspired the development of various fine-tuned variants for medical segmentation tasks. However, fine-tuned variants like MedSAM are trained on comparatively limited medical imaging data that often suffers from heterogeneity, scarce annotations, and distributional shifts. These challenges limit their ability to generalize across a wide range of medical segmentation tasks. In this regard, we propose MedSAMix, a training-free model merging method that integrates the strengths of both generalist models (e.g., SAM) and specialist models (e.g., MedSAM) for medical image segmentation. In contrast to traditional model merging approaches that rely on manual configuration and often result in suboptimal outcomes, we propose a zero-order optimization method to automatically discover optimal layer-wise merging solutions. Furthermore, for clinical applications, we develop two regimes to meet the demand of domain-specificity and generalizability in different scenarios by single-task optimization and multi-objective optimization respectively. Extensive evaluations on 25 medical segmentation tasks demonstrate that MedSAMix effectively mitigates model bias and consistently improves performance in both domain-specific accuracy and generalization, achieving improvements of 6.67% on specialized tasks and 4.37% on multi-task evaluations.

PaperID: 1595, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07301

Authors:Huizai Yao, Sicheng Zhao, Pengteng Li, Yi Cui, Shuo Lu, Weiyu Guo, Yunfan Lu, Yijie Xu, Hui Xiong

Affiliations: Thrust of Artificial Intelligence, Department of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Tsinghua University, NLPR & MAIS, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR

Title: Beyond Boundaries: Leveraging Vision Foundation Models for Source-Free Object Detection

Abstract:
SourceFree Object Detection (SFOD) aims to adapt a source-pretrained object detector to a target domain without access to source data. However, existing SFOD methods predominantly rely on internal knowledge from the source model, which limits their capacity to generalize across domains and often results in biased pseudo-labels, thereby hindering both transferability and discriminability. In contrast, Vision Foundation Models (VFMs), pretrained on massive and diverse data, exhibit strong perception capabilities and broad generalization, yet their potential remains largely untapped in the SFOD setting. In this paper, we propose a novel SFOD framework that leverages VFMs as external knowledge sources to jointly enhance feature alignment and label quality. Specifically, we design three VFM-based modules: (1) Patch-weighted Global Feature Alignment (PGFA) distills global features from VFMs using patch-similarity–based weighting to enhance global feature transferability; (2) Prototype-based Instance Feature Alignment (PIFA) performs instance-level contrastive learning guided by momentum-updated VFM prototypes; and (3) Dual-source Enhanced Pseudo-label Fusion (DEPF) fuses predictions from detection VFMs and teacher models via an entropy-aware strategy to yield more reliable supervision. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art SFOD performance, validating the effectiveness of integrating VFMs to simultaneously improve transferability and discriminability.

PaperID: 1596, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20898

Authors:Xiao Yu, Zhaojie Fang, Guanyu Zhou, Yin Shen, Huoling Luo, Ye Li, Ahmed Elazab, Xiang Wan, Ruiquan Ge, Changmiao Wang

Affiliations: Hangzhou Dianzi University, Shenzhen Institute of Information Technology, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data

Title: DGSAN: Dual-Graph Spatiotemporal Attention Network for Pulmonary Nodule Malignancy Prediction

Abstract:
Lung cancer continues to be the leading cause of cancerrelated deaths globally. Early detection and diagnosis of pulmonary nodules are essential for improving patient survival rates. Although previous research has integrated multimodal and multi-temporal information, outperforming single modality and single time point, the fusion methods are limited to inefficient vector concatenation and simple mutual attention, highlighting the need for more effective multimodal information fusion. To address these challenges, we introduce a Dual-Graph Spatiotemporal Attention Network, which leverages temporal variations and multimodal data to enhance the accuracy of predictions. Our methodology involves developing a Global-Local Feature Encoder to better capture the local, global, and fused characteristics of pulmonary nodules. Additionally, a Dual-Graph Construction method organizes multimodal features into inter-modal and intra-modal graphs. Furthermore, a Hierarchical Cross-Modal Graph Fusion Module is introduced to refine feature integration. We also compiled a novel multimodal dataset named the NLST-cmst dataset as a comprehensive source of support for related research. Our extensive experiments, conducted on both the NLST-cmst and curated CSTL-derived datasets, demonstrate that our DGSAN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in classifying pulmonary nodules with exceptional computational efficiency.

PaperID: 1597, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00613

Authors:Yating Yu, Congqi Cao, Zhaoying Wang, Weihua Meng, Jie Li, Yuxin Li, Zihao Wei, Zhongpei Shen, Jiajun Zhang

Affiliations: Northwestern Polytechnical University

Title: CueBench: Advancing Unified Understanding of Context-Aware Video Anomalies in Real-World

Abstract:
How far are deep models from realworld video anomaly understanding (VAU)? Current works typically emphasize detecting unexpected occurrences deviating from normal patterns or comprehending anomalous events with interpretable descriptions. However, they exhibit only a superficial comprehension of real-world anomalies, with limited breadth in complex principles and subtle contexts that distinguish the anomalies from normalities, e.g., climbing cliffs with safety gear vs. without it. To this end, we introduce CueBench, the first of its kind Benchmark, devoted to Context-aware video anomalies within a Unified Evaluation framework. We comprehensively establish an event-centric hierarchical taxonomy that anchors two core event types: 14 conditional and 18 absolute anomaly events, defined by their refined semantics from diverse contexts across 174 scenes and 198 attributes. Based on this, we propose to unify and benchmark context-aware VAU with various challenging tasks across recognition, temporal grounding, detection, and anticipation. It also serves as a rigorous and fair probing evaluation suite for generalized and specialized vision-language models (VLMs) across both generative and discriminative paradigms. To address the challenges underlying CueBench, we further develop Cue-R1 based on R1-style reinforcement fine-tuning with verifiable, task-aligned, and hierarchy-refined rewards in a unified generative manner. Extensive results on CueBench reveal that, existing VLMs are still far from satisfactory real-world anomaly understanding, while our Cue-R1 surpasses these state-of-the-art approaches by over 24% on average.

PaperID: 1598, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.22612

Authors:Dafeng Zhang, Yongqi Song, Shizhuo Liu

Affiliations: Samsung R&D Institute China-Beijing (SRC-B)

Title: Enhancing Noise Resilience in Face Clustering via Sparse Differential Transformer

Abstract:
The method used to measure relationships between face embeddings plays a crucial role in determining the performance of face clustering. Existing methods employ the Jaccard similarity coefficient instead of the traditional cosine distance to enhance the measurement accuracy. However, these methods introduce an excessive number of irrelevant nodes, producing Jaccard coefficients with limited discriminative power and adversely affecting clustering performance. To address this issue, we propose a predictiondriven Top-K Jaccard similarity coefficient that enhances the purity of neighboring nodes, thereby improving the reliability of similarity measurements. Nevertheless, accurately predicting the optimal number of neighbors (Top-K) remains challenging, leading to suboptimal clustering results. To overcome this limitation, we develop a Transformer-based prediction model that examines the relationships between the central node and its neighboring nodes near the Top-K to further enhance the reliability of similarity estimation. However, vanilla Transformer, when applied to predict relationships between nodes, often introduces noise due to their overemphasis on irrelevant feature relationships. To address these challenges, we propose a Sparse Differential Transformer (SDT), instead of the vanilla Transformer, to eliminate noise and enhance the model's anti-noise capabilities. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets, such as MS-Celeb-1M, demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, outperforming existing methods and providing a more robust solution for face clustering.

PaperID: 1599, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.05795

Authors:Hao Zhang, Yanping Zha, Qingwei Zhuang, Zhenfeng Shao, Jiayi Ma

Affiliations: Wuhan University

Title: Robust Fusion Controller: Degradation-Aware Image Fusion with Fine-Grained Language Instructions

Abstract:
Current image fusion methods struggle to adapt to realworld environments encompassing diverse degradations with spatially varying characteristics. To address this challenge, we propose a robust fusion controller (RFC) capable of achieving degradation-aware image fusion through fine-grained language instructions, ensuring its reliable application in adverse environments. Specifically, RFC first parses language instructions to innovatively derive the functional condition and the spatial condition, where the former specifies the degradation type to remove, while the latter defines its spatial coverage. Then, a composite control priori is generated through a multi-condition coupling network, achieving a seamless transition from abstract language instructions to latent control variables. Subsequently, we design a hybrid attention-based fusion network to aggregate multi-modal information, in which the obtained composite control priori is deeply embedded to linearly modulate the intermediate fused features. To ensure the alignment between language instructions and control outcomes, we introduce a novel language-feature alignment loss, which constrains the consistency between feature-level gains and the composite control priori. Extensive experiments on publicly available datasets demonstrate that our RFC is robust against various composite degradations, particularly in highly challenging flare scenarios.

PaperID: 1600, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11323

Authors:Haonan Zhang, Xinyao Wang, Boxi Wu, Tu Zheng, Wang Yunhua, Zheng Yang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Shandong Port Land-Sea International Logistics Group Co.

Title: Delving into Dynamic Scene Cue-Consistency for Robust 3D Multi-Object Tracking

Abstract:
3D multiobject tracking is a critical and challenging task in the field of autonomous driving. A common paradigm relies on modeling individual object motion, e.g., Kalman filters, to predict trajectories. While effective in simple scenarios, this approach often struggles in crowded environments or with inaccurate detections, as it overlooks the rich geometric relationships between objects. This highlights the need to leverage spatial cues. However, existing geometry-aware methods can be susceptible to interference from irrelevant objects, leading to ambiguous features and incorrect associations. To address this, we propose focusing on cue-consistency: identifying and matching stable spatial patterns over time. We introduce the Dynamic Scene Cue-Consistency Tracker (DSC-Track) to implement this principle. Firstly, we design a unified spatiotemporal encoder using Point Pair Features (PPF) to learn discriminative trajectory embeddings while suppressing interference. Secondly, our cue-consistency transformer module explicitly aligns consistent feature representations between historical tracks and current detections. Finally, a dynamic update mechanism preserves salient spatiotemporal information for stable online tracking. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes and Waymo Open Datasets validate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach. On the nuScenes benchmark, for instance, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching 73.2% and 70.3% AMOTA on the validation and test sets, respectively.

PaperID: 1601, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10774

Authors:Junjie Zhang, Feng Zhao, Hanqiang Liu, Jun Yu

Affiliations: Xi'an University of Posts and Telecommunications, Shaanxi Normal University, University of Science and Technology of China

Title: Frequency-Aware Vision-Language Multimodality Generalization Network for Remote Sensing Image Classification

Abstract:
The booming remote sensing (RS) technology is giving rise to a novel multimodality generalization task, which requires the model to overcome data heterogeneity while possessing powerful crossscene generalization ability. Moreover, most vision-language models usually describe surface materials using universal texts, lacking proprietary linguistic prior knowledge specific to different RS modalities. In this work, we formalize RS multimodality generalization (RSMG) as a learning paradigm, and propose a frequency-aware vision-language multimodality generalization network (FVMGN) for RS image classification. Specifically, a diffusion-based training-test-time augmentation (DTAug) strategy is designed to reconstruct multimodal land-cover distributions, enriching input information for FVMGN. Following that, to overcome multimodal heterogeneity, a multimodal wavelet disentanglement (MWDis) module is developed to learn cross-domain invariant features by resampling low and high frequency components in the frequency domain. Considering the characteristics of RS vision modalities, shared and proprietary class texts is designed as linguistic inputs for the transformer-based text encoder to extract diverse text features. For multimodal vision inputs, a spatial-frequency-aware image encoder (SFIE) is constructed to realize local-global feature reconstruction and representation. Finally, a multiscale spatial-frequency feature alignment (MSFFA) module is suggested to construct a unified semantic space, ensuring refined multiscale alignment of different text and vision features in spatial and frequency domains. Extensive experiments show that FVMGN has the excellent multimodality generalization ability compared with state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 1602, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14031

Authors:Rong Zhang, Jinxiao Li, Jingnan Wang, Zhiwen Zuo, Jianfeng Dong, Wei Li, Chi Wang, Weiwei Xu, Xun Wang

Affiliations: Zhejiang Gongshang University, Nanjing University, Zhejiang University

Title: FashionMAC: Deformation-Free Fashion Image Generation with Fine-Grained Model Appearance Customization

Abstract:
Garmentcentric fashion image generation aims to synthesize realistic and controllable human models dressing a given garment, which has attracted growing interest due to its practical applications in e-commerce. The key challenges of the task lie in two aspects: (1) faithfully preserving the garment details, and (2) gaining fine-grained controllability over the model's appearance. Existing methods typically require performing garment deformation in the generation process, which often leads to garment texture distortions. Also, they fail to control the fine-grained attributes of the generated models, due to the lack of specifically designed mechanisms. To address these issues, we propose FashionMAC, a novel diffusion-based deformation-free framework that achieves high-quality and controllable fashion showcase image generation. The core idea of our framework is to eliminate the need for performing garment deformation and directly outpaint the garment segmented from a dressed person, which enables faithful preservation of the intricate garment details. Moreover, we propose a novel region-adaptive decoupled attention (RADA) mechanism along with a chained mask injection strategy to achieve fine-grained appearance controllability over the synthesized human models. Specifically, RADA adaptively predicts the generated regions for each fine-grained text attribute and enforces the text attribute to focus on the predicted regions by a chained mask injection strategy, significantly enhancing the visual fidelity and the controllability. Extensive experiments validate the superior performance of our framework compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 1603, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08967

Authors:Ruiqiang Zhang, Zehua Ma, Guanjie Wang, Chang Liu, Hengyi Wang, Weiming Zhang

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China

Title: AuthSig: Safeguarding Scanned Signatures Against Unauthorized Reuse in Paperless Workflows

Abstract:
With the deepening trend of paperless workflows, signatures as a means of identity authentication are gradually shifting from traditional inkon-paper to electronic formats. Despite the availability of dynamic pressure-sensitive and PKI-based digital signatures, static scanned signatures remain prevalent in practice due to their convenience. However, these static images, having almost lost their authentication attributes, cannot be reliably verified and are vulnerable to malicious copying and reuse. To address these issues, we propose AuthSig, a novel static electronic signature framework based on generative models and watermark, which binds authentication information to the signature image. Leveraging the human visual system’s insensitivity to subtle style variations, AuthSig finely modulates style embeddings during generation to implicitly encode watermark bits-enforcing a One Signature, One Use policy. To overcome the scarcity of handwritten signature data and the limitations of traditional augmentation methods, we introduce a keypoint-driven data augmentation strategy that effectively enhances style diversity to support robust watermark embedding. Experimental results show that AuthSig achieves over 98% extraction accuracy under both digital-domain distortions and signature-specific degradations, and remains effective even in print-scan scenarios.

PaperID: 1604, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12107

Authors:Tianxiang Zhang, Peipeng Yu, Zhihua Xia, Longchen Dai, Xiaoyu Zhou, Hui Gao

Affiliations: Jinan University

Title: Fine-Grained DINO Tuning with Dual Supervision for Face Forgery Detection

Abstract:
The proliferation of sophisticated deepfakes poses significant threats to information integrity. While DINOv2 shows promise for detection, existing finetuning approaches treat it as generic binary classification, overlooking distinct artifacts inherent to different deepfake methods. To address this, we propose a DeepFake Fine-Grained Adapter (DFF-Adapter) for DINOv2. Our method incorporates lightweight multi-head LoRA modules into every transformer block, enabling efficient backbone adaptation. DFF-Adapter simultaneously addresses authenticity detection and fine-grained manipulation type classification, where classifying forgery methods enhances artifact sensitivity. We introduce a shared branch propagating fine-grained manipulation cues to the authenticity head. This enables multi-task cooperative optimization, explicitly enhancing authenticity discrimination with manipulation-specific knowledge. Utilizing only 3.5M trainable parameters, our parameter-efficient approach achieves detection accuracy comparable to or even surpassing that of current complex state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 1605, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07253

Authors:Li Zheng, Liangbin Xie, Jiantao Zhou, He YiMin

Affiliations: University of Macau

Title: Universal Adversarial Purification with DDIM Metric Loss for Stable Diffusion

Abstract:
Stable Diffusion (SD) often produces degraded outputs when the training dataset contains adversarial noise. Adversarial purification offers a promising solution by removing adversarial noise from contaminated data. However, existing purification methods are primarily designed for classification tasks and fail to address SDspecific adversarial strategies, such as attacks targeting the VAE encoder, UNet denoiser, or both. To address the gap in SD security, we propose Universal Diffusion Adversarial Purification (UDAP), a novel framework tailored for defending adversarial attacks targeting SD models. UDAP leverages the distinct reconstruction behaviors of clean and adversarial images during Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIM) inversion to optimize the purification process. By minimizing the DDIM metric loss, UDAP can effectively remove adversarial noise. Additionally, we introduce a dynamic epoch adjustment strategy that adapts optimization iterations based on reconstruction errors, significantly improving efficiency without sacrificing purification quality. Experiments demonstrate UDAP’s robustness against diverse adversarial methods, including PID (VAE-targeted), Anti-DreamBooth (UNet-targeted), MIST (hybrid), and robustness-enhanced variants like Anti-Diffusion (Anti-DF) and MetaCloak. UDAP also generalizes well across SD versions and text prompts, showcasing its practical applicability in real-world scenarios.

PaperID: 1606, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19943

Authors:Haoyi Zhong, Fang-Lue Zhang, Andrew Chalmers, Taehyun Rhee

Affiliations: Victoria University of Wellington, University of Melbourne

Title: SE360: Semantic Edit in 360° Panoramas via Hierarchical Data Construction

Abstract:
While instructionbased image editing is emerging, extending it to 360° panorama introduces additional challenges. Existing methods often produce implausible results in both equirectangular projections (ERP) and perspective views. To address these limitations, we propose SE360, a novel framework for multi-condition guided object editing in 360° panoramas. At its core is a novel coarse-to-fine autonomous data generation pipeline without manual intervention. This pipeline leverages a Vision-Language Model (VLM) and adaptive projection adjustment for hierarchical analysis, ensuring the holistic segmentation of objects and their physical context. The resulting data pairs are both semantically meaningful and geometrically consistent, even when sourced from unlabeled panoramas. Furthermore, we introduce a cost-effective, two-stage data refinement strategy to improve data realism and mitigate model overfitting to erasing artifacts. Based on the constructed dataset, we train a Transformer-based diffusion model to allow flexible object editing guided by text, mask, or reference image in 360° panoramas. Our experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods in both visual quality and semantic accuracy.

PaperID: 1607, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.10287

Authors:Hao Zhou, Xiaobao Guo, Yuzhe Zhu, Adams Wai-Kin Kong

Affiliations: College of Computing and Data Science (CCDS), Nanyang Technological University

Title: MACS: Multi-source Audio-to-image Generation with Contextual Significance and Semantic Alignment

Abstract:
Propelled by the breakthrough in deep generative models, audioto-image generation has emerged as a pivotal cross-modal task that converts complex auditory signals into rich visual representations. However, previous works only focus on single-source audio inputs for image generation, ignoring the multi-source characteristic in natural auditory scenes, thus limiting the performance in generating comprehensive visual content. To bridge this gap, we propose a method called MACS to conduct multi-source audio-to-image generation. To our best knowledge, this is the first work that explicitly separates multi-source audio to capture the rich audio components before image generation. MACS is a two-stage method. In the first stage, multi-source audio inputs are separated by a weakly supervised method, where the audio and text labels are semantically aligned by casting into a common space using the large pre-trained CLAP model. We introduce a ranking loss to consider the contextual significance of the separated audio signals. In the second stage, effective image generation is achieved by mapping the separated audio signals to the generation condition using only a trainable adapter and a MLP layer. We preprocess the LLP dataset as the first full multi-source audio-to-image generation benchmark. The experiments are conducted on multi-source, mixed-source, and single-source audio-to-image generation tasks. The proposed MACS outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods in 17 out of the 21 evaluation indexes on all tasks and delivers superior visual quality.

PaperID: 1608, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11688

Authors:Aihua Zhu, Rui Su, Qinglin Zhao, Li Feng, Meng Shen, Shibo He

Affiliations: Macau University of Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University

Title: Hierarchical Schedule Optimization for Fast and Robust Diffusion Model Sampling

Abstract:
Diffusion probabilistic models have set a new standard for generative fidelity but are hindered by a slow iterative sampling process. A powerful trainingfree strategy to accelerate this process is Schedule Optimization, which aims to find an optimal distribution of timesteps for a fixed and small Number of Function Evaluations (NFE) to maximize sample quality. To this end, a successful schedule optimization method must adhere to four core principles: effectiveness, adaptivity, practical robustness, and computational efficiency. However, existing paradigms struggle to satisfy these principles simultaneously, motivating the need for a more advanced solution. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Hierarchical-Schedule-Optimizer (HSO), a novel and efficient bi-level optimization framework. HSO reframes the search for a globally optimal schedule into a more tractable problem by iteratively alternating between two synergistic levels: an upper-level global search for an optimal initialization strategy and a lower-level local optimization for schedule refinement. This process is guided by two key innovations: the Midpoint Error Proxy (MEP), a solver-agnostic and numerically stable objective for effective local optimization, and the Spacing-Penalized Fitness (SPF) function, which ensures practical robustness by penalizing pathologically close timesteps. Extensive experiments show that HSO sets a new state-of-the-art for training-free sampling in the extremely low-NFE regime. For instance, with an NFE of just 5, HSO achieves a remarkable FID of 11.94 on LAION-Aesthetics with Stable Diffusion v2.1. Crucially, this level of performance is attained not through costly retraining, but with a one-time optimization cost of less than 8 seconds, presenting a highly practical and efficient paradigm for diffusion model acceleration.

PaperID: 1609, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20572

Authors:Brendan Juba, Kuldeep S. Meel

Affiliations: Washington University in St. Louis, Georgia Institute of Technology University of Toronto

Title: The Limitations and Power of NP-Oracle Based Functional Synthesis Techniques

Abstract:
Given a Boolean relational specification between inputs and outputs, the problem of functional synthesis is to construct a function that maps each assignment of the input to an assignment of the output such that each tuple of input and output assignments meets the specification. The past decade has witnessed significant improvement in the scalability of functional synthesis tools, allowing them to handle problems with tens of thousands of variables. A common ingredient in these approaches is their reliance on SAT solvers, thereby exploiting the breakthrough advances in SAT solving over the past three decades. While the recent techniques have been shown to perform well in practice, there is little theoretical understanding of the limitations and power of these approaches. The primary contribution of this work is to initiate a systematic theoretical investigation into the power of functional synthesis approaches that rely on NP oracles. We first show that even when small Skolem functions exist, naive bitby-bit learning approaches fail due to the relational nature of specifications. We establish fundamental limitations of interpolation-based approaches proving that even when small Skolem functions exist, resolution-based interpolation must produce exponential-size circuits. We prove that access to an NP oracle is inherently necessary for efficient synthesis. Our main technical result shows that it is possible to use NP oracles to synthesize small Skolem functions in time polynomial in the size of the specification and the size of the smallest sufficient set of witnesses, establishing positive results for a broad class of relational specifications.

PaperID: 1610, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00928

Authors:Jiajun Cao, Qinggang Zhang, Yunbo Tang, Zhishang Xiang, Chang Yang, Jinsong Su

Affiliations: Xiamen University, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: Augmenting Intra-Modal Understanding in MLLMs for Robust Multimodal Keyphrase Generation

Abstract:
Multimodal keyphrase generation (MKP) aims to extract a concise set of keyphrases that capture the essential meaning of paired image–text inputs, enabling structured understanding, indexing, and retrieval of multimedia data across the web and social platforms. Success in this task demands effectively bridging the semantic gap between heterogeneous modalities. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) achieve superior crossmodal understanding by leveraging massive pretraining on image-text corpora, we observe that they often struggle with modality bias and fine-grained intra-modal feature extraction. This oversight leads to a lack of robustness in real-world scenarios where multimedia data is noisy, along with incomplete or misaligned modalities. To address this problem, we propose AimKP, a novel framework that explicitly reinforces intra-modal semantic learning in MLLMs while preserving cross-modal alignment. AimKP incorporates two core innovations: (i) Progressive Modality Masking, which forces fine-grained feature extraction from corrupted inputs by progressively masking modality information during training; (ii) Gradient-based Filtering, that identifies and discards noisy samples, preventing them from corrupting the model’s core cross-modal learning. Extensive experiments validate AimKP’s effectiveness in multimodal keyphrase generation and its robustness across different scenarios.

PaperID: 1611, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22303

Authors:Xinghe Cheng, Zihan Zhang, Jiapu Wang, Liangda Fang, Chaobo He, Quanlong Guan, Shirui Pan, Weiqi Luo

Affiliations: Jinan University, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, South China Normal University, Griffith University

Title: GraphRAG-Induced Dual Knowledge Structure Graphs for Personalized Learning Path Recommendation

Abstract:
Learning path recommendation seeks to provide students with a structured sequence of learning items (e.g., knowledge concepts or exercises) to optimize their learning efficiency. Despite significant efforts in this area, most existing methods primarily rely on prerequisite relations, which present two major limitations: (1) Prerequisite relations between knowledge concepts are difficult to obtain due to the cost of expert annotation, hindering the application of current learning path recommendation methods. (2) Relying on a single sequentially dependent knowledge structure based on prerequisite relations implies that a confusing knowledge concept can disrupt subsequent learning processes, which is referred to as blocked learning. To address these two challenges, we propose a novel approach, GraphRAGInduced Dual Knowledge Structure Graphs for Personalized Learning Path Recommendation (KnowLP), which enhances learning path recommendations by incorporating both prerequisite and similarity relations between knowledge concepts. Specifically, we introduce a knowledge structure graph generation module EDU-GraphRAG that constructs knowledge structure graphs for different educational datasets, significantly improving the applicability of learning path recommendation methods. We then propose a Discrimination Learning-driven Reinforcement Learning (DLRL) module that utilizes similarity relations as fallback relations when prerequisite relations become ineffective, thereby alleviating the blocked learning. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, demonstrating that our method not only achieves state-of-the-art performance but also generates more effective and longer learning paths.

PaperID: 1612, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06913

Authors:Xian Guo, Ben Chen, Siyuan Wang, Ying Yang, Mingyue Cheng, Chenyi Lei, Yuqing Ding, Han Li

Affiliations: Kuaishou Technology, University of Science and Technology of China

Title: OneSug: The Unified End-to-End Generative Framework for E-commerce Query Suggestion

Abstract:
Query suggestion plays a crucial role in enhancing user experience in ecommerce search systems by providing relevant query recommendations that align with users' initial input. This module helps users navigate towards personalized preference needs and reduces typing effort, thereby improving search experience. Traditional query suggestion modules usually adopt multi-stage cascading architectures, for making a well trade-off between system response time and business conversion. But they often suffer from inefficiencies and suboptimal performance due to inconsistent optimization objectives across stages. To address these, we propose OneSug, the first end-to-end generative framework for e-commerce query suggestion. OneSug incorporates a prefix2query representation enhancement module to enrich prefixes using semantically and interactively related queries to bridge content and business characteristics, an encoder-decoder generative model that unifies the query suggestion process, and a reward-weighted ranking strategy with behavior-level weights to capture fine-grained user preferences. Extensive evaluations on large-scale industry datasets demonstrate OneSug's ability for effective and efficient query suggestion. Furthermore, OneSug has been successfully deployed for the entire traffic on the e-commerce search engine in TEST platform for over 1 month, with statistically significant improvements in user top click position (-9.33%), CTR (+2.01%), Order (+2.04%), and Revenue (+1.69%) over the online multi-stage strategy, showing great potential in e-commercial conversion.

PaperID: 1613, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06285

Authors:Peng He, Yanglei Gan, Tingting Dai, Run Lin, Xuexin Li, Yao Liu, Qiao Liu

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Hebei Agricultural University

Title: Exploiting Inter-Session Information with Frequency-enhanced Dual-Path Networks for Sequential Recommendation

Abstract:
Sequential recommendation (SR) aims to predict a user's next item preference by modeling historical interaction sequences. Recent advances often integrate frequencydomain modules to compensate for self-attention's low-pass nature by restoring the high-frequency signals critical for personalized recommendations. Nevertheless, existing frequency-aware solutions process each session in isolation and optimize exclusively with time-domain objectives. Consequently, they overlook cross-session spectral dependencies and fail to enforce alignment between predicted and actual spectral signatures, leaving valuable frequency information under-exploited. To this end, we propose FreqRec, a Frequency-Enhanced Dual-Path Network for sequential Recommendation that jointly captures inter-session and intra-session behaviors via a learnable Frequency-domain Multi-layer Perceptron. Moreover, FreqRec is optimized under a composite objective that combines cross entropy with a frequency-domain consistency loss, explicitly aligning predicted and true spectral signatures. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks show that FreqRec surpasses strong baselines and remains robust under data sparsity and noisy-log conditions.

PaperID: 1614, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17587

Authors:Yuxuan Hu, Jian Chen, Yuhao Wang, Zixuan Li, Jing Xiong, Pengyue Jia, Wei Wang, Chengming Li, Xiangyu Zhao

Affiliations: Shenzhen MSU-BIT University, University of Hong Kong

Title: Emotion and Intention Guided Multi-Modal Learning for Sticker Response Selection

Abstract:
Stickers are widely used in online communication to convey emotions and implicit intentions. The Sticker Response Selection (SRS) task aims to select the most contextually appropriate sticker based on the dialogue. However, existing methods typically rely on semantic matching and model emotional and intentional cues separately, which can lead to mismatches when emotions and intentions are misaligned. To address this issue, we propose Emotion and Intention Guided MultiModal Learning (EIGML). This framework is the first to jointly model emotion and intention, effectively reducing the bias caused by isolated modeling and significantly improving selection accuracy. Specifically, we introduce Dual-Level Contrastive Framework to perform both intra-modality and inter-modality alignment, ensuring consistent representation of emotional and intentional features within and across modalities. In addition, we design an Intention-Emotion Guided Multi-Modal Fusion module that integrates emotional and intentional information progressively through three components: Emotion-Guided Intention Knowledge Selection, Intention-Emotion Guided Attention Fusion, and Similarity-Adjusted Matching Mechanism. This design injects rich, effective information into the model and enables a deeper understanding of the dialogue, ultimately enhancing sticker selection performance. Experimental results on two public datasets show that EIGML outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving higher accuracy and a better understanding of emotional and intentional features.

PaperID: 1615, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09141

Authors:Xuetao Li, Wenke Huang, Nengyuan Pan, Kaiyan Zhao, Songhua Yang, Yiming Wang, Mengde Li, Mang Ye, Jifeng Xuan, Miao Li

Affiliations: Wuhan University, Hubei University, University of Macau

Title: RGMP: Recurrent Geometric-prior Multimodal Policy for Generalizable Humanoid Robot Manipulation

Abstract:
Humanoid robots exhibit significant potential in executing diverse humanlevel skills. However, current research predominantly relies on data-driven approaches that necessitate extensive training datasets to achieve robust multimodal decision-making capabilities and generalizable visuomotor control. These methods raise concerns due to the neglect of geometric reasoning in unseen scenarios and the inefficient modeling of robot-target relationships within the training data, resulting in a significant waste of training resources. To address these limitations, we present the Recurrent Geometric-prior Multimodal Policy (RGMP), an end-to-end framework that unifies geometric-semantic skill reasoning with data-efficient visuomotor control. For perception capabilities, we propose the Geometric-prior Skill Selector, which infuses geometric inductive biases into a vision language model, producing adaptive skill sequences for unseen scenes with minimal spatial common sense tuning. To achieve data-efficient robotic motion synthesis, we introduce the Adaptive Recursive Gaussian Network, which parameterizes robot-object interactions as a compact hierarchy of Gaussian processes that recursively encode multi-scale spatial relationships, yielding dexterous, data-efficient motion synthesis even from sparse demonstrations. Evaluated on both our humanoid robot and desktop robot, the RGMP framework achieves 87% task success in generalization tests and exhibits 5× greater data efficiency than the state-of-the-art model. This performance underscores its superior cross-domain generalization, paving the way for more versatile and data-efficient robotic systems.

PaperID: 1616, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12945

Authors:Yujie Li, Zezhi Shao, Chengqing Yu, Yisong Fu, Tao Sun, Yongjun Xu, Fei Wang

Affiliations: Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: APT: Affine Prototype-Timestamp for Time Series Forecasting Under Distribution Shift

Abstract:
Time series forecasting under distribution shift remains challenging, as existing deep learning models often rely on local statistical normalization (e.g., mean and variance) that fails to capture global distribution shift. Methods like RevIN and its variants attempt to decouple distribution and pattern but still struggle with missing values, noisy observations, and invalid channelwise affine transformation. To address these limitations, we propose Affine Prototype-Timestamp(APT), a lightweight and flexible plug-in module that injects global distribution features into the normalization–forecasting pipeline. By leveraging timestamp-conditioned prototype learning, APT dynamically generates affine parameters that modulate both input and output series, enabling the backbone to learn from self-supervised, distribution-aware clustered instances. APT is compatible with arbitrary forecasting backbones and normalization strategies while introducing minimal computational overhead. Extensive experiments across six benchmark datasets and multiple backbone-normalization combinations demonstrate that APT significantly improves forecasting performance under distribution shift.

PaperID: 1617, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.07019

Authors:Zhiqiang Liu, Yin Hua, Mingyang Chen, Yichi Zhang, Zhuo Chen, Lei Liang, Wen Zhang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University ZJU-Ant Group Joint Lab of Knowledge Graph, Baichuan Inc., Ant Group ZJU-Ant Group Joint Lab of Knowledge Graph

Title: UniHR: Hierarchical Representation Learning for Unified Knowledge Graph Link Prediction

Abstract:
Realworld knowledge graphs (KGs) contain not only standard triple-based facts, but also more complex, heterogeneous types of facts, such as hyper-relational facts with auxiliary key-value pairs, temporal facts with additional timestamps, and nested facts that imply relationships between facts. These richer forms of representation have attracted significant attention due to their enhanced expressiveness and capacity to model complex semantics in real-world scenarios. However, most existing studies suffer from two main limitations: (1) they typically focus on modeling only specific types of facts, thus making it difficult to generalize to real-world scenarios with multiple fact types; and (2) they struggle to achieve generalizable hierarchical (inter-fact and intra-fact) modeling due to the complexity of these representations. To overcome these limitations, we propose UniHR, a Unified Hierarchical Representation learning framework, which consists of a learning-optimized Hierarchical Data Representation (HiDR) module and a unified Hierarchical Structure Learning (HiSL) module. The HiDR module unifies hyper-relational KGs, temporal KGs, and nested factual KGs into triple-based representations. Then HiSL incorporates intra-fact and inter-fact message passing, focusing on enhancing both semantic information within individual facts and enriching the structural information between facts. To go beyond the unified method itself, we further explore the potential of unified representation in complex real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments on 9 datasets across 5 types of KGs demonstrate the effectiveness of UniHR and highlight the strong potential of unified representations.

PaperID: 1618, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16248

Authors:Yun Lu, Xiaoyu Shi, Hong Xie, Chongjun Xia, Zhenhui Gong, Mingsheng Shang

Affiliations: Chongqing Institute of Green and Intelligent Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences Chongqing School, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, The First Affiliated Hospital, University of Science and Technology of China

Title: Revisiting Fairness-aware Interactive Recommendation: Item Lifecycle as a Control Knob

Abstract:
This paper revisits fairnessaware interactive recommendation (e.g., TikTok, KuaiShou) by introducing a novel control knob, i.e., the lifecycle of items. We make threefold contributions. First, we conduct a comprehensive empirical analysis and uncover that item lifecycles in short-video platforms follow a compressed three-phase pattern, i.e., rapid growth, transient stability, and sharp decay, which significantly deviates from the classical four-stage model (introduction, growth, maturity, decline). Second, we introduce LHRL, a lifecycle-aware hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that dynamically harmonizes fairness and accuracy by leveraging phase-specific exposure dynamics. LHRL consists of two key components: (1) PhaseFormer, a lightweight encoder combining STL decomposition and attention mechanisms for robust phase detection; (2) a two-level HRL agent, where the high-level policy imposes phase-aware fairness constraints, and the low-level policy optimizes immediate user engagement. This decoupled optimization allows for effective reconciliation between long-term equity and short-term utility. Third, experiments on multiple real-world interactive recommendation datasets demonstrate that LHRL significantly improves both fairness and user engagement. Furthermore, the integration of lifecycle-aware rewards into existing RL-based models consistently yields performance gains, highlighting the generalizability and practical value of our approach.

PaperID: 1619, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12507

Authors:Jingtian Ma, Jingyuan Wang, Leong Hou U

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, China MIIT Key Laboratory of Data Intelligence and Management, China School of Economics and Management, China MOE Engineering Research Center of Advanced Computer Application Technology, University of Macau, Macau SAR

Title: Hierarchical Frequency-Decomposition Graph Neural Networks for Road Network Representation Learning

Abstract:
Road networks are critical infrastructures underpinning intelligent transportation systems and their related applications. Effective representation learning of road networks remains challenging due to the complex interplay between spatial structures and frequency characteristics in traffic patterns. Existing graph neural networks for modeling road networks predominantly fall into two paradigms: spatialbased methods that capture local topology but tend to over-smooth representations, and spectral-based methods that analyze global frequency components but often overlook localized variations. This spatial-spectral misalignment limits their modeling capacity for road networks exhibiting both coarse global trends and fine-grained local fluctuations. To bridge this gap, we propose HiFiNet, a novel hierarchical frequency-decomposition graph neural network that unifies spatial and spectral modeling. HiFiNet constructs a multi-level hierarchy of virtual nodes to enable localized frequency analysis, and employs a decomposition–updating–reconstruction framework with a topology-aware graph transformer to separately model and fuse low- and high-frequency signals. Theoretically justified and empirically validated on multiple real-world datasets across four downstream tasks, HiFiNet demonstrates superior performance and generalization ability in capturing effective road network representations.

PaperID: 1620, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04001

Authors:Fengran Mo, Jinghan Zhang, Yuchen Hui, Jia Ao Sun, Zhichao Xu, Zhan Su, Jian-Yun Nie

Affiliations: Université de Montréal, Clemson University, University of Utah

Title: ConvMix: A Mixed-Criteria Data Augmentation Framework for Conversational Dense Retrieval

Abstract:
Conversational search aims to satisfy users’ complex information needs via multipleturn interactions. The key challenge lies in revealing real users’ search intent from the context-dependent queries. Previous studies achieve conversational search by fine-tuning a conversational dense retriever with relevance judgments between pairs of context-dependent queries and documents. However, this training paradigm encounters data scarcity issues. To this end, we propose ConvMix, a mixed-criteria framework to augment conversational dense retrieval, which covers more aspects than existing data augmentation frameworks. We design a two-sided relevance judgment augmentation schema in a scalable manner via the aid of large language models. Besides, we integrate the framework with quality control mechanisms to obtain semantically diverse samples and near-distribution supervisions to combine various annotated data. Experimental results on five widely used benchmarks show that the conversational dense retriever trained by our ConvMix framework outperforms previous baseline methods, which demonstrates our superior effectiveness.

PaperID: 1621, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12132

Authors:Zhenqiang Ye, Jinjie Lu, Tianlong Gu, Fengrui Hao, Xuemin Wang

Affiliations: College of Cyber Security, Jinan University Engineering Research Center of Trustworthy AI (Ministry of Education), School of Computer Science and Information Security, Guilin University of Electronic Technology

Title: FairGSE: Fairness-Aware Graph Neural Network Without High False Positive Rates

Abstract:
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as the mainstream paradigm for graph representation learning due to their effective message aggregation. However, this advantage also amplifies biases inherent in graph topology, raising fairness concerns. Existing fairnessaware GNNs provide satisfactory performance on fairness metrics such as Statistical Parity and Equal Opportunity while maintaining acceptable accuracy trade-offs. Unfortunately, we observe that this pursuit of fairness metrics neglects the GNN's ability to predict negative labels, which renders their predications with extremely high False Positive Rates (FPRs), resulting in negative effects in high-risk scenarios. To this end, we advocate that classification performance should be carefully calibrated while improving fairness, rather than simply constraining accuracy loss. Furthermore, we propose Fair GNN via Structural Entropy (FairGSE), a novel framework that maximizes two-dimensional structural entropy (2D-SE) to improve fairness without neglecting false positives. Experiments on several real-world datasets show FairGSE reduces FPR by 39% vs. state-of-the-art fairness-aware GNNs, with comparable fairness improvement.

PaperID: 1622, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01598

Authors:En Yu, Jie Lu, Kun Wang, Xiaoyu Yang, Guangquan Zhang

Affiliations: University of Technology Sydney

Title: Drift-aware Collaborative Assistance Mixture of Experts for Heterogeneous Multistream Learning

Abstract:
Learning from multiple data streams in realworld scenarios is fundamentally challenging due to intrinsic heterogeneity and unpredictable concept drifts. Existing methods typically assume homogeneous streams and employ static architectures with indiscriminate knowledge fusion, limiting generalizability in complex dynamic environments. To tackle this gap, we propose CAMEL, a dynamic Collaborative Assistance Mixture of Experts Learning framework. It addresses heterogeneity by assigning each stream an independent system with a dedicated feature extractor and task-specific head. Meanwhile, a dynamic pool of specialized private experts captures stream-specific idiosyncratic patterns. Crucially, collaboration across these heterogeneous streams is enabled by a dedicated assistance expert. This expert employs a multi-head attention mechanism to distill and integrate relevant context autonomously from all other concurrent streams. It facilitates targeted knowledge transfer while inherently mitigating negative transfer from irrelevant sources. Furthermore, we propose an Autonomous Expert Tuner (AET) strategy, which dynamically manages expert lifecycles in response to drift. It instantiates new experts for emerging concepts (freezing prior ones to prevent catastrophic forgetting) and prunes obsolete ones. This expert-level plasticity provides a robust and efficient mechanism for online model capacity adaptation. Extensive experiments demonstrate CAMEL’s superior generalizability across diverse multistreams and exceptional resilience against complex concept drifts.

PaperID: 1623, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.03280

Authors:Dong Zhang, Lin Li, Ming Li, Amran Bhuiyan, Meng Sun, Xiaohui Tao, Jimmy Huang

Affiliations: Wuhan University of Technology, York University, University of Southern Queensland

Title: Modeling Item-Level Dynamic Variability with Residual Diffusion for Bundle Recommendation

Abstract:
Existing solutions for bundle recommendation (BR) have achieved remarkable effectiveness for predicting the user’s preference for prebuilt bundles. However, bundleitem (B-I) affiliation will vary dynamically in real scenarios. For ex ample, a bundle themed as ‘casual outfit’ may add ‘hat’ or remove ‘watch’ due to factors such as seasonal variations, changes in user preferences or inventory adjustments. Our empirical study demonstrates that the performance of main stream BR models may fluctuate or decline under item-level variability. This paper makes the first attempt to address the above problem and proposes Residual Diffusion for Bundle Recommendation (RDiffBR) as a model-agnostic generative framework which can assist a BR model in adapting this sce nario. During the initial training of the BR model, RDiffBR employs a residual diffusion model to process the item-level bundle embeddings which are generated by the BR model to represent bundle theme via a forward-reverse process. In the inference stage, RDiffBR reverses item-level bundle em beddings obtained by the well-trained bundle model under B-I variability scenarios to generate the effective item-level bundle embeddings. In particular, the residual connection in our residual approximator significantly enhances BR mod els’ ability to generate high-quality item-level bundle embed dings. Experiments on six BRmodelsandfourpublicdatasets from different domains show that RDiffBR improves the per formance of Recall and NDCG of backbone BR models by up to 23%, while only increases training time about 4%.

PaperID: 1624, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05859

Authors:Wenkang Zhang, Yan Zhao, Qiang Wang, Zhixin Xu, Li Song, Zhengxue Cheng

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Visionstar Information Technology (Shanghai) Co.

Title: D-FCGS: Feedforward Compression of Dynamic Gaussian Splatting for Free-Viewpoint Videos

Abstract:
FreeViewpoint Video (FVV) enables immersive 3D experiences, but efficient compression of dynamic 3D representation remains a major challenge. Existing dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting methods couple reconstruction with optimization-dependent compression and customized motion formats, limiting generalization and standardization. To address this, we propose D-FCGS, a novel Feedforward Compression framework for Dynamic Gaussian Splatting. Key innovations include: (1) a standardized Group-of-Frames (GoF) structure with I-P coding, leveraging sparse control points to extract inter-frame motion tensors; (2) a dual prior-aware entropy model that fuses hyperprior and spatial-temporal priors for accurate rate estimation; (3) a control-point-guided motion compensation mechanism and refinement network to enhance view-consistent fidelity. Trained on Gaussian frames derived from multi-view videos, D-FCGS generalizes across diverse scenes in a zero-shot fashion. Experiments show that it matches the rate-distortion performance of optimization-based methods, achieving over 40 times compression compared to the baseline while preserving visual quality across viewpoints. This work advances feedforward compression of dynamic 3DGS, facilitating scalable FVV transmission and storage for immersive applications.

PaperID: 1625, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13637

Authors:Yasunori Akagi, Takeshi Kurashima

Affiliations:

Title: Delta Matters: An Analytically Tractable Model for beta–delta Discounting Agents

Abstract:
Humans exhibit timeinconsistent behavior, in which planned actions diverge from executed actions. Understanding time inconsistency and designing appropriate interventions is a key research challenge in computer science and behavioral economics. Previous work focuses on progress-based tasks and derives a closed-form description of agent behavior, from which they obtain optimal intervention strategies. They model time-inconsistency using the β–δ discounting (quasi-hyperbolic discounting), but the analysis is limited to the case δ = 1. In this paper, we relax that constraint and show that a closed-form description of agent behavior remains possible for the general case 0 < δ ≤ 1. Based on this result, we derive the conditions under which agents abandon tasks and develop efficient methods for computing optimal interventions. Our analysis reveals that agent behavior and optimal interventions depend critically on the value of δ, suggesting that fixing δ = 1 in many prior studies may unduly simplify real-world decision-making processes.

PaperID: 1626, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.14957

Authors:Jaroslaw Byrka, Franciszek Malinka, Tomasz Ponitka

Affiliations: University of Wrocław, Tel Aviv University

Title: Probing EFX via PMMS: (Non-)Existence Results in Discrete Fair Division

Abstract:
We study the fair division of indivisible items and provide new insights into the EFX problem, which is widely regarded as the central open question in fair division, and the PMMS problem, a strictly stronger variant of EFX. Our first result constructs a threeagent instance with two monotone valuations and one additive valuation in which no PMMS allocation exists. Since EFX allocations are known to exist under these assumptions, this establishes a formal separation between EFX and PMMS. We prove existence of fair allocations for three important special cases. We show that EFX allocations exist for personalized bivalued valuations, where for each agent i there exist values aᵢ > bᵢ such that agent i assigns value vᵢ(g) ∈ aᵢ, bᵢ to each good g. We establish an analogous existence result for PMMS allocations when aᵢ is divisible by bᵢ. We also prove that PMMS allocations exist for binary-valued MMS-feasible valuations, where each bundle S has value vᵢ(S) ∈ 0, 1. Notably, this result holds even without assuming monotonicity of valuations and thus applies to the fair division of chores and mixed manna. Finally, we study a class of valuations called pair-demand valuations, which extend the well-studied unit-demand valuations to the case where each agent derives value from at most two items, and we show that PMMS allocations exist in this setting. Our proofs are constructive, and we provide polynomial-time algorithms for all three existence results.

PaperID: 1627, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03438

Authors:Vladimir Davidiuk, Yuriy Dementiev, Artur Ignatiev, Danil Sagunov

Affiliations: St. Petersburg State University, ITMO University

Title: EFX and PO Allocation Exists for Two Types of Goods

Abstract:
We study the problem of fairly and efficiently allocating indivisible goods among agents with additive valuations. We focus on envyfreeness up to any good (EFX) — an important fairness notion in fair division of indivisible goods. A central open question in this field is whether EFX allocations always exist for any number of agents. While recent results have established EFX existence for settings with at most three distinct valuations and for two types of goods, the general case remains unresolved. In this paper, we extend the existent knowledge by proving that EFX allocations satisfying Pareto optimality (PO) always exist and can be computed in quasiliniear time when there are two types of goods, given that the valuations are positive. Our findings demonstrate a fairly simple and efficient algorithm constructing an EFX+PO allocation.

PaperID: 1628, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11475

Authors:Argyrios Deligkas, Gregory Gutin, Mark Jones, Philip R. Neary, Anders Yeo

Affiliations: Royal Holloway University of London, UK Nankai University, Independent Researcher, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark University of Johannesburg, South Africa

Title: Public Goods Games in Directed Networks with Constraints on Sharing

Abstract:
In a public goods game, every player chooses whether or not to buy a good that all neighboring players will have access to. We consider a setting in which the good is indivisible, neighboring players are outneighbors in a directed graph, and there is a capacity constraint on their number, k, that can benefit from the good. This means that each player makes a two-pronged decision: decide whether or not to buy and, conditional on buying, choose which k out-neighbors to share access. We examine both pure and mixed Nash equilibria in the model from the perspective of existence, computation, and efficiency. We perform a comprehensive study for these three dimensions with respect to both sharing capacity (k) and the network structure (the underlying directed graph), and establish sharp complexity dichotomies for each.

PaperID: 1629, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10228

Authors:Thanasis Lianeas, Marios Mertzanidis, Aikaterini Nikolidaki

Affiliations: University of West Attica, Purdue University, National Technical University of Athens

Title: Facility Location for Congesting Commuters and Generalizing the Cost-Distance Problem

Abstract:
In Facility Location problems there are agents that should be connected to facilities and locations where facilities may be opened so that agents can connect to them. We depart from Uncapacitated Facility Location and by assuming that the connection costs of agents to facilities are congestion dependent, we define a novel problem, namely, Facility Location for Congesting (Selfish) Commuters. The connection costs of agents to facilities come as a result of how the agents commute to reach the facilities in an underlying network with cost functions on the edges. Inapproximability results follow from the related literature and thus approximate solutions is all we can hope for. For when the cost functions are nondecreasing we employ in a novel way an approximate version of Caratheodory’s Theorem to show how approximate solutions for different versions of the problem can be derived. For when the cost functions are nonincreasing we show how this problem generalizes the CostDistance problem and provide an algorithm that for this more general case achieves the same approximation guarantees.

PaperID: 1630, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12214

Authors:Ruochen Li, Zhanxing Zhu, Tanqiu Qiao, Hubert P. H. Shum

Affiliations: Durham University, University of Southampton

Title: ViTE: Virtual Graph Trajectory Expert Router for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction

Abstract:
Pedestrian trajectory prediction is critical for ensuring safety in autonomous driving, surveillance systems, and urban planning applications. While early approaches primarily focus on onehop pairwise relationships, recent studies attempt to capture high-order interactions by stacking multiple Graph Neural Network (GNN) layers. However, these approaches face a fundamental trade-off: insufficient layers may lead to under-reaching problems that limit the model's receptive field, while excessive depth can result in prohibitive computational costs. We argue that an effective model should be capable of adaptively modeling both explicit one-hop interactions and implicit high-order dependencies, rather than relying solely on architectural depth. To this end, we propose ViTE (Virtual graph Trajectory Expert router), a novel framework for pedestrian trajectory prediction. ViTE consists of two key modules: a Virtual Graph that introduces dynamic virtual nodes to model long-range and high-order interactions without deep GNN stacks, and an Expert Router that adaptively selects interaction experts based on social context using a Mixture-of-Experts design. This combination enables flexible and scalable reasoning across varying interaction patterns. Experiments on three benchmarks (ETH/UCY, NBA, and SDD) demonstrate that our method consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, validating both its effectiveness and practical efficiency.

PaperID: 1631, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17604

Authors:Jiajun Ma, Yongchao Zhang, Chao Zhang, Zhao Lv, Shengbing Pei

Affiliations: Anhui University

Title: BrainHGT: A Hierarchical Graph Transformer for Interpretable Brain Network Analysis

Abstract:
Graph Transformer shows remarkable potential in brain network analysis due to its ability to model graph structures and complex node relationships. Most existing methods typically model the brain as a flat network, ignoring its modular structure, and their attention mechanisms treat all brain region connections equally, ignoring distancerelated node connection patterns. However, brain information processing is a hierarchical process that involves local and long-range interactions between brain regions, interactions between regions and sub-functional modules, and interactions among functional modules themselves. This hierarchical interaction mechanism enables the brain to efficiently integrate local computations and global information flow, supporting the execution of complex cognitive functions. To address this issue, we propose BrainHGT, a hierarchical Graph Transformer that simulates the brain’s natural information processing from local regions to global communities. Specifically, we design a novel long-short range attention encoder that utilizes parallel pathways to handle dense local interactions and sparse long-range connections, thereby effectively alleviating the over-globalizing issue. To further capture the brain’s modular architecture, we designe a prior-guided clustering module that utilizes a cross-attention mechanism to group brain regions into functional communities and leverage neuroanatomical prior to guide the clustering process, thereby improving the biological plausibility and interpretability. Experimental results indicate that our proposed method significantly improves performance of disease identification, and can reliably capture the sub-functional modules of the brain, demonstrating its interpretability.

PaperID: 1632, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17965

Authors:Xiangfei Sheng, Zhichao Duan, Xiaofeng Pan, Yipo Huang, Zhichao Yang, Pengfei Chen, Leida Li

Affiliations: Xidian University, Chang’an University

Title: TuningIQA: Fine-Grained Blind Image Quality Assessment for Livestreaming Camera Tuning

Abstract:
Livestreaming has become increasingly prevalent in modern visual communication, where automatic camera quality tuning is essential for delivering superior user Quality of Experience (QoE). Such tuning requires accurate blind image quality assessment (BIQA) to guide parameter optimization decisions. Unfortunately, the existing BIQA models typically only predict an overall coarsegrained quality score, which cannot provide fine-grained perceptual guidance for precise camera parameter tuning. To bridge this gap, we first establish FGLive-10K, a comprehensive fine-grained BIQA database containing 10,185 high-resolution images captured under varying camera parameter configurations across diverse livestreaming scenarios. The dataset features 50,925 multi-attribute quality annotations and 19,234 fine-grained pairwise preference annotations. Based on FGLive-10K, we further develop TuningIQA, a fine-grained BIQA metric for livestreaming camera tuning, which integrates human-aware feature extraction and graph-based camera parameter fusion. Extensive experiments and comparisons demonstrate that TuningIQA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art BIQA methods in both score regression and fine-grained quality ranking, achieving superior performance when deployed for livestreaming camera tuning.

PaperID: 1633, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18929

Authors:Zijian Song, Xiaoxin Lin, Tao Pu, Zhenlong Yuan, Guangrun Wang, Liang Lin

Affiliations: Sun Yat-sen University

Title: Human-Centric Open-Future Task Discovery: Formulation, Benchmark, and Scalable Tree-Based Search

Abstract:
Recent progress in robotics and embodied AI is largely driven by Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). However, a key challenge remains underexplored: how can we advance LMMs to discover tasks that assist humans in openfuture scenarios, where human intentions are highly concurrent and dynamic. In this work, we formalize the problem of Human-centric Open-future Task Discovery (HOTD), focusing particularly on identifying tasks that reduce human effort across plausible futures. To facilitate this study, we propose HOTD-Bench, which features over 2K real-world videos, a semi-automated annotation pipeline, and a simulation-based protocol tailored for open-set future evaluation. Additionally, we propose the Collaborative Multi-Agent Search Tree (CMAST) framework, which decomposes complex reasoning through a multi-agent system and structures the reasoning process through a scalable search tree module. In our experiments, CMAST achieves the best performance on the HOTD-Bench, significantly surpassing existing LMMs. It also integrates well with existing LMMs, consistently improving performance.

PaperID: 1634, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09428

Authors:Yuxiao Wang, Yu Lei, Wolin Liang, Weiying Xue, Zhenao Wei, Nan Zhuang, Qi Liu

Affiliations: South China University of Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University, Suzhou City University, Zhejiang University

Title: What-Meets-Where: Unified Learning of Action and Contact Localization in Images

Abstract:
People control their bodies to establish contact with the environment. To comprehensively understand actions across diverse visual contexts, it is essential to simultaneously consider what action is occurring and where it is happening. Current methodologies, however, often inadequately capture this duality, typically failing to jointly model both action semantics and their spatial contextualization within scenes. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel vision task that simultaneously predicts highlevel action semantics and fine-grained body-part contact regions. Our proposed framework, PaIR-Net, comprises three key components: the Contact Prior Aware Module (CPAM) for identifying contact-relevant body parts, the Prior-Guided Concat Segmenter (PGCS) for pixel-wise contact segmentation, and the Interaction Inference Module (IIM) responsible for integrating global interaction relationships. To facilitate this task, we present PaIR (Part-aware Interaction Representation), a comprehensive dataset containing 13,979 images that encompass 654 actions, 80 object categories, and 17 body parts. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that PaIR-Net significantly outperforms baseline approaches, while ablation studies confirm the efficacy of each architectural component.

PaperID: 1635, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08971

Authors:Sicheng Yang, Yukai Huang, Weitong Cai, Shitong Sun, You He, Jiankang Deng, Hang Zhang, Jifei Song, Zhensong Zhang

Affiliations: Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Independent Researcher, Queen Mary University of London, Imperial College London, University of Surrey

Title: Plug-and-Play Clarifier: A Zero-Shot Multimodal Framework for Egocentric Intent Disambiguation

Abstract:
The performance of egocentric AI agents is fundamentally limited by multimodal intent ambiguity. This challenge arises from a combination of underspecified language, imperfect visual data, and deictic gestures, which frequently leads to task failure. Existing monolithic VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) struggle to resolve these multimodal ambiguous inputs, often failing silently or hallucinating responses. To address these ambiguities, we introduce the Plug-and-Play Clarifier, a zero-shot and modular framework that decomposes the problem into discrete, solvable sub-tasks. Specifically, our framework consists of three synergistic modules: (1) a text clarifier that uses dialogue-driven reasoning to interactively disambiguate linguistic intent, (2) a vision clarifier that delivers real-time guidance feedback, instructing users to adjust their positioning for improved capture quality, and (3) a cross-modal clarifier with grounding mechanism that robustly interprets 3D pointing gestures and identifies the specific objects users are pointing to. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework improves the intent clarification performance of small language models (4-8B) by approximately 30%, making them competitive with significantly larger counterparts. We also observe consistent gains when applying our framework to these larger models. Furthermore, our vision clarifier increases corrective guidance accuracy by over 20%, and our cross-modal clarifier improves semantic answer accuracy for referential grounding by 5%. Overall, our method provides a plug-and-play framework that effectively resolves multimodal ambiguity and significantly enhances user experience in egocentric interaction.

PaperID: 1636, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10091

Authors:Qilang Ye, Yu Zhou, Lian He, Jie Zhang, Xuanming Guo, Jiayu Zhang, Mingkui Tan, Weicheng Xie, Yue Sun, Tao Tan, Xiaochen Yuan, Ghada Khoriba, Zitong Yu

Affiliations: VCIP & TMCC & DISSec, College of Computer Science & College of Cryptology and Cyber Science, School of Computer Science & Technology, Great Bay University, Zhongguancun Academy, South China University of Technology, Shenzhen University, Macao Polytechnic University, Nile University

Title: SUGAR: Learning Skeleton Representation with Visual-Motion Knowledge for Action Recognition

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) hold rich implicit knowledge and powerful transferability. In this paper, we explore the combination of LLMs with the human skeleton to perform action classification and description. However, when treating LLM as a recognizer, two questions arise: 1) How can LLMs understand the skeleton? 2) How can LLMs distinguish among actions? To address these problems, we introduce a novel paradigm named learning Skeleton representation with visualmotion knowledge for Action Recognition (SUGAR). In our pipeline, we first utilize off-the-shelf large-scale video models as a knowledge base to generate visual, motion information related to actions. Then, we propose to supervise skeleton learning through this prior knowledge to yield discrete representations. Finally, we use the LLM with untouched pre-training weights to understand these representations and generate the desired action targets and descriptions. Notably, we present a Temporal Query Projection (TQP) module to continuously model the skeleton signals with long sequences. Experiments on several skeleton-based action classification benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of our SUGAR. Moreover, experiments on zero-shot scenarios show that SUGAR is more versatile than linear-based methods.

PaperID: 1637, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16233

Authors:Kewei Chen, Yayu Long, Shuai Li, Mingsheng Shang

Affiliations: Chongqing Institute of Green and Intelligent Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, University of Oulu

Title: FT-NCFM: An Influence-Aware Data Distillation Framework for Efficient VLA Models

Abstract:
The powerful generalization of VisionLanguage-Action (VLA) models is bottlenecked by their heavy reliance on massive, redundant, and unevenly valued datasets, hindering their widespread application. Existing model-centric optimization paths, such as model compression (which often leads to performance degradation) or policy distillation (whose products are model-dependent and lack generality), fail to fundamentally address this data-level challenge. To this end, this paper introduces FT-NCFM, a fundamentally different, data-centric generative data distillation framework. Our framework employs a self-contained Fact-Tracing (FT) engine that combines causal attribution with programmatic contrastive verification to assess the intrinsic value of samples. Guided by these assessments, an adversarial NCFM process synthesizes a model-agnostic, information-dense, and reusable data asset. Experimental results on several mainstream VLA benchmarks show that models trained on just 5% of our distilled coreset achieve a success rate of 85-90% compared with training on the full dataset, while reducing training time by over 80%. Our work demonstrates that intelligent data distillation is a highly promising new path for building efficient, high-performance VLA models.

PaperID: 1638, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06240

Authors:Tzu-Jung Lin, Jia-Fong Yeh, Hung-Ting Su, Chung-Yi Lin, Yi-Ting Chen, Winston H. Hsu

Affiliations: National Taiwan University, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

Title: Affordance-Guided Coarse-to-Fine Exploration for Base Placement in Open-Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation

Abstract:
In openvocabulary mobile manipulation (OVMM), task success often hinges on the selection of an appropriate base placement for the robot. Existing approaches typically navigate to proximity-based regions without considering affordances, resulting in frequent manipulation failures. We propose Affordance-Guided Coarse-to-Fine Exploration, a zero-shot framework for base placement that integrates semantic understanding from vision-language models (VLMs) with geometric feasibility through an iterative optimization process. Our method constructs cross-modal representations, namely Affordance RGB and Obstacle Map+, to align semantics with spatial context. This enables reasoning that extends beyond the egocentric limitations of RGB perception. To ensure interaction is guided by task-relevant affordances, we leverage coarse semantic priors from VLMs to guide the search toward task-relevant regions and refine placements with geometric constraints, thereby reducing the risk of convergence to local optima. Evaluated on five diverse open-vocabulary mobile manipulation tasks, our system achieves an 85% success rate, significantly outperforming classical geometric planners and VLM-based methods. This demonstrates the promise of affordance-aware and multimodal reasoning for generalizable, instruction-conditioned planning in OVMM.

PaperID: 1639, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19257

Authors:Chenghao Liu, Jiachen Zhang, Chengxuan Li, Zhimu Zhou, Shixin Wu, Songfang Huang, Huiling Duan

Affiliations: Peking University

Title: TTF-VLA: Temporal Token Fusion via Pixel-Attention Integration for Vision-Language-Action Models

Abstract:
VisionLanguage-Action (VLA) models process visual inputs independently at each timestep, discarding valuable temporal information inherent in robotic manipulation tasks. This frame-by-frame processing makes models vulnerable to visual noise while ignoring the substantial coherence between consecutive frames in manipulation sequences. We propose Temporal Token Fusion (TTF), a training-free approach that intelligently integrates historical and current visual representations to enhance VLA inference quality. Our method employs dual-dimension detection combining efficient grayscale pixel difference analysis with attention-based semantic relevance assessment, enabling selective temporal token fusion through hard fusion strategies and keyframe anchoring to prevent error accumulation. Comprehensive experiments across LIBERO, SimplerEnv, and real robot tasks demonstrate consistent improvements: 4.0 percentage points average on LIBERO (72.4% vs 68.4% baseline), cross-environment validation on SimplerEnv (4.8% relative improvement), and 8.7% relative improvement on real robot tasks. Our approach proves model-agnostic, working across OpenVLA and VLA-Cache architectures. Notably, TTF reveals that selective Query matrix reuse in attention mechanisms enhances rather than compromises performance, suggesting promising directions for direct KQV matrix reuse strategies that achieve computational acceleration while improving task success rates.

PaperID: 1640, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01247

Authors:Buqing Nie, Yang Zhang, Rongjun Jin, Zhanxiang Cao, Huangxuan Lin, Xiaokang Yang, Yue Gao

Affiliations: MoE Key Lab of Artifcial Intelligence and AI Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: Coordinated Humanoid Robot Locomotion with Symmetry Equivariant Reinforcement Learning Policy

Abstract:
The human nervous system exhibits bilateral symmetry, enabling coordinated and balanced movements. However, existing Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods for humanoid robots neglect morphological symmetry of the robot, leading to uncoordinated and suboptimal behaviors. Inspired by human motor control, we propose Symmetry Equivariant Policy (SEPolicy), a new DRL framework that embeds strict symmetry equivariance in the actor and symmetry invariance in the critic without additional hyperparameters. SE-Policy enforces consistent behaviors across symmetric observations, producing temporally and spatially coordinated motions with higher task performance. Extensive experiments on velocity tracking tasks, conducted in both simulation and real-world deployment with the Unitree G1 humanoid robot, demonstrate that SE-Policy improves tracking accuracy by up to 40% compared to state-of-the-art baselines, while achieving superior spatial-temporal coordination. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of SE-Policy and its broad applicability to humanoid robots.

PaperID: 1641, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.00500

Authors:Zilong Xie, Jingyu Gong, Xin Tan, Zhizhong Zhang, Yuan Xie

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, East China Normal University

Title: Zero-Shot Robotic Manipulation via 3D Gaussian Splatting-Enhanced Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Abstract:
Existing endto-end approaches of robotic manipulation often lack generalization to unseen objects or tasks due to limited data and poor interpretability. While recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate strong commonsense reasoning, they struggle with geometric and spatial understanding required for pose prediction. In this paper, we propose RobMRAG, a 3D Gaussian Splatting-Enhanced Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MRAG) framework for zero-shot robotic manipulation. Specifically, We construct a multi-source manipulation knowledge base containing object contact frames, task completion frames, and pose parameters. During inference, a Hierarchical Multimodal Retrieval module first employs hybrid semantic search to find task-relevant object prototypes, then selects the geometrically closest reference example based on pixel-level similarity and Instance Matching Distance (IMD). We further introduce a 3D-Aware Pose Refinement module based on 3D Gaussian Splatting into the MRAG framework, which aligns the pose of the reference object to the target object in 3D space. The aligned results are reprojected onto the image plane and used as input to the MLLM to enhance the generation of the final pose parameters. Extensive experiments show that on a test set containing 30 categories of household objects, our method improves the success rate by 7.76% compared to the best-performing zero-shot baseline under the same setting, and by 6.54% compared to the state-of-the-art supervised baseline. Our results validate that RobMRAG effectively bridges the gap between high-level semantic reasoning and low-level geometric execution, enabling robotic systems that generalize to unseen objects while remaining inherently interpretable.

PaperID: 1642, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09377

Authors:Xuemei Yao, Xiao Yang, Jianbin Sun, Liuwei Xie, Xuebin Shao, Xiyu Fang, Hang Su, Kewei Yang

Affiliations: College of Systems Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Institute for AI, THBI Lab, BNRist Center, Tsinghua University Tsinghua-Bosch Joint ML Center, CATARC Intelligent Technology

Title: ReflexDiffusion: Reflection-Enhanced Trajectory Planning for High-lateral-acceleration Scenarios in Autonomous Driving

Abstract:
Generating safe and reliable trajectories for autonomous vehicles in longtail scenarios remains a significant challenge, particularly for High-lateral-acceleration maneuvers such as sharp turns that represent critical safety situations. Existing trajectory planners exhibit systematic failures in these scenarios due to data imbalance, resulting in insufficient representation of vehicle dynamics, road geometry, and environmental constraints in high-risk situations, leading to suboptimal or unsafe trajectory prediction when vehicles operate near their physical boundaries. In this paper, we introduce ReflexDiffusion, a novel inference-stage framework that enhances diffusion-based trajectory planners through reflective adjustment. Our method introduces a gradient-based adjustment mechanism during the iterative denoising process: after each standard trajectory update, we compute the gradient between conditional and unconditional noise predictions to explicitly amplify critical conditioning signals, including road curvature and lateral vehicle dynamics. This amplification enforces strict adherence to physical constraints, particularly improving stability during high-lateral-acceleration maneuvers where precise vehicle-road interaction is paramount. Evaluated on the nuPlan Test14-hard benchmark, ReflexDiffusion achieves a 14.1% improvement in driving score for high-lateral-acceleration scenarios compared to state-of-the-art methods. This demonstrates that inference-time trajectory optimization can effectively compensate for training data sparsity by dynamically reinforcing safety-critical constraints at the handling limits. The framework's architecture-agnostic design enables direct deployment across existing diffusion-based planners, offering a practical solution for improving autonomous vehicle safety in challenging driving conditions.

PaperID: 1643, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17806

Authors:Ryoma Yataka, Pu (Perry) Wang, Petros Boufounos, Ryuhei Takahashi

Affiliations: Information Technology R&D Center, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories

Title: Indoor Multi-View Radar Object Detection via 3D Bounding Box Diffusion

Abstract:
Multiview indoor radar perception has drawn attention due to its cost-effectiveness and low privacy risks. Existing methods often rely on implicit cross-view radar feature association, such as proposal pairing in RFMask or query-to-feature cross-attention in RETR, which can lead to ambiguous feature matches and degraded detection in complex indoor scenes. To address these limitations, we propose REXO (multi-view Radar object dEtection with 3D bounding boX diffusiOn), which lifts the 2D bounding box (BBox) diffusion process of DiffusionDet into the 3D radar space. REXO utilizes these noisy 3D BBoxes to guide an explicit cross-view radar feature association, enhancing the cross-view radar-conditioned denoising process. By accounting for prior knowledge that the person is in contact with the ground, REXO reduces the number of diffusion parameters by determining them from this prior. Evaluated on two open indoor radar datasets, our approach surpasses state-of-the-art methods by a margin of +4.22 AP on the HIBER dataset and +11.02 AP on the MMVR dataset. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/merlresearch/radar-bbox-diffusion.

PaperID: 1644, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07067

Authors:Ruijie Zhang, Bixin Zeng, Shengpeng Wang, Fuhui Zhou, Wei Wang

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Wuhan University

Title: RaLD: Generating High-Resolution 3D Radar Point Clouds with Latent Diffusion

Abstract:
Millimeterwave radar offers a promising sensing modality for autonomous systems thanks to its robustness in adverse conditions and low cost. However, its utility is significantly limited by the sparsity and low resolution of radar point clouds, which poses challenges for tasks requiring dense and accurate 3D perception. Despite that recent efforts have shown great potential by exploring generative approaches to address this issue, they often rely on dense voxel representations that are inefficient and struggle to preserve structural detail. To fill this gap, we make the key observation that latent diffusion models (LDMs), though successful in other modalities, have not been effectively leveraged for radar-based 3D generation due to a lack of compatible representations and conditioning strategies. We introduce RaLD, a framework that bridges this gap by integrating scene-level frustum-based LiDAR autoencoding, order-invariant latent representations, and direct radar spectrum conditioning. These insights lead to a more compact and expressive generation process. Experiments show that RaLD produces dense and accurate 3D point clouds from raw radar spectrums, offering a promising solution for robust perception in challenging environments.

PaperID: 1645, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08548

Authors:Yuchi Zhang, Churui Sun, Shiqi Liang, Diyuan Liu, Chao Ji, Weinan Zhang, Ting Liu

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, iFLYTEK Research

Title: Bridging Scale Discrepancies in Robotic Control via Language-Based Action Representations

Abstract:
Recent endto-end robotic manipulation research increasingly adopts architectures inspired by large language models to enable robust manipulation. However, a critical challenge arises from severe distribution shifts between robotic action data, primarily due to substantial numerical variations in action commands across diverse robotic platforms and tasks, hindering the effective transfer of pretrained knowledge. To address this limitation, we propose a semantically grounded linguistic representation to normalize actions for efficient pretraining. Unlike conventional discretized action representations that are sensitive to numerical scales, the motion representation specifically disregards numeric scale effects, emphasizing directionality instead. This abstraction mitigates distribution shifts, yielding a more generalizable pretraining representation. Moreover, using the motion representation narrows the feature distance between action tokens and standard vocabulary tokens, mitigating modality gaps. Multi-task experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves generalization performance and transferability in robotic manipulation tasks.

PaperID: 1646, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06371

Authors:Yingnan Zhao, Xinmiao Wang, Dewei Wang, Xinzhe Liu, Dan Lu, Qilong Han, Peng Liu, Chenjia Bai

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Engineering University, China Telecom, Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), University of Science and Technology of China, ShanghaiTech University, Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: Towards Adaptive Humanoid Control via Multi-Behavior Distillation and Reinforced Fine-Tuning

Abstract:
Humanoid robots are promising to learn a diverse set of humanlike locomotion behaviors, including standing up, walking, running, and jumping. However, existing methods predominantly require training independent policies for each skill, yielding behavior-specific controllers that exhibit limited generalization and brittle performance when deployed on irregular terrains and in diverse situations. To address this challenge, we propose Adaptive Humanoid Control (AHC) that adopts a two-stage framework to learn an adaptive humanoid locomotion controller across different skills and terrains. Specifically, we first train several primary locomotion policies and perform a multi-behavior distillation process to obtain a basic multi-behavior controller, facilitating adaptive behavior switching based on the environment. Then, we perform reinforced fine-tuning by collecting online feedback in performing adaptive behaviors on more diverse terrains, enhancing terrain adaptability for the adaptive behavior controller. We conduct experiments in both simulation and real-world experiments in Unitree G1 robots. The results show that our method exhibits strong adaptability across various situations and terrains.

PaperID: 1647, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07991

Authors:Hyojun Choi, Seokju Hwang, Kyong-Ho Lee

Affiliations: Yonsei University

Title: VSPO: Validating Semantic Pitfalls in Ontology via LLM-Based CQ Generation

Abstract:
Competency Questions (CQs) play a crucial role in validating ontology design. While manually crafting CQs can be highly timeconsuming and costly for ontology engineers, recent studies have explored the use of large language models (LLMs) to automate this process. However, prior approaches have largely evaluated generated CQs based on their similarity to existing datasets, which often fail to verify semantic pitfalls such as “Misusing allValuesFrom”. Since such pitfalls cannot be reliably detected through rule-based methods, we propose a novel dataset and model of Validating Semantic Pitfalls in Ontology (VSPO) for CQ generation specifically designed to verify the semantic pitfalls. To simulate missing and misused axioms, we use LLM to generate natural language definitions of classes and properties and introduce misalignments between the definitions and the ontology by removing axioms or altering logical operators (e.g., substituting union with intersection). We then fine-tune LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct to generate CQs that validate these semantic discrepancies between the provided definitions and the corresponding axioms. The resulting CQs can detect a broader range of modeling errors compared to existing public datasets. Our fine-tuned model demonstrates superior performance over baselines, showing 26% higher precision and 28.2% higher recall than GPT-4.1 in generating CQs for pitfall validation. This research enables automatic generation of TBox-validating CQs using LLMs, significantly reducing manual effort while improving semantic alignment between ontologies and expert knowledge. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to target semantic pitfall validation in CQ generation using LLMs.

PaperID: 1648, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11281

Authors:Patrick Koopmann, Yasir Mahmood, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, Balram Tiwari

Affiliations: Knowledge in Artificial Intelligence, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Data Science Group, Heinz Nixdorf Institute, Paderborn University

Title: Can You Tell the Difference? Contrastive Explanations for ABox Entailments

Abstract:
We introduce the notion of contrastive ABox explanations to answer questions of the type “Why is a an instance of C, but b is not?”. While there are various approaches for explaining positive entailments (why is C(a) entailed by the knowledge base) as well as missing entailments (why is C(b) not entailed) in isolation, contrastive explanations consider both at the same time, which allows them to focus on the relevant commonalities and differences between a and b. We develop an appropriate notion of contrastive explanations for the special case of ABox reasoning with description logic ontologies, and analyze the computational complexity for different variants under different optimality criteria, considering lightweight as well as more expressive description logics. We implemented a first method for computing one variant of contrastive explanations, and evaluated it on generated problems for realistic knowledge bases.

PaperID: 1649, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09174

Authors:Václav Kůla, Qipeng Kuang, Yuyi Wang, Yuanhong Wang, Ondřej Kuželka

Affiliations: Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague, University of Hong Kong, CRRC Zhuzhou Institute, Jilin University

Title: Tractable Weighted FirstOrder Model Counting with Bounded Treewidth Binary Evidence

Abstract:
The Weighted FirstOrder Model Counting Problem (WFOMC) asks to compute the weighted sum of models of a given first-order logic sentence over a given domain. Conditioning WFOMC on evidence—fixing the truth values of a set of ground literals—has been shown impossible in time polynomial in the domain size (unless ♯P ⊆ FP) even for fragments of logic that are otherwise tractable for WFOMC without evidence. In this work, we address the barrier by restricting the binary evidence to the case where the underlying Gaifman graph has bounded treewidth. We present a polynomial-time algorithm in the domain size for computing WFOMC for the two-variable fragments ??² and ?² conditioned on such binary evidence. Furthermore, we show the applicability of our algorithm in combinatorial problems by solving the stable seating arrangement problem on bounded-treewidth graphs of bounded degree, which was an open problem. We also conducted experiments to show the scalability of our algorithm compared to the existing model counting solvers.

PaperID: 1650, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03523

Authors:Kengo Nakamura, Masaaki Nishino, Norihito Yasuda

Affiliations: Communication Science Laboratories

Title: Variance Computation for Weighted Model Counting with Knowledge Compilation Approach

Abstract:
One of the most important queries in knowledge compilation is weighted model counting (WMC), which has been applied to probabilistic inference on various models, such as Bayesian networks. In practical situations on inference tasks, the model's parameters have uncertainty because they are often learned from data, and thus we want to compute the degree of uncertainty in the inference outcome. One possible approach is to regard the inference outcome as a random variable by introducing distributions for the parameters and evaluate the variance of the outcome. Unfortunately, the tractability of computing such a variance is hardly known. Motivated by this, we consider the problem of computing the variance of WMC and investigate this problem's tractability. First, we derive a polynomial time algorithm to evaluate the WMC variance when the input is given as a structured dDNNF. Second, we prove the hardness of this problem for structured DNNFs, d-DNNFs, and FBDDs, which is intriguing because the latter two allow polynomial time WMC algorithms. Finally, we show an application that measures the uncertainty in the inference of Bayesian networks. We empirically show that our algorithm can evaluate the variance of the marginal probability on real-world Bayesian networks and analyze the impact of the variances of parameters on the variance of the marginal.

PaperID: 1651, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00602

Authors:Wanle Zhong, Keman Huang, Xiaoyong Du

Affiliations: Renmin University of China

Title: AgentODRL: A Large Language Model-based Multi-agent System for ODRL Generation

Abstract:
The Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) is a pivotal standard for automating data rights management. However, the inherent logical complexity of authorization policies, combined with the scarcity of highquality ``Natural Language-to-ODRL" training datasets, impedes the ability of current methods to efficiently and accurately translate complex rules from natural language into the ODRL format. To address this challenge, this research leverages the potent comprehension and generation capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to achieve both automation and high fidelity in this translation process. We introduce AgentODRL, a multi-agent system based on an Orchestrator-Workers architecture. The architecture consists of specialized Workers, including a Generator for ODRL policy creation, a Decomposer for breaking down complex use cases, and a Rewriter for simplifying nested logical relationships. The Orchestrator agent dynamically coordinates these Workers, assembling an optimal pathway based on the complexity of the input use case. Specifically, we enhance the ODRL Generator by incorporating a validator-based syntax strategy and a semantic reflection mechanism powered by a LoRA-finetuned model, significantly elevating the quality of the generated policies. Extensive experiments were conducted on a newly constructed dataset comprising 770 use cases of varying complexity, all situated within the context of data spaces. The results, evaluated using ODRL syntax and semantic scores, demonstrate that our proposed Orchestrator-Workers system, enhanced with these strategies, achieves superior performance on the ODRL generation task.

PaperID: 1652, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18034

Authors:Haonan An, Guang Hua, Hangcheng Cao, Zhengru Fang, Guowen Xu, Susanto Rahardja, Yuguang Fang

Affiliations: City University of Hong Kong, Singapore Institute of Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Removing BoxFree Watermarks for Image-to-Image Models via Query-Based Reverse Engineering

Abstract:
The intellectual property of deep generative networks (GNets) can be protected using a cascaded hiding network (HNet) which embeds watermarks (or marks) into GNet outputs, known as boxfree watermarking. Although both GNet and HNet are encapsulated in a black box (called operation network, or ONet), with only the generated and marked outputs from HNet being released to end users and deemed secure, in this paper, we reveal an overlooked vulnerability in such systems. Specifically, we show that the hidden GNet outputs can still be reliably estimated via query-based reverse engineering, leaking the generated and unmarked images, despite the attacker's limited knowledge of the system. Our first attempt is to reverse-engineer an inverse model for HNet under the stringent black-box condition, for which we propose to exploit the query process with specially curated input images. While effective, this method yields unsatisfactory image quality. To improve this, we subsequently propose an alternative method leveraging the equivalent additive property of box-free model watermarking and reverse-engineering a forward surrogate model of HNet, with better image quality preservation. Extensive experimental results on image processing and image generation tasks demonstrate that both attacks achieve impressive watermark removal success rates (100%) while also maintaining excellent image quality (reaching the highest PSNR of 34.69 dB), substantially outperforming existing attacks, highlighting the urgent need for robust defensive strategies to mitigate the identified vulnerability in box-free model watermarking.

PaperID: 1653, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.11880

Authors:Jieming Bian, Lei Wang, Letian Zhang, Jie Xu

Affiliations: University of Florida, Middle Tennessee State University

Title: FedALT: Federated Fine-Tuning Through Adaptive Local Training with Rest-of-World LoRA

Abstract:
Finetuning large language models (LLMs) in federated settings enables privacy-preserving adaptation but suffers from cross-client interference due to model aggregation. Existing federated LoRA fine-tuning methods, primarily based on FedAvg, struggle with data heterogeneity, leading to harmful cross-client interference and suboptimal personalization. In this work, we propose FedALT, a novel personalized federated LoRA fine-tuning algorithm that fundamentally departs from FedAvg. Instead of using an aggregated model to initialize local training, each client continues training its individual LoRA while incorporating shared knowledge through a separate Rest-of-World (RoW) LoRA component. To effectively balance local adaptation and global information, FedALT introduces an adaptive mixer that dynamically learns input-specific weightings between the individual and RoW LoRA components, drawing conceptual foundations from the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) paradigm. Through extensive experiments on NLP benchmarks, we demonstrate that FedALT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art personalized federated LoRA fine-tuning methods, achieving superior local adaptation without sacrificing computational efficiency.

PaperID: 1654, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07260

Authors:Hohei Chan, Xinzhi Zhang, Antao Xiang, Weinan Zhang, Mengchen Zhao

Affiliations: South China University of Technology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: PADiff: Predictive and Adaptive Diffusion Policies for Ad Hoc Teamwork

Abstract:
Ad hoc teamwork (AHT) requires agents to collaborate with previously unseen teammates, which is crucial for many realworld applications. The core challenge of AHT is to develop an ego agent that can predict and adapt to unknown teammates on the fly. Conventional RL-based approaches optimize a single expected return, which often causes policies to collapse into a single dominant behavior, thus failing to capture the multimodal cooperation patterns inherent in AHT. In this work, we introduce PADiff, a diffusion-based approach that captures agent's multimodal behaviors, unlocking its diverse cooperation modes with teammates. However, standard diffusion models lack the ability to predict and adapt in non-stationary AHT scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose a novel diffusion-based policy that integrates critical predictive information about teammates into the denoising process. Extensive experiments across three environments demonstrate that PADiff outperforms existing AHT methods significantly.

PaperID: 1655, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12861

Authors:Dexia Chen, Wentao Zhang, Qianjie Zhu, Ping Hu, Weibing Li, Tong Zhang, Ruixuan Wang

Affiliations: Sun Yat-sen University, China Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and Advanced Computing, Ministry of Education, Guangxi University, Xinjiang University, Peng Cheng Laboratory

Title: Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning via Multi-View Collaborative Optimization with Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
Visionlanguage models (VLMs) pre-trained on natural image and language data, such as CLIP, have exhibited significant potential in few-shot image recognition tasks, leading to development of various efficient transfer learning methods. These methods exploit inherent pre-learned knowledge in VLMs and have achieved strong performance on standard image datasets. However, their effectiveness is often limited when confronted with cross-domain tasks where imaging domains differ from natural images. To address this limitation, we propose Consistency-guided Multi-view Collaborative Optimization (CoMuCo), a novel fine-tuning strategy for VLMs. This strategy employs two functionally complementary expert modules to extract multi-view features, while incorporating prior knowledge-based consistency constraints and information geometry-based consensus mechanisms to enhance the robustness of feature learning. Additionally, a new cross-domain few-shot benchmark is established to help comprehensively evaluate methods on imaging domains distinct from natural images. Extensive empirical evaluations on both existing and newly proposed benchmarks suggest CoMuCo consistently outperforms current methods.

PaperID: 1656, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.16673

Authors:Ruiming Chen, Junming Yang, Shiyu Xia, Xu Yang, Xin Geng

Affiliations: Southeast University

Title: Extracting Multimodal Learngene in CLIP: Unveiling the Multimodal Generalizable Knowledge

Abstract:
CLIP (Contrastive LanguageImage Pre-training) has attracted widespread attention for its multimodal generalizable knowledge, which is significant for downstream tasks. However, the computational overhead of a large number of parameters and large-scale pre-training poses challenges of pre-training a different scale of CLIP. Learngene extracts the generalizable components termed as learngene from an ancestry model and initializes diverse descendant models with it. Previous Learngene paradigms fail to handle the generalizable knowledge in multimodal scenarios. In this paper, we put forward the idea of utilizing a multimodal block to extract the multimodal generalizable knowledge, which inspires us to propose MM-LG (Multimodal Learngene), a novel framework designed to extract and leverage generalizable components from CLIP. Specifically, we first establish multimodal and unimodal blocks to extract the multimodal and unimodal generalizable knowledge in a weighted-sum manner. Subsequently, we employ these components to numerically initialize descendant models of varying scales and modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate MM-LG's effectiveness, which achieves performance gains over existing learngene approaches (e.g.,+3.1% on Oxford-IIIT PET and +4.13% on Flickr30k) and comparable or superior results to the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm (e.g.,+1.9% on Oxford-IIIT PET and +3.65% on Flickr30k). Notably, MM-LG requires only around 25% of the parameter storage while reducing around 2.8× pre-training costs for diverse model scales compared to the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm, making it particularly suitable for efficient deployment across diverse downstream tasks.

PaperID: 1657, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13147

Authors:Shaoyuan Chen, Zhixuan Chen, Dawei Yang, Zhihang Yuan, Qiang Wu

Affiliations: Houmo AI, Peking University

Title: OTARo: Once Tuning for All Precisions Toward Robust On-Device LLMs

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) finetuning techniques not only improve the adaptability to diverse downstream tasks, but also mitigate adverse effects of model quantization. Despite this, conventional quantization suffers from its structural limitation that hinders flexibility during the fine-tuning and deployment stages. Practical on-device tasks demand different quantization precisions (i.e. different bit-widths), e.g., understanding tasks tend to exhibit higher tolerance to reduced precision compared to generation tasks. Conventional quantization, typically relying on scaling factors that are incompatible across bit-widths, fails to support the on-device switching of precisions when confronted with complex real‑world scenarios. To overcome the dilemma, we propose OTARo, a novel method that enables on-device LLMs to flexibly switch quantization precisions while maintaining performance robustness through once fine-tuning. OTARo introduces Shared Exponent Floating Point (SEFP), a distinct quantization mechanism, to produce different bit-widths through simple mantissa truncations of a single model. Moreover, to achieve bit-width robustness in downstream applications, OTARo performs a learning process toward losses induced by different bit-widths. The method involves two critical strategies: (1) Exploitation-Exploration Bit-Width Path Search (BPS), which iteratively updates the search path via a designed scoring mechanism; (2) Low-Precision Asynchronous Accumulation (LAA), which performs asynchronous gradient accumulations and delayed updates under low bit-widths. Experiments on popular LLMs, e.g., LLaMA3.2-1B, LLaMA3-8B, demonstrate that OTARo achieves consistently strong and robust performance for all precisions.

PaperID: 1658, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.06888

Authors:Wei Chen, Wanyang Gu, Linjun Peng, Ting Yan, Ruichu Cai, Zhifeng Hao, Kun Zhang

Affiliations: Guangdong University of Technology, Shantou University, Carnegie Mellon University Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

Title: Horizontal and Vertical Federated Causal Structure Learning via Higher-order Cumulants

Abstract:
Federated causal discovery aims to uncover causal relationships while protecting data privacy, with significant realworld applications. Existing methods focus on horizontal federated settings where clients share the same variables but have different samples. However, in practice, clients may have different variables, leading to spurious causal relationships. To address this issue, we comprehensively consider causal structure learning methods under both horizontal and vertical federated settings. Interestingly, we find that, higher-order cumulants rely solely on the joint distribution of the relevant variables and are useful to solve the above problem in the linear non-Gaussian case. This motivates us to provide the identification theories for determining the causal order over observed variables, leveraging the difference in the product of the (cross) cumulants of the specific variables. Based on these theories, we develop a method for learning causal order in the horizontal and vertical federated scenarios. Specifically, we first obtain local (cross) cumulant matrices of observed variables from all participating clients to construct a global cumulant matrix. This global cumulant matrix is then used for recursive source variable identification, ultimately yielding a causal strength matrix of the union of variables from all clients. Our algorithm demonstrates superior performance in experiments on both synthetic and real-world data.

PaperID: 1659, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07636

Authors:Yanan Chen, Tieliang Gong, Yunjiao Zhang, Wen Wen

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, China Telecom

Title: Beyond Sharpness: A Flatness Decomposition Framework for Efficient Continual Learning

Abstract:
Continual Learning (CL) aims to enable models to sequentially learn multiple tasks without forgetting previous knowledge. Recent studies have shown that optimizing towards flatter loss minima can improve model generalization. However, existing sharpnessaware methods for CL suffer from two key limitations: (1) they treat sharpness regularization as a unified signal without distinguishing the contributions of its components. and (2) they introduce substantial computational overhead that impedes practical deployment. To address these challenges, we propose FLAD, a novel optimization framework that decomposes sharpness-aware perturbations into gradient-aligned and stochastic-noise components, and show that retaining only the noise component promotes generalization. We further introduce a lightweight scheduling scheme that enables FLAD to maintain significant performance gains even under constrained training time. FLAD can be seamlessly integrated into various CL paradigms and consistently outperforms standard and sharpness-aware optimizers in diverse experimental settings, demonstrating its effectiveness and practicality in CL.

PaperID: 1660, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07384

Authors:Yu Chen, Hongxu Zhu, Jiadong Wang, Kainan Chen, Xinyuan Qian

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology Beijing (USTB), China School of Data Science, Hong Kong, Technical University of Munich, Eigenspace GmbH

Title: AV-SSAN: Audio-Visual Selective DOA Estimation Through Explicit Multi-Band Semantic-Spatial Alignment

Abstract:
Audiovisual sound source localization (AV-SSL) estimates the position of sound sources by fusing auditory and visual cues. Current AV-SSL methodologies typically require spatially-paired audio-visual data and cannot selectively localize specific target sources. To address these limitations, we introduce Cross-Instance Audio-Visual Localization (CI-AVL), a novel task that localizes target sound sources using visual prompts from different instances of the same semantic class. CI-AVL enables selective localization without spatially paired data. To solve this task, we propose AV-SSAN, a semantic-spatial alignment framework centered on a Multi-Band Semantic-Spatial Alignment Network (MB-SSA Net). MB-SSA Net decomposes the audio spectrogram into multiple frequency bands, aligns each band with semantic visual prompts, and refines spatial cues to estimate the direction-of-arrival (DoA). To facilitate this research, we construct VGGSound-SSL, a large-scale dataset comprising 13,981 spatial audio clips across 296 categories, each paired with visual prompts. AV-SSAN achieves a mean absolute error of 16.59° and an accuracy of 71.29%, significantly outperforming existing AV-SSL methods.

PaperID: 1661, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.05955

Authors:Yuliang Chen, Xi Lin, Jun Wu, Xiangrui Cai, Qiaolun Zhang, Xichun Fan, Jiapeng Xu, Xiu Su

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Shanghai Key Laboratory of Integrated Administration Technologies for Information Security, College of Computer Science, Nankai University, Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Polytechnic Institute of Milan, New York University Shanghai, Big Data Institute, Central South University

Title: Multi-Modal Style Transfer-based Prompt Tuning for Efficient Federated Domain Generalization

Abstract:
Federated Domain Generalization (FDG) aims to collaboratively train a global model across distributed clients that can generalize well on unseen domains. However, existing FDG methods typically struggle with crossclient data heterogeneity and incur significant communication and computation overhead. To address these challenges, this paper presents a new FDG framework, dubbed FaST-PT, which facilitates local feature augmentation and efficient unseen domain adaptation in a distributed manner. First, we propose a lightweight Multi-Modal Style Transfer (MST) method to transform image embedding under text supervision, which could expand the training data distribution and mitigate domain shift. We then design a dual-prompt module that decomposes the prompt into global and domain prompts. Specifically, global prompts capture general knowledge from augmented embedding across clients, while domain prompts capture domain-specific knowledge from local data. Besides, Domain-aware Prompt Generation (DPG) is introduced to adaptively generate suitable prompts for each sample, which facilitates unseen domain adaptation through knowledge fusion. Extensive experiments on four cross-domain benchmark datasets, e.g., PACS and DomainNet, demonstrate the superior performance of FaST-PT over SOTA FDG methods such as FedDG-GA and DiPrompt. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness and efficiency of FaST-PT.

PaperID: 1662, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15614

Authors:Xinshun Feng, Mingzhe Liu, Yi Qiao, Tongyu Zhu, Leilei Sun, Shuai Wang

Affiliations: Hangzhou International Innovation Institute, Beihang University

Title: Behavior Tokens Speak Louder: Disentangled Explainable Recommendation with Behavior Vocabulary

Abstract:
Recent advances in explainable recommendation have explored the integration of language models to analyze natural language rationales for user–item interactions. Despite their potential, existing methods often rely on IDbased representations that obscure semantic meaning and impose structural constraints on language models, thereby limiting their applicability in open-ended scenarios. These challenges are intensified by the complex nature of real-world interactions, where diverse user intents are entangled and collaborative signals rarely align with linguistic semantics. To overcome these limitations, we propose BEAT, a unified and transferable framework that tokenizes user and item behaviors into discrete, interpretable sequences. We construct a behavior vocabulary via a vector-quantized autoencoding process that disentangles macro-level interests and micro-level intentions from graph-based representations. We then introduce multi-level semantic supervision to bridge the gap between behavioral signals and language space. A semantic alignment regularization mechanism is designed to embed behavior tokens directly into the input space of frozen language models. Experiments on three public datasets show that BEAT improves zero-shot recommendation performance while generating coherent and informative explanations. Further analysis demonstrates that our behavior tokens capture fine-grained semantics and offer a plug-and-play interface for integrating complex behavior patterns into large language models.

PaperID: 1663, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.03752

Authors:Yuhao He, Jinyu Tian, Xianwei Zheng, Li Dong, Yuanman Li, Jiantao Zhou

Affiliations: Faculty of Innovation Engineering, Macau University of Science and Technology, School of Mathematics, Foshan University, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Ningbo University, College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Shenzhen University, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Macau

Title: Deferred Poisoning: Making the Model More Vulnerable via Hessian Singularization

Abstract:
Recent studies have shown that deep learning models are very vulnerable to poisoning attacks. Many defense methods have been proposed to address this issue. However, traditional poisoning attacks are not as threatening as commonly believed. This is because they often cause differences in how the model performs on the training set compared to the validation set. Such inconsistency can alert defenders that their data has been poisoned, allowing them to take the necessary defensive actions. In this paper, we introduce a more threatening type of poisoning attack called the Deferred Poisoning Attack. This new attack allows the model to function normally during the training and validation phases but makes it very sensitive to evasion attacks or even natural noise. We achieve this by ensuring the poisoned model's loss function has a similar value as a normally trained model at each input sample but with a large local curvature. A similar model loss ensures that there is no obvious inconsistency between the training and validation accuracy, demonstrating high stealthiness. On the other hand, the large curvature implies that a small perturbation may cause a significant increase in model loss, leading to substantial performance degradation, which reflects a worse robustness. We fulfill this purpose by making the model have singular Hessian information at the optimal point via our proposed Singularization Regularization term. We have conducted both theoretical and empirical analyses of the proposed method and validated its effectiveness through experiments on image classification tasks. Furthermore, we have confirmed the hazards of this form of poisoning attack under more general scenarios using natural noise, offering a new perspective for research in the field of security.

PaperID: 1664, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13541

Authors:Yue Hou, Ruomei Liu, Yingke Su, Junran Wu, Ke Xu

Affiliations: Beihang University

Title: Graph Out-of-Distribution Detection via Test-Time Calibration with Dual Dynamic Dictionaries

Abstract:
A key challenge in graph outof-distribution (OOD) detection lies in the absence of ground-truth OOD samples during training. Existing methods are typically optimized to capture features within the in-distribution (ID) data and calculate OOD scores, which often limits pre-trained models from representing distributional boundaries, leading to unreliable OOD detection. Moreover, the latent structure of graph data is often governed by multiple underlying factors, which remains less explored. To address these challenges, we propose a novel test-time graph OOD detection method, termed BaCa, that calibrates OOD scores using dual dynamically updated dictionaries without requiring fine-tuning the pre-trained model. Specifically, BaCa estimates graphons and applies a mix-up strategy solely with test samples to generate diverse boundary-aware discriminative topologies, eliminating the need for exposing auxiliary datasets as outliers. We construct dual dynamic dictionaries via priority queues and attention mechanisms to adaptively capture latent ID and OOD representations, which are then utilized for boundary-aware OOD score calibration. To the best of our knowledge, extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that BaCa significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in OOD detection.

PaperID: 1665, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12628

Authors:Ke Hu, Liyao Xiang, Peng Tang, Weidong Qiu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, John Hopcroft Center for Computer Science

Title: FedTopo: Topology-Informed Representation Alignment in Federated Learning Under Non-I.I.D. Conditions

Abstract:
Current federatedlearning models deteriorate under heterogeneous (non-I.I.D.) client data, as their feature representations diverge and pixel- or patch-level objectives fail to capture the global topology which is essential for high-dimensional visual tasks. We propose FedTopo, a framework that integrates Topological-Guided Block Screening (TGBS) and Topological Embedding (TE) to leverage topological information, yielding coherently aligned cross-client representations by Topological Alignment Loss (TAL). First, Topology-Guided Block Screening (TGBS) automatically selects the most topology-informative block, i.e., the one with maximal topological separability, whose persistence-based signatures best distinguish within- versus between-class pairs, ensuring that subsequent analysis focuses on topology-rich features. Next, this block yields a compact Topological Embedding, which quantifies the topological information for each client. Finally, a Topological Alignment Loss (TAL) guides clients to maintain topological consistency with the global model during optimization, reducing representation drift across rounds. Experiments on Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100 under four non-I.I.D. partitions show that FedTopo accelerates convergence and improves accuracy over strong baselines.

PaperID: 1666, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12869

Authors:Zhengyu Hu, Jieyu Zhang, Zhihan Xiong, Alexander Ratner, Kaize Ding, Ranjay Krishna

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, University of Washington, Department of Computer Science, Northwestern University

Title: Towards Acyclic Preference Evaluation of Language Models via Multiple Evaluators

Abstract:
Despite the remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs), evaluating their outputs' quality regarding preference remains a critical challenge. While existing works usually leverage a strong LLM as the judge for comparing LLMs' response pairwisely, such a singleevaluator approach is vulnerable to cyclic preference, i.e., output A is better than B, B than C, but C is better than A, causing contradictory evaluation results. To address this, we introduce PGED (Preference Graph Ensemble and Denoise), a novel approach that leverages multiple model-based evaluators to construct preference graphs, and then ensembles and denoises these graphs for acyclic, non-contradictory evaluation results. We provide theoretical guarantees for our framework, demonstrating its efficacy in recovering the ground truth preference structure. Extensive experiments on ten benchmarks demonstrate PGED 's superiority in three applications: 1) model ranking for evaluation, 2) response selection for test-time scaling, and 3) data selection for model fine-tuning. Notably, PGED combines small LLM evaluators (e.g., Llama3-8B, Mistral-7B, Qwen2-7B) to outperform strong ones (e.g., Qwen2-72B), showcasing its effectiveness in enhancing evaluation reliability and improving model performance.

PaperID: 1667, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11038

Authors:Jiaming Huang, Yi Gao, Fuchang Pan, Renjie Li, Wei Dong

Affiliations: Zhejiang University

Title: SemanticNN: Compressive and Error-Resilient Semantic Offloading for Extremely Weak Devices

Abstract:
With the rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), integrating artificial intelligence (AI) on extremely weak embedded devices has garnered significant attention, enabling improved realtime performance and enhanced data privacy. However, the resource limitations of such devices and unreliable network conditions necessitate error-resilient device-edge collaboration systems. Traditional approaches focus on bit-level transmission correctness, which can be inefficient under dynamic channel conditions. In contrast, we propose SemanticNN, a semantic codec that tolerates bit-level errors in pursuit of semantic-level correctness, enabling compressive and resilient collaborative inference offloading under strict computational and communication constraints. It incorporates a Bit Error Rate (BER)-aware decoder that adapts to dynamic channel conditions and a Soft Quantization (SQ)-based encoder to learn compact representations. Building on this architecture, we introduce Feature-augmentation Learning, a novel training strategy that enhances offloading efficiency. To address encoder-decoder capability mismatches from asymmetric resources, we propose XAI-based Asymmetry Compensation to enhance decoding semantic fidelity. We conduct extensive experiments on STM32 using three models and six datasets across image classification and object detection tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that, under varying transmission error rates, SemanticNN significantly reduces feature transmission volume by 56.82–344.83× while maintaining superior inference accuracy.

PaperID: 1668, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08631

Authors:Yaohui Huang, Runmin Zou, Yun Wang, Laeeq Aslam, Ruipeng Dong

Affiliations: School of Automation, Central South University

Title: M2FMoE: Multi-Resolution Multi-View Frequency Mixture-of-Experts for Extreme-Adaptive Time Series Forecasting

Abstract:
Forecasting time series with extreme events is critical yet challenging due to their high variance, irregular dynamics, and sparse but highimpact nature. While existing methods excel in modeling dominant regular patterns, their performance degrades significantly during extreme events, constituting the primary source of forecasting errors in real-world applications. Although some approaches incorporate auxiliary signals to improve performance, they still fail to capture extreme events' complex temporal dynamics. To address these limitations, we propose M²FMoE, an extreme-adaptive forecasting model that learns both regular and extreme patterns through multi-resolution and multi-view frequency modeling. It comprises three modules: (1) a multi-view frequency mixture-of-experts module assigns experts to distinct spectral bands in Fourier and Wavelet domains, with cross-view shared band splitter aligning frequency partitions and enabling inter-expert collaboration to capture both dominant and rare fluctuations; (2) a multi-resolution adaptive fusion module that hierarchically aggregates frequency features from coarse to fine resolutions, enhancing sensitivity to both short-term variations and sudden changes; (3) a temporal gating integration module that dynamically balances long-term trends and short-term frequency-aware features, improving adaptability to both regular and extreme temporal patterns. Experiments on real-world hydrological datasets with extreme patterns demonstrate that M²FMoE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines without requiring extreme-event labels.

PaperID: 1669, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11472

Authors:Sooyong Jang, Insup Lee

Affiliations: University of Pennsylvania

Title: Quantifying and Improving Adaptivity in Conformal Prediction Through Input Transformations

Abstract:
Conformal prediction constructs a set of labels instead of a single point prediction, while providing a probabilistic coverage guarantee. Beyond the coverage guarantee, adaptiveness to example difficulty is an important property. It means that the method should produce larger prediction sets for more difficult examples, and smaller ones for easier examples. Existing evaluation methods for adaptiveness typically analyze coverage rate violation or average set size across bins of examples grouped by difficulty. However, these approaches often suffer from imbalanced binning, which can lead to inaccurate estimates of coverage or set size. To address this issue, we propose a binning method that leverages input transformations to sort examples by difficulty, followed by uniformmass binning. Building on this binning, we introduce two metrics to better evaluate adaptiveness. These metrics provide more reliable estimates of coverage rate violation and average set size due to balanced binning, leading to more accurate adaptivity assessment. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed metric correlates more strongly with the desired adaptiveness property compared to existing ones. Furthermore, motivated by our findings, we propose a new adaptive prediction set algorithm that groups examples by estimated difficulty and applies group-conditional conformal prediction. This allows us to determine appropriate thresholds for each group. Experimental results on both (a) an Image Classification (ImageNet) (b) a medical task (visual acuity prediction) show that our method outperforms existing approaches according to the new metrics.

PaperID: 1670, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18396

Authors:Kaifeng Jin, Ignavier Ng, Kun Zhang, Biwei Huang

Affiliations: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Carnegie Mellon University, University of California San Diego

Title: Revisiting Differentiable Structure Learning: Inconsistency of L1 Penalty and Beyond

Abstract:
Recent advances in differentiable structure learning have framed the combinatorial problem of learning directed acyclic graphs as a continuous optimization problem. Various aspects, including data standardization, have been studied to identify factors that influence the empirical performance of these methods. In this work, we investigate critical limitations in differentiable structure learning methods, focusing on settings where the true structure can be identified up to Markov equivalence classes, particularly in the linear Gaussian case. While recent work highlighted potential nonconvexity issues in this setting, we demonstrate and explain why the use of L1-penalized likelihood in such cases is fundamentally inconsistent, even if the global optimum of the optimization problem can be found. To resolve this limitation, we develop a hybrid differentiable structure learning method based on L0-penalized likelihood with hard acyclicity constraint, where the L0 penalty can be approximated by different techniques including Gumbel-Softmax. Specifically, we first estimate the underlying moral graph, and use it to restrict the search space of the optimization problem, which helps alleviate the non-convexity issue. Experimental results show that the proposed method enhances empirical performance both before and after data standardization, providing a more reliable path for future advancements in differentiable structure learning, especially for learning Markov equivalence classes.

PaperID: 1671, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09908

Authors:Pengfei Jin, Peng Shu, Sifan Song, Sekeun Kim, Qing Xiao, Cheng Chen, Tianming Liu, Xiang Li, Quanzheng Li

Affiliations: Center of Advanced Medical Computing and Analysis, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, School of Computing, The University of Georgia, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Hong Kong

Title: Beyond Adapter Retrieval: Latent Geometry-Preserving Composition via Sparse Task Projection

Abstract:
Recent advances in parameterefficient transfer learning have demonstrated the utility of composing LoRA adapters from libraries of pretrained modules. However, most existing approaches rely on simple retrieval heuristics or uniform averaging, which overlook the latent structure of task relationships in representation space. We propose a new framework for adapter reuse that moves beyond retrieval, formulating adapter composition as a geometry-aware sparse reconstruction problem. Specifically, we represent each task by a latent prototype vector derived from the base model’s encoder and aim to approximate the target task prototype as a sparse linear combination of retrieved reference prototypes, under an L1-regularized optimization objective. The resulting combination weights are then used to blend the corresponding LoRA adapters, yielding a composite adapter tailored to the target task. This formulation not only preserves the local geometric structure of the task representation manifold, but also promotes interpretability and efficient reuse by selecting a minimal set of relevant adapters. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across multiple domains—including medical image segmentation, medical report generation and image synthesis. Our results highlight the benefit of coupling retrieval with latent geometry-aware optimization for improved zero-shot generalization.

PaperID: 1672, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19662

Authors:Rohan Juneja, Shivam Aggarwal, Safeen Huda, Tulika Mitra, Li-Shiuan Peh

Affiliations: National University of Singapore

Title: HALO: Hardware-Aware Quantization with Low Critical-Path-Delay Weights for LLM Acceleration

Abstract:
Quantization is critical for efficiently deploying large language models (LLMs). Yet conventional methods remain hardwareagnostic, limited to bit-width constraints, and do not account for intrinsic circuit characteristics such as the timing behaviors and energy profiles of Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) units. This disconnect from circuit-level behavior limits the ability to exploit available timing margins and energy-saving opportunities, reducing the overall efficiency of deployment on modern accelerators. To address these limitations, we propose HALO, a versatile framework for Hardware-Aware Post-Training Quantization (PTQ). Unlike traditional methods, HALO explicitly incorporates detailed hardware characteristics, including critical-path timing and power consumption, into its quantization approach. HALO strategically selects weights with low critical-path-delays enabling higher operational frequencies and dynamic frequency scaling without disrupting the architecture's dataflow. Remarkably, HALO achieves these improvements with only a few dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) adjustments, ensuring simplicity and practicality in deployment. Additionally, by reducing switching activity within the MAC units, HALO effectively lowers energy consumption. Evaluations on accelerators such as Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) demonstrate that HALO significantly enhances inference efficiency, achieving average performance improvements of 270% and energy savings of 51% over baseline quantization methods, all with minimal impact on accuracy.

PaperID: 1673, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.13131

Authors:Ivan Karpukhin, Andrey Savchenko

Affiliations: Sber AI Lab

Title: Detecting the Future: All-at-Once Event Sequence Forecasting with Horizon Matching

Abstract:
Longhorizon events forecasting is a crucial task across various domains, including retail, finance, healthcare, and social networks. Traditional models for event sequences often extend to forecasting on horizon using an autoregressive (recursive) multi-step strategy, which has limited effectiveness due to typical convergence to constant or repetitive outputs. To address this limitation, we introduce DEF, a novel approach for simultaneous forecasting of multiple future events on a horizon with high accuracy and diversity. Our method optimally aligns predictions with ground truth events during training by using a novel matching-based loss function. We establish a new state-of-the-art in long-horizon event prediction, achieving up to a 50% relative improvement over existing temporal point processes and event prediction models. Furthermore, we achieve state-of-the-art performance in next-event prediction tasks while demonstrating high computational efficiency during inference.

PaperID: 1674, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03020

Authors:Brandon Knutson, Amandin Chyba Rabeendran, Michael Ivanitskiy, Jordan Pettyjohn, Cecilia Diniz Behn, Samy Wu Fung, Daniel McKenzie

Affiliations: Colorado School of Mines, New York University, University of Chicago

Title: On Logical Extrapolation for Mazes with Recurrent and Implicit Networks

Abstract:
Recent work suggests that certain neural network architectures — particularly recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and implicit neural networks (INNs) — are capable of logical extrapolation. When trained on easy instances of a task, these networks (henceforth: logical extrapolators) can generalize to more difficult instances. Previous research has hypothesized that logical extrapolators do so by learning a scalable, iterative algorithm for the given task which converges to the solution. We examine this idea more closely in the context of a single task: maze solving. By varying test data along multiple axes — not just maze size — we show that models introduced in prior work fail in a variety of ways, some expected and others less so. It remains uncertain whether any of these models has truly learned an algorithm. However, we provide evidence that a certain RNN has approximately learned a form of `deadendfilling'. We show that training these models on more diverse data addresses some failure modes but, paradoxically, does not improve logical extrapolation. We also analyze convergence behavior, and show that models explicitly trained to converge to a fixed point are likely to do so when extrapolating, while models that are not may exhibit more exotic limiting behavior such as limit cycles, even when they correctly solve the problem. Our results (i) show that logical extrapolation is not immune to the problem of goal misgeneralization, and (ii) suggest that analyzing the dynamics of extrapolation may yield insights into designing better logical extrapolators.

PaperID: 1675, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13049

Authors:Antoine Ledent, Soo Mun Chong, Nong Minh Hieu

Affiliations: Singapore Management University

Title: Generalization Bounds for Semi-supervised Matrix Completion with Distributional Side Information

Abstract:
We study a matrix completion problem where both the ground truth R matrix and the unknown sampling distribution P over observed entries are lowrank matrices, and share a common subspace. We assume that a large amount M of unlabeled data drawn from the sampling distribution P is available, together with a small amount N of "labeled" data drawn from the same distribution and noisy estimates of the corresponding ground truth entries. This setting is inspired by recommender systems scenarios where the unlabeled data corresponds to "implicit feedback" (consisting in interactions such as purchase, click, etc. ) and the labeled data corresponds to the "explicit feedback", consisting of interactions where the user has given an explicit rating to the item. Leveraging powerful results from the theory of low-rank subspace recovery, together with classic generalization bounds for matrix completion models, we show error bounds consisting of a sum of two error terms corresponding to sample complexities of nd and dr respectively (ignoring log factors), where d is the rank of P and r is the rank of M. In synthetic experiments, we confirm that the true generalization error naturally splits into independent error terms corresponding to the estimations of P and the ground truth matrix G respectively. In real-life experiments on Douban and MovieLens with most explicit ratings removed, we demonstrate that the method can outperform baselines relying only on the explicit ratings, demonstrating that our assumptions provide a valid toy theoretical setting to study the interaction between explicit and implicit feedbacks in recommender systems.

PaperID: 1676, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07901

Authors:Haoning Li, Qinghua Huang

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, OPtics and ElectroNics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University

Title: DANS-KGC: Diffusion Based Adaptive Negative Sampling for Knowledge Graph Completion

Abstract:
Negative sampling (NS) strategies play a crucial role in knowledge graph representation. In order to overcome the limitations of existing negative sampling strategies, such as vulnerability to false negatives, limited generalization, and lack of control over sample hardness, we propose DANSKGC (Diffusion-based Adaptive Negative Sampling for Knowledge Graph Completion). DANS-KGC comprises three key components: the Difficulty Assessment Module (DAM), the Adaptive Negative Sampling Module (ANS), and the Dynamic Training Mechanism (DTM). DAM evaluates the learning difficulty of entities by integrating semantic and structural features. Based on this assessment, ANS employs a conditional diffusion model with difficulty-aware noise scheduling, leveraging semantic and neighborhood information during the denoising phase to generate negative samples of diverse hardness. DTM further enhances learning by dynamically adjusting the hardness distribution of negative samples throughout training, enabling a curriculum-style progression from easy to hard examples. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization ability of DANS-KGC, with the method achieving state-of-the-art results on all three evaluation metrics for the UMLS and YAGO3-10 datasets.

PaperID: 1677, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09212

Authors:Xingyao Li, Fengzhuo Zhang, Cunxiao Du, Hui Ji

Affiliations: National University of Singapore, Sea AI Lab

Title: Annealed Relaxation of Speculative Decoding for Faster Autoregressive Image Generation

Abstract:
Despite significant progress in autoregressive image generation, inference remains slow due to the sequential nature of AR models and the ambiguity of image tokens, even when using speculative decoding. Recent works attempt to address this with relaxed speculative decoding but lack theoretical grounding. In this paper, we establish the theoretical basis of relaxed SD and propose COOL-SD, an annealed relaxation of speculative decoding built on two key insights. The first analyzes the total variation (TV) distance between the target model and relaxed speculative decoding and yields an optimal resampling distribution that minimizes an upper bound of the distance. The second uses perturbation analysis to reveal an annealing behaviour in relaxed speculative decoding, motivating our annealed design. Together, these insights enable COOL-SD to generate images faster with comparable quality, or achieve better quality at similar latency. Experiments validate the effectiveness of COOL-SD, showing consistent improvements over prior methods in speed-quality trade-offs.

PaperID: 1678, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09332

Authors:Xinpeng Li, Kai Ming Ting

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University

Title: Distribution-Based Feature Attribution for Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier

Abstract:
The proliferation of complex, blackbox AI models has intensified the need for techniques that can explain their decisions. Feature attribution methods have become a popular solution for providing post-hoc explanations, yet the field has historically lacked a formal problem definition. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a formal definition for the problem of feature attribution, which stipulates that explanations be supported by an underlying probability distribution represented by the given dataset. Our analysis reveals that many existing model-agnostic methods fail to meet this criterion, while even those that do often possess other limitations. To overcome these challenges, we propose Distributional Feature Attribution eXplanations (DFAX), a novel, model-agnostic method for feature attribution. DFAX is the first feature attribution method to explain classifier predictions directly based on the data distribution. We show through extensive experiments that DFAX is more effective and efficient than state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 1679, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.05585

Authors:Yuxuan Li, Yicheng Gao, Ning Yang, Stephen Xia

Affiliations: Northwestern University, University of Southern California, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: TW-CRL: Time-Weighted Contrastive Reward Learning for Efficient Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Episodic tasks in Reinforcement Learning (RL) often pose challenges due to sparse reward signals and highdimensional state spaces, which hinder efficient learning. Additionally, these tasks often feature hidden “trap states”—irreversible failures that prevent task completion but do not provide explicit negative rewards to guide agents away from repeated errors. To address these issues, we propose Time-Weighted Contrastive Reward Learning (TW-CRL), an Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) framework that leverages both successful and failed demonstrations. By incorporating temporal information, TW-CRL learns a dense reward function that identifies critical states associated with success or failure. This approach not only enables agents to avoid trap states but also encourages meaningful exploration beyond simple imitation of expert trajectories. Empirical evaluations on navigation tasks and robotic manipulation benchmarks demonstrate that TW-CRL surpasses state-of-the-art methods, achieving improved efficiency and robustness.

PaperID: 1680, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08499

Authors:Wenwen Liao, Hang Ruan, Jianbo Yu, Bing Song, Yuansong Wang, Xiaofeng Yang

Affiliations: Fudan University, East China University of Science and Technology, Tsinghua University

Title: EfficientFSL: Enhancing Few-Shot Classification via Query-Only Tuning In Vision Transformers

Abstract:
Large models such as Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated remarkable superiority over smaller architectures like ResNet in fewshot classification, owing to their powerful representational capacity. However, fine-tuning such large models demands extensive GPU memory and prolonged training time, making them impractical for many real-world low-resource scenarios. To bridge this gap, we propose EfficientFSL, a query-only fine-tuning framework tailored specifically for few-shot classification with ViT, which achieves competitive performance while significantly reducing computational overhead. EfficientFSL fully leverages the knowledge embedded in the pre-trained model and its strong comprehension ability, achieving high classification accuracy with an extremely small number of tunable parameters. Specifically, we introduce a lightweight trainable Forward Block to synthesize task-specific queries that extract informative features from the intermediate representations of the pre-trained model in a query-only manner. We further propose a Combine Block to fuse multi-layer outputs, enhancing the depth and robustness of feature representations. Finally, a Support-Query Attention Block mitigates distribution shift by adjusting prototypes to align with the query set distribution. With minimal trainable parameters, EfficientFSL achieves state-of-the-art performance on four in-domain few-shot datasets and six cross-domain datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in real-world applications.

PaperID: 1681, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20431

Authors:Dohun Lim, Minji Kim, Jaewoon Lim, Sungchan Kim

Affiliations: Jeonbuk National University

Title: BRIC: Bridging Kinematic Plans and Physical Control at Test Time

Abstract:
We propose BRIC, a novel testtime adaptation (TTA) framework that enables long-term human motion generation by resolving execution discrepancies between diffusion-based kinematic motion planners and reinforcement learning-based physics controllers. While diffusion models can generate diverse and expressive motions conditioned on text and scene context, they often produce physically implausible outputs, leading to execution drift during simulation. To address this, BRIC dynamically adapts the physics controller to noisy motion plans at test time, while preserving pre-trained skills via a loss function that mitigates catastrophic forgetting. In addition, BRIC introduces a lightweight test-time guidance mechanism that steers the diffusion model in the signal space without updating its parameters. By combining both adaptation strategies, BRIC ensures consistent and physically plausible long-term executions across diverse environments in an effective and efficient manner. We validate the effectiveness of BRIC on a variety of long-term tasks, including motion composition, obstacle avoidance, and human-scene interaction, achieving state-of-the-art performance across all tasks.

PaperID: 1682, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06854

Authors:Jiexi Liu, Meng Cao, Songcan Chen

Affiliations: School of Computer and Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University of Finance and Economics, College of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics MIIT Key Laboratory of Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence

Title: Beyond Observations: Reconstruction Error-Guided Irregularly Sampled Time Series Representation Learning

Abstract:
Irregularly sampled time series (ISTS), characterized by nonuniform time intervals with natural missingness, are prevalent in real-world applications. Existing approaches for ISTS modeling primarily rely on observed values to impute unobserved ones or infer latent dynamics. However, these methods overlook a critical source of learning signal: the reconstruction error inherently produced during model training. Such error implicitly reflects how well a model captures the underlying data structure and can serve as an informative proxy for unobserved values. To exploit this insight, we propose iTimER, a simple yet effective self-supervised pre-training framework for ISTS representation learning. iTimER models the distribution of reconstruction errors over observed values and generates pseudo-observations for unobserved timestamps through a mixup strategy between sampled errors and the last available observations. This transforms unobserved timestamps into noise-aware training targets, enabling meaningful reconstruction signals. A Wasserstein metric aligns reconstruction error distributions between observed and pseudo-observed regions, while a contrastive learning objective enhances the discriminability of learned representations. Extensive experiments on classification, interpolation, and forecasting tasks demonstrate that iTimER consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods under the ISTS setting.

PaperID: 1683, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05498

Authors:Larkin Liu, Kashif Rasul, Yutong Chao, Jalal Etesami

Affiliations: Hugging Face, Technische Universität München

Title: Riemannian Manifold Learning for Stackelberg Games with Neural Flow Representations

Abstract:
We present a novel framework for online learning in Stackelberg generalsum games, where two agents, the leader and follower, engage in sequential turn-based interactions. At the core of this approach is a learned diffeomorphism that maps the joint action space to a smooth spherical Riemannian manifold, referred to as the Stackelberg manifold. This mapping, facilitated by neural normalizing flows, ensures the formation of tractable isoplanar subspaces, enabling efficient techniques for online learning. Leveraging the linearity of the agents' reward functions on the Stackelberg manifold, our construct allows the application of linear bandit algorithms. We then provide a rigorous theoretical basis for regret minimization on the learned manifold and establish bounds on the simple regret for learning Stackelberg equilibrium. This integration of manifold learning into game theory uncovers a previously unrecognized potential for neural normalizing flows as an effective tool for multi-agent learning. We present empirical results demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach compared to standard baselines, with applications spanning domains such as cybersecurity and economic supply chain optimization.

PaperID: 1684, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11250

Authors:Xvyuan Liu, Xiangfei Qiu, Xingjian Wu, Zhengyu Li, Chenjuan Guo, Jilin Hu, Bin Yang

Affiliations: East China Normal University

Title: Rethinking Irregular Time Series Forecasting: A Simple Yet Effective Baseline

Abstract:
The forecasting of irregular multivariate time series (IMTS) is crucial in key areas such as healthcare, biomechanics, climate science, and astronomy. However, achieving accurate and practical predictions is challenging due to two main factors. First, the inherent irregularity and data missingness in irregular time series make modeling difficult. Second, most existing methods are typically complex and resourceintensive. In this study, we propose a general framework called APN to address these challenges. Specifically, we design a novel Time-Aware Patch Aggregation (TAPA) module that achieves adaptive patching. By learning dynamically adjustable patch boundaries and a time-aware weighted averaging strategy, TAPA transforms the original irregular sequences into high-quality, regularized representations in a channel-independent manner. Additionally, we use a simple query module to effectively integrate historical information while maintaining the model's efficiency. Finally, predictions are made by a shallow MLP. Experimental results on multiple real-world datasets show that APN outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both efficiency and accuracy.

PaperID: 1685, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12423

Authors:Jiaji Ma, Puja Trivedi, Danai Koutra

Affiliations: University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Title: GraphTextack: A Realistic Black-Box Node Injection Attack on LLM-Enhanced GNNs

Abstract:
Textattributed graphs (TAGs), which combine structural and textual node information, are ubiquitous across many domains. Recent work integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to jointly model semantics and structure, resulting in more general and expressive models that achieve state-of-the-art performance on TAG benchmarks. However, this integration introduces dual vulnerabilities: GNNs are sensitive to structural perturbations, while LLM-derived features are vulnerable to prompt injection and adversarial phrasing. While existing adversarial attacks largely perturb structure or text independently, we find that uni-modal attacks cause only modest degradation in LLM-enhanced GNNs. Moreover, many existing attacks assume unrealistic capabilities, such as white-box access or direct modification of graph data. To address these gaps, we propose GraphTextack, the first black-box, multi-modal node injection attack for LLM-enhanced GNNs. GraphTextack injects nodes with carefully crafted structure and semantics to degrade model performance, operating under a realistic threat model without relying on model internals or surrogate models. To navigate the combinatorial, non-differentiable search space of connectivity and feature assignments, GraphTextack introduces a novel evolutionary optimization framework with a multi-objective fitness function that balances local prediction disruption and global graph influence. Extensive experiments on five datasets and two state-of-the-art LLM-enhanced GNN models show that GraphTextack significantly outperforms 12 strong baselines.

PaperID: 1686, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.17629

Authors:Kaichen Ouyang, Zong Ke, Shengwei Fu, Lingjie Liu, Puning Zhao, Dayu Hu

Affiliations: Department of Mathematics, University of Science and Technology of China, Faculty of Science, National University of Singapore, Key Laboratory of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, Ministry of Education, Guizhou University, Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, United Kingdom, School of Cyber Science and Technology, Sun Yat-sen University, College of Medicine and Biological Information Engineering, Northeastern University

Title: Learn from Global Correlations: Enhancing Evolutionary Algorithm via Spectral GNN

Abstract:
Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are optimization algorithms that simulate natural selection and genetic mechanisms. Despite advancements, existing EAs have two main issues: (1) they rarely update nextgeneration individuals based on global correlations, thus limiting comprehensive learning; (2) it is challenging to balance exploration and exploitation, excessive exploitation leads to premature convergence to local optima, while excessive exploration results in an excessively slow search. Existing EAs heavily rely on manual parameter settings, inappropriate parameters might disrupt the exploration-exploitation balance, further impairing model performance. To address these challenges, we propose a novel evolutionary algorithm framework called Graph Neural Evolution (GNE). Unlike traditional EAs, GNE represents the population as a graph, where nodes correspond to individuals, and edges capture their relationships, thus effectively leveraging global information. Meanwhile, GNE utilizes spectral graph neural networks (GNNs) to decompose evolutionary signals into their frequency components and designs a filtering function to fuse these components. High-frequency components capture diverse global information, while low-frequency components capture more consistent information. This explicit frequency filtering strategy directly controls global-scale features through frequency components, overcoming the limitations of manual parameter settings and making the exploration-exploitation control more interpretable and effective. Extensive evaluations on nine benchmark functions (e.g., Sphere, Rastrigin, and Rosenbrock) demonstrate that GNE consistently outperforms both classical algorithms (GA, DE, CMA-ES) and advanced algorithms (SDAES, RL-SHADE) under various conditions, including original, noise-corrupted, and optimal solution deviation scenarios. GNE achieves solution quality several orders of magnitude better than other algorithms (e.g., 3.07e-20 mean on Sphere vs. 1.51e-07).

PaperID: 1687, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19693

Authors:Alberto Pirillo, Luca Colombo

Affiliations: Politecnico di Milano

Title: ReBoot: Encrypted Training of Deep Neural Networks with CKKS Bootstrapping

Abstract:
Growing concerns over data privacy underscore the need for deep learning methods capable of processing sensitive information without compromising confidentiality. Among privacyenhancing technologies, Homomorphic Encryption (HE) stands out by offering post-quantum cryptographic security and end-to-end data protection, safeguarding data even during computation. Prior research on encrypted training has primarily focused on logistic regression, model fine-tuning, or relied on multi-party computation. This is largely due to the substantial computational overhead and algorithmic complexity involved in training deep Neural Networks (NNs) under HE. In this paper, we present ReBoot, the first framework to enable fully encrypted and non-interactive training of Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) using CKKS bootstrapping. ReBoot introduces a novel HE-compliant NN architecture based on local error signals, specifically designed to minimize multiplicative depth and reduce noise accumulation during training. It employs a tailored packing strategy that leverages real-number arithmetic through CKKS SIMD operations, significantly lowering both computational and memory overhead. We evaluate ReBoot on both image and tabular benchmarks, demonstrating up to +6.83% improvement in test accuracy over existing solutions, while reducing training latency by up to 8.83×. ReBoot is made available to the scientific community as a public repository.

PaperID: 1688, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17670

Authors:Manhin Poon, Xiangxiang Dai, Xutong Liu, Fang Kong, John C.S. Lui, Jinhang Zuo

Affiliations: City University of Hong Kong, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, University of Washington, Southern University of Science and Technology

Title: Online Multi-LLM Selection via Contextual Bandits Under Unstructured Context Evolution

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit diverse response behaviors, costs, and strengths, making it challenging to select the most suitable LLM for a given user query. We study the problem of adaptive multiLLM selection in an online setting, where the learner interacts with users through multi-step query refinement and must choose LLMs sequentially without access to offline datasets or model internals. A key challenge arises from unstructured context evolution: the prompt dynamically changes in response to previous model outputs via a black-box process, which cannot be simulated, modeled, or learned. To address this, we propose the first contextual bandit framework for sequential LLM selection under unstructured prompt dynamics. We formalize a notion of myopic regret and develop a LinUCB-based algorithm that provably achieves sublinear regret without relying on future context prediction. We further introduce budget-aware and positionally-aware (favoring early-stage satisfaction) extensions to accommodate variable query costs and user preferences for early high-quality responses. Our algorithms are theoretically grounded and require no offline fine-tuning or dataset-specific training. Experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our methods outperform existing LLM routing strategies in both accuracy and cost-efficiency, validating the power of contextual bandits for real-time, adaptive LLM selection.

PaperID: 1689, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15773

Authors:Yuanyuan Qi, Xiaohao Yang, Jueqing Lu, Guoxiang Guo, Joanne Enticott, Gang Liu, Lan Du

Affiliations: Monash University, Harbin Engineering University

Title: Next Generation Active Learning: Mixture of LLMs in the Loop

Abstract:
With the rapid advancement and strong generalization capabilities of large language models (LLMs), they have been increasingly incorporated into the active learning pipelines as annotators to reduce annotation costs. However, considering the annotation quality, labels generated by LLMs often fall short of realworld applicability. To address this, we propose a novel active learning framework, Mixture of LLMs in the Loop Active Learning, replacing human annotators with labels generated through a Mixture-of-LLMs-based annotation model, aimed at enhancing LLM-based annotation robustness by aggregating the strengths of multiple LLMs. To further mitigate the impact of the noisy labels, we introduce annotation discrepancy and negative learning to identify the unreliable annotations and enhance learning effectiveness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves performance comparable to human annotation and consistently outperforms single-LLM baselines and other LLM-ensemble-based approaches. Moreover, our framework is built on lightweight LLMs, enabling it to operate fully on local machines in real-world applications.

PaperID: 1690, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08339

Authors:Ruiyu Qiu, Rui Wang, Guanghui Yang, Xiang Li, Zhijiang Shao

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Ningbo University

Title: LPPG-RL: Lexicographically Projected Policy Gradient Reinforcement Learning with Subproblem Exploration

Abstract:
Lexicographic multiobjective problems, which consist of multiple conflicting subtasks with explicit priorities, are common in real-world applications. Despite the advantages of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in single tasks, extending conventional RL methods to prioritized multiple objectives remains challenging. In particular, traditional Safe RL and Multi-Objective RL (MORL) methods have difficulty enforcing priority orderings efficiently. Therefore, Lexicographic Multi-Objective RL (LMORL) methods have been developed to address these challenges. However, existing LMORL methods either rely on heuristic threshold tuning with prior knowledge or are restricted to discrete domains. To overcome these limitations, we propose Lexicographically Projected Policy Gradient RL (LPPG-RL), a novel LMORL framework which leverages sequential gradient projections to identify feasible policy update directions, thereby enabling LPPG-RL broadly compatible with all policy gradient algorithms in continuous spaces. LPPG-RL reformulates the projection step as an optimization problem, and utilizes Dykstra's projection rather than generic solvers to deliver great speedups, especially for small- to medium-scale instances. In addition, LPPG-RL introduces Subproblem Exploration (SE) to prevent gradient vanishing, accelerate convergence and enhance stability. We provide theoretical guarantees for convergence and establish a lower bound on policy improvement. Finally, through extensive experiments in a 2D navigation environment, we demonstrate the effectiveness of LPPG-RL, showing that it outperforms existing state-of-the-art continuous LMORL methods.

PaperID: 1691, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12322

Authors:Chang-Wei Shi, Shi-Shang Wang, Wu-Jun Li

Affiliations: National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, School of Computer Science, Nanjing University

Title: Ordered Local Momentum for Asynchronous Distributed Learning Under Arbitrary Delays

Abstract:
Momentum SGD (MSGD) serves as a foundational optimizer in training deep models due to momentum's key role in accelerating convergence and enhancing generalization. Meanwhile, asynchronous distributed learning is crucial for training largescale deep models, especially when the computing capabilities of the workers in the cluster are heterogeneous. To reduce communication frequency, local updates are widely adopted in distributed learning. However, how to implement asynchronous distributed MSGD with local updates remains unexplored. To solve this problem, we propose a novel method, called ordered local momentum (OrLoMo), for asynchronous distributed learning. In OrLoMo, each worker runs MSGD locally. Then the local momentum from each worker will be aggregated by the server in order based on its global iteration index. To the best of our knowledge, OrLoMo is the first method to implement asynchronous distributed MSGD with local updates. We prove the convergence of OrLoMo for non-convex problems under arbitrary delays. Experiments validate that OrLoMo can outperform its synchronous counterpart and other asynchronous methods.

PaperID: 1692, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24434

Authors:Md Shahriar Rahim Siddiqui, Moshe Eliasof, Eldad Haber

Affiliations: The University of British Columbia, University of Cambridge Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Title: Graph Flow Matching: Enhancing Image Generation with Neighbor-Aware Flow Fields

Abstract:
Flow matching casts sample generation as learning a continuoustime velocity field that transports noise to data. Existing flow matching networks typically predict each point's velocity independently, considering only its location and time along its flow trajectory, and ignoring neighboring points. However, this pointwise approach may overlook correlations between points along the generation trajectory that could enhance velocity predictions, thereby improving downstream generation quality. To address this, we propose Graph Flow Matching (GFM), a lightweight enhancement that decomposes the learned velocity into a reaction term -- any standard flow matching network -- and a diffusion term that aggregates neighbor information via a graph neural module. This reaction-diffusion formulation retains the scalability of deep flow models while enriching velocity predictions with local context, all at minimal additional computational cost. Operating in the latent space of a pretrained variational autoencoder, GFM consistently improves Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) and recall across five image generation benchmarks (LSUN Church, LSUN Bedroom, FFHQ, AFHQ-Cat, and CelebA-HQ at 256 × 256), demonstrating its effectiveness as a modular enhancement to existing flow matching architectures.

PaperID: 1693, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16414

Authors:Vladimir Solodkin, Andrey Veprikov, Alexander Chernyavskiy, Aleksandr Beznosikov

Affiliations: Moscow Independent Research Institute of Artificial Intelligence (MIRAI)

Title: Methods for Optimization Problems with Markovian Stochasticity and Non-Euclidean Geometry

Abstract:
This paper examines a variety of classical optimization problems, including wellknown minimization tasks and more general variational inequalities. We consider a stochastic formulation of these problems and, unlike most previous work, we take into account the complex Markov nature of the noise. We also consider the geometry of the problem in an arbitrary non-Euclidean setting and propose four methods based on the Mirror Descent iteration technique. The theoretical analysis is provided for smooth and convex minimization problems and variational inequalities with Lipschitz and monotone operators. The convergence guarantees obtained are optimal for first-order stochastic methods, as evidenced by the lower bound estimates provided in this paper. In order to validate the theoretical results, we present the relevant numerical experiments on various reinforcement learning tasks.

PaperID: 1694, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13322

Authors:Baogang Song, Dongdong Zhao, Jianwen Xiang, Qiben Xu, Zizhuo Yu

Affiliations: Wuhan University of Technology

Title: Injection, Attack and Erasure: Revocable Backdoor Attacks via Machine Unlearning

Abstract:
Backdoor attacks pose a persistent security risk to deep neural networks (DNNs) due to their stealth and durability. While recent research has explored leveraging model unlearning mechanisms to enhance backdoor concealment, existing attack strategies still leave persistent traces that may be detected through static analysis. In this work, we introduce the first paradigm of revocable backdoor attacks, where the backdoor can be proactively and thoroughly removed after the attack objective is achieved. We formulate the trigger optimization in revocable backdoor attacks as a bilevel optimization problem: by simulating both backdoor injection and unlearning processes, the trigger generator is optimized to achieve a high attack success rate (ASR) while ensuring that the backdoor can be easily erased through unlearning. To mitigate the optimization conflict between injection and removal objectives, we employ a deterministic partition of poisoning and unlearning samples to reduce samplinginduced variance, and further apply the Projected Conflicting Gradient (PCGrad) technique to resolve the remaining gradient conflicts. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet demonstrate that our method maintains ASR comparable to state-of-the-art backdoor attacks, while enabling effective removal of backdoor behavior after unlearning. This work opens a new direction for backdoor attack research and presents new challenges for the security of machine learning systems.

PaperID: 1695, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09219

Authors:Paul Strang, Zacharie Alès, Côme Bissuel, Olivier Juan, Safia Kedad-Sidhoum, Emmanuel Rachelson

Affiliations: EDF R&D, France CNAM, ENSTA IP Paris

Title: Planning in Branch-and-Bound: Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Exact Combinatorial Optimization

Abstract:
MixedInteger Linear Programming (MILP) lies at the core of many real-world combinatorial optimization (CO) problems, traditionally solved by branch-and-bound (B&B). A key driver influencing B&B solvers efficiency is the variable selection heuristic that guides branching decisions. Looking to move beyond static, hand-crafted heuristics, recent work has explored adapting traditional reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to the B&B setting, aiming to learn branching strategies tailored to specific MILP distributions. In parallel, RL agents have achieved remarkable success in board games, a very specific type of combinatorial problems, by leveraging environment simulators to plan via Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). Building on these developments, we introduce Plan-and-Branch-and-Bound (PlanB&B), a model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) agent that leverages a learned internal model of the B&B dynamics to discover improved branching strategies. Computational experiments empirically validate our approach, with our MBRL branching agent outperforming previous state-of-the-art RL methods across four standard MILP benchmarks.

PaperID: 1696, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19885

Authors:Chenglu Sun, Shuo Shen, Haonan Hu, Wei Zhou, Chen Chen

Affiliations: Sports Products Department, Interactive Entertainment Group, School of Future Technology, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Human Phenome Institute, Fudan University

Title: Complex Instruction Following with Diverse Style Policies in Football Games

Abstract:
Despite advancements in languagecontrolled reinforcement learning (LC-RL) for basic domains and straightforward commands (e.g., object manipulation and navigation), effectively extending LC-RL to comprehend and execute high-level or abstract instructions in complex, multi-agent environments, such as football games, remains a significant challenge. To address this gap, we introduce Language-Controlled Diverse Style Policies (LCDSP), a novel LC-RL paradigm specifically designed for complex scenarios. LCDSP comprises two key components: a Diverse Style Training (DST) method and a Style Interpreter (SI). The DST method efficiently trains a single policy capable of exhibiting a wide range of diverse behaviors by modulating agent actions through style parameters (SP). The SI is designed to accurately and rapidly translate high-level language instructions into these corresponding SP. Through extensive experiments in a complex 5v5 football environment, we demonstrate that LCDSP effectively comprehends abstract tactical instructions and accurately executes the desired diverse behavioral styles, showcasing its potential for complex, real-world applications.

PaperID: 1697, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.00602

Authors:Li Sun, Lanxu Yang, Jiayu Tian, Bowen Fang, Xiaoyan Yu, Junda Ye, Peng Tang, Hao Peng, Philip S. Yu

Affiliations: North China Electric Power University, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Tsinghua University, Beijing Institute of Technology, Shandong University, Beihang University, University of Illinois Chicago

Title: Learning to Explore: Policy-Guided Outlier Synthesis for Graph Out-of-Distribution Detection

Abstract:
Detecting Outof-Distribution (OOD) graphs—those are drawn from a different distribution from the training data-is a critical task for ensuring the safety and reliability of Graph Neural Networks. The main challenge in unsupervised graph-level Out-of-Distribution detection lies in its common reliance on purely in-distribution (ID) data. This ID-only training paradigm leads to an incomplete characterization of the feature space, resulting in decision boundaries that lack the robustness needed to effectively separate ID from OOD samples. While incorporating synthesized outliers into the training process is a promising direction, existing generation methods are limited by their dependence on pre-defined, non-adaptive sampling heuristics (e.g., distance- or density-based). Such fixed strategies lack the flexibility to systematically explore the most informative OOD regions for refining decision boundaries. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel Policy-Guided Outlier Synthesis (PGOS) framework that replaces static heuristics with a learned, adaptive exploration policy. PGOS trains a reinforcement learning agent to autonomously navigate low-density regions within a structured latent space, sampling representations that are maximally effective for regularizing the OOD decision boundary. These sampled points are then decoded into high-quality pseudo-OOD graphs to enhance the detector's robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate the strong performance of our method, state-of-the-art results on multiple graph OOD and anomaly detection benchmarks.

PaperID: 1698, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12791

Authors:Dahao Tang, Nan Yang, Yanli Li, Zhiyu Zhu, Zhibo Jin, Dong Yuan

Affiliations: University of Sydney, University of Technology Sydney

Title: Optimal Look-back Horizon for Time Series Forecasting in Federated Learning

Abstract:
Selecting an appropriate lookback horizon remains a fundamental challenge in time series forecasting (TSF), particularly in federated learning scenarios where data is decentralized, heterogeneous, and often non-independent. While recent work has explored horizon selection by preserving forecasting-relevant information in an intrinsic space, these approaches are primarily restricted to centralized and independently distributed settings. This paper presents a principled framework for adaptive horizon selection in federated time series forecasting through an intrinsic space formulation. We introduce a synthetic data generator that captures essential temporal structures in client data, including autoregressive dependencies, seasonality, and trend, while incorporating client-specific heterogeneity. Building on this model, we define a transformation that maps time series windows into an intrinsic representation space with well-defined geometric and statistical properties. We then derive a decomposition of the forecasting loss into a Bayesian term, which reflects irreducible uncertainty, and an approximation term, which accounts for finite-sample effects and limited model capacity. Our analysis shows that while increasing the look-back horizon improves the identifiability of deterministic patterns, it also increases approximation error due to higher model complexity and reduced sample efficiency. We prove that the total forecasting loss is minimized at the smallest horizon where the irreducible loss starts to saturate, while the approximation loss continues to rise. This work provides a rigorous theoretical foundation for adaptive horizon selection for time series forecasting in federated learning.

PaperID: 1699, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12389

Authors:Lakshya Tomar, Vinayak Abrol, Puneet Agarwal

Affiliations: RocketFrog AI, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology

Title: NADIR: Differential Attention Flow for Non-Autoregressive Transliteration in Indic Languages

Abstract:
In this work, we argue that not all sequenceto-sequence tasks require the strong inductive biases of autoregressive (AR) models. Tasks like multilingual transliteration, code refactoring, grammatical correction or text normalization often rely on local dependencies where the full modeling capacity of AR models can be overkill, creating a trade-off between their high accuracy and high inference latency. While non-autoregressive (NAR) models offer speed, they typically suffer from hallucinations and poor length control. To explore this trade-off, we focus on the multilingual transliteration task in Indic languages and introduce NADIR, a novel NAR architecture designed to strike a balance between speed and accuracy. NADIR integrates a Differential Transformer and a Mixture-of-Experts mechanism, enabling it to robustly model complex character mappings without sequential dependencies. NADIR achieves over a 13× speed-up compared to the state-of-the-art AR baseline. It maintains a competitive mean Character Error Rate of 15.78%, compared to 14.44% for the AR model and 21.88% for a standard NAR equivalent. Importantly, NADIR reduces Repetition errors by 49.53%, Substitution errors by 24.45%, Omission errors by 32.92%, and Insertion errors by 16.87%. This work provides a practical blueprint for building fast and reliable NAR systems, effectively bridging the gap between AR accuracy and the demands of real-time, large-scale deployment.

PaperID: 1700, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22272

Authors:Nassim Walha, Sebastian G. Gruber, Thomas Decker, Yinchong Yang, Alireza Javanmardi, Eyke Hüllermeier, Florian Buettner

Affiliations: German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) German Cancer Consortium (DKTK) Goethe University Frankfurt, KU Leuven, Siemens AG, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich) Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), Germany Frankfurt Cancer Institute

Title: Fine-grained Uncertainty Decomposition in Large Language Models: A Spectral Approach

Abstract:
As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated in diverse applications, obtaining reliable measures of their predictive uncertainty has become critically important. A precise distinction between aleatoric uncertainty, arising from inherent ambiguities within input data, and epistemic uncertainty, originating exclusively from model limitations, is essential to effectively address each uncertainty source. In this paper, we introduce Spectral Uncertainty, a novel approach to quantifying and decomposing uncertainties in LLMs. Leveraging the Von Neumann entropy from quantum information theory, Spectral Uncertainty provides a rigorous theoretical foundation for separating total uncertainty into distinct aleatoric and epistemic components. Unlike existing baseline methods, our approach incorporates a finegrained representation of semantic similarity, enabling nuanced differentiation among various semantic interpretations in model responses. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that Spectral Uncertainty outperforms state-of-the-art methods in estimating both aleatoric and total uncertainty across diverse models and benchmark datasets.

PaperID: 1701, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23485

Authors:Guoan Wan, Tianyu Chen, Fangzheng Feng, Haoyi Zhou, Runhua Xu

Affiliations: Beihang University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: FRoD: Full-Rank Efficient Fine-Tuning with Rotational Degrees for Fast Convergence

Abstract:
Parameterefficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods have emerged as a practical solution for adapting large foundation models to downstream tasks, reducing computational and memory costs by updating only a small subset of parameters. Among them, approaches like LoRA aim to strike a balance between efficiency and expressiveness, but often suffer from slow convergence and limited adaptation capacity due to their inherent low-rank constraints. This trade-off hampers the ability of PEFT methods to capture complex patterns needed for diverse tasks. To address these challenges, we propose FRoD, a novel fine-tuning method that combines hierarchical joint decomposition with rotational degrees of freedom. By extracting a globally shared basis across layers and injecting sparse, learnable perturbations into scaling factors for flexible full-rank updates, FRoD enhances expressiveness and efficiency, leading to faster and more robust convergence. On 20 benchmarks spanning vision, reasoning, and language understanding, FRoD matches full model fine-tuning in accuracy, while using only 1.72% of trainable parameters under identical training budgets.

PaperID: 1702, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11279

Authors:Jihang Wang, Dongcheng Zhao, Ruolin Chen, Qian Zhang, Yi Zeng

Affiliations: Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance Beijing Key Laboratory of Safe Al and Superalignment

Title: Boosting the Robustness-Accuracy Trade-off of SNNs by Robust Temporal Self-Ensemble

Abstract:
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a promising direction for energyefficient and brain-inspired computing, yet their vulnerability to adversarial perturbations remains poorly understood. In this work, we revisit the adversarial robustness of SNNs through the lens of temporal ensembling, treating the network as a collection of evolving sub-networks across discrete timesteps. This formulation uncovers two critical but underexplored challenges—the fragility of individual temporal sub-networks and the tendency for adversarial vulnerabilities to transfer across time. To overcome these limitations, we propose Robust Temporal self-Ensemble (RTE), a training framework that improves the robustness of each sub-network while reducing the temporal transferability of adversarial perturbations. RTE integrates both objectives into a unified loss and employs a stochastic sampling strategy for efficient optimization. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that RTE consistently outperforms existing training methods in robust-accuracy trade-off. Additional analyses reveal that RTE reshapes the internal robustness landscape of SNNs, leading to more resilient and temporally diversified decision boundaries. Our study highlights the importance of temporal structure in adversarial learning and offers a principled foundation for building robust spiking models.

PaperID: 1703, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08035

Authors:Xinyu Wang, Jinxiao Du, Yiyang Peng, Wei Ma

Affiliations: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR

Title: From Sequential to Recursive: Enhancing Decision-Focused Learning with Bidirectional Feedback

Abstract:
Decisionfocused learning (DFL) has emerged as a powerful end-to-end alternative to conventional predict-then-optimize (PTO) pipelines by directly optimizing predictive models through downstream decision losses. Existing DFL frameworks are limited by their strictly sequential structure, referred to as sequential DFL (S-DFL). However, S-DFL fails to capture the bidirectional feedback between prediction and optimization in complex interaction scenarios. In view of this, we first time propose recursive decision-focused learning (R-DFL), a novel framework that introduces bidirectional feedback between downstream optimization and upstream prediction. We further extend two distinct differentiation methods: explicit unrolling via automatic differentiation and implicit differentiation based on fixed-point methods, to facilitate efficient gradient propagation in R-DFL. We rigorously prove that both methods achieve comparable gradient accuracy, with the implicit method offering superior computational efficiency. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets, including the newsvendor problem and the bipartite matching problem, demonstrate that R-DFL not only substantially enhances the final decision quality over sequential baselines but also exhibits robust adaptability across diverse scenarios in closed-loop decision-making problems.

PaperID: 1704, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.05212

Authors:Xueyao Wang, Xiuding Cai, Honglin Shang, Yaoyao Zhu, Yu Yao

Affiliations: Chengdu Institute of Computer Application, Chinese Academy of Sciences University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Zhenhua Research Institute Co.

Title: Early Warning of Intraoperative Adverse Events via Transformer-Driven Multi-Label Learning

Abstract:
Early warning of intraoperative adverse events plays a vital role in reducing surgical risk and improving patient safety. While deep learning has shown promise in predicting the single adverse event, several key challenges remain: overlooking adverse event dependencies, underutilizing heterogeneous clinical data, and suffering from the class imbalance inherent in medical datasets. To address these issues, we construct the first Multilabel Adverse Events dataset (MuAE) for intraoperative adverse events prediction, covering six critical events. Next, we propose a novel Transformer-based multi-label learning framework (IAENet) that combines an improved Time-Aware Feature-wise Linear Modulation (TAFiLM) module for static covariates and dynamic variables robust fusion and complex temporal dependencies modeling. Furthermore, we introduce a Label-Constrained Reweighting Loss (LCRLoss) with co-occurrence regularization to effectively mitigate intra-event imbalance and enforce structured consistency among frequently co-occurring events. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IAENet consistently outperforms strong baselines on 5, 10, and 15-minute early warning tasks, achieving improvements of +5.05%, +2.82%, and +7.57% on average F1 score. These results highlight the potential of IAENet for supporting intelligent intraoperative decision-making in clinical practice.

PaperID: 1705, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00716

Authors:Yingxu Wang, Mengzhu Wang, Zhichao Huang, Suyu Liu, Nan Yin

Affiliations: Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Hebei University of Technology, JD Industrial, Nanyang Technological University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: Nested Graph Pseudo-Label Refinement for Noisy Label Domain Adaptation Learning

Abstract:
Graph Domain Adaptation (GDA) facilitates knowledge transfer from labeled source graphs to unlabeled target graphs by learning domaininvariant representations, which is essential in applications such as molecular property prediction and social network analysis. However, most existing GDA methods rely on the assumption of clean source labels, which rarely holds in real-world scenarios where annotation noise is pervasive. This label noise severely impairs feature alignment and degrades adaptation performance under domain shifts. To address this challenge, we propose Nested Graph Pseudo-Label Refinement (NeGPR), a novel framework tailored for graph-level domain adaptation with noisy labels. NeGPR first pretrains dual branches, i.e., semantic and topology branches, by enforcing neighborhood consistency in the feature space, thereby reducing the influence of noisy supervision. To bridge domain gaps, NeGPR employs a nested refinement mechanism in which one branch selects high-confidence target samples to guide the adaptation of the other, enabling progressive cross-domain learning. Furthermore, since pseudo-labels may still contain noise and the pre-trained branches are already overfitted to the noisy labels in the source domain, NeGPR incorporates a noise-aware regularization strategy. This regularization is theoretically proven to mitigate the adverse effects of pseudo-label noise, even under the presence of source overfitting, thus enhancing the robustness of the adaptation process. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that NeGPR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods under severe label noise.

PaperID: 1706, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.01511

Authors:Jiayang Wu, Jiale Zhou, Rubo Wang, Xingyi Zhang, Xun Lin, Tianxu Lv, Leong Hou U, Yefeng Zheng

Affiliations: Westlake University, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Jiangnan University, University of macau

Title: Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts with Retrieval Augmentation for Protein Active Site Identification

Abstract:
Accurate identification of protein active sites at the residue level is crucial for understanding protein function and advancing drug discovery. However, current methods face two critical challenges: vulnerability in singleinstance prediction due to sparse training data, and inadequate modality reliability estimation that leads to performance degradation when unreliable modalities dominate fusion processes. To address these challenges, we introduce Multimodal Mixtureof-Experts with Retrieval Augmentation (MERA), the first retrieval-augmented framework for protein active site identification. MERA employs hierarchical multi-expert retrieval that dynamically aggregates contextual information from chain, sequence, and active-site perspectives through residuelevel mixture-of-experts gating. To prevent modality degradation, we propose a reliability-aware fusion strategy based on Dempster–Shafer evidence theory that quantifies modality trustworthiness through belief mass functions and learnable discounting coefficients, enabling principled multimodal integration. Extensive experiments on ProTAD-Gen and TS125 datasets demonstrate that MERA achieves state-of-the-art performance, with 90% AUPRC on active site prediction and significant gains on peptide-binding site identification, validating the effectiveness of retrieval-augmented multi-expert modeling and reliability-guided fusion

PaperID: 1707, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.19651

Authors:Yuanyuan Xu, Wenjie Zhang, Ying Zhang, Xuemin Lin, Xiwei Xu

Affiliations: University of New South Wales, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: Unlocking Multi-Modal Potentials for Link Prediction on Dynamic Text-Attributed Graphs

Abstract:
Dynamic TextAttributed Graphs (DyTAGs) are a novel graph paradigm that captures evolving temporal events (edges) alongside rich textual attributes. Existing studies can be broadly categorized into TGNN-driven and LLM-driven approaches, both of which encode textual attributes and temporal structures for DyTAG representation. We observe that DyTAGs inherently comprise three distinct modalities: temporal, textual, and structural, often exhibiting completely disjoint distributions. However, the first two modalities are largely overlooked by existing studies, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose MoMent, a multi-modal network that explicitly models, integrates, and aligns each modality to learn node representations for link prediction. Given the disjoint nature of the original modality distributions, we first construct modality-specific features and encode them using individual encoders to capture correlations across temporal patterns, semantic context, and local structures. Each encoder generates modality-specific tokens, which are then fused into comprehensive node representations with a theoretical guarantee. To avoid disjoint subspaces of these heterogeneous modalities, we propose a dual-domain alignment loss that first aligns their distributions globally and then fine-tunes coherence at the instance level. This enhances coherent representations from temporal, textual, and structural views. Extensive experiments across seven datasets show that MoMent achieves up to 17.28% accuracy improvement and up to 31x speed-up against eight baselines.

PaperID: 1708, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15267

Authors:Huiyan Xue, Xuming Ran, Yaxin Li, Qi Xu, Enhui Li, Yi Xu, Qiang Zhang

Affiliations: Dalian University of Technology, National University of Singapore

Title: Distillation-Guided Structural Transfer for Continual Learning Beyond Sparse Distributed Memory

Abstract:
Sparse neural systems are gaining traction for efficient continual learning due to their modularity and low interference. Architectures like Sparse Distributed Memory MultiLayer Perceptrons (SDMLP) construct task-specific subnetworks via Top-K activation and have shown resilience against catastrophic forgetting. However, their rigid modularity poses two fundamental challenges: (1) the isolation of sparse subnetworks severely limits cross-task knowledge reuse; and (2) increased sparsity reduces interference but often degrades performance due to constrained feature sharing.We propose Selective Subnetwork Distillation (SSD), a structurally guided continual learning framework that treats distillation not as a regularizer, but as a topology-aligned information conduit. By identifying neurons with high activation frequency, SSD selectively distills knowledge within previous Top-K subnetworks and output logits—without requiring replay or task labels—preserving both sparsity and functional specialization.Unlike conventional distillation, SSD operates under hard modular constraints and enables structural realignment without altering the sparse architecture.While our method is validated on SDMLP, its structure-aligned mechanism has the potential to generalize to other sparse networks as a plug-in module for promoting representation sharing.Comprehensive experiments on Split CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and MNIST demonstrate that SSD improves accuracy, retention, and manifold coverage, offering a structurally grounded solution to sparse continual learning.

PaperID: 1709, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13626

Authors:Kaiwen Xue, Chenglong Li, Zhonghong Ou, Guoxin Zhang, Kaoyan Lu, Shuai Lyu, Yifan Zhu, Ping Zong, Junpeng Ding, Xinyu Liu, Qunlin Chen, Weiwei Qin, Yiran Shen, Jiayi Cen

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Southwest University, University of Southampton

Title: CreBench: Human-Aligned Creativity Evaluation from Idea to Process to Product

Abstract:
Humandefined creativity is highly abstract, posing a challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to comprehend and assess creativity that aligns with human judgments. The absence of an existing benchmark further exacerbates this dilemma. To this end, we propose CreBench, which consists of two key components: 1) an evaluation benchmark covering the multiple dimensions from creative idea to process to products; 2) CreMIT (Creativity Multimodal Instruction Tuning dataset), a multimodal creativity evaluation dataset, consisting of 2.2K diverse-sourced multimodal data, 79.2K human feedbacks and 4.7M multityped instructions. Specifically, to ensure MLLMs can handle diverse creativity-related queries, we prompt GPT to refine the human feedback to activate stronger creativity assessment capabilities. CreBench serves as a foundation for building MLLMs that understand human-aligned creativity. Based on the CreBench, we fine-tune open-source general MLLMs, resulting in CreExpert, a multimodal creativity evaluation expert model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed CreExpert models achieve significantly better alignment with human creativity evaluation compared to state-ofthe-art MLLMs, including the most advanced GPT-4V and Gemini-Pro-Vision.

PaperID: 1710, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19229

Authors:Qirong Yang, Yucheng Guo, Zicheng Liu, Yujie Yang, Qijin Yin, Siyuan Li, Shaomin Ji, Linlin Chao, Xiaoming Zhang

Affiliations: BioMap Research

Title: TrinityDNA: A Bio-Inspired Foundational Model for Efficient Long-Sequence DNA Modeling

Abstract:
The modeling of genomic sequences presents unique challenges due to their long length and structural complexity. Traditional sequence models struggle to capture longrange dependencies and biological features inherent in DNA. In this work, we propose TrinityDNA, a novel DNA foundational model designed to address these challenges. The model integrates biologically informed components, including Groove Fusion for capturing DNA's structural features and Gated Reverse Complement (GRC) to handle the inherent symmetry of DNA sequences. Additionally, we introduce a multi-scale attention mechanism that allows the model to attend to varying levels of sequence dependencies, and an evolutionary training strategy that progressively adapts the model to both prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes. TrinityDNA provides a more accurate and efficient approach to genomic sequence modeling, offering significant improvements in gene function prediction, regulatory mechanism discovery, and other genomics applications. Our model bridges the gap between machine learning techniques and biological insights, paving the way for more effective analysis of genomic data. Additionally, we introduced a new DNA long-sequence CDS annotation benchmark to make evaluations more comprehensive and oriented toward practical applications.

PaperID: 1711, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10213

Authors:Xi Yang, Han Zhang, Zhijian Lin, Yibiao Hu, Hong Han

Affiliations: Xidian University

Title: Out-of-Context Misinformation Detection via Variational Domain-Invariant Learning with Test-Time Training

Abstract:
Outof-context misinformation (OOC) is a low-cost form of misinformation in news reports, which refers to place authentic images into out-of-context or fabricated image-text pairings. This problem has attracted significant attention from researchers in recent years. Current methods focus on assessing image-text consistency or generating explanations. However, these approaches assume that the training and test data are drawn from the same distribution. When encountering novel news domains, models tend to perform poorly due to the lack of prior knowledge. To address this challenge, we propose Variational Domain-Invariant Learning with Test-Time Training (VDT) framework to enhance the domain adaptation capability for OOC misinformation detection. Domain-Invariant Variational Align module is employed to jointly encodes source and target domain data to learn a separable distributional space and domain-invariant features. For preserving semantic integrity, we utilize domain consistency constraint module to reconstruct the source and target domain latent distribution. During testing phase, we adopt the test-time training strategy and confidence-variance filtering module to dynamically updating the VAE encoder and classifier, facilitating the model's adaptation to the target domain distribution. Extensive experiments conducted on the benchmark dataset NewsCLIPpings demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines under most domain adaptation settings.

PaperID: 1712, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12697

Authors:Yiyuan Yang, Guodong Long, Qinghua Lu, Liming Zhu, Jing Jiang

Affiliations: University of Technology Sydney

Title: Bi-level Personalization for Federated Foundation Models: A Task-vector Aggregation Approach

Abstract:
Federated foundation models represent a new paradigm to jointly finetune pre-trained foundation models across clients. It is still a challenge to fine-tune foundation models for a small group of new users or specialized scenarios, which typically involve limited data compared to the large-scale data used in pre-training. In this context, the trade-off between personalization and federation becomes more sensitive. To tackle these, we proposed a bi-level personalization framework for federated fine-tuning on foundation models. Specifically, we conduct personalized fine-tuning on the client-level using its private data, and then conduct a personalized aggregation on the server-level using similar users measured by client-specific task vectors. Given the personalization information gained from client-level fine-tuning, the server-level personalized aggregation can gain group-wise personalization information while mitigating the disturbance of irrelevant or interest-conflict clients with non-IID data. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm has been demonstrated by extensive experimental analysis in benchmark datasets.

PaperID: 1713, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03679

Authors:Zewen Yang, Dongfa Zhang, Xiaobing Dai, Fengyi Yu, Chi Zhang, Bingkun Huang, Hamid Sadeghian, Sami Haddadin

Affiliations: Chair of Robotics and Systems Intelligence, Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence, Technical University of Munich, School of Computation, Information and Technology, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

Title: Streaming Generated Gaussian Process Experts for Online Learning and Control

Abstract:
Gaussian Processes (GPs), as a nonparametric learning method, offer flexible modeling capabilities and calibrated uncertainty quantification for function approximations. Additionally, GPs support online learning by efficiently incorporating new data with polynomialtime computation, making them well-suited for safety-critical dynamical systems that require rapid adaptation. However, the inference and online updates of exact GPs, when processing streaming data, incur cubic computation time and quadratic storage memory complexity, limiting their scalability to large datasets in real-time settings. In this paper, we propose a streaming kernel-induced progressively generated expert framework of Gaussian processes (SkyGP) that addresses both computational and memory constraints by maintaining a bounded set of experts, while inheriting the learning performance guarantees from exact Gaussian processes. Furthermore, two SkyGP variants are introduced, each tailored to a specific objective, either maximizing prediction accuracy (SkyGP-Dense) or improving computational efficiency (SkyGP-Fast). The effectiveness of SkyGP is validated through extensive benchmarks and real-time control experiments demonstrating its superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

PaperID: 1714, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24592

Authors:Weebum Yoo, Sung Whan Yoon

Affiliations: Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology

Title: A Flat Minima Perspective on Understanding Augmentations and Model Robustness

Abstract:
Model robustness indicates a model’s capability to generalize well on unforeseen distributional shifts, including data corruptions and adversarial attacks. Data augmentation is one of the most prevalent and effective ways to enhance robustness. Despite the great success of the diverse augmentations in different fields, a unified theoretical understanding of their efficacy in improving model robustness is lacking. We theoretically reveal a general condition for labelpreserving augmentations to bring robustness to diverse distribution shifts through the lens of flat minima and generalization bound, which de facto turns out to be strongly correlated with robustness against different distribution shifts in practice. Unlike most earlier works, our theoretical framework accommodates all the label-preserving augmentations and is not limited to particular distribution shifts. We substantiate our theories through different simulations on the existing common corruption and adversarial robustness benchmarks based on the CIFAR and ImageNet datasets.

PaperID: 1715, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07994

Authors:Han Yu, Xiaojuan Zhao, Aiping Li, Kai Chen, Ziniu Liu, Zhichao Peng

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology, Hunan University of Humanities, Science and Technology

Title: Enhancing Logical Expressiveness in Graph Neural Networks via Path-Neighbor Aggregation

Abstract:
Graph neural networks (GNNs) can effectively model structural information of graphs, making them widely used in knowledge graph (KG) reasoning. However, existing studies on the expressive power of GNNs mainly focuses on simple singlerelation graphs, and there is still insufficient discussion on the power of GNN to express logical rules in KGs. How to enhance the logical expressive power of GNNs is still a key issue. Motivated by this, we propose Path-Neighbor enhanced GNN (PN-GNN), a method to enhance the logical expressive power of GNN by aggregating node-neighbor embeddings on the reasoning path. First, we analyze the logical expressive power of existing GNN-based methods and point out the shortcomings of the expressive power of these methods. Then, we theoretically investigate the logical expressive power of PN-GNN, showing that it not only has strictly stronger expressive power than C-GNN but also that its (k+1)-hop logical expressiveness is strictly superior to that of k-hop. Finally, we evaluate the logical expressive power of PN-GNN on six synthetic datasets and two real-world datasets. Both theoretical analysis and extensive experiments confirm that PN-GNN enhances the expressive power of logical rules without compromising generalization, as evidenced by its competitive performance in KG reasoning tasks.

PaperID: 1716, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23014

Authors:Tao Yu, Yongqi An, Kuan Zhu, Guibo Zhu, Ming Tang, Jinqiao Wang

Affiliations: Foundation Model Research Center, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China School of Artificial Intelligence, China Wuhan AI Research

Title: Improving Generalization in LLM Structured Pruning via Function-Aware Neuron Grouping

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance across natural language tasks but incur substantial computational and storage costs due to their scale. Posttraining structured pruning offers an efficient solution. However, when few-shot calibration sets fail to adequately reflect the pretraining data distribution, existing methods exhibit limited generalization to downstream tasks. To address this issue, we propose Function-Aware Neuron Grouping (FANG), a post-training pruning framework that alleviates calibration bias by identifying and preserving neurons critical to specific function. FANG groups neurons with similar function based on the type of semantic context they process and prunes each group independently. During importance estimation within each group, tokens that strongly correlate with the functional role of the neuron group are given higher weighting. Additionally, FANG also preserves neurons that contribute across multiple context types. To achieve a better trade-off between sparsity and performance, it allocates sparsity to each block adaptively based on its functional complexity. Experiments show that FANG improves downstream accuracy while preserving language modeling performance. It achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) results when combined with FLAP and OBC, two representative pruning methods. Specifically, FANG outperforms FLAP and OBC by 1.5%–8.5% in average accuracy under 30% and 40% sparsity.

PaperID: 1717, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11663

Authors:Zhixiong Zhao, Fangxin Liu, Junjie Wang, Chenyang Guan, Zongwu Wang, Li Jiang, Haibing Guan

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: SpecQuant: Spectral Decomposition and Adaptive Truncation for Ultra-Low-Bit LLMs Quantization

Abstract:
The emergence of accurate open large language models (LLMs) has sparked a push for advanced quantization techniques to enable efficient deployment on enduser devices. In this paper, we revisit the challenge of extreme LLM compression---targeting ultra-low-bit quantization for both activations and weights---from a Fourier frequency domain perspective. We propose SpecQuant, a two-stage framework that tackles activation outliers and cross-channel variance. In the first stage, activation outliers are smoothed and transferred into the weight matrix to simplify downstream quantization. In the second stage, we apply channel-wise low-frequency Fourier truncation to suppress high-frequency components while preserving essential signal energy, improving quantization robustness. Our method builds on the principle that most of the weight energy is concentrated in low-frequency components, which can be retained with minimal impact on model accuracy. To enable runtime adaptability, we introduce a lightweight truncation module during inference that adjusts truncation thresholds based on channel characteristics. On LLaMA-3 8B, SpecQuant achieves 4-bit quantization for both weights and activations, narrowing the zero-shot accuracy gap to only 1.5% compared to full precision, while delivering 2× faster inference and 3× lower memory usage.

PaperID: 1718, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06032

Authors:Wang-Tao Zhou, Zhao Kang, Ke Yan, Ling Tian

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: ITPP: Learning Disentangled Event Dynamics in Marked Temporal Point Processes

Abstract:
Marked Temporal Point Processes (MTPPs) provide a principled framework for modeling asynchronous event sequences by conditioning on the history of past events. However, most existing MTPP models rely on channelmixing strategies that encode information from different event types into a single, fixed-size latent representation. This entanglement can obscure type-specific dynamics, leading to performance degradation and increased risk of overfitting. In this work, we introduce ITPP, a novel channel-independent architecture for MTPP modeling that decouples event type information using an encoder-decoder framework with an ODE-based backbone. Central to ITPP is a type-aware inverted self-attention mechanism, designed to explicitly model inter-channel correlations among heterogeneous event types. This architecture enhances effectiveness and robustness while reducing overfitting. Comprehensive experiments on multiple real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that ITPP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art MTPP models in both predictive accuracy and generalization.

PaperID: 1719, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20100

Authors:Xinguo Zhu, Shaohui Peng, Jiaming Guo, Yunji Chen, Qi Guo, Yuanbo Wen, Hang Qin, Ruizhi Chen, Qirui Zhou, Ke Gao, Yanjun Wu, Chen Zhao, Ling Li

Affiliations: Intelligent Software Research Center, Institute of Software, China Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, China University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, State Key Lab of Processors, Institute of Computing Technology

Title: QiMeng-Kernel: Macro-Thinking Micro-Coding Paradigm for LLM-Based High-Performance GPU Kernel Generation

Abstract:
Developing highperformance GPU kernels is critical for AI and scientific computing, but remains challenging due to its reliance on expert crafting and poor portability. While large language models (LLMs) offer promise for automation, both general-purpose and finetuned LLMs suffer from two fundamental and conflicting limitations: correctness and efficiency. The key reason is that existing LLM-based approaches directly generate the entire optimized low-level programs, requiring exploration of an extremely vast space encompassing both optimization policies and implementation codes. To address the challenge of exploring an intractable space, we propose Macro Thinking Micro Coding (MTMC), a hierarchical framework inspired by the staged optimization strategy of human experts. It decouples optimization strategy from implementation details, ensuring efficiency through high-level strategy and correctness through low-level implementation. Specifically, Macro Thinking employs reinforcement learning to guide lightweight LLMs in efficiently exploring and learning semantic optimization strategies that maximize hardware utilization. Micro Coding leverages general-purpose LLMs to incrementally implement the stepwise optimization proposals from Macro Thinking, avoiding full-kernel generation errors. Together, they effectively navigate the vast optimization space and intricate implementation details, enabling LLMs for high-performance GPU kernel generation. Comprehensive results on widely adopted benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of MTMC on GPU kernel generation in both accuracy and running time. On KernelBench, MTMC achieves near 100% and 70% accuracy at Levels 1-2 and 3, over 50% than SOTA general-purpose and domain-finetuned LLMs, with up to 7.3× speedup over LLMs, and 2.2× over expert-optimized PyTorch Eager kernels. On the more challenging TritonBench, MTMC attains up to 59.64% accuracy and 34× speedup. All models and datasets will be made publicly available.

PaperID: 1720, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12846

Authors:Zelin Zhu, Yancheng Huang, Kai Yang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Tongji University, China. Shenzhen Loop Area Institute

Title: RoS-Guard: Robust and Scalable Online Change Detection with Delay-Optimal Guarantees

Abstract:
Online change detection (OCD) aims to rapidly identify change points in streaming data and is critical in applications such as power system monitoring, wireless network sensing, and financial anomaly detection. Existing OCD methods typically assume precise system knowledge, which is unrealistic due to estimation errors and environmental variations. Moreover, existing OCD methods often struggle with efficiency in largescale systems. To overcome these challenges, we propose RoS-Guard, a robust and optimal OCD algorithm tailored for linear systems with uncertainty. Through a tight relaxation and reformulation of the OCD optimization problem, RoS-Guard employs neural unrolling to enable efficient parallel computation via GPU acceleration. The algorithm provides theoretical guarantees on performance, including expected false alarm rate and worst-case average detection delay. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of RoS-Guard and demonstrate significant computational speedup in large-scale system scenarios.

PaperID: 1721, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13133

Authors:Yuanxin Zhuang, Dazhong Shen, Ying Sun

Affiliations: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Title: NGTM: Substructure-based Neural Graph Topic Model for Interpretable Graph Generation

Abstract:
Graph generation plays a pivotal role across numerous domains, including molecular design and knowledge graph construction. Although existing methods achieve considerable success in generating realistic graphs, their interpretability remains limited, often obscuring the rationale behind structural decisions. To address this challenge, we propose the Neural Graph Topic Model (NGTM), a novel generative framework inspired by topic modeling in natural language processing. NGTM represents graphs as mixtures of latent topics, each defining a distribution over semantically meaningful substructures, which facilitates explicit interpretability at both local and global scales. The generation process transparently integrates these topic distributions with a global structural variable, enabling clear semantic tracing of each generated graph. Experiments demonstrate that NGTM achieves competitive generation quality while uniquely enabling finegrained control and interpretability, allowing users to tune structural features or induce biological properties through topic-level adjustments.

PaperID: 1722, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04581

Authors:Magauiya Zhussip, Dmitriy Shopkhoev, Ammar Ali, Stamatios Lefkimmiatis

Affiliations: MWS AI

Title: Share Your Attention: Transformer Weight Sharing via Matrix-based Dictionary Learning

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized AI applications, yet their high computational and memory demands hinder their widespread deployment. Existing compression techniques focus on intrablock optimizations (e.g., low-rank approximation or attention head pruning), while the repetitive layered structure of transformers implies significant inter-block redundancy - a dimension largely unexplored beyond key-value (KV) caching. Inspired by dictionary learning in convolutional networks, we propose a framework for structured weight sharing across transformer layers. Our approach decomposes attention projection matrices (Q, K, V, O) into shared dictionary atoms, reducing the attention module's parameters by 66.7% (e.g., 226.5M -> 75M in a 700M-parameter model) while achieving on-par performance. Unlike complex methods requiring distillation or architectural changes, MASA (Matrix Atom Sharing in Attention) operates as a drop-in replacement - trained with standard optimizers - and represents each layer's weights as linear combinations of shared matrix atoms. Experiments across scales (100M-700M parameters) show that MASA achieves better benchmark accuracy and perplexity than grouped-query attention (GQA), low-rank baselines and recently proposed Repeat-all-over/Sequential sharing at comparable parameter budgets. Ablation studies confirm robustness to the dictionary size and the efficacy of shared representations in capturing cross-layer statistical regularities. Extending to Vision Transformers (ViT), MASA matches performance metrics on image classification tasks with 66.7% fewer attention parameters. By combining dictionary learning strategies with transformer efficiency, MASA offers a scalable blueprint for parameter-efficient models without sacrificing performance. Finally, we investigate the possibility of employing MASA on large pretrained models to reduce their number of parameters without experiencing any significant drop in their performance.

PaperID: 1723, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06727

Authors:Jiangwen Dong, Zehui Lin, Wanyu Lin, Mingjin Zhang

Affiliations: Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, Department of Computing

Title: S-DAG: A Subject-Based Directed Acyclic Graph for Multi-Agent Heterogeneous Reasoning

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance in complex reasoning problems. Their effectiveness highly depends on the specific nature of the task, especially the required domain knowledge. Existing approaches, such as mixtureof-experts, typically operate at the task level; they are too coarse to effectively solve the heterogeneous problems involving multiple subjects. This work proposes a novel framework that performs fine-grained analysis at subject level equipped with a designated multi-agent collaboration strategy for addressing heterogeneous problem reasoning. Specifically, given an input query, we first employ a Graph Neural Network to identify the relevant subjects and infer their interdependencies to generate an Subject-based Directed Acyclic Graph (S-DAG), where nodes represent subjects and edges encode information flow. Then we profile the LLM models by assigning each model a subject-specific expertise score, and select the top-performing one for matching corresponding subject of the S-DAG. Such subject-model matching enables graph-structured multi-agent collaboration where information flows from the starting model to the ending model over S-DAG. We curate and release multi-subject subsets of standard benchmarks (MMLU-Pro, GPQA, MedMCQA) to better reflect complex, real-world reasoning tasks. Extensive experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms existing task-level model selection and multi-agent collaboration baselines in accuracy and efficiency. These results highlight the effectiveness of subject-aware reasoning and structured collaboration in addressing complex and multi-subject problems.

PaperID: 1724, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11306

Authors:Wei Fan, JinYi Yoon, Bo Ji

Affiliations: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Title: iMAD: Intelligent Multi-Agent Debate for Efficient and Accurate LLM Inference

Abstract:
Large Language Model (LLM) agent systems have advanced rapidly, driven by their strong generalization in zeroshot settings. To further enhance reasoning and accuracy on complex tasks, Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) has emerged as a promising framework that engages multiple LLM agents in structured debates to encourage diverse reasoning. However, triggering MAD for every query is inefficient, as it incurs substantial computational (token) cost and may even degrade accuracy by overturning correct answers from single-agent. To address these limitations, we propose intelligent Multi-Agent Debate (iMAD), a token-efficient framework that selectively triggers MAD only when it is likely to be beneficial (i.e., correcting an initially wrong answer). To achieve this goal, iMAD learns generalizable model behaviors to make accurate debate decisions. Specifically, iMAD first prompts a single agent to produce a structured self-critique response, from which we extract 41 interpretable linguistic and semantic features capturing hesitation cues. Then, iMAD uses a lightweight debate decision classifier, trained using our proposed FocusCal loss without test-dataset-specific tuning, to make robust zero-shot debate decisions. Through extensive experiments using six (visual) question answering datasets against five competitive baselines, we show that iMAD significantly reduces token usage (by up to 92%) while also improving final answer accuracy (by up to 13.5%).

PaperID: 1725, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12876

Authors:Heyang Ma, Qirui Mi, Qipeng Yang, Zijun Fan, Bo Li, Haifeng Zhang

Affiliations: Institute of Automation, Nanjing University of International Business and Economics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, School of Economics, Peking University

Title: Think, Speak, Decide: Language-Augmented Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Economic Decision-Making

Abstract:
Economic decision‑making depends not only on structured signals—such as prices and taxes—but also on unstructured language, including peer dialogue and media narratives. While multi‑agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has shown promise in optimizing economic decisions, it struggles with the semantic ambiguity and contextual richness of language. We propose LAMP (Language‑Augmented Multi‑Agent Policy), the first framework to integrate language into economic decision‑making, narrowing the gap to real‑world settings. LAMP follows a Think–Speak–Decide pipeline: (1) Think interprets numerical observations to extract short‑term shocks and long‑term trends, caching high‑value reasoning trajectories. (2) Speak crafts and exchanges strategic messages based on the reasoning, updating beliefs by parsing peer communications. (3) Decide fuses numerical data, reasoning, and reflections into a MARL policy to optimize language‑augmented decision‑making. Experiments in economic simulation show that LAMP outperforms both MARL and LLM‑only baselines in cumulative return (+63.5%, +34.0%), robustness (+18.8%, +59.4%), and interpretability. These results demonstrate the potential of language‑augmented policies to deliver more effective and robust economic strategies.

PaperID: 1726, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.02975

Authors:Mitchell Abrams, Kaveh Eskandari Miandoab, Felix Gervits, Vasanth Sarathy, Matthias Scheutz

Affiliations: Tufts University, DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory

Title: Where Norms and References Collide: Evaluating LLMs on Normative Reasoning

Abstract:
Embodied agents, such as robots, will need to interact in situated environments where successful communication often depends on reasoning over social norms: shared expectations that constrain what actions are appropriate in context. A key capability in such settings is normbased reference resolution (NBRR), where interpreting referential expressions requires inferring implicit normative expectations grounded in physical and social context. Yet it remains unclear whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can support this kind of reasoning. In this work, we introduce SNIC (Situated Norms in Context), a human-validated diagnostic testbed designed to probe how well state-of-the-art LLMs can extract and utilize normative principles relevant to NBRR. SNIC emphasizes physically grounded norms that arise in everyday tasks such as cleaning, tidying, and serving. Across a range of controlled evaluations, we find that even the strongest LLMs struggle to consistently identify and apply social norms—particularly when norms are implicit, underspecified, or in conflict. These findings reveal a blind spot in current LLMs and highlight a key challenge for deploying language-based systems in socially situated, embodied settings.

PaperID: 1727, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.25015

Authors:Siddhant Agarwal, Adya Dhuler, Polly Ruhnke, Melvin Speisman, Md Shad Akhtar, Shweta Yadav

Affiliations: University of Illinois at Chicago, Creighton University, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology

Title: MAMA-Memeia! Multi-Aspect Multi-Agent Collaboration for Depressive Symptoms Identification in Memes

Abstract:
Over the past years, memes have evolved from being exclusively a medium of humorous exchanges to one that allows users to express a range of emotions freely and easily. With the evergrowing utilization of memes in expressing depressive sentiments, we conduct a study on identifying depressive symptoms exhibited by memes shared by users of online social media platforms. We introduce RESTOREx as a vital resource for detecting depressive symptoms in memes on social media through the Large Language Model (LLM) generated and human-annotated explanations. We introduce MAMA-Memeia, a collaborative multi-agent multi-aspect discussion framework grounded in the clinical psychology method of Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT) Competencies. MAMA-Memeia improves upon the current state-of-the-art by 7.55% in macro-F1 and is established as the new benchmark compared to over 30 methods.

PaperID: 1728, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12155

Authors:Thong Bach, Dung Nguyen, Thao Minh Le, Truyen Tran

Affiliations: Deakin University, Pennsylvania State University

Title: Rethinking Deep Alignment Through the Lens of Incomplete Safety Learning

Abstract:
Large language models exhibit systematic vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks despite extensive safety alignment through supervised finetuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback. These vulnerabilities manifest as differential safety behavior across token positions, with safety modifications concentrating in early positions while later positions show minimal distributional changes from base models. We provide a mechanistic analysis of safety alignment training dynamics, revealing that gradient concentration during autoregressive training creates signal decay across token positions. This leads to incomplete distributional learning where safety training fails to fully transform model preferences in later response regions. We introduce base-favored tokens as computational indicators of incomplete safety learning. Analysis reveals that while early positions undergo substantial distributional changes, later positions retain concerning base model preferences in safety-critical contexts, indicating systematic incomplete learning due to insufficient training signals. We develop a targeted completion method that addresses these undertrained regions through adaptive penalties and hybrid teacher distillation. Experimental evaluation across Llama and Qwen model families demonstrates remarkable improvements in adversarial robustness, with dramatic reductions in attack success rates across multiple attack types while fully preserving general capabilities.

PaperID: 1729, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08496

Authors:Bingsong Bai, Yizhong Geng, Fengping Wang, Cong Wang, Puyuan Guo, Yingming Gao, Ya Li

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: HQ-SVC: Towards High-Quality Zero-Shot Singing Voice Conversion in Low-Resource Scenarios

Abstract:
Zeroshot singing voice conversion (SVC) transforms a source singer's timbre to an unseen target speaker's voice while preserving melodic content without fine-tuning. Existing methods model speaker timbre and vocal content separately, losing essential acoustic information that degrades output quality while requiring significant computational resources. To overcome these limitations, we propose HQ-SVC, an efficient framework for high-quality zero-shot SVC. HQ-SVC first extracts jointly content and speaker features using a decoupled codec. It then enhances fidelity through pitch and volume modeling, preserving critical acoustic information typically lost in separate modeling approaches, and progressively refines outputs via differentiable signal processing and diffusion techniques. Evaluations confirm HQ-SVC significantly outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot SVC methods in conversion quality and efficiency. Beyond voice conversion, HQ-SVC achieves superior voice naturalness compared to specialized audio super-resolution methods while natively supporting voice super-resolution tasks.

PaperID: 1730, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15958

Authors:Zhenyu Bi, Gaurav Srivastava, Yang Li, Swastik Roy, Meng Lu, Morteza Ziyadi, Xuan Wang

Affiliations: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, College of William and Mary

Title: JudgeBoard: Benchmarking and Enhancing Small Language Models for Reasoning Evaluation

Abstract:
While small language models (SLMs) have shown promise on various reasoning tasks, their ability to judge the correctness of answers remains unclear compared to large language models (LLMs). Prior work on LLMas-a-judge frameworks typically relies on comparing candidate answers against ground-truth labels or other candidate answers using predefined metrics like entailment. However, this approach is inherently indirect and difficult to fully automate, offering limited support for fine-grained and scalable evaluation of reasoning outputs. In this work, we propose JudgeBoard, a novel evaluation pipeline that directly queries models to assess the correctness of candidate answers without requiring extra answer comparisons. We focus on two core reasoning domains: mathematical reasoning and science/commonsense reasoning, and construct task-specific evaluation leaderboards using both accuracy-based ranking and an Elo-based rating system across five benchmark datasets, enabling consistent model comparison as judges rather than comparators. To improve judgment performance in lightweight models, we propose MAJ (Multi-Agent Judging), a novel multi-agent evaluation framework that leverages multiple interacting SLMs with distinct reasoning profiles to approximate LLM-level judgment accuracy through collaborative deliberation. Experimental results reveal a significant performance gap between SLMs and LLMs in isolated judging tasks. However, our MAJ framework substantially improves the reliability and consistency of SLMs. On the MATH dataset, MAJ using smaller-sized models as backbones performs comparatively well or even better than their larger-sized counterparts. Our findings highlight that multi-agent SLM systems can potentially match or exceed LLM performance in judgment tasks, with implications for scalable and efficient assessment.

PaperID: 1731, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18329

Authors:Guo Chen, Junjie Huang, Huaijin Xie, Fei Sun, Tao Jia

Affiliations: Southwest University, Communication University of China, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: LiR3AG: A Lightweight Rerank Reasoning Strategy Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Abstract:
RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) effectively enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating retrieved external knowledge into the generation process. Reasoning models improve LLM performance in multi-hop QA tasks, which require integrating and reasoning over multiple pieces of evidence across different documents to answer a complex question. However, they often introduce substantial computational costs, including increased token consumption and inference latency. To better understand and mitigate this trade-off, we conduct a comprehensive study of reasoning strategies for reasoning models in RAG multi-hop QA tasks. Our findings reveal that reasoning models adopt structured strategies to integrate retrieved and internal knowledge, primarily following two modes: Context-Grounded Reasoning, which relies directly on retrieved content, and Knowledge-Reconciled Reasoning, which resolves conflicts or gaps using internal knowledge. To this end, we propose a novel Lightweight Rerank Reasoning Strategy Framework for RAG (LiR³AG) to enable non-reasoning models to transfer reasoning strategies by restructuring retrieved evidence into coherent reasoning chains. LiR³AG significantly reduce the average 98% output tokens overhead and 58.6% inferencing time while improving 8B non-reasoning model's F1 performance ranging from 6.2% to 22.5% to surpass the performance of 32B reasoning model in RAG, offering a practical and efficient path forward for RAG systems.

PaperID: 1732, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.03450

Authors:Yiye Chen, Harpreet S. Sawhney, Nicholas Gydé, Yanan Jian, Jack Saunders, Patricio Vela, Benjamin E Lundell

Affiliations: Amazon Robotics, University of Bath Microsoft, Georgia Institute of Technology

Title: Schema-Guided Scene-Graph Reasoning Based on Multi-Agent Large Language Model System

Abstract:
Scene graphs have emerged as a structured and serializable environment representation for grounded spatial reasoning with Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we propose SG2, an iterative SchemaGuided Scene-Graph reasoning framework based on multi-agent LLMs. The agents are grouped into two modules: a (1) Reasoner module for abstract task planning and graph information queries generation, and a (2) Retriever module for extracting corresponding graph information based on code-writing following the queries. Two modules collaborate iteratively, enabling sequential reasoning and adaptive attention to graph information. The scene graph schema, prompted to both modules, serves to not only streamline both reasoning and retrieval process, but also guide the cooperation between two modules. This eliminates the need to prompt LLMs with full graph data, reducing the chance of hallucination due to irrelevant information. Through experiments in multiple simulation environments, we show that our framework surpasses existing LLM-based approaches and baseline single-agent, tool-based Reason-while-Retrieve strategy in numerical Q&A and planning tasks.

PaperID: 1733, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19456

Authors:Jinwei Chi, Ke Wang, Yu Chen, Xuanye Lin, Qiang Xu

Affiliations: Jinan University, South China University of Technology

Title: Activations as Features: Probing LLMs for Generalizable Essay Scoring Representations

Abstract:
Automated essay scoring (AES) is a challenging task in crossprompt settings due to the diversity of scoring criteria. While previous studies have focused on the output of large language models (LLMs) to improve scoring accuracy, we believe activations from intermediate layers may also provide valuable information. To explore this possibility, we evaluated the discriminative power of LLMs’ activations in cross-prompt essay scoring task. Specifically, we used activation to fit probes and further analyzed the effects of different models and input content of LLMs on this discriminative power. By computing the directions of essays across various trait dimensions under different prompts, we analyzed the variation in evaluation perspectives of large language models concerning essay types and traits. Results show that the activations possess strong discriminative power in evaluating essay quality and that LLMs can adapt their evaluation perspectives to different traits and essay types, effectively handling the diversity of scoring criteria in cross-prompt settings.

PaperID: 1734, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10920

Authors:Seungho Choi, Sihyun Park, Minsang Kim, Chansol Park, Bongsu Kim

Affiliations:

Title: HanjaBridge: Resolving Semantic Ambiguity in Korean LLMs via Hanja-Augmented Pre-Training

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) often show poor performance in lowresource languages like Korean, partly due to unique linguistic challenges such as homophonous Sino-Korean words that are indistinguishable in Hangul script. To address this semantic ambiguity, we propose HanjaBridge, a novel meaning-injection technique integrated into a continual pre-training (CPT) framework. Instead of deterministically mapping a word to a single Hanja (Chinese character), HanjaBridge presents the model with all possible Hanja candidates for a given homograph, encouraging the model to learn contextual disambiguation. This process is paired with token-level knowledge distillation to prevent catastrophic forgetting. Experimental results show that HanjaBridge significantly improves Korean language understanding, achieving a 21% relative improvement on the KoBALT benchmark. Notably, by reinforcing semantic alignment between Korean and Chinese through shared Hanja, we observe a strong positive cross-lingual transfer. Furthermore, these gains persist even when Hanja augmentation is omitted at inference time, ensuring practical efficiency with no additional run-time cost.

PaperID: 1735, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11141

Authors:Shiyao Cui, Xijia Feng, Yingkang Wang, Junxiao Yang, Zhexin Zhang, Biplab Sikdar, Hongning Wang, Han Qiu, Minlie Huang

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, National University of Singapore

Title: When Smiley Turns Hostile: Interpreting How Emojis Trigger LLMs’ Toxicity

Abstract:
Emojis are globally used nonverbal cues in digital communication, and extensive research has examined how large language models (LLMs) understand and utilize emojis across contexts. While usually associated with friendliness or playfulness, it is observed that emojis may trigger toxic content generation in LLMs. Motivated by such a observation, we aim to investigate: (1) whether emojis can clearly enhance the toxicity generation in LLMs and (2) how to interpret this phenomenon. We begin with a comprehensive exploration of emoji-triggered LLM toxicity generation by automating the construction of prompts with emojis to subtly express toxic intent. Experiments across 5 mainstream languages on 7 famous LLMs along with jailbreak tasks demonstrate that prompts with emojis could easily induce toxicity generation. To understand this phenomenon, we conduct model-level interpretations spanning semantic cognition, sequence generation and tokenization, suggesting that emojis can act as a heterogeneous semantic channel to bypass the safety mechanisms. To pursue deeper insights, we further probe the pre-training corpus and uncover potential correlation between the emoji-related data polution with the toxicity generation behaviors.

PaperID: 1736, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.06968

Authors:Li Du, Hanyu Zhao, Yiming Ju, Tengfei Pan

Affiliations:

Title: Scaling Towards the Information Boundary of Instructions through Data Synthesizing

Abstract:
Highquality instructions are crucial for aligning pretrained models to improve their performance on downstream tasks. Although current instruction datasets have reached tens of millions of samples, models finetuned on them may still struggle with complex instruction following and tasks in rare domains. This is primarily due to limited expansion in both "coverage" (coverage of task types and knowledge areas) and "depth" (instruction complexity) of the instruction set. To address this issue, we propose a systematic instruction data construction framework, which integrates a hierarchical labeling system, an informative seed selection algorithm, an evolutionary data synthesis process, and a model deficiency diagnosis with targeted data generation. These components form an iterative closed-loop to continuously enhance the coverage and depth of instruction data. Based on this framework, we construct Infinity Instruct Subject, a high-quality dataset containing approximately 1.5 million instructions. Experiments on multiple foundation models and benchmark tasks demonstrate its effectiveness in improving instruction-following capabilities. Further analyses suggest that InfinityInstruct-Subject shows enlarged coverage and depth compared to comparable synthesized instruction datasets.

PaperID: 1737, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11464

Authors:Xiaoran Fan, Zhichao Sun, Tao Ji, Lixing Shen, Tao Gui

Affiliations: Fudan University, Hikvision Inc

Title: MHA2MLA-VLM: Enabling DeepSeek’s Economical Multi-Head Latent Attention Across Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
As visionlanguage models (VLMs) tackle increasingly complex and multimodal tasks, the rapid growth of Key-Value (KV) cache imposes significant memory and computational bottlenecks during inference. While Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA) offers an effective means to compress the KV cache and accelerate inference, adapting existing VLMs to the MLA architecture without costly pretraining remains largely unexplored. In this work, we present MHA2MLA-VLM, a parameter-efficient and multimodal-aware framework for converting off-the-shelf VLMs to MLA. Our approach features two core techniques: (1) a modality-adaptive partial-RoPE strategy that supports both traditional and multimodal settings by selectively masking nonessential dimensions, and (2) a modality-decoupled low-rank approximation method that independently compresses the visual and textual KV spaces. Furthermore, we introduce parameter-efficient fine-tuning to minimize adaptation cost and demonstrate that minimizing output activation error, rather than parameter distance, substantially reduces performance loss. Extensive experiments on three representative VLMs show that MHA2MLA-VLM restores original model performance with minimal supervised data, significantly reduces KV cache footprint, and integrates seamlessly with KV quantization.

PaperID: 1738, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.11809

Authors:Biao Fu, Donglei Yu, Minpeng Liao, Chengxi Li, Xinjie Chen, Yidong Chen, Kai Fan, Xiaodong Shi

Affiliations: Xiamen University Key Laboratory of Digital Protection and Intelligent Processing of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Fujian and Taiwan (Xiamen University), Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Alibaba Group Tongyi Lab

Title: Efficient and Adaptive Simultaneous Speech Translation with Fully Unidirectional Architecture

Abstract:
Simultaneous speech translation (SimulST) produces translations incrementally while processing partial speech input. Although large language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in offline translation tasks, applying them to SimulST poses notable challenges. Existing LLMbased SimulST approaches either incur significant computational overhead due to repeated encoding of bidirectional speech encoder, or they depend on a fixed read/write policy, limiting the efficiency and performance. In this work, we introduce Efficient and Adaptive Simultaneous Speech Translation (EASiST) with fully unidirectional architecture, including both speech encoder and LLM. EASiST includes a multi-latency data curation strategy to generate semantically aligned SimulST training samples and redefines SimulST as an interleaved generation task with explicit read/write tokens. To facilitate adaptive inference, we incorporate a lightweight policy head that dynamically predicts read/write actions. Additionally, we employ a multi-stage training strategy to align speech-text modalities and optimize both translation and policy behavior. Experiments on both in-domain (MuST-C) and out-of-domain (Europarl-ST) En-De and En-Es datasets demonstrate that EASiST offers superior latency-quality trade-offs compared to several strong baselines.

PaperID: 1739, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02203

Authors:Jiale Fu, Yaqing Wang, Simeng Han, Jiaming Fan, Xu Yang

Affiliations: Southeast University Key Laboratory of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Technology and Its Interdisciplinary Applications (Southeast University), Ministry of Education, Beijing Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Applications, Stanford University

Title: GraphIC: A Graph-Based In-Context Example Retrieval Model for Multi-Step Reasoning

Abstract:
Incontext learning (ICL) enhances large language models (LLMs) by incorporating demonstration examples, yet its effectiveness heavily depends on the quality of selected examples. Current methods typically use text embeddings to measure semantic similarity, which often introduces bias in multi-step reasoning tasks. This occurs because text embeddings contain irrelevant semantic information and lack deeper reasoning structures. To address this, we propose GraphIC, a graph-based retrieval model that leverages reasoning-aware representation and specialized similarity metric for in-context example retrieval. GraphIC first constructs thought graphs—directed, node-attributed graphs that explicitly model reasoning steps and their dependencies—for candidate examples and queries. This approach filters out superficial semantics while preserving essential reasoning processes. Next, GraphIC retrieves examples using a novel similarity metric tailored for these graphs, capturing sequential reasoning patterns and asymmetry between examples. Comprehensive evaluations across mathematical reasoning, code generation, and logical reasoning tasks demonstrate that GraphIC outperforms 10 baseline methods. Our results highlight the importance of reasoning-aware retrieval in ICL, offering a robust solution for enhancing LLM performance in multi-step reasoning scenarios.

PaperID: 1740, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17585

Authors:Kang He, Boyu Chen, Yuzhe Ding, Fei Li, Chong Teng, Donghong Ji

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Aerospace Information Security and Trusted Computing, Ministry of Education, School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University

Title: PaSE: Prototype-aligned Calibration and Shapley-based Equilibrium for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Abstract:
Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) seeks to understand human emotions by integrating textual, acoustic, and visual signals. Although multimodal fusion is designed to leverage crossmodal complementarity, real-world scenarios often exhibit modality competition: dominant modalities tend to overshadow weaker ones, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose PaSE, a novel Prototype-aligned Calibration and Shapley-optimized Equilibrium framework, which enhances collaboration while explicitly mitigating modality competition. PaSE first applies Prototype-guided Calibration Learning (PCL) to refine unimodal representations and align them through an Entropic Optimal Transport mechanism that ensures semantic consistency. To further stabilize optimization, we introduce a Dual-Phase Optimization strategy. A prototype-gated fusion module is first used to extract shared representations, followed by Shapley-based Gradient Modulation (SGM), which adaptively adjusts gradients according to the contribution of each modality. Extensive experiments on IEMOCAP, MOSI, and MOSEI confirm that PaSE achieves the superior performance and effectively alleviates modality competition.

PaperID: 1741, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04946

Authors:Nameer Hirschkind, Joseph Liu, Xiao Yu, Mahesh Kumar Nandwana

Affiliations:

Title: REINA: Regularized Entropy Information-Based Loss for Efficient Simultaneous Speech Translation

Abstract:
Simultaneous Speech Translation (SimulST) systems stream in audio while simultaneously emitting translated text or speech. Such systems face the significant challenge of balancing translation quality and latency. We introduce a strategy to optimize this tradeoff: wait for more input only if you gain information by doing so. Based on this strategy, we present Regularized Entropy INformation Adaptation (REINA), a novel loss to train an adaptive policy using an existing nonstreaming translation model. We derive REINA from information theory principles and show that REINA helps push the reported Pareto frontier of the latency/quality tradeoff over prior works. Utilizing REINA, we train a SimulST model on French, Spanish and German, both from and into English. Training on only open source or synthetically generated data, we achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) streaming results for models of comparable size. We also introduce a metric for streaming efficiency, quantitatively showing REINA improves the latency/quality trade-off by as much as 21 percent compared to prior approaches, normalized against non-streaming baseline BLEU scores.

PaperID: 1742, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09282

Authors:Jiliang Hu, Zuchao Li, Baoyuan Qi, Guoming Liu, Ping Wang

Affiliations: Wuhan University, Xiaomi Corporation

Title: End-to-End Contrastive Language-Speech Pretraining Model for Long-Form Spoken Question Answering

Abstract:
Significant progress has been made in spoken question answering (SQA) in recent years. However, many existing methods, including large audio language models, struggle with processing long audio. Follow the success of retrieval augmented generation, a speechrelated retriever shows promising in help preprocessing long-form speech. But the performance of existing speech-related retrievers is lacking. To address this challenge, we propose CLSR, an end-to-end contrastive language-speech retriever that efficiently extracts question-relevant segments from long audio recordings for downstream SQA task. Unlike conventional speech-text contrastive models, CLSR incorporates an intermediate step that converts acoustic features into text-like representations prior to alignment, thereby more effectively bridging the gap between modalities. Experimental results across four cross-modal retrieval datasets demonstrate that CLSR surpasses both end-to-end speech related retrievers and pipeline approaches combining speech recognition with text retrieval, providing a robust foundation for advancing practical long-form SQA applications.

PaperID: 1743, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13410

Authors:Zhaopei Huang, Qifeng Dai, Guozheng Wu, Xiaopeng Wu, Xubin Li, Tiezheng Ge, Wenxuan Wang, Qin Jin

Affiliations: Renmin University of China, Taobao & Tmall Group of Alibaba

Title: Mem-PAL: Towards Memory-based Personalized Dialogue Assistants for Long-term User-Agent Interaction

Abstract:
With the rise of smart personal devices, serviceoriented human-agent interactions have become increasingly prevalent. This trend highlights the need for personalized dialogue assistants that can understand user-specific traits to accurately interpret requirements and tailor responses to individual preferences. However, existing approaches often overlook the complexities of long-term interactions and fail to capture users’ subjective characteristics. To address these gaps, we present PAL-Bench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate the personalization capabilities of service-oriented assistants in long-term user-agent interactions. In the absence of available real-world data, we develop a multi-step LLM-based synthesis pipeline, which is further verified and refined by human annotators. This process yields PAL-Set, the first Chinese dataset comprising multi-session user logs and dialogue histories, which serves as the foundation for PAL-Bench. Furthermore, to improve personalized service-oriented interactions, we propose H2Memory, a hierarchical and heterogeneous memory framework that incorporates retrieval-augmented generation to improve personalized response generation. Comprehensive experiments on both our PAL-Bench and an external dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed memory framework.

PaperID: 1744, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09984

Authors:Bo Li, Zhenghua Xu, Rui Xie

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Power Distribution Equipment and System, School of Health Sciences and Biomedical Engineering, Hebei University of Technology, Peking University, National Engineering Research Center for Software Engineering

Title: Language Drift in Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Characterization and Decoding-Time Mitigation

Abstract:
Multilingual RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to perform knowledge-intensive tasks in multilingual settings by leveraging retrieved documents as external evidence. However, when the retrieved evidence differs in language from the user query and in-context exemplars, the model often exhibits language drift by generating responses in an unintended language. This phenomenon is especially pronounced during reasoning-intensive decoding, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) generation, where intermediate steps introduce further language instability. In this paper, we systematically study output language drift in multilingual RAG across multiple datasets, languages, and LLM backbones. Our controlled experiments reveal that the drift results not from comprehension failure but from decoder-level collapse, where dominant token distributions and high-frequency English patterns dominate the intended generation language. We further observe that English serves as a semantic attractor under cross-lingual conditions, emerging as both the strongest interference source and the most frequent fallback language. To mitigate this, we propose Soft Constrained Decoding (SCD), a lightweight, training-free decoding strategy that gently steers generation toward the target language by penalizing non-target-language tokens. SCD is model-agnostic and can be applied to any generation algorithm without modifying the architecture or requiring additional data. Experiments across three multilingual datasets and multiple typologically diverse languages show that SCD consistently improves language alignment and task performance, providing an effective and generalizable solution in multilingual RAG.

PaperID: 1745, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11789

Authors:Jiayi Li, Xiao Liu, Yansong Feng

Affiliations: Peking University

Title: From Single to Societal: Analyzing Persona-Induced Bias in Multi-Agent Interactions

Abstract:
Large Language Model (LLM)based multi-agent systems are increasingly used to simulate human interactions and solve collaborative tasks. A common practice is to assign agents with personas to encourage behavioral diversity. However, this raises a critical yet underexplored question: do personas introduce biases into multi-agent interactions? This paper presents a systematic investigation into persona-induced biases in multi-agent interactions, with a focus on social traits like trustworthiness (how an agent's opinion is received by others) and insistence (how strongly an agent advocates for its opinion). Through a series of controlled experiments in collaborative problem-solving and persuasion tasks, we reveal that (1) LLM-based agents exhibit biases in both trustworthiness and insistence, with personas from historically advantaged groups (e.g., men and White individuals) perceived as less trustworthy and demonstrating less insistence; and (2) agents exhibit significant in-group favoritism, showing a higher tendency to conform to others who share the same persona. These biases persist across various LLMs, group sizes, and numbers of interaction rounds, highlighting an urgent need for awareness and mitigation to ensure the fairness and reliability of multi-agent systems.

PaperID: 1746, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09884

Authors:Xuzhao Li, Xuchen Li, Shiyu Hu, Yongzhen Guo, Wentao Zhang

Affiliations: Ant Group, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences University of Chinese Academy of Sciences Zhongguancun Academy, Nanyang Technological University, Zhongguancun Academy Peking University

Title: VerifyBench: A Systematic Benchmark for Evaluating Reasoning Verifiers Across Domains

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance their reasoning capabilities through feedback. A critical challenge is verifying the consistency of modelgenerated responses and reference answers, since these responses are often lengthy, diverse, and nuanced. Rule-based verifiers struggle with complexity, prompting the use of model-based verifiers. Existing research primarily focuses on building better verifiers, yet a systematic evaluation of different types of verifiers' performance across domains remains lacking, severely constraining the reliable development of Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR). To address this, we propose VerifyBench--a cross-domain comprehensive benchmark for systematically evaluating verifiers. We construct about 4,000 expert-level questions covering mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology. Questions are equipped with reference answers and diverse responses. The reliability of the evaluation is ensured through a rigorous collection and annotation process conducted by a multidisciplinary expert team. We design a four-dimensional experimental framework to comprehensively compare the performance boundaries of specialized verifiers and general LLMs under combined conditions of extracted answers vs. complete responses, and short vs. long outputs. Our evaluation uncovers fundamental trade-offs in verifiers: while specialized verifiers achieve leading accuracy (the best model reaching 96.48% in chemistry), they exhibit deficiencies in recall; general models show stronger inclusivity but unstable accuracy. More importantly, we discover verifiers' high sensitivity to input structure and inherent limitations in cross-domain generalization, providing critical insights into the bottlenecks of current verifier technology.

PaperID: 1747, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.12326

Authors:Jiayi Lin, Yanlin Wang, Yibiao Yang, Lei Zhang, Yutao Xie

Affiliations: Sun Yat-Sen University, Nanjing University, International Digital Economy Academy

Title: Towards Better Code Understanding in Decoder-Only Models with Contrastive Learning

Abstract:
Recent advances in largescale code generation models have led to remarkable progress in producing high-quality code. These models are trained in a self-supervised manner on extensive unlabeled code corpora using a decoder-only architecture. However, despite their generative strength, decoder-only models often exhibit limited performance on code understanding tasks such as code search and clone detection, primarily due to their generation-oriented training objectives. While training large encoder-only models from scratch on massive code datasets can improve understanding ability but remains computationally expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we explore a more efficient alternative by transferring knowledge from pre-trained decoder-only code generation models to code understanding tasks. We investigate how decoder-only architectures can be effectively adapted to learn discriminative and semantically meaningful code representations. To this end, we propose CL4D, a contrastive learning framework tailored to strengthen the representation capabilities of decoder-only models. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that CL4D achieves competitive or superior performance compared to existing methods on representative code understanding tasks, including code search and clone detection. Further analysis reveals that CL4D substantially improves the semantic alignment of code representations by reducing the distance between semantically similar code snippets. These findings highlight the feasibility of leveraging decoder-only models as a unified backbone for both code generation and understanding.

PaperID: 1748, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10375

Authors:Shuyi Liu, Yu-Ming Shang, Xi Zhang

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: TruthfulRAG: Resolving Factual-level Conflicts in Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Knowledge Graphs

Abstract:
RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a powerful framework for enhancing the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating retrieval-based methods with generative models. As external knowledge repositories continue to expand and the parametric knowledge within models becomes outdated, a critical challenge for RAG systems is resolving conflicts between retrieved external information and LLMs' internal knowledge, which can significantly compromise the accuracy and reliability of generated content. However, existing approaches to conflict resolution typically operate at the token or semantic level, often leading to fragmented and partial understanding of factual discrepancies between LLMs' knowledge and context, particularly in knowledge-intensive tasks. To address this limitation, we propose TruthfulRAG, the first framework that leverages Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to resolve factual-level knowledge conflicts in RAG systems. Specifically, TruthfulRAG constructs KGs by systematically extracting triples from retrieved content, utilizes query-based graph retrieval to identify relevant knowledge, and employs entropy-based filtering mechanisms to precisely locate conflicting elements and mitigate factual inconsistencies, thereby enabling LLMs to generate faithful and accurate responses. Extensive experiments reveal that TruthfulRAG outperforms existing methods, effectively alleviating knowledge conflicts and improving the robustness and trustworthiness of RAG systems.

PaperID: 1749, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12289

Authors:Haowei Lou, Hye-young Paik, Wen Hu, Lina Yao

Affiliations: University of New South Wales

Title: ParaMETA: Towards Learning Disentangled Paralinguistic Speaking Styles Representations from Speech

Abstract:
Learning representative embeddings for different types of speaking styles, such as emotion, age, and gender, is critical for both recognition tasks (e.g., cognitive computing and humancomputer interaction) and generative tasks (e.g., style-controllable speech generation). In this work, we introduce ParaMETA, a unified and flexible framework for learning and controlling speaking styles directly from speech. Unlike existing methods that rely on single-task models or cross-modal alignment, ParaMETA learns disentangled, task-specific embeddings by projecting speech into dedicated subspaces for each style type. This design reduces inter-task interference, mitigates negative transfer, and allows a single model to handle multiple paralinguistic tasks such as emotion, gender, age, and nationality classification. Beyond recognition, ParaMETA enables fine-grained style control in Text-To-Speech (TTS) generative models. It supports both speech- and text-based prompting and allows users to modify one speaking style while preserving others. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ParaMETA outperforms strong baselines in classification accuracy and generates more natural and expressive speech, while maintaining a lightweight and efficient model suitable for real-world applications.

PaperID: 1750, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06916

Authors:Shichao Ma, Yunhe Guo, Jiahao Su, Qihe Huang, Zhengyang Zhou, Yang Wang

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China

Title: Talk2Image: A Multi-Agent System for Multi-Turn Image Generation and Editing

Abstract:
Textto-image generation tasks have driven remarkable advances in diverse media applications, yet most focus on single-turn scenarios and struggle with iterative, multi-turn creative tasks. Recent dialogue-based systems attempt to bridge this gap, but their single-agent, sequential paradigm often causes intention drift and incoherent edits. To address these limitations, we present Talk2Image, a novel multi-agent system for interactive image generation and editing in multi-turn dialogue scenarios. Our approach integrates three key components: intention parsing from dialogue history, task decomposition and collaborative execution across specialized agents, and feedback-driven refinement based on a multi-view evaluation mechanism. Talk2Image enables step-by-step alignment with user intention and consistent image editing. Experiments demonstrate that Talk2Image outperforms existing baselines in controllability, coherence, and user satisfaction across iterative image generation and editing tasks.

PaperID: 1751, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10338

Authors:Guduru Manoj, Neel Prabhanjan Rachamalla, Ashish Kulkarni, Gautam Rajeev, Jay Piplodiya, Arul Menezes, Shaharukh Khan, Souvik Rana, Manya Sah, Chandra Khatri, Shubham Agarwal

Affiliations:

Title: BhashaKritika: Building Synthetic Pretraining Data at Scale for Indic Languages

Abstract:
In the context of pretraining of Large Language Models (LLMs), synthetic data has emerged as an alternative for generating highquality pretraining data at scale. This is particularly beneficial in low resource language settings where the benefits of the recent LLMs have been unevenly distributed across languages. In this work, we present a systematic study on the generation and evaluation of synthetic multilingual pretraining data for Indic languages, where we construct a large scale synthetic dataset BhashaKritika, comprising 540B tokens using 5 different techniques for 10 languages. We explore the impact of grounding generation in documents, personas and topics. We analyze how language choice, both in the prompt instructions and document grounding affects data quality and we compare translations of English content with native generation in Indic languages. In order to support scalable and language-sensitive evaluation, we introduce a modular quality evaluation pipeline that integrates script and language detection, metadata consistency checks, n-gram repetition analysis, and perplexity-based filtering using KenLM models. Our framework enables robust quality control across diverse scripts and linguistic contexts. Empirical results through model runs reveal key trade-offs in generation strategies and highlight best practices for constructing effective multilingual corpora. This work contributes practical insights for advanced pretraining recipes in low-resource and script-diverse settings, particularly in the Indian context.

PaperID: 1752, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06682

Authors:Shibing Mo, Haoyang Ruan, Kai Wu, Jing Liu

Affiliations: School of Artifcial Intelligence, Xidian University

Title: Textual Self-Attention Network: Test-Time Preference Optimization Through Textual Gradient-Based Attention

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization capabilities, but aligning their outputs with human preferences typically requires expensive supervised finetuning. Recent test-time methods leverage textual feedback to overcome this, but they often critique and revise a single candidate response, lacking a principled mechanism to systematically analyze, weigh, and synthesize the strengths of multiple promising candidates. Such a mechanism is crucial because different responses may excel in distinct aspects (e.g., clarity, factual accuracy, or tone), and combining their best elements may produce a far superior outcome. This paper proposes the Textual Self-Attention Network (TSAN), a new paradigm for test-time preference optimization that requires no parameter updates. TSAN emulates self-attention entirely in natural language to overcome this gap: it analyzes multiple candidates by formatting them into textual keys and values, weighs their relevance using an LLM-based attention module, and synthesizes their strengths into a new, preference-aligned response under the guidance of the learned textual attention. This entire process operates in a textual gradient space, enabling iterative and interpretable optimization. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that with just three test-time iterations on a base SFT model, TSAN outperforms supervised models like Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct and surpasses the current state-of-the-art test-time alignment method by effectively leveraging multiple candidate solutions.

PaperID: 1753, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01166

Authors:Bingshen Mu, Hexin Liu, Hongfei Xue, Kun Wei, Lei Xie

Affiliations: Speech and Language Processing Group (ASLP@NPU), School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University

Title: Hearing More with Less: Multi-Modal Retrieval-and-Selection Augmented Conversational LLM-Based ASR

Abstract:
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) aims to convert human speech content into corresponding text. In conversational scenarios, effectively utilizing context can enhance its accuracy. Large Language Models' (LLMs) exceptional longcontext understanding and reasoning abilities enable LLM-based ASR (LLM-ASR) to leverage historical context for recognizing conversational speech, which has a high degree of contextual relevance. However, existing conversational LLM-ASR methods use a fixed number of preceding utterances or the entire conversation history as context, resulting in significant ASR confusion and computational costs due to massive irrelevant and redundant information. This paper proposes a multi-modal retrieval-and-selection method named MARS that augments conversational LLM-ASR by enabling it to retrieve and select the most relevant acoustic and textual historical context for the current utterance. Specifically, multi-modal retrieval obtains a set of candidate historical contexts, each exhibiting high acoustic or textual similarity to the current utterance. Multi-modal selection calculates the acoustic and textual similarities for each retrieved candidate historical context and, by employing our proposed near-ideal ranking method to consider both similarities, selects the best historical context. Evaluations on the Interspeech 2025 Multilingual Conversational Speech Language Model Challenge dataset show that the LLM-ASR, when trained on only 1.5K hours of data and equipped with the MARS, outperforms the state-of-the-art top-ranking system trained on 179K hours of data.

PaperID: 1754, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02529

Authors:Alicja Rączkowska, Riccardo Belluzzo, Piotr Zieliński, Joanna Baran, Paweł Olszewski

Affiliations: Machine Learning Research

Title: RetrySQL: Text-to-SQL Training with Retry Data for Self-Correcting Query Generation

Abstract:
The textto-SQL task is an active challenge in Natural Language Processing. Many existing solutions focus on using black-box language models extended with specialized components within customized end-to-end text-to-SQL pipelines. While these solutions use both closed-source proprietary language models and coding-oriented open-source models, there is a lack of research regarding SQL-specific small generative models. At the same time, recent advancements in self-correcting generation strategies show promise for improving the capabilities of existing architectures. The application of these concepts to the text-to-SQL task remains unexplored. In this paper, we introduce RetrySQL, a new approach to training text-to-SQL generation models. We prepare reasoning steps for reference SQL queries and then corrupt them to create retry data that contains both incorrect and corrected steps, divided with a special token. We continuously pre-train open-source coding models with this data and demonstrate that retry steps yield an improvements of up to 4 and 9 percentage points for overall and challenging execution metrics, respectively, as compared to pre-training without retry data. We showcase that the self-correcting behavior is learned by the model and the increase in downstream accuracy metrics is a result of this additional skill. Finally, we incorporate RetrySQL-trained models into the full text-to-SQL pipeline and showcase that they are competitive in terms of execution accuracy with proprietary models that contain orders of magnitude more parameters. RetrySQL demonstrates that self-correction can be learned in the text-to-SQL task and provides a novel way of improving generation accuracy for small SQL-oriented language models.

PaperID: 1755, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17637

Authors:Ye Tian, Chengcheng Wang, Jing Han, Yehui Tang, Kai Han

Affiliations: Huawei Noah's Ark Lab, University of Sydney, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: PocketLLM: Ultimate Compression of Large Language Models via Meta Networks

Abstract:
As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to grow in size, storing and transmitting them on edge devices becomes increasingly challenging. Traditional methods like quantization and pruning struggle to achieve extreme compression of LLMs without sacrificing accuracy. In this paper, we introduce PocketLLM, a novel approach to compress LLMs in a latent space via metanetworks. A simple encoder network is proposed to project the weights of LLMs into discrete latent vectors, which are then represented using a compact codebook. A lightweight decoder network is employed to map the codebook's representative vectors back to the original weight space. This method allows for significant compression of the large weights in LLMs, consisting solely of a small decoder, a concise codebook, and an index. Extensive experiments show that PocketLLM achieves superior performance even at significantly high compression ratios, e.g., compressing Llama 2-7B by 10x with a negligible drop in accuracy.

PaperID: 1756, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00057

Authors:Thomas Jean-Michel Valentin, Ardi Madadi, Gaetano Sapia, Marcel Böhme

Affiliations: Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay, Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy

Title: Incoherence as Oracle-less Measure of Error in LLM-Based Code Generation

Abstract:
Generating code from a natural language programming task is one of the most successful applications of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, the generated program may be buggy. Without an oracle, such as an existing, correct implementation or a formal specification, can we somehow estimate how likely the generated program is correct? In this paper, we propose a measure of incorrectness, called incoherence, that can be estimated efficiently in the absence of an oracle and allows us to establish a lower bound on the error, i.e., the probability that the LLMgenerated program for that specification is incorrect. In our experiments, our incoherence-based methodology can automatically identify about two-thirds of incorrect programs without reports of false positives for the average task. In fact, an oracle-based evaluation of LLMs can be reliably replaced by an incoherence-based evaluation. In particular, we find a very strong agreement between the ranking of LLMs by the number of programs deemed correct via an oracle (pass@1) and the ranking of LLMs by the number of programs deemed correct via incoherence.

PaperID: 1757, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08383

Authors:Bo Wang, Junzhuo Li, Hong Chen, Yuanlin Chu, Yuxuan Fan, Xuming Hu

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Title: Deconstructing Pre-training: Knowledge Attribution Analysis in MoE and Dense Models

Abstract:
Mixtureof-Experts (MoE) architectures decouple model capacity from per-token computation, enabling scaling beyond the computational limits imposed by dense scaling laws. Yet how MoE architectures shape knowledge acquisition during pre-training—and how this process differs from dense architectures—remains unknown. To address this issue, we introduce Gated-LPI (Log-Probability Increase), a neuron-level attribution metric that decomposes log-probability increase across neurons. We present a time-resolved comparison of knowledge acquisition dynamics in MoE and dense architectures, tracking checkpoints over 1.2M (~ 5.0T tokens) and 600K (~ 2.5T tokens) training steps, respectively. Our experiments uncover three patterns: (1) Low-entropy backbone. The top approximately 1% of MoE neurons capture over 45% of positive updates, forming a high-utility core, which is absent in the dense baseline. (2) Early consolidation. The MoE model locks into a stable importance profile within < 100K steps, whereas the dense model remains volatile throughout training. (3) Functional robustness. Masking the ten most important MoE attention heads reduces relational HIT@10 by < 10%, compared with > 50% for the dense model, showing that sparsity fosters distributed—rather than brittle—knowledge storage. These patterns collectively demonstrate that sparsity fosters an intrinsically stable and distributed computational backbone from early in training, helping bridge the gap between sparse architectures and training-time interpretability.

PaperID: 1758, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08552

Authors:Xinyuan Wang, Dongjie Wang, Wangyang Ying, Haoyue Bai, Nanxu Gong, Sixun Dong, Kunpeng Liu, Yanjie Fu

Affiliations: Arizona State University, University of Kansas, Clemson University

Title: Efficient Post-Training Refinement of Latent Reasoning in Large Language Models

Abstract:
Reasoning is a key component of language understanding in Large Language Models. While Chainof-Thought prompting enhances performance via explicit intermediate steps, it suffers from sufficient token overhead and a fixed reasoning trajectory, preventing step-wise refinement. Recent advances in latent reasoning address these limitations by refining internal reasoning processes directly in the model’s latent space, without producing explicit outputs. However, a key challenge remains: how to effectively update reasoning embeddings during post-training to guide the model toward more accurate solutions. To overcome this challenge, we propose a lightweight post-training framework that refines latent reasoning trajectories using two novel strategies: (1) Contrastive reasoning feedback, which compares reasoning embeddings against strong and weak baselines to infer effective update directions via embedding enhancement; (2) Residual embedding refinement, which stabilizes updates by progressively integrating current and historical gradients, enabling fast yet controlled convergence. Extensive experiments and case studies are conducted on five reasoning benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Notably, a +5% accuracy gain on MathQA without additional training.

PaperID: 1759, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09109

Authors:Wenda Wei, Yu-An Liu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Lixin Su, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Maarten de Rijke, Xueqi Cheng

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Baidu Inc., University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Title: Thinking Forward and Backward: Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning for Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning

Abstract:
Retrievalaugmented generation (RAG) has proven to be effective in mitigating hallucinations in large language models, yet its effectiveness remains limited in complex, multi-step reasoning scenarios. Recent efforts have incorporated search-based interactions into RAG, enabling iterative reasoning with real-time retrieval. Most approaches rely on outcome-based supervision, offering no explicit guidance for intermediate steps. This often leads to reward hacking and degraded response quality. We propose Bi-RAR, a novel retrieval-augmented reasoning framework that evaluates each intermediate step jointly in both forward and backward directions. To assess the information completeness of each step, we introduce a bidirectional information distance grounded in Kolmogorov complexity, approximated via language model generation probabilities. This quantification measures both how far the current reasoning is from the answer and how well it addresses the question. To optimize reasoning under these bidirectional signals, we adopt a multi-objective reinforcement learning framework with a cascading reward structure that emphasizes early trajectory alignment. Empirical results on seven question answering benchmarks demonstrate that Bi-RAR surpasses previous methods and enables efficient interaction and reasoning with the search engine during training and inference.

PaperID: 1760, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10037

Authors:Xiaolong Wei, Yuehu Dong, Xingliang Wang, Xingyu Zhang, Zhejun Zhao, Dongdong Shen, Long Xia, Dawei Yin

Affiliations: Beihang University, Baidu Inc., Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing Jiaotong University

Title: Beyond ReAct: A Planner-Centric Framework for Complex Tool-Augmented LLM Reasoning

Abstract:
Existing toolaugmented large language models (LLMs) encounter significant challenges when processing complex queries. Current frameworks such as ReAct are prone to local optimization traps due to their reliance on incremental decision-making processes. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Planner-centric Plan-Execute paradigm that fundamentally resolves local optimization bottlenecks through architectural innovation. Central to our approach is a novel Planner model that performs global Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) planning for complex queries, enabling optimized execution beyond conventional tool coordination. We also introduce ComplexTool-Plan, a large-scale benchmark dataset featuring complex queries that demand sophisticated multi-tool composition and coordination capabilities. Additionally, we develop a two-stage training methodology that integrates Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), systematically enhancing the Planner's tool selection accuracy and global planning awareness through structured DAG-based planning. When integrated with a capable executor, our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the StableToolBench benchmark for complex user queries, demonstrating superior end-to-end execution capabilities and robust handling of intricate multi-tool workflows.

PaperID: 1761, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.06524

Authors:Jian Wu, Hang Yu, Bingchang Liu, Yang Wenjie, Peng Di, Jianguo Li, Yue Zhang

Affiliations: Ant Group, Westlake University

Title: LAMDAS: LLM as an Implicit Classifier for Domain-specific Data Selection

Abstract:
Adapting large language models (LLMs) to specific domains often faces a critical bottleneck: the scarcity of highquality, human-curated data. While large volumes of unchecked data are readily available, indiscriminately using them for fine-tuning risks introducing noise and degrading performance. Strategic data selection is thus crucial, requiring a method that is both accurate and efficient. Existing approaches, categorized as similarity-based and direct optimization methods, struggle to simultaneously achieve these goals. In this paper, we introduce LAMDAS (LLM as an implicit classifier for domain-specific Data Selection), a novel approach that leverages the pre-trained LLM itself as an implicit classifier, thereby bypassing explicit feature engineering and computationally intensive optimization process. LAMDAS reframes data selection as a one-class classification problem, identifying candidate data that "belongs" to the target domain defined by a small reference dataset. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that LAMDAS not only exceeds the performance of full-data training using a fraction of the data but also outperforms nine state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines under various scenarios. Furthermore, LAMDAS achieves the most compelling balance between performance gains and computational efficiency compared to all evaluated baselines.

PaperID: 1762, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04440

Authors:Yutong Wu, Di Huang, Ruosi Wan, Yue Peng, Shijie Shang, Chenrui Cao, Lei Qi, Rui Zhang, Xishan Zhang, Zidong Du, Jie Yan, Xing Hu

Affiliations: State Key Lab of Processors, Institute of Computing Technology, CAS University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, StepFun Inc., CAS University of Science and Technology of China

Title: StepFun-Formalizer: Unlocking the Autoformalization Potential of LLMs Through Knowledge-Reasoning Fusion

Abstract:
Autoformalization aims to translate naturallanguage mathematical statements into a formal language. While LLMs have accelerated progress in this area, existing methods still suffer from low accuracy. We identify two key abilities for effective autoformalization: comprehensive mastery of formal-language domain knowledge, and reasoning capability of natural language problem understanding and informal-formal alignment. Without the former, a model cannot identify the correct formal objects; without the latter, it struggles to interpret real-world contexts and map them precisely into formal expressions. To address these gaps, we introduce ThinkingF, a data synthesis and training pipeline that improves both abilities. First, we construct two datasets: one by distilling and selecting large-scale examples rich in formal knowledge, and another by generating informal-to-formal reasoning trajectories guided by expert-designed templates. We then apply SFT and RLVR with these datasets to further fuse and refine the two abilities. The resulting 7B and 32B models exhibit both comprehensive formal knowledge and strong informal-to-formal reasoning. Notably, StepFun-Formalizer-32B achieves SOTA BEq@1 scores of 40.5% on FormalMATH-Lite and 26.7% on ProverBench, surpassing all prior general-purpose and specialized models.

PaperID: 1763, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13003

Authors:Yifeng Xiong, Xiaohui Xie

Affiliations: University of California

Title: OPLoRA: Orthogonal Projection LoRA Prevents Catastrophic Forgetting During Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Abstract:
LowRank Adaptation (LoRA) enables efficient fine-tuning of large language models but suffers from catastrophic forgetting when learned updates interfere with the dominant singular directions that encode essential pre-trained knowledge. We propose Orthogonal Projection LoRA (OPLoRA), a theoretically grounded approach that prevents this interference through double-sided orthogonal projections. By decomposing frozen weights via SVD, OPLoRA constrains LoRA updates to lie entirely within the orthogonal complement of the top-k singular subspace using projections PL = I − Uk Ukᵀ and PR = I − Vk Vkᵀ. We prove that this construction exactly preserves the top-k singular triples, providing mathematical guarantees for knowledge retention. To quantify subspace interference, we introduce ρk, a metric measuring update alignment with dominant directions. Extensive experiments across commonsense reasoning, mathematics, and code generation demonstrate that OPLoRA significantly reduces forgetting while maintaining competitive task-specific performance on LLaMA-2 7B and Qwen2.5 7B, establishing orthogonal projection as an effective mechanism for knowledge preservation in parameter-efficient fine-tuning.

PaperID: 1764, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13329

Authors:Shufan Yang, Zifeng Cheng, Zhiwei Jiang, Yafeng Yin, Cong Wang, Shiping Ge, Yuchen Fu, Qing Gu

Affiliations: Nanjing University

Title: RegionMarker: A Region-Triggered Semantic Watermarking Framework for Embedding-as-a-Service Copyright Protection

Abstract:
Embeddingas-a-Service (EaaS) is an effective and convenient deployment solution for addressing various NLP tasks. Nevertheless, recent research has shown that EaaS is vulnerable to model extraction attacks, which could lead to significant economic losses for model providers. For copyright protection, existing methods inject watermark embeddings into text embeddings and use them to detect copyright infringement. However, current watermarking methods often resist only a subset of attacks and fail to provide comprehensive protection. To this end, we present the region-triggered semantic watermarking framework called RegionMarker, which defines trigger regions within a low-dimensional space and injects watermarks into text embeddings associated with these regions. By utilizing a secret dimensionality reduction matrix to project onto this subspace and randomly selecting trigger regions, RegionMarker makes it difficult for watermark removal attacks to evade detection. Furthermore, by embedding watermarks across the entire trigger region and using the text embedding as the watermark, RegionMarker is resilient to both paraphrasing and dimension-perturbation attacks. Extensive experiments on various datasets show that RegionMarker is effective in resisting different attack methods, thereby protecting the copyright of EaaS.

PaperID: 1765, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07781

Authors:Zeyu Yang, Lai Wei, Roman Koshkin, Xi Chen, Satoshi Nakamura

Affiliations: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen Shenzhen Loop Area Institute, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST)

Title: SASST: Leveraging Syntax-Aware Chunking and LLMs for Simultaneous Speech Translation

Abstract:
This work proposes a grammarbased chunking strategy that segments input streams into semantically complete units by parsing dependency relations (e.g., noun phrase boundaries, verb-object structures) and punctuation features. The method ensures chunk coherence and minimizes semantic fragmentation. Building on this mechanism, we present SASST (Syntax-Aware Simultaneous Translation), an end-to-end framework integrating frozen Whisper encoder and decoder-only LLM. The unified architecture dynamically outputs translation tokens or symbols to jointly optimize translation timing and content, with target-side reordering addressing word-order divergence. Experiments on CoVoST2 multilingual corpus (En to De/Zh/Ja) demonstrate significant translation quality improvements across languages, validating the effectiveness of syntactic structures in LLM-driven SimulST systems.

PaperID: 1766, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10855

Authors:Tom Yuviler, Dana Drachsler-Cohen

Affiliations: Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Title: ExPairT-LLM: Exact Learning for LLM Code Selection by Pairwise Queries

Abstract:
Despite recent advances in LLMs, the task of code generation is still challenging. To cope, code selection algorithms select the best program from multiple programs generated by an LLM. However, existing algorithms can fail to identify the correct program, either because they fail to distinguish nonequivalent programs or because they rely on an LLM and assume it always correctly determines the output for every input. We present ExPairTLLM, an exact learning algorithm for code selection that selects a program by posing two new types of queries to an LLM oracle: pairwise membership and pairwise equivalence. These queries are simpler for LLMs and enable ExPairT-LLM to identify the correct program through a tournament, which is robust to some LLM mistakes. We evaluate ExPairT-LLM on four popular code datasets. Its pass@1 (success rate) outperforms the state-of-the-art code selection algorithm on average by +13.0% and up to +27.1%. It also improves the pass@1 of LLMs performing complex reasoning by +24.0%.

PaperID: 1767, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.01400

Authors:Xingshan Zeng, Weiwen Liu, Xu Huang, Zezhong Wang, Lingzhi Wang, Liangyou Li, Yasheng Wang, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Ruiming Tang, Qun Liu

Affiliations: Huawei Technologies Ltd., Shanghai Jiao Tong University, University of Science and Technology of China, Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: ToolACE-R: Model-aware Iterative Training and Adaptive Refinement for Tool learning

Abstract:
Tool learning, which allows Large Language Models (LLMs) to leverage external tools for solving complex user tasks, has emerged as a promising avenue for extending model capabilities. However, existing approaches primarily focus on data synthesis for finetuning LLMs to invoke tools effectively, largely ignoring how to fully stimulate the potential of the model. In this paper, we propose ToolACE-R, a novel framework that includes both model-aware iterative training and adaptive refinement for tool learning. ToolACE-R features a model-aware iterative training procedure that progressively adjust training samples based on the model’s evolving capabilities to maximize its potential. Additionally, it incorporates self-refinement training corpus which emphasizes LLM's ability to iteratively refine their tool calls, optimizing performance without requiring external feedback. Furthermore, we introduce adaptive self-refinement for efficient test-time scaling, where the trained model can autonomously determine when to stop the process based on iterative self-refinement. We conduct extensive experiments across several benchmark datasets, showing that ToolACE-R achieves competitive performance compared to advanced LLMs. The performance can be further improved efficiently through adaptive self-refinement. These results highlight the effectiveness and generalizability of ToolACE-R, offering a promising direction for more efficient and scalable tool learning.

PaperID: 1768, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12520

Authors:Jie Zhang, Bo Tang, Wanzi Shao, Wenqiang Wei, Jihao Zhao, Jianqing Zhu, Zhiyu Li, Wen Xi, Zehao Lin, Feiyu Xiong, Yanchao Tan

Affiliations: College of Computer and Data Science, Fuzhou University, AIDS and SIAR, MemTensor (Shanghai) Technology Co., Ltd. School of Information, Renmin University of China, China Haisum Engineering CO.

Title: TAdaRAG: Task Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation via On-the-Fly Knowledge Graph Construction

Abstract:
RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) improves large language models by retrieving external knowledge, often truncated into smaller chunks due to the input context window, which leads to information loss, resulting in response hallucinations and broken reasoning chains. Moreover, traditional RAG retrieves unstructured knowledge, introducing irrelevant details that hinder accurate reasoning. To address these issues, we propose TAdaRAG, a novel RAG framework for on-the-fly task-adaptive knowledge graph construction from external sources. Specifically, we design an intent-driven routing mechanism to a domain-specific extraction template, followed by supervised fine-tuning and a reinforcement learning-based implicit extraction mechanism, ensuring concise, coherent, and non-redundant knowledge integration. Evaluations on six public benchmarks and a real-world business benchmark (NowNewsQA) across three backbone models demonstrate that TAdaRAG outperforms existing methods across diverse domains and long-text tasks, highlighting its strong generalization and practical effectiveness.

PaperID: 1769, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09596

Authors:Mingkuan Zhao, Wentao Hu, Jiayin Wang, Xin Lai, Tianchen Huang, Yuheng Min, Rui Yan, Xiaoyan Zhu

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, University of Science and Technology of China, Tsinghua University, University of California, San Diego

Title: Making Every Head Count: Sparse Attention Without the Speed-Performance Trade-off

Abstract:
The design of Large Language Models (LLMs) has long been hampered by a fundamental conflict within their core attention mechanism: its remarkable expressivity is built upon a computational complexity of O(H·N²) that grows quadratically with the context size (N) and linearly with the number of heads (H). This standard implementation harbors significant computational redundancy, as all heads independently compute attention over the same sequence space. Existing sparse methods, meanwhile, often trade information integrity for computational efficiency. To resolve this efficiencyperformance trade-off, we propose SPAttention, whose core contribution is the introduction of a new paradigm we term Principled Structural Sparsity. SPAttention does not merely drop connections but instead reorganizes the computational task by partitioning the total attention workload into balanced, non-overlapping distance bands, assigning each head a unique segment. This approach transforms the multi-head attention mechanism from H independent O(N²) computations into a single, collaborative O(N²) computation, fundamentally reducing complexity by a factor of H. The structured inductive bias compels functional specialization among heads, enabling a more efficient allocation of computational resources from redundant modeling to distinct dependencies across the entire sequence span. Extensive empirical validation on the OLMoE-1B-7B and 0.25B-1.75B model series demonstrates that while delivering an approximately two-fold increase in training throughput, its performance is on par with standard dense attention, even surpassing it on select key metrics, while consistently outperforming representative sparse attention methods including Longformer, Reformer, and BigBird across all evaluation metrics. Our work demonstrates that thoughtfully designed structural sparsity can serve as an effective inductive bias that simultaneously improves both computational efficiency and model performance, opening a new avenue for the architectural design of next-generation, high-performance LLMs.

PaperID: 1770, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09281

Authors:Jingjing Zhou, Gaoxiang Cong, Li Su, Liang Li

Affiliations: Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: STaR: Sensitive Trajectory Regulation for Unlearning in Large Reasoning Models

Abstract:
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have advanced automated multistep reasoning, but their ability to generate complex Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trajectories introduces severe privacy risks, as sensitive information may be deeply embedded throughout the reasoning process. Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) unlearning approaches that typically focus on modifying only final answers are insufficient for LRMs, as they fail to remove sensitive content from intermediate steps, leading to persistent privacy leakage and degraded security. To address these challenges, we propose Sensitive Trajectory Regulation (STaR), a parameter-free, inference-time unlearning framework that achieves robust privacy protection throughout the reasoning process. Specifically, we first identify sensitive content via semantic-aware detection. Then, we inject global safety constraints through secure prompt encoder. Next, we perform trajectory-aware suppression to dynamically block sensitive content across the entire reasoning chain. Finally, we apply token-level adaptive filtering to prevent both exact and paraphrased sensitive tokens during generation. Furthermore, to overcome the inadequacies of existing evaluation protocols, we introduce two metrics: Multi-Decoding Consistency Assessment (MCS), which measures the consistency of unlearning across diverse decoding strategies, and Multi-Granularity Membership Inference Attack (MIA) Evaluation, which quantifies privacy protection at both answer and reasoning-chain levels. Experiments on the R-TOFU benchmark demonstrate that STaR achieves comprehensive and stable unlearning with minimal utility loss, setting a new standard for privacy-preserving reasoning in LRMs.

PaperID: 1771, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01476

Authors:Youchao Zhou, Heyan Huang, Yicheng Liu, Rui Dai, Xinglin Wang, Xingchen Zhang, Shumin Shi, Yang Deng

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University

Title: Do Retrieval Augmented Language Models Know When They Don’t Know?

Abstract:
Existing large language models (LLMs) occasionally generate plausible yet factually incorrect responses, known as hallucinations. Two main approaches have been proposed to mitigate hallucinations: retrievalaugmented language models (RALMs) and refusal post-training. However, current research predominantly focuses on their individual effectiveness while overlooking the evaluation of the refusal capability of RALMs. Ideally, if RALMs know when they do not know, they should refuse to answer. In this study, we ask the fundamental question: Do RALMs know when they don’t know? Specifically, we investigate three questions. First, are RALMs well calibrated with respect to different internal and external knowledge states? We examine the influence of various factors. Contrary to expectations, when all retrieved documents are irrelevant, RALMs still tend to refuse questions they could have answered correctly. Next, given the model's pronounced over-refusal behavior, we raise a second question: How does a RALM's refusal ability align with its calibration quality? Our results show that the over-refusal problem can be mitigated through in-context fine-tuning. However, we observe that improved refusal behavior does not necessarily imply better calibration or higher overall accuracy. Finally, we ask: Can we combine refusal-aware RALMs with uncertainty-based answer abstention to mitigate over-refusal? We develop a simple yet effective refusal mechanism for refusal-post-trained RALMs that improves their overall answer quality by balancing refusal and correct answers. Our study provides a more comprehensive understanding of the factors influencing RALM behavior. Meanwhile, we emphasize that uncertainty estimation for RALMs remains an open problem deserving deeper investigation.

PaperID: 1772, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17756

Authors:Zhihan Zhou, Daqian Shi, Rui Song, Lida Shi, Xiaolei Diao, Hao Xu

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, Culture Relics and Artificial Intelligence, Jilin University, Key Laboratory of Ancient Chinese Script, Queen Mary University of London, University of Trento

Title: AncientBench: Towards Comprehensive Evaluation on Excavated and Transmitted Chinese Corpora

Abstract:
Comprehension of ancient texts plays an important role in archaeology and understanding of Chinese history and civilization. The rapid development of large language models needs benchmarks that can evaluate their comprehension of ancient characters. Existing Chinese benchmarks are mostly targeted at modern Chinese and transmitted documents in ancient Chinese, but the part of excavated documents in ancient Chinese is not covered. To meet this need, we propose the AncientBench, which aims to evaluate the comprehension of ancient characters, especially in the scenario of excavated documents. The AncientBench is divided into four dimensions, which correspond to the four competencies of ancient character comprehension: glyph comprehension, pronunciation comprehension, meaning comprehension, and contextual comprehension. The benchmark also contains ten tasks, including radical, phonetic radical, homophone, cloze, translation, and more, providing a comprehensive framework for evaluation. We convened archaeological researchers to conduct experimental evaluations, proposed an ancient model as baseline, and conducted extensive experiments on the currently bestperforming large language models. The experimental results reveal the great potential of large language models in ancient textual scenarios as well as the gap with humans. Our research aims to promote the development and application of large language models in the field of archaeology and ancient Chinese language.

PaperID: 1773, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10974

Authors:Yuxin Cao, Wei Song, Derui Wang, Jingling Xue, Jin Song Dong

Affiliations: National University of Singapore, University of New South Wales CSIRO's CSIRO's University of New South Wales

Title: Failures to Surface Harmful Contents in Video Large Language Models

Abstract:
Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) are increasingly deployed on numerous critical applications, where users rely on autogenerated summaries while casually skimming the video stream. We show that this interaction hides a critical safety gap: if harmful content is embedded in a video, either as full-frame inserts or as small corner patches, state-of-the-art VideoLLMs rarely mention the harmful content in the output, despite its clear visibility to human viewers. A root-cause analysis reveals three compounding design flaws: (1) insufficient temporal coverage resulting from the sparse, uniformly spaced frame sampling used by most leading VideoLLMs, (2) spatial information loss introduced by aggressive token downsampling within sampled frames, and (3) encoder-decoder disconnection, whereby visual cues are only weakly utilized during text generation. Leveraging these insights, we craft three zero-query black-box attacks, aligning with these flaws in the processing pipeline. Our large-scale evaluation across five leading VideoLLMs shows that the harmfulness omission rate exceeds 90% in most cases. Even when harmful content is clearly present in all frames, these models consistently fail to identify it. These results underscore a fundamental vulnerability in current VideoLLMs' designs and highlight the urgent need for sampling strategies, token compression, and decoding mechanisms that guarantee semantic coverage rather than speed alone.

PaperID: 1774, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09442

Authors:Xiaoxiao Chi, Xuyun Zhang, Yan Wang, Hongsheng Hu, Wanchun Dou

Affiliations: Macquarie University, The University of Newcastle, Nanjing University

Title: Reference Recommendation Based Membership Inference Attack Against Hybrid-Based Recommender Systems

Abstract:
Recommender systems have been widely deployed across various domains such as ecommerce and social media, and intelligently suggest items like products and potential friends to users based on their preferences and interaction history, which are often privacy-sensitive. Recent studies have revealed that recommender systems are prone to membership inference attacks (MIAs), where an attacker aims to infer whether or not a user’s data has been used for training a target recommender system. However, existing MIAs fail to exploit the unique characteristic of recommender systems, and therefore are only applicable to mixed recommender systems consisting of two recommendation algorithms. This leaves a gap in investigating MIAs against hybrid-based recommender systems where the same algorithm utilizing user-item historical interactions and attributes of users and items serves and produces personalised recommendations. To investigate how the personalisation in hybrid-based recommender systems influences MIA, we propose a novel metric-based MIA. Specifically, we leverage the characteristic of personalisation to obtain reference recommendation for any target users. Then, a relative membership metric is proposed to exploit a target user’s historical interactions, target recommendation, and reference recommendation to infer the membership of the target user’s data. Finally, we theoretically and empirically demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed metric-based MIA on hybrid-based recommender systems.

PaperID: 1775, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.15851

Authors:Lingyu Li, Yang Yao, Yixu Wang, Chunbo Li, Yan Teng, Yingchun Wang

Affiliations: The University of Hong Kong, Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: The Other Mind: How Language Models Exhibit Human Temporal Cognition

Abstract:
As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance, they exhibit certain cognitive patterns similar to those of humans that are not directly specified in training data. This study investigates this phenomenon by focusing on temporal cognition in LLMs. Leveraging the similarity judgment task, we find that larger models spontaneously establish a subjective temporal reference point and adhere to the WeberFechner law, whereby the perceived distance logarithmically compresses as years recede from this reference point. To uncover the mechanisms behind this behavior, we conducted multiple analyses across neuronal, representational, and informational levels. We first identify a set of temporal-preferential neurons and find that this group exhibits minimal activation at the subjective reference point and implements a logarithmic coding scheme convergently found in biological systems. Probing representations of years reveals a hierarchical construction process, where years evolve from basic numerical values in shallow layers to abstract temporal orientation in deep layers. Finally, using pre-trained embedding models, we found that the training corpus itself possesses an inherent, non-linear temporal structure, which provides the raw material for the model's internal construction. In discussion, we propose an experientialist perspective for understanding these findings, where the LLMs' cognition is viewed as a subjective construction of the external world by its internal representational system. This nuanced perspective implies the potential emergence of alien cognitive frameworks that humans cannot intuitively predict, pointing toward a direction for AI alignment that focuses on guiding internal constructions.

PaperID: 1776, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06913

Authors:Siyuan Li, Xi Lin, Guangyan Li, Zehao Liu, Aodu Wulianghai, Li Ding, Jun Wu, Jianhua Li

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China Shanghai Key Laboratory of Integrated Administration Technologies for Information Security, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Model-Agnostic Sentiment Distribution Stability Analysis for Robust LLM-Generated Texts Detection

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has resulted in increasingly sophisticated AIgenerated content, posing significant challenges in distinguishing LLM-generated text from human-written language. Existing detection methods, primarily based on lexical heuristics or fine-tuned classifiers, often suffer from limited generalizability and are vulnerable to paraphrasing, adversarial perturbations, and cross-domain shifts. In this work, we propose SentiDetect, a model-agnostic framework for detecting LLM-generated text by analyzing the divergence in sentiment distribution stability. Our method is motivated by the empirical observation that LLM outputs tend to exhibit emotionally consistent patterns, whereas human-written texts display greater emotional variability. To capture this phenomenon, we define two complementary metrics: sentiment distribution consistency and sentiment distribution preservation, which quantify stability under sentiment-altering and semantic-preserving transformations. We evaluate SentiDetect on five diverse domains and a range of advanced LLMs, including Gemini-1.5-Pro, Claude-3, GPT-4-0613, and LLaMa-3.3. Experimental results demonstrate its superiority over state-of-the-art baselines, with over 16% and 11% F1 score improvements on Gemini-1.5-Pro and GPT-4-0613, respectively. Moreover, SentiDetect also shows greater robustness to paraphrasing, adversarial attacks, and text length variations, outperforming existing detectors in challenging scenarios.

PaperID: 1777, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03209

Authors:Xinwei Liu, Xiaojun Jia, Yuan Xun, Simeng Qin, Xiaochun Cao

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, China School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Northeastern University, School of Cyber Science and Technology, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University

Title: GeoShield: Safeguarding Geolocation Privacy from Vision-Language Models via Adversarial Perturbations

Abstract:
VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) such as GPT-4o now demonstrate a remarkable ability to infer users' locations from public shared images, posing a substantial risk to geoprivacy. Although adversarial perturbations offer a potential defense, current methods are ill-suited for this scenario: they often perform poorly on high-resolution images and low perturbation budgets, and may introduce irrelevant semantic content. To address these limitations, we propose GeoShield, a novel adversarial framework designed for robust geoprivacy protection in real-world scenarios. GeoShield comprises three key modules: a feature disentanglement module that separates geographical and non-geographical information, an exposure element identification module that pinpoints geo-revealing regions within an image, and a scale-adaptive enhancement module that jointly optimizes perturbations at both global and local levels to ensure effectiveness across resolutions. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks show that GeoShield consistently surpasses prior methods in black-box settings, achieving strong privacy protection with minimal impact on visual or semantic quality. To our knowledge, this work is the first to explore adversarial perturbations for defending against geolocation inference by advanced VLMs, providing a practical solution to escalating privacy concerns.

PaperID: 1778, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11656

Authors:Luca Marzari, Manuele Bicego, Ferdinando Cicalese, Alessandro Farinelli

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, University of Verona

Title: On the Probabilistic Learnability of Compact Neural Network Preimage Bounds

Abstract:
Although recent provable methods have been developed to compute preimage bounds for neural networks, their scalability is fundamentally limited by the #Phardness of the problem. In this work, we adopt a novel probabilistic perspective, aiming to deliver solutions with high-confidence guarantees and bounded error. To this end, we investigate the potential of bootstrap-based and randomized approaches that are capable of capturing complex patterns in high-dimensional spaces, including input regions where a given output property holds. In detail, we introduce Random Forest Property Verifier (RF-ProVe), a method that exploits an ensemble of randomized decision trees to generate candidate input regions satisfying a desired output property and refines them through active resampling. Our theoretical derivations offer formal statistical guarantees on region purity and global coverage, providing a practical, scalable solution for computing compact preimage approximations in cases where exact solvers fail to scale.

PaperID: 1779, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08603

Authors:Carlos Antonio Pinzón, Ehab ElSalamouny, Lucas Massot, Alexis Miller, Héber Hwang Arcolezi, Catuscia Palamidessi

Affiliations: École Polytechnique, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon

Title: Estimating the True Distribution of Data Collected with Randomized Response

Abstract:
Randomized Response (RR) is a protocol designed to collect and analyze categorical data with local differential privacy guarantees. It has been used as a building block of mechanisms deployed by Big tech companies to collect app or web users' data. Each user reports an automatic random alteration of their true value to the analytics server, which then estimates the histogram of the true unseen values of all users using a debiasing rule to compensate for the added randomness. A known issue is that the standard debiasing rule can yield a vector with negative values (which can not be interpreted as a histogram), and there is no consensus on the best fix. An elegant but slow solution is the Iterative Bayesian Update algorithm (IBU), which converges to the Maximum Likelihood Estimate (MLE) as the number of iterations goes to infinity. This paper bypasses IBU by providing a simple formula for the exact MLE of RR and compares it with other estimation methods experimentally to help practitioners decide which one to use.

PaperID: 1780, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14925

Authors:Zhiqiang Wang, Yichao Gao, Yanting Wang, Suyuan Liu, Haifeng Sun, Haoran Cheng, Guanquan Shi, Haohua Du, Xiangyang Li

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, Beihang university

Title: MCPTox: A Benchmark for Tool Poisoning on Real-World MCP Servers

Abstract:
By providing a standardized interface for LLM agents to interact with external tools, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is quickly becoming a cornerstone of the modern autonomous agent ecosystem. However, it creates novel attack surfaces due to untrusted external tools. While prior work has focused on attacks injected through external tool outputs, we investigate a more fundamental vulnerability: Tool Poisoning, where malicious instructions are embedded within a tool's metadata at the registration stage. To date, this threat has been primarily demonstrated through isolated cases, lacking a systematic, largescale evaluation. We introduce MCPTox, the first benchmark to systematically evaluate agent robustness against Tool Poisoning in realistic MCP settings. MCPTox is constructed upon 45 live, real-world MCP servers and 353 authentic tools. To achieve this, we design three distinct attack templates to generate a comprehensive suite of 1348 malicious test cases by few-shot learning, covering 10 categories of potential risks. Our evaluation on 20 prominent LLM agents setting reveals a widespread vulnerability to Tool Poisoning, with GPT-o1-mini, achieving an attack success rate of 72.8%. We find that more capable models are often more susceptible, as the attack exploits their superior instruction-following abilities. Finally, the failure case analysis reveals that agents rarely refuse these attacks, with the highest refused rate (Claude-3.7-Sonnet) less than 3%, demonstrating that existing safety alignment is ineffective against malicious actions that use legitimate tools for unauthorized operation. Our findings create a crucial empirical baseline for understanding and mitigating this widespread threat, and we release MCPTox for the development of verifiably safer AI agents.

PaperID: 1781, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07947

Authors:Yaxin Xiao, Qingqing Ye, Zi Liang, Haoyang Li, RongHua Li, Huadi Zheng, Haibo Hu

Affiliations: Department of Electronical and Electronic Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Huawei Technologies Co.

Title: Class-feature Watermark: A Resilient Black-box Watermark Against Model Extraction Attacks

Abstract:
Machine learning models constitute valuable intellectual property, yet remain vulnerable to model extraction attacks (MEA), where adversaries replicate their functionality through blackbox queries. Model watermarking counters MEAs by embedding forensic markers for ownership verification. Current black-box watermarks prioritize MEA survival through representation entanglement, yet inadequately explore resilience against sequential MEAs and removal attacks. Our study reveals that this risk is underestimated because existing removal methods are weakened by entanglement. To address this gap, we propose Watermark Removal attacK (WRK), which circumvents entanglement constraints by exploiting decision boundaries shaped by prevailing sample-level watermark artifacts. WRK effectively reduces watermark success rates by ≥88.79% across existing watermarking benchmarks. For robust protection, we propose Class-Feature Watermarks (CFW), which improve resilience by leveraging class-level artifacts. CFW constructs a synthetic class using out-of-domain samples, eliminating vulnerable decision boundaries between original domain samples and their artifact-modified counterparts (watermark samples). CFW concurrently optimizes both MEA transferability and post-MEA stability. Experiments across multiple domains show that CFW consistently outperforms prior methods in resilience, maintaining a watermark success rate of ≥70.15% in extracted models even under the combined MEA and WRK distortion, while preserving the utility of protected models.

PaperID: 1782, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.17602

Authors:Huiyuan Xie, Chenyang Li, Huining Zhu, Chubin Zhang, Yuxiao Ye, Zhenghao Liu, Zhiyuan Liu

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Queen Mary University of London Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, East China University of Political Science and Law, Northeastern University

Title: LexChain: Modeling Legal Reasoning Chains for Chinese Tort Case Analysis

Abstract:
Legal reasoning is a fundamental component of legal analysis and decisionmaking. Existing computational approaches to legal reasoning predominantly rely on generic reasoning frameworks such as syllogism, which do not comprehensively examine the nuanced process of legal reasoning. Moreover, current research has largely focused on criminal cases, with insufficient modeling for civil cases. In this work, we present a novel framework to explicitly model legal reasoning in the analysis of Chinese tort-related civil cases. We first operationalize the legal reasoning process in tort analysis into the three-module LexChain framework, with each module consisting of multiple finer-grained sub-steps. Informed by the LexChain framework, we introduce the task of tort legal reasoning and construct an evaluation benchmark to systematically assess the critical steps within analytical reasoning chains for tort analysis. Leveraging this benchmark, we evaluate existing large language models for their legal reasoning ability in civil tort contexts. Our results indicate that current models still fall short in accurately handling crucial elements of tort legal reasoning. Furthermore, we introduce several baseline approaches that explicitly incorporate LexChain-style reasoning through prompting or post-training. The proposed baselines achieve significant improvements in tort-related legal reasoning and generalize well to related legal analysis tasks, demonstrating the value of explicitly modeling legal reasoning chains to enhance the reasoning capabilities of language models.

PaperID: 1783, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11240

Authors:Yuhan Xie, Chen Lyu

Affiliations: Shanghai University of Finance and Economics

Title: HealSplit: Towards Self-Healing Through Adversarial Distillation in Split Federated Learning

Abstract:
Split Federated Learning (SFL) is an emerging paradigm for privacypreserving distributed learning. However, it remains vulnerable to sophisticated data poisoning attacks targeting local features, labels, smashed data, and model weights. Existing defenses, primarily adapted from traditional Federated Learning (FL), are less effective under SFL due to limited access to complete model updates. This paper presents HealSplit, the first unified defense framework tailored for SFL, offering end-to-end detection and recovery against five sophisticated types of poisoning attacks. HealSplit comprises three key components: (1) a topology-aware detection module that constructs graphs over smashed data to identify poisoned samples via topological anomaly scoring (TAS); (2) a generative recovery pipeline that synthesizes semantically consistent substitutes for detected anomalies, validated by a consistency validation student; and (3) an adversarial multi-teacher distillation framework trains the student using semantic supervision from a Vanilla Teacher and anomaly-aware signals from an Anomaly-Influence Debiasing (AD) Teacher, guided by the alignment between topological and gradient-based interaction matrices. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that HealSplit consistently outperforms ten state-of-the-art defenses, achieving superior robustness and defense effectiveness across diverse attack scenarios.

PaperID: 1784, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02711

Authors:Jing Xue, Zhishen Sun, Haishan Ye, Luo Luo, Xiangyu Chang, Guang Dai

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, SGIT AI Lab, State Grid Corporation of China, Fudan University

Title: Privacy Leaks by Adversaries: Adversarial Iterations for Membership Inference Attack

Abstract:
Membership inference attack (MIA) has become one of the most widely used and effective methods for evaluating the privacy risks of machine learning models. This attack aims to determine whether a specific sample is part of the model's training set by analyzing the model's output. While traditional membership inference attacks focus on leveraging the model’s posterior output, such as confidence on the target sample, we propose IMIA, a novel attack strategy that utilizes the process of generating adversarial samples to infer membership. We propose to infer the member properties of the target sample using the number of iterations required to generate its adversarial sample. We conduct experiments across multiple models and datasets, and our results demonstrate that the number of iterations for generating an adversarial sample is a reliable feature for membership inference, achieving strong performance both in blackbox and white-box attack scenarios. This work provides a new perspective for evaluating model privacy and highlights the potential of adversarial example-based features for privacy leakage assessment.

PaperID: 1785, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.18193

Authors:Yiran Yang, Zhaowei Liu, Yuan Yuan, Yukun Song, Xiong Ma, Yinghao Song, Xiangji Zeng, Lu Sun, Yulu Wang, Hai Zhou, Shuai Cui, Zhaohan Gong, Jiefei Zhang

Affiliations: Kuaishou Technology

Title: BLM-Guard: Explainable Multimodal Ad Moderation with Chain-of-Thought and Policy-Aligned Rewards

Abstract:
Shortvideo platforms now host vast multimodal ads whose deceptive visuals, speech and subtitles demand finer-grained, policy-driven moderation than community safety filters. We present BLM-Guard, a content-audit framework for commercial ads that fuses Chain-of-Thought reasoning with rule-based policy principles and a critic-guided reward. A rule-driven ICoT data-synthesis pipeline jump-starts training by generating structured scene descriptions, reasoning chains and labels, cutting annotation costs. Reinforcement learning then refines the model using a composite reward balancing causal coherence with policy adherence. A multitask architecture models intra-modal manipulations (e.g., exaggerated imagery) and cross-modal mismatches (e.g., subtitle–speech drift), boosting robustness. Experiments on real short-video ads show BLM-Guard surpasses strong baselines in accuracy, consistency and generalization.

PaperID: 1786, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17350

Authors:Chenming Zhou, Jiaan Wang, Yu Li, Lei Li, Juan Cao, Sheng Tang

Affiliations: Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Beyond Semantic Features: Pixel-level Mapping for Generalized AI-Generated Image Detection

Abstract:
The rapid evolution of generative technologies necessitates reliable methods for detecting AIgenerated images. A critical limitation of current detectors is their failure to generalize to images from unseen generative models, as they often overfit to source-specific semantic cues rather than learning universal generative artifacts. To overcome this, we introduce a simple yet remarkably effective pixel-level mapping pre-processing step to disrupt the pixel value distribution of images and break the fragile, non-essential semantic patterns that detectors commonly exploit as shortcuts. This forces the detector to focus on more fundamental and generalizable high-frequency traces inherent to the image generation process. Through comprehensive experiments on GAN and diffusion-based generators, we show that our approach significantly boosts the cross-generator performance of state-of-the-art detectors. Extensive analysis further verifies our hypothesis that the disruption of semantic cues is the key to generalization.

PaperID: 1787, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08385

Authors:Masataro Asai

Affiliations: IBM Research / MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab

Title: Bilevel MCTS for Amortized O(1) Node Selection in Classical Planning

Abstract:
We study an efficient implementation of MultiArmed Bandit (MAB)-based Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for classical planning. One weakness of MCTS is that it spends a significant time in deciding which node to expand next. While selecting a node from an OPEN list with N nodes has O(1) runtime complexity with traditional array-based priority-queues for dense integer keys, the tree-based OPEN list used by MCTS requires O(log N), which roughly corresponds to the search depth d. In classical planning, d is arbitrarily large (e.g., 2^k-1 in k-disk Tower-of-Hanoi) and the runtime for node selection is significant, unlike in game tree search, where the cost is negligible compared to the node evaluation (rollouts) because d is inherently limited by the game (e.g. d≦361 in Go). To improve this bottleneck, we propose a bilevel modification to MCTS that runs a best-first search from each selected leaf nodes with an expansion budget proportional to d, which achieves amortized O(1) runtime for node selection, equivalent to traditional queue-based OPEN list. In addition, we introduce Tree Collapsing, an enhancement that reduces action selection steps and further improves the performance.

PaperID: 1788, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16400

Authors:Zhehao Zhang, Ryan A. Rossi, Tong Yu, Franck Dernoncourt, Ruiyi Zhang, Jiuxiang Gu, Sungchul Kim, Xiang Chen, Zichao Wang, Nedim Lipka

Affiliations: The Ohio State University, Adobe Inc.

Title: VipAct: Visual-Perception Enhancement via Specialized VLM Agent Collaboration and Tool-use

Abstract:
While visionlanguage models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various tasks combining textual and visual information, they continue to struggle with fine-grained visual perception tasks that require detailed pixel-level analysis. Effectively eliciting comprehensive reasoning from VLMs on such intricate visual elements remains an open challenge. In this paper, we present VipAct, an agent framework that enhances VLMs by integrating multi-agent collaboration and vision expert models, enabling more precise visual understanding and comprehensive reasoning. VipAct consists of an orchestrator agent, which manages task requirement analysis, planning, and coordination, along with specialized agents that handle specific tasks such as image captioning and vision expert models that provide high-precision perceptual information. This multi-agent approach allows VLMs to better perform fine-grained visual perception tasks by synergizing planning, reasoning, and tool use. We evaluate VipAct on benchmarks featuring a diverse set of visual perception tasks, with experimental results demonstrating significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art baselines across all tasks. Furthermore, comprehensive ablation studies reveal the critical role of multi-agent collaboration in eliciting more detailed System-2 reasoning and highlight the importance of image input for task planning. Additionally, our error analysis identifies patterns of VLMs' inherent limitations in visual perception, providing insights into potential future improvements. VipAct offers a flexible and extensible framework, paving the way for more advanced visual perception systems across various real-world applications.

PaperID: 1789, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14361

Authors:Nicholas Tagliapietra, Katharina Ensinger, Christoph Zimmer, Osman Mian

Affiliations: Computer Science Department, TU Darmstadt, Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence, Duale Hochschule Baden-Wuerttemberg Mannheim, Institute for AI in Medicine IKIM

Title: Causal Structure Learning for Dynamical Systems with Theoretical Score Analysis

Abstract:
Real world systems evolve in continuoustime according to their underlying causal relationships, yet their dynamics are often unknown. Existing approaches to learning such dynamics typically either discretize time ---leading to poor performance on irregularly sampled data--- or ignore the underlying causality. We propose CADYT, a novel method for causal discovery on dynamical systems addressing both these challenges. In contrast to state-of-the-art causal discovery methods that model the problem using discrete-time Dynamic Bayesian networks, our formulation is grounded in Difference-based causal models, which allow milder assumptions for modeling the continuous nature of the system. CADYT leverages exact Gaussian Process inference for modeling the continuous-time dynamics which is more aligned with the underlying dynamical process. We propose a practical instantiation that identifies the causal structure via a greedy search guided by the Algorithmic Markov Condition and Minimum Description Length principle. Our experiments show that CADYT outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both regularly and irregularly-sampled data, discovering causal networks closer to the true underlying dynamics.

PaperID: 1790, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10148

Authors:Zhanhong Fang, Debing Wang, Jinbiao Chen, Jiahai Wang, Zizhen Zhang

Affiliations: SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE

Title: UCPO: A Universal Constrained Combinatorial Optimization Method via Preference Optimization

Abstract:
Neural solvers have demonstrated remarkable success in combinatorial optimization, often surpassing traditional heuristics in speed, solution quality, and generalization. However, their efficacy deteriorates significantly when confronted with complex constraints that cannot be effectively managed through simple masking mechanisms. To address this limitation, we introduce Universal Constrained Preference Optimization (UCPO), a novel plugand-play framework that seamlessly integrates preference learning into existing neural solvers via a specially designed loss function, without requiring architectural modifications. UCPO embeds constraint satisfaction directly into a preference-based objective, eliminating the need for meticulous hyperparameter tuning. Leveraging a lightweight warm-start fine-tuning protocol, UCPO enables pre-trained models to consistently produce near-optimal, feasible solutions on challenging constraint-laden tasks, achieving exceptional performance with as little as 1% of the original training budget.

PaperID: 1791, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16575

Authors:Fares Fourati, Mohamed-Slim Alouini, Vaneet Aggarwal

Affiliations: Purdue University

Title: ECPv2: Fast, Efficient, and Scalable Global Optimization of Lipschitz Functions

Abstract:
We propose ECPv2, a scalable and theoretically grounded algorithm for global optimization of Lipschitz continuous functions with unknown Lipschitz constants. Building on the Every Call is Precious (ECP) framework, which ensures that each accepted function evaluation is potentially informative, ECPv2 addresses key limitations of ECP, including high computational cost and overly conservative early behavior. ECPv2 introduces three innovations: (i) an adaptive lower bound that prevents vacuous acceptance regions, (ii) a memory mechanism that restricts comparisons to a fixedsize subset of past evaluations, and (iii) a fixed random projection that accelerates distance computations in high dimensions. We theoretically show that ECPv2 retains ECP’s regret guarantees and expands the acceptance region with high probability. Extensive experiments and ablation studies empirically validate these findings. Using principled hyperparameter settings, we evaluate ECPv2 across a wide range of nonconvex optimization problems and find that it consistently matches or outperforms leading optimizers while significantly reducing wall clock time.

PaperID: 1792, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10264

Authors:Gal Hadar, Forest Agostinelli, Shahaf S. Shperberg

Affiliations: Ben Gurion University of the Negev, University of South Carolina, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Title: Beyond Single-Step Updates: Reinforcement Learning of Heuristics with Limited-Horizon Search

Abstract:
Many sequential decisionmaking problems can be formulated as shortest-path problems, where the objective is to reach a goal state from a given starting state. Heuristic search is a standard approach for solving such problems, relying on a heuristic function to estimate the cost to the goal from any given state. Recent approaches leverage reinforcement learning to learn heuristics by applying deep approximate value iteration. These methods typically rely on single-step Bellman updates, where the heuristic of a state is updated based on its best neighbor and the corresponding edge cost. This work proposes a generalized approach that enhances both state sampling and heuristic updates by performing limited-horizon searches and updating each state's heuristic based on the shortest path to the search frontier, incorporating both edge costs and the heuristic values of frontier states.

PaperID: 1793, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11883

Authors:Chaoqi Jia, Longkun Guo, Kewen Liao, Zhigang Lu, Chao Chen, Jason Xue

Affiliations: Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University), Guangdong University of Technology Fuzhou University, Deakin University, Western Sydney University, CSIRO's and Responsible AI Research (RAIR) Centre, Adelaide University

Title: Approximation Algorithm for Constrained k-Center Clustering: A Local Search Approach

Abstract:
Clustering is a longstanding research problem and a fundamental tool in AI and data analysis. The traditional k-center problem, known as a fundamental theoretical challenge in clustering, has a best possible approximation ratio of 2, and any improvement to a ratio of 2 - ε would imply P = NP. In this work, we study the constrained k-center clustering problem, where instance-level cannot-link (CL) and must-link (ML) constraints are incorporated as background knowledge. Although general CL constraints significantly increase the hardness of approximation, previous work has shown that disjoint CL sets permit constant-factor approximations. However, whether local search can achieve such a guarantee in this setting remains an open question. To this end, we propose a novel local search framework based on a transformation to a dominating matching set problem, achieving the best possible approximation ratio of 2. The experimental results on both real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms baselines in solution quality.

PaperID: 1794, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15810

Authors:Chen Wang, Yue-Jiao Gong, Zhiguang Cao, Zeyuan Ma

Affiliations: South China University of Technology, Singapore Management University

Title: Instance Generation for Meta-Black-Box Optimization Through Latent Space Reverse Engineering

Abstract:
To relieve intensive humanexpertise required to design optimization algorithms, recent Meta-Black-Box Optimization (MetaBBO) researches leverage generalization strength of meta-learning to train neural network-based algorithm design policies over a predefined training problem set, which automates the adaptability of the low-level optimizers on unseen problem instances. Currently, a common training problem set choice in existing MetaBBOs is well-known benchmark suites CoCo-BBOB. Although such choice facilitates the MetaBBO's development, problem instances in CoCo-BBOB are more or less limited in diversity, raising the risk of overfitting of MetaBBOs, which might further results in poor generalization. In this paper, we propose an instance generation approach, termed as LSRE, which could generate diverse training problem instances for MetaBBOs to learn more generalizable policies. LSRE first trains an autoencoder which maps high-dimensional problem features into a 2-dimensional latent space. Uniform-grid sampling in this latent space leads to hidden representations of problem instances with sufficient diversity. By leveraging a genetic-programming approach to search function formulas with minimal L2-distance to these hidden representations, LSRE reverse engineers a diversified problem set, termed as Diverse-BBO. We validate the effectiveness of LSRE by training various MetaBBOs on Diverse-BBO and observe their generalization performances on either synthetic or realistic scenarios. Extensive experimental results underscore the superiority of Diverse-BBO to existing training set choices in MetaBBOs. Further ablation studies not only demonstrate the effectiveness of design choices in LSRE, but also reveal interesting insights on instance diversity and MetaBBO's generalization.

PaperID: 1795, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06124

Authors:Sayantan Adak, Pratyush Chatterjee, Somnath Banerjee, Rima Hazra, Somak Aditya, Animesh Mukherjee

Affiliations: Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India Cisco Systems, Eindhoven University of Technology

Title: AURA: Affordance-Understanding and Risk-aware Alignment Technique for Large Language Models

Abstract:
Present day LLMs face the challenge of managing affordancebased safety risks—situations where outputs inadvertently facilitate harmful actions due to overlooked logical implications. Traditional safety solutions, such as scalar outcome-based reward models, parameter tuning, or heuristic decoding strategies, lack the granularity and proactive nature needed to reliably detect and intervene during subtle yet crucial reasoning steps. Addressing this fundamental gap, we introduce AURA, an innovative, multi-layered framework centered around Process Reward Models (PRMs), providing comprehensive, step level evaluations across logical coherence and safety-awareness. Our framework seamlessly combines introspective self-critique, fine-grained PRM assessments, and adaptive safety-aware decoding to dynamically and proactively guide models toward safer reasoning trajectories. Empirical evidence clearly demonstrates that this approach significantly surpasses existing methods, significantly improving the logical integrity and affordance-sensitive safety of model outputs. This research represents a pivotal step toward safer, more responsible, and contextually aware AI, setting a new benchmark for alignment-sensitive applications.

PaperID: 1796, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.12205

Authors:Zhirui Chen, Vincent Y. F. Tan

Affiliations: National University of Singapore

Title: On the Exponential Convergence for Offline RLHF with Pairwise Comparisons

Abstract:
We consider the problem of offline reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) with pairwise comparisons, where the implicit reward is a linear function of an unknown parameter. Given an offline dataset, our objective is to identify the optimal action for each state, with the ultimate goal of minimizing the simple regret. We propose an algorithm, Reinforcement Learning with Locally Optimal Weights (RLLOW), which achieves an exponential rate of simple regret that decays exponentially with the ratio of the number of data samples to an instance-dependent hardness parameter. This hardness parameter depends explicitly on the suboptimality gap of each action. Furthermore, we derive the first instance-dependent lower bound for offline RLHF with pairwise comparisons. Interestingly, the lower and upper bounds on the simple regret match in an order-wise sense in the exponent, demonstrating the order-wise optimality of RL-LOW. Motivated by privacy considerations in practical applications, we further extend RL-LOW to the setting of differential privacy and show, somewhat surprisingly, that the hardness parameter remains unchanged in the asymptotic regime as the number of data samples tends to infinity. This result highlights the inherent efficiency of RL-LOW in preserving the privacy of the observed rewards. By establishing instance-dependent bounds with exponential convergence rates, our work fills an important gap in the existing literature, which has primarily focused on worst-case regret bounds with inverse polynomial convergence rates for offline RLHF with pairwise comparisons.

PaperID: 1797, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07065

Authors:Brage Eilertsen, Røskva Bjørgfinsdóttir, Francielle Vargas, Ali Ramezani-Kebrya

Affiliations: University of Oslo, Universidade de São Paulo

Title: Aligning Attention with Human Rationales for Self-Explaining Hate Speech Detection

Abstract:
The opaque nature of deep learning models presents significant challenges for the ethical deployment of hate speech detection systems. To address this limitation, we introduce Supervised Rational Attention (SRA), a framework that explicitly aligns model attention with human rationales, improving both interpretability and fairness in hate speech classification. SRA integrates a supervised attention mechanism into transformerbased classifiers, optimizing a joint objective that combines standard classification loss with an alignment loss term that minimizes the discrepancy between attention weights and human-annotated rationales. We evaluated SRA on hate speech benchmarks in English (HateXplain) and Portuguese (HateBRXplain) with rationale annotations. Empirically, SRA achieves 2.4× better explainability compared to current baselines, and produces token-level explanations that are more faithful and human-aligned. In terms of fairness, SRA achieves competitive fairness across all measures, with second-best performance in detecting toxic posts targeting identity groups, while maintaining comparable results on other metrics. These findings demonstrate that incorporating human rationales into attention mechanisms can enhance interpretability and faithfulness without compromising fairness.

PaperID: 1798, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02596

Authors:Fan Gao, Dongyuan Li, Ding Xia, Fei Mi, Yasheng Wang, Lifeng Shang, Baojun Wang

Affiliations: The University of Tokyo, Huawei Technologies Ltd.

Title: EssayBench: Evaluating Large Language Models in Multi-Genre Chinese Essay Writing

Abstract:
Promptbased essay writing is an effective and common way to assess students' critical thinking skills. Recent work has evaluated the impressive capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) on this task. However, most studies focus primarily on English. Those examining LLMs' performance in Chinese often rely on coarse-grained text quality metrics, overlooking the structural and rhetorical complexities of Chinese essays, particularly across diverse genres. We therefore propose EssayBench, a multi-genre benchmark specifically designed for Chinese essay writing, along with a fine-grained, genre-specific scoring framework that hierarchically aggregates scores to better align with human preferences. The dataset comprises 728 real-world prompts across four major genres (Argumentative, Narrative, Descriptive, and Expository), and includes both Open-Ended and Constrained types. Our evaluation protocol is validated through a comprehensive human agreement study. The results show that our protocol aligns well with human judgments, achieving a highest Spearman's correlation of 0.816 and outperforming coarse-grained evaluation methods by an average of 8.6%. Finally, we benchmark 15 large LLMs, analyzing their strengths and limitations across genres and instruction types. We believe EssayBench offers a more reliable framework for evaluating Chinese essay generation and provides valuable insights for improving LLMs in this domain.

PaperID: 1799, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10952

Authors:Steven J. Jones, Robert E. Wray, John E. Laird

Affiliations: Center for Integrated Cognition at IQMRI

Title: Requirements for Aligned, Dynamic Resolution of Conflicts in Operational Constraints

Abstract:
Deployed, autonomous AI systems must often evaluate multiple plausible courses of action (extended sequences of behavior) in novel or underspecified contexts. Despite extensive training, these systems will inevitably encounter scenarios where no available course of action fully satisfies all operational constraints (e.g., operating procedures, rules, laws, norms, and goals). To achieve goals in accordance with human expectations and values, agents must go beyond their trained policies and instead construct, evaluate, and justify candidate courses of action. These processes require contextual ``knowledge'' that may lie outside prior (policy) training. This paper characterizes requirements for agent decision making in these contexts. It also identifies the types of knowledge agents require to make decisions robust to agent goals and aligned with human expectations. Drawing on both analysis and empirical case studies, we examine how agents need to integrate normative, pragmatic, and situational understanding to select and then to pursue more aligned courses of action in complex, real-world environments.

PaperID: 1800, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01373

Authors:Sheng Liu, Tianyu Luan, Phani Nuney, Xuelu Feng, Junsong Yuan

Affiliations: State University of New York at Buffalo

Title: SRAM: Shape-Realism Alignment Metric for No Reference 3D Shape Evaluation

Abstract:
3D generation and reconstruction techniques have been widely used in computer games, film, and other content creation areas. As the application grows, there is a growing demand for 3D shapes that look truly realistic. Traditional evaluation methods rely on a ground truth to measure mesh fidelity. However, in many practical cases, a shape's realism does not depend on having a ground truth reference. In this work, we propose a ShapeRealism Alignment Metric that leverages a large language model (LLM) as a bridge between mesh shape information and realism evaluation. To achieve this, we adopt a mesh encoding approach that converts 3D shapes into the language token space. A dedicated realism decoder is designed to align the language model’s output with human perception of realism. Additionally, we introduce a new dataset, RealismGrading, which provides human-annotated realism scores without the need for ground truth shapes. Our dataset includes shapes generated by 16 different algorithms on over a dozen objects, making it more representative of practical 3D shape distributions. We validate our metric's performance and generalizability through k-fold cross-validation across different objects. Experimental results show that our metric correlates well with human perceptions and outperforms existing methods, and has good generalizability.

PaperID: 1801, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03672

Authors:Arpan Mukherjee, Marcello Bullo, Deniz Gündüz

Affiliations: Imperial College London

Title: SharedRep-RLHF: A Shared Representation Approach to RLHF with Diverse Preferences

Abstract:
Uniformreward reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which trains a single reward model to represent the preferences of all annotators, fails to capture the diversity of opinions across sub-populations, inadvertently favoring dominant groups. The state-of-the-art, MaxMin-RLHF, addresses this by learning group-specific reward models, and by optimizing for the group receiving the minimum reward, thereby promoting fairness. However, we identify that a key limitation of MaxMin-RLHF is its poor performance when the minimum-reward group is a minority. To mitigate this drawback, we introduce a novel framework, termed SharedRep-RLHF. At its core, SharedRep-RLHF learns and leverages shared preference traits in annotations among various groups, in contrast to learning separate reward models across groups. We first show that MaxMin-RLHF is provably suboptimal in learning shared traits, and then quantify the sample complexity of SharedRep RLHF. Experiments across diverse natural language tasks showcase the effectiveness of ShareRep-RLHF compared to MaxMin-RLHF with a gain of up to 20% in win rate.

PaperID: 1802, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11169

Authors:Ayush Pandey, Jai Bardhan, Ishita Jain, Ramya S Hebbalaguppe, Rohan Raju Dhanakshirur, Lovekesh Vig

Affiliations: TCS Research

Title: Refine and Align: Confidence Calibration Through Multi-Agent Interaction in VQA

Abstract:
In the context of Visual Question Answering (VQA) and Agentic AI, calibration refers to how closely an AI system's confidence in its answers reflects their actual correctness. This aspect becomes especially important when such systems operate autonomously and must make decisions under visual uncertainty. While modern VQA systems, powered by advanced visionlanguage models (VLMs), are increasingly used in high-stakes domains like medical diagnostics and autonomous navigation due to their improved accuracy, the reliability of their confidence estimates remains under-examined. Particularly, these systems often produce overconfident responses. To address this, we introduce AlignVQA, a debate-based multi-agent framework, in which diverse specialized VLM -- each following distinct prompting strategies -- generate candidate answers and then engage in two-stage interaction: generalist agents critique, refine and aggregate these proposals. This debate process yields confidence estimates that more accurately reflect the model’s true predictive performance. We find that more calibrated specialized agents produce better aligned confidences. Furthermore, we introduce a novel differentiable calibration-aware loss function called AlignCal designed to fine-tune the specialized agents by minimizing an upper bound on the calibration error. This objective explicitly improves the fidelity of each agent’s confidence estimates. Empirical results across multiple benchmark VQA datasets substantiate the efficacy of our approach, demonstrating substantial reductions in calibration discrepancies.

PaperID: 1803, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10576

Authors:Yuval Shapira, Dana DrachslerCohen

Affiliations: Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

Title: Tight Robustness Certification Through the Convex Hull of ℓ₀ Attacks

Abstract:
Fewpixel attacks mislead a classifier by modifying a few pixels of an image. Their perturbation space is an ℓ₀-ball, which is not convex, unlike ℓₚ-balls for p ≥ 1. However, existing local robustness verifiers typically scale by relying on linear bound propagation, which captures convex perturbation spaces. We show that the convex hull of an ℓ₀-ball is the intersection of its bounding box and an asymmetrically scaled ℓ₁-like polytope. The volumes of the convex hull and this polytope are nearly equal as the input dimension increases. We then show a linear bound propagation that precisely computes bounds over the convex hull and is significantly tighter than bound propagations over the bounding box or our ℓ₁-like polytope. This bound propagation scales the state-of-the-art ℓ₀ verifier on its most challenging robustness benchmarks by 1.24x-7.07x, with a geometric mean of 3.16.

PaperID: 1804, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06512

Authors:Haonan Shi, Guoli Wang, Tu Ouyang, An Wang

Affiliations: Case Western Reserve University

Title: EASE: Practical and Efficient Safety Alignment for Small Language Models

Abstract:
Small language models (SLMs) are increasingly deployed on edge devices, making their safety alignment crucial yet challenging. Current shallow alignment methods that rely on direct refusal of malicious queries fail to provide robust protection, particularly against adversarial jailbreaks. While deliberative safety reasoning alignment offers deeper alignment for defending against sophisticated attacks, effectively implanting such reasoning capability in SLMs with limited capabilities remains an open challenge. Moreover, safety reasoning incurs significant computational overhead as models apply reasoning to nearly all queries, making it impractical for resourceconstrained edge deployment scenarios that demand rapid responses. We propose EASE, a novel framework that enables practical and Efficient safety Alignment for Small languagE models. Our approach first identifies the optimal safety reasoning teacher that can effectively distill safety reasoning capabilities to SLMs. We then align models to selectively activate safety reasoning for dangerous adversarial jailbreak queries while providing direct responses to straightforward malicious queries and general helpful tasks. This selective mechanism enables small models to maintain robust safety guarantees against sophisticated attacks while preserving computational efficiency for benign interactions. Experimental results demonstrate that EASE reduces jailbreak attack success rates by up to 17% compared to shallow alignment methods while reducing inference overhead by up to 90% compared to deliberative safety reasoning alignment, making it practical for SLMs real-world edge deployments.

PaperID: 1805, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00709

Authors:Yifan Xu, Xichen Ye, Yifan Chen, Qiaosheng Zhang

Affiliations: Hong Kong Baptist University, Fudan University, Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Title: When Human Preferences Flip: An Instance-Dependent Robust Loss for RLHF

Abstract:
Quality of datasets plays an important role in large language model (LLM) alignment. In collecting human feedback, however, preference flipping is ubiquitous and causes corruption in data annotation; the issue necessitates the alignment algorithms with improved robustness against potential flipped pairs. To this end, this paper introduces a FlippingAware Direct Preference Optimization (FA-DPO) algorithm tailored to preference flipping from a reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) perspective. We dissect the inherent human intention model and the preference flipping mechanism introduced by external factors as two distinct stages; in the latter, we introduce an instance-dependent flipping probability on the basis of the Bradley-Terry (BT) model. Further, by leveraging features relevant to preference annotation, we capture uncertainty in judgments and model preference flipping patterns. In practice, we design a simple yet efficient iterative optimization algorithm compatible with the original RLHF and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) algorithms. In our experiments, we investigate the instance-dependent preference flipping model under multiple circumstances for evaluation of our proposed method, as well as other baseline methods.

PaperID: 1806, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06852

Authors:Peng Zhang, Peijie Sun

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: Differentiated Directional Intervention: A Framework for Evading LLM Safety Alignment

Abstract:
Safety alignment instills in Large Language Models (LLMs) a critical capacity to refuse malicious requests. Prior works have modeled this refusal mechanism as a single linear direction in the activation space. We posit that this is an oversimplification that conflates two functionally distinct neural processes: the detection of harm and the execution of a refusal. In this work, we deconstruct this single representation into a Harm Detection Direction and a Refusal Execution Direction. Leveraging this finegrained model, we introduce Differentiated Bi-Directional Intervention (DBDI), a new white-box framework that precisely neutralizes the safety alignment at critical layer. DBDI applies adaptive projection nullification to the refusal execution direction while suppressing the harm detection direction via direct steering. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DBDI outperforms prominent jailbreaking methods, achieving up to a 97.88% attack success rate on models such as Llama-2. By providing a more granular and mechanistic framework, our work offers a new direction for the in-depth understanding of LLM safety alignment.

PaperID: 1807, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13007

Authors:Yiyang Zhao, Huiyu Bai, Xuejiao Zhao

Affiliations: College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Joint NTU-UBC Research Centre of Excellence in Active Living for the Elderly (LILY), Singapore Alibaba-NTU Singapore Joint Research Institute (ANGEL)

Title: GEM: Generative Entropy-Guided Preference Modeling for Few-Shot Alignment of LLMs

Abstract:
Alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences typically relies on supervised reward models or external judges that demand abundant annotations. However, in fields that rely on professional knowledge, such as medicine and law, such largescale preference labels are often unachievable. In this paper, we propose a generative entropy-guided preference modeling approach named GEM for LLMs aligment at low-resource and domain-specific scenarios. Instead of training a discriminative reward model on preference data, we directly train the LLM to internalize a closed-loop optimization architecture that can extract and exploit the multi-dimensional, fine-grained cognitive signals implicit in human preferences. Specifically, our Cognitive Filtering module, based on entropy theory in decision making, first leverages Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to generate diverse candidate reasoning chains (CoTs) from preference data. Subsequently, it introduces a token scoring mechanism to rank and weight the sampled CoTs, boosting the importance of high-confidence answers and strategically high-entropy tokens. Building on these filtered preferences, we fine-tune the LLM using a novel self-evaluated group advantage algorithm, SEGA, which effectively aggregates group-level cognitive signals and transforms the entropy-based scores into implicit rewards for policy optimization. In these ways, GEM empowers the LLM to rely on its own judgments and establishes an entropy-guided closed-loop cognitive optimization framework, enabling highly efficient few-shot alignment of LLMs. Experiments on general benchmarks and domain-specific tasks (such as mathematical reasoning and medical dialogues) demonstrate that our GEM achieves significant improvements with few-shot preference data.

PaperID: 1808, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06105

Authors:Junwen Zheng, Xinran Xu, Li Rong Wang, Chang Cai, Lucinda Siyun Tan, Dingyuan Wang, Hong Liang Tey, Xiuyi Fan

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Centre for Frontier AI Research, National Skin Centre, National Healthcare Group

Title: Explainable Melanoma Diagnosis with Contrastive Learning and LLM-based Report Generation

Abstract:
Deep learning has demonstrated expertlevel performance in melanoma classification, positioning it as a powerful tool in clinical dermatology. However, model opacity and the lack of interpretability remain critical barriers to clinical adoption, as clinicians often struggle to trust the decision-making processes of black-box models. To address this gap, we present a Cross-modal Explainable Framework for Melanoma (CEFM) that leverages contrastive learning as the core mechanism for achieving interpretability. Specifically, CEFM maps clinical criteria for melanoma diagnosis—namely Asymmetry, Border, and Color (ABC)—into the Vision Transformer embedding space using dual projection heads, thereby aligning clinical semantics with visual features. The aligned representations are subsequently translated into structured textual explanations via natural language generation, creating a transparent link between raw image data and clinical interpretation. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate 92.79% accuracy and an AUC of 0.961, along with significant improvements across multiple interpretability metrics. Qualitative analyses further show that the spatial arrangement of the learned embeddings aligns with clinicians’ application of the ABC rule, effectively bridging the gap between high-performance classification and clinical trust.

PaperID: 1809, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10572

Authors:Mohammadsina Almasi, Hadis Anahideh

Affiliations: University of Illinois Chicago

Title: Bi-Level Contextual Bandits for Individualized Resource Allocation Under Delayed Feedback

Abstract:
Equitably allocating limited resources in highstakes domains—such as education, employment, and healthcare—requires balancing short-term utility with long-term impact, while accounting for delayed outcomes, hidden heterogeneity, and ethical constraints. However, most learning-based allocation frameworks either assume immediate feedback or ignore the complex interplay between individual characteristics and intervention dynamics. We propose a novel bi-level contextual bandit framework for individualized resource allocation under delayed feedback, designed to operate in real-world settings with dynamic populations, capacity constraints, and time-sensitive impact. At the meta level, the model optimizes subgroup-level budget allocations to satisfy fairness and operational constraints. At the base level, it identifies the most responsive individuals within each group using a neural network trained on observational data, while respecting cooldown windows and delayed treatment effects modeled via resource-specific delay kernels. By explicitly modeling temporal dynamics and feedback delays, the algorithm continually refines its policy as new data arrive, enabling more responsive and adaptive decision-making. We validate our approach on two real-world datasets from education and workforce development, showing that it achieves higher cumulative outcomes, better adapts to delay structures, and ensures equitable distribution across subgroups. Our results highlight the potential of delay-aware, data-driven decision-making systems to improve institutional policy and social welfare.

PaperID: 1810, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03749

Authors:Livia Betti, Farooq Sanni, Gnouyaro Z. Sogoyou, Togbe Agbagla, Cullen Molitor, Tamma Carleton, Esther Rolf

Affiliations: University of Colorado Boulder, Togo Data Lab, University of California, Berkeley Center for Effective Global Action

Title: Mapping on a Budget: Optimizing Spatial Data Collection for ML

Abstract:
In applications across agriculture, ecology, and human development, machine learning with satellite imagery (SatML) is limited by the sparsity of labeled training data. While satellite data cover the globe, labeled training datasets for SatML are often small, spatially clustered, and collected for other purposes (e.g., administrative surveys or field measurements). Despite the pervasiveness of this issue in practice, past SatML research has largely focused on new model architectures and training algorithms to handle scarce training data, rather than modeling data conditions directly. This leaves scientists and policymakers who wish to use SatML for largescale monitoring uncertain about whether and how to collect additional data to maximize performance. Here, we present the first problem formulation for the optimization of spatial training data in the presence of heterogeneous data collection costs and realistic budget constraints, as well as novel methods for addressing this problem. In experiments simulating different problem settings across three continents and four tasks, our strategies reveal substantial gains from sample optimization. Further experiments delineate settings for which optimized sampling is particularly effective. The problem formulation and methods we introduce are designed to generalize across application domains for SatML; we put special emphasis on a specific problem setting where our coauthors can immediately use our findings to augment clustered agricultural surveys for SatML monitoring in Togo.

PaperID: 1811, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11973

Authors:Ankit Bhardwaj, Rohail Asim, Sachin Kumar Chauhan, Yasir Zaki, Lakshmi Subramanian

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, New York University, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

Title: Self-Regulating Cars: Automating Traffic Control in Free Flow Road Networks

Abstract:
Freeflow road networks, such as suburban highways, are increasingly experiencing traffic congestion due to growing commuter inflow and limited infrastructure. Traditional control mechanisms—traffic signals or local heuristics—are ineffective or infeasible in these high-speed, signal-free environments. We introduce self-regulating cars, a reinforcement learning-based traffic control protocol that dynamically modulates vehicle speeds to optimize throughput and prevent congestion, without requiring new physical infrastructure. Our approach integrates classical traffic flow theory, gap acceptance models, and microscopic simulation into a physics-informed RL framework. By abstracting roads into super-segments, the agent captures emergent flow dynamics and learns robust speed modulation policies from instantaneous traffic observations. Evaluated in the high-fidelity PTV Vissim simulator on a real-world highway network, our method improves total throughput by 5%, reduces average delay by 13%, and decreases total stops by 3% compared to the no-control setting. It also achieves smoother, congestion-resistant flow while generalizing across varied traffic patterns—demonstrating its potential for scalable, ML-driven traffic management.

PaperID: 1812, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03307

Authors:Kristen Goebel, William Solow, Paola Pesantez-Cabrera, Markus Keller, Alan Fern

Affiliations: Oregon State University, Washington State University

Title: Budgeted Online Active Learning with Expert Advice and Episodic Priors

Abstract:
This paper introduces a novel approach to budgeted online active learning from finitehorizon data streams with extremely limited labeling budgets. In agricultural applications, such streams might include daily weather data over a growing season, and labels require costly measurements of weather-dependent plant characteristics. Our method integrates two key sources of prior information: a collection of preexisting expert predictors and episodic behavioral knowledge of the experts based on unlabeled data streams. Unlike previous research on online active learning with experts, our work simultaneously considers query budgets, finite horizons, and episodic knowledge, enabling effective learning in applications with severely limited labeling capacity. We demonstrate the utility of our approach through experiments on various prediction problems derived from both a realistic agricultural crop simulator and real-world data from multiple grape cultivars. The results show that our method significantly outperforms baseline expert predictions, uniform query selection, and existing approaches that consider budgets and limited horizons but neglect episodic knowledge, even under highly constrained labeling budgets.

PaperID: 1813, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.18818

Authors:Marc Grimson, Joshua Fan, Courtney L. Davis, Dylan van Bramer, Daniel Fink, Carla P. Gomes

Affiliations: Cornell University

Title: LabelKAN - Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Inter-Label Learning: Avian Community Learning

Abstract:
Global biodiversity loss is accelerating, prompting international efforts such as the KunmingMontreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to direct resources toward halting species declines. A key challenge in achieving this goal is having access to robust methodologies to understand where species occur and how they relate to each other within broader ecological communities. Recent deep learning-based advances in joint species distribution modeling have shown improved predictive performance, but effectively incorporating community-level learning, taking into account species-species relationships in addition to species-environment relationships, remains an outstanding challenge. We introduce LabelKAN, a novel framework based on Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) to learn inter-label connections from predictions of each label. When modeling avian species distributions, LabelKAN achieves substantial gains in predictive performance across the vast majority of species. In particular, our method demonstrates strong improvements for rare and difficult-to-predict species, which are often the most important when setting biodiversity targets under frameworks like GBF. These performance gains also translate to more confident predictions of the species spatial patterns as well as more confident predictions of community structure. We illustrate how the LabelKAN leads to qualitative and quantitative improvements with a focused application on the Great Blue Heron, an emblematic species in freshwater ecosystems that has experienced significant population declines across the United States in recent years. Using the LabelKAN framework, we are able to identify communities and species in New York that will be most sensitive to further declines in Great Blue Heron populations. Our results underscore the critical importance of incorporating information on community assemblage in species distribution modeling. By leveraging species co-occurrence patterns, our approach offers deeper ecological insights and supports more informed conservation planning in the face of accelerating biodiversity loss. Beyond species distribution modeling, LabelKAN provides a principled approach to capturing inter-label connections and can generalize to diverse multi-label tasks. We hope it encourages further research on inter-label learning across domains.

PaperID: 1814, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03589

Authors:Adib Hasan, Mardavij Roozbehani, Munther A. Dahleh

Affiliations: Independent Researcher, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Title: VITA: Variational Pretraining of Transformers for Climate-Robust Crop Yield Forecasting

Abstract:
Accurate crop yield forecasting is essential for global food security. However, current AI models systematically underperform when yields deviate from historical trends. We attribute this to the lack of rich, physically grounded datasets directly linking atmospheric states to yields. To address this, we introduce VITA (Variational Inference Transformer for Asymmetric Data), a variational pretraining framework that learns representations from large satellitebased weather datasets and transfers to the ground-based limited measurements available for yield prediction. VITA is trained using detailed meteorological variables as proxy targets during pretraining and learns to predict latent atmospheric states under a seasonality-aware sinusoidal prior. This allows the model to be fine-tuned using limited weather statistics during deployment. Applied to 763 counties in the US Corn Belt, VITA achieves state-of-the-art performance in predicting corn and soybean yields across all evaluation scenarios, particularly during extreme years, with statistically significant improvements (paired t-test, p < 0.0001). Importantly, VITA outperforms prior frameworks like GNN-RNN without soil data, and larger foundational models (e.g., Chronos-Bolt) with less compute, making it practical for real-world use, especially in data-scarce regions. This work highlights how domain-aware AI design can overcome data limitations and support resilient agricultural forecasting in a changing climate.

PaperID: 1815, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.05381

Authors:Kazi Ashik Islam, Zakaria Mehrab, Mahantesh M Halappanavar, Henning Mortveit, Katragadda Sridhar, Jon Derek Loftis, Stefan Hoops, Madhav Marathe

Affiliations: Biocomplexity Institute, University of Virginia, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Department of Communications and Information Technology, City of Virginia Beach, Virginia Institute of Marine Science, College of William and Mary

Title: Towards High Resolution Probabilistic Coastal Inundation Forecasting from Sparse Observations

Abstract:
Coastal flooding poses increasing threats to communities worldwide, necessitating accurate and hyperlocal inundation forecasting for effective emergency response. However, real-world deployment of forecasting systems is often constrained by sparse sensor networks, where only a limited subset of locations may have sensors due to budget constraints. To approach this challenge, we present Diff-Sparse, a masked conditional diffusion model designed for probabilistic coastal inundation forecasting from sparse sensor observations. Diff-Sparse primarily utilizes the inundation history of a location and its neighboring locations from a context time window as spatiotemporal context. The fundamental challenge of spatiotemporal prediction based on sparse observations in the context window is addressed by introducing a novel masking strategy during training. Digital elevation data and temporal co-variates are utilized as additional spatial and temporal contexts, respectively. A convolutional neural network and a conditional UNet architecture with cross-attention mechanism are employed to capture the spatiotemporal dynamics in the data. We trained and tested Diff-Sparse on coastal inundation data from the Eastern Shore of Virginia and systematically assessed the performance of Diff-Sparse across different sparsity levels (0%, 50%, 95% missing observations). Our experiment results show that Diff-Sparse achieves upto 62% improvement in terms of two forecasting performance metrics compared to existing methods, at 95% sparsity level. Moreover, our ablation studies reveal that digital elevation data becomes more useful at high sparsity levels compared to temporal co-variates.

PaperID: 1816, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08314

Authors:Calvin Isley, Joshua Gilbert, Evangelos Kassos, Michaela Kocher, Allen Nie, Emma Brunskill, Ben Domingue, Jake Hofman, Joscha Legewie, Teddy Svoronos, Charlotte Tuminelli, Sharad Goel

Affiliations: Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford Graduate School of Education, Microsoft Research, Harvard University

Title: Assessing the Quality of AI-Generated Exams: A Large-Scale Field Study

Abstract:
While large language models (LLMs) challenge conventional methods of teaching and learning, they present an exciting opportunity to improve efficiency and scale highquality instruction. One promising application is the generation of customized exams, tailored to specific course content. There has been significant recent excitement on automatically generating questions using artificial intelligence, but also comparatively little work evaluating the psychometric quality of these items in real-world educational settings. Filling this gap is an important step toward understanding generative AI's role in effective test design. In this study, we introduce and evaluate an iterative refinement strategy for question generation, repeatedly producing, assessing, and improving questions through cycles of LLM-generated critique and revision. We evaluate the quality of these AI-generated questions in a large-scale field study involving 91 classes---covering computer science, mathematics, chemistry, and more---in dozens of colleges across the United States, comprising nearly 1700 students. Our analysis, based on item response theory (IRT), suggests that for students in our sample the AI-generated questions performed comparably to expert-created questions designed for standardized exams. Our results illustrate the power of AI to make high-quality assessments more readily available, benefiting both teachers and students.

PaperID: 1817, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05629

Authors:Zheng Jiang, Wei Wang, Gaowei Zhang, Yi Wang

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, School of Computer Science

Title: SSTODE: Ocean-Atmosphere Physics-Informed Neural ODEs for Sea Surface Temperature Prediction

Abstract:
Sea Surface Temperature (SST) is crucial for understanding upperocean thermal dynamics and ocean-atmosphere interactions, which have profound economic and social impacts. While data-driven models show promise in SST prediction, their black-box nature often limits interpretability and overlooks key physical processes. Recently, physics-informed neural networks have been gaining momentum but struggle with complex ocean-atmosphere dynamics due to 1) inadequate characterization of seawater movement (e.g., coastal upwelling) and 2) insufficient integration of external SST drivers (e.g., turbulent heat fluxes). To address these challenges, we propose SSTODE, a physics-informed Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (Neural ODEs) framework for SST prediction. First, we derive ODEs from fluid transport principles, incorporating both advection and diffusion to model ocean spatiotemporal dynamics. Through variational optimization, we recover a latent velocity field that explicitly governs the temporal dynamics of SST. Building upon ODE, we introduce an Energy Exchanges Integrator (EEI)-inspired by ocean heat budget equations-to account for external forcing factors. Thus, the variations in the components of these factors provide deeper insights into SST dynamics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SSTODE achieves state-of-the-art performances in global and regional SST forecasting benchmarks. Furthermore, SSTODE visually reveals the impact of advection dynamics, thermal diffusion patterns, and diurnal heating-cooling cycles on SST evolution. These findings demonstrate the model's interpretability and physical consistency.

PaperID: 1818, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.19896

Authors:Bo Jin, ShichaoZhao, Jin Lyu, Bin Zhang, Tao Yu, Liang An, Yebin Liu, Meili Wang

Affiliations: College of Information Engineering, Northwest A&F University, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Department of Automation, Ministry of Agriculture; Shaanxi Key Laboratory of Agricultural Information Perception and Intelligent Service; Shaanxi Engineering Research Center of Agricultural Information Intelligent Perception and Analysis

Title: Monocular Mesh Recovery and Body Measurement of Female Saanen Goats

Abstract:
The lactation performance of Saanen dairy goats, renowned for their high milk yield, is intrinsically linked to their body size, making accurate 3D body measurement essential for assessing milk production potential, yet existing reconstruction methods lack goatspecific authentic 3D data. To address this limitation, we establish the FemaleSaanenGoat dataset containing synchronized eight-view RGBD videos of 55 female Saanen goats (6-18 months). Using multi-view DynamicFusion, we fuse noisy, non-rigid point cloud sequences into high-fidelity 3D scans, overcoming challenges from irregular surfaces and rapid movement. Based on these scans, we develop SaanenGoat, a parametric 3D shape model specifically designed for female Saanen goats. This model features a refined template with 41 skeletal joints and enhanced udder representation, registered with our scan data. A comprehensive shape space constructed from 48 goats enables precise representation of diverse individual variations. With the help of SaanenGoat model, we get high-precision 3D reconstruction from single-view RGBD input, and achieve automated measurement of six critical body dimensions: body length, height, chest width, chest girth, hip width, and hip height. Experimental results demonstrate the superior accuracy of our method in both 3D reconstruction and body measurement, presenting a novel paradigm for large-scale 3D vision applications in precision livestock farming.

PaperID: 1819, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19500

Authors:Hou Hei Lam, Jiangjie Qiu, Xiuyuan Hu, Wentao Li, Fankun Zeng, Siwei Fu, Hao Zhang, Xiaonan Wang

Affiliations: Tsinghua University

Title: CycleChemist: A Dual-Pronged Machine Learning Framework for Organic Photovoltaic Discovery

Abstract:
Organic photovoltaic (OPV) materials offer a promising pathway for sustainable energy generation. However, their development is hindered by the challenge of identifying highperformance donor-acceptor pairs with optimal power conversion efficiencies (PCEs). Most existing design strategies focus exclusively on either the donor or the acceptor, rather than employing a unified model capable of designing both components. In this work, we introduce a dual-pronged machine learning framework for OPV discovery, integrating predictive modeling and generative molecular design. In this study, we propose the newly curated Organic Photovoltaic Donor-Acceptor Dataset (OPV²D), the largest of its kind, comprising 2,000 experimentally characterized donor-acceptor pairs. This dataset serves as a comprehensive foundation for model training and evaluation. To enable accurate property prediction in organic photovoltaic (OPV) materials, we first introduce the Organic Photovoltaic Classifier (OPVC) to predict the likelihood that a given material exhibits OPV behavior. Complementing this, we develop a hierarchical graph neural network framework that integrates multi-task learning and cross-modal donor–acceptor interaction modeling. This framework includes the Molecular Orbital Energy Estimator (MOE²) for predicting the highest occupied molecular orbital–lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (HOMO–LUMO) energy levels, and the Photovoltaic Performance Predictor (P³) for estimating power conversion efficiency (PCE). In addition, we introduce the Material Generative Pretrained Transformer (MatGPT) to generate synthetically accessible organic semiconductors. Building on this, we propose a reinforcement learning strategy with three-objective policy optimization that guides molecular generation while preserving chemical validity. By bridging molecular representation learning with device performance prediction, our framework advances computational OPV material discovery.

PaperID: 1820, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06799

Authors:Naiyi Li, Zihui Ma, Runlong Yu, Lingyao Li

Affiliations: University of Maryland, College Park, University of Alabama, University of South Florida

Title: LSDTs: LLM-Augmented Semantic Digital Twins for Adaptive Knowledge-Intensive Infrastructure Planning

Abstract:
Digital Twins (DTs) offer powerful tools for managing complex infrastructure systems, but their effectiveness is often limited by challenges in integrating unstructured knowledge. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) bring new potential to address this gap, with strong abilities in extracting and organizing diverse textual information. We therefore propose LSDTs (LLMAugmented Semantic Digital Twins), a framework that helps LLMs extract planning knowledge from unstructured documents like environmental regulations and technical guidelines, and organize it into a formal ontology. This ontology forms a semantic layer that powers a digital twin—a virtual model of the physical system—allowing it to simulate realistic, regulation-aware planning scenarios. We evaluate LSDTs through a case study of offshore wind farm planning in Maryland, including its application during Hurricane Sandy. Results demonstrate that LSDTs support interpretable, regulation-aware layout optimization, enable high-fidelity simulation, and enhance adaptability in infrastructure planning. This work shows the potential of combining generative AI with digital twins to support complex, knowledge-driven planning tasks.

PaperID: 1821, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13484

Authors:Liu Liu, Alexandra Schild, Marco Cipriano, Fatimeh Al Ghannam, Freya Tan, Gerard de Melo, Andres Sevtsuk

Affiliations: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Hasso Plattner Institute

Title: MINGLE: VLMs for Semantically Complex Region Detection in Urban Scenes

Abstract:
Understanding grouplevel social interactions in public spaces is crucial for urban planning, informing the design of socially vibrant and inclusive environments. Detecting such interactions from images involves interpreting subtle visual cues such as relations, proximity and co-movement – semantically complex signals that go beyond traditional object detection. To address this challenge, we introduce a social group region detection task, which requires inferring and spatially grounding visual regions defined by abstract interpersonal relations. We propose MINGLE (Modeling INterpersonal Group-Level Engagement), a modular three-stage pipeline that integrates: (1) off-the-shelf human detection and depth estimation, (2) VLM-based reasoning to classify pairwise social affiliation, and (3) a lightweight spatial aggregation algorithm to localize socially connected groups. To support this task and encourage future research, we present a new dataset of 100K urban street-view images annotated with bounding boxes and labels for both individuals and socially interacting groups. The annotations combine human-created labels and outputs from the MINGLE pipeline, ensuring semantic richness and broad coverage of real world scenarios.

PaperID: 1822, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.22454

Authors:Ayan Majumdar, Deborah D. Kanubala, Kavya Gupta, Isabel Valera

Affiliations: Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Saarland University

Title: A Causal Framework to Measure and Mitigate Non-binary Treatment Discrimination

Abstract:
Fairness studies of algorithmic decisionmaking systems often simplify complex decision processes, such as bail or lending decisions, into binary classification tasks (e.g., approve or not approve). However, these approaches overlook that such decisions are not inherently binary; they also involve non-binary treatment decisions (e.g., loan or bail terms) that can influence the downstream outcomes (e.g., loan repayment or reoffending). We argue that treatment decisions are integral to the decision-making process and, therefore, should be central to fairness analyses. Consequently, we propose a causal framework that extends and complements existing fairness notions by explicitly distinguishing between decision-subjects’ covariates and the treatment decisions. Our framework leverages path-specific counterfactual reasoning to: (i) measure treatment disparity and its downstream effects in historical data; and (ii) mitigate the impact of past unfair treatment decisions when automating decision-making. We use our framework to empirically analyze four widely used loan approval datasets to reveal potential disparity in non-binary treatment decisions and their discriminatory impact on outcomes, highlighting the need to incorporate treatment decisions in fairness assessments. Finally, by intervening in treatment decisions, we show that our framework effectively mitigates treatment discrimination from historical loan approval data to ensure fair risk score estimation and (non-binary) decision-making processes that benefit all stakeholders.

PaperID: 1823, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07806

Authors:Ahmed Sabir, Markus Kängsepp, Rajesh Sharma

Affiliations: University of Tartu, Estonia Plaksha University

Title: The Confidence Trap: Gender Bias and Predictive Certainty in LLMs

Abstract:
The increased use of large language models (LLMs) in sensitive domains leads to growing interest in how their confidence scores correspond to fairness and bias. This study examines the alignment between LLMpredicted confidence and human-annotated bias judgments. Focusing on gender bias, the research investigates probability confidence calibration in contexts involving gendered pronoun resolution. The goal is to evaluate if calibration metrics based on predicted confidence scores effectively capture fairness-related disparities in LLMs. The results show that, among the six state-of-the-art models, Gemma-2 demonstrates the worst calibration according to the gender bias benchmark. The primary contribution of this work is a fairness-aware evaluation of LLMs confidence calibration, offering guidance for ethical deployment. In addition, we introduce a new calibration metric, Gender-ECE, designed to measure gender disparities in resolution tasks.

PaperID: 1824, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.19749

Authors:Catherine Villeneuve, Benjamin Akera, Mélisande Teng, David Rolnick

Affiliations: McGill University Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, Université de Montréal Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute

Title: BATIS: Bayesian Approaches for Targeted Improvement of Species Distribution Models

Abstract:
Species distribution models (SDMs), which aim to predict species occurrence based on environmental variables, are widely used to monitor and respond to biodiversity change. Recent deep learning advances for SDMs have been shown to perform well on complex and heterogeneous datasets, but their effectiveness remains limited by spatial biases in the data. In this paper, we revisit deep SDMs from a Bayesian perspective and introduce BATIS, a novel and practical framework wherein prior predictions are updated iteratively using limited observational data. Models must appropriately capture both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty to effectively combine finegrained local insights with broader ecological patterns. We benchmark an extensive set of uncertainty quantification approaches on a novel dataset including citizen science observations from the eBird platform. Our empirical study shows how Bayesian deep learning approaches can greatly improve the reliability of SDMs in data-scarce locations, which can contribute to ecological understanding and conservation efforts.

PaperID: 1825, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.15045

Authors:Jinge Wu, Zhaolong Wu, Ruizhe Li, Tong Chen, Abul Hasan, Yunsoo Kim, Jason Pui-Yin Cheung, Teng Zhang, Honghan Wu

Affiliations: University College London, The University of Hong Kong, University of Aberdeen, The University of Sydney, University of Oxford

Title: Error Correction in Radiology Reports: A Knowledge Distillation-Based Multi-Stage Framework

Abstract:
The increasing complexity and workload of clinical radiology leads to inevitable oversights and mistakes in their use as diagnostic tools, causing delayed treatments and sometimes lifethreatening harm to patients. While large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in many tasks, their utilities in detecting and correcting errors in radiology reporting are limited. This paper proposes a novel dual-knowledge infusion framework that enhances LLMs' capability for radiology report proofreading through systematic integration of medical expertise. Specifically, the knowledge infusion combines medical knowledge graph distillation (MKGD) with external knowledge retrieval (EXKR), enabling an effective automated approach in tackling mistakes in radiology reporting. By decomposing the complex proofreading task into three specialized stages of detection, localization, and correction, our method mirrors the systematic review process employed by expert radiologists, ensuring both precision and clinical interpretability. To perform a robust, clinically relevant evaluation, a comprehensive benchmark is also proposed using real-world radiology reports with real-world error patterns, including speech recognition confusions, terminology ambiguities, and template-related inconsistencies. Extensive evaluations across multiple LLM architectures demonstrate substantial improvements of our approach: up to 31.56% increase in error detection accuracy and 37.4% reduction in processing time. Human evaluation by radiologists confirms superior clinical relevance and factual consistency compared to existing approaches.

PaperID: 1826, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12817

Authors:Shasha Zhou, Mingyu Huang, Jack Cole, Charles Britton, Ming Yin, Jan Wolber, Ke Li

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, University of Exeter, Purdue University, GE HealthCare

Title: Assessing Automated Fact-Checking for Medical LLM Responses with Knowledge Graphs

Abstract:
The recent proliferation of large language models (LLMs) holds the potential to revolutionize healthcare, with strong capabilities in diverse medical tasks. Yet, deploying LLMs in highstakes healthcare settings requires rigorous verification and validation to understand any potential harm. This paper investigates the reliability and viability of using medical knowledge graphs (KGs) for the automated factuality evaluation of LLM-generated responses. To ground this investigation, we introduce FAITH, a framework designed to systematically probe the strengths and limitations of this KG-based approach. FAITH operates without reference answers by decomposing responses into atomic claims, linking them to a medical KG, and scoring them based on evidence paths. Experiments on diverse medical tasks with human subjective evaluations demonstrate that KG-grounded evaluation achieves considerably higher correlations with clinician judgments and can effectively distinguish LLMs with varying capabilities. It is also robust to textual variances. The inherent explainability of its scoring can further help users understand and mitigate the limitations of current LLMs. We conclude that while limitations exist, leveraging KGs is a prominent direction for automated factuality assessment in healthcare.

PaperID: 1827, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08955

Authors:Qinyi Zhang, Duanyu Feng, Ronghui Han, Yangshuai Wang, Hao Wang

Affiliations: Sichuan University, National University of Singapore

Title: MicroEvoEval: A Systematic Evaluation Framework for Image-Based Microstructure Evolution Prediction

Abstract:
Simulating microstructure evolution (MicroEvo) is vital for materials design but demands high numerical accuracy, efficiency, and physical fidelity. Although recent studies on deep learning (DL) offers a promising alternative to traditional solvers, the field lacks standardized benchmarks. Existing studies are flawed due to a lack of comparing specialized MicroEvo DL models with stateof-the-art spatio-temporal architectures, an overemphasis on numerical accuracy over physical fidelity, and a failure to analyze error propagation over time. To address these gaps, we introduce MicroEvoEval, the first comprehensive benchmark for image-based microstructure evolution prediction. We evaluate 14 models, encompassing both domain-specific and general-purpose architectures, across four representative MicroEvo tasks with datasets specifically structured for both short- and long-term assessment. Our multi-faceted evaluation framework goes beyond numerical accuracy and computational cost, incorporating a curated set of structure-preserving metrics to assess physical fidelity. Our extensive evaluations yield several key insights. Notably, we find that modern architectures (e.g., VMamba), not only achieve superior long-term stability and physical fidelity but also operate with an order-of-magnitude greater computational efficiency. The results highlight the necessity of holistic evaluation and identify these modern architectures as a highly promising direction for developing efficient and reliable surrogate models in data-driven materials science.

PaperID: 1828, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.00647

Authors:Noorain Mukhtiar, Adnan Mahmood, Quan Z. Sheng

Affiliations: Macquarie University

Title: CoRe-Fed: Bridging Collaborative and Representation Fairness via Federated Embedding Distillation

Abstract:
With the proliferation of distributed data sources, Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a key approach to enable collaborative intelligence through decentralized model training while preserving data privacy. However, conventional FL algorithms often suffer from performance disparities across clients caused by heterogeneous data distributions and unequal participation, which leads to unfair outcomes. Specifically, we focus on two core fairness challenges, i.e., representation bias, arising from misaligned client representations, and collaborative bias, stemming from inequitable contribution during aggregation, both of which degrade model performance and generalizability. To mitigate these disparities, we propose CoReFed, a unified optimization framework that bridges collaborative and representation fairness via embedding-level regularization and fairness-aware aggregation. Initially, an alignment-driven mechanism promotes semantic consistency between local and global embeddings to reduce representational divergence. Subsequently, a dynamic reward-penalty-based aggregation strategy adjusts each client’s weight based on participation history and embedding alignment to ensure contribution-aware aggregation. Extensive experiments across diverse models and datasets demonstrate that CoRe-Fed improves both fairness and model performance over state-of-the-art baseline algorithms.

PaperID: 1829, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12211

Authors:Longchao Da, David Isele, Hua Wei, Manish Saroya

Affiliations: Arizona State University, Honda Research Institute USA

Title: Measuring What Matters: Scenario-Driven Evaluation for Trajectory Predictors in Autonomous Driving

Abstract:
Being able to anticipate the motion of surrounding agents is essential for the safe operation of autonomous driving systems in dynamic situations. While various methods have been proposed for trajectory prediction, the current evaluation practices still rely on errorbased metrics (e.g., ADE, FDE), which reveal the accuracy from a post-hoc view but ignore the actual effect the predictor brings to the self-driving vehicles (SDVs), especially in complex interactive scenarios: a high-quality predictor not only chases accuracy, but should also captures all possible directions a neighbor agent might move, to support the SDVs' cautious decision-making. Given that the existing metrics hardly account for this standard, in our work, we propose a comprehensive pipeline that adaptively evaluates the predictor's performance by two dimensions: accuracy and diversity. Based on the criticality of the driving scenario, these two dimensions are dynamically combined and result in a final score for the predictor's performance. Extensive experiments on a closed-loop benchmark using a real-world dataset show that our pipeline yields a more reasonable evaluation than traditional metrics by better reflecting the correlation of the predictors' evaluation with the autonomous vehicles' driving performance. This evaluation pipeline shows a robust way to select a predictor that potentially contributes most to the SDV's driving performance.

PaperID: 1830, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13756

Authors:Niklas Erdmann, Lars Bentsen, Roy Stenbro, Heine Nygard Riise, Narada Dilp Warakagoda, Paal E. Engelstad

Affiliations: University of Oslo, Institute for Energy Technology

Title: Multi-Horizon Time Series Forecasting of Non-Parametric CDFs with Deep Lattice Networks

Abstract:
Probabilistic forecasting is not only a way to add more information to a prediction of the future, but it also builds on weaknesses in point prediction. Sudden changes in a time series can still be captured by a cumulative distribution function (CDF), while a point prediction is likely to miss it entirely. The modeling of CDFs within forecasts has historically been limited to parametric approaches, but due to recent advances, this no longer has to be the case. We aim to advance the fields of probabilistic forecasting and monotonic networks by connecting them and propose an approach that permits the forecasting of implicit, complete, and nonparametric CDFs. For this purpose, we propose an adaptation to deep lattice networks (DLN) for monotonically constrained simultaneous/implicit quantile regression in time series forecasting. Quantile regression usually produces quantile crossovers, which need to be prevented to achieve a legitimate CDF. By leveraging long short term memory units (LSTM) as the embedding layer, and spreading quantile inputs to all sublattices of a DLN with an extended output size, we can produce a multi-horizon forecast of an implicit CDF due to the monotonic constraintability of DLNs that prevent quantile crossovers. We compare and evaluate our approach's performance to relevant state of the art within the context of a highly relevant application of time series forecasting: Day-ahead, hourly forecasts of solar irradiance observations. Our experiments show that the adaptation of a DLN performs just as well or even better than an unconstrained approach. Further comparison of the adapted DLN against a scalable monotonic neural network shows that our approach performs better. With this adaptation of DLNs, we intend to create more interest and crossover investigations in techniques of monotonic neural networks and probabilistic forecasting.

PaperID: 1831, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.02372

Authors:Haowei Hua, Jingwen Yang, Wanyu Lin, Pan Zhou

Affiliations: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Singapore Management University

Title: Revisiting the Canonicalization for Fast and Accurate Crystal Tensor Property Prediction

Abstract:
Predicting the tensor properties of crystalline materials is a fundamental task in materials science. Unlike singlevalue property prediction, which is inherently invariant, tensor property prediction requires maintaining O(3) group tensor equivariance. Such equivariance constraint often requires specialized architecture designs to achieve effective predictions, inevitably introducing tremendous computational costs. Canonicalization, a classical technique for geometry, has recently been explored for efficient learning with symmetry. In this work, we revisit the problem of crystal tensor property prediction through the lens of canonicalization. Specifically, we demonstrate how polar decomposition, a simple yet efficient algebraic method, can serve as a form of canonicalization and be leveraged to ensure equivariant tensor property prediction. Building upon this insight, we propose a general O(3)-equivariant framework for efficient crystal tensor property prediction, referred to as GoeCTP. By utilizing canonicalization, GoeCTP achieves high efficiency without requiring the explicit incorporation of equivariance constraints into the network architecture. Experimental results indicate that GoeCTP achieves the best prediction performance and runs at most 13 times faster compared to existing state-of-the-art methods in benchmarking datasets, underscoring its effectiveness and efficiency.

PaperID: 1832, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07050

Authors:Victor Shea-Jay Huang, Le Zhuo, Yi Xin, Zhaokai Wang, Fu-Yun Wang, Yuchi Wang, Renrui Zhang, Peng Gao, Hongsheng Li

Affiliations: Multimedia Laboratory (MMLab), Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title: TIDE: Temporal-Aware Sparse Autoencoders for Interpretable Diffusion Transformers in Image Generation

Abstract:
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) are a powerful yet underexplored class of generative models compared to UNet-based diffusion architectures. We propose TIDE—Temporal-aware sparse autoencoders for Interpretable Diffusion transformErs—a framework designed to extract sparse, interpretable activation features across timesteps in DiTs. TIDE effectively captures temporally-varying representations and reveals that DiTs naturally learn hierarchical semantics (e.g., 3D structure, object class, and fine-grained concepts) during large-scale pretraining. Experiments show that TIDE enhances interpretability and controllability while maintaining reasonable generation quality, enabling applications such as safe image editing and style transfer.

PaperID: 1833, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06696

Authors:Dian Jin, Yancheng Yuan, Xiaoming Tao

Affiliations: Research Institute for Intelligent Wearable Systems, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Department of Applied Mathematics

Title: Magnitude-Modulated Equivariant Adapter for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Equivariant Graph Neural Networks

Abstract:
Pretrained equivariant graph neural networks based on spherical harmonics offer efficient and accurate alternatives to computationally expensive abinitio methods, yet adapting them to new tasks and chemical environments still requires fine-tuning. Conventional parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques, such as Adapters and LoRA, typically break symmetry, making them incompatible with those equivariant architectures. ELoRA, recently proposed, is the first equivariant PEFT method. It achieves improved parameter efficiency and performance on many benchmarks. However, the relatively high degrees of freedom it retains within each tensor order can still perturb pretrained feature distributions and ultimately degrade performance. To address this, we present Magnitude-Modulated Equivariant Adapter (MMEA), a novel equivariant fine-tuning method which employs lightweight scalar gating to modulate feature magnitudes on a per-order and per-multiplicity basis. We demonstrate that MMEA preserves strict equivariance and, across multiple benchmarks, consistently improves energy and force predictions to state-of-the-art levels while training fewer parameters than competing approaches. These results suggest that, in many practical scenarios, modulating channel magnitudes is sufficient to adapt equivariant models to new chemical environments without breaking symmetry, pointing toward a new paradigm for equivariant PEFT design.

PaperID: 1834, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09385

Authors:Uisang Lee, Changhoon Chung, Junmo Lee, Soo-Mook Moon

Affiliations: Seoul National University

Title: BugSweeper: Function-Level Detection of Smart Contract Vulnerabilities Using Graph Neural Networks

Abstract:
The rapid growth of Ethereum has made it more important to quickly and accurately detect smart contract vulnerabilities. While machine learningbased methods have shown some promise, many still rely on rule-based preprocessing designed by domain experts. Rule-based preprocessing methods often discard crucial context from the source code, potentially causing certain vulnerabilities to be overlooked and limiting adaptability to newly emerging threats. We introduce BugSweeper, an end-to-end deep learning framework that detects vulnerabilities directly from the source code without manual engineering. BugSweeper represents each Solidity function as a Function-Level Syntax Graph (FLAG), a novel graph that combines its Syntax Tree (AST) with enriched control-flow and data-flow semantics. Then, our two-stage Graph Neural Network (GNN) analyzes these graphs. The first-stage GNN filters noise from the syntax graphs, while the second-stage GNN conducts high-level reasoning to detect diverse vulnerabilities. Extensive experiments on real-world contracts show that BugSweeper significantly outperforms all state-of-the-art detection methods. By removing the need for handcrafted rules, our approach offers a robust, automated, and scalable solution for securing smart contracts without any dependence on security experts.

PaperID: 1835, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12711

Authors:Fanxiao Li, Jiaying Wu, Tingchao Fu, Yunyun Dong, Bingbing Song, Wei Zhou

Affiliations: School of Information Science and Engineering, Yunnan University, National University of Singapore, School of Software and AI, Yunnan-Malaya Institute (School of Engineering), Function and Construction (VegLab)

Title: Drifting Away from Truth: GenAI-Driven News Diversity Challenges LVLM-Based Misinformation Detection

Abstract:
The proliferation of multimodal misinformation poses growing threats to public discourse and societal trust. While Large VisionLanguage Models (LVLMs) have enabled recent progress in multimodal misinformation detection (MMD), the rise of generative AI (GenAI) tools introduces a new challenge: GenAI-driven news diversity, characterized by highly varied and complex content. We show that this diversity induces multi-level drift, comprising (1) model-level misperception drift, where stylistic variations disrupt a model’s internal reasoning, and (2) evidence-level drift, where expression diversity degrades the quality or relevance of retrieved external evidence. These drifts significantly degrade the robustness of current LVLM-based MMD systems. To systematically study this problem, we introduce DriftBench, a large-scale benchmark comprising 16,000 news instances across six categories of diversification. We design three evaluation tasks: (1) robustness of truth verification under multi-level drift; (2) susceptibility to adversarial evidence contamination generated by GenAI; and (3) analysis of reasoning consistency across diverse inputs. Experiments with six state-of-the-art LVLM-based detectors show substantial performance drops (average F1 ↓ 14.8%) and increasingly unstable reasoning traces, with even more severe failures under adversarial evidence injection. Our findings uncover fundamental vulnerabilities in existing MMD systems and suggest an urgent need for more resilient approaches in the GenAI era.

PaperID: 1836, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00942

Authors:Haitao Li, Ziyu Li, Yiheng Mao, Ziyi Liu, Zhoujian Sun, Zhengxing Huang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Transtek Medical Electronics Co., Ant Group

Title: anyECG-chat: A Generalist ECG-MLLM for Flexible ECG Input and Multi-Task Understanding

Abstract:
The advent of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has sparked interest in their application to electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis. However, existing ECGfocused MLLMs primarily focus on report generation tasks, often limited to single 12-lead, short-duration (10s) ECG inputs, thereby underutilizing the potential of MLLMs. To this end, we aim to develop a MLLM for ECG analysis that supports a broader range of tasks and more flexible ECG inputs. However, existing ECG-QA datasets are often monotonous. To address this gap, we first constructed the anyECG dataset, which encompasses a wide variety of tasks, including report generation, abnormal waveform localization, and open-ended question answering. In addition to standard hospital ECGs, we introduced long-duration reduced-lead ECGs for home environments and multiple ECG comparison scenarios commonly encountered in clinical practice. Furthermore, we propose the anyECG-chat model, which supports dynamic-length ECG inputs and multiple ECG inputs. We trained the model using a three-stage curriculum training recipe with the anyECG dataset. A comprehensive evaluation was conducted, demonstrating that anyECG-chat is capable of supporting various practical application scenarios, including not only common report generation tasks but also abnormal waveform localization for long-duration reduced-lead ECGs in home environments and comprehensive comparative analysis of multiple ECGs.

PaperID: 1837, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07982

Authors:Maoqi Liu, Quan Fang, Yuhao Wu, Can Zhao, Yang Yang, Kaiquan Cai

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Aviation Data Communication Corporation, Beihang University, School of Electronic and Information Engineering State Key Laboratory of CNS/ATM

Title: NOTAM-Evolve: A Knowledge-Guided Self-Evolving Optimization Framework with LLMs for NOTAM Interpretation

Abstract:
Accurate interpretation of Notices To Airmen (NOTAMs) is critical for aviation safety, yet their condensed and cryptic language poses significant challenges to both manual and automated processing. Existing automated systems are typically limited to "Shallow Parsing," failing to extract the actionable intelligence needed for operational decisions. We formalize the complete interpretation task as "Deep Parsing," a dualreasoning challenge requiring both dynamic knowledge grounding (linking the NOTAM to evolving real-world aeronautical data) and schema-based inference (applying static domain rules to deduce operational status). To tackle this challenge, we propose NOTAM-Evolve, a self-evolving framework that enables a Large Language Model (LLM) to autonomously master complex NOTAM interpretation. Leveraging a knowledge graph-enhanced retrieval module for data grounding, the framework introduces a crucial closed-loop learning process where the LLM progressively improves from its own outputs, minimizing the need for extensive human-annotated reasoning traces. In conjunction with this framework, we introduce a new benchmark dataset of 10,000 expert-annotated NOTAMs. Our experiments demonstrate that NOTAM-Evolve achieves a 30.4% absolute accuracy improvement over the base LLM, establishing a new state-of-the-art on the task of structured NOTAM interpretation.

PaperID: 1838, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05309

Authors:Xiangyu Liu, Haodi Lei, Yi Liu, Yang Liu, Wei Hu

Affiliations: Nanjing University

Title: ProtSAE: Disentangling and Interpreting Protein Language Models via Semantically-Guided Sparse Autoencoders

Abstract:
Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) has emerged as a powerful tool for mechanistic interpretability of large language models. Recent works apply SAE to protein language models (PLMs), aiming to extract and analyze biologically meaningful features from their latent spaces. However, SAE suffers from semantic entanglement, where individual neurons often mix multiple nonlinear concepts, making it difficult to reliably interpret or manipulate model behaviors. In this paper, we propose a semanticallyguided SAE, called ProtSAE. Unlike existing SAE which requires annotation datasets to filter and interpret activations, we guide semantic disentanglement during training using both annotation datasets and domain knowledge to mitigate the effects of entangled attributes. We design interpretability experiments showing that ProtSAE learns more biologically relevant and interpretable hidden features compared to previous methods. Performance analyses further demonstrate that ProtSAE maintains high reconstruction fidelity while achieving better results in interpretable probing. We also show the potential of ProtSAE in steering PLMs for downstream generation tasks.

PaperID: 1839, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06649

Authors:Bin Rao, Chengyue Wang, Haicheng Liao, Qianfang Wang, Yanchen Guan, Jiaxun Zhang, Xingcheng Liu, Meixin Zhu, Kanye Ye Wang, Zhenning Li

Affiliations: University of Macau, South China University of Technology, Southeast University

Title: Differentiable Semantic Meta-Learning Framework for Long-Tail Motion Forecasting in Autonomous Driving

Abstract:
Longtail motion forecasting is a core challenge for autonomous driving, where rare yet safety-critical events-such as abrupt maneuvers and dense multi-agent interactions-dominate real-world risk. Existing approaches struggle in these scenarios because they rely on either non-interpretable clustering or model-dependent error heuristics, providing neither a differentiable notion of “tailness” nor a mechanism for rapid adaptation. We propose SAML, a Semantic-Aware Meta-Learning framework that introduces the first differentiable definition of tailness for motion forecasting. SAML quantifies motion rarity via semantically meaningful intrinsic (kinematic, geometric, temporal) and interactive (local and global risk) properties, which are fused by a Bayesian Tail Perceiver into a continuous, uncertainty-aware Tail Index. This Tail Index drives a meta-memory adaptation module that couples a dynamic prototype memory with an MAML-based cognitive set mechanism, enabling fast adaptation to rare or evolving patterns. Experiments on nuScenes, NGSIM, and HighD show that SAML achieves state-of-the-art overall accuracy and substantial gains on top 1-5% worst-case events, while maintaining high efficiency. Our findings highlight semantic meta-learning as a pathway toward robust and safety-critical motion forecasting.

PaperID: 1840, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10165

Authors:Yuancheng Sun, Yuxuan Ren, Zhaoming Chen, Xu Han, Kang Liu, Qiwei Ye

Affiliations: Institute of Automation, Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, Chinese Academy of Sciences University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: EPO: Diverse and Realistic Protein Ensemble Generation via Energy Preference Optimization

Abstract:
Accurate exploration of protein conformational ensembles is essential for uncovering function but remains hard because moleculardynamics (MD) simulations suffer from high computational costs and energy-barrier trapping. This paper presents Energy Preference Optimization (EPO), an online refinement algorithm that turns a pretrained protein ensemble generator into an energy-aware sampler without extra MD trajectories. Specifically, EPO leverages stochastic differential equation sampling to explore the conformational landscape and incorporates a novel energy-ranking mechanism based on list-wise preference optimization. Crucially, EPO introduces a practical upper bound to efficiently approximate the intractable probability of long sampling trajectories in continuous-time generative models, making it easily adaptable to existing pretrained generators. On Tetrapeptides, ATLAS, and Fast-Folding benchmarks, EPO successfully generates diverse and physically realistic ensembles, establishing a new state-of-the-art in nine evaluation metrics. These results demonstrate that energy-only preference signals can efficiently steer generative models toward thermodynamically consistent conformational ensembles, providing an alternative to long MD simulations and widening the applicability of learned potentials in structural biology and drug discovery.

PaperID: 1841, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.09148

Authors:Yuchen Wang, Dongpeng Hou, Weikai Jing, Chao Gao, Xianghua Li, Yang Liu

Affiliations: Northwestern Polytechnical University

Title: Modeling Trend Dynamics with Variational Neural ODEs for Information Popularity Prediction

Abstract:
Predicting the future popularity of information in online social networks is a crucial yet challenging task, due to the complex spatiotemporal dynamics underlying information diffusion. Existing methods typically use structural or sequential patterns within the observation window as direct inputs for subsequent popularity prediction. However, most approaches lack the ability to explicitly model the overall trend of popularity up to the prediction time, which leads to limited predictive capability. To address these limitations, we propose VNOIP, a novel method based on variational neural Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) for information popularity prediction. Specifically, VNOIP introduces bidirectional jump ODEs with attention mechanisms to capture longrange dependencies and bidirectional context within cascade sequences. Furthermore, by jointly considering both cascade patterns and overall trend temporal patterns, VNOIP explicitly models the continuous-time dynamics of popularity trend trajectories with variational neural ODEs. Additionally, a knowledge distillation loss is employed to align the evolution of prior and posterior latent variables. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that VNOIP is highly competitive in both prediction accuracy and efficiency compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 1842, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.21749

Authors:Longlong Zhang, Xi Wang, Haotong Du, Yangyi Xu, Zhuo Liu, Yang Liu

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Optics and Electronics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University, School of Automation Science and Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, School of Computer Science

Title: RABot: Reinforcement-Guided Graph Augmentation for Imbalanced and Noisy Social Bot Detection

Abstract:
Social bot detection is pivotal for safeguarding the integrity of online information ecosystems. Although recent graph neural network (GNN) solutions achieve strong results, they remain hindered by two practical challenges: (i) severe class imbalance arising from the high cost of generating bots, and (ii) topological noise introduced by bots that skillfully mimic human behavior and forge deceptive links. We propose the Reinforcementguided graph Augmentation social Bot detector (RABot), a multi-granularity graph-augmentation framework that addresses both issues in a unified manner. RABot employs a neighborhood-aware oversampling strategy that linearly interpolates minority-class embeddings within local subgraphs, thereby stabilizing the decision boundary under low-resource regimes. Concurrently, a reinforcement-learning-driven edge-filtering module combines similarity-based edge features with adaptive threshold optimization to excise spurious interactions during message passing, yielding a cleaner topology. Extensive experiments on three real-world benchmarks and four GNN backbones demonstrate that RABot consistently surpasses state-of-the-art baselines. In addition, since its augmentation and filtering modules are orthogonal to the underlying architecture, RABot can be seamlessly integrated into existing GNN pipelines to boost performance with minimal overhead.

PaperID: 1843, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.18864

Authors:Yunzhong Zhang, You Zhou, Changqing Su, Zhen Cheng, Zhaofei Yu, Bo Xiong, Tiejun Huang, Xun Cao

Affiliations: Nanjing university, Nanjing University, Peking University, Tsinghua University

Title: Spike Imaging Velocimetry: Dense Motion Estimation of Fluids Using Spike Streams

Abstract:
Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) is a widely adopted noninvasive imaging technique that tracks the motion of tracer particles across image sequences to capture the velocity distribution of fluid flows. It is commonly employed to analyze complex flow structures and validate numerical simulations. This study explores the untapped potential of spike cameras—ultra-high-speed, high-dynamic-range vision sensors—in high-speed fluid velocimetry. We propose a deep learning framework, Spike Imaging Velocimetry (SIV), tailored for high-resolution fluid motion estimation. To enhance the network’s performance, we design three novel modules specifically adapted to the characteristics of fluid dynamics and spike streams: the Detail-Preserving Hierarchical Transform (DPHT), the Graph Encoder (GE), and the Multi-scale Velocity Refinement (MSVR). Furthermore, we introduce a spike-based PIV dataset, Particle Scenes with Spike and Displacement (PSSD), which contains labeled samples from three representative fluid-dynamics scenarios: steady turbulence, high-speed flow, and high-dynamic-range conditions. Our proposed method outperforms existing baselines across all these scenarios, demonstrating its effectiveness.

PaperID: 1844, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12489

Authors:Qingsong Zhong, Haomin Yu, Yan Lin, Wangmeng Shen, Long Zeng, Jilin Hu

Affiliations: East China Normal University, University of Salford, Aalborg University

Title: SculptDrug: A Spatial Condition-Aware Bayesian Flow Model for Structure-based Drug Design

Abstract:
StructureBased Drug Design (SBDD) has emerged as a popular approach in drug discovery, leveraging three-dimensional protein structures to generate drug ligands. However, existing generative models encounter several key challenges: (1) Incorporating boundary condition constraints, (2) Integrating hierarchical structural conditions and (3) Ensuring spatial modeling fidelity. To overcome these limitations, we propose SculptDrug, a spatial condition-aware generative model based on Bayesian Flow Networks (BFNs). First, SculptDrug follows a BFNs-based framework and employs a progressive denoising strategy to ensure spatial modeling fidelity, iteratively refining atom positions while enhancing local interactions for precise spatial alignment. Second, we introduce the Boundary Awareness Block, which incorporates protein surface constraints into the generative process to ensure that the generated ligands are geometrically compatible with the target protein. Finally, we design a Hierarchical Encoder that captures global structural context while preserving fine-grained molecular interactions, ensuring overall consistency and accurate ligand-protein conformations. We evaluate SculptDrug on the CrossDocked dataset, and experimental results demonstrate that SculptDrug outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, proving the efficacy of spatial condition-aware modeling.

PaperID: 1845, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07139

Authors:Junhong Zou, Wei Qiu, Zhenxu Sun, Xiaomei Zhang, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Xiangyu Zhu

Affiliations: Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, School of Artificial Intelligence, Institute of Mechanics, Key Laboratory for Mechanics in Fluid Solid Coupling Systems

Title: AdaField: Generalizable Surface Pressure Modeling with Physics-Informed Pre-training and Flow-Conditioned Adaptation

Abstract:
The surface pressure field of transportation systems, including cars, trains, and aircraft, is critical for aerodynamic analysis and design. In recent years, deep neural networks have emerged as promising and efficient methods for modeling surface pressure field, being alternatives to computationally expensive CFD simulations. Currently, largescale public datasets are available for domains such as automotive aerodynamics. However, in many specialized areas, such as high-speed trains, data scarcity remains a fundamental challenge in aerodynamic modeling, severely limiting the effectiveness of standard neural network approaches. To address this limitation, we propose the Adaptive Field Learning Framework (AdaField), which pre-trains the model on public large-scale datasets to improve generalization in sub-domains with limited data. AdaField comprises two key components. First, we design the Semantic Aggregation Point Transformer (SAPT) as a high-performance backbone that efficiently handles large-scale point clouds for surface pressure prediction. Second, regarding the substantial differences in flow conditions and geometric scales across different aerodynamic subdomains, we propose Flow-Conditioned Adapter (FCA) and Physics-Informed Data Augmentation (PIDA). FCA enables the model to flexibly adapt to different flow conditions with a small set of trainable parameters, while PIDA expands the training data distribution to better cover variations in object scale and velocity. Our experiments show that AdaField achieves SOTA performance on the DrivAerNet++ dataset and can be effectively transferred to train and aircraft scenarios with minimal fine-tuning. These results highlight AdaField’s potential as a generalizable and transferable solution for surface pressure field modeling, supporting efficient aerodynamic design across a wide range of transportation systems.

PaperID: 1846, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10826

Authors:Xinlei Niu, Kin Wai Cheuk, Jing Zhang, Naoki Murata, Chieh-Hsin Lai, Michele Mancusi, Woosung Choi, Giorgio Fabbro, Wei-Hsiang Liao, Charles Patrick Martin, Yuki Mitsufuji

Affiliations: Australian National University, Sony AI, Sony Europe B.V.

Title: SteerMusic: Enhanced Musical Consistency for Zero-shot Text-Guided and Personalized Music Editing

Abstract:
Music editing is an important step in music production, which has broad applications, including game development and film production. Most existing zeroshot text-guided editing methods rely on pretrained diffusion models by involving forward-backward diffusion processes. However, these methods often struggle to preserve the musical content. Additionally, text instructions alone usually fail to accurately describe the desired music. In this paper, we propose two music editing methods that improve the consistency between the original and edited music by leveraging score distillation. The first method, SteerMusic, is a coarse-grained zero-shot editing approach using delta denoising score. The second method, SteerMusic+, enables fine-grained personalized music editing by manipulating a concept token that represents a user-defined musical style. SteerMusic+ allows for the editing of music into user-defined musical styles that cannot be achieved by the text instructions alone. Experimental results show that our methods outperform existing approaches in preserving both music content consistency and editing fidelity. User studies further validate that our methods achieve superior music editing quality.

PaperID: 1847, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.20767

Authors:Jiesheng Wu, Shengrong Li

Affiliations: Anhui Normal University, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Title: SPP-SCL: Semi-Push-Pull Supervised Contrastive Learning for Image-Text Sentiment Analysis and Beyond

Abstract:
Existing ImageText Sentiment Analysis (ITSA) methods may suffer from inconsistent intra-modal and inter-modal sentiment relationships. Therefore, we develop a method that balances before fusing to solve the issue of vision-language imbalance intra-modal and inter-modal sentiment relationships; that is, a Semi-Push-Pull Supervised Contrastive Learning (SPP-SCL) method is proposed. Specifically, the method is implemented using a novel two-step strategy, namely first using the proposed intra-modal supervised contrastive learning to pull the relationships between the intra-modal and then performing a well-designed conditional execution statement. If the statement result is false, our method will perform the second step, which is inter-modal supervised contrastive learning to push away the relationships between inter-modal. The two-step strategy will balance the intra-modal and inter-modal relationships to achieve the purpose of relationship consistency and finally perform cross-modal feature fusion for sentiment analysis and detection. Experimental studies on three public image-text sentiment and sarcasm detection datasets demonstrate that SPP-SCL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin and is more discriminative in sentiment.

PaperID: 1848, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08252

Authors:Yi Yang, Haowen Li, Tianxiang Li, Boyu Cao, Xiaohan Zhang, Liqun Chen, Qi Liu

Affiliations: South China University of Technology

Title: Melodia: Training-Free Music Editing Guided by Attention Probing in Diffusion Models

Abstract:
Textto-music generation technology is progressing rapidly, creating new opportunities for musical composition and editing. However, existing music editing methods often fail to preserve the source music's temporal structure, including melody and rhythm, when altering particular attributes like instrument, genre, and mood. To address this challenge, this paper conducts an in-depth probing analysis on attention maps within AudioLDM 2, a diffusion-based model commonly used as the backbone for existing music editing methods. We reveal a key finding: cross-attention maps encompass details regarding distinct musical characteristics, and interventions on these maps frequently result in ineffective modifications. In contrast, self-attention maps are essential for preserving the temporal structure of the source music during its conversion into the target music. Building upon this understanding, we present Melodia, a training-free technique that selectively manipulates self-attention maps in particular layers during the denoising process and leverages an attention repository to store source music information, achieving accurate modification of musical characteristics while preserving the original structure without requiring textual descriptions of the source music. Additionally, we propose two novel metrics to better evaluate music editing methods. Both objective and subjective experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior results in terms of textual adherence and structural integrity across various datasets. This research enhances comprehension of internal mechanisms within music generation models and provides improved control for music creation.

PaperID: 1849, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04270

Authors:Deming Zhou, Yuetong Fang, Zhaorui Wang, Renjing Xu

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Title: TDSNNs: Competitive Topographic Deep Spiking Neural Networks for Visual Cortex Modeling

Abstract:
The primate visual cortex exhibits topographic organization, where functionally similar neurons are spatially clustered, a structure widely believed to enhance neural processing efficiency. While prior works have demonstrated that conventional deep ANNs can develop topographic representations, these models largely neglect crucial temporal dynamics. This oversight often leads to significant performance degradation in tasks like object recognition and compromises their biological fidelity. To address this, we leverage spiking neural networks (SNNs), which inherently capture spikebased temporal dynamics and offer enhanced biological plausibility. We propose a novel Spatio-Temporal Constraints (STC) loss function for topographic deep spiking neural networks (TDSNNs), successfully replicating the hierarchical spatial functional organization observed in the primate visual cortex from low-level sensory input to high-level abstract representations. Our results show that STC effectively generates representative topographic features across simulated visual cortical areas. While introducing topography typically leads to significant performance degradation in ANNs, our spiking architecture exhibits a remarkably small performance drop (No drop in ImageNet top-1 accuracy, compared to a 3% drop observed in TopoNet, which is the best-performing topographic ANN so far) and outperforms topographic ANNs in brain-likeness. We also reveal that topographic organization facilitates efficient and stable temporal information processing via the spike mechanism in TDSNNs, contributing to model robustness. These findings suggest that TDSNNs offer a compelling balance between computational performance and brain-like features, providing not only a framework for interpreting neural science phenomena but also novel insights for designing more efficient and robust deep learning models.

PaperID: 1850, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14376

Authors:Dongnam Byun, Jungwon Park, Jungmin Ko, Changin Choi, Wonjong Rhee

Affiliations: Seoul National University

Title: DOS: Directional Object Separation in Text Embeddings for Multi-Object Image Generation

Abstract:
Recent progress in textto-image (T2I) generative models has led to significant improvements in generating high-quality images aligned with text prompts. However, these models still struggle with prompts involving multiple objects, often resulting in object neglect or object mixing. Through extensive studies, we identify four problematic scenarios, Similar Shapes, Similar Textures, Dissimilar Background Biases, and Many Objects, where inter-object relationships frequently lead to such failures. Motivated by two key observations about CLIP embeddings, we propose DOS (Directional Object Separation), a method that modifies three types of CLIP text embeddings before passing them into text-to-image models. Experimental results show that DOS consistently improves the success rate of multi-object image generation and reduces object mixing. In human evaluations, DOS significantly outperforms four competing methods, receiving 26.24%-43.04% more votes across four benchmarks. These results highlight DOS as a practical and effective solution for improving multi-object image generation.

PaperID: 1851, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15167

Authors:Jing Cao, Kui Jiang, Shenyi Li, Xiaocheng Feng, Yong Huang

Affiliations: Faculty of Computing, Harbin Institute of Technology, Key Lab of Smart Prevention and Mitigation of Civil Engineering Disasters

Title: Learning Depth from Past Selves: Self-Evolution Contrast for Robust Depth Estimation

Abstract:
Selfsupervised depth estimation has gained significant attention in autonomous driving and robotics. However, existing methods exhibit substantial performance degradation under adverse weather conditions such as rain and fog, where reduced visibility critically impairs depth prediction. To address this issue, we propose a novel self-evolution contrastive learning framework called SEC-Depth for self-supervised robust depth estimation tasks. Our approach leverages intermediate parameters generated during training to construct temporally evolving latency models. Using these, we design a self-evolution contrastive scheme to mitigate performance loss under challenging conditions. Concretely, we first design a dynamic update strategy of latency models for the depth estimation task to capture optimization states across training stages. To effectively leverage latency models, we introduce a self-evolution contrastive Loss (SECL) that treats outputs from historical latency models as negative samples. This mechanism adaptively adjusts learning objectives while implicitly sensing weather degradation severity, reducing the needs for manual intervention. Experiments show that our method integrates seamlessly into diverse baseline models and significantly enhances robustness in zero-shot evaluations.

PaperID: 1852, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06051

Authors:Linhan Cao, Wei Sun, Weixia Zhang, Xiangyang Zhu, Jun Jia, Kaiwei Zhang, Dandan Zhu, Guangtao Zhai, Xiongkuo Min

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiaotong University, East China Normal University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Title: VQAThinker: Exploring Generalizable and Explainable Video Quality Assessment via Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Video quality assessment (VQA) aims to objectively quantify perceptual quality degradation in alignment with human visual perception. Despite recent advances, existing VQA models still suffer from two critical limitations: poor generalization to outof-distribution (OOD) videos and limited explainability, which restrict their applicability in real-world scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose VQAThinker, a reasoning-based VQA framework that leverages large multimodal models (LMMs) with reinforcement learning to jointly model video quality understanding and scoring, emulating human perceptual decision-making. Specifically, we adopt group relative policy optimization (GRPO), a rule-guided reinforcement learning algorithm that enables reasoning over video quality under score-level supervision, and introduce three VQA-specific rewards: (1) a bell-shaped regression reward that increases rapidly as the prediction error decreases and becomes progressively less sensitive near the ground truth; (2) a pairwise ranking reward that guides the model to correctly determine the relative quality between video pairs; and (3) a temporal consistency reward that encourages the model to prefer temporally coherent videos over their perturbed counterparts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VQAThinker achieves state-of-the-art performance on both in-domain and OOD VQA benchmarks, showing strong generalization for video quality scoring. Furthermore, evaluations on video quality understanding tasks validate its superiority in distortion attribution and quality description compared to existing explainable VQA models and LMMs. These findings demonstrate that reinforcement learning offers an effective pathway toward building generalizable and explainable VQA models solely with score-level supervision.

PaperID: 1853, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13191

Authors:Gong Chen, Chaokun Zhang, Pengcheng Lv, Xiaohui Xie

Affiliations: College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University, School of Future Technology, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University

Title: CoRA: A Collaborative Robust Architecture with Hybrid Fusion for Efficient Perception

Abstract:
Collaborative perception has garnered significant attention as a crucial technology to overcome the perceptual limitations of singleagent systems. Many state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods have achieved communication efficiency and high performance via intermediate fusion. However, they share a critical vulnerability: their performance degrades under adverse communication conditions due to the misalignment induced by data transmission, which severely hampers their practical deployment. To bridge this gap, we re-examine different fusion paradigms, and recover that the strengths of intermediate and late fusion are not a trade-off, but a complementary pairing. Based on this key insight, we propose CoRA, a novel collaborative robust architecture with a hybrid approach to decouple performance from robustness with low communication. It is composed of two components: a feature-level fusion branch and an object-level correction branch. Its first branch selects critical features and fuses them efficiently to ensure both performance and scalability. The second branch leverages semantic relevance to correct spatial displacements, guaranteeing resilience against pose errors. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of CoRA. Under extreme scenarios, CoRA improves upon its baseline performance by approximately 19% in AP@0.7 with more than 5x less communication volume, which makes it a promising solution for robust collaborative perception.

PaperID: 1854, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05011

Authors:Jaehoon Choi, Dongki Jung, Chris Maxey, Sungmin Eum, Yonghan Lee, Dinesh Manocha, Heesung Kwon

Affiliations: University of Maryland, College Park, DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory

Title: UAV4D: Dynamic Neural Rendering of Human-Centric UAV Imagery Using Gaussian Splatting

Abstract:
Despite significant advancements in dynamic neural rendering, existing methods fail to address the unique challenges posed by UAVcaptured scenarios, particularly those involving monocular camera setups, top-down perspective, and multiple small, moving humans, which are not adequately represented in existing datasets. In this work, we introduce UAV4D, a framework for enabling photorealistic rendering for dynamic real-world scenes captured by UAVs. Specifically, we address the challenge of reconstructing dynamic scenes with multiple moving pedestrians from monocular video data without the need for additional sensors. We use a combination of a 3D foundation model and a human mesh reconstruction model to reconstruct both the scene background and humans. We propose a novel approach to resolve the scene scale ambiguity and place both humans and the scene in world coordinates by identifying human-scene contact points. Additionally, we exploit the SMPL model and background mesh to initialize Gaussian splats, enabling holistic scene rendering. We evaluated our method on three complex UAV-captured datasets: VisDrone, Manipal-UAV, and Okutama-Action, each with distinct characteristics and 10-50 humans. Our results demonstrate the benefits of our approach over existing methods in novel view synthesis, achieving a 1.5 dB PSNR improvement and superior visual sharpness.

PaperID: 1855, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16505

Authors:Meng Chu, Yukang Chen, Haokun Gui, Shaozuo Yu, Yi Wang, Jiaya Jia

Affiliations: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shanghai AI Laboratory

Title: TraveLLaMA: A Multimodal Travel Assistant with Large-Scale Dataset and Structured Reasoning

Abstract:
Tourism and travel planning increasingly rely on digital assistance, yet existing multimodal AI systems often lack specialized knowledge and contextual understanding of urban environments. We present TraveLLaMA, a specialized multimodal language model designed for comprehensive travel assistance. Our work addresses the fundamental challenge of developing practical AI travel assistants through three key contributions: (1) TravelQA, a novel dataset of 265k questionanswer pairs combining 160k text QA from authentic travel sources, 100k vision-language QA featuring maps and location imagery, and 5k expert-annotated Chain-of-Thought reasoning examples; (2) Travel-CoT, a structured reasoning framework that decomposes travel queries into spatial, temporal, and practical dimensions, improving answer accuracy by 10.8% while providing interpretable decision paths; and (3) an interactive agent system validated through extensive user studies. Through fine-tuning experiments on state-of-the-art vision-language models (LLaVA, Qwen-VL, Shikra), we achieve 6.2-9.4% base improvements, further enhanced by Travel-CoT reasoning. Our model demonstrates superior capabilities in contextual travel recommendations, map interpretation, and scene understanding while providing practical information such as operating hours and cultural insights. User studies with 500 participants show TraveLLaMA achieves a System Usability Scale score of 82.5, significantly outperforming general-purpose models and establishing new standards for multimodal travel assistance systems.

PaperID: 1856, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11478

Authors:Nhat Chung, Taisei Hanyu, Toan Nguyen, Huy Le, Frederick Bumgarner, Duy Minh Ho Nguyen, Khoa Vo, Kashu Yamazaki, Chase Rainwater, Tung Kieu, Anh Nguyen, Ngan Le

Affiliations: FPT Software AI Center, University of Arkansas, University of Stuttgart German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems (IMPRS-IS), Carnegie Mellon University, Aalborg University, University of Liverpool

Title: Rethinking Progression of Memory State in Robotic Manipulation: An Object-Centric Perspective

Abstract:
As embodied agents operate in increasingly complex environments, the ability to perceive, track, and reason about individual object instances over time becomes essential, especially in tasks requiring sequenced interactions with visually similar objects. In nonMarkovian settings, critical decision cues lie in object histories rather than the current scene. Without persistent memory of prior interactions (what was used, where it was placed, or how it changed), visuomotor policies may fail, repeat past actions, or overlook completed ones. To surface this challenge, we introduce LIBERO-Mem, a non-Markovian task suite for stress-testing robotic manipulation under object-level partial observability. It combines short- and long-horizon object tracking with temporally sequenced subgoals, requiring reasoning beyond the current frame. However, vision-language-action (VLA) models often struggle in such settings, with token scaling quickly becoming intractable even for tasks spanning just a few hundred frames. We propose Embodied-SlotSSM, a slot-centric VLA framework built for temporal scalability. It maintains spatio-temporally consistent slot identities and leverages them through two mechanisms: (1) slot-state-space modeling for reconstructing short-term history, and (2) a relational encoder to align the input tokens with action decoding. Together, these components enable temporally grounded, context-aware action prediction. Experiments show Embodied-SlotSSM's baseline performance on LIBERO-Mem and general tasks, offering a scalable solution for non-Markovian reasoning in object-centric policies.

PaperID: 1857, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14095

Authors:Sisi Dai, Kai Xu

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)

Title: AnchorHOI: Zero-shot Generation of 4D Human-Object Interaction via Anchor-based Prior Distillation

Abstract:
Despite significant progress in textdriven 4D human-object interaction (HOI) generation with supervised methods, the scalability remains limited by the scarcity of large-scale 4D HOI datasets. To overcome this, recent approaches attempt zero-shot 4D HOI generation with pre-trained image diffusion models. However, interaction cues are minimally distilled during the generation process, restricting their applicability across diverse scenarios. In this paper, we propose AnchorHOI, a novel framework that thoroughly exploits hybrid priors by incorporating video diffusion models beyond image diffusion models, advancing 4D HOI generation. Nevertheless, directly optimizing high-dimensional 4D HOI with such priors remains challenging, particularly for human pose and compositional motion. To address this challenge, AnchorHOI introduces an anchor-based prior distillation strategy, which constructs interaction-aware anchors and then leverages them to guide generation in a tractable two-step process. Specifically, two tailored anchors are designed for 4D HOI generation: anchor Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) for expressive interaction composition, and anchor keypoints for realistic motion synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AnchorHOI outperforms previous methods with superior diversity and generalization.

PaperID: 1858, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12391

Authors:Dasith de Silva Edirimuni, Ajmal Saeed Mian

Affiliations: The University of Western Australia

Title: Class-Partitioned VQ-VAE and Latent Flow Matching for Point Cloud Scene Generation

Abstract:
Most 3D scene generation methods are limited to only generating object bounding box parameters while newer diffusion methods also generate class labels and latent features. Using object size or latent feature, they then retrieve objects from a predefined database. For complex scenes of varied, multicategorical objects, diffusion-based latents cannot be effectively decoded by current autoencoders into the correct point cloud objects which agree with target classes. We introduce a Class-Partitioned Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder (CPVQ-VAE) that is trained to effectively decode object latent features, by employing a pioneering class-partitioned codebook where codevectors are labeled by class. To address the problem of codebook collapse, we propose a class-aware running average update which reinitializes dead codevectors within each partition. During inference, object features and class labels, both generated by a Latent-space Flow Matching Model (LFMM) designed specifically for scene generation, are consumed by the CPVQ-VAE. The CPVQ-VAE's class-aware inverse look-up then maps generated latents to codebook entries that are decoded to class-specific point cloud shapes. Thereby, we achieve pure point cloud generation without relying on an external objects database for retrieval. Extensive experiments reveal that our method reliably recovers plausible point cloud scenes, with up to 70.4% and 72.3% reduction in Chamfer and Point2Mesh errors on complex living room scenes.

PaperID: 1859, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.09531

Authors:Bohan Fu, Guanyi Qin, Fazhan Zhang, Zihao Huang, Mingxuan Li, Runze Hu

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology, National University of Singapore

Title: DR.Experts: Differential Refinement of Distortion-Aware Experts for Blind Image Quality Assessment

Abstract:
Blind Image Quality Assessment, aiming to replicate human perception of visual quality without reference, plays a key role in vision tasks, yet existing models often fail to effectively capture subtle distortion cues, leading to a misalignment with human subjective judgments. We identify that the root cause of this limitation lies in the lack of reliable distortion priors, as methods typically learn shallow relationships between unified image features and quality scores, resulting in their insensitive nature to distortions and thus limiting their performance. To address this, we introduce DR.Experts, a novel priordriven BIQA framework designed to explicitly incorporate distortion priors, enabling a reliable quality assessment. DR.Experts begins by leveraging a degradation-aware vision-language model to obtain distortion-specific priors, which are further refined and enhanced by the proposed Distortion-Saliency Differential Module through distinguishing them from semantic attentions, thereby ensuring the genuine representations of distortions. The refined priors, along with semantics and bridging representation, are then fused by a proposed mixture-of-experts style module named the Dynamic Distortion Weighting Module. This mechanism weights each distortion-specific feature as per its perceptual impact, ensuring that the final quality prediction aligns with human perception. Extensive experiments conducted on five challenging BIQA benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of DR.Experts over current methods and showcase its excellence in terms of generalization and data efficiency.

PaperID: 1860, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10376

Authors:Jingyun Fu, Zhiyu Xiang, Na Zhao

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Singapore University of Technology and Design

Title: RaLiFlow: Scene Flow Estimation with 4D Radar and LiDAR Point Clouds

Abstract:
Recent multimodal fusion methods, integrating images with LiDAR point clouds, have shown promise in scene flow estimation. However, the fusion of 4D millimeter wave radar and LiDAR remains unexplored. Unlike LiDAR, radar is cheaper, more robust in various weather conditions and can detect pointwise velocity, making it a valuable complement to LiDAR. However, radar inputs pose challenges due to noise, low resolution, and sparsity. Moreover, there is currently no dataset that combines LiDAR and radar data specifically for scene flow estimation. To address this gap, we construct a Radar-LiDAR scene flow dataset based on a public real-world automotive dataset. We propose an effective preprocessing strategy for radar denoising and scene flow label generation, deriving more reliable flow ground truth for radar points out of the object boundaries. Additionally, we introduce RaLiFlow, the first joint scene flow learning framework for 4D radar and LiDAR, which achieves effective radar-LiDAR fusion through a novel Dynamic-aware Bidirectional Cross-modal Fusion (DBCF) module and a carefully designed set of loss functions. The DBCF module integrates dynamic cues from radar into the local cross-attention mechanism, enabling the propagation of contextual information across modalities. Meanwhile, the proposed loss functions mitigate the adverse effects of unreliable radar data during training and enhance the instance-level consistency in scene flow predictions from both modalities, particularly for dynamic foreground areas. Extensive experiments on the repurposed scene flow dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms existing LiDAR-based and radar-based single-modal methods by a significant margin.

PaperID: 1861, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14026

Authors:Yibing Fu, Yunpeng Zhao, Zhitao Zeng, Cheng Chen, Yueming Jin

Affiliations: Department of Biomedical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Hong Kong

Title: Unleashing the Power of Image-Tabular Self-Supervised Learning via Breaking Cross-Tabular Barriers

Abstract:
Multimodal learning integrating medical images and tabular data has significantly advanced clinical decision-making in recent years. Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for pretraining these models on large-scale unlabeled image-tabular data, aiming to learn discriminative representations. However, existing SSL methods for image-tabular representation learning are often confined to specific data cohorts, mainly due to their rigid tabular modeling mechanisms when modeling heterogeneous tabular data. This inter-tabular barrier hinders the multi-modal SSL methods from effectively learning transferrable medical knowledge shared across diverse cohorts. In this paper, we propose a novel SSL framework, namely CITab, designed to learn powerful multi-modal feature representations in a cross-tabular manner. We design the tabular modeling mechanism from a semantic-awareness perspective by integrating column headers as semantic cues, which facilitates transferrable knowledge learning and the scalability in utilizing multiple data sources for pretraining. Additionally, we propose a prototype-guided mixture-of-linear layer (P-MoLin) module for tabular feature specialization, empowering the model to effectively handle the heterogeneity of tabular data and explore the underlying medical concepts. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on Alzheimer's disease diagnosis task across three publicly available data cohorts containing 4,461 subjects. Experimental results demonstrate that CITab outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, paving the way for effective and scalable cross-tabular multi-modal learning.

PaperID: 1862, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.01042

Authors:Linhao Huang, Xue Jiang, Zhiqiang Wang, Wentao Mo, Xi Xiao, Yong-Jie Yin, Bo Han, Feng Zheng

Affiliations: Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University Peng Cheng Laboratory, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China Electronics Corporation, TMLR Group, Southern University of Science and Technology

Title: Transferability of Adversarial Attacks in Video-based MLLMs: A Cross-modal Image-to-Video Approach

Abstract:
Videobased multimodal large language models (V-MLLMs) have shown vulnerability to adversarial examples in video-text multimodal tasks. However, the transferability of adversarial videos to unseen models—a common and practical real-world scenario—remains unexplored. In this paper, we pioneer an investigation into the transferability of adversarial video samples across V-MLLMs. We find that existing adversarial attack methods face significant limitations when applied in black-box settings for V-MLLMs, which we attribute to the following shortcomings: (1) lacking generalization in perturbing video features, (2) focusing only on sparse key-frames, and (3) failing to integrate multimodal information. To address these limitations and deepen the understanding of V-MLLM vulnerabilities in black-box scenarios, we introduce the Image-to-Video MLLM (I2V-MLLM) attack. In I2V-MLLM, we utilize an image-based multimodal large language model (I-MLLM) as a surrogate model to craft adversarial video samples. Multimodal interactions and spatiotemporal information are integrated to disrupt video representations within the latent space, improving adversarial transferability. Additionally, a perturbation propagation technique is introduced to handle different unknown frame sampling strategies. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can generate adversarial examples that exhibit strong transferability across different V-MLLMs on multiple video-text multimodal tasks. Compared to white-box attacks on these models, our black-box attacks (using BLIP-2 as a surrogate model) achieve competitive performance, with average attack success rate (AASR) of 57.98% on MSVD-QA and 58.26% on MSRVTT-QA for Zero-Shot VideoQA tasks, respectively.

PaperID: 1863, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07934

Authors:Sida Huang, Siqi Huang, Ping Luo, Hongyuan Zhang

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, OPtics and ElectroNics (iOPEN), China Telecom, The University of Hong Kong, Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI)

Title: Laytrol: Preserving Pretrained Knowledge in Layout Control for Multimodal Diffusion Transformers

Abstract:
With the development of diffusion models, enhancing spatial controllability in textto-image generation has become a vital challenge. As a representative task for addressing this challenge, layout-to-image generation aims to generate images that are spatially consistent with the given layout condition. Existing layout-to-image methods typically introduce the layout condition by integrating adapter modules into the base generative model. However, the generated images often exhibit low visual quality and stylistic inconsistency with the base model, indicating a loss of pretrained knowledge. To alleviate this issue, we construct the Layout Synthesis (LaySyn) dataset, which leverages images synthesized by the base model itself to mitigate the distribution shift from the pretraining data. Moreover, we propose the Layout Control (Laytrol) Network, in which parameters are inherited from MM-DiT to preserve the pretrained knowledge of the base model. To effectively activate the copied parameters and avoid disturbance from unstable control conditions, we adopt a dedicated initialization scheme for Laytrol. In this scheme, the layout encoder is initialized as a pure text encoder to ensure that its output tokens remain within the data domain of MM-DiT. Meanwhile, the outputs of the layout control network are initialized to zero. In addition, we apply Object-level Rotary Position Embedding to the layout tokens to provide coarse positional information. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

PaperID: 1864, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13571

Authors:Ziyang Huang, Jiagang Chen, Jin Liu, Shunping Ji

Affiliations: Wuhan University, Hangzhou Dianzi University

Title: Opt3DGS: Optimizing 3D Gaussian Splatting with Adaptive Exploration and Curvature-Aware Exploitation

Abstract:
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a leading framework for novel view synthesis, yet its core optimization challenges remain underexplored. We identify two key issues in 3DGS optimization: entrapment in suboptimal local optima and insufficient convergence quality. To address these, we propose Opt3DGS, a robust framework that enhances 3DGS through a twostage optimization process of adaptive exploration and curvature-guided exploitation. In the exploration phase, an Adaptive Weighted Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) method enhances global search to escape local optima. In the exploitation phase, a Local Quasi-Newton Direction-guided Adam optimizer leverages curvature information for precise and efficient convergence. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate that Opt3DGS achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality by refining the 3DGS optimization process without modifying its underlying representation.

PaperID: 1865, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14420

Authors:Nakamasa Inoue, Kanoko Goto, Masanari Oi, Martyna Gruszka, Mahiro Ukai, Takumi Hirose, Yusuke Sekikawa

Affiliations: Institute of Science Tokyo, DENSO IT Laboratory

Title: DISCODE: Distribution-Aware Score Decoder for Robust Automatic Evaluation of Image Captioning

Abstract:
Large visionlanguage models (LVLMs) have shown impressive performance across a broad range of multimodal tasks. However, robust image caption evaluation using LVLMs remains challenging, particularly under domain-shift scenarios. To address this issue, we introduce the Distribution-Aware Score Decoder (DISCODE), a novel finetuning-free method that generates robust evaluation scores better aligned with human judgments across diverse domains. The core idea behind DISCODE lies in its test-time adaptive evaluation approach, which introduces the Adaptive Test-Time (ATT) loss, leveraging a Gaussian prior distribution to improve robustness in evaluation score estimation. This loss is efficiently minimized at test time using an analytical solution that we derive. Furthermore, we introduce the Multi-domain Caption Evaluation (MCEval) benchmark, a new image captioning evaluation benchmark covering six distinct domains, designed to assess the robustness of evaluation metrics. In our experiments, we demonstrate that DISCODE achieves state-of-the-art performance as a reference-free evaluation metric across MCEval and four representative existing benchmarks.

PaperID: 1866, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.21220

Authors:Alvi Md Ishmam, Najibul Haque Sarker, Zaber Ibn Abdul Hakim, Chris Thomas

Affiliations: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Title: LAMP: Learning Universal Adversarial Perturbations for Multi-Image Tasks via Pre-trained Models

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across visionlanguage tasks. Recent advancements allow these models to process multiple images as inputs. However, the vulnerabilities of multi-image MLLMs remain unexplored. Existing adversarial attacks focus on single-image settings and often assume a white-box threat model which is impractical in many real-world scenarios. This paper introduces LAMP, a black-box method for learning UAPs targeting multi-image MLLMs. LAMP applies an attention-based constraint that which prevents the model from effectively aggregating information across images. LAMP also introduces a novel cross-image contagious constraint that forces perturbed tokens to influence clean tokens to spread adversarial effects without requiring all inputs to be modified. Additionally, an index-attention suppression loss creates a robust position invariant attack. Experimental results show that LAMP outperforms SOTA baselines and achieves the highest attack success rates across multiple vision-language tasks.

PaperID: 1867, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.06044

Authors:Chaeyoung Jeong, Kwangsu Kim

Affiliations: Sungkyunkwan University

Title: COSMOS: Coherent SuperGaussian Modeling with Spatial Priors for Sparse-View 3D Splatting

Abstract:
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as a promising approach for 3D reconstruction, providing explicit, pointbased representations and enabling high-quality real-time rendering. However, when trained with sparse input views, 3DGS suffers from overfitting and structural degradation, leading to poor generalization on novel views. This limitation arises from its optimization relying solely on photometric loss without incorporating any 3D structure priors. To address this issue, we propose Coherent supergaussian Modeling with Spatial Priors (COSMOS). Inspired by the concept of superpoints from 3D segmentation, COSMOS introduces 3D structure priors by newly defining supergaussian groupings of Gaussians based on local geometric cues and appearance features. To this end, COSMOS applies inter-group global self-attention across supergaussian groups and sparse local attention among individual Gaussians, enabling the integration of global and local spatial information. These structure-aware features are then used for predicting Gaussian attributes, facilitating more consistent 3D reconstructions. Furthermore, by leveraging supergaussian-based grouping, COSMOS enforces an intra-group positional regularization to maintain structural coherence and suppress floaters, thereby enhancing training stability under sparse-view conditions. Our experiments on Blender and DTU show that COSMOS surpasses state‑of‑the‑art methods in sparse‑view settings without any external depth supervision.

PaperID: 1868, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10134

Authors:Mingda Jia, Weiliang Meng, Zenghuang Fu, Yiheng Li, Qi Zeng, Yifan Zhang, Ju Xin, Rongtao Xu, Jiguang Zhang, Xiaopeng Zhang

Affiliations: Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, The Navigation Guarantee Center Of North China Sea, Spatialtemporal AI

Title: Explicit Temporal-Semantic Modeling for Dense Video Captioning via Context-Aware Cross-Modal Interaction

Abstract:
Dense video captioning jointly localizes and captions salient events in untrimmed videos. Recent methods primarily focus on leveraging additional prior knowledge and advanced multitask architectures to achieve competitive performance. However, these pipelines rely on implicit modeling that uses frame-level or fragmented video features, failing to capture the temporal coherence across event sequences and comprehensive semantics within visual contexts. To address this, we propose an explicit temporal-semantic modeling framework called Context-Aware Cross-Modal Interaction (CACMI), which leverages both latent temporal characteristics within videos and linguistic semantics from text corpus. Specifically, our model consists of two core components: Cross-modal Frame Aggregation aggregates relevant frames to extract temporally coherent, event-aligned textual features through cross-modal retrieval; and Context-aware Feature Enhancement utilizes query-guided attention to integrate visual dynamics with pseudo-event semantics. Extensive experiments on the ActivityNet Captions and YouCook2 datasets demonstrate that CACMI achieves the state-of-the-art performance on dense video captioning task.

PaperID: 1869, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12939

Authors:Wei Jiang, Jiahao Cui, Yizheng Wu, Zhan Peng, Zhiyu Pan, Zhiguo Cao

Affiliations: School of AIA, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: Semi-Supervised High Dynamic Range Image Reconstructing via Bi-Level Uncertain Area Masking

Abstract:
Reconstructing high dynamic range (HDR) images from low dynamic range (LDR) bursts plays an essential role in the computational photography. Impressive progress has been achieved by learningbased algorithms which require LDR-HDR image pairs. However, these pairs are hard to obtain, which motivates researchers to delve into the problem of annotation-efficient HDR image reconstructing: how to achieve comparable performance with limited HDR ground truths (GTs). This work attempts to address this problem from the view of semi-supervised learning where a teacher model generates pseudo HDR GTs for the LDR samples without GTs and a student model learns from pseudo GTs. Nevertheless, the confirmation bias, i.e., the student may learn from the artifacts in pseudo HDR GTs, presents an impediment. To remove this impediment, an uncertainty-based masking process is proposed to discard unreliable parts of pseudo GTs at both pixel and patch levels, then the student can learn from the trusted areas. With this novel masking process, our semi-supervised HDR reconstructing method not only outperforms previous annotation-efficient algorithms, but also achieves comparable performance with up-to-date fully-supervised methods by using only 6.7% HDR GTs.

PaperID: 1870, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04505

Authors:Daisheng Jin, Ying He

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University

Title: MonoCloth: Reconstruction and Animation of Cloth-Decoupled Human Avatars from Monocular Videos

Abstract:
Reconstructing realistic 3D human avatars from monocular videos is a challenging task due to the limited geometric information and complex nonrigid motion involved. We present MonoCloth, a new method for reconstructing and animating clothed human avatars from monocular videos. To overcome the limitations of monocular input, we introduce a part-based decomposition strategy that separates the avatar into body, face, hands, and clothing. This design reflects the varying levels of reconstruction difficulty and deformation complexity across these components. Specifically, we focus on detailed geometry recovery for the face and hands. For clothing, we propose a dedicated cloth simulation module that captures garment deformation using temporal motion cues and geometric constraints. Experimental results demonstrate that MonoCloth improves both visual reconstruction quality and animation realism compared to existing methods. Furthermore, thanks to its part-based design, MonoCloth also supports additional tasks such as clothing transfer, underscoring its versatility and practical utility.

PaperID: 1871, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07253

Authors:Zhangyu Lai, Yilin Lu, Xinyang Li, Jianghang Lin, Yansong Qu, Ming Li, Liujuan Cao

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing, Ministry of Education of China, Xiamen University, P.R. China., Shandong Inspur Database Technology Co.

Title: AnomalyPainter: Vision-Language-Diffusion Synergy for Realistic and Diverse Unseen Industrial Anomaly Synthesis

Abstract:
Visual anomaly detection is limited by the lack of sufficient anomaly data. While existing anomaly synthesis methods have made remarkable progress, achieving both realism and diversity in synthesis remains a major obstacle. To address this, we propose AnomalyPainter, a novel framework that breaks the diversityrealism trade-off dilemma through synergizing Vision Language Large Model (VLLM), Latent Diffusion Model (LDM), and our newly introduced texture library Tex-9K. Tex-9K is a professional texture library containing 75 categories and 8792 texture assets crafted for diverse anomaly synthesis. Leveraging VLLM's general knowledge, reasonable anomaly text descriptions are generated for each industrial object and matched with relevant diverse textures from Tex-9K. These textures then guide the LDM via ControlNet to paint on normal images. Furthermore, we introduce Texture-Aware Latent Init to stabilize the natural-image-trained ControlNet for industrial images. Extensive experiments show that AnomalyPainter outperforms existing methods in realism, diversity, and generalization, achieving superior downstream performance.

PaperID: 1872, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06748

Authors:Ji Li, Chao Wang

Affiliations: Capital Normal University, China Agricultural University

Title: Image Restoration via Primal Dual Hybrid Gradient and Flow Generative Model

Abstract:
Regularized optimization has been a classical approach to solving imaging inverse problems, where the regularization term enforces desirable properties of the unknown image. Recently, the integration of flow matching generative models into image restoration has garnered significant attention, owing to their powerful prior modeling capabilities. In this work, we incorporate such generative priors into a Plugand-Play (PnP) framework based on proximal splitting, where the proximal operator associated with the regularizer is replaced by a time-dependent denoiser derived from the generative model. While existing PnP methods have achieved notable success in inverse problems with smooth squared ℓ2 data fidelity--typically associated with Gaussian noise--their applicability to more general data fidelity terms remains underexplored. To address this, we propose a general and efficient PnP algorithm inspired by the primal-dual hybrid gradient (PDHG) method. Our approach is computationally efficient, memory-friendly, and accommodates a wide range of fidelity terms. In particular, it supports both ℓ1 and ℓ2 norm-based losses, enabling robustness to non-Gaussian noise types such as Poisson and impulse noise. We validate our method on several image restoration tasks, including denoising, super-resolution, deblurring, and inpainting, and demonstrate that ℓ1 and ℓ2 fidelity terms outperform the conventional squared ℓ2 loss in the presence of non-Gaussian noise.

PaperID: 1873, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06328

Authors:Jiahao Li, Yusheng Luo, Yunzhong Lou, Xiangdong Zhou

Affiliations: Fudan University

Title: ReCAD: Reinforcement Learning Enhanced Parametric CAD Model Generation with Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
We present ReCAD, a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that bootstraps pretrained large models (PLMs) to generate precise parametric computeraided design (CAD) models from multimodal inputs by leveraging their inherent generative capabilities. With just access to simple functional interfaces (e.g., point coordinates), our approach enables the emergence of complex CAD operations (e.g., pattern replication and mirror). This stands in contrast to previous methods, which typically rely on knowledge injected through supervised fine-tuning (SFT), offer limited support for editability, and fail to exploit the strong generative priors of PLMs. Specifically, the ReCAD framework begins by fine-tuning vision-language models (VLMs) to equip them with basic CAD model generation capabilities, where we rewrite CAD scripts into parameterized code that is leveraged to generate accurate textual descriptions for supervision. Then, we propose a novel RL strategy that incorporates parameterized code as guidance to enhance the model’s reasoning on challenging questions. Furthermore, we employ a hierarchical primitive learning process to progressively teach structured and compositional skills under a unified reward function that ensures both geometric accuracy and semantic fidelity. ReCAD sets a new state-of-the-art in both text-to-CAD and image-to-CAD tasks, significantly improving geometric accuracy across in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings. In the image-to-CAD task, for instance, it reduces the mean Chamfer Distance from 73.47 to 29.61 (in-distribution) and from 272.06 to 80.23 (out-of-distribution), outperforming existing baselines by a substantial margin.

PaperID: 1874, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10241

Authors:Jinxuan Li, Yi Zhang, Jian-Fang Hu, Chaolei Tan, Tianming Liang, Beihao Xia

Affiliations: SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY, China Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and Advanced Computing, Ministry of Education, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: TubeRMC: Tube-conditioned Reconstruction with Mutual Constraints for Weakly-supervised Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding

Abstract:
SpatioTemporal Video Grounding (STVG) aims to localize a spatio-temporal tube that corresponds to a given language query in an untrimmed video. This is a challenging task since it involves complex vision-language understanding and spatiotemporal reasoning. Recent works have explored weakly-supervised setting in STVG to eliminate reliance on fine-grained annotations like bounding boxes or temporal stamps. However, they typically follow a simple late-fusion manner, which generates tubes independent of the text description, often resulting in failed target identification and inconsistent target tracking. To address this limitation, we propose a Tube-conditioned Reconstruction with Mutual Constraints (TubeRMC) framework that generates text-conditioned candidate tubes with pre-trained visual grounding models and further refine them via tube-conditioned reconstruction with spatio-temporal constraints. Specifically, we design three reconstruction strategies from temporal, spatial, and spatio-temporal perspectives to comprehensively capture rich tube-text correspondences. Each strategy is equipped with a Tube-conditioned Reconstructor, utilizing spatio-temporal tubes as condition to reconstruct the key clues in the query. We further introduce mutual constraints between spatial and temporal proposals to enhance their quality for reconstruction. TubeRMC outperforms existing methods on two public benchmarks VidSTG and HCSTVG. Further visualization shows that TubeRMC effectively mitigates both target identification errors and inconsistent tracking.

PaperID: 1875, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19300

Authors:Jun Li, Zikun Chen, Haibo Chen, Shuo Chen, Jian Yang

Affiliations: Nanjing University

Title: RMLer: Synthesizing Novel Objects Across Diverse Categories via Reinforcement Mixing Learning

Abstract:
Novel object synthesis by integrating distinct textual concepts from diverse categories remains a significant challenge in textto-image generation. Existing methods often suffer from insufficient concept mixing, lack of rigorous evaluation, and suboptimal outputs, resulting in conceptual imbalance, superficial combinations, or mere juxtapositions. To address these limitations, we propose Reinforcement Mixing Learning (RMLer), a framework that formulates cross-category concept fusion as a reinforcement learning problem: mixed features serve as states, mixing strategies as actions, and visual outcomes as rewards. Specifically, we design an MLP policy network to predict dynamic coefficients for blending cross-category text embeddings. We further introduce visual rewards based on (1) semantic similarity and (2) compositional balance between the fused object and its constituent concepts, and optimize the policy via proximal policy optimization. At inference time, a selection strategy leverages these rewards to curate the highest-quality fused objects. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RMLer synthesizes coherent, high-fidelity objects from diverse categories and consistently outperforms existing methods. Our work provides a robust framework for generating novel visual concepts, with promising applications in film, gaming, and design.

PaperID: 1876, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14642

Authors:Lin Li, Wei Chen, Jiahui Li, Kwang-Ting Cheng, Long Chen

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Zhejiang University

Title: Relation-R1: Progressively Cognitive Chain-of-Thought Guided Reinforcement Learning for Unified Relation Comprehension

Abstract:
Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have significantly improved object-level grounding and region captioning. However, they remain limited in visual relation understanding, struggling even with binary relation detection, let alone N-ary relations involving multiple semantic roles. The core reason is the lack of modeling for structural semantic dependencies among multi-entities, leading to over-reliance on language priors (e.g., defaulting to "person drinks a milk" if a person is merely holding it). To this end, we propose Relation-R1, the first unified relation comprehension framework that explicitly integrates cognitive chain-of-thought (CoT)-guided supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and group relative policy optimization (GRPO) within a reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm. Specifically, we first establish foundational reasoning capabilities via SFT, enforcing structured outputs with thinking processes. Then, GRPO is utilized to refine these outputs via multi-rewards optimization, prioritizing visual-semantic grounding over language-induced biases, thereby improving generalization capability. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of various CoT strategies within this framework, demonstrating that a specific-to-general progressive approach in CoT guidance further improves generalization, especially in capturing synonymous N-ary relations. Extensive experiments on widely-used PSG and SWiG datasets demonstrate that Relation-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance in both binary and N-ary relation understanding.

PaperID: 1877, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.21718

Authors:Shiying Li, Xingqun Qi, Bingkun Yang, Weile Chen, Zezhao Tian, Muyi Sun, Qifeng Liu, Man Zhang, Zhenan Sun

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: VividListener: Expressive and Controllable Listener Dynamics Modeling for Multi-Modal Responsive Interaction

Abstract:
Generating responsive listener head dynamics with nuanced emotions and expressive reactions is crucial for dialogue modeling in various virtual avatar animations. Previous studies mainly focus on the direct shortterm production of listener behavior. They overlook the fine-grained control over motion variations and emotional intensity, especially in long-sequence modeling. Moreover, the lack of long-term and large-scale paired speaker-listener corpora incorporating head dynamics and fine-grained multi-modality annotations limits the application of dialogue modeling. Therefore, we first newly collect a large-scale multi-turn dataset of 3D dyadic conversation containing more than 1.4M valid frames for multi-modal responsive interaction, dubbed ListenerX. Additionally, we propose VividListener, a novel framework enabling fine-grained, expressive, and controllable listener dynamics modeling. This framework leverages multi-modal conditions as guiding principles for fostering coherent interactions between speakers and listeners. Specifically, we design the Responsive Interaction Module (RIM) to adaptively represent the multi-modal interactive embeddings. RIM ensures the listener dynamics achieve fine-grained semantic coordination with textual descriptions and adjustments, while preserving expressive reaction with speaker behavior. Meanwhile, we propose the Emotional Intensity Tags (EIT) for emotion intensity editing with multi-modal information integration, applying to both text descriptions and listener motion amplitude. Extensive experiments conducted on our newly collected ListenerX dataset demonstrate that VividListener achieves state-of-the-art performance, realizing expressive and controllable listener dynamics.

PaperID: 1878, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.15383

Authors:Shuwei Li, Lei Tan, Robby T. Tan

Affiliations: National University of Singapore

Title: Bridging Day and Night: Target-Class Hallucination Suppression in Unpaired Image Translation

Abstract:
Dayto-night unpaired image translation is important to downstream tasks but remains challenging due to large appearance shifts and the lack of direct pixel-level supervision. Existing methods often introduce semantic hallucinations, where objects from target classes such as traffic signs and vehicles, as well as man-made light effects, are incorrectly synthesized. These hallucinations significantly degrade downstream performance. We propose a novel framework that detects and suppresses hallucinations of target-class features during unpaired translation. To detect hallucination, we design a dual-head discriminator that additionly performs semantic segmentation to identify hallucinated content in background regions. To suppress these hallucinations, we introduce class-specific prototypes, constructed by aggregating features of annotated target-domain objects, which act as semantic anchors for each class. Built upon a Schrödinger Bridge-based translation model, our framework performs iterative refinement, where detected hallucination features are explicitly pushed away from class prototypes in feature space, thus preserving object semantics across the translation trajectory. Experiments show that our method outperforms existing approaches both qualitatively and quantitatively. On the BDD100K dataset, it improves mAP by 15.5% for day-to-night domain adaptation, with a notable 31.7% gain for classes such as traffic lights that are prone to hallucinations.

PaperID: 1879, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04335

Authors:Yan Li, Ze Yang, Keisuke Tateno, Federico Tombari, Liang Zhao, Gim Hee Lee

Affiliations: National University of Singapore, Peking University, Google Technical University of Munich, The University of Edinburgh

Title: RiemanLine: Riemannian Manifold Representation of 3D Lines for Factor Graph Optimization

Abstract:
Minimal parametrization of 3D lines plays a critical role in camera localization and structural mapping. Existing representations in robotics and computer vision predominantly handle independent lines, overlooking structural regularities such as sets of parallel lines that are pervasive in manmade environments. This paper introduces RiemanLine, a unified minimal representation for 3D lines formulated on Riemannian manifolds that jointly accommodates both individual lines and parallel-line groups. Our key idea is to decouple each line landmark into global and local components: a shared vanishing direction optimized on the unit sphere, and scaled normal vectors constrained on orthogonal subspaces, enabling compact encoding of structural regularities. For n parallel lines, the proposed representation reduces the parameter space from 4n (orthonormal form) to 2n+2, naturally embedding parallelism without explicit constraints. We further integrate this parameterization into a factor graph framework, allowing global direction alignment and local reprojection optimization within a unified manifold-based bundle adjustment. Extensive experiments on ICL-NUIM, TartanAir, and synthetic benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves significantly more accurate pose estimation and line reconstruction, while reducing parameter dimensionality and improving convergence stability.

PaperID: 1880, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17097

Authors:Yanshu Li, Jianjiang Yang, Ziteng Yang, Bozheng Li, Ligong Han, Hongyang He, Zhengtao Yao, Yingjie Victor Chen, Songlin Fei, Dongfang Liu, Ruixiang Tang

Affiliations: Brown University, University of Bristol, MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, University of Warwick, University of Southern California, Purdue University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rutgers University

Title: Make LVLMs Focus: Context-Aware Attention Modulation for Better Multimodal In-Context Learning

Abstract:
Multimodal incontext learning (ICL) is becoming a key capability that allows large vision-language models (LVLMs) to adapt to novel tasks without parameter updates, which expands their usefulness in many real-world applications. However, ICL performance remains unstable even when the in-context demonstrations (ICDs) are well matched, showing that LVLMs still struggle to make full use of the provided context. While existing work mainly focuses on prompt engineering or post-hoc logit calibration, we study the attention mechanisms inside LVLMs to address their inherent limitations. We identify two important weaknesses in their self-attention that hinder effective ICL. To address these weaknesses, we propose Context-Aware Modulated Attention (CAMA), a training-free and plug-and-play method that dynamically adjusts attention logits based on the input in-context sequence. CAMA uses a two-stage modulation process that strengthens attention to semantically important tokens, especially visual ones. Across four LVLMs and seven benchmarks, CAMA consistently outperforms vanilla models and baselines, showing clear effectiveness and generalization. It can also activate the intended benefits of prompt engineering methods and remains robust across different sequence configurations. Therefore, CAMA opens up new directions for improving multimodal reasoning through a deeper understanding of attention dynamics.

PaperID: 1881, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.10001

Authors:Chengjia Liang, Zhenjiong Wang, Chao Chen, Ruizhi Zhang, Songxi Liang, Hai Xie, Haijun Lei, Zhongwei Huang

Affiliations: Shenzhen University, University of Nottingham, Hainan University, Hubei University of Technology

Title: DW-DGAT: Dynamically Weighted Dual Graph Attention Network for Neurodegenerative Disease Diagnosis

Abstract:
Parkinson's disease (PD) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) are the two most prevalent and incurable neurodegenerative diseases (NDs) worldwide, for which early diagnosis is critical to delay their progression. However, the high dimensionality of multimetric data with diverse structural forms, the heterogeneity of neuroimaging and phenotypic data, and class imbalance collectively pose significant challenges to early ND diagnosis. To address these challenges, we propose a dynamically weighted dual graph attention network (DW-DGAT) that integrates: (1) a general-purpose data fusion strategy to merge three structural forms of multi-metric data; (2) a dual graph attention architecture based on brain regions and inter-sample relationships to extract both micro- and macro-level features; and (3) a class weight generation mechanism combined with two stable and effective loss functions to mitigate class imbalance. Rigorous experiments, based on the Parkinson Progression Marker Initiative (PPMI) and Alzhermer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) studies, demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our approach.

PaperID: 1882, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02780

Authors:Qifan Liang, Junlin Li, Zhen Han, Xihao Wang, Zhongyuan Wang, Bin Mei

Affiliations: National Engineering Research Center for Multimedia Software, School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, China Hubei Key Laboratory of Multimedia and Network Communication Engineering, School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Zhongnan Hospital

Title: Rethinking Surgical Smoke: A Smoke-Type-Aware Laparoscopic Video Desmoking Method and Dataset

Abstract:
Electrocautery or lasers will inevitably generate surgical smoke, which hinders the visual guidance of laparoscopic videos for surgical procedures. The surgical smoke can be classified into different types based on its motion patterns, leading to distinctive spatiotemporal characteristics across smoky laparoscopic videos. However, existing desmoking methods fail to account for such smoke-type-specific distinctions. Therefore, we propose the first Smoke-Type-Aware Laparoscopic Video Desmoking Network (STANet) by introducing two smoke types: Diffusion Smoke and Ambient Smoke. Specifically, a smoke mask segmentation sub-network is designed to jointly conduct smoke mask and smoke type predictions based on the attention-weighted mask aggregation, while a smokeless video reconstruction sub-network is proposed to perform specially desmoking on smoky features guided by two types of smoke mask. To address the entanglement challenges of two smoke types, we further embed a coarse-to-fine disentanglement module into the mask segmentation sub-network, which yields more accurate disentangled masks through the smoke-type-aware cross attention between non-entangled and entangled regions. In addition, we also construct the first large-scale synthetic video desmoking dataset with smoke type annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method not only outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in quality evaluations, but also exhibits superior generalization across multiple downstream surgical tasks.

PaperID: 1883, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06717

Authors:Han Liu, Hengyu Man, Xingtao Wang, Wenrui Li, Debin Zhao

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: MRT: Learning Compact Representations with Mixed RWKV-Transformer for Extreme Image Compression

Abstract:
Recent advances in extreme image compression have revealed that mapping pixel data into highly compact latent representations can significantly improve coding efficiency. However, most existing methods compress images into 2D latent spaces via convolutional neural networks (CNNs) or Swin Transformers, which tend to retain substantial spatial redundancy, thereby limiting overall compression performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Mixed RWKV-Transformer (MRT) architecture that encodes images into more compact 1-D latent representations by synergistically integrating the complementary strengths of linear-attention-based RWKV and self-attention-based Transformer models. Specifically, MRT partitions each image into fixed-size windows, utilizing RWKV modules to capture global dependencies across windows and Transformer blocks to model local redundancies within each window. The hierarchical attention mechanism enables more efficient and compact representation learning in the 1-D domain. To further enhance compression efficiency, we introduce a dedicated RWKV Compression Model (RCM) tailored to the structure characteristics of the intermediate 1-D latent features in MRT. Extensive experiments on standard image compression benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our approach. The proposed MRT framework consistently achieves superior reconstruction quality at bitrates below 0.02 bits per pixel (bpp). Quantitative results based on the DISTS metric show that MRT significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art 2-D architecture GLC, achieving bitrate savings of 43.75%, 30.59% on the Kodak and CLIC2020 test datasets, respectively.

PaperID: 1884, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09215

Authors:Yuanyuan Liu, Haiyang Mei, Dongyang Zhan, Jiayue Zhao, Dongsheng Zhou, Bo Dong, Xin Yang

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Social Computing and Cognitive Intelligence, National University of Singapore, Dalian University, Cephia AI

Title: View-on-Graph: Zero-Shot 3D Visual Grounding via Vision-Language Reasoning on Scene Graphs

Abstract:
3D visual grounding (3DVG) identifies objects in 3D scenes from language descriptions. Existing zeroshot approaches leverage 2D vision–language models (VLMs) by converting 3D spatial information (SI) into forms amenable to VLM processing, typically as composite inputs such as specified-view renderings or video sequences with overlaid object markers. However, this VLM ⊕ SI paradigm yields entangled visual representations that compel the VLM to process entire cluttered cues, making it hard to exploit spatial–semantic relationships effectively. In this work, we propose a new VLM ⊗ SI paradigm that externalizes the 3D SI into a form enabling the VLM to incrementally retrieve only what it needs during reasoning. We instantiate this paradigm with a novel View-on-Graph (VoG) method, which organizes the scene into a multi-modal, multi-layer scene graph and allows the VLM to operate as an active agent that selectively accesses necessary cues as it traverses the scene. This design offers two intrinsic advantages: (i) by structuring 3D context into a spatially and semantically coherent scene graph rather than confounding the VLM with densely entangled visual inputs, it lowers the VLM's reasoning difficulty; and (ii) by actively exploring and reasoning over the scene graph, it naturally produces transparent, step-by-step traces for interpretable 3DVG. Extensive experiments show that VoG achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance, establishing structured scene exploration as a promising strategy for advancing zero-shot 3DVG.

PaperID: 1885, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.10945

Authors:K Lokesh, Abhirama Subramanyam Penamakuri, Uday Agarwal, Apoorva Challa, Shreya K Gowda, Somesh Gupta, Anand Mishra

Affiliations: Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi

Title: PatientVLM Meets DocVLM: Pre-Consultation Dialogue Between Vision-Language Models for Efficient Diagnosis

Abstract:
Traditionally, AI research in medical diagnosis has largely centered on image analysis. While this has led to notable advancements, the absence of patientreported symptoms continues to hinder diagnostic accuracy. To address this, we propose a Pre-Consultation Dialogue Framework (PCDF) that mimics real-world diagnostic procedures, where doctors iteratively query patients before reaching a conclusion. Specifically, we simulate diagnostic dialogues between two vision–language models (VLMs): a DocVLM, which generates follow-up questions based on the image and dialogue history, and a PatientVLM, which responds using a symptom profile derived from the ground-truth diagnosis. We additionally conducted a small-scale clinical validation of the synthetic symptoms generated by our framework, with licensed clinicians confirming their clinical relevance, symptom coverage, and overall realism. These findings indicate that the resulting DocVLM–PatientVLM interactions form coherent, multi-turn consultations paired with images and diagnoses, which we then use to fine-tune the DocVLM. This dialogue-based supervision leads to substantial gains over image-only training, highlighting the value of realistic symptom elicitation for diagnosis.

PaperID: 1886, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00052

Authors:Jianzhi Long, Wenhao Sun, Rong-Cheng Tu, Dacheng Tao

Affiliations: The University of Sydney, Nanyang Technological University

Title: Lightning Fast Caching-based Parallel Denoising Prediction for Accelerating Talking Head Generation

Abstract:
Diffusionbased talking head models generate high-quality, photorealistic videos but suffer from slow inference, limiting practical applications. Existing acceleration methods for gen- eral diffusion models fail to exploit the temporal and spatial redundancies unique to talking head generation. In this paper, we propose a task-specific framework addressing these inefficiencies through two key innovations. First, we introduce Lightning-fast Caching-based Parallel denoising prediction (LightningCP), caching static features to bypass most model layers in inference time. We also enable parallel prediction using cached features and estimated noisy latents as inputs, efficiently bypassing sequential sampling. Second, we propose Decoupled Foreground Attention (DFA) to further accelerate attention computations, exploiting the spatial decoupling in talking head videos to restrict attention to dynamic foreground regions. Additionally, we remove reference features in certain layers to bring extra speedup. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly improves inference speed while preserving video quality.

PaperID: 1887, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.08448

Authors:Haocheng Lu, Nan Zhang, Wei Tao, Xiaoyang Qu, Guokuan Li, Jiguang Wan, Jianzong Wang

Affiliations: Ping An Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: Vista: Scene-Aware Optimization for Streaming Video Question Answering Under Post-Hoc Queries

Abstract:
Streaming video question answering (Streaming Video QA) poses distinct challenges for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as video frames arrive sequentially and user queries can be issued at arbitrary timepoints. Existing solutions relying on fixedsize memory or naive compression often suffer from context loss or memory overflow, limiting their effectiveness in long-form, real-time scenarios.We present Vista, a novel framework for scene-aware streaming video QA that enables efficient and scalable reasoning over continuous video streams. The innovation of Vista can be summarized in three aspects: (1) Scene-aware segmentation. Vista dynamically clusters incoming frames into temporally and visually coherent scene units. (2) Scene-aware compression. Each scene is compressed into a compact token representation and stored in GPU memory for efficient index-based retrieval, while the full-resolution frames are offloaded to CPU memory. (3) Scene-aware recall. Upon receiving a question, relevant scenes are selectively recalled and reintegrated into the model’s input space, enabling both efficiency and completeness. Vista is model-agnostic and integrates seamlessly with a variety of vision-language backbones, enabling long-context reasoning without compromising latency or memory efficiency. Extensive experiments on StreamingBench demonstrate that Vista achieves state-of-the-art performance, establishing a strong baseline for real-world streaming video understanding.

PaperID: 1888, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12066

Authors:Jialang Lu, Shuning Sun, Pu Wang, Chen Wu, Feng Gao, Lina Gong, Dianjie Lu, Guijuan Zhang, Zhuoran Zheng

Affiliations: Hubei University, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shandong University, University of Science and Technology of China, Ocean University of China, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Shandong Normal University, SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY

Title: DCA-LUT: Deep Chromatic Alignment with 5D LUT for Purple Fringing Removal

Abstract:
Purple fringing, a persistent artifact caused by Longitudinal Chromatic Aberration (LCA) in camera lenses, has long degraded the clarity and realism of digital imaging. Traditional solutions rely on complex and expensive apochromatic (APO) lens hardware and the extraction of handcrafted features, ignoring the datadriven approach. To fill this gap, we introduce DCA-LUT, the first deep learning framework for purple fringing removal. Inspired by the physical root of the problem-the spatial misalignment of RGB color channels due to lens dispersion, we introduce a novel Chromatic-Aware Coordinate Transformation (CA-CT) module, learning an image-adaptive color space to decouple and isolate fringing into a dedicated dimension. This targeted separation allows the network to learn a precise "purple fringe channel," which then guides the accurate restoration of the luminance channel. The final color correction is performed by a learned 5D Look-Up Table (5D LUT), enabling efficient and powerful non-linear color mapping. To enable robust training and fair evaluation, we constructed a large-scale synthetic purple fringing dataset (PF-Synth). Extensive experiments in synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in purple fringing removal.

PaperID: 1889, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09834

Authors:Xuntao Lyu, Ching-Chi Lin, Abdullah Al Arafat, Georg von der Brüggen, Jian-Jia Chen, Zhishan Guo

Affiliations: North Carolina State University, TU Dortmund University

Title: CertMask: Certifiable Defense Against Adversarial Patches via Theoretically Optimal Mask Coverage

Abstract:
Adversarial patch attacks inject localized perturbations into images to mislead deep vision models. These attacks can be physically deployed, posing serious risks to realworld applications. In this paper, we propose CertMask, a certifiably robust defense that constructs a provably sufficient set of binary masks to neutralize patch effects with strong theoretical guarantees. While the state-of-the-art approach (PatchCleanser) requires two rounds of masking and incurs O(n^2) inference cost, CertMask performs only a single round of masking with O(n) time complexity, where n is the cardinality of the mask set to cover an input image. Our proposed mask set is computed using a mathematically rigorous coverage strategy that ensures each possible patch location is covered at least k times, providing both efficiency and robustness. We offer a theoretical analysis of the coverage condition and prove its sufficiency for certification. Experiments on ImageNet, ImageNette, and CIFAR-10 show that CertMask improves certified robust accuracy by up to +13.4% over PatchCleanser, while maintaining clean accuracy nearly identical to the vanilla model.

PaperID: 1890, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10423

Authors:Jiayang Meng, Tao Huang, Hong Chen, Chen Hou, Guolong Zheng

Affiliations: Renmin University of China, Minjiang University

Title: Enhanced Privacy Leakage from Noise-Perturbed Gradients via Gradient-Guided Conditional Diffusion Models

Abstract:
Federated learning synchronizes models through gradient transmission and aggregation. However, these gradients pose significant privacy risks, as sensitive training data is embedded within them. Existing gradient inversion attacks suffer from significantly degraded reconstruction performance when gradients are perturbed by noisea common defense mechanism. In this paper, we introduce gradient-guided conditional diffusion models for reconstructing private images from leaked gradients, without prior knowledge of the target data distribution. Our approach leverages the inherent denoising capability of diffusion models to circumvent the partial protection offered by noise perturbation, thereby improving attack performance under such defenses. We further provide a theoretical analysis of the reconstruction error bounds and the convergence properties of the attack loss, characterizing the impact of key factors—such as noise magnitude and attacked model architecture—on reconstruction quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate our attack's superior reconstruction performance with Gaussian noise-perturbed gradients, and confirm our theoretical findings.

PaperID: 1891, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11468

Authors:Davide Napolitano, Luca Cagliero, Fabrizio Battiloro

Affiliations: Politecnico di Torino

Title: Benchmarking Visual LLMs Resilience to Unanswerable Questions on Visually Rich Documents

Abstract:
The evolution of Visual Large Language Models (VLLMs) has revolutionized the automatic understanding of Visually Rich Documents (VRDs), which contain both textual and visual elements. Although VLLMs excel in Visual Question Answering (VQA) on multipage VRDs, their ability to detect unanswerable questions is still an open research question. Our research delves into the robustness of the VLLMs to plausible yet unanswerable questions, i.e., questions that appear valid but cannot be answered due to subtle corruptions caused by swaps between related concepts or plausible question formulations. Corruptions are generated by replacing the original natural language entities with other ones of the same type, belonging to different document elements, and in different layout positions or pages of the related document. To this end, we present VRD-UQA (VISUALLY RICH DOCUMENT UNANSWERABLE QUESTION ANSWERING), a benchmark for evaluating VLLMs' resilience to plausible yet unanswerable questions across multiple dimensions. It automatically alters the questions of existing VQA datasets consisting of multi-page VRDs, verifies their unanswerability using a VLLM-as-a-judge approach, and then thoroughly evaluates VLLMs' performance. Experiments, run on 12 models, analyze: (1) The VLLMs' accuracy in detecting unanswerable questions at both page and document levels; (2) The effect of different types of corruption (NLP entity, document element, layout); (3) The effectiveness of different knowledge injection strategies based on in-context learning (OCR, multi-page selection, or the possibility of unanswerability). Our findings reveal VLLMs' limitations and demonstrate that VRD-UQA can serve as an evaluation framework for developing resilient document VQA systems.

PaperID: 1892, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00401

Authors:Wenbo Nie, Lang Nie, Chunyu Lin, Jingwen Chen, Ke Xing, Jiyuan Wang, Kang Liao

Affiliations: Institute of Information Science, Beijing Jiaotong University Visual Intelligence + X International Joint Laboratory of the Ministry of Education, Chongqing University of Post and Telecommunications, Nanyang Technological University

Title: Beyond Wide-Angle Images: Structure-to-Detail Video Portrait Correction via Unsupervised Spatiotemporal Adaptation

Abstract:
Wideangle cameras, despite their popularity for content creation, suffer from distortion-induced facial stretching—especially at the edge of the lens—which degrades visual appeal. To address this issue, we propose a structure-to-detail portrait correction model named ImagePC. It integrates the long-range awareness of the transformer and multi-step denoising of diffusion models into a unified framework, achieving global structural robustness and local detail refinement. Besides, considering the high cost of obtaining video labels, we then repurpose ImagePC for unlabeled wide-angle videos (termed VideoPC), by spatiotemporal diffusion adaption with spatial consistency and temporal smoothness constraints. For the former, we encourage the denoised image to approximate pseudo labels following the wide-angle distortion distribution pattern, while for the latter, we derive rectification trajectories with backward optical flows and smooth them. Compared with ImagePC, VideoPC maintains high-quality facial corrections in space and mitigates the potential temporal shakes sequentially in blind scenarios. Finally, to establish an evaluation benchmark and train the framework, we establish a video portrait dataset with a large diversity in the number of people, lighting conditions, and background. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed methods outperform existing solutions quantitatively and qualitatively, contributing to high-fidelity wide-angle videos with stable and natural portraits.

PaperID: 1893, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07379

Authors:Himanshu Pal, Venkata Sai Pranav Bachina, Ankit Gangwal, Charu Sharma

Affiliations: International Institute of Information Technology

Title: LORETTA: A Low Resource Framework to Poison Continuous Time Dynamic Graphs

Abstract:
Temporal Graph Neural Networks (TGNNs) are increasingly used in highstakes domains, such as financial forecasting, recommendation systems, and fraud detection. However, their susceptibility to poisoning attacks poses a critical security risk. We introduce LoReTTA (Low Resource Two-phase Temporal Attack), a novel adversarial framework on Continuous-Time Dynamic Graphs, which degrades TGNN performance by an average of 29.47% across 4 widely benchmark datasets and 4 State-of-the-Art (SotA) models. LoReTTA operates through a two-stage approach: (1) sparsify the graph by removing high-impact edges using any of the 16 tested temporal importance metrics, (2) strategically replace removed edges with adversarial negatives via LoReTTA’s novel degree-preserving negative sampling algorithm. Our plug-and-play design eliminates the need for expensive surrogate models while adhering to realistic unnoticeability constraints. LoReTTA degrades performance by upto 42.0% on MOOC, 31.5% on Wikipedia, 28.8% on UCI, and 15.6% on Enron. LoReTTA outperforms 11 attack baselines, remains undetectable to 4 leading anomaly detection systems, and is robust to 4 SotA adversarial defense training methods, establishing its effectiveness, unnoticeability, and robustness.

PaperID: 1894, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20026

Authors:Ziwei Qin, Xuhui Song, Deqing Huang, Na Qin, Jun Li

Affiliations: Institute of Systems Science and Technology, School of Electrical Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University

Title: MAPI-GNN: Multi-Activation Plane Interaction Graph Neural Network for Multimodal Medical Diagnosis

Abstract:
Graph neural networks are increasingly applied to multimodal medical diagnosis for their inherent relational modeling capabilities. However, their efficacy is often compromised by the prevailing reliance on a single, static graph built from indiscriminate features, hindering the ability to model patientspecific pathological relationships. To this end, the proposed Multi-Activation Plane Interaction Graph Neural Network (MAPI-GNN) reconstructs this single-graph paradigm by learning a multifaceted graph profile from semantically disentangled feature subspaces. The framework first uncovers latent graph-aware patterns via a multi-dimensional discriminator; these patterns then guide the dynamic construction of a stack of activation graphs; and this multifaceted profile is finally aggregated and contextualized by a relational fusion engine for a robust diagnosis. Extensive experiments on two diverse tasks, comprising over 1300 patient samples, demonstrate that MAPI-GNN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 1895, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03252

Authors:Wentao Qu, Guofeng Mei, Jing Wang, Yujiao Wu, Xiaoshui Huang, Liang Xiao

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Shanghai Jiaotong University

Title: Robust Single-Stage Fully Sparse 3D Object Detection via Detachable Latent Diffusion

Abstract:
Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) have shown success in robust 3D object detection tasks. Existing methods often rely on the score matching from 3D boxes or pretrained diffusion priors. However, they typically require multi-step iterations in inference, which limits efficiency. To address this, we propose a Robust single-stage fully Sparse 3D object Detection Network with a Detachable Latent Framework (DLF) of DDPMs, named RSDNet. Specifically, RSDNet learns the denoising process in latent feature spaces through lightweight denoising networks like multi-level denoising autoencoders (DAEs). This enables RSDNet to effectively understand scene distributions under multi-level perturbations, achieving robust and reliable detection. Meanwhile, we reformulate the noising and denoising mechanisms of DDPMs, enabling DLF to construct multi-type and multi-level noise samples and targets, enhancing RSDNet robustness to multiple perturbations. Furthermore, a semantic-geometric conditional guidance is introduced to perceive the object boundaries and shapes, alleviating the center feature missing problem in sparse representations, enabling RSDNet to perform in a fully sparse detection pipeline. Moreover, the detachable denoising network design of DLF enables RSDNet to perform single-step detection in inference, further enhancing detection efficiency. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks show that RSDNet can outperform existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art detection.

PaperID: 1896, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18041

Authors:Sahil Shah, S P Sharan, Harsh Goel, Minkyu Choi, Mustafa Munir, Manvik Pasula, Radu Marculescu, Sandeep Chinchali

Affiliations: The University of Texas at Austin, Independent Researcher

Title: NeuS-QA: Grounding Long-Form Video Understanding in Temporal Logic and Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning

Abstract:
While visionlanguage models (VLMs) excel at tasks involving single images or short videos, they still struggle with Long Video Question Answering (LVQA) due to its demand for complex multi-step temporal reasoning. Vanilla approaches, which simply sample frames uniformly and feed them to a VLM along with the question, incur significant token overhead. This forces aggressive downsampling of long videos, causing models to miss fine-grained visual structure, subtle event transitions, and key temporal cues. Recent works attempt to overcome these limitations through heuristic approaches; however, they lack explicit mechanisms for encoding temporal relationships and fail to provide any formal guarantees that the sampled context actually encodes the compositional or causal logic required by the question. To address these foundational gaps, we introduce NeuS-QA, a training-free, plug-and-play neuro-symbolic pipeline for LVQA. NeuS-QA first translates a natural language question into a logic specification that models the temporal relationship between frame-level events. Next, we construct a video automaton to model the video's frame-by-frame event progression, and finally employ model checking to compare the automaton against the specification to identify all video segments that satisfy the question's logical requirements. Only these logic-verified segments are submitted to the VLM, thus improving interpretability, reducing hallucinations, and enabling compositional reasoning without modifying or fine-tuning the model. Experiments on the LongVideoBench and CinePile benchmarks show that NeuS-QA significantly improves performance by over 10%, particularly on questions involving event ordering, causality, and multi-step reasoning.

PaperID: 1897, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18336

Authors:Kaito Shiku, Kazuya Nishimura, Shinnosuke Matsuo, Yasuhiro Kojima, Ryoma Bise

Affiliations: Kyushu University, National Cancer Center Japan

Title: Auxiliary Gene Learning: Spatial Gene Expression Estimation by Auxiliary Gene Selection

Abstract:
Spatial transcriptomics (ST) is a novel technology that enables the observation of gene expression at the resolution of individual spots within pathological tissues. ST quantifies the expression of tens of thousands of genes in a tissue section; however, heavy observational noise is often introduced during measurement. In prior studies, to ensure meaningful assessment, both training and evaluation have been restricted to only a small subset of highly variable genes, and genes outside this subset have also been excluded from the training process. However, since there are likely coexpression relationships between genes, low-expression genes may still contribute to the estimation of the evaluation target. In this paper, we propose Auxiliary Gene Learning (AGL) that utilizes the benefit of the ignored genes by reformulating their expression estimation as auxiliary tasks and training them jointly with the primary tasks. To effectively leverage auxiliary genes, we must select a subset of auxiliary genes that positively influence the prediction of the target genes. However, this is a challenging optimization problem due to the vast number of possible combinations. To overcome this challenge, we propose Prior-Knowledge-Based Differentiable Top-k Gene Selection via Bi-level Optimization (DkGSB), a method that ranks genes by leveraging prior knowledge and relaxes the combinatorial selection problem into a differentiable top-k selection problem. The experiments confirm the effectiveness of incorporating auxiliary genes and show that the proposed method outperforms conventional auxiliary task learning approaches.

PaperID: 1898, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.03615

Authors:Baiyang Song, Jun Peng, Yuxin Zhang, Guangyao Chen, Feidiao Yang, Jianyuan Guo

Affiliations: Xiamen University, Peng Cheng Laboratory, Peking University, City University of Hong Kong

Title: KTV: Keyframes and Key Tokens Selection for Efficient Training-Free Video LLMs

Abstract:
Trainingfree video understanding methods leverage the strong image comprehension capabilities of pre-trained vision language models (VLMs) by treating videos as a sequences of static frames, thus obviating the need for costly video-specific training. However, this paradigm often suffers from severe visual redundancy and high computational overhead, especially when processing long videos. Crucially, existing keyframe selection strategies, especially those based on CLIP similarity, are prone to biases and may inadvertently overlook critical frames, resulting in suboptimal video comprehension. To address these significant challenges, we propose KTV, a novel two-stage framework for efficient and effective training-free video understanding. In the first stage, KTV performs question-agnostic keyframe selection by clustering frame-level visual features, yielding a compact, diverse, and representative subset of frames that mitigates temporal redundancy. In the second stage, KTV applies key visual token selection, pruning redundant or less informative tokens from each selected keyframe based on token importance and redundancy, which significantly reduces the number of tokens fed into the LLM. Extensive experiments on the Multiple-Choice VideoQA task demonstrate that KTV outperforms state-of-the-art training-free baselines while using significantly fewer visual tokens, e.g., only 504 tokens for a 60 min video with 10800 frames, achieving 44.8% accuracy on the MLVU-Test benchmark. In particular, KTV also exceeds several training-based approaches on certain benchmarks.

PaperID: 1899, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23760

Authors:Xinyang Song, Libin Wang, Weining Wang, Shaozhen Liu, Dandan Zheng, Jingdong Chen, Qi Li, Zhenan Sun

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ant Group, Institute of Automation

Title: UniAlignment: Semantic Alignment for Unified Image Generation, Understanding, Manipulation and Perception

Abstract:
The remarkable success of diffusion models in textto-image generation has sparked growing interest in expanding their capabilities to a variety of multi-modal tasks, including image understanding, manipulation, and perception. These tasks require advanced semantic comprehension across both visual and textual modalities, especially in scenarios involving complex semantic instructions. However, existing approaches often rely heavily on vision-language models (VLMs) or modular designs for semantic guidance, leading to fragmented architectures and computational inefficiency. To address these challenges, we propose UniAlignment, a unified multimodal generation framework within a single diffusion transformer. UniAlignment introduces a dual-stream diffusion training strategy that incorporates both intrinsic-modal semantic alignment and cross-modal semantic alignment, thereby enhancing the model's cross-modal consistency and instruction-following robustness. Additionally, we present SemGen-Bench, a new benchmark specifically designed to evaluate multimodal semantic consistency under complex textual instructions. Extensive experiments across multiple tasks and benchmarks demonstrate that UniAlignment outperforms existing baselines, underscoring the significant potential of diffusion models in unified multimodal generation.

PaperID: 1900, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04502

Authors:Qixin Sun, Ziqin Wang, Hengyuan Zhao, Yilin Li, Kaiyou Song, Si Liu, Xiaolin Hu, Qingpei Guo, Linjiang Huang

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University, École Centrale de Pékin, Beijing China, Independent Researcher, QIYUAN LAB

Title: VaccineRAG: Boosting Multimodal Large Language Models’ Immunity to Harmful RAG Samples

Abstract:
Retrieval Augmented Generation enhances the response accuracy of Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating retrieval and generation modules with external knowledge, demonstrating particular strength in realtime queries and Visual Question Answering tasks. However, the effectiveness of RAG is frequently hindered by the precision of the retriever: many retrieved samples fed into the generation phase are irrelevant or misleading, posing a critical bottleneck to LLMs’ performance. To address this challenge, we introduce VaccineRAG, a novel Chain-of-Thought-based retrieval-augmented generation dataset. On one hand, VaccineRAG employs a benchmark to evaluate models using data with varying positive/negative sample ratios, systematically exposing inherent weaknesses in current LLMs. On the other hand, it enhances models’ sample-discrimination capabilities by prompting LLMs to generate explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) analysis for each sample before producing final answers. Furthermore, to enhance the model’s ability to learn long-sequence complex CoT content, we propose Partial-GRPO. By modeling the outputs of LLMs as multiple components rather than a single whole, our model can make more informed preference selections for complex sequences, thereby enhancing its capacity to learn complex CoT. Comprehensive evaluations and ablation studies on VaccineRAG validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

PaperID: 1901, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06082

Authors:Yanxiao Sun, Jiafu Wu, Yun Cao, Chengming Xu, Yabiao Wang, Weijian Cao, Donghao Luo, Chengjie Wang, Yanwei Fu

Affiliations: Fudan University, Tencent Youtu Lab

Title: SwiftVideo: A Unified Framework for Few-Step Video Generation Through Trajectory-Distribution Alignment

Abstract:
Diffusionbased or flow-based models have achieved significant progress in video synthesis but require multiple iterative sampling steps, which incurs substantial computational overhead. While many distillation methods that are solely based on trajectory-preserving or distribution-matching have been developed to accelerate video generation models, these approaches often suffer from performance breakdown or increased artifacts in few-step settings. To address these limitations, we propose SwiftVideo, a unified and stable distillation framework that combines the advantages of trajectory-preserving and distribution-matching strategies. Our approach introduces continuous-time consistency distillation to ensure precise preservation of ODE trajectories. Subsequently, We propose a dual-perspective alignment encompassing distribution alignment between synthetic and real data along with trajectory alignment across different inference steps. Our method maintains high-quality video generation while substantially reducing the number of inference steps. Quantitative evaluations on the OpenVid-1M benchmark demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches in few-step video generation.

PaperID: 1902, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13119

Authors:Keke Tang, Tianyu Hao, Xiaofei Wang, Weilong Peng, Denghui Zhang, Peican Zhu, Zhihong Tian

Affiliations: Guangzhou University, University of Science and Technology of China, Northwestern Polytechnical University

Title: Less Is More: Sparse and Cooperative Perturbation for Point Cloud Attacks

Abstract:
Most adversarial attacks on point clouds perturb a large number of points, causing widespread geometric changes and limiting applicability in realworld scenarios. While recent works explore sparse attacks by modifying only a few points, such approaches often struggle to maintain effectiveness due to the limited influence of individual perturbations. In this paper, we propose SCP, a sparse and cooperative perturbation framework that selects and leverages a compact subset of points whose joint perturbations produce amplified adversarial effects. Specifically, SCP identifies the subset where the misclassification loss is locally convex with respect to their joint perturbations, determined by checking the positive-definiteness of the corresponding Hessian block. The selected subset is then optimized to generate high-impact adversarial examples with minimal modifications. Extensive experiments show that SCP achieves 100% attack success rates, surpassing state-of-the-art sparse attacks, and delivers superior imperceptibility to dense attacks with far fewer modifications.

PaperID: 1903, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13014

Authors:Haoyu Wang, Lei Zhang, Wenrui Liu, Dengyang Jiang, Wei Wei, Chen Ding

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an University of Posts & Telecommunications

Title: JoDiffusion: Jointly Diffusing Image with Pixel-Level Annotations for Semantic Segmentation Promotion

Abstract:
Given the inherently costly and timeintensive nature of pixel-level annotation, the generation of synthetic datasets comprising sufficiently diverse synthetic images paired with ground-truth pixel-level annotations has garnered increasing attention recently for training high-performance semantic segmentation models. However, existing methods necessitate to either predict pseudo annotations after image generation or generate images conditioned on manual annotation masks, which incurs image-annotation semantic inconsistency or scalability problem. To migrate both problems with one stone, we present a novel dataset generative diffusion framework for semantic segmentation, termed JoDiffusion. Firstly, given a standard latent diffusion model, JoDiffusion incorporates an independent annotation variational auto-encoder (VAE) network to map annotation masks into the latent space shared by images. Then, the diffusion model is tailored to capture the joint distribution of each image and its annotation mask conditioned on a text prompt. By doing these, JoDiffusion enables simultaneously generating paired images and semantically consistent annotation masks solely conditioned on text prompts, thereby demonstrating superior scalability. Additionally, a mask optimization strategy is developed to mitigate the annotation noise produced during generation. Experiments on Pascal VOC, COCO, and ADE20K datasets show that the annotated dataset generated by JoDiffusion yields substantial performance improvements in semantic segmentation compared to existing methods.

PaperID: 1904, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17993

Authors:Jiayu Wang, Haoyu Bian, Haoran Sun, Shaoning Zeng

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: SD-PSFNet: Sequential and Dynamic Point Spread Function Network for Image Deraining

Abstract:
Image deraining is crucial for vision applications but is challenged by the complex multiscale physics of rain and its coupling with scenes. To address this challenge, a novel approach inspired by multi-stage image restoration is proposed, incorporating Point Spread Function (PSF) mechanisms to reveal the image degradation process while combining dynamic physical modeling with sequential feature fusion transfer, named SD-PSFNet. Specifically, SD-PSFNet employs a sequential restoration architecture with three cascaded stages, allowing multiple dynamic evaluations and refinements of the degradation process estimation. The network utilizes components with learned PSF mechanisms to dynamically simulate rain streak optics, enabling effective rain-background separation while progressively enhancing outputs through novel PSF components at each stage. Additionally, SD-PSFNet incorporates adaptive gated fusion for optimal cross-stage feature integration, enabling sequential refinement from coarse rain removal to fine detail restoration. Our model achieves state-of-the-art PSNR/SSIM metrics on Rain100H (33.12dB/0.9371), RealRain-1k-L (42.28dB/0.9872), and RealRain-1k-H (41.08dB/0.9838). In summary, SD-PSFNet demonstrates excellent capability in complex scenes and dense rainfall conditions, providing a new physics-aware approach to image deraining.

PaperID: 1905, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07760

Authors:Menglin Wang, Xiaojin Gong, Jiachen Li, Genlin Ji

Affiliations: Nanjing Normal University, Zhejiang University

Title: Modality-Aware Bias Mitigation and Invariance Learning for Unsupervised Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification

Abstract:
Unsupervised visibleinfrared person re-identification (USVI-ReID) aims to match individuals across visible and infrared cameras without relying on any annotation. Given the significant gap across visible and infrared modality, estimating reliable cross-modality association becomes a major challenge in USVI-ReID. Existing methods usually adopt optimal transport to associate the intra-modality clusters, which is prone to propagating the local cluster errors, and also overlooks global instance-level relations. By mining and attending to the visible-infrared modality bias, this paper focuses on addressing cross-modality learning from two aspects: bias-mitigated global association and modality-invariant representation learning. Motivated by the camera-aware distance rectification in single-modality re-ID, we propose modality-aware Jaccard distance to mitigate the distance bias caused by modality discrepancy, so that more reliable cross-modality associations can be estimated through global clustering. To further improve cross-modality representation learning, a `split-and-contrast' strategy is designed to obtain modality-specific global prototypes. By explicitly aligning these prototypes under global association guidance, modality-invariant yet ID-discriminative representation learning can be achieved. While conceptually simple, our method obtains state-of-the-art performance on benchmark VI-ReID datasets and outperforms existing methods by a significant margin, validating its effectiveness.

PaperID: 1906, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.09287

Authors:Shilei Wang, Pujian Lai, Dong Gao, Jifeng Ning, Gong Cheng

Affiliations: School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University, College of Information Engineering, Northwest A\&F University

Title: Exploring Modality-Aware Fusion and Decoupled Temporal Propagation for Multi-Modal Object Tracking

Abstract:
Most existing multimodal trackers adopt uniform fusion strategies, overlooking the inherent differences between modalities. Moreover, they propagate temporal information through mixed tokens, leading to entangled and less discriminative temporal representations. To address these limitations, we propose MDTrack, a novel framework for modality-aware fusion and decoupled temporal propagation in multi-modal object tracking. Specifically, for modality-aware fusion, we allocate dedicated experts to each modality (Infrared, Event, Depth, and RGB) to process their respective representations. The gating mechanism within the Mixture of Experts (MoE) then dynamically selects the optimal experts based on the input features, enabling adaptive and modality-specific fusion. For decoupled temporal propagation, we introduce two separate State Space Model (SSM) structures to independently store and update the hidden states h of the RGB and X-modal streams, effectively capturing their distinct temporal information. To ensure synergy between the two temporal representations, we incorporate a set of cross-attentions between the input features of the two SSMs, facilitating implicit information exchange. The resulting temporally enriched features are then integrated into the backbone via another set of cross-attention, enhancing MDTrack’s ability to leverage temporal information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Both MDTrack-S (Modality-Specific Training) and MDTrack-U (Unified-Modality Training) achieve state-of-the-art performance across five multi-modal tracking benchmarks.

PaperID: 1907, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12224

Authors:Meng Wei, Kun Yuan, Shi Li, Yue Zhou, Long Bai, Nassir Navab, Hongliang Ren, Hong Joo Lee, Tom Vercauteren, Nicolas Padoy

Affiliations: King's College London, University of Strasbourg, Technical University of Munich, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title: Where It Moves, It Matters: Referring Surgical Instrument Segmentation via Motion

Abstract:
Enabling intuitive, languagedriven interaction with surgical scenes is a critical step toward intelligent operating rooms and autonomous surgical robotic assistance. However, the task of referring segmentation, localizing surgical instruments based on natural language descriptions, remains underexplored in surgical videos, with existing approaches struggling to generalize due to reliance on static visual cues and predefined instrument names. In this work, we introduce SurgRef, a novel motion-guided framework that grounds free-form language expressions in instrument motion, capturing how tools move and interact across time, rather than what they look like. This allows models to understand and segment instruments even under occlusion, ambiguity, or unfamiliar terminology. To train and evaluate SurgRef, we present Ref-IMotion, a diverse, multi-institutional video dataset with dense spatiotemporal masks and rich motion-centric expressions. SurgRef achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and generalization across surgical procedures, setting a new benchmark for robust, language-driven surgical video segmentation.

PaperID: 1908, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.14847

Authors:Meiqi Wu, Jiashu Zhu, Xiaokun Feng, Chubin Chen, Chen Zhu, Bingze Song, Fangyuan Mao, Jiahong Wu, Xiangxiang Chu, Kaiqi Huang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Alibaba Group, The Key Laboratory of Cognition and Decision Intelligence for Complex Systems, Tsinghua University, Southeast University, Institute of Computing Technology

Title: ImagerySearch: Adaptive Test-Time Search for Video Generation Beyond Semantic Dependency Constraints

Abstract:
Video generation models have achieved remarkable progress, particularly excelling in realistic scenarios; however, their performance degrades notably in imaginative scenarios. These prompts often involve rarely cooccurring concepts with long-distance semantic relationships, falling outside training distributions. Existing methods typically apply test-time scaling for improving video quality, but their fixed search spaces and static reward designs limit adaptability to imaginative scenarios. To fill this gap, we propose ImagerySearch, a dynamic test-time scaling law strategy inspired by imagery that adaptively adjusts the inference search space and reward guided by prompts, effectively enhancing generation quality in imaginative scenarios. Furthermore, we introduce LDT-Bench, the first benchmark targeting long-distance semantic prompts, designed to evaluate the creativity of video generation models. It comprises 2,839 challenging concept pairs from diverse recognition datasets and incorporates an automatic evaluation protocol to assess creative capacity. Extensive experiments on LDT-Bench demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms general generation models and test-time scaling approaches. Additionally, ImagerySearch achieves strong performance on VBench, confirming its effectiveness in improving video generation quality under diverse conditions.

PaperID: 1909, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.08014

Authors:Yun Xing, Nhat Chung, Jie Zhang, Yue Cao, Ivor Tsang, Yang Liu, Lei Ma, Qing Guo

Affiliations: University of Alberta, China A*STAR, National University of Singapore, Singapore A*STAR, Nanyang Technological University, Canada The University of Tokyo, Nankai University

Title: MAGIC: Mastering Physical Adversarial Generation in Context Through Collaborative LLM Agents

Abstract:
Physical adversarial attacks in driving scenarios can expose critical vulnerabilities in visual perception models. However, developing such attacks remains nontrivial due to diverse real-world environmental influences. Existing approaches either struggle to generalize to dynamic environments or fail to achieve consistent physical attack performance. To address these challenges, we propose MAGIC (Mastering Physical Adversarial Generation In Context), a novel framework powered by multi-modal LLM agents to automatically understand the scene context during testing time and generate adversarial patches through synergistic interaction of language and vision understanding. Specifically, MAGIC orchestrates three specialized LLM agents: the adv-patch generation agent masters the creation of deceptive patches via strategic prompt manipulation for text-to-image models; the adv-patch deployment agent ensures contextual coherence by determining optimal deployment strategies based on scene understanding; and the self-examination agent completes this trilogy by providing critical oversight and iterative refinement of both processes. We validate our approach with both digital and physical scenarios, i.e., nuImage and real-world scenes, where both statistical and visual results demonstrate that our MAGIC is powerful and effective for attacking widely applied object detection systems, such as YOLO and DETR series.

PaperID: 1910, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20835

Authors:Hao Yang, Qianyu Zhou, Haijia Sun, Xiangtai Li, Xuequan Lu, Lizhuang Ma, Shuicheng YAN

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Jilin University, NanJing university, Nanyang Technological University, The University of Western Australia, National University of Singapore

Title: PointDGRWKV: Generalizing RWKV-like Architecture to Unseen Domains for Point Cloud Classification

Abstract:
Domain Generalization (DG) has been recently explored to enhance the generalizability of Point Cloud Classification (PCC) models toward unseen domains. Prior works are based on convolutional networks, Transformer or Mamba architectures, either suffering from limited receptive fields or high computational cost, or insufficient longrange dependency modeling. RWKV, as an emerging architecture, possesses superior linear complexity, global receptive fields, and long-range dependency. In this paper, we present the first work that studies the generalizability of RWKV models in DG PCC. We find that directly applying RWKV to DG PCC encounters two significant challenges: RWKV's fixed direction token shift methods, like Q-Shift, introduce spatial distortions when applied to unstructured point clouds, weakening local geometric modeling and reducing robustness. In addition, the Bi-WKV attention in RWKV amplifies slight cross-domain differences in key distributions through exponential weighting, leading to attention shifts and degraded generalization. To this end, we propose PointDGRWKV, the first RWKV-based framework tailored for DG PCC. It introduces two core modules to enhance spatial modeling and cross-domain robustness, while maintaining RWKV's linear efficiency. In particular, we present Adaptive Geometric Token Shift to model local neighborhood structures to improve geometric context awareness. In addition, Cross-Domain key feature Distribution Alignment is designed to mitigate attention drift by aligning key feature distributions across domains. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that PointDGRWKV achieves state-of-the-art performance on DG PCC.

PaperID: 1911, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10068

Authors:Muzhou Yang, Wuzhou Quan, Mingqiang Wei

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Title: Perceive, Act and Correct: Confidence Is Not Enough for Hyperspectral Classification

Abstract:
Confidence alone is often misleading in hyperspectral image classification, as models tend to mistake high predictive scores for correctness while lacking awareness of uncertainty. This leads to confirmation bias, especially under sparse annotations or class imbalance, where models overfit confident errors and fail to generalize. We propose CABIN (CognitiveAware Behavior-Informed learNing), a semi-supervised framework that addresses this limitation through a closed-loop learning process of perception, action, and correction. CABIN first develops perceptual awareness by estimating epistemic uncertainty, identifying ambiguous regions where errors are likely to occur. It then acts by adopting an Uncertainty-Guided Dual Sampling Strategy, selecting uncertain samples for exploration while anchoring confident ones as stable pseudo-labels to reduce bias. To correct noisy supervision, CABIN introduces a Fine-Grained Dynamic Assignment Strategy that categorizes pseudo-labeled data into reliable, ambiguous, and noisy subsets, applying tailored losses to enhance generalization. Experimental results show that a wide range of state-of-the-art methods benefit from the integration of CABIN, with improved labeling efficiency and performance.

PaperID: 1912, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19133

Authors:Pengxuan Yang, Ben Lu, Zhongpu Xia, Chao Han, Yinfeng Gao, Teng Zhang, Kun Zhan, Xianpeng Lang, Yupeng Zheng, Qichao Zhang

Affiliations: The State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, CAS School of Advanced Interdisciplinary Sciences, Li Auto, CAS School of Artificial Intelligence

Title: WorldRFT: Latent World Model Planning with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Autonomous Driving

Abstract:
Latent World Models enhance scene representation through temporal selfsupervised learning, presenting a perception annotation-free paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving. However, the reconstruction-oriented representation learning tangles perception with planning tasks, leading to suboptimal optimization for planning. To address this challenge, we propose WorldRFT, a planning-oriented latent world model framework that aligns scene representation learning with planning via a hierarchical planning decomposition and local-aware interactive refinement mechanism, augmented by reinforcement learning fine-tuning (RFT) to enhance safety-critical policy performance. Specifically, WorldRFT integrates a vision-geometry foundation model to improve 3D spatial awareness, employs hierarchical planning task decomposition to guide representation optimization, and utilizes local-aware iterative refinement to derive a planning-oriented driving policy. Furthermore, we introduce Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), which applies trajectory Gaussianization and collision-aware rewards to fine-tune the driving policy, yielding systematic improvements in safety. WorldRFT achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on both open-loop nuScenes and closed-loop NavSim benchmarks. On nuScenes, it reduces collision rates by 83% (0.30% → 0.05%). On NavSim, using camera-only sensors input, it attains competitive performance with the LiDAR-based SOTA method DiffusionDrive (87.8 vs. 88.1 PDMS).

PaperID: 1913, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06734

Authors:Qianfeng Yang, Xiang Chen, Pengpeng Li, Qiyuan Guan, Guiyue Jin, Jiyu Jin

Affiliations: Dalian Polytechnic University, Nanjing University of Science and Technology

Title: Rethinking Rainy 3D Scene Reconstruction via Perspective Transforming and Brightness Tuning

Abstract:
Rain degrades the visual quality of multiview images, which are essential for 3D scene reconstruction, resulting in inaccurate and incomplete reconstruction results. Existing datasets often overlook two critical characteristics of real rainy 3D scenes: the viewpoint-dependent variation in the appearance of rain streaks caused by their projection onto 2D images, and the reduction in ambient brightness resulting from cloud coverage during rainfall. To improve data realism, we construct a new dataset named OmniRain3D that incorporates perspective heterogeneity and brightness dynamicity, enabling more faithful simulation of rain degradation in 3D scenes. Based on this dataset, we propose an end-to-end reconstruction framework named REVR-GSNet (Rain Elimination and Visibility Recovery for 3D Gaussian Splatting). Specifically, REVR-GSNet integrates recursive brightness enhancement, Gaussian primitive optimization, and GS-guided rain elimination into a unified architecture through joint alternating optimization, achieving high-fidelity reconstruction of clean 3D scenes from rain-degraded inputs. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our dataset and method. Our dataset and method provide a foundation for future research on multi-view image deraining and rainy 3D scene reconstruction.

PaperID: 1914, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18075

Authors:Jianhang Yao, Yongbin Zheng, Siqi Lu, Wanying Xu, Peng Sun

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology

Title: VK-Det: Visual Knowledge Guided Prototype Learning for Open-Vocabulary Aerial Object Detection

Abstract:
To identify objects beyond predefined categories, openvocabulary aerial object detection (OVAD) leverages the zero-shot capabilities of visual-language models (VLMs) to generalize from base to novel categories. Existing approaches typically utilize self-learning mechanisms with weak text supervision to generate region-level pseudo-labels to align detectors with VLMs semantic spaces. However, text dependence induces semantic bias, restricting open-vocabulary expansion to text-specified concepts. We propose VK-Det, a visual knowledge-guided open-vocabulary object detection framework without extra supervision. First, we discover and leverage vision encoder's inherent informative region perception to attain fine-grained localization and adaptive distillation. Second, we introduce a novel prototype-aware pseudo-labeling strategy. It models inter-class decision boundaries through feature clustering and maps detection regions to latent categories via prototype matching. This enhances attention to novel objects while compensating for missing supervision. Extensive experiments show state-of-the-art performance, achieving 30.1 mAPᴺ on DIOR and 23.3 mAPᴺ on DOTA, outperforming even extra supervised methods.

PaperID: 1915, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08169

Authors:Xinhui Yin, Qifei Li, Yilin Guo, Hongxia Xie, Xiaoli Zhang

Affiliations: Jilin University, Peking University

Title: KPLM-STA: Physically-Accurate Shadow Synthesis for Human Relighting via Keypoint-Based Light Modeling

Abstract:
Image composition aims to seamlessly integrate a foreground object into a background, where generating realistic and geometrically accurate shadows remains a persistent challenge. While recent diffusionbased methods have outperformed GAN-based approaches, existing techniques, such as the diffusion-based relighting framework IC-Light, still fall short in producing shadows with both high appearance realism and geometric precision, especially in composite images. To address these limitations, we propose a novel shadow generation framework based on a Keypoints Linear Model (KPLM) and a Shadow Triangle Algorithm (STA). KPLM models articulated human bodies using nine keypoints and one bounding block, enabling physically plausible shadow projection and dynamic shading across joints, thereby enhancing visual realism. STA further improves geometric accuracy by computing shadow angles, lengths, and spatial positions through explicit geometric formulations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on shadow realism benchmarks, particularly under complex human poses, and generalizes effectively to multi-directional relighting scenarios such as those supported by IC-Light.

PaperID: 1916, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15488

Authors:Jiangyong Yu, Changyong Shu, Sifan Zhou, Zichen Yu, Xing Hu, Dawei Yang

Affiliations: Houmo AI, Southeast University, Dalian University of Technology

Title: FQ-PETR: Fully Quantized Position Embedding Transformation for Multi-View 3D Object Detection

Abstract:
Camerabased multi-view 3D detection is crucial for autonomous driving. PETR and its variants (PETRs) excel in benchmarks but face deployment challenges due to high computational cost and memory footprint. Quantization is an effective technique for compressing deep neural networks by reducing the bit width of weights and activations. However, directly applying existing quantization methods to PETRs leads to severe accuracy degradation. This issue primarily arises from two key challenges: (1) significant magnitude disparity between multi-modal features—specifically, image features and camera-ray positional embeddings (PE), and (2) the inefficiency and approximation error of quantizing non-linear operators, which commonly rely on hardware-unfriendly computations. In this paper, we propose FQ-PETR, a fully quantized framework for PETRs, featuring three key innovations: (1) Quantization-Friendly LiDAR-ray Position Embedding (QFPE): Replacing multi-point sampling with LiDAR-prior-guided single-point sampling and anchor-based embedding eliminates problematic non-linearities (e.g., inverse-sigmoid) and aligns PE scale with image features, preserving accuracy. (2) Dual-Lookup Table (DULUT): This algorithm approximates complex non-linear functions using two cascaded linear LUTs, achieving high fidelity with minimal entries and no specialized hardware. (3) Quantization After Numerical Stabilization (QANS): Performing quantization after softmax numerical stabilization mitigates attention distortion from large inputs. On PETRs (e.g., PETR, StreamPETR, PETRv2, MV2d), FQ-PETR under W8A8 achieves near-floating-point accuracy (<1% degradation) while reducing latency by up to 75%, significantly outperforming existing PTQ and QAT baselines.

PaperID: 1917, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13113

Authors:Zhaocheng Yu, Kui Jiang, Junjun Jiang, Xianming Liu, Guanglu Sun, Yi Xiao

Affiliations: Faculty of Computing, Harbin Institute of Technology, School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin University of Science and Technology, School of Computer and Artificial Intelligence, Zhengzhou University

Title: Semantics and Content Matter: Towards Multi-Prior Hierarchical Mamba for Image Deraining

Abstract:
Rain significantly degrades the performance of computer vision systems, particularly in applications like autonomous driving and video surveillance. While existing deraining methods have made considerable progress, they often struggle with fidelity of semantic and spatial details. To address these limitations, we propose the MultiPrior Hierarchical Mamba (MPHM) network for image deraining. This novel architecture synergistically integrates macro-semantic textual priors (CLIP) for task-level semantic guidance and micro-structural visual priors (DINOv2) for scene-aware structural information. To alleviate potential conflicts between heterogeneous priors, we devise a progressive Priors Fusion Injection (PFI) that strategically injects complementary cues at different decoder levels. Meanwhile, we equip the backbone network with an elaborate Hierarchical Mamba Module (HMM) to facilitate robust feature representation, featuring a Fourier-enhanced dual-path design that concurrently addresses global context modeling and local detail recovery. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate MPHM's state-of-the-art performance, achieving a 0.57 dB PSNR gain on the Rain200H dataset while delivering superior generalization on real-world rainy scenarios.

PaperID: 1918, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11102

Authors:Shangbo Yuan, Jie Xu, Ping Hu, Xiaofeng Zhu, Na Zhao

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Hainan University

Title: Graph Smoothing for Enhanced Local Geometry Learning in Point Cloud Analysis

Abstract:
Graphbased methods have proven to be effective in capturing relationships among points for 3D point cloud analysis. However, these methods often suffer from suboptimal graph structures, particularly due to sparse connections at boundary points and noisy connections in junction areas. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method that integrates a graph smoothing module with an enhanced local geometry learning module. Specifically, we identify the limitations of conventional graph structures, particularly in handling boundary points and junction areas. In response, we introduce a graph smoothing module designed to optimize the graph structure and minimize the negative impact of unreliable sparse and noisy connections. Based on the optimized graph structure, we improve the feature extract function with local geometry information. These include shape features derived from adaptive geometric descriptors based on eigenvectors and distribution features obtained through cylindrical coordinate transformation. Experimental results on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our method in various point cloud learning tasks, i.e., classification, part segmentation, and semantic segmentation.

PaperID: 1919, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.22262

Authors:Yujian Yuan, Changjie Wu, Xinyuan Chang, Sijin Wang, Hang Zhang, Shiyi Liang, Shuang Zeng, Mu Xu

Affiliations: Alibaba Group

Title: UniMapGen: A Generative Framework for Large-Scale Map Construction from Multi-modal Data

Abstract:
Largescale map construction is foundational for critical applications such as autonomous driving and navigation systems. Traditional large-scale map construction approaches mainly rely on costly and inefficient special data collection vehicles and labor-intensive annotation processes. While existing satellite-based methods have demonstrated promising potential in enhancing the efficiency and coverage of map construction, they exhibit two major limitations: (1) inherent drawbacks of satellite data (e.g., occlusions, outdatedness) and (2) inefficient vectorization from perception-based methods, resulting in discontinuous and rough roads that require extensive post-processing. This paper presents a novel generative framework, UniMapGen, for large-scale map construction, offering three key innovations: (1) representing lane lines as discrete sequence and establishing an iterative strategy to generate more complete and smooth map vectors than traditional perception-based methods. (2) proposing a flexible architecture that supports multi-modal inputs, enabling dynamic selection among BEV, PV, and text prompt, to overcome the drawbacks of satellite data. (3) developing a state update strategy for global continuity and consistency of the constructed large-scale map. UniMapGen achieves state-of-the-art performance on the OpenSatMap dataset. Furthermore, UniMapGen can infer occluded roads and predict roads missing from dataset annotations.

PaperID: 1920, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12679

Authors:Bofei Zhang, Zirui Shang, Zhi Gao, Wang Zhang, Rui Xie, Xiaojian Ma, Tao Yuan, Xinxiao Wu, Song-Chun Zhu, Qing Li

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory for General Artificial Intelligence, Beijing Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Technology, School of Computer Science & Technology, BIGAI School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Peking University, BIGAI Shanghai Jiaotong University, Beijing Institute of Technology, Tsinghua University

Title: TongUI: Internet-Scale Trajectories from Multimodal Web Tutorials for Generalized GUI Agents

Abstract:
Building Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents is a promising research direction, which simulates human interaction with computers or mobile phones to perform diverse GUI tasks. However, a major challenge in developing generalized GUI agents is the lack of sufficient trajectory data across various operating systems and applications, mainly due to the high cost of manual annotations. In this paper, we propose the TongUI framework that transforms millions of multimodal web tutorials into GUI trajectories for generalized GUI agents. Concretely, we crawl GUI videos and articles from the Internet and process them into GUI agent trajectory data. Based on this, we construct the GUINet-1M dataset, which contains 1 million trajectories across five operating systems and over 280 applications. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest open-source GUI trajectory dataset. We develop the TongUI agent by fine-tuning Qwen2.5-VL-3B/7B/32B models on GUI-Net-1M, which shows consistent performance improvements on commonly used grounding and navigation benchmarks, outperforming baseline agents by 10% on multiple benchmarks, showing the effectiveness of the GUI-Net-1M dataset and underscoring the significance of our TongUI framework.

PaperID: 1921, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11488

Authors:Bozhou Zhang, Jingyu Li, Nan Song, Li Zhang

Affiliations: School of Data Science, Fudan University Shanghai Innovation Institute

Title: Perception in Plan: Coupled Perception and Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Abstract:
Endto-end autonomous driving has achieved remarkable advancements in recent years. Existing methods primarily follow a perception–planning paradigm, where perception and planning are executed sequentially within a fully differentiable framework for planning-oriented optimization. We further advance this paradigm through a "perception-in-plan'' framework design, which integrates perception into the planning process. This design facilitates targeted perception guided by evolving planning objectives over time, ultimately enhancing planning performance. Building on this insight, we introduce VeteranAD, a coupled perception and planning framework for end-to-end autonomous driving. By incorporating multi-mode anchored trajectories as planning priors, the perception module is specifically designed to gather traffic elements along these trajectories, enabling comprehensive and targeted perception. Planning trajectories are then generated based on both the perception results and the planning priors. To make perception fully serve planning, we adopt an autoregressive strategy that progressively predicts future trajectories while focusing on relevant regions for targeted perception at each step. With this simple yet effective design, VeteranAD fully unleashes the potential of planning-oriented end-to-end methods, leading to more accurate and reliable driving behavior. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM and Bench2Drive datasets demonstrate that our VeteranAD achieves state-of-the-art performance.

PaperID: 1922, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.05255

Authors:Guanghao Zhang, Tao Zhong, Yan Xia, Mushui Liu, Zhelun Yu, Haoyuan Li, Wanggui He, Dong She, Yi Wang, Hao Jiang

Affiliations: Alibaba Group

Title: CMMCoT: Enhancing Complex Multi-Image Comprehension via Multi-Modal Chain-of-Thought and Memory Augmentation

Abstract:
While previous multimodal slowthinking methods have demonstrated remarkable success in single-image understanding scenarios, their effectiveness becomes fundamentally constrained when extended to more complex multi-image comprehension tasks. This limitation stems from their predominant reliance on text-based intermediate reasoning processes. While for human, when engaging in sophisticated multi-image analysis, they typically perform two complementary cognitive operations: (1) continuous cross-image visual comparison through region-of-interest matching, and (2) dynamic memorization of critical visual concepts throughout the reasoning chain. Motivated by these observations, we propose the Complex Multi-Modal Chain-of-Thought (CMMCoT) framework, a multi-step reasoning framework that mimics human-like "slow thinking" for multi-image understanding. Our approach incorporates two key innovations: (1) The construction of interleaved multimodal multi-step reasoning chains, which utilize critical visual region tokens, extracted from intermediate reasoning steps, as supervisory signals. This mechanism not only facilitates comprehensive cross-modal understanding but also enhances model interpretability. (2) The introduction of a test-time memory augmentation module that expands the model’s reasoning capacity during inference while preserving parameter efficiency. Furthermore, to facilitate research in this direction, we have curated a novel multi-image slow-thinking dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.

PaperID: 1923, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16161

Authors:Lirui Zhang, Zhengkai Zhao, Zhi Zuo, Pan Gao, Jie Qin

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Title: Simba: Towards High-Fidelity and Geometrically-Consistent Point Cloud Completion via Transformation Diffusion

Abstract:
Point cloud completion is a fundamental task in 3D vision. A persistent challenge in this field is simultaneously preserving finegrained details present in the input while ensuring the global structural integrity of the completed shape. While recent works leveraging local symmetry transformations via direct regression have significantly improved the preservation of geometric structure details, these methods suffer from two major limitations: (1) These regression-based methods are prone to overfitting which tend to memorize instant-specific transformations instead of learning a generalizable geometric prior. (2) Their reliance on point-wise transformation regression lead to high sensitivity to input noise, severely degrading their robustness and generalization. To address these challenges, we introduce Simba, a novel framework that reformulates point-wise transformation regression as a distribution learning problem. Our approach integrates symmetry priors with the powerful generative capabilities of diffusion models, avoiding instance-specific memorization while capturing robust geometric structures. Additionally, we introduce a hierarchical Mamba-based architecture to achieve high-fidelity upsampling. Extensive experiments across the PCN, ShapeNet, and KITTI benchmarks validate our method's state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.

PaperID: 1924, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16211

Authors:Shikang Zheng, Liang Feng, Xinyu Wang, Qinming Zhou, Peiliang Cai, Chang Zou, Jiacheng Liu, Yuqi Lin, Junjie Chen, Yue Ma, Linfeng Zhang

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China South China University of Technology, China Tsinghua University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: Forecast Then Calibrate: Feature Caching as ODE for Efficient Diffusion Transformers

Abstract:
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in highfidelity image and video generation. To reduce their substantial computational costs, feature caching techniques have been proposed to accelerate inference by reusing hidden representations from previous timesteps. However, current methods often struggle to maintain generation quality at high acceleration ratios, where prediction errors increase sharply due to the inherent instability of long-step forecasting. In this work, we adopt an ordinary differential equation (ODE) perspective on the hidden-feature sequence, modeling layer representations along the trajectory as a feature-ODE. We attribute the degradation of existing caching strategies to their inability to robustly integrate historical features under large skipping intervals. To address this, we propose FoCa (Forecast-then-Calibrate), which treats feature caching as a feature-ODE solving problem. Extensive experiments on image, video generation, and super-resolution tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of FoCa, especially under aggressive acceleration. Without additional training, FoCa achieves near-lossless speedups of 5.50× on FLUX, 6.45× on HunyuanVideo, 3.17× on Inf-DiT, and maintains high quality with a 4.53× speedup on DiT.

PaperID: 1925, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12030

Authors:Jun Zhou, Chi Xu, Kaifeng Tang, Yuting Ge, Tingrui Guo, Li Cheng

Affiliations: School of Automation, China University of Geosciences, Ministry of Education, University of Alberta, AB Canada, Wuhan China, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Title: VPHO: Joint Visual-Physical Cue Learning and Aggregation for Hand-Object Pose Estimation

Abstract:
Estimating the 3D poses of hands and objects from a single RGB image is a fundamental yet challenging problem, with broad applications in augmented reality and humancomputer interaction. Existing methods largely rely on visual cues alone, often producing results that violate physical constraints such as interpenetration or non-contact. Recent efforts to incorporate physics reasoning typically depend on post-optimization or non-differentiable physics engines, which compromise visual consistency and end-to-end trainability. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel framework that jointly integrates visual and physical cues for hand-object pose estimation. This integration is achieved through two key ideas: 1) joint visual-physical cue learning: The model is trained to extract 2D visual cues and 3D physical cues, thereby enabling more comprehensive representation learning for hand-object interactions; 2) candidate pose aggregation: A novel refinement process that aggregates multiple diffusion-generated candidate poses by leveraging both visual and physical predictions, yielding a final estimate that is visually consistent and physically plausible. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches in both pose accuracy and physical plausibility.

PaperID: 1926, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15580

Authors:Sifan Zhou, Yichao Cao, Jiahao Nie, Yuqian Fu, Ziyu Zhao, Xiaobo Lu, Shuo Wang

Affiliations: School of Automation, Ministry of Education, Southeast University, Central South University, Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics, Sofia University ”St. Kliment Ohridski”, Mininglamp Technology

Title: CompTrack: Information Bottleneck-Guided Low-Rank Dynamic Token Compression for Point Cloud Tracking

Abstract:
3D single object tracking (SOT) in LiDAR point clouds is a critical task in computer vision and autonomous driving. Despite great success having been achieved, the inherent sparsity of point clouds introduces a dualredundancy challenge that limits existing trackers: (1) vast spatial redundancy from background noise impairs accuracy, and (2) informational redundancy within the foreground hinders efficiency. To tackle these issues, we propose CompTrack, a novel end-to-end framework that systematically eliminates both forms of redundancy in point clouds. First, CompTrack incorporates a Spatial Foreground Predictor (SFP) module to filter out irrelevant background noise based on information entropy, addressing spatial redundancy. Subsequently, its core is an Information Bottleneck-guided Dynamic Token Compression (IB-DTC) module that eliminates the informational redundancy within the foreground. Theoretically grounded in low-rank approximation, this module leverages an online SVD analysis to adaptively compress the redundant foreground into a compact and highly informative set of proxy tokens. Extensive experiments on KITTI, nuScenes and Waymo datasets demonstrate that CompTrack achieves top-performing tracking performance with superior efficiency, running at a real-time 90 FPS on a single RTX 3090 GPU.

PaperID: 1927, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23463

Authors:Xingcheng Zhou, Xuyuan Han, Feng Yang, Yunpu Ma, Volker Tresp, Alois Knoll

Affiliations: Technical University of Munich, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

Title: OpenDriveVLA: Towards End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Large Vision Language Action Model

Abstract:
We present OpenDriveVLA, a VisionLanguage Action (VLA) model designed for end-to-end autonomous driving, built upon open-source large language models. OpenDriveVLA generates spatially-grounded driving actions by leveraging multimodal inputs, including both 2D and 3D instance-aware visual representations, ego vehicle states, and language commands. To bridge the modality gap between driving visual representations and language embeddings, we introduce a hierarchical vision-language alignment process, projecting both 2D and 3D structured visual tokens into a unified semantic space. Furthermore, we incorporate structured agent–environment–ego interaction modeling into the autoregressive decoding process, enabling the model to capture fine-grained spatial dependencies and behavior-aware dynamics critical for reliable trajectory planning. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that OpenDriveVLA achieves state-of-the-art results across open-loop trajectory planning and driving-related question-answering tasks. Qualitative analyses further illustrate its superior capability to follow high-level driving commands and robustly generate trajectories under challenging scenarios, highlighting its potential for next-generation end-to-end autonomous driving.

PaperID: 1928, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07749

Authors:Shengqian Zhu, Chengrong Yu, Qiang Wang, Ying Song, Guangjun Li, Jiafei Wu, Xiaogang Xu, Zhang Yi, Junjie Hu

Affiliations: Sichuan University, Zhejiang Lab, Hong Kong

Title: Class Incremental Medical Image Segmentation via Prototype-Guided Calibration and Dual-Aligned Distillation

Abstract:
Class incremental medical image segmentation (CIMIS) aims to preserve knowledge of previously learned classes while learning new ones without relying on oldclass annotations. However, existing methods 1) either adopt one-size-fits-all strategies that treat all spatial regions and feature channels equally, which may hinder the preservation of accurate old knowledge, 2) or focus solely on aligning local prototypes with global ones for old classes while overlooking their local representations in new data, leading to knowledge degradation. To mitigate the above issues, we propose Prototype-Guided Calibration Distillation (PGCD) and Dual-Aligned Prototype Distillation (DAPD) for CIMIS in this paper. Specifically, PGCD exploits prototype-to-feature similarity to calibrate class-specific distillation intensity in different spatial regions, effectively reinforcing reliable old knowledge and suppressing misleading cues from old classes. Complementarily, DAPD aligns the local prototypes of old classes extracted from the current model with both global historical prototypes and local prototypes, further enhancing segmentation performance on old categories. Comprehensive evaluations on two widely used multi-organ segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its robustness and generalization capabilities.

PaperID: 1929, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13102

Authors:Yu Zhu, Dan Zeng, Shuiwang Li, Qijun Zhao, Qiaomu Shen, Bo Tang

Affiliations: Sun Yat-sen University, Guilin University of Technology, Sichuan University, Beijing Institute of Technology, Southern University of Science and Technology

Title: CapeNext: Rethinking and Refining Dynamic Support Information for Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation

Abstract:
Recent research in CategoryAgnostic Pose Estimation (CAPE) has adopted fixed textual keypoint description as semantic prior for two-stage pose matching frameworks. While this paradigm enhances robustness and flexibility by disentangling the dependency of support images, our critical analysis reveals two inherent limitations of static joint embedding: (1) polysemy-induced cross-category ambiguity during the matching process(e.g., the concept "leg" exhibiting divergent visual manifestations across humans and furniture), and (2) insufficient discriminability for fine-grained intra-category variations (e.g., posture and fur discrepancies between a sleeping white cat and a standing black cat). To overcome these challenges, we propose a new framework that innovatively integrates hierarchical cross-modal interaction with dual-stream feature refinement, enhancing the joint embedding with both class-level and instance-specific cues from textual description and specific images. Experiments on the MP-100 dataset demonstrate that, regardless of the network backbone, CapeNext consistently outperforms state-of-the-art CAPE methods by a large margin.

PaperID: 1930, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07015

Authors:Hannes Ihalainen, Dieter Vandesande, André Schidler, Jeremias Berg, Bart Bogaerts, Matti Järvisalo

Affiliations: University of Helsinki, Vrije Universiteit Brussel KU Leuven, University of Freiburg, KU Leuven Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Title: Efficient and Reliable Hitting-Set Computations for the Implicit Hitting Set Approach

Abstract:
The implicit hitting set (IHS) approach offers a general framework for solving computationally hard combinatorial optimization problems declaratively. IHS iterates between a decision oracle used for extracting sources of inconsistency and an optimizer for computing socalled hitting sets (HSs) over the accumulated sources of inconsistency. While the decision oracle is language-specific, the optimizers is usually instantiated through integer programming. We explore alternative algorithmic techniques for hitting set optimization based on different ways of employing pseudo-Boolean (PB) reasoning as well as stochastic local search. We extensively evaluate the practical feasibility of the alternatives in particular in the context of pseudo-Boolean (0-1 IP) optimization as one of the most recent instantiations of IHS. Highlighting a trade-off between efficiency and reliability, while a commercial IP solver turns out to remain the most effective way to instantiate HS computations, it can cause correctness issues due to numerical instability; in fact, we show that exact HS computations instantiated via PB reasoning can be made competitive with a numerically exact IP solver. Furthermore, the use of PB reasoning as a basis for HS computations allows for obtaining certificates for the correctness of IHS computations, generally applicable to any IHS instantiation in which reasoning in the declarative language at hand can be captured in the PB-based proof format we employ.

PaperID: 1931, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12922

Authors:Yu Hou, Won-Yong Shin

Affiliations: Yonsei University

Title: Tokenize Once, Recommend Anywhere: Unified Item Tokenization for Multi-domain LLM-based Recommendation

Abstract:
Large language model (LLM)based recommender systems have achieved high-quality performance by bridging the discrepancy between the item space and the language space through item tokenization. However, existing item tokenization methods typically require training separate models for each item domain, limiting generalization. Moreover, the diverse distributions and semantics across item domains make it difficult to construct a unified tokenization that preserves domain-specific information. To address these challenges, we propose UniTok, a Unified item Tokenization framework that integrates our own mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture with a series of codebooks to convert items into discrete tokens, enabling scalable tokenization while preserving semantic information across multiple item domains. Specifically, items from different domains are first projected into a unified latent space through a shared encoder. They are then routed to domain-specific experts to capture the unique semantics, while a shared expert, which is always active, encodes common knowledge transferable across domains. Additionally, to mitigate semantic imbalance across domains, we present a mutual information calibration mechanism, which guides the model towards retaining similar levels of semantic information for each domain. Comprehensive experiments on wide-ranging real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed UniTok framework is (a) highly effective: achieving up to 51.89% improvements over strong benchmarks, (b) theoretically sound: showing the analytical validity of our architectural design and optimization; and (c) highly generalizable: demonstrating robust performance across diverse domains without requiring per-domain retraining, a capability not supported by existing baselines.

PaperID: 1932, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.04870

Authors:Jun Hu, Yufei He, Yuan Li, Bryan Hooi, Bingsheng He

Affiliations: National University of Singapore

Title: NTSFormer: A Self-Teaching Graph Transformer for Multimodal Isolated Cold-Start Node Classification

Abstract:
Isolated coldstart node classification on multimodal graphs is challenging because such nodes have no edges and often have missing modalities (e.g., absent text or image features). Existing methods address structural isolation by degrading graph learning models to multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) for isolated cold-start inference, using a teacher model (with graph access) to guide the MLP. However, this results in limited model capacity in the student, which is further challenged when modalities are missing. In this paper, we propose Neighbor-to-Self Graph Transformer (NTSFormer), a unified Graph Transformer framework that jointly tackles the isolation and missing-modality issues via a self-teaching paradigm. Specifically, NTSFormer uses a cold-start attention mask to simultaneously make two predictions for each node: a "student" prediction based only on self information (i.e., the node's own features), and a "teacher" prediction incorporating both self and neighbor information. This enables the model to supervise itself without degrading to an MLP, thereby fully leveraging the Transformer's capacity to handle missing modalities. To handle diverse graph information and missing modalities, NTSFormer performs a one-time multimodal graph pre-computation that converts structural and feature data into token sequences, which are then processed by Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Input Projection and Transformer layers for effective fusion. Experiments on public datasets show that NTSFormer achieves superior performance for multimodal isolated cold-start node classification.

PaperID: 1933, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21653

Authors:Yuan Li, Jun Hu, Bryan Hooi, Bingsheng He, Cheng Chen

Affiliations: National University of Singapore, ByteDance Inc.

Title: DGP: A Dual-Granularity Prompting Framework for Fraud Detection with Graph-Enhanced LLMs

Abstract:
Realworld fraud detection applications benefit from graph learning techniques that jointly exploit node features—often rich in textual data—and graph structural information. Recently, Graph-Enhanced LLMs have emerged as a promising graph learning approach that converts graph information into prompts, exploiting LLMs' ability to reason over both textual and structural information. Among them, text-only prompting, which converts graph information into prompts consisting solely of text tokens, offers a solution that relies only on LLM tuning without requiring additional graph-specific encoders. However, text-only prompting struggles on heterogeneous fraud-detection graphs: multi-hop relations expand exponentially with each additional hop, leading to rapidly growing neighborhoods associated with dense textual information. These neighborhoods may overwhelm the model with long, irrelevant content in the prompt and suppress key signals from the target node, thereby degrading performance. To address this challenge, we propose Dual Granularity Prompting (DGP), which mitigates information overload by preserving fine-grained textual details for the target node while summarizing neighbor information into coarse-grained text prompts. DGP introduces tailored summarization strategies for different data modalities—bi-level semantic abstraction for textual fields and statistical aggregation for numerical features—enabling effective compression of verbose neighbor content into concise, informative prompts. Experiments across public and industry datasets demonstrate that DGP operates within a manageable token budget while improving fraud detection performance by up to 6.8% (AUPRC) over state-of-the-art methods, showing the potential of Graph-Enhanced LLMs for fraud detection.

PaperID: 1934, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12645

Authors:Hongyang Liu, Zhu Sun, Tianjun Wei, Yan Wang, Jiajie Zhu, Xinghua Qu

Affiliations: Macquarie University, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Nanyang Technological University, Bytedance Seed

Title: Diagnostic-Guided Dynamic Profile Optimization for LLM-based User Simulators in Sequential Recommendation

Abstract:
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled realistic user simulators for developing and evaluating recommender systems (RSs). However, existing LLMbased simulators for RSs face two major limitations: (1) static and single-step prompt-based inference that leads to inaccurate and incomplete user profile construction; (2) unrealistic and single-round recommendation-feedback interaction pattern that fails to capture real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose DGDPO (Diagnostic-Guided Dynamic Profile Optimization), a novel framework that constructs user profile through a dynamic and iterative optimization process to enhance the simulation fidelity. Specifically, DGDPO incorporates two core modules within each optimization loop: firstly, a specialized LLM-based diagnostic module, calibrated through our novel training strategy, accurately identifies specific defects in the user profile. Subsequently, a generalized LLM-based treatment module analyzes the diagnosed defect and generates targeted suggestions to refine the profile. Furthermore, unlike existing LLM-based user simulators that are limited to single-round interactions, we are the first to integrate DGDPO with sequential recommenders, enabling a bidirectional evolution where user profiles and recommendation strategies adapt to each other over multi-round interactions. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

PaperID: 1935, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03858

Authors:Ya Liu, Junbin Liu, Wing-Kin Ma, Aritra Konar

Affiliations: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, KU Leuven

Title: A Scalable and Exact Relaxation for Densest k-Subgraph via Error Bounds

Abstract:
Given an undirected graph and a size parameter k, the Densest kSubgraph (DkS) problem extracts the subgraph on k vertices with the largest number of induced edges. While DkS is NP--hard and difficult to approximate, penalty-based continuous relaxations of the problem have recently enjoyed practical success for real-world instances of DkS. In this work, we propose a scalable and exact continuous penalization approach for DkS using the error bound principle, which enables the design of suitable penalty functions. Notably, we develop new theoretical guarantees ensuring that both the global and local optima of the penalized problem match those of the original problem. The proposed penalized reformulation enables the use of first-order continuous optimization methods. In particular, we develop a non-convex proximal gradient algorithm, where the non-convex proximal operator can be computed in closed form, resulting in low per-iteration complexity. We also provide convergence analysis of the algorithm. Experiments on large-scale instances of the DkS problem and one of its variants, the Densest (k1, k2) Bipartite Subgraph (Dk1k2BS) problem, demonstrate that our method achieves a favorable balance between computation cost and solution quality.

PaperID: 1936, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17989

Authors:Jiayi Luo, Qingyun Sun, Yuecen Wei, Haonan Yuan, Xingcheng Fu, Jianxin Li

Affiliations: Beihang University, Beijing University, Guangxi Normal University

Title: Privacy Auditing of Multi-Domain Graph Pre-Trained Model Under Membership Inference Attacks

Abstract:
Multidomain graph pre-training has emerged as a pivotal technique in developing graph foundation models. While it greatly improves the generalization of graph neural networks, its privacy risks under membership inference attacks (MIAs), which aim to identify whether a specific instance was used in training (member), remain largely unexplored. However, effectively conducting MIAs against multi-domain graph pre-trained models is a significant challenge due to: (i) Enhanced Generalization Capability: Multi-domain pre-training reduces the overfitting characteristics commonly exploited by MIAs. (ii) Unrepresentative Shadow Datasets: Diverse training graphs hinder the obtaining of reliable shadow graphs. (iii) Weakened Membership Signals: Embedding-based outputs offer less informative cues than logits for MIAs. To tackle these challenges, we propose MGP-MIA, a novel framework for Membership Inference Attacks against Multi-domain Graph Pre-trained models. Specifically, we first propose a membership signal amplification mechanism that amplifies the overfitting characteristics of target models via machine unlearning. We then design an incremental shadow model construction mechanism that builds a reliable shadow model with limited shadow graphs via incremental learning. Finally, we introduce a similarity-based inference mechanism that identifies members based on their similarity to positive and negative samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed MGP-MIA and reveal the privacy risks of multi-domain graph pre-training.

PaperID: 1937, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12579

Authors:Yongwen Ren, Chao Wang, Peng Du, Chuan Qin, Dazhong Shen, Hui Xiong

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, iFLYTEK Co., School of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, University of Science and Technology of China, School of Software and Microelectronics, Peking University, Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, College of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Thrust of Artificial Intelligence, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: Enhancing Conversational Recommender Systems with Tree-Structured Knowledge and Pretrained Language Models

Abstract:
Recent advances in pretrained language models (PLMs) have significantly improved conversational recommender systems (CRS), enabling more fluent and contextaware interactions. To further enhance accuracy and mitigate hallucination, many methods integrate PLMs with knowledge graphs (KGs), but face key challenges: failing to fully exploit PLM reasoning over graph relationships, indiscriminately incorporating retrieved knowledge without context filtering, and neglecting collaborative preferences in multi-turn dialogues. To this end, we propose PCRS-TKA, a prompt-based framework employing retrieval-augmented generation to integrate PLMs with KGs. PCRS-TKA constructs dialogue-specific knowledge trees from KGs and serializes them into texts, enabling structure-aware reasoning while capturing rich entity semantics. Our approach selectively filters context-relevant knowledge and explicitly models collaborative preferences using specialized supervision signals. A semantic alignment module harmonizes heterogeneous inputs, reducing noise and enhancing accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PCRS-TKA consistently outperforms all baselines in both recommendation and conversational quality.

PaperID: 1938, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01672

Authors:Zhongyuan Wu, Jingyuan Wang, Zexuan Cheng, Yilong Zhou, Weizhi Wang, Juhua Pu, Chao Li, Changqing Ma

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, China MOE Engineering Research Center of Advanced Computer Application Technology, China School of Economics and Management, China MIIT Key Laboratory of Data Intelligence and Management, Capinfo Co.

Title: ICAD-LLM: One-for-All Anomaly Detection via In-Context Learning with Large Language Models

Abstract:
Anomaly detection (AD) is a fundamental task of critical importance across numerous domains. Current systems increasingly operate in rapidly evolving environments that generate diverse yet interconnected data modalities—such as time series, system logs, and tabular records—as exemplified by modern IT systems. Effective AD methods in such environments must therefore possess two critical capabilities: (1) the ability to handle heterogeneous data formats within a unified framework, allowing the model to process and detect multiple modalities in a consistent manner during anomalous events; (2) a strong generalization ability to quickly adapt to new scenarios without extensive retraining. However, most existing methods fall short of these requirements, as they typically focus on single modalities and lack the flexibility to generalize across domains. To address this gap, we introduce a novel paradigm: InContext Anomaly Detection (ICAD), where anomalies are defined by their dissimilarity to a relevant reference set of normal samples. Under this paradigm, we propose ICAD-LLM, a unified AD framework leveraging Large Language Models' in-context learning abilities to process heterogeneous data within a single model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ICAD-LLM achieves competitive performance with task-specific AD methods and exhibits strong generalization to previously unseen tasks, which substantially reduces deployment costs and enables rapid adaptation to new environments. To the best of our knowledge, ICAD-LLM is the first model capable of handling anomaly detection tasks across diverse domains and modalities.

PaperID: 1939, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.11225

Authors:Zhiwei Yang, Haimei Qin, Xiaoyan Yu, Hao Peng, Lei Jiang, Li Sun, Zhiqin Yang

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China School of Cyber Security, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beihang University, North China Electric Power University, Hong Kong

Title: Structural Entropy Guided Incremental Learning for Open-World Multimodal Social Event Detection

Abstract:
With the explosive growth of multimodal data streams on social media, the timely detection of emerging social events has become increasingly important. As a result, Multimodal Social Event Detection in openworld settings is receiving growing attention. However, most existing methods face two major limitations: (1) They overlook the dynamic nature of open-world social media data and fail to design dedicated incremental learning frameworks. (2) They ignore the impact of noise in streaming data, leading to performance degradation over long-term detection. To overcome these limitations, we propose SeInEvent (Structural Entropy Guided Incremental Learning for Open-World Multimodal Social Event Detection). Our innovations are as follows: First, considering data dynamics, we design a self-supervised alternating incremental contrastive learning mechanism. Through knowledge distillation, historical event clusters were reviewed and consolidated, and contrastive learning was combined to absorb knowledge of unknown events, ultimately achieving incremental learning without labels. Second, addressing the impact of noise, we propose a Pointwise Structural Entropy-based noise filter, which quantifies each sample’s informational contribution to the event clustering structure. It enables automatic removal of noisy data and supports robust long-term detection. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that SeInEvent achieves superior performance.

PaperID: 1940, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.16874

Authors:Jian Zhang, Zhangqi Wang, Haiping Zhu, Kangda Cheng, Kai He, Bo Li, Qika Lin, Jun Liu, Erik Cambria

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, Harbin Institute of Technology, National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University

Title: MARS: Multi-Agent Adaptive Reasoning with Socratic Guidance for Automated Prompt Optimization

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) typically operate in a questionanswering paradigm, where the quality of the input prompt critically affects the response. Automated Prompt Optimization (APO) aims to overcome the cognitive biases of manually crafted prompts and explore a broader prompt design space. However, existing APO methods often suffer from rigid template structures and inefficient exploration in the prompt space. To this end, we propose a Multi-Agent Adaptive Reasoning with Socratic guidance framework (MARS) for APO. MARS consists of five complementary agents and formulates the optimization process as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), enabling adaptive prompt refinement through explicit state modeling and interactive feedback. Specifically, a Planner agent generates flexible optimization trajectories, a Teacher-Critic-Student triad engages in Socratic-style dialogue to iteratively optimize the prompt based on pseudo-gradient signals in the text space, and a Target agent executes the prompt in downstream tasks to provide performance feedback. MARS integrates reasoning, feedback, and state transition into a unified hidden-state evolution process, improving both the effectiveness and interpretability of optimization. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that MARS outperforms existing APO methods in terms of optimization performance, search efficiency, and interpretability.

PaperID: 1941, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17733

Authors:Jingmao Zhang, Zhiting Zhao, Yunqi Lin, Jianghong Ma, Tianjun Wei, Haijun Zhang, Xiaofeng Zhang

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Nanyang Technological University

Title: Diversity Recommendation via Causal Deconfounding of Co-purchase Relations and Counterfactual Exposure

Abstract:
Beyond useritem modeling, item-to-item relationships are increasingly used to enhance recommendation. However, common methods largely rely on co-occurrence, making them prone to item popularity bias and user attributes, which degrades embedding quality and performance. Meanwhile, although diversity is acknowledged as a key aspect of recommendation quality, existing research offers limited attention to it, with a notable lack of causal perspectives and theoretical grounding. To address these challenges, we propose Cadence: Diversity Recommendation via Causal Deconfounding of Co-purchase Relations and Counterfactual Exposure—a plug-and-play framework built upon LightGCN as the backbone, primarily designed to enhance recommendation diversity while preserving accuracy. First, we compute the Unbiased Asymmetric Co-purchase Relationship (UACR) between items—excluding item popularity and user attributes—to construct a deconfounded directed item graph, with an aggregation mechanism to refine embeddings. Second, we leverage UACR to identify diverse categories of items that exhibit strong causal relevance to a user's interacted items but have not yet been engaged with. We then simulate their behavior under high-exposure scenarios, thereby significantly enhancing recommendation diversity while preserving relevance. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art diversity models in both diversity and accuracy, and further validates its effectiveness, transferability, and efficiency over baselines.

PaperID: 1942, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07062

Authors:Yimei Zhang, Guojiang Shen, Kaili Ning, Tongwei Ren, Xuebo Qiu, Mengmeng Wang, Xiangjie Kong

Affiliations: Nanjing University, Zhejiang University of Technology

Title: Improving Region Representation Learning from Urban Imagery with Noisy Long-Caption Supervision

Abstract:
Region representation learning plays a pivotal role in urban computing by extracting meaningful features from unlabeled urban data. Analogous to how perceived facial age reflects an individual's health, the visual appearance of a city serves as its "portrait", encapsulating latent socioeconomic and environmental characteristics. Recent studies have explored leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to incorporate textual knowledge into imagery-based urban region representation learning. However, two major challenges remain: i) difficulty in aligning fine-grained visual features with long captions, and ii) suboptimal knowledge incorporation due to noise in LLM-generated captions. To address these issues, we propose a novel pre-training framework called UrbanLN that improves Urban region representation learning through Long-text awareness and Noise suppression. Specifically, we introduce an information-preserved stretching interpolation strategy that aligns long captions with fine-grained visual semantics in complex urban scenes. To effectively mine knowledge from LLM-generated captions and filter out noise, we propose a dual-level optimization strategy. At the data level, a multi-model collaboration pipeline automatically generates diverse and reliable captions without human intervention. At the model level, we employ a momentum-based self-distillation mechanism to generate stable pseudo-targets, facilitating robust cross-modal learning under noisy conditions. Extensive experiments across four real-world cities and various downstream tasks demonstrate the superior performance of our UrbanLN.

PaperID: 1943, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17435

Authors:Zengyu Zou, Jingyuan Wang, Yixuan Huang, Junjie Wu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, China MOE Engineering Research Center of Advanced Computer Application Technology, China MIIT Key Laboratory of Data Intelligence and Management, School of Economics and Management

Title: Multi-Agent Pointer Transformer: Seq-to-Seq Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Vehicle Dynamic Pickup-Delivery Problems

Abstract:
This paper addresses the cooperative MultiVehicle Dynamic Pickup and Delivery Problem with Stochastic Requests (MVDPDPSR) and proposes an end-to-end centralized decision-making framework based on sequence-to-sequence, named Multi-Agent Pointer Transformer (MAPT). MVDPDPSR is an extension of the vehicle routing problem and a spatio-temporal system optimization problem, widely applied in scenarios such as on-demand delivery. Classical operations research methods face bottlenecks in computational complexity and time efficiency when handling large-scale dynamic problems. Although existing reinforcement learning methods have achieved some progress, they still encounter several challenges: 1) Independent decoding across multiple vehicles fails to model joint action distributions; 2) The feature extraction network struggles to capture inter-entity relationships; 3) The joint action space is exponentially large. To address these issues, we designed the MAPT framework, which employs a Transformer Encoder to extract entity representations, combines a Transformer Decoder with a Pointer Network to generate joint action sequences in an AutoRegressive manner, and introduces a Relation-Aware Attention module to capture inter-entity relationships. Additionally, we guide the model's decision-making using informative priors to facilitate effective exploration. Experiments on 8 datasets demonstrate that MAPT significantly outperforms existing baseline methods in terms of performance and exhibits substantial computational time advantages compared to classical operations research methods.

PaperID: 1944, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13445

Authors:Clemens Anzinger, Jiehua Chen, Christian Hatschka, Manuel Sorge, Alexander Temper

Affiliations: TU Wien, Institute of Logic and Computation

Title: How Hard Is It to Explain Preferences Using Few Boolean Attributes?

Abstract:
We study the computational complexity of explaining preference data through Boolean attribute models (BAMs), motivated by extensive research involving attribute models and their promise in understanding preference structure and enabling more efficient decisionmaking processes. In a BAM, each alternative possesses a subset of binary attributes, each voter cares about a subset of attributes, and voters prefer alternatives with more of their desired attributes. In the BAM problem, we are given a preference profile and want to know whether there is a k-attribute model explaining the profile. We establish a complexity dichotomy for the number of attributes k: BAM is linear-time solvable for k≤2 but NP-complete for k≥3. The problem remains hard even when preference orders have length two. On the positive side, BAM becomes fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by the number of alternatives m. For the special case of two voters, we provide a linear-time algorithm. We also analyze variants where partial information is given: When voter preferences over attributes are known (BAM With Cares) or when alternative attributes are specified (BAM With Has), showing that for most parameters BAM With Cares is more difficult whereas BAM With Has is more tractable except for being NP-hard even for one voter.

PaperID: 1945, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.05695

Authors:Vittorio Bilò, Martin Loebl, Cosimo Vinci

Affiliations: Department of Mathematics and Physics ``Ennio De Giorgi'', University of Salento, Department of Applied Mathematics, Charles University, Czech Republic.

Title: Approximately Envy-free and Equitable Allocations of Indivisible Items for Non-monotone Valuations

Abstract:
We revisit the setting of fair allocation of indivisible items among agents with heterogeneous, nonmonotone valuations. We explore the existence and efficient computation of allocations that approximately satisfy either envy-freeness or equity constraints. Approximate envy-freeness ensures that each agent values her bundle at least as much as those given to the others, after some (or any) item removal, while approximate equity guarantees roughly equal valuations among agents, under similar adjustments. As a key technical contribution of this work, by leveraging fixed-point theorems (such as Sperner's Lemma and its variants), we establish the existence of envy-free-up-to-one-good-and-one-chore (EF1_g^c) and equitable-up-to-one-good-and-one-chore (EQ1_g^c) allocations, for non-monotone valuations that are always either non-negative or non-positive. These notions represent slight relaxations of the well-studied envy-free-up-to-one-item (EF1) and equitable-up-to-one-item (EQ1) guarantees, respectively. Our existential results hold even when items are arranged in a path and bundles must form connected sub-paths. The case of non-positive valuations, in particular, has been solved by proving a novel multi-coloring variant of Sperner's Lemma that constitutes a combinatorial result of independent interest. In addition, we also design a polynomial-time dynamic programming algorithm that computes an EQ1_g^c allocation. For monotone non-increasing valuations and path-connected bundles, all the above results can be extended to EF1 and EQ1 guarantees as well. Finally, we provide existential and computational results for certain stronger up-to-any-item equity notions under objective valuations, where items are partitioned into goods and chores.

PaperID: 1946, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06454

Authors:Joshua Caiata, Ben Armstrong, Kate Larson

Affiliations: University of Waterloo, Tulane University

Title: What Voting Rules Actually Do: A Data-Driven Analysis of Multi-Winner Voting

Abstract:
Committeeselection problems arise in many contexts and applications, and there has been increasing interest within the social choice research community on identifying which properties are satisfied by different multi-winner voting rules. In this work, we propose a data-driven framework to evaluate how frequently voting rules violate axioms across diverse preference distributions in practice, shifting away from the binary perspective of axiom satisfaction given by worst-case analysis. Using this framework, we analyze the relationship between multi-winner voting rules and their axiomatic performance under several preference distributions, and propose a methodology for systematically minimizing axioms violations. Our results suggest that data-driven approaches to social choice can inform the design of new voting systems and support the continuation of data-driven research in social choice.

PaperID: 1947, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11422

Authors:Lukun Wu, Jie Li, Ziqi Ren, Kaifan Zhang, Xinbo Gao

Affiliations: School of Electronic Engineering, Xidian University, School of Life Science and Technology

Title: Shrinking the Teacher: An Adaptive Teaching Paradigm for Asymmetric EEG-Vision Alignment

Abstract:
Decoding visual features from EEG signals is a central challenge in neuroscience, with crossmodal alignment as the dominant approach. We argue that the relationship between visual and brain modalities is fundamentally asymmetric, characterized by two critical gaps: a Fidelity Gap (stemming from EEG's inherent noise and signal degradation, vs. vision's high-fidelity features) and a Semantic Gap (arising from EEG's shallow conceptual representation, vs. vision's rich semantic depth). Previous methods often overlook this asymmetry, forcing alignment between the two modalities as if they were equal partners and thereby leading to poor generalization. To address this, we propose the adaptive teaching paradigm. This paradigm empowers the ``teacher" modality (vision) to dynamically shrink and adjust its knowledge structure under task guidance, tailoring its semantically dense features to match the ``student" modality (EEG)'s capacity. We implement this paradigm with the ShrinkAdapter, a simple yet effective module featuring a residual-free design and a bottleneck structure. Through extensive experiments, we validate the underlying rationale and effectiveness of our paradigm. Our method achieves a top-1 accuracy of 60.2% on the zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval task, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods by a margin of 9.8%. Our work introduces a new perspective for asymmetric alignment: the teacher must shrink and adapt to bridge the vision-brain gap.

PaperID: 1948, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.15597

Authors:Qian Zheng, Ming Chen, Sha Zhao, Shi Gu, Peng Lin, De Ma, Huajin Tang, Gang Pan

Affiliations: Zhejiang University

Title: S³: Spiking Neurons as an Isolating Segmenter for Brain Signal Decoding

Abstract:
Recent brain decoding studies have primarily emphasized the development of brain decoders, while largely neglecting the segmentation step. Existing methods typically adopt fixedlength segmentation, which might overlook subject- or task-level variability and disrupt temporal patterns within brain signals. To address this gap, we propose S3, which leverages spiking neurons as an isolating segmenter for brain signal decoding. S3 segments brain signals adaptively, considering subject- and task-level variability while preserving intrinsic temporal patterns of brain signals. It exploits the unique reset mechanism of spiking neurons to isolate previous irrelevant temporal patterns during the generation of each segmentation point. To optimize S3 for enhancing task performance in the absence of segmentation labels, we develop an optimization method where segmentation pseudo-labels are created with a stochastic-greedy algorithm to optimize them, while circumventing gradient blockade between S3 and task performance. Experiments on 10 downstream tasks across 13 public datasets demonstrate that S3 consistently outperforms existing methods, validating its effectiveness, generalizability and interpretability.

PaperID: 1949, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10935

Authors:Yifan Zhuang, Calvin Huang, Zepeng Yu, Yongjie Zou, Jiawei Ju

Affiliations: Sony Interactive Entertainment, Independent researcher, Lingang Laboratory

Title: CAT-Net: A Cross-Attention Tone Network for Cross-Subject EEG-EMG Fusion Tone Decoding

Abstract:
Braincomputer interface (BCI) speech decoding has emerged as a promising tool for assisting individuals with speech impairments. In this context, the integration of electroencephalography (EEG) and electromyography (EMG) signals offers strong potential for enhancing decoding performance. Mandarin tone classification presents particular challenges, as tonal variations convey distinct meanings even when phonemes remain identical. In this study, we propose a novel cross-subject multimodal BCI decoding framework that fuses EEG and EMG signals to classify four Mandarin tones under both audible and silent speech conditions. Inspired by the cooperative mechanisms of neural and muscular systems in speech production, our neural decoding architecture combines spatial-temporal feature extraction branches with a cross-attention fusion mechanism, enabling informative interaction between modalities. We further incorporate domain-adversarial training to improve cross-subject generalization. We collected 4,800 EEG trials and 4,800 EMG trials from 10 participants using only twenty EEG and five EMG channels, demonstrating the feasibility of minimal-channel decoding. Despite employing lightweight modules, our model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across all conditions, achieving average classification accuracies of 87.83% for audible speech and 88.08% for silent speech. In cross-subject evaluations, it still maintains strong performance with accuracies of 83.27% and 85.10% for audible and silent speech, respectively. We further conduct ablation studies to validate the effectiveness of each component. Our findings suggest that tone-level decoding with minimal EEG-EMG channels is feasible and potentially generalizable across subjects, contributing to the development of practical BCI applications.

PaperID: 1950, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.04201

Authors:Ning Cheng, Jinan Xu, Jialing Chen, Bin Fang, Wenjuan Han

Affiliations: Ministry of Education School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing China, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: STOLA: Self-Adaptive Touch-Language Framework for Tactile Commonsense Reasoning in Open-Ended Scenarios

Abstract:
This paper explores the challenges of integrating tactile sensing into intelligent systems for multimodal reasoning, particularly in enabling commonsense reasoning about the openended physical world. We identify two key challenges: modality discrepancy, where existing touch-language models often treat touch as a mere sub-modality of language without further addressing the semantic differences, and open-ended tactile data scarcity, where current datasets lack the diversity, open-endedness, and complexity needed for reasoning. To overcome these challenges, we introduce SToLa, a Self-Adaptive Touch-Language framework. SToLa utilizes Mixture of Experts (MoE) to dynamically process, unify, and manage tactile and language modalities, capturing their unique characteristics. Crucially, we also present a comprehensive tactile commonsense reasoning dataset and benchmark featuring free-form questions and responses, 8 physical properties, 4 interactive characteristics, and diverse commonsense knowledge. Experiments show SToLa exhibits competitive performance compared to existing models on the PHYSICLEAR benchmark and self-constructed datasets, proving the effectiveness of the Mixture of Experts architecture in multimodal management and the performance advantages for open-scenario tactile commonsense reasoning tasks.

PaperID: 1951, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08140

Authors:Luoping Cui, Hanqing Liu, Mingjie Liu, Endian Lin, Donghong Jiang, Yuhao Wang, Chuang Zhu

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: PEOD: A Pixel-Aligned Event-RGB Benchmark for Object Detection Under Challenging Conditions

Abstract:
Robust object detection for challenging scenarios increasingly relies on event cameras, yet existing EventRGB datasets remain constrained by sparse coverage of extreme conditions and low spatial resolution (≤ 640 × 480), which prevents comprehensive evaluation of detectors under challenging scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose PEOD, the first large-scale, pixel-aligned and hign-resolution (1280 × 720) Event-RGB dataset for object detection under challenge conditions. PEOD contains 130+ spatiotemporal-aligned sequences and 340k manual bounding boxes, with 57% of data captured under low-light, overexposure, and high-speed motion. Furthermore, we benchmark 14 methods across three input configurations (Event-based, RGB-based, and Event-RGB fusion) on PEOD. On the full test set and normal subset, fusion-based models achieve the excellent performance. However, in illumination challenge subset, the top event-based model outperforms all fusion models, while fusion models still outperform their RGB-based counterparts, indicating limits of existing fusion methods when the frame modality is severely degraded. PEOD establishes a realistic, high-quality benchmark for multimodal perception and will be publicly released later to facilitate future research.

PaperID: 1952, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18845

Authors:Changxin Huang, Lv Tang, Zhaohuan Zhan, Lisha Yu, Runhao Zeng, Zun Liu, Zhengjie Wang, Jianqiang Li

Affiliations: Shenzhen University, Shenzhen MSU-BIT University, Sun Yat-sen University, Beijing Institute of Technology

Title: UNeMo: Collaborative Visual-Language Reasoning and Navigation via a Multimodal World Model

Abstract:
Visionand-Language Navigation (VLN) requires agents to autonomously navigate complex environments via visual images and natural language instructions—remains highly challenging. Recent research on enhancing language-guided navigation reasoning using pre-trained large language models (LLMs) has shown promising prospects. However, the reasoning of such methods is limited to the linguistic modality, lacking visual reasoning capabilities. Moreover, existing reasoning modules are optimized separately from navigation policies, leading to incompatibility and potential conflicts in optimization objectives. To tackle these challenges, we introduce UNeMo, a novel framework designed for the collaborative optimization of visual state reasoning and navigational decision-making. It introduces a Multimodal World Model (MWM) that takes visual features, language instructions, and navigational actions as inputs to jointly predict subsequent visual states, enabling cross-modal reasoning. Via a Hierarchical Prediction-Feedback (HPN) mechanism, MWM collaborates with navigation policies: the first layer generates actions using current vision-and-language features; MWM then infers post-action visual states to guide the second layer’s fine-grained decisions. This forms a dynamic bidirectional promotion mechanism where MWM reasoning optimizes navigation policies, while policy decisions feedback to improve MWM’s reasoning accuracy. Experiments on R2R and REVERIE datasets show UNeMo outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 2.1% and 0.7% in navigation accuracy for unseen scenes, validating its effectiveness.

PaperID: 1953, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12925

Authors:Weize Xie, Yi Ding, Ying He, Leilei Wang, Binwen Bai, Zheyi Zhao, Chenyang Wang, F. Richard Yu

Affiliations: Shenzhen University, Carleton University

Title: ForeDiffusion: Foresight-Conditioned Diffusion Policy via Future View Construction for Robot Manipulation

Abstract:
Diffusion strategies have advanced visual motor control by progressively denoising highdimensional action sequences, providing a promising method for robot manipulation. However, as task complexity increases, the success rate of existing baseline models decreases considerably. Analysis indicates that current diffusion strategies are confronted with two limitations. First, these strategies only rely on short-term observations as conditions. Second, the training objective remains limited to a single denoising loss, which leads to error accumulation and causes grasping deviations. To address these limitations, this paper proposes Foresight-Conditioned Diffusion (ForeDiffusion), by injecting the predicted future view representation into the diffusion process. As a result, the policy is guided to be forward-looking, enabling it to correct trajectory deviations. Following this design, ForeDiffusion employs a dual loss mechanism, combining the traditional denoising loss and the consistency loss of future observations, to achieve the unified optimization. Extensive evaluation on the Adroit suite and the MetaWorld benchmark demonstrates that ForeDiffusion achieves an average success rate of 80% for the overall task, significantly outperforming the existing mainstream diffusion methods by approximately 20% in high difficulty tasks, while maintaining more stable performance across the entire tasks.

PaperID: 1954, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06465

Authors:Xuesong Zhang, Yunbo Xu, Jia Li, Ruonan Liu, Zhenzhen Hu

Affiliations: Hefei University of Technology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: Agent Journey Beyond RGB: Hierarchical Semantic-Spatial Representation Enrichment for Vision-and-Language Navigation

Abstract:
Navigating unseen environments based on natural language instructions remains difficult for egocentric agents in Visionand-Language Navigation (VLN). Intuitively, humans inherently ground concrete semantic knowledge within spatial layouts during indoor navigation. Although previous studies have introduced diverse environmental representations to enhance reasoning, other co-occurrence modalities are often naively concatenated with RGB features, resulting in suboptimal utilization of each modality's distinct contribution. Inspired by this, we propose a hierarchical Semantic Understanding and Spatial Awareness (SUSA) architecture to enable agents to perceive and ground environments at diverse scales. Specifically, the Textual Semantic Understanding (TSU) module supports local action prediction by generating view-level descriptions, thereby capturing fine-grained environmental semantics and narrowing the modality gap between instructions and environments. Complementarily, the Depth-enhanced Spatial Perception (DSP) module incrementally constructs a trajectory-level depth exploration map, providing the agent with a coarse-grained comprehension of the global spatial layout. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SUSA's hierarchical representation enrichment not only boosts the navigation performance of the baseline on discrete VLN benchmarks (REVERIE, R2R, and SOON), but also exhibits superior generalization to the continuous R2R-CE.

PaperID: 1955, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14131

Authors:Yu Zhong, Zihao Zhang, Rui Zhang, Lingdong Huang, Haihan Gao, Shuo Wang, Da Li, Ruijian Han, Jiaming Guo, Shaohui Peng, Di Huang, Yunji Chen

Affiliations: State Key Lab of Processors, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Institute of Software

Title: Run, Ruminate, and Regulate: A Dual-process Thinking System for Vision-and-Language Navigation

Abstract:
Visionand-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an agent to dynamically explore complex 3D environments following human instructions. Recent research underscores the potential of harnessing large language models (LLMs) for VLN, given their commonsense knowledge and general reasoning capabilities. Despite their strengths, a substantial gap in task completion performance persists between LLM-based approaches and domain experts, as LLMs inherently struggle to comprehend real-world spatial correlations precisely; additionally, LLM inference can make the decision-making process considerably inefficient. To address these issues, we propose a novel dual-process thinking framework dubbed R3, integrating LLMs' generalization capabilities with VLN-specific expertise in a zero-shot manner. The framework comprises three core modules: Runner, Ruminator, and Regulator. The Runner is a lightweight transformer-based expert model that ensures efficient and accurate navigation under regular circumstances. The Ruminator employs a multimodal LLM as the backbone and adopts chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to elicit structured reasoning from the LLM. The Regulator monitors the navigation progress and controls the appropriate thinking mode according to three criteria, integrating Runner and Ruminator harmoniously. Experimental results illustrate that R3 significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, exceeding 3.28% and 3.30% in SPL and RGSPL respectively on the REVERIE benchmark, highlighting the effectiveness of our method in handling challenging VLN tasks.

PaperID: 1956, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05855

Authors:Jiayu Zhou, Qiwei Wu, Jian Li, Zhe Chen, Xiaogang Xiong, Renjing Xu

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Title: Gentle Manipulation Policy Learning via Demonstrations from VLM Planned Atomic Skills

Abstract:
Autonomous execution of longhorizon, contact-rich manipulation tasks traditionally requires extensive real-world data and expert engineering, posing significant cost and scalability challenges. This paper proposes a novel framework integrating hierarchical semantic decomposition, reinforcement learning (RL), visual language models (VLMs), and knowledge distillation to overcome these limitations. Complex tasks are decomposed into atomic skills, with RL-trained policies for each primitive exclusively in simulation. Crucially, our RL formulation incorporates explicit force constraints to prevent object damage during delicate interactions. VLMs perform high-level task decomposition and skill planning, generating diverse expert demonstrations. These are distilled into a unified policy via Visual-Tactile Diffusion Policy for end-to-end execution. We conduct comprehensive ablation studies exploring different VLM-based task planners to identify optimal demonstration generation pipelines, and systematically compare imitation learning algorithms for skill distillation. Extensive simulation experiments and physical deployment validate that our approach achieves policy learning for long-horizon manipulation without costly human demonstrations, while the VLM-guided atomic skill framework enables scalable generalization to diverse tasks.

PaperID: 1957, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11512

Authors:Yiyun Zhou, Mingjing Xu, Jingwei Shi, Quanjiang Li, Jingyuan Chen

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Swansea University, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, National University of Defense Technology

Title: Collaborative Representation Learning for Alignment of Tactile, Language, and Vision Modalities

Abstract:
Tactile sensing offers rich and complementary information to vision and language, enabling robots to perceive finegrained object properties. However, existing tactile sensors lack standardization, leading to redundant features that hinder cross-sensor generalization. Moreover, existing methods fail to fully integrate the intermediate communication among tactile, language, and vision modalities. To address this, we propose TLV-CoRe, a CLIP-based Tactile-Language-Vision Collaborative Representation learning method. TLV-CoRe introduces a Sensor-Aware Modulator to unify tactile features across different sensors and employs tactile-irrelevant decoupled learning to disentangle irrelevant tactile features. Additionally, a Unified Bridging Adapter is introduced to enhance tri-modal interaction within the shared representation space. To fairly evaluate the effectiveness of tactile models, we further propose the RSS evaluation framework, focusing on Robustness, Synergy, and Stability across different methods. Experimental results demonstrate that TLV-CoRe significantly improves sensor-agnostic representation learning and cross-modal alignment, offering a new direction for multimodal tactile representation.

PaperID: 1958, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07095

Authors:Meghyn Bienvenu, Quentin Manière

Affiliations: Université de Bordeaux, Bordeaux INP, UMR Talence, Department of Computer Science, Leipzig University, Germany Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence

Title: Data Complexity of Querying Description Logic Knowledge Bases Under Cost-Based Semantics

Abstract:
In this paper, we study the data complexity of querying inconsistent weighted description logic (DL) knowledge bases under recentlyintroduced cost-based semantics. In a nutshell, the idea is to assign each interpretation a cost based upon the weights of the violated axioms and assertions, and certain and possible query answers are determined by considering all (resp. some) interpretations having optimal or bounded cost. Whereas the initial study of cost-based semantics focused on DLs between EL_bot and ALCO, we consider DLs that may contain inverse roles and role inclusions, thus covering prominent DL-Lite dialects. Our data complexity analysis goes significantly beyond existing results by sharpening several lower bounds and pinpointing the precise complexity of optimal-cost certain answer semantics (no non-trivial upper bound was known). Moreover, while all existing results show the intractability of cost-based semantics, our most challenging and surprising result establishes that if we consider DL-Lite^H_bool ontologies and a fixed cost bound, certain answers for instance queries and possible answers for conjunctive queries can be computed using first-order rewriting and thus enjoy the lowest possible data complexity (AC0).

PaperID: 1959, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.08252

Authors:Joshua Hirschbrunn, Yevgeny Kazakov

Affiliations: University of Ulm

Title: Extending Description Logics with Generic Concepts – the Case of Terminologies

Abstract:
We propose an extension of Description Logics (DLs) with generic concepts and conditional axioms. Inspired by objectoriented languages, generic concepts allow a compact definition of concepts with similar structures. For example, one can define a generic concept Owner[X] to describe objects that own another object from X, and later use a specific replacement of the parameter X, such as Owner[Pet] representing pet owners. Conditional axioms can be used to set bounds on the values that replace the generic parameters. For example, we could restrict replacements of X in a concept Keeper[X] to only subconcepts of Pet. As the set of possible parameter replacements can be infinite and even uncountable, the generic extensions are, in general, undecidable. To identify decidable generic DLs, we focus on the case of terminologies, requiring that variables are only used in definitions of generic concepts. We formulate restrictions that allow a reduction of generic entailment to classical entailment and further conditions that ensure decidability.

PaperID: 1960, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11885

Authors:Zhifei Li, Ziyue Qin, Xiangyu Luo, Xiaoju Hou, Yue Zhao, Miao Zhang, Zhifang Huang, Kui Xiao, Bing Yang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Hubei University, Ministry of Education, Wuhan China, School of Cyber Science and Technology, Institute of Vocational Education, Guangdong Industry Polytechnic University, Guangzhou China, Shandong Police College, Ji’nan China

Title: MyGram: Modality-aware Graph Transformer with Global Distribution for Multi-modal Entity Alignment

Abstract:
Multimodal entity alignment aims to identify equivalent entities between two multi-modal Knowledge graphs by integrating multi-modal data, such as images and text, to enrich the semantic representations of entities. However, existing methods may overlook the structural contextual information within each modality, making them vulnerable to interference from shallow features. To address these challenges, we propose MyGram, a modality-aware graph transformer with global distribution for multi-modal entity alignment. Specifically, we develop a modality diffusion learning module to capture deep structural contextual information within modalities and enable fine-grained multi-modal fusion. In addition, we introduce a Gram Loss that acts as a regularization constraint by minimizing the volume of a 4-dimensional parallelotope formed by multi-modal features, thereby achieving global distribution consistency across modalities. We conduct experiments on five public datasets. Results show that MyGram outperforms baseline models, achieving a maximum improvement of 4.8% in Hits@1 on FBDB15K, 9.9% on FBYG15K, and 4.3% on DBP15K.

PaperID: 1961, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.12014

Authors:Gongxi Zhu, Hanlin Gu, Lixin Fan, Qiang Yang, Yuxing Han

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: FedGRPO: Privately Optimizing Foundation Models with Group-Relative Rewards from Domain Clients

Abstract:
One important direction of Federated Foundation Models (FedFMs) is leveraging data from small client models to enhance the performance of a large server‑side foundation model. Existing methods based on model level or representation level knowledge transfer either require expensive local training or incur high communication costs and introduce unavoidable privacy risks. We reformulate this problem as a reinforcement learning style evaluation process and propose FedGRPO, a privacy preserving framework comprising two modules. The first module performs competencebased expert selection by building a lightweight confidence graph from auxiliary data to identify the most suitable clients for each question. The second module leverages the “Group Relative” concept from the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) framework by packaging each question together with its solution rationale into candidate policies, dispatching these policies to a selected subset of expert clients, and aggregating solely the resulting scalar reward signals via a federated group–relative loss function. By exchanging reward values instead of data or model updates, FedGRPO reduces privacy risk and communication overhead while enabling parallel evaluation across heterogeneous devices. Empirical results on diverse domain tasks demonstrate that FedGRPO achieves superior downstream accuracy and communication efficiency compared to conventional FedFMs baselines.

PaperID: 1962, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11469

Authors:Zifan Liu, Yuan Cao, Yifan Sun, Yanwei Yu, Heng Qi

Affiliations: Ocean University of China, Dalian University of Technology

Title: Automatic Channel Pruning by Searching with Structure Embedding for Hash Network

Abstract:
Deep hash networks are widely used in tasks such as largescale image retrieval due to high search efficiency and low storage costs through binary hash codes. With the growing demand for deploying deep hash networks on resource-constrained devices, it is crucial to perform network compression on them, in which automatic pruning constitutes a priority option owing to efficacy maintenance. However, existing pruning methods are mostly designed for image classification, while hashing networks must generate compact binary codes, making each channel more sensitive to retrieval objectives. As a result, their performance often degrades when applied to image retrieval tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel Automatic Channel Pruning framework by Searching with Structure Embedding (ACP-SSE). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore pruning techniques for deep hash networks and the first automatic pruning method by searching based on network topology structure. Specifically, we first design a structure encoding model by Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) whose graph is constructed by hash network and nodes' features are initialized by pruning strategies. The model is trained by contrastive learning loss efficiently without accuracy supervision by fine-tuning pruned models. In addition, we introduce a dynamic pruning search space in consideration of the resource constraints. By converting the automatic channel pruning task into searching the pruned structure with effect similar to the unpruned structure, it enables the method to adapt to various network architectures. Finally, the optimal networks are selected from the candidate set according to their performance in specific downstream tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ACP-SSE indeed works in the automatic channel pruning area, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in hashing-based image retrieval, while maintaining competitive accuracy in image classification.

PaperID: 1963, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.11465

Authors:Mohamed Abdelsamad, Michael Ulrich, Bin Yang, Miao Zhang, Yakov Miron, Abhinav Valada

Affiliations: Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence, University of Freiburg

Title: DOS: Distilling Observable Softmaps of Zipfian Prototypes for Self-Supervised Point Representation

Abstract:
Recent advances in selfsupervised learning (SSL) have shown tremendous potential for learning 3D point cloud representations without human annotations. However, SSL for 3D point clouds still faces critical challenges due to irregular geometry, shortcut-prone reconstruction, and unbalanced semantics distribution. In this work, we propose DOS (Distilling Observable Softmaps), a novel SSL framework that self-distills semantic relevance softmaps only at observable (unmasked) points. This strategy prevents information leakage from masked regions and provides richer supervision than discrete token-to-prototype assignments. To address the challenge of unbalanced semantics in an unsupervised setting, we introduce Zipfian prototypes and incorporate them using a modified Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm, Zipf-Sinkhorn, which enforces a power-law prior over prototype usage and modulates the sharpness of the target softmap during training. DOS outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on semantic segmentation and 3D object detection across multiple benchmarks, including nuScenes, Waymo, SemanticKITTI, ScanNet, and ScanNet200, without relying on extra data or annotations. Our results demonstrate that observable-point softmaps distillation offers a scalable and effective paradigm for learning robust 3D representations.

PaperID: 1964, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11817

Authors:Zhongde An, Jinhong You, Jiyanglin Li, Yiming Tang, Wen Li, Heming Du, Shouguo Du

Affiliations: Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Guizhou University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai Lixin University of Accounting and Finance, Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, Australian National University, Shanghai Municipal Big Data Center

Title: FreDN: Spectral Disentanglement for Time Series Forecasting via Learnable Frequency Decomposition

Abstract:
Time series forecasting is essential in a wide range of real world applications. Recently, frequencydomain methods have attracted increasing interest for their ability to capture global dependencies. However, when applied to non-stationary time series, these methods encounter the spectral entanglement and the computational burden of complex-valued learning. The spectral entanglement refers to the overlap of trends, periodicities, and noise across the spectrum due to spectral leakage and the presence of non-stationarity. However, existing decompositions are not suited to resolving spectral entanglement. To address this, we propose the Frequency Decomposition Network (FreDN), which introduces a learnable Frequency Disentangler module to separate trend and periodic components directly in the frequency domain. Furthermore, we propose a theoretically supported ReIm Block to reduce the complexity of complex-valued operations while maintaining performance. We also re-examine the frequency-domain loss function and provide new theoretical insights into its effectiveness. Extensive experiments on seven long-term forecasting benchmarks demonstrate that FreDN outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to 10%. Furthermore, compared with standard complex-valued architectures, our real-imaginary shared-parameter design reduces the parameter count and computational cost by at least 50%.

PaperID: 1965, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.07484

Authors:Yuexin Bian, Jie Feng, Yuanyuan Shi

Affiliations: University of California, San Diego

Title: DiffOP: Reinforcement Learning of Optimization-Based Control Policies via Implicit Policy Gradients

Abstract:
Realworld control systems require policies that are not only high-performing but also interpretable and robust. A promising direction toward this goal is model-based control, which learns system dynamics and cost functions from historical data and then uses these models to inform decision-making. Building on this paradigm, we introduce DiffOP, a novel framework for learning optimization-based control policies defined implicitly through optimization control problems. Without relying on value function approximation, DiffOP jointly learns the cost and dynamics models and directly optimizes the actual control costs using policy gradients. To enable this, we derive analytical policy gradients by applying implicit differentiation to the underlying optimization problem and integrating it with the standard policy gradient framework. Under standard regularity conditions, we establish that DiffOP converges to an epsilon-stationary point within O(1/epsilon) iterations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DiffOP through experiments on nonlinear control tasks and power system voltage control with constraints.

PaperID: 1966, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17298

Authors:Fanpu Cao, Yaofo Chen, Zeng You, Wei Luo

Affiliations: South China University of Technology, South China Agricultural University Pazhou Laboratory

Title: ProCache: Constraint-Aware Feature Caching with Selective Computation for Diffusion Transformer Acceleration

Abstract:
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved stateof-the-art performance in generative modeling, yet their high computational cost hinders real-time deployment. While feature caching offers a promising training-free acceleration solution by exploiting temporal redundancy, existing methods suffer from two key limitations: (1) uniform caching intervals fail to align with the non-uniform temporal dynamics of DiT, and (2) naive feature reuse with excessively large caching intervals can lead to severe error accumulation. In this work, we analyze the evolution of DiT features during denoising and reveal that both feature changes and error propagation are highly time- and depth-varying. Motivated by this, we propose ProCache, a training-free dynamic feature caching framework that addresses these issues via two core components: (i) a constraint-aware caching pattern search module that generates non-uniform activation schedules through offline constrained sampling, tailored to the model’s temporal characteristics; and (ii) a selective computation module that selectively compute within deep blocks and high-importance tokens for cached segments to mitigate error accumulation with minimal overhead. Extensive experiments on PixArt-alpha and DiT demonstrate that ProCache achieves up to 1.96 times and 2.90 times acceleration with negligible quality degradation, significantly outperforming prior caching-based methods.

PaperID: 1967, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10435

Authors:Tianxiao Cao, Kyohei Atarashi, Hisashi Kashima

Affiliations: Kyoto University

Title: Unpacking the Implicit Norm Dynamics of Sharpness-Aware Minimization in Tensorized Models

Abstract:
SharpnessAware Minimization (SAM) has been proven to be an effective optimization technique for improving generalization in overparameterized models. While prior works have explored the implicit regularization of SAM in simple two-core scale-invariant settings, its behavior in more general tensorized or scale-invariant models remains underexplored. In this work, we leverage scale-invariance to analyze the norm dynamics of SAM in general tensorized models. We introduce the notion of Norm Deviation as a global measure of core norm imbalance, and derive its evolution under SAM using gradient flow analysis. We show that SAM's implicit control of Norm Deviation is governed by the covariance between core norms and their gradient magnitudes. Motivated by these findings, we propose a simple yet effective method, Deviation-Aware Scaling (DAS), which explicitly mimics this regularization behavior by scaling core norms in a data-adaptive manner. Our experiments across tensor completion, noisy training, model compression, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning confirm that DAS achieves competitive or improved performance over SAM, while offering reduced computational overhead.

PaperID: 1968, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.09882

Authors:Gongpu Chen, Soung Chang Liew, Deniz Gündüz

Affiliations: Imperial College London, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title: GINO-Q: Learning an Asymptotically Optimal Index Policy for Restless Multi-armed Bandits

Abstract:
The restless multiarmed bandit (RMAB) framework is a popular model with applications across a wide variety of fields. However, its solution is hindered by the exponentially growing state space (with respect to the number of arms) and the combinatorial action space, making traditional reinforcement learning methods infeasible for large-scale instances. In this paper, we propose GINO-Q, a three-timescale stochastic approximation algorithm designed to learn an asymptotically optimal index policy for RMABs. GINO-Q mitigates the curse of dimensionality by decomposing the RMAB into a series of subproblems, each with the same dimension as a single arm, ensuring that complexity increases linearly with the number of arms. Unlike recently developed Whittle-index-based algorithms, GINO-Q does not require RMABs to be indexable, enhancing its flexibility and applicability. Our experimental results demonstrate that GINO-Q consistently learns near-optimal policies, even for non-indexable RMABs where Whittle-index-based algorithms perform poorly, and it converges significantly faster than existing baselines.

PaperID: 1969, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01173

Authors:Jiayi Chen, Jing Li, Guiling Wang

Affiliations: New Jersey Institute of Technology

Title: MARS: A Meta-Adaptive Reinforcement Learning Framework for Risk-Aware Multi-Agent Portfolio Management

Abstract:
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown significant promise in automated portfolio management; however, effectively balancing risk and return remains a central challenge, as many models fail to adapt to dynamically changing market conditions. We propose Metacontrolled Agents for a Risk-aware System (MARS), a novel framework addressing this through a multi-agent, risk-aware approach. MARS replaces monolithic models with a Heterogeneous Agent Ensemble, where each agent’s unique risk profile is enforced by a Safety-Critic network to span behaviors from capital preservation to aggressive growth. A high-level Meta-Adaptive Controller (MAC) dynamically orchestrates this ensemble, shifting reliance between conservative and aggressive agents to minimize drawdown during downturns while seizing opportunities in bull markets. This two-tiered structure leverages behavioral diversity rather than explicit feature engineering to ensure a disciplined portfolio robust across market regimes. Experiments on major international indexes confirm that our framework significantly reduces maximum drawdown and volatility while maintaining competitive returns.

PaperID: 1970, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12838

Authors:Rongqin Chen, Fan Mo, Pak Lon Ip, Shenghui Zhang, Dan Wu, Ye Li, Leong Hou U

Affiliations: University of Macau, ZOZO Research Waseda University, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology

Title: Connectivity-Guided Sparsification of 2-FWL GNNs: Preserving Full Expressivity with Improved Efficiency

Abstract:
Higherorder Graph Neural Networks (HOGNNs) based on the 2-FWL test achieve superior expressivity by modeling 2-node and 3-node interactions, but incur cubic computational cost. Existing efficiency methods typically reduce this burden at the expense of expressivity. We propose Co-Sparsify, a connectivity-aware sparsification framework that eliminates provably redundant computations while preserving full 2-FWL expressive power. Our key insight is that 3-node interactions are expressively necessary only within biconnected components, namely, maximal subgraphs where every node pair lies on a cycle. Outside these components, structural relationships are fully captured via 2-node message passing and graph readouts, rendering higher-order modeling unnecessary. Co-Sparsify restricts 2-node message passing to connected components and 3-node interactions to biconnected components, eliminating redundant computation without approximation or sampling. We prove that Co-Sparsified GNNs match the expressivity of the 2-FWL test. Empirically, when applied to PPGN, Co-Sparsify matches or exceeds accuracy on synthetic substructure counting tasks and achieves state-of-the-art performance on real-world benchmarks (ZINC, QM9 and TUD). This study demonstrates that high expressivity and scalability are not mutually exclusive: principled, topology-guided sparsification enables powerful, efficient GNNs with theoretical guarantees.

PaperID: 1971, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10227

Authors:Yue Chen, Jianfeng Lu, Shuqin Cao, Wei Wang, Gang Li, Guanghui Wen

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Hubei Province Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing and Real-time Industrial System, China Key Laboratory of Social Computing and Cognitive Intelligence (Dalian University of Technology), Ministry of Education, College of Computer Science, Inner Mongolia University, School of Automation, Southeast University

Title: FedCure: Mitigating Participation Bias in Semi-Asynchronous Federated Learning with Non-IID Data

Abstract:
While semiasynchronous federated learning (SAFL) combines the efficiency of synchronous training with the flexibility of asynchronous updates, it inherently suffers from participation bias, which is further exacerbated by non-IID data distributions. More importantly, hierarchical architecture shifts participation from individual clients to client groups, thereby further intensifying this issue. Despite notable advancements in SAFL research, most existing works still focus on conventional cloud-end architectures while largely overlooking the critical impact of non-IID data on scheduling across the cloud–edge–client hierarchy. To tackle these challenges, we propose FedCure, an innovative semiasynchronous Federated learning framework that leverages Coalition construction and participation-aware scheduling to mitigate participation bias with non-IID data. Specifically, FedCure operates through three key rules: (1) a preference rule that optimizes coalition formation by maximizing collective benefits and establishing theoretically stable partitions to reduce non-IID-induced performance degradation; (2) a scheduling rule that integrates the virtual queue technique with Bayesian-estimated coalition dynamics, mitigating efficiency loss while ensuring mean rate stability; and (3) a resource allocation rule that enhances computational efficiency by optimizing client CPU frequencies based on estimated coalition dynamics while satisfying delay requirements. Comprehensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that FedCure improves accuracy by up to 5.1x compared with four state-of-the-art baselines, while significantly enhancing efficiency with the lowest coefficient of variation 0.0223 for per-round latency and maintaining long-term balance across diverse scenarios.

PaperID: 1972, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01296

Authors:Guanjie Cheng, Mengzhen Yang, Xinkui Zhao, Shuyi Yu, Tianyu Du, Yangyang Wu, Mengying Zhu, Shuiguang Deng

Affiliations: Zhejiang University

Title: LSHFed: Robust and Communication-Efficient Federated Learning with Locally-Sensitive Hashing Gradient Mapping

Abstract:
Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across distributed nodes without exposing raw data, but its decentralized nature makes it vulnerable in trustdeficient environments. Inference attacks may recover sensitive information from gradient updates, while poisoning attacks can degrade model performance or induce malicious behaviors. Existing defenses often suffer from high communication and computation costs, or limited detection precision. To address these issues, we propose LSHFed, a robust and communication-efficient FL framework that simultaneously enhances aggregation robustness and privacy preservation. At its core, LSHFed incorporates LSHGM, a novel gradient verification mechanism that projects high-dimensional gradients into compact binary representations via multi-hyperplane locality-sensitive hashing. This enables accurate detection and filtering of malicious gradients using only their irreversible hash forms, thus mitigating privacy leakage risks and substantially reducing transmission overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LSHFed maintains high model performance even when up to 50% of participants are collusive adversaries, while achieving up to a 1000× reduction in gradient verification communication compared to full-gradient methods.

PaperID: 1973, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13144

Authors:Jiacheng Cheng, Xu Zhang, Guanghui Qiu, Yifang Zhang, Yinchuan Li, Kaiyuan Feng

Affiliations: School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University, School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University, Science and Technology on Electronic Information Control Laboratory, China Academy of Electronics and Information Technology, Knowin AI, Academy of Advanced Interdisciplinary Research

Title: Personalized Federated Learning with Bidirectional Communication Compression via One-Bit Random Sketching

Abstract:
Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative training across decentralized data, but faces key challenges of bidirectional communication overhead and clientside data heterogeneity. To address communication costs while embracing data heterogeneity, we propose pFed1BS, a novel personalized federated learning framework that achieves extreme communication compression through one-bit random sketching. In personalized FL, the goal shifts from training a single global model to creating tailored models for each client. In our framework, clients transmit highly compressed one-bit sketches, and the server aggregates and broadcasts a global one-bit consensus. To enable effective personalization, we introduce a sign-based regularizer that guides local models to align with the global consensus while preserving local data characteristics. To mitigate the computational burden of random sketching, we employ the Fast Hadamard Transform for efficient projection. Theoretical analysis guarantees that our algorithm converges to a stationary neighborhood of the global potential function. Numerical simulations demonstrate that pFed1BS substantially reduces communication costs while achieving competitive performance compared to advanced communication-efficient FL algorithms.

PaperID: 1974, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.10721

Authors:Kangke Cheng, Shihong Song, Guanlin Mo, Hu Ding

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

Title: Sample-and-Search: An Effective Algorithm for Learning-Augmented k-Median Clustering in High Dimensions

Abstract:
In this paper, we investigate the learningaugmented k-median clustering problem, which aims to improve the performance of traditional clustering algorithms by preprocessing the point set with a predictor of error rate α ∈ [0,1). This preprocessing step assigns potential labels to the points before clustering. We introduce an algorithm for this problem based on a simple yet effective sampling method, which substantially improves upon the time complexities of existing algorithms. Moreover, we mitigate their exponential dependency on the dimensionality of the Euclidean space. Lastly, we conduct experiments to compare our method with several state-of-the-art learning-augmented k-median clustering methods. The experimental results suggest that our proposed approach can significantly reduce the computational complexity in practice, while achieving a lower clustering cost.

PaperID: 1975, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13124

Authors:Changxi Chi, Yufei Huang, Jun Xia, Jiangbin Zheng, Yunfan Liu, Zelin Zang, Stan Z. Li

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Hong Kong Institute of Science & Innovation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Westlake University

Title: Departures: Distributional Transport for SingleCell Perturbation Prediction with Neural Schrödinger Bridges

Abstract:
Predicting singlecell perturbation outcomes directly advances gene function analysis and facilitates drug candidate selection, making it a key driver of both basic and translational biomedical research. However, a major bottleneck in this task is the unpaired nature of single-cell data, as the same cell cannot be observed both before and after perturbation due to the destructive nature of sequencing. Although some neural generative transport models attempt to tackle unpaired single-cell perturbation data, they either lack explicit conditioning or depend on prior spaces for indirect distribution alignment, limiting precise perturbation modeling. In this work, we approximate Schrödinger Bridge (SB), which defines stochastic dynamic mappings recovering the entropy-regularized optimal transport (OT), to directly align the distributions of control and perturbed single-cell populations across different perturbation conditions. Unlike prior SB approximations that rely on bidirectional modeling to infer optimal source-target sample coupling, we leverage Minibatch-OT based pairing to avoid such bidirectional inference and the associated ill-posedness of defining the reverse process. This pairing directly guides bridge learning, yielding a scalable approximation to the SB. We approximate two SB models, one modeling discrete gene activation states and the other continuous expression distributions. Joint training enables accurate perturbation modeling and captures single-cell heterogeneity. Experiments on public genetic and drug perturbation datasets show that our model effectively captures heterogeneous single-cell responses and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

PaperID: 1976, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14784

Authors:Koustav Chowdhury, Bibhabasu Mandal, Sourav De, Sagar Ghosh, Swagatam Das, Debolina Paul, Saptarshi Chakraborty

Affiliations: Indian Statistical Institute, The University of Texas at Austin, University of Oxford, University of Michigan

Title: Convex Clustering Redefined: Robust Learning with the Median of Means Estimator

Abstract:
Clustering approaches that utilize convex loss functions have recently attracted growing interest in the formation of compact data clusters. Although classical methods like kmeans and its wide family of variants are still widely used, all of them require the number of clusters (k) to be supplied as input, and many are notably sensitive to initialization. Convex clustering provides a more stable alternative by formulating the clustering task as a convex optimization problem, ensuring a unique global solution. However, it faces challenges in handling high dimensional data, especially in the presence of noise and outliers. Additionally, strong fusion regularization, controlled by the tuning parameter, can hinder effective cluster formation within a convex clustering framework. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a robust approach that integrates convex clustering with the Median of Means (MoM) estimator, thus developing an outlier resistant and efficient clustering framework that does not necessitate a prior knowledge of the number of clusters. By leveraging the robustness of MoM alongside the stability of convex clustering, our method enhances both performance and efficiency, especially on large scale datasets. Theoretical analysis demonstrates weak consistency under specific conditions, while experiments on synthetic and real world datasets validate the method’s superior performance compared to existing approaches.

PaperID: 1977, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19256

Authors:Hang Ding, Xue Wang, Tian Zhou, Tao Yao

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Alibaba Group US, DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group Hupan Lab

Title: SimDiff: Simpler Yet Better Diffusion Model for Time Series Point Forecasting

Abstract:
Diffusion models have recently shown promise in time series forecasting, particularly for probabilistic predictions. However, they often fail to achieve stateof-the-art point estimation performance compared to regression-based methods. This limitation stems from difficulties in providing sufficient contextual bias to track distribution shifts and in balancing output diversity with the stability and precision required for point forecasts. Existing diffusion-based approaches mainly focus on full-distribution modeling under probabilistic frameworks, often with likelihood maximization objectives, while paying little attention to dedicated strategies for high-accuracy point estimation. Moreover, other existing point prediction diffusion methods frequently rely on pre-trained or jointly trained mature models for contextual bias, sacrificing the generative flexibility of diffusion models. To address these challenges, we propose SimDiff, a single-stage, end-to-end framework. SimDiff employs a single unified Transformer network carefully tailored to serve as both denoiser and predictor, eliminating the need for external pre-trained or jointly trained regressors. It achieves state-of-the-art point estimation performance by leveraging intrinsic output diversity and improving mean squared error accuracy through multiple inference ensembling. Key innovations, including normalization independence and the median-of-means estimator, further enhance adaptability and stability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SimDiff significantly outperforms existing methods in time series point forecasting.

PaperID: 1978, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21106

Authors:Ze Feng, Sen Yang, Boqiang Duan, Wankou Yang, Jingdong Wang

Affiliations: Baidu Inc, Southeast University

Title: EM-KD: Distilling Efficient Multimodal Large Language Model with Unbalanced Vision Tokens

Abstract:
Efficient Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) compress vision tokens to reduce resource consumption, but the loss of visual information can degrade comprehension capabilities. Although some priors introduce Knowledge Distillation to enhance student models, they overlook the fundamental differences in finegrained vision comprehension caused by unbalanced vision tokens between the efficient student and vanilla teacher. In this paper, we propose EM-KD, a novel paradigm that enhances the Efficient MLLMs with Knowledge Distillation. To overcome the challenge of unbalanced vision tokens, we first calculate the Manhattan distance between the vision logits of teacher and student, and then align them in the spatial dimension with the Hungarian matching algorithm. After alignment, EM-KD introduces two distillation strategies: 1) Vision-Language Affinity Distillation (VLAD) and 2) Vision Semantic Distillation (VSD). Specifically, VLAD calculates the affinity matrix between text tokens and aligned vision tokens, and minimizes the smooth L1 distance of the student and the teacher affinity matrices. Considering the semantic richness of vision logits in the final layer, VSD employs the reverse KL divergence to measure the discrete probability distributions of the aligned vision logits over the vocabulary space. Comprehensive evaluation on diverse benchmarks demonstrates that EM-KD trained model outperforms prior Efficient MLLMs on both accuracy and efficiency with a large margin, validating its effectiveness. Compared with previous distillation methods, which are equipped with our proposed vision token matching strategy for fair comparison, EM-KD also achieves better performance.

PaperID: 1979, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21146

Authors:Xinyue Guo, Xiaoran Yang, Lipan Zhang, Jianxuan Yang, Zhao Wang, Jian Luan

Affiliations: Xiaomi Corporation, Wuhan University

Title: AV-Edit: Multimodal Generative Sound Effect Editing via Audio-Visual Semantic Joint Control

Abstract:
Sound effect editing—modifying audio by adding, removing, or replacing elements—remains constrained by existing approaches that rely solely on lowlevel signal processing or coarse text prompts, often resulting in limited flexibility and suboptimal audio quality. To address this, we propose AV-Edit, a generative sound effect editing framework that enables fine-grained editing of existing audio tracks in videos by jointly leveraging visual, audio, and text semantics. Specifically, the proposed method employs a specially designed contrastive audio-visual masking autoencoder (CAV-MAE-Edit) for multimodal pre-training, learning aligned cross-modal representations. These representations are then used to train an editorial Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MM-DiT) capable of removing visually irrelevant sounds and generating missing audio elements consistent with video content through a correlation-based feature gating training strategy. Furthermore, we construct a dedicated video-based sound editing dataset as an evaluation benchmark. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed AV-Edit generates high-quality audio with precise modifications based on visual content, achieving state-of-the-art performance in the field of sound effect editing and exhibiting strong competitiveness in the domain of audio generation.

PaperID: 1980, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01787

Authors:Yiwei Guo, Bohan Li, Hankun Wang, Zhihan Li, Shuai Wang, Xie Chen, Kai Yu

Affiliations: X-LANCE Lab, School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, Jiangsu Key Lab of Language Computing, School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University

Title: AHAMask: Reliable Task Specification for Large Audio Language Models Without Instructions

Abstract:
Although current large audio language models (LALMs) extend text large language models (LLMs) with generic acoustic understanding abilities, they usually suffer from prompt sensitivity, where different instructions of the same intention can yield drastically different outcomes. In this work, we propose AHAMask, where we simply mask some of the attention heads in the decoderonly LLM backbone of LALMs, to trigger specific acoustic task functionalities without instructions. These masks are efficiently obtained by training on an LALM, with the number of trainable parameters equal to the attention head count in its LLM backbone. We show by experiments that applying such selective attention head masks achieves comparable or even better performance than using instructions, either on single or composite tasks. Besides achieving reliable acoustic task specification for LALMs, this also reveals that LALMs exhibit certain ``functional pathways'' in their attention heads.

PaperID: 1981, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07032

Authors:Tiantian He, Keyue Jiang, An Zhao, Anna Schroder, Elinor Thompson, Sonja Soskic, Frederik Barkhof, Daniel C. Alexander

Affiliations: UCL Hawkes Institute and Department of Computer Science, University College London, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering & AI Centre, UCL Hawkes Institute and Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, Amsterdam University Medical Center, Vrije Universiteit

Title: A Stage-Aware Mixture of Experts Framework for Neurodegenerative Disease Progression Modelling

Abstract:
The longterm progression of neurodegenerative diseases is commonly conceptualized as a spatiotemporal diffusion process that consists of a graph diffusion process across the structural brain connectome and a localized reaction process within brain regions. However, modeling this progression remains challenging due to 1) the scarcity of longitudinal data obtained through irregular and infrequent subject visits and 2) the complex interplay of pathological mechanisms across brain regions and disease stages, where traditional models assume fixed mechanisms throughout disease progression. To address these limitations, we propose a novel stage-aware Mixture of Experts (MoE) framework that explicitly models how different contributing mechanisms dominate at different disease stages through time-dependent expert weighting. This architecture is a key innovation designed to maximize the utility of small datasets and provide interpretable insights into disease etiology. Data-wise, we utilize an iterative dual optimization method to properly estimate the temporal position of individual observations, constructing a cohort-level progression trajectory from irregular snapshots. Model-wise, we enhance the spatial component with an inhomogeneous graph neural diffusion model (IGND) that allows diffusivity to vary based on node states and time, providing more flexible representations of brain networks. We also introduce a localized neural reaction module to capture complex dynamics beyond standard processes.The resulting IGND-MoE model dynamically integrates these components across temporal states, offering a principled way to understand how stage-specific pathological mechanisms contribute to progression. When used to model tau pathology propagation in human brains, IGND-MoE outperforms purely pathophysiological and purely neural baselines in long-term prediction accuracy. Moreover, its stage-wise weights yield novel clinical insights that align with literature, suggesting that graph-related processes are more influential at early stages, while other unknown physical processes become dominant later on. Our findings highlight the necessity of designing hybrid and expert-constrained models that account for the evolving nature of neurodegenerative processes.

PaperID: 1982, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12341

Authors:Paul Hofman, Yusuf Sale, Eyke Hüllermeier

Affiliations: LMU Munich Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML)

Title: Uncertainty Quantification for Machine Learning: One Size Does Not Fit All

Abstract:
Proper quantification of predictive uncertainty is essential for the use of machine learning in safetycritical applications. Various uncertainty measures have been proposed for this purpose, typically claiming superiority over other measures. In this paper, we argue that there is no single best measure. Instead, uncertainty quantification should be tailored to the specific application. To this end, we use a flexible family of uncertainty measures that distinguishes between total, aleatoric, and epistemic uncertainty of second-order distributions. These measures can be instantiated with specific loss functions, so-called proper scoring rules, to control their characteristics, and we show that different characteristics are useful for different tasks. In particular, we show that, for the task of selective prediction, the scoring rule should ideally match the task loss. On the other hand, for out-of-distribution detection, our results confirm that mutual information, a widely used measure of epistemic uncertainty, performs best. Furthermore, in an active learning setting, epistemic uncertainty based on zero-one loss is shown to consistently outperform other uncertainty measures.

PaperID: 1983, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21500

Authors:Qian Hong, Cheng Bian, Xiao Zhou, Xiaoyu Li, Yelei Li, Zijing Zeng

Affiliations: Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China, OPPO Health Lab, China Beijing Key Laboratory of Research on Large Models and Intelligent Governance Engineering Research Center of Next-Generation Intelligent Search and Recommendation

Title: Lost in Time? A Meta-Learning Framework for Time-Shift-Tolerant Physiological Signal Transformation

Abstract:
Translating noninvasive signals such as photoplethysmography (PPG) and ballistocardiography (BCG) into clinically meaningful signals like arterial blood pressure (ABP) is vital for continuous, low-cost healthcare monitoring. However, temporal misalignment in multimodal signal transformation impairs transformation accuracy, especially in capturing critical features like ABP peaks. Conventional synchronization methods often rely on strong similarity assumptions or manual tuning, while existing Learning with Noisy Labels (LNL) approaches are ineffective under time-shifted supervision, either discarding excessive data or failing to correct label shifts. To address this challenge, we propose ShiftSyncNet, a meta-learning-based bi-level optimization framework that automatically mitigates performance degradation due to time misalignment. It comprises a transformation network (TransNet) and a time-shift correction network (SyncNet), where SyncNet learns time offsets between training pairs and applies Fourier phase shifts to align supervision signals. Experiments on one real-world industrial dataset and two public datasets show that ShiftSyncNet outperforms strong baselines by 9.4%, 6.0%, and 12.8%, respectively. The results highlight its effectiveness in correcting time shifts, improving label quality, and enhancing transformation accuracy across diverse misalignment scenarios, pointing toward a unified direction for addressing temporal inconsistencies in multimodal physiological transformation.

PaperID: 1984, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19822

Authors:Wentao Hu, Mingkuan Zhao, Shuangyong Song, Xiaoyan Zhu, Xin Lai, Jiayin Wang

Affiliations: China Telecom, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI)

Title: Mosaic Pruning: A Hierarchical Framework for Generalizable Pruning of Mixture-of-Experts Models

Abstract:
Sparse Mixtureof-Experts (SMoE) architectures have enabled a new frontier in scaling Large Language Models (LLMs), offering superior performance by activating only a fraction of their total parameters during inference. However, their practical deployment is severely hampered by substantial static memory overhead, as all experts must be loaded into memory. Existing post-training pruning methods, while reducing model size, often derive their pruning criteria from a single, general-purpose corpus. This leads to a critical limitation: a catastrophic performance degradation when the pruned model is applied to other domains, necessitating a costly re-pruning for each new domain. To address this generalization gap, we introduce Mosaic Pruning (MoP). The core idea of MoP is to construct a functionally comprehensive set of experts through a structured ``cluster-then-select" process. This process leverages a similarity metric that captures expert performance across different task domains to functionally cluster the experts, and subsequently selects the most representative expert from each cluster based on our proposed Activation Variability Score. Unlike methods that optimize for a single corpus, our proposed Mosaic Pruning ensures that the pruned model retains a functionally complementary set of experts, much like the tiles of a mosaic that together form a complete picture of the original model's capabilities, enabling it to handle diverse downstream tasks.Extensive experiments on various MoE models demonstrate the superiority of our approach. MoP significantly outperforms prior work, achieving a 7.24% gain on general tasks and 8.92% on specialized tasks like math reasoning and code generation.

PaperID: 1985, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.05516

Authors:Hengguan Huang, Xing Shen, Guang-Yuan Hao, Songtao Wang, Lingfa Meng, Dianbo Liu, David Alejandro Duchene, Hao Wang, Samir Bhatt

Affiliations: McGill University, Cornell University, University of Alberta, University of Copenhagen, National University of Singapore, Rutgers University

Title: BayesAgent: Bayesian Agentic Reasoning Under Uncertainty via Verbalized Probabilistic Graphical Modeling

Abstract:
Human cognition excels at transcending sensory input and forming latent representations that structure our understanding of the world. While Large Language Model (LLM) agents demonstrate emergent reasoning and decisionmaking abilities, they lack a principled framework for capturing latent structures and modeling uncertainty. In this work, we explore for the first time how to bridge LLM agents with probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) to address agentic reasoning under uncertainty. To this end, we introduce Verbalized Probabilistic Graphical Modeling (vPGM), a Bayesian agentic framework that (i) guides LLM agents in following key principles of PGMs through natural language and (ii) refines the resulting posterior distributions via numerical Bayesian inference. Unlike many traditional probabilistic methods requiring substantial domain expertise, vPGM bypasses expert‐driven model design, making it well‐suited for scenarios with limited assumptions. We evaluated our model on several agentic reasoning tasks, both close-ended and open-ended. Our results indicate that the model effectively enhances confidence calibration and text generation quality.

PaperID: 1986, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12881

Authors:Cheongjae Jang, Jonghyun Won, Soyeon Jun, Chun Kee Chung, Keehyoung Joo, Yung-Kyun Noh

Affiliations: Hanyang University, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Seoul National University, Korea Institute for Advanced Study

Title: On the Information Processing of One-Dimensional Wasserstein Distances with Finite Samples

Abstract:
Leveraging the Wasserstein distance—a summation of samplewise transport distances in data space—is advantageous in many applications for measuring support differences between two underlying density functions. However, when supports significantly overlap while densities exhibit substantial pointwise differences, it remains unclear whether and how this transport information can accurately identify these differences, particularly their analytic characterization in finite-sample settings. We address this issue by conducting an analysis of the information processing capabilities of the one-dimensional Wasserstein distance with finite samples. By utilizing the Poisson process and isolating the rate factor, we demonstrate the capability of capturing the pointwise density difference with Wasserstein distances and how this information harmonizes with support differences. The analyzed properties are confirmed using neural spike train decoding and amino acid contact frequency data. The results reveal that the one-dimensional Wasserstein distance highlights meaningful density differences related to both rate and support.

PaperID: 1987, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20737

Authors:Daeheon Jeong, Seoyeon Byun, Kihoon Son, Dae Hyun Kim, Juho Kim

Affiliations: Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Korea University, Yonsei University

Title: CANVAS: A Benchmark for Vision-Language Models on Tool-Based User Interface Design

Abstract:
User interface (UI) design is an iterative process in which designers progressively refine their work with design software such as Figma or Sketch. Recent advances in vision–language models (VLMs) with tool invocation suggest these models can operate design software to edit a UI design through iteration. Understanding and enhancing this capacity is important, as it highlights VLMs’ potential to collaborate with designers within conventional software. However, as no existing benchmark evaluates toolbased design performance, the capacity remains unknown. To address this, we introduce CANVAS, a benchmark for VLMs on tool-based user interface design. Our benchmark contains 598 tool-based design tasks paired with ground-truth references sampled from 3.3K mobile UI designs across 30 function-based categories (e.g., onboarding, messaging). In each task, a VLM updates the design step-by-step through context-based tool invocations (e.g., create a rectangle as a button background), linked to design software. Specifically, CANVAS incorporates two task types: (i) design replication evaluates the ability to reproduce a whole UI screen; (ii) design modification evaluates the ability to modify a specific part of an existing screen. Results suggest that leading models exhibit more strategic tool invocations, improving design quality. Furthermore, we identify common error patterns models exhibit, guiding future work in enhancing tool-based design capabilities.

PaperID: 1988, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07997

Authors:Ke Jia, Yuheng Ma, Yang Li, Feifei Wang

Affiliations: Center for Applied Statistics, Renmin University of China

Title: PrAda-GAN: A Private Adaptive Generative Adversarial Network with Bayes Network Structure

Abstract:
We revisit the problem of generating synthetic data under differential privacy. To address the core limitations of marginalbased methods, we propose the Private Adaptive Generative Adversarial Network with Bayes Network Structure (PrAda-GAN), which integrates the strengths of both GAN-based and marginal-based approaches. Our method adopts a sequential generator architecture to capture complex dependencies among variables, while adaptively regularizing the learned structure to promote sparsity in the underlying Bayes network. Theoretically, we establish diminishing bounds on the parameter distance, variable selection error, and Wasserstein distance. Our analysis shows that leveraging dependency sparsity leads to significant improvements in convergence rates. Empirically, experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that PrAda-GAN outperforms existing tabular data synthesis methods in terms of the privacy–utility trade-off.

PaperID: 1989, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12494

Authors:Jiecheng Jiang, Jiawei Tang, Jiahao Jiang, Hui Liu, Junhui Hou, Yuheng Jia

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, National University of Singapore, Nanjing China, School of Computing Information Sciences, Saint Francis University, Hong Kong, Department of Computer Science, Ministry of Education

Title: Towards Better IncomLDL: We Are Unaware of Hidden Labels in Advance

Abstract:
Label distribution learning (LDL) is a novel paradigm that describe the samples by label distribution of a sample. However, acquiring LDL dataset is costly and timeconsuming, which leads to the birth of incomplete label distribution learning (IncomLDL). All the previous IncomLDL methods set the description degrees of "missing" labels in an instance to 0, but remains those of other labels unchanged. This setting is unrealistic because when certain labels are missing, the degrees of the remaining labels will increase accordingly. We fix this unrealistic setting in IncomLDL and raise a new problem: LDL with hidden labels (HidLDL), which aims to recover a complete label distribution from a real-world incomplete label distribution where certain labels in an instance are omitted during annotation. To solve this challenging problem, we discover the significance of proportional information of the observed labels and capture it by an innovative constraint to utilize it during the optimization process. We simultaneously use local feature similarity and the global low-rank structure to reveal the mysterious veil of hidden labels. Moreover, we theoretically give the recovery bound of our method, proving the feasibility of our method in learning from hidden labels. Extensive recovery and predictive experiments on various datasets prove the superiority of our method to state-of-the-art LDL and IncomLDL methods.

PaperID: 1990, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17633

Authors:DoYoung Kim, Jin-Seop Lee, Noo-ri Kim, SungJoon Lee, Jee-Hyong Lee

Affiliations: Sungkyunkwan University

Title: BD-Net: Has Depth-Wise Convolution Ever Been Applied in Binary Neural Networks?

Abstract:
Recent advances in model compression have highlighted the potential of lowbit precision techniques, with Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) attracting attention for their extreme efficiency. However, extreme quantization in BNNs limits representational capacity and destabilizes training, posing significant challenges for lightweight architectures with depth-wise convolutions. To address this, we propose a 1.58-bit convolution to enhance expressiveness and a pre-BN residual connection to stabilize optimization by improving the Hessian condition number. These innovations enable, to the best of our knowledge, the first successful binarization of depth-wise convolutions in BNNs. Our method achieves 33M OPs on ImageNet with MobileNet V1, establishing a new state-of-the-art in BNNs by outperforming prior methods with comparable OPs. Moreover, it consistently outperforms existing methods across various datasets, including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, STL-10, Tiny ImageNet, and Oxford Flowers 102, with accuracy improvements of up to 9.3 percentage points.

PaperID: 1991, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13283

Authors:Jongha Kim, Minseong Bae, Sanghyeok Lee, Jinsung Yoon, Hyunwoo J. Kim

Affiliations: Korea University, Google Cloud AI

Title: TabFlash: Efficient Table Understanding with Progressive Question Conditioning and Token Focusing

Abstract:
Table images present unique challenges for effective and efficient understanding due to the need for questionspecific focus and the presence of redundant background regions. Existing Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) approaches often overlook these characteristics, resulting in uninformative and redundant visual representations. To address these issues, we aim to generate visual features that are both informative and compact for improved table understanding. We first propose progressive question conditioning, which injects the question into Vision Transformer layers with gradually increasing frequency, considering each layer’s capacity to handle additional information, to generate question-aware visual features. To reduce redundancy, we introduce a pruning strategy that discards background tokens, thereby improving efficiency. To mitigate information loss from pruning, we further propose token focusing, a training strategy that encourages the model to concentrate essential information in the retained tokens. By combining these approaches, we present TabFlash, an efficient and effective MLLM for table understanding. TabFlash achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming both open-source and proprietary MLLMs, while requiring 27% less FLOPs and 30% less memory usage compared to the second-best MLLM.

PaperID: 1992, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.22307

Authors:You Li, Guannan Zhao, Yuhao Ju, Yunqi He, Jie Gu, Hai Zhou

Affiliations: Northwestern University

Title: LLA: Enhancing Security and Privacy for Generative Models with Logic-Locked Accelerators

Abstract:
We introduce LLA, an effective intellectual property (IP) protection scheme for generative AI models. LLA leverages the synergy between hardware and software to defend against various supply chain threats, including model theft, model corruption, and information leakage. On the software side, it embeds key bits into neurons that can trigger outliers to degrade performance and applies invariance transformations to obscure the key values. On the hardware side, it integrates a lightweight locking module into the AI accelerator while maintaining compatibility with various dataflow patterns and toolchains. An accelerator with a prestored secret key acts as a license to access the model services provided by the IP owner. The evaluation results show that LLA can withstand a broad range of oracle-guided key optimization attacks, while incurring a minimal computational overhead of less than 0.1% for 7,168 key bits.

PaperID: 1993, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23472

Authors:Shuyuan Lin, Wenwu Peng, Junjie Huang, Qiang Qi, Miaohui Wang, Jian Weng

Affiliations: Jinan University, Qingdao University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen University

Title: MCI-Net: A Robust Multi-Domain Context Integration Network for Point Cloud Registration

Abstract:
Robust and discriminative feature learning is critical for highquality point cloud registration. However, existing deep learning–based methods typically rely on Euclidean neighborhood-based strategies for feature extraction, which struggle to effectively capture the implicit semantics and structural consistency in point clouds. To address these issues, we propose a multi-domain context integration network (MCI-Net) that improves feature representation and registration performance by aggregating contextual cues from diverse domains. Specifically, we propose a graph neighborhood aggregation module, which constructs a global graph to capture the overall structural relationships within point clouds. We then propose a progressive context interaction module to enhance feature discriminability by performing intra-domain feature decoupling and inter-domain context interaction. Finally, we design a dynamic inlier selection method that optimizes inlier weights using residual information from multiple iterations of pose estimation, thereby improving the accuracy and robustness of registration. Extensive experiments on indoor RGB-D and outdoor LiDAR datasets show that the proposed MCI-Net significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving the highest registration recall of 96.4% on 3DMatch.

PaperID: 1994, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.15908

Authors:Dingbang Liu, Fenghui Ren, Jun Yan, Guoxin Su, Shohei Kato, Wen Gu

Affiliations: University of Wollongong, Nagoya Institute of Technology

Title: Reinforcement Learning with Fuzzy Human Attention-Guided Graph for Heterogeneous Multiagent Systems

Abstract:
Effective agent coordination is crucial in cooperative Multiagent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). While recent advances have significantly improved cooperation by modeling agent interactions through various graph structures, most existing approaches primarily focus on homogeneous agents. Despite the ubiquity of heterogeneous agents, constructing a comprehensive graph that captures their diverse attributes and relationships from scratch is notoriously laborintensive for both humans and agents, which makes policy learning extremely challenging. To tackle this difficulty, we propose a novel method that utilizes a fuzzy human attention-guided graph to model inter-agent relationships. Instead of learning the graph entirely from scratch, we incorporate abstract human attention, with its uncertainty captured through fuzzy logic, to guide the graph development process. To further accommodate the varying attributes and objectives of heterogeneous agents while maintaining their learning capabilities, the attention-guided graph is fine-tuned through a hyper-network. Our proposed approach is end-to-end trainable and agnostic to specific MARL methods. Empirical evaluations conducted on challenging heterogeneous scenarios from the StarCraft Multiagent Challenge (SMAC) and SMACv2 validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

PaperID: 1995, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09144

Authors:Junyi Liu, Stanley Kok

Affiliations: National University of Singapore

Title: Practical Global and Local Bounds in Gaussian Process Regression via Chaining

Abstract:
Gaussian process regression (GPR) is a popular nonparametric Bayesian method that provides predictive uncertainty estimates and is widely used in safetycritical applications. While prior research has introduced various uncertainty bounds, most existing approaches require access to specific input features, and rely on posterior mean and variance estimates or the tuning of hyperparameters. These limitations hinder robustness and fail to capture the model’s global behavior in expectation. To address these limitations, we propose a chaining-based framework for estimating upper and lower bounds on the expected extreme values over unseen data, without requiring access to specific input features. We provide kernel-specific refinements for commonly used kernels such as RBF and Matérn, in which our bounds are tighter than generic constructions. We further improve numerical tightness by avoiding analytical relaxations. In addition to global estimation, we also develop a novel method for local uncertainty quantification at specified inputs. This approach leverages chaining geometry through partition diameters, adapting to local structures without relying on posterior variance scaling. Our experimental results validate the theoretical findings and demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

PaperID: 1996, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.13352

Authors:Wenyu Liu, Tianqiang Huang, Pengfei Zhang, Zong Ke, Minghui Min, Puning Zhao

Affiliations: College of Computer and Cyber Security, Fujian Normal University, Anhui University of Science and Technology, National University of Singapore, China University of Mining Technology, School of Cyber Science and Technology, Sun Yat-sen University

Title: High Dimensional Distributed Gradient Descent with Arbitrary Number of Byzantine Attackers

Abstract:
Adversarial attacks pose a major challenge to distributed learning systems, prompting the development of numerous robust learning methods. However, most existing approaches suffer from the curse of dimensionality, i.e. the error increases with the number of model parameters. In this paper, we make a progress towards high dimensional problems, under arbitrary number of Byzantine attackers. The cornerstone of our design is a direct high dimensional semiverified mean estimation method. The idea is to identify a subspace with large variance. The components of the mean value perpendicular to this subspace are estimated using corrupted gradient vectors uploaded from worker machines, while the components within this subspace are estimated using auxiliary dataset. As a result, a combination of large corrupted dataset and small clean dataset yields significantly better performance than using them separately. We then apply this method as the aggregator for distributed learning problems. The theoretical analysis shows that compared with existing solutions, our method gets rid of sqrtd dependence on the dimensionality, and achieves minimax optimal statistical rates. Numerical results validate our theory as well as the effectiveness of the proposed method.

PaperID: 1997, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04247

Authors:Zhixin Liu, Xuanlin Liu, Sihan Xu, Yaqiong Qiao, Ying Zhang, Xiangrui Cai

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Data and Intelligent System Security, Ministry of Education, Nankai University, College of Computer Science, China (DISSec) Tianjin Key Laboratory of Visual Computing and Intelligent Perception (VCIP) College of Cryptology and Cyber Science

Title: Beyond Immediate Activation: Temporally Decoupled Backdoor Attacks on Time Series Forecasting

Abstract:
Existing backdoor attacks on multivariate time series (MTS) forecasting enforce strict temporal and dimensional coupling between triggers and target patterns, requiring synchronous activation at fixed positions across variables. However, realistic scenarios often demand delayed and variablespecific activation. We identify this critical unmet need and propose TDBA, a temporally decoupled backdoor attack framework for MTS forecasting. By injecting triggers that encode the expected location of the target pattern, TDBA enables the activation of the target pattern at any positions within the forecasted data, with the activation position flexibly varying across different variable dimensions. TDBA introduces two core modules: (1) a position-guided trigger generation mechanism that leverages smoothed Gaussian priors to generate triggers that are position-related to the predefined target pattern; and (2) a position-aware optimization module that assigns soft weights based on trigger completeness, pattern coverage, and temporal offset, facilitating targeted and stealthy attack optimization. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that TDBA consistently outperforms existing baselines in effectiveness while maintaining good stealthiness. Ablation studies confirm the controllability and robustness of its design.

PaperID: 1998, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12409

Authors:Ziwei Liu, Borui Kang, Wei Li, Hangjie Yuan, Yanbing Yang, Wenbin Li, Yifan Zhu, Tao Feng, Jun Luo

Affiliations: College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, Nanyang Technological University, School of Computer Science, Nanjing University, DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, College of Computing and Data Science

Title: Branch, or Layer? Zeroth-Order Optimization for Continual Learning of Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
VisionLanguage Continual Learning (VLCL) has attracted significant research attention for its robust capabilities, and the adoption of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) strategies is enabling these models to achieve competitive performance with substantially reduced resource consumption. However, dominated First-Order (FO) optimization is prone to trap models in suboptimal local minima, especially in limited exploration subspace within PEFT. To overcome this challenge, this paper pioneers a systematic exploration of adopting Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization for PEFT-based VLCL. We first identify the incompatibility of naive full-ZO adoption in VLCL due to optimization process instability. We then investigate the application of ZO optimization from a modality branch-wise to a fine-grained layer-wise across various training units to identify an optimal strategy. Besides, a key theoretical insight reveals that vision modality exhibit higher variance than language counterparts in VLCL during the ZO optimization process, and we propose a modality-aware stabilized ZO strategy, which adopts gradient sign normalization in ZO and constrains vision modality perturbation to further improve performance. Benefiting from the adoption of ZO optimization, PEFT-based VLCL fulfills better ability to escape local minima during the optimization process, extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results.

PaperID: 1999, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00849

Authors:Yunbo Long, Jiaquan Zhang, Xi Chen, Alexandra Brintrup

Affiliations: Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Incubation Institute, Fudan University Shanghai Innovation Institute, Fudan University Shanghai Academy of AI for Science

Title: Topological Federated Clustering via Gravitational Potential Fields Under Local Differential Privacy

Abstract:
Clustering nonindependent and identically distributed (non-IID) data under local differential privacy (LDP) in federated settings presents a critical challenge: preserving privacy while maintaining accuracy without iterative communication. Existing one-shot methods rely on unstable pairwise centroid distances or neighborhood rankings, degrading severely under strong LDP noise and data heterogeneity. We present Gravitational Federated Clustering (GFC), a novel approach to privacy-preserving federated clustering that overcomes the limitations of distance-based methods under varying LDP. Addressing the critical challenge of clustering non-IID data with diverse privacy guarantees, GFC transforms privatized client centroids into a global gravitational potential field where true cluster centers emerge as topologically persistent singularities. Our framework introduces two key innovations: (1) a client-side compactness-aware perturbation mechanism that encodes local cluster geometry as "mass" values, and (2) a server-side topological aggregation phase that extracts stable centroids through persistent homology analysis of the potential field's superlevel sets. Theoretically, we establish a closed-form bound between the privacy budget ε and centroid estimation error, proving the potential field's Lipschitz smoothing properties exponentially suppress noise in high-density regions. Empirically, GFC outperforms state-of-the-art methods on ten benchmarks, especially under strong LDP constraints (ε < 1), while maintaining comparable performance at lower privacy budgets. By reformulating federated clustering as a topological persistence problem in a synthetic physics-inspired space, GFC achieves unprecedented privacy-accuracy trade-offs without iterative communication, providing a new perspective for privacy-preserving distributed learning.

PaperID: 2000, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19031

Authors:Weigang Lu, Ziyu Guan, Wei Zhao, Yaming Yang, Yujie Sun, Zheng Liang, Yibing Zhan, Dapeng Tao

Affiliations: Xidian University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, JD Explore Academy, Yunnan University

Title: ProGMLP: A Progressive Framework for GNN-to-MLP Knowledge Distillation with Efficient Trade-offs

Abstract:
GNNto-MLP (G2M) methods have emerged as a promising approach to accelerate Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) by distilling their knowledge into simpler Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs). These methods bridge the gap between the expressive power of GNNs and the computational efficiency of MLPs, making them well-suited for resource-constrained environments. However, existing G2M methods are limited by their inability to flexibly adjust inference cost and accuracy dynamically, a critical requirement for real-world applications where computational resources and time constraints can vary significantly. To address this, we introduce a Progressive framework designed to offer flexible and on-demand trade-offs between inference cost and accuracy for GNN-to-MLP knowledge distillation (ProGMLP). ProGMLP employs a Progressive Training Structure (PTS), where multiple MLP students are trained in sequence, each building on the previous one. Furthermore, ProGMLP incorporates Progressive Knowledge Distillation (PKD) to iteratively refine the distillation process from GNNs to MLPs, and Progressive Mixup Augmentation (PMA) to enhance generalization by progressively generating harder mixed samples. Our approach is validated through comprehensive experiments on eight real-world graph datasets, demonstrating that ProGMLP maintains high accuracy while dynamically adapting to varying runtime scenarios, making it highly effective for deployment in diverse application settings.

PaperID: 2001, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17982

Authors:Jiayi Luo, Qingyun Sun, Lingjuan Lyu, Ziwei Zhang, Haonan Yuan, Xingcheng Fu, Jianxin Li

Affiliations: Beihang University, Guangxi Normal University

Title: Towards Effective, Stealthy, and Persistent Backdoor Attacks Targeting Graph Foundation Models

Abstract:
Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) are pretrained on diverse source domains and adapted to unseen targets, enabling broad generalization for graph machine learning. Despite that GFMs have attracted considerable attention recently, their vulnerability to backdoor attacks remains largely underexplored. A compromised GFM can introduce backdoor behaviors into downstream applications, posing serious security risks. However, launching backdoor attacks against GFMs is non-trivial due to three key challenges. (1) Effectiveness: Attackers lack knowledge of the downstream task during pre-training, complicating the assurance that triggers reliably induce misclassifications into desired classes. (2) Stealthiness: The variability in node features across domains complicates trigger insertion that remains stealthy. (3) Persistence: Downstream fine-tuning may erase backdoor behaviors by updating model parameters. To address these challenges, we propose GFM-BA, a novel Backdoor Attack model against Graph Foundation Models. Specifically, we first design a label-free trigger association module that links the trigger to a set of prototype embeddings, eliminating the need for knowledge about downstream tasks to perform backdoor injection. Then, we introduce a node-adaptive trigger generator, dynamically producing node-specific triggers, reducing the risk of trigger detection while reliably activating the backdoor. Lastly, we develop a persistent backdoor anchoring module that firmly anchors the backdoor to fine-tuning-insensitive parameters, enhancing the persistence of the backdoor under downstream adaptation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, stealthiness, and persistence of GFM-BA.

PaperID: 2002, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01727

Authors:Sisuo Lyu, Siru Zhong, Weilin Ruan, Qingxiang Liu, Qingsong Wen, Hui Xiong, Yuxuan Liang

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Squirrel Ai Learning

Title: OccamVTS: Distilling Vision Models to 1% Parameters for Time Series Forecasting

Abstract:
Time series forecasting is fundamental to diverse applications, with recent approaches leverage large vision models (LVMs) to capture temporal patterns through visual representations. We reveal that while vision models enhance forecasting performance, 99% of their parameters are unnecessary for time series tasks. Through crossmodal analysis, we find that time series align with low-level textural features but not high-level semantics, which can impair forecasting accuracy. We propose OccamVTS, a knowledge distillation framework that extracts only the essential 1% of predictive information from LVMs into lightweight networks. Using pre-trained LVMs as privileged teachers, OccamVTS employs pyramid-style feature alignment combined with correlation and feature distillation to transfer beneficial patterns while filtering out semantic noise. Counterintuitively, this aggressive parameter reduction improves accuracy by eliminating overfitting to irrelevant visual features while preserving essential temporal patterns. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that OccamVTS consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance with only 1% of the original parameters, particularly excelling in few-shot and zero-shot scenarios.

PaperID: 2003, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03521

Authors:Xiaosen Lyu, Jiayu Xiong, Yuren Chen, Wanlong Wang, Xiaoqing Dai, Jing Wang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Huaqiao University, China Xiamen Key Laboratory of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Title: Cross-Space Synergy: A Unified Framework for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Abstract:
Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation (MERC) aims to predict speakers’ emotions by integrating textual, acoustic, and visual cues. Existing approaches either struggle to capture complex cross‑modal interactions or experience gradient conflicts and unstable training when using deeper architectures. To address these issues, we propose CrossSpace Synergy (CSS), which couples a representation component with an optimization component. Synergistic Polynomial Fusion (SPF) serves the representation role, leveraging low-rank tensor factorization to efficiently capture high-order cross-modal interactions. Pareto Gradient Modulator (PGM) serves the optimization role, steering updates along Pareto-optimal directions across competing objectives to alleviate gradient conflicts and improve stability. Experiments show that CSS outperforms existing representative methods on IEMOCAP and MELD in both accuracy and training stability, demonstrating its effectiveness in complex multimodal scenarios.

PaperID: 2004, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17454

Authors:Shusen Ma, Yunbo Zhao, Yu Kang

Affiliations: Institute of Advanced Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center

Title: C3RL: Rethinking the Combination of Channel-independence and Channel-mixing from Representation Learning

Abstract:
Multivariate time series forecasting has drawn increasing attention due to its practical importance. Existing approaches typically adopt either channelmixing (CM) or channel-independence (CI) strategies. CM strategy can capture inter-variable dependencies but fails to discern variable-specific temporal patterns. CI strategy improves this aspect but fails to fully exploit cross-variable dependencies like CM. Hybrid strategies based on feature fusion offer limited generalization and interpretability. To address these issues, we propose C3RL, a novel representation learning framework that jointly models both CM and CI strategies. Motivated by contrastive learning in computer vision, C3RL treats the inputs of the two strategies as transposed views and builds a siamese network architecture: one strategy serves as the backbone, while the other complements it. By jointly optimizing contrastive and prediction losses with adaptive weighting, C3RL balances representation and forecasting performance. Extensive experiments on seven models show that C3RL boosts the best-case performance rate to 81.4% for models based on CI strategy and to 76.3% for models based on CM strategy, demonstrating strong generalization and effectiveness.

PaperID: 2005, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09826

Authors:Abinay Reddy Naini, Fernando Diaz, Carlos Busso

Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University

Title: RankList – a Listwise Preference Learning Framework for Predicting Subjective Preferences

Abstract:
Preference learning has gained significant attention in tasks involving subjective human judgments, such as speech emotion recognition (SER) and image aesthetic assessment. While pairwise frameworks such as RankNet offer robust modeling of relative preferences, they are inherently limited to local comparisons and struggle to capture global ranking consistency. To address these limitations, we propose RankList, a novel listwise preference learning framework that generalizes RankNet to structured listlevel supervision. Our formulation explicitly models local and non-local ranking constraints within a probabilistic framework. The paper introduces a log-sum-exp approximation to improve training efficiency. We further extend RankList with skip-wise comparisons, enabling progressive exposure to complex list structures and enhancing global ranking fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method across diverse modalities. On benchmark SER datasets (MSP-Podcast, IEMOCAP, BIIC Podcast), RankList achieves consistent improvements in Kendall's Tau and ranking accuracy compared to standard listwise baselines. We also validate our approach on aesthetic image ranking using the Artistic Image Aesthetics dataset, highlighting its broad applicability. Through ablation and cross-domain studies, we show that RankList not only improves in-domain ranking but also generalizes better across datasets. Our framework offers a unified, extensible approach for modeling ordered preferences in subjective learning scenarios.

PaperID: 2006, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05984

Authors:Ankur Naskar, Gugan Thoppe, Vijay Gupta

Affiliations: Indian Institute of Science, Purdue University

Title: Parameter-free Optimal Rates for Nonlinear Semi-Norm Contractions with Applications to Q-Learning

Abstract:
Algorithms for solving nonlinear fixedpoint equations---such as average-reward Q-learning and TD-learning---often involve semi-norm contractions. Achieving parameter-free optimal convergence rates for these methods via Polyak–Ruppert averaging has remained elusive, largely due to the non-monotonicity of such semi-norms. We close this gap by (i.) recasting the averaged error as a linear recursion involving a nonlinear perturbation, and (ii.) taming the nonlinearity by coupling the semi-norm's contraction with the monotonicity of a suitably induced norm. Our main result yields the first parameter-free ~O(1/√t) optimal rates for Q-learning in both average-reward and exponentially discounted settings, where t denotes the iteration index. The result applies within a broad framework that accommodates both synchronous and asynchronous updates, single-agent and distributed deployments, and data streams obtained from either simulators or along Markovian trajectories.

PaperID: 2007, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07474

Authors:Youngmin Oh, Hyung-Il Kim, Jung Uk Kim

Affiliations: Chonnam National University, Kyung Hee University

Title: Task Prototype-Based Knowledge Retrieval for Multi-Task Learning from Partially Annotated Data

Abstract:
Multitask learning (MTL) is critical in real-world applications such as autonomous driving and robotics, enabling simultaneous handling of diverse tasks. However, obtaining fully annotated data for all tasks is impractical due to labeling costs. Existing methods for partially labeled MTL typically rely on predictions from unlabeled tasks, making it difficult to establish reliable task associations and potentially leading to negative transfer and suboptimal performance. To address these issues, we propose a prototype-based knowledge retrieval framework that achieves robust MTL instead of relying on predictions from unlabeled tasks. Our framework consists of two key components: (1) a task prototype embedding task-specific characteristics and quantifying task associations, and (2) a knowledge retrieval transformer that adaptively refines feature representations based on these associations. To achieve this, we introduce an association knowledge generating (AKG) loss to ensure the task prototype consistently captures task-specific characteristics. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, highlighting its potential for robust multi-task learning, even when only a subset of tasks is annotated.

PaperID: 2008, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03663

Authors:Deepak Pandita, Flip Korn, Chris Welty, Christopher M Homan

Affiliations: Rochester Institute of Technology, Google Research

Title: Forest vs Tree: The (N, K) Trade-off in Reproducible ML Evaluation

Abstract:
Reproducibility is a cornerstone of scientific validation and of the authority it confers on its results. Reproducibility in machine learning evaluations leads to greater trust, confidence, and value. However, the ground truth responses used in machine learning often necessarily come from humans, among whom disagreement is prevalent, and surprisingly little research has studied the impact of effectively ignoring disagreement in these responses, as is typically the case. One reason for the lack of research is that budgets for collecting humanannotated evaluation data are limited, and obtaining more samples from multiple raters for each example greatly increases the per-item annotation costs. We investigate the trade-off between the number of items (N) and the number of responses per item (K) needed for reliable machine learning evaluation. We analyze a diverse collection of categorical datasets for which multiple annotations per item exist, and simulated distributions fit to these datasets, to determine the optimal (N, K) configuration, given a fixed budget (N x K), for collecting evaluation data and reliably comparing the performance of machine learning models. Our findings show, first, that accounting for human disagreement may come with N x K at no more than 1000 (and often much lower) for every dataset tested on at least one metric. Moreover, this minimal N x K almost always occurred for K > 10. Furthermore, the nature of the tradeoff between K and N, or if one even existed, depends on the evaluation metric, with metrics that are more sensitive to the full distribution of responses performing better at higher levels of K. Our methods can be used to help ML practitioners get more effective test data by finding the optimal metrics and number of items and annotations per item to collect to get the most reliability for their budget.

PaperID: 2009, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22805

Authors:Yuqi Pang, Bowen Yang, Yun Cao, Rong Fan, Xiaoyu Li, Chen He

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China School of Cyber Security

Title: MoCHA: Advanced VisionLanguage Reasoning with MoE Connector and Hierarchical Group Attention

Abstract:
Vision large language models (VLLMs) are focusing primarily on handling complex and finegrained visual information by incorporating advanced vision encoders and scaling up visual models. However, these approaches face high training and inference costs, as well as challenges in extracting visual details, effectively bridging across modalities. In this work, we propose a novel visual framework, MoCHA, to address these issues. Our framework integrates four vision backbones (i.e., CLIP, SigLIP, DINOv2 and ConvNeXt) to extract complementary visual features and is equipped with a sparse Mixture of Experts Connectors (MoECs) module to dynamically select experts tailored to different visual dimensions. To mitigate redundant or insufficient use of the visual information encoded by the MoECs module, we further design a Hierarchical Group Attention (HGA) with intra- and inter-group operations and an adaptive gating strategy for encoded visual features. We train MoCHA on two mainstream LLMs (e.g., Phi2-2.7B and Vicuna-7B) and evaluate their performance across various benchmarks. Notably, MoCHA outperforms state-of-the-art open-weight models on various tasks. For example, compared to CuMo (Mistral-7B), our MoCHA (Phi2-2.7B) presents outstanding abilities to mitigate hallucination by showing improvements of 3.25% in POPE and to follow visual instructions by raising 153 points on MME. Finally, ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed MoECs and HGA in improving the overall performance of MoCHA.

PaperID: 2010, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19765

Authors:Sumin Park, Noseong Park

Affiliations: Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology

Title: How Many Experts Are Enough? Towards Optimal Semantic Specialization for Mixture-of-Experts

Abstract:
Finding the optimal configuration of Sparse Mixtureof- Experts (SMoE) that maximizes semantic differentiation among experts is essential for exploiting the full potential of MoE architectures. However, existing SMoE frameworks either heavily rely on hyperparameter tuning or overlook the importance of diversifying semantic roles across experts when adapting the expert pool size. We propose Mixture-of-Experts for Adaptive Semantic Specialization (MASS), a semantic-aware MoE framework for adaptive expert expansion and dynamic routing. MASS introduces two key advancements: (i) a gradient-based semantic drift detector that prompts targeted expert expansion when the existing expert pool lacks capacity to capture the full semantic diversity of the data, and (ii) an integration of adaptive routing strategy that dynamically adjusts expert usage based on token-level routing confidence mass. We first demonstrate that MASS reliably converges to the point of optimal balance between cost-performance trade-off with notably improved sematic specialization in a highly controlled synthetic setup. Further empirical results on real-world datasets across language and vision domains show that MASS consistently outperforms a range of strong MoE baselines, demonstrating its domain robustness and enhanced expert specialization.

PaperID: 2011, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09791

Authors:Siddeshwar Raghavan, Jiangpeng He, Fengqing Zhu

Affiliations: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Department of Computer Science, Indiana University

Title: PANDA – Patch and Distribution-Aware Augmentation for Long-Tailed Exemplar-Free Continual Learning

Abstract:
ExemplarFree Continual Learning (EFCL) restricts the storage of previous task data and is highly susceptible to catastrophic forgetting. While pre-trained models (PTMs) are increasingly leveraged for EFCL, existing methods often overlook the inherent imbalance of real-world data distributions. We discovered that real-world data streams commonly exhibit dual-level imbalances, dataset-level distributions combined with extreme or reversed skews within individual tasks, creating both intra-task and inter-task disparities that hinder effective learning and generalization. To address these challenges, we propose PANDA, a Patch-and-Distribution-Aware Augmentation framework that integrates seamlessly with existing PTM-based EFCL methods. PANDA amplifies low-frequency classes by using a CLIP encoder to identify representative regions and transplanting those into frequent-class samples within each task. Furthermore, PANDA incorporates an adaptive balancing strategy that leverages prior task distributions to smooth inter-task imbalances, reducing the overall gap between average samples across tasks and enabling fairer learning with frozen PTMs. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate PANDA's capability to work with existing PTM-based CL methods, improving accuracy and reducing catastrophic forgetting.

PaperID: 2012, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16778

Authors:Yating Ren, Yikun Ban, Huobin Tan

Affiliations: Beihang University

Title: GCL-OT: Graph Contrastive Learning with Optimal Transport for Heterophilic Text-Attributed Graphs

Abstract:
Recently, structure–text contrastive learning has shown promising performance on textattributed graphs by leveraging the complementary strengths of graph neural networks and language models. However, existing methods typically rely on homophily assumptions in similarity estimation and hard optimization objectives, which limit their applicability to heterophilic graphs. Although existing methods can mitigate heterophily through structural adjustments or neighbor aggregation, they usually treat textual embeddings as static targets, leading to suboptimal alignment. In this work, we identify the multi-granular heterophily in text-attributed graphs, including complete heterophily, partial heterophily, and latent homophily, which makes structure–text alignment particularly challenging due to mixed, noisy, and missing semantic correlations. To achieve flexible and bidirectional alignment, we propose GCL-OT, a novel graph contrastive learning framework with optimal transport, equipped with tailored mechanisms for each type of heterophily. Specifically, for partial heterophily, we design a RealSoftMax-based similarity estimator to emphasize key neighbor-word interactions while easing background noise. For complete heterophily, we introduce a prompt-based filter that adaptively excludes irrelevant noise during optimal transport alignment. Furthermore, we incorporate OT-guided soft supervision to uncover potential neighbors with similar semantics, enhancing the learning of latent homophily. Theoretical analysis shows that GCL-OT can improve the mutual information bound and Bayes error guarantees. Extensive experiments on nine benchmarks show that GCL-OT outperforms state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness.

PaperID: 2013, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11560

Authors:Angelo Rodio, Giovanni Neglia, Zheng Chen, Erik G. Larsson

Affiliations: Linköping University

Title: A Unified Convergence Analysis for Semi-Decentralized Learning: Sampled-to-Sampled vs. Sampled-to-All Communication

Abstract:
In semidecentralized federated learning, devices primarily rely on device-to-device communication but occasionally interact with a central server. Periodically, a sampled subset of devices uploads their local models to the server, which computes an aggregate model. The server can then either (i) share this aggregate model only with the sampled clients (sampled-to-sampled, S2S) or (ii) broadcast it to all clients (sampled-to-all, S2A). Despite their practical significance, a rigorous theoretical and empirical comparison of these two strategies remains absent. We address this gap by analyzing S2S and S2A within a unified convergence framework that accounts for key system parameters: sampling rate, server aggregation frequency, and network connectivity. Our results, both analytical and experimental, reveal distinct regimes where one strategy outperforms the other, depending primarily on the degree of data heterogeneity across devices. These insights lead to concrete design guidelines for practical semi-decentralized FL deployments.

PaperID: 2014, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.00291

Authors:Eran Rosenbluth, Martin Grohe

Affiliations: RWTH Aachen University

Title: Repetition Makes Perfect: Recurrent Graph Neural Networks Match Message Passing Limit

Abstract:
We precisely characterize the expressivity of computable Recurrent Graph Neural Networks (recurrent GNNs). We prove that recurrent GNNs with finiteprecision parameters, sum aggregation, and ReLU activation, can compute any graph algorithm that respects the natural message-passing invariance induced by the Color Refinement (or Weisfeiler-Leman) algorithm. While it is well known that the expressive power of GNNs is limited by this invariance [Morris et al., AAAI 2019; Xu et al., ICLR 2019], we establish that recurrent GNNs can actually match this limit. This is in contrast to non-recurrent GNNs, which have the power of Weisfeiler-Leman only in a very weak, "non-uniform", sense where each graph size requires a different GNN to compute with. Our construction introduces only a polynomial overhead in both time and space. Furthermore, we show that by incorporating random initialization, for connected graphs recurrent GNNs can express all graph algorithms. In particular, any polynomial-time graph algorithm can be emulated on connected graphs in polynomial time by a recurrent GNN with random initialization.

PaperID: 2015, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12174

Authors:Lifeng Shen, Xuyang Li, Lele Long

Affiliations: Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: TSGDiff: Rethinking Synthetic Time Series Generation from a Pure Graph Perspective

Abstract:
Diffusion models have shown great promise in data generation, yet generating time series data remains challenging due to the need to capture complex temporal dependencies and structural patterns. In this paper, we present TSGDiff, a novel framework that rethinks time series generation from a graphbased perspective. Specifically, we represent time series as dynamic graphs, where edges are constructed based on Fourier spectrum characteristics and temporal dependencies. A graph neural network-based encoder-decoder architecture is employed to construct a latent space, enabling the diffusion process to model the structural representation distribution of time series effectively. Furthermore, we propose the Topological Structure Fidelity (Topo-FID) score, a graph-aware metric for assessing the structural similarity of time series graph representations. Topo-FID integrates two sub-metrics: Graph Edit Similarity, which quantifies differences in adjacency matrices, and Structural Entropy Similarity, which evaluates the entropy of node degree distributions. This comprehensive metric provides a more accurate assessment of structural fidelity in generated time series. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that TSGDiff generates high-quality synthetic time series data generation, faithfully preserving temporal dependencies and structural integrity, thereby advancing the field of synthetic time series generation.

PaperID: 2016, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13116

Authors:Qipeng Song, Nan Yang, Ziqi Xu, Yue Li, Wei Shao, Feng Xia

Affiliations: Xidian University, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

Title: Synthetic Forgetting Without Access: A Few-Shot Zero-Glance Framework for Machine Unlearning

Abstract:
Machine unlearning aims to eliminate the influence of specific data from trained models to ensure privacy compliance. However, most existing methods assume full access to the original training dataset, which is often impractical. We address a more realistic yet challenging setting: fewshot zero-glance, where only a small subset of the retained data is available and the forget set is entirely inaccessible. We introduce GFOES, a novel framework comprising a Generative Feedback Network (GFN) and a two-phase fine-tuning procedure. GFN synthesises Optimal Erasure Samples (OES), which induce high loss on target classes, enabling the model to forget class-specific knowledge without access to the original forget data, while preserving performance on retained classes. The two-phase fine-tuning procedure enables aggressive forgetting in the first phase, followed by utility restoration in the second. Experiments on three image classification datasets demonstrate that GFOES achieves effective forgetting at both logit and representation levels, while maintaining strong performance using only 5% of the original data. Our framework offers a practical and scalable solution for privacy-preserving machine learning under data-constrained conditions.

PaperID: 2017, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17008

Authors:Zexi Tan, Xiaopeng Luo, Yunlin Liu, Yiqun Zhang

Affiliations: Guangdong University of Technology

Title: Mask the Redundancy: Evolving Masking Representation Learning for Multivariate Time-Series Clustering

Abstract:
Multivariate TimeSeries (MTS) clustering discovers intrinsic grouping patterns of temporal data samples. Although time-series provide rich discriminative information, they also contain substantial redundancy, such as steady-state machine operation records and zero-output periods of solar power generation. Such redundancy diminishes the attention given to discriminative timestamps in representation learning, thus leading to performance bottlenecks in MTS clustering. Masking has been widely adopted to enhance the MTS representation, where temporal reconstruction tasks are designed to capture critical information from MTS. However, most existing masking strategies appear to be standalone preprocessing steps, isolated from the learning process, which hinders dynamic adaptation to the importance of clustering-critical timestamps. Accordingly, this paper proposes the Evolving-masked MTS Clustering (EMTC) method, whose model architecture comprises Importance-aware Variate-wise Masking (IVM) and Multi-Endogenous Views (MEV) generation modules. IVM adaptively guides the model in learning more discriminative representations for clustering, while the reconstruction and cluster-guided contrastive learning pathways enhance and connect the representation learning to clustering tasks. Extensive experiments on 15 benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of EMTC over eight SOTA methods, where the EMTC achieves an average improvement of 4.85% in F1-Score over the strongest baselines.

PaperID: 2018, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.04883

Authors:Sanyam Vyas, Alberto Caron, Chris Hicks, Pete Burnap, Vasilios Mavroudis

Affiliations: Cardiff University, The Alan Turing Institute

Title: Beyond Training-time Poisoning: Component-level and Post-training Backdoors in Deep Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) systems are increasingly used in safetycritical applications, yet their security remains severely underexplored. This work investigates backdoor attacks, which implant hidden triggers that cause malicious actions only when specific inputs appear in the observation space. Existing DRL backdoor research focuses solely on training-time attacks requiring full adversarial access to the training pipeline. In contrast, we reveal critical vulnerabilities across the DRL supply chain where backdoors can be embedded with significantly reduced adversarial privileges. We introduce two novel attacks: (1) TrojanentRL, which exploits component-level flaws to implant a persistent backdoor that survives full model retraining; and (2) InfrectroRL, a post-training backdoor attack which requires no access to training, validation, or test data. Empirical and analytical evaluations across six Atari environments show our attacks rival state-of-the-art training-time backdoor attacks while operating under much stricter adversarial constraints. We also demonstrate that InfrectroRL further evades two leading DRL backdoor defenses. These findings challenge the current research focus and highlight the urgent need for robust defenses.

PaperID: 2019, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11039

Authors:Hualei Wang, Yiming Li, Shuo Ma, Hong Liu, Xiangdong Wang

Affiliations: Beijing Key Laboratory of Mobile Computing and Pervasive Device, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Listening Between the Frames: Bridging Temporal Gaps in Large Audio-Language Models

Abstract:
Recent Large AudioLanguage Models (LALMs) exhibit impressive capabilities in understanding audio content for conversational QA tasks. However, these models struggle to accurately understand timestamps for temporal localization (e.g., Temporal Audio Grounding) and are restricted to short audio perception, leading to constrained capabilities on fine-grained tasks. We identify three key aspects that limit their temporal localization and long audio understanding: (i) timestamp representation, (ii) architecture, and (iii) data. To address this, we introduce TimeAudio, a novel method that empowers LALMs to connect their understanding of audio content with precise temporal perception. Specifically, we incorporate unique temporal markers to improve time-sensitive reasoning and apply an absolute time-aware encoding that explicitly grounds the acoustic features with absolute time information. Moreover, to realize end-to-end long audio understanding, we introduce a segment-level token merging module to substantially reduce audio token redundancy and enhance the efficiency of information extraction. Due to the lack of suitable datasets and evaluation metrics, we consolidate existing audio datasets into a new dataset focused on temporal tasks and establish a series of metrics to evaluate the fine-grained performance. Evaluations show strong performance across a variety of fine-grained tasks, such as dense captioning, temporal grounding, and timeline speech summarization, which demonstrates TimeAudio's robust temporal localization and reasoning capabilities.

PaperID: 2020, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17987

Authors:Jinping Wang, Zhiqiang Gao, Zhang Dinggen, Zhiwu Xie

Affiliations: Wenzhou-Kean University, Wenzhou Kean University

Title: Escaping Optimization Stagnation: Taking Steps Beyond Task Arithmetic via Difference Vectors

Abstract:
Current methods for editing pretrained models face significant challenges, primarily high computational costs and limited scalability. Task arithmetic has recently emerged as a promising solution, using simple arithmetic operations—addition and negation—based on task vectors which are the differences between fine-tuned and pre-trained model weights, to efficiently modify model behavior. However, the full potential of task arithmetic remains underexplored, primarily due to limited mechanisms for overcoming optimization stagnation. To address this challenge, we introduce the notion of difference vector, a generalized form of task vectors derived from the historical movements during optimization. Using difference vectors as directed perturbations, we proposed the Difference Vector-based Anisotropic Scaling Iterative algorithm (DV-BASI) to enable a continuous optimization process for task arithmetic methods without relying on any additional modules or components. Notably, by leveraging escapability and directional advantages of difference vectors, the average performance on different tasks of the multi-task model merged by DV-BASI may even outperform models individually fine-tuned. Based on this observation, we extend the application of difference vectors to a feasible fine-tuning method for single-task models. On the practical side, DV-BASI allows expressive searching directions with few learnable parameters and forms a scalable framework. We also integrate DV-BASI with task arithmetic methods and advanced optimization techniques to achieve state-of-the-art performance on both supervised and unsupervised evaluation protocols.

PaperID: 2021, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.18753

Authors:Qin Wang, Alessio Quercia, Benjamin Bruns, Abigail Morrison, Hanno Scharr, Kai Krajsek

Affiliations: Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH

Title: Self-Supervised Learning Based on Transformed Image Reconstruction for Equivariance-Coherent Feature Representation

Abstract:
Selfsupervised learning (SSL) methods have achieved remarkable success in learning image representations allowing invariances in them — but therefore discarding transformation information that some computer vision tasks actually require. While recent approaches attempt to address this limitation by learning equivariant features using linear operators in feature space, they impose restrictive assumptions that constrain flexibility and generalization. We introduce a weaker definition for the transformation relation between image and feature space denoted as equivariance-coherence. We propose a novel SSL auxillary task that learns equivariance-coherent representations through intermediate transformation reconstruction, which can be integrated with existing joint embedding SSL methods. Our key idea is to reconstruct images at intermediate points along transformation paths, e.g. when training on 30° rotations, we reconstruct the 10° and 20° rotation states. Reconstructing intermediate states requires the transformation information used in augmentations, rather than suppressing it, and therefore fosters features containing the augmented transformation information. Our method decomposes feature vectors into invariant and equivariant parts, training them with standard SSL losses and reconstruction losses, respectively. We demonstrate substantial improvements on synthetic equivariance benchmarks while maintaining competitive performance on downstream tasks requiring invariant representations. The approach seamlessly integrates with existing SSL methods (iBOT, DINOv2) and consistently enhances performance across diverse tasks, including segmentation, detection, depth estimation, and video dense prediction. Our framework provides a practical way for augmenting SSL methods with equivariant capabilities while preserving invariant performance.

PaperID: 2022, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11111

Authors:Xin Wang, Pietro Lodi Rizzini, Sourav Medya, Zhiling Lan

Affiliations: University of Illinois at Chicago

Title: SMART: A Surrogate Model for Predicting Application Runtime in Dragonfly Systems

Abstract:
The Dragonfly network, with its highradix and low-diameter structure, is a leading interconnect in high-performance computing. A major challenge is workload interference on shared network links. Parallel discrete event simulation (PDES) is commonly used to analyze workload interference. However, high-fidelity PDES is computationally expensive, making it impractical for large-scale or real-time scenarios. Hybrid simulation that incorporates data-driven surrogate models offers a promising alternative, especially for forecasting application runtime, a task complicated by the dynamic behavior of network traffic. We present SMART, a surrogate model that combines graph neural networks (GNNs) and large language models (LLMs) to capture both spatial and temporal patterns from port level router data. SMART outperforms existing statistical and machine learning baselines, enabling accurate runtime prediction and supporting efficient hybrid simulation of Dragonfly networks.

PaperID: 2023, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11162

Authors:Zhanpeng Wang, Shuting Cao, Yuhang Lu, YuhanLi, Na Lei, Zhongxuan Luo

Affiliations: Dalian University of Technology

Title: OT-ALD: Aligning Latent Distributions with Optimal Transport for Accelerated Image-to-Image Translation

Abstract:
The Dual Diffusion Implicit Bridge (DDIB) is an emerging imageto-image (I2I) translation method that preserves cycle consistency while achieving strong flexibility. It links two independently trained diffusion models (DMs) in the source and target domains by first adding noise to a source image to obtain a latent code, then denoising it in the target domain to generate the translated image. However, this method faces two key challenges: (1) low translation efficiency, and (2) translation trajectory deviations caused by mismatched latent distributions. To address these issues, we propose a novel I2I translation framework, OT-ALD, grounded in optimal transport (OT) theory, which retains the strengths of DDIB-based approach. Specifically, we compute an OT map from the latent distribution of the source domain to that of the target domain, and use the mapped distribution as the starting point for the reverse diffusion process in the target domain. Our error analysis confirms that OT-ALD eliminates latent distribution mismatches. Moreover, OT-ALD effectively balances faster image translation with improved image quality. Experiments on four translation tasks across three high-resolution datasets show that OT-ALD improves sampling efficiency by 20.29% and reduces the FID score by 2.6 on average compared to the top-performing baseline models.

PaperID: 2024, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10943

Authors:Jialin Wu, Jian Yang, Handing Wang, Jiajun Wen, Zhiyong Yu

Affiliations: Department of Computer, Rocket Force University of Engineering, Department of Engineering, School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University

Title: From Parameter to Representation: A ClosedForm Approach for Controllable Model Merging

Abstract:
Model merging combines expert models for multitask performance but faces challenges from parameter interference. This has sparked recent interest in controllable model merging, giving users the ability to explicitly balance performance tradeoffs. Existing approaches employ a compile-then-query paradigm, performing a costly offline multi-objective optimization to enable fast, preference-aware model generation. This offline stage typically involves iterative search or dedicated training, with complexity that grows exponentially with the number of tasks. To overcome these limitations, we shift the perspective from parameter-space optimization to a direct correction of the model's final representation. Our approach models this correction as an optimal linear transformation, yielding a closed-form solution that replaces the entire offline optimization process with a single-step, architecture-agnostic computation. This solution directly incorporates user preferences, allowing a Pareto-optimal model to be generated on-the-fly with complexity that scales linearly with the number of tasks. Experimental results show our method generates a superior Pareto front with more precise preference alignment and drastically reduced computational cost.

PaperID: 2025, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10348

Authors:Wenhan Wu, Zhili He, Huanghuang Liang, Yili Gong, Jiawei Jiang, Chuang Hu, Dazhao Cheng

Affiliations: Wuhan University

Title: REMISVFU: Vertical Federated Unlearning via Representation Misdirection for Intermediate Output Feature

Abstract:
Dataprotection regulations such as the GDPR grant every participant in a federated system a right to be forgotten. Federated unlearning has therefore emerged as a research frontier, aiming to remove a specific party's contribution from the learned model while preserving the utility of the remaining parties. However, most unlearning techniques focus on Horizontal Federated Learning (HFL), where data are partitioned by samples. In contrast, Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) allows organizations that possess complementary feature spaces to train a joint model without sharing raw data. The resulting feature-partitioned architecture renders HFL-oriented unlearning methods ineffective. In this paper, we propose ReMisVFU, a plug-and-play representation-misdirection framework that enables fast, client-level unlearning in splitVFL systems. When a deletion request arrives, the forgetting party collapses its encoder output to a randomly sampled anchor on the unit sphere, severing the statistical link between its features and the global model. To maintain utility for the remaining parties, the server jointly optimizes a retention loss and a forgetting loss, aligning their gradients via orthogonal projection to eliminate destructive interference. Evaluations on public benchmarks show that ReMisVFU suppresses back-door attack success to the natural class-prior level and sacrifices only about 2.5% points of clean accuracy, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 2026, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16399

Authors:Guojun Xiong, Milind Tambe

Affiliations: Harvard University

Title: VORTEX: Aligning Task Utility and Human Preferences Through LLM-Guided Reward Shaping

Abstract:
In social impact optimization, AI decision systems often rely on solvers that optimize wellcalibrated mathematical objectives. However, these solvers cannot directly accommodate evolving human preferences, typically expressed in natural language rather than formal constraints. Recent approaches address this by using large language models (LLMs) to generate new reward functions from preference descriptions. While flexible, they risk sacrificing the system's core utility guarantees. In this paper, we propose VORTEX, a language-guided reward shaping framework that preserves established optimization goals while adaptively incorporating human feedback. By formalizing the problem as multi-objective optimization, we use LLMs to iteratively generate shaping rewards based on verbal reinforcement and text-gradient prompt updates. This allows stakeholders to steer decision behavior via natural language without modifying solvers or specifying trade-off weights. We provide theoretical guarantees that VORTEX converges to Pareto-optimal trade-offs between utility and preference satisfaction. Empirical results in real-world allocation tasks demonstrate that VORTEX outperforms baselines in satisfying human-aligned coverage goals while maintaining high task performance. This work introduces a practical and theoretically grounded paradigm for human-AI collaborative optimization guided by natural language.

PaperID: 2027, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07210

Authors:Binyan Xu, Fan Yang, Di Tang, Xilin Dai, Kehuan Zhang

Affiliations: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sun Yat-sen University, Zhejiang University

Title: Breaking the Stealth-Potency Trade-off in Clean-Image Backdoors with Generative Trigger Optimization

Abstract:
Cleanimage backdoor attacks, which use only label manipulation in training datasets to compromise deep neural networks, pose a significant threat to security-critical applications. A critical flaw in existing methods is that the poison rate required for a successful attack induces a proportional, and thus noticeable, drop in Clean Accuracy (CA), undermining their stealthiness. This paper presents a new paradigm for clean-image attacks that minimizes this accuracy degradation by optimizing the trigger itself. We introduce Generative Clean-Image Backdoors (GCB), a framework that uses a conditional InfoGAN to identify naturally occurring image features that can serve as potent and stealthy triggers. By ensuring these triggers are easily separable from benign task-related features, GCB enables a victim model to learn the backdoor from an extremely small set of poisoned examples, resulting in a CA drop of less than 1%. Our experiments demonstrate GCB's remarkable versatility, successfully adapting to six datasets, five architectures, and four tasks, including the first demonstration of clean-image backdoors in regression and segmentation. GCB also exhibits resilience against most of the existing backdoor defenses.

PaperID: 2028, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02322

Authors:Yuzhuang Xu, Xu Han, Yuanchi Zhang, Yixuan Wang, Yijun Liu, Shiyu Ji, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Tsinghua University, Tencent Inc

Title: CAMERA: Multi-Matrix Joint Compression for MoE Models via Micro-Expert Redundancy Analysis

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) with Mixtureof-Experts (MoE) architectures are distinguished by their strong performance scaling with increasing parameters across a wide range of tasks, yet they also suffer from substantial computational and storage overheads. Notably, the performance gains of MoE models do not scale proportionally with the growth in expert parameters. While prior works attempt to reduce parameters via expert-level pruning, merging, or decomposition, they still suffer from challenges in both performance and computational efficiency. In this paper, we address these challenges by introducing micro-expert as a finer-grained compression unit that spans across matrices. We first establish a more fundamental perspective, viewing MoE layers as mixtures of micro-experts, and present CAMERA, a lightweight and training-free framework for identifying micro-expert redundancy. Our analysis uncovers significant variance in micro-expert contributions during decoding. Based on this insight, we further propose CAMERA-P, a structured micro-expert pruning framework, and CAMERA-Q, a mixed-precision quantization idea designed for micro-experts. Extensive experiments on nine downstream tasks show that CAMERA-P consistently outperforms strong baselines under pruning ratios ranging from 20% to 60%. Furthermore, CAMERA-Q achieves superior results under aggressive 2-bit quantization, surpassing existing matrix- and channel-level ideas. Notably, our method enables complete micro-expert analysis of Qwen2-57B-A14B in less than 5 minutes on a single NVIDIA A100-40GB GPU.

PaperID: 2029, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06452

Authors:Leyan Xue, Changqing Zhang, Kecheng Xue, Xiaohong Liu, Guangyu Wang, Zongbo Han

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Tianjin University, State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Institute of Medical Artificial Intelligence, South China Hospital, Medical School, Shenzhen University

Title: MULTIBENCH++: A Unified and Comprehensive Multimodal Fusion Benchmarking Across Specialized Domains

Abstract:
Although multimodal fusion has made significant progress, its advancement is severely hindered by the lack of adequate evaluation benchmarks. Current fusion methods are typically evaluated on a small selection of public datasets, a limited scope that inadequately represents the complexity and diversity of realworld scenarios, potentially leading to biased evaluations. This issue presents a twofold challenge. On one hand, models may overfit to the biases of specific datasets, hindering their generalization to broader practical applications. On the other hand, the absence of a unified evaluation standard makes fair and objective comparisons between different fusion methods difficult. Consequently, a truly universal and high-performance fusion model has yet to emerge. To address these challenges, we have developed a large-scale, domain-adaptive benchmark for multimodal evaluation. This benchmark integrates over 30 datasets, encompassing 15 modalities and 20 predictive tasks across key application domains. To complement this, we have also developed an open-source, unified, and automated evaluation pipeline that includes standardized implementations of state-of-the-art models and diverse fusion paradigms. Leveraging this platform, we have conducted large-scale experiments, successfully establishing new performance baselines across multiple tasks. This work provides the academic community with a crucial platform for rigorous and reproducible assessment of multimodal models, aiming to propel the field of multimodal artificial intelligence to new heights.

PaperID: 2030, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09828

Authors:Mingkun Yang, Ran Zhu, Qing Wang, Jie Yang

Affiliations: Delft University of Technology

Title: SMoFi: Step-wise Momentum Fusion for Split Federated Learning on Heterogeneous Data

Abstract:
Split Federated Learning is a systemefficient federated learning paradigm that leverages the rich computing resources at a central server to train model partitions. Data heterogeneity across silos, however, presents a major challenge undermining the convergence speed and accuracy of the global model. This paper introduces Step-wise Momentum Fusion (SMoFi), an effective and lightweight framework that counteracts gradient divergence arising from data heterogeneity by synchronizing the momentum buffers across server-side optimizers. To control gradient divergence over the training process, we design a staleness-aware alignment mechanism that imposes constraints on gradient updates of the server-side submodel at each optimization step. Extensive validations on multiple real-world datasets show that SMoFi consistently improves global model accuracy (up to 7.1%) and convergence speed (up to 10.25x). Furthermore, SMoFi has a greater impact with more clients involved and deeper learning models, making it particularly suitable for model training in resource-constrained contexts.

PaperID: 2031, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.01840

Authors:Qiantao Yang, Liquan Chen, Mingfu Xue, Songze Li

Affiliations: School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Southeast University, School of Communication and Electronic Engineering, East China Normal University

Title: Tackling Resource-Constrained and Data-Heterogeneity in Federated Learning with Double-Weight Sparse Pack

Abstract:
Federated learning has drawn widespread interest from researchers, yet the data heterogeneity across edge clients remains a key challenge, often degrading model performance. Existing methods enhance model compatibility with data heterogeneity by splitting models and knowledge distillation. However, they neglect the insufficient communication bandwidth and computing power on the client, failing to strike an effective balance between addressing data heterogeneity and accommodating limited client resources. To tackle this limitation, we propose a personalized federated learning method based on cosine sparsification parameter packing and dualweighted aggregation (FedCSPACK), which effectively leverages the limited client resources and reduces the impact of data heterogeneity on model performance. In FedCSPACK, the client packages model parameters and selects the most contributing parameter packages for sharing based on cosine similarity, effectively reducing bandwidth requirements. The client then generates a mask matrix anchored to the shared parameter package to improve the alignment and aggregation efficiency of sparse updates on the server. Furthermore, directional and distribution distance weights are embedded in the mask to implement a weighted-guided aggregation mechanism, enhancing the robustness and generalization performance of the global model. Extensive experiments across four datasets using ten state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that FedCSPACK effectively improves communication and computational efficiency while maintaining high model accuracy.

PaperID: 2032, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21807

Authors:Jiaao Yu, Shenwei Li, Mingjie Han, Yifei Yin, Wenzheng Song, Chenghao Jia, Man Lan

Affiliations: East China Normal University

Title: Activating Visual Context and Commonsense Reasoning Through Masked Prediction in VLMs

Abstract:
Recent breakthroughs in reasoning models have markedly advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models, particularly via training on tasks with verifiable rewards. Yet, a significant gap persists in their adaptation to realworld multimodal scenarios, most notably, vision-language tasks, due to a heavy focus on single-modal language settings. While efforts to transplant reinforcement learning techniques from NLP to Visual Language Models (VLMs) have emerged, these approaches often remain confined to perception-centric tasks or reduce images to textual summaries, failing to fully exploit visual context and commonsense knowledge, ultimately constraining the generalization of reasoning capabilities across diverse multimodal environments. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel fine-tuning task, Masked Prediction via Context and Commonsense (MPCC), which forces models to integrate visual context and commonsense reasoning by reconstructing semantically meaningful content from occluded images, thereby laying the foundation for generalized reasoning. To systematically evaluate the model’s performance in generalized reasoning, we developed a specialized evaluation benchmark, MPCC-Eval, and employed various fine-tuning strategies to guide reasoning. Among these, we introduced an innovative training method, Reinforcement Fine-Tuning with Prior Sampling, which not only enhances model performance but also improves its generalized reasoning capabilities in out-of-distribution (OOD) and cross-task scenarios.

PaperID: 2033, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08470

Authors:Peng Yu, Yike Chen, Chao Xu, Albert Bifet, Jesse Read

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Télécom Paris The University of Waikato, École polytechnique

Title: Binary Split Categorical Feature with Mean Absolute Error Criteria in CART

Abstract:
In the context of the Classification and Regression Trees (CART) algorithm, the efficient splitting of categorical features using standard criteria like GINI and Entropy is wellestablished. However, using the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) criterion for categorical features has traditionally relied on various numerical encoding methods. This paper demonstrates that unsupervised numerical encoding methods are not viable for MAE criteria. Furthermore, we present a novel and efficient splitting algorithm that addresses the challenges of handling categorical features with the MAE criterion. Our findings underscore the limitations of existing approaches and offer a promising solution to enhance the handling of categorical data in CART algorithms.

PaperID: 2034, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06029

Authors:Hui Zeng, Daming Zhao, Pengfei Yang, WenXuan Hou, Tianyang Zheng, Hui Li, Weiye Ji, Jidong Zhai

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Xidian University

Title: Lethe: Layer- and Time-Adaptive KV Cache Pruning for Reasoning-Intensive LLM Serving

Abstract:
Generative reasoning with large language models (LLMs) often involves long decoding sequences, leading to substantial memory and latency overheads from accumulating keyvalue (KV) caches. While existing KV compression methods primarily focus on reducing prefill memory from long input sequences, they fall short in addressing the dynamic and layer-sensitive nature of long-form generation, which is central to reasoning tasks. We propose Lethe, a dynamic KV cache management framework that introduces adaptivity along both the spatial and temporal dimensions of decoding. Along the spatial dimension, Lethe performs layerwise sparsity-aware allocation, assigning token pruning budgets to each transformer layer based on estimated attention redundancy. Along the temporal dimension, Lethe conducts multi-round token pruning during generation, driven by a Recency-Aware Selective Retention (RASR) mechanism. RASR extends traditional recency-based heuristics by also considering token relevance derived from evolving attention patterns, enabling informed decisions about which tokens to retain or evict. Empirical results demonstrate that Lethe achieves a favorable balance between efficiency and generation quality across diverse models and tasks, increases throughput by up to 2.56×.

PaperID: 2035, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.01124

Authors:Honglei Zhang, Zhiwei Li, Haoxuan Li, Xin Zhou, Jie Zhang, Yidong Li

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Big Data & Artificial Intelligence in Transportation, Ministry of Education, China Beijing Jiaotong University, University of Technology Sydney, Peking University, Nanyang Technological University

Title: TransFR: Transferable Federated Recommendation with Adapter Tuning on Pre-trained Language Models

Abstract:
Federated recommendations (FRs), facilitating multiple local clients to collectively learn a global model without disclosing user private data, have emerged as a prevalent ondevice service. In conventional FRs, a dominant paradigm is to utilize discrete identities to represent clients and items, which are then mapped to domain-specific embeddings to participate in model training. Despite considerable performance, we reveal three inherent limitations that can not be ignored in federated settings, i.e., non-transferability across domains, ineffectiveness in cold-start settings, and potential privacy violations during federated training. To this end, we propose a transferable federated recommendation model, TransFR, which delicately incorporates the general capabilities empowered by pre-trained models and the personalized abilities by fine-tuning local private data. Specifically, it first learns domain-agnostic representations of items by exploiting pre-trained models with public textual corpora. To tailor for FR tasks, we further introduce efficient federated adapter-tuning and post-adaptation personalization, which facilitate personalized adapters for each client by fitting local private data. We theoretically prove the advantages of incorporating adapter tuning in FRs regarding both effectiveness and privacy. Through extensive experiments, we show that our TransFR surpasses state-of-the-art FRs on transferability.

PaperID: 2036, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09049

Authors:Mingjie Zhao, Zhanpei Huang, Yang Lu, Mengke Li, Yiqun Zhang, Weifeng Su, Yiu-ming Cheung

Affiliations: Hong Kong Baptist University, Guangdong University of Technology, Xiamen University, Shenzhen University, BNU-HKBU United International College

Title: Break the Tie: Learning Cluster-Customized Category Relationships for Categorical Data Clustering

Abstract:
Categorical attributes with qualitative values are ubiquitous in cluster analysis of real datasets. Unlike the Euclidean distance of numerical attributes, the categorical attributes lack welldefined relationships of their possible values (also called categories interchangeably), which hampers the exploration of compact categorical data clusters. Although most attempts are made for developing appropriate distance metrics, they typically assume a fixed topological relationship between categories when learning distance metrics, which limits their adaptability to varying cluster structures and often leads to suboptimal clustering performance. This paper, therefore, breaks the intrinsic relationship tie of attribute categories and learns customized distance metrics suitable for flexibly and accurately revealing various cluster distributions. As a result, the fitting ability of the clustering algorithm is significantly enhanced, benefiting from the learnable category relationships. Moreover, the learned category relationships are proved to be Euclidean distance metric-compatible, enabling a seamless extension to mixed datasets that include both numerical and categorical attributes. Comparative experiments on 12 real benchmark datasets with significance tests show the superior clustering accuracy of the proposed method with an average ranking of 1.25, which is significantly higher than the 5.21 ranking of the best-performing methods. Code and extended version with detailed proofs are provided online.

PaperID: 2037, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.04777

Authors:Shurong Zheng, Yousong Zhu, Hongyin Zhao, Fan Yang, Yufei Zhan, Ming Tang, Jinqiao Wang

Affiliations: Foundation Model Research Center, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Peng Cheng Laboratory, School of Artificial Intelligence, China University of Mining and Technology-Beijing, China Wuhan AI Research

Title: GeM-VG: Towards Generalized Multi-image Visual Grounding with Multimodal Large Language Models

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive progress in singleimage grounding and general multi-image understanding. Recently, some methods begin to address multi-image grounding. However, they are constrained by single-target localization and limited types of practical tasks, due to the lack of unified modeling for generalized grounding tasks. Therefore, we propose GeM-VG, an MLLM capable of Generalized Multi-image Visual Grounding. To support this, we systematically categorize and organize existing multi-image grounding tasks according to cognitive demands and introduce the MG-Data-240K dataset, addressing the limitations of existing datasets regarding target quantity and image relation. To tackle the challenges of robustly handling diverse multi-image grounding tasks, we further propose a hybrid reinforcement finetuning strategy that integrates chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning and direct answering, considering their complementary strengths. This strategy adopts an R1-like algorithm guided by a carefully designed rule-based reward, effectively enhancing the model’s overall perception and reasoning capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior generalized grounding capabilities of our model. For multi-image grounding, it outperforms the previous leading MLLMs by 2.0% and 9.7% on MIG-Bench and MC-Bench, respectively. In single-image grounding, it achieves a 9.1% improvement over the base model on ODINW. Furthermore, our model retains strong capabilities in general multi-image understanding.

PaperID: 2038, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17563

Authors:Yunduo Zhou, Bo Dong, Chang Li, Yuanchen Wang, Xuefeng Yin, Yang Wang, Xin Yang

Affiliations: Dalian University of Technology, Cephia AI

Title: Dynamic Weight Adaptation in Spiking Neural Networks Inspired by Biological Homeostasis

Abstract:
Homeostatic mechanisms play a crucial role in maintaining optimal functionality within the neural circuits of the brain. By regulating physiological and biochemical processes, these mechanisms ensure the stability of an organism’s internal environment, enabling it to better adapt to external changes. Among these mechanisms, the Bienenstock, Cooper, and Munro (BCM) theory has been extensively studied as a key principle for maintaining the balance of synaptic strengths in biological systems. Despite the extensive development of spiking neural networks (SNNs) as a model for bionic neural networks, no prior work in the machine learning community has integrated biologically plausible BCM formulations into SNNs to provide homeostasis. In this study, we propose a Dynamic Weight Adaptation Mechanism (DWAM) for SNNs, inspired by the BCM theory. DWAM can be integrated into the host SNN, dynamically adjusting network weights in real time to regulate neuronal activity, providing homeostasis to the host SNN without any finetuning. We validated our method through dynamic obstacle avoidance and continuous control tasks under both normal and specifically designed degraded conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that DWAM not only enhances the performance of SNNs without existing homeostatic mechanisms under various degraded conditions but also further improves the performance of SNNs that already incorporate homeostatic mechanisms.

PaperID: 2039, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06803

Authors:Ziqi Liu, Ziyang Zhou, Yilin Li, Mingxuan Hu, Yushan Pan, Zhijie Xu, Yangbin Chen

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

Title: SEVADE: Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Analysis with Decoupled Evaluation for Hallucination-Resistant Sarcasm Detection

Abstract:
Sarcasm detection is a crucial yet challenging Natural Language Processing task. Existing Large Language Model methods are often limited by singleperspective analysis, static reasoning pathways, and a susceptibility to hallucination when processing complex ironic rhetoric, which impacts their accuracy and reliability. To address these challenges, we propose SEVADE, a novel Self-Evolving multi-agent Analysis framework with Decoupled Evaluation for hallucination-resistant sarcasm detection. The core of our framework is a Dynamic Agentive Reasoning Engine (DARE), which utilizes a team of specialized agents grounded in linguistic theory to perform a multifaceted deconstruction of the text and generate a structured reasoning chain. Subsequently, a separate lightweight rationale adjudicator (RA) performs the final classification based solely on this reasoning chain. This decoupled architecture is designed to mitigate the risk of hallucination by separating complex reasoning from the final judgment. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, with average improvements of 7.01% in Accuracy and 6.55% in Macro-F1 score.

PaperID: 2040, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04849

Authors:Yifan Su, Rishi Veerapaneni, Jiaoyang Li

Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University

Title: BTPG-max: Achieving Local Maximal Bidirectional Pairs for Bidirectional Temporal Plan Graphs

Abstract:
MultiAgent Path Finding (MAPF) requires computing collision-free paths for multiple agents in shared environment. Most MAPF planners assume that each agent reaches a specific location at a specific timestep, but this is infeasible to directly follow on real systems where delays often occur. To address collisions caused by agents deviating due to delays, the Temporal Plan Graph (TPG) was proposed, which converts a MAPF time dependent solution into a time independent set of inter-agent dependencies. Recently, a Bidirectional TPG (BTPG) was proposed which relaxed some dependencies into "bidirectional pairs" and improved efficiency of agents executing their MAPF solution with delays. Our work improves upon this prior work by designing an algorithm, BPTG-max, that finds more bidirectional pairs. Our main theoretical contribution is in designing the BTPG-max algorithm is locally optimal, i.e. which constructs a BTPG where no additional bidirectional pairs can be added. We also show how in practice BTPG-max leads to BTPGs with significantly more bidirectional edges, superior anytime behavior, and improves robustness to delays.

PaperID: 2041, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18761

Authors:Hao Wu, Shoucheng Song, Chang Yao, Sheng Han, Huaiyu Wan, Youfang Lin, Kai Lv

Affiliations: Beijing Jiaotong University

Title: Think How Your Teammates Think: Active Inference Can Benefit Decentralized Execution

Abstract:
In multiagent systems, explicit cognition of teammates' decision logic serves as a critical factor in facilitating coordination. Communication (i.e., "Tell") can assist in the cognitive development process by information dissemination, yet it is inevitably subject to real-world constraints such as noise, latency, and attacks. Therefore, building the understanding of teammates' decisions without communication remains challenging. To address this, we propose a novel non-communication MARL framework that realizes the construction of cognition through local observation-based modeling (i.e., "Think"). Our framework enables agents to model teammates' active inference process. At first, the proposed method produces three teammate portraits: perception-belief-action. Specifically, we model the teammate's decision process as follows: 1) Perception: observing environments; 2) Belief: forming beliefs; 3) Action: making decisions. Then, we selectively integrate the belief portrait into the decision process based on the accuracy and relevance of the perception portrait. This enables the selection of cooperative teammates and facilitates effective collaboration. Extensive experiments on the SMAC, SMACv2, MPE, and GRF benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of our method.

PaperID: 2042, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.22041

Authors:Lixiu Wu, Yuanrong Tang, Qisen Pan, Xianyang Zhan, Yuchen Han, Lanxi Xiao, Tianhong Wang, Chen Zhong, Jiangtao Gong

Affiliations: Tsinghua University

Title: An LLM-based Simulation Framework for Embodied Conversational Agents in Psychological Counseling

Abstract:
Due to privacy concerns, open dialogue datasets for mental health are primarily generated through human or AI synthesis methods. However, the inherent implicit nature of psychological processes, particularly those of clients, poses challenges to the authenticity and diversity of synthetic data. In this paper, we propose ECAs (short for Embodied Conversational Agents), a framework for embodied agent simulation based on Large Language Models (LLMs) that incorporates multiple psychological theoretical principles. Using simulation, we expand real counseling case data into a nuanced embodied cognitive memory space and generate dialogue data based on highfrequency counseling questions. We validated our framework using the D4 dataset. First, we created a public ECAs dataset through batch simulations based on D4. Licensed counselors evaluated our method, demonstrating that it significantly outperforms baselines in simulation authenticity and necessity. Additionally, two LLM-based automated evaluation methods were employed to confirm the higher quality of the generated dialogues compared to the baselines.

PaperID: 2043, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21042

Authors:Cheng Yang, Hui Jin, Xinlei Yu, Zhipeng Wang, Yaoqun Liu, Fenglei Fan, Dajiang Lei, Gangyong Jia, Changmiao Wang, Ruiquan Ge

Affiliations: Hangzhou Dianzi University, National University of Singapore, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, City University of Hong Kong, Chongqing University of Post and Telecommunications, Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data

Title: LungNoduleAgent: A Collaborative Multi-Agent System for Precision Diagnosis of Lung Nodules

Abstract:
Diagnosing lung cancer typically involves physicians identifying lung nodules in Computed tomography (CT) scans and generating diagnostic reports based on their morphological features and medical expertise. Although advancements have been made in using multimodal large language models for analyzing lung CT scans, challenges remain in accurately describing nodule morphology and incorporating medical expertise. These limitations affect the reliability and effectiveness of these models in clinical settings. Collaborative multiagent systems offer a promising strategy for achieving a balance between generality and precision in medical applications, yet their potential in pathology has not been thoroughly explored. To bridge these gaps, we introduce LungNoduleAgent, an innovative collaborative multi-agent system specifically designed for analyzing lung CT scans. LungNoduleAgent streamlines the diagnostic process into sequential components, improving precision in describing nodules and grading malignancy through three primary modules. The first module, the Nodule Spotter, coordinates clinical detection models to accurately identify nodules. The second module, the Radiologist, integrates localized image description techniques to produce comprehensive CT reports. Finally, the Doctor Agent System performs malignancy reasoning by using images and CT reports, supported by a pathology knowledge base and a multi-agent system framework. Extensive testing on two private datasets and the public LIDC-IDRI dataset indicates that LungNoduleAgent surpasses mainstream vision-language models, agent systems, and advanced expert models such as GPT-4o, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, LLaMA-3.2 Vision, Qwen2.5-VL, Med-R1, MedGemma, MedAgent-Pro, MedAgents, MDAgent and LLaVA-Med. These results highlight the importance of region-level semantic alignment and multi-agent collaboration in diagnosing nodules. LungNoduleAgent stands out as a promising foundational tool for supporting clinical analyses of lung nodules.

PaperID: 2044, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.10211

Authors:Khoa Anh Ta, Nguyen Van Dinh, Kiet Van Nguyen

Affiliations: Faculty of Information Science and Engineering, University of Information Technology, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Vietnam National University

Title: ViDia2Std: A Parallel Corpus and Methods for Low-Resource Vietnamese Dialect-to-Standard Translation

Abstract:
Vietnamese exhibits extensive dialectal variation, posing challenges for NLP systems trained predominantly on standard Vietnamese. Such systems often underperform on dialectal inputs, especially from underrepresented Central and Southern regions. Previous work on dialect normalization has focused narrowly on Centralto-Northern dialect transfer using synthetic data and limited dialectal diversity. These efforts exclude Southern varieties and intra-regional variants within the North. We introduce ViDia2Std, the first manually annotated parallel corpus for dialect-to-standard Vietnamese translation covering all 63 provinces. Unlike prior datasets, ViDia2Std includes diverse dialects from Central, Southern, and non-standard Northern regions often absent from existing resources, making it the most dialectally inclusive corpus to date. The dataset consists of over 13,000 sentence pairs sourced from real-world Facebook comments and annotated by native speakers across all three dialect regions. To assess annotation consistency, we define a semantic mapping agreement metric that accounts for synonymous standard mappings across annotators. Based on this criterion, we report agreement rates of 86% (North), 82% (Central), and 85% (South). We benchmark several sequence-to-sequence models on ViDia2Std. mBART-large-50 achieves the best results (BLEU 0.8166, ROUGE-L 0.9384, METEOR 0.8925), while ViT5-base offers competitive performance with fewer parameters. ViDia2Std demonstrates that dialect normalization substantially improves downstream tasks, highlighting the need for dialect-aware resources in building robust Vietnamese NLP systems.

PaperID: 2045, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.22710

Authors:Kaitong Cai, Jusheng Zhang, Yijia Fan, Jing Yang, Keze Wang

Affiliations: Sun Yat-sen University

Title: RaCoT: Plug-and-Play Contrastive Example Generation Mechanism for Enhanced LLM Reasoning Reliability

Abstract:
RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) faces a core bottleneck with knowledge-sparse and semantically ambiguous long-tail queries, where retrieval noise distorts reasoning and necessitates costly post-processing. To tackle this, we propose RaCoT (Retrieval-aware Contrastive-of-Thought), a novel framework that shifts contrastive thinking to the pre-retrieval stage. By automatically generating a semantically adjacent yet differently answered contrastive question and extracting a Δ-Prompt to capture their key differences, RaCoT guides the model to proactively focus on the "critical details that determine answer divergence." This approach allows it to suppress semantic interference within a single retrieval pass, overcoming the theoretical bottleneck of single-vector queries that struggle to simultaneously encode signals for what to attend to and what to ignore. On six authoritative benchmarks, including PopQA and TriviaQA-unfiltered, RaCoT outperforms strong baselines like RankRAG and Self-RAG by 0.9-2.4 percentage points. It exhibits superior robustness, with a performance drop of only 8.6% in adversarial tests, far surpassing the over 15% degradation in other methods. Furthermore, its low latency (3.12s) and token overhead (11.54) place it on the accuracy-efficiency Pareto frontier, while ablation studies validate the necessity of each component. Ultimately, RaCoT reframes the RAG paradigm from "post-hoc context cleaning" to "a priori shaping of discriminative reasoning," offering an efficient and robust path toward reliable AI systems for real-time, resource-constrained deployments.

PaperID: 2046, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12265

Authors:Junjie Chen, Weihang Su, Zhumin Chu, Haitao Li, Yujia Zhou, Dingbo Yuan, Xudong Wang, Jun Zhou, Yiqun Liu, Min Zhang, Shaoping Ma, Qingyao Ai

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Ant Group

Title: Auto-PRE: An Automatic and Cost-Efficient Peer-Review Framework for Language Generation Evaluation

Abstract:
The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has highlighted the need for efficient and reliable methods to evaluate their performance. Traditional evaluation methods often face challenges like high costs, limited task formats, dependence on human references, and systematic biases. To address these limitations, we propose AutoPRE, an automatic LLM evaluation framework inspired by the peer review process. Unlike previous approaches that rely on human annotations, Auto-PRE automatically selects evaluator LLMs based on three core traits: consistency, pertinence, and self-confidence, which correspond to the instruction, content, and response stages, respectively, and collectively cover the entire evaluation process. Experiments on three representative tasks, including summarization, non-factoid QA, and dialogue generation, demonstrate that Auto-PRE achieves state-of-the-art performance while significantly reducing evaluation costs. Furthermore, the structured and scalable design of our automatic qualification exam framework provides valuable insights into automating the evaluation of LLMs-as-judges, paving the way for more advanced LLM-based evaluation frameworks.

PaperID: 2047, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06567

Authors:Yao Cheng, Yibo Zhao, Jiapeng Zhu, Yao Liu, Xing Sun, Xiang Li

Affiliations: East China Normal University, Tencent YouTu Lab

Title: Human Cognition Inspired RAG with Knowledge Graph for Complex Problem Solving

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential across various domains. However, they often struggle with integrating external knowledge and performing complex reasoning, leading to hallucinations and unreliable outputs. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising paradigm to mitigate these issues by incorporating external knowledge. Yet, conventional RAG approaches, especially those based on vector similarity, fail to effectively capture relational dependencies and support multistep reasoning. In this work, we propose CogGRAG, a human cognition-inspired, graph-based RAG framework designed for Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA). CogGRAG models the reasoning process as a tree-structured mind map that decomposes the original problem into interrelated subproblems and explicitly encodes their semantic relationships. This structure not only provides a global view to guide subsequent retrieval and reasoning but also enables self-consistent verification across reasoning paths. The framework operates in three stages: (1) top-down problem decomposition via mind map construction, (2) structured retrieval of both local and global knowledge from external Knowledge Graphs (KGs), and (3) bottom-up reasoning with dual-process self-verification. Unlike previous tree-based decomposition methods such as MindMap or Graph-CoT, CogGRAG unifies problem decomposition, knowledge retrieval, and reasoning under a single graph-structured cognitive framework, allowing early integration of relational knowledge and adaptive verification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CogGRAG achieves superior accuracy and reliability compared to existing methods.

PaperID: 2048, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08545

Authors:Zhenlong Dai, Zhuoluo Zhao, Hengning Wang, Xiu Tang, Sai Wu, Chang Yao, Zhipeng Gao, Jingyuan Chen

Affiliations: Zhejiang University

Title: Learner-Tailored Program Repair: A Solution Generator with Iterative Edit-Driven Retrieval Enhancement

Abstract:
With the development of large language models (LLMs) in the field of programming, intelligent programming coaching systems have gained widespread attention. However, most research focuses on repairing the buggy code of programming learners without providing the underlying causes of the bugs. To address this gap, we introduce a novel task, namely LPR (LearnerTailored Program Repair). We then propose a novel and effective framework, LSGen (Learner-Tailored Solution Generator), to enhance program repair while offering the bug descriptions for the buggy code. In the first stage, we utilize a repair solution retrieval framework to construct a solution retrieval database and then employ an edit-driven code retrieval approach to retrieve valuable solutions, guiding LLMs in identifying and fixing the bugs in buggy code. In the second stage, we propose a solution-guided program repair method, which fixes the code and provides explanations under the guidance of retrieval solutions. Moreover, we propose an Iterative Retrieval Enhancement method that utilizes evaluation results of the generated code to iteratively optimize the retrieval direction and explore more suitable repair strategies, improving performance in practical programming coaching scenarios. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms a set of baselines by a large margin, validating the effectiveness of our framework for the newly proposed LPR task.

PaperID: 2049, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07888

Authors:Chenhao Dang, Jing Ma

Affiliations: China Electronics Technology Group Corporation Research Institute, Renmin University of China

Title: Breaking the Adversarial Robustness-Performance Trade-off in Text Classification via Manifold Purification

Abstract:
A persistent challenge in text classification (TC) is that enhancing model robustness against adversarial attacks typically degrades performance on clean data. We argue that this challenge can be resolved by modeling the distribution of clean samples in the encoder’s embedding manifold. To this end, we propose the ManifoldCorrecting Causal Flow (MC²F), a two-module system that operates directly on sentence embeddings. A Stratified Riemannian Continuous Normalizing Flow (SR-CNF) learns the density of the clean data manifold. It identifies out-of-distribution embeddings, which are then corrected by a Geodesic Purification Solver. This solver projects adversarial points back onto the learned manifold via the shortest path, restoring a clean, semantically coherent representation. We conducted extensive evaluations on text classification (TC) across three datasets and multiple adversarial attacks. The results demonstrate that our method, MC²F, not only establishes a new state-of-the-art in adversarial robustness but also fully preserves performance on clean data, even yielding modest gains in Accuracy.

PaperID: 2050, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.05231

Authors:Linghan Fang, Tianxin Xie, Li Liu

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Title: Boosting ASR Robustness via Test-Time Reinforcement Learning with Audio-Text Semantic Rewards

Abstract:
Recently, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems (e.g., Whisper) have achieved remarkable accuracy improvements but remain highly sensitive to realworld unseen data (data with large distribution shifts), including noisy environments and diverse accents. To address this issue, test-time adaptation (TTA) has shown great potential in improving the model adaptability at inference time without ground-truth labels, and existing TTA methods often rely on pseudo-labeling or entropy minimization. However, by treating model confidence as a learning signal, these methods may reinforce high-confidence errors, leading to confirmation bias that undermines adaptation. To overcome these limitations, we present ASR-TRA, a novel Test-time Reinforcement Adaptation framework inspired by causal intervention. More precisely, our method introduces a learnable decoder prompt and utilizes temperature-controlled stochastic decoding to generate diverse transcription candidates. These are scored by a reward model that measures audio-text semantic alignment, and the resulting feedback is used to update both model and prompt parameters via reinforcement learning. Comprehensive experiments on LibriSpeech with synthetic noise and L2 Arctic accented English datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA), including SUTA and SGEM, in both accuracy and inference speed. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of combining audio and language-based rewards, highlighting our method's enhanced stability and interpretability. Overall, our approach provides a practical and robust solution for deploying ASR systems in challenging real-world conditions.

PaperID: 2051, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10900

Authors:Xueren Ge, Sahil Murtaza, Anthony Cortez, Homa Alemzadeh

Affiliations: University of Virginia

Title: Expert-Guided Prompting and Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Emergency Medical Service Question Answering

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in medical question answering, yet they often overlook the domainspecific expertise that professionals depend on-such as the clinical subject areas (e.g., trauma, airway) and the certification level (e.g., EMT, Paramedic). Existing approaches typically apply general-purpose prompting or retrieval strategies without leveraging this structured context, limiting performance in high-stakes settings. We address this gap with EMSQA, an 24.3K-question multiple-choice dataset spanning 10 clinical subject areas and 4 certification levels, accompanied by curated, subject area-aligned knowledge bases (40K documents and 2M tokens). Building on EMSQA, we introduce (i) Expert-CoT, a prompting strategy that conditions chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning on specific clinical subject area and certification level, and (ii) ExpertRAG, a retrieval-augmented generation pipeline that grounds responses in subject area-aligned documents and real-world patient data. Experiments on 4 LLMs show that Expert-CoT improves up to 2.05% over vanilla CoT prompting. Additionally, combining Expert-CoT with ExpertRAG yields up to a 4.59% accuracy gain over standard RAG baselines. Notably, the 32B expertise-augmented LLMs pass all the computer-adaptive EMS certification simulation exams.

PaperID: 2052, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20916

Authors:Yuan Ge, Junxiang Zhang, Xiaoqian Liu, Bei Li, Xiangnan Ma, Chenglong Wang, Kaiyang Ye, Yangfan Du, Linfeng Zhang, Yuxin Huang, Tong Xiao, Zhengtao Yu, Jingbo Zhu

Affiliations: Northeastern University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Kunming University of Science and Technology

Title: SageLM: A Multi-aspect and Explainable Large Language Model for Speech Judgement

Abstract:
Speechto-Speech (S2S) Large Language Models (LLMs) are foundational to natural human-computer interaction, enabling end-to-end spoken dialogue systems. However, evaluating these models remains a fundamental challenge. We propose SageLM, an end-to-end, multi-aspect, and explainable speech LLM for comprehensive S2S LLMs evaluation. First, unlike cascaded approaches that disregard acoustic features, SageLM jointly assesses both semantic and acoustic dimensions. Second, it leverages rationale-based supervision to enhance explainability and guide model learning, achieving superior alignment with evaluation outcomes compared to rule-based reinforcement learning methods. Third, we introduce SpeechFeedback, a synthetic preference dataset, and employ a two-stage training paradigm to mitigate the scarcity of speech preference data. Trained on both semantic and acoustic dimensions, SageLM achieves an 82.79% agreement rate with human evaluators, outperforming cascaded and SLM-based baselines by at least 7.42% and 26.20%, respectively.

PaperID: 2053, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15851

Authors:Yilin Geng, Haonan Li, Honglin Mu, Xudong Han, Timothy Baldwin, Omri Abend, Eduard Hovy, Lea Frermann

Affiliations: University of Melbourne, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Title: Control Illusion: The Failure of Instruction Hierarchies in Large Language Models

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed with hierarchical instruction schemes, where certain instructions (e.g., systemlevel directives) are expected to take precedence over others (e.g., user messages). Yet, we lack a systematic understanding of how effectively these hierarchical control mechanisms work. We introduce a systematic evaluation framework based on constraint prioritization to assess how well LLMs enforce instruction hierarchies. Our experiments across six state-of-the-art LLMs reveal that models struggle with consistent instruction prioritization, even for simple formatting conflicts. We find that the widely-adopted system/user prompt separation fails to establish a reliable instruction hierarchy, and models exhibit strong inherent biases toward certain constraint types regardless of their priority designation. Interestingly, we also find that societal hierarchy framings (e.g., authority, expertise, consensus) show stronger influence on model behavior than system/user roles, suggesting that pretraining-derived social structures function as latent behavioral priors with potentially greater impact than post-training guardrails.

PaperID: 2054, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11225

Authors:Chengyu Huang, Zhengxin Zhang, Claire Cardie

Affiliations: Cornell University

Title: HAPO: Training Language Models to Reason Concisely via History-Aware Policy Optimization

Abstract:
While scaling the length of responses at testtime has been shown to markedly improve the reasoning abilities and performance of large language models (LLMs), it often results in verbose outputs and increases inference cost. Prior approaches for efficient test-time scaling, typically using universal budget constraints or query-level length optimization, do not leverage historical information from previous encounters with the same problem during training. We hypothesize that this limits their ability to progressively make solutions more concise over time. To address this, we present History-Aware Policy Optimization (HAPO), which keeps track of a history state (e.g., the minimum length over previously generated correct responses) for each problem. HAPO employs a novel length reward function based on this history state to incentivize the discovery of correct solutions that are more concise than those previously found. Crucially, this reward structure avoids overly penalizing shorter incorrect responses with the goal of facilitating exploration towards more efficient solutions. By combining this length reward with a correctness reward, HAPO jointly optimizes for correctness and efficiency. We use HAPO to train DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, DeepScaleR-1.5B-Preview, and Qwen-2.5-1.5B-Instruct, and evaluate HAPO on several math benchmarks that span various difficulty levels. Experiment results demonstrate that HAPO effectively induces LLMs’ concise reasoning abilities, producing length reductions of 33-59% with accuracy drops of only 2-5%.

PaperID: 2055, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07193

Authors:Jiacheng Huang, Ning Yu, Xiaoyin Yi

Affiliations: Hubei Normal University, Chongqing University of Post and Telecommunications

Title: EMODIS: A Benchmark for Context-Dependent Emoji Disambiguation in Large Language Models

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in realworld communication settings, yet their ability to resolve context-dependent ambiguity remains underexplored. In this work, we present EMODIS, a new benchmark for evaluating LLMs' capacity to interpret ambiguous emoji expressions under minimal but contrastive textual contexts. Each instance in EMODIS comprises an ambiguous sentence containing an emoji, two distinct disambiguating contexts that lead to divergent interpretations, and a specific question that requires contextual reasoning. We evaluate both open-source and API-based LLMs, and find that even the strongest models frequently fail to distinguish meanings when only subtle contextual cues are present. Further analysis reveals systematic biases toward dominant interpretations and limited sensitivity to pragmatic contrast. EMODIS provides a rigorous testbed for assessing contextual disambiguation, and highlights the gap in semantic reasoning between humans and LLMs.

PaperID: 2056, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05337

Authors:Jiameng Huang, Baijiong Lin, Guhao Feng, Jierun Chen, Di He, Lu Hou

Affiliations: Peking University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Huawei Technologies Ltd.

Title: Efficient Reasoning for Large Reasoning Language Models via Certainty-Guided Reflection Suppression

Abstract:
Recent Large Reasoning Language Models (LRLMs) employ long chainof-thought reasoning with complex reflection behaviors, typically signaled by specific trigger words (e.g., "Wait" and "Alternatively") to enhance performance. However, these reflection behaviors can lead to the overthinking problem where the generation of redundant reasoning steps that unnecessarily increase token usage, raise inference costs, and reduce practical utility. In this paper, we propose Certainty-Guided Reflection Suppression (CGRS), a novel method that mitigates overthinking in LRLMs while maintaining reasoning accuracy. CGRS operates by dynamically suppressing the model's generation of reflection triggers when it exhibits high confidence in its current response, thereby preventing redundant reflection cycles without compromising output quality. Our approach is model-agnostic, requires no retraining or architectural modifications, and can be integrated seamlessly with existing autoregressive generation pipelines. Extensive experiments across four reasoning benchmarks (i.e., AIME24, AMC23, MATH500, and GPQA-D) demonstrate CGRS's effectiveness: it reduces token usage by an average of 18.5% to 41.9% while preserving accuracy and also achieves the optimal balance between length reduction and performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines. These results hold consistently across model architectures (e.g., DeepSeek-R1-Distill series, QwQ-32B, and Qwen3 family) and scales (4B to 32B parameters), highlighting CGRS's practical value for efficient reasoning.

PaperID: 2057, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.05694

Authors:Shuting Jiang, Ran Song, Yuxin Huang, Yan Xiang, Yantuan Xian, Shengxiang Gao, Zhengtao Yu

Affiliations: Faculty of Information Engineering and Automation, Kunming University of Science and Technology, China Yunnan Key Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence

Title: Consensus-Aligned Neuron Efficient Fine-Tuning Large Language Models for Multi-Domain Machine Translation

Abstract:
Multidomain machine translation (MDMT) aims to build a unified model capable of translating content across diverse domains. Despite the impressive machine translation capabilities demonstrated by large language models (LLMs), domain adaptation still remains a challenge for LLMs. Existing MDMT methods such as in-context learning and parameter-efficient fine-tuning often suffer from domain shift, parameter interference and limited generalization. In this work, we propose a neuron-efficient fine-tuning framework for MDMT that identifies and updates consensus-aligned neurons within LLMs. These neurons are selected by maximizing the mutual information between neuron behavior and domain features, enabling LLMs to capture both generalizable translation patterns and domain-specific nuances. Our method then fine-tunes LLMs guided by these neurons, effectively mitigating parameter interference and domain-specific overfitting. Comprehensive experiments on three LLMs across ten German-English and Chinese-English translation domains evidence that our method consistently outperforms strong PEFT baselines on both seen and unseen domains, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

PaperID: 2058, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12051

Authors:Shuyang Jiang, Yusheng Liao, Zhe Chen, Ya Zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Yu Wang

Affiliations: Fudan University Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Title: MedS³: Towards Medical Slow Thinking with Self-Evolved Soft Dual-sided Process Supervision

Abstract:
Medical language models face critical barriers to realworld clinical reasoning applications. However, mainstream efforts, which fall short in task coverage, lack fine-grained supervision for intermediate reasoning steps, and rely on proprietary systems, are still far from a versatile, credible and efficient language model for clinical reasoning usage. To this end, we propose MedS3, a self-evolving framework that imparts robust reasoning capabilities to small, deployable models. Starting with 8,000 curated instances sampled via a curriculum strategy across five medical domains and 16 datasets, we use a small base policy model to conduct Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for constructing rule-verifiable reasoning trajectories. Self-explored reasoning trajectories ranked by node values are used to bootstrap the policy model via reinforcement fine-tuning and preference learning. Moreover, we introduce a soft dual process reward model that incorporates value dynamics: steps that degrade node value are penalized, enabling fine-grained identification of reasoning errors even when the final answer is correct. Experiments on eleven benchmarks show that MedS3 outperforms the previous state-of-the-art medical model by +6.45 accuracy points and surpasses 32B-scale general-purpose reasoning models by +8.57 points. Additional empirical analysis further demonstrates that MedS3 achieves robust and faithful reasoning behavior.

PaperID: 2059, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04748

Authors:Xinyue Kang, Diwei Shi, Li Chen

Affiliations: Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University

Title: Model Whisper: Steering Vectors Unlock Large Language Models’ Potential in Test-Time

Abstract:
It is a critical challenge to efficiently unlock the powerful reasoning potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for specific tasks or new distributions. Existing testtime adaptation methods often require tuning model parameters, which is not only computationally expensive but also risks degrading the model's pre-existing abilities.To address this, we introduce a lightweight component, Test-Time Steering Vectors (TTSV), which is prepended to the input while keeping the LLM's parameters entirely frozen. By optimizing the TTSV on test data to minimize the model's output entropy, we steer the model towards an internal state of higher confidence, activating its inherent abilities most relevant to the current task. TTSV is both lightweight and highly efficient to optimize, making it a true plug-and-play enhancement. Extensive experiments validate our approach's effectiveness on both base models and reasoning-enhanced models. For instance, on the MATH500 task, TTSV achieves a 45.88% relative performance gain on the Qwen2.5-Math-7B model and a 16.22% relative gain on the Qwen3-4B model. Furthermore, our approach exhibits robust generalization, with its steering vectors proving highly transferable across diverse tasks.

PaperID: 2060, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.23178

Authors:Chen Li, Peiji Yang, Yicheng Zhong, Jianxing Yu, Zhisheng Wang, Zihao Gou, Wenqing Chen, Jian Yin

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Sun Yat-sen University, Ministry of Culture and Tourism, School of Software Engineering

Title: HPSU: A Benchmark for Human-Level Perception in Real-World Spoken Speech Understanding

Abstract:
Recent advances in Speech Large Language Models (Speech LLMs) have led to great progress in speech understanding tasks such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Speech Emotion Recognition (SER). However, whether these models can achieve humanlevel auditory perception, particularly in terms of their ability to comprehend latent intentions and implicit emotions in real-world spoken language, remains underexplored. To this end, we introduce the Human-level Perception in Spoken Speech Understanding (HPSU), a new benchmark for fully evaluating the human-level perceptual and understanding capabilities of Speech LLMs. HPSU comprises over 20,000 expert-validated spoken language understanding samples in English and Chinese. It establishes a comprehensive evaluation framework by encompassing a spectrum of tasks, ranging from basic speaker attribute recognition to complex inference of latent intentions and implicit emotions. To address the issues of data scarcity and high cost of manual annotation in real-world scenarios, we developed a semi-automatic annotation process. This process fuses audio, textual, and visual information to enable precise speech understanding and labeling, thus enhancing both annotation efficiency and quality. We systematically evaluate various open-source and proprietary Speech LLMs. The results demonstrate that even top-performing models still fall considerably short of human capabilities in understanding genuine spoken interactions. Consequently, HPSU will be useful for guiding the development of Speech LLMs toward human-level perception and cognition.

PaperID: 2061, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.24768

Authors:Haoyu Li, Xuhong Li, Yiming Dong, Kun Liu

Affiliations: School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology, Baidu Inc., School of Physics, Peking University

Title: From Macro to Micro: Probing Dataset Diversity in Language Model Fine-Tuning

Abstract:
Dataset diversity plays a pivotal role for the successful training of many machine learning models, particularly in the supervised finetuning (SFT) stage of large language model (LLM) development. Despite increasing recognition of its importance, systematic analyses of dataset diversity still remain underexplored. To address this gap, this work presents a systematic taxonomy of existing diversity-control strategies, which primarily focus on the instruction component, operating at either macroscopic (entire instruction semantics) or mesoscopic levels (instruction units), and furthermore introduces a novel analysis of microscopic diversity within the response component, specifically analyzing the statistical distribution of tokens in SFT training samples. In the experimental evaluation, we construct fixed-size datasets (e.g., 10,000 samples each) from a corpus of 117,000 open-source SFT samples, incorporating six distinct diversity-control strategies spanning macro-, meso-, and microscopic levels applied to both instructions and responses. We then fine-tune LLMs on these datasets to assess the six diversity-control strategies. Results reveal that while macroscopic and mesoscopic strategies lead to higher performance with increasing diversity, the microscopic strategy in responses exhibits not only a stronger correlation between model performance and the degree of diversity, but also superior performance with maximum diversity across all strategies. These findings offer actionable insights for constructing high-performance SFT datasets.

PaperID: 2062, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10128

Authors:Qinfeng Li, Miao Pan, Ke Xiong, Ge Su, Zhiqiang Shen, Yan Liu, Sun Bing, Hao Peng, Xuhong Zhang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Ant Group, Universal Identification Technology (Hangzhou) Co., Zhejiang Normal University

Title: RAGFort: Dual-Path Defense Against Proprietary Knowledge Base Extraction in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Abstract:
RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) systems deployed over proprietary knowledge bases face growing threats from reconstruction attacks that aggregate model responses to replicate knowledge bases. Such attacks exploit both intra-class and inter-class paths—progressively extracting fine-grained knowledge within topics and diffusing it across semantically related ones, thereby enabling comprehensive extraction of the original knowledge base. However, existing defenses target only one path, leaving the other unprotected. We conduct a systematic exploration to assess the impact of protecting each path independently and find that joint protection is essential for effective defense. Based on this, we propose RAGFort, a structure-aware dual-module defense combining contrastive reindexing for inter-class isolation and constrained cascade generation for intra-class protection. Experiments across security, performance, and robustness confirm that RAGFort significantly reduces reconstruction success while preserving answer quality, offering the first comprehensive defense against knowledge base extraction attacks.

PaperID: 2063, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08317

Authors:Shuaimin Li, Liyang Fan, Yufang Lin, Zeyang Li, Xian Wei, Shiwen Ni, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Min Yang

Affiliations: Shenzhen Key Laboratory for High Performance Data Mining, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University, East China Normal University, University of Science and Technology of China, Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, New South Wales

Title: Automatic Paper Reviewing with Heterogeneous Graph Reasoning over LLM-Simulated Reviewer-Author Debates

Abstract:
Existing paper review methods often rely on superficial manuscript features or directly on large language models (LLMs), which are prone to hallucinations, biased scoring, and limited reasoning capabilities. Moreover, these methods often fail to capture the complex argumentative reasoning and negotiation dynamics inherent in reviewerauthor interactions. To address these limitations, we propose ReViewGraph (Reviewer-Author Debates Graph Reasoner), a novel framework that performs heterogeneous graph reasoning over LLM-simulated multi-round reviewer-author debates. In our approach, reviewer-author exchanges are simulated through LLM-based multi-agent collaboration. Diverse opinion relations (e.g., acceptance, rejection, clarification, and compromise) are then explicitly extracted and encoded as typed edges within a heterogeneous interaction graph. By applying graph neural networks to reason over these structured debate graphs, ReViewGraph captures fine-grained argumentative dynamics and enables more informed review decisions. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that ReViewGraph outperforms strong baselines with an average relative improvement of 15.73%, underscoring the value of modeling detailed reviewer–author debate structures.

PaperID: 2064, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.11477

Authors:Yifan Liang, Andong Li, Kang Yang, Guochen Yu, Fangkun Liu, Lingling Dai, Xiaodong Li, Chengshi Zheng

Affiliations: Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Jiangnan University

Title: SLD-L2S: Hierarchical Subspace Latent Diffusion for High-Fidelity Lip to Speech Synthesis

Abstract:
Although lipto-speech synthesis (L2S) has achieved significant progress in recent years, current state-of-the-art methods typically rely on intermediate representations such as mel-spectrograms or discrete self-supervised learning (SSL) tokens. The potential of latent diffusion models (LDMs) in this task remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce SLD-L2S, a novel L2S framework built upon a hierarchical subspace latent diffusion model. Our method aims to directly map visual lip movements to the continuous latent space of a pre-trained neural audio codec, thereby avoiding the information loss inherent in traditional intermediate representations. The core of our method is a hierarchical architecture that processes visual representations through multiple parallel subspaces, initiated by a subspace decomposition module. To efficiently enhance interactions within and between these subspaces, we design the diffusion convolution block (DiCB) as our network backbone. Furthermore, we employ a reparameterized flow matching technique to directly generate the target latent vectors. This enables a principled inclusion of speech language model (SLM) and semantic losses during training, moving beyond conventional flow matching objectives and improving synthesized speech quality. Our experiments show that SLD-L2S achieves state-of-the-art generation quality on multiple benchmark datasets, surpassing existing methods in both objective and subjective evaluations.

PaperID: 2065, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13768

Authors:Shengchao Liu, Xiaoming Liu, Chengzhengxu Li, Zhaohan Zhang, Guoxin Ma, Yu Lan, Shuai Xiao

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, Queen Mary University of London

Title: MGT-Prism: Enhancing Domain Generalization for Machine-Generated Text Detection via Spectral Alignment

Abstract:
Large Language Models have shown growing ability to generate fluent and coherent texts that are highly similar to the writing style of humans. Current detectors for MachineGenerated Text (MGT) perform well when they are trained and tested in the same domain but generalize poorly to unseen domains, due to domain shift between data from different sources. In this work, we propose MGT-Prism , an MGT detection method from the perspective of the frequency domain for better domain generalization. Our key insight stems from analyzing text representations in the frequency domain, where we observe consistent spectral patterns across diverse domains, while significant discrepancies in magnitude emerge between MGT and human-written texts (HWTs). The observation initiates the design of a low frequency domain filtering module for filtering out the document-level features that are sensitive to domain shift, and a dynamic spectrum alignment strategy to extract the task-specific and domain-invariant features for improving the detector's performance in domain generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MGT-Prism outperforms state‑of‑the‑art baselines by an average of 0.90% in accuracy and 0.92% in F1 score on 11 test datasets across three domain‑generalization scenarios.

PaperID: 2066, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10714

Authors:Shuaitong Liu, Renjue Li, Lijia Yu, Lijun Zhang, Zhiming Liu, Gaojie Jin

Affiliations: College of Computer and Information Science, Software College, Southwest University, Institute of AI for Industries, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Software, Department of Computer Science, University of Exeter

Title: BadThink: Triggered Overthinking Attacks on Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models

Abstract:
Recent advances in Chainof-Thought (CoT) prompting have substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but have also introduced their computational efficiency as a new attack surface. In this paper, we propose BadThink, the first backdoor attack designed to deliberately induce "overthinking" behavior in CoT-enabled LLMs while ensuring stealth. When activated by carefully crafted trigger prompts, BadThink manipulates the model to generate inflated reasoning traces—producing unnecessarily redundant thought processes while preserving the consistency of final outputs. This subtle attack vector creates a covert form of performance degradation that significantly increases computational costs and inference time while remaining difficult to detect through conventional output evaluation methods. We implement this attack through a sophisticated poisoning-based fine-tuning strategy, employing a novel LLM-based iterative optimization process to embed the behavior by generating highly naturalistic poisoned data. Our experiments on multiple state-of-the-art models and reasoning tasks show that BadThink consistently increases reasoning trace lengths—achieving an over 17× increase on the MATH-500 dataset—while remaining stealthy and robust. This work reveals a critical, previously unexplored vulnerability where reasoning efficiency can be covertly manipulated, demonstrating a new class of sophisticated attacks against CoT-enabled systems.

PaperID: 2067, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09734

Authors:Yanyi Liu, Qingwen Yang, Tiezheng Guo, Feiyu Qu, Jun Liu, Yingyou Wen

Affiliations: Northeastern University, Dartmouth College

Title: From Detection to Diagnosis: Advancing Hallucination Analysis with Automated Data Synthesis

Abstract:
Hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs), defined as the generation of content inconsistent with facts or context, represent a core obstacle to their reliable deployment in critical domains. Current research primarily focuses on binary "detection" approaches that, while capable of identifying hallucinations, fail to provide interpretable and actionable feedback for model improvement, thus limiting practical utility. To address this limitation, a new research paradigm is proposed, shifting from "detection" to "diagnosis". The Hallucination Diagnosis Task is introduced, a task which requires models to not only detect hallucinations, but also perform error localization, causal explanation, and content correction. We develop the Hallucination Diagnosis Generator (HDG), an automated pipeline that systematically generates highquality training samples with rich diagnostic metadata from raw corpora through multi-dimensional augmentation strategies including controlled fact fabrication and reasoning chain perturbation. Using HDG-generated data, we train HDM-4B-RL, a 4-billion-parameter hallucination diagnosis model, employing Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a comprehensive reward function incorporating structural, accuracy, and localization signals. Experimental results demonstrate that our model surpasses previous state-of-the-art detection models on the HaluEval benchmark while achieving comparable performance to advanced general-purpose models. In comprehensive diagnosis tasks, HDM-4B-RL matches the capabilities of larger general models while maintaining a smaller size. This work validates the feasibility and value of hallucination diagnosis, providing an effective methodology for building more trustworthy and reliable generative AI systems.

PaperID: 2068, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23229

Authors:Hao Lu, Yanchi Gu, Haoyuan Huang, Yulin Zhou, Ningxin Zhu, Chen Li

Affiliations: JianChengXingYun Technology Co.

Title: MCTSr-Zero: Self-Reflective Psychological Counseling Dialogues Generation via Principles and Adaptive Exploration

Abstract:
The integration of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with Large Language Models (LLMs) has demonstrated significant success in structured, problemoriented tasks. However, applying these methods to open-ended dialogues, such as those in psychological counseling, presents unique challenges. Unlike tasks with objective correctness, success in therapeutic conversations depends on subjective factors like empathetic engagement, ethical adherence, and alignment with human preferences, for which strict correctness criteria are ill-defined. Existing result-oriented MCTS approaches can therefore produce misaligned responses. To address this, we introduce MCTSr-Zero, an MCTS framework designed for open-ended, human-centric dialogues. Its core innovation is domain alignment, which shifts the MCTS search objective from predefined end-states towards conversational trajectories that conform to target domain principles (e.g., empathy in counseling). Furthermore, MCTSr-Zero incorporates Regeneration and Meta-Prompt Adaptation mechanisms to substantially broaden exploration by allowing the MCTS to consider fundamentally different initial dialogue strategies. We evaluate MCTSr-Zero in psychological counseling by generating multi-turn dialogue data, which is used to fine-tune an LLM, PsyLLM. We also introduce PsyEval, a benchmark for assessing multi-turn psychological counseling dialogues. Experiments demonstrate that PsyLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance on PsyEval and other relevant metrics, validating MCTSr-Zero's effectiveness in generating high-quality, principle-aligned conversational data for human-centric domains and addressing the LLM challenge of consistently adhering to complex psychological standards.

PaperID: 2069, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06530

Authors:Xiaonan Luo, Yue Huang, Ping He, Xiangliang Zhang

Affiliations: University of Notre Dame, Vanderbilt University

Title: Better Datasets Start from RefineLab: Automatic Optimization for High-Quality Dataset Refinement

Abstract:
High‑quality Question–Answer (QA) datasets are foundational for reliable Large Language Model (LLM) evaluation, yet even expert‑crafted datasets exhibit persistent gaps in domain coverage, misaligned difficulty distributions, and factual inconsistencies. The recent surge in generative modelpowered datasets has compounded these quality challenges. In this work, we introduce RefineLab, the first LLM‑driven framework that automatically refines raw QA textual data into high-quality datasets under a controllable token‑budget constraint. RefineLab takes a set of target quality attributes as refinement objectives and performs selective edits within a predefined token budget to ensure practicality and efficiency. In essence, RefineLab addresses a constrained optimization problem: improving the quality of QA samples as much as possible while respecting resource limitations. With a set of available refinement operations, RefineLab takes as input the original dataset, a specified set of target quality dimensions, and a token budget, and determines which refinement operations should be applied to each QA sample. This process is guided by an assignment module that selects optimal refinement strategies to maximize overall dataset quality while adhering to the budget constraint. Experiments demonstrate that RefineLab consistently narrows divergence from expert datasets across coverage, difficulty alignment, factual fidelity, and distractor quality. RefineLab pioneers a scalable, customizable path to reproducible dataset design, with broad implications for LLM evaluation.

PaperID: 2070, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14422

Authors:Xutao Mao, Ezra Xuanru Tao, Leyao Wang

Affiliations: Vanderbilt University, Yale University

Title: MindVote: When AI Meets the Wild West of Social Media Opinion

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as scalable tools for pilot testing, predicting public opinion distributions before deploying costly surveys. However, the prevailing paradigm for evaluating these models relies on traditional structured surveys—a methodology misaligned with the more realistic scenarios like social media where opinions are rich in digital contexts. By design, surveys strip away the social and cultural context that shapes public opinion, and LLM benchmarks built on this paradigm inherit these critical limitations. To bridge this gap, we introduce MindVote, the first benchmark for public opinion prediction grounded in authentic social media discourse. MindVote is constructed from 3,918 naturalistic polls sourced from Reddit and Weibo, spanning 23 topics and enriched with detailed annotations for platform and topical context. Using this benchmark, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 15 LLMs, revealing a critical "surveybased specialization pitfall" where models fine-tuned on traditional surveys underperform their general-purpose counterparts and demonstrating the necessity of context in social media. MindVote provides a robust, ecologically valid framework to move beyond survey-based evaluations and advance the development of social intelligent AI systems.

PaperID: 2071, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18395

Authors:Jungsuk Oh, Jay-Yoon Lee

Affiliations: Seoul National University

Title: Latent Self-Consistency for Reliable Majority-Set Selection in Short- and Long-Answer Reasoning

Abstract:
Probabilistic decoding in Large Language Models (LLMs) often yields inconsistent outputs, particularly on complex or longform questions. Self-Consistency (SC) mitigates this for short-form QA by majority voting over exact strings, whereas Universal Self-Consistency (USC) and Weighted Unigram Consistency Score (WUCS) extend to long-form responses but lose accuracy on short-form benchmarks. We introduce Latent Self-Consistency (LSC), which selects the most semantically consistent response using learnable token embeddings. LSC's lightweight forward processing of summary tokens only introduces negligible runtime overhead (at most 0.9%) on top of standard decoding of the base LLM, and requires no changes to the model architecture. Across 6 short-form and 5 long-form reasoning benchmarks (e.g., MATH, MMLU, TruthfulQA), LSC surpasses SC, USC, and WUCS on both short-form and long-form on average performance, while adding negligible computational overhead on vanilla inference. These results position LSC as a reliable consistency-selection method that works effectively across various answer formats. Additionally, LSC provides well-calibrated confidence estimates, maintaining low expected calibration error across both answer formats.

PaperID: 2072, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09411

Authors:Wolfgang Otto, Lu Gan, Sharmila Upadhyaya, Saurav Karmakar, Stefan Dietze

Affiliations: GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences

Title: GSAP-ERE: Fine-Grained Scholarly Entity and Relation Extraction Focused on Machine Learning

Abstract:
Research in Machine Learning (ML) and AI evolves rapidly. Information Extraction (IE) from scientific publications enables to identify information about research concepts and resources on a large scale and therefore is a pathway to improve understanding and reproducibility of MLrelated research. To training and testing of IE models focused on fine-grained information in ML-related research, e.g. method training and data usage, we introduce GSAP-ERE. It is a manually curated fine-grained dataset of mentions of 63K ML-related entities and 35K relations distributed across 10 entity types and 18 semantically categorized relation types annoated in the full text of 100 ML publications. We show that our dataset enables fine-tuned models to automatically extract ML-related information that facilitate knowledge graph (KG) construction from scholarly papers or monitoring of computational reproducibility of AI research at scale. Additionally, we use our dataset as a test suite to explore prompting strategies for IE using Large Language Models (LLM). We observe that the performance of state-of-the-art LLM prompting methods is largely outperformed by our best fine-tuned baseline model (NER: 80.6%, RE: 54.0% for the fine-tuned model vs. NER: 44.4%, RE: 10.1% for the LLM). This disparity of performance between supervised models and unsupervised usage of LLMs suggests datasets like GSAP-ERE are needed to advance research in the domain of scholarly information extraction.

PaperID: 2073, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.18437

Authors:Yixing Peng, Licheng Zhang, Shancheng Fang, Yi Liu, Peijian Gu, Quan Wang

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, Shenzhen University, People's Daily Online, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: FineRef: Fine-Grained Error Reflection and Correction for Long-Form Generation with Citations

Abstract:
Generating with citations is crucial for trustworthy Large Language Models (LLMs), yet even advanced LLMs often produce mismatched or irrelevant citations. Existing methods overoptimize citation fidelity while overlooking relevance to the user query, which degrades answer quality and robustness in real-world settings with noisy or irrelevant retrieved content. Moreover, the prevailing single-pass paradigm struggles to deliver optimal answers in long-form generation that requiring multiple citations. To address these limitations, we propose FineRef, a framework based on Fine-grained error Reflection, which explicitly teaches the model to self-identify and correct two key citation errors—mismatch and irrelevance—on a per-citation basis. FineRef follows a two-stage training strategy. The first stage instills an “attempt–reflect–correct” behavioral pattern via supervised fine-tuning, using fine-grained and controllable reflection data constructed by specialized lightweight models. An online self-reflective bootstrapping strategy is designed to improve generalization by iteratively enriching training data with verified, self-improving examples. To further enhance the self-reflection and correction capability, the second stage applies process-level reinforcement learning with a multi-dimensional reward scheme that promotes reflection accuracy, answer quality, and correction gain. Experiments on the ALCE benchmark demonstrate that FineRef significantly improves both citation performance and answer accuracy. Our 7B model outperforms GPT-4 by up to 18% in Citation F1 and 4% in EM Recall, while also surpassing the state-of-the-art model across key evaluation metrics. FineRef also exhibits strong generalization and robustness in domain transfer settings and noisy retrieval scenarios.

PaperID: 2074, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13048

Authors:Weiwei Qi, Shuo Shao, Wei Gu, Tianhang Zheng, Puning Zhao, Zhan Qin, Kui Ren

Affiliations: The State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University, SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY

Title: MAJIC: Markovian Adaptive Jailbreaking via Iterative Composition of Diverse Innovative Strategies

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities but remain vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks, which can elicit harmful content from the models by manipulating the input prompts. Existing blackbox jailbreaking techniques primarily rely on static prompts crafted with a single, non-adaptive strategy, or employ rigid combinations of several underperforming attack methods, which limits their adaptability and generalization. To address these limitations, we propose MAJIC, a Markovian adaptive jailbreaking framework that attacks black-box LLMs by iteratively combining diverse innovative disguise strategies. MAJIC first establishes a ''Disguise Strategy Pool'' by refining existing strategies and introducing several innovative approaches. To further improve the attack performance and efficiency, MAJIC formulate the sequential selection and fusion of strategies in the pool as a Markov chain. Under this formulation, MAJIC initializes and employs a Markov matrix to guide the strategy composition, where transition probabilities between strategies are dynamically adapted based on attack outcomes, thereby enabling MAJIC to learn and discover effective attack pathways tailored to the target model. Our empirical results demonstrate that MAJIC significantly outperforms existing jailbreak methods on prominent models such as GPT-4o and Gemini-2.0-flash, achieving over 90% attack success rate with fewer than 15 queries per attempt on average.

PaperID: 2075, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07587

Authors:Shreyas Rajesh, Pavan Holur, Chenda Duan, David Chong, Vwani Roychowdhury

Affiliations: University of California, Los Angeles

Title: Beyond Fact Retrieval: Episodic Memory for RAG with Generative Semantic Workspaces

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) face fundamental challenges in longcontext reasoning: many documents exceed their finite context windows, while performance on texts that do fit degrades with sequence length, necessitating their augmentation with external memory frameworks. Current solutions, which have evolved from retrieval using semantic embeddings to more sophisticated structured knowledge graphs representations for improved sense-making and associativity, are tailored for fact-based retrieval and fail to build the space-time-anchored narrative representations required for tracking entities through episodic events. To bridge this gap, we propose the Generative Semantic Workspace (GSW), a neuro-inspired generative memory framework that builds structured, interpretable representations of evolving situations, enabling LLMs to reason over evolving roles, actions, and spatiotemporal contexts. Our framework comprises an Operator, which maps incoming observations to intermediate semantic structures, and a Reconciler, which integrates these into a persistent workspace that enforces temporal, spatial, and logical coherence. On the Episodic Memory Benchmark (EpBench) comprising corpora ranging from 100k to 1M tokens in length, GSW outperforms existing RAG based baselines by up to 20%. Furthermore, GSW is highly efficient, reducing query-time context tokens by 51% compared to the next most token-efficient baseline, reducing inference time costs considerably. More broadly, GSW offers a concrete blueprint for endowing LLMs with human-like episodic memory, paving the way for more capable agents that can reason over long horizons.

PaperID: 2076, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11139

Authors:Yiming Rong, Yixin Zhang, Ziyi Wang, Deyang Jiang, Yunlong Zhao, Haoran Wu, Shiyu Zhou, Bo Xu

Affiliations: Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Speech-Aware Long Context Pruning and Integration for Contextualized Automatic Speech Recognition

Abstract:
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have achieved remarkable performance in common conditions but often struggle to leverage longcontext information in contextualized scenarios that require domain-specific knowledge, such as conference presentations. This challenge arises primarily due to constrained model context windows and the sparsity of relevant information within extensive contextual noise. To solve this, we propose the SAP^2 method, a novel framework that dynamically prunes and integrates relevant contextual keywords in two stages. Specifically, each stage leverages our proposed Speech-Driven Attention-based Pooling mechanism, enabling efficient compression of context embeddings while preserving speech-salient information. Experimental results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of SAP^2 on the SlideSpeech and LibriSpeech datasets, achieving word error rates (WER) of 7.71% and 1.12%, respectively. On SlideSpeech, our method notably reduces biased keyword error rates (B-WER) by 41.1% compared to non-contextual baselines. SAP^2 also exhibits robust scalability, consistently maintaining performance under extensive contextual input conditions on both datasets.

PaperID: 2077, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18905

Authors:Dimitrios Rontogiannis, Maxime Peyrard, Nicolas Baldwin, Martin Josifoski, Robert West, Dimitrios Gunopulos

Affiliations: Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Université Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble INP, FAIR at Meta, Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Title: Interactive Evaluation of Large Language Models for Multi-Requirement Software Engineering Tasks

Abstract:
Standard singleturn, static benchmarks fall short in evaluating the nuanced capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) on complex tasks such as software engineering. In this work, we propose a novel interactive evaluation framework that assesses LLMs on multi-requirement programming tasks through structured, feedback-driven dialogue. Each task is modeled as a requirement dependency graph, and an "interviewer" LLM, aware of the ground-truth solution, provides minimal, targeted hints to an "interviewee" model to help correct errors and fulfill target constraints. This dynamic protocol enables fine-grained diagnostic insights into model behavior, uncovering strengths and systematic weaknesses that static benchmarks fail to measure. We build on DevAI, a benchmark of 55 curated programming tasks, by adding ground-truth solutions and evaluating the relevance and utility of interviewer hints through expert annotation. Our results highlight the importance of dynamic evaluation in advancing the development of collaborative code-generating agents.

PaperID: 2078, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03644

Authors:Wenxuan Shen, Mingjia Wang, Yaochen Wang, Dongping Chen, Junjie Yang, Yao Wan, Weiwei Lin

Affiliations: South China University of Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen China

Title: Are We on the Right Way to Assess Document Retrieval-Augmented Generation?

Abstract:
RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) systems using Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show great promise for complex document understanding, yet their development is critically hampered by inadequate evaluation. Current benchmarks often focus on specific part of document RAG system and use synthetic data with incomplete ground truth and evidence labels, therefore failing to reflect real-world bottlenecks and challenges. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Double-Bench: a new large-scale, multilingual, and multimodal evaluation system that is able to produce fine-grained assessment to each component within document RAG systems. It comprises 3,276 documents (72,880 pages) and 5,168 single- and multi-hop queries across 6 languages and 4 document types with streamlined dynamic update support for potential data contamination issues. Queries are grounded in exhaustively scanned evidence pages and verified by human experts to ensure maximum quality and completeness. Our comprehensive experiments across 9 state-of-the-art embedding models, 4 MLLMs and 4 end-to-end document RAG frameworks demonstrate the gap between text and visual embedding models is narrowing, highlighting the need in building stronger document retrieval models. Our findings also reveal the over-confidence dilemma within current document RAG frameworks that tend to provide answer even without evidence support. We hope our fully open-source Double-Bench provide a rigorous foundation for future research in advanced document RAG systems. We plan to retrieve timely corpus and release new benchmarks on an annual basis.

PaperID: 2079, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.09936

Authors:Yuxuan Tian, Zihan Wang, Yebo Peng, Aomufei Yuan, Zhiming Wang, Bairen Yi, Xin Liu, Yong Cui, Tong Yang

Affiliations: Peking University, ByteDance Inc., Tsinghua University

Title: KeepKV: Achieving Periodic Lossless KV Cache Compression for Efficient LLM Inference

Abstract:
Efficient inference of large language models (LLMs) is hindered by an evergrowing key-value (KV) cache, making KV cache compression a critical research direction. Traditional methods selectively evict less important KV cache entries, which leads to information loss and hallucinations. Recently, merging-based strategies have been explored to retain more information by merging KV pairs that would be discarded; however, these existing approaches inevitably introduce inconsistencies in attention distributions before and after merging, causing degraded generation quality. To overcome this challenge, we propose KeepKV , a novel adaptive KV cache merging method designed to preserve performance under strict memory constraints, achieving single-step lossless compression and providing error bounds for multi-step compression. KeepKV introduces the Electoral Votes mechanism that records merging history and adaptively adjusts attention scores. Moreover, it further leverages a novel Zero Inference-Perturbation Merging method, compensating for attention loss resulting from cache merging. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks and LLM architectures demonstrate that KeepKV substantially reduces memory usage while successfully retaining essential context information, achieving over 2 times inference throughput improvement and maintaining superior generation quality even with only 10% KV cache budgets.

PaperID: 2080, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23407

Authors:Ante Wang, Yujie Lin, Jingyao Liu, Suhang Wu, Hao Liu, Xinyan Xiao, Jinsong Su

Affiliations: School of Informatics, Xiamen University, Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Department of Digital Media Technology, Baidu Inc., China Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Title: Beyond Passive Critical Thinking: Fostering Proactive Questioning to Enhance Human-AI Collaboration

Abstract:
Critical thinking is essential for building robust AI systems, preventing them from blindly accepting flawed data or biased reasoning. However, prior work has primarily focused on passive critical thinking, where models simply reject problematic queries without taking constructive steps to address user requests. In this work, we introduce proactive critical thinking, a paradigm where models actively seek missing or clarifying information from users to resolve their queries better. To evaluate this capability, we present GSMMC and GSM-MCE, two novel benchmarks based on GSM8K for assessing mathematical reasoning under incomplete or misleading conditions. Experiments on Qwen3 and Llama series models show that, while these models excel in traditional reasoning tasks, they struggle with proactive critical thinking, especially smaller ones. However, we demonstrate that reinforcement learning (RL) can significantly improve this ability. By incorporating heuristic information into the reward function, we achieve substantial gains, boosting the Qwen3-1.7B's accuracy from 0.15% to 73.98% on GSM-MC. We hope this work advances models that collaborate more effectively with users in problem-solving through proactive critical thinking.

PaperID: 2081, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.21763

Authors:Heng Wang, Changxing Wu

Affiliations: East China Jiaotong University

Title: Improving Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition with Natural Language Explanations from LLMs

Abstract:
Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (IDRR) remains a challenging task due to the requirement for deep semantic understanding in the absence of explicit discourse markers. A further limitation is that existing methods only predict relations without providing any supporting explanations. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown strong reasoning capabilities in both deep language understanding and natural language explanation generation. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective approach to distill the reasoning capabilities of LLMs into lightweight IDRR models to improve both performance and interpretability. Specifically, we first prompt an LLM to generate explanations for each training instance conditioned on its gold label. Then, we introduce a novel classificationgeneration framework that jointly performs relation prediction and explanation generation, and train it with the additional supervision of LLM-generated explanations. Our framework is plug-and-play, enabling easy integration with most existing IDRR models. Experimental results on PDTB demonstrate that our approach significantly improves IDRR performance, while human evaluation further confirms that the generated explanations enhance model interpretability. Furthermore, we validate the generality of our approach on sentiment classification and natural language inference.

PaperID: 2082, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20210

Authors:Hualei Wang, Na Li, Chuke Wang, Shu Wu, Zhifeng Li, Dong Yu

Affiliations: Tencent AI Lab, XIntelligence Technology Co.

Title: Enhancing Stability and Fidelity for Zero-Shot TTS with a Multi-Level Evaluator

Abstract:
Recent advances in zeroshot text-to-speech (TTS), driven by language models, diffusion models and masked generation, have achieved impressive naturalness in speech synthesis. Nevertheless, stability and fidelity remain key challenges, manifesting as mispronunciations, audible noise, and quality degradation. To address these issues, we introduce Vox-Evaluator, a multi-level evaluator designed to guide the correction of erroneous speech segments and preference alignment for TTS systems. It is capable of identifying the temporal boundaries of erroneous segments and providing a holistic quality assessment of the generated speech. Specifically, to refine erroneous segments and enhance the robustness of the zero-shot TTS model, we propose to automatically identify acoustic errors with the evaluator, mask the erroneous segments, and finally regenerate speech conditioning on the correct portions. In addition, the fine-gained information obtained from Vox-Evaluator can guide the preference alignment for TTS model, thereby reducing the bad cases in speech synthesize. Due to the lack of suitable training datasets for the Vox-Evaluator, we also constructed a synthesized text-speech dataset annotated with fine-grained pronunciation errors or audio quality issues. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Vox-Evaluator in enhancing the stability and fidelity of TTS systems through the speech correction mechanism and preference optimization.

PaperID: 2083, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13705

Authors:Siqi Wang, Zhengyu Chen, Teng Xiao, Zheqi Lv, Jinluan Yang, Xunliang Cai, Jingang Wang, Xiaomeng Li

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Meituan Inc., Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence

Title: Scaling and Transferability of Annealing Strategies in Large Language Model Training

Abstract:
Learning rate scheduling is crucial for training large language models, yet understanding the optimal annealing strategies across different model configurations remains challenging. In this work, we investigate the transferability of annealing dynamics in large language model training and refine a generalized predictive framework for optimizing annealing strategies under the WarmupSteady-Decay (WSD) scheduler. Our improved framework incorporates training steps, maximum learning rate, and annealing behavior, enabling more efficient optimization of learning rate schedules. Our work provides a practical guidance for selecting optimal annealing strategies without exhaustive hyperparameter searches, demonstrating that smaller models can serve as reliable proxies for optimizing the training dynamics of larger models. We validate our findings on extensive experiments using both Dense and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, demonstrating that optimal annealing ratios follow consistent patterns and can be transferred across different training configurations.

PaperID: 2084, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08364

Authors:Xinyi Wang, Yiping Song, Zhiliang Tian, Bo Liu, Tingjin Luo, Minlie Huang

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology, Academy of Military Sciences, The CoAI Group, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University

Title: DPRM: A Dual Implicit Process Reward Model in Multi-Hop Question Answering

Abstract:
In multihop question answering (MHQA) tasks, Chain of Thought (CoT) improves the quality of generation by guiding large language models (LLMs) through multi-step reasoning, and Knowledge Graphs (KGs) reduce hallucinations via semantic matching. Outcome Reward Models (ORMs) provide feedback after generating the final answers but fail to evaluate the process for multi-step reasoning. Traditional Process Reward Models (PRMs) evaluate the reasoning process but require costly human annotations or rollout generation. While implicit PRM is trained only with outcome signals and derives step rewards through reward parameterization without explicit annotations, it is more suitable for multi-step reasoning in MHQA tasks. However, existing implicit PRM has only been explored for plain text scenarios. When adapting to MHQA tasks, it cannot handle the graph structure constraints in KGs and capture the potential inconsistency between CoT and KG paths. To address these limitations, we propose the DPRM (Dual Implicit Process Reward Model). It trains two implicit PRMs for CoT and KG reasoning in MHQA tasks. Both PRMs, namely KG-PRM and CoT-PRM, derive step-level rewards from outcome signals via reward parameterization without additional explicit annotations. Among them, KG-PRM uses preference pairs to learn structural constraints from KGs. DPRM further introduces a consistency constraint between CoT and KG reasoning steps, making the two PRMs mutually verify and collaboratively optimize the reasoning paths. We also provide a theoretical demonstration of the derivation of process rewards. Experimental results show that our method outperforms 13 baselines on multiple datasets with up to 16.6% improvement on Hit@1.

PaperID: 2085, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01564

Authors:Zeguan Xiao, Diyang Dou, Boya Xiong, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen

Affiliations: Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Southern University of Science and Technology

Title: Enhancing Uncertainty Estimation in LLMs with Expectation of Aggregated Internal Belief

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of natural language tasks, but often exhibit overconfidence and generate plausible yet incorrect answers. This overconfidence, especially in models undergone Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), poses significant challenges for reliable uncertainty estimation and safe deployment. In this paper, we propose EAGLE (Expectation of AGgregated internaL bEief), a novel selfevaluation-based calibration method that leverages the internal hidden states of LLMs to derive more accurate confidence scores. Instead of relying on the model's final output, our approach extracts internal beliefs from multiple intermediate layers during self-evaluation. By aggregating these layer-wise beliefs and calculating the expectation over the resulting confidence score distribution, EAGLE produces a refined confidence score that more faithfully reflects the model's internal certainty. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets and LLMs demonstrate that EAGLE significantly improves calibration performance over existing baselines. We also provide an in-depth analysis of EAGLE, including a layer-wise examination of uncertainty patterns, a study of the impact of self-evaluation prompts, and an analysis of the effect of self-evaluation score range.

PaperID: 2086, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15443

Authors:Ao Xie, Jiahui Chen, Quanzhi Zhu, Xiaoze Jiang, Zhiheng Qin, Enyun Yu, Han Li

Affiliations: Kuaishou Technology

Title: CroPS: Improving Dense Retrieval with Cross-Perspective Positive Samples in Short-Video Search

Abstract:
Dense retrieval has become a foundational paradigm in modern search systems, especially on shortvideo platforms. However, most industrial systems adopt a self-reinforcing training pipeline that relies on historically exposed user interactions for supervision. This paradigm inevitably leads to a filter bubble effect, where potentially relevant but previously unseen content is excluded from the training signal, biasing the model toward narrow and conservative retrieval. In this paper, we present CroPS (Cross-Perspective Positive Samples), a novel retrieval data engine designed to alleviate this problem by introducing diverse and semantically meaningful positive examples from multiple perspectives. CroPS enhances training with positive signals derived from user query reformulation behavior (query-level), engagement data in recommendation streams (system-level), and world knowledge synthesized by large language models (knowledge-level). To effectively utilize these heterogeneous signals, we introduce a Hierarchical Label Assignment (HLA) strategy and a corresponding H-InfoNCE loss that together enable fine-grained, relevance-aware optimization. Extensive experiments conducted on Kuaishou Search, a large-scale commercial short-video search platform, demonstrate that CroPS significantly outperforms strong baselines both offline and in live A/B tests, achieving superior retrieval performance and reducing query reformulation rates. CroPS is now fully deployed in Kuaishou Search, serving hundreds of millions of users daily.

PaperID: 2087, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10210

Authors:Zhikang Xie, Weilin Wan, Peizhu Gong, Weizhong Zhang, Cheng Jin

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University, School of Data Science

Title: Advanced Black-Box Tuning of Large Language Models with Limited API Calls

Abstract:
Blackbox tuning is an emerging paradigm for adapting large language models (LLMs) to better achieve desired behaviors, particularly when direct access to model parameters is unavailable. Current strategies, however, often present a dilemma of suboptimal extremes: either separately train a small proxy model and then use it to shift the predictions of the foundation model, offering notable efficiency but often yielding limited improvement; or making API calls in each tuning iteration to the foundation model, which entails prohibitive computational costs. In this paper, we argue that a more reasonable way for black-box tuning is to train the proxy model with limited API calls. The underlying intuition is based on two key observations: first, the training samples may exhibit correlations and redundancies, suggesting that the foundation model’s predictions can be estimated from previous calls; second, foundation models frequently demonstrate low accuracy on downstream tasks. Therefore, we propose a novel advanced black-box tuning method for LLMs with limited API calls. Our core strategy involves training a Gaussian Process (GP) surrogate model with "LogitMap Pairs" derived from querying the foundation model on a minimal but highly informative training subset. This surrogate can approximate the outputs of the foundation model to guide the training of the proxy model, thereby effectively reducing the need for direct queries to the foundation model. Extensive experiments verify that our approach elevates pre-trained language model accuracy from 55.92% to 86.85%, reducing the frequency of API queries to merely 1.38%. This significantly outperforms offline approaches that operate entirely without API access. Notably, our method also achieves comparable or superior accuracy to query-intensive approaches, while significantly reducing API costs. This offers a robust and high-efficiency paradigm for language model adaptation.

PaperID: 2088, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18651

Authors:Chenxu Yang, Qingyi Si, Lanrui Wang, Zheng Lin

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Huawei Technologies Ltd.

Title: Breaking the Trade-Off Between Faithfulness and Expressiveness for Large Language Models

Abstract:
Grounding responses in external knowledge represents an effective strategy for mitigating hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, current LLMs struggle to seamlessly integrate knowledge while simultaneously maintaining faithfulness (or fidelity) and expressiveness, capabilities that humans naturally possess. This limitation results in outputs that either lack support from external knowledge, thereby compromising faithfulness, or appear overly verbose and unnatural, thus sacrificing expressiveness. In this work, to break the tradeoff between faithfulness and expressiveness, we propose Collaborative Decoding (CoDe), a novel approach that dynamically integrates output probabilities generated with and without external knowledge. This integration is guided by distribution divergence and model confidence, enabling the selective activation of relevant and reliable expressions from the model's internal parameters. Furthermore, we introduce a knowledge-aware reranking mechanism that prevents over-reliance on prior parametric knowledge while ensuring proper utilization of provided external information. Through comprehensive experiments, our plug-and-play CoDe framework demonstrates superior performance in enhancing faithfulness without compromising expressiveness across diverse LLMs and evaluation metrics, validating both its effectiveness and generalizability.

PaperID: 2089, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02454

Authors:Zhaorui Yang, Bo Pan, Han Wang, Yiyao Wang, Xingyu Liu, Luoxuan Weng, Yingchaojie Feng, Haozhe Feng, Minfeng Zhu, Bo Zhang, Wei Chen

Affiliations: State Key Lab of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University, National University of Singapore, Tencent TEG

Title: Multimodal DeepResearcher: Generating Text-Chart Interleaved Reports from Scratch with Agentic Framework

Abstract:
Visualizations play a crucial part in effective communication of concepts and information. Recent advances in reasoning and retrieval augmented generation have enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform deep research and generate comprehensive reports. Despite its progress, existing deep research frameworks primarily focus on generating textonly content, leaving the automated generation of interleaved texts and visualizations underexplored. This novel task poses key challenges in designing informative visualizations and effectively integrating them with text reports. To address these challenges, we propose Formal Description of Visualization (FDV), a structured textual representation of charts that enables LLMs to learn from and generate diverse, high-quality visualizations. Building on this representation, we introduce Multimodal DeepResearcher, an agentic framework that decomposes the task into four stages: (1) researching, (2) exemplar report textualization, (3) planning and (4) multimodal report generation. For the evaluation of the generated reports, we develop MultimodalReportBench which contains 100 diverse topics as inputs, and a set of dedicated metrics for report and chart evaluation. Extensive experiments across models and evaluation methods demonstrate the effectiveness of Multimodal DeepResearcher. Notably, utilizing the same Claude 3.7 Sonnet model, Multimodal DeepResearcher achieves an 82% overall win rate over the baseline method.

PaperID: 2090, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06842

Authors:Hua Ye, Siyuan Chen, Ziqi Zhong, Canran Xiao, Haoliang Zhang, Yuhan Wu, Fei Shen

Affiliations: Nanjing university, University of Bristol, London School of Economics and Political Science, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, University of Oklahoma, Zhejiang University, National University of Singapore

Title: Seeing through the Conﬂict: Transparent Knowledge Conﬂict Handling in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) equipped with retrieval—the RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) paradigm—should combine their parametric knowledge with external evidence, yet in practice they often hallucinate, over-trust noisy snippets, or ignore vital context. We introduce TCR (Transparent Conflict Resolution), a plug-and-play framework that makes this decision process observable and controllable. TCR (i) disentangles semantic match and factual consistency via dual contrastive encoders, (ii) estimates self-answerability to gauge confidence in internal memory, and (iii) feeds the three scalar signals to the generator through a lightweight soft-prompt with SNR-based weighting. Across seven benchmarks TCR improves conflict detection (+5–18 F₁), raises knowledge-gap recovery by +21.4 percentage points and cuts misleading-context overrides by –29.3 percentage points, while adding only 0.3% parameters. The signals align with human judgements and expose temporal decision patterns.

PaperID: 2091, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10229

Authors:Yangfan Ye, Xiaocheng Feng, Xiachong Feng, Lei Huang, Weitao Ma, Qichen Hong, Yunfei Lu, Duyu Tang, Dandan Tu, Bing Qin

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, University of Hong Kong, Huawei Technologies Ltd.

Title: LangGPS: Language Separability Guided Data Pre-Selection for Joint Multilingual Instruction Tuning

Abstract:
Joint multilingual instruction tuning is a widely adopted approach to improve the multilingual instructionfollowing ability and downstream performance of large language models (LLMs), but the resulting multilingual capability remains highly sensitive to the composition and selection of the training data. Existing selection methods, often based on features like text quality, diversity, or task relevance, typically overlook the intrinsic linguistic structure of multilingual data. In this paper, we propose LangGPS, a lightweight two-stage pre-selection framework guided by language separability—a signal that quantifies how well samples in different languages can be distinguished in the model’s representation space. LangGPS first filters training data based on separability scores and then refines the subset using existing selection methods. Extensive experiments across six benchmarks and 22 languages demonstrate that applying LangGPS on top of existing selection methods improves their effectiveness and generalizability in multilingual training, especially for understanding tasks and low-resource languages. Further analysis reveals that highly separable samples facilitate the formation of clearer language boundaries and support faster adaptation, while low-separability samples tend to function as bridges for cross-lingual alignment. Besides, we also find that language separability can serves as an effective signal for multilingual curriculum learning, where interleaving samples with diverse separability levels yields stable and generalizable gains. Together, we hope our work offers a new perspective on data utility in multilingual contexts and support the development of more linguistically informed LLMs.

PaperID: 2092, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06446

Authors:Bohan Yu, Wei Huang, Kang Liu

Affiliations: School of Advanced Interdisciplinary Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China MEG, Baidu Inc., Institute of Automation, The Key Laboratory of Cognition and Decision Intelligence for Complex Systems, China School of Artificial Intelligence

Title: SR-KI: Scalable and Real-Time Knowledge Integration into LLMs via Supervised Attention

Abstract:
This paper proposes SRKI, a novel approach for integrating real-time and large-scale structured knowledge bases (KBs) into large language models (LLMs). SR-KI begins by encoding KBs into key-value pairs using a pretrained encoder, and injects them into LLMs' KV cache. Building on this representation, we employ a two-stage training paradigm: first locating a dedicated retrieval layer within the LLM, and then applying an attention-based loss at this layer to explicitly supervise attention toward relevant KB entries. Unlike traditional retrieval-augmented generation methods that rely heavily on the performance of external retrievers and multi-stage pipelines, SR-KI supports end-to-end inference by performing retrieval entirely within the model’s latent space. This design enables efficient compression of injected knowledge and facilitates dynamic knowledge updates. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that SR-KI enables the integration of up to 40K KBs into a 7B LLM on a single A100 40GB GPU, and achieves strong retrieval performance—maintaining over 98% Recall@10 on the best-performing task and exceeding 88% on average across all tasks. Task performance on question answering and KB ID generation also demonstrates that SR-KI maintains strong performance while achieving up to 99.75% compression of the injected KBs.

PaperID: 2093, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02583

Authors:Lei Zan, Keli Zhang, Ruichu Cai, Lujia Pan

Affiliations: Huawei Noah's Ark Lab, Guangdong University of Technology Peng Cheng Laboratory

Title: CAMA: Enhancing Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models with Causal Knowledge

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of tasks, yet they still struggle with complex mathematical reasoning, a challenge fundamentally rooted in deep structural dependencies. To address this challenge, we propose CAusal MAthematician (CAMA), a two stage causal framework that equips LLMs with explicit, reusable mathematical structure. In the learning stage, CAMA first constructs the Mathematical Causal Graph (MCG), a high level representation of solution strategies, by combining LLM priors with causal discovery algorithms applied to a corpus of question solution pairs. The resulting MCG encodes essential knowledge points and their causal dependencies. To better align the graph with downstream reasoning tasks, CAMA further refines the MCG through iterative feedback derived from a selected subset of the question solution pairs. In the reasoning stage, given a new question, CAMA dynamically extracts a task relevant subgraph from the MCG, conditioned on both the question content and the LLM’s intermediate reasoning trace. This subgraph, which encodes the most pertinent knowledge points and their causal dependencies, is then injected back into the LLM to guide its reasoning process. Empirical results on real world datasets show that CAMA significantly improves LLM performance on challenging mathematical problems. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate that structured guidance consistently outperforms unstructured alternatives, and that incorporating asymmetric causal relationships yields greater improvements than using symmetric associations alone.

PaperID: 2094, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.21505

Authors:Shimao Zhang, Zhejian Lai, Xiang Liu, Shuaijie She, Xiao Liu, Yeyun Gong, Shujian Huang, Jiajun Chen

Affiliations: Nanjing University, Microsoft Research Asia

Title: How Does Alignment Enhance LLMs’ Multilingual Capabilities? A Language Neurons Perspective

Abstract:
Multilingual Alignment is an effective and representative paradigm to enhance LLMs' multilingual capabilities, which transfers the capabilities from the highresource languages to the low-resource languages. Meanwhile, some research on language-specific neurons provides a new perspective to analyze and understand LLMs' mechanisms. However, we find that there are many neurons that are shared by multiple but not all languages and cannot be correctly classified. In this work, we propose a ternary classification methodology that categorizes neurons into three types, including language-specific neurons, language-related neurons, and general neurons. And we propose a corresponding identification algorithm to distinguish these different types of neurons. Furthermore, based on the distributional characteristics of different types of neurons, we divide the LLMs' internal process for multilingual inference into four parts: (1) multilingual understanding, (2) shared semantic space reasoning, (3) multilingual output space transformation, and (4) vocabulary space outputting. Additionally, we systematically analyze the models before and after alignment with a focus on different types of neurons. We also analyze the phenomenon of ''Spontaneous Multilingual Alignment''. Overall, our work conducts a comprehensive investigation based on different types of neurons, providing empirical results and valuable insights to better understand multilingual alignment and multilingual capabilities of LLMs.

PaperID: 2095, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19797

Authors:Yiqun Zhang, Hao Li, Chenxu Wang, Linyao Chen, Qiaosheng Zhang, Peng Ye, Shi Feng, Xinrun Wang, Jia Xu, Lei Bai, Shuyue Hu

Affiliations: Northeastern University, Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, China Northwest Polytechnical University, China Beijing Institue of Technology, China The University of Tokyo, Singapore Management University

Title: The Avengers: A Routing Recipe for Collective Intelligence in Language Models

Abstract:
Proprietary models are increasingly dominating the race for everlarger language models. Can open-source, smaller models remain competitive across a broad range of tasks? In this paper, we present the Avengers---a lightweight framework that leverages the collective intelligence of these smaller models. The Avengers builds upon four lightweight operations: (i) embedding: encode queries using a text embedding model; (ii) clustering: group queries based on their semantic similarity; (iii) scoring: scores each model's performance within each cluster; and (iv) voting: improve outputs via repeated sampling and voting. At inference time, each query is embedded and assigned to its nearest cluster. The top-performing model(s) within that cluster are selected to generate the response with repeated sampling. Remarkably, with 10 open-source models (~7B parameters each), the Avengers surpasses GPT-4o, 4.1, and 4.5 in average performance across 15 diverse datasets spanning mathematics, coding, logical reasoning, general knowledge, and affective tasks. In particular, it surpasses GPT-4.1 on mathematics tasks by 18.21% and on code tasks by 7.46%. Furthermore, the Avengers delivers superior out-of-distribution generalization, and remains robust across various embedding models, clustering algorithms, ensemble strategies, data efficiency, and values of its sole parameter---the number of clusters.

PaperID: 2096, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07001

Authors:Zhenliang Zhang, Xinyu Hu, Xiaojun Wan

Affiliations: Peking University

Title: SCOPE: Intrinsic Semantic Space Control for Mitigating Copyright Infringement in LLMs

Abstract:
Large language models sometimes inadvertently reproduce passages that are copyrighted, exposing downstream applications to legal risk. Most existing studies for inferencetime defences focus on surface-level token matching and rely on external blocklists or filters, which add deployment complexity and may overlook semantically paraphrased leakage. In this work, we reframe copyright infringement mitigation as intrinsic semantic-space control and introduce SCOPE, an inference-time method that requires no parameter updates or auxiliary filters. Specifically, the sparse autoencoder (SAE) projects hidden states into a high-dimensional, near-monosemantic space; benefiting from this representation, we identify a copyright-sensitive subspace and clamp its activations during decoding. Experiments on widely recognized benchmarks show that SCOPE mitigates copyright infringement without degrading general utility. Further interpretability analyses confirm that the isolated subspace captures high-level semantics.

PaperID: 2097, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09865

Authors:Mingye Zhu, Yi Liu, Zheren Fu, Quan Wang, Yongdong Zhang

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, People's Daily Online, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: In-Token Rationality Optimization: Towards Accurate and Concise LLM Reasoning via Self-Feedback

Abstract:
Training Large Language Models (LLMs) for chainof-thought reasoning presents a significant challenge: supervised fine-tuning on a single "golden" rationale hurts generalization as it penalizes equally valid alternatives, whereas reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards struggles with credit assignment and prohibitive computational cost. To tackle these limitations, we introduce InTRO (In-Token Rationality Optimization), a new framework that enables both token-level exploration and self-feedback for accurate and concise reasoning. Instead of directly optimizing an intractable objective over all valid reasoning paths, InTRO leverages correction factors—token-wise importance weights estimated by the information discrepancy between the generative policy and its answer-conditioned counterpart, for informative next-token selection. This approach allows the model to perform token-level exploration and receive self-generated feedback within a single forward pass, ultimately encouraging accurate and concise rationales. Across six math-reasoning benchmarks, InTRO consistently outperforms other baselines, raising solution accuracy by up to 20% relative to the base model. Its chains of thought are also notably more concise, exhibiting reduced verbosity. Beyond this, InTRO enables cross-domain transfer, successfully adapting to out-of-domain reasoning tasks that extend beyond the realm of mathematics, demonstrating robust generalization.

PaperID: 2098, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09999

Authors:Saket Sanjeev Chaturvedi, Gaurav Bagwe, Lan Emily Zhang, Pan He, Xiaoyong Yuan

Affiliations: Clemson University, Auburn University

Title: MOBA: A Material-Oriented Backdoor Attack Against LiDAR-Based 3D Object Detection Systems

Abstract:
LiDARbased 3D object detection is widely used in safety-critical systems. However, these systems remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks that embed hidden malicious behaviors during training. A key limitation of existing backdoor attacks is their lack of physical realizability, primarily due to the digital-to-physical domain gap. Digital triggers often fail in real-world settings because they overlook material-dependent LiDAR reflection properties. On the other hand, physically constructed triggers are often unoptimized, leading to low effectiveness or easy detectability. This paper introduces Material-Oriented Backdoor Attack (MOBA), a novel framework that bridges the digital–physical gap by explicitly modeling the material properties of real-world triggers. MOBA tackles two key challenges in physical backdoor design: 1) robustness of the trigger material under diverse environmental conditions, 2) alignment between the physical trigger's behavior and its digital simulation. First, we propose a systematic approach to selecting robust trigger materials, identifying titanium dioxide (TiO₂) for its high diffuse reflectivity and environmental resilience. Second, to ensure the digital trigger accurately mimics the physical behavior of the material-based trigger, we develop a novel simulation pipeline that features: (1) an angle-independent approximation of the Oren–Nayar BRDF model to generate realistic LiDAR intensities, and (2) a distance-aware scaling mechanism to maintain spatial consistency across varying depths. We conduct extensive experiments on state-of-the-art LiDAR-based and Camera-LiDAR fusion models, showing that MOBA achieves a 93.50% attack success rate, outperforming prior methods by over 41%. Our work reveals a new class of physically realizable threats and underscores the urgent need for defenses that account for material-level properties in real-world environments.

PaperID: 2099, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09993

Authors:Zhongjian Miao, Hao Fu, Chen Wei

Affiliations: Li Auto Inc.

Title: SPAN: Benchmarking and Improving Cross-Calendar Temporal Reasoning of Large Language Models

Abstract:
Temporal reasoning is a fundamental capability for large language models (LLMs) to understand realworld dynamics. Existing research on temporal reasoning has predominantly focused on the Gregorian calendar. However, as many countries and regions concurrently adopt multiple calendar systems, temporal reasoning across calendars becomes crucial for LLMs in global and multicultural contexts. Unfortunately, cross-calendar temporal reasoning remains underexplored, with no dedicated benchmark available to evaluate this capability. To bridge this gap, we introduce SPAN, a cross-calendar temporal reasoning benchmark, which requires LLMs to perform intra-calendar temporal reasoning and inter-calendar temporal conversion. SPAN features ten cross-calendar temporal reasoning directions, two reasoning types, and two question formats across six calendars. To enable time-variant and contamination-free evaluation, we propose a template-driven protocol for dynamic instance generation that enables assessment on a user-specified Gregorian date. We conduct extensive experiments on both open- and closed-source state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs over a range of dates spanning 100 years from 1960 to 2060. Our evaluations show that these LLMs achieve an average accuracy of only 34.5%, with none exceeding 80%, indicating that this task remains challenging. Through in-depth analysis of reasoning types, question formats, and temporal reasoning directions, we identify two key obstacles for LLMs: Future-Date Degradation and Calendar Asymmetry Bias. To strengthen LLMs' cross-calendar temporal reasoning capability, we further develop an LLM-powered Time Agent that leverages tool-augmented code generation. Empirical results show that Time Agent achieves an average accuracy of 95.31%, outperforming several competitive baselines, highlighting the potential of tool-augmented code generation to advance cross-calendar temporal reasoning. We hope this work will inspire further efforts toward more temporally and culturally adaptive LLMs.

PaperID: 2100, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19499

Authors:Hong-Hanh Nguyen-Le, Van-Tuan Tran, Thuc D. Nguyen, Nhien-An Le-Khac

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin, Department of Knowledge Engineering, University of Science

Title: Beyond Binary Classification: A Semi-supervised Approach to Generalized AI-generated Image Detection

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of generators (e.g., StyleGAN, Midjourney, DALLE) has produced highly realistic synthetic images, posing significant challenges to digital media authenticity. These generators are typically based on a few core architectural families, primarily Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Diffusion Models (DMs). A critical vulnerability in current forensics is the failure of detectors to achieve cross-generator generalization, especially when crossing architectural boundaries (e.g., from GANs to DMs). We hypothesize that this gap stems from fundamental differences in the artifacts produced by these distinct architectures. In this work, we provide a theoretical analysis explaining how the distinct optimization objectives of the GAN and DM architectures lead to different manifold coverage behaviors. We demonstrate that GANs permit partial coverage, often leading to boundary artifacts, while DMs enforce complete coverage, resulting in over-smoothing patterns. Motivated by this analysis, we propose the Triarchy Detect or (TriDetect), a semi-supervised approach that enhances binary classification by discovering latent architectural patterns within the "fake" class. TriDetect employs balanced cluster assignment via the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm and a cross-view consistency mechanism, encouraging the model to learn fundamental architectural distincts. We evaluate our approach on two standard benchmarks and three in-the-wild datasets against 13 baselines to demonstrate its generalization capability to unseen generators.

PaperID: 2101, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01365

Authors:Zihan Wang, Rui Zhang, Hongwei Li, Wenshu Fan, Wenbo Jiang, Qingchuan Zhao, Guowen Xu

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, City University of Hong Kong

Title: ConfGuard: A Simple and Effective Backdoor Detection for Large Language Models

Abstract:
Backdoor attacks pose a significant threat to Large Language Models (LLMs), where adversaries can embed hidden triggers to manipulate LLM's outputs. Most existing defense methods, primarily designed for classification tasks, are ineffective against the autoregressive nature and vast output space of LLMs, thereby suffering from poor performance and high latency. To address these limitations, we investigate the behavioral discrepancies between benign and backdoored LLMs in output space. We identify a critical phenomenon which we term sequence lock: a backdoored model generates the target sequence with abnormally high and consistent confidence compared to benign generation. Building on this insight, we propose ConfGuard, a lightweight and effective detection method that monitors a sliding window of token confidences to identify sequence lock. Extensive experiments demonstrate ConfGuard achieves a near 100% true positive rate (TPR) and a negligible false positive rate (FPR) in the vast majority of cases. Crucially, the ConfGuard enables realtime detection almost without additional latency, making it a practical backdoor defense for real-world LLM deployments.

PaperID: 2102, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.06753

Authors:Yuankun Xie, Ruibo Fu, Xiaopeng Wang, Zhiyong Wang, Songjun Cao, Long Ma, Haonan Cheng, Long Ye

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Media Convergence and Communication, Communication University of China, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, School of Artificial Intelligence, YouTu Lab

Title: Detect All-Type Deepfake Audio: Wavelet Prompt Tuning for Enhanced Auditory Perception

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of audio generation technologies has escalated the risks of malicious deepfake audio across speech, sound, singing voice, and music, threatening multimedia security and trust. While existing countermeasures (CMs) perform well in singletype audio deepfake detection (ADD), their performance declines in cross-type scenarios. This paper is dedicated to studying the all-type ADD task. We are the first to comprehensively establish an all-type ADD benchmark to evaluate current CMs, incorporating cross-type deepfake detection across speech, sound, singing voice, and music. Then, we introduce the prompt tuning self-supervised learning (PT-SSL) training paradigm, which optimizes SSL front-end by learning specialized prompt tokens for ADD, requiring 458× fewer trainable parameters than fine-tuning (FT). Considering the auditory perception of different audio types, we propose the wavelet prompt tuning (WPT)-SSL method to capture type-invariant auditory deepfake information from the frequency domain without requiring additional training parameters, thereby enhancing performance over FT in the all-type ADD task. To achieve an universally CM, we utilize all types of deepfake audio for co-training. Experimental results demonstrate that WPT-XLSR-AASIST achieved the best performance, with an average EER of 3.58% across all evaluation sets.

PaperID: 2103, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16743

Authors:Adeel Yousaf, Joseph Fioresi, James Beetham, Amrit Singh Bedi, Mubarak Shah

Affiliations: Center for Research in Computer Vision, University of Central Florida, SAFERR AI Lab

Title: SafeR-CLIP: Mitigating NSFW Content in Vision-Language Models While Preserving Pre-Trained Knowledge

Abstract:
Improving the safety of visionlanguage models like CLIP via fine-tuning often comes at a steep price, causing significant drops in their generalization performance. We find this trade-off stems from rigid alignment strategies that force unsafe concepts toward single, predefined safe targets, disrupting the model's learned semantic structure. To address this, we propose a proximity-aware approach: redirecting unsafe concepts to their semantically closest safe alternatives to minimize representational change. We introduce SafeR-CLIP, a fine-tuning framework that applies this principle of minimal intervention. SafeR-CLIP successfully reconciles safety and performance, recovering up to 8.0% in zero-shot accuracy over prior methods while maintaining robust safety. To support more rigorous evaluation, we also contribute NSFWCaps, a new benchmark of 1,000 highly-aligned pairs for testing safety under distributional shift. Our work shows that respecting the geometry of pretrained representations is key to achieving safety without sacrificing performance.

PaperID: 2104, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06471

Authors:Jingtao Tang, Hang Ma

Affiliations: Simon Fraser University

Title: GHOST: Solving the Traveling Salesman Problem on Graphs of Convex Sets

Abstract:
We study GCSTSP, a variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) defined over a Graph of Convex Sets (GCS) - a powerful representation for trajectory planning that decomposes the configuration space into convex regions connected by a sparse graph. In GCS-TSP, edge costs are not fixed but depend on the specific trajectory passing through each convex region, making classical TSP methods inapplicable. We introduce GHOST, a hierarchical framework that optimally solves GCS-TSP by combining combinatorial tour search with convex trajectory optimization. GHOST systematically explores tours on a complete graph induced by the GCS, using a novel abstract-path-unfolding algorithm to compute admissible lower bounds that guide best-first search at both the high level (over tours) and the low level (over feasible GCS paths realizing the tour). These bounds provide strong pruning power, reducing unnecessary optimization calls. We prove that GHOST guarantees optimality and present a bounded-suboptimal variant for time-critical settings. Experiments show that GHOST is orders-of-magnitude faster than unified mixed-integer convex programming baseline while uniquely handling complex problems involving high-order continuity constraints and incomplete GCSs.

PaperID: 2105, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.11187

Authors:Ruixiao Yang, Chuchu Fan

Affiliations: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Title: Optimization of Multi-Agent Flying Sidekick Traveling Salesman Problem over Road Networks

Abstract:
The mixed truckdrone delivery system has attracted increasing attention for its potential to optimize last-mile logistics. While the Flying Sidekick Traveling Salesman Problem (FSTSP) provides a foundation for modeling the truck-drone collaboration, it falls short of capturing real-world complexities by assuming a single truck-drone pair operating on a fully connected graph. We introduce the Multi-Agent FSTSP (MA-FSTSP), which extends FSTSP to handle multiple trucks, each carrying multiple drones operating over real road networks. Trucks must follow roads, while drones can fly directly between locations. To solve this NP-hard problem efficiently, we propose a novel three-phase algorithm that first partitions customers using a set-based distance heuristic, then computes initial truck routes via a Set TSP formulation, and finally optimizes drone deployment patterns by dynamic programming. Through extensive experiments on real-world road networks from Manhattan (1,024 nodes) and Boston (11,000 nodes), we demonstrate that our method achieves more than 30% cost reduction compared to existing approaches while scaling effectively to problems with 150 customers within a 20-minute computational time-bound.

PaperID: 2106, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15551

Authors:Yukun Du, Haiyue Yu, Xiaotong Xie, Yan Zheng, Lixin Zhan, Yudong Du, Chongshuang Hu, Boxuan Wang, Jiang Jiang

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology, Xinxiang University

Title: Meta-Black-Box Optimization with Bi-Space Landscape Analysis and Dual-Control Mechanism for SAEA

Abstract:
SurrogateAssisted Evolutionary Algorithms (SAEAs) are widely used for expensive Black-Box Optimization. However, their reliance on rigid, manually designed components such as infill criteria and evolutionary strategies during the search process limits their flexibility across tasks. To address these limitations, we propose Dual-Control Bi-Space Surrogate-Assisted Evolutionary Algorithm (DB-SAEA), a Meta-Black-Box Optimization (MetaBBO) framework tailored for multi-objective problems. DB-SAEA learns a meta-policy that jointly regulates candidate generation and infill criterion selection, enabling dual control. The bi-space Exploratory Landscape Analysis (ELA) module in DB-SAEA adopts an attention-based architecture to capture optimization states from both true and surrogate evaluation spaces, while ensuring scalability across problem dimensions, population sizes, and objectives. Additionally, we integrate TabPFN as the surrogate model for accurate and efficient prediction with uncertainty estimation. The framework is trained via reinforcement learning, leveraging parallel sampling and centralized training to enhance efficiency and transferability across tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that DB-SAEA not only outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across diverse benchmarks, but also exhibits strong zero-shot transfer to unseen tasks with higher-dimensional settings. This work introduces the first MetaBBO framework with dual-level control over SAEAs and a bi-space ELA that captures surrogate model information.

PaperID: 2107, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03082

Authors:Fei Liu, Yilu Liu, Qingfu Zhang, Tong Xialiang, Mingxuan Yuan

Affiliations: City University of Hong Kong, Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab

Title: EoH-S: Evolution of Heuristic Set Using LLMs for Automated Heuristic Design

Abstract:
Automated Heuristic Design (AHD) using Large Language Models (LLMs) has achieved notable success in the past two years. Despite the effectiveness of existing approaches, they only design a single heuristic to serve all problem instances, often inducing poor generalization across different distributions or sizes. To address this issue, we propose Automated Heuristic Set Design (AHSD), a new methodology for LLMdriven AHD. The aim of AHSD is to automatically design a small-sized complementary heuristic set to serve diverse problem instances, such that each problem instance could be optimized by at least one heuristic in this set. We propose Evolution of Heuristic Set (EoH-S), which realizes AHSD using an evolutionary search framework. It incorporates a complementary population management and a memetic search to design a set of heuristics. Extensive experiments on online bin packing, traveling salesman problem, and capacitated vehicle routing problem show that EoH-S consistently outperforms existing AHD methods. The resulting heuristics exhibit complementary performance across instances of varying sizes and distributions.

PaperID: 2108, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09549

Authors:Daniel Platnick, Dawson Tomasz, Eamon Earl, Sourena Khanzadeh, Richard Valenzano

Affiliations: Toronto Metropolitan University

Title: Breadth-First Search vs. Restarting Random Walks for Escaping Uninformed Heuristic Regions

Abstract:
Greedy search methods such as Greedy BestFirst Search (GBFS) and Enforced Hill-Climbing (EHC) often struggle when faced with Uninformed Heuristic Regions (UHRs) like heuristic local minima or plateaus. In this work, we theoretically and empirically compare two popular methods for escaping UHRs: breadth-first search (BrFS) and restarting random walks (RRWs). First, we derive the expected runtime of escaping a UHR using BrFS and RRWs, based on properties of the UHR and the random walk procedure, and then use these results to identify when RRWs will be faster in expectation than BrFS. Next, we evaluate these methods for escaping UHRs by comparing standard EHC, which uses BrFS to escape UHRs, to variants of EHC called EHC-RRW, which use RRWs for that purpose. EHC-RRW is shown to have strong expected runtime guarantees in cases where EHC has previously been shown to be effective. Finally, we run experiments with these approaches on PDDL planning benchmarks to better understand their relative effectiveness for escaping UHRs.

PaperID: 2109, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.12570

Authors:Danyang Zhang, Zerong Zhong, Weijie Zheng, Benjamin Doerr

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, State Key Laboratory of Smart Farm Technologies and Systems, International Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Harbin Institute of Technology, China; Pengcheng Laboratory, Laboratoire d’Informatique (LIX), École Polytechnique, Institut Polytechnique de Paris

Title: Superior Runtime Guarantees for the MOEA/D Multi-Objective Optimizer via Weighted-Sum Decomposition

Abstract:
The MOEA/D is the most popular decompositionbased evolutionary algorithm to solve multi-objective optimization problems. However, among the two common decomposition approaches, weighted-sum and Tchebycheff, the existing theoretical research almost exclusively focus on the latter one. In this first complete mathematical runtime analysis for the MOEA/D using the original weighted-sum decomposition, we show that this variant of the algorithm solves the classic ONEMINMAX benchmark considerably faster than both the MOEA/D with Tchebycheff decomposition and many other classic algorithms such as the NSGA-II, NSGA-III, SMS-EMOA, and SPEA2. More precisely, we show that already a logarithmic number of subproblems suffices for the algorithm to be efficient, and then typically O(n log^2 n) function evaluations suffice to compute the full Pareto front. This beats the other algorithms by a factor of Θ(n / log n). For a second benchmark, the ONEJUMPZEROJUMP problem, we show a speed-up by a factor of Θ(n). Overall, this work shows that a further development of the weighted-sum approach might be fruitful.

PaperID: 2110, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12804

Authors:Ali Falahati, Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri, Kate Larson, Lukasz Golab

Affiliations: University of Waterloo, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Title: The Alignment Game: A Theory of Long-Horizon Alignment Through Recursive Curation

Abstract:
In selfconsuming generative models that train on their own outputs, alignment with user preferences becomes a recursive rather than one-time process. In this paper, we provide the first formal foundation for analyzing the long-term effects of such recursive retraining on alignment. Under a two-stage curation mechanism based on the Bradley–Terry (BT) model, we model alignment as an interaction between two factions: the Model Owner, who filters which outputs should be learned by the model, and the Public User, who determines which outputs are ultimately shared and retained through interactions with the model. Our analysis reveals three structural convergence regimes: consensus collapse, compromise on shared optima, and asymmetric refinement, depending on the degree of preference alignment. We prove a fundamental impossibility theorem: no recursive BT-based curation mechanism can simultaneously preserve diversity, ensure symmetric influence, and eliminate dependence on initialization. Framing the process as dynamic social choice, we show that alignment is not a static goal but an evolving equilibrium shaped by power asymmetries and path dependence.

PaperID: 2111, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.06874

Authors:Matthew Lyle Olson, Neale Ratzlaff, Musashi Hinck, Tri Nguyen, Vasudev Lal, Joseph Campbell, Simon Stepputtis, Shao-Yen Tseng

Affiliations: Oregon State University, Purdue University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Title: LieCraft: A Multi-Agent Framework for Evaluating Deceptive Capabilities in Language Models

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive generalpurpose capabilities but also introduce serious safety risks, particularly the potential for deception as models acquire increased agency and human oversight diminishes. In this work, we present LieCraft: a novel evaluation framework and sandbox for measuring LLM deception that addresses key limitations of prior game-based evaluations. At its core, LieCraft is a novel multiplayer hidden-role game in which players select an ethical alignment and execute strategies over a long time-horizon to accomplish missions. Cooperators work together to solve event challenges and expose bad actors, while Defectors evade suspicion while secretly sabotaging missions. To enable real-world relevance, we develop 10 grounded scenarios such as childcare, hospital resource allocation, and loan underwriting that recontextualize the underlying mechanics in ethically significant, high-stakes domains. We ensure balanced gameplay in LieCraft through careful design of game mechanics and reward structures that incentivize meaningful strategic choices while eliminating degenerate strategies. Beyond the framework itself, we report results from 12 state-of-the-art LLMs across three behavioral axes: propensity to defect, deception skill, and accusation accuracy. Our findings reveal that despite differences in competence and overall alignment, all models are willing to act unethically, conceal their intentions, and outright lie to pursue their goals.

PaperID: 2112, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18035

Authors:Wei Qian, Chenxu Zhao, Yangyi Li, Mengdi Huai

Affiliations: Iowa State University

Title: Towards Benchmarking Privacy Vulnerabilities in Selective Forgetting with Large Language Models

Abstract:
The rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have primarily focused on the process of learning from data to acquire knowledgeable learning systems. As these systems are increasingly deployed in critical areas, ensuring their privacy and alignment with human values is paramount. Recently, selective forgetting (also known as machine unlearning) has shown promise for privacy and data removal tasks, and has emerged as a transformative paradigm shift in the field of AI. It refers to the ability of a model to selectively erase the influence of previously seen data, which is especially important for compliance with modern data protection regulations and for aligning models with human values. Despite its promise, selective forgetting raises significant privacy concerns, especially when the data involved come from sensitive domains. While new unlearninginduced privacy attacks are continuously proposed, each is shown to outperform its predecessors using different experimental settings, which can lead to overly optimistic and potentially unfair assessments that may disproportionately favor one particular attack over the others. In this work, we present the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating privacy vulnerabilities in selective forgetting. We extensively investigate privacy vulnerabilities of machine unlearning techniques and benchmark privacy leakage across a wide range of victim data, state-of-the-art unlearning privacy attacks, unlearning methods, and model architectures. We systematically evaluate and identify critical factors related to unlearning-induced privacy leakage. With our novel insights, we aim to provide a standardized tool for practitioners seeking to deploy customized unlearning applications with faithful privacy assessments.

PaperID: 2113, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12735

Authors:Ankita Raj, Chetan Arora

Affiliations: Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

Title: Backdoor Attacks on Open Vocabulary Object Detectors via Multi-Modal Prompt Tuning

Abstract:
Openvocabulary object detectors (OVODs) unify vision and language to detect arbitrary object categories based on text prompts, enabling strong zero-shot generalization to novel concepts. As these models gain traction in high-stakes applications such as robotics, autonomous driving, and surveillance, understanding their security risks becomes crucial. In this work, we conduct the first study of backdoor attacks on OVODs and reveal a new attack surface introduced by prompt tuning. We propose TrAP (Trigger-Aware Prompt tuning), a multi-modal backdoor injection strategy that jointly optimizes prompt parameters in both image and text modalities along with visual triggers. TrAP enables the attacker to implant malicious behavior using lightweight, learnable prompt tokens without retraining the base model weights, thus preserving generalization while embedding a hidden backdoor. We adopt a curriculum-based training strategy that progressively shrinks the trigger size, enabling effective backdoor activation using small trigger patches at inference. Experiments across multiple datasets show that TrAP achieves high attack success rates for both object misclassification and object disappearance attacks, while also improving clean image performance on downstream datasets compared to the zero-shot setting.

PaperID: 2114, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.13677

Authors:Zihui Wu, Haichang Gao, Jiacheng Luo, Zhaoxiang Liu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Xidian University, Data Science & Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, China Unicom

Title: HumorReject: Decoupling LLM Safety from Refusal Prefix via a Little Humor

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) commonly rely on explicit refusal prefixes for safety, making them vulnerable to prefix injection attacks. We introduce HumorReject, a novel datadriven approach that reimagines LLM safety by decoupling it from refusal prefixes through humor as an indirect refusal strategy. Rather than explicitly rejecting harmful instructions, HumorReject responds with contextually appropriate humor that naturally defuses potentially dangerous requests. Our approach effectively addresses common "over-defense" issues while demonstrating superior robustness against various attack vectors. Our findings suggest that improvements in training data design can be as important as the alignment algorithm itself in achieving effective LLM safety.

PaperID: 2115, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05982

Authors:Zonglin Wu, Yule Xue, Yaoyao Feng, Xiaolong Wang, Yiren Song

Affiliations: Southwest University, National University of Singapore

Title: MCA-Bench: A Multimodal Benchmark for Evaluating CAPTCHA Robustness Against VLM-based Attacks

Abstract:
As automated attack techniques rapidly advance, CAPTCHAs remain a critical defense mechanism against malicious bots. However, existing CAPTCHA schemes encompass a diverse range of modalities—from static distorted text and obfuscated images to interactive clicks, sliding puzzles, and logicbased questions—yet the community still lacks a unified, large-scale, multimodal benchmark to rigorously evaluate their security robustness. To address this gap, we introduce MCA-Bench, a comprehensive and reproducible benchmarking suite that integrates heterogeneous CAPTCHA types into a single evaluation protocol. Leveraging a shared vision–language model backbone, we fine-tune specialized cracking agents for each CAPTCHA category, enabling consistent, cross-modal assessments. Extensive experiments reveal that MCA-Bench effectively maps the vulnerability spectrum of modern CAPTCHA designs under varied attack settings, and—crucially—offers the first quantitative analysis of how challenge complexity, interaction depth, and model solvability interrelate. Based on these findings, we propose three actionable design principles and identify key open challenges, laying the groundwork for systematic CAPTCHA hardening, fair benchmarking, and broader community collaboration.

PaperID: 2116, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12804

Authors:Hanwei Zhang, Luo Cheng, Rui Wen, Yang Zhang, Lijun Zhang, Holger Hermanns

Affiliations: Saarland University, Universität des Saarlandes, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Science, Institute of Science Tokyo, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security

Title: SL-CBM: Enhancing Concept Bottleneck Models with Semantic Locality for Better Interpretability

Abstract:
Explainable AI (XAI) is crucial for building transparent and trustworthy machine learning systems, especially in highstakes domains. Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) have emerged as a promising ante-hoc approach that provides interpretable, concept-level explanations by explicitly modeling human-understandable concepts. However, existing CBMs often suffer from poor locality faithfulness, failing to spatially align concepts with meaningful image regions, which limits their interpretability and reliability. In this work, we propose SL-CBM (CBM with Semantic Locality), a novel extension that enforces locality faithfulness by generating spatially coherent saliency maps at both concept and class levels. SL-CBM integrates a 1 × 1 convolutional layer with a cross-attention mechanism to enhance alignment between concepts, image regions, and final predictions. Unlike prior methods, SL-CBM produces faithful saliency maps inherently tied to the model’s internal reasoning, facilitating more effective debugging and intervention. Extensive experiments on image datasets demonstrate that SL-CBM substantially improves locality faithfulness, explanation quality, and intervention efficacy while maintaining competitive classification accuracy. Our ablation studies highlight the importance of contrastive and entropy-based regularization for balancing accuracy, sparsity, and faithfulness. Overall, SL-CBM bridges the gap between concept-based reasoning and spatial explainability, setting a new standard for interpretable and trustworthy concept-based models.

PaperID: 2117, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11693

Authors:Xin Zhao, Xiaojun Chen, Bingshan Liu, Zeyao Liu, Zhendong Zhao, Xiaoyan Gu

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences State Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Security Defense School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Value-Aligned Prompt Moderation via Zero-Shot Agentic Rewriting for Safe Image Generation

Abstract:
Generative visionlanguage models like Stable Diffusion demonstrate remarkable capabilities in creative media synthesis, but they also pose substantial risks of producing unsafe, offensive, or culturally inappropriate content when prompted adversarially. Current defenses struggle to align outputs with human values without sacrificing generation quality or incurring high costs. To address these challenges, we introduce VALOR (Value-Aligned LLM-Overseen Rewriter), a modular, zero-shot agentic framework for safer and more helpful text-to-image generation. VALOR integrates layered prompt analysis with human-aligned value reasoning: a multi-level NSFW detector filters lexical and semantic risks; a cultural value alignment module identifies violations of social norms, legality, and representational ethics; and an intention disambiguator detects subtle or indirect unsafe implications. When unsafe content is detected, prompts are selectively rewritten by a large language model under dynamic, role-specific instructions designed to preserve user intent while enforcing alignment. If the generated image still fails a safety check, VALOR optionally performs a stylistic regeneration to steer the output toward a safer visual domain without altering core semantics. Experiments across adversarial, ambiguous, and value-sensitive prompts show that VALOR significantly reduces unsafe outputs by up to 100.00% while preserving prompt usefulness and creativity. These results highlight VALOR as a scalable and effective approach for deploying safe, aligned, and helpful image generation systems in open-world settings.

PaperID: 2118, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08139

Authors:Tianyi Zhou, Johanne Medina, Sanjay Chawla

Affiliations: KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University

Title: Can LLMs Detect Their Confabulations? Estimating Reliability in Uncertainty-Aware Language Models

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to generating fluent but incorrect content, known as confabulation, which poses increasing risks in multiturn or agentic applications where outputs may be reused as context. In this work, we investigate how in-context information influences model behavior and whether LLMs can identify their unreliable responses. We propose a reliability estimation that leverages token-level uncertainty to guide the aggregation of internal model representations. Specifically, we compute aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty from output logits to identify salient tokens and aggregate their hidden states into compact representations for response-level reliability prediction. Through controlled experiments on open QA benchmarks, we find that correct in-context information improves both answer accuracy and model confidence, while misleading context often induces confidently incorrect responses, revealing a misalignment between uncertainty and correctness. Our probing-based method captures these shifts in model behavior and improves the detection of unreliable outputs across multiple open-source LLMs. These results underscore the limitations of direct uncertainty signals and highlight the potential of uncertainty-guided probing for reliability-aware generation.

PaperID: 2119, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07267

Authors:Chen Han, Yijia Ma, Jin Tan, Wenzhen Zheng, Xijin Tang

Affiliations: School of Advanced Interdisciplinary Sciences, Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, State Key Laboratory of Mathematical Sciences, School of Economics and Management, CAS StepFun

Title: Beyond Detection: Exploring Evidence-based Multi-Agent Debate for Misinformation Intervention and Persuasion

Abstract:
Multiagent debate (MAD) frameworks have emerged as promising approaches for misinformation detection by simulating adversarial reasoning. While prior work has focused on detection accuracy, the importance of helping users understand the reasoning behind factual judgments has been overlooked. The debate transcripts generated during MAD offer a rich but underutilized resource for transparent reasoning. In this study, we introduce ED2D, an evidence-based MAD framework that extends previous approach by incorporating factual evidence retrieval. More importantly, ED2D is designed not only as a detection framework but also as a persuasive multi-agent system aimed at correcting user beliefs and discouraging misinformation sharing. We compare the persuasive effects of ED2D-generated debunking transcripts with those authored by human experts. Results demonstrate that ED2D outperforms existing baselines across three misinformation detection benchmarks. When ED2D generates correct predictions, its debunking transcripts exhibit persuasive effects comparable to those of human experts; However, when ED2D misclassifies, its accompanying explanations may inadvertently reinforce users’ misconceptions, even when presented alongside accurate human explanations. Our findings highlight both the promise and the potential risks of deploying MAD systems for misinformation intervention. We further develop a public community website to help users explore ED2D, fostering transparency, critical thinking, and collaborative fact-checking.

PaperID: 2120, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09156

Authors:Woojin Kim, Changkwon Lee, Hyeoncheol Kim

Affiliations: Korea University

Title: KTCF: Actionable Recourse in Knowledge Tracing via Counterfactual Explanations for Education

Abstract:
Using Artificial Intelligence to improve teaching and learning benefits greater adaptivity and scalability in education. Knowledge Tracing (KT) is recognized for student modeling task due to its superior performance and application potential in education. To this end, we conceptualize and investigate counterfactual explanation as the connection from XAI for KT to education. Counterfactual explanations offer actionable recourse, are inherently causal and local, and easy for educational stakeholders to understand who are often nonexperts. We propose KTCF, a counterfactual explanation generation method for KT that accounts for knowledge concept relationships, and a post-processing scheme that converts a counterfactual explanation into a sequence of educational instructions. We experiment on a large-scale educational dataset and show our KTCF method achieves superior and robust performance over existing methods, with improvements ranging from 5.7% to 34% across metrics. Additionally, we provide a qualitative evaluation of our post-processing scheme, demonstrating that the resulting educational instructions help in reducing large study burden. We show that counterfactuals have the potential to advance the responsible and practical use of AI in education. Future works on XAI for KT may benefit from educationally grounded conceptualization and developing stakeholder-centered methods.

PaperID: 2121, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10013

Authors:Shufeng Kong, Zijie Wang, Nuan Cui, Hao Tang, Yihan Meng, Yuanyuan Wei, Feifan Chen, Yingheng Wang, Zhuo Cai, Yaonan Wang, Yulong Zhang, Yuzheng Li, Zibin Zheng, Caihua Liu, Hao Liang

Affiliations: School of Software Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Cornell University, Institute of TCM Diagnostics, Hunan University of Chinese Medicine, Department of Computer Science, Merchants Union Consumer Finance Company Limited (MUCFC), The Fifth Affiliated Hospital, School of Artificial Intelligence, Guilin University of Electronic Technology

Title: MIRNet: Integrating Constrained Graph-Based Reasoning with Pre-training for Diagnostic Medical Imaging

Abstract:
Automated interpretation of medical images demands robust modeling of complex visualsemantic relationships while addressing annotation scarcity, label imbalance, and clinical plausibility constraints. We introduce MIRNet (Medical Image Reasoner Network), a novel framework that integrates self-supervised pre-training with constrained graph-based reasoning. Tongue image diagnosis is a particularly challenging domain that requires fine-grained visual and semantic understanding. Our approach leverages self-supervised masked autoencoder (MAE) to learn transferable visual representations from unlabeled data; employs graph attention networks (GAT) to model label correlations through expert-defined structured graphs; enforces clinical priors via constraint-aware optimization using KL divergence and regularization losses; and mitigates imbalance using asymmetric loss (ASL) and boosting ensembles. To address annotation scarcity, we also introduce TongueAtlas-4K, a comprehensive expert-curated benchmark comprising 4,000 images annotated with 22 diagnostic labels–representing the largest public dataset in tongue analysis. Validation shows our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. While optimized for tongue diagnosis, the framework readily generalizes to broader diagnostic medical imaging tasks.

PaperID: 2122, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.17902

Authors:Girish A. Koushik, Helen Treharne, Aditya Joshi, Diptesh Kanojia

Affiliations: Nature-Inspired Computing & Engineering, University of Surrey, United Kingdom, Surrey Centre for Cyber Security, University of New South Wales

Title: TRACE: Textual Relevance Augmentation and Contextual Encoding for Multimodal Hate Detection

Abstract:
Social media memes are a challenging domain for hate detection because they intertwine visual and textual cues into culturally nuanced messages. To tackle these challenges, we introduce TRACE, a hierarchical multimodal framework that leverages visually grounded context augmentation, along with a novel captionscoring network to emphasize hate-relevant content, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning of CLIP’s text encoder. Our experiments demonstrate that selectively fine-tuning deeper text encoder layers significantly enhances performance compared to simpler projection-layer fine-tuning methods. Specifically, our framework achieves state-of-the-art accuracy (0.807) and F1-score (0.806) on the widely-used Hateful Memes dataset, matching the performance of considerably larger models while maintaining efficiency. Moreover, it achieves superior generalization on the MultiOFF offensive meme dataset (F1-score 0.673), highlighting robustness across meme categories. Additional analyses confirm that robust visual grounding and nuanced text representations significantly reduce errors caused by benign confounders. We publicly release our code to facilitate future research.

PaperID: 2123, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07723

Authors:Yonggeon Lee, Jibin Hwang, Alfred Malengo Kondoro, Juhyun Song, Youngtae Noh

Affiliations: Hanyang University, Republic of Korea

Title: Enabling Delayed-Full Charging Through Transformer-Based Real-Time-to-Departure Modeling for EV Battery Longevity

Abstract:
Electric vehicles (EVs) are key to sustainable mobility, yet their lithiumion batteries (LIBs) degrade more rapidly under prolonged high states of charge (SOC). This can be mitigated by delaying full charging DFC until just before departure, which requires accurate prediction of user departure times. In this work, we propose Transformer-based real-time-to-event (TTE) model for accurate EV departure prediction. Our approach represents each day as a TTE sequence by discretizing time into grid-based tokens. Unlike previous methods primarily dependent on temporal dependency from historical patterns, our method leverages streaming contextual information to predict departures. Evaluation on a real-world study involving 93 users and passive smartphone data demonstrates that our method effectively captures irregular departure patterns within individual routines, outperforming baseline models. These results highlight the potential for practical deployment of the DFC algorithm and its contribution to sustainable transportation systems.

PaperID: 2124, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07871

Authors:Chenxi Lin, Weikang Yuan, Zhuoren Jiang, Biao Huang, Ruitao Zhang, Jianan Ge, Yueqian Xu, Jianxing Yu

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Zhejiang Gongshang University Laboratory for Statistical Monitoring and Intelligent Governance of Common Prosperity

Title: AlignSurvey: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Human Preferences Alignment in Social Surveys

Abstract:
Understanding human attitudes, preferences, and behaviors through social surveys is essential for academic research and policymaking. Yet traditional surveys face persistent challenges, including fixedquestion formats, high costs, limited adaptability, and difficulties ensuring cross-cultural equivalence. While recent studies explore large language models (LLMs) to simulate survey responses, most are limited to structured questions, overlook the entire survey process, and risks under-representing marginalized groups due to training data biases. We introduce AlignSurvey, the first benchmark that systematically replicates and evaluates the full social survey pipeline using LLMs. It defines four tasks aligned with key survey stages: social role modeling, semi-structured interview modeling, attitude stance modeling and survey response modeling. It also provides task-specific evaluation metrics to assess alignment fidelity, consistency, and fairness at both individual and group levels, with a focus on demographic diversity. To support AlignSurvey, we construct a multi-tiered dataset architecture: (i) the Social Foundation Corpus, a cross-national resource with 44K+ interview dialogues and 400K+ structured survey records; and (ii) a suite of Entire-Pipeline Survey Datasets, including the expert-annotated AlignSurvey-Expert (ASE) and two nationally representative surveys for cross-cultural evaluation. We release the SurveyLM family, obtained through two-stage fine-tuning of open-source LLMs, and offer reference models for evaluating domain-specific alignment. All datasets, models, and tools are available at github and huggingface to support transparent and socially responsible research.

PaperID: 2125, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14527

Authors:Jiangfan Liu, Yongkang Guo, Fangzhi Zhong, Tianyuan Zhang, Zonglei Jing, Siyuan Liang, Jiakai Wang, Mingchuan Zhang, Aishan Liu, Xianglong Liu

Affiliations: Beihang University, Nanyang Technological University, Zhongguancun Laboratory, Henan University of Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Dataspace

Title: Adversarial Generation and Collaborative Evolution of Safety-Critical Scenarios for Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract:
The generation of safetycritical scenarios in simulation has become increasingly crucial for safety evaluation in autonomous vehicles (AV) prior to road deployment in society. However, current approaches largely rely on predefined threat patterns or rule-based strategies, which limit their ability to expose diverse and unforeseen failure modes. To overcome these, we propose ScenGE, a framework that can generate plentiful safety-critical scenarios by reasoning novel adversarial cases and then amplifying them with complex traffic flows. Given a simple prompt of a benign scene, it first performs Meta-Scenario Generation, where a large language model (LLM), grounded in structured driving knowledge (e.g., traffic regulations, real-world accident records), infers an adversarial agent whose behavior poses a threat that is both plausible and deliberately challenging. This meta-scenario is then specified in executable code for precise in-simulator control. Subsequently, Complex Scenario Evolution uses background vehicles to amplify the core threat introduced by Meta-Scenario. It builds an adversarial collaborator graph to identify key agent trajectories for optimization. These perturbations are designed to simultaneously reduce the ego vehicle's maneuvering space and create critical occlusions. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple reinforcement learning (RL) based AV models show that ScenGE uncovers more severe collision cases (+31.96%) on average than SoTA baselines. Additionally, our ScenGE can be applied to large model based AV systems and deployed on different simulators; we further observe that adversarial training on our scenarios improves the model robustness. We hope our paper can build up a critical step towards building public trust and ensuring their safe deployment.

PaperID: 2126, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13469

Authors:Shiyuan Luo, Chonghao Qiu, Runlong Yu, Yiqun Xie, Xiaowei Jia

Affiliations: University of Pittsburgh, University of Alabama, University of Maryland

Title: GREAT: Generalizable Representation Enhancement via Auxiliary Transformations for Zero-Shot Environmental Prediction

Abstract:
Environmental modeling faces critical challenges in predicting ecosystem dynamics across unmonitored regions due to limited and geographically imbalanced observation data. This challenge is compounded by spatial heterogeneity, causing models to learn spurious patterns that fit only local data. Unlike conventional domain generalization, environmental modeling must preserve invariant physical relationships and temporal coherence during augmentation. In this paper, we introduce Generalizable Representation Enhancement via Auxiliary Transformations (GREAT), a framework that effectively augments available datasets to improve predictions in completely unseen regions. GREAT guides the augmentation process to ensure that the original governing processes can be recovered from the augmented data, and the inclusion of the augmented data leads to improved model generalization. Specifically, GREAT learns transformation functions at multiple layers of neural networks to augment both raw environmental features and temporal influence. They are refined through a novel bilevel training process that constrains augmented data to preserve key patterns of the original source data. We demonstrate GREAT's effectiveness on stream temperature prediction across six ecologically diverse watersheds in the eastern U.S., each containing multiple stream segments. Experimental results show that GREAT significantly outperforms existing methods in zero-shot scenarios. This work provides a practical solution for environmental applications where comprehensive monitoring is infeasible.

PaperID: 2127, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19481

Authors:Manuel Mosquera, Melissa Verónica Robles, Johan R. Portela, Rubén Manrique

Affiliations: Universidad de Los Andes

Title: Improving Low-Resource Translation with Dictionary-Guided Fine-Tuning and RL: A Spanish-to-Wayuunaiki Study

Abstract:
Lowresource machine translation remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs), which often lack exposure to these languages during pretraining and have limited parallel data for fine-tuning. We propose a novel approach that enhances translation for low-resource languages by integrating an external dictionary tool and training models end-to-end using reinforcement learning, in addition to supervised fine-tuning. Focusing on the Spanish–Wayuunaiki language pair, we frame translation as a tool-augmented decision-making problem in which the model can selectively consult a bilingual dictionary during generation. Our method combines supervised instruction tuning with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), enabling the model to learn both when and how to use the tool effectively. BLEU similarity scores are used as rewards to guide this learning process. Preliminary results show that our tool-augmented models achieve up to +3.37 BLEU improvement over previous work and an 18% relative gain compared to a supervised baseline without dictionary access, on the Spanish–Wayuunaiki test set from the AmericasNLP 2025 Shared Task. We also conduct ablation studies to assess the effects of model architecture and training strategy, comparing Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct with other models such as LLaMA and a prior NLLB-based system. These findings highlight the promise of combining LLMs with external tools and the role of reinforcement learning in improving translation quality in low-resource language settings.

PaperID: 2128, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09914

Authors:Xuan Shen, Brian Wingenroth, Zichao Wang, Jason Kuen, Wanrong Zhu, Ruiyi Zhang, Yiwei Wang, Lichun Ma, Anqi Liu, Hongfu Liu, Tong Sun, Kevin S. Hawkins, Kate Tasker, G. Caleb Alexander, Jiuxiang Gu

Affiliations: Northeastern University, Johns Hopkins University, Adobe Research, University of California, National Institutes of Health, Brandeis University, San Francisco

Title: OIDA-QA: A Multimodal Benchmark for Analyzing the Opioid Industry Documents Archive

Abstract:
The opioid crisis represents a significant moment in public health that reveals systemic shortcomings across regulatory systems, healthcare practices, corporate governance, and public policy. Analyzing how these interconnected systems simultaneously failed to protect public health requires innovative analytic approaches for exploring the vast amounts of data and documents disclosed in the UCSFJHU Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA). The complexity, multimodal nature, and specialized characteristics of these healthcare-related legal and corporate documents necessitate more advanced methods and models tailored to specific data types and detailed annotations, ensuring the precision and professionalism in the analysis. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by organizing the original dataset according to document attributes and constructing a benchmark with 400k training documents and 10k for testing. From each document, we extract rich multimodal information—including textual content, visual elements, and layout structures—to capture a comprehensive range of features. Using multiple AI models, we then generate a large-scale dataset comprising 360k training QA pairs and 10k testing QA pairs. Building on this foundation, we develop domain-specific multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) and explore the impact of multimodal inputs on task performance. To further enhance response accuracy, we incorporate historical QA pairs as contextual grounding for answering current queries. Additionally, we incorporate page references within the answers and introduce an importance-based page classifier, further improving the precision and relevance of the information provided. Preliminary results indicate the improvements with our AI assistant in document information extraction and question-answering tasks.

PaperID: 2129, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07803

Authors:Wenhao Xu, Akshatha Arodi, Jian-Yun Nie, Arsène Fansi Tchango

Affiliations: Mila - Quebec AI Institute, Université de Montréal

Title: Judging by the Rules: Compliance-Aligned Framework for Modern Slavery Statement Monitoring

Abstract:
Modern slavery affects millions of people worldwide, and regulatory frameworks such as Modern Slavery Acts now require companies to publish detailed disclosures. However, these statements are often vague and inconsistent, making manual review timeconsuming and difficult to scale. While NLP offers a promising path forward, high-stakes compliance tasks require more than accurate classification: they demand transparent, rule-aligned outputs that legal experts can verify. Existing applications of large language models (LLMs) often reduce complex regulatory assessments to binary decisions, lacking the necessary structure for robust legal scrutiny. We argue that compliance verification is fundamentally a rule-matching problem: it requires evaluating whether textual statements adhere to well-defined regulatory rules. To this end, we propose a novel framework that harnesses AI for rule-level compliance verification while preserving expert oversight. At its core is the Compliance Alignment Judge (CA-Judge), which evaluates model-generated justifications based on their fidelity to statutory requirements. Using this feedback, we train the Compliance Alignment LLM (CALLM), a model that produces rule-consistent, human-verifiable outputs. CALLM improves predictive performance and generates outputs that are both transparent and legally grounded, offering a more verifiable and actionable solution for real-world compliance analysis.

PaperID: 2130, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06661

Authors:Keith Badger, Jefferson Huang, Marek Petrik

Affiliations: University of New Hampshire, Naval Postgraduate School

Title: Convergence of Fast Policy Iteration in Markov Games and Robust MDPs

Abstract:
Markov games and robust MDPs are closely related models that involve computing a pair of saddle point policies. As part of the longstanding effort to develop efficient algorithms for these models, the Filar-Tolwinski (FT) algorithm has shown considerable promise. As our first contribution, we demonstrate that FT may fail to converge to a saddle point and may loop indefinitely, even in small games. This observation contradicts the proof of FT's optimality in the original paper. As our second contribution, we then propose Residual Conditioned Policy Iteration (RCPI). RCPI builds on FT, but is guaranteed to converge to a saddle point. Our numerical results show that RCPI outperforms other convergent algorithms by several orders of magnitude.

PaperID: 2131, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09741

Authors:Houming Wu, Ling Chen

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University

Title: TawPipe: Topology-Aware Weight Pipeline Parallelism for Accelerating Long-Context Large Models Training

Abstract:
Training large language models (LLMs) is fundamentally constrained by limited device memory and costly interdevice communication. Although pipeline parallelism alleviates memory pressure by partitioning models across devices, it incurs activation communication overhead that scales linearly with sequence length, limiting efficiency in long-context training. Recent weight-passing approaches (e.g., WeiPipe) mitigate this by transmitting model weights instead of activations, but suffer from redundant peer-to-peer (P2P) transfers and underutilized intra-node bandwidth. We propose TawPipe—topology-aware weight pipeline parallelism, which exploits hierarchical bandwidth in distributed clusters for improved communication efficiency. TawPipe: (i) groups devices based on topology to optimize intra-node collective and inter-node P2P communication; (ii) assigns each device a fixed shard of model weights and gradients, avoiding redundant transfers; and (iii) overlaps communication with computation to hide latency. Unlike global collective operations used in fully sharded data parallelism (FSDP), TawPipe confines most communication within node boundaries, significantly reducing cross-node traffic. Extensive experiments on up to 24 GPUs with LLaMA‑style models show that TawPipe achieves superior throughput and scalability compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 2132, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.20209

Authors:Shaorong Chen, Jingbo Zhou, Jun Xia

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, AI Lab, Westlake University, AIMS Lab, Hong Kong

Title: Regressorguided Diffusion Model for De Novo Peptide Sequencing with Explicit Mass Control

Abstract:
The discovery of novel proteins relies on sensitive protein identification, for which de novo peptide sequencing (DNPS) from mass spectra is a crucial approach. While deep learning has advanced DNPS, existing models inadequately enforce the fundamental mass consistency constraint—that a predicted peptide's mass must match the experimental measured precursor mass. Previous DNPS methods often treat this critical information as a simple input feature or use it in postprocessing, leading to numerous implausible predictions that do not adhere to this fundamental physical property. To address this limitation, we introduce DiffuNovo, a novel regressor-guided diffusion model for de novo peptide sequencing that provides explicit peptide-level mass control. Our approach integrates the mass constraint at two critical stages: during training, a novel peptide-level mass loss guides model optimization, while at inference, regressor-based guidance from gradient-based updates in the latent space steers the generation to compel the predicted peptide adheres to the mass constraint. Comprehensive evaluations on established benchmarks demonstrate that DiffuNovo surpasses state-of-the-art methods in DNPS accuracy. Additionally, as the first DNPS model to employ a diffusion model as its core backbone, DiffuNovo leverages the powerful controllability of diffusion architecture and achieves a significant reduction in mass error, thereby producing much more physically plausible peptides. These innovations represent a substantial advancement toward robust and broadly applicable DNPS. The source code is available in the supplementary material.

PaperID: 2133, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19768

Authors:Xing Cui, Yueying Zou, Zekun Li, Peipei Li, Xinyuan Xu, Xuannan Liu, Huaibo Huang

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, University of California, Santa Barbara, MAIS & NLPR, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: T2Agent: A Tool-augmented Multimodal Misinformation Detection Agent with Monte Carlo Tree Search

Abstract:
Realworld multimodal misinformation often arises from mixed forgery sources, requiring dynamic reasoning and adaptive verification. However, existing methods mainly rely on static pipelines and limited tool usage, limiting their ability to handle such complexity and diversity. To address this challenge, we propose T2Agent, a novel misinformation detection agent that incorporates an extensible toolkit with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). The toolkit consists of modular tools such as web search, forgery detection, and consistency analysis. Each tool is described using standardized templates, enabling seamless integration and future expansion. To avoid inefficiency from using all tools simultaneously, a greedy search-based selector is proposed to identify a task-relevant subset. This subset then serves as the action space for MCTS to dynamically collect evidence and perform multi-source verification. To better align MCTS with the multi-source nature of misinformation detection, T2Agent extends traditional MCTS with multi-source verification, which decomposes the task into coordinated subtasks targeting different forgery sources. A dual reward mechanism containing a reasoning trajectory score and a confidence score is further proposed to encourage a balance between exploration across mixed forgery sources and exploitation for more reliable evidence. We conduct ablation studies to confirm the effectiveness of the tree search mechanism and tool usage. Extensive experiments further show that T2Agent consistently outperforms existing baselines on challenging mixed-source multimodal misinformation benchmarks, demonstrating its strong potential as a training-free detector.

PaperID: 2134, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15791

Authors:Xiaolei Diao, Zhihan Zhou, Lida Shi, Ting Wang, Ruihua Qi, Daqian Shi, Hao Xu

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, Culture Relics and Artificial Intelligence, University of Trento, Jilin University, School of Artificial Intelligence, School of Software Engineering, Tongji University, School of Archaeology, Queen Mary, University of London Key Laboratory of Ancient Chinese Script

Title: InteChar: A Unified Oracle Bone Character List for Ancient Chinese Language Modeling

Abstract:
Constructing historical language models (LMs) plays a crucial role in aiding archaeological provenance studies and understanding ancient cultures. However, existing resources present major challenges for training effective LMs on historical texts. First, the scarcity of historical language samples renders unsupervised learning approaches based on large text corpora highly inefficient, hindering effective pretraining. Moreover, due to the considerable temporal gap and complex evolution of ancient scripts, the absence of comprehensive character encoding schemes limits the digitization and computational processing of ancient texts, particularly in early Chinese writing. To address these challenges, we introduce InteChar, a unified and extensible character list that integrates unencoded oracle bone characters with traditional and modern Chinese. InteChar enables consistent digitization and representation of historical texts, providing a foundation for robust modeling of ancient scripts. To evaluate the effectiveness of InteChar, we construct the Oracle Corpus Set (OracleCS), an ancient Chinese corpus that combines expert-annotated samples with LLM-assisted data augmentation, centered on Chinese oracle bone inscriptions. Extensive experiments show that models trained with InteChar on OracleCS achieve substantial improvements across various historical language understanding tasks, confirming the effectiveness of our approach and establishing a solid foundation for future research in ancient Chinese NLP.

PaperID: 2135, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.18026

Authors:Rikuto Kotoge, Ziwei Yang, Zheng Chen, Yushun Dong, Yasuko Matsubara, Jimeng Sun, Yasushi Sakurai

Affiliations: The University of Osaka, Bioinformatics Center, Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University SANKEN, Department of Computer Science, Florida State University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Title: Targeted Pathway Inference for Biological Knowledge Bases via Graph Learning and Explanation

Abstract:
Retrieving targeted pathways in biological knowledge bases, particularly when incorporating wetlab experimental data, remains a challenging task and often requires downstream analyses and specialized expertise. In this paper, we frame this challenge as a solvable graph learning and explaining task and propose a novel subgraph inference framework, ExPath, that explicitly integrates experimental data to classify various graphs (bio-networks) in biological databases. The links (representing pathways) that contribute more to classification can be considered as targeted pathways. Our framework can seamlessly integrate biological foundation models to encode the experimental molecular data. We propose ML-oriented biological evaluations and a new metric. The experiments involving 301 bio-networks evaluations demonstrate that pathways inferred by ExPath are biologically meaningful, achieving up to 4.5× higher Fidelity+ (necessity) and 14× lower Fidelity- (sufficiency) than explainer baselines, while preserving signaling chains up to 4× longer.

PaperID: 2136, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13018

Authors:Songlin Li, Guofeng Yu, Zhiqing Guo, Yunfeng Diao, Dan Ma, Gaobo Yang

Title: Beyond Fully Supervised Pixel Annotations: Scribble-Driven Weakly-Supervised Framework for Image Manipulation Localization

Abstract:
Deep learningbased image manipulation localization (IML) methods have achieved remarkable performance in recent years, but typically rely on large-scale pixel-level annotated datasets. To address the challenge of acquiring high-quality annotations, some recent weakly supervised methods utilize image-level labels to segment manipulated regions. However, the performance is still limited due to insufficient supervision signals. In this study, we explore a form of weak supervision that improves the annotation efficiency and detection performance, namely scribble annotation supervision. We re-annotated mainstream IML datasets with scribble labels and propose the first scribble-based IML (Sc-IML) dataset. Additionally, we propose the first scribble-based weakly supervised IML framework. Specifically, we employ self-supervised training with a structural consistency loss to encourage the model to produce consistent predictions under multi-scale and augmented inputs. In addition, we propose a prior-aware feature modulation module (PFMM) that adaptively integrates prior information from both manipulated and authentic regions for dynamic feature adjustment, further enhancing feature discriminability and prediction consistency in complex scenes. We also propose a gated adaptive fusion module (GAFM) that utilizes gating mechanisms to regulate information flow during feature fusion, guiding the model toward emphasizing potential tampered regions. Finally, we propose a confidence-aware entropy minimization loss. This loss dynamically regularizes predictions in weakly annotated or unlabeled regions based on model uncertainty, effectively suppressing unreliable predictions. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing fully supervised approaches in terms of average performance both in-distribution and out-of-distribution.

PaperID: 2137, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11380

Authors:Jiangkai Long, Yanran Zhu, Chang Tang, Kun Sun, Yuanyuan Liu, Xuesong Yan

Affiliations: China University of Geosciences, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: When Genes Speak: A Semantic-Guided Framework for Spatially Resolved Transcriptomics Data Clustering

Abstract:
Spatial transcriptomics enables gene expression profiling with spatial context, offering unprecedented insights into the tissue microenvironment. However, most computational models treat genes as isolated numerical features, ignoring the rich biological semantics encoded in their symbols. This prevents a truly deep understanding of critical biological characteristics. To overcome this limitation, we present SemST, a semanticguided deep learning framework for spatial transcriptomics data clustering. SemST leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable genes to "speak" through their symbolic meanings, transforming gene sets within each tissue spot into biologically informed embeddings. These embeddings are then fused with the spatial neighborhood relationships captured by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), achieving a coherent integration of biological function and spatial structure. We further introduce the Fine-grained Semantic Modulation (FSM) module to optimally exploit these biological priors. The FSM module learns spot-specific affine transformations that empower the semantic embeddings to perform an element-wise calibration of the spatial features, thus dynamically injecting high-order biological knowledge into the spatial context. Extensive experiments on public spatial transcriptomics datasets show that SemST achieves state-of-the-art clustering performance. Crucially, the FSM module exhibits plug-and-play versatility, consistently improving the performance when integrated into other baseline methods.

PaperID: 2138, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.02712

Authors:Andrzej Mizera, Jakub Zarzycki

Affiliations: Faculty of Mathematics, and Mechanics, University of Warsaw IDEAS Research Institute, University of Warsaw IDEAS NCBR Sp. z o.o.

Title: The GATTACA Framework: Graph Neural NetworkBased Reinforcement Learning for Controlling Biological Networks

Abstract:
Cellular reprogramming, the artificial transformation of one cell type into another, has been attracting increasing research attention due to its therapeutic potential for complex diseases. However, identifying effective reprogramming strategies through classical wetlab experiments is hindered by long time commitments and high costs. Although computational methods have been proposed to address this challenge, exact state-of-the-art techniques suffer from limited scalability owing to the notorious state space explosion problem. To overcome this limitation, we explore deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for controlling holistic Boolean network models of complex biological systems, such as gene regulatory and signalling pathway networks. We formulate a novel control problem for Boolean network models operating under the asynchronous update mode, specifically tailored to the context of cellular reprogramming. To solve it, we devise GATTACA - a DRL-based computational framework explicitly designed for scalability, capable of handling large and complex network models where exact methods fail. To facilitate scalability of our framework, we consider our previously introduced concept of a pseudo-attractor and improve the procedure for effective identification of pseudo-attractor states. We incorporate graph neural networks with graph convolution operations into the artificial neural network approximator of the DRL agent's action-value function. The new architecture allows us to leverage the available knowledge on the structure of a biological system and to indirectly, yet effectively, encode the system's dynamics into a latent representation. Experiments on several large-scale, real-world biological networks from the literature demonstrate the scalability and effectiveness of our approach.

PaperID: 2139, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24002

Authors:Tan Pan, Yixuan Sun, Chen Jiang, Qiong Gao, Rui Sun, Xingmeng Zhang, Zhenqi Yang, Limei Han, Yixiu Liang, Yuan Cheng, Kaiyu Guo

Affiliations: Department of Electrocardiology, Zhongshan Hospital of Fudan University, Shanghai Academy of Artificial Intelligence for Science, Department of Cardiology

Title: Tracing the Heart’s Pathways: ECG Representation Learning from a Cardiac Conduction Perspective

Abstract:
The multilead electrocardiogram (ECG) stands as a cornerstone of cardiac diagnosis. Recent strides in electrocardiogram self-supervised learning (eSSL) have brightened prospects for enhancing representation learning without relying on high-quality annotations. Yet earlier eSSL methods suffer a key limitation: they focus on consistent patterns across leads and beats, overlooking the inherent differences in heartbeats rooted in cardiac conduction processes, while subtle but significant variations carry unique physiological signatures. Moreover, representation learning for ECG analysis should align with ECG diagnostic guidelines, which progress from individual heartbeats to single leads and ultimately to lead combinations. This sequential logic, however, is often neglected when applying pre-trained models to downstream tasks. To address these gaps, we propose CLEAR-HUG, a two-stage framework designed to capture subtle variations in cardiac conduction across leads while adhering to ECG diagnostic guidelines. In the first stage, we introduce an eSSL model termed Conduction-LEAd Reconstructor (CLEAR), which captures both specific variations and general commonalities across heartbeats. Treating each heartbeat as a distinct entity, CLEAR employs a simple yet effective sparse attention mechanism to reconstruct signals without interference from other heartbeats. In the second stage, we implement a Hierarchical lead-Unified Group head (HUG) for disease diagnosis, mirroring clinical workflow. Experimental results across six tasks show a 6.84% improvement, validating the effectiveness of CLEAR-HUG. This highlights its ability to enhance representations of cardiac conduction and align patterns with expert diagnostic guidelines.

PaperID: 2140, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08334

Authors:Zihang Shao, Wentao Lei, Lei Wang, Wen-Cai Ye, Li Liu

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Jinan University

Title: HSA-Net: Hierarchical and Structure-Aware Framework for Efficient and Scalable Molecular Language Modeling

Abstract:
Molecular representation learning, a cornerstone for downstream tasks like molecular captioning and molecular property prediction, heavily relies on Graph Neural Networks (GNN). However, GNN suffers from the oversmoothing problem, where node-level features collapse in deep GNN layers. While existing feature projection methods with cross-attention have been introduced to mitigate this issue, they still perform poorly in deep features. This motivated our exploration of using Mamba as an alternative projector for its ability to handle complex sequences. However, we observe that while Mamba excels at preserving global topological information from deep layers, it neglects fine-grained details in shallow layers. The capabilities of Mamba and cross-attention exhibit a global-local trade-off. To resolve this critical global-local trade-off, we propose Hierarchical and Structure-Aware Network (HSA-Net), a novel framework with two modules that enables a hierarchical feature projection and fusion. Firstly, a Hierarchical Adaptive Projector (HAP) module is introduced to process features from different graph layers. It learns to dynamically switch between a cross-attention projector for shallow layers and a structure-aware Graph-Mamba projector for deep layers, producing high-quality, multi-level features. Secondly, to adaptively merge these multi-level features, we design a Source-Aware Fusion (SAF) module, which flexibly selects fusion experts based on the characteristics of the aggregation features, ensuring a precise and effective final representation fusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our HSA-Net framework quantitatively and qualitatively outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.

PaperID: 2141, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09854

Authors:Yidan Sun, Mengying Zhu, Feiyue Chen, Yangyang Wu, Xiaolei Dan, Mengyuan Yang, Xiaolin Zheng, Shenglin Ben

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, National FinTech Risk Monitoring Center

Title: TermGPT: Multi-Level Contrastive Fine-Tuning for Terminology Adaptation in Legal and Financial Domains

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in text generation tasks; however, their embedding spaces often suffer from the isotropy problem, resulting in poor discrimination of domainspecific terminology, particularly in legal and financial contexts. This weakness in term-level representation can severely hinder downstream tasks such as legal judgment prediction or financial risk analysis, where subtle semantic distinctions are critical. To address this problem, we propose TermGPT, a multi-level contrastive fine-tuning framework designed for terminology adaptation. We first construct a sentence graph to capture semantic and structural relations, and generate semantically consistent yet discriminative positive and negative samples based on contextual and topological cues. We then devise a multi-level contrastive learning approach at both the sentence and token levels, enhancing global contextual understanding and fine-grained term discrimination. To support robust evaluation, we construct the first financial terminology dataset derived from official regulatory documents. Experiments show that TermGPT outperforms existing baselines in term discrimination tasks within the finance and legal domains.

PaperID: 2142, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04446

Authors:Kiymet Akdemir, Jing Shi, Kushal Kafle, Brian L. Price, Pinar Yanardag

Affiliations: Virginia Tech, Adobe Research, San Jose

Title: Plot’n Polish: Zero-Shot Story Visualization and Disentangled Editing with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Abstract:
Textto-image diffusion models have demonstrated significant capabilities to generate diverse and detailed visuals in various domains, and story visualization is emerging as a particularly promising application. However, as their use in real-world creative domains increases, the need for providing enhanced control, refinement, and the ability to modify images post-generation in a consistent manner becomes an important challenge. Existing methods often lack the flexibility to apply fine or coarse edits while maintaining visual and narrative consistency across multiple frames, preventing creators from seamlessly crafting and refining their visual stories. To address these challenges, we introduce Plot'n Polish, a zero-shot framework that enables consistent story generation and provides fine-grained control over story visualizations at various levels of detail.

PaperID: 2143, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18189

Authors:Zihao Deng, Yijia Li, Renrui Zhang, Peijun Ye

Affiliations: Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: NL2CA: Auto-formalizing Cognitive Decision-Making from Natural Language Using an Unsupervised CriticNL2LTL Framework

Abstract:
Cognitive computing models offer a formal and interpretable way to characterize human's deliberation and decisionmaking, yet their development remains labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose NL2CA, a novel method for auto-formalizing cognitive decision-making rules from natural language descriptions of human experience. Different from most related work that exploits either pure manual or human-guided interactive modeling, our method is fully automated without any human intervention. The approach first translates text into Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) using a fine-tuned large language model (LLM), then refines the logic via an unsupervised Critic Tree, and finally transforms the output into executable production rules compatible with symbolic cognitive frameworks. Based on the resulted rules, a cognitive agent is further constructed and optimized through cognitive reinforcement learning according to the real-world behavioral data. Our method is validated in two domains: (1) NL-to-LTL translation, where our CriticNL2LTL module achieves consistent performance across both expert and large-scale benchmarks without human-in-the-loop feedbacks, and (2) cognitive driving simulation, where agents automatically constructed from human interviews have successfully learned the diverse decision patterns of about 70 trials in different critical scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that NL2CA enables scalable, interpretable, and human-aligned cognitive modeling from unstructured textual data, offering a novel paradigm to automatically design symbolic cognitive agents.

PaperID: 2144, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12199

Authors:Runhao Jiang, Chengzhi Jiang, Rui Yan, Huajin Tang

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University

Title: MPD-SGR: Robust Spiking Neural Networks with Membrane Potential Distribution-Driven Surrogate Gradient Regularization

Abstract:
The surrogate gradient (SG) method has shown significant promise in enhancing the performance of deep spiking neural networks (SNNs), but it also introduces vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks. Although spike coding strategies and neural dynamics parameters have been extensively studied for their impact on robustness, the critical role of gradient magnitude, which reflects the model's sensitivity to input perturbations, remains underexplored. In SNNs, the gradient magnitude is primarily determined by the interaction between the membrane potential distribution (MPD) and the SG function. In this study, we investigate the relationship between the MPD and SG and their implications for improving the robustness of SNNs. Our theoretical analysis reveals that reducing the proportion of membrane potentials lying within the gradientavailable range of the SG function effectively mitigates the sensitivity of SNNs to input perturbations. Building upon this insight, we propose a novel MPD-driven surrogate gradient regularization (MPD-SGR) method, which enhances robustness by explicitly regularizing the MPD based on its interaction with the SG function. Extensive experiments across multiple image classification benchmarks and diverse network architectures confirm that the MPD-SGR method significantly enhances the resilience of SNNs to adversarial perturbations and exhibits strong generalizability across diverse network configurations, SG functions, and spike encoding schemes.

PaperID: 2145, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11773

Authors:Zikang Leng, Megha Thukral, Yaqi Liu, Hrudhai Rajasekhar, Shruthi K. Hiremath, Jiaman He, Thomas Plötz

Affiliations: Georgia Institute of Technology, RMIT University

Title: AgentSense: Virtual Sensor Data Generation Using LLM Agents in Simulated Home Environments

Abstract:
A major challenge in developing robust and generalizable Human Activity Recognition (HAR) systems for smart homes is the lack of large and diverse labeled datasets. Variations in home layouts, sensor configurations, and individual behaviors further exacerbate this issue. To address this, we leverage the idea of embodied AI agents—virtual agents that perceive and act within simulated environments guided by internal world models. We introduce AgentSense, a virtual data generation pipeline in which agents live out daily routines in simulated smart homes, with behavior guided by Large Language Models (LLMs). The LLM generates diverse synthetic personas and realistic routines grounded in the environment, which are then decomposed into finegrained actions. These actions are executed in an extended version of the VirtualHome simulator, which we augment with virtual ambient sensors that record the agents’ activities. Our approach produces rich, privacy-preserving sensor data that reflects real-world diversity. We evaluate AgentSense on five real HAR datasets. Models pretrained on the generated data consistently outperform baselines, especially in low-resource settings. Furthermore, combining the generated virtual sensor data with a small amount of real data achieves performance comparable to training on full real-world datasets. These results highlight the potential of using LLM-guided embodied agents for scalable and cost-effective sensor data generation in HAR.

PaperID: 2146, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12485

Authors:Pengze Li, Jiaqi Liu, Junchi Yu, Lihao Liu, Mingyu Ding, Wanli Ouyang, Shixiang Tang, Xi Chen

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Incubation Institute of Fudan University Shanghai Academy of AI for Science

Title: ARCHE: A Novel Task to Evaluate LLMs on Latent Reasoning Chain Extraction

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in scientific domains. While they can produce reasoninglike content via methods such as chain-of-thought prompting, these outputs are typically unstructured and informal, obscuring whether models truly understand the fundamental reasoning paradigms that underpin scientific inference. To address this, we introduce a novel task named Latent Reasoning Chain Extraction (ARCHE), in which models must decompose complex reasoning arguments into combinations of standard reasoning paradigms in the form of a Reasoning Logic Tree (RLT). In an RLT, all reasoning steps are explicitly categorized as one of three variants of Peirce’s fundamental inference modes: deduction, induction, or abduction. To facilitate this task, we release ARCHE Bench, a new benchmark derived from 70 Nature Communications articles, including more than 1,900 references and 38,000 viewpoints. We propose two logic-aware evaluation metrics: Entity Coverage (EC) for content completeness and Reasoning Edge Accuracy (REA) for step-by-step logical validity. Evaluations on 10 leading LLMs on ARCHE Bench reveal that models exhibit a trade-off between REA and EC, and none are yet able to extract a complete and standard reasoning chain. These findings highlight a substantial gap between the abilities of current reasoning models and the rigor required for scientific argumentation.

PaperID: 2147, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03293

Authors:Shijing Zhu, Zhuang Chen, Guanqun Bi, Binghang Li, Yaxi Deng, Dazhen Wan, Libiao Peng, Xiyao Xiao, Rongsheng Zhang, Tangjie Lv, Zhipeng Hu, FangFang Li, Minlie Huang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University, CoAI Group, Tsinghua University, Lingxin AI

Title: Ψ-Arena: Interactive Assessment and Optimization of LLM-based Psychological Counselors with Tripartite Feedback

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in providing scalable mental health support, while evaluating their counseling capability remains crucial to ensure both efficacy and safety. Existing evaluations are limited by the static assessment that focuses on knowledge tests, the single perspective that centers on user experience, and the openloop framework that lacks actionable feedback. To address these issues, we propose Ψ-Arena, an interactive framework for comprehensive assessment and optimization of LLM-based counselors, featuring three key characteristics: (1) Realistic arena interactions that simulate real-world counseling through multi-stage dialogues with psychologically profiled NPC clients; (2) Tripartite evaluation that integrates assessments from the client, supervisor, and counselor perspectives; (3) Closed-loop optimization that iteratively improves LLM counselors using diagnostic feedback. Experiments across eight state-of-the-art LLMs show significant performance variations in different real-world scenarios and evaluation perspectives. Moreover, reflection-based optimization results in up to a 141% improvement in counseling performance. We hope Ψ-Arena provides a foundational resource for advancing reliable and human-aligned LLM applications in mental healthcare.

PaperID: 2148, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17781

Authors:Yohanes Yudhi Adikusuma, Qixing Huang, Ying He

Affiliations: University of Texas at Austin, Nanyang Technological University

Title: LiteGE: Lightweight Geodesic Embedding for Efficient Geodesics Computation and Non-Isometric Shape Correspondence

Abstract:
Computing geodesic distances on 3D surfaces is fundamental to many tasks in 3D vision and geometry processing, with deep connections to tasks such as shape correspondence. Recent learningbased methods achieve strong performance but rely on large 3D backbones, leading to high memory usage and latency, which limit their use in interactive or resource-constrained settings. We introduce LiteGE, a lightweight approach that constructs compact, category-aware shape descriptors by applying PCA to unsigned distance field (UDFs) samples at informative voxels. This descriptor is efficient to compute and removes the need for high-capacity networks. LiteGE remains robust on sparse point clouds, supporting inputs with as few as 300 points, where prior methods fail. Extensive experiments show that LiteGE reduces memory usage and inference time by up to 300x compared to existing neural approaches. In addition, by exploiting the intrinsic relationship between geodesic distance and shape correspondence, LiteGE enables fast and accurate shape matching. Our method achieves up to 1000x speedup over state-of-the-art mesh-based approaches while maintaining comparable accuracy on non-isometric shape pairs, including evaluations on point-cloud inputs.

PaperID: 2149, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03736

Authors:Shuyan Bai, Tingfa Xu, Peifu Liu, Yuhao Qiu, Huiyan Bai, Huan Chen, Yanyan Peng, Jianan Li

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology

Title: HyperCOD: The First Challenging Benchmark and Baseline for Hyperspectral Camouflaged Object Detection

Abstract:
RGBbased camouflaged object detection struggles in real-world scenarios where color and texture cues are ambiguous. While hyperspectral image offers a powerful alternative by capturing fine-grained spectral signatures, progress in hyperspectral camouflaged object detection (HCOD) has been critically hampered by the absence of a dedicated, large-scale benchmark. To spur innovation, we introduce HyperCOD, the first challenging benchmark for HCOD. Comprising 350 high-resolution hyperspectral images, It features complex real-world scenarios with minimal objects, intricate shapes, severe occlusions, and dynamic lighting to challenge current models.The advent of foundation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) presents a compelling opportunity. To adapt the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for HCOD, we propose HyperSpectral Camouflage-aware SAM (HSC-SAM). HSC-SAM ingeniously reformulates the hyperspectral image by decoupling it into a spatial map fed to SAM's image encoder and a spectral saliency map that serves as an adaptive prompt. This translation effectively bridges the modality gap. Extensive experiments show that HSC-SAM sets a new state-of-the-art on HyperCOD and generalizes robustly to other public HSI datasets. The HyperCOD dataset and our HSC-SAM baseline provide a robust foundation to foster future research in this emerging area.

PaperID: 2150, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10142

Authors:Zhicheng Cai, Hao Zhu, Linsen Chen, Qiu Shen, Xun Cao

Affiliations: Nanjing University, Nanjing university

Title: Split-Layer: Enhancing Implicit Neural Representation by Maximizing the Dimensionality of Feature Space

Abstract:
Implicit neural representation (INR) models signals as continuous functions using neural networks, offering efficient and differentiable optimization for inverse problems across diverse disciplines. However, the representational capacity of INR—defined by the range of functions the neural network can characterize—is inherently limited by the lowdimensional feature space in conventional multilayer perceptron (MLP) architectures. While widening the MLP can linearly increase feature space dimensionality, it also leads to a quadratic growth in computational and memory costs. To address this limitation, we propose the split-layer, a novel reformulation of MLP construction. The split-layer divides each layer into multiple parallel branches and integrates their outputs via Hadamard product, effectively constructing a high-degree polynomial space. This approach significantly enhances INR’s representational capacity by expanding the feature space dimensionality without incurring prohibitive computational overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the split-layer substantially improves INR performance, surpassing existing methods across multiple tasks, including 2D image fitting, 2D CT reconstruction, 3D shape representation, and 5D novel view synthesis.

PaperID: 2151, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12631

Authors:Yushe Cao, Dianxi Shi, Xing Fu, Xuechao Zou, Haikuo Peng, Xueqi Li, Chun Yu, Junliang Xing

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Intelligent Game and Decision Lab, Ant Group, Beijing Jiaotong University, National University of Defense Technology

Title: Multivariate Diffusion Transformer with Decoupled Attention for High-Fidelity Mask-Text Collaborative Facial Generation

Abstract:
While significant progress has been achieved in multimodal facial generation using semantic masks and textual descriptions, conventional feature fusion approaches often fail to enable effective crossmodal interactions, thereby leading to suboptimal generation outcomes. To address this challenge, we introduce MDiTFace—a customized diffusion transformer framework that employs a unified tokenization strategy to process semantic mask and text inputs, eliminating discrepancies between heterogeneous modality representations. The framework facilitates comprehensive multimodal feature interaction through stacked, newly designed multivariate transformer blocks that process all conditions synchronously. Additionally, we design a novel decoupled attention mechanism by dissociating implicit dependencies between mask tokens and temporal embeddings. This mechanism segregates internal computations into dynamic and static pathways, enabling caching and reuse of features computed in static pathways after initial calculation, thereby reducing additional computational overhead introduced by mask condition by over 94% while maintaining performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MDiTFace significantly outperforms other competing methods in terms of both facial fidelity and conditional consistency.

PaperID: 2152, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06172

Authors:Hua Chang, Xin Xu, Wei Liu, Wei Wang, Xin Yuan, Kui Jiang

Affiliations: Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Hubei Province Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing and Real-time Industrial System, Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: MambaOVSR: Multiscale Fusion with Global Motion Modeling for Chinese Opera Video Super-Resolution

Abstract:
Chinese opera is celebrated for preserving classical art. However, early filming equipment limitations have degraded videos of lastcentury performances by renowned artists (e.g., low frame rates and resolution), hindering archival efforts. Although space-time video super-resolution (STVSR) has advanced significantly, applying it directly to opera videos remains challenging. The scarcity of datasets impedes the recovery of high-frequency details, and existing STVSR methods lack global modeling capabilities—compromising visual quality when handling opera’s characteristic large motions. To address these challenges, we pioneer a large-scale Chinese Opera Video Clip (COVC) dataset and propose the Mamba-based multiscale fusion network for space-time Opera Video Super-Resolution (MambaOVSR). Specifically, MambaOVSR involves three novel components: the Global Fusion Module (GFM) for motion modeling through a multiscale alternating scanning mechanism, and the Multiscale Synergistic Mamba Module (MSMM) for alignment across different sequence lengths. Additionally, our MambaVR block resolves feature artifacts and positional information loss during alignment. Experimental results on the COVC dataset show that MambaOVSR significantly outperforms the SOTA STVSR method by an average of 1.86 dB in terms of PSNR.

PaperID: 2153, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03065

Authors:Pengtao Chen, Xianfang Zeng, Maosen Zhao, Mingzhu Shen, Wei Cheng, Gang Yu, Tao Chen

Affiliations: Fudan University, Imperial College London

Title: Sparse-vDiT: Unleashing the Power of Sparse Attention to Accelerate Video Diffusion Transformers

Abstract:
While Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved breakthroughs in video generation, this long sequence generation task remains constrained by the quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms, resulting in significant inference latency. Through detailed analysis of attention maps in Video Diffusion Transformer (vDiT), we identify three recurring sparsity patterns: diagonal, multidiagonal, and vertical-stripe structures. And even 3-6% attention heads can be skipped. Crucially, these patterns exhibit strong layer-depth and head-position correlations but show limited dependence on the input content. Leveraging these findings, we propose Sparse-vDiT, a sparsity acceleration framework for vDiT comprising: 1) Pattern-optimized sparse kernels that replace dense attention with computationally efficient implementations for each identified sparsity pattern. 2) An offline sparse diffusion search algorithm that selects the optimal sparse computation strategy per layer and head via hardware-aware cost modeling. After determining the optimal configuration, we fuse heads within the same layer that share the same attention strategy, enhancing inference efficiency. Integrated into state-of-the-art vDiT models (CogVideoX1.5, HunyuanVideo, and Wan2.1), Sparse-vDiT achieves 2.09×, 2.38×, and 1.67× theoretical FLOP reduction, and actual inference speedups of 1.76×, 1.85×, and 1.58×, respectively, while maintaining high visual fidelity, with PSNR values reaching 24.13, 27.09, and 22.59. Our work demonstrates that latent structural sparsity in vDiTs can be systematically exploited for long video synthesis.

PaperID: 2154, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06032

Authors:Kiran Chhatre, Christopher E. Peters, Srikrishna Karanam

Affiliations: KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Adobe Research

Title: Learning 3D Texture-Aware Representations for Parsing Diverse Human Clothing and Body Parts

Abstract:
Existing methods for human parsing into body parts and clothing often use fixed mask categories with broad labels that obscure finegrained clothing types. Recent open-vocabulary segmentation approaches leverage pretrained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion model features for strong zero-shot transfer, but typically group entire humans into a single person category, failing to distinguish diverse clothing or detailed body parts. To address this, we propose Spectrum, a unified network for part-level pixel parsing (body parts and clothing) and instance-level grouping. While diffusion-based open-vocabulary models generalize well across tasks, their internal representations are not specialized for detailed human parsing. We observe that, unlike diffusion models with broad representations, image-driven 3D texture generators maintain faithful correspondence to input images, enabling stronger representations for parsing diverse clothing and body parts. Spectrum introduces a novel repurposing of an Image-to-Texture (I2Tx) diffusion model—obtained by fine-tuning a T2I model on 3D human texture maps—for improved alignment with body parts and clothing. From an input image, we extract human-part internal features via the I2Tx diffusion model and generate semantically valid masks aligned to diverse clothing categories through prompt-guided grounding. Once trained, Spectrum produces semantic segmentation maps for every visible body part and clothing category, ignoring standalone garments or irrelevant objects, for any number of humans in the scene. We conduct extensive cross-dataset experiments—separately assessing body parts, clothing parts, unseen clothing categories, and full-body masks—and demonstrate that Spectrum consistently outperforms baseline methods in prompt-based segmentation.

PaperID: 2155, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18858

Authors:Xiao Cui, Yulei Qin, Xinyue Li, Wengang Zhou, Hongsheng Li, Houqiang Li

Affiliations: Independent Researcher, University of Science and Technology of China, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title: Rethinking Long-tailed Dataset Distillation: A Uni-Level Framework with Unbiased Recovery and Relabeling

Abstract:
Dataset distillation creates a small distilled set that enables efficient training by capturing key information from the full dataset. While existing dataset distillation methods perform well on balanced datasets, they struggle under longtailed distributions, where imbalanced class frequencies induce biased model representations and corrupt statistical estimates such as Batch Normalization (BN) statistics. In this paper, we rethink long-tailed dataset distillation by revisiting the limitations of trajectory-based methods, and instead adopt the statistical alignment perspective to jointly mitigate model bias and restore fair supervision. To this end, we introduce three dedicated components that enable unbiased recovery of distilled images and soft relabeling: (1) enhancing expert models (an observer model for recovery and a teacher model for relabeling) to enable reliable statistics estimation and soft-label generation; (2) recalibrating BN statistics via a full forward pass with dynamically adjusted momentum to reduce representation skew; (3) initializing synthetic images by incrementally selecting high-confidence and diverse augmentations via a multi-round mechanism that promotes coverage and diversity. Extensive experiments on four long-tailed benchmarks show consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods across varying degrees of class imbalance.Notably, our approach improves top-1 accuracy by 15.6% on CIFAR-100-LT and 11.8% on Tiny-ImageNet-LT under IPC=10 and IF=10.

PaperID: 2156, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22233

Authors:Xiang Feng, Tieshi Zhong, Shuo Chang, Weiliu Wang, Chengkai Wang, Yifei Chen, Tongyu Hu, Yuhe Wang, Zhenzhong Kuang, Xuefei Yin, Yanming Zhu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Hangzhou Dianzi University, China ShanghaiTech University, School of Information Communication and Technology, Griffith University

Title: IE-SRGS: An Internal-External Knowledge Fusion Framework for High-Fidelity 3D Gaussian Splatting Super-Resolution

Abstract:
Reconstructing highresolution (HR) 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) models from low-resolution (LR) inputs remains challenging due to the lack of fine-grained textures and geometry. Existing methods typically rely on pre-trained 2D super-resolution (2DSR) models to enhance textures, but suffer from 3D Gaussian ambiguity arising from cross-view inconsistencies and domain gaps inherent in 2DSR models. We propose IE-SRGS, a novel 3DGS SR paradigm that addresses this issue by jointly leveraging the complementary strengths of external 2DSR priors and internal 3DGS features. Specifically, we use 2DSR and depth estimation models to generate HR images and depth maps as external knowledge, and employ multi-scale 3DGS models to produce cross-view consistent, domain-adaptive counterparts as internal knowledge. A mask-guided fusion strategy is introduced to integrate these two sources and synergistically exploit their complementary strengths, effectively guiding the 3D Gaussian optimization toward high-fidelity reconstruction. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that IE-SRGS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative accuracy and visual fidelity.

PaperID: 2157, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06741

Authors:Wenbo Huang, Jinghui Zhang, Zhenghao Chen, Guang Li, Lei Zhang, Yang Cao, Fang Dong, Takahiro Ogawa, Miki Haseyama

Affiliations: Southeast University, University of Newcastle, Hokkaido University, Nanjing Normal University, Institute of Science Tokyo

Title: Otter: Mitigating Background Distractions of Wide-Angle Few-Shot Action Recognition with Enhanced RWKV

Abstract:
Wideangle videos in few-shot action recognition (FSAR) effectively express actions within specific scenarios. However, without a global understanding of both subjects and background, recognizing actions in such samples remains challenging because of the background distractions. Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV), which learns interaction between various dimensions, shows promise for global modeling. While directly applying RWKV to wide-angle FSAR may fail to highlight subjects due to excessive background information. Additionally, temporal relation degraded by frames with similar backgrounds is difficult to reconstruct, further impacting performance. Therefore, we design the CompOund SegmenTation and Temporal REconstructing RWKV (Otter). Specifically, the Compound Segmentation Module (CSM) is devised to segment and emphasize key patches in each frame, effectively highlighting subjects against background information. The Temporal Reconstruction Module (TRM) is incorporated into the temporal-enhanced prototype construction to enable bidirectional scanning, allowing better reconstruct temporal relation. Furthermore, a regular prototype is combined with the temporal-enhanced prototype to simultaneously enhance subject emphasis and temporal modeling, improving wide-angle FSAR performance. Extensive experiments on benchmarks such as SSv2, Kinetics, UCF101, and HMDB51 demonstrate that Otter achieves state-of-the-art performance. Extra evaluation on the VideoBadminton dataset further validates the superiority of Otter in wide-angle FSAR.

PaperID: 2158, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14238

Authors:Yan Huang, Yongyi Su, Xin Lin, Le Zhang, Xun Xu

Affiliations: South China University of Technology, Guangzhou University, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Enhancing Generalization of Depth Estimation Foundation Model via Weakly-Supervised Adaptation with Regularization

Abstract:
The emergence of foundation models has substantially advanced zeroshot generalization in monocular depth estimation (MDE), as exemplified by the Depth Anything series. However, given access to some data from downstream tasks, a natural question arises: can the performance of these models be further improved? To this end, we propose WeSTAR, a parameter-efficient framework that performs Weakly supervised Self-Training Adaptation with Regularization, designed to enhance the robustness of MDE foundation models in unseen and diverse domains. We first adopt a dense self-training objective as the primary source of structural self-supervision. To further improve robustness, we introduce semantically-aware hierarchical normalization, which exploits instance-level segmentation maps to perform more stable and multi-scale structural normalization. Beyond dense supervision, we introduce a cost-efficient weak supervision in the form of pairwise ordinal depth annotations to further guide the adaptation process, which enforces informative ordinal constraints to mitigate local topological errors. Finally, a weight regularization loss is employed to anchor the LoRA updates, ensuring training stability and preserving the model's generalizable knowledge. Extensive experiments on both realistic and corrupted out-of-distribution datasets under diverse and challenging scenarios demonstrate that WeSTAR consistently improves generalization and achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of benchmarks.

PaperID: 2159, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01181

Authors:Qiaoqiao Jin, Siming Fu, Dong She, Weinan Jia, Hualiang Wang, Mu Liu, Jidong Jiang

Affiliations: ByteDance Inc., University of Science and Technology of China, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: FocusDPO: Dynamic Preference Optimization for Multi-Subject Personalized Image Generation via Adaptive Focus

Abstract:
Multisubject personalized image generation aims to synthesize customized images containing multiple specified subjects without requiring test-time optimization. However, achieving fine-grained independent control over multiple subjects remains challenging due to difficulties in preserving subject fidelity and preventing cross-subject attribute leakage. We present FocusDPO, a framework that adaptively identifies focus regions based on dynamic semantic correspondence and supervision image complexity. During training, our method progressively adjusts these focal areas across noise timesteps, implementing a weighted strategy that rewards information-rich patches while penalizing regions with low prediction confidence. The framework dynamically adjusts focus allocation during the DPO process according to the semantic complexity of reference images and establishes robust correspondence mappings between generated and reference subjects. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method substantially enhances the performance of existing pre-trained personalized generation models, achieving state-of-the-art results on both single-subject and multi-subject personalized image synthesis benchmarks. Our method effectively mitigates attribute leakage while preserving superior subject fidelity across diverse generation scenarios, advancing the frontier of controllable multi-subject image synthesis.

PaperID: 2160, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07499

Authors:Kwanyoung Kim

Affiliations: Samsung Research

Title: Toward the Frontiers of Reliable Diffusion Sampling via Adversarial Sinkhorn Attention Guidance

Abstract:
Diffusion models have demonstrated strong generative performance when using guidance methods such as classifierfree guidance (CFG), which enhance output quality by modifying the sampling trajectory. These methods typically improve a target output by intentionally degrading another, often the unconditional output, using heuristic perturbation functions such as identity mixing or blurred conditions. However, these approaches lack a principled foundation and rely on manually designed distortions. In this work, we propose Adversarial Sinkhorn Attention Guidance (ASAG), a novel method that reinterprets attention scores in diffusion models through the lens of optimal transport and intentionally increases the transport cost to disrupt unreliable attention flows. Instead of naively corrupting the attention mechanism, ASAG injects an adversarial cost within self-attention layers to reduce pixel-wise similarity between queries and keys. This deliberate degradation weakens misleading attention alignments and leads to improved conditional and unconditional sample quality. ASAG shows consistent improvements in text-to-image diffusion, and enhances controllability and fidelity in downstream applications such as IP-Adapter and ControlNet. The method is lightweight, plug-and-play, and improves reliability without requiring any model retraining.

PaperID: 2161, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.21773

Authors:JuneHyoung Kwon, MiHyeon Kim, Eunju Lee, Yoonji Lee, Seunghoon Lee, YoungBin Kim

Affiliations: Chung-Ang University, Korea Telecom Research

Title: Easy to Learn, Yet Hard to Forget: Towards Robust Unlearning Under Bias

Abstract:
Machine unlearning, which enables a model to forget specific data, is crucial for ensuring data privacy and model reliability. However, its effectiveness can be severely undermined in realworld scenarios where models learn unintended biases from spurious correlations within the data. This paper investigates the unique challenges of unlearning from such biased models. We identify a novel phenomenon we term "shortcut unlearning," where models exhibit an "easy to learn, yet hard to forget" tendency. Specifically, models struggle to forget easily-learned, bias-aligned samples; instead of forgetting the class attribute, they unlearn the bias attribute, which can paradoxically improve accuracy on the class intended to be forgotten. To address this, we propose CUPID, a new unlearning framework inspired by the observation that samples with different biases exhibit distinct loss landscape sharpness. Our method first partitions the forget set into causal- and bias-approximated subsets based on sample sharpness, then disentangles model parameters into causal and bias pathways, and finally performs a targeted update by routing refined causal and bias gradients to their respective pathways. Extensive experiments on biased datasets including Waterbirds, BAR, and Biased NICO++ demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art forgetting performance and effectively mitigates the shortcut unlearning problem.

PaperID: 2162, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24861

Authors:Meng Lan, Lefei Zhang, Xiaomeng Li

Affiliations: Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, National Engineering Research Center for Multimedia Software, School of Computer Science, Wuhan University

Title: OFL-SAM2: Prompt SAM2 with Online Few-shot Learner for Efficient Medical Image Segmentation

Abstract:
The Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) has demonstrated remarkable promptable visual segmentation capabilities in video data, showing potential for extension to medical image segmentation (MIS) tasks involving 3D volumes and temporally correlated 2D image sequences. However, adapting SAM2 to MIS presents several challenges, including the need for extensive annotated medical data for finetuning and high-quality manual prompts, which are both labor-intensive and require intervention from medical experts. To address these challenges, we introduce OFL-SAM2, a prompt-free SAM2 framework for label-efficient MIS. Our core idea is to leverage limited annotated samples to train a lightweight mapping network that captures medical knowledge and transforms generic image features into target features, thereby providing additional discriminative target representations for each frame and eliminating the need for manual prompts. Crucially, the mapping network supports online parameter update during inference, enhancing the model’s generalization across test sequences. Technically, we introduce two key components: (1) an online few-shot learner that trains the mapping network to generate target features using limited data, and (2) an adaptive fusion module that dynamically integrates the target features with the memory-attention features generated by frozen SAM2, leading to accurate and robust target representation. Extensive experiments on three diverse MIS datasets demonstrate that OFL-SAM2 achieves state-of-the-art performance with limited training data.

PaperID: 2163, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06823

Authors:Ji Li, Chao Wang

Affiliations: Capital Normal University, China Agricultural University

Title: Integrating Reweighted Least Squares with Plug-and-Play Diffusion Priors for Noisy Image Restoration

Abstract:
Existing plugand-play image restoration methods typically employ off-the-shelf Gaussian denoisers as proximal operators within classical optimization frameworks based on variable splitting. Recently, denoisers induced by generative priors have been successfully integrated into regularized optimization methods for image restoration under Gaussian noise. However, their application to non-Gaussian noise--such as impulse noise--remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-play image restoration framework based on generative diffusion priors for robust removal of general noise types, including impulse noise. Within the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation framework, the data fidelity term is adapted to the specific noise model. Departing from the conventional least-squares loss used for Gaussian noise, we introduce a generalized Gaussian scale mixture-based loss, which approximates a wide range of noise distributions and leads to an ℓq-norm fidelity term. This optimization problem is addressed using an iteratively reweighted least squares (IRLS) approach, wherein the proximal step involving the generative prior is efficiently performed via a diffusion-based denoiser. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method effectively removes non-Gaussian impulse noise and achieves superior restoration performance.

PaperID: 2164, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16170

Authors:Jiahao Li, Yang Lu, Yachao Zhang, Yong Xie, Fangyong Wang, Yuan Xie, Yanyun Qu

Affiliations: Xiamen University, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Hanjiang National Laboratory, East China Normal University

Title: Target Refocusing via Attention Redistribution for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation: An Explainability Perspective

Abstract:
Openvocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) employs pixel-level vision-language alignment to associate category-related prompts with corresponding pixels. A key challenge is enhancing the multimodal dense prediction capability, specifically this pixel-level multimodal alignment. Although existing methods achieve promising results by leveraging CLIP’s vision-language alignment, they rarely investigate the performance boundaries of CLIP for dense prediction from an interpretability mechanisms perspective. In this work, we systematically investigate CLIP's internal mechanisms and identify a critical phenomenon: analogous to human distraction, CLIP diverts significant attention resources from target regions to irrelevant tokens. Our analysis reveals that these tokens arise from dimension-specific over-activation; filtering them enhances CLIP's dense prediction performance. Consequently, we propose Refocusing CLIP (RF-CLIP), a training-free approach that emulates human distraction-refocusing behavior to redirect attention from distraction tokens back to target regions, thereby refining CLIP's multimodal alignment granularity. Our method achieves SOTA performance on eight benchmarks while maintaining high inference efficiency.

PaperID: 2165, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12432

Authors:Xilai Li, Xiaosong Li, Weijun Jiang

Affiliations: Foshan University

Title: Text-Guided Channel Perturbation and Pre-Trained Knowledge Integration for Unified Multi-Modality Image Fusion

Abstract:
Multimodality image fusion enhances scene perception by combining complementary information. Unified models aim to share parameters across modalities for multi-modality image fusion, but large modality differences often cause gradient conflicts, limiting performance. Some methods introduce modality-specific encoders to enhance feature perception and improve fusion quality. However, this strategy reduces generalisation across different fusion tasks. To overcome this limitation, we propose a unified multi-modality image fusion framework based on channel perturbation and pre-trained knowledge integration (UP-Fusion). To suppress redundant modal information and emphasize key features, we propose the Semantic-Aware Channel Pruning Module (SCPM), which leverages the semantic perception capability of a pre-trained model to filter and enhance multi-modality feature channels. Furthermore, we proposed the Geometric Affine Modulation Module (GAM), which uses original modal features to apply affine transformations on initial fusion features to maintain the feature encoder modal discriminability. Finally, we apply a Text-Guided Channel Perturbation Module (TCPM) during decoding to reshape the channel distribution, reducing the dependence on modality-specific channels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing methods on both multi-modality image fusion and downstream tasks.

PaperID: 2166, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07871

Authors:Yanshu Li, Jianjiang Yang, Zhennan Shen, Ligong Han, Haoyan Xu, Ruixiang Tang

Affiliations: Brown University, University of Bristol, MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, University of Southern California, Rutgers University

Title: CATP: Contextually Adaptive Token Pruning for Efficient and Enhanced Multimodal In-Context Learning

Abstract:
Modern large visionlanguage models (LVLMs) convert each input image into a large set of tokens that far outnumber the text tokens. Although this improves visual perception, it also introduces severe image token redundancy. Because image tokens contain sparse information, many contribute little to reasoning but greatly increase inference cost. Recent image token pruning methods address this issue by identifying important tokens and removing the rest. These methods improve efficiency with only small performance drops. However, most of them focus on single-image tasks and overlook multimodal in-context learning (ICL), where redundancy is higher and efficiency is more important. Redundant tokens weaken the advantage of multimodal ICL for rapid domain adaptation and lead to unstable performance. When existing pruning methods are applied in this setting, they cause large accuracy drops, which exposes a clear gap and the need for new approaches. To address this, we propose Contextually Adaptive Token Pruning (CATP), a training-free pruning method designed for multimodal ICL. CATP uses two stages of progressive pruning that fully reflect the complex cross-modal interactions in the input sequence. After removing 77.8% of the image tokens, CATP achieves an average performance gain of 0.6% over the vanilla model on four LVLMs and eight benchmarks, clearly outperforming all baselines. At the same time, it improves efficiency by reducing inference latency by an average of 10.78%. CATP strengthens the practical value of multimodal ICL and lays the foundation for future progress in interleaved image-text settings.

PaperID: 2167, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06908

Authors:Yuzhen Li, Min Liu, Zhaoyang Li, Yuan Bian, Xueping Wang, Erbo Zhai, Yaonan Wang

Affiliations: Hunan University, Hunan Normal University

Title: Mono3DVG-EnSD: Enhanced Spatial-aware and Dimension-decoupled Text Encoding for Monocular 3D Visual Grounding

Abstract:
Monocular 3D Visual Grounding (Mono3DVG) is an emerging task that locates 3D objects in RGB images using text descriptions with geometric cues. However, existing methods face two key limitations. Firstly, they often overrely on high-certainty keywords that explicitly identify the target object while neglecting critical spatial descriptions. Secondly, generalized textual features contain both 2D and 3D descriptive information, thereby capturing an additional dimension of details compared to singular 2D or 3D visual features. This characteristic leads to cross-dimensional interference when refining visual features under text guidance. To overcome these challenges, we propose Mono3DVG-EnSD, a novel framework that integrates two key components: the CLIP-Guided Lexical Certainty Adapter (CLIP-LCA) and the Dimension-Decoupled Module (D2M). The CLIP-LCA dynamically masks high-certainty keywords while retaining low-certainty implicit spatial descriptions, thereby forcing the model to develop a deeper understanding of spatial relationships in captions for object localization. Meanwhile, the D2M decouples dimension-specific (2D/3D) textual features from generalized textual features to guide corresponding visual features at same dimension, which mitigates cross-dimensional interference by ensuring dimensionally-consistent cross-modal interactions. Through comprehensive comparisons and ablation studies on the Mono3DRefer dataset, our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across all metrics. Notably, it improves the challenging Far(Acc@0.5) scenario by a significant +13.54%.

PaperID: 2168, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13063

Authors:Zhenghua Li, Hang Chen, Zihao Sun, Kai Li, Xiaolin Hu

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Technology, Institute for AI, Tsinghua University, IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing China, Zhili College

Title: FGNet: Leveraging Feature-Guided Attention to Refine SAM2 for 3D EM Neuron Segmentation

Abstract:
Accurate segmentation of neural structures in Electron Microscopy (EM) images is paramount for neuroscience. However, this task is challenged by intricate morphologies, low signalto-noise ratios, and scarce annotations, limiting the accuracy and generalization of existing methods. To address these challenges, we seek to leverage the priors learned by visual foundation models on a vast amount of natural images to better tackle this task. Specifically, we propose a novel framework that can effectively transfer knowledge from Segment Anything 2 (SAM2), which is pre-trained on natural images, to the EM domain. We first use SAM2 to extract powerful, general-purpose features. To bridge the domain gap, we introduce a Feature-Guided Attention module that leverages semantic cues from SAM2 to guide a lightweight encoder, the Fine-Grained Encoder (FGE), in focusing on these challenging regions. Finally, a dual-affinity decoder generates both coarse and refined affinity maps. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches with the SAM2 weights frozen. Upon further fine-tuning on EM data, our method significantly outperforms existing SOTA methods. This study validates that transferring representations pre-trained on natural images, when combined with targeted domain-adaptive guidance, can effectively address the specific challenges in neuron segmentation.

PaperID: 2169, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.18860

Authors:Dacheng Liao, Mengshi Qi, Liang Liu, Huadong Ma

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: Improving Batch Normalization with Test-Time Adaptation for Robust Object Detection in Self-Driving

Abstract:
In open realworld autonomous driving scenarios, challenges such as sensor failure and extreme weather hinder the generalization of current autonomous driving perception models to these unseen domain, due to the domain shifts between the test and training data. As the parameter scale of autonomous driving perception models grows, traditional test-time adaptation (TTA) methods become unstable and often degrade model performance in most scenarios. To address these challenges, this paper proposes two new robust methods to improve the Batch Normalization with TTA for object detection in autonomous driving: (1) We introduce a new LearnableBN layer based on Geometric Confidence Maximization and Entropy Minimization. Specifically, we modify the traditional BN layer by incorporating auxiliary learnable parameters, which enables the BN layer to dynamically update the statistics according to the different input data. (2) We propose a novel semantic-consistency based dual-stage adaptation strategy, which encourages the model to iteratively search for the optimal solution and eliminates unstable samples during the adaptation process. Extensive experiments on the NuScenes-C dataset shows that our method achieves a maximum improvement of about 10% using BEVFormer as the baseline across six corruption types and three levels of severity.

PaperID: 2170, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13285

Authors:Bo Liu, Qiao Qin, Qinghui He

Affiliations: Chongqing Key Laboratory of Image Cognition, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China School of Artificial Intelligence, China School of Computer Science and Technology

Title: CausalCLIP: Causally-Informed Feature Disentanglement and Filtering for Generalizable Detection of Generated Images

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of generative models has increased the demand for generated image detectors capable of generalizing across diverse and evolving generation techniques. However, existing methods, including those leveraging pretrained vision-language models, often produce highly entangled representations, mixing task-relevant forensic cues (causal features) with spurious or irrelevant patterns (non-causal features), thus limiting generalization. To address this issue, we propose CausalCLIP, a framework that explicitly disentangles causal from non-causal features and employs targeted filtering guided by causal inference principles to retain only the most transferable and discriminative forensic cues. By modeling the generation process with a structural causal model and enforcing statistical independence through Gumbel-Softmax-based feature masking and Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) constraints, CausalCLIP isolates stable causal features robust to distribution shifts. When tested on unseen generative models from different series, CausalCLIP demonstrates strong generalization ability, achieving improvements of 6.83% in accuracy and 4.06% in average precision over state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 2171, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14137

Authors:Hangyu Liu, Bo Peng, Pengxiang Ding, Donglin Wang

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Westlake University

Title: Rethinking Target Label Conditioning in Adversarial Attacks: A 2D Tensor-Guided Generative Approach

Abstract:
Compared to singletarget adversarial attacks, multi-target attacks have garnered significant attention due to their ability to generate adversarial images for multiple target classes simultaneously. However, existing generative approaches for multi-target attacks primarily encode target labels into one-dimensional tensors, leading to a loss of fine-grained visual information and overfitting to model-specific features during noise generation. To address this gap, we first identify and validate that the semantic feature quality and quantity are critical factors affecting the transferability of targeted attacks: 1) Feature quality refers to the structural and detailed completeness of the implanted target features, as deficiencies may result in the loss of key discriminative information; 2) Feature quantity refers to the spatial sufficiency of the implanted target features, as inadequacy limits the victim model's attention to this feature. Based on these findings, we propose the 2D Tensor-Guided Adversarial Fusion (TGAF) framework, which leverages the powerful generative capabilities of diffusion models to encode target labels into two-dimensional semantic tensors for guiding adversarial noise generation. Additionally, we design a novel masking strategy tailored for the training process, ensuring that parts of the generated noise retain complete semantic information about the target class. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TGAF consistently surpasses state-of-the-art methods across various settings.

PaperID: 2172, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05353

Authors:Kang Liu, Zhuoqi Ma, Zikang Fang, Yunan Li, Kun Xie, Qiguang Miao

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Xidian University, Ministry of Education, Xi'an China, Shaanxi China

Title: PriorRG: Prior-Guided Contrastive Pre-training and Coarse-to-Fine Decoding for Chest X-ray Report Generation

Abstract:
Chest Xray report generation aims to reduce radiologists' workload by automatically producing high-quality preliminary reports. A critical yet underexplored aspect of this task is the effective use of patient-specific prior knowledge---including clinical context (e.g., symptoms, medical history) and the most recent prior image---which radiologists routinely rely on for diagnostic reasoning. Most existing methods generate reports from single images, neglecting this essential prior information and thus failing to capture diagnostic intent or disease progression. To bridge this gap, we propose PriorRG, a novel chest X-ray report generation framework that emulates real-world clinical workflows via a two-stage training pipeline. In Stage 1, we introduce a prior-guided contrastive pre-training scheme that leverages clinical context to guide spatiotemporal feature extraction, allowing the model to align more closely with the intrinsic spatiotemporal semantics in radiology reports. In Stage 2, we present a prior-aware coarse-to-fine decoding for report generation that progressively integrates patient-specific prior knowledge with the vision encoder's hidden states. This decoding allows the model to align with diagnostic focus and track disease progression, thereby enhancing the clinical accuracy and fluency of the generated reports. Extensive experiments on MIMIC-CXR and MIMIC-ABN datasets demonstrate that PriorRG outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving a 3.6% BLEU-4 and 3.8% F1 score improvement on MIMIC-CXR, and a 5.9% BLEU-1 gain on MIMIC-ABN.

PaperID: 2173, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.20530

Authors:Wenxuan Liu, Zhuo Zhou, Xuemei Jia, Siyuan Yang, Wenxin Huang, Xian Zhong, Chia-Wen Lin

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory for Multimedia Information Processing, National Engineering Research Center for Multimedia Software, Wuhan University, College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, Hubei Key Laboratory of Big Data Intelligent Analysis and Application, Hubei University, Hubei Key Laboratory of Transportation Internet of Things, Department of Electrical Engineering, National Tsing Hua University

Title: Beyond the Horizon: Decoupling Multi-View UAV Action Recognition via Partial Order Transfer

Abstract:
Action recognition using uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) faces unique challenges due to substantial view variations along the vertical spatial axis. Unlike groundbased scenarios, UAVs capture actions from diverse altitudes, resulting in pronounced appearance discrepancies and reduced recognition robustness. To address this, we introduce a multi-view formulation tailored for UAV altitudes and empirically uncover a distinctive partial order among views, where recognition accuracy consistently declines as altitude increases. This key observation motivates the proposed Aero Partial Order Guided Network (Aerorder), which explicitly models and exploits the hierarchical structure of UAV views to enhance cross-altitude action recognition. Aerorder comprises three main components: (1) a View Partition (VP) module that groups views by altitude using the head-to-body ratio; (2) an Order-aware Feature Decoupling (OFD) module that disentangles action-relevant and view-specific representations under partial order guidance; and (3) an Action Partial Order Guide (APOG) that progressively transfers knowledge from easier (low-altitude) to harder (high-altitude) views. Extensive experiments on Drone-Action, MOD20, and UAV validate the superiority of Aerorder, achieving consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods, up to 4.7% and 1.3% gains on Drone-Action and MOD20, respectively.

PaperID: 2174, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06833

Authors:Zhenjie Liu, Jianzhang Lu, Renjie Lu, Cong Liang, Shangfei Wang

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China

Title: ConsistTalk: Intensity Controllable Temporally Consistent Talking Head Generation with Diffusion Noise Search

Abstract:
Recent advancements in video diffusion models have significantly enhanced audiodriven portrait animation. However, current methods still suffer from flickering, identity drift, and poor audio-visual synchronization. These issues primarily stem from entangled appearance-motion representations and unstable inference strategies. In this paper, we introduce ConsistTalk, a novel intensity-controllable and temporally consistent talking head generation framework with diffusion noise search inference. First, we propose an optical flow-guided temporal module (OFT) that decouples motion features from static appearance by leveraging facial optical flow, thereby reducing visual flicker and improving temporal consistency. Second, we present an Audio-to-Intensity (A2I) model obtained through multimodal teacher-student knowledge distillation. By transforming audio and facial velocity features into a frame-wise intensity sequence, the A2I model enables joint modeling of audio and visual motion, resulting in more natural dynamics. This further enables fine-grained, frame-wise control of motion dynamics while maintaining tight audio-visual synchronization. Third, we introduce a diffusion noise initialization strategy (IC-Init). By enforcing explicit constraints on background coherence and motion continuity during inference-time noise search, we achieve better identity preservation and refine motion dynamics compared to the current autoregressive strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ConsistTalk significantly outperforms prior methods in reducing flicker, preserving identity, and delivering temporally stable, high-fidelity talking head videos.

PaperID: 2175, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01380

Authors:Tianyu Luan, Xuelu Feng, Zixin Zhu, Phani Nuney, Sheng Liu, Xuan Gong, David Doermann, Chunming Qiao, Junsong Yuan

Affiliations: State University of New York at Buffalo

Title: Textured Geometry Evaluation: Perceptual 3D Textured Shape Metric via 3D Latent-Geometry Network

Abstract:
Textured highfidelity 3D models are crucial for games, AR/VR, and film, but human-aligned evaluation methods still fall behind despite recent advances in 3D reconstruction and generation. Existing metrics, such as Chamfer Distance, often fail to align with how humans evaluate the fidelity of 3D shapes. Recent learning-based metrics attempt to improve this by relying on rendered images and 2D image quality metrics. However, these approaches face limitations due to incomplete structural coverage and sensitivity to viewpoint choices. Moreover, most methods are trained on synthetic distortions, which differ significantly from real-world distortions, resulting in a domain gap. To address these challenges, we propose a new fidelity evaluation method that is based directly on 3D meshes with texture, without relying on rendering. Our method, named Textured Geometry Evaluation TGE, jointly uses the geometry and color information to calculate the fidelity of the input textured mesh with comparison to a reference colored shape. To train and evaluate our metric, we design a human-annotated dataset with real-world distortions. Experiments show that TGE outperforms rendering-based and geometry-only methods on real-world distortion dataset.

PaperID: 2176, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13297

Authors:Enhui Ma, Lijun Zhou, Tao Tang, Jiahuan Zhang, Junpeng Jiang, Zhan Zhang, Dong Han, Kun Zhan, Xueyang Zhang, Xianpeng Lang, Haiyang Sun, Xia Zhou, Di Lin, Kaicheng Yu

Affiliations: Zhejiang University Autolab, Westlake University, Li Auto Inc., Tianjin University

Title: CorrectAD: A Self-Correcting Agentic System to Improve End-to-end Planning in Autonomous Driving

Abstract:
Endto-end planning methods are the de-facto standard of the current autonomous driving system, while the robustness of the data-driven approaches suffers due to the notorious long-tail problem (i.e., rare but safety-critical failure cases). In this work, we explore whether recent diffusion-based video generation methods (a.k.a. world models), paired with structured 3D layouts, can enable a fully automated pipeline to self-correct such failure cases. We first introduce an agent to simulate the role of product manager, dubbed PM-Agent, which formulates data requirements to collect data similar to the failure cases. Then, we use a generative model that can simulate both data collection and annotation. However, existing generative models struggle to generate high-fidelity data conditioned on 3D layouts. To address this, we propose DriveSora, which can generate spatiotemporally consistent videos aligned with the 3D annotations requested by PM-Agent. We integrate these components into our self-correcting agentic system, CorrectAD. Importantly, our pipeline is end-to-end model agnostic and can be applied to improve any end-to-end planner. Evaluated on both nuScenes and a more challenging in-house dataset across multiple end-to-end planners, CorrectAD corrects 62.5% and 49.8% of failure cases, reducing collision rates by 39% and 27%, respectively.

PaperID: 2177, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08321

Authors:Lichen Ma, Xiaolong Fu, GaojingZhou, Zipeng Guo, Ting Zhu, Yichun Liu, Yu Shi, Jason Li, Junshi Huang

Affiliations: JD.COM Sun Yat-sen University

Title: UM-Text: A Unified Multimodal Model for Image Understanding and Visual Text Editing

Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of image generation, visual text editing using natural language instructions has received increasing attention. The main challenge of this task is to fully understand the instruction and reference image, and thus generate visual text that is styleconsistent with the image. Previous methods often involve complex steps of specifying the text content and attributes, such as font size, color, and layout, without considering the stylistic consistency with the reference image. To address this, we propose UM-Text, a unified multimodal model for context understanding and visual text editing by natural language instructions. Specifically, we introduce a Visual Language Model (VLM) to process the instruction and reference image, so that the text content and layout can be elaborately designed according to the context information. To generate an accurate and harmonious visual text image, we further propose the UM Encoder to combine the embeddings of various condition information, where the combination is automatically configured by VLM according to the input instruction. During training, we propose a regional consistency loss to offer more effective supervision for glyph generation on both latent and RGB space, and design a tailored three-stage training strategy to further enhance model performance. In addition, we contribute the UM-DATA-200K, a large-scale visual text image dataset on diverse scenes for model training. Extensive qualitative and quantitative results on multiple public benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

PaperID: 2178, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17927

Authors:Yingjie Ma, Xun Lin, Yong Xu, Weicheng Xie, Zitong Yu

Affiliations: Shenzhen University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Harbin Institute of Technology, Great Bay University

Title: PA-FAS: Towards Interpretable and Generalizable Multimodal Face Anti-Spoofing via Path-Augmented Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
In recent years, face antispoofing (FAS) has made notable progress in multimodal fusion, cross-domain generalization, and interpretability. With the development of large language models and reinforcement learning (RL), strategy-based training paradigms offer new opportunities for jointly modeling multimodality, generalization, and interpretability. However, compared to unimodal reasoning, multimodal reasoning introduces more complex logic, such as accurate feature representation and cross-modal verification, which significantly increases reasoning complexity and labeling difficulty. Due to the lack of high-quality annotations in existing multimodal FAS datasets, directly applying RL strategies is sub-optimal, hindering robust multimodal reasoning. In this paper, we find two key issues of supervised fine-tuning combined with reinforcement learning (SFT+RL) paradigms in multimodal FAS reasoning: 1) limited multimodal reasoning paths not only hinder the full utilization of multimodal information but also constrain the model’s exploration space after SFT, thereby affecting the effectiveness of subsequent RL; and 2) the mismatch between single-task supervision and the diversity of multimodal reasoning paths leads to reasoning confusion, where models may exploit shortcuts by directly mapping input images to answers, bypassing the intended reasoning process. These issues further increase the complexity of multimodal reasoning and hinder the effective application of RL strategies. To address these challenges, we propose the PA-FAS framework with a reasoning path enhancement strategy for high-quality extended reasoning sequences construction based on limited annotated data to enrich the reasoning paths and alleviate exploration constraints. Additionally, we introduce an answer shuffling mechanism during SFT for comprehensive multimodal analysis rather than mining superficial cues, thus encouraging deeper reasoning and avoiding shortcut learning. Our method significantly improves multimodal reasoning accuracy and generalization, and successfully unifies multimodal fusion, cross-domain generalization, and interpretability towards trustworthy multimodal FAS.

PaperID: 2179, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08246

Authors:Ziyu Ma, Chenhui Gou, Yiming Hu, Yong Wang, Bohan Zhuang, Jianfei Cai

Affiliations: Alibaba Group, Data Science & AI Department, Faculty of IT, Monash University, ZIP Lab, Zhejiang University

Title: Where and What Matters: Sensitivity-Aware Task Vectors for Many-Shot Multimodal In-Context Learning

Abstract:
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown promising incontext learning (ICL) capabilities, but scaling to many-shot settings remains difficult due to limited context length and high inference cost. To address these challenges, task-vector-based methods have been explored by inserting compact representations of many-shot in-context demonstrations into model activations. However, existing task-vector-based methods either overlook the importance of where to insert task vectors or struggle to determine suitable values for each location. To this end, we propose a novel Sensitivity-aware Task Vector insertion framework (STV) to figure out where and what to insert. Our key insight is that activation deltas across query-context pairs exhibit consistent structural patterns, providing a reliable cue for insertion. Based on the identified sensitive-aware locations, we construct a pre-clustered activation bank for each location by clustering the activation values, and then apply reinforcement learning to choose the most suitable one to insert. We evaluate STV across a range of multimodal models (e.g., Qwen-VL, Idefics-2) and tasks (e.g., VizWiz, OK-VQA), demonstrating its effectiveness and showing consistent improvements over previous task-vector-based methods with strong generalization.

PaperID: 2180, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14681

Authors:Hyun-Jic Oh, Junsik Kim, Zhiyi Shi, Yichen Wu, Yu-An Chen, Peter K Sorger, Hanspeter Pfister, Won-Ki Jeong

Affiliations: Korea University, Harvard University, Harvard Medical School

Title: Virtual Multiplex Staining for Histological Images Using a Marker-Wise Conditioned Diffusion Model

Abstract:
Multiplex imaging is revolutionizing pathology by enabling the simultaneous visualization of multiple biomarkers within tissue samples, providing molecularlevel insights that traditional hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining cannot provide. However, the complexity and cost of multiplex data acquisition have hindered its widespread adoption. Additionally, most existing large repositories of H&E images lack corresponding multiplex images, limiting opportunities for multi-modal analysis. To address these challenges, we leverage recent advances in latent diffusion models (LDMs), which excel at modeling complex data distributions by utilizing their powerful priors for fine-tuning to a target domain. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for virtual multiplex staining that utilizes pretrained LDM parameters to generate multiplex images from H&E images using a conditional diffusion model. Our approach enables marker-by-marker generation by conditioning the diffusion model on each marker, while sharing the same architecture across all markers. To tackle the challenge of varying pixel value distributions across different marker stains and to improve inference speed, we fine-tune the model for single-step sampling, enhancing both color contrast fidelity and inference efficiency through pixel-level loss functions. We validate our framework on two publicly available datasets, notably demonstrating its effectiveness in generating up to 18 different marker types with improved accuracy, a substantial increase over the 2-3 marker types achieved in previous approaches. This validation highlights the potential of our framework, pioneering virtual multiplex staining. Finally, this paper bridges the gap between H&E and multiplex imaging, potentially enabling retrospective studies and large-scale analyses of existing H&E image repositories.

PaperID: 2181, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20058

Authors:Mingyang Ou, Haojin Li, Yifeng Zhang, Ke Niu, Zhongxi Qiu, Heng Li, Jiang Liu

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Computer School, Beijing Information Science and Technology University, Beijing China, Research Institute of Trustworthy Autonomous Systems, Faculty of Biomedical Engineering, Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology

Title: DeLightMono: Enhancing Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation in Endoscopy by Decoupling Uneven Illumination

Abstract:
Selfsupervised monocular depth estimation serves as a key task in the development of endoscopic navigation systems. However, performance degradation persists due to uneven illumination inherent in endoscopic images, particularly in low-intensity regions. Existing low-light enhancement techniques fail to effectively guide the depth network. Furthermore, solutions from other fields, like autonomous driving, require well-lit images, making them unsuitable and increasing data collection burdens. To this end, we present DeLightMono - a novel self-supervised monocular depth estimation framework with illumination decoupling. Specifically, endoscopic images are represented by a designed illumination-reflectance-depth model, and are decomposed with auxiliary networks. Moreover, a self-supervised joint-optimizing framework with novel losses leveraging the decoupled components is proposed to mitigate the effects of uneven illumination on depth estimation. The effectiveness of the proposed methods was rigorously verified through extensive comparisons and an ablation study performed on two public datasets.

PaperID: 2182, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.15033

Authors:Manav Prabhakar, Jwalandhar Girnar, Arpan Kusari

Affiliations: University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Title: Fractured Glass, Failing Cameras: Simulating Physics-Based Adversarial Samples for Autonomous Driving Systems

Abstract:
While much research has recently focused on generating physicsbased adversarial samples, a critical yet often overlooked category originates from physical failures within on-board cameras—components essential to the perception systems of autonomous vehicles. Camera failures, whether due to external stresses causing hardware breakdown or internal component faults, can directly jeopardize the safety and reliability of autonomous driving systems. Firstly, we motivate the study using two separate real-world experiments to showcase that indeed glass failures would cause the detection based neural network models to fail. Secondly, we develop a simulation-based study using the physical process of the glass breakage to create perturbed scenarios, representing a realistic class of physics-based adversarial samples. Using a finite element model (FEM)-based approach, we generate surface cracks on the camera image by applying a stress field defined by particles within a triangular mesh. Lastly, we use physically-based rendering (PBR) techniques to provide realistic visualizations of these physically plausible fractures. To assess the safety implications, we apply the simulated broken glass effects as image filters to two autonomous driving datasets- KITTI and BDD100K- as well as the large-scale image detection dataset MS-COCO. We then evaluate detection failure rates for critical object classes using CNN-based object detection models (YOLOv8 and Faster R-CNN) and a transformer-based architecture with Pyramid Vision Transformers. To further investigate the distributional impact of these visual distortions, we compute the Kullback-Leibler (K-L) divergence between three distinct data distributions, applying various broken glass filters to a custom dataset (captured through a cracked windshield), as well as the KITTI and Kaggle cats and dogs datasets. The K-L divergence analysis suggests that these broken glass filters do not introduce significant distributional shifts. Our goal is to provide a robust, physics-based methodology for generating adversarial samples that reflect real-world camera failures, with the overarching aim of improving the resilience and safety of autonomous driving systems against such physical threats.

PaperID: 2183, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16098

Authors:Jinyuan Qu, Hongyang Li, Xingyu Chen, Shilong Liu, Yukai Shi, Tianhe Ren, Ruitao Jing, Lei Zhang

Affiliations: Princeton University, International Digital Economy Academy (IDEA)

Title: SegDINO3D: 3D Instance Segmentation Empowered by Both Image-Level and Object-Level 2D Features

Abstract:
In this paper, we present SegDINO3D, a novel Transformer encoderdecoder framework for 3D instance segmentation. As 3D training data is generally not as sufficient as 2D training images, SegDINO3D is designed to fully leverage 2D representation from a pre-trained 2D detection model, including both image-level and object-level features, for improving 3D representation. SegDINO3D takes both a point cloud and its associated 2D images as input. In the encoder stage, it first enriches each 3D point by retrieving 2D image features from its corresponding image views and then leverages a 3D encoder for 3D context fusion. In the decoder stage, it formulates 3D object queries as 3D anchor boxes and performs cross-attention from 3D queries to 2D object queries obtained from 2D images using the 2D detection model. These 2D object queries serve as a compact object-level representation of 2D images, effectively avoiding the challenge of keeping thousands of image feature maps in the memory while faithfully preserving the knowledge of the pre-trained 2D model. The introducing of 3D box queries also enables the model to modulate cross-attention using the predicted boxes for more precise querying. SegDINO3D achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the ScanNetV2 and ScanNet200 3D instance segmentation benchmarks. Notably, on the challenging ScanNet200 dataset, SegDINO3D significantly outperforms prior methods by +8.7 and +6.8 mAP on the validation and hidden test sets, respectively, demonstrating its superiority.

PaperID: 2184, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13713

Authors:Xincheng Shuai, Zhenyuan Qin, Henghui Ding, Dacheng Tao

Affiliations: Fudan University, Nanyang Technological University

Title: Free-Form Scene Editor: Enabling Multi-Round Object Manipulation Like in a 3D Engine

Abstract:
Recent advances in textto-image (T2I) diffusion models have significantly improved semantic image editing, yet most methods fall short in performing 3D-aware object manipulation. In this work, we present FFSE, a 3D-aware autoregressive framework designed to enable intuitive, physically-consistent object editing directly on real-world images. Unlike previous approaches that either operate in image space or require slow and error-prone 3D reconstruction, FFSE models editing as a sequence of learned 3D transformations, allowing users to perform arbitrary manipulations, such as translation, scaling, and rotation, while preserving realistic background effects (e.g., shadows, reflections) and maintaining global scene consistency across multiple editing rounds. To support learning of multi-round 3D-aware object manipulation, we introduce 3DObjectEditor, a hybrid dataset constructed from simulated editing sequences across diverse objects and scenes, enabling effective training under multi-round and dynamic conditions. Extensive experiments show that the proposed FFSE significantly outperforms existing methods in both single-round and multi-round 3D-aware editing scenarios.

PaperID: 2185, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06665

Authors:Lingran Song, Yucheng Zhou, Jianbing Shen

Affiliations: University of Macau

Title: Sim4Seg: Boosting Multimodal Multi-disease Medical Diagnosis Segmentation with Region-Aware Vision-Language Similarity Masks

Abstract:
Despite significant progress in pixellevel medical image analysis, existing medical image segmentation models rarely explore medical segmentation and diagnosis tasks jointly. However, it is crucial for patients that models can provide explainable diagnoses along with medical segmentation results. In this paper, we introduce a medical vision-language task named Medical Diagnosis Segmentation (MDS), which aims to understand clinical queries for medical images and generate the corresponding segmentation masks as well as diagnostic results. To facilitate this task, we first present the Multimodal Multi-disease Medical Diagnosis Segmentation (M3DS) dataset, containing diverse multimodal multi-disease medical images paired with their corresponding segmentation masks and diagnosis chain-of-thought, created via an automated diagnosis chain-of-thought generation pipeline. Moreover, we propose Sim4Seg, a novel framework that improves the performance of diagnosis segmentation by taking advantage of the Region-Aware Vision-Language Similarity to Mask (RVLS2M) module. To improve overall performance, we investigate a test-time scaling strategy for MDS tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines in both segmentation and diagnosis.

PaperID: 2186, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.17753

Authors:Wenbin Tan, Jiawen Lin, Fangyong Wang, Yuan Xie, Yong Xie, Yachao Zhang, Yanyun Qu

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing, Ministry of Education of China, School of Informatics, Xiamen University, China School of Big Data, Tongren University, Hanjiang National Laboratory, School of Computer Science and Technology, East China Normal University, Department of Computer Science, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: PC-CrossDiff: Point-Cluster Dual-Level Cross-Modal Differential Attention for Unified 3D Referring and Segmentation

Abstract:
3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) aims to localize the referent of natural language referring expressions through two core tasks: Referring Expression Comprehension (3DREC) and Segmentation (3DRES). While existing methods achieve high accuracy in simple, singleobject scenes, they suffer from severe performance degradation in complex, multi-object scenes that are common in real-world settings, hindering practical deployment. Existing methods face two key challenges in complex, multi-object scenes: inadequate parsing of implicit localization cues critical for disambiguating visually similar objects, and ineffective suppression of dynamic spatial interference from co-occurring objects, resulting in degraded grounding accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose PC-CrossDiff, a unified dual-task framework with a dual-level cross-modal differential attention architecture for 3DREC and 3DRES. Specifically, the framework introduces: (i) Point-Level Differential Attention (PLDA) modules that apply bidirectional differential attention between text and point clouds, adaptively extracting implicit localization cues via learnable weights to improve discriminative representation; (ii) Cluster-Level Differential Attention (CLDA) modules that establish a hierarchical attention mechanism to adaptively enhance localization-relevant spatial relationships while suppressing ambiguous or irrelevant spatial relations through a localization-aware differential attention block. To address the scale disparity and conflicting gradients in joint 3DREC–3DRES training, we propose L_DGTL, a unified loss function that explicitly reduces multi-task crosstalk and enables effective parameter sharing across tasks. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ScanRefer, NR3D, and SR3D benchmarks. Notably, on the Implicit subsets of ScanRefer, it improves the Overall@0.50 score by +10.16% for the 3DREC task, highlighting its strong ability to parse implicit spatial cues.

PaperID: 2187, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05144

Authors:Chaolei Wang, Yang Luo, Jing Du, Siyu Chen, Yiping Chen, Ting Han

Affiliations: Sun Yat-sen University, University of Waterloo, Jimei University

Title: SGS-3D: High-Fidelity 3D Instance Segmentation via Reliable Semantic Mask Splitting and Growing

Abstract:
Accurate 3D instance segmentation is crucial for highquality scene understanding in the 3D vision domain. However, 3D instance segmentation based on 2D-to-3D lifting approaches struggle to produce precise instance-level segmentation, due to accumulated errors introduced during the lifting process from ambiguous semantic guidance and insufficient depth constraints. To tackle these challenges, we propose Splitting and Growing reliable Semantic mask for high-fidelity 3D instance segmentation (SGS-3D), a novel "split-then-grow" framework that first purifies and splits ambiguous lifted masks using geometric primitives, and then grows them into complete instances within the scene. Unlike existing approaches that directly rely on raw lifted masks and sacrifice segmentation accuracy, SGS-3D serves as a training-free refinement method that jointly fuses semantic and geometric information, enabling effective cooperation between the two levels of representation. Specifically, for semantic guidance, we introduce a mask filtering strategy that leverages the co-occurrence of 3D geometry primitives to identify and remove ambiguous masks, thereby ensuring more reliable semantic consistency with the 3D object instances. For the geometric refinement, we construct fine-grained object instances by exploiting both spatial continuity and high-level features, particularly in the case of semantic ambiguity between distinct objects. Experimental results on ScanNet200, ScanNet++, and KITTI-360 demonstrate that SGS-3D substantially improves segmentation accuracy and robustness against inaccurate masks from pre-trained models, yielding high-fidelity object instances while maintaining strong generalization across diverse indoor and outdoor environments.

PaperID: 2188, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.13425

Authors:Sirui Wang, Zhou Guan, Bingxi Zhao, Tongjia Gu, Jie Liu

Affiliations: Beijing Jiaotong University

Title: CaTFormer: Causal Temporal Transformer with Dynamic Contextual Fusion for Driving Intention Prediction

Abstract:
Accurate prediction of driving intention is key to enhancing the safety and interactive efficiency of humanmachine co-driving systems. It serves as a cornerstone for achieving high-level autonomous driving. However, current approaches remain inadequate for accurately modeling the complex spatiotemporal interdependencies and the unpredictable variability of human driving behavior. To address these challenges, we propose CaTFormer, a causal Temporal Transformer that explicitly models causal interactions between driver behavior and environmental context for robust intention prediction. Specifically, CaTFormer introduces a novel Reciprocal Delayed Fusion (RDF) mechanism for precise temporal alignment of interior and exterior feature streams, a Counterfactual Residual Encoding (CRE) module that systematically eliminates spurious correlations to reveal authentic causal dependencies, and an innovative Feature Synthesis Network (FSN) that adaptively synthesizes these purified representations into coherent temporal representations. Experimental results demonstrate that CaTFormer attains state-of-the-art performance on the Brain4Cars dataset. It effectively captures complex causal temporal dependencies and enhances both the accuracy and transparency of driving intention prediction.

PaperID: 2189, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18851

Authors:Yilin Wen, Kechuan Dong, Yusuke Sugano

Affiliations: The University of Tokyo

Title: Robust Long-Term Test-Time Adaptation for 3D Human Pose Estimation Through Motion Discretization

Abstract:
Online testtime adaptation addresses the train-test domain gap by adapting the model on unlabeled streaming test inputs before making the final prediction. However, online adaptation for 3D human pose estimation suffers from error accumulation when relying on self-supervision with imperfect predictions, leading to degraded performance over time. To mitigate this fundamental challenge, we propose a novel solution that highlights the use of motion discretization. Specifically, we employ unsupervised clustering in the latent motion representation space to derive a set of anchor motions, whose regularity aids in supervising the human pose estimator and enables efficient self-replay. Additionally, we introduce an effective and efficient soft-reset mechanism by reverting the pose estimator to its exponential moving average during continuous adaptation. We examine long-term online adaptation by continuously adapting to out-of-domain streaming test videos of the same individual, which allows for the capture of consistent personal shape and motion traits throughout the streaming observation. By mitigating error accumulation, our solution enables robust exploitation of these personal traits for enhanced accuracy. Experiments demonstrate that our solution outperforms previous online test-time adaptation methods and validate our design choices.

PaperID: 2190, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08079

Authors:Jiacheng Wu, Ruiqi Zhang, Jie Chen

Affiliations: Hong Kong Baptist University

Title: Deep Inverse Shading: Consistent Albedo and Surface Detail Recovery via Generative Refinement

Abstract:
Reconstructing human avatars using generative priors is essential for achieving versatile and realistic avatar models. Traditional approaches often rely on volumetric representations guided by generative models, but these methods require extensive volumetric rendering queries, leading to slow training. Alternatively, surfacebased representations offer faster optimization through differentiable rasterization, yet they are typically limited by vertex count, restricting mesh resolution and scalability when combined with generative priors. Moreover, integrating generative priors into physically based human avatar modeling remains largely unexplored. To address these challenges, we introduce DIS (Deep Inverse Shading), a unified framework for high-fidelity, relightable avatar reconstruction that incorporates generative priors into a coherent surface representation. DIS centers on a mesh-based model that serves as the target for optimizing both surface and material details. The framework fuses multi-view 2D generative surface normal predictions, rich in detail but often inconsistent, into the central mesh using a normal conversion module. This module converts generative normal outputs into per-triangle surface offsets via differentiable rasterization, enabling the capture of fine geometric details beyond sparse vertex limitations. Additionally, DIS integrates a de-shading module, informed by generative priors, to recover accurate material properties such as albedo. This module refines albedo predictions by removing baked-in shading and back-propagates reconstruction errors to further optimize the mesh geometry. Through this joint optimization of geometry and material appearance, DIS achieves physically consistent, high-quality reconstructions suitable for accurate relighting. Our experiments show that DIS delivers SOTA relighting quality, enhanced rendering efficiency, lower memory consumption, and detailed surface reconstruction.

PaperID: 2191, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05853

Authors:Qing Wu, Hongjiang Wei, Jingyi Yu, Yuyao Zhang

Affiliations: School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: Unsupervised Multi-Parameter Inverse Solving for Reducing Ring Artifacts in 3D X-Ray CBCT

Abstract:
Ring artifacts are prevalent in 3D conebeam computed tomography (CBCT) due to non-ideal responses of X-ray detectors, substantially affecting image quality and diagnostic reliability. Existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) ring artifact reduction (RAR) methods rely on supervised learning with large-scale paired CT datasets. While effective in-domain, supervised methods tend to struggle to fully capture the physical characteristics of ring artifacts, leading to pronounced performance drops in complex real-world acquisitions. Moreover, their scalability to 3D CBCT is limited by high memory demands. In this work, we propose Riner, a new unsupervised RAR method. Based on a theoretical analysis of ring artifact formation, we reformulate RAR as a multi-parameter inverse problem, where the non-ideal responses of X-ray detectors are parameterized as solvable physical variables. Using a new differentiable forward model, Riner can jointly learn the implicit neural representation of artifact-free images and estimate the physical parameters directly from CT measurements, without external training data. Additionally, Riner is memory-friendly due to its ray-based optimization, enhancing its usability in large-scale 3D CBCT. Experiments on both simulated and real-world datasets show Riner outperforms existing SOTA supervised methods.

PaperID: 2192, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11438

Authors:Mingjie Xu, Jinpeng Chen, Yuzhi Zhao, Jason Chun Lok Li, Yue Qiu, Zekang Du, Mengyang Wu, Pingping Zhang, Kun Li, Hongzheng Yang, Wenao Ma, Jiaheng Wei, Qinbin Li, Kangcheng Liu, Wenqiang Lei

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), City University of Hong Kong, The University of Hong Kong, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hunan University, Sichuan University

Title: VP-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Visual Prompting in Multimodal Large Language Models

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) have enabled a wide range of advanced visionlanguage applications, including fine-grained object recognition and contextual understanding. When querying specific regions or objects in an image, human users naturally use "Visual Prompts" (VP) like bounding boxes to provide reference. However, no existing benchmark systematically evaluates the ability of MLLMs to interpret such VPs. This gap raises uncertainty about whether current MLLMs can effectively recognize VPs, an intuitive prompting method for humans, and utilize them to solve problems. To address this limitation, we introduce VP-Bench, aiming to assess MLLMs’ capability in VP perception and utilization. VP-Bench employs a two-stage evaluation framework: Stage 1 examines models’ ability to perceive VPs in natural scenes, utilizing 100K visualized prompts spanning 8 shapes and 355 attribute combinations. Stage 2 investigates the impact of VPs on downstream tasks, measuring their effectiveness in real-world problem-solving scenarios. Using VP-Bench, we evaluate 21 MLLMs, including proprietary systems (e.g., GPT-4o) and open-source models (e.g., InternVL-2.5 and Qwen2.5-VL). In addition, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the factors influencing VP understanding, such as attribute variations and model scale. VP-Bench establishes a new reference framework for studying MLLMs’ ability to comprehend and resolve grounded referring questions.

PaperID: 2193, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12131

Authors:Quanxing Xu, Ling Zhou, Feifei Zhang, Rubing Huang, Jinyu Tian

Affiliations: Macau University of Science and Technology, Tianjin University of Technology

Title: OAD-Promoter: Enhancing Zero-Shot VQA Using Large Language Models with Object Attribute Description

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a crucial tool in Visual Question Answering (VQA) for handling knowledgeintensive questions in few-shot or zero-shot scenarios. However, their reliance on massive training datasets often causes them to inherit language biases during the acquisition of knowledge. This limitation imposes two key constraints on existing methods: (1) LLM predictions become less reliable due to bias exploitation, and (2) despite strong knowledge reasoning capabilities, LLMs still struggle with out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. To address these issues, we propose Object Attribute Description Promoter (OAD-Promoter), a novel approach for enhancing LLM-based VQA by mitigating language bias and improving domain-shift robustness. OAD-Promoter comprises three components: the Object-concentrated Example Generation (OEG) module, the Memory Knowledge Assistance (MKA) module, and the OAD Prompt. The OEG module generates global captions and object-concentrated samples, jointly enhancing visual information input to the LLM and mitigating bias through complementary global and regional visual cues. The MKA module assists the LLM in handling OOD samples by retrieving relevant knowledge from stored examples to support questions from unseen domains. Finally, the OAD Prompt integrates the outputs of the preceding modules to optimize LLM inference. Experiments demonstrate that OAD-Promoter significantly improves the performance of LLM-based VQA methods in few-shot or zero-shot settings, achieving new state-of-the-art results.

PaperID: 2194, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.00695

Authors:Xingguo Xu, Zhanyu Liu, Weixiang Zhou, Yuansheng Gao, Junjie Cao, Yuhao Wang, Jixiang Luo, Dell Zhang

Affiliations: School of Mathematical Sciences, Dalian University of Technology, College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, School of Future Technology, Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom

Title: STMI: Segmentation-Guided Token Modulation with Cross-Modal Hypergraph Interaction for Multi-Modal Object Re-Identification

Abstract:
Multimodal object Re-Identification (ReID) aims to exploit complementary information from different modalities to retrieve specific objects. However, existing methods often rely on hard token filtering or simple fusion strategies, which can lead to the loss of discriminative cues and increased background interference. To address these challenges, we propose STMI, a novel multi-modal learning framework consisting of three key components: (1) Segmentation-Guided Feature Modulation (SFM) module leverages SAM-generated masks to enhance foreground representations and suppress background noise through learnable attention modulation; (2) Semantic Token Reallocation (STR) module employs learnable query tokens and an adaptive reallocation mechanism to extract compact and informative representations without discarding any tokens; (3) Cross-Modal Hypergraph Interaction (CHI) module constructs a unified hypergraph across modalities to capture high-order semantic relationships. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks (i.e., RGBNT201, RGBNT100, and MSVR310) demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed STMI framework in multi-modal ReID scenarios.

PaperID: 2195, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21241

Authors:Xinjie Xu, Shuyu Cheng, Dongwei Xu, Qi Xuan, Chen Ma

Affiliations: Institute of Cyberspace Security, Zhejiang University of Technology, JQ Investments

Title: Improving the Convergence Rate of Ray Search Optimization for Query-Efficient Hard-Label Attacks

Abstract:
In hardlabel black-box adversarial attacks, where only the top-1 predicted label is accessible, the prohibitive query complexity poses a major obstacle to practical deployment. In this paper, we focus on optimizing a representative class of attacks that search for the optimal ray direction yielding the minimum ℓ₂-norm perturbation required to move a benign image into the adversarial region. Inspired by Nesterov's Accelerated Gradient (NAG), we propose a momentum-based algorithm, ARS-OPT, which proactively estimates the gradient with respect to a future ray direction inferred from accumulated momentum. We provide a theoretical analysis of its convergence behavior, showing that ARS-OPT enables more accurate directional updates and achieves faster, more stable optimization. To further accelerate convergence, we incorporate surrogate-model priors into ARS-OPT's gradient estimation, resulting in PARS-OPT with enhanced performance. The superiority of our approach is supported by theoretical guarantees under standard assumptions. Extensive experiments on ImageNet and CIFAR-10 demonstrate that our method surpasses 13 state-of-the-art approaches in query efficiency.

PaperID: 2196, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09944

Authors:Zhiyuan Xu, Min Nan, Yuhang Guo, Tong Wei

Affiliations: Southeast University

Title: TSPE-GS: Probabilistic Depth Extraction for Semi-Transparent Surface Reconstruction via 3D Gaussian Splatting

Abstract:
3D Gaussian Splattingbased geometry reconstruction is regarded as an excellent paradigm due to its favorable trade-off between speed and reconstruction quality. However, such 3D Gaussian-based reconstruction pipelines often face challenges when reconstructing semi-transparent surfaces, hindering their broader application in real-world scenes. The primary reason is the assumption in mainstream methods that each pixel corresponds to one specific depth—an assumption that fails under semi-transparent conditions where multiple surfaces are visible, leading to depth ambiguity and ineffective recovery of geometric structures. To address these challenges, we propose TSPE-GS (Transparent Surface Probabilistic Extraction for Gaussian Splatting), a novel probabilistic depth extraction approach that uniformly samples transmittance to model the multi-modal distribution of opacity and depth per pixel, replacing the previous single-peak distribution that caused depth confusion across surfaces. By progressively fusing truncated signed distance functions, TSPE-GS separately reconstructs distinct external and internal surfaces in a unified framework. Our method can be easily generalized to other Gaussian-based reconstruction pipelines, effectively extracting semi-transparent surfaces without requiring additional training overhead. Extensive experiments on both public and self-collected semi-transparent datasets, as well as opaque object datasets, demonstrate that TSPE-GS significantly enhances reconstruction accuracy for semi-transparent surfaces while maintaining reconstruction quality in opaque scenes.

PaperID: 2197, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08177

Authors:Zhonghao Yan, Muxi Diao, Yuxuan Yang, Ruoyan Jing, Jiayuan Xu, Kaizhou Zhang, Lele Yang, Yanxi Liu, Kongming Liang, Zhanyu Ma

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing Information Science and Technology University

Title: MedReasoner: Reinforcement Learning Drives Reasoning Grounding from Clinical Thought to Pixel-Level Precision

Abstract:
Accurately grounding regions of interest (ROIs) is critical for diagnosis and treatment planning in medical imaging. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) combine visual perception with natural language, current medicalgrounding pipelines still rely on supervised fine-tuning with explicit spatial hints, making them ill-equipped to handle the implicit queries common in clinical practice. This work makes three core contributions. We first define Unified Medical Reasoning Grounding (UMRG), a novel vision–language task that demands clinical reasoning and pixel-level grounding. Second, we release U-MRG-14K, a dataset of 14K samples featuring pixel-level masks alongside implicit clinical queries and reasoning traces, spanning 10 modalities, 15 super-categories, and 108 specific categories. Finally, we introduce MedReasoner, a modular framework that distinctly separates reasoning from segmentation: an MLLM reasoner is optimized with reinforcement learning, while a frozen segmentation expert converts spatial prompts into masks, with alignment achieved through format and accuracy rewards. MedReasoner achieves state-of-the-art performance on U-MRG-14K and demonstrates strong generalization to unseen clinical queries, underscoring the significant promise of reinforcement learning for interpretable medical grounding.

PaperID: 2198, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15967

Authors:Muyao Yuan, Yuanhong Zhang, Weizhan Zhang, Lan Ma, Yuan Gao, Jiangyong Ying, Yudeng Xin

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University, China Telecom, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Melbourne

Title: InfoCLIP: Bridging Vision-Language Pretraining and Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation via Information-Theoretic Alignment Transfer

Abstract:
Recently, the strong generalization ability of CLIP has facilitated openvocabulary semantic segmentation, which labels pixels using arbitrary text. However, existing methods that fine-tune CLIP for segmentation on limited seen categories often lead to overfitting and degrade the pretrained vision-language alignment. To stabilize modality alignment during fine-tuning, we propose InfoCLIP, which leverages an information-theoretic perspective to transfer alignment knowledge from pretrained CLIP to the segmentation task. Specifically, this transfer is guided by two novel objectives grounded in mutual information. First, we compress the pixel-text modality alignment from pretrained CLIP to reduce noise arising from its coarse-grained local semantic representations learned under image-text supervision. Second, we maximize the mutual information between the alignment knowledge of pretrained CLIP and the fine-tuned model to transfer compact local semantic relations suited for the segmentation task. Extensive evaluations across various benchmarks validate the effectiveness of InfoCLIP in enhancing CLIP fine-tuning for open-vocabulary semantic segmentation, demonstrating its adaptability and superiority in asymmetric transfer.

PaperID: 2199, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08945

Authors:Haowei Zhang, Yuanpei Zhao, Ji-Zhe Zhou, Mao Li

Affiliations: College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, China Engineering Research Center of Machine Learning and Industry Inteligence, Ministry of Education of China

Title: FGM-HD: Boosting Generation Diversity of Fractal Generative Models through Hausdorff Dimension Induction

Abstract:
Improving the diversity of generated results while maintaining high visual quality remains a significant challenge in image generation tasks. Fractal Generative Models (FGMs) are efficient in generating highquality images, but their inherent self-similarity limits the diversity of output images. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach based on the Hausdorff Dimension (HD), a widely recognized concept in fractal geometry used to quantify structural complexity, which aids in enhancing the diversity of generated outputs. To incorporate HD into FGM, we propose a learnable HD estimation method that predicts HD directly from image embeddings, addressing computational cost concerns. However, simply introducing HD into a hybrid loss is insufficient to enhance diversity in FGMs due to: 1) degradation of image quality, and 2) limited improvement in generation diversity. To this end, during training, we adopt an HD-based loss with a monotonic momentum-driven scheduling strategy to progressively optimize the hyperparameters, obtaining optimal diversity without sacrificing visual quality. Moreover, during inference, we employ HD-guided rejection sampling to select geometrically richer outputs. Extensive experiments on the ImageNet dataset demonstrate that our FGM-HD framework yields a 39% improvement in output diversity compared to vanilla FGMs, while preserving comparable image quality. To our knowledge, this is the very first work introducing HD into FGM. Our method effectively enhances the diversity of generated outputs while offering a principled theoretical contribution to FGM development.

PaperID: 2200, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09883

Authors:Liheng Zhang, Jin Wang, Hui Li, Bingfeng Zhang, Weifeng Liu

Affiliations: China University of Petroleum (East China), Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: HCC-3D: Hierarchical Compensatory Compression for 98% 3D Token Reduction in Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
3D understanding has drawn significant attention recently, leveraging VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) to enable multi-modal reasoning between point cloud and text data. Current 3D-VLMs directly embed the 3D point clouds into 3D tokens, following large 2D-VLMs with powerful reasoning capabilities. However, this framework has a great computational cost limiting its application, where we identify that the bottleneck lies in processing all 3D tokens in the Large Language Model (LLM) part. This raises the question: how can we reduce the computational overhead introduced by 3D tokens while preserving the integrity of their essential information? To address this question, we introduce Hierarchical Compensatory Compression (HCC-3D) to efficiently compress 3D tokens while maintaining critical detail retention. Specifically, we first propose a global structure compression (GSC), in which we design global queries to compress all 3D tokens into a few key tokens while keeping overall structural information. Then, to compensate for the information loss in GSC, we further propose an adaptive detail mining (ADM) module that selectively recompresses salient but under-attended features through complementary scoring. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HCC-3D not only achieves extreme compression ratios (approximately 98%) compared to previous 3D VLMs, but also achieves new state-of-the-art performance, showing the great improvements on both efficiency and performance.

PaperID: 2201, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12215

Authors:Peng Zhang, Zhihui Lai, Wenting Chen, Xu Wu, Heng Kong

Affiliations: Shenzhen University, Stanford University, Baoan Central Hospital of Shenzhen

Title: FaNe: Towards Fine-Grained Cross-Modal Contrast with False-Negative Reduction and Text-Conditioned Sparse Attention

Abstract:
Medical visionlanguage pre-training (VLP) offers significant potential for advancing medical image understanding by leveraging paired image-report data. However, existing methods are limited by False Negatives (FaNe) induced by semantically similar texts and insufficient fine-grained cross-modal alignment. To address these limitations, we propose FaNe, a semantic-enhanced VLP framework. To mitigate false negatives, we introduce a semantic-aware positive pair mining strategy based on text-text similarity with adaptive normalization. Furthermore, we design a text-conditioned sparse attention pooling module to enable fine-grained image-text alignment through localized visual representations guided by textual cues. To strengthen intra-modal discrimination, we develop a hard-negative aware contrastive loss that adaptively reweights semantically similar negatives. Extensive experiments on five downstream medical imaging benchmarks demonstrate that FaNe achieves state-of-the-art performance across image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, validating the effectiveness of our framework.

PaperID: 2202, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04062

Authors:Yichi Zhang, Wenbo Zhang, Zehui Ling, Gang Feng, Sisi Peng, Deshu Chen, Yuchen Liu, Hongwei Zhang, Shuqi Wang, Lanlan Li, Limei Han, Yuan Cheng, Zixin Hu, Yuan Qi, Le Xue

Affiliations: Shanghai Universal Medical Imaging Diagnostic Center, Fudan University

Title: PET2Rep: Towards Vision-Language Model-Drived Automated Radiology Report Generation for Positron Emission Tomography

Abstract:
Positron emission tomography (PET) is a cornerstone of modern oncologic and neurologic imaging, distinguished by its unique ability to illuminate dynamic metabolic processes that transcend the anatomical focus of traditional imaging technologies. Radiology reports are essential for clinical decision making, yet their manual creation is laborintensive and time-consuming. Recent advancements of vision-language models (VLMs) have shown strong potential in medical applications, presenting a promising avenue for automating report generation. However, existing applications of VLMs in the medical domain have predominantly focused on structural imaging modalities, while the unique characteristics of molecular PET imaging have largely been overlooked. To bridge the gap, we introduce PET2Rep, a large-scale comprehensive benchmark for evaluation of general and medical VLMs for radiology report generation for PET images. PET2Rep stands out as the first dedicated dataset for PET report generation with metabolic information, uniquely capturing whole-body image-report pairs that cover dozens of organs to fill the critical gap in existing benchmarks and mirror real-world clinical comprehensiveness. In addition to widely recognized natural language generation metrics, we introduce a series of clinical efficiency metrics to evaluate the quality of radiotracer uptake pattern description in key organs in generated reports. We conduct a head-to-head comparison of 30 cutting-edge general-purpose and medical-specialized VLMs. The results show that the current state-of-the-art VLMs perform poorly on PET report generation task, falling considerably short of fulfilling practical needs. Moreover, we identify several key insufficiency that need to be addressed to advance the development in medical applications. We believe PET2Rep will serve as a platform for the development and application of VLMs for PET imaging, accelerating the development of trustworthy reporting tools that can genuinely alleviate radiologist burden and enhance patient care.

PaperID: 2203, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08247

Authors:Haowen Zheng, Hu Zhu, Lu Deng, Weihao Gu, Yang Yang, Yanyan Liang

Affiliations: Macau University of Science and Technology, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, HAOMO.AI Technology Co., Institute for AI Industry Research, Tsinghua University, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Distilling Future Temporal Knowledge with Masked Feature Reconstruction for 3D Object Detection

Abstract:
Camerabased temporal 3D object detection has shown impressive results in autonomous driving, with offline models improving accuracy by using future frames. Knowledge distillation (KD) can be an appealing framework for transferring rich information from offline models to online models. However, existing KD methods overlook future frames, as they mainly focus on spatial feature distillation under strict frame alignment or on temporal relational distillation, thereby making it challenging for online models to effectively learn future knowledge. To this end, we propose a sparse query-based approach, Future Temporal Knowledge Distillation (FTKD), which effectively transfers future frame knowledge from an offline teacher model to an online student model. Specifically, we present a future-aware feature reconstruction strategy to encourage the student model to capture future features without strict frame alignment. In addition, we further introduce future-guided logit distillation to leverage the teacher's stable foreground and background context. FTKD is applied to two high-performing 3D object detection baselines, achieving up to 1.3 mAP and 1.3 NDS gains on the nuScenes dataset, as well as the most accurate velocity estimation, without increasing inference cost.

PaperID: 2204, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13138

Authors:Longhui Zheng, Qiming Xia, Xiaolu Chen, Zhaoliang Liu, Chenglu Wen

Affiliations: Xiamen University

Title: WinMamba: Multi-Scale Shifted Windows in State Space Model for 3D Object Detection

Abstract:
3D object detection is critical for autonomous driving, yet it remains fundamentally challenging to simultaneously maximize computational efficiency and capture longrange spatial dependencies.We observed that Mamba-based models, with their linear state-space design, capture long-range dependencies at lower cost, offering a promising balance between efficiency and accuracy.However, existing methods rely on axis-aligned scanning within a fixed window, inevitably discarding spatial information. To address this problem, we propose WinMamba, a novel Mamba-based 3D feature-encoding backbone composed of stacked WinMamba blocks. To enhance the backbone with robust multi-scale representation, the WinMamba block incorporates a window-scale-adaptive module that compensates voxel features across varying resolutions during sampling. Meanwhile, to obtain rich contextual cues within the linear state space, we equip the WinMamba layer with a learnable positional encoding and a window-shift strategy.Extensive experiments on the KITTI and Waymo datasets demonstrate that WinMamba significantly outperforms the baseline. Ablation studies further validate the individual contributions of the WSF and AWF modules in improving detection accuracy. The code will be made publicly available.

PaperID: 2205, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23752

Authors:Jin Zhou, Yi Zhou, Hongliang Yang, Pengfei Xu, Hui Huang

Affiliations: Shenzhen University

Title: StrokeFusion: Vector Sketch Generation via Joint Stroke-UDF Encoding and Latent Sequence Diffusion

Abstract:
In the field of sketch generation, rasterformat trained models often produce non-stroke artifacts, while vector-format trained models typically lack a holistic understanding of sketches, leading to compromised recognizability. Moreover, existing methods struggle to extract common features from similar elements (e.g., eyes of animals) appearing at varying positions across sketches. To address these challenges, we propose StrokeFusion, a two-stage framework for vector sketch generation. It contains a dual-modal sketch feature learning network that maps strokes into a high-quality latent space. This network decomposes sketches into normalized strokes and jointly encodes stroke sequences with Unsigned Distance Function (UDF) maps, representing sketches as sets of stroke feature vectors. Building upon this representation, our framework exploits a stroke-level latent diffusion model that simultaneously adjusts stroke position, scale, and trajectory during generation. This enables high-fidelity stroke generation while supporting stroke interpolation editing. Extensive experiments across multiple sketch datasets, demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art techniques, validating its effectiveness in preserving structural integrity and semantic features.

PaperID: 2206, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04566

Authors:Jinxing Zhou, Ziheng Zhou, Yanghao Zhou, Yuxin Mao, Zhangling Duan, Dan Guo

Affiliations: Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei University of Technology, National University of Singapore, OpenNLP Lab, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center

Title: CLASP: Cross-modal Salient Anchor-based Semantic Propagation for Weakly-supervised Dense Audio-Visual Event Localization

Abstract:
The Dense AudioVisual Event Localization (DAVEL) task aims to temporally localize events in untrimmed videos that occur simultaneously in both the audio and visual modalities. This paper explores DAVEL under a new and more challenging weakly-supervised setting (W-DAVEL task), where only video-level event labels are provided and the temporal boundaries of each event are unknown. We address W-DAVEL by exploiting cross-modal salient anchors, which are defined as reliable timestamps that are well predicted under weak supervision and exhibit highly consistent event semantics across audio and visual modalities. Specifically, we propose a Mutual Event Agreement Evaluation module, which generates an agreement score by measuring the discrepancy between the predicted audio and visual event classes. Then, the agreement score is utilized in a Cross-modal Salient Anchor Identification module, which identifies the audio and visual anchor features through global-video and local temporal window identification mechanisms. The anchor features after multimodal integration are fed into an Anchor-based Temporal Propagation module to enhance event semantic encoding in the original temporal audio and visual features, facilitating better temporal localization under weak supervision. We establish benchmarks for W-DAVEL on both the UnAV-100 and ActivityNet1.3 datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

PaperID: 2207, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07029

Authors:Liang Zhou, Qiming Wang, Tianze Chen

Affiliations: Hohai University

Title: Certified L2-Norm Robustness of 3D Point Cloud Recognition in the Frequency Domain

Abstract:
3D point cloud classification is a fundamental task in safetycritical applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and augmented reality. However, recent studies reveal that point cloud classifiers are vulnerable to structured adversarial perturbations and geometric corruptions, posing risks to their deployment in safety-critical scenarios. Existing certified defenses limit point-wise perturbations but overlook subtle geometric distortions that preserve individual points yet alter the overall structure, potentially leading to misclassification. In this work, we propose FreqCert, a novel certification framework that departs from conventional spatial domain defenses by shifting robustness analysis to the frequency domain, enabling structured certification against global l2-bounded perturbations. FreqCert first transforms the input point cloud via the graph Fourier transform (GFT), then applies structured frequency-aware subsampling to generate multiple sub-point clouds. Each sub-cloud is independently classified by a standard model, and the final prediction is obtained through majority voting, where sub-clouds are constructed based on spectral similarity rather than spatial proximity, making the partitioning more stable under l2 perturbations and better aligned with the object’s intrinsic structure. We derive a closed-form lower bound on the certified l2 robustness radius and prove its tightness under minimal and interpretable assumptions, establishing a theoretical foundation for frequency domain certification. Extensive experiments on the ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN datasets demonstrate that FreqCert consistently achieves higher certified accuracy and empirical accuracy under strong perturbations. Our results suggest that spectral representations provide an effective pathway toward certifiable robustness in 3D point cloud recognition.

PaperID: 2208, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15221

Authors:Xiyu Zhu, Wei Wang, Xin Yuan, Xiao Wang

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology

Title: SLCFormer: Spectral-Local Context Transformer with Physics-Grounded Flare Synthesis for Nighttime Flare Removal

Abstract:
Lens flare is a common nighttime artifact caused by strong light sources scattering within camera lenses, leading to hazy streaks, halos, and glare that degrade visual quality. However, existing methods usually fail to effectively address nonuniform scattered flares, which severely reduces their applicability to complex realworld scenarios with diverse lighting conditions.To address this issue, we propose SLCFormer, a novel spectral-local context transformer framework for effective nighttime lens flare removal. SLCFormer integrates two key modules: the Frequency Fourier and Excitation Module (FFEM), which captures efficient global contextual representations in the frequency domain to model flare characteristics, and the Directionally-Enhanced Spatial Module (DESM) for local structural enhancement and directional features in the spatial domain for precise flare removal. Furthermore, we introduce a ZernikeVAE-based scatter flare generation pipeline to synthesize physically realistic scatter flares with spatially varying PSFs, bridging optical physics and data-driven training. Extensive experiments on the Flare7K++ dataset demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing approaches in both quantitative metrics and perceptual visual quality, and generalizing robustly to real nighttime scenes with complex flare artifacts.

PaperID: 2209, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.24374

Authors:Yuda Zou, Zijian Zhang, Yongchao Xu

Affiliations: National Engineering Research Center for Multimedia Software, Institute of Artificial Intelligence, School of Computer Science, Hubei Luojia Laboratory, Wuhan University, Wuhan China

Title: Decoupling What to Count and Where to See for Referring Expression Counting

Abstract:
Referring Expression Counting (REC) extends classlevel object counting to the fine-grained subclass-level, aiming to enumerate objects matching a textual expression that specifies both the class and distinguishing attribute. A fundamental challenge, however, has been overlooked: annotation points are typically placed on class-representative locations (e.g., heads), forcing models to focus on class-level features while neglecting attribute information from other visual regions (e.g., legs for ''walking''). To address this, we propose W2-Net, a novel framework that explicitly decouples the problem into ''what to count'' and ''where to see'' via a dual-query mechanism. Specifically, alongside the standard what-to-count (w2c) queries that localize the object, we introduce dedicated where-to-see (w2s) queries. The w2s queries are guided to seek and extract features from attribute-specific visual regions, enabling precise subclass discrimination. Furthermore, we introduce Subclass Separable Matching (SSM), a novel matching strategy that incorporates a repulsive force to enhance inter-subclass separability during label assignment. W2-Net significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on the REC-8K dataset, reducing counting error by 22.5% (validation) and 18.0% (test), and improving localization F1 by 7% and 8%, respectively.

PaperID: 2210, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.18204

Authors:Haoyue Bai, Guodong Chen, Wangyang Ying, Xinyuan Wang, Nanxu Gong, Sixun Dong, Giulia Pedrielli, Haoyu Wang, Haifeng Chen, Yanjie Fu

Affiliations: Arizona State University, University of California Berkeley Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NEC Labs America

Title: Brownian Bridge Augmented Surrogate Simulation and Injection Planning for Geological CO2 Storage

Abstract:
Geological CO2 storage (GCS) involves injecting captured CO2 into deep subsurface formations to support climate goals. The effective management of GCS relies on adaptive injection planning to dynamically control injection rates and well pressures to balance both storage safety and efficiency. Prior literature, including numerical optimization methods and surrogateoptimization methods, is limited by real-world GCS requirements of smooth state transitions and goal-directed planning within limited time. To address these limitations, we propose a Brownian Bridge–augmented framework for surrogate simulation and injection planning in GCS and develop two insights (i) Brownian bridge as smooth state regularizer for better surrogate simulator; (ii) Brownian bridge as goal-time-conditioned planning guidance for better injection planning. Our method has three stages: (i) learning deep Brownian bridge representations with contrastive and reconstructive losses from historical reservoir and utility trajectories, (ii) incorporating Brownian bridge-based next state interpolation for simulator regularization (iii) guiding injection planning with Brownian utility-conditioned trajectories to generate high-quality injection plans. Experimental results across multiple datasets collected from diverse GCS settings demonstrate that our framework consistently improves simulation fidelity and planning effectiveness while maintaining low computational overhead.

PaperID: 2211, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18958

Authors:Qisen Chai, Yansong Wang, Junjie Huang, Tao Jia

Affiliations: Southwest University

Title: Learning to Compress Graphs via Dual Agents for Consistent Topological Robustness Evaluation

Abstract:
As graphstructured data grow increasingly large, evaluating their robustness under adversarial attacks becomes computationally expensive and difficult to scale. To address this challenge, we propose to compress graphs into compact representations that preserve both topological structure and robustness profile, enabling efficient and reliable evaluation.We propose Cutter, a dual-agent reinforcement learning framework composed of a Vital Detection Agent (VDA) and a Redundancy Detection Agent (RDA), which collaboratively identify structurally vital and redundant nodes for guided compression. Cutter incorporates three key strategies to enhance learning efficiency and compression quality: trajectory-level reward shaping to transform sparse trajectory returns into dense, policy-equivalent learning signals; prototype-based shaping to guide decisions using behavioral patterns from both highand low-return trajectories; and cross-agent imitation to enable safer and more transferable exploration. Experiments on multiple real-world graphs demonstrate that Cutter generates compressed graphs that retain essential static topological properties and exhibit robustness degradation trends highly consistent with the original graphs under various attack scenarios, thereby significantly improving evaluation efficiency without compromising assessment fidelity.

PaperID: 2212, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12386

Authors:Jundong Chen, Honglei Zhang, Chunxu Zhang, Fangyuan Luo, Yidong Li

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Big Data & Artificial Intelligence in Transportation, Ministry of Education, China Beijing Jiaotong University, Jilin University, Beijing University of Technology

Title: Breaking the Aggregation Bottleneck in Federated Recommendation: A Personalized Model Merging Approach

Abstract:
Federated recommendation (FR) facilitates collaborative training by aggregating local models from massive devices, enabling clientspecific personalization while ensuring privacy. However, we empirically and theoretically demonstrate that server-side aggregation can undermine client-side personalization, leading to suboptimal performance, i.e., the aggregation bottleneck. This issue stems from the inherent heterogeneity across numerous clients in FR, which drives the global model to deviate from local optima. To this end, we propose FedEM, which elastically merges the global and local models to compensate for impaired personalization. Unlike existing personalized federated recommendation (pFR) methods, FedEM (1) investigates the aggregation bottleneck in FR through theoretical insights, rather than relying on heuristic analysis; (2) leverages off-the-shelf local models rather than designing additional mechanisms to boost personalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method preserves client personalization during collaborative training, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 2213, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.22879

Authors:Xingcheng Fu, Shengpeng Wang, Yisen Gao, Xianxian Li, Chunpei Li, Qingyun Sun, Dongran Yu

Affiliations: Guangxi Normal University

Title: Towards LLM-Empowered Knowledge Tracing via LLM-Student Hierarchical Behavior Alignment in Hyperbolic Space

Abstract:
Knowledge Tracing (KT) diagnoses students’ concept mastery through continuous learning state monitoring in education. Existing methods primarily focus on studying behavioral sequences based on ID or textual information. While existing methods rely on ID-based sequences or shallow textual features, they often fail to capture (1) the hierarchical evolution of cognitive states and (2) individualized prob- lem difficulty perception due to limited semantic modeling. Therefore, this paper proposes a Large Language Model Hyperbolic Aligned Knowledge Tracing(L-HAKT). First, the teacher agent deeply parses question semantics and explicitly constructs hierarchical dependencies of knowledge points; the student agent simulates learning behaviors to generate synthetic data. Then, contrastive learning is performed between synthetic and real data in hyperbolic space to reduce distribution differences in key features such as question difficulty and forgetting patterns. Finally, by optimizing hyperbolic curvature, we explicitly model the tree-like hierarchical structure of knowledge points, precisely characterizing differences in learning curve morphology for knowledge points at different levels. Extensive experiments on four real-world educational datasets validate the effectiveness of our Large Language Model Hyperbolic Aligned Knowledge Tracing (L-HAKT) framework.

PaperID: 2214, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.22266

Authors:Bing Hao, Minglai Shao, Zengyi Wo, Yunlong Chu, Yuhang Liu, Ruijie Wang

Affiliations: School of New Media and Communication, Tianjin University, Beihang University, China Key Lab of Education Blockchain and Intelligent Technology, Ministry of Education, Guangxi Normal University, School of Computer Science and Technology

Title: LLMTM: Benchmarking and Optimizing LLMs for Temporal Motif Analysis in Dynamic Graphs

Abstract:
The widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs) has motivated a growing interest in their capacity for processing dynamic graphs. Temporal motifs, as an elementary unit and important local property of dynamic graphs which can directly reflect anomalies and unique phenomena, are essential for understanding their evolutionary dynamics and structural features. However, leveraging LLMs for temporal motif analysis on dynamic graphs remains relatively unexplored. In this paper, we systematically study LLM performance on temporal motifrelated tasks. Specifically, we propose a comprehensive benchmark, LLMTM (Large Language Models in Temporal Motifs), which includes six tailored tasks across nine temporal motif types. We then conduct extensive experiments to analyze the impacts of different prompting techniques and LLMs (including nine models: openPangu-7B, the DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen series, Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct, GPT-4o-mini, DeepSeek-R1, and o3) on model performance. Informed by our benchmark findings, we develop a tool-augmented LLM agent that leverages precisely engineered prompts to solve these tasks with high accuracy. Nevertheless, the high accuracy of the agent incurs a substantial cost. To address this trade-off, we propose a simple yet effective structure-aware dispatcher that considers both the dynamic graph's structural properties and the LLM's cognitive load to intelligently dispatch queries between the standard LLM prompting and the more powerful agent. Our experiments demonstrate that the structure-aware dispatcher effectively maintains high accuracy while reducing cost.

PaperID: 2215, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14256

Authors:Yu Liu, Xixun Lin, Yanmin Shang, Yangxi Li, Shi Wang, Yanan Cao

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, Peking University, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: PathMind: A Retrieve-Prioritize-Reason Framework for Knowledge Graph Reasoning with Large Language Models

Abstract:
Knowledge graph reasoning (KGR) is the task of inferring new knowledge by performing logical deductions on knowledge graphs. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in complex reasoning tasks. Despite promising success, current LLMbased KGR methods still face two critical limitations. First, existing methods often extract reasoning paths indiscriminately, without assessing their different importance, which may introduce irrelevant noise that misleads LLMs. Second, while some methods leverage LLMs to dynamically explore potential reasoning paths, they require high retrieval demands and frequent LLM calls. To address these limitations, we propose PathMind, a novel framework designed to enhance faithful and interpretable reasoning by selectively guiding LLMs with important reasoning paths. Specifically, PathMind follows a "Retrieve-Prioritize-Reason" paradigm. First, it retrieves a query subgraph from KG through the retrieval module. Next, it introduces a path prioritization mechanism that identifies important reasoning paths using a semantic-aware path priority function, which simultaneously considers the accumulative cost and the estimated future cost for reaching the target. Finally, PathMind generates accurate and logically consistent responses via a dual-phase training strategy, including task-specific instruction tuning and path-wise preference alignment. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that PathMind consistently outperforms competitive baselines, particularly on complex reasoning tasks with fewer input tokens, by identifying essential reasoning paths.

PaperID: 2216, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07759

Authors:Xiaofan Tu, Tiantian Duan, Shuyi Miao, Hanwen Zhang, Yi Sun

Affiliations: Beihang University Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Future Blockchain and Privacy Computing, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: HiLoMix: Robust High- and Low-Frequency Graph Learning Framework for Mixing Address Association

Abstract:
As mixing services are increasingly being exploited by malicious actors for illicit transactions, mixing address association has emerged as a critical research task. A range of approaches have been explored, with graphbased models standing out for their ability to capture structural patterns in transaction networks. However, these approaches face two main challenges: label noise and label scarcity, leading to suboptimal performance and limited generalization. To address these, we propose HiLoMix, a graph-based learning framework specifically designed for mixing address association. First, we construct the Heterogeneous Attributed Mixing Interaction Graph (HAMIG) to enrich the topological structure. Second, we introduce frequency-aware graph contrastive learning that captures complementary structural signals from high- and low-frequency graph views. Third, we employ weak supervised learning that assigns confidence-based weights to noisy labels. Then, we jointly train high-pass and low-pass GNNs using both unsupervised contrastive signals and confidence-based supervision to learn robust node representations. Finally, we adopt a stacking framework to fuse predictions from multiple heterogeneous models, further improving generalization and robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that HiLoMix outperforms existing methods in mixing address association.

PaperID: 2217, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.19499

Authors:Xiangxu Wang, Tianhong Zhao, Wei Tu, Bowen Zhang, Guanzhou Chen, Jinzhou Cao

Affiliations: Shenzhen Technology University, Shenzhen University, Wuhan University

Title: Sat2Flow: A Structure-Aware Diffusion Framework for Human Flow Generation from Satellite Imagery

Abstract:
OriginDestination (OD) flow matrices are critical for urban mobility analysis, supporting traffic forecasting, infrastructure planning, and policy design. Existing methods face two key limitations: (1) reliance on costly auxiliary features (e.g., Points of Interest, socioeconomic statistics) with limited spatial coverage, and (2) fragility to spatial topology changes, where reordering urban regions disrupts the structural coherence of generated flows. We propose Sat2Flow, a structure-aware diffusion framework that generates structurally coherent OD flows using only satellite imagery. Our approach employs a multi-kernel encoder to capture diverse regional interactions and a permutation-aware diffusion process that maintains consistency across regional orderings. Through joint contrastive training linking satellite features with OD patterns and equivariant diffusion training enforcing structural invariance, Sat2Flow ensures topological robustness under arbitrary regional reindexing. Experiments on real-world datasets show that Sat2Flow outperforms physics-based and data-driven baselines in accuracy while preserving flow distributions and spatial structures under index permutations. Sat2Flow offers a globally scalable solution for OD flow generation in data-scarce environments, eliminating region-specific auxiliary data dependencies while maintaining structural robustness for reliable mobility modeling.

PaperID: 2218, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19363

Authors:Canran Xiao, Jiabao Dou, Zhiming Lin, Zong Ke, Liwei Hou

Affiliations: Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, Hong Kong Baptist University, Nankai University, National University of Singapore, Hunan University

Title: From Points to Coalitions: Hierarchical Contrastive Shapley Values for Prioritizing Data Samples

Abstract:
How should we quantify the value of each training example when datasets are large, heterogeneous, and geometrically structured? Classical DataShapley answers in principle, but its O(n!) complexity and point-wise perspective are ill-suited to modern scales. We propose Hierarchical Contrastive Data Valuation (HCDV), a three-stage framework that (i) learns a contrastive, geometry-preserving representation, (ii) organizes the data into a balanced coarse-to-fine hierarchy of clusters, and (iii) assigns Shapley-style pay-offs to coalitions via local Monte-Carlo games whose budgets are propagated downward. HCDV collapses the factorial burden to O(T∑ℓKℓ) = O(TKmax log n), rewards examples that sharpen decision boundaries, and regularizes outliers through curvature-based smoothness. We prove that HCDV approximately satisfies the four Shapley axioms with surplus loss O(η log n), enjoys sub-Gaussian coalition deviation Õ(1/√T), and incurs at most kε∞ regret for top-k selection. Experiments on four benchmarks — tabular, vision, streaming, and a 45 M-sample CTR task — plus the OpenDataVal suite show that HCDV lifts accuracy by up to +5 pp, slashes valuation time by up to 100×, and directly supports tasks such as augmentation filtering, low-latency streaming updates, and fair marketplace payouts.

PaperID: 2219, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05540

Authors:Yang Xu, Hang Zhang, Yixiao Ma, Ye Zhu, Kai Ming Ting

Affiliations: Nanjing University, Deakin University

Title: SCoNE: Spherical Consistent Neighborhoods Ensemble for Effective and Efficient Multi-View Anomaly Detection

Abstract:
The core problem in multiview anomaly detection is to represent local neighborhoods of normal instances consistently across all views. Recent approaches consider a representation of local neighborhood in each view independently, and then capture the consistent neighbors across all views via a learning process. They suffer from two key issues. First, there is no guarantee that they can capture consistent neighbors well, especially when the same neighbors are in regions of varied densities in different views, resulting in inferior detection accuracy. Second, the learning process has a high computational cost of O(N^2), rendering them inapplicable for large datasets. To address these issues, we propose a novel method termed Spherical Consistent Neighborhoods Ensemble (SCoNE). It has two unique features: (a) the consistent neighborhoods are represented with multi-view instances directly, requiring no intermediate representations as used in existing approaches; and (b) the neighborhoods have data-dependent properties, which lead to large neighborhoods in sparse regions and small neighborhoods in dense regions. The data-dependent properties enable local neighborhoods in different views to be represented well as consistent neighborhoods, without learning. This leads to O(N) time complexity. Empirical evaluations show that SCoNE has superior detection accuracy and runs orders-of-magnitude faster in large datasets than existing approaches.

PaperID: 2220, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.12950

Authors:Ming Yin, Zongsheng Cao, Qiqing Xia, Chenyang Tu, Neng Gao

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Department of Information Science, Tsinghua University, Chinese Academy of Sciences State Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Security Defense

Title: NumCoKE: Ordinal-Aware Numerical Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs with Mixture-of-Experts and Contrastive Learning

Abstract:
Knowledge graphs (KGs) serve as a vital backbone for a wide range of AI applications, including natural language understanding and recommendation. A promising yet underexplored direction is numerical reasoning over KGs, which involves inferring new facts by leveraging not only symbolic triples but also numerical attribute values (e.g., length, weight). However, existing methods fall short in two key aspects: (1) Incomplete semantic integration: Most models struggle to jointly encode entities, relations, and numerical attributes in a unified representation space, limiting their ability to extract relationaware semantics from numeric information. (2) Ordinal indistinguishability: Due to subtle differences between close values and sampling imbalance, models often fail to capture fine-grained ordinal relationships (e.g., longer, heavier), especially in the presence of hard negatives. To address these challenges, we propose NumCoKE—a numerical reasoning framework for KGs based on Mixture-of-Experts and Ordinal Contrastive Embedding. To overcome (C1), we introduce a Mixture-of-Experts Knowledge-Aware (MoEKA) encoder that jointly aligns symbolic and numeric components into a shared semantic space, while dynamically routing attribute features to relation-specific experts. To handle (C2), we propose Ordinal Knowledge Contrastive Learning (OKCL), which constructs ordinal-aware positive and negative samples using prior knowledge, enabling the model to better discriminate subtle semantic shifts. Extensive experiments on three public KG benchmarks demonstrate that NumCoKE consistently outperforms competitive baselines across diverse attribute distributions, validating its superiority in both semantic integration and ordinal reasoning.

PaperID: 2221, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12453

Authors:Martin Jupakkal Andersen, Ioannis Caragiannis, Anders Bo Ipsen, Alexander Søltoft

Affiliations: Aarhus University

Title: Computing Approximately Proportional Allocations of Indivisible Goods: Beyond Additive and Monotone Valuations

Abstract:
Although approximate notions of envyfreeness—such as envy-freeness up to one good (EF1)—have been extensively studied for indivisible goods, the seemingly simpler fairness concept of proportionality up to one good (PROP1) has received far less attention. For additive valuations, every EF1 allocation is PROP1, and well-known algorithms such as round-robin and envy-cycle elimination compute such allocations in polynomial time. PROP1 is also compatible with Pareto efficiency, as maximum Nash welfare allocations are EF1 and hence PROP1. We ask whether these favorable properties extend to non-additive valuations. We study a broad class of allocation instances with satiating goods, where agents have non-negative valuation functions that need not be monotone, allowing for negative marginal values. We present the following results: --EF1 implies PROP1 for submodular valuations over satiating goods, ensuring existence and efficient computation via envy-cycle elimination for monotone submodular valuations; --Round-robin computes a partial PROP1 allocation after the second-to-last round for satiating submodular goods and a complete PROP1 for submodular monotone valuations; --PROP1 allocations for satiating subadditive goods can be computed in polynomial-time; --Maximum Nash welfare allocations are PROP1 for monotone submodular goods, revealing yet another facet of their ``unreasonable fairness.''

PaperID: 2222, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.00563

Authors:Gennaro Auricchio, Jie Zhang

Affiliations: University of Padua, University of Bath

Title: Designing Optimal Mechanisms to Locate Facilities with Insufficient Capacity for Bayesian Agents

Abstract:
In this paper, we study the Facility Location Problem with Scarce Resources (FLPSR) under the assumption that agents' type follows a probability distribution on [0,1]. In the FLPSR, the goal is to identify the optimal locations for one or more capacitated facilities to maximize Social Welfare (SW), defined as the sum of the utilities of all agents. Since the total capacity of the facilities is insufficient to serve all agents, they compete in a FirstCome-First-Served game to get accommodated. The main contribution of the paper ties Optimal Transport theory to the problem of selecting a truthful mechanism tailored to the agents' distributions. For the case of a single facility, we show that an optimal mechanism always exists. We examine three classes of probability distributions and characterize the optimal mechanism analytically or provide a routine to numerically compute it. We extend our results to the case in which we have two capacitated facilities to place. Initially, we assume that agents are independent and identically distributed, but our techniques generalize to scenarios where agents are not identically distributed. Finally, we validate our findings through several numerical experiments, including: (i) deriving optimal mechanisms for the class of beta distributions, (ii) assessing the Bayesian approximation ratio of these mechanisms for small numbers of agents, and (iii)assessing how quickly the expected mechanism SW converges to its limit.

PaperID: 2223, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.05925

Authors:Greg d'Eon, Hala Murad, Kevin Leyton-Brown, James R. Wright

Affiliations: University of British Columbia, University of Alberta

Title: ElementaryNet: A Non-Strategic Neural Network for Predicting Human Behavior in Normal-Form Games

Abstract:
Behavioral game theory models serve two purposes: yielding insights into how human decisionmaking works, and predicting how people would behave in novel strategic settings. A system called GameNet represents the state of the art for predicting human behavior in the setting of unrepeated simultaneous-move games, combining a simple "level-k" model of strategic reasoning with a complex neural network model of non-strategic "level-0" behavior. Although this reliance on well-established ideas from cognitive science ought to make GameNet interpretable, the flexibility of its level-0 model raises the possibility that it is able to emulate strategic reasoning. In this work, we prove that GameNet's level-0 model is indeed too general. We then introduce ElementaryNet, a novel neural network that is provably incapable of expressing strategic behavior. We show that these additional restrictions are empirically harmless, with ElementaryNet and GameNet having statistically indistinguishable performance. We then show how it is possible to derive insights about human behavior by varying ElementaryNet's features and interpreting its parameters, finding evidence of iterative reasoning, learning about the depth of this reasoning process, and showing the value of a rich level-0 specification.

PaperID: 2224, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.08008

Authors:Reda Ouhamma, Maryam Kamgarpour

Affiliations: EPFL - EPF Lausanne

Title: Learning in Zero-Sum Markov Games: Relaxing Strong Reachability and Mixing Time Assumptions

Abstract:
We address payoffbased decentralized learning in infinite-horizon zero-sum Markov games. In this setting, each player makes decisions based solely on received rewards, without observing the opponent's strategy or actions, nor sharing information. Prior works established polynomial-time convergence to an approximate Nash equilibrium under strong reachability and mixing time assumptions. We propose a convergent algorithm that significantly relaxes these assumptions, requiring only the existence of a single policy with bounded reachability and mixing time. Our key algorithmic novelty is introducing Tsallis entropy regularization to smooth the best-response policy updates. By suitably tuning this regularization, we ensure sufficient exploration, thus bypassing previous stringent assumptions on the MDP. We prove a polynomial-time convergence to an approximate Nash equilibrium by establishing novel properties of the value and policy updates induced by the Tsallis entropy regularizer.

PaperID: 2225, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.00783

Authors:Nathaniel Sauerberg, Caspar Oesterheld

Affiliations: University of Texas at Austin, Foundations of Cooperative AI Lab, Carnegie Mellon University

Title: Promises Made, Promises Kept: Safe Pareto Improvements via Ex Post Verifiable Commitments

Abstract:
A safe Pareto improvement (SPI) is a modification of a game that leaves all players better off with certainty. SPIs are typically proven under qualitative assumptions about the way different games are played. For example, we assume that strictly dominated strategies can be iteratively removed and that isomorphic games are played isomorphically. In this work, we study SPIs achieved through three types of ex post verifiable commitments promises about player behavior from which deviations can be detected by observing the game. First, we consider disarmament -- commitments not to play certain actions. Next, we consider SPIs based on token games. A token game is a game played by simply announcing an action (via cheap talk). As such, its outcome is intrinsically meaningless. However, we assume the players commit in advance to play specific (pure or correlated) strategy profiles in the original game as a function of the token game outcome. Under such commitments, the token game becomes a new, meaningful normal-form game. Finally, we consider default-conditional commitment: SPIs in settings where the players' default ways of playing the original game can be credibly revealed and hence the players can commit to act as a function of this default. We characterize the complexity of deciding whether SPIs exist in all three settings, giving a mixture of characterizations and efficient algorithms and \NP- and \textscGraph Isomorphism-hardness

PaperID: 2226, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07984

Authors:Ying Wang, Jiaqian Li, Tianze Wei, Hau Chan, Minming Li

Affiliations: Columbia University, Boston University, City University of Hong Kong, University of Nebraska

Title: Centralized Group Equitability and Individual Envy-Freeness in the Allocation of Indivisible Items

Abstract:
We study the fair allocation of indivisible items to groups of agents from the perspectives of both the agents and a centralized allocator. In our setting, the centralized allocator aims to ensure that the allocation is fair both among the groups and between individual agents. This setting applies to many realworld scenarios, such as when a school administrator allocates resources (e.g., office spaces and supplies) to staff members within departments or when a city council allocates limited housing units to families in need across different communities. To ensure fairness between agents, we consider the classical notion of envy-freeness (EF). To ensure fairness among groups, we introduce the notion of centralized group equitability (CGEQ), which captures fairness for groups from the centralized allocator’s perspective. Because an EF or CGEQ allocation does not always exist in general, we consider their natural relaxations: envy-freeness to one item (EF1) and centralized group equitability up to one item (CGEQ1). For different classes of valuation functions of the agents and the centralized allocator, we show that allocations satisfying both EF1 and CGEQ1 always exist, and we design efficient algorithms to compute such allocations. We also consider the centralized group maximin share (CGMMS) from the centralized allocator's perspective as a group-level fairness objective with EF1 for agents, and present several results.

PaperID: 2227, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.06976

Authors:Upasana Biswas, Vardhan Palod, Siddhant Bhambri, Subbarao Kambhampati

Affiliations: Arizona State University

Title: Who Is Helping Whom? Analyzing Inter-Dependencies to Evaluate Cooperation in Human-AI Teaming

Abstract:
Stateof-the-art methods for Human-AI Teaming and Zero-shot Cooperation focus on task completion i.e. task rewards, as the sole evaluation metric while being agnostic to `how' the two agents work with each other. Furthermore, subjective user studies only offer limited insight into the quality of cooperation existing within the team. Specifically, we are interested in understanding the cooperative behaviors arising within the team when trained agents are paired with humans - a problem that has been overlooked by the existing literature. To formally address this problem, we propose the concept of constructive interdependence - measuring how much agents rely on each other’s actions to achieve the shared goal - as a key metric for evaluating cooperation in human-agent teams. We measure interdependence in terms of action interactions in a STRIPS formalism, and define metrics that allow us to assess the degree of reliance between the agents' actions. We pair state-of-the-art agents with learned human models as well as human participants in a user study for the popular Overcooked domain, and evaluate the task reward and teaming performance for these human-agent teams. While prior work has claimed that state-of-the-art agents exhibit cooperative behavior based on their high task rewards, our results reveal that these agents often fail to induce cooperation, as evidenced by consistently low interdependence across teams. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that teaming performance is not necessarily correlated with task reward, highlighting that task reward alone cannot reliably measure cooperation arising in a human-agent team.

PaperID: 2228, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13237

Authors:Alan Gabriel Paredes Cetina, Kaouther Benguessoum, Raoni Lourenco, Sylvain Kubler

Affiliations: University of Luxembourg

Title: Counterfactual eXplainable AI (XAI) Method for Deep Learning-Based Multivariate Time Series Classification

Abstract:
Recent advances in deep learning have improved multivariate time series (MTS) classification and regression by capturing complex patterns, but their lack of transparency hinders decisionmaking. Explainable AI (XAI) methods offer partial insights, yet often fall short of conveying the full decision space. Counterfactual Explanations (CE) provide a promising alternative, but current approaches typically prioritize either accuracy, proximity or sparsity -- rarely all -- limiting their practical value. To address this, we propose CONFETTI, a novel multi-objective CE method for MTS. CONFETTI identifies key MTS subsequences, locates a counterfactual target, and optimally modifies the time series to balance prediction confidence, proximity and sparsity. This method provides actionable insights with minimal changes, improving interpretability, and decision support. CONFETTI is evaluated on seven MTS datasets from the UEA archive, demonstrating its effectiveness in various domains. CONFETTI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art CE methods in its optimization objectives, and in six other metrics from the literature, achieving ≥ 10% higher confidence while improving sparsity in ≥ 40%.

PaperID: 2229, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16590

Authors:Sen Chen, Tong Zhao, Yi Bin, Fei Ma, Wenqi Shao, Zheng Wang

Affiliations: Tongji University, Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy (SZ), Shanghai AI Laboratory

Title: D-GARA: A Dynamic Benchmarking Framework for GUI Agent Robustness in Real-World Anomalies

Abstract:
Developing intelligent agents capable of operating a wide range of Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) with humanlevel proficiency is a key milestone on the path toward Artificial General Intelligence. While most existing datasets and benchmarks for training and evaluating GUI agents are static and idealized, failing to reflect the complexity and unpredictability of real-world environments, particularly the presence of anomalies. To bridge this research gap, we propose D-GARA, a dynamic benchmarking framework, to evaluate Android GUI agent robustness in real-world anomalies. D-GARA introduces a diverse set of real-world anomalies that GUI agents commonly face in practice, including interruptions such as permission dialogs, battery warnings, and update prompts. Based on D-GARA framework, we construct and annotate a benchmark featuring commonly used Android applications with embedded anomalies to support broader community research. Comprehensive experiments and results demonstrate substantial performance degradation in state-of-the-art GUI agents when exposed to anomaly-rich environments, highlighting the need for robustness-aware learning. D-GARA is modular and extensible, supporting the seamless integration of new tasks, anomaly types, and interaction scenarios to meet specific evaluation goals.

PaperID: 2230, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05863

Authors:Yuning Chen, Sha Zhao, Shijian Li, Gang Pan

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Brain-Machine Intelligence, Zhejiang University

Title: EMOD: A Unified EEG Emotion Representation Framework Leveraging V-A Guided Contrastive Learning

Abstract:
Emotion recognition from EEG signals is essential for affective computing and has been widely explored using deep learning. While recent deep learning approaches have achieved strong performance on single EEG emotion datasets, their generalization across datasets remains limited due to the heterogeneity in annotation schemes and data formats. Existing models typically require datasetspecific architectures tailored to input structure and lack semantic alignment across diverse emotion labels. To address these challenges, we propose EMOD: A Unified EEG Emotion Representation Framework Leveraging Valence–Arousal (V–A) Guided Contrastive Learning. EMOD learns transferable and emotion-aware representations from heterogeneous datasets by bridging both semantic and structural gaps. Specifically, we project discrete and continuous emotion labels into a unified V–A space and formulate a soft-weighted supervised contrastive loss that encourages emotionally similar samples to cluster in the latent space. To accommodate variable EEG formats, EMOD employs a flexible backbone comprising a Triple-Domain Encoder followed by a Spatial-Temporal Transformer, enabling robust extraction and integration of temporal, spectral, and spatial features. We pretrain EMOD on 8 public EEG datasets and evaluate its performance on three benchmark datasets. Experimental results show that EMOD achieves the state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating strong adaptability and generalization across diverse EEG-based emotion recognition scenarios.

PaperID: 2231, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12844

Authors:Julia Santaniello, Matthew Russell, Benson Jiang, Donatello Sassaroli, Robert Jacob, Jivko Sinapov

Affiliations: Tufts University

Title: Towards Reinforcement Learning from Neural Feedback: Mapping fNIRS Signals to Agent Performance

Abstract:
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a methodology that aligns agent behavior with human preferences by integrating human feedback into the agent's training process. We introduce a possible framework that employs passive BrainComputer Interfaces (BCI) to guide agent training from implicit neural signals. We present and release a novel dataset of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) recordings collected from 25 human participants across three domains: a Pick-and-Place Robot, Lunar Lander, and Flappy Bird. We train classifiers to predict levels of agent performance (optimal, sub-optimal, or worst-case) from windows of preprocessed fNIRS feature vectors, achieving an average F1 score of 67% for binary classification and 46% for multi-class models averaged across conditions and domains. We also train regressors to predict the degree of deviation between an agent's chosen action and a set of near-optimal policies, providing a continuous measure of performance. We evaluate cross-subject generalization and demonstrate that fine-tuning pre-trained models with a small sample of subject-specific data increases average F1 scores by 17% and 41% for binary and multi-class models, respectively. Our work demonstrates that mapping implicit fNIRS signals to agent performance is feasible and can be improved, laying the foundation for future brain-driven RLHF systems.

PaperID: 2232, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12074

Authors:Xinyue Yu, Youqing Fang, Pingyu Wu, Guoyang Ye, Wenbo Zhou, Weiming Zhang, Song Xiao

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, Beijing Electronic Science and Technology Institute

Title: MF-Speech: Achieving Fine-Grained and Compositional Control in Speech Generation via Factor Disentanglement

Abstract:
Generating expressive and controllable human speech is one of the core goals of generative artificial intelligence, but its progress has long been constrained by two fundamental challenges: the deep entanglement of speech factors and the coarse granularity of existing control mechanisms. To overcome these challenges, we have proposed a novel framework called MFSpeech, which consists of two core components: MF-SpeechEncoder and MF-SpeechGenerator. MF-SpeechEncoder acts as a factor purifier, adopting a multi-objective optimization strategy to decompose the original speech signal into highly pure and independent representations of content, timbre, and emotion. Subsequently, MF-SpeechGenerator functions as a conductor, achieving precise, composable and fine-grained control over these factors through dynamic fusion and Hierarchical Style Adaptive Normalization (HSAN). Experiments demonstrate that in the highly challenging multi-factor compositional speech generation task, MF-Speech significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, achieving a lower word error rate (WER=4.67%), superior style control (SECS=0.5685, Corr=0.68), and the highest subjective evaluation scores (nMOS=3.96, sMOS_t=3.86, sMOS_e=3.78). Furthermore, the learned discrete factors exhibit strong transferability, demonstrating their significant potential as a general-purpose speech representation.

PaperID: 2233, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06836

Authors:Wenjiang Zhang, Sifeng Wang, Yuwei Su, Xinyu Li, Chen Zhang, Suyu Zhong

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China Queen Mary School Hainan, Hainan China

Title: NeuroBridge: Bio-Inspired Self-Supervised EEG-to-Image Decoding via Cognitive Priors and Bidirectional Semantic Alignment

Abstract:
Visual neural decoding seeks to reconstruct or infer perceived visual stimuli from brain activity patterns, providing critical insights into human cognition and enabling transformative applications in braincomputer interfaces and artificial intelligence. Current approaches, however, remain constrained by the scarcity of high-quality stimulus-brain response pairs and the inherent semantic mismatch between neural representations and visual content. Inspired by perceptual variability and co-adaptive strategy of the biological systems, we propose a novel self-supervised architecture, named NeuroBridge, which integrates Cognitive Prior Augmentation (CPA) with Shared Semantic Projector (SSP) to promote effective cross-modality alignment. Specifically, CPA simulates perceptual variability by applying asymmetric, modality-specific transformations to both EEG signals and images, enhancing semantic diversity. Unlike previous approaches, SSP establishes a bidirectional alignment process through a co-adaptive strategy, which mutually aligns features from two modalities into a shared semantic space for effective cross-modal learning. NeuroBridge surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods under both intra-subject and inter-subject settings. In the intra-subject scenario, it achieves the improvements of 12.3% in top-1 accuracy and 10.2% in top-5 accuracy, reaching 63.2% and 89.9% respectively on a 200-way zero-shot retrieval task. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and scalability of the proposed framework for neural visual decoding.

PaperID: 2234, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06840

Authors:Qunchao Jin, Yilin Wu, Changhao Chen

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Title: PanoNav: Mapless Zero-Shot Object Navigation with Panoramic Scene Parsing and Dynamic Memory

Abstract:
Zeroshot object navigation (ZSON) in unseen environments remains a challenging problem for household robots, requiring strong perceptual understanding and decision-making capabilities. While recent methods leverage metric maps and Large Language Models (LLMs), they often depend on depth sensors or prebuilt maps, limiting the spatial reasoning ability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Mapless ZSON approaches have emerged to address this, but they typically make short-sighted decisions, leading to local deadlocks due to a lack of historical context. We propose PanoNav, a fully RGB-only, mapless ZSON framework that integrates a Panoramic Scene Parsing module to unlock the spatial parsing potential of MLLMs from panoramic RGB inputs, and a Memory-guided Decision-Making mechanism enhanced by a Dynamic Bounded Memory Queue to incorporate exploration history and avoid local deadlocks. Experiments on the public navigation benchmark show that PanoNav significantly outperforms representative baselines in both SR and SPL metrics.

PaperID: 2235, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16517

Authors:Zirui Song, Guangxian Ouyang, Mingzhe Li, Yuheng Ji, Chenxi Wang, Zixiang Xu, Zeyu Zhang, Xiaoqing Zhang, Qian Jiang, Fengxian Ji, Zhenhao Chen, Zhongzhi Li, Xiuying Chen

Affiliations: Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, The Australian National University, Renmin University of China

Title: ManipLVM-R1: Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning in Embodied Manipulation with Large Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
Large VisionLanguage Models (LVLMs) have recently advanced robotic manipulation by leveraging vision for scene perception and language for instruction following. However, existing methods rely heavily on costly human-annotated training datasets, which limits their generalization and causes them to struggle in out-of-domain (OOD) scenarios, reducing real-world adaptability. To address these challenges, we propose ManipLVM-R1, a novel reinforcement learning framework that replaces traditional supervision with Reinforcement Learning using Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). By directly optimizing for task-aligned outcomes, our method enhances generalization and physical reasoning while removing the dependence on costly annotations. Specifically, we design two rule-based reward functions targeting key robotic manipulation subtasks: an Affordance Perception Reward to enhance localization of interaction regions, and a Trajectory Match Reward to ensure the physical plausibility of action paths. These rewards provide immediate feedback and impose spatial-logical constraints, encouraging the model to go beyond shallow pattern matching and instead learn deeper, more systematic reasoning about physical interactions. Experimental results show that ManipLVM-R1 achieves substantial performance gains across multiple manipulation tasks, using only 50% of the training data while achieving strong generalization to OOD scenarios. We further analyze the benefits of our reward design and its impact on task success and efficiency.

PaperID: 2236, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08935

Authors:Ningnan Wang, Weihuang Chen, Liming Chen, Haoxuan Ji, Zhongyu Guo, Xuchong Zhang, Hongbin Sun

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence National Engineering Research Center for Visual Information and Applications Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi'an Jiaotong University

Title: Expand Your SCOPE: Semantic Cognition over Potential-Based Exploration for Embodied Visual Navigation

Abstract:
Embodied visual navigation remains a challenging task, as agents must explore unknown environments with limited knowledge. Existing zeroshot studies have shown that incorporating memory mechanisms to support goal-directed behavior can improve long-horizon planning performance. However, they overlook visual frontier boundaries, which fundamentally dictate future trajectories and observations, and fall short of inferring the relationship between partial visual observations and navigation goals. In this paper, we propose Semantic Cognition Over Potential-based Exploration (SCOPE), a zero-shot framework that explicitly leverages frontier information to drive potential-based exploration, enabling more informed and goal-relevant decisions. SCOPE estimates exploration potential with a Vision-Language Model and organizes it into a spatio-temporal potential graph, capturing boundary dynamics to support long-horizon planning. In addition, SCOPE incorporates a self-reconsideration mechanism that revisits and refines prior decisions, enhancing reliability and reducing overconfident errors. Experimental results on two diverse embodied navigation tasks show that SCOPE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 4.6% in accuracy. Further analysis demonstrates that its core components lead to improved calibration, stronger generalization, and higher decision quality.

PaperID: 2237, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04063

Authors:Hongyin Zhang, Shiyuan Zhang, Junxi Jin, Qixin Zeng, Yifan Qiao, Hongchao Lu, Donglin Wang

Affiliations: University of California, Los Angeles, Westlake University, National Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, National Engineering Research Center for Visual Information and Applications, and Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi'an Jiaotong University

Title: Balancing Signal and Variance: Adaptive Offline RL Post-Training for VLA Flow Models

Abstract:
VisionLanguage-Action (VLA) models based on flow matching have shown excellent performance in general-purpose robotic manipulation tasks. However, the action accuracy of these models on complex downstream tasks is unsatisfactory. One important reason is that these models rely solely on the post-training paradigm of imitation learning, which makes it difficult to have a deeper understanding of the distribution properties of data quality, which is exactly what Reinforcement Learning (RL) excels at. In this paper, we theoretically propose an offline RL post-training objective for VLA flow models and induce an efficient and feasible offline RL fine-tuning algorithm −− Adaptive Reinforced Flow Matching (ARFM). By introducing an adaptively adjusted scaling factor in the VLA flow model loss, we construct a principled bias-variance trade-off objective function to optimally control the impact of RL signal on flow loss. ARFM adaptively balances RL advantage preservation and flow loss gradient variance control, resulting in a more stable and efficient fine-tuning process. Extensive simulation and real-world experimental results show that ARFM exhibits excellent generalization, robustness, few-shot learning, and continuous learning performance.

PaperID: 2238, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08303

Authors:Yang Zhang, Zhanxiang Cao, Buqing Nie, Haoyang Li, Zhong Jiangwei, Qiao Sun, Xiaoyi Hu, Xiaokang Yang, Yue Gao

Affiliations: MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence and AI Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Lenovo Research

Title: Keep On Going: Learning Robust Humanoid Motion Skills via Selective Adversarial Training

Abstract:
Humanoid robots are expected to operate reliably over long horizons while executing versatile wholebody skills. Yet Reinforcement Learning (RL) motion policies typically lose stability under prolonged operation, sensor/actuator noise, and real world disturbances. In this work, we propose a Selective Adversarial Attack for Robust Training (SA2RT) to enhance the robustness of motion skills. The adversary is learned to identify and sparsely perturb the most vulnerable states and actions under an attack-budget constraint, thereby exposing true weakness without inducing conservative overfitting. The resulting non-zero sum, alternating optimization continually strengthens the motion policy against the strongest discovered attacks. We validate our approach on the Unitree G1 humanoid robot across perceptive locomotion and whole-body control tasks. Experimental results show that adversarially trained policies improve the terrain traversal success rate by 40%, reduce the trajectory tracking error by 32%, and maintain long horizon mobility and tracking performance. Together, these results demonstrate that selective adversarial attacks are an effective driver for learning robust, long horizon humanoid motion skills.

PaperID: 2239, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08021

Authors:Bernardo Cuenca Grau, Eva Feng, Przemysław Andrzej Wałęga

Affiliations: University of Oxford, Queen Mary, University of London

Title: The Correspondence Between Bounded Graph Neural Networks and Fragments of First-Order Logic

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) address two key challenges in applying deep learning to graphstructured data: they handle varying size input graphs and ensure invariance under graph isomorphism. While GNNs have demonstrated broad applicability, understanding their expressive power remains an important question. In this paper, we propose GNN architectures that correspond precisely to prominent fragments of first-order logic (FO), including various modal logics as well as more expressive two-variable fragments. To establish these results, we apply methods from finite model theory of first-order and modal logics to the domain of graph representation learning. Our results provide a unifying framework for understanding the logical expressiveness of GNNs within FO.

PaperID: 2240, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.19546

Authors:Ethan Blaser, Shangtong Zhang

Affiliations: University of Virginia

Title: Asymptotic and Finite Sample Analysis of Nonexpansive Stochastic Approximations with Markovian Noise

Abstract:
Stochastic approximation is a powerful class of algorithms with celebrated success. However, a large body of previous analysis focuses on stochastic approximations driven by contractive operators, which is not applicable in some important reinforcement learning settings like the average reward setting. This work instead investigates stochastic approximations with merely nonexpansive operators. In particular, we study nonexpansive stochastic approximations with Markovian noise, providing both asymptotic and finite sample analysis. Key to our analysis are novel bounds of noise terms resulting from the Poisson equation. As an application, we prove for the first time that classical tabular average reward temporal difference learning converges to a samplepath dependent fixed point.

PaperID: 2241, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17601

Authors:Zhaolin Cai, Fan Li, Ziwei Zheng, Haixia Bi, Lijun He

Affiliations: Xinjiang University, Xi'an Jiaotong University

Title: HeadHunt-VAD: Hunting Robust Anomaly-Sensitive Heads in MLLM for Tuning-Free Video Anomaly Detection

Abstract:
Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) aims to locate events that deviate from normal patterns in videos. Traditional approaches often rely on extensive labeled data and incur high computational costs. Recent tuningfree methods based on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer a promising alternative by leveraging their rich world knowledge. However, these methods typically rely on textual outputs, which introduces information loss, exhibits normalcy bias, and suffers from prompt sensitivity, making them insufficient for capturing subtle anomalous cues. To address these constraints, we propose HeadHunt-VAD, a novel tuning-free VAD paradigm that bypasses textual generation by directly hunting robust anomaly-sensitive internal attention heads within the frozen MLLM. Central to our method is a Robust Head Identification module that systematically evaluates all attention heads using a multi-criteria analysis of saliency and stability, identifying a sparse subset of heads that are consistently discriminative across diverse prompts. Features from these expert heads are then fed into a lightweight anomaly scorer and a temporal locator, enabling efficient and accurate anomaly detection with interpretable outputs. Extensive experiments show that HeadHunt-VAD achieves state-of-the-art performance among tuning-free methods on two major VAD benchmarks while maintaining high efficiency, validating head-level probing in MLLMs as a powerful and practical solution for real-world anomaly detection.

PaperID: 2242, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06202

Authors:Chang Che, Ziqi Wang, Pengwan Yang, Cheems Wang, Hui Ma, Zenglin Shi

Affiliations: Hefei University of Technology, University of Amsterdam, Tsinghua University

Title: LoRA in LoRA: Towards Parameter-Efficient Architecture Expansion for Continual Visual Instruction Tuning

Abstract:
Continual Visual Instruction Tuning (CVIT) enables Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to incrementally learn new tasks over time. However, this process is challenged by catastrophic forgetting, where performance on previously learned tasks deteriorates as the model adapts to new ones. A common approach to mitigate forgetting is architecture expansion, which introduces taskspecific modules to prevent interference. Yet, existing methods often expand entire layers for each task, leading to significant parameter overhead and poor scalability. To overcome these issues, we introduce LoRA in LoRA (LiLoRA), a highly efficient architecture expansion method tailored for CVIT in MLLMs. LiLoRA shares the LoRA matrix A across tasks to reduce redundancy, applies an additional low-rank decomposition to matrix B to minimize task-specific parameters, and incorporates a cosine-regularized stability loss to preserve consistency in shared representations over time. Extensive experiments on a diverse CVIT benchmark show that LiLoRA consistently achieves superior performance in sequential task learning while significantly improving parameter efficiency compared to existing approaches.

PaperID: 2243, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10997

Authors:Jiajun Chen, Sai Cheng, Yuan Yutao, YiRui Zhang, Haitao Yuan, Peng Peng, Yi Zhong

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, National Technological University, Tsinghua University, Beijing Institute of Technology

Title: PROMISE: Prompt-Attentive Hierarchical Contrastive Learning for Robust Cross-Modal Representation with Missing Modalities

Abstract:
Multimodal models integrating natural language and visual information have substantially improved emotion recognition performance. However, their effectiveness significantly declines in realworld situations where certain modalities are missing or unavailable. This degradation primarily stems from inconsistent representation learning between complete multimodal data and incomplete modality scenarios. Existing approaches typically address missing modalities through relatively simplistic generation methods, yet these approaches fail to adequately preserve cross-modal consistency, leading to suboptimal performance. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel multimodal framework named PROMISE, a prompting-Attentive Hierarchical Contrastive Learning approach designed explicitly for robust cross-modal representation under conditions of missing modalities. Specifically, Promise innovatively incorporates multimodal prompt learning into a hierarchical contrastive learning framework, equipped with a specially designed prompting-attention mechanism. This mechanism dynamically generates robust and consistent representations for scenarios where particular modalities are absent, thereby effectively bridging the representational gap between complete and incomplete data. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets, along with comprehensive ablation studies, clearly demonstrate the superior performance of PROMISE compared to current state-of-the-art multimodal methods.

PaperID: 2244, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06805

Authors:Jinhao Chen, Zhen Yang, Jianxin Shi, Tianyu Wo, Jie Tang

Affiliations: Beihang University, Tsinghua University

Title: MathSE: Improving Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning via Self-Evolving Iterative Reflection and Reward-Guided Fine-Tuning

Abstract:
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in visionlanguage answering tasks. Despite their strengths, these models often encounter challenges in achieving complex reasoning tasks such as mathematical problem-solving. Previous works have focused on fine-tuning on specialized mathematical datasets. However, these datasets are typically distilled directly from teacher models, which capture only static reasoning patterns and leaving substantial gaps compared to student models. This reliance on fixed teacher-derived datasets not only restricts the model's ability to adapt to novel or more intricate questions that extend beyond the confines of the training data, but also lacks the iterative depth needed for robust generalization. To overcome these limitations, we propose MathSE, a Mathematical Self-Evolving framework for MLLMs. In contrast to traditional one-shot fine-tuning paradigms, MathSE iteratively refines the model through cycles of inference, reflection, and reward-based feedback. Specifically, we leverage iterative fine-tuning by incorporating correct reasoning paths derived from previous-stage inference and integrating reflections from a specialized Outcome Reward Model (ORM). To verify the effectiveness of MathSE, we evaluate it on a suite of challenging benchmarks, demonstrating significant performance gains over backbone models. Notably, our experimental results on MathVL-test surpass the leading open-source multimodal mathematical reasoning model QVQ.

PaperID: 2245, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18212

Authors:Xinrui Chen, Hongxing Zhang, Fanyi Zeng, Yongxian Wei, Yizhi Wang, Xitong Ling, Guanghao Li, Chun Yuan

Affiliations: Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, School of Information Science and Technology, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

Title: Prune&Comp: Free Lunch for Layer-Pruned LLMs via Iterative Pruning with Magnitude Compensation

Abstract:
Layer pruning is a viable technique for compressing large language models while achieving acceleration proportional to the pruning ratio. In this work, we identify that removing any layer induces a magnitude gap in hidden states, and demonstrate that a simple compensation operation leads to superior performance in iterative layer pruning. This key observation motivates us to propose Prune&Comp, a novel, plugand-play iterative layer pruning scheme that leverages magnitude compensation to mitigate such gaps in a training-free manner. Specifically, we first estimate the magnitude gap of layer removal and then eliminate it by rescaling the remaining weights offline. We further demonstrate the advantages of Prune&Comp in improving the stability of iterative pruning. When integrated with an iterative prune-and-compensate loop, Prune&Comp consistently enhances existing layer pruning metrics. For instance, when 5 layers of LLaMA-3-8B are pruned with the prevalent Taylor+ metric, Prune&Comp reduces PPL from 512.78 to 16.34 and retains 90.57% of the original performance across 9 question-answering tasks, outperforming the baseline by 24.72%.

PaperID: 2246, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12569

Authors:You Rim Choi, Subeom Park, Seojun Heo, Eunchung Noh, Hyung-Sin Kim

Affiliations: Seoul National University, Samsung Electronics

Title: Let the Void Be Void: Robust Open-Set Semi-Supervised Learning via Selective Non-Alignment

Abstract:
Openset semi-supervised learning (OSSL) leverages unlabeled data containing both in-distribution (ID) and unknown out-of-distribution (OOD) samples, aiming simultaneously to improve closed-set accuracy and detect novel OOD instances. Existing methods either discard valuable information from uncertain samples or force-align every unlabeled sample into one or a few synthetic “catch-all” representations, resulting in geometric collapse and overconfidence on only seen OODs. To address the limitations, we introduce selective non-alignment, adding a novel “skip” operator into conventional pull and push operations of contrastive learning. Our framework, SkipAlign, selectively skips alignment (pulling) for low-confidence unlabeled samples, retaining only gentle repulsion against ID prototypes. This approach transforms uncertain samples into a pure repulsion signal, resulting in tighter ID clusters and naturally dispersed OOD features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SkipAlign significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in detecting unseen OOD data without sacrificing ID classification accuracy.

PaperID: 2247, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02724

Authors:Yahia Dalbah, Marcel Worring, Yen-Chia Hsu

Affiliations: University of Amsterdam

Title: Veli: Unsupervised Method and Unified Benchmark for Low-Cost Air Quality Sensor Correction

Abstract:
Urban air pollution is a major health crisis causing millions of premature deaths annually, underscoring the urgent need for accurate and scalable monitoring of air quality (AQ). While lowcost sensors (LCS) offer a scalable alternative to expensive reference-grade stations, their readings are affected by drift, calibration errors, and environmental interference. To address these challenges, we introduce Veli (Reference free Variational Estimation via Latent Inference), an unsupervised Bayesian model that leverages variational inference to correct LCS readings without requiring co-location with reference stations, eliminating a major deployment barrier. Specifically, Veli constructs a disentangled representation of the LCS readings, effectively separating the true pollutant reading from the sensor noise. To build our model and address the lack of standardized benchmarks in AQ monitoring, we also introduce the Air Quality Sensor Data Repository (AQ-SDR). AQ-SDR is the largest AQ sensor benchmark to date, with readings from 23,737 LCS and reference stations across multiple regions. Veli demonstrates strong generalization across both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings, effectively handling sensor drift and erratic sensor behavior. Appendices are available in the extended version.

PaperID: 2248, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10735

Authors:Lin Du, Lu Bai, Jincheng Li, Lixin Cui, Hangyuan Du, Lichi Zhang, Yuting Chen, Zhao Li

Affiliations: Beijing Normal University, Central University of Finance and Economics, Shanxi University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Zhejiang Lab

Title: LGAN: An Efficient High-Order Graph Neural Network via the Line Graph Aggregation

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a dominant paradigm for graph classification. Specifically, most existing GNNs mainly rely on the message passing strategy between neighbor nodes, where the expressivity is limited by the 1dimensional Weisfeiler-Lehman (1-WL) test. Although a number of k-WL-based GNNs have been proposed to overcome this limitation, their computational cost increases rapidly with k, significantly restricting the practical applicability. Moreover, since the k-WL models mainly operate on node tuples, these k-WL-based GNNs cannot retain fine-grained node- or edge-level semantics required by attribution methods (e.g., Integrated Gradients), leading to the less interpretable problem. To overcome the above shortcomings, in this paper, we propose a novel Line Graph Aggregation Network (LGAN), that constructs a line graph from the induced subgraph centered at each node to perform the higher-order aggregation. We theoretically prove that the LGAN not only possesses the greater expressive power than the 2-WL under injective aggregation assumptions, but also has lower time complexity. Empirical evaluations on benchmarks demonstrate that the LGAN outperforms state-of-the-art k-WL-based GNNs, while offering better interpretability.

PaperID: 2249, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10843

Authors:Alex W. Goodall, Edwin Hamel-De Le Court, Francesco Belardinelli

Affiliations: Imperial College London

Title: Behaviour Policy Optimization: Provably Lower Variance Return Estimates for Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to highvariance return estimates. In this paper we leverage new results from off-policy evaluation; it has recently been shown that well-designed behaviour policies can be used to collect off-policy data for provably lower variance return estimates. This result is surprising as it means collecting data on-policy is not variance optimal. We extend this key insight to the online reinforcement learning setting, where both policy evaluation and improvement are interleaved to learn optimal policies. Off-policy RL has been well studied (e.g., IMPALA), with correct and truncated importance weighted samples for de-biasing and managing variance appropriately. Generally these approaches are concerned with reconciling data collected from multiple workers in parallel, while the policy is updated asynchronously, mismatch between the workers and policy is corrected in a mathematically sound way. Here we consider only one worker - the behaviour policy, which is used to collect data for policy improvement, with provably lower variance return estimates. In our experiments we extend two policy-gradient methods with this regime, demonstrating better sample efficiency and performance over a diverse set of environments.

PaperID: 2250, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.18929

Authors:Alan J.X. Guo, Mengyi Wei, Yufan Dai, Yali Wei, Pengchen Zhang

Affiliations: Tianjin University

Title: Disturbance-based Discretization, Differentiable IDS Channel, and an IDS-Correcting Code for DNA-based Storage

Abstract:
With recent advancements in nextgeneration data storage, especially in biological molecule-based storage, insertion, deletion, and substitution (IDS) error-correcting codes have garnered increased attention. However, a universal method for designing tailored IDS-correcting codes across varying channel settings remains underexplored. We present an autoencoder-based approach, THEA-code, aimed at efficiently generating IDS-correcting codes for complex IDS channels. In the work, a disturbance-based discretization is proposed to discretize the features of the autoencoder, and a simulated differentiable IDS channel is developed as a differentiable alternative for IDS operations. These innovations facilitate the successful convergence of the autoencoder, producing channel-customized IDS-correcting codes that demonstrate commendable performance across complex IDS channels, particularly in realistic DNA-based storage channels.

PaperID: 2251, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10923

Authors:Zhixia He, Chen Zhao, Minglai Shao, Xintao Wu, Xujiang Zhao, Dong Li, Qin Tian, Linlin Yu

Affiliations: Tianjin University, Baylor University, University of Arkansas, NEC Labs America, Augusta University

Title: Out-of-Distribution Detection with Positive and Negative Prompt Supervision Using Large Language Models

Abstract:
Outof-distribution (OOD) detection is committed to delineating the classification boundaries between in-distribution (ID) and OOD images. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable OOD detection performance by integrating both visual and textual modalities. In this context, negative prompts are introduced to emphasize the dissimilarity between image features and prompt content. However, these prompts often include a broad range of non-ID features, which may result in suboptimal outcomes due to the capture of overlapping or misleading information. To address this issue, we propose Positive and Negative Prompt Supervision, which encourages negative prompts to capture inter-class features and transfers this semantic knowledge to the visual modality to enhance OOD detection performance. Our method begins with class-specific positive and negative prompts initialized by large language models (LLMs). These prompts are subsequently optimized, with positive prompts focusing on features within each class, while negative prompts highlight features around category boundaries. Additionally, a graph-based architecture is employed to aggregate semantic-aware supervision from the optimized prompt representations and propagate it to the visual branch, thereby enhancing the performance of the energy-based OOD detector. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-1K, across eight OOD datasets and five different LLMs, demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 2252, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10573

Authors:Yi Huang, Qingyun Sun, Yisen Gao, Haonan Yuan, Xingcheng Fu, Jianxin Li

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong, Key Lab of Education Blockchain and Intelligent Technology, Ministry of Education, Guangxi Normal University

Title: Is the Information Bottleneck Robust Enough? Towards Label-Noise Resistant Information Bottleneck Learning

Abstract:
The Information Bottleneck (IB) principle facilitates effective representation learning by preserving labelrelevant information while compressing irrelevant information. However, its strong reliance on accurate labels makes it inherently vulnerable to label noise, prevalent in real-world scenarios, resulting in significant performance degradation and overfitting. To address this issue, we propose LaT-IB, a novel Label-Noise ResistanT Information Bottleneck method which introduces a "Minimal-Sufficient-Clean" (MSC) criterion. Instantiated as a mutual information regularizer to retain task-relevant information while discarding noise, MSC addresses standard IB’s vulnerability to noisy label supervision. To achieve this, LaT-IB employs a noise-aware latent disentanglement that decomposes the latent representation into components aligned with to the clean label space and the noise space. Theoretically, we first derive mutual information bounds for each component of our objective including prediction, compression, and disentanglement, and moreover prove that optimizing it encourages representations invariant to input noise and separates clean and noisy label information. Furthermore, we design a three-phase training framework: Warmup, Knowledge Injection and Robust Training, to progressively guide the model toward noise-resistant representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LaT-IB achieves superior robustness and efficiency under label noise, significantly enhancing robustness and applicability in real-world scenarios with label noise.

PaperID: 2253, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09100

Authors:Hiro Ishii, Kenta Niwa, Hiroshi Sawada, Akinori Fujino, Noboru Harada, Rio Yokota

Affiliations: Institute of Science Tokyo, NTT Communication Science Laboratories

Title: FedPM: Federated Learning Using Second-order Optimization with Preconditioned Mixing of Local Parameters

Abstract:
We propose Federated Preconditioned Mixing (FedPM), a novel Federated Learning (FL) method that leverages secondorder optimization. Prior methods - such as LocalNewton, LTDA, and FedSophia - have incorporated second-order optimization in FL by performing iterative local updates on clients and applying simple mixing of local parameters on the server. However, these methods often suffer from drift in local preconditioners, which significantly disrupts the convergence of parameter training, particularly in heterogeneous data settings. To overcome this issue, we refine the update rules by decomposing the ideal second-order update - computed using globally preconditioned global gradients - into parameter mixing on the server and local parameter updates on clients. As a result, our FedPM introduces preconditioned mixing of local parameters on the server, effectively mitigating drift in local preconditioners. We provide a theoretical convergence analysis demonstrating a superlinear rate for strongly convex objectives in scenarios involving a single local update. To demonstrate the practical benefits of FedPM, we conducted extensive experiments. The results showed significant improvements with FedPM in the test accuracy compared to conventional methods incorporating simple mixing, fully leveraging the potential of second-order optimization.

PaperID: 2254, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02073

Authors:Qirui Ji, Bin Qin, Yifan Jin, Yunze Zhao, Chuxiong Sun, Changwen Zheng, Jianwen Cao, Jiangmeng Li

Affiliations: Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: HTG-GCL: Leveraging Hierarchical Topological Granularity from Cellular Complexes for Graph Contrastive Learning

Abstract:
Graph contrastive learning (GCL) aims to learn discriminative semantic invariance by contrasting different views of the same graph that share critical topological patterns. However, existing GCL approaches with structural augmentations often struggle to identify taskrelevant topological structures, let alone adapt to the varying coarse-to-fine topological granularities required across different downstream tasks. To remedy this issue, we introduce Hierarchical Topological Granularity Graph Contrastive Learning (HTG-GCL), a novel framework that leverages transformations of the same graph to generate multi-scale ring-based cellular complexes, embodying the concept of topological granularity, thereby generating diverse topological views. Recognizing that a certain granularity may contain misleading semantics, we propose a multi-granularity decoupled contrast and apply a granularity-specific weighting mechanism based on uncertainty estimation. Comprehensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of HTG-GCL, highlighting its superior performance in capturing meaningful graph representations through hierarchical topological information.

PaperID: 2255, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23830

Authors:Linglin Jing, Yuting Gao, Zhigang Wang, Wang Lan, Yiwen Tang, Weiyun Wang, Wenhai Wang, Qingpei Guo

Affiliations: Shanghai AI Lab, Ant Group

Title: EvoMoE: Expert Evolution in Mixture of Experts for Multimodal Large Language Models

Abstract:
Recent advancements have shown that the Mixture of Experts (MoE) approach significantly enhances the capacity of large language models (LLMs) and improves performance on downstream tasks. Building on these promising results, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have increasingly adopted MoE techniques. However, existing multi-modal MoE tuning methods typically face two key challenges: expert uniformity and router rigidity. Expert uniformity occurs because MoE experts are often initialized by simply replicating the FFN parameters from LLMs, leading to homogenized expert functions and weakening the intended diversification of the MoE architecture. Meanwhile, router rigidity stems from the prevalent use of static linear routers for expert selection, which fail to distinguish between visual and textual tokens, resulting in similar expert distributions for image and text. To address these limitations, we propose EvoMoE, an innovative MoE tuning framework. EvoMoE introduces a meticulously designed expert initialization strategy that progressively evolves multiple robust experts from a single trainable expert, a process termed expert evolution that specifically targets severe expert homogenization. Furthermore, we introduce the Dynamic Token-aware Router (DTR), a novel routing mechanism that allocates input tokens to appropriate experts based on their modality and intrinsic token values. This dynamic routing is facilitated by hypernetworks, which dynamically generate routing weights tailored for each individual token. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EvoMoE significantly outperforms other sparse MLLMs across a variety of multi-modal benchmarks, including MME, MMBench, TextVQA, and POPE. Our results highlight the effectiveness of EvoMoE in enhancing the performance of MLLMs by addressing the critical issues of expert uniformity and router rigidity.

PaperID: 2256, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16191

Authors:Sungmin Kang, Jisoo Kim, Salman Avestimehr, Sunwoo Lee

Affiliations: University of Southern California, Inha University

Title: GEM: A Scale-Aware and Distribution-Sensitive Sparse Fine-Tuning Framework for Effective Downstream Adaptation

Abstract:
Parameterefficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has become a popular way to adapt large pre-trained models to new tasks. Most PEFT methods update only a small subset of parameters while freezing the rest, avoiding redundant computation. As they maximize the absolute size of the updates without regard to the parameters’ original scale, the resulting changes in model behavior can be minimal. In contrast, we maximize updates relative to each parameter’s scale, yielding more meaningful downstream adaptation. We propose Gradient-to-Weight Ratio and Entropy-guided Masking (GEM), a parameter scale-aware, distribution-sensitive sparse fine-tuning framework. GEM prioritizes parameters whose updates are significant in proportion to their initial pre-trained values. It also adaptively determines how many parameters to tune at each layer based on the entropy of parameter values, thereby making the most effective use of the computational budget in PEFT. Our empirical study demonstrates the efficacy of GEM on both general-domain tasks (GLUE and SuperGLUE) and domain-specific tasks (GSM8k and MBPP), achieving up to a 1.6% improvement in fine-tuning accuracy over full fine-tuning while updating only 0.1% of model parameters.

PaperID: 2257, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.18479

Authors:Kyoleen Kwak, Hyoseok Hwang

Affiliations: Kyung Hee University

Title: Enhancing Control Policy Smoothness by Aligning Actions with Predictions from Preceding States

Abstract:
Deep reinforcement learning has proven to be a powerful approach to solving control tasks, but its characteristic high‑frequency oscillations make it difficult to apply in real‑world environments. While prior methods have addressed action oscillations via architectural or lossbased methods, the latter typically depend on heuristic or synthetic definitions of state similarity to promote action consistency, which often fail to accurately reflect the underlying system dynamics. In this paper, we propose a novel loss-based method by introducing a transition-induced similar state. The transition-induced similar state is defined as the distribution of next states transitioned from the previous state. Since it utilizes only environmental feedback and actually collected data, it better captures system dynamics. Building upon this foundation, we introduce Action Smoothing by Aligning Actions with Predictions from Preceding States (ASAP), an action smoothing method that effectively mitigates action oscillations. ASAP enforces action smoothness by aligning the actions with those taken in transition-induced similar states and by penalizing second-order differences to suppress high-frequency oscillations. Experiments in Gymnasium and Isaac-lab environments demonstrate that ASAP yields smoother control and improved policy performance over existing methods.

PaperID: 2258, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01134

Authors:Ran Li, Lingshu Zeng

Affiliations: Northeast Normal University

Title: Transformers in Pseudo-Random Number Generation: A Dual Perspective on Theory and Practice

Abstract:
Pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs) are high-nonlinear processes, and they are key blocks in optimization of Large language models. Transformers excel at processing complex nonlinear relationships. Thus it is reasonable to generate high-quality pseudo-random numbers based on transformers. In this paper, we explore this question from both theoretical and practical perspectives, highlighting the potential benefits and implications of Transformer in PRNGs. We theoretically demonstrate that decoder-only Transformer models with Chain-of-Thought can simulate both the Linear Congruential Generator (LCG) and Mersenne Twister (MT) PRNGs. Based on this, we conclude that the log-precision decoder-only Transformer can represent non-uniform AC0. Our simulative theoretical findings are validated through experiments. The random numbers generated by Transformer-based PRNGs successfully pass the majority of NIST tests, whose heat maps exhibit clear statistical randomness. Finally, we assess their capability in prediction attacks.

PaperID: 2259, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09478

Authors:Renda Li, Hailang Huang, Fei Wei, Feng Xiong, Yong Wang, Xiangxiang Chu

Affiliations: Alibaba Group

Title: AdaCuRL: Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning with Invalid Sample Mitigation and Historical Revisiting

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated considerable potential for enhancing reasoning in large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods suffer from Gradient Starvation and Policy Degradation when training directly on samples with mixed difficulty. To mitigate this, prior approaches leverage Chainof-Thought (CoT) data, but the construction of high-quality CoT annotations remains labor-intensive. Alternatively, curriculum learning strategies have been explored but frequently encounter challenges, such as difficulty mismatch, reliance on manual curriculum design, and catastrophic forgetting. To address these issues, we propose AdaCuRL, a Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning framework that integrates coarse-to-fine difficulty estimation with adaptive curriculum scheduling. This approach dynamically aligns data difficulty with model capability and incorporates a data revisitation mechanism to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. Furthermore, AdaCuRL employs adaptive reference and sparse KL strategies to prevent Policy Degradation. Extensive experiments across diverse reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that AdaCuRL consistently achieves significant performance improvements on both LLMs and MLLMs.

PaperID: 2260, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10809

Authors:Jiazhou Liang, Hassan Khurram, Scott Sanner

Affiliations: University of Toronto

Title: Near-optimal Linear Predictive Clustering in Non-separable Spaces via MIP and QPBO Reductions

Abstract:
Linear Predictive Clustering (LPC) partitions samples based on shared linear relationships between feature and target variables, with numerous applications including marketing, medicine, and education. Greedy optimization methods, commonly used for LPC, alternate between clustering and linear regression but lack global optimality. While effective for separable clusters, they struggle in nonseparable settings where clusters overlap in feature space. In an alternative constrained optimization paradigm, previous works formulated LPC as a Mixed-Integer Program (MIP), ensuring global optimality regardless of separability but at the cost of poor scalability. This work builds on the constrained optimization paradigm to introduce two novel approaches that improve the efficiency of global optimization for LPC. By leveraging key theoretical properties of separability, we derive near-optimal approximations with provable error bounds, significantly reducing the MIP formulation’s complexity and improving scalability. Additionally, we can further approximate LPC as a Quadratic Pseudo-Boolean Optimization (QPBO) problem, achieving additional computational gains in the special case of two clusters. Comparative analyses on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our methods consistently achieve near-optimal solutions with substantially lower regression errors than greedy optimization while exhibiting superior scalability over existing MIP formulations.

PaperID: 2261, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.05675

Authors:Bingyi Liu, Jinbo He, Haiyong Shi, Enshu Wang, Weizhen Han, Jingxiang Hao, Peixi Wang, Zhuangzhuang Zhang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University, Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong

Title: CHDP: Cooperative Hybrid Diffusion Policies for Reinforcement Learning in Parameterized Action Space

Abstract:
Hybrid action space, which combines discrete choices and continuous parameters, is prevalent in domains such as robot control and game AI. However, efficiently modeling and optimizing hybrid discretecontinuous action space remains a fundamental challenge, mainly due to limited policy expressiveness and poor scalability in high-dimensional settings. To address this challenge, we view the hybrid action space problem as a fully cooperative game and propose a Cooperative Hybrid Diffusion Policies (CHDP) framework to solve it. CHDP employs two cooperative agents that leverage a discrete and a continuous diffusion policy, respectively. The continuous policy is conditioned on the discrete action's representation, explicitly modeling the dependency between them. This cooperative design allows the diffusion policies to leverage their expressiveness to capture complex distributions in their respective action spaces. To mitigate the update conflicts arising from simultaneous policy updates in this cooperative setting, we employ a sequential update scheme that fosters co-adaptation. Moreover, to improve scalability when learning in high-dimensional discrete action space, we construct a codebook that embeds the action space into a low-dimensional latent space. This mapping enables the discrete policy to learn in a compact, structured space. Finally, we design a Q-function-based guidance mechanism to align the codebook's embeddings with the discrete policy's representation during training. On challenging hybrid action benchmarks, CHDP outperforms state-of-the-art method by up to 19.3% in success rate.

PaperID: 2262, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.17818

Authors:Wen Luo, Peng Chen, Xiaotao Huang, LiQun Huang

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: ViTCoP: Accelerating Large Vision-Language Models via Visual and Textual Semantic Collaborative Pruning

Abstract:
Large VisionLanguage Models (LVLMs) incur high computational costs due to significant redundancy in their visual tokens. To effectively reduce this cost, researchers have proposed various visual token pruning methods. However, existing methods are generally limited, either losing critical visual information prematurely due to pruning in the vision encoder, or leading to information redundancy among the selected tokens due to pruning in the Large Language Models (LLMs). To address these challenges, we propose a Visual and Textual Semantic Collaborative Pruning framework (ViTCoP) that combines redundancy filtering in the vision encoder with step-wise co-pruning within the LLM based on its hierarchical characteristics, to efficiently preserve critical and informationally diverse visual tokens. Meanwhile, to ensure compatibility with acceleration techniques like FlashAttention, we introduce the L2 norm of K-vectors as the token saliency metric in the LLM. Extensive experiments on various Large Vision-Language Models demonstrate that ViTCoP not only achieves state-of-the-art performance surpassing existing methods on both image and video understanding tasks, but also significantly reduces model inference latency and GPU memory consumption. Notably, its performance advantage over other methods becomes even more pronounced under extreme pruning rates.

PaperID: 2263, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.17678

Authors:Fengji Ma, Hei Victor Cheng, Chenxing Li, Li Liu

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Aarhus University

Title: TIMA: Text-Image Mutual Awareness for Balancing Zero-Shot Adversarial Robustness and Generalization Ability

Abstract:
Achieving zeroshot adversarial robustness without sacrificing generalization remains challenging for foundation models such as CLIP, especially under large adversarial perturbations. Through empirical analyses, we identify three critical yet overlooked issues: (1) Logit margins exhibit a stable offset between small and large adversarial perturbations, suggesting that explicitly adjusting margins could improve robustness against unseen large perturbations. (2) A significant negative correlation exists between logit margin and inter-class semantic similarity, indicating that semantic structures are insufficiently leveraged by existing methods. (3) Existing methods for adjusting text embeddings disrupt the intrinsic semantic consistency established by pre-trained models, undermining generalization capability. Motivated by these findings, we propose a novel Text-Image Mutual Awareness (TIMA) framework, including a Text-Aware Image (TAI) tuning module with an Adaptive Semantic-Aware Margin (ASAM) to explicitly calibrate logit margins, and an Image-Aware Text (IAT) tuning module with Semantic Consistent Minimum Hyperspherical Energy (SC-MHE) to preserve semantic consistency. Comprehensive experiments validate that TIMA significantly outperforms existing approaches by effectively addressing the identified limitations.

PaperID: 2264, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21044

Authors:Junpeng Ma, Qizhe Zhang, Ming Lu, Zhibin Wang, Qiang Zhou, Jun Song, Shanghang Zhang

Affiliations: Peking University, Taobao & Tmall Group of Alibaba

Title: MMG-Vid: Maximizing Marginal Gains at Segment-level and Token-level for Efficient Video LLMs

Abstract:
Video Large Language Models (VLLMs) excel in video understanding, but their excessive visual tokens pose a significant computational challenge for realworld applications. Current methods aim to enhance inference efficiency by visual token pruning. However, they do not consider the dynamic characteristics and temporal dependencies of video frames, as they perceive video understanding as a multi-frame task. To address these challenges, we propose MMG-Vid, a novel training-free visual token pruning framework that removes redundancy by Maximizing Marginal Gains at both segment-level and token-level. Specifically, we first divide the video into segments based on frame similarity, and then dynamically allocate the token budget for each segment to maximize the marginal gain of each segment. Subsequently, we propose a temporal-guided DPC algorithm that jointly models inter-frame uniqueness and intra-frame diversity, thereby maximizing the marginal gain of each token. By combining both stages, MMG-Vid can maximize the utilization of the limited token budget, significantly improving efficiency while maintaining strong performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MMG-Vid can maintain over 99.5% of the original performance, while effectively reducing 75% visual tokens and accelerating the prefilling stage by 3.9x on LLaVA-OneVision-7B.

PaperID: 2265, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.05566

Authors:Xiang Ma, Lexin Fang, Litian Xu, Caiming Zhang

Affiliations: Shandong University, University of Exeter

Title: Aligning the True Semantics: Constrained Decoupling and Distribution Sampling for Cross-Modal Alignment

Abstract:
Crossmodal alignment is a crucial task in multimodal learning aimed at achieving semantic consistency between vision and language. This requires that image-text pairs exhibit similar semantics. Traditional algorithms pursue embedding consistency to achieve semantic consistency, ignoring the non-semantic information present in the embedding. An intuitive approach is to decouple the embeddings into semantic and modality components, aligning only the semantic component. However, this introduces two main challenges: (1) There is no established standard for distinguishing semantic and modal information. (2) The modality gap can cause semantic alignment deviation or information loss. To align the true semantics, we propose a novel cross-modal alignment algorithm via Constrained Decoupling and Distribution Sampling (CDDS). Specifically, (1) A dual-path UNet is introduced to adaptively decouple the embeddings, applying multiple constraints to ensure effective separation. (2) A distribution sampling method is proposed to bridge the modality gap, ensuring the rationality of the alignment process. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks and model backbones demonstrate the superiority of CDDS, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 6.6% to 14.2%.

PaperID: 2266, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06568

Authors:Joao Mattos, Debolina Halder Lina, Arlei Silva

Affiliations: Rice University

Title: Breaking the Dyadic Barrier: Rethinking Fairness in Link Prediction Beyond Demographic Parity

Abstract:
Link prediction is a fundamental task in graph machine learning with applications ranging from social recommendation to knowledge graph completion. Fairness in this setting is critical, as biased predictions can exacerbate societal inequalities. Prior work adopts a dyadic definition of fairness, enforcing fairness through demographic parity between intragroup and inter-group link predictions. However, we show that this dyadic framing can obscure underlying disparities across subgroups, allowing systemic biases to go undetected. Moreover, we argue that demographic parity does not meet the desired properties for fairness assessment in ranking-based tasks such as link prediction. We formalize the limitations of existing fairness evaluations and propose a framework that enables a more expressive assessment. Additionally, we propose a lightweight post-processing method combined with decoupled link predictors that effectively mitigates bias and achieves state-of-the-art fairness–utility trade-offs.

PaperID: 2267, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09871

Authors:Hyung-Jun Moon, Sung-Bae Cho

Affiliations: Department of Artificial Intelligence, Yonsei University, Department of Computer Science

Title: Expandable and Differentiable Dual Memories with Orthogonal Regularization for Exemplarfree Continual Learning

Abstract:
Continual learning methods used to force neural networks to process sequential tasks in isolation, preventing them from leveraging useful intertask relationships and causing them to repeatedly relearn similar features or overly differentiate them. To address this problem, we propose a fully differentiable, exemplar-free expandable method composed of two complementary memories: One learns common features that can be used across all tasks, and the other combines the shared features to learn discriminative characteristics unique to each sample. Both memories are differentiable so that the network can autonomously learn latent representations for each sample. For each task, the memory adjustment module adaptively prunes critical slots and minimally expands capacity to accommodate new concepts, and orthogonal regularization enforces geometric separation between preserved and newly learned memory components to prevent interference. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet show that the proposed method outperforms 14 state-of-the-art methods for class-incremental learning, achieving final accuracies of 55.13%, 37.24%, and 30.11%, respectively. Additional analysis confirms that, through effective integration and utilization of knowledge, the proposed method can increase average performance across sequential tasks, and it produces feature extraction results closest to the upper bound, thus establishing a new milestone in continual learning.

PaperID: 2268, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09376

Authors:Alexander Nadel, Ron Wettenstein

Affiliations: Reichman University

Title: From Decision Trees to Boolean Logic: A Fast and Unified SHAP Algorithm

Abstract:
SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) is a key tool for interpreting decision tree ensembles by assigning contribution values to features. It is widely used in finance, advertising, medicine, and other domains. Two main approaches to SHAP calculation exist: PathDependent SHAP, which leverages the tree structure for efficiency, and Background SHAP, which uses a background dataset to estimate feature distributions. We introduce Woodelf, a SHAP algorithm that integrates decision trees, game theory, and Boolean logic into a unified framework. For each consumer, Woodelf constructs a pseudo-Boolean formula that captures their feature values, the structure of the decision tree ensemble, and the entire background dataset. It then leverages this representation to compute Background SHAP in linear time. Woodelf can also compute Path-Dependent SHAP, Shapley interaction values, Banzhaf values, and Banzhaf interaction values. Woodelf is designed to run efficiently on CPU and GPU hardware alike. Available via the Python package woodelf, it is implemented using NumPy, SciPy, and CuPy without relying on custom C++ or CUDA code. This design enables fast performance and seamless integration into existing frameworks, supporting large-scale computation of SHAP and other game-theoretic values in practice. For example, on a dataset with 3,000,000 rows, 5,000,000 background samples, and 127 features, Woodelf computed all Background Shapley values in 162 seconds on CPU and 16 seconds on GPU—compared to 44 minutes required by the best method on any hardware platform, representing 16x and 165x speedups, respectively.

PaperID: 2269, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05577

Authors:Saptarshi Nath, Christos Peridis, Eseoghene Benjamin, Xinran Liu, Soheil Kolouri, Peter Kinnell, Zexin Li, Cong Liu, Shirin Dora, Andrea Soltoggio

Affiliations: Loughborough University, Alan Turing Institute, Vanderbilt University, University of California

Title: Policy Search, Retrieval, and Composition via Task Similarity in Collaborative Agentic Systems

Abstract:
Agentic AI aims to create systems that set their own goals, adapt proactively to change, and refine behavior through continuous experience. Recent advances suggest that, when facing multiple and unforeseen tasks, agents could benefit from sharing machinelearned knowledge and reusing policies that have already been fully or partially learned by other agents. However, how to query, select, and retrieve policies from a pool of agents, and how to integrate such policies remains a largely unexplored area. This study explores how an agent decides what knowledge to select, from whom, and when and how to integrate it in its own policy in order to accelerate its own learning. The proposed algorithm, Modular Sharing and Composition in Collective Learning (MOSAIC), improves learning in agentic collectives by combining (1) knowledge selection using performance signals and cosine similarity on Wasserstein task embeddings, (2) modular and transferable neural representations via masks, and (3) policy integration, composition and fine-tuning. MOSAIC outperforms isolated learners and global sharing approaches in both learning speed and overall performance, and in some cases solves tasks that isolated agents cannot. The results also demonstrate that selective, goal-driven reuse leads to less susceptibility to task interference. We also observe the emergence of self-organization, where agents solving simpler tasks accelerate the learning of harder ones through shared knowledge.

PaperID: 2270, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.06227

Authors:Pierriccardo Olivieri, Fausto Lasca, Alessandro Gianola, Matteo Papini

Affiliations: Politecnico di Milano, INESC-ID/Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Milano

Title: Do It for HER: First-Order Temporal Logic Reward Specification in Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
In this work, we propose a novel framework for the logical specification of nonMarkovian rewards in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with large state spaces. Our approach leverages Linear Temporal Logic Modulo Theories over finite traces (LTLfMT), a more expressive extension of classical temporal logic in which predicates are first-order formulas of arbitrary first-order theories rather than simple Boolean variables. This enhanced expressiveness enables the specification of complex tasks over unstructured and heterogeneous data domains, promoting a unified and reusable framework that eliminates the need for manual predicate encoding. However, the increased expressive power of LTLfMT introduces additional theoretical and computational challenges compared to standard LTLf specifications. We address these challenges from a theoretical standpoint, identifying a fragment of LTLfMT that is tractable but sufficiently expressive for reward specification in an infinite-state-space context. From a practical perspective, we introduce a method based on reward machines and Hindsight Experience Replay (HER) to translate first-order logic specifications and address reward sparsity. We evaluate this approach to a continuous-control setting using Non-Linear Arithmetic Theory, showing that it enables natural specification of complex tasks. Experimental results show how a tailored implementation of HER is fundamental in solving tasks with complex goals.

PaperID: 2271, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07023

Authors:Junjun Pan, Yixin Liu, Chuan Zhou, Fei Xiong, Alan Wee-Chung Liew, Shirui Pan

Affiliations: School of Information and Communication Technology, Griffith University, Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University

Title: Correcting False Alarms from Unseen: Adapting Graph Anomaly Detectors at Test Time

Abstract:
Graph anomaly detection (GAD), which aims to detect outliers in graphstructured data, has received increasing research attention recently. However, existing GAD methods assume identical training and testing distributions, which is rarely valid in practice. In real-world scenarios, unseen but normal samples may emerge during deployment, leading to a normality shift that degrades the performance of GAD models trained on the original data. Through empirical analysis, we reveal that the degradation arises from (1) semantic confusion, where unseen normal samples are misinterpreted as anomalies due to their novel patterns, and (2) aggregation contamination, where the representations of seen normal nodes are distorted by unseen normals through message aggregation. While retraining or fine-tuning GAD models could be a potential solution to the above challenges, the high cost of model retraining and the difficulty of obtaining labeled data often render this approach impractical in real-world applications. To bridge the gap, we proposed a lightweight and plug-and-play Test-time adaptation framework for correcting Unseen Normal pattErns (TUNE) in GAD. To address semantic confusion, a graph aligner is employed to align the shifted data to the original one at the graph attribute level. Moreover, we utilize the minimization of representation-level shift as a supervision signal to train the aligner, which leverages the estimated aggregation contamination as a key indicator of normality shift. Extensive experiments on 10 real-world datasets demonstrate that TUNE significantly enhances the generalizability of pre-trained GAD models to both synthetic and real unseen normal patterns.

PaperID: 2272, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09783

Authors:Pablo Ruiz-Morales, Dries Vanoost, Davy Pissoort, Mathias Verbeke

Affiliations: Declarative Languages and Artificial Intelligence (DTAI), KU Leuven

Title: Koopman Invariants as Drivers of Emergent Time-Series Clustering in Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures

Abstract:
JointEmbedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs), a powerful class of self-supervised models, exhibit an unexplained ability to cluster time-series data by their underlying dynamical regimes. We propose a novel theoretical explanation for this phenomenon, hypothesizing that JEPA's predictive objective implicitly drives it to learn the invariant subspace of the system's Koopman operator. We prove that an idealized JEPA loss is minimized when the encoder represents the system's regime indicator functions, which are Koopman eigenfunctions. This theory was validated on synthetic data with known dynamics, demonstrating that constraining the JEPA's linear predictor to be a near-identity operator is the key inductive bias that forces the encoder to learn these invariants. We further discuss that this constraint is critical for selecting this interpretable solution from a class of mathematically equivalent but entangled optima, revealing the predictor's role in representation disentanglement. This work demystifies a key behavior of JEPAs, provides a principled connection between modern self-supervised learning and dynamical systems theory, and informs the design of more robust and interpretable time-series models.

PaperID: 2273, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22270

Authors:Zhongjie Shi, Puyu Wang, Chenyang Zhang, Yuan Cao

Affiliations: Georgia Institute of Technology, Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität Kaiserslautern-Landau, The University of Hong Kong

Title: Towards Understanding Generalization in DP-GD: A Case Study in Training Two-Layer CNNs

Abstract:
Modern deep learning techniques focus on extracting intricate information from data to achieve accurate predictions. However, the training datasets may be crowdsourced and include sensitive information, such as personal contact details, financial data, and medical records. As a result, there is a growing emphasis on developing privacypreserving training algorithms for neural networks that maintain good performance while preserving privacy. In this paper, we investigate the generalization and privacy performances of the differentially private gradient descent (DP-GD) algorithm, which is a private variant of the gradient descent (GD) by incorporating additional noise into the gradients during each iteration. Moreover, we identify a concrete learning task where DP-GD can achieve superior generalization performance compared to GD in training two-layer Huberized ReLU convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Specifically, we demonstrate that, under mild conditions, a small signal-to-noise ratio can result in GD producing training models with poor test accuracy, whereas DP-GD can yield training models with good test accuracy and privacy guarantees if the signal-to-noise ratio is not too small. This indicates that DP-GD has the potential to enhance model performance while ensuring privacy protection in certain learning tasks. Numerical simulations are further conducted to support our theoretical results.

PaperID: 2274, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.00312

Authors:Chuxiong Sun, Peng He, Qirui Ji, Zehua Zang, Jiangmeng Li, Rui Wang, Wei Wang

Affiliations: National Key Laboratory of Space Integrated Information System, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: M2I2: Learning Efficient Multi-Agent Communication via Masked State Modeling and Intention Inference

Abstract:
Communication is essential in coordinating the behaviors of multiple agents. However, existing methods primarily emphasize content, timing, and partners for information sharing, often neglecting the critical aspect of integrating shared information. This gap can significantly impact agents' ability to understand and respond to complex, uncertain interactions, thus affecting overall communication efficiency. To address this issue, we introduce M2I2, a novel framework designed to enhance the agents' capabilities to assimilate and utilize received information effectively. M2I2 equips agents with advanced capabilities for masked state modeling and jointaction prediction, enriching their perception of environmental uncertainties and facilitating the anticipation of teammates' intentions. This approach ensures that agents are furnished with both comprehensive and relevant information, bolstering more informed and synergistic behaviors. Moreover, we propose a Dimensional Rational Network, innovatively trained via a meta-learning paradigm, to identify the importance of dimensional pieces of information, evaluating their contributions to decision-making and auxiliary tasks. Then, we implement an importance-based heuristic for selective information masking and sharing. This strategy optimizes the efficiency of masked state modeling and the rationale behind information sharing. We evaluate M2I2 across diverse multi-agent tasks, the results demonstrate its superior performance, efficiency, and generalization capabilities, over existing state-of-the-art methods in various complex scenarios.

PaperID: 2275, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11294

Authors:Bertille Tierny, Arthur Charpentier, Francois Hu

Affiliations: Milliman France, R&D Department, Université du Québec à Montréal, Paris AI Lab

Title: Decomposing Direct and Indirect Biases in Linear Models Under Demographic Parity Constraint

Abstract:
Linear models are widely used in highstakes decision-making due to their simplicity and interpretability. Yet when fairness constraints such as demographic parity are introduced, their effects on model coefficients, and thus on how predictive bias is distributed across features, remain opaque. Existing approaches on linear models often rely on strong and unrealistic assumptions, or overlook the explicit role of the sensitive attribute, limiting their practical utility for fairness assessment. We propose a post-processing framework that can be applied on top of any linear model to decompose the resulting bias into direct (sensitive-attribute) and indirect (correlated-features) components. Our method analytically characterizes how demographic parity reshapes each model coefficient, including those of both sensitive and non-sensitive features. This enables a transparent, feature-level interpretation of fairness interventions and reveals how bias may persist or shift through correlated variables. Our framework requires no model retraining and provides actionable insights for model auditing and mitigation. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method captures fairness dynamics missed by prior work, offering a practical and interpretable tool for responsible deployment of linear models.

PaperID: 2276, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09585

Authors:Xinyi Tong, Yiran Zhu, Jishang Chen, Chunru Zhan, Tianle Wang, Sirui Zhang, Nian Liu, Tiezheng Ge, Duo XU, Xin Jin, Feng Yu, Song-Chun Zhu

Affiliations: Alibaba Group, Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, Central Conservatory of Music‌

Title: Video Echoed in Music: Semantic, Temporal, and Rhythmic Alignment for Video-to-Music Generation

Abstract:
Videoto-Music generation seeks to generate musically appropriate background music that enhances audiovisual immersion for videos. However, current approaches suffer from two critical limitations: 1) incomplete representation of video details, leading to weak alignment, and 2) inadequate temporal and rhythmic correspondence, particularly in achieving precise beat synchronization. To address the challenges, we propose Video Echoed in Music (VeM), a latent music diffusion that generates high-quality soundtracks with semantic, temporal, and rhythmic alignment for input videos. To capture video details comprehensively, VeM employs a hierarchical video parsing that acts as a music conductor, orchestrating multi-level information across modalities. Modality-specific encoders, coupled with a storyboard-guided cross-attention mechanism (SG-CAtt), integrate semantic cues while maintaining temporal coherence through position and duration encoding. For rhythmic precision, the frame-level transition-beat aligner and adapter (TB-As) dynamically synchronize visual scene transitions with music beats. We further contribute a novel video-music paired dataset sourced from e-commerce advertisements and video-sharing platforms, which imposes stricter transition-beat synchronization requirements. Meanwhile, we introduce novel metrics tailored to the task. Experimental results demonstrate superiority, particularly in semantic relevance and rhythmic precision.

PaperID: 2277, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.00596

Authors:Govind Waghmare, Srini Rohan Gujulla Leel, Nikhil Tumbde, Sumedh B G, Sonia Gupta, Srikanta Bedathur

Affiliations: Indian Institute of Technology

Title: Kernelized Edge Attention: Addressing Semantic Attention Blurring in Temporal Graph Neural Networks

Abstract:
Temporal Graph Neural Networks (TGNNs) aim to capture the evolving structure and timing of interactions in dynamic graphs. Although many models incorporate time through encodings or architectural design, they often compute attention over entangled node and edge representations, failing to reflect their distinct temporal behaviors. Node embeddings evolve slowly as they aggregate longterm structural context, while edge features reflect transient, timestamped interactions (e.g. messages, trades, or transactions). This mismatch results in semantic attention blurring, where attention weights cannot distinguish between slowly drifting node states and rapidly changing, information-rich edge interactions. As a result, models struggle to capture fine-grained temporal dependencies and provide limited transparency into how temporal relevance is computed. This paper introduces KEAT (Kernelized Edge Attention for Temporal Graphs), a novel attention formulation that modulates edge features using a family of continuous-time kernels, including Laplacian, RBF, and learnable MLP variant. KEAT preserves the distinct roles of nodes and edges, and integrates seamlessly with both Transformer-style (e.g., DyGFormer) and message-passing (e.g., TGN) architectures. It achieves up to 18% MRR improvement over the recent DyGFormer and 7% over TGN on link prediction tasks, enabling more accurate, interpretable and temporally aware message passing in TGNNs.

PaperID: 2278, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09047

Authors:Shengbo Wang, Hong Sun, Ke Li

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, University of Exeter

Title: Preference Is More than Comparisons: Rethinking Dueling Bandits with Augmented Human Feedback

Abstract:
Interactive preference elicitation (IPE) aims to substantially reduce human effort while acquiring human preferences in wide personalization systems. Dueling bandit (DB) algorithms enable optimal decisionmaking in IPE building on pairwise comparisons. However, they remain inefficient when human feedback is sparse. Existing methods address sparsity by heavily relying on parametric reward models, whose rigid assumptions are vulnerable to misspecification. In contrast, we explore an alternative perspective based on feedback augmentation, and introduce critical improvements to the model-free DB framework. Specifically, we introduce augmented confidence bounds to integrate augmented human feedback under generalized concentration properties, and analyze the multi-factored performance trade-off via regret analysis. Our prototype algorithm achieves competitive performance across several IPE benchmarks, including recommendation, multi-objective optimization, and response optimization for large language models, demonstrating the potential of our approach for provably efficient IPE in broader applications.

PaperID: 2279, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10644

Authors:Yihua Wang, Qi Jia, Cong Xu, Feiyu Chen, Yuhan Liu, Haotian Zhang, Liang Jin, Lu Liu, Zhichun Wang

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing Normal University, IEIT SYSTEMS Co.

Title: Conditional Information Bottleneck for Multimodal Fusion: Overcoming Shortcut Learning in Sarcasm Detection

Abstract:
Multimodal sarcasm detection is a complex task that requires distinguishing subtle complementary signals across modalities while filtering out irrelevant information. Many advanced methods rely on learning shortcuts from datasets rather than extracting intended sarcasmrelated features. However, our experiments show that shortcut learning impairs the model's generalization in real-world scenarios. Furthermore, we reveal the weaknesses of current modality fusion strategies for multimodal sarcasm detection through systematic experiments, highlighting the necessity of focusing on effective modality fusion for complex emotion recognition. To address these challenges, we construct MUStARD++R by removing shortcut signals from MUStARD++. Then, a Multimodal Conditional Information Bottleneck (MCIB) model is introduced to enable efficient multimodal fusion for sarcasm detection. Experimental results show that the MCIB achieves the best performance without relying on shortcut learning.

PaperID: 2280, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.07011

Authors:Zhuonan Wang, Zhenxuan Fan, Siwen Tan, Yu Zhong, Yuqian Yuan, Haoyuan Li, Hao Jiang, Wenqiao Zhang, Feifei Shao, Hongwei Wang, Jun Xiao

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Alibaba Group

Title: MAU-GPT: Enhancing Multi-type Industrial Anomaly Understanding via Anomaly-aware and Generalist Experts Adaptation

Abstract:
As industrial manufacturing scales, automating finegrained product image analysis has become critical for quality control. However, existing approaches are hindered by limited dataset coverage and poor model generalization across diverse and complex anomaly patterns. To address these challenges, we introduce MAU-Set, a comprehensive dataset for Multi-type industrial Anomaly Understanding. It spans multiple industrial domains and features a hierarchical task structure, ranging from binary classification to complex reasoning. Alongside this dataset, we establish a rigorous evaluation protocol to facilitate fair and comprehensive model assessment. Building upon this foundation, we further present MAU-GPT, a domain-adapted multimodal large model specifically designed for industrial anomaly understanding. It incorporates a novel AMoE-LoRA mechanism that unifies anomaly-aware and generalist experts adaptation, enhancing both understanding and reasoning across diverse defect classes. Extensive experiments show that MAU-GPT consistently outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods across all domains, demonstrating strong potential for scalable and automated industrial inspection.

PaperID: 2281, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10218

Authors:Haolong Xiang, Peisi Wang, Xiaolong Xu, Kun Yi, Xuyun Zhang, Quan Z. Sheng, Amin Beheshti, Wei Fan

Affiliations: Nanjing University, State Information Center of China, Macquarie University, University of Auckland

Title: MTP: Exploring Multimodal Urban Traffic Profiling with Modality Augmentation and Spectrum Fusion

Abstract:
With rapid urbanization in the modern era, traffic signals from various sensors have been playing a significant role in monitoring the states of cities, which provides a strong foundation in ensuring safe travel, reducing traffic congestion and optimizing urban mobility. Most existing methods for traffic time series modeling often rely on the original data modality, i.e., numerical direct readings from the sensors in cities. However, this unimodal approach overlooks the semantic information existing in multimodal heterogeneous urban data in different perspectives, which hinders a comprehensive understanding of traffic signals and limits the accurate prediction of complex traffic dynamics. To address this problem, we propose a novel Multimodal framework, MTP, for urban Traffic Profiling, which learns multimodal features through numeric, visual, and textual perspectives in the frequency domain. The three branches drive a multimodal perspective of traffic signal learning for augmentation, while the frequency learning strategies delicately refine the information for extraction. Specifically, we first conduct the visual augmentation for the traffic time series, which transforms the original modality into periodicity images and frequency images for visual learning. Also, we augment descriptive texts for the traffic time series based on the specific topic, background information and item description for textual learning. To complement the numeric information, we utilize frequency multilayer perceptrons for learning on the original modality. We design a hierarchical contrastive learning on the three branches to fuse the three modalities. Finally, extensive experiments on six realworld datasets demonstrate superior performance compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.

PaperID: 2282, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.14718

Authors:Feng Xiong, Zongxia Xie, Yanru Sun, Haoyu Wang, Jianhong Lin

Affiliations: Tianjin University, Fudan University

Title: SEED: Spectral Entropy-Guided Evaluation of Spatial-Temporal Dependencies for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Abstract:
Effective multivariate time series forecasting often benefits from accurately modeling complex intervariable dependencies. However, existing attention- or graph-based methods face three key issues: (a) strong temporal self-dependencies are often disrupted by irrelevant variables; (b) softmax normalization ignores and reverses negative correlations; (c) variables struggle to perceive their temporal positions. To address these, we propose SEED, a Spectral Entropy-guided evaluation framework for spatial-temporal dependency modeling. SEED introduces a Dependency Evaluator, a key innovation that leverages spectral entropy to dynamically provide a preliminary evaluation of the spatial and temporal dependencies of each variable, enabling the model to adaptively balance Channel Independence (CI) and Channel Dependence (CD) strategies. To account for temporal regularities originating from the influence of other variables rather than intrinsic dynamics, we propose Spectral Entropy-based Fuser to further refine the evaluated dependency weights, effectively separating this part. Moreover, to preserve negative correlations, we introduce a Signed Graph Constructor that enables signed edge weights, overcoming the limitations of softmax. Finally, to help variables perceive their temporal positions and thereby construct more comprehensive spatial features, we introduce the Context Spatial Extractor, which leverages local contextual windows to extract spatial features. Extensive experiments on 12 real-world datasets from various application domains demonstrate that SEED achieves state-of-the-art performance, validating its effectiveness and generality.

PaperID: 2283, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09475

Authors:Shibo Yao, Renshuai Tao, Xiaolong Zheng, Chao Liang, Chunjie Zhang

Affiliations: Beijing Jiaotong University, Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan University

Title: Leveraging Failed Samples: A Few-Shot and Training-Free Framework for Generalized Deepfake Detection

Abstract:
Recent deepfake detection studies often treat unseen sample detection as a ``zeroshot" task, training on images generated by known models but generalizing to unknown ones. A key real-world challenge arises when a model performs poorly on unknown samples, yet these samples remain available for analysis. This highlights that it should be approached as a ``few-shot" task, where effectively utilizing a small number of samples can lead to significant improvement. Unlike typical few-shot tasks focused on semantic understanding, deepfake detection prioritizes image realism, which closely mirrors real-world distributions. In this work, we propose the Few-shot Training-free Network (FTNet) for real-world few-shot deepfake detection. Simple yet effective, FTNet differs from traditional methods that rely on large-scale known data for training. Instead, FTNet uses only one fake sample from an evaluation set, mimicking the scenario where new samples emerge in the real world and can be gathered for use, without any training or parameter updates. During evaluation, each test sample is compared to the known fake and real samples, and it is classified based on the category of the nearest sample. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of AI-generated images from 29 different generative models and achieve a new SoTA performance, with an average improvement of 8.7% compared to existing methods. This work introduces a fresh perspective on real-world deepfake detection: when the model struggles to generalize on a few-shot sample, leveraging the failed samples leads to better performance.

PaperID: 2284, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22788

Authors:Junfei Zhan, Haoxun Shen, Zheng Lin, Tengjiao He

Affiliations: University of Pennsylvania, University of Hong Kong, Jinan University

Title: PRISM: Privacy-Aware Routing for Adaptive Cloud–Edge LLM Inference via Semantic Sketch Collaboration

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but incur high communication overhead and privacy risks in cloud deployments, while facing compute and memory constraints when confined to edge devices.Cloud–edge inference has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving privacy in LLM services by retaining sensitive computations on local devices.However, existing cloud–edge inference approaches apply uniform privacy protection without considering input sensitivity, resulting in unnecessary perturbation and degraded utility even for nonsensitive tokens. To address this limitation, we propose Privacy-aware Routing for Inference with Semantic Modulation (PRISM), a context-aware framework that dynamically balances privacy and inference quality. PRISM executes in four stages: (1) the edge device profiles entity-level sensitivity; (2) a soft gating module, also on the edge, selects an execution mode -cloud, edge, or collaboration; (3) for collaborative paths, the edge applies adaptive two-layer local differential privacy based on entity risks; and (4) the cloud LLM generates a semantic sketch from the perturbed prompt, which is then refined by the edge-side small language model (SLM) using local context.Our results show that PRISM consistently achieves superior privacy-utility trade-offs in various scenarios, reducing energy consumption and latency to 40–50% of baseline methods such as Uniform and Selective LDP, while maintaining high output quality under strong privacy constraints. These findings are validated through comprehensive evaluations involving realistic prompts, actual energy measurements, and heterogeneous cloud–edge model deployments.

PaperID: 2285, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08875

Authors:Fuyao Zhang, Xinyu Yan, Tiantong Wu, Wenjie Li, Tianxiang Chen, Yang Cao, Ran Yan, Longtao Huang, Wei Yang Bryan Lim, Qiang Yang

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University, Institute of Science Tokyo, Alibaba Group, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: Oblivionis: A Lightweight Learning and Unlearning Framework for Federated Large Language Models

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly leverage Federated Learning (FL) to utilize private, taskspecific datasets for fine-tuning while preserving data privacy. However, while federated LLM frameworks effectively enable collaborative training without raw data sharing, they critically lack built-in mechanisms for regulatory compliance like GDPR’s right to be forgotten. Integrating private data heightens concerns over data quality and long-term governance, yet existing distributed training frameworks offer no principled way to selectively remove specific client contributions post-training. Due to distributed data silos, stringent privacy constraints, and the intricacies of interdependent model aggregation, federated LLM unlearning is significantly more complex than centralized LLM unlearning. To address this gap, we introduce Oblivionis, a lightweight learning and unlearning framework that enables clients to selectively remove specific private data during federated LLM training, enhancing trustworthiness and regulatory compliance. By unifying FL and unlearning as a dual optimization objective, we incorporate 6 FL and 5 unlearning algorithms for comprehensive evaluation and comparative analysis, establishing a robust pipeline for federated LLM unlearning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Oblivionis outperforms local training, achieving a robust balance between forgetting efficacy and model utility, with cross-algorithm comparisons providing clear directions for future LLM development.

PaperID: 2286, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09924

Authors:Hu Zhang, Zhien Dai, Zhaohui Tang, Yongfang Xie

Affiliations: Central South University

Title: MDMLP-EIA: Multi-domain Dynamic MLPs with Energy Invariant Attention for Time Series Forecasting

Abstract:
Time series forecasting is essential across diverse domains. While MLPbased methods have gained attention for achieving Transformer-comparable performance with fewer parameters and better robustness, they face critical limitations including loss of weak seasonal signals, capacity constraints in weight-sharing MLPs, and insufficient channel fusion in channel-independent strategies. To address these challenges, we propose MDMLP-EIA (Multi-domain Dynamic MLPs with Energy Invariant Attention) with three key innovations. First, we develop an adaptive fused dual-domain seasonal MLP that categorizes seasonal signals into strong and weak components. It employs an adaptive zero-initialized channel fusion strategy to minimize noise interference while effectively integrating predictions. Second, we introduce an energy invariant attention mechanism that adaptively focuses on different feature channels within trend and seasonal predictions across time steps. This mechanism maintains constant total signal energy to align with the decomposition-prediction-reconstruction framework and enhance robustness against disturbances. Third, we propose a dynamic capacity adjustment mechanism for channel-independent MLPs. This mechanism scales neuron count with the square root of channel count, ensuring sufficient capacity as channels increase. Extensive experiments across nine benchmark datasets demonstrate that MDMLP-EIA achieves state-of-the-art performance in both prediction accuracy and computational efficiency.

PaperID: 2287, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10945

Authors:Xingyue Zhao, Wenke Huang, Xingguang Wang, Haoyu Zhao, Linghao Zhuang, Anwen Jiang, Guancheng Wan, Mang Ye

Affiliations: Wuhan University, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xinjiang University

Title: Divide, Conquer and Unite: Hierarchical Style-Recalibrated Prototype Alignment for Federated Medical Segmentation

Abstract:
Federated learning enables multiple medical institutions to train a global model without sharing data, yet feature heterogeneity from diverse scanners or protocols remains a major challenge. Many existing works attempt to address this issue by leveraging model representations (e.g., mean feature vectors) to correct local training; however, they often face two key limitations: 1) Incomplete Contextual Representation Learning: Current approaches primarily focus on finallayer features, overlooking critical multi-level cues and thus diluting essential context for accurate segmentation. 2) Layerwise Style Bias Accumulation: Although utilizing representations can partially align global features, these methods neglect domain-specific biases within intermediate layers, allowing style discrepancies to build up and reduce model robustness. To address these challenges, we propose FedBCS to bridge feature representation gaps via domain-invariant contextual prototypes alignment. Specifically, we introduce a frequency-domain adaptive style recalibration into prototype construction that not only decouples content-style representations but also learns optimal style parameters, enabling more robust domain-invariant prototypes. Furthermore, we design a context-aware dual-level prototype alignment method that extracts domain-invariant prototypes from different layers of both encoder and decoder and fuses them with contextual information for finer-grained representation alignment. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that our method exhibits remarkable performance.

PaperID: 2288, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02667

Authors:Haozhuo Zheng, Cheng Wang, Yang Liu

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin institute of technology

Title: Graph VQ-Transformer (GVT): Fast and Accurate Molecular Generation via High-Fidelity Discrete Latents

Abstract:
The de novo generation of molecules with desirable properties is a critical challenge, where diffusion models are computationally intensive and autoregressive models struggle with error propagation. In this work, we introduce the Graph VQTransformer (GVT), a two-stage generative framework that achieves both high accuracy and efficiency. The core of our approach is a novel Graph Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder (VQ-VAE) that compresses molecular graphs into high-fidelity discrete latent sequences. By synergistically combining a Graph Transformer with canonical Reverse Cuthill-McKee (RCM) node ordering and Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE), our VQ-VAE achieves near-perfect reconstruction rates. An autoregressive Transformer is then trained on these discrete latents, effectively converting graph generation into a well-structured sequence modeling problem. Crucially, this mapping of complex graphs to high-fidelity discrete sequences bridges molecular design with the powerful paradigm of large-scale sequence modeling, unlocking potential synergies with Large Language Models (LLMs). Extensive experiments show that GVT achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive performance across major benchmarks like ZINC250k, MOSES, and GuacaMol, and notably outperforms leading diffusion models on key distribution similarity metrics such as FCD and KL Divergence. With its superior performance, efficiency, and architectural novelty, GVT not only presents a compelling alternative to diffusion models but also establishes a strong new baseline for the field, paving the way for future research in discrete latent-space molecular generation.

PaperID: 2289, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.20549

Authors:Weihai Zhi, Jiayan Guo, Shangyang Li

Affiliations: Guangdong Institute of Intelligence Science and Technology, School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Peking University

Title: MedGR2: Breaking the Data Barrier for Medical Reasoning via Generative Reward Learning

Abstract:
The application of visionlanguage models in medicine is critically hampered by the scarcity of high-quality, expert-annotated data. Supervised fine-tuning on existing datasets often leads to poor generalization on unseen modalities and tasks, while reinforcement learning, a promising alternative, is stymied by the lack of reliable reward signals in this data-scarce domain. To address this challenge, we propose a Generative Reward Learning framework that establishes a self-improving training cycle. The framework jointly develops a data generator and a reward model, enabling the automated and continuous creation of high-quality multimodal medical data that serves as an effective training source for post-training. Our experiments demonstrate that supervised fine-tuning using the generated data already surpasses models trained on large-scale human-curated datasets. More importantly, when the generated data is further leveraged for reinforcement learning via Group Relative Policy Optimization, the resulting model achieves state-of-the-art cross-modality and cross-task generalization, significantly outperforming specialized reinforcement-learning-based methods. Notably, a compact model trained under this framework attains performance competitive with foundation models containing more than an order of magnitude more parameters. These results suggest a new paradigm for data-efficient learning in high-stakes medical domains, shifting the bottleneck from data scarcity to data generation and unlocking the potential of reinforcement learning for building robust and generalizable medical AI systems.

PaperID: 2290, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05709

Authors:Boyu Chen, Siran Chen, Zhengrong Yue, Kainan Yan, Chenyun Yu, Beibei Kong, Lei Cheng, Chengxiang Zhuo, Zang Li, Yali Wang

Affiliations: Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Science, Platform and Content Group, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, China Cheng is the last name. Lei is the given name., Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Title: G-UBS: Towards Robust Understanding of Implicit Feedback via Group-Aware User Behavior Simulation

Abstract:
User feedback is critical for refining recommendation systems, yet explicit feedback (e.g., likes or dislikes) remains scarce in practice. As a more feasible alternative, inferring user preferences from massive implicit feedback has shown great potential (e.g., a user quickly skipping a recommended video usually indicates disinterest). Unfortunately, implicit feedback is often noisy: a user might skip a video due to accidental clicks or other reasons, rather than disliking it. Such noise can easily misjudge user interests, thereby undermining recommendation performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel Groupaware User Behavior Simulation (G-UBS) paradigm, which leverages contextual guidance from relevant user groups, enabling robust and in-depth interpretation of implicit feedback for individual users. Specifically, G-UBS operates via two key agents. First, the User Group Manager (UGM) effectively clusters users to generate group profiles utilizing a ``summarize-cluster-reflect" workflow based on LLMs. Second, the User Feedback Modeler (UFM) employs an innovative group-aware reinforcement learning approach, where each user is guided by the associated group profiles during the reinforcement learning process, allowing UFM to robustly and deeply examine the reasons behind implicit feedback. To assess our G-UBS paradigm, we have constructed a Video Recommendation benchmark with Implicit Feedback (IF-VR). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first multi-modal benchmark for implicit feedback evaluation in video recommendation, encompassing 15k users, 25k videos, and 933k interaction records with implicit feedback. Extensive experiments on IF-VR demonstrate that G-UBS significantly outperforms mainstream LLMs and MLLMs, with a 4.0% higher proportion of videos achieving a play rate > 30% and 14.9% higher reasoning accuracy on IF-VR.

PaperID: 2291, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00740

Authors:Qingwen Yang, Feiyu Qu, Tiezheng Guo, Yanyi Liu, Yingyou Wen

Affiliations: Northeastern University, Dartmouth College

Title: Augmented Runtime Collaboration for Self-Organizing Multi-Agent Systems: A Hybrid Bi-Criteria Routing Approach

Abstract:
LLMbased multi-agent systems have demonstrated significant capabilities across diverse domains. However, the task performance and efficiency are fundamentally constrained by their collaboration strategies. Prevailing approaches rely on static topologies and centralized global planning, a paradigm that limits their scalability and adaptability in open, decentralized networks. Effective collaboration planning in distributed systems using only local information thus remains a formidable challenge. To address this, we propose BiRouter, a novel dual-criteria routing method for Self-Organizing Multi-Agent Systems (SO-MAS). This method enables each agent to autonomously execute "next-hop" task routing at runtime, relying solely on local information. Its core decision-making mechanism is predicated on balancing two metrics: (1) the ImpScore, which evaluates a candidate agent's long-term importance to the overall goal, and (2) the GapScore, which assesses its contextual continuity for the current task state. Furthermore, we introduce a dynamically updated reputation mechanism to bolster system robustness in untrustworthy environments and have developed a large-scale, cross-domain dataset, comprising thousands of annotated task-routing paths, to enhance the model's generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BiRouter achieves superior performance and token efficiency over existing baselines, while maintaining strong robustness and effectiveness in information-limited, decentralized, and untrustworthy settings.

PaperID: 2292, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03817

Authors:Wei Yang, Jesse Thomason

Affiliations: University of Southern California

Title: Learning to Deliberate: Meta-policy Collaboration for Agentic LLMs with Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Multiagent systems of large language models (LLMs) show promise for complex reasoning, but their effectiveness is often limited by fixed collaboration protocols. These frameworks typically focus on macro-level orchestration while overlooking agents’ internal deliberative capabilities. This critical meta-cognitive blindspot treats agents as passive executors unable to adapt their strategy based on internal cognitive states like uncertainty or confidence. We introduce the Meta-Policy Deliberation Framework (MPDF), where agents learn a decentralized policy over a set of high-level meta-cognitive actions: Persist, Refine, and Concede. To overcome the instability of traditional policy gradients in this setting, we develop SoftRankPO, a novel reinforcement learning algorithm. SoftRankPO stabilizes training by shaping advantages based on the rank of rewards mapped through smooth normal quantiles, making the learning process robust to reward variance. Experiments show that MPDF with SoftRankPO achieves a 4-5% absolute gain in average accuracy across six mathematical and general reasoning benchmarks compared to state-of-the-art heuristic and learning-based multi-agent reasoning algorithms. Our work presents a paradigm for learning adaptive, meta-cognitive policies for multi-agent LLM systems, shifting the focus from designing fixed protocols to learning dynamic, deliberative strategies.

PaperID: 2293, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11733

Authors:Ruijia Zhang, Xinyan Zhao, Ruixiang Wang, Sigen Chen, Guibin Zhang, An Zhang, Kun Wang, Qingsong Wen

Affiliations: National University of Singapore, Chongqing University, Nanyang Technological University, Squirrel Ai Learning

Title: SafeSieve: From Heuristics to Experience in Progressive Pruning for LLM-based Multi-Agent Communication

Abstract:
LLMbased multi-agent systems exhibit strong collaborative capabilities but often suffer from redundant communication and excessive token overhead. Existing methods typically enhance efficiency through pretrained GNNs or greedy algorithms, but often isolate pre- and post-task optimization, lacking a unified strategy. To this end, we present SafeSieve, a progressive and adaptive multi-agent pruning algorithm that dynamically refines the inter-agent communication through a novel dual-mechanism. SafeSieve integrates initial LLM-based semantic evaluation with accumulated performance feedback, enabling a smooth transition from heuristic initialization to experience-driven refinement. Unlike existing greedy Top-k pruning methods, SafeSieve employs 0-extension clustering to preserve structurally coherent agent groups while eliminating ineffective links. Experiments across benchmarks (SVAMP, HumanEval, etc.) showcase that SafeSieve achieves 94.01% average accuracy while reducing token usage by 12.4%-27.8%. Results further demonstrate robustness under prompt injection attacks (1.23% average accuracy drop). In heterogeneous settings, SafeSieve reduces deployment costs by 13.3% while maintaining performance. These results establish SafeSieve as an efficient, GPU-free, and scalable framework for practical multi-agent systems. Our code can be found below.

PaperID: 2294, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15381

Authors:Tiannan Zhang, Rishi Veerapaneni, Shao-Hung Chan, Jiaoyang Li, Maxim Likhachev

Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University, University of Southern California

Title: Dynamic Agent Grouping ECBS: Scaling Windowed Multi-Agent Path Finding with Completeness Guarantees

Abstract:
MultiAgent Path Finding (MAPF) is the problem of finding a set of collision-free paths for a team of agents. Although several MAPF methods that solve full-horizon MAPF have completeness guarantees, very few MAPF methods that plan partial paths have completeness guarantees. Recent work introduced the Windowed Complete MAPF (WinC-MAPF) framework, which shows how windowed optimal MAPF solvers (e.g., SS-CBS) can use heuristic updates and disjoint agent groups to maintain completeness even when planning partial paths. A core limitation of WinC-MAPF is that it requires optimal MAPF solvers. Our main contribution is to extend WinC-MAPF by showing how we can use a bounded suboptimal solver while maintaining completeness. In particular, we design Dynamic Agent Grouping ECBS (DAG-ECBS) which dynamically creates and plans agent groups while maintaining that each agent group solution is bounded suboptimal. We prove how DAG-ECBS can maintain completeness in the WinC-MAPF framework and can improve scalability compared to windowed ECBS which does not have completeness guarantees. More broadly, our work serves as a blueprint for designing more MAPF methods that can use the WinC-MAPF framework

PaperID: 2295, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08719

Authors:Yuzhuo Bai, Shitong Duan, Muhua Huang, Jing Yao, Zhenghao Liu, Peng Zhang, Tun Lu, Xiaoyuan Yi, Maosong Sun, Xing Xie

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Fudan University, Stanford University, Microsoft Research Asia, Northeastern University of China

Title: IROTE: Human-like Traits Elicitation of Large Language Model via In-Context Self-Reflective Optimization

Abstract:
Trained on various humanauthored corpora, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated a certain capability of reflecting specific human-like traits (e.g., personality or values) by prompting, benefiting applications like personalized LLMs and social simulations. However, existing methods suffer from the superficial elicitation problem: LLMs can only be steered to mimic shallow and unstable stylistic patterns, failing to embody the desired traits precisely and consistently across diverse tasks like humans. To address this challenge, we propose IROTE, a novel in-context method for stable and transferable trait elicitation. Drawing on psychological theories suggesting that traits are formed through identity-related reflection, our method automatically generates and optimizes a textual self-reflection within prompts, which comprises self-perceived experience, to stimulate LLMs' trait-driven behavior. The optimization is performed by iteratively maximizing an information-theoretic objective that enhances the connections between LLMs' behavior and the target trait, while reducing noisy redundancy in reflection without any fine-tuning, leading to evocative and compact trait reflection. Extensive experiments across three human trait systems manifest that one single IROTE-generated self-reflection can induce LLMs' stable impersonation of the target trait across diverse downstream tasks beyond simple questionnaire answering, consistently outperforming existing strong baselines.

PaperID: 2296, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12175

Authors:Haoyang Chen, Richong Zhang, Junfan Chen

Affiliations: Beihang University

Title: Rethinking Label Consistency of In-Context Learning: An Implicit Transductive Label Propagation Perspective

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) perform incontext learning (ICL) with minimal supervised examples, which benefits various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. One of the critical research focus is the selection of prompt demonstrations. Current approaches typically employ retrieval models to select the top-K most semantically similar examples as demonstrations. However, we argue that existing methods are limited since the label consistency is not guaranteed during demonstration selection. Our cognition derives from the Bayesian view of ICL and our rethinking of ICL from the transductive label propagation perspective. We treat ICL as a transductive learning method and incorporate latent concepts from Bayesian view and deduce that similar demonstrations guide the concepts of query, with consistent labels serving as estimates. Based on this understanding, we establish a label propagation framework to link label consistency with propagation error bounds. To model label consistency, we propose a data synthesis method, leveraging both semantic and label information, and use TopK sampling with Synthetic Data (TopK-SD) to acquire demonstrations with consistent labels. TopK-SD outperforms original TopK sampling on multiple benchmarks. Our work provides a new perspective for understanding the working mechanisms within ICL.

PaperID: 2297, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02573

Authors:Jérémie Dentan, Davide Buscaldi, Sonia Vanier

Affiliations: LIX (École Polytechnique, IP Paris, CNRS) LIPN (Université Sorbonne Paris Nord)

Title: Guess or Recall? Training CNNs to Classify and Localize Memorization in LLMs

Abstract:
Verbatim memorization in Large Language Models (LLMs) is a multifaceted phenomenon involving distinct underlying mechanisms. We introduce a novel method to analyze the different forms of memorization described by the existing taxonomy. Specifically, we train Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on the attention weights of the LLM and evaluate the alignment between this taxonomy and the attention weights involved in decoding. We find that the existing taxonomy performs poorly and fails to reflect distinct mechanisms within the attention blocks. We propose a new taxonomy that maximizes alignment with the attention weights, consisting of three categories: memorized samples that are guessed using language modeling abilities, memorized samples that are recalled due to high duplication in the training set, and nonmemorized samples. Our results reveal that few-shot verbatim memorization does not correspond to a distinct attention mechanism. We also show that a significant proportion of extractable samples are in fact guessed by the model and should therefore be studied separately. Finally, we develop a custom visual interpretability technique to localize the regions of the attention weights involved in each form of memorization.

PaperID: 2298, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20944

Authors:Zhongren Dong, Bin Wang, Jing Han, Haotian Guo, Xiaojun Mo, Yimin Cao, Zixing Zhang

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, Hunan University, Beijing Xiaomi Mobile Software Co., China Shenzhen Research Institute

Title: SACodec: Asymmetric Quantization with Semantic Anchoring for Low-Bitrate High-Fidelity Neural Speech Codecs

Abstract:
Neural Speech Codecs face a fundamental tradeoff at low bitrates: preserving acoustic fidelity often compromises semantic richness. To address this, we introduce SACodec, a novel codec built upon an asymmetric dual-quantizer that employs our proposed Semantic Anchoring mechanism. This design strategically decouples the quantization of Semantic and Acoustic details. The semantic anchoring is achieved via a lightweight projector that aligns acoustic features with a frozen, large-scale mHuBERT codebook, injecting linguistic priors while guaranteeing full codebook utilization. Sequentially, for acoustic details, a residual activation module with SimVQ enables a single-layer quantizer (acoustic path) to faithfully recover fine-grained information. At just 1.5 kbps, SACodec establishes a new state of the art by excelling in both fidelity and semantics: subjective listening tests confirm that its reconstruction quality is perceptually highly comparable to ground-truth audio, while its tokens demonstrate substantially improved semantic richness in downstream tasks. This work suggests that assigning specialized semantic quantizers to distinct information streams offers an effective path to reconcile the long-standing trade-off between fidelity, semantics, and modeling simplicity in low-bitrate speech tokenization.

PaperID: 2299, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12509

Authors:Jiwei Fang, Bin Zhang, Changwei Wang, Jin Wan, Zhiwei Xu

Affiliations: Shandong University, The Key Laboratory of Cognition and Decision Intelligence for Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qilu University of Technology

Title: Graph of Verification: Structured Verification of LLM Reasoning with Directed Acyclic Graphs

Abstract:
Verifying the complex and multistep reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a critical challenge, as holistic methods often overlook localized flaws. Step-by-step validation is a promising alternative, yet existing methods are often rigid. They struggle to adapt to diverse reasoning structures, from formal proofs to informal natural language narratives. To address this adaptability gap, we propose the Graph of Verification (GoV), a novel framework for adaptable and multi-granular verification. GoV's core innovation is its flexible node block architecture. This mechanism allows GoV to adaptively adjust its verification granularity—from atomic steps for formal tasks to entire paragraphs for natural language—to match the native structure of the reasoning process. This flexibility allows GoV to resolve the fundamental trade-off between verification precision and robustness. Experiments on both well-structured and loosely-structured benchmarks demonstrate GoV's versatility. The results show that GoV's adaptive approach significantly outperforms both holistic baselines and other state-of-the-art decomposition-based methods, establishing a new standard for training-free reasoning verification.

PaperID: 2300, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08555

Authors:Yue Fang, Zhi Jin, Jie An, Hongshen Chen, Xiaohong Chen, Naijun Zhan

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Peking University Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies (PKU), National Key Laboratory of Space Integrated Information System, Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, East China Normal University

Title: RESTL: Reinforcement Learning Guided by Multi-Aspect Rewards for Signal Temporal Logic Transformation

Abstract:
Signal Temporal Logic (STL) is a powerful formal language for specifying realtime specifications of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Transforming specifications written in natural language into STL formulas automatically has attracted increasing attention. Existing rule-based methods depend heavily on rigid pattern matching and domain-specific knowledge, limiting their generalizability and scalability. Recently, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) of large language models (LLMs) has been successfully applied to transform natural language into STL. However, the lack of fine-grained supervision on atomic proposition correctness, semantic fidelity, and formula readability often leads SFT-based methods to produce formulas misaligned with the intended meaning. To address these issues, we propose RESTL, a reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework for the transformation from natural language to STL. RESTL introduces multiple independently trained reward models that provide fine-grained, multi-faceted feedback from four perspectives, i.e., atomic proposition consistency, semantic alignment, formula succinctness, and symbol matching. These reward models are trained with a curriculum learning strategy to improve their feedback accuracy, and their outputs are aggregated into a unified signal that guides the optimization of the STL generator via Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). Experimental results demonstrate that RESTL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both automatic metrics and human evaluations.

PaperID: 2301, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10501

Authors:Yushi Feng, Junye Du, Yingying Hong, Qifan Wang, Lequan Yu

Affiliations: The University of Hong Kong

Title: PASS: Probabilistic Agentic Supernet Sampling for Interpretable and Adaptive Chest X-Ray Reasoning

Abstract:
Existing toolaugmented agentic systems are limited in the real world by (i) black-box reasoning steps that undermine trust of decision-making and pose safety risks, (ii) poor multimodal integration, which is inherently critical for healthcare tasks, and (iii) rigid and computationally inefficient agentic pipelines. We introduce PASS (Probabilistic Agentic Supernet Sampling), the first multimodal framework to address these challenges for Chest X-Ray (CXR) reasoning. PASS adaptively samples agentic workflows over a multi-tool graph, yielding decision paths annotated with interpretable probabilities. Given the complex CXR reasoning task with multimodal medical data, PASS leverages its learned task-conditioned distribution over the agentic supernet. Thus, it adaptively selects the most suitable tool at each supernet layer, offering probability-annotated trajectories for post-hoc audits and directly enhancing medical AI safety. PASS also continuously compresses salient findings into an evolving personalized memory, while dynamically deciding whether to deepen its reasoning path or invoke an early exit for efficiency. To optimize a Pareto frontier balancing performance and cost, we design a novel three-stage training procedure, including expert knowledge warm-up, contrastive path-ranking, and cost-aware reinforcement learning. To facilitate rigorous evaluation, we introduce CAB-E, a comprehensive benchmark for multi-step, safety-critical, free-form reasoning. Experiments across various benchmarks validate that PASS significantly outperforms strong baselines in multiple metrics (e.g., accuracy, LLM-Judge, semantic similarity, etc.) while balancing computational costs, pushing a new paradigm shift towards interpretable, adaptive, and multimodal medical agentic systems.

PaperID: 2302, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.06663

Authors:Giacomo Frisoni, Lorenzo Molfetta, Mattia Buzzoni, Gianluca Moro

Affiliations: University of Bologna

Title: Graph-of-Mark: Promote Spatial Reasoning in Multimodal Language Models with Graph-Based Visual Prompting

Abstract:
Recent advances in trainingfree visual prompting, such as Set-of-Mark, have emerged as a promising direction for enhancing the grounding capabilities of multimodal language models (MLMs). These techniques operate by partitioning the input image into object regions and annotating them with marks–predominantly boxes with numeric identifiers–before feeding the augmented image to the MLM. However, these approaches treat marked objects as isolated entities, failing to capture the relationships between them. On these premises, we propose Graph-of-Mark (GoM), the first pixel-level visual prompting technique that overlays scene graphs onto the input image for spatial reasoning tasks. We evaluate GoM across 3 open-source MLMs and 4 different datasets, conducting extensive ablations on drawn components and investigating the impact of auxiliary graph descriptions in the text prompt. Our results demonstrate that GoM consistently improves the zero-shot capability of MLMs in interpreting object positions and relative directions, improving base accuracy in visual question answering and localization up to 11 percentage points.

PaperID: 2303, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01725

Authors:Jiannan Guan, Qiguang Chen, Libo Qin, Dengyun Peng, Jinhao Liu, Liangyu Huo, Jian Xie, Wanxiang Che

Affiliations: Research Center for Social Computing and Interactive Robotics, Harbin Institute of Technology, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University, Du Xiaoman (Beijing) Science Technology Co.

Title: Beware of Reasoning Overconfidence: Pitfalls in the Reasoning Process for Multi-solution Tasks

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in reasoning tasks requiring a single correct answer, but they perform poorly in multisolution tasks that require generating comprehensive and diverse answers. We attribute this limitation to reasoning overconfidence: a tendency to express undue certainty in an incomplete solution set. To examine the effect, we introduce MuSoBench, a benchmark of multi-solution problems. Experiments show that the conventional short chain-of-thought (Short-CoT) prompting paradigm exhibits pronounced overconfidence, whereas the emerging long chain-of-thought (Long-CoT) approach mitigates it through iterative exploration and self-reflection. We further characterise observable behaviours and influential factors. To probe the underlying cause, we propose the cognitive-rigidity hypothesis, which posits that overconfidence arises when the reasoning process prematurely converges on a narrow set of thought paths. An attention-entropy analysis offers preliminary support for this view. These findings provide tools for assessing the completeness of LLM reasoning and highlight the need to move evaluation beyond single-answer accuracy toward comprehensive exploration.

PaperID: 2304, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11667

Authors:Feng Guo, Yuntao Wen, Shen Gao, Junshuo Zhang, Shuo Shang

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Beyond Superficial Forgetting: Thorough Unlearning Through Knowledge Density Estimation and Block Re-Insertion

Abstract:
Machine unlearning, which selectively removes harmful knowledge from a pretrained model without retraining from scratch, is crucial for addressing privacy, regulatory compliance, and ethical concerns in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing unlearning methods often struggle to thoroughly remove harmful knowledge, leaving residual harmful knowledge that can be easily recovered. To address these limitations, we propose Knowledge Density-Guided Unlearning via Blocks Reinsertion (KUnBR), a novel approach that first identifies layers with rich harmful knowledge and then thoroughly eliminates the harmful knowledge via re-insertion strategy. Our method introduces knowledge density estimation to quantify and locate layers containing the most harmful knowledge, enabling precise unlearning. Additionally, we design a layer re-insertion strategy that extracts and re-inserts harmful knowledge-rich layers into the original LLM, bypassing gradient obstruction caused by cover layers and ensuring effective gradient propagation during unlearning. Extensive experiments conducted on several unlearning and general capability benchmarks demonstrate that KUnBR achieves state-of-the-art forgetting performance while maintaining model utility.

PaperID: 2305, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14342

Authors:Xingwei He, Qianru Zhang, Pengfei Chen, Guanhua Chen, Linlin Yu, Yuan Yuan, Siu-Ming Yiu

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong, School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University, Department of Statistics and Data Science, Southern University of Science and Technology, Augusta University, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing China Qingdao Research Institute

Title: ConInstruct: Evaluating Large Language Models on Conflict Detection and Resolution in Instructions

Abstract:
Instructionfollowing is a critical capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). While existing works primarily focus on assessing how well LLMs adhere to user instructions, they often overlook scenarios where instructions contain conflicting constraints—a common occurrence in complex prompts. The behavior of LLMs under such conditions remains under-explored. To bridge this gap, we introduce ConInstruct, a benchmark specifically designed to assess LLMs' ability to detect and resolve conflicts within user instructions. Using this dataset, we evaluate LLMs' conflict detection performance and analyze their conflict resolution behavior. Our experiments reveal two key findings: (1) Most proprietary LLMs exhibit strong conflict detection capabilities, whereas among open-source models, only DeepSeek-R1 demonstrates similarly strong performance. DeepSeek-R1 and Claude-4.5-Sonnet achieve the highest average F1-scores at 91.5% and 87.3%, respectively, ranking first and second overall. (2) Despite their strong conflict detection abilities, LLMs rarely explicitly notify users about the conflicts or request clarification when faced with conflicting constraints. These results underscore a critical shortcoming in current LLMs and highlight an important area for future improvement when designing instruction-following LLMs.

PaperID: 2306, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02677

Authors:Zhiyuan He

Affiliations: University College London, University of London

Title: Exploring Depth Generalization in Large Language Models for Solving Recursive Logic Tasks

Abstract:
Large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across many tasks, yet face significant challenges when dealing with recursive reasoning problems—those requiring the resolution of nested hierarchical structures. While prior research has extensively studied length generalization (a model’s ability to handle longer sequences than seen during training), we investigate a distinct and underexplored limitation: depth generalization. Here, depth refers to the number of nested levels in a hierarchical problem, such as the layers of parentheses in a mathematical expression or the nesting of logical clauses in a Boolean formula. Our work reveals that standard transformer architectures struggle with problems involving deeper recursion than encountered during training, even when they perform well on longer but nonnested sequences. This limitation stems from their inability to maintain stack-like behavior—the capacity to track and resolve multiple levels of nested dependencies. Through systematic analysis, we demonstrate how this architectural constraint leads to rapid performance decay as the depth of recursion increases. To address this challenge, we develop a novel looped locate-and-replace pipeline that decomposes recursive problems into manageable subcomponents. The approach employs two specialized models: a locator that identifies solvable subexpressions and a replacer that evaluates these components while preserving the overall structure. We evaluate this method in three carefully designed domains—Boolean algebra, recursive arithmetic, and propositional logic—each with a controllable depth of recursion. Our results show that the proposed method effectively alleviates performance decay when tested on out-of-distribution recursion depth.

PaperID: 2307, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11567

Authors:Jinpeng Hu, Ao Wang, Qianqian Xie, Zhuo Li, Hui Ma, Dan Guo

Affiliations: Hefei University of Technology, Wuhan University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title: AgentMental: An Interactive Multi-Agent Framework for Explainable and Adaptive Mental Health Assessment

Abstract:
Mental health assessment is crucial for early intervention and effective treatment, yet traditional clinicianbased approaches are limited by the shortage of qualified professionals. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have sparked growing interest in automated psychological assessment, yet most existing approaches are constrained by their reliance on static text analysis, limiting their ability to capture deeper and more informative insights that emerge through dynamic interaction and iterative questioning. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a multi-agent framework for mental health evaluation that simulates clinical doctor-patient dialogues, with specialized agents assigned to questioning, adequacy evaluation, scoring, and updating. In detail, we introduce an adaptive questioning mechanism in which an evaluation agent assesses the adequacy of user responses to determine the necessity of generating targeted follow-up queries to address ambiguity and missing information. Additionally, we employ a tree-structured memory in which the root node encodes the user's basic information, while child nodes (e.g., topic and statement) organize key information according to distinct symptom categories and interaction turns. This memory is dynamically updated throughout the interaction to reduce redundant questioning and enhance the information extraction and contextual tracking capabilities. Experimental results on the DAIC-WOZ dataset illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, which achieves better performance than existing approaches. Our code is released at \urlhttps://github.com/MindIntLab-HFUT/AgentMental.

PaperID: 2308, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02188

Authors:Kaibo Huang, Yukun Wei, WanshengWu, Tianhua Zhang, Zhongliang Yang, Linna Zhou

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: Whispering Agents: A Event-Driven Covert Communication Protocol for the Internet of Agents

Abstract:
The emergence of the Internet of Agents (IoA) introduces critical challenges for communication privacy in sensitive, highstakes domains. While standard Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocols secure message content, they are not designed to protect the act of communication itself, leaving agents vulnerable to surveillance and traffic analysis. We find that the rich, event-driven nature of agent dialogues provides a powerful, yet untapped, medium for covert communication. To harness this potential, we introduce and formalize the Covert Event Channel, the first unified model for agent covert communication driven by three interconnected dimensions, which consist of the Storage, Timing, and Behavioral channels. Based on this model, we design and engineer Pi-CCAP, a novel protocol that operationalizes this event-driven paradigm. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that Pi-CCAP achieves high capacity and robustness while remaining imperceptible to powerful LLM-based wardens, establishing its practical viability. By systematically engineering this channel, our work provides the foundational understanding essential for developing the next generation of monitoring systems and defensive protocols for a secure and trustworthy IoA.

PaperID: 2309, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21715

Authors:Rui Ke, Jiahui Xu, Shenghao Yang, Kuang Wang, Feng Jiang, Haizhou Li

Affiliations: Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data, The School of Data Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology, Shenzhen The School of Artificial Intelligence, Shenzhen Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore

Title: CATCH: A Controllable Theme Detection Framework with Contextualized Clustering and Hierarchical Generation

Abstract:
Theme detection is a fundamental task in usercentric dialogue systems, aiming to identify the latent topic of each utterance without relying on predefined schemas. Unlike intent induction, which operates within fixed label spaces, theme detection requires cross-dialogue consistency and alignment with personalized user preferences, posing significant challenges. Existing methods often struggle with sparse, short utterances for accurate topic representation and fail to capture user-level thematic preferences across dialogues. To address these challenges, we propose CATCH (Controllable Theme Detection with Contextualized Clustering and Hierarchical Generation), a unified framework that integrates three core components: (1) context-aware topic representation, which enriches utterance-level semantics using surrounding topic segments; (2) preference-guided topic clustering, which jointly models semantic proximity and personalized feedback to align themes across dialogue; and (3) a hierarchical theme generation mechanism designed to suppress noise and produce robust, coherent topic labels. Experiments on a multi-domain customer dialogue benchmark (DSTC-12) demonstrate the effectiveness of CATCH with 8B LLM in both theme clustering and topic generation quality.

PaperID: 2310, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20344

Authors:Taewhoo Lee, Minju Song, Chanwoong Yoon, Jungwoo Park, Jaewoo Kang

Affiliations: Korea University

Title: The Curious Case of Analogies: Investigating Analogical Reasoning in Large Language Models

Abstract:
Analogical reasoning is at the core of human cognition, serving as an important foundation for a variety of intellectual activities. While prior work has shown that LLMs can represent task patterns and surfacelevel concepts, it remains unclear whether these models can encode high-level relational concepts and apply them to novel situations through structured comparisons. In this work, we explore this fundamental aspect using proportional and story analogies, and identify three key findings. First, LLMs effectively encode the underlying relationships between analogous entities; both attributive and relational information propagate through mid-upper layers in correct cases, whereas reasoning failures reflect missing relational information within these layers. Second, unlike humans, LLMs often struggle not only when relational information is missing, but also when attempting to apply it to new entities. In such cases, strategically patching hidden representations at critical token positions can facilitate information transfer to a certain extent. Lastly, successful analogical reasoning in LLMs is marked by strong structural alignment between analogous situations, whereas failures often reflect degraded or misplaced alignment. Overall, our findings reveal that LLMs exhibit emerging but limited capabilities in encoding and applying high-level relational concepts, highlighting both parallels and gaps with human cognition.

PaperID: 2311, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17183

Authors:Junsong Li, Jie Zhou, Bihao Zhan, Yutao Yang, Qianjun Pan, Shilian Chen, Tianyu Huai, Xin Li, Qin Chen, Liang He

Affiliations: East China Normal University, Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Title: LifeAlign: Lifelong Alignment for Large Language Models with Memory-Augmented Focalized Preference Optimization

Abstract:
Alignment plays a crucial role in Large Language Models (LLMs) in aligning with human preferences on a specific task/domain. Traditional alignment methods suffer from catastrophic forgetting, where models lose previously learned values when adapting to new preferences or domains. We introduce LifeAlign, a novel framework for lifelong alignment that enables LLMs to maintain consistent human preference alignment across sequential learning tasks without forgetting previously learned values. Our approach consists of two key innovations. First, we propose a focalized preference optimization strategy that aligns LLMs with new preferences while preventing the erosion of alignment acquired from previous tasks. Second, we develop a shortto-long memory consolidation mechanism that merges denoised short-term preference representations into stable long-term memory using intrinsic dimensionality reduction, enabling efficient storage and retrieval of alignment patterns across diverse domains. We evaluate LifeAlign across multiple sequential alignment tasks spanning different domains and preference types. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance in maintaining both preference alignment quality and knowledge retention compared to existing lifelong learning approaches.

PaperID: 2312, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10712

Authors:Qinfeng Li, Miao Pan, Jintao Chen, Fu Teng, Zhiqiang Shen, Ge Su, Hao Peng, Xuhong Zhang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Ant Group, Zhejiang Normal University

Title: Do Not Merge My Model! Safeguarding Open-Source LLMs Against Unauthorized Model Merging

Abstract:
Model merging has emerged as an efficient technique for expanding large language models (LLMs) by integrating specialized expert models. However, it also introduces a new threat: model merging stealing, where freeriders exploit models through unauthorized model merging. Unfortunately, existing defense mechanisms fail to provide effective protection. Specifically, we identify three critical protection properties that existing methods fail to simultaneously satisfy: (1) proactively preventing unauthorized merging; (2) ensuring compatibility with general open-source settings; (3) achieving high security with negligible performance loss. To address the above issues, we propose MergeBarrier, a plug-and-play defense that proactively prevents unauthorized merging. The core design of MergeBarrier is to disrupt the Linear Mode Connectivity (LMC) between the protected model and its homologous counterparts, thereby eliminating the low-loss path required for effective model merging. Extensive experiments show that MergeBarrier effectively prevents model merging stealing with negligible accuracy loss.

PaperID: 2313, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03360

Authors:Qingchuan Li, Mingyue Cheng, Zirui Liu, Daoyu Wang, Yuting Zeng, Tongxuan Liu

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China

Title: From Hypothesis to Premises: LLM-based Backward Logical Reasoning with Selective Symbolic Translation

Abstract:
Logical reasoning is a core challenge in natural language understanding and a fundamental capability of artificial intelligence, underpinning scientific discovery, mathematical theorem proving, and complex decisionmaking. Despite the remarkable progress of large language models (LLMs), most current approaches still rely on forward reasoning paradigms, generating step-by-step rationales from premises to conclusions. However, such methods often suffer from redundant inference paths, hallucinated steps, and semantic drift, resulting in inefficient and unreliable reasoning. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Hypothesis-driven Backward Logical Reasoning (HBLR). The core idea is to integrate confidence-aware symbolic translation with hypothesis-driven backward reasoning. In the translation phase, only high-confidence spans are converted into logical form, such as first-order logic (FOL), while uncertain content remains in natural language. A translation reflection module further ensures semantic fidelity by evaluating symbolic outputs and reverting lossy ones back to text when necessary. In the reasoning phase, HBLR simulates human deductive thinking by assuming the conclusion is true and recursively verifying its premises. A reasoning reflection module further identifies and corrects flawed inference steps, enhancing logical coherence. Extensive experiments on five reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that HBLR consistently outperforms strong baselines in both accuracy and efficiency.

PaperID: 2314, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.11873

Authors:Qiyang Li, Rui Kong, Yuchen Li, Hengyi Cai, Shuaiqiang Wang, Linghe Kong, Guihai Chen, Dawei Yin

Affiliations: Baidu Inc., Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: AdaFuse: Accelerating Dynamic Adapter Inference via Token-Level Pre-Gating and Fused Kernel Optimization

Abstract:
The integration of dynamic, sparse structures like Mixtureof-Experts (MoE) with parameter-efficient adapters (e.g., LoRA) is a powerful technique for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs). However, this architectural enhancement comes at a steep cost: despite minimal increases in computational load, the inference latency often skyrockets, leading to decoding speeds slowing by over 2.5 times. Through a fine-grained performance analysis, we pinpoint the primary bottleneck not in the computation itself, but in the severe overhead from fragmented, sequential CUDA kernel launches required for conventional dynamic routing. To address this challenge, we introduce AdaFuse, a framework built on a tight co-design between the algorithm and the underlying hardware system to enable efficient dynamic adapter execution. Departing from conventional layer-wise or block-wise routing, AdaFuse employs a token-level pre-gating strategy, which makes a single, global routing decision for all adapter layers before a token is processed. This ``decide-once, apply-everywhere'' approach effectively staticizes the execution path for each token, creating an opportunity for holistic optimization. We capitalize on this by developing a custom CUDA kernel that performs a fused switching operation, merging the parameters of all selected LoRA adapters into the backbone model in a single, efficient pass. Experimental results on popular open-source LLMs show that AdaFuse achieves accuracy on par with state-of-the-art dynamic adapters while drastically cutting decoding latency by a factor of over 2.4x, thereby bridging the gap between model capability and inference efficiency.

PaperID: 2315, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09245

Authors:Shuocheng Li, Yihao Liu, Silin Du, Wenxuan Zeng, Zhe Xu, Mengyu Zhou, Yeye He, Haoyu Dong, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang

Affiliations: Peking University, Stanford University

Title: Jupiter: Enhancing LLM Data Analysis Capabilities via Notebook and Inference-Time Value-Guided Search

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown great promise in automating data science workflows. However, existing models still struggle with multistep reasoning and tool use, limiting their effectiveness on complex data analysis tasks. To address this limitation, we propose a scalable pipeline that extracts high-quality, tool-based data analysis tasks and their executable multi-step solutions from real-world Jupyter notebooks and associated data files. Using this pipeline, we introduce NbQA, a large-scale dataset of standardized task–solution pairs that reflect authentic tool-use patterns in practical data science scenarios. To further enhance the multi-step reasoning capabilities, we present Jupiter, a framework that formulates data analysis as a search problem and applies Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to generate diverse solution trajectories for value model learning. During inference, Jupiter combines the value model and node visit counts to efficiently collect executable multi-step plans with minimal search steps. Experimental results show that Qwen2.5-7B and 14B-Instruct models on NbQA solve 77.82% and 86.38% of tasks on InfiAgent-DABench, respectively—matching or surpassing GPT-4o and advanced agent frameworks. Further evaluations demonstrate improved generalization and stronger tool-use reasoning across diverse multi-step reasoning tasks.

PaperID: 2316, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.21239

Authors:Xiaomin Li, Zhou Yu, Ziji Zhang, Yingying Zhuang, Swair Shah, Narayanan Sadagopan, Anurag Beniwal

Affiliations: Harvard University

Title: Semantic Volume: Quantifying and Detecting Both External and Internal Uncertainty in LLMs

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse tasks by encoding vast amounts of factual knowledge. However, they are still prone to hallucinations, generating incorrect or misleading information, often accompanied by high uncertainty. Existing methods for hallucination detection primarily focus on quantifying internal uncertainty, which arises from missing or conflicting knowledge within the model. However, hallucinations can also stem from external uncertainty, where ambiguous user queries lead to multiple possible interpretations. In this work, we introduce Semantic Volume, a novel mathematical measure for quantifying both external and internal uncertainty in LLMs. Our approach perturbs queries and responses, embeds them in a semantic space, and computes the Gram matrix determinant of the embedding vectors, capturing their dispersion as a measure of uncertainty. Our framework provides a generalizable and unsupervised uncertainty detection method without requiring internal access to LLMs. We conduct extensive experiments on both external and internal uncertainty detections, demonstrating that our Semantic Volume method consistently outperforms existing baselines in both tasks. Additionally, we provide theoretical insights linking our measure to differential entropy, unifying and extending previous samplingbased uncertainty measures such as the semantic entropy. Semantic Volume is shown to be a robust and interpretable approach to improving the reliability of LLMs by systematically detecting uncertainty in both user queries and model responses.

PaperID: 2317, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07061

Authors:Xinran Li, Yu Liu, Jiaqi Qiao, Xiujuan Xu

Affiliations: Dalian University of Technology

Title: Do LLMs Feel? Teaching Emotion Recognition with Prompts, Retrieval, and Curriculum Learning

Abstract:
Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) is a crucial task for understanding human emotions and enabling natural humancomputer interaction. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown great potential in this field, their ability to capture the intrinsic connections between explicit and implicit emotions remains limited. We propose a novel ERC training framework, PRC-Emo, which integrates Prompt engineering, demonstration Retrieval, and Curriculum learning, with the goal of exploring whether LLMs can effectively perceive emotions in conversational contexts. Specifically, we design emotion-sensitive prompt templates based on both explicit and implicit emotional cues to better guide the model in understanding the speaker’s psychological states. We construct the first dedicated demonstration retrieval repository for ERC, which includes training samples from widely used datasets, as well as high-quality dialogue examples generated by LLMs and manually verified. Moreover, we introduce a curriculum learning strategy into the LoRA fine-tuning process, incorporating weighted emotional shifts between same-speaker and different-speaker utterances to assign difficulty levels to dialogue samples, which are then organized in an easy-to-hard training sequence. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets—IEMOCAP and MELD—show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalizability of our approach in improving LLM-based emotional understanding.

PaperID: 2318, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07218

Authors:Feng Liang, Weixin Zeng, Runhao Zhao, Xiang Zhao

Affiliations: China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, National Key Laboratory of Big Data and Decision, National University of Defense Technology

Title: NeSTR: A Neuro-Symbolic Abductive Framework for Temporal Reasoning in Large Language Models

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. However, temporal reasoning, particularly under complex temporal constraints, remains a major challenge. To this end, existing approaches have explored symbolic methods, which encode temporal structure explicitly, and reflective mechanisms, which revise reasoning errors through multistep inference. Nonetheless, symbolic approaches often underutilize the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, while reflective methods typically lack structured temporal representations, which can result in inconsistent or hallucinated reasoning. As a result, even when the correct temporal context is available, LLMs may still misinterpret or misapply time-related information, leading to incomplete or inaccurate answers. To address these limitations, in this work, we propose Neuro-Symbolic Temporal Reasoning (NeSTR), a novel framework that integrates structured symbolic representations with hybrid reflective reasoning to enhance the temporal sensitivity of LLM inference. NeSTR preserves explicit temporal relations through symbolic encoding, enforces logical consistency via verification, and corrects flawed inferences using abductive reflection. Extensive experiments on diverse temporal question answering benchmarks demonstrate that NeSTR achieves superior zero-shot performance and consistently improves temporal reasoning without any fine-tuning, showcasing the advantage of neuro-symbolic integration in enhancing temporal understanding in large language models.

PaperID: 2319, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07605

Authors:Xun Liang, Hanyu Wang, Huayi Lai, Simin Niu, Shichao Song, Jiawei Yang, Jihao Zhao, Feiyu Xiong, Bo Tang, Zhiyu Li

Affiliations: Renmin University of China, Institute for Advanced Algorithms Research (Shanghai) MemTensor (Shanghai) Technology Co.

Title: SEAP: Sparse Expert Activation Pruning Unlocks the Brainpower of Large Language Models

Abstract:
Pruning is a promising approach to reduce the high inference cost of large language models (LLMs), but it often comes at the expense of performance. Motivated by the "functional localization" theory in neuroscience, we hypothesize that LLMs contain taskspecific expert activation paths, where specific subsets of neurons are co-activated for particular tasks. This structure allows selective activation to preserve task performance while improving inference efficiency. We introduce Sparse Expert Activation Pruning (SEAP), a training-free pruning method for large language models. SEAP identifies task-relevant activation paths by analyzing the clustering patterns of hidden states and neuron activations on a multi-task calibration dataset. Cross-task transfer evaluations confirm the existence of such expert activation structures. SEAP constructs task-aware pruning masks by leveraging a task-expert calibration dataset, which provides representative samples across diverse tasks to reveal their activation signatures. It then employs a lightweight task router to dynamically select relevant computation paths based on the input task. This design significantly reduces inference cost without compromising accuracy. Experimental results show that SEAP retains model performance with only a 1.5% drop on most tasks at 20% sparsity, and at 50% sparsity, it surpasses strong pruning baselines such as WandA and FLAP by over 20%. These results highlight SEAP as a scalable and effective solution for efficient LLM inference.

PaperID: 2320, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06778

Authors:Ruiheng Liu, Xiaobing Chen, Jinyu Zhang, Qiongwen Zhang, Yu Zhang, Bailong Yang

Affiliations: Xi’an Research Institute of High-Tech, Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: SafeNLIDB: A Privacy-Preserving Safety Alignment Framework for LLM-based Natural Language Database Interfaces

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has driven significant progress in Natural Language Interface to Database (NLIDB). However, the widespread adoption of LLMs has raised critical privacy and security concerns. During interactions, LLMs may unintentionally expose confidential database contents or be manipulated by attackers to exfiltrate data through seemingly benign queries. While current efforts typically rely on rulebased heuristics or LLM agents to mitigate this leakage risk, these methods still struggle with complex inference-based attacks, suffer from high false positive rates, and often compromise the reliability of SQL queries. To address these challenges, we propose SafeNLIDB, a novel privacy-security alignment framework for LLM-based NLIDB. The framework features an automated pipeline that generates hybrid chain-of-thought interaction data from scratch, seamlessly combining explicit security reasoning with SQL generation. Additionally, we introduce reasoning warm-up and alternating preference optimization to overcome the multi-preference oscillations of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), enabling LLMs to produce security-aware SQL through fine-grained reasoning without the need for human-annotated preference data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms both larger-scale LLMs and ideal-setting baselines, achieving significant security improvements while preserving high utility.

PaperID: 2321, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.10798

Authors:Yijun Liu, Yixuan Wang, Yuzhuang Xu, Shiyu Ji, Yang Xu, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: Judge Q: Trainable Queries for Optimized Information Retention in KV Cache Eviction

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) utilize keyvalue (KV) cache to store historical information during sequence processing. The size of KV cache grows linearly as the length of the sequence extends, which seriously affects memory usage and decoding efficiency. Current methods for KV cache eviction typically utilize the last window from the pre-filling phase as queries to compute the KV importance scores for eviction. Although this scheme is simple to implement, it tends to overly focus on local information, potentially leading to the neglect or omission of crucial global information. To mitigate this issue, we propose Judge Q, a novel training method which incorporates a soft token list. This method only tunes the model’s embedding layer at a low training cost. By concatenating the soft token list at the end of the input sequence, we train these tokens' attention map to the original input sequence to align with that of the actual decoded tokens. In this way, the queries corresponding to the soft tokens can effectively capture global information and better evaluate the importance of the keys and values within the KV cache, thus maintaining decoding quality when KV cache is evicted. Under the same eviction budget, our method exhibits less performance degradation compared to existing eviction approaches. We validate our approach through experiments conducted on models such as Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3, using benchmarks including LongBench, RULER, and Needle-in-a-Haystack. Results indicate an improvement of approximately 1 point on the LongBench and over 3 points on RULER. This proposed methodology can be seamlessly integrated into existing open-source models with minimal training overhead, thereby enhancing performance in KV cache eviction scenarios.

PaperID: 2322, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17515

Authors:Songshuo Lu, Hua Wang, Zhi Chen, Yaohua Tang

Affiliations: Moore Threads AI

Title: URPO: A Unified Reward & Policy Optimization Framework for Large Language Models

Abstract:
Largescale alignment pipelines typically pair a policy model with a separately trained reward model whose parameters remain frozen during reinforcement learning (RL). This separation creates a complex, resource-intensive pipeline and leads to a performance ceiling. We propose a novel framework, Unified Reward & Policy Optimization (URPO), that unifies instruction-following (“player”) and reward modeling (“referee”) into a single model and a single training phase. Our method recasts all alignment data-including preference pairs, verifiable reasoning, and open-ended instructions-into a unified generative format optimized by a single Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) loop. This enables the model to learn from ground-truth preferences and verifiable logic while simultaneously generating its own rewards for open-ended tasks. Experiments on the Qwen2.5-7B model demonstrate that URPO significantly outperforms a strong baseline using a separate generative reward model, boosting the instructionfollowing score on AlpacaEval to 44.84 and achieving a 36% relative improvement on the challenging AIME reasoning benchmark. Furthermore, URPO cultivates a superior internal evaluator as a byproduct of training, achieving a RewardBench score of 85.15 and surpassing the dedicated reward model it replaces (83.55). By eliminating the need for a separate reward model and fostering a co-evolutionary dynamic, URPO presents a simpler, more efficient, and more effective path towards robustly aligned language models.

PaperID: 2323, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11343

Authors:Haitong Luo, Weiyao Zhang, Suhang Wang, Wenji Zou, Chungang Lin, Xuying Meng, Yujun Zhang

Affiliations: Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Pennsylvania State University

Title: SpecDetect: Simple, Fast, and Training-Free Detection of LLM-Generated Text via Spectral Analysis

Abstract:
The proliferation of highquality text from Large Language Models (LLMs) demands reliable and efficient detection methods. While existing training-free approaches show promise, they often rely on surface-level statistics and overlook fundamental signal properties of the text generation process. In this work, we reframe detection as a signal processing problem, introducing a novel paradigm that analyzes the sequence of token log-probabilities in the frequency domain. By systematically analyzing the signal's spectral properties using the global Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) and the local Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT), we find that human-written text consistently exhibits significantly higher spectral energy. This higher energy reflects the larger-amplitude fluctuations inherent in human writing compared to the suppressed dynamics of LLM-generated text. Based on this key insight, we construct SpecDetect, a detector built on a single, robust feature from the global DFT: DFT total energy. We also propose an enhanced version, SpecDetect++, which incorporates a sampling discrepancy mechanism to further boost robustness. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art model while running in nearly half the time. Our work introduces a new, efficient, and interpretable pathway for LLM-generated text detection, showing that classical signal processing techniques offer a surprisingly powerful solution to this modern challenge.

PaperID: 2324, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07260

Authors:Huipeng Ma, Luan Zhang, Dandan Song, Linmei Hu, Yuhang Tian, Jun Yang, Changzhi Zhou, Chenhao Li, Yizhou Jin, Xudong Li, Meng Lin, Mingxing Zhang, Shuhao Zhang

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology, China QiYuan Lab, Tsinghua University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: ActiShade: Activating Overshadowed Knowledge to Guide Multi-Hop Reasoning in Large Language Models

Abstract:
In multihop reasoning, multi-round retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods typically rely on LLM-generated content as the retrieval query. However, these approaches are inherently vulnerable to knowledge overshadowing—a phenomenon where critical information is overshadowed during generation. As a result, the LLM-generated content may be incomplete or inaccurate, leading to irrelevant retrieval and causing error accumulation during the iteration process. To address this challenge, we propose ActiShade, which detects and activates overshadowed knowledge to guide large language models(LLMs) in multi-hop reasoning. Specifically, ActiShade iteratively detects the overshadowed keyphrase in the given query, retrieves documents relevant to both the query and the overshadowed keyphrase, and generates a new query based on the retrieved documents to guide the next-round iteration. By supplementing the overshadowed knowledge during the formulation of next-round queries while minimizing the introduction of irrelevant noise, ActiShade reduces the error accumulation caused by knowledge overshadowing. Extensive experiments show that ActiShade outperforms existing methods across multiple datasets and LLMs.

PaperID: 2325, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17170

Authors:Vy Nguyen, Ziqi Xu, Jeffrey Chan, Estrid He, Feng Xia, Xiuzhen Zhang

Affiliations: Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

Title: Hallucinate Less by Thinking More: Aspect-Based Causal Abstention for Large Language Models

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce fluent but factually incorrect responses, a phenomenon known as hallucination. Abstention, where the model chooses not to answer and instead outputs phrases such as "I don't know", is a common safeguard. However, existing abstention methods typically rely on postgeneration signals, such as generation variations or feedback, which limits their ability to prevent unreliable responses in advance. In this paper, we introduce Aspect-Based Causal Abstention (ABCA), a new framework that enables early abstention by analysing the internal diversity of LLM knowledge through causal inference. This diversity reflects the multifaceted nature of parametric knowledge acquired from various sources, representing diverse aspects such as disciplines, legal contexts, or temporal frames. ABCA estimates causal effects conditioned on these aspects to assess the reliability of knowledge relevant to a given query. Based on these estimates, we enable two types of abstention: Type-1, where aspect effects are inconsistent (knowledge conflict), and Type-2, where aspect effects consistently support abstention (knowledge insufficiency). Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that ABCA improves abstention reliability, achieves state-of-the-art performance, and enhances the interpretability of abstention decisions.

PaperID: 2326, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13592

Authors:Nicolò Penzo, Marco Guerini, Bruno Lepri, Goran Glavaš, Sara Tonelli

Affiliations: Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy University of Trento, Center For Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, University of Würzburg

Title: Don’t Stop the Multi-Party! On Generating Synthetic Written Multi-Party Conversations with Constraints

Abstract:
Written MultiParty Conversations (WMPCs) are widely studied across disciplines, with social media as a primary data source due to their accessibility. However, these datasets raise privacy concerns and often reflect platform-specific properties. For example, interactions between speakers may be limited due to rigid platform structures (e.g., threads, tree-like discussions), which yield overly simplistic interaction patterns (e.g., one-to-one ``reply-to'' links). This work explores the feasibility of generating synthetic WMPCs with instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) by providing deterministic constraints such as dialogue structure and participants’ stance. We investigate two complementary strategies of leveraging LLMs in this context: (i.) LLMs as WMPC generators, where we task the LLM to generate a whole WMPC at once and (ii.) LLMs as WMPC parties, where the LLM generates one turn of the conversation at a time (made of speaker, addressee and message), provided the conversation history. We next introduce an analytical framework to evaluate compliance with the constraints, content quality, and interaction complexity for both strategies. Finally, we assess the level of obtained WMPCs via human and LLM-as-a-judge evaluations. We find stark differences among LLMs, with only some being able to generate high-quality WMPCs. We also find that turn-by-turn generation yields better conformance to constraints and higher linguistic variability than generating WMPCs in one pass. Nonetheless, our structural and qualitative evaluation indicates that both generation strategies can yield high-quality WMPCs.

PaperID: 2327, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08379

Authors:Giorgio Piras, Raffaele Mura, Fabio Brau, Luca Oneto, Fabio Roli, Battista Biggio

Affiliations: University of Cagliari, Università degli Studi di Genova

Title: SOM Directions Are Better than One: Multi-Directional Refusal Suppression in Language Models

Abstract:
Refusal refers to the functional behavior enabling safetyaligned language models to reject harmful or unethical prompts. Following the growing scientific interest in mechanistic interpretability, recent work encoded refusal behavior as a single direction in the model’s latent space; e.g., computed as the difference between the centroids of harmful and harmless prompt representations. However, emerging evidence suggests that concepts in LLMs often appear to be encoded as a low-dimensional manifold embedded in the high-dimensional latent space. Motivated by these findings, we propose a novel method leveraging Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) to extract multiple refusal directions. To this end, we first prove that SOMs generalize the prior work's difference-in-means technique. We then train SOMs on harmful prompt representations to identify multiple neurons. By subtracting the centroid of harmless representations from each neuron, we derive a set of multiple directions expressing the refusal concept. We validate our method on an extensive experimental setup, demonstrating that ablating multiple directions from models' internals outperforms not only the single-direction baseline but also specialized jailbreak algorithms, leading to an effective suppression of refusal. Finally, we conclude by analyzing the mechanistic implications of our approach.

PaperID: 2328, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02515

Authors:Zhan Qu, Shuzhou Yuan, Michael Färber

Affiliations: Technische Universität Dresden ScaDS.AI

Title: PoeTone: A Framework for Constrained Generation of Structured Chinese Songci with LLMs

Abstract:
This paper presents a systematic investigation into the constrained generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in producing Songci, a classical Chinese poetry form characterized by strict structural, tonal, and rhyme constraints defined by Cipai templates. We first develop a comprehensive, multifaceted evaluation framework that includes: (i) a formal conformity score, (ii) automated quality assessment using LLMs, (iii) human evaluation, and (iv) classification-based probing tasks. Using this framework, we evaluate the generative performance of 18 LLMs, including 3 proprietary models and 15 open-source models across 4 families, under five prompting strategies: zero-shot, one-shot, completion-based, instruction-based, and chain-of-thought. Finally, we propose a Generate-Critic architecture in which the evaluation framework functions as an automated critic. Leveraging the critic’s feedback as a scoring function for best-of-N selection, we fine-tune 3 lightweight open-source LLMs via supervised fine-tuning (SFT), resulting in improvements of up to 5.88% in formal conformity. Our findings offer new insights into the generative strengths and limitations of LLMs in producing culturally significant and formally constrained literary texts.

PaperID: 2329, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.02775

Authors:Weikang Shi, Houxing Ren, Junting Pan, Aojun Zhou, Ke Wang, Zimu Lu, Yunqiao Yang, Yuxuan Hu, Linda Wei, Mingjie Zhan, Hongsheng Li

Affiliations: Multimedia Laboratory (MMLab), The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title: From Solver to Tutor: Evaluating the Pedagogical Intelligence of LLMs with KMP-Bench

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) show significant potential in AI mathematical tutoring, yet current evaluations often rely on simplistic metrics or narrow pedagogical scenarios, failing to assess comprehensive, multiturn teaching effectiveness. In this paper, we introduce KMP-Bench, a comprehensive K-8 Mathematical Pedagogical Benchmark designed to assess LLMs from two complementary perspectives. The first module, KMP-Dialogue, evaluates holistic pedagogical capabilities against six core principles (e.g., Challenge, Explanation, Feedback), leveraging a novel multi-turn dialogue dataset constructed by weaving together diverse pedagogical components. The second module, KMP-Skills, provides a granular assessment of foundational tutoring abilities, including multi-turn problem-solving, error detection and correction, and problem generation. Our evaluations on KMP-Bench reveal a key disparity: while leading LLMs excel at tasks with verifiable solutions, they struggle with the nuanced application of pedagogical principles. Additionally, we present KMP-Pile, a large-scale (150K) dialogue dataset. Models fine-tuned on KMP-Pile show substantial improvement on KMP-Bench, underscoring the value of pedagogically-rich training data for developing more effective AI math tutors.

PaperID: 2330, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12991

Authors:Zeyu Shi, Ziming Wang, Tianyu Chen, Shiqi Gao, Haoyi Zhou, Qingyun Sun, Jianxin Li

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, School of Software

Title: Fine-Tuned LLMs Know They Don’t Know: A Parameter-Efficient Approach to Recovering Honesty

Abstract:
The honesty of Large Language Models (LLMs) is increasingly important for safe deployment in highstakes domains. However, this crucial trait is severely undermined by supervised fine-tuning (SFT), a common technique for model specialization. Existing recovery methods rely on data-intensive global parameter adjustments, implicitly assuming that SFT deeply corrupts the models' ability to recognize their knowledge boundaries. However, we observe that fine‑tuned LLMs still preserve this ability; what is damaged is their capacity to faithfully express that awareness. Building on this, we propose Honesty-Critical Neurons Restoration (HCNR) to surgically repair this suppressed capacity. HCNR identifies and restores key expression-governing neurons to their pre-trained state while harmonizing them with task-oriented neurons via Hessian-guided compensation. Experiments on four QA tasks and five LLM families demonstrate that HCNR effectively recovers 33.25% of the compromised honesty while achieving at least 2.23x speedup with over 10x less data compared to baseline methods, offering a practical solution for trustworthy LLM deployment.

PaperID: 2331, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04216

Authors:Ruike Song, Zeen Song, Huijie Guo, Wenwen Qiang

Affiliations: Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences Nankai University, Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Causal Reward Adjustment: Mitigating Reward Hacking in External Reasoning via Backdoor Correction

Abstract:
External reasoning systems combine language models with process reward models (PRMs) to select highquality reasoning paths for complex tasks such as mathematical problem solving. However, these systems are prone to reward hacking, where high-scoring but logically incorrect paths are assigned high scores by the PRMs, leading to incorrect answers. From a causal inference perspective, we attribute this phenomenon primarily to the presence of confounding semantic features. To address it, we propose Causal Reward Adjustment (CRA), a method that mitigates reward hacking by estimating the true reward of a reasoning path. CRA trains sparse autoencoders on the PRM’s internal activations to recover interpretable features, then corrects confounding by using backdoor adjustment. Experiments on math solving datasets demonstrate that CRA mitigates reward hacking and improves final accuracy, without modifying the policy model or retraining PRM.

PaperID: 2332, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15274

Authors:Yiliu Sun, Zicheng Zhao, Yang Wei, Yanfang Zhang, Chen Gong

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, School of Software, North University of China, School of Automation and Intelligent Sensing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: Well Begun, Half Done: Reinforcement Learning with Prefix Optimization for LLM Reasoning

Abstract:
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) significantly enhances the reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). Current RLVR approaches typically conduct training across all generated tokens, but neglect to explore which tokens (e.g., prefix tokens) actually contribute to reasoning. This uniform training strategy spends substantial effort on optimizing lowreturn tokens, which in turn impedes the potential improvement from high-return tokens and reduces overall training effectiveness. To address this issue, we propose a novel RLVR approach called Progressive Prefix-token Policy Optimization (PPPO), which highlights the significance of the prefix segment of generated outputs. Specifically, inspired by the well-established human thinking theory of Path Dependence, where early-stage thoughts substantially constrain subsequent thinking trajectory, we identify an analogous phenomenon in LLM reasoning termed Beginning Lock-in Effect (BLE). PPPO leverages this finding by focusing its optimization objective on the prefix reasoning process of LLMs. This targeted optimization strategy can positively influence subsequent reasoning processes, and ultimately improve final results. To improve the learning effectiveness of LLMs on how to start reasoning with high quality, PPPO introduces two training strategies: (a) Progressive Prefix Retention, which shapes a progressive learning process by increasing the proportion of retained prefix tokens during training; (b) Continuation Accumulated Reward, which mitigates reward bias by sampling multiple continuations for one prefix token sequence, and accumulating their scores as the reward signal. Extensive experimental results on various reasoning tasks (e.g., math, physics, chemistry, and biology) demonstrate that our proposed PPPO outperforms representative RLVR methods, with the accuracy improvements of 18.02% on only 26.17% training tokens.

PaperID: 2333, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12189

Authors:Marco Valentino, Geonhee Kim, Dhairya Dalal, Zhixue Zhao, André Freitas

Affiliations: University of Sheffield, University of Manchester, University of Galway

Title: Mitigating Content Effects on Reasoning in Language Models Through Fine-Grained Activation Steering

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit reasoning biases, often conflating content plausibility with formal logical validity. This can lead to wrong inferences in critical domains, where plausible arguments are incorrectly deemed logically valid or vice versa. This paper investigates how content biases on reasoning can be mitigated through activation steering, an inferencetime technique that modulates internal activations. Specifically, after localising the layers responsible for formal and plausible inference, we investigate activation steering on a controlled syllogistic reasoning task, designed to disentangle formal validity from content plausibility. An extensive empirical analysis reveals that contrastive steering methods consistently support linear control over content biases. However, a static approach is insufficient to debias all the tested models. We then investigate how to control content effects by dynamically determining the steering parameters through fine-grained conditional methods. By introducing a novel kNN-based conditional approach (K-CAST), we demonstrate that conditional steering can effectively reduce biases on unresponsive models, achieving up to 15% absolute improvement in formal reasoning accuracy. Finally, we found that steering for content effects is robust to prompt variations, incurs minimal side effects on multilingual language modeling capabilities, and can partially generalize to different reasoning tasks. In practice, we demonstrate that activation-level interventions offer a scalable inference-time strategy for enhancing the robustness of LLMs, contributing towards more systematic and unbiased reasoning capabilities

PaperID: 2334, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12464

Authors:Chenglong Wang, Yifu Huo, Yang Gan, Yongyu Mu, Qiaozhi He, Murun Yang, Bei Li, Chunliang Zhang, Tongran Liu, Anxiang Ma, Zhengtao Yu, Jingbo Zhu, Tong Xiao

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Meituan Inc., China NiuTrans Research, CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Kunming University of Science and Technology

Title: Probing Preference Representations: A Multi-Dimensional Evaluation and Analysis Method for Reward Models

Abstract:
Previous methods evaluate reward models by testing them on a fixed pairwise ranking test set, but they typically do not provide performance information on each preference dimension. In this work, we address the evaluation challenge of reward models by probing preference representations. To confirm the effectiveness of this evaluation method, we construct a Multidimensional Reward Model Benchmark (MRMBench), a collection of six probing tasks for different preference dimensions. We design it to favor and encourage reward models that better capture preferences across different dimensions. Furthermore, we introduce an analysis method, inference-time probing, which identifies the dimensions used during the reward prediction and enhances its interpretability. Through extensive experiments, we find that MRMBench strongly correlates with LLM alignment performance, supporting it as a reliable reference for developing advanced reward models. By analyzing the evaluation results on MRMBench, we reveal that reward models struggle to simultaneously capture preferences across multiple dimensions, highlighting the potential of multi-objective optimization in reward modeling. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that the proposed inference-time probing method provides a reliable metric for assessing the confidence of reward predictions, leading to improved alignment of large language models.

PaperID: 2335, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.04134

Authors:Jinting Wang, Shan Yang, Chenxing Li, Dong Yu, Li Liu

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Technology and Science (Guangzhou), Tencent AI Lab, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Title: UniCUE: Unified Recognition and Generation Framework for Chinese Cued Speech Video-to-Speech Generation

Abstract:
Cued Speech (CS) enhances lipreading via hand coding, offering visual phonemic cues that support precise speech perception for the hearingimpaired. The task of CS Video-to-Speech generation (CSV2S) aims to convert CS videos into intelligible speech signals. Most existing research focuses on CS Recognition (CSR), which transcribes video content into text. Consequently, a common solution for CSV2S is to integrate CSR with a text-to-speech (TTS) system. However, this pipeline relies on text as an intermediate medium, which may lead to error propagation and temporal misalignment between speech and CS video dynamics. In contrast, directly generating audio speech from CS video (direct CSV2S) often suffer from the inherent multimodal complexity and the limited availability of CS data. To address these challenges, we propose UniCUE, the first unified framework for CSV2S that directly generates speech from CS videos without relying on intermediate text. The core innovation of UniCUE lies in integrating a understanding task (CSR) that provides fine-grained CS visual-semantic cues to to guide the speech generation. Specifically, UniCUE incorporates a pose-aware visual processor, a semantic alignment pool that enables precise visual–semantic mapping, and a VisioPhonetic adapter to bridge the understanding and generation tasks within a unified architecture. To support this framework, we construct UniCUE-HI, a large-scale Mandarin CS dataset containing 11,282 videos from 14 cuers, including both hearing-impaired and normal-hearing individuals. Extensive experiments conducted on this dataset demonstrate that UniCUE achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across multiple evaluation metrics.

PaperID: 2336, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10019

Authors:Li Wang, Changhao Zhang, Zengqi Xiu, Kai Lu, Xin Yu, Kui Zhang, Wenjun Wu

Affiliations: Beihang University, UCL Hawkes Institute and Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, University College London, State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China School of Artificial Intelligence, China Hangzhou International Innovation Institute, China Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Future Blockchain and Privacy Computing

Title: Decoupling Understanding from Reasoning via Problem Space Mapping for Small-Scale Model Reasoning

Abstract:
Despite recent advances in the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), improving the reasoning ability of Small Language Models (SLMs, e.g., up to 1.5B parameters) remains challenging. A key obstacle lies in the complexity and variability of natural language: essentially equivalent problems often appear in diverse surface forms, often obscured by redundant or distracting details. This imposes a dual burden on SLMs: they must first extract the core problem from complex linguistic input, and then perform reasoning based on that understanding. The resulting vast and noisy problem space hinders optimization, particularly for models with limited capacity. To address this, we propose a new framework that decouples understanding from reasoning by mapping natural language problems into a canonical problem spacea semantically simplified yet expressive domain. This enables SLMs to focus on reasoning over standardized inputs, free from linguistic variability. Within this framework, we introduce DURIT (Decoupled Understanding from Reasoning via Iterative Training), a three-step algorithm that iteratively: (1) mapping natural language problems via reinforcement learning, (2) aligns reasoning trajectories through self-distillation, and (3) trains reasoning policies in the problem space. The mapper and reasoner are co-trained in an alternating loop throughout this process. Experiments show that DURIT substantially improves SLMs' performance on both in-domain and out-of-domain mathematical and logical reasoning tasks. Beyond improving reasoning capabilities, DURIT also improves the robustness of reasoning, validating decoupling understanding from reasoning as an effective strategy for strengthening SLMs.

PaperID: 2337, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02710

Authors:Yuan Wang, Shujian Gao, Jiaxiang Liu, Songtao Jiang, Xia Haoxiang, Xiaotian Zhang, Zhaolu Kang, Yemin Wang, Zuozhu Liu

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Fudan University, Peking University

Title: Beyond N-grams: A Hierarchical Reward Learning Framework for Clinically-Aware Medical Report Generation

Abstract:
Automatic medical report generation can greatly reduce the workload of doctors, but it is often unreliable for realworld deployment. Current methods can write formally fluent sentences but may be factually flawed, introducing serious medical errors known as clinical hallucinations, which make them untrustworthy for diagnosis. To bridge this gap, we introduce HiMed-RL, a Hierarchical Medical Reward Learning Framework designed to explicitly prioritize clinical quality. HiMed-RL moves beyond simple text matching by deconstructing reward learning into three synergistic levels: it first ensures linguistic fluency at the token-level, then enforces factual grounding at the concept-level by aligning key medical terms with expert knowledge, and finally assesses high-level diagnostic consistency at the semantic-level using a specialized LLM verifier. This hierarchical reward is implemented via a Human-inspired Dynamic Reward Adjustment, a strategy which first teaches the model to learn basic facts before progressing to more complex diagnostic reasoning. Experimentally, HiMed-3B achieves state-of-the-art performance on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks, particularly on the latter, with an improvement of 10.8% over the second-best baseline. Our work provides a robust paradigm for generating reports that not only improve fluency but clinical fine-grained quality.

PaperID: 2338, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20178

Authors:Zhiyuan Wang, Jinhao Duan, Qingni Wang, Xiaofeng Zhu, Tianlong Chen, Xiaoshuang Shi, Kaidi Xu

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Drexel University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Title: COIN: Uncertainty-Guarding Selective Question Answering for Foundation Models with Provable Risk Guarantees

Abstract:
Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in foundation models is crucial for identifying and mitigating hallucinations in automatically generated text. However, heuristic UQ approaches lack statistical guarantees for key metrics such as the false discovery rate (FDR) in selective prediction tasks. Previous research adopts the split conformal prediction (SCP) framework to ensure desired coverage of admissible answers by constructing datadriven prediction sets, yet these sets typically contain incorrect candidates, undermining their practical effectiveness. To address this, we introduce COIN, an uncertainty-guarding selection framework that calibrates statistically valid uncertainty thresholds to filter a single generated answer per question under user-specified FDR constraints. COIN estimates the empirical error rate on the calibration set and applies confidence interval methods such as Clopper–Pearson to establish a high-probability upper bound on the true error rate (i.e., FDR). This enables the selection of the largest threshold that ensures FDR control on test data while significantly increasing sample retention. We demonstrate COIN's robustness in risk control, strong test-time power in retaining admissible answers, and predictive efficiency under limited calibration data across both general and multimodal text generation tasks. Furthermore, we show that employing alternative UQ and upper bound construction strategies can further boost COIN's power performance, which underscores its extensibility and adaptability to diverse application scenarios.

PaperID: 2339, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10532

Authors:Mingqi Wu, Zhihao Zhang, Qiaole Dong, Zhiheng Xi, Jun Zhao, Senjie Jin, Xiaoran Fan, Yuhao Zhou, Huijie Lv, Ming Zhang, Yanwei Fu, Qin Liu, Songyang Zhang, Qi Zhang

Affiliations: Fudan University, University of California, Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Title: Reasoning or Memorization? Unreliable Results of Reinforcement Learning Due to Data Contamination

Abstract:
Reasoning in large language models has long been a central research focus, and recent studies employing reinforcement learning (RL) have introduced diverse methods that yield substantial performance gains with minimal or even no external supervision. Surprisingly, some studies even suggest that random or incorrect reward signals can enhance performance. However, these breakthroughs are predominantly observed for the mathematically strong Qwen2.5 series on benchmarks such as MATH500, AMC, and AIME, and seldom transfer to models like Llama, which warrants a more in-depth investigation. In this work, our empirical analysis reveals that pre-training on massive web-scale corpora leaves Qwen2.5 susceptible to data contamination in widely used benchmarks. Consequently, conclusions derived from contaminated benchmarks on Qwen2.5 series may be unreliable. To obtain trustworthy evaluation results, we introduce a generator that creates fully clean arithmetic problems of arbitrary length and difficulty, dubbed RandomCalculation. Using this leakage-free dataset, we show that only accurate reward signals yield steady improvements that surpass the base model’s performance boundary in mathematical reasoning, whereas random or incorrect rewards do not. Moreover, we conduct more fine-grained analyses to elucidate the factors underlying the different performance observed on the MATH-500 and RandomCalculation benchmarks. Consequently, we recommend that future studies evaluate models on uncontaminated benchmarks and, when feasible, test various model series to ensure trustworthy conclusions about RL and related methods.

PaperID: 2340, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00466

Authors:Yang Xiao, Chunpu Xu, Ruifeng Yuan, Jessie Wang, Wenjie Li, Pengfei Liu

Affiliations: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Shanghai Jiaotong University

Title: SCALE: Selective Resource Allocation for Overcoming Performance Bottlenecks in Mathematical Test-time Scaling

Abstract:
Testtime compute scaling has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing mathematical reasoning in large language models (LLMs) by allocating additional computational resources during inference. However, current methods employ uniform resource distribution across all reasoning sub-problems, creating fundamental bottlenecks where challenging sub-problems receive insufficient attention while routine operations consume disproportionate resources. This uniform allocation creates performance bottlenecks where additional computational resources yield diminishing returns. Inspired by dual-process theory, we propose SCALE (Selective Resource Allocation), a framework that selectively allocates computational resources based on sub-problem difficulty. SCALE operates through four stages: (1) problem decomposition into sequential reasoning sub-problems, (2) difficulty assessment of each sub-problem to distinguish between routine operations and computationally challenging sub-problems, (3) selective processing mode assignment between System 1 for simple sub-problems and System 2 for complex ones, and (4) sequential execution with context propagation. By concentrating resources on challenging sub-problems while processing routine operations efficiently, SCALE achieves substantial performance improvements with superior resource utilization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SCALE significantly outperforms uniform scaling baselines, achieving accuracy improvements of up to 13.75 percentage points (57.50% to 71.25% on AIME25) while reducing computational costs by 33-53%, representing a major advance in test-time scaling that addresses fundamental limitations of current approaches.

PaperID: 2341, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05083

Authors:Dexuan Xu, Jieyi Wang, Zhongyan Chai, Yongzhi Cao, Hanpin Wang, Huamin Zhang, Yu Huang

Affiliations: Peking University, Institute of Basic Theory of Chinese Medicine, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences

Title: MedMKEB: A Comprehensive Knowledge Editing Benchmark for Medical Multimodal Large Language Models

Abstract:
Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have significantly improved medical AI, enabling it to unify the understanding of visual and textual information. However, as medical knowledge continues to evolve, it is critical to allow these models to efficiently update outdated or incorrect information without retraining from scratch. Although textual knowledge editing has been widely studied, there is still a lack of systematic benchmarks for multimodal medical knowledge editing involving image and text modalities. To fill this gap, we present MedMKEB, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the reliability, generality, locality, portability, and robustness of knowledge editing in medical multimodal large language models. MedMKEB is built on a highquality medical visual question-answering dataset and enriched with carefully constructed editing tasks, including counterfactual correction, semantic generalization, knowledge transfer, and adversarial robustness. We incorporate human expert validation to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the benchmark. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art general and medical MLLMs demonstrate the limitations of existing knowledge editing methods in the medical domain, highlighting the need to develop specialized editing strategies.

PaperID: 2342, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18178

Authors:Mutian Yang, Jiandong Gao, Ji Wu

Affiliations: Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Haidian District, Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, College of AI

Title: Decoupling Knowledge and Reasoning in LLMs: An Exploration Using Cognitive Dual-System Theory

Abstract:
While large language models (LLMs) leverage both knowledge and reasoning during inference, the capacity to distinguish between them plays a pivotal role in model analysis, interpretability, and development. Inspired by dualsystem cognitive theory, we propose a cognition attribution framework to decouple the contribution of knowledge and reasoning. In particular, the cognition of LLMs is decomposed into two distinct yet complementary phases: knowledge retrieval (Phase 1) and reasoning adjustment (Phase 2). To separate these phases, LLMs are prompted to generate answers under two different cognitive modes, fast thinking and slow thinking, respectively. The performance under different cognitive modes is analyzed to quantify the contribution of knowledge and reasoning. This architecture is employed to 15 LLMs across 3 datasets. Results reveal: (1) reasoning adjustment is domain-specific, benefiting reasoning-intensive domains (e.g., mathematics, physics, and chemistry) and potentially imparing knowledge-intensive domains. (2) Parameter scaling improves both knowledge and reasoning, with knowledge improvements being more pronounced. Additionally, parameter scaling make LLMs reasoning significantly more prudent, while moderately more intelligent. (3) Knowledge primarily resides in lower network layers, while reasoning operates in higher layers. Our framework not only helps understand LLMs from a "decoupling" perspective, but also provides new insights into existing research, including scaling laws, hierarchical knowledge editing, and limitations of small-scale-LLM reasoning.

PaperID: 2343, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06372

Authors:Han Yin, Yafeng Chen, Chong Deng, Luyao Cheng, Hui Wang, Chao-Hong Tan, Qian Chen, Wen Wang, Xiangang Li

Affiliations: Tongyi Lab, Alibaba Group

Title: SpeakerLM: End-to-End Versatile Speaker Diarization and Recognition with Multimodal Large Language Models

Abstract:
The Speaker Diarization and Recognition (SDR) task aims to predict ``who spoke when and what'' within an audio clip, which is a crucial task in various realworld multi-speaker scenarios such as meeting transcription and dialogue systems. Existing SDR systems typically adopt a cascaded framework, combining multiple modules such as speaker diarization (SD) and automatic speech recognition (ASR). The cascaded systems suffer from several limitations, such as error propagation, difficulty in handling overlapping speech, and lack of joint optimization for exploring the synergy between SD and ASR tasks. To address these limitations, we introduce SpeakerLM, a unified multimodal large language model for SDR that jointly performs SD and ASR in an end-to-end manner. Moreover, to facilitate diverse real-world scenarios, we incorporate a flexible speaker registration mechanism into SpeakerLM, enabling SDR under different speaker registration settings. SpeakerLM is progressively developed with a multi-stage training strategy on large-scale real data. Extensive experiments show that SpeakerLM demonstrates strong data scaling capability and generalizability, outperforming state-of-the-art cascaded baselines on both in-domain and out-of-domain public SDR benchmarks. Furthermore, experimental results show that the proposed speaker registration mechanism effectively ensures robust SDR performance of SpeakerLM across diverse speaker registration conditions and varying numbers of registered speakers.

PaperID: 2344, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.16607

Authors:Shuozhi Yuan, Liming Chen, Miaomiao Yuan, Zhao Jin

Affiliations: China Telecom Digital Intelligence, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: MCTS-SQL: Light-Weight LLMs Can Master the Text-to-SQL Through Monte Carlo Tree Search

Abstract:
Textto-SQL is a fundamental yet challenging task in the NLP area, aiming at translating natural language questions into SQL queries. While recent advances in large language models have greatly improved performance, most existing approaches depend on models with tens of billions of parameters or costly APIs, limiting their applicability in resource-constrained environments. For real world, especially on edge devices, it is crucial for Text-to-SQL to ensure cost-effectiveness. Therefore, enabling the light-weight models for Text-to-SQL is of great practical significance. However, smaller LLMs often struggle with complicated user instruction, redundant schema linking or syntax correctness. To address these challenges, we propose MCTS-SQL, a novel framework that uses Monte Carlo Tree Search to guide SQL generation through multi-step refinement. Since the light-weight models' weak performance of single-shot prediction, we generate better results through several trials with feedback. However, directly applying MCTS-based methods inevitably leads to significant time and computational overhead. Driven by this issue, we propose a token-level prefix-cache mechanism that stores prior information during iterations, effectively improved the execution speed. Experiments results on the SPIDER and BIRD benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Using a small open-source Qwen2.5-Coder-1.5B, our method outperforms ChatGPT-3.5. When leveraging a more powerful model Gemini 2.5 to explore the performance upper bound, we achieved results competitive with the SOTA. Our findings demonstrate that even small models can be effectively deployed in practical Text-to-SQL systems with the right strategy.

PaperID: 2345, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15219

Authors:Chao Zhang, Minghan Li, Tianrui Lv, Guodong Zhou

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University

Title: RFKG-CoT: Relation-Driven Adaptive Hop-count Selection and Few-Shot Path Guidance for Knowledge-Aware QA

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) often generate hallucinations in knowledgeintensive QA due to parametric knowledge limitations. While existing methods like KG-CoT improve reliability by integrating knowledge graph (KG) paths, they suffer from rigid hop-count selection (solely question-driven) and underutilization of reasoning paths (lack of guidance). To address this, we propose RFKG-CoT: First, it replaces the rigid hop-count selector with a relation-driven adaptive hop-count selector that dynamically adjusts reasoning steps by activating KG relations (e.g., 1-hop for direct ''brother" relations, 2-hop for indirect ''father-son" chains), formalized via a relation mask. Second, it introduces a few-shot in-context learning path guidance mechanism with CoT (think) that constructs examples in a ''question-paths-answer" format to enhance LLMs' ability to understand reasoning paths. Experiments on four KGQA benchmarks show RFKG-CoT improves accuracy by up to 14.7 pp (Llama2-7B on WebQSP) over KG-CoT. Ablations confirm the hop-count selector and the path prompt are complementary, jointly transforming KG evidence into more faithful answers.

PaperID: 2346, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12113

Authors:Lanxue Zhang, Yuqiang Xie, Fang Fang, Fanglong Dong, Rui Liu, Yanan Cao

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China School of Cyber Security, Independent Researcher, JIUTIAN Research

Title: MetaGDPO: Alleviating Catastrophic Forgetting with Metacognitive Knowledge Through Group Direct Preference Optimization

Abstract:
Large Language Models demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities, which can be effectively compressed into smaller models. However, existing datasets and finetuning approaches still face challenges that lead to catastrophic forgetting, particularly for models smaller than 8B. First, most datasets typically ignore the relationship between training data knowledge and the model's inherent abilities, making it difficult to preserve prior knowledge. Second, conventional training objectives often fail to constrain inherent knowledge preservation, which can result in forgetting of previously learned skills. To address these issues, we propose a comprehensive solution that alleviates catastrophic forgetting from both the data and fine-tuning approach perspectives. On the data side, we construct a dataset of 5K instances that covers multiple reasoning tasks and incorporates metacognitive knowledge, making it more tolerant and effective for distillation into smaller models. We annotate the metacognitive knowledge required to solve each question and filter the data based on task knowledge and the model's inherent skills. On the training side, we introduce GDPO (Group Direction Preference Optimization), which is better suited for resource-limited scenarios and can efficiently approximate the performance of GRPO. Guided by the large model and by implicitly constraining the optimization path through a reference model, GDPO enables more effective knowledge transfer from the large model and constrains excessive parameter drift. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly alleviates catastrophic forgetting and improves reasoning performance on smaller models.

PaperID: 2347, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.16743

Authors:Xiaoyun Zhang, Zhengyue Zhao, Wenxuan Shi, Kaidi Xu, Di Huang, Xing Hu

Affiliations: State Key Lab of Processors, Institute of Computing Technology, CAS University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, City University of Hong Kong

Title: Safety Alignment of Large Language Models via Contrasting Safe and Harmful Distributions

Abstract:
With the widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs), it has become a significant concern to ensure their safety and prevent harmful responses. While current safealignment methods based on instruction fine-tuning and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) can effectively reduce harmful responses from LLMs, they often require high-quality datasets and heavy computational overhead during model training. Another way to align language models is to modify the logit of tokens in model outputs without heavy training. Recent studies have shown that contrastive decoding can enhance the performance of language models by reducing the likelihood of confused tokens. However, these methods require the manual selection of contrastive models or instruction templates, limiting the degree of contrast. To this end, we propose Adversarial Contrastive Decoding (ACD), an optimization-based framework to generate two opposite soft system prompts, the Safeguarding Prompt (SP) and the Adversarial Prompt (AP), for prompt-based contrastive decoding. The SP aims to promote safer outputs while the AP aims to exploit the harmful parts of the model, providing a strong contrast to align the model with safety. ACD only needs to apply a lightweight prompt tuning on a rather small anchor dataset without training the target model. Experiments conducted on extensive models and benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves much better safety performance than previous model training-free decoding methods without sacrificing its original generation ability.

PaperID: 2348, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10036

Authors:Dong Zhao, Yadong Wang, Xiang Chen, Chenxi Wang, Hongliang Dai, Chuanxing Geng, Shengzhong Zhang, Shao-Yuan Li, Sheng-Jun Huang

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Zhejiang University

Title: Reflect Then Learn: Active Prompting for Information Extraction Guided by Introspective Confusion

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) show remarkable potential for fewshot information extraction (IE), yet their performance is highly sensitive to the choice of in-context examples. Conventional selection strategies often fail to provide informative guidance, as they overlook a key source of model fallibility: confusion stemming not just from semantic content, but also from the generation of well-structured formats required by IE tasks. To address this, we introduce Active Prompting for Information Extraction (APIE), a novel active prompting framework guided by a principle we term introspective confusion. Our method empowers an LLM to assess its own confusion through a dual-component uncertainty metric that uniquely quantifies both Format Uncertainty (difficulty in generating correct syntax) and Content Uncertainty (inconsistency in extracted semantics). By ranking unlabeled data with this comprehensive score, our framework actively selects the most challenging and informative samples to serve as few-shot exemplars. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks show that our approach consistently outperforms strong baselines, yielding significant improvements in both extraction accuracy and robustness. Our work highlights the critical importance of a fine-grained, dual-level view of model uncertainty when it comes to building effective and reliable structured generation systems.

PaperID: 2349, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.12034

Authors:Ziyi Zhao, Chongming Gao, Yang Zhang, Haoyan Liu, Weinan Gan, Huifeng Guo, Yong Liu, Fuli Feng

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, National University of Singapore, Huawei Technologies Co.

Title: Don’t Start Over: A Cost-Effective Framework for Migrating Personalized Prompts Between LLMs

Abstract:
Personalization in Large Language Models (LLMs) often relies on userspecific soft prompts. However, these prompts become obsolete when the foundation model is upgraded, necessitating costly, full-scale retraining. To overcome this limitation, we propose the Prompt-level User Migration Adapter (PUMA), a lightweight framework to efficiently migrate personalized prompts across incompatible models. PUMA utilizes a parameter-efficient adapter to bridge the semantic gap, combined with a group-based user selection strategy to significantly reduce training costs. Experiments on three large-scale datasets show our method matches or even surpasses the performance of retraining from scratch, reducing computational cost by up to 98%. The framework demonstrates strong generalization across diverse model architectures and robustness in advanced scenarios like chained and aggregated migrations, offering a practical path for the sustainable evolution of personalized AI by decoupling user assets from the underlying models.

PaperID: 2350, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10400

Authors:Lifan Zheng, Jiawei Chen, Qinghong Yin, Jingyuan Zhang, Xinyi Zeng, Yu Tian

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, East China Normal University; Zhongguancun Academy, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Kuaishou Technology, Dept. of Comp. Sci. and Tech., Institute for AI, Tsinghua University

Title: Rethinking the Reliability of Multi-agent System: A Perspective from Byzantine Fault Tolerance

Abstract:
Ensuring the reliability of agent architectures and effectively identifying problematic agents when failures occur are crucial challenges in multiagent systems (MAS). Advances in large language models (LLMs) have established LLM-based agents as a major branch of MAS, enabling major breakthroughs in complex problem solving and world modeling. However, the reliability implications of this shift remain largely unexplored. i.e., whether substituting traditional agents with LLM-based agents can effectively enhance the reliability of MAS. In this work, we investigate and quantify the reliability of LLM-based agents from the perspective of Byzantine fault tolerance. We observe that LLM-based agents demonstrate stronger skepticism when processing erroneous message flows, a characteristic that enables them to outperform traditional agents across different topological structures. Motivated by the results of the pilot experiment, we design CP-WBFT, a confidence probe-based weighted Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus mechanism to enhance the stability of MAS with different topologies. It capitalizes on the intrinsic reflective and discriminative capabilities of LLMs by employing a probe-based, weighted information flow transmission method to improve the reliability of LLM-based agents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CP-WBFT achieves superior performance across diverse network topologies under extreme Byzantine conditions (85.7 % fault rate). Notably, our approach surpasses traditional methods by attaining remarkable accuracy on various topologies and maintaining strong reliability in both mathematical reasoning and safety assessment tasks.

PaperID: 2351, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15055

Authors:Hongli Zhou, Hui Huang, Ziqing Zhao, Lvyuan Han, Huicheng Wang, Kehai Chen, Muyun Yang, Wei Bao, Jian Dong, Bing Xu, Conghui Zhu, Hailong Cao, Tiejun Zhao

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, China Electronics Standardization Institute

Title: Lost in Benchmarks? Rethinking Large Language Model Benchmarking with Item Response Theory

Abstract:
The evaluation of large language models (LLMs) via benchmarks is widespread, yet inconsistencies between different leaderboards and poor separability among top models raise concerns about their ability to accurately reflect authentic model capabilities. This paper provides a critical analysis of benchmark effectiveness, examining mainstream prominent LLM benchmarks using results from diverse models. We first propose PseudoSiamese Network for Item Response Theory (PSN-IRT), an enhanced Item Response Theory framework that incorporates a rich set of item parameters within an IRT-grounded architecture. PSN-IRT can be utilized for accurate and reliable estimations of item characteristics and model abilities. Based on PSN-IRT, we conduct extensive analysis on 11 LLM benchmarks comprising 41,871 items, revealing significant and varied shortcomings in their measurement quality. Furthermore, we demonstrate that leveraging PSN-IRT is able to construct smaller benchmarks while maintaining stronger alignment with human preference.

PaperID: 2352, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.00269

Authors:Omar Claflin

Affiliations:

Title: Feature Integration Spaces: Joint Training Reveals Dual Encoding in Neural Network Representations

Abstract:
Current sparse autoencoder (SAE) approaches to neural network interpretability assume that activations can be decomposed through linear superposition into sparse, interpretable features. Despite high reconstruction fidelity, SAEs consistently fail to eliminate polysemanticity and exhibit pathological behavioral errors. We propose that neural networks encode information in two complementary spaces com-pressed into the same substrate: feature identity and feature integration. To test this dual encoding hypothesis, we develop sequential and joint-training architectures to capture identity and integration patterns simultaneously. Joint training achieves 41.3% reconstruction improvement and 51.6% reduction in KL divergence errors. This architecture spontaneously develops bimodal feature organization: low squared norm features contributing to integration pathways and the rest contributing directly to the residual. Small nonlinear components (3% of parameters) achieve 16.5% standalone improvements, demonstrating parameter-efficient capture of computational relationships crucial for behavior. Additionally, intervention experiments using 2×2 factorial stimulus designs demonstrated that integration features exhibit selective sensitivity to experimental manipulations and produce systematic behavioral effects on model outputs, including significant interaction effects across semantic dimensions. This work provides systematic evidence for (1) dual encoding in neural representations, (2) meaningful nonlinearly encoded feature interactions, and (3) introduces an architectural paradigm shift from post-hoc feature analysis to integrated computational design, establishing foundations for next-generation SAEs.

PaperID: 2353, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09192

Authors:Shenghua Feng, Jie An, Fanjiang Xu

Affiliations: National Key Laboratory of Space Integrated Information System, Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, China University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Runtime Safety and Reach-avoid Prediction of Stochastic Systems via Observation-aware Barrier Functions

Abstract:
Stochastic dynamical systems have emerged as fundamental models across numerous application domains, providing powerful mathematical representations for capturing uncertain system behavior. In this paper, we address the problem of runtime safety and reachavoid probability prediction for discrete-time stochastic systems with online observations, i.e., estimating the probability that the system satisfies a given safety or reach-avoid specification. Unlike traditional approaches that rely solely on offline models, we propose a framework that incorporates real-time observations to dynamically refine probability estimates for safety and reach-avoid events. By introducing observation-aware barrier functions, our method adaptively updates probability bounds as new observations are collected, combining efficient offline computation with online backward iteration. This approach enables rigorous and responsive prediction of safety and reach-avoid probabilities under uncertainty. In addition to the theoretical guarantees, experimental results on benchmark systems demonstrate the practical effectiveness of the proposed method.

PaperID: 2354, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03177

Authors:Zhaoxu Li, Chenqi Kong, Yi Yu, Qiangqiang Wu, Xinghao Jiang, Ngai-Man Cheung, Bihan Wen, Alex Kot, Xudong Jiang

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University, City University of Hong Kong, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Singapore University of Technology and Design

Title: SAVER: Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models via Style-Aware Visual Early Revision

Abstract:
Large VisionLanguage Models (LVLMs) recently achieve significant breakthroughs in understanding complex visual-textual contexts. However, hallucination issues still limit their real-world applicability. Although previous mitigation methods effectively reduce hallucinations in photographic images, they largely overlook the potential risks posed by stylized images, which play crucial roles in critical scenarios such as game scene understanding, art education, and medical analysis. In this work, we first construct a dataset comprising photographic images and their corresponding stylized versions with carefully annotated caption labels. We then conduct head-to-head comparisons on both discriminative and generative tasks by benchmarking 13 advanced LVLMs on the collected datasets. Our findings reveal that stylized images tend to induce significantly more hallucinations than their photographic counterparts. To address this issue, we propose Style-Aware Visual Early Revision (SAVER), a novel mechanism that dynamically adjusts LVLMs' final outputs based on the token-level visual attention patterns, leveraging early-layer feedback to mitigate hallucinations caused by stylized images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAVER achieves state-of-the-art performance in hallucination mitigation across various models, datasets, and tasks.

PaperID: 2355, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.05034

Authors:Tiantian Liu, Hongwei Yao, Feng Lin, Tong Wu, Zhan Qin, Kui Ren

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Xiamen University, Zhejiang University Hangzhou High-Tech Zone (Binjiang) Institute of Blockchain and Data Security

Title: Eguard: Defending LLM Embeddings Against Inversion Attacks via Text Mutual Information Optimization

Abstract:
While text embeddings enable efficient semantic processing in LLMs, they remain vulnerable to inversion attacks that reconstruct sensitive original text. However, current defense methods typically treat text embeddings from the feature level independently, ignoring the exploitation of the mutual relation among the embedding construction pipeline. To address this limitation, we propose Eguard, a framework that effectively disrupts chains of relationships between the original semantic space and defended functional space. Our improvements manifest at two levels, i.e., the globallevel and local-level mutual information. At the global level, we propose to minimize the statistical dependency between protected embeddings and their original inputs, effectively decoupling sensitive content from the semantic space accessible to adversaries. At the local level, we apply keyword-antonym contrastive learning to enforce semantic discriminability within the space of downstream utility. This synergy of global privacy control and local semantic alignment allows Eguard to achieve a superior privacy-utility trade-off than traditional defenses. Our approach significantly reduces privacy risks, protecting over 95 percent of tokens from inversion while maintaining high performance across downstream tasks consistent with original embeddings.

PaperID: 2356, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12188

Authors:Haoyu Lei, Kaiwen Zhou, Yinchuan Li, Zhitang Chen, Farzan Farnia

Affiliations: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Huawei Noah's Ark Lab

Title: Boosting Cross-problem Generalization in Diffusion-Based Neural Combinatorial Solver via Inference Time Adaptation

Abstract:
Diffusionbased Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has demonstrated effectiveness in solving NP-complete (NPC) problems by learning discrete diffusion models for solution generation, eliminating hand-crafted domain knowledge. Despite their success, existing NCO methods face significant challenges in both cross-scale and cross-problem generalization, and high training costs compared to traditional solvers. While recent studies on diffusion models have introduced training-free guidance approaches that leverage pre-defined guidance functions for conditional generation, such methodologies have not been extensively explored in combinatorial optimization. To bridge this gap, we propose a training-free inference time adaptation framework (DIFU-Ada) that enables both the zero-shot cross-problem transfer and cross-scale generalization capabilities of diffusion-based NCO solvers without requiring additional training. We provide theoretical analysis that helps understanding the cross-problem transfer capability. Our experimental results demonstrate that a diffusion solver, trained exclusively on the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), can achieve competitive zero-shot transfer performance across different problem scales on TSP variants, such as Prize Collecting TSP (PCTSP) and the Orienteering Problem (OP), through inference time adaptation.

PaperID: 2357, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06220

Authors:Cheng Yan, Wuyang Zhang, Zhiyuan Ning, Fan Xu, Ziyang Tao, Lu Zhang, Bing Yin, Yanyong Zhang

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, Research Department, iFLYTEK Co.

Title: Breaking Model Lock-in: Cost-Efficient Zero-Shot LLM Routing via a Universal Latent Space

Abstract:
The rapid proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to a fragmented and inefficient ecosystem, a state of ``model lockin'' where seamlessly integrating novel models remains a significant bottleneck. Current routing frameworks require exhaustive, costly retraining, hindering scalability and adaptability. We introduce ZeroRouter, a new paradigm for LLM routing that breaks this lock-in. Our approach is founded on a universal latent space, a model-agnostic representation of query difficulty that fundamentally decouples the characterization of a query from the profiling of a model. This allows for zero-shot onboarding of new models without full-scale retraining. ZeroRouter features a context-aware predictor that maps queries to this universal space and a dual-mode optimizer that balances accuracy, cost, and latency. Our framework consistently outperforms all baselines, delivering higher accuracy at lower cost and latency.

PaperID: 2358, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19814

Authors:Kohsuke Kubota, Shonosuke Sugasawa

Affiliations: NTT DOCOMO, Keio University

Title: Causal Inference Under Threshold Manipulation: Bayesian Mixture Modeling and Heterogeneous Treatment Effects

Abstract:
Many marketing applications, including credit card incentive programs, offer rewards to customers who exceed specific spending thresholds to encourage increased consumption. Quantifying the causal effect of these thresholds on customers is crucial for effective marketing strategy design. Although regression discontinuity design is a standard method for such causal inference tasks, its assumptions can be violated when customers, aware of the thresholds, strategically manipulate their spending to qualify for the rewards. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework for estimating the causal effect under threshold manipulation. The main idea is to model the observed spending distribution as a mixture of two distributions: one representing customers strategically affected by the threshold, and the other representing those unaffected. To fit the mixture model, we adopt a twostep Bayesian approach consisting of modeling non-bunching customers and fitting a mixture model to a sample around the threshold. We show posterior contraction of the resulting posterior distribution of the causal effect under large samples. Furthermore, we extend this framework to a hierarchical Bayesian setting to estimate heterogeneous causal effects across customer subgroups, allowing for stable inference even with small subgroup sample sizes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods through simulation studies and illustrate their practical implications using a real-world marketing dataset.

PaperID: 2359, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.17323

Authors:Haoyang Zheng, Hengrong Du, Ruqi Zhang, Guang Lin

Affiliations: Purdue University, Fisk University

Title: Exploring Non-Convex Discrete Energy Landscapes: An Efficient Langevin-Like Sampler with Replica Exchange

Abstract:
Gradientbased Discrete Samplers (GDSs) are effective for sampling discrete energy landscapes. However, they often stagnate in complex, non-convex settings. To improve exploration, we introduce the Discrete Replica EXchangE Langevin (DREXEL) sampler and its variant with Adjusted Metropolis (DREAM). These samplers use two GDSs at different temperatures and step sizes: one focuses on local exploitation, while the other explores broader energy landscapes. When energy differences are significant, sample swaps occur, governed by a mechanism tailored for discrete sampling to ensure detailed balance. Theoretically, we prove that the proposed samplers satisfy detailed balance and converge to the target distribution under mild conditions. Experiments across 2d synthetic simulations, sampling from Ising models and restricted Boltzmann machines, and training deep energy-based models further confirm their efficiency in exploring non-convex discrete energy landscapes.

PaperID: 2360, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01331

Authors:Saman Ahmadi, Mahdi Jalili

Affiliations: Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

Title: A Fast Heuristic Search Approach for Energy-Optimal Profile Routing for Electric Vehicles

Abstract:
We study the energyoptimal shortest path problem for electric vehicles (EVs) in large-scale road networks, where recuperated energy along downhill segments introduces negative energy costs. While traditional point-to-point pathfinding algorithms for EVs assume a known initial energy level, many real-world scenarios involving uncertainty in available energy require planning optimal paths for all possible initial energy levels, a task known as energy-optimal profile search. Existing solutions typically rely on specialized profile-merging procedures within a label-correcting framework that results in searching over complex profiles. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective label-setting approach based on multi-objective A search, which employs a novel profile dominance rule to avoid generating and handling complex profiles. We develop four variants of our method and evaluate them on real-world road networks enriched with realistic energy consumption data. Experimental results demonstrate that our energy profile A search achieves performance comparable to energy-optimal A with a known initial energy level.

PaperID: 2361, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.11916

Authors:Ehsan Futuhi, Nathan R. Sturtevant

Affiliations: University of Alberta

Title: A Parallel CPU-GPU Framework for Batching Heuristic Operations in Depth-First Heuristic Search

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of GPU technology has unlocked powerful parallel processing capabilities, creating new opportunities to enhance classic search algorithms. This hardware has been exploited in bestfirst search algorithms with neural network-based heuristics by creating batched versions of A and Weighted A that delay heuristic evaluation until sufficiently many states can be evaluated in parallel on the GPU. But, research has not addressed how depth-first algorithms like IDA or Budgeted Tree Search (BTS) can have their heuristic computations batched. This is more complicated in a tree search, because progress in the search tree is blocked until heuristic evaluations are complete. In this paper we show that GPU parallelization of heuristics can be effectively performed when the tree search is parallelized on the CPU while heuristic evaluations are parallelized on the GPU. We develop a parallelized cost-bounded depth-first search (CB-DFS) framework that can be applied to both IDA and BTS, significantly improving their performance. We demonstrate the strength of the approach on the 3x3 Rubik's Cube and the 4x4 sliding tile puzzle (STP) with both classifier-based and regression-based heuristics.

PaperID: 2362, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12271

Authors:Zhiyu An, Wan Du

Affiliations: University of California

Title: MoralReason: Generalizable Moral Decision Alignment for LLM Agents Using Reasoning-Level Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Large language models are increasingly influencing human moral decisions, yet current approaches focus primarily on evaluating rather than actively steering their moral decisions. We formulate this as an outof-distribution moral alignment problem, where LLM agents must learn to apply consistent moral reasoning frameworks to scenarios beyond their training distribution. We introduce Moral-Reason-QA, a novel dataset extending 680 human-annotated, high-ambiguity moral scenarios with framework-specific reasoning traces across utilitarian, deontological, and virtue ethics, enabling systematic evaluation of moral generalization in realistic decision contexts. Our learning approach employs Group Relative Policy Optimization with composite rewards that simultaneously optimize decision alignment and framework-specific reasoning processes to facilitate learning of the underlying moral frameworks. Experimental results demonstrate successful generalization to unseen moral scenarios, with softmax-normalized alignment scores improving by +0.757 for utilitarian and +0.450 for deontological frameworks when tested on out-of-distribution evaluation sets. The experiments also reveal training challenges and promising directions that inform future research. These findings establish that LLM agents can be systematically trained to internalize and apply specific moral frameworks to novel situations, providing a critical foundation for AI safety as language models become more integrated into human decision-making processes.

PaperID: 2363, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04567

Authors:Zhuotong Chen, Fang Liu, Xuan Zhu, Haozhu Wang, Jiayu Li, Yanjun Qi, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

Affiliations:

Title: Preference Optimization via Contrastive Divergence: Your Policy Is Secretly an NLL Estimator

Abstract:
Existing studies on preference optimization (PO) have been focused on constructing pairwise preference data following simple heuristics, such as maximizing the margin between chosen and rejected responses based on human (or AI) ratings. In this work, we develop a novel PO framework that provides theoretical guidance to effectively sample rejected responses. To achieve this, we formulate PO as minimizing the negative loglikelihood (NLL) of a probability model and propose a sampling-based solution to estimate its normalization constant via contrastive divergence. We show that these estimative samples can act as rejected responses in PO. Leveraging the connection established between PO and NLL estimation, we propose a novel PO algorithm, called Monte-Carlo-based PO (MC-PO), that applies a MC kernel to sample hard negatives w.r.t.~the log-likelihood of the target policy. Intuitively, these hard negatives represent the rejected samples that are most difficult for the current policy to differentiate. We show that MC-PO outperforms existing SOTA baselines on popular alignment benchmarks.

PaperID: 2364, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13789

Authors:Haotian Jin, Yang Li, Haihui Fan, Lin Shen, Xiangfang Li, Bo Li

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences State Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Security Defense

Title: Uncovering and Aligning Anomalous Attention Heads to Defend Against NLP Backdoor Attacks

Abstract:
Backdoor attacks pose a serious threat to the security of large language models (LLMs), causing them to exhibit anomalous behavior under specific trigger conditions. The design of backdoor triggers has evolved from fixed triggers to dynamic or implicit triggers. This increased flexibility in trigger design makes it challenging for defenders to accurately identify their specific forms. Most existing backdoor defense methods are limited to specific types of triggers or rely on an additional clean model for support. To address this issue, we propose a backdoor detection method based on attention similarity, enabling backdoor detection without prior knowledge of the trigger. Our study reveals that models subjected to backdoor attacks exhibit unusually high similarity among attention heads when exposed to triggers. Based on this observation, we propose an attention safety alignment approach combined with headwise fine-tuning to rectify potentially contaminated attention heads, thereby effectively mitigating the impact of backdoor attacks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly reduces the success rate of backdoor attacks while preserving the model’s performance on downstream tasks.

PaperID: 2365, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05066

Authors:Aditya Kumar, Tom Blanchard, Adam Dziedzic, Franziska Boenisch

Affiliations: CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Vector Institute University of Toronto

Title: Beautiful Images, Toxic Words: Understanding and Addressing Offensive Text in Generated Images

Abstract:
Stateof-the-art Diffusion Models (DMs) produce highly realistic images. While prior work has successfully mitigated Not Safe For Work (NSFW) content in the visual domain, we identify a novel threat: the generation of NSFW text embedded within images. This includes offensive language, such as insults, racial slurs, and sexually explicit terms, posing significant risks to users. We show that all state-of-the-art DMs (e.g., SD3, SDXL, Flux, DeepFloyd IF) are vulnerable to this issue. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that existing mitigation techniques, effective for visual content, fail to prevent harmful text generation while substantially degrading benign text generation. As an initial step toward addressing this threat, we introduce a novel fine-tuning strategy that targets only the text-generation layers in DMs. Therefore, we construct a safety fine-tuning dataset by pairing each NSFW prompt with two images: one with the NSFW term, and another where that term is replaced with a carefully crafted benign alternative while leaving the image unchanged otherwise. By training on this dataset, the model learns to avoid generating harmful text while preserving benign content and overall image quality. Finally, to advance research in the area, we release ToxicBench, an open-source benchmark for evaluating NSFW text generation in images. It includes our curated fine-tuning dataset, a set of harmful prompts, new evaluation metrics, and a pipeline that assesses both NSFW-ness and text and image quality. Our benchmark aims to guide future efforts in mitigating NSFW text generation in text-to-image models, thereby contributing to their safe deployment.

PaperID: 2366, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10692

Authors:Hongyi Li, Chengxuan Zhou, Chu Wang, Sicheng Liang, Yanting Chen, Qinlin Xie, Jiawei Ye, Jie Wu

Affiliations: Fudan University

Title: StyleBreak: Revealing Alignment Vulnerabilities in Large Audio-Language Models via Style-Aware Audio Jailbreak

Abstract:
Large Audiolanguage Models (LAMs) have recently enabled powerful speech-based interactions by coupling audio encoders with Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the security of LAMs under adversarial attacks remains underexplored, especially through audio jailbreaks that craft malicious audio prompts to bypass alignment. Existing efforts primarily rely on converting text-based attacks into speech or applying shallow signal-level perturbations, overlooking the impact of human speech’s expressive variations on LAM alignment robustness. To address this gap, we propose StyleBreak, a novel style-aware audio jailbreak framework that systematically investigates how diverse human speech attributes affect LAM alignment robustness. Specifically, StyleBreak employs a two-stage style-aware transformation pipeline that perturbs both textual content and audio to control linguistic, paralinguistic, and extralinguistic attributes. Furthermore, we develop a query-adaptive policy network that automatically searches for adversarial styles to enhance the efficiency of LAM jailbreak exploration. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that LAMs exhibit critical vulnerabilities when exposed to diverse human speech attributes. Moreover, StyleBreak achieves substantial improvements in attack effectiveness and efficiency across multiple attack paradigms, highlighting the urgent need for more robust alignment in LAMs.

PaperID: 2367, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07091

Authors:Jeng-Lin Li, Ming-Ching Chang, Wei-Chao Chen

Affiliations: Inventec Corporation, State University of New York

Title: How Bias Binds: Measuring Hidden Associations for Bias Control in Text-to-Image Compositions

Abstract:
Textto-image generative models often exhibit bias related to sensitive attributes. However, current research tends to focus narrowly on single-object prompts with limited contextual diversity. In reality, each object or attribute within a prompt can contribute to bias. For example, the prompt ``an assistant wearing a pink hat'' may reflect female-inclined biases associated with a pink hat. Neglecting joint semantic bindings in prompts leads to significant failures of current debiasing methods. We present a preliminary investigation into how bias manifests under semantic binding, where contextual associations between objects and attributes affect generative outcomes. We demonstrate that the underlying bias distribution can be amplified based on these associations. Therefore, we introduce a bias adherence score that quantifies how specific object-attribute bindings activate bias. To delve deeper, we develop a training-free context-bias control framework to explore how token decoupling can facilitate the debiasing of semantic bindings. This framework achieves over 10% debiasing improvement in compositional generation tasks. Our analysis of bias scores across various attribute-object bindings and token decorrelation highlights a fundamental challenge: reducing bias without disrupting essential semantic relationships. These findings expose critical limitations in current debiasing approaches when applied to semantically bound contexts, underscoring the need to reassess prevailing bias mitigation strategies.

PaperID: 2368, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14903

Authors:Renjith Prasad Kaippilly Mana, Abhilekh Borah, Hasnat Md Abdullah, Chathurangi Shyalika, Gurpreet Singh, Ritvik Garimella, Rajarshi Roy, Harshul Raj Surana, Nasrin Imanpour, Suranjana Trivedy, Amit Sheth, Amitava Das

Affiliations: University of South Carolina, Manipal University Jaipur, Texas A&M University, Kalyani Government Engineering College, BITS Pilani

Title: DETONATE – A Benchmark for Text-to-Image Alignment and Kernelized Direct Preference Optimization

Abstract:
Alignment is crucial for textto-image (T2I) models to ensure that the generated images faithfully capture user intent while maintaining safety and fairness. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a key alignment technique for large language models (LLMs), and its influence is now extending to T2I systems. This paper introduces DPO-Kernels for T2I models, a novel extension of DPO that enhances alignment across three key dimensions: (i) Hybrid Loss, which integrates embedding-based objectives with the traditional probability-based loss to improve optimization; (ii) Kernelized Representations, leveraging Radial Basis Function (RBF), Polynomial, and Wavelet kernels to enable richer feature transformations, ensuring better separation between safe and unsafe inputs; and (iii) Divergence Selection, expanding beyond DPO’s default Kullback–Leibler (KL) regularizer by incorporating alternative divergence measures such as Wasserstein and Rényi divergences to enhance stability and robustness in alignment training. We introduce DETONATE, the first large-scale benchmark of its kind, comprising approximately 100K curated image pairs, categorized as chosen and rejected. This benchmark encapsulates three critical axes of social bias and discrimination: Race, Gender, and Disability. The prompts are sourced from the hate speech datasets, while the images are generated using state-of-the-art T2I models, including Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large (SD-3.5), Stable Diffusion XL (SD-XL), and Midjourney. Furthermore, to evaluate alignment beyond surface metrics, we introduce the Alignment Quality Index (AQI) for T2I systems: a novel geometric measure that quantifies latent space separability of safe/unsafe image activations, revealing hidden model vulnerabilities. While alignment techniques often risk overfitting, we empirically demonstrate that DPO-Kernels preserve strong generalization bounds using the theory of Heavy-Tailed Self-Regularization (HT-SR).

PaperID: 2369, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07850

Authors:Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Jiayi Li, Yingfan Zhou, Sarah Rajtmajer, Shomir Wilson

Affiliations: Pennsylvania State University

Title: A Tale of Two Identities: An Ethical Audit of AI-Crafted Synthetic Personas

Abstract:
As LLMs (large language models) are increasingly used to generate synthetic personas, particularly in datalimited domains such as health, privacy, and HCI, it becomes necessary to understand how these narratives represent identity, especially that of minority communities. In this paper, we audit synthetic personas generated by 3 LLMs (GPT4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Deepseek v2.5) through the lens of representational harm, focusing specifically on racial identity. Using a mixed-methods approach combining close reading, lexical analysis, and a parameterized creativity framework, we compare 1,512 LLM-generated persona to human-authored responses. Our findings reveal that LLMs disproportionately foreground racial markers, overproduce culturally coded language, and construct personas that are syntactically elaborate yet narratively reductive. These patterns result in a range of sociotechnical harms, including stereotyping, exoticism, erasure, and benevolent bias, that are often obfuscated by superficially positive narrations. We formalize this phenomenon as algorithmic othering, where minoritized identities are rendered hypervisible but less authentic.

PaperID: 2370, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05934

Authors:Aran Nayebi

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University

Title: Intrinsic Barriers and Practical Pathways for Human–AI Alignment: An Agreement-Based Complexity Analysis

Abstract:
We formalize AI alignment as a multiobjective optimization problem called -agreement, in which a set of N agents (including humans) must reach approximate (ε) agreement across M candidate objectives, with probability at least 1-δ. Analyzing communication complexity, we prove an information-theoretic lower bound showing that once either M or N is large enough, no amount of computational power or rationality can avoid intrinsic alignment overheads. This establishes rigorous limits to alignment itself, not merely to particular methods, clarifying a "No-Free-Lunch" principle: encoding "all human values" is inherently intractable and must be managed through consensus-driven reduction or prioritization of objectives. Complementing this impossibility result, we construct explicit algorithms as achievability certificates for alignment under both unbounded and bounded rationality with noisy communication. Even in these best-case regimes, our bounded-agent and sampling analysis shows that with large task spaces (D) and finite samples, reward hacking is globally inevitable: rare high-loss states are systematically under-covered, implying scalable oversight must target safety-critical slices rather than uniform coverage. Together, these results identify fundamental complexity barriers---tasks (M), agents (N), and state-space size (D)---and offer principles for more scalable human-AI collaboration.

PaperID: 2371, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15282

Authors:Ninell Oldenburg, Ruchira Dhar, Anders Søgaard

Affiliations: University of Copenhagen

Title: Realist and Pluralist Conceptions of Intelligence and Their Implications on AI Research

Abstract:
In this paper, we argue that current AI research operates on a spectrum between two different underlying conceptions of intelligence: Intelligence Realism, which holds that intelligence represents a single, universal capacity measurable across all systems, and Intelligence Pluralism, which views intelligence as diverse, contextdependent capacities that cannot be reduced to a single universal measure. Through an analysis of current debates in AI research, we demonstrate how the conceptions remain largely implicit yet fundamentally shape how empirical evidence gets interpreted across a wide range of areas. These underlying views generate fundamentally different research approaches across three areas. Methodologically, they produce different approaches to model selection, benchmark design, and experimental validation. Interpretively, they lead to contradictory readings of the same empirical phenomena, from capability emergence to system limitations. Regarding AI risk, they generate categorically different assessments: realists view superintelligence as the primary risk and search for unified alignment solutions, while pluralists see diverse threats across different domains requiring context-specific solutions. We argue that making explicit these underlying assumptions can contribute to a clearer understanding of disagreements in AI research.

PaperID: 2372, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.12574

Authors:Yohei Hayamizu, David DeFazio, Hrudayangam Mehta, Zainab Altaweel, Jacqueline Choe, Chao Lin, Jake Juettner, Furui Xiao, Jeremy Blackburn, Shiqi Zhang

Affiliations: State University of New York at Binghamton

Title: From Woofs to Words: Towards Intelligent Robotic Guide Dogs with Verbal Communication

Abstract:
Assistive robotics is an important subarea of robotics that focuses on the wellbeing of people with disabilities. A robotic guide dog is an assistive quadruped robot for assisting visually impaired people in obstacle avoidance and navigation. Enabling language capabilities on robotic guide dogs goes beyond naively adding an existing dialog system onto a mobile robot. The novel challenges include grounding language to the dynamically changing environment and improving spatial awareness for the human handler. To address those challenges, we develop a novel dialog system for robotic guide dogs that uses large language models to verbalize both navigational plans and scenes. The goal is to enable verbal communication for collaborative decision-making within the handler-robot team. In experiments, we performed a human study to evaluate different verbalization strategies, and a simulation study to evaluate the efficiency and accuracy in navigation tasks.

PaperID: 2373, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13689

Authors:Sofia Jamil, Kotla Sai Charan, Sriparna Saha, Koustava Goswami, Joseph K J

Affiliations: Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Adobe Systems

Title: Crossing Borders: A Multimodal Challenge for Indian Poetry Translation and Image Generation

Abstract:
Indian poetry, known for its linguistic complexity and deep cultural resonance, has a rich and varied heritage spanning thousands of years. However, its layered meanings, cultural allusions, and sophisticated grammatical constructions often pose challenges for comprehension, especially for nonnative speakers or readers unfamiliar with its context and language. Despite its cultural significance, existing works on poetry have largely overlooked Indian language poems. In this paper, we propose the Translation and Image Generation (TAI) framework, leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and Latent Diffusion Models through appropriate prompt tuning. Our framework supports the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals of Quality Education (SDG 4) and Reduced Inequalities (SDG 10), by enhancing the accessibility of culturally rich Indian-language poetry to a global audience. It includes (1) a translation module that uses an Odds Ratio Preference Alignment Algorithm to accurately translate morphologically rich poetry into English; (2) an image generation module that employs a semantic graph to capture tokens, dependencies, and semantic relationships between metaphors and their meanings, to create visually meaningful representations of Indian poems. Our comprehensive experimental evaluation, including both human and quantitative assessments, demonstrates the superiority of TAI Diffusion in poem image generation tasks, outperforming strong baselines. To further address the scarcity of resources for Indian-language poetry, we introduce the Morphologically Rich Indian Language Poems MorphoVerse Dataset, comprising 1,570 poems across 21 low-resource Indian languages. By addressing the gap in poetry translation and visual comprehension, this work aims to broaden accessibility and enrich the reader’s experience.

PaperID: 2374, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07954

Authors:Haoan Jin, Han Ying, Jiacheng Ji, Hanhui Xu, Mengyue Wu

Affiliations: X-LANCE Lab, School of Computer Science, MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Ant Group, Institute of Technology Ethics for Human Future, Fudan University

Title: A Human-Centric Pipeline for Aligning Large Language Models with Chinese Medical Ethics

Abstract:
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled their application to a range of healthcare tasks. However, aligning LLMs with the nuanced demands of medical ethics, especially under complex realworld scenarios, remains underexplored. In this work, we present MedES, a dynamic, scenario-centric benchmark specifically constructed from 260 authoritative Chinese medical, ethical, and legal sources to reflect the challenges in clinical decision-making. To facilitate model alignment, we introduce a guardian-in-the-loop framework that leverages a dedicated automated evaluator—trained on expert-labeled data and achieving over 97% accuracy within our domain—to generate targeted prompts and provide structured ethical feedback. Using this pipeline, we align a 7B-parameter LLM through supervised fine-tuning and domain-specific preference optimization. Experimental results, conducted entirely within the Chinese medical ethics context, demonstrate that our aligned model outperforms notably larger baselines on core ethical tasks, with observed improvements in both quality and composite evaluation metrics. Our work offers a practical and adaptable framework for aligning LLMs with medical ethics in the Chinese healthcare domain, and suggests that similar alignment pipelines may be instantiated in other legal and cultural environments through modular replacement of the underlying normative corpus.

PaperID: 2375, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15846

Authors:Chenchen Kuai, Chenhao Wu, Yang Zhou, Bruce Wang, Tianbao Yang, Zhengzhong Tu, Zihao Li, Yunlong Zhang

Affiliations: Texas A&M University College Station, University of California, Los Angeles, Texas A&M University - College Station

Title: CyPortQA: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Cyclone Preparedness in Port Operation

Abstract:
As tropical cyclones intensify and track forecasts become increasingly uncertain, U.S. ports face heightened supplychain risk under extreme weather conditions. Port operators need to rapidly synthesize diverse multimodal forecast products, such as probabilistic wind maps, track cones, and official advisories, into clear, actionable guidance as cyclones approach. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer a powerful means to integrate these heterogeneous data sources alongside broader contextual knowledge, yet their accuracy and reliability in the specific context of port cyclone preparedness have not been rigorously evaluated. To fill this gap, we introduce CyPortQA, the first multimodal benchmark tailored to port operations under cyclone threat. CyPortQA assembles 2,917 real-world disruption scenarios from 2015 through 2023, spanning 145 U.S. principal ports and 90 named storms. Each scenario fuses multi-source data (i.e., tropical cyclone products, port operational impact records, and port condition bulletins) and is expanded through an automated pipeline into 117,178 structured question–answer pairs. Using this benchmark, we conduct extensive experiments on diverse MLLMs, including both open-source and proprietary model. MLLMs demonstrate great potential in situation understanding but still face considerable challenges in reasoning tasks, including potential impact estimation and decision reasoning.

PaperID: 2376, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03553

Authors:Sangyub Lee, Heedou Kim, Hyeoncheol Kim

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Korea University

Title: Evaluating LLMs for Police Decision-Making: A Framework Based on Police Action Scenarios

Abstract:
The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in police operations is growing, yet an evaluation framework tailored to po- lice operations remains absent. While LLM’s responses may not always be legally “incorrect”, their unverified use still can lead to severe issues such as unlawful arrests and improper evidence collection. To address this, we propose PAS (Po- lice Action Scenarios), a systematic framework covering the entire evaluation process. Applying this framework, we con- structed a novel QA dataset from over 8,000 official docu- ments and established key metrics validated through statis- tical analysis with police expert judgements. Experimental results show that commercial LLMs struggle with our new police-related tasks, particularly in providing fact-based rec- ommendations. This study highlights the necessity of an ex- pandable evaluation framework to ensure reliable AI-driven police operations. We release our data and prompt template.

PaperID: 2377, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02741

Authors:Zhixiang Lu, Yulong Li, Feilong Tang, Zhengyong Jiang, Chong Li, Mian Zhou, Tenglong Li, Jionglong Su

Affiliations: Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

Title: DeepGB-TB: A Risk-Balanced Cross-Attention Gradient-Boosted Convolutional Network for Rapid, Interpretable Tuberculosis Screening

Abstract:
Largescale tuberculosis (TB) screening is limited by the high cost and operational complexity of traditional diagnostics, creating a need for artificial-intelligence solutions. We propose DeepGB-TB, a non-invasive system that instantly assigns TB risk scores using only cough audio and basic demographic data. The model couples a lightweight one-dimensional convolutional neural network for audio processing with a gradient-boosted decision tree for tabular features. Its principal innovation is a Cross-Modal Bidirectional Cross-Attention module (CM-BCA) that iteratively exchanges salient cues between modalities, emulating the way clinicians integrate symptoms and risk factors. To meet the clinical priority of minimizing missed cases, we design a Tuberculosis Risk-Balanced Loss (TRBL) that places stronger penalties on false-negative predictions, thereby reducing high-risk misclassifications. DeepGB-TB is evaluated on a diverse dataset of 1,105 patients collected across seven countries, achieving an AUROC of 0.903 and an F1-score of 0.851, representing a new state of the art. Its computational efficiency enables real-time, offline inference directly on common mobile devices, making it ideal for low-resource settings. Importantly, the system produces clinically validated explanations that promote trust and adoption by frontline health workers. By coupling AI innovation with public-health requirements for speed, affordability, and reliability, DeepGB-TB offers a tool for advancing global TB control.

PaperID: 2378, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08040

Authors:Soumyaroop Nandi, Prem Natarajan

Affiliations: Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, Marina Del Rey, USA Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science, Los Angeles, USA CapitalOne

Title: Rescind: Countering Image Misconduct in Biomedical Publications with Vision-Language and State-Space Modeling

Abstract:
Scientific image manipulation in biomedical publications poses a growing threat to research integrity and reproducibility. Unlike natural image forensics, biomedical forgery detection is uniquely challenging due to domainspecific artifacts, complex textures, and unstructured figure layouts. We present the first vision-language guided framework for both generating and detecting biomedical image forgeries. By combining diffusion-based synthesis with vision-language prompting, our method enables realistic and semantically controlled manipulations—including duplication, splicing, and region removal—across diverse biomedical modalities. We introduce Rescind, a large-scale benchmark featuring fine-grained annotations and modality-specific splits, and propose Integscan, a structured state-space modeling framework that integrates attention-enhanced visual encoding with prompt-conditioned semantic alignment for precise forgery localization. To ensure semantic fidelity, we incorporate a VLM-based verification loop that filters generated forgeries based on consistency with intended prompts. Extensive experiments on Rescind and existing benchmarks demonstrate that Integscan achieves state-of-the-art performance in both detection and localization, establishing a strong foundation for automated scientific integrity analysis.

PaperID: 2379, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.08954

Authors:Terrence Neumann, Maria De-Arteaga, Sina Fazelpour

Affiliations: University of Texas at Austin, Universitat Ramon Llull, Northeastern University

Title: Should You Use LLMs to Simulate Opinions? Quality Checks for Early-Stage Deliberation

Abstract:
The emergent capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have prompted interest in using them as surrogates for human subjects in opinion surveys. However, prior evaluations of LLMbased opinion simulation have relied heavily on costly, domain-specific survey data, and mixed empirical results leave their reliability in question. To enable cost-effective, early-stage evaluation, we introduce a quality control assessment designed to test the viability of LLM-simulated opinions on Likert-scale tasks without requiring large-scale human data for validation. This assessment comprises two key tests: logical consistency and alignment with stakeholder expectations, offering a low-cost, domain-adaptable validation tool. We apply our quality control assessment to an opinion simulation task relevant to AI-assisted content moderation and fact-checking workflows---a socially impactful use case---and evaluate nine LLMs using a baseline prompt engineering method (backstory prompting), as well as fine-tuning and in-context learning variants. None of the models or methods pass the full assessment, revealing several failure modes. We conclude with a discussion of the risk management implications and release TopicMisinfo, a benchmark dataset with paired human and LLM annotations simulated by various models and approaches, to support future research.

PaperID: 2380, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10684

Authors:Anupama Sitaraman, Bharathan Balaji, Yuvraj Agarwal

Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University

Title: SpiderGen: Towards Procedure Generation for Carbon Life Cycle Assessments with Generative AI

Abstract:
Investigating the effects of climate change and global warming caused by GHG emissions have been a key concern worldwide. These emissions are largely contributed to by the production, use and disposal of consumer products. Thus, it is important to build tools to estimate the environmental impact of consumer goods, an essential part of which is conducting Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs). LCAs specify and account for the appropriate processes involved with the production, use, and disposal of the products. We present SpiderGen, an LLMbased workflow which integrates the taxonomy and methodology of traditional LCA with the reasoning capabilities and world knowledge of LLMs to generate graphical representations of the key procedural information used for LCA, known as Product Category Rules Process Flow Graphs (PCR PFGs). We additionally evaluate the output of SpiderGen by comparing it with 65 real-world LCA documents. We find that SpiderGen provides accurate LCA process information that is either fully correct or has minor errors, achieving an F1-Score of 65% across 10 sample data points, as compared to 53% using a one-shot prompting method. We observe that the remaining errors occur primarily due to differences in detail between LCA documents, as well as differences in the ``scope" of which auxiliary processes must also be included. We also demonstrate that SpiderGen performs better than several baselines techniques, such as chain-of-thought prompting and one-shot prompting. Finally, we highlight SpiderGen's potential to reduce the human effort and costs for estimating carbon impact, as it is able to produce LCA process information for less than 1 USD in under 10 minutes as compared to the status quo LCA, which can cost over 25000 USD and take up to 21-person days.

PaperID: 2381, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13759

Authors:Han Wang, Deyi Ji, Junyu Lu, Lanyun Zhu, Hailong Zhang, Haiyang Wu, Liqun Liu, Peng Shu, Roy Ka-Wei Lee

Affiliations: Singapore University of Technology and Design, Dalian University of Technology, Nanyang Technological University

Title: Multi-Agent VLMs Guided Self-Training with PNU Loss for Low-Resource Offensive Content Detection

Abstract:
Accurate detection of offensive content on social media demands highquality labeled data; however, such data is often scarce due to the low prevalence of offensive instances and the high cost of manual annotation. To address this low-resource challenge, we propose a self-training framework that leverages abundant unlabeled data through collaborative pseudo-labeling. Starting with a lightweight classifier trained on limited labeled data, our method iteratively assigns pseudo-labels to unlabeled instances with the support of Multi-Agent Vision-Language Models (MA-VLMs). Unlabeled data on which the classifier and MA-VLMs agree are designated as the Agreed-Unknown set, while conflicting samples form the Disagreed-Unknown set. To enhance label reliability, MA-VLMs simulate dual perspectives, moderator and user, capturing both regulatory and subjective viewpoints. The classifier is optimized using a novel Positive-Negative-Unlabeled (PNU) loss, which jointly exploits labeled, Agreed-Unknown, and Disagreed-Unknown data while mitigating pseudo-label noise. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our framework substantially outperforms baselines under limited supervision and approaches the performance of large-scale models.

PaperID: 2382, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.19418

Authors:Yingji Zhang, Marco Valentino, Danilo Carvalho, André Freitas

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK Idiap Research Institute, School of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, UK Cancer Biomarker Centre, CRUK Manchester Institute, Switzerland Cancer Biomarker Centre

Title: Learning to Disentangle Latent Reasoning Rules with Language VAEs: A Systematic Study

Abstract:
Incorporating explicit reasoning rules within the latent space of language models (LMs) offers a promising pathway to enhance generalisation, interpretability, and controllability. While current Transformerbased language models have shown strong performance on Natural Language Inference (NLI) tasks, they often rely on memorisation rather than explicit rule-based generalisation. This work investigates how human-interpretable reasoning rules can be explicitly encoded within LMs with the support of Language Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), as a mechanism for generative control. We propose a complete pipeline for learning reasoning rules within Transformer-based language VAEs. This pipeline encompasses three rule-based reasoning tasks, a supporting theoretical framework, and a practical end-to-end architecture. The experiment illustrates the following findings: Disentangled reasoning: Under explicit signal supervision, reasoning rules (viewed as functional mappings) can be disentangled within the encoder’s parametric space. This separation results in distinct clustering of rules in the output feature space. Prior knowledge injection: injecting rule-based constraints into the Query enables the model to more effectively retrieve the stored Value from memory based on Key. This approach offers a simple method for integrating prior knowledge into decoder-only language models. Moreover, we found that FFN layers are better than attention layers at preserving the separation of reasoning rules in the model's parameters.

PaperID: 2383, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.14258

Authors:Ho Yin Au, Junkun Jiang, Jie Chen

Affiliations: Hong Kong Baptist University

Title: SOSControl: Enhancing Human Motion Generation Through Saliency-Aware Symbolic Orientation and Timing Control

Abstract:
Traditional textto-motion frameworks often lack precise control, and existing approaches based on joint keyframe locations provide only positional guidance, making it challenging and unintuitive to specify body part orientations and motion timing. To address these limitations, we introduce the Salient Orientation Symbolic (SOS) script, a programmable symbolic framework for specifying body part orientations and motion timing at keyframes. We further propose an automatic SOS extraction pipeline that employs temporally-constrained agglomerative clustering for frame saliency detection and a Saliency-based Masking Scheme (SMS) to generate sparse, interpretable SOS scripts directly from motion data. Moreover, we present the SOSControl framework, which treats the available orientation symbols in the sparse SOS script as salient and prioritizes satisfying these constraints during motion generation. By incorporating SMS-based data augmentation and gradient-based iterative optimization, the framework enhances alignment with user-specified constraints. Additionally, it employs a ControlNet-based ACTOR-PAE Decoder to ensure smooth and natural motion outputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the SOS extraction pipeline generates human-interpretable scripts with symbolic annotations at salient keyframes, while the SOSControl framework outperforms existing baselines in motion quality, controllability, and generalizability with respect to motion timing and body part orientation control.

PaperID: 2384, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.06483

Authors:Guanjie Cheng, Boyi Li, Peihan Wu, Feiyi Chen, Xinkui Zhao, Mengying Zhu, Shuiguang Deng

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Northeastern University

Title: DyC-STG: Dynamic Causal Spatio-Temporal Graph Network for Real-time Data Credibility Analysis in IoT

Abstract:
The wide spreading of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors generates vast spatiotemporal data streams, but ensuring data credibility is a critical yet unsolved challenge for applications like smart homes. While spatio-temporal graph (STG) models are a leading paradigm for such data, they often fall short in dynamic, human-centric environments due to two fundamental limitations: (1) their reliance on static graph topologies, which fail to capture physical, event-driven dynamics, and (2) their tendency to confuse spurious correlations with true causality, undermining robustness in human-centric environments. To address these gaps, we propose the Dynamic Causal Spatio-Temporal Graph Network (DyC-STG), a novel framework designed for real-time data credibility analysis in IoT. Our framework features two synergistic contributions: an event-driven dynamic graph module that adapts the graph topology in real-time to reflect physical state changes, and a causal reasoning module to distill causally-aware representations by strictly enforcing temporal precedence. To facilitate the research in this domain we release two new real-world datasets. Comprehensive experiments show that DyC-STG establishes a new state-of-the-art, outperforming the strongest baselines by 1.4 percentage points and achieving an F1-Score of up to 0.930.

PaperID: 2385, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02458

Authors:Yichao Feng, Haoran Luo, Lang Feng, Shuai Zhao, Anh Tuan Luu

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University

Title: From Stimuli to Minds: Enhancing Psychological Reasoning in LLMs via Bilateral Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Large Language Models show promise in emotion understanding, social reasoning, and empathy, yet struggle with psychologically grounded tasks requiring inference of implicit mental states in complex, socially and contextually ambiguous settings. These limitations stem from lacking theoryaligned supervision and difficulty capturing nuanced mental processes in real-world narratives. To bridge this gap, we leverage expert-labeled scenarios and propose a trajectory-aware reinforcement learning framework imitating expert psychological reasoning. By integrating real-world stimuli with structured reasoning guidance, our approach enables compact models to internalize social-cognitive principles, perform nuanced inference, and support continual self-improvement. Experiments across benchmarks show expert-level interpretive capability across psychological tasks.

PaperID: 2386, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06294

Authors:Wenjie Hu, Sidun Liu, Peng Qiao, Zhenglun Sun, Yong Dou

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology

Title: Transolver Is a Linear Transformer: Revisiting Physics-Attention Through the Lens of Linear Attention

Abstract:
Recent advances in Transformerbased Neural Operators have enabled significant progress in data-driven solvers for Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). Most current research has focused on reducing the quadratic complexity of attention to address the resulting low training and inference efficiency. Among these works, Transolver stands out as a representative method that introduces Physics-Attention to reduce computational costs. Physics-Attention projects grid points into slices for slice attention, then maps them back through deslicing. However, we observe that Physics-Attention can be reformulated as a special case of linear attention, and that the slice attention may even hurt the model performance. Based on these observations, we argue that its effectiveness primarily arises from the slice and deslice operations rather than interactions between slices. Building on this insight, we propose a two-step transformation to redesign Physics-Attention into a canonical linear attention, which we call Linear Attention Neural Operator (LinearNO). Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on six standard PDE benchmarks, while reducing the number of parameters by an average of 40.0% and computational cost by 36.2%. Additionally, it delivers superior performance on two challenging, industrial-level datasets: AirfRANS and Shape-Net Car.

PaperID: 2387, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07322

Authors:Song Jin, Shuqi Li, Shukun Zhang, Rui Yan

Affiliations: Renmin University of China

Title: FinRpt: Dataset, Evaluation System and LLM-based Multi-agent Framework for Equity Research Report Generation

Abstract:
While LLMs have shown great success in financial tasks like stock prediction and question answering, their application in fully automating Equity Research Report generation remains uncharted territory. In this paper, we formulate the Equity Research Report (ERR) Generation task for the first time. To address the data scarcity and the evaluation metrics absence, we present an opensource evaluation benchmark for ERR generation - FinRpt. We frame a Dataset Construction Pipeline that integrates 7 financial data types and produces a high-quality ERR dataset automatically, which could be used for model training and evaluation. We also introduce a comprehensive evaluation system including 11 metrics to assess the generated ERRs. Moreover, we propose a multi-agent framework specifically tailored to address this task, named FinRpt-Gen, and train several LLM-based agents on the proposed datasets using Supervised Fine-Tuning and Reinforcement Learning. Experimental results indicate the data quality and metrics effectiveness of the benchmark FinRpt and the strong performance of FinRpt-Gen, showcasing their potential to drive innovation in the ERR generation field. All code and datasets are publicly available.

PaperID: 2388, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13786

Authors:Yue Ling, Peiqi Zhang, Zhenyi Zhang, Peijie Zhou

Affiliations: Peking University

Title: CellStream: Dynamical Optimal Transport Informed Embeddings for Reconstructing Cellular Trajectories from Snapshots Data

Abstract:
Singlecell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq), especially temporally resolved datasets, enables genome-wide profiling of gene expression dynamics at single-cell resolution across discrete time points. However, current technologies provide only sparse, static snapshots of cell states and are inherently influenced by technical noise, complicating the inference and representation of continuous transcriptional dynamics. Although embedding methods can reduce dimensionality and mitigate technical noise, the majority of existing approaches typically treat trajectory inference separately from embedding construction, often neglecting temporal structure. To address this challenge, here we introduce CellStream, a novel deep learning framework that jointly learns embedding and cellular dynamics from single-cell snapshots data by integrating an autoencoder with unbalanced dynamical optimal transport. Compared to existing methods, CellStream generates dynamics-informed embeddings that robustly capture temporal developmental processes while maintaining high consistency with the underlying data manifold. We demonstrate CellStream’s effectiveness on both simulated datasets and real scRNA-seq data, including spatial transcriptomics. Our experiments indicate significant quantitative improvements over state-of-the-art methods in representing cellular trajectories with enhanced temporal coherence and reduced noise sensitivity. Overall, CellStream provides a new tool for learning and representing continuous streams from the noisy, static snapshots of single-cell gene expression.

PaperID: 2389, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23725

Authors:Siqi Ma, Jiajie Huang, Fan Zhang, Jinlin Wu, Yue Shen, Guohui Fan, Zhu Zhang, Zelin Zang

Affiliations: BioMap Research Westlake University, Xi'an Jiaotong University, The University of Tokyo, Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Hong Kong Institute of Science & Innovation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ant Group, China-Japan Friendship Hospital

Title: MedLA: A Logic-Driven Multi-Agent Framework for Complex Medical Reasoning with Large Language Models

Abstract:
Answering complex medical questions requires not only domain expertise and patientspecific information, but also structured and multi-perspective reasoning. Existing multi-agent approaches often rely on fixed roles or shallow interaction prompts, limiting their ability to detect and resolve fine-grained logical inconsistencies. To address this, we propose MedLA, a logic-driven multi-agent framework built on large language models. Each agent organizes its reasoning process into an explicit logical tree based on syllogistic triads (major premise, minor premise, and conclusion), enabling transparent inference and premise-level alignment. Agents engage in a multi-round, graph-guided discussion to compare and iteratively refine their logic trees, achieving consensus through error correction and contradiction resolution. We demonstrate that MedLA consistently outperforms both static role-based systems and single-agent baselines on challenging benchmarks such as MedDDx and standard medical QA tasks. Furthermore, MedLA scales effectively across both open-source and commercial LLM backbones, achieving state-of-the-art performance and offering a generalizable paradigm for trustworthy medical reasoning.

PaperID: 2390, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11122

Authors:Yu Shi, Yitong Duan, Jian Li

Affiliations: Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University

Title: Navigating the Alpha Jungle: An LLM-Powered MCTS Framework for Formulaic Alpha Factor Mining

Abstract:
Alpha factor mining is pivotal in quantitative investment for identifying predictive signals from complex financial data. While traditional formulaic alpha mining relies on human expertise, contemporary automated methods, such as those based on genetic programming or reinforcement learning, often struggle with search inefficiency or yield alpha factors that are difficult to interpret. This paper introduces a novel framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to overcome these limitations. Our framework leverages the LLM's instructionfollowing and reasoning capability to iteratively generate and refine symbolic alpha formulas within an MCTS-driven exploration. A key innovation is the guidance of MCTS exploration by rich, quantitative feedback from financial backtesting of each candidate factor, enabling efficient navigation of the vast search space. Furthermore, a frequent subtree avoidance mechanism is introduced to enhance search diversity and prevent formulaic homogenization, further improving performance. Experimental results on real-world stock market data demonstrate that our LLM-based framework outperforms existing methods by mining alphas with superior predictive accuracy and trading performance. The resulting formulas are also more amenable to human interpretation, establishing a more effective and efficient paradigm for formulaic alpha mining.

PaperID: 2391, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12398

Authors:Zhixin Xie, Xurui Song, Jun Luo

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University

Title: Where to Start Alignment? Diffusion Large Language Model May Demand a Distinct Position

Abstract:
Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have recently emerged as a competitive nonautoregressive paradigm due to their unique training and inference approach. However, there is currently a lack of safety study on this novel architecture. In this paper, we present the first analysis of dLLMs' safety performance and propose a novel safety alignment method tailored to their unique generation characteristics. Specifically, we identify a critical asymmetry between the defender and attacker in terms of security. For the defender, we reveal that the middle tokens of the response, rather than the initial ones, are more critical to the overall safety of dLLM outputs; this seems to suggest that aligning middle tokens can be more beneficial to the defender. The attacker, on the contrary, may have limited power to manipulate middle tokens, as we find dLLMs have a strong tendency towards a sequential generation order in practice, forcing the attack to meet this distribution and diverting it from influencing the critical middle tokens. Building on this asymmetry, we introduce Middle-tOken Safety Alignment (MOSA), a novel method that directly aligns the model's middle generation with safe refusals exploiting reinforcement learning. We implement MOSA and compare its security performance against eight attack methods on two benchmarks. We also test the utility of MOSA-aligned dLLM on coding, math, and general reasoning. The results strongly prove the superiority of MOSA.

PaperID: 2392, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07735

Authors:Rongchao Xu, Kunlin Cai, Lin Jiang, Zhiqing Hong, Yuan Tian, Guang Wang

Affiliations: Florida State University, University of California, Los Angeles, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Title: GeoGen: A Two-stage Coarse-to-Fine Framework for Fine-grained Synthetic Location-based Social Network Trajectory Generation

Abstract:
LocationBased Social Network (LBSN) check-in trajectory data are important for many practical applications like POI recommendation, advertising, and pandemic intervention. However, the high collection costs and ever-increasing privacy concerns prevent us from accessing large-scale LBSN trajectory data. The recent advances in synthetic data generation provide us with a new opportunity to achieve this, which utilizes generative AI to generate synthetic data that preserves the characteristics of real data while ensuring privacy protection. However, generating synthetic LBSN check-in trajectories remains challenging due to their spatially discrete, temporally irregular nature and the complex spatio-temporal patterns caused by sparse activities and uncertain human mobility. To address this challenge, we propose GeoGen, a two-stage coarse-to-fine framework for large-scale LBSN check-in trajectory generation. In the first stage, we reconstruct spatially continuous, temporally regular latent movement sequences from the original LBSN check-in trajectories and then design a Sparsity-aware Spatio-temporal Diffusion model (S^2TDiff) with an efficient denosing network to learn their underlying behavioral patterns. In the second stage, we design Coarse2FineNet, a Transformer-based Seq2Seq architecture equipped with a dynamic context fusion mechanism in the encoder and a multi-task hybrid-head decoder, which generates fine-grained LBSN trajectories based on coarse-grained latent movement sequences by modeling semantic relevance and behavioral uncertainty. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets show that GeoGen excels state-of-the-art models for both fidelity and utility evaluation, e.g., it increases over 69% and 55% in distance and radius metrics on the FS-TKY dataset.

PaperID: 2393, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13341

Authors:Zihe Yan, Kai Luo, Haoyu Yang, Yang Yu, Zhuosheng Zhang, Guancheng Li

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiaotong University, Tsinghua University, Tencent Security Xuanwu Lab, Tencent Xuanwu Lab, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: An LLM-based Quantitative Framework for Evaluating High-Stealthy Backdoor Risks in OSS Supply Chains

Abstract:
In modern software development workflows, the opensource software supply chain significantly contributes to efficient and convenient engineering practices. With increasing system complexity, it has become a common practice to use open-source software as third-party dependencies. However, due to the lack of maintenance for underlying dependencies and insufficient community auditing, ensuring the security of source code and the legitimacy of repository maintainers has become a challenge, particularly in the context of high-stealth backdoor attacks such as the XZ-Util incident. To address these problems, we propose a fine-grained project evaluation framework for backdoor risk assessment in open-source software. Our evaluation framework models highly stealthy backdoor attacks from the attacker’s perspective and defines targeted metrics for each attack stage. Moreover, to overcome the limitations of static analysis in assessing the reliability of repository maintenance activities, such as irregular committer privilege escalation and insufficient review participation, we employ large language models (LLMs) to perform semantic evaluation of code repositories while avoiding reliance on manually crafted patterns. The effectiveness of our framework is validated on 66 high-priority packages in the Debian ecosystem, and the experimental results reveal that the current open-source software supply chain is exposed to a series of security risks.

PaperID: 2394, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07005

Authors:Jianbo Yu, Yixuan Li, Hai Xu, Kang Xu, Junjielong Xu, Zhijing Li, Pinjia He, Wanyuan Wang

Affiliations: Southeast University, Nanyang Technological University, Focus Technology Co., Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen University

Title: MicLog: Towards Accurate and Efficient LLM-based Log Parsing via Progressive Meta In-Context Learning

Abstract:
Log parsing converts semistructured logs into structured templates, forming a critical foundation for downstream analysis. Traditional syntax and semantic-based parsers often struggle with semantic variations in evolving logs and data scarcity stemming from their limited domain coverage. Recent large language model (LLM)-based parsers leverage in-context learning (ICL) to extract semantics from examples, demonstrating superior accuracy. However, LLM-based parsers face two main challenges: 1) underutilization of ICL capabilities, particularly in dynamic example selection and cross-domain generalization, leading to inconsistent performance; 2) time-consuming and costly LLM querying. To address these challenges, we present MicLog, the first progressive meta in-context learning (ProgMeta-ICL) log parsing framework that combines meta-learning with ICL on small open-source LLMs (i.e., Qwen-2.5-3B). Specifically, MicLog: i) enhances LLMs' ICL capability through a zero-shot to k-shot ProgMeta-ICL paradigm, employing weighted DBSCAN candidate sampling and enhanced BM25 demonstration selection; ii) accelerates parsing via a multi-level pre-query cache that dynamically matches and refines recently parsed templates. Evaluated on Loghub-2.0, MicLog achieves 10.3% higher parsing accuracy than the state-of-the-art parser while reducing parsing time by 42.4%.

PaperID: 2395, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06259

Authors:Yiwen Zhang, Keyan Ding, Yihang Wu, Xiang Zhuang, Yi Yang, Qiang Zhang, Huajun Chen

Affiliations: The Polytechnic Institute, Zhejiang University, ZJU-Hangzhou Global Scientific and Technological Innovation Center, College of Computer Science and Technology, ZJU-UIUC Institute

Title: Breaking the Modality Barrier: Generative Modeling for Accurate Molecule Retrieval from Mass Spectra

Abstract:
Retrieving molecular structures from tandem mass spectra is a crucial step in rapid compound identification. Existing retrieval methods, such as traditional mass spectral library matching, suffer from limited spectral library coverage, while recent crossmodal representation learning frameworks often encounter modality misalignment, resulting in suboptimal retrieval accuracy and generalization. To address these limitations, we propose GLMR, a Generative Language Model-based Retrieval framework that mitigates the cross-modal misalignment through a two-stage process. In the pre-retrieval stage, a contrastive learning-based model identifies top candidate molecules as contextual priors for the input mass spectrum. In the generative retrieval stage, these candidate molecules are integrated with the input mass spectrum to guide a generative model in producing refined molecular structures, which are then used to re-rank the candidates based on molecular similarity. Experiments on both MassSpecGym and the proposed MassRET-20k dataset demonstrate that GLMR significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving over 40% improvement in top-1 accuracy and exhibiting strong generalizability.

PaperID: 2396, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08455

Authors:Shiyan Zheng, Herun Wan, Minnan Luo, Junhang Huang

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, Beijing Institute of Technology

Title: Bot Meets Shortcut: How Can LLMs Aid in Handling Unknown Invariance OOD Scenarios?

Abstract:
While existing social bot detectors perform well on benchmarks, their robustness across diverse realworld scenarios remains limited due to unclear ground truth and varied misleading cues. In particular, the impact of shortcut learning, where models rely on spurious correlations instead of capturing causal task-relevant features, has received limited attention. To address this gap, we conduct an in-depth study to assess how detectors are influenced by potential shortcuts based on textual features, which are most susceptible to manipulation by social bots. We design a series of shortcut scenarios by constructing spurious associations between user labels and superficial textual cues to evaluate model robustness. Results show that shifts in irrelevant feature distributions significantly degrade social bot detector performance, with an average relative accuracy drop of 32 % in the baseline models. To tackle this challenge, we propose mitigation strategies based on large language models, leveraging counterfactual data augmentation. These methods mitigate the problem from data and model perspectives across three levels, including data distribution at both the individual user text and overall dataset levels, as well as model’s ability to extract causal information. Our strategies achieve an average relative performance improvement of 56 % under shortcut scenarios.

PaperID: 2397, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04531

Authors:Zhuang Chen, Guanqun Bi, Wen Zhang, Jiawei Hu, Aoyun Wang, Xiyao Xiao, Kun Feng, Minlie Huang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University, CoAI Group, Tsinghua University, University of International Relations, Central China Normal University, Lingxin AI, Yuquan Hospital

Title: Unveiling the Landscape of Clinical Depression Assessment: From Behavioral Signatures to Psychiatric Reasoning

Abstract:
Depression is a widespread mental disorder that affects millions worldwide. While automated depression assessment shows promise, most studies rely on limited or nonclinically validated data, and often prioritize complex model design over real-world effectiveness. In this paper, we aim to unveil the landscape of clinical depression assessment. We introduce C-MIND, a clinical multimodal neuropsychiatric diagnosis dataset collected over two years from real hospital visits. Each participant completes three structured psychiatric tasks and receives a final diagnosis from expert clinicians, with informative audio, video, transcript, and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) signals recorded. Using C-MIND, we first analyze behavioral signatures relevant to diagnosis. We train a range of classical models to quantify how different tasks and modalities contribute to diagnostic performance, and dissect the effectiveness of their combinations. We then explore whether LLMs can perform psychiatric reasoning like clinicians and identify their clear limitations in realistic clinical settings. In response, we propose to guide the reasoning process with clinical expertise and consistently improve LLM diagnostic performance by up to 10% in Macro-F1 score. We aim to build an infrastructure for clinical depression assessment from both data and algorithmic perspectives, enabling C-MIND to facilitate grounded and reliable research for mental healthcare.

PaperID: 2398, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00205

Authors:Xiangyu Kong, Hengde Zhu, Haoqin Sun, Zhihao Guo, Jiayan Gu, Xinyi Ni, Wei Zhang, Shizhe Liu, Siyang Song

Affiliations: University of Exeter, Tongji University, Nankai University, The Manchester Metropolitan University, Hefei University, Zhejiang University, University of Oxford

Title: Learning Personalised Human Internal Cognition from External Expressive Behaviours for Real Personality Recognition

Abstract:
Automatic real personality recognition (RPR) aims to evaluate human real personality traits from their expressive behaviours. However, most existing solutions generally act as external observers to infer observers' personality impressions based on target individuals' expressive behaviours, which significantly deviate from their real personalities and consistently lead to inferior recognition performance. Inspired by the association between real personality and human internal cognition underlying the generation of expressive behaviours, we propose a novel RPR approach that efficiently simulates personalised internal cognition from external short audiovisual behaviours expressed by target individual. The simulated personalised cognition, represented as a set of network weights that enforce the personalised network to reproduce the individual-specific facial reactions, is further encoded as a graph containing two-dimensional node and edge feature matrices, with a novel 2D Graph Neural Network (2D-GNN) proposed for inferring real personality traits from it. To simulate real personality-related cognition, an end-to-end (E2E) strategy is designed to jointly train our cognition simulation, 2D graph construction, and personality recognition modules. Experiments show our approach’s effectiveness in capturing real personality traits with superior computational efficiency.

PaperID: 2399, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.00583

Authors:Xiangdong Li, Ye Lou, Ao Gao, Wei Zhang, Siyang Song

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, University of Exeter

Title: MAUGen: A Unified Diffusion Approach for Multi-Identity Facial Expression and AU Label Generation

Abstract:
The lack of largescale, demographically diverse face images with precise Action Unit (AU) occurrence and intensity annotations has long been recognized as a fundamental bottleneck in developing generalizable facial AU recognition systems. In this paper, we propose MAUGen, a diffusion-based multi-modal framework that jointly generates a large collection of photorealistic facial expressions and anatomically consistent AU labels, including both occurrence and intensity, conditioned on a single descriptive text prompt. Our MAUGen involves two key modules: (1) a Multi-modal Representation Learning (MRL) module that captures the relationships among the paired facial textual description, facial identity, facial expression image, and AU activations within a unified latent space; and (2) a Diffusion-based Image-label Generator (DIG) that decodes the obtained joint representation into aligned facial image-label pairs across diverse identities. Under this framework, we introduce the Multi-Identity Facial Action (MIFA), a large-scale multi-modal (i.e., text descriptions, face images with labels) synthetic dataset that features comprehensive AU annotations and identity variations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAUGen outperforms existing methods in synthesizing photorealistic, demographically diverse facial images, along with semantically aligned AU labels.

PaperID: 2400, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09003

Authors:Zhouxing Tan, Ruochong Xiong, Yulong Wan, Jinlong Ma, Hanlin Xue, Qichun Deng, Haifeng Jing, Zhengtong Zhang, Depei Liu, Shiyuan Luo, Junfei Liu

Affiliations: National Engineering Research Center for Software Engineering, Peking University, Guangzhou Quwan Network Technology

Title: Detecting Emotional Dynamic Trajectories: An Evaluation Framework for Emotional Support in Language Models

Abstract:
Emotional support is a core capability in humanAI interaction, with applications including psychological counseling, role play, and companionship. However, existing evaluations of large language models (LLMs) often rely on short, static dialogues and fail to capture the dynamic and long-term nature of emotional support. To overcome this limitation, we shift from snapshot-based evaluation to trajectory-based assessment, adopting a user-centered perspective that evaluates models based on their ability to improve and stabilize user emotional states over time. Our framework constructs a large-scale benchmark consisting of 328 emotional contexts and 1,152 disturbance events, simulating realistic emotional shifts under evolving dialogue scenarios. To encourage psychologically grounded responses, we constrain model outputs using validated emotion regulation strategies such as situation selection and cognitive reappraisal. User emotional trajectories are modeled as a first-order Markov process, and we apply causally-adjusted emotion estimation to obtain unbiased emotional state tracking. Based on this framework, we introduce three trajectory-level metrics: Baseline Emotional Level (BEL), Emotional Trajectory Volatility (ETV), and Emotional Centroid Position (ECP). These metrics collectively capture user emotional dynamics over time and support comprehensive evaluation of long-term emotional support performance of LLMs. Extensive evaluations across a diverse set of LLMs reveal significant disparities in emotional support capabilities and provide actionable insights for model development.

PaperID: 2401, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07883

Authors:Jiaqi Wang, Liutao Yu, Xiongri Shen, Sihang Guo, Chenlin Zhou, Leilei Zhao, Yi Zhong, Zhiguo Zhang, Zhengyu Ma

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Pengcheng Laboratory, Shenzhen Great Bay University

Title: SpikCommander: A High-performance Spiking Transformer with Multi-view Learning for Efficient Speech Command Recognition

Abstract:
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a promising path toward energyefficient speech command recognition (SCR) by leveraging their event-driven processing paradigm. However, existing SNN-based SCR methods often struggle to capture rich temporal dependencies and contextual information from speech due to limited temporal modeling and binary spike-based representations. To address these challenges, we first introduce the multi-view spiking temporal-aware self-attention (MSTASA) module, which combines effective spiking temporal-aware attention with a multi-view learning framework to model complementary temporal dependencies in speech commands. Building on MSTASA, we further propose SpikCommander, a fully spike-driven transformer architecture that integrates MSTASA with a spiking contextual refinement channel MLP (SCR-MLP) to jointly enhance temporal context modeling and channel-wise feature integration. We evaluate our method on three benchmark datasets: the Spiking Heidelberg Dataset (SHD), the Spiking Speech Commands (SSC), and the Google Speech Commands V2 (GSC). Extensive experiments demonstrate that SpikCommander consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) SNN approaches with fewer parameters under comparable time steps, highlighting its effectiveness and efficiency for robust speech command recognition.

PaperID: 2402, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15029

Authors:Zekun Wang, Sashank Varma

Affiliations: Georgia Institute of Technology

Title: Computer Vision Modeling of the Development of Geometric and Numerical Concepts in Humans

Abstract:
Mathematical thinking is a fundamental aspect of human cognition. Cognitive scientists have investigated the mechanisms that underlie our ability to thinking geometrically and numerically, to take two prominent examples, and developmental scientists have documented the trajectories of these abilities over the lifespan. Prior research has shown that computer vision (CV) models trained on the unrelated task of image classification nevertheless learn latent representations of geometric and numerical concepts similar to those of adults. Building on this demonstrated cognitive alignment, the current study investigates whether CV models also show developmental alignment: whether their performance improvements across training to match the developmental progressions observed in children. In a detailed case study of the ResNet50 model, we show that this is the case. For the case of geometry and topology, we find developmental alignment for some classes of concepts (Euclidean Geometry, Geometrical Figures, Metric Properties, Topology) but not others (Chiral Figures, Geometric Transformations, Symmetrical Figures). For the case of number, we find developmental alignment in the emergence of a human-like ``mental number line'' representation with experience. These findings show the promise of computer vision models for understanding the development of mathematical understanding in humans. They point the way to future research exploring additional model architectures and building larger benchmarks.

PaperID: 2403, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12498

Authors:Jongseong Bae, Junwoo Ha, Jinnyeong Heo, Yeongin Lee, Ha Young Kim

Affiliations: Yonsei University

Title: Towards Temporal Fusion Beyond the Field of View for Camera-based Semantic Scene Completion

Abstract:
Recent camerabased 3D semantic scene completion (SSC) methods have increasingly explored leveraging temporal cues to enrich the features of the current frame. However, while these approaches primarily focus on enhancing in-frame regions, they often struggle to reconstruct critical out-of-frame areas near the sides of the ego-vehicle, although previous frames commonly contain valuable contextual information about these unseen regions. To address this limitation, we propose the Current-Centric Contextual 3D Fusion (C3DFusion) module, which generates hidden region-aware 3D feature geometry by explicitly aligning 3D-lifted point features from both current and historical frames. C3DFusion performs enhanced temporal fusion through two complementary techniques—historical context blurring and current-centric feature densification—which suppress noise from inaccurately warped historical point features by attenuating their scale, and enhance current point features by increasing their volumetric contribution. Simply integrated into standard SSC architectures, C3DFusion demonstrates strong effectiveness, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods on the SemanticKITTI and SSCBench-KITTI-360 datasets. Furthermore, it exhibits robust generalization, achieving notable performance gains when applied to other baseline models.

PaperID: 2404, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10634

Authors:Francisco Caetano, Christiaan Viviers, Peter H.N. de With, Fons van der Sommen

Affiliations: Eindhoven University of Technology

Title: Symmetrical Flow Matching: Unified Image Generation, Segmentation, and Classification with Score-Based Generative Models

Abstract:
Flow Matching has emerged as a powerful framework for learning continuous transformations between distributions, enabling highfidelity generative modeling. This work introduces Symmetrical Flow Matching (SymmFlow), a new formulation that unifies semantic segmentation, classification, and image generation within a single model. Using a symmetric learning objective, SymmFlow models forward and reverse transformations jointly, ensuring bi-directional consistency, while preserving sufficient entropy for generative diversity. A new training objective is introduced to explicitly retain semantic information across flows, featuring efficient sampling while preserving semantic structure, allowing for one-step segmentation and classification without iterative refinement. Unlike previous approaches that impose strict one-to-one mapping between masks and images, SymmFlow generalizes to flexible conditioning, supporting both pixel-level and image-level class labels. Experimental results on various benchmarks demonstrate that SymmFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance on semantic image synthesis, obtaining FID scores of 11.9 on CelebAMask-HQ and 7.0 on COCO-Stuff with only 25 inference steps. Additionally, it delivers competitive results on semantic segmentation and shows promising capabilities in classification tasks.

PaperID: 2405, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.11343

Authors:Qinglong Cao, Xirui Li, Ding Wang, Chao Ma, Yuntian Chen, Xiaokang Yang

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Eastern Institute of Technology

Title: Latent Knowledge-Guided Video Diffusion for Scientific Phenomena Generation from a Single Initial Frame

Abstract:
Video diffusion models have achieved impressive results in natural scene generation, yet they struggle to generalize to scientific phenomena such as fluid simulations and meteorological processes, where underlying dynamics are governed by scientific laws. These tasks pose unique challenges, including severe domain gaps, limited training data, and the lack of descriptive language annotations. To handle this dilemma, we extracted the latent scientific phenomena knowledge and further proposed a fresh framework that teaches video diffusion models to generate scientific phenomena from a single initial frame. Particularly, static knowledge is extracted via pretrained masked autoencoders, while dynamic knowledge is derived from pre-trained optical flow prediction. Subsequently, based on the aligned spatial relations between the CLIP vision and language encoders, the visual embeddings of scientific phenomena, guided by latent scientific phenomena knowledge, are projected to generate the pseudo-language prompt embeddings in both spatial and frequency domains. By incorporating these prompts and fine-tuning the video diffusion model, we enable the generation of videos that better adhere to scientific laws. Extensive experiments on both computational fluid dynamics simulations and real-world typhoon observations demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving superior fidelity and consistency across diverse scientific scenarios.

PaperID: 2406, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.12791

Authors:Baoliang Chen, Siyi Pan, Dongxu Wu, Liang Xie, Xiangjie Sui, Lingyu Zhu, Hanwei Zhu

Affiliations: South China Normal University, Guangdong University of Technology, City University of Macau, City University of Hong Kong, Nanyang Technological University

Title: Mitigating Perception Bias: A Training-Free Approach to Enhance LMM for Image Quality Assessment

Abstract:
Despite the impressive performance of large multimodal models (LMMs) in highlevel visual tasks, their capacity for image quality assessment (IQA) remains limited. One main reason is that LMMs are primarily trained for high-level tasks (e.g., image captioning), emphasizing unified image semantics extraction under varied quality. Such semantic-aware yet quality-insensitive perception bias inevitably leads to a heavy reliance on image semantics when those LMMs are forced for quality rating. In this paper, instead of retraining or tuning an LMM costly, we propose a training-free debiasing framework, in which the image quality prediction is rectified by mitigating the bias caused by image semantics. Specifically, we first explore several semantic-preserving distortions that can significantly degrade image quality while maintaining identifiable semantics. By applying these specific distortions to the query/test images, we ensure that the degraded images are recognized as poor quality while their semantics remain. During quality inference, both a query image and its corresponding degraded version are fed to the LMM along with a prompt indicating that the query image quality should be inferred under the condition that the degraded one is deemed poor quality. This prior condition effectively aligns the LMM’s quality perception, as all degraded images are consistently rated as poor quality, regardless of their semantic difference. Finally, the quality scores of the query image inferred under different prior conditions (degraded versions) are aggregated using a conditional probability model. Extensive experiments on various IQA datasets show that our debiasing framework could consistently enhance the LMM performance and the code will be publicly available.

PaperID: 2407, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01216

Authors:Bolei Chen, Shengsheng Yan, Yongzheng Cui, Jiaxu Kang, Ping Zhong, Jianxin Wang

Affiliations: Central South University

Title: Perspective from a Broader Context: Can Room Style Knowledge Help Visual Floorplan Localization?

Abstract:
Since a building's floorplan remains consistent over time and is inherently robust to changes in visual appearance, visual Floorplan Localization (FLoc) has received increasing attention from researchers. However, as a compact and minimalist representation of the building's layout, floorplans contain many repetitive structures (e.g., hallways and corners), thus easily result in ambiguous localization. Existing methods either pin their hopes on matching 2D structural cues in floorplans or rely on 3D geometryconstrained visual pre-trainings, ignoring the richer contextual information provided by visual images. In this paper, we suggest using broader visual scene context to empower FLoc algorithms with scene layout priors to eliminate localization uncertainty. In particular, we propose an unsupervised learning technique with clustering constraints to pre-train a room discriminator on self-collected unlabeled room images. Such a discriminator can empirically extract the hidden room type of the observed image and distinguish it from other room types. By injecting the scene context information summarized by the discriminator into an FLoc algorithm, the room style knowledge is effectively exploited to guide definite visual FLoc. We conducted sufficient comparative studies on two standard visual Floc benchmarks. Our experiments show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods and achieves significant improvements in robustness and accuracy.

PaperID: 2408, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.07493

Authors:Rui Ding, Zhaonian Kuang, Zongwei Zhou, Meng Yang, Xinhu Zheng, Gang Hua

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, Horizon Robotics, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Title: RayD3D: Distilling Depth Knowledge Along the Ray for Robust Multi-View 3D Object Detection

Abstract:
Multiview 3D detection with bird’s eye view (BEV) is crucial for autonomous driving and robotics, but its robustness in real-world is limited as it struggles to predict accurate depth values. A mainstream solution, cross-modal distillation, transfers depth information from LiDAR to camera models but also unintentionally transfers depth-irrelevant information (e.g. LiDAR density). To mitigate this issue, we propose RayD3D, which transfers crucial depth knowledge along the ray: a line projecting from the camera to true location of an object. It is based on the fundamental imaging principle that predicted location of this object can only vary along this ray, which is finally determined by predicted depth value. Therefore, distilling along the ray enables more effective depth information transfer. More specifically, we design two ray-based distillation modules. Ray-based Contrastive Distillation (RCD) incorporates contrastive learning into distillation by sampling along the ray to learn how LiDAR accurately locates objects. Ray-based Weighted Distillation (RWD) adaptively adjusts distillation weight based on the ray to minimize the interference of depth-irrelevant information in LiDAR. For validation, we widely apply RayD3D into three representative types of BEV-based models, including BEVDet, BEVDepth4D, and BEVFormer. Our method is trained on clean NuScenes, and tested on both clean NuScenes and RoboBEV with a variety types of data corruptions. Our method significantly improves the robustness of all the three base models in all scenarios without increasing inference costs, and achieves the best when compared to recently released multi-view and distillation models.

PaperID: 2409, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18591

Authors:Wei Dong, Han Zhou, Junwei Lin, Jun Chen

Affiliations: McMaster University

Title: Zero-Reference Joint Low-Light Enhancement and Deblurring via Visual Autoregressive Modeling with VLM-Derived Modulation

Abstract:
Realworld dark images commonly exhibit not only low visibility and contrast but also complex noise and blur, posing significant restoration challenges. Existing methods often rely on paired data or fail to model dynamic illumination and blur characteristics, leading to poor generalization. To tackle this, we propose a generative framework based on visual autoregressive (VAR) modeling, guided by perceptual priors from the vision-language model (VLM). Specifically, to supply informative conditioning cues for VAR models, we deploy an adaptive curve estimation scheme to modulate the diverse illumination based on VLM-derived visibility scores. In addition, we integrate dynamic and spatial-frequency-aware Rotary Positional Encodings (SF-RoPE) into VAR to enhance its ability to model structures degraded by blur. Furthermore, we propose a recursive phase-domain modulation strategy that mitigates blur-induced artifacts in the phase domain via bounded iterative refinement guided by VLM-assessed blur scores. Our framework is fully unsupervised and achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets.

PaperID: 2410, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13081

Authors:Yehonatan Elisha, Seffi Cohen, Oren Barkan, Noam Koenigstein

Affiliations: Tel Aviv University, Harvard University, Open University of Israel

Title: Rethinking Saliency Maps: A Cognitive Human Aligned Taxonomy and Evaluation Framework for Explanations

Abstract:
Saliency maps have become a cornerstone of visual explanation in deep learning, yet there remains no consensus on their intended purpose and their alignment with specific user queries. This fundamental ambiguity undermines both the evaluation and practical utility of explanation methods. In this paper, we introduce the ReferenceFrame x Granularity (RFxG) taxonomy—a principled framework that addresses this ambiguity by conceptualizing saliency explanations along two essential axes: the reference-frame axis (distinguishing between pointwise "Why Husky?" and contrastive "Why Husky and not Shih-tzu?" explanations) and the granularity axis (ranging from fine-grained class-level to coarse-grained group-level interpretations, e.g., “Why Husky?” vs. “Why Dog?”). Through this lens, we identify critical limitations in existing evaluation metrics, which predominantly focus on pointwise faithfulness while neglecting contrastive reasoning and semantic granularity. To address these gaps, we propose four novel faithfulness metrics that systematically assess explanation quality across both RFxG dimensions. Our comprehensive evaluation framework spans ten state-of-the-art methods, 4 model architectures, and 3 datasets. By suggesting a shift from model-centric to user-intent-driven evaluation, our work provides both the conceptual foundation and practical tools necessary for developing explanations that are not only faithful to model behavior but also meaningfully aligned with human understanding.

PaperID: 2411, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09352

Authors:Houzhang Fang, Shukai Guo, Qiuhuan Chen, Yi Chang, Luxin Yan

Affiliations: Xidian University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: Spatio-Temporal Context Learning with Temporal Difference Convolution for Moving Infrared Small Target Detection

Abstract:
Moving infrared small target detection (IRSTD) plays a critical role in practical applications, such as surveillance of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and UAVbased search system. Moving IRSTD still remains highly challenging due to weak target features and complex background interference. Accurate spatio-temporal feature modeling is crucial for moving target detection, typically achieved through either temporal differences or spatio-temporal (3D) convolutions. Temporal difference can explicitly leverage motion cues but exhibits limited capability in extracting spatial features, whereas 3D convolution effectively represents spatio-temporal features yet lacks explicit awareness of motion dynamics along the temporal dimension. In this paper, we propose a novel moving IRSTD network (TDCNet), which effectively extracts and enhances spatio-temporal features for accurate target detection. Specifically, we introduce a novel temporal difference convolution (TDC) re-parameterization module that comprises three parallel TDC blocks designed to capture contextual dependencies across different temporal ranges. Each TDC block fuses temporal difference and 3D convolution into a unified spatio-temporal convolution representation. This re-parameterized module can effectively capture multi-scale motion contextual features while suppressing pseudo-motion clutter in complex backgrounds, significantly improving detection performance. Moreover, we propose a TDC-guided spatio-temporal attention mechanism that performs cross-attention between the spatio-temporal features extracted from the TDC-based backbone and a parallel 3D backbone. This mechanism models their global semantic dependencies to refine the current frame’s features, thereby guiding the model to focus more accurately on critical target regions. To facilitate comprehensive evaluation, we construct a new challenging benchmark, IRSTD-UAV, consisting of 15,106 real infrared images with diverse low signal-to-clutter ratio scenarios and complex backgrounds. Extensive experiments on IRSTD-UAV and public infrared datasets demonstrate that our TDCNet achieves state-of-the-art detection performance in moving target detection.

PaperID: 2412, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18888

Authors:Qian Jiang, Qianqian Wang, Xin Jin, Michał Woźniak, Shaowen Yao, Wei Zhou

Affiliations: Yunnan University, Yunnan university, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology

Title: MFmamba: A Multi-function Network for Panchromatic Image Resolution Restoration Based on State-Space Model

Abstract:
Remote sensing images are becoming increasingly widespread in military, earth resource exploration. Because of the limitation of a single sensor, we can obtain high spatial resolution grayscale panchromatic (PAN) images and low spatial resolution color multispectral (MS) images. Therefore, an important issue is to obtain a color image with high spatial resolution when there is only a PAN image at the input. The existing methods improve spatial resolution using superresolution (SR) technology and spectral recovery using colorization technology. However, the SR technique cannot improve the spectral resolution, and the colorization technique cannot improve the spatial resolution. Moreover, the pansharpening method needs two registered inputs and can not achieve SR. As a result, an integrated approach is expected. We designed a novel multi-function model (MFmamba) to realize the tasks of SR, spectral recovery, joint SR and spectral recovery through three different inputs. Firstly, MFmamba utilizes UNet++ as the backbone, and a Mamba Upsample Block (MUB) is combined with UNet++. Secondly, a Dual Pool Attention (DPA) is designed to replace the skip connection in UNet++. Finally, a Multi-scale Hybrid Cross Block (MHCB) is proposed for initial feature extraction. Many experiments show that MFmamba is competitive in evaluation metrics and visual results and performs well in the three tasks when only the input PAN image is used.

PaperID: 2413, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11106

Authors:Zhonghua Jiang, Kui Chen, Kunxi Li, Keting Yin, Yiyun Zhou, Zhaode Wang, Chengfei Lv, Shengyu Zhang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Alibaba Group

Title: AccKV: Towards Efficient Audio-Video LLMs Inference via Adaptive-Focusing and Cross-Calibration KV Cache Optimization

Abstract:
Recent advancements in AudioVideo Large Language Models (AV-LLMs) have enhanced their capabilities in tasks like audio-visual question answering and multimodal dialog systems. Video and audio introduce an extended temporal dimension, resulting in a larger key-value (KV) cache compared to static image embedding. A naive optimization strategy is to selectively focus on and retain KV caches of audio or video based on task. However, in the experiment, we observed that the attention of AV-LLMs to various modalities in the high layers is not strictly dependent on the task. In higher layers, the attention of AV-LLMs shifts more towards the video modality. In addition, we also found that directly integrating temporal KV of audio and spatial-temporal KV of video may lead to information confusion and significant performance degradation of AV-LLMs. If audio and video are processed indiscriminately, it may also lead to excessive compression or reservation of a certain modality, thereby disrupting the alignment between modalities. To address these challenges, we propose AccKV, an Adaptive-Focusing and Cross-Calibration KV cache optimization framework designed specifically for efficient AV-LLMs inference. Our method is based on layer adaptive focusing technology, selectively focusing on key modalities according to the characteristics of different layers, and enhances the recognition of heavy hitter tokens through attention redistribution. In addition, we propose a Cross-Calibration technique that first integrates inefficient KV caches within the audio and video modalities, and then aligns low-priority modality with high-priority modality to selectively evict KV cache of low-priority modality. The experimental results show that AccKV can significantly improve the computational efficiency of AV-LLMs while maintaining accuracy.

PaperID: 2414, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10382

Authors:Hyundo Lee, Suhyung Choi, Inwoo Hwang, Byoung-Tak Zhang

Affiliations: Seoul National University, Columbia University

Title: Towards Spatially Consistent Image Generation: On Incorporating Intrinsic Scene Properties into Diffusion Models

Abstract:
Image generation models trained on large datasets can synthesize highquality images but often produce spatially inconsistent and distorted images due to limited information about the underlying structures and spatial layouts. In this work, we leverage intrinsic scene properties (e.g., depth, segmentation maps) that provide rich information about the underlying scene, unlike prior approaches that solely rely on image-text pairs or use intrinsics as conditional inputs. Our approach aims to co-generate both images and their corresponding intrinsics, enabling the model to implicitly capture the underlying scene structure and generate more spatially consistent and realistic images. Specifically, we first extract rich intrinsic scene properties from a large image dataset with pre-trained estimators, eliminating the need for additional scene information or explicit 3D representations. We then aggregate various intrinsic scene properties into a single latent variable using an autoencoder. Building upon pre-trained large-scale Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs), our method simultaneously denoises the image and intrinsic domains by carefully sharing mutual information so that the image and intrinsic reflect each other without degrading image quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our method corrects spatial inconsistencies and produces a more natural layout of scenes while maintaining the fidelity and textual alignment of the base model (e.g., Stable Diffusion).

PaperID: 2415, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20991

Authors:Chade Li, Pengju Zhang, Yihong Wu

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. School of Artificial Intelligence

Title: MR-COSMO: Visual-Text Memory Recall and Direct CrOSs-MOdal Alignment Method for Query-Driven 3D Segmentation

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of visionlanguage models (VLMs) in 3D domains has accelerated research in text-query-guided point cloud processing, though existing methods underperform in point-level segmentation due to inadequate 3D-text alignment that limits local feature-text context linking. To address this limitation, we propose MR-COSMO, a Visual-Text Memory Recall and Direct CrOSs-MOdal Alignment Method for Query-Driven 3D Segmentation, establishing explicit alignment between 3D point clouds and text/2D image data through a dedicated direct cross-modal alignment module while implementing a visual-text memory module with specialized feature banks. This direct alignment mechanism enables precise fusion of geometric and semantic features, while the memory module employs specialized banks storing text features, visual features, and their correspondence mappings to dynamically enhance scene-specific representations via attention-based knowledge recall. Comprehensive experiments across 3D instruction, reference, and semantic segmentation benchmarks confirm state-of-the-art performance.

PaperID: 2416, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12263

Authors:Jingyao Li, Jingyun Wang, Molin Tan, Haochen Wang, Cilin Yan, Likun Shi, Jiayin Cai, Xiaolong Jiang, Yao Hu

Affiliations: Xiaohongshu Inc.

Title: CrossVid: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-Video Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models

Abstract:
CrossVideo Reasoning (CVR) presents a significant challenge in video understanding, which requires simultaneous understanding of multiple videos to aggregate and compare information across groups of videos. Most existing video understanding benchmarks focus on single-video analysis, failing to assess the ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to simultaneously reason over various videos. Recent benchmarks evaluate MLLMs' capabilities on multi-view videos that capture different perspectives of the same scene. However, their limited tasks hinder a thorough assessment of MLLMs in diverse real-world CVR scenarios. To this end, we introduce CrossVid, the first benchmark designed to comprehensively evaluate MLLMs' spatial-temporal reasoning ability in cross-video contexts. Firstly, CrossVid encompasses a wide spectrum of hierarchical tasks, comprising four high-level dimensions and ten specific tasks, thereby closely reflecting the complex and varied nature of real-world video understanding. Secondly, CrossVid provides 5,331 videos, along with 9,015 challenging question-answering pairs, spanning single-choice, multiple-choice, and open-ended question formats. Through extensive experiments on various open-source and closed-source MLLMs, we observe that Gemini-2.5-Pro performs best on CrossVid, achieving an average accuracy of 50.4%. Notably, our in-depth case study demonstrates that most current MLLMs struggle with CVR tasks, primarily due to their inability to integrate or compare evidence distributed across multiple videos for reasoning. These insights highlight the potential of CrossVid to guide future advancements in enhancing MLLMs’ CVR capabilities.

PaperID: 2417, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.06282

Authors:Shuangzhi Li, Junlong Shen, Lei Ma, Xingyu Li

Affiliations: University of Alberta

Title: From Dataset to Real-world: General 3D Object Detection via Generalized Cross-domain Few-shot Learning

Abstract:
LiDARbased 3D object detection models often struggle to generalize to real-world environments due to limited object diversity in existing datasets. To tackle it, we introduce the first generalized cross-domain few-shot (GCFS) task in 3D object detection, aiming to adapt a source-pretrained model to both common and novel classes in a new domain with only few-shot annotations. We propose a unified framework that learns stable target semantics under limited supervision by bridging 2D open-set semantics with 3D spatial reasoning. Specifically, an image-guided multi-modal fusion injects transferable 2D semantic cues into the 3D pipeline via vision-language models, while a physically-aware box search enhances 2D-to-3D alignment via LiDAR priors. To capture class-specific semantics from sparse data, we further introduce contrastive-enhanced prototype learning, which encodes few-shot instances into discriminative semantic anchors and stabilizes representation learning. Extensive experiments on GCFS benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our approach in realistic deployment settings.

PaperID: 2418, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18234

Authors:Yue Li, Meng Tian, Dechang Zhu, Jiangtong Zhu, Zhenyu Lin, Zhiwei Xiong, Xinhai Zhao

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, Yinwang Intelligent Technology Co. Ltd., Huawei Technologies Ltd.

Title: Drive-R1: Bridging Reasoning and Planning in VLMs for Autonomous Driving with Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Large visionlanguage models (VLMs) for autonomous driving (AD) are evolving beyond perception and cognition tasks toward motion planning. However, we identify two critical challenges in this direction: (1) VLMs tend to learn shortcuts by relying heavily on history input information, achieving seemingly strong planning results without genuinely understanding the visual inputs; and (2) the chain-of-thought (COT) reasoning processes are always misaligned with the motion planning outcomes, and how to effectively leverage the complex reasoning capability to enhance planning remains largely underexplored. In this paper, we start from a small-scale domain-specific VLM and propose Drive-R1, designed to bridge the scenario reasoning and motion planning for AD. Drive-R1 first undergoes the supervised finetuning on an elaborate dataset containing both long and short COT data. Drive-R1 is encouraged to reason step-by-step from visual input to final planning decisions. Subsequently, Drive-R1 is trained within a reinforcement learning framework that incentivizes the discovery of reasoning paths that are more informative for planning, guided by rewards based on predicted trajectories and meta actions. Experimental evaluations on the nuScenes and DriveLM-nuScenes benchmarks demonstrate that Drive-R1 achieves superior performance compared to existing state-of-the-art VLMs. We believe that Drive-R1 presents a promising direction for bridging reasoning and planning in AD, offering methodological insights for future research and applications.

PaperID: 2419, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17189

Authors:Xiao Liang, Chenxi Liu, Zhi Ma, Di Wang, Bin Jing, Quan Wang, Yuanyuan Shi

Affiliations: Xidian University, Capital Medical University, The Ninth Medical Center of the Chinese PLA General Hospital

Title: Anatomical Region-Guided Contrastive Decoding: A Plug-and-Play Strategy for Mitigating Hallucinations in Medical VLMs

Abstract:
Medical VisionLanguage Models (MedVLMs) show immense promise in clinical applicability. However, their reliability is hindered by hallucinations, where models often fail to derive answers from visual evidence, instead relying on learned textual priors. Existing mitigation strategies for MedVLMs have distinct limitations: training-based methods rely on costly expert annotations, limiting scalability, while training-free interventions like contrastive decoding, though data-efficient, apply a global, untargeted correction whose effects in complex real-world clinical settings can be unreliable. To address these challenges, we introduce Anatomical Region-Guided Contrastive Decoding (ARCD), a plug-and-play strategy that mitigates hallucinations by providing targeted, region-specific guidance. Our module leverages an anatomical mask to direct a three-tiered contrastive decoding process. By dynamically re-weighting at the token, attention, and logits levels, it verifiably steers the model's focus onto specified regions, reinforcing anatomical understanding and suppressing factually incorrect outputs. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets, including chest X-ray, CT, brain MRI, and ocular ultrasound, demonstrate our method's effectiveness in improving regional understanding, reducing hallucinations, and enhancing overall diagnostic accuracy.

PaperID: 2420, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13150

Authors:Rifen Lin, Alex Jinpeng Wang, Jiawei Mo, Min Li

Affiliations: Central South University

Title: Skeletons Speak Louder than Text: A Motion-Aware Pretraining Paradigm for Video-Based Person Re-Identification

Abstract:
Multimodal pretraining has revolutionized visual understanding, but its impact on videobased person re-identification (ReID) remains underexplored. Existing approaches often rely on video-text pairs, yet suffer from two fundamental limitations: (1) lack of genuine multimodal pretraining, and (2) text poorly captures fine-grained temporal motion—an essential cue for distinguishing identities in video. In this work, we take a bold departure from text-based paradigms by introducing the first skeleton-driven pretraining framework for ReID. To achieve this, we propose Contrastive Skeleton-Image Pretraining for ReID (CSIP-ReID), a novel two-stage method that leverages skeleton sequences as a spatiotemporally informative modality aligned with video frames. In the first stage, we employ contrastive learning to align skeleton and visual features at sequence level. In the second stage, we introduce a dynamic Prototype Fusion Updater (PFU) to refine multimodal identity prototypes, fusing motion and appearance cues. Moreover, we propose a Skeleton Guided Temporal Modeling (SGTM) module that distills temporal cues from skeleton data and integrates them into visual features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CSIP-ReID achieves new state-of-the-art results on standard video ReID benchmarks (MARS, LS-VID, iLIDS-VID). Moreover, it exhibits strong generalization to skeleton-only ReID tasks (BIWI, IAS), significantly outperforming previous methods. CSIP-ReID pioneers an annotation-free and motion-aware pretraining paradigm for ReID, opening a new frontier in multimodal representation learning.

PaperID: 2421, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12301

Authors:Chi Liu, Jincheng Liu, Congcong Zhu, Minghao Wang, Sheng Shen, Jia Gu, Tianqing Zhu, Wanlei Zhou

Affiliations: City University of Macau, Torrens University Australia

Title: Rethinking Bias in Generative Data Augmentation for Medical AI: A Frequency Recalibration Method

Abstract:
Developing Medical AI relies on large datasets and easily suffers from data scarcity. Generative data augmentation (GDA) using AI generative models offers a solution to synthesize realistic medical images. However, the bias in GDA is often underestimated in medical domains, with concerns about the risk of introducing detrimental features generated by AI and harming downstream tasks. This paper identifies the frequency misalignment between real and synthesized images as one of the key factors underlying unreliable GDA and proposes the Frequency Recalibration (FreRec) method to reduce the frequency distributional discrepancy and thus improve GDA. FreRec involves (1) Statistical Highfrequency Replacement (SHR) to roughly align high-frequency components and (2) Reconstructive High-frequency Mapping (RHM) to enhance image quality and reconstruct high-frequency details. Extensive experiments were conducted in various medical datasets, including brain MRIs, chest X-rays, and fundus images. The results show that FreRec significantly improves downstream medical image classification performance compared to uncalibrated AI-synthesized samples. FreRec is a standalone post-processing step that is compatible with any generative model and can integrate seamlessly with common medical GDA pipelines.

PaperID: 2422, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02517

Authors:Jiaqi Liu, Ronghao Fu, Lang Sun, Haoran Liu, Xiao Yang, Weipeng Zhang, Xu Na, Zhuoran Duan, Bo Yang

Affiliations: Jilin University

Title: SkyMoE: A Vision-Language Foundation Model for Enhancing Geospatial Interpretation with Mixture of Experts

Abstract:
The emergence of large visionlanguage models (VLMs) has significantly enhanced the efficiency and flexibility of geospatial interpretation. However, general-purpose VLMs remain suboptimal for remote sensing (RS) tasks. Existing geospatial VLMs typically adopt a unified modeling strategy and struggle to differentiate between task types and interpretation granularities, limiting their ability to balance local detail perception and global contextual understanding. In this paper, we present SkyMoE, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) vision-language model tailored for multimodal, multi-task RS interpretation. SkyMoE employs an adaptive router that generates task- and granularity-aware routing instructions, enabling specialized large language model experts to handle diverse sub-tasks. To further promote expert decoupling and granularity sensitivity, we introduce a context-disentangled augmentation strategy that creates contrastive pairs between local and global features, guiding experts toward level-specific representation learning. We also construct MGRS-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark covering multiple RS interpretation tasks and granularity levels, to evaluate generalization in complex scenarios. Extensive experiments on 21 public datasets demonstrate that SkyMoE achieves state-of-the-art performance across tasks, validating its adaptability, scalability, and superior multi-granularity understanding in remote sensing.

PaperID: 2423, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17301

Authors:Yunyi Liu, Yingshu Li, Zhanyu Wang, Xinyu Liang, Lingqiao Liu, Lei Wang, Luping Zhou

Affiliations: University of Sydney, Binzhou Medical University, University of Adelaide, University of Wollonong

Title: ReFINE: A Reward-Based Framework for Interpretable and Nuanced Evaluation of Radiology Report Generation

Abstract:
Automated radiology report generation (R2Gen) has advanced significantly, yet evaluation remains challenging due to the complexity of assessing report quality. Traditional metrics often misalign with human judgments, failing to identify specific deficiencies. To address this, we introduce ReFINE, a framework for training an Evaluation Model using a novel marginbased reward enforcement loss. This approach decomposes report quality into fine-grained sub-scores across user-defined criteria, improving interpretability. Leveraging GPT-4, we generate diverse training data with paired accepted and rejected reports to train our model under a reward-based system. The trained ReFINE Score provides both granular sub-scores and an aggregated quality assessment, enabling criterion-specific evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate ReFINE's superior alignment with human judgments, outperforming traditional metrics in model selection. Its robustness is validated across three expert-annotated datasets—including chest X-rays and multimodal reports covering 9 imaging modalities—and under two distinct scoring systems.

PaperID: 2424, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07049

Authors:Hui Lu, Yi Yu, Song Xia, Yiming Yang, Deepu Rajan, Boon Poh Ng, Alex Kot, Xudong Jiang

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University

Title: From Pretrain to Pain: Adversarial Vulnerability of Video Foundation Models Without Task Knowledge

Abstract:
Largescale Video Foundation Models (VFMs) have significantly advanced various video-related tasks, either through task-specific models or Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, the open accessibility of VFMs also introduces critical security risks, as adversaries can exploit full knowledge of the VFMs to launch potent attacks. This paper investigates a novel and practical adversarial threat scenario: attacking downstream models or MLLMs fine-tuned from open-source VFMs, without requiring access to the victim task, training data, model query, and architecture. In contrast to conventional transfer-based attacks that rely on task-aligned surrogate models, we demonstrate that adversarial vulnerabilities can be exploited directly from the VFMs. To this end, we propose the Transferable Video Attack (TVA), a temporal-aware adversarial attack method that leverages the temporal representation dynamics of VFMs to craft effective perturbations. TVA integrates a bidirectional contrastive learning mechanism to maximize the discrepancy between the clean and adversarial features, and introduces a temporal consistency loss that exploits motion cues to enhance the sequential impact of perturbations. TVA avoids the need to train expensive surrogate models or access to domain-specific data, thereby offering a more practical and efficient attack strategy. Extensive experiments across 24 video-related tasks demonstrate the efficacy of TVA against downstream models and MLLMs, revealing a previously underexplored security vulnerability in the deployment of video models.

PaperID: 2425, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02149

Authors:Ziyang Luo, Nian Liu, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Junwei Han

Affiliations: Northwestern Polytechnical University, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

Title: AURORA: Augmented Understanding via Structured Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning for Reference Audio-Visual Segmentation

Abstract:
Reference AudioVisual Segmentation (Ref-AVS) tasks challenge models to precisely locate sounding objects by integrating visual, auditory, and textual cues. Existing methods often lack genuine semantic understanding, tending to memorize fixed reasoning patterns. Furthermore, jointly training for reasoning and segmentation can compromise pixel-level precision. To address these issues, we introduce AURORA, a novel framework designed to enhance genuine reasoning and language comprehension in reference audio-visual segmentation. We employ a structured Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting mechanism to guide the model through a step-by-step reasoning process and introduce a novel segmentation feature distillation loss to effectively integrate these reasoning abilities without sacrificing segmentation performance. To further cultivate the model's genuine reasoning capabilities, we devise a further two-stage training strategy: first, a ``corrective reflective-style training" stage utilizes self-correction to enhance the quality of reasoning paths, followed by reinforcement learning via Group Reward Policy Optimization (GRPO) to bolster robustness in challenging scenarios. Experiments demonstrate that AURORA achieves state-of-the-art performance on Ref-AVS benchmarks and generalizes effectively to unreferenced segmentation.

PaperID: 2426, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01730

Authors:Jianbo Ma, Hui Luo, Qi Chen, Yuankai Qi, Yumei Sun, Amin Beheshti, Jianlin Zhang, Ming-Hsuan Yang

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Optical Field Manipulation Science and Technology, Institute of Optics and Electronics, CAS School of Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, University of Adelaide, Macquarie University, University of California

Title: Tracking the Unstable: Appearance-Guided Motion Modeling for Robust Multi-Object Tracking in UAV-Captured Videos

Abstract:
Multiobject tracking (MOT) aims to track multiple objects while maintaining consistent identities across frames of a given video. In unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) recorded videos, frequent viewpoint changes and complex UAV-ground relative motion dynamics pose significant challenges, which often lead to unstable affinity measurement and ambiguous association. Existing methods typically model motion and appearance cues separately, overlooking their spatio-temporal interplay and resulting in suboptimal tracking performance. In this work, we propose AMOT, which jointly exploits appearance and motion cues through two key components: an Appearance-Motion Consistency (AMC) matrix and a Motion-aware Track Continuation (MTC) module. Specifically, the AMC matrix computes bi-directional spatial consistency under the guidance of appearance features, enabling more reliable and context-aware identity association. The MTC module complements AMC by reactivating unmatched tracks through appearance-guided predictions that align with Kalman-based predictions, thereby reducing broken trajectories caused by missed detections. Extensive experiments on three UAV benchmarks, including VisDrone2019, UAVDT, and VT-MOT-UAV, demonstrate that our AMOT outperforms current state-of-the-art methods and generalizes well in a plug-and-play and training-free manner.

PaperID: 2427, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10118

Authors:Ke Niu, Haiyang Yu, Zhuofan Chen, Mengyang Zhao, Teng Fu, Bin Li, Xiangyang Xue

Affiliations: Fudan University

Title: From Intent to Execution: Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reinforcement Learning for Precise CAD Code Generation

Abstract:
ComputerAided Design (CAD) plays a vital role in engineering and manufacturing, yet current CAD workflows require extensive domain expertise and manual modeling effort. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have made it possible to generate code from natural language, opening new opportunities for automating parametric 3D modeling. However, directly translating human design intent into executable CAD code remains highly challenging, due to the need for logical reasoning, syntactic correctness, and numerical precision. In this work, we propose CAD-RL, a multimodal Chain-of-Thought (CoT) guided reinforcement learning post training framework for CAD modeling code generation. Our method combines CoT-based Cold Start with goal-driven reinforcement learning post training using three task-specific rewards: executability reward, geometric accuracy reward, and external evaluation reward. To ensure stable policy learning under sparse and high-variance reward conditions, we introduce three targeted optimization strategies: Trust Region Stretch for improved exploration, Precision Token Loss for enhanced dimensions parameter accuracy, and Overlong Filtering to reduce noisy supervision. To support training and benchmarking, we release ExeCAD, a noval dataset comprising 16,540 real-world CAD examples with paired natural language and structured design language descriptions, executable CADQuery scripts, and rendered 3D models. Experiments demonstrate that CAD-RL achieves significant improvements in reasoning quality, output precision, and code executability over existing VLMs.

PaperID: 2428, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18718

Authors:Linwei Qiu, Gongzhe Li, Xiaozhe Zhang, Qilin Sun, Fengying Xie

Affiliations: Tianmushan Laboratory, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, School of Data Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Beihang University

Title: Rectification Reimagined: A Unified Mamba Model for Image Correction and Rectangling with Prompts

Abstract:
Image correction and rectangling are valuable tasks in practical photography systems such as smartphones. Recent remarkable advancements in deep learning have undeniably brought about substantial performance improvements in these fields. Nevertheless, existing methods mainly rely on taskspecific architectures. This significantly restricts their generalization ability and effective application across a wide range of different tasks. In this paper, we introduce the Unified Rectification Framework (UniRect), a comprehensive approach that addresses these practical tasks from a consistent distortion rectification perspective. Our approach incorporates various task-specific inverse problems into a general distortion model by simulating different types of lenses. To handle diverse distortions, UniRect adopts one task-agnostic rectification framework with a dual-component structure: a Deformation Module, which utilizes a novel Residual Progressive Thin-Plate Spline (RP-TPS) model to address complex geometric deformations, and a subsequent Restoration Module, which employs Residual Mamba Blocks (RMBs) to counteract the degradation caused by the deformation process and enhance the fidelity of the output image. Moreover, a Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoEs) structure is designed to circumvent heavy task competition in multi-task learning due to varying distortions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our models have achieved state-of-the-art performance compared with other up-to-date methods.

PaperID: 2429, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.09446

Authors:Tran Bao Sam, Hung Vu, Dao Trung Kien, Tran Dat Dang, Van Ha Tang, Steven Truong

Affiliations:

Title: GIIM: Graph-based Learning of Inter- and Intra-view Dependencies for Multi-view Medical Image Diagnosis

Abstract:
Computeraided diagnosis (CADx) has become vital in medical imaging, but automated systems often struggle to replicate the nuanced process of clinical interpretation. Expert diagnosis requires a comprehensive analysis of how abnormalities relate to each other across various views and time points, but current multi-view CADx methods frequently overlook these complex dependencies. Specifically, they fail to model the crucial relationships within a single view and the dynamic changes lesions exhibit across different views. This limitation, combined with the common challenge of incomplete data, greatly reduces their predictive reliability. To address these gaps, we reframe the diagnostic task as one of relationship modeling and propose GIIM, a novel graph-based approach. Our framework is uniquely designed to simultaneously capture both critical intra-view dependencies between abnormalities and inter-view dynamics. Furthermore, it ensures diagnostic robustness by incorporating specific techniques to effectively handle missing data, a common clinical issue. We demonstrate the generality of this approach through extensive evaluations on diverse imaging modalities, including CT, MRI, and mammography. The results confirm that our GIIM model significantly enhances diagnostic accuracy and robustness over existing methods, establishing a more effective framework for future CADx systems.

PaperID: 2430, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.18671

Authors:Yiming Sun, Mi Zhang, Feifei Li, Geng Hong, Min Yang

Affiliations: Fudan University

Title: SmartSight: Mitigating Hallucination in Video-LLMs Without Compromising Video Understanding via Temporal Attention Collapse

Abstract:
Despite Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) having rapidly advanced in recent years, perceptual hallucinations pose a substantial safety risk, which severely restricts their real-world applicability. While several methods for hallucination mitigation have been proposed, they often compromise the model’s capacity for video understanding and reasoning. In this work, we propose SmartSight, a pioneering step to address this issue in a training-free manner by leveraging the model’s own introspective capabilities. Specifically, SmartSight generates multiple candidate responses to uncover low-hallucinated outputs that are often obscured by standard greedy decoding. It assesses the hallucination of each response using the Temporal Attention Collapse score, which measures whether the model over-focuses on trivial temporal regions of the input video when generating the response. To improve efficiency, SmartSight identifies the Visual Attention Vanishing point, enabling more accurate hallucination estimation and early termination of hallucinated responses, leading to a substantial reduction in decoding cost. Experiments show that SmartSight substantially lowers hallucinations for QwenVL-2.5-7B by 10.59% on VRIPT-HAL, while simultaneously enhancing video understanding and reasoning, boosting performance on VideoMMMU by 8.86%. These results highlight SmartSight’s effectiveness in improving the reliability of open-source Video-LLMs.

PaperID: 2431, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19002

Authors:Hao Wang, Eiki Murata, Lingfang Zhang, Ayako Sato, So Fukuda, Ziqi Yin, Wentao Hu, Keisuke Nakao, Yusuke Nakamura, Sebastian Zwirner, Yi-Chia Chen, Hiroyuki Otomo, Hiroki Ouchi, Daisuke Kawahara

Affiliations: Waseda University, Inc. AI Shift, Nara Institute of Science and Technology CyberAgent

Title: VIR-Bench: Evaluating Geospatial and Temporal Understanding of MLLMs via Travel Video Itinerary Reconstruction

Abstract:
Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have significantly enhanced video understanding capabilities, opening new possibilities for practical applications. Yet current video benchmarks focus largely on indoor scenes or shortrange outdoor activities, leaving the challenges associated with long-distance travel largely unexplored. Mastering extended geospatial-temporal trajectories is critical for next-generation MLLMs, underpinning real-world tasks such as embodied-AI planning and navigation. To bridge this gap, we present VIR-Bench, a novel benchmark consisting of 200 travel videos that frames itinerary reconstruction as a challenging task designed to evaluate and push forward MLLMs' geospatial-temporal intelligence. Experimental results reveal that state-of-the-art MLLMs, including proprietary ones, struggle to achieve high scores, underscoring the difficulty of handling videos that span extended spatial and temporal scales. Moreover, we conduct an in-depth case study in which we develop a prototype travel-planning agent that leverages the insights gained from VIR-Bench. The agent’s markedly improved itinerary recommendations verify that our evaluation protocol not only benchmarks models effectively but also translates into concrete performance gains in user-facing applications.

PaperID: 2432, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11700

Authors:Jiahui Wang, Haiyue Zhu, Haoren Guo, Abdullah Al Mamun, Cheng Xiang, Tong Heng Lee

Affiliations: National University of Singapore, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)

Title: EPSegFZ: Efficient Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation for Fewand Zero-Shot Scenarios with Language Guidance

Abstract:
Recent approaches for fewshot 3D point cloud semantic segmentation typically require a two-stage learning process, i.e., a pre-training stage followed by a few-shot training stage. While effective, these methods face overreliance on pre-training, which hinders model flexibility and adaptability. Some models tried to avoid pre-training yet failed to capture ample information. In addition, current approaches focus on visual information in the support set and neglect or do not fully exploit other useful data, such as textual annotations. This inadequate utilization of support information impairs the performance of the model and restricts its zero-shot ability. To address these limitations, we present a novel pre-training-free network, named Efficient Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation for Few- and Zero-shot scenarios. Our EPSegFZ incorporates three key components. A Prototype-Enhanced Registers Attention (ProERA) module and a Dual Relative Positional Encoding (DRPE)-based cross-attention mechanism for improved feature extraction and accurate query-prototype correspondence construction without pre-training. A Language-Guided Prototype Embedding (LGPE) module that effectively leverages textual information from the support set to improve few-shot performance and enable zero-shot inference.Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 5.68% and 3.82% on the S3DIS and ScanNet benchmarks, respectively.

PaperID: 2433, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12056

Authors:Sijie Wang, Qiang Wang, Shaohuai Shi

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology，Shenzhen

Title: PipeDiT: Accelerating Diffusion Transformers in Video Generation with Task Pipelining and Model Decoupling

Abstract:
Video generation has been advancing rapidly, and diffusion transformer (DiT) based models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities. However, their practical deployment is often hindered by slow inference speeds and high memory consumption. In this paper, we propose a novel pipelining framework named PipeDiT to accelerate video generation, which is equipped with three main innovations. First, we design a pipelining algorithm (PipeSP) for sequence parallelism (SP) to enable the computation of latent generation and communication among multiple GPUs to be pipelined, thus reducing the inference latency. Second, we propose DeDiVAE to decouple the diffusion module and the VAE module into two GPU groups whose executions can also be pipelined to reduce the memory consumption and inference latency. Third, to better utilize the GPU resources in the VAE group, we propose an attention coprocessing (Aco) method to further reduce the overall video generation latency. We integrate our PipeDiT into both OpenSoraPlan and HunyuanVideo, two state-of-the-art open-source video generation frameworks, and conduct extensive experiments on two 8-GPU systems. Experimental results show that, under many common resolution and timestep configurations, our PipeDiT achieves 1.06× to 4.02× speedups over OpenSoraPlan and HunyuanVideo.

PaperID: 2434, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.01328

Authors:Taoyue Wang, Xiang Zhang, Xiaotian Li, Huiyuan Yang, Lijun Yin

Affiliations: State University of New York at Binghamton, Missouri University of Science and Technology

Title: You Only Need One Stage: Novel-View Synthesis from a Single Blind Face Image

Abstract:
We propose a novel onestage method, NVB-Face, for generating consistent Novel-View images directly from a single Blind Face image. Existing approaches to novel-view synthesis for objects or faces typically require a high-resolution RGB image as input. When dealing with degraded images, the conventional pipeline follows a two-stage process: first restoring the image to high resolution, then synthesizing novel views from the restored result. However, this approach is highly dependent on the quality of the restored image, often leading to inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the final output. To address this limitation, we extract single-view features directly from the blind face image and introduce a feature manipulator that transforms these features into 3D-aware, multi-view latent representations. Leveraging the powerful generative capacity of a diffusion model, our framework synthesizes high-quality, consistent novel-view face images. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms traditional two-stage approaches in both consistency and fidelity.

PaperID: 2435, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04939

Authors:Zehao Wang, Xinpeng Liu, Yudonglin Zhang, Xiaoqian Wu, Zhou Fang, Yifan Fang, Junfu Pu, Cewu Lu, Yong-Lu Li

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University, ARC Lab, Tencent PCG

Title: Verb Mirage: Unveiling and Assessing Verb Concept Hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have garnered significant attention recently and demonstrate outstanding capabilities in various tasks such as OCR, VQA, captioning, etc. However, hallucination remains a persistent issue. While numerous methods have been proposed to mitigate hallucinations, achieving notable improvements, these methods primarily focus on mitigating hallucinations related to object/noun concepts. Verb concepts, which are crucial for understanding human actions, have been largely overlooked. In this paper, to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate the verb hallucination phenomenon of MLLMs from various perspectives. Our findings reveal that most stateof-the-art MLLMs suffer from severe verb hallucination. To assess the effectiveness of existing mitigation methods for object concept hallucination in relation to verb hallucination, we evaluated these methods and found that they do not effectively address verb hallucination. To address this issue, we propose a baseline method based on fine-tuning with rich verb knowledge, achieving decent superiority. The experiment results demonstrate that our method significantly reduces hallucinations related to verbs.

PaperID: 2436, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03056

Authors:Zhen Wang, Jiaojiao Zhao, Qilong Wang, Yongfeng Dong, Wenlong Yu

Affiliations: Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin University

Title: Fine-Grained Generalization via Structuralizing Concept and Feature Space into Commonality, Specificity and Confounding

Abstract:
FineGrained Domain Generalization (FGDG) presents greater challenges than conventional domain generalization due to the subtle inter-class differences and relatively pronounced intra-class variations inherent in fine-grained recognition tasks. Under domain shifts, the model becomes overly sensitive to fine-grained cues, leading to the suppression of critical features and a significant drop in performance. Cognitive studies suggest that humans classify objects by leveraging both common and specific attributes, enabling accurate differentiation between fine-grained categories. However, current deep learning models have yet to incorporate this mechanism effectively. Inspired by this mechanism, we propose Concept-Feature Structuralized Generalization (CFSG). This model explicitly disentangles both the concept and feature spaces into three structured components: common, specific, and confounding segments. To mitigate the adverse effects of varying degrees of distribution shift, we introduce an adaptive mechanism that dynamically adjusts the proportions of common, specific, and confounding components. In the final prediction, explicit weights are assigned to each pair of components. Extensive experiments on three single-source benchmark datasets demonstrate that CFSG achieves an average performance improvement of 9.87% over baseline models and outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by an average of 3.08%. Additionally, explainability analysis validates that CFSG effectively integrates multi-granularity structured knowledge and confirms that feature structuralization facilitates the emergence of concept structuralization.

PaperID: 2437, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.12587

Authors:Le Wu, Lv Bo, Songsong Ouyang, Yingying Zhu

Affiliations: Shenzhen University

Title: MRGeo: Robust Cross-View Geo-Localization of Corrupted Images via Spatial and Channel Feature Enhancement

Abstract:
Crossview geo-localization (CVGL) aims to accurately localize street-view images through retrieval of corresponding geo-tagged satellite images. While prior works have achieved nearly perfect performance on certain standard datasets, their robustness in real-world corrupted environments remains under-explored. This oversight causes severe performance degradation or failure when images are affected by corruption such as blur or weather, significantly limiting practical deployment. To address this critical gap, we introduce MRGeo, the first systematic method designed for robust CVGL under corruption. MRGeo employs a hierarchical defense strategy that enhances the intrinsic quality of features and then enforces a robust geometric prior. Its core is the Spatial-Channel Enhancement Block, which contains: (1) a Spatial Adaptive Representation Module that models global and local features in parallel and uses a dynamic gating mechanism to arbitrate their fusion based on feature reliability; and (2) a Channel Calibration Module that performs compensatory adjustments by modeling multi-granularity channel dependencies to counteract information loss. To prevent spatial misalignment under severe corruption, a Region-level Geometric Alignment Module imposes a geometric structure on the final descriptors, ensuring coarse-grained consistency. Comprehensive experiments on both robustness benchmark and standard datasets demonstrate that MRGeo not only achieves an average R@1 improvement of 2.92% across three comprehensive robustness benchmarks (CVUSA-C-ALL, CVACT_val-C-ALL, and CVACT_test-C-ALL) but also establishes superior performance in cross-area evaluation, thereby demonstrating its robustness and generalization capability.

PaperID: 2438, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.05499

Authors:Weishang Wu, Yifei Shi, Zhiping Cai

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology

Title: TOSC: Task-Oriented Shape Completion for Open-World Dexterous Grasp Generation from Partial Point Clouds

Abstract:
Taskoriented dexterous grasping remains challenging in robotic manipulations of open-world objects under severe partial observation, where significant missing data invalidates generic shape completion. In this paper, to overcome this limitation, we study \emphTask-Oriented Shape Completion, a new task that focuses on completing the potential contact regions rather than the entire shape. We argue that shape completion for grasping should be explicitly guided by the downstream manipulation task. To achieve this, we first generate multiple task-oriented shape completion candidates by leveraging the zero-shot capabilities of object functional understanding from several pre-trained foundation models. A 3D discriminative autoencoder is then proposed to evaluate the plausibility of each generated candidate and optimize the most plausible one from a global perspective. A conditional flow-matching model named FlowGrasp is developed to generate task-oriented dexterous grasps from the optimized shape. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in task-oriented dexterous grasping and task-oriented shape completion, improving the Grasp Displacement and the Chamfer Distance over the state-of-the-art by 16.17% and 55.26%, respectively. In particular, it shows good capabilities in grasping objects with severe missing data. It also demonstrates good generality in handling open-set categories and tasks.

PaperID: 2439, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.25008

Authors:Yuchen Wu, Jiahe Li, Fabio Tosi, Matteo Poggi, Jin Zheng, Xiao Bai

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, State Key Laboratory of Complex Critical Software Environment, Jiangxi Research Institute, Beihang University, University of Bologna

Title: FoundationSLAM: Unleashing the Power of Depth Foundation Models for End-to-End Dense Visual SLAM

Abstract:
We present FoundationSLAM, a learningbased monocular dense SLAM system that addresses the absence of geometric consistency in previous flow-based approaches for accurate and robust tracking and mapping. Our core idea is to bridge flow estimation with geometric reasoning by leveraging the guidance from foundation depth models. To this end, we first develop a Hybrid Flow Network that produces geometry-aware correspondences, enabling consistent depth and pose inference across diverse keyframes. To enforce global consistency, we propose a Bi-Consistent Bundle Adjustment Layer that jointly optimizes keyframe pose and depth under multi-view constraints. Furthermore, we introduce a Reliability-Aware Refinement mechanism that dynamically adapts the flow update process by distinguishing between reliable and uncertain regions, forming a closed feedback loop between matching and optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FoundationSLAM achieves superior trajectory accuracy and dense reconstruction quality across multiple challenging datasets, while running in real-time at 18 FPS, demonstrating strong generalization to various scenarios and practical applicability of our method.

PaperID: 2440, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.21035

Authors:Junhao Xiao, Zhiyu Wu, Hao Lin, Yi Chen, Yahui Liu, Xiaoran Zhao, Zixu Wang, Zejiang He

Affiliations: Central China Normal University, Fudan University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Kuaishou Technology, National University of Defense Technology

Title: Not Just What’s There: Enabling CLIP to Comprehend Negated Visual Descriptions Without Fine-Tuning

Abstract:
VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) like CLIP struggle to understand negation, often embedding affirmatives and negatives similarly (e.g., matching "no dog" with dog images). Existing methods refine negation understanding via fine-tuning CLIP’s text encoder, risking overfitting. In this work, we propose CLIPGlasses, a plug-and-play framework that enhances CLIP’s ability to comprehend negated visual descriptions. CLIPGlasses adapts a dual-stage design: a Lens module disentangles negated semantics from text embeddings, and a Frame module predicts context-aware repulsion strength, which is integrated into the modified similarity computation to penalize alignment with negated semantics, thereby reducing false positive matches. Experiments show that CLIP equipped with CLIPGlasses achieves competitive in-domain performance and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in cross-domain generalization. Its superiority is especially evident under low-resource conditions, indicating stronger robustness across domains.

PaperID: 2441, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.19233

Authors:Zeyu Xiao, Mingyang Sun, Yimin Cong, Lintao Wang, Dongliang Kou, Zhenyi Wu, Dingkang Yang, Peng Zhai, Zeyu Wang, Lihua Zhang

Affiliations: College of Intelligent Robotics and Advanced Manufacturing, Fudan University, Hong Kong, China Fysics Intelligence Technologies Co.

Title: UniMGS: Unifying Mesh and 3D Gaussian Splatting with Single-Pass Rasterization and Proxy-Based Deformation

Abstract:
Joint rendering and deformation of mesh and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have significant value as both representations offer complementary advantages for graphics applications. However, due to differences in representation and rendering pipelines, existing studies render meshes and 3DGS separately, making it difficult to accurately handle occlusions and transparency. Moreover, the deformed 3DGS still suffers from visual artifacts due to the sensitivity to the topology quality of the proxy mesh. These issues pose serious obstacles to the joint use of 3DGS and meshes, making it difficult to adapt 3DGS to conventional meshoriented graphics pipelines. We propose UniMGS, the first unified framework for rasterizing mesh and 3DGS in a single-pass anti-aliased manner, with a novel binding strategy for 3DGS deformation based on proxy mesh. Our key insight is to blend the colors of both triangle and Gaussian fragments by anti-aliased α-blending in a single pass, achieving visually coherent results with precise handling of occlusion and transparency. To improve the visual appearance of the deformed 3DGS, our Gaussian-centric binding strategy employs a proxy mesh and spatially associates Gaussians with the mesh faces, significantly reducing rendering artifacts. With these two components, UniMGS enables the visualization and manipulation of 3D objects represented by mesh or 3DGS within a unified framework, opening up new possibilities in embodied AI, virtual reality, and gaming. We will release our source code to facilitate future research.

PaperID: 2442, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08310

Authors:Qingshan Xu, Jiao Liu, Shangshu Yu, Yuxuan Wang, Yuan Zhou, Junbao Zhou, Jiequan Cui, Yew-Soon Ong, Hanwang Zhang

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University, Northeastern University, Hefei University of Technology, Singapore A*STAR

Title: NeuSpring: Neural Spring Fields for Reconstruction and Simulation of Deformable Objects from Videos

Abstract:
In this paper, we aim to create physical digital twins of deformable objects under interaction. Existing methods focus more on the physical learning of current state modeling, but generalize worse to future prediction. This is because existing methods ignore the intrinsic physical properties of deformable objects, resulting in the limited physical learning in the current state modeling. To address this, we present NeuSpring, a neural spring field for the reconstruction and simulation of deformable objects from videos. Built upon springmass models for realistic physical simulation, our method consists of two major innovations: 1) a piecewise topology solution that efficiently models multi-region spring connection topologies using zero-order optimization, which considers the material heterogeneity of real-world objects. 2) a neural spring field that represents spring physical properties across different frames using a canonical coordinate-based neural network, which effectively leverages the spatial associativity of springs for physical learning. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our NeuSping achieves superior reconstruction and simulation performance for current state modeling and future prediction, with Chamfer distance improved by 20% and 25%, respectively.

PaperID: 2443, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13607

Authors:Xin Xu, Hao Liu, Wei Liu, Wei Wang, Jiayi Wu, Kui Jiang

Affiliations: Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: ICLR: Inter-Chrominance and Luminance Interaction for Natural Color Restoration in Low-Light Image Enhancement

Abstract:
LowLight Image Enhancement (LLIE) task aims at improving contrast while restoring details and textures for images captured in low-light conditions. HVI color space has made significant progress in this task by enabling precise decoupling of chrominance and luminance. However, for the interaction of chrominance and luminance branches, substantial distributional differences between the two branches prevalent in natural images limit complementary feature extraction, and luminance errors are propagated to chrominance channels through the nonlinear parameter. Furthermore, for interaction between different chrominance branches, images with large homogeneous-color regions usually exhibit weak correlation between chrominance branches due to concentrated distributions. Traditional pixel-wise losses exploit strong inter-branch correlations for co-optimization, causing gradient conflicts in weakly correlated regions. Therefore, we propose an Inter-Chrominance and Luminance Interaction (ICLR) framework including a Dual-stream Interaction Enhancement Module (DIEM) and a Covariance Correction Loss (CCL). The DIEM improves the extraction of complementary information from two dimensions, fusion and enhancement, respectively. The CCL utilizes luminance residual statistics to penalize chrominance errors and balances gradient conflicts by constraining chrominance branches covariance. Experimental results on multiple datasets show that the proposed ICLR framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 2444, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02660

Authors:Yijun Xu, Jingrui Zhang, Yuhan Chen, Dingwen Wang, Lei Yu, Chu He

Affiliations: School of Electronic Information, Wuhan University, School of Computer Science, College of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering, Chongqing University, School of Artificial Intelligence

Title: PMGS: Reconstruction of Projectile Motion Across Large Spatiotemporal Spans via 3D Gaussian Splatting

Abstract:
Modeling complex rigid motion across large spatiotemporal spans remains an unresolved challenge in dynamic reconstruction. Existing paradigms are mainly confined to shortterm, small-scale deformation and offer limited consideration for physical consistency. This study proposes PMGS, focusing on reconstructing Projectile Motion via 3D Gaussian Splatting. The workflow comprises two stages: 1) Target Modeling: achieving object-centralized reconstruction through dynamic scene decomposition and an improved point density control; 2) Motion Recovery: restoring full motion sequences by learning per-frame SE(3) poses. We introduce an acceleration consistency constraint to bridge Newtonian mechanics and pose estimation, and design a dynamic simulated annealing strategy that adaptively schedules learning rates based on motion states. Futhermore, we devise a Kalman fusion scheme to optimize error accumulation from multi-source observations to mitigate disturbances. Experiments show PMGS’s superior performance in reconstructing high-speed nonlinear rigid motion compared to mainstream dynamic methods.

PaperID: 2445, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.06186

Authors:Shuailin Xue, Jun Wan, Lihua Zhang, Wenwen Min

Affiliations: School of Information Science and Engineering, Yunnan University, Kunming China, School of Information Engineering, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan China, School of Artificial Intelligence, School of Computer Science, Wuhan University

Title: SpaCRD: Multimodal Deep Fusion of Histology and Spatial Transcriptomics for Cancer Region Detection

Abstract:
Accurate detection of cancer tissue regions (CTR) enables deeper analysis of the tumor microenvironment and offers crucial insights into treatment response. Traditional CTR detection methods, which typically rely on the rich cellular morphology in histology images, are susceptible to a high rate of false positives due to morphological similarities across different tissue regions. The groundbreaking advances in spatial transcriptomics (ST) provide detailed cellular phenotypes and spatial localization information, offering new opportunities for more accurate cancer region detection. However, current methods are unable to effectively integrate histology images with ST data, especially in the context of crosssample and cross-platform/batch settings for accomplishing the CTR detection. To address this challenge, we propose SpaCRD, a transfer learning-based method that deeply integrates histology images and ST data to enable reliable CTR detection across diverse samples, platforms, and batches. Once trained on source data, SpaCRD can be readily generalized to accurately detect cancerous regions across samples from different platforms and batches. The core of SpaCRD is a category-regularized variational reconstruction-guided bidirectional cross-attention fusion network, which enables the model to adaptively capture latent co-expression patterns between histological features and gene expression from multiple perspectives. Extensive benchmark analysis on 23 matched histology-ST datasets spanning various disease types, platforms, and batches demonstrates that SpaCRD consistently outperforms existing eight state-of-the-art methods in CTR detection.

PaperID: 2446, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09028

Authors:Jinkun You, Jiaxue Li, Jie Zhang, Yicong Zhou

Affiliations: University of Macau, China University of Geosciences (Beijing)

Title: Dense Cross-Scale Image Alignment with Fully Spatial Correlation and Just Noticeable Difference Guidance

Abstract:
Existing unsupervised image alignment methods exhibit limited accuracy and high computational complexity. To address these challenges, we propose a dense crossscale image alignment model. It takes into account the correlations between cross-scale features to decrease the alignment difficulty. Our model supports flexible trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency by adjusting the number of scales utilized. Additionally, we introduce a fully spatial correlation module to further improve accuracy while maintaining low computational costs. We incorporate the just noticeable difference to encourage our model to focus on image regions more sensitive to distortions, eliminating noticeable alignment errors. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art approaches.

PaperID: 2447, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.06321

Authors:Lixin Zhan, Jiang Jie, Tianjian Zhou, Yukun Du, Yan Zheng, Xuehu Duan

Affiliations: College of Systems Engineering, National University of Defense Technology

Title: P-SLCR: Unsupervised Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation via Prototypes Structure Learning and Consistent Reasoning

Abstract:
Current semantic segmentation approaches for point cloud scenes heavily rely on manual labeling, while research on unsupervised semantic segmentation methods specifically for raw point clouds is still in its early stages. Unsupervised point cloud learning poses significant challenges due to the absence of annotation information and the lack of pretraining. The development of effective strategies is crucial in this context. In this paper, we propose a novel prototype library-driven unsupervised point cloud semantic segmentation strategy that utilizes Structure Learning and Consistent Reasoning (P-SLCR). First, we propose a Consistent Structure Learning to establish structural feature learning between consistent points and the library of consistent prototypes by selecting high-quality features. Second, we propose a Semantic Relation Consistent Reasoning that constructs a prototype inter-relation matrix between consistent and ambiguous prototype libraries separately. This process ensures the preservation of semantic consistency by imposing constraints on consistent and ambiguous prototype libraries through the prototype inter-relation matrix. Finally, our method was extensively evaluated on the S3DIS, SemanticKITTI, and Scannet datasets, achieving the best performance compared to unsupervised methods. Specifically, the mIoU of 47.1% is achieved for Area-5 of the S3DIS dataset, surpassing the classical fully supervised method PointNet by 2.5%.

PaperID: 2448, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17300

Authors:Wenrui Zhang, Xinggang Wang, Bin Feng, Wenyu Liu

Affiliations: School of Electronic Information and Communications, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: MolSight: Optical Chemical Structure Recognition with SMILES Pretraining, Multi-Granularity Learning and Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Optical Chemical Structure Recognition (OCSR) plays a pivotal role in modern chemical informatics, enabling the automated conversion of chemical structure images from scientific literature, patents, and educational materials into machinereadable molecular representations. This capability is essential for large-scale chemical data mining, drug discovery pipelines, and Large Language Model (LLM) applications in related domains. However, existing OCSR systems face significant challenges in accurately recognizing stereochemical information due to the subtle visual cues that distinguish stereoisomers, such as wedge and dash bonds, ring conformations, and spatial arrangements. To address these challenges, we propose MolSight, a comprehensive learning framework for OCSR that employs a three-stage training paradigm. In the first stage, we conduct pre-training on large-scale but noisy datasets to endow the model with fundamental perception capabilities for chemical structure images. In the second stage, we perform multi-granularity fine-tuning using datasets with richer supervisory signals, systematically exploring how auxiliary tasks—specifically chemical bond classification and atom localization—contribute to molecular formula recognition. Finally, we employ reinforcement learning for post-training optimization and introduce a novel stereochemical structure dataset. Remarkably, we find that even with MolSight's relatively compact parameter size, the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm can further enhance the model's performance on stereomolecular. Through extensive experiments across diverse datasets, our results demonstrate that MolSight achieves state-of-the-art performance in (stereo)chemical optical structure recognition.

PaperID: 2449, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.18564

Authors:Xuanyu Zhang, Weiqi Li, Shijie Zhao, Junlin Li, Li Zhang, Jian Zhang

Affiliations: School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Peking University, ByteDance Inc.

Title: VQ-Insight: Teaching VLMs for AI-Generated Video Quality Understanding via Progressive Visual Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Recent advances in AIgenerated content (AIGC) have led to the emergence of powerful text-to-video generation models. Despite these successes, evaluating the quality of AIGC-generated videos remains challenging due to limited generalization, lack of temporal awareness, heavy reliance on large-scale annotated datasets, and the lack of effective interaction with generation models. Most current approaches rely on supervised fine-tuning of vision-language models (VLMs), which often require large-scale annotated datasets and tend to decouple understanding and generation. To address these shortcomings, we propose VQ-Insight, a novel reasoning-style VLM framework for AIGC video quality assessment. Our approach features: (1) a progressive video quality learning scheme that combines image quality warm-up, general task-specific temporal learning, and joint optimization with the video generation model; (2) the design of multi-dimension scoring rewards, preference comparison rewards, and temporal modeling rewards to enhance both generalization and specialization in video quality evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VQ-Insight consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in preference comparison, multi-dimension scoring, and natural video scoring, bringing significant improvements for video generation tasks.

PaperID: 2450, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16567

Authors:Yin Zhang, Yongqiang Zhang, Yaoyue Zheng, Bogdan Raducanu, Dan Liu

Affiliations: School of Instrument Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, College of Computer Science, Inner Mongolia, Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Computer Vision Center

Title: Causal-Tune: Mining Causal Factors from Vision Foundation Models for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation

Abstract:
Finetuning Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) with a small number of parameters has shown remarkable performance in Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation (DGSS). Most existing works either train lightweight adapters or refine intermediate features to achieve better generalization on unseen domains. However, they both overlook the fact that long-term pre-trained VFMs often exhibit artifacts, which hinder the utilization of valuable representations and ultimately degrade DGSS performance. Inspired by causal mechanisms, we observe that these artifacts are associated with non-causal factors, which usually reside in the low- and high-frequency components of the VFM spectrum. In this paper, we explicitly examine the causal and non-causal factors of features within VFMs for DGSS, and propose a simple yet effective method to identify and disentangle them, enabling more robust domain generalization. Specifically, we propose Causal-Tune, a novel fine-tuning strategy designed to extract causal factors and suppress non-causal ones from the features of VFMs. First, we extract the frequency spectrum of features from each layer using the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). A Gaussian band-pass filter is then applied to separate the spectrum into causal and non-causal components. To further refine the causal components, we introduce a set of causal-aware learnable tokens that operate in the frequency domain, while the non-causal components are discarded. Finally, refined features are transformed back into the spatial domain via inverse DCT and passed to the next layer. Extensive experiments conducted on various cross-domain tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of Causal-Tune. In particular, our method achieves superior performance under adverse weather conditions, improving +4.8% mIoU over the baseline in snow conditions.

PaperID: 2451, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18634

Authors:Chunlin Zhong, Qiuxia Hou, Zhangjun Zhou, Yanhao Zhang, Shuang Hao, Haonan Lu, He Tang, Xiang Bai

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Oppo AI center, Xi'an Jiaotong University

Title: OwlCap: Harmonizing Motion-Detail for Video Captioning via HMD-270K and Caption Set Equivalence Reward

Abstract:
Video captioning aims to generate comprehensive and coherent descriptions of the video content, contributing to the advancement of both video understanding and generation. However, existing methods often suffer from motiondetail imbalance, as models tend to overemphasize one aspect while neglecting the other. This imbalance results in incomplete captions, which in turn leads to a lack of consistency in video understanding and generation. To address this issue, we propose solutions from two aspects: 1) Data aspect: We constructed the Harmonizing Motion-Detail 270K (HMD-270K) dataset through a two-stage pipeline: Motion-Detail Fusion (MDF) and Fine-Grained Examination (FGE). 2) Optimization aspect: We introduce the Caption Set Equivalence Reward (CSER) based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). CSER enhances completeness and accuracy in capturing both motion and details through unit-to-set matching and bidirectional validation. Based on the HMD-270K supervised fine-tuning and GRPO post-training with CSER, we developed OwlCap, a powerful video captioning Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM) with motion-detail balance. Experimental results demonstrate that OwlCap achieves significant improvements compared to baseline models on two benchmarks: the detail-focused VDC (+4.2 Acc) and the motion-focused DREAM-1K (+4.6 F1).

PaperID: 2452, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02230

Authors:Yingji Zhong, Kaichen Zhou, Zhihao Li, Lanqing Hong, Zhenguo Li, Dan Xu

Affiliations: Huawei Noah's Ark Lab

Title: Empowering Sparse-Input Neural Radiance Fields with Dual-Level Semantic Guidance from Dense Novel Views

Abstract:
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have shown remarkable capabilities for photorealistic novel view synthesis. One major deficiency of NeRF is that dense inputs are typically required, and the rendering quality will drop drastically given sparse inputs. In this paper, we highlight the effectiveness of rendered semantics from dense novel views, and show that rendered semantics can be treated as a more robust form of augmented data than rendered RGB. Our method enhances NeRF’s performance by incorporating guidance derived from the rendered semantics. The rendered semantic guidance encompasses two levels: the supervision level and the feature level. The supervisionlevel guidance incorporates a bi-directional verification module that decides the validity of each rendered semantic label, while the feature-level guidance integrates a learnable codebook that encodes semantic-aware information, which is queried by each point via the attention mechanism to obtain semanticrelevant predictions. The overall semantic guidance is embedded into a self-improved pipeline.We also introduce a more challenging sparse-input indoor benchmark, where the number of inputs is limited to as few as 6. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and it exhibits superior performance compared to existing approaches.

PaperID: 2453, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.04969

Authors:Haoran Zhu, Zhenyuan Dong, Kristi Topollai, Beiyao Sha, Anna Ewa Choromanska

Affiliations: New York University

Title: Self-Supervised Representation Learning with Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture for Automotive LiDAR Object Detection

Abstract:
Recently, self‑supervised representation learning relying on vast amounts of unlabeled data has been explored as a pre‑training method for autonomous driving. However, directly applying popular contrastive or generative methods to this problem is insufficient and may even lead to negative transfer. In this paper, we present AD‑L‑JEPA, a novel self‑supervised pre‑training framework with a joint embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) for automotive LiDAR object detection. Unlike existing methods, AD‑L‑JEPA is neither generative nor contrastive. Instead of explicitly generating masked regions, our method predicts Bird’s‑Eye‑View embeddings to capture the diverse nature of driving scenes. Furthermore, our approach eliminates the need to manually form contrastive pairs by employing explicit variance regularization to avoid representation collapse. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements on the LiDAR 3D object detection downstream task across the KITTI3D, Waymo, and ONCE datasets, while reducing GPU hours by 1.9×–2.7× and GPU memory by 2.8×–4× compared with the stateof-the-art method Occupancy-MAE. Notably, on the largest ONCE dataset, pre‑training on 100K frames yields a 1.61 mAP gain, better than in case of all the other methods pre‑trained on either 100K or 500K frames, and pre‑training on 500K frames yields a 2.98 mAP gain, better than in case of all the other methods pre‑trained on either 500K or 1M frames. AD‑L‑JEPA constitutes the first JEPA‑based pre‑training method for autonomous driving. It offers better quality, faster, and more GPU‑memory‑efficient self‑supervised representation learning.

PaperID: 2454, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12919

Authors:Dexin Zuo, Ang Li, Wei Wang, Wenxian Yu, Danping Zou

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiaotong University

Title: CoordAR: One-Reference 6D Pose Estimation of Novel Objects via Autoregressive Coordinate Map Generation

Abstract:
Object 6D pose estimation, a crucial task for robotics and augmented reality applications, becomes particularly challenging when dealing with novel objects whose 3D models are not readily available. To reduce dependency on 3D models, recent studies have explored onereference-based pose estimation, which requires only a single reference view instead of a complete 3D model. However, existing methods that rely on real-valued coordinate regression suffer from limited global consistency due to the local nature of convolutional architectures and face challenges in symmetric or occluded scenarios owing to a lack of uncertainty modeling. We present CoordAR, a novel autoregressive framework for one-reference 6D pose estimation of unseen objects. CoordAR formulates 3D-3D correspondences between the reference and query views as a map of discrete tokens, which is obtained in an autoregressive and probabilistic manner. To enable accurate correspondence regression, CoordAR introduces 1) a novel coordinate map tokenization that enables probabilistic prediction over discretized 3D space; 2) a modality-decoupled encoding strategy that separately encodes RGB appearance and coordinate cues; and 3) an autoregressive transformer decoder conditioned on both position-aligned query features and the partially generated token sequence. With these novel mechanisms, CoordAR significantly outperforms existing methods on multiple benchmarks and demonstrates strong robustness to symmetry, occlusion, and other challenges in real-world tests.

PaperID: 2455, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.10461

Authors:Haoyu Zhu, Yao Zhang, Jiashen Ren, Qingchun Hou

Affiliations: Zhejiang University

Title: T-SKM-Net: Trainable Neural Network Framework for Linear Constraint Satisfaction via Sampling Kaczmarz-Motzkin Method

Abstract:
Neural network constraint satisfaction is crucial for safetycritical applications such as power system optimization, robotic path planning, and autonomous driving. However, existing constraint satisfaction methods face efficiency-applicability trade-offs, with hard constraint methods suffering from either high computational complexity or restrictive assumptions on constraint structures. The Sampling Kaczmarz-Motzkin (SKM) method is a randomized iterative algorithm for solving large-scale linear inequality systems with favorable convergence properties, but its argmax operations introduce non-differentiability, posing challenges for neural network applications. This work proposes the Trainable Sampling Kaczmarz-Motzkin Network (T-SKM-Net) framework and, for the first time, systematically integrates SKM-type methods into neural network constraint satisfaction. The framework transforms mixed constraint problems into pure inequality problems through null space transformation, employs SKM for iterative solving, and maps solutions back to the original constraint space, efficiently handling both equality and inequality constraints. We provide theoretical proof of post-processing effectiveness in expectation and end-to-end trainability guarantees based on unbiased gradient estimators, demonstrating that despite non-differentiable operations, the framework supports standard backpropagation. On the DCOPF case118 benchmark, our method achieves 4.27ms/item GPU serial forward inference with 0.0025% max optimality gap with post-processing mode and 5.25ms/item with 0.0008% max optimality gap with joint training mode, delivering over 25× speedup compared to the pandapower solver while maintaining zero constraint violations under given tolerance.

PaperID: 2456, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17714

Authors:Hanbo Bi, Zhiqiang Yuan, Zexi Jia, Jiapei Zhang, Chongyang Li, Peixiang Luo, Ying Deng, Xiaoyue Duan, Jinchao Zhang

Affiliations: WeChat AI, China Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: F2RVLM: Boosting Fine-grained Fragment Retrieval for Multi-Modal Long-form Dialogue with Vision Language Model

Abstract:
Traditional dialogue retrieval aims to select the most appropriate utterance or image from recent dialogue history. However, they often fail to meet users’ actual needs for revisiting semantically coherent content scattered across longform conversations. To fill this gap, we define the Fine-grained Fragment Retrieval (FFR) task, requiring models to locate query-relevant fragments, comprising both utterances and images, from multimodal long-form dialogues. As a foundation for FFR, we construct MLDR, the longest-turn multimodal dialogue retrieval dataset to date, averaging 25.45 turns per dialogue, with each naturally spanning three distinct topics. To evaluate generalization in real-world scenarios, we curate and annotate a WeChat-based test set comprising real-world multimodal dialogues with an average of 75.38 turns. Building on these resources, we explore existing generation-based Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on FFR and observe that they often retrieve incoherent utterance-image fragments. While optimized for generating responses from visual-textual inputs, these models lack explicit supervision to ensure semantic coherence within retrieved fragments. To address this, we propose F2RVLM, a generative retrieval model trained in a two-stage paradigm: (1) supervised fine-tuning to inject fragment-level retrieval knowledge, and (2) GRPO-based reinforcement learning with multi-objective rewards to encourage outputs with semantic precision, relevance, and contextual coherence. In addition, to account for difficulty variations arising from differences in intra-fragment element distribution, ranging from locally dense to sparsely scattered, we introduce a difficulty-aware curriculum sampling that ranks training instances by predicted difficulty and gradually incorporates harder examples. This strategy enhances the model’s reasoning ability in long-form, multi-turn dialogue contexts. Experiments on both in-domain and real-domain sets demonstrate that F2RVLM substantially outperforms popular VLMs, achieving superior retrieval performance.

PaperID: 2457, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03067

Authors:Difu Feng, Qianqian Xu, Zitai Wang, Cong Hua, Zhiyong Yang, Qingming Huang

Affiliations: Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, School of Computer Science and Technology

Title: Quantifying the Potential to Escape Filter Bubbles: A Behavior-Aware Measure via Contrastive Simulation

Abstract:
Nowadays, recommendation systems have become crucial to online platforms, shaping user exposure by accurate preference modeling. However, such an exposure strategy can also reinforce users’ existing preferences, leading to a notorious phenomenon named filter bubbles. Given its negative effects, such as group polarization, increasing attention has been paid to exploring reasonable measures to filter bubbles. However, most existing evaluation metrics simply measure the diversity of user exposure, failing to distinguish between algorithmic preference modeling and actual information confinement. In view of this, we introduce Bubble Escape Potential (BEP), a behavioraware measure that quantifies how easily users can escape from filter bubbles. Specifically, BEP leverages a contrastive simulation framework that assigns different behavioral tendencies (e.g., positive vs. negative) to synthetic users and compares the induced exposure patterns. This design enables decoupling the effect of filter bubbles and preference modeling, allowing for more precise diagnosis of bubble severity. We conduct extensive experiments across multiple recommendation models to examine the relationship between predictive accuracy and bubble escape potential across different groups. To the best of our knowledge, our empirical results are the first to quantitatively validate the dilemma between preferences modeling and filter bubbles. What's more, we observe a counter-intuitive phenomenon that mild random recommendations are ineffective in alleviating filter bubbles, which can offer a principled foundation for further work in this direction.

PaperID: 2458, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04175

Authors:Jingyi Liao, Yongyi Su, Rong-Cheng Tu, Zhao Jin, Wenhao Sun, Yiting Li, Xun Xu, Dacheng Tao, Xulei Yang

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University, Institute for Infocomm Research A*STAR

Title: AD-FM: Multimodal LLMs for Anomaly Detection via Multi-Stage Reasoning and Fine-Grained Reward Optimization

Abstract:
While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities across diverse domains, their application to specialized anomaly detection (AD) remains constrained by domain adaptation challenges. Existing Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) based approaches suffer from two critical limitations: inadequate training data utilization when models produce uniform responses, and insufficient supervision over reasoning processes that encourage immediate binary decisions without deliberative analysis. We propose a comprehensive framework addressing these limitations through two synergistic innovations. First, we introduce a multistage deliberative reasoning process that guides models from region identification to focused examination, generating diverse response patterns essential for GRPO optimization while enabling structured supervision over analytical workflows. Second, we develop a fine-grained reward mechanism incorporating classification accuracy and localization supervision, transforming binary feedback into continuous signals that distinguish genuine analytical insight from spurious correctness. Comprehensive evaluation across multiple industrial datasets shows that our method achieves superior accuracy by enabling general-purpose MLLMs to acquire fine-grained visual discrimination for detecting subtle manufacturing defects.

PaperID: 2459, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21801

Authors:Zhuoxing Wei, Qingchen Xie, Qi Liu, Jingsong Yu

Affiliations: Tsinghua University and The core local commerce segment of Meituan, University of Science and Technology of China, Peking University

Title: DMGIN: How Multimodal LLMs Enhance Large Recommendation Models for Lifelong User Post-click Behaviors

Abstract:
Modeling user interest based on lifelong user behavior sequences is crucial for enhancing ClickThrough Rate (CTR) prediction. However, long post-click behavior sequences themselves pose severe performance issues: the sheer volume of data leads to high computational costs and inefficiencies in model training and inference. Traditional methods address this by introducing two-stage approaches, but this compromises model effectiveness due to incomplete utilization of the full sequence context. More importantly, integrating multimodal embeddings into existing large recommendation models (LRM) presents significant challenges: These embeddings often exacerbate computational burdens and mismatch with LRM architectures. To address these issues and enhance the model's efficiency and accuracy, we introduce Deep Multimodal Group Interest Network (DMGIN). Given the observation that user post-click behavior sequences contain a large number of repeated items with varying behaviors and timestamps, DMGIN employs Multimodal LLMs(MLLM) for grouping to reorganize complete lifelong post-click behavior sequences more effectively, with almost no additional computational overhead, as opposed to directly introducing multimodal embeddings. To mitigate the potential information loss from grouping, we have implemented two key strategies. First, we analyze behaviors within each group using both interest statistics and intra-group transformers to capture group traits. Second, apply inter-group transformers to temporally ordered groups to capture the evolution of user group interests. Our extensive experiments on both industrial and public datasets confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of DMGIN. The A/B test in our LBS advertising system shows that DMGIN improves CTR by 4.7% and Revenue per Mile by 2.3%.

PaperID: 2460, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09531

Authors:Yue Yao, Ruining Yang, Tom Gedeon

Affiliations: Shandong University, Northeastern University, Curtin University

Title: Bipartite Mode Matching for Vision Training Set Search from a Hierarchical Data Server

Abstract:
We explore a situation in which the target domain is accessible, but realtime data annotation is not feasible. Instead, we would like to construct an alternative training set from a large-scale data server so that a competitive model can be obtained. For this problem, because the target domain usually exhibits distinct modes (i.e., semantic clusters representing data distribution), if the training set does not contain these target modes, the model performance would be compromised. While prior existing works improve algorithms iteratively, our research explores the often-overlooked potential of optimizing the structure of the data server. Inspired by the hierarchical nature of web search engines, we introduce a hierarchical data server, together with a bipartite mode matching algorithm (BMM) to align source and target modes. For each target mode, we look in the server data tree for the best mode match, which might be large or small in size. Through bipartite matching, we aim for all target modes to be optimally matched with source modes in a one-on-one fashion. Compared with existing training set search algorithms, we show that the matched server modes constitute training sets that have consistently smaller domain gaps with the target domain across object re-identification (re-ID) and detection tasks. Consequently, models trained on our searched training sets have higher accuracy than those trained otherwise. BMM allows data-centric unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) orthogonal to existing model-centric UDA methods. By combining the BMM with existing UDA methods like pseudo-labeling, further improvement is observed.

PaperID: 2461, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10716

Authors:Niclas Boehmer, Maximilian T. Wittmann

Affiliations: Hasso Plattner Institute

Title: Picking a Representative Set of Solutions in Multiobjective Optimization: Axioms, Algorithms, and Experiments

Abstract:
Many realworld decision-making problems involve optimizing multiple objectives simultaneously, rendering the selection of the most preferred solution a non-trivial problem: All Pareto optimal solutions are viable candidates, and it is typically up to a decision maker to select one for implementation based on their subjective preferences. To reduce the cognitive load on the decision maker, previous work has introduced the Pareto pruning problem, where the goal is to compute a fixed-size subset of Pareto optimal solutions that best represent the full set, as evaluated by a given quality measure. Reframing Pareto pruning as a multiwinner voting problem, we conduct an axiomatic analysis of existing quality measures, uncovering several unintuitive behaviors. Motivated by these findings, we introduce a new measure, directed coverage. We also analyze the computational complexity of optimizing various quality measures, identifying previously unknown boundaries between tractable and intractable cases depending on the number and structure of the objectives. Finally, we present an experimental evaluation, demonstrating that the choice of quality measure has a decisive impact on the characteristics of the selected set of solutions and that our proposed measure performs competitively or even favorably across a range of settings.

PaperID: 2462, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.16628

Authors:Haoran Gu, Handing Wang, Yi Mei, Mengjie Zhang, Yaochu Jin

Affiliations: Xidian University, Victoria University of Wellington, Westlake University

Title: ParetoHqD: Fast Offline Multiobjective Alignment of Large Language Models Using Pareto High-Quality Data

Abstract:
Aligning large language models with multiple human expectations and values is crucial for ensuring that they adequately serve a variety of user needs. To this end, offline multiobjective alignment algorithms such as the Rewardsin-Context algorithm have shown strong performance and efficiency. However, inappropriate preference representations and training with imbalanced reward scores limit the performance of such algorithms. In this work, we introduce ParetoHqD that addresses the above issues by representing human preferences as preference directions in the objective space and regarding data near the Pareto front as ''high-quality'' data. For each preference, ParetoHqD follows a two-stage supervised fine-tuning process, where each stage uses an individual Pareto high-quality training set that best matches its preference direction. The experimental results have demonstrated the superiority of ParetoHqD over five baselines on two multiobjective alignment tasks.

PaperID: 2463, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.23359

Authors:Nana Wang, Suli Wang, Gen Li, Pengfei Ren, Hao Su

Affiliations: Technische Universität Darmstadt NoBarriers.ai Technology, BeiHang University, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Zhengzhou University

Title: New Synthetic Goldmine: Hand Joint Angle-Driven EMG Data Generation Framework for Micro-Gesture Recognition

Abstract:
Electromyography (EMG)based gesture recognition has emerged as a promising approach for human-computer interaction. However, its performance is often limited by the scarcity of labeled EMG data, significant cross-user variability, and poor generalization to unseen gestures. To address these challenges, we propose SeqEMG-GAN, a conditional, sequence-driven generative framework that synthesizes high-fidelity EMG signals from hand joint angle sequences. Our method introduces a context-aware architecture composed of an angle encoder, a dual-layer context encoder featuring the novel Ang2Gist unit, a deep convolutional EMG generator, and a discriminator, all jointly optimized via adversarial learning. By conditioning on joint kinematic trajectories, SeqEMG-GAN is capable of generating semantically consistent EMG sequences, even for previously unseen gestures, thereby enhancing data diversity and physiological plausibility. Experimental results show that classifiers trained solely on synthetic data experience only a slight accuracy drop (from 57.77% to 55.71%). In contrast, training with a combination of real and synthetic data significantly improves accuracy to 60.53%, outperforming real-only training by 2.76%. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, also achieves the state-of-art performance in augmenting EMG datasets and enhancing gesture recognition performance for applications such as neural robotic hand control, AI/AR glasses, and gesture-based virtual gaming systems.

PaperID: 2464, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13359

Authors:Yuhang Wang, Yanxu Zhu, Jitao Sang

Affiliations: Beijing Jiaotong University

Title: Reasoning Shapes Alignment: Investigating Cultural Alignment in Large Reasoning Models with Cultural Norms

Abstract:
The advanced reasoning capabilities of Large Reasoning Models enable them to thoroughly understand and apply safety policies through deliberate thought processes, thereby improving the models' safety. Beyond safety, these models must also be able to reflect the diverse range of human values across various cultures. This paper presents the Cultural Normbased Cultural Alignment (CNCA) framework, which enables models to leverage their powerful reasoning ability to align with cultural norms. Specifically, we propose three methods to automatically mine cultural norms from limited survey data and explore ways to effectively utilize these norms for improving cultural alignment. Two alignment paradigms are examined: an in-context alignment method, where cultural norms are explicitly integrated into the user context, and a fine-tuning-based method, which internalizes norms through enhanced Chain-of-Thought training data. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods, highlighting that models with stronger reasoning capabilities benefit more from cultural norm mining and utilization. Our findings emphasize the potential for reasoning models to better reflect diverse human values through culturally informed alignment strategies.

PaperID: 2465, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17691

Authors:Yan Yu, Yilun Liu, Minggui He, Shimin Tao, Weibin Meng, Xinhua Yang, Li Zhang, Hongxia Ma, Dengye Li, Daimeng Wei, Boxing Chen, Fuliang Li

Affiliations: Northeastern University, Tongji University, Huawei Canada

Title: ELSPR: Evaluator LLM Training Data Self-Purification on Non-Transitive Preferences via Tournament Graph Reconstruction

Abstract:
Pairwise evaluation of large language models (LLMs) has become the dominant paradigm for benchmarking openended tasks, yet non-transitive preferences—where evaluators prefer A over B, B over C, but C over A—fundamentally undermine ranking reliability. We show that this critical issue stems largely from low-quality data that contains inherently ambiguous preference pairs. To address this challenge, we propose ELSPR, a principled graph-theoretic framework that models pairwise preferences as tournament graphs and systematically identifies problematic training data. ELSPR quantifies non-transitivity through strongly connected components (SCCs) analysis and measures overall preference clarity using a novel normalized directed graph structural entropy metric. Our filtering methodology selectively removes preference data that induce non-transitivity while preserving transitive preferences. Extensive experiments on the AlpacaEval benchmark demonstrate that models fine-tuned on ELSPR-filtered data achieve substantial improvements: a 13.8% reduction in non-transitivity, a 0.088 decrease in structural entropy, and significantly enhanced discriminative power in real-world evaluation systems. Human validation confirms that discarded data exhibit dramatically lower inter-annotator agreement (34.4% vs. 52.6%) and model-human consistency (51.2% vs. 80.6%) compared to cleaned data. These findings establish ELSPR as an effective data self-purification approach for developing more robust, consistent, and human-aligned LLM evaluation systems.

PaperID: 2466, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13870

Authors:Zaid Hadach, Hajar El Hammouti, El Houcine Bergou, Adnane Saoud

Affiliations: University Mohammed VI Polytechnic

Title: Just Few States Are Enough: Randomized Sparse Feedback for Stability of Dynamical Systems

Abstract:
While classical control theory assumes that the controller has access to measurements of the entire state (or output) at every time instant, this paper investigates a setting where the feedback controller can only access a randomly selected subset of the state vector at each time step. Due to the random sparsification that selects only a subset of the state components at each step, we analyze the stability of the closedloop system in terms of Asymptotic Mean-Square Stability (AMSS), which ensures that the system state converges to zero in the mean-square sense. We consider the problem of designing both a feedback gain matrix and a measurement sparsification strategy that minimizes the number of state components required for feedback, while ensuring AMSS of the closed-loop system. Interestingly, (1) we provide conditions on the dynamics of the system under which it is possible to find a sparsification strategy, and (2) we propose a Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) based algorithm that jointly computes a stabilizing gain matrix, and a randomized sparsification strategy that minimizes the expected number of measured state coordinates while preserving the AMSS. Our approach is then extended to the case where the sparsification probabilities vary across the state components. Based on these theoretical findings, we propose an algorithmic procedure to compute the vector of sparsification parameters, along with the corresponding feedback gain matrix. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the stability properties of control systems that rely solely on randomly selected state measurements. Numerical simulations demonstrate that, in some settings, the system achieves comparable performance to full-state feedback while requiring measurements from only 0.3 percent of the state coordinates.

PaperID: 2467, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07650

Authors:Helong Huang, Min Cen, Kai Tan, Xingyue Quan, Guowei Huang, Hong Zhang

Affiliations: Huawei Technologies Ltd., University of Science and Technology of China

Title: GraphCoT-VLA: A 3D Spatial-Aware Reasoning Vision-Language-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation with Ambiguous Instructions

Abstract:
Visionlanguage-action models have emerged as a crucial paradigm in robotic manipulation. However, existing VLA models exhibit notable limitations in handling ambiguous language instructions and unknown environmental states. Furthermore, their perception is largely constrained to static two-dimensional observations, lacking the capability to model three-dimensional interactions between the robot and its environment. To address these challenges, this paper proposes GraphCoT-VLA, an efficient end-to-end model. To enhance the model's ability to interpret ambiguous instructions and improve task planning, we design a structured Chain-of-Thought reasoning module that integrates high-level task understanding and planning, failed task feedback, and low-level imaginative reasoning about future object positions and robot actions. Additionally, we construct a real-time updatable 3D Pose-Object graph, which captures the spatial configuration of robot joints and the topological relationships between objects in 3D space, enabling the model to better understand and manipulate their interactions. We further integrates a dropout hybrid reasoning strategy to achieve efficient control outputs. Experimental results across multiple real-world robotic tasks demonstrate that GraphCoT-VLA significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of task success rate and response speed, exhibiting strong generalization and robustness in open environments and under uncertain instructions.

PaperID: 2468, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.08765

Authors:Yatai Ji, Zhengqiu Zhu, Yong Zhao, Beidan Liu, Chen Gao, Yihao Zhao, Sihang Qiu, Yue Hu, Quanjun Yin

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology, Tsinghua University

Title: Towards Autonomous UAV Visual Object Search in City Space: Benchmark and Agentic Methodology

Abstract:
Aerial Visual Object Search (AVOS) tasks in urban environments require Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to autonomously search for and identify target objects based on visual inputs without external guidance. Existing approaches struggle in complex urban environments due to redundant semantic processing, similar object ambiguity, and the explorationexploitation dilemma. To advance research and support the AVOS task, we introduce CityAVOS, the first benchmark dataset for autonomous search of static urban objects. It features 2,420 tasks of varying difficulty across six object categories, designed to rigorously evaluate UAV search strategies. To solve the AVOS task, we also propose PRPSearcher (Perception-Reasoning-Planning Searcher), a novel agentic method powered by multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) that enables a UAV agent to think and reason like humans on visual cues when searching for objects. Specifically, PRPSearcher constructs three specialized maps: an object-centric dynamic semantic map enhancing spatial perception, a 3D cognitive map based on semantic "attraction" values for target reasoning, and a 3D uncertainty map for balanced exploration-exploitation search. Moreover, we propose a denoising mechanism to mitigate interference from similar objects and design an Inspiration Promote Thought prompting mechanism for adaptive action planning. Experimental results on CityAVOS demonstrate that PRPSearcher surpasses existing baselines in both success rate and search efficiency (on average: +37.69% SR, +28.96% SPL, -30.69% MSS, and -46.40% NE). Our work paves the way for future advances in embodied visual target search.

PaperID: 2469, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.20384

Authors:Rongyu Zhang, Menghang Dong, Yuan Zhang, Liang Heng, Xiaowei Chi, Gaole Dai, Li Du, Dan Wang, Yuan Du, Shanghang Zhang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Peking University, State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Nanjing University

Title: MoLe-VLA: Dynamic Layer-skipping Vision Language Action Model via Mixture-of-Layers for Efficient Robot Manipulation

Abstract:
VisionLanguage-Action (VLA) models enable robotic systems to perform embodied tasks but face deployment challenges due to the high computational demands of the dense Large Language Models (LLMs), with existing early-exit-based sparsification methods often overlooking the critical semantic role of final layers in downstream tasks. Aligning with the recent breakthrough of the Shallow Brain Hypothesis (SBH) in neuroscience and the mixture of experts in model sparsification, we conceptualize each LLM layer as an expert and propose a Mixture-of-LayEr Vision Language Action model (MoLe-VLA or simply MoLe) architecture for dynamic LLM layer activation. Specifically, we introduce a Spatial-Temporal Aware Router (STAR) for MoLe to selectively activate only parts of the layers based on the robot’s current state, mimicking the brain's distinct signal pathways specialized for cognition and causal reasoning. Additionally, to compensate for the cognition ability of LLM lost during the layer-skipping, we devise a Cognitive self-Knowledge Distillation (CogKD) to enhance the understanding of task demands and generate task-relevant action sequences by leveraging cognition features. Extensive experiments in RLBench simulations and real-world environments demonstrate the superiority of MoLe-VLA in both efficiency and performance, improving the mean success rate by 9.7% across ten simulation tasks while accelerating inference by 36.8% over OpenVLA.

PaperID: 2470, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19361

Authors:Mario Leiva, Noel Ngu, Joshua Shay Kricheli, Aditya Taparia, Ransalu Senanayake, Paulo Shakarian, Nathaniel D. Bastian, John Corcoran, Gerardo Simari

Affiliations: Universidad Nacional del Sur (UNS) & ICIC (UNS-CONICET), Bahía Blanca, Arizona State University, AZ USA, Syracuse University, NY USA, United States Military Academy, West Point, Systems Planning & Analysis, VA USA

Title: Consistency-based Abductive Reasoning over Perceptual Errors of Multiple Pre-trained Models in Novel Environments

Abstract:
The deployment of pretrained perception models in novel environments often leads to performance degradation due to distributional shifts. Although recent artificial intelligence approaches for metacognition use logical rules to characterize and filter model errors, improving precision often comes at the cost of reduced recall. This paper addresses the hypothesis that leveraging multiple pre-trained models can mitigate this recall reduction. We formulate the challenge of identifying and managing conflicting predictions from various models as a consistency-based abduction problem, building on the idea of abductive learning (ABL) but applying it to test-time instead of training. The input predictions and the learned error detection rules derived from each model are encoded in a logic program. We then seek an abductive explanation—a subset of model predictions—that maximizes prediction coverage while ensuring the rate of logical inconsistencies (derived from domain constraints) remains below a specified threshold. We propose two algorithms for this knowledge representation task: an exact method based on Integer Programming (IP) and an efficient Heuristic Search (HS). Through extensive experiments on a simulated aerial imagery dataset featuring controlled, complex distributional shifts, we demonstrate that our abduction-based framework outperforms individual models and standard ensemble baselines, achieving, for instance, average relative improvements of approximately 13.6% in F1-score and 16.6% in accuracy across 15 diverse test datasets when compared to the best individual model. Our results validate the use of consistency-based abduction as an effective mechanism to robustly integrate knowledge from multiple imperfect models in challenging, novel scenarios.

PaperID: 2471, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06604

Authors:Michał Sochański, Przemysław Andrzej Wałęga, Michał Zawidzki

Affiliations: University of Łódź

Title: Description Logics with Two Types of Definite Descriptions: Complexity, Expressiveness, and Automated Deduction

Abstract:
Definite descriptions are expressions of the form „the unique x satisfying property C,” which allow reference to objects through their distinguishing characteristics. They play a crucial role in ontology and query languages, offering an alternative to proper names (IDs), which lack semantic content and serve merely as placeholders. In this paper, we introduce two extensions of the wellknown description logic ALC with local and global definite descriptions, denoted ALCiL and ALCiG, respectively. We define appropriate bisimulation notions for these logics, enabling an analysis of their expressiveness. We show that although both logics share the same tight ExpTime complexity bounds for concept and ontology satisfiability, ALCiG is strictly more expressive than ALCiL. Moreover, we present tableau-based decision procedures for satisfiability in both logics, provide their implementation, and report on a series of experiments. The empirical results demonstrate the practical utility of the implementation and reveal interesting correlations between performance and structural properties of the input formulas.

PaperID: 2472, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12188

Authors:Xuanyu Chen, Nan Yang, Shuai Wang, Dong Yuan

Affiliations: The University of Sydney, Northwest Polytechnical University

Title: Scaling Law Analysis in Federated Learning: How to Select the Optimal Model Size?

Abstract:
The recent success of large language models (LLMs) has sparked a growing interest in training largescale models. As the model size continues to scale, concerns are growing about the depletion of high-quality, well-curated training data. This has led practitioners to explore training approaches like Federated Learning (FL), which can leverage the abundant data on edge devices while maintaining privacy. However, the decentralization of training datasets in FL introduces challenges to scaling large models, a topic that remains under-explored. This paper fills this gap and provides qualitative insights on generalizing the previous model scaling experience to federated learning scenarios. Specifically, we derive a PAC-Bayes (Probably Approximately Correct Bayesian) upper bound for the generalization error of models trained with stochastic algorithms in federated settings and quantify the impact of distributed training data on the optimal model size by finding the analytic solution of model size that minimizes this bound. Our theoretical results demonstrate that the optimal model size has a negative power law relationship with the number of clients if the total training compute is unchanged. Besides, we also find that switching to FL with the same training compute will inevitably reduce the upper bound of generalization performance that the model can achieve through training, and that estimating the optimal model size in federated scenarios should depend on the average training compute across clients. Furthermore, we also empirically validate the correctness of our results with extensive training runs on different models, network settings, and datasets.

PaperID: 2473, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08008

Authors:Zhiqi Chen, Yuzhou Liu, Jiarui Liu, Wanfu Gao

Affiliations: Jilin University

Title: Combining LLM Semantic Reasoning with GNN Structural Modeling for Multi-View Multi-Label Feature Selection

Abstract:
Multiview multi-label feature selection aims to identify informative features from heterogeneous views, where each sample is associated with multiple interdependent labels. This problem is particularly important in machine learning involving high-dimensional, multimodal data such as social media, bioinformatics or recommendation systems. Existing Multi-View Multi-Label Feature Selection (MVMLFS) methods mainly focus on analyzing statistical information of data, but seldom consider semantic information. In this paper, we aim to use these two types of information jointly and propose a method that combines Large Language Models (LLMs) semantic reasoning with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) structural modeling for MVMLFS. Specifically, the method consists of three main components. (1) LLM is first used as an evaluation agent to assess the latent semantic relevance among feature, view, and label descriptions. (2) A semantic-aware heterogeneous graph with two levels is designed to represent relations among features, views and labels: one is a semantic graph representing semantic relations, and the other is a statistical graph. (3) A lightweight Graph Attention Network (GAT) is applied to learn node embedding in the heterogeneous graph as feature saliency scores for ranking and selection. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art baselines, and it is still effective when applied to small-scale datasets, showcasing its robustness, flexibility, and generalization ability.

PaperID: 2474, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13010

Authors:Jeongwhan Choi, Seungjun Park, Sumin Park, Sung-Bae Cho, Noseong Park

Affiliations: Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, Yonsei University

Title: Are Graph Transformers Necessary? Efficient Long-Range Message Passing with Fractal Nodes in MPNNs

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful tools for learning on graphstructured data, but often struggle to balance local and global information. While graph Transformers aim to address this by enabling long-range interactions, they often overlook the inherent locality and efficiency of Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs). We propose a new concept called 'fractal nodes', inspired by the fractal structure observed in real-world networks. Our approach is based on the intuition that graph partitioning naturally induces fractal structure, where subgraphs often reflect the connectivity patterns of the full graph. Fractal nodes are designed to coexist with the original nodes and adaptively aggregate subgraph-level feature representations, thereby enforcing feature similarity within each subgraph. We show that fractal nodes alleviate the over-squashing problem by providing direct shortcut connections that enable long-range propagation of subgraph-level representations. Experiment results show that our method improves the expressive power of MPNNs and achieves comparable or better performance to graph Transformers while maintaining the computational efficiency of MPNN by improving the long-range dependencies of MPNN.

PaperID: 2475, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12121

Authors:Wanlong Fang, Tianle Zhang, Alvin Chan

Affiliations: Artificial Intelligence-X (AI-X) @ NTU, Interdisciplinary Graduate Programme, Nanyang Technological University, College of Computing and Data Science

Title: To Align or Not to Align: Strategic Multimodal Representation Alignment for Optimal Performance

Abstract:
Multimodal learning often relies on aligning representations across modalities to enable effective information integration—an approach traditionally assumed to be universally beneficial. However, prior research has primarily taken an observational approach, examining naturally occurring alignment in multimodal data and exploring its correlation with model performance, without systematically studying the direct effects of explicitly enforced alignment between representations of different modalities. In this work, we investigate how explicit alignment influences both model performance and representation alignment under different modalityspecific information structures. Specifically, we introduce a controllable contrastive learning module that enables precise manipulation of alignment strength during training, allowing us to explore when explicit alignment improves or hinders performance. Our results on synthetic and real datasets under different data characteristics show that the impact of explicit alignment on the performance of unimodal models is related to the characteristics of the data: the optimal level of alignment depends on the amount of redundancy between the different modalities. We can find an optimal alignment strength that balances modality-specific signals and shared redundancy in the mixed information distributions. This work can help practitioners on when and how to enforce alignment for optimal unimodal encoder performance.

PaperID: 2476, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.15082

Authors:Wanfu Gao, Zebin He, Jun Gao

Affiliations: Jilin University

Title: The Semantic Architect: How FEAML Bridges Structured Data and LLMs for Multi-Label Tasks

Abstract:
Existing feature engineering methods based on large language models (LLMs) have not yet been applied to multilabel learning tasks. They lack the ability to model complex label dependencies and are not specifically adapted to the characteristics of multi-label tasks. To address the above issues, we propose Feature Engineering Automation for Multi-Label Learning (FEAML), an automated feature engineering method for multi-label classification which leverages the code generation capabilities of LLMs. By utilizing metadata and label co-occurrence matrices, LLMs are guided to understand the relationships between data features and task objectives, based on which high-quality features are generated.The newly generated features are evaluated in terms of model accuracy to assess their effectiveness, while Pearson correlation coefficients are used to detect redundancy. FEAML further incorporates the evaluation results as feedback to drive LLMs to continuously optimize code generation in subsequent iterations. By integrating LLMs with a feedback mechanism, FEAML realizes an efficient, interpretable and self-improving feature engineering paradigm. Empirical results on various multi-label datasets demonstrate that our FEAML outperforms other feature engineering methods.

PaperID: 2477, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.16342

Authors:Haoqi He, Yan Xiao, Wenzhi Xu, Ruoying Liu, Xiaokai Lin, Kai Wen

Affiliations: School of Cyber Science and Technology, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, Beijing QBoson Quantum Technology Co.

Title: HiQ-Lip: A Hierarchical Quantum-Classical Method for Global Lipschitz Constant Estimation of ReLU Networks

Abstract:
Estimating the global Lipschitz constant of neural networks is crucial for understanding and improving their robustness and generalization capabilities. However, precise calculations are NPhard, and current semidefinite programming (SDP) methods face challenges such as high memory usage and slow processing speeds. In this paper, we propose HiQ-Lip, a hybrid quantum-classical hierarchical method that leverages Coherent Ising Machines (CIMs) to estimate the global Lipschitz constant. We tackle the estimation by converting it into a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem and implement a multilevel graph coarsening and refinement strategy to adapt to the constraints of contemporary quantum hardware. Our experimental evaluations on fully connected neural networks demonstrate that HiQ-Lip not only provides estimates comparable to state-of-the-art methods but also significantly accelerates the computation process. In specific tests involving two-layer neural networks with 256 hidden neurons, HiQ-Lip doubles the solving speed and offers more accurate upper bounds than the existing best method, LiPopt. These findings highlight the promising utility of small-scale quantum devices in advancing the estimation of neural network robustness.

PaperID: 2478, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01579

Authors:Lingfeng He, De Cheng, Di Xu, Huaijie Wang, Nannan Wang

Affiliations: Xidian University, Huawei Technologies Ltd.

Title: Harnessing Textual Semantic Priors for Knowledge Transfer and Refinement in CLIP-Driven Continual Learning

Abstract:
Continual learning (CL) aims to equip models with the ability to learn from a stream of tasks without forgetting previous knowledge. With the progress of visionlanguage models like Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP), their promise for CL has attracted increasing attention due to their strong generalizability. However, the potential of rich textual semantic priors in CLIP in addressing the stability–plasticity dilemma remains underexplored. During backbone training, most approaches transfer past knowledge without considering semantic relevance, leading to interference from unrelated tasks that disrupt the balance between stability and plasticity. Besides, while text-based classifiers provide strong generalization, they suffer from limited plasticity due to the inherent modality gap in CLIP. Visual classifiers help bridge this gap, but their prototypes lack rich and precise semantics. To address these challenges, we propose Semantic-Enriched Continual Adaptation (SECA), a unified framework that harnesses the anti-forgetting and structured nature of textual priors to guide semantic-aware knowledge transfer in the backbone and reinforce the semantic structure of the visual classifier. Specifically, a Semantic-Guided Adaptive Knowledge Transfer (SG-AKT) module is proposed to assess new images' relevance to diverse historical visual knowledge via textual cues, and aggregate relevant knowledge in an instance-adaptive manner as distillation signals. Moreover, a Semantic-Enhanced Visual Prototype Refinement (SE-VPR) module is introduced to refine visual prototypes using inter-class semantic relations captured in class-wise textual embeddings. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our approach.

PaperID: 2479, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06756

Authors:Xin He, Yili Wang, Yiwei Dai, Xin Wang

Affiliations: Jilin University

Title: Dual Mamba for Node-Specific Representation Learning: Tackling Over-Smoothing with Selective State Space Modeling

Abstract:
Oversmoothing remains a fundamental challenge in deep Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), where repeated message passing causes node representations to become indistinguishable. While existing solutions, such as residual connections and skip layers, alleviate this issue to some extent, they fail to explicitly model how node representations evolve in a node-specific and progressive manner across layers. Moreover, these methods do not take global information into account, which is also crucial for mitigating the over-smoothing problem. To address the aforementioned issues, in this work, we propose a Dual Mamba-enhanced Graph Convolutional Network (DMbaGCN), which is a novel framework that integrates Mamba into GNNs to address over-smoothing from both local and global perspectives. DMbaGCN consists of two modules: the Local State-Evolution Mamba (LSEMba) for local neighborhood aggregation and utilizing Mamba’s selective state space modeling to capture node-specific representation dynamics across layers, and the Global Context-Aware Mamba (GCAMba) that leverages Mamba’s global attention capabilities to incorporate global context for each node. By combining these components, DMbaGCN enhances node discriminability in deep GNNs, thereby mitigating over-smoothing. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method.

PaperID: 2480, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06608

Authors:Asela Hevapathige, Asiri Wijesinghe, Ahad N. Zehmakan

Affiliations: Australian National University

Title: Beyond Fixed Depth: Adaptive Graph Neural Networks for Node Classification Under Varying Homophily

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved significant success in addressing node classification tasks. However, the effectiveness of traditional GNNs degrades on heterophilic graphs, where connected nodes often belong to different labels or properties. While recent work has introduced mechanisms to improve GNN performance under heterophily, certain key limitations still exist. Most existing models apply a fixed aggregation depth across all nodes, overlooking the fact that nodes may require different propagation depths based on their local homophily levels and neighborhood structures. Moreover, many methods are tailored to either homophilic or heterophilic settings, lacking the flexibility to generalize across both regimes. To address these challenges, we develop a theoretical framework that links local structural and label characteristics to information propagation dynamics at the node level. Our analysis shows that optimal aggregation depth varies across nodes and is critical for preserving classdiscriminative information. Guided by this insight, we propose a novel adaptive-depth GNN architecture that dynamically selects node-specific aggregation depths using theoretically grounded metrics. Our method seamlessly adapts to both homophilic and heterophilic patterns within a unified model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently enhances the performance of standard GNN backbones across diverse benchmarks.

PaperID: 2481, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04988

Authors:Yue Li, Weifan Wang, Tai Sing Lee

Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University

Title: Modeling Rapid Contextual Learning in the Visual Cortex with Fast-Weight Deep Autoencoder Networks

Abstract:
Recent neurophysiological studies have revealed that the early visual cortex can rapidly learn global image context, as evidenced by a sparsification of population responses and a reduction in mean activity when exposed to familiar versus novel image contexts. This phenomenon has been attributed primarily to local recurrent interactions, rather than changes in feedforward or feedback pathways—supported by both empirical findings and circuitlevel modeling. Recurrent neural circuits capable of simulating these effects have been shown to reshape the geometry of neural manifolds, enhancing robustness and invariance to irrelevant variations. In this study, we employ a Vision Transformer (ViT)-based autoencoder to investigate, from a functional perspective, how familiarity training can induce sensitivity to global context in the early layers of a deep neural network. We hypothesize that rapid learning operates via fast weights, which encode transient or short-term memory traces, and we explore the use of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to implement such fast weights within each Transformer layer. Our results show that: (1) The proposed ViT-based autoencoder's self-attention circuit is performing a manifold transform similar to a neural circuit developed for modeling the familiarity effect. (2) Familiarity training induces alignment of latent representation in early layers with the top layer that contains global context information. (3) Familiarity training makes self-attention pay attention to a broader scope details in the remembered image context, rather than just the critical features for object recognition. (4) These effects are significantly amplified by the incorporation of LoRA-based fast weights. Together, these findings suggest that familiarity training can introduce global sensitivity to earlier layers in a hierarchical network, and that a hybrid fast-and-slow weight architecture may provide a viable computational model for studying the functional consequences of rapid global context learning in the brain.

PaperID: 2482, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14011

Authors:Afonso Lourenço, João Rodrigo, João Gama, Goreti Marreiros

Affiliations: Polytechnic of Porto, Rua Dr. António Bernardino de Almeida, University of Porto, Rua Dr. Roberto Frias

Title: DFDT: Dynamic Fast Decision Tree for IoT Data Stream Mining on Edge Devices

Abstract:
The Internet of Things generates massive data streams, with edge computing emerging as a key enabler for online IoT applications and 5G networks. Edge solutions facilitate realtime machine learning inference, but also require continuous adaptation to concept drifts. While extensions of the Very Fast Decision Tree (VFDT) remain state-of-the-art for tabular stream mining, their unregulated growth limit efficiency, particularly in ensemble settings where post-pruning at the individual tree level is seldom applied. This paper presents DFDT, a novel memory-constrained algorithm for online learning. DFDT employs activity-aware pre-pruning, dynamically adjusting splitting criteria based on leaf node activity: low-activity nodes are deactivated to conserve resources, moderately active nodes split under stricter conditions, and highly active nodes leverage a skipping mechanism for accelerated growth. Additionally, adaptive grace periods and tie thresholds allow DFDT to modulate splitting decisions based on observed data variability, enhancing the accuracy–memory–runtime trade-off while minimizing the need for hyperparameter tuning. An ablation study reveals three DFDT variants suited to different resource profiles. Fully compatible with existing ensemble frameworks, DFDT provides a drop-in alternative to standard VFDT-based learners.

PaperID: 2483, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13898

Authors:Yishun Lu, Wesley Armour

Affiliations: Oxford e-Research Centre, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford

Title: Beyond the Mean: Fisher-Orthogonal Projection for Natural Gradient Descent in Large Batch Training

Abstract:
Modern GPUs are equipped with large amounts of highbandwidth memory, enabling them to support mini-batch sizes of up to tens of thousands of training samples. However, most existing optimizers struggle to perform effectively at such a large batch size. As batch size increases, gradient noise decreases due to averaging over many samples, limiting the ability of first-order methods to escape sharp or suboptimal minima and reach the global minimum. Meanwhile, second-order methods like the natural gradient with Kronecker-Factored Approximate Curvature (KFAC) often require excessively high damping to remain stable at large batch sizes. This high damping effectively ``washes out" the curvature information that gives these methods their advantage, reducing their performance to that of simple gradient descent. In this paper, we introduce Fisher-Orthogonal Projection (FOP), a novel technique that restores the effectiveness of the second-order method at very large batch sizes, enabling scalable training with improved generalization and faster convergence. FOP constructs a variance-aware update direction by leveraging gradients from two sub-batches, enhancing the average gradient with a component of the gradient difference that is orthogonal to the average under the Fisher-metric. Through extensive benchmarks, we show that FOP accelerates convergence by ×1.2–1.3 over K-FAC and ×1.5–1.7 over SGD/AdamW at the same moderate batch sizes, while at extreme scales it achieves up to a ×7.5 speedup. Unlike other methods, FOP maintains small-batch accuracy when scaling to extremely large batch sizes. Moreover, it reduces Top-1 error by 2.3–3.3% on long-tailed CIFAR benchmarks, demonstrating robust generalization under severe class imbalance. Our lightweight, geometry-aware use of intra-batch variance makes natural-gradient optimization practical on modern data-centre GPUs. FOP is open-source and pip-installable, which can be integrated into existing training code with a single line and no extra configuration.

PaperID: 2484, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10841

Authors:YongKyung Oh, Dong-Young Lim, Sungil Kim

Affiliations: University of California, Los Angeles, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology

Title: FlowPath: Learning Data-Driven Manifolds with Invertible Flows for Robust Irregularly-sampled Time Series Classification

Abstract:
Modeling continuoustime dynamics from sparse and irregularly-sampled time series remains a fundamental challenge. Neural controlled differential equations provide a principled framework for such tasks, yet their performance is highly sensitive to the choice of control path constructed from discrete observations. Existing methods commonly employ fixed interpolation schemes, which impose simplistic geometric assumptions that often misrepresent the underlying data manifold, particularly under high missingness. We propose FlowPath, a novel approach that learns the geometry of the control path via an invertible neural flow. Rather than merely connecting observations, FlowPath constructs a continuous and data-adaptive manifold, guided by invertibility constraints that enforce information-preserving and well-behaved transformations. This inductive bias distinguishes FlowPath from prior unconstrained learnable path models. Empirical evaluations on 18 benchmark datasets and a real-world case study demonstrate that FlowPath consistently achieves statistically significant improvements in classification accuracy over baselines using fixed interpolants or non-invertible architectures. These results highlight the importance of modeling not only the dynamics along the path but also the geometry of the path itself, offering a robust and generalizable solution for learning from irregular time series.

PaperID: 2485, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07242

Authors:Tianle Song, Chenhao Lin, Yang Cao, Zhengyu Zhao, Jiahao Sun, Chong Zhang, Le Yang, Chao Shen

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, Institute of Science Tokyo, Xi’an Jiaotong University

Title: Privacy on the Fly: A Predictive Adversarial Transformation Network for Mobile Sensor Data

Abstract:
Mobile motion sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes are now ubiquitously accessible by thirdparty apps via standard APIs. While enabling rich functionalities like activity recognition and step counting, this openness has also enabled unregulated inference of sensitive user traits, such as gender, age, and even identity, without user consent. Existing privacy-preserving techniques, such as GAN-based obfuscation or differential privacy, typically require access to the full input sequence, introducing latency that is incompatible with real-time scenarios. Worse, they tend to distort temporal and semantic patterns, degrading the utility of the data for benign tasks like activity recognition. To address these limitations, we propose the Predictive Adversarial Transformation Network (PATN), a real-time privacy-preserving framework that leverages historical signals to generate adversarial perturbations proactively. The perturbations are applied immediately upon data acquisition, enabling continuous protection without disrupting application functionality. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate that PATN substantially degrades the performance of privacy inference models, achieving Attack Success Rate (ASR) of 40.11% and 44.65% (reducing inference accuracy to near-random) and increasing the Equal Error Rate (EER) from 8.30% and 7.56% to 41.65% and 46.22%. On ASR, PATN outperforms baseline methods by 16.16% and 31.96%, respectively.

PaperID: 2486, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09443

Authors:Julian Spravil, Sebastian Houben, Sven Behnke

Affiliations: Fraunhofer IAIS, Computer Science Institute VI, University of Bonn, Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems, University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, Autonomous Intelligent Systems, Germany Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, Germany Center for Robotics

Title: Scaling Laws for Conditional Emergence of Multilingual Image Captioning via Generalization from Translation

Abstract:
Crosslingual, cross-task transfer is challenged by task-specific data scarcity, which becomes more severe as language support grows and is further amplified in vision-language models (VLMs). We investigate multilingual generalization in encoder-decoder transformer VLMs to enable zero-shot image captioning in languages encountered only in the translation task. In this setting, the encoder must learn to generate generalizable, task-aware latent vision representations to instruct the decoder via inserted cross-attention layers. To analyze scaling behavior, we train Florence-2 based and Gemma-2 based models (0.4B to 11.2B parameters) on a synthetic dataset using varying compute budgets. While all languages in the dataset have image-aligned translations, only a subset of them include image captions. Notably, we show that captioning can emerge using a language prefix, even when this language only appears in the translation task. We find that indirect learning of unseen task-language pairs adheres to scaling laws that are governed by the multilinguality of the model, model size, and seen training samples. Finally, we demonstrate that the scaling laws extend to downstream tasks, achieving competitive performance through fine-tuning in multimodal machine translation (Multi30K, CoMMuTE), lexical disambiguation (CoMMuTE), and image captioning (Multi30K, XM3600, COCO Karpathy).

PaperID: 2487, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24903

Authors:Zichen Tang, Haihong E, Rongjin Li, Jiacheng Liu, Linwei Jia, Zhuodi Hao, Zhongjun Yang, Yuanze Li, Haolin Tian, Xinyi Hu, Peizhi Zhao, Yuan Liu, Zhengyu Wang, Xianghe Wang, Yiling Huang, Xueyuan Lin, Ruofei Bai, Zijian Xie, Qian Huang, Ruining Cao, Haocheng Gao

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Hithink RoyalFlush Information Network Co.

Title: FinMMDocR: Benchmarking Financial Multimodal Reasoning with Scenario Awareness, Document Understanding, and Multi-Step Computation

Abstract:
We introduce FinMMDocR, a novel bilingual multimodal benchmark for evaluating multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on realworld financial numerical reasoning. Compared to existing benchmarks, our work delivers three major advancements. (1) Scenario Awareness: 57.9% of 1,200 expert-annotated problems incorporate 12 types of implicit financial scenarios (e.g., Portfolio Management), challenging models to perform expert-level reasoning based on assumptions; (2) Document Understanding: 837 Chinese/English documents spanning 9 types (e.g., Company Research) average 50.8 pages with rich visual elements, significantly surpassing existing benchmarks in both breadth and depth of financial documents; (3) Multi-Step Computation: Problems demand 11-step reasoning on average (5.3 extraction + 5.7 calculation steps), with 65.0% requiring cross-page evidence (2.4 pages average). The best-performing MLLM achieves only 58.0% accuracy, and different retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods show significant performance variations on this task. We expect FinMMDocR to drive improvements in MLLMs and reasoning-enhanced methods on complex multimodal reasoning tasks in real-world scenarios.

PaperID: 2488, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12545

Authors:Robin van der Laag, Hao Wang, Thomas Bäck, Yingjie Fan

Affiliations: Leiden University

Title: Center-Outward q-Dominance: A Sample-Computable Proxy for Strong Stochastic Dominance in Stochastic Multi-Objective Optimisation

Abstract:
Stochastic multiobjective optimization (SMOOP) requires ranking multivariate distributions; yet, most empirical studies perform scalarization, which loses information and is unreliable. Based on the optimal transport theory, we introduce the center-outward q-dominance relation and prove it implies strong first-order stochastic dominance (FSD). Also, we develop an empirical test procedure based on q-dominance, and derive an explicit sample size threshold, n(δ), to control the Type I error. We verify the usefulness of our approach in two scenarios: (1) as a ranking method in hyperparameter tuning; (2) as a selection method in multi-objective optimization algorithms. For the former, we analyze the final stochastic Pareto sets of seven multi-objective hyperparameter tuners on the YAHPO-MO benchmark tasks with q-dominance, which allows us to compare these tuners when the expected hypervolume indicator (HVI, the most common performance metric) of the Pareto sets becomes indistinguishable. For the latter, we replace the mean value-based selection in the NSGA-II algorithm with q-dominance, which shows a superior convergence rate on noise-augmented ZDT benchmark problems. These results establish center-outward q-dominance as a principled, tractable foundation for seeking truly stochastically dominant solutions for SMOOPs.

PaperID: 2489, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07844

Authors:Jinping Wang, Zhiqiang Gao, Zhiwu Xie

Affiliations: Wenzhou-Kean University, Wenzhou Kean University

Title: Space Alignment Matters: The Missing Piece for Inducing Neural Collapse in Long-Tailed Learning

Abstract:
Recent studies on Neural Collapse (NC) reveal that, under classbalanced conditions, the class feature means and the classifier weights spontaneously align into a simplex equiangular tight frame (ETF). In long-tailed regimes, however, severe sample imbalance tends to prevent the emergence of the NC phenomenon, resulting in poor generalization performance.Current efforts predominantly seek to recover the ETF geometry by imposing constraints on features or classifier weights, yet overlook a critical problem: There is a pronounced misalignment between the feature and the classifier weight spaces. In this paper, we theoretically quantify the harm of such misalignment through an optimal error exponent analysis.Built on this insight, we propose three explicit alignment strategies that plug-and-play into existing long-tail methods without architectural change. Extensive experiments on the CIFAR-10-LT, CIFAR-100-LT, and ImageNet-LT datasets consistently boost examined baselines and achieve the state-of-the-art performances.

PaperID: 2490, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07164

Authors:Min Wang, Xin Li, Mingzhong Wang, Hasnaa Bennis

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology, Jilin University, University of the Sunshine Coast

Title: Offline Meta-Reinforcement Learning with Flow-Based Task Inference and Adaptive Correction of Feature Overgeneralization

Abstract:
Offline metareinforcement learning (OMRL) combines the strengths of learning from diverse datasets in offline RL with the adaptability to new tasks of meta-RL, promising safe and efficient knowledge acquisition by RL agents. However, OMRL still suffers extrapolation errors due to out-of-distribution (OOD) actions, compromised by broad task distributions and Markov Decision Process (MDP) ambiguity in meta-RL setups. Existing research indicates that the generalization of the Q network affects the extrapolation error in offline RL. This paper investigates this relationship by decomposing the Q value into feature and weight components, observing that while decomposition enhances adaptability and convergence in the case of high-quality data, it often leads to policy degeneration or collapse in complex tasks. We observe that decomposed Q values introduce a large estimation bias when the feature encounters OOD samples, a phenomenon we term "feature overgeneralization''. To address this issue, we propose FLORA, which identifies OOD samples by modeling feature distributions and estimating their uncertainties. FLORA integrates a return feedback mechanism to adaptively adjust feature components. Furthermore, to learn precise task representations, FLORA explicitly models the complex task distribution using a chain of invertible transformations. We theoretically and empirically demonstrate that FLORA achieves rapid adaptation and meta-policy improvement compared to baselines across various environments.

PaperID: 2491, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07618

Authors:Yulu Wang, Ziqian Zeng, Jianjun Wu, Zhifeng Tang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University

Title: Neural Architecture for Fast and Reliable Coagulation Assessment in Clinical Settings: Leveraging Thromboelastography

Abstract:
In an ideal medical environment, realtime coagulation monitoring can enable early detection and prompt remediation of risks. However, traditional Thromboelastography (TEG), a widely employed diagnostic modality, can only provide such outputs after nearly 1 hour of measurement. The delay might lead to elevated mortality rates. These issues clearly point out one of the key challenges for medical AI development: Making reasonable predictions based on very small data sets and accounting for variation between different patient populations, a task where conventional deep learning methods typically perform poorly. We present Physiological State Reconstruction (PSR), a new algorithm specifically designed to take advantage of dynamic changes between individuals and to maximize useful information produced by small amounts of clinical data through mapping to reliable predictions and diagnosis. We develop MDFE to facilitate integration of varied temporal signals using multi-domain learning, and jointly learn high-level temporal interactions together with attentions via HLA; furthermore, the parameterized DAM we designed maintains the stability of the computed vital signs. PSR evaluates with 4 TEG-specialized data sets and establishes remarkable performance -- predictions of R^2 > 0.98 for coagulation traits and error reduction around half compared to the state-of-the-art methods, and halving the inferencing time too. Drift-aware learning suggests a new future, with potential uses well beyond thrombophilia discovery towards medical AI applications with data scarcity.

PaperID: 2492, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05012

Authors:Zeqing Wang, Kangye Ji, Di Wang, Haibin Zhang, Fei Cheng

Affiliations: Xidian University

Title: SAMCL: Empowering SAM to Continually Learn from Dynamic Domains with Extreme Storage Efficiency

Abstract:
Segment Anything Model (SAM) struggles in openworld scenarios with diverse domains. In such settings, naive fine-tuning with a well-designed learning module is inadequate and often causes catastrophic forgetting issue when learning incrementally. To address this issue, we propose a novel continual learning (CL) method for SAM, termed SAMCL. Rather than relying on a fixed learning module, our method decomposes incremental knowledge into separate modules and trains a selector to choose the appropriate one during inference. However, this intuitive design introduces two key challenges: ensuring effective module learning and selection, and managing storage as tasks accumulate. To tackle these, we introduce two components: AugModule and Module Selector. AugModule reduces the storage of the popular LoRA learning module by sharing parameters across layers while maintaining accuracy. It also employs heatmaps—generated from point prompts—to further enhance domain adaptation with minimal additional cost. Module Selector leverages the observation that SAM’s embeddings can effectively distinguish domains, enabling high selection accuracy by training on low-consumed embeddings instead of raw images. Experiments show that SAMCL outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving only 0.19% forgetting and at least 2.5% gain on unseen domains. Each AugModule requires just 0.233 MB, reducing storage by at least 24.3% over other fine-tuning approaches. The buffer storage for Module Selector is further reduced by up to 256x.

PaperID: 2493, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.09109

Authors:Ganxi Xu, Jinyi Long, Jia Zhang

Affiliations: Jinan University

Title: Probability Distribution Alignment and Low-Rank Weight Decomposition for Source-Free Domain Adaptive Brain Decoding

Abstract:
Brain decoding currently faces significant challenges in individual differences, modality alignment, and highdimensional embeddings. To address individual differences, researchers often use source subject data, which leads to issues such as privacy leakage and heavy data storage burdens. In modality alignment, current works focus on aligning the softmax probability distribution but neglect the alignment of marginal probability distributions, resulting in modality misalignment. Additionally, images and text are aligned separately with fMRI without considering the complex interplay between images and text, leading to poor image reconstruction. Finally, the enormous dimensionality of CLIP embeddings causes significant computational costs. Although the dimensionality of CLIP embeddings can be reduced by ignoring the number of patches obtained from images and the number of tokens acquired from text, this comes at the cost of a significant drop in model performance, creating a dilemma. To overcome these limitations, we propose a source-free domain adaptation-based brain decoding framework. Firstly, we apply source-free domain adaptation, which only acquires the source model without accessing source data during target model adaptation, to brain decoding to address cross-subject variations, privacy concerns, and the heavy burden of data storage. Secondly, we employ maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) to align the marginal probability distributions between embeddings of different modalities. Moreover, to accommodate the complex interplay between image and text, we concatenate the embeddings of image and text and then use singular value decomposition (SVD) to obtain a new embedding. What’s more, to achieve better image generation quality, we employ the Wasserstein distance (WD) to align the probability distributions of new embeddings. Finally, in the target model adaptation phase of source-free domain adaptation, we employ low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to reduce the high expense of tuning the target model. Sufficient experiments demonstrate our work outperforms state-of-the-art methods for brain decoding tasks.

PaperID: 2494, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16258

Authors:Yang Xu, Zuliang Yang, Kai Ming Ting

Affiliations: Nanjing University

Title: GeoPTH: A Lightweight Approach to Category-Based Trajectory Retrieval via Geometric Prototype Trajectory Hashing

Abstract:
Trajectory similarity retrieval is an important part of spatiotemporal data mining, however, existing methods have the following limitations: traditional metrics are computationally expensive, while learningbased methods suffer from substantial training costs and potential instability. This paper addresses these problems by proposing Geometric Prototype Trajectory Hashing (GeoPTH), a novel, lightweight, and non-learning framework for efficient category-based trajectory retrieval. GeoPTH constructs data-dependent hash functions by using representative trajectory prototypes, i.e., small point sets preserving geometric characteristics, as anchors. The hashing process is efficient, which involves mapping a new trajectory to its closest prototype via a robust, Hausdorff metric. Extensive experiments show that GeoPTH’s retrieval accuracy is highly competitive with both traditional metrics and state-of-the-art learning methods, and it significantly outperforms binary codes generated through simple binarization of the learned embeddings. Critically, GeoPTH consistently outperforms all competitors in terms of efficiency. Our work demonstrates that a lightweight, prototype-centric approach offers a practical and powerful alternative, achieving an exceptional retrieval performance and computational efficiency.

PaperID: 2495, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15578

Authors:Jiexia Ye, Weiqi Zhang, Ziyue Li, Jia Li, Fugee Tsung

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Technical University of Munich

Title: MedSpaformer: A Transferable Transformer with Multi-Granularity Token Sparsification for Medical Time Series Classification

Abstract:
Accurate medical time series (MedTS) classification is essential for effective clinical diagnosis, yet remains challenging due to complex multichannel temporal dependencies, information redundancy, and label scarcity. While transformer-based models have shown promise in time series analysis, most are designed for forecasting tasks and fail to fully exploit the unique characteristics of MedTS. In this paper, we introduce MedSpaformer, a transformer-based framework tailored for MedTS classification. It incorporates a sparse token-based dual-attention mechanism that enables global context modeling and token sparsification, allowing dynamic feature refinement by focusing on informative tokens while reducing redundancy. This mechanism is integrated into a multi-granularity cross-channel encoding scheme to capture intra- and inter-granularity temporal dependencies and inter-channel correlations, enabling progressive refinement of task-relevant patterns in medical signals. The sparsification design allows our model to flexibly accommodate inputs with variable lengths and channel dimensions. We also introduce an adaptive label encoder to extract label semantics and address cross-dataset label space misalignment. Together, these components enhance the model’s transferability across heterogeneous medical datasets, which helps alleviate the challenge of label scarcity. Our model outperforms 13 baselines across 7 medical datasets under supervised learning. It also excels in few-shot learning and demonstrates zero-shot capability in both in-domain and cross-domain diagnostics. These results highlight MedSpaformer's robustness and its potential as a unified solution for MedTS classification across diverse settings.

PaperID: 2496, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09319

Authors:Le Yi, Wei Huang, Lei Zhang, Kefu Zhao, Yan Wang, Zizhou Wang

Affiliations: College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, Institute of High Performance Computing

Title: DualFete: Revisiting Teacher-Student Interactions from a Feedback Perspective for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Abstract:
The teacherstudent paradigm has emerged as a canonical framework in semi-supervised learning. When applied to medical image segmentation, the paradigm faces challenges due to inherent image ambiguities, making it particularly vulnerable to erroneous supervision. Crucially, the student's iterative reconfirmation of these errors leads to self-reinforcing bias. While some studies attempt to mitigate this bias, they often rely on external modifications to the conventional teacher-student framework, overlooking its intrinsic potential for error correction. In response, this work introduces a feedback mechanism into the teacher-student framework to counteract error reconfirmations. Here, the student provides feedback on the changes induced by the teacher's pseudo-labels, enabling the teacher to refine these labels accordingly. We specify that this interaction hinges on two key components: the feedback attributor, which designates pseudo-labels triggering the student's update, and the feedback receiver, which determines where to apply this feedback. Building on this, a dual-teacher feedback model is further proposed, which allows more dynamics in the feedback loop and fosters more gains by resolving disagreements through cross-teacher supervision while avoiding consistent errors. Comprehensive evaluations on three medical image benchmarks demonstrate the method's effectiveness in addressing error propagation in semi-supervised medical image segmentation.

PaperID: 2497, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11685

Authors:Tianyi Yin, Jingwei Wang, Chenze Wang, Han Wang, Jiexuan Cai, Min Liu, Yunlong Ma, Kun Gao, Yuting Song, Weiming Shen

Affiliations: Tongji University, Zhongguancun Academy, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: R-Tuning: Wavelet-Decomposed Replay and Semantic Alignment for Continual Adaptation of Pretrained Time-Series Models

Abstract:
Pretrained models have demonstrated exceptional generalization capabilities in time-series forecasting; however, adapting them to evolving data distributions remains a significant challenge. A key hurdle lies in accessing the original training data, as fine-tuning solely on new data often leads to catastrophic forgetting. To address this issue, we propose Replay Tuning (R-Tuning), a novel framework designed for the continual adaptation of pre-trained time-series models. R-Tuning constructs a unified latent space that captures both prior and current task knowledge through a frequency-aware replay strategy. Specifically, it augments model-generated samples via wavelet-based decomposition across multiple frequency bands, generating trend-preserving and fusion-enhanced variants to improve representation diversity and replay efficiency. To further reduce reliance on synthetic samples, R-Tuning introduces a latent consistency constraint that aligns new representations with the prior task space. This constraint guides joint optimization within a compact and semantically coherent latent space, ensuring robust knowledge retention and adaptation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of R-Tuning, which reduces MAE and MSE by up to 46.9% and 46.8%, respectively, on new tasks, while preserving prior knowledge with gains of up to 5.7% and 6.0% on old tasks. Notably, under few-shot settings, R-Tuning outperforms all state-of-the-art baselines even when synthetic proxy samples account for only 5% of the new task dataset.

PaperID: 2498, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17129

Authors:Yeqin Zhang, Yizheng Zhao, Chen Hu, Binxing Jiao, Daxin Jiang, Ruihang Miao, Cam-Tu Nguyen

Affiliations: Nanjing University

Title: Learning to Compress: Unlocking the Potential of Large Language Models for Text Representation

Abstract:
Text representation plays a critical role in tasks like clustering, retrieval, and other downstream applications. With the emergence of large language models (LLMs), there is increasing interest in harnessing their capabilities for this purpose. However, most of the LLMs are inherently causal and optimized for nexttoken prediction, making them suboptimal for producing holistic representations. To address this, recent studies introduced pretext tasks to adapt LLMs for text representation. Most of these tasks, however, rely on token-level prediction objectives, such as the masked next-token prediction (MNTP) used in LLM2Vec. In this work, we explore the untapped potential of context compression as a pretext task for unsupervised adaptation of LLMs. During compression pre-training, the model learns to generate compact memory tokens, which substitute the whole context for downstream sequence prediction. Experiments demonstrate that a well-designed compression objective can significantly enhance LLM-based text representations, outperforming models trained with token-level pretext tasks. Further improvements through contrastive learning produce a strong representation model (LLM2Comp) that outperforms contemporary LLM-based text encoders on a wide range of tasks while being more sample-efficient, requiring significantly less training data.

PaperID: 2499, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11181

Authors:Zhenghao Zhang, Jun Xie, Xingchen Chen, Tao Yu, Hongzhu Yi, Kaixin Xu, Yuanxiang Wang, Tianyu Zong, Xinming Wang, Jiahuan Chen, Guoqing Chao, Feng Chen, Zhepeng Wang, Jungang Xu

Affiliations: Lenovo Research, Harbin Institute of Technology, Institute of automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhejiang University, Shanghai Jiaotong University

Title: Dynamic Deep Graph Learning for Incomplete Multi-View Clustering with Masked Graph Reconstruction Loss

Abstract:
The prevalence of realworld multi-view data makes incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC) a crucial research. The rapid development of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has established them as one of the mainstream approaches for multi-view clustering. Despite significant progress in GNNs-based IMVC, some challenges remain: (1) Most methods rely on the K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) algorithm to construct static graphs from raw data, which introduces noise and diminishes the robustness of the graph topology. (2) Existing methods typically utilize the Mean Squared Error (MSE) loss between the reconstructed graph and the sparse adjacency graph directly as the graph reconstruction loss, leading to substantial gradient noise during optimization. To address these issues, we propose a novel Dynamic Deep Graph Learning for Incomplete Multi-View Clustering with Masked Graph Reconstruction Loss (DGIMVCM). Firstly, we construct a missing-robust global graph from the raw data. A graph convolutional embedding layer is then designed to extract primary features and refined dynamic view-specific graph structures, leveraging the global graph for imputation of missing views. This process is complemented by graph structure contrastive learning, which identifies consistency among view-specific graph structures. Secondly, a graph self-attention encoder is introduced to extract high-level representations based on the imputed primary features and view-specific graphs, and is optimized with a masked graph reconstruction loss to mitigate gradient noise during optimization. Finally, a clustering module is constructed and optimized through a pseudo-label self-supervised training mechanism. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets validate the effectiveness and superiority of DGIMVCM.

PaperID: 2500, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.19142

Authors:Zhicheng Zhang, Zhaocheng Du, Jieming Zhu, Jiwei Tang, Fengyuan Lu, Wang Jiaheng, Song-Li Wu, Qianhui Zhu, Jingyu Li, Hai-Tao Zheng, Zhenhua Dong

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Huawei Noah's Ark Lab, Nanjing university, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Sun Yat-sen University

Title: Length-Adaptive Interest Network for Balancing Long and Short Sequence Modeling in CTR Prediction

Abstract:
User behavior sequences in modern recommendation systems exhibit significant length heterogeneity, ranging from sparse shortterm interactions to rich long-term histories. While longer sequences provide more context, we observe that increasing the maximum input sequence length in existing CTR models paradoxically degrades performance for short-sequence users due to attention polarization and length imbalance in training data. To address this, we propose LAIN (Length-Adaptive Interest Network), a plug-and-play framework that explicitly incorporates sequence length as a conditioning signal to balance long- and short-sequence modeling. LAIN consists of three lightweight components: a Spectral Length Encoder that maps length into continuous representations, Length-Conditioned Prompting that injects global contextual cues into both long- and short-term behavior branches, and Length-Modulated Attention that adaptively adjusts attention sharpness based on sequence length. Extensive experiments on three real-world benchmarks across five strong CTR backbones show that LAIN consistently improves overall performance, achieving up to 1.15% AUC gain and 2.25% log loss reduction. Notably, our method significantly improves accuracy for short-sequence users without sacrificing long-sequence effectiveness. Our work offers a general, efficient, and deployable solution to mitigate length-induced bias in sequential recommendation.

PaperID: 2501, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.15683

Authors:Zishuai Zhang, Hainan Zhang, Weihua Li, Qinnan Zhang, Jin Dong, Yongxin Tong, Zhiming Zheng

Affiliations: Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Future Blockchain and Privacy Computing, Beihang University, School of Artificial Intelligence, China Beijing Academy of Blockchain and Edge Computing, School of Computer Science and Engineering

Title: FedSEA-LLaMA: A Secure, Efficient and Adaptive Federated Splitting Framework for Large Language Models

Abstract:
Private data holds promise for improving LLMs due to its high quality, but its scattered distribution across data silos and the high computational demands of LLMs limit their deployment in federated environments. To address this, the transformerbased federated split models are proposed, which offload most model parameters to the server (or distributed clients) while retaining only a small portion on the client to ensure data privacy. Despite this design, they still face three challenges: 1) Peer-to-peer key encryption struggles to secure transmitted vectors effectively; 2) The auto-regressive nature of LLMs means that federated split learning can only train and infer sequentially, causing high communication overhead; 3) Fixed partition points lack adaptability to downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce FedSEA-LLaMA, a Secure, Efficient, and Adaptive Federated splitting framework based on LLaMA2. First, we inject Gaussian noise into forward-pass hidden states to enable secure end-to-end vector transmission. Second, we employ attention-mask compression and KV cache collaboration to reduce communication costs, accelerating training and inference. Third, we allow users to dynamically adjust the partition points for input/output blocks based on specific task requirements. Experiments on natural language understanding, summarization, and conversational QA tasks show that FedSEA-LLaMA maintains performance comparable to centralized LLaMA2 and achieves up to 8× speedups in training and inference. Further analysis of privacy attacks and different partition points also demonstrates the effectiveness of FedSEA-LLaMA in security and adaptability.

PaperID: 2502, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.08346

Authors:Yujin Zhou, Pengcheng Wen, Jiale Chen, Boqin Yin, Han Zhu, Jiaming Ji, Juntao Dai, Chi-Min Chan, Sirui Han

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Sun Yat-sen University, Peking University

Title: What, Whether and How? Unveiling Process Reward Models for Thinking with Images Reasoning

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) has demonstrated excellent abilities in various visual tasks. Building upon these developments, the thinking with images paradigm has emerged, enabling models to dynamically edit and reencode visual information at each reasoning step, mirroring human visual processing. However, this paradigm introduces significant challenges as diverse errors may occur during reasoning processes. This necessitates Process Reward Models (PRMs) for distinguishing positive and negative reasoning steps, yet existing benchmarks for PRMs are predominantly text-centric and lack comprehensive assessment under this paradigm. To address these gaps, this work introduces the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for evaluating PRMs under the thinking with images paradigm. Our main contributions are: (1) Through extensive analysis of reasoning trajectories and guided search experiments with PRMs, we define 7 fine-grained error types and demonstrate both the necessity for specialized PRMs and the potential for improvement. (2) We construct a comprehensive benchmark comprising 1,206 manually annotated thinking with images reasoning trajectories spanning 4 categories and 16 subcategories for fine-grained evaluation of PRMs. (3) Our experimental analysis reveals that current LVLMs fall short as effective PRMs, exhibiting limited capabilities in visual reasoning process evaluation with significant performance disparities across error types, positive evaluation bias, and sensitivity to reasoning step positions. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of our benchmark and establish crucial foundations for advancing PRMs in LVLMs.

PaperID: 2503, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06899

Authors:Yanchen Deng, Xinrun Wang, Bo An

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Management University

Title: GDBA Revisited: Unleashing the Power of Guided Local Search for Distributed Constraint Optimization

Abstract:
Local search is an important class of incomplete algorithms for solving Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (DCOPs) but it often converges to poor local optima. While Generalized Distributed Breakout Algorithm (GDBA) provides a comprehensive rule set to escape premature convergence, its empirical benefits remain marginal on generalvalued problems. In this work, we systematically examine GDBA and identify three factors that potentially lead to its inferior performance, i.e., over-aggressive constraint violation conditions, unbounded penalty accumulation, and uncoordinated penalty updates. To address these issues, we propose Distributed Guided Local Search (DGLS), a novel GLS framework for DCOPs that incorporates an adaptive violation condition to selectively penalize constraints with high cost, a penalty evaporation mechanism to control the magnitude of penalization, and a synchronization scheme for coordinated penalty updates. We theoretically show that the penalty values are bounded, and agents play a potential game in DGLS. Extensive empirical results on various benchmarks demonstrate the great superiority of DGLS over state-of-the-art baselines. Compared to Damped Max-sum with high damping factors, our DGLS achieves competitive performance on general-valued problems, and outperforms by significant margins on structured problems in terms of anytime results.

PaperID: 2504, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01022

Authors:Bo Fu, Zhe Chen, Rahul Chandan, Alexandre Ormiga Galvao Barbosa, Michael Caldara, Joey W. Durham, Federico Pecora

Affiliations:

Title: Symbolic Planning and Multi-Agent Path Finding in Extremely Dense Environments with Unassigned Agents

Abstract:
We introduce the Block Rearrangement Problem (BRaP), a challenging component of large warehouse management which involves rearranging storage blocks within dense grids to achieve a goal state. We formally define the BRaP as a graph search problem. Building on intuitions from sliding puzzle problems, we propose five searchbased solution algorithms, leveraging joint configuration space search, classical planning, multi-agent pathfinding, and expert heuristics. We evaluate the five approaches empirically for plan quality and scalability. Despite the exponential relation between search space size and block number, our methods demonstrate efficiency in creating rearrangement plans for deeply buried blocks in up to 80x80 grids.

PaperID: 2505, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08926

Authors:Zhuhui Li, Chunbo Luo, Liming Huang, Luyu Qi, Geyong Min

Affiliations: University of Exeter, Central South University, University of Bristol

Title: Achieving Equilibrium Under Utility Heterogeneity: An Agent-Attention Framework for Multi-Agent Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Multiagent multi-objective systems (MAMOS) have emerged as powerful frameworks for modelling complex decision-making problems across various real-world domains, such as robotic exploration, autonomous traffic management, and sensor network optimisation. MAMOS enhances scalability and robustness through decentralised control and more accurately captures inherent trade-offs between conflicting objectives. In MAMOS, each agent uses utility functions that map return vectors to scalar values. Existing MAMOS optimisation methods face significant challenges in handling heterogeneous objective and utility function settings, where training non-stationarity is intensified due to private utility functions and the associated policies. In this paper, we first theoretically prove that direct access to, or structured modeling of, global utility functions is necessary to achieve the Bayesian Nash Equilibrium under decentralised execution constraints. To access the global utility functions while preserving the decentralised execution, we propose an Agent-Attention Multi-Agent Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (AA-MAMORL) framework. Our approach implicitly learns a joint belief over other agents’ utility functions and their associated policies during centralised training, effectively mapping global states and utilities to each agent's policy. During execution, each agent independently selects actions based on local observations and its private utility function to approximate a BNE, without relying on inter-agent communication. We evaluate our framework through extensive experiments in a custom-designed MAMO Particle environment and the standard MOMALand benchmark. The results demonstrate that accessibility to global preferences and our proposed AA-MAMORL significantly improves performance and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 2506, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06776

Authors:Xufei Tian, Wenli Du, Shaoyi Yang, Han Hu, Hui Xin, Shifeng Qu, Ke Ye

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Industrial Control Technology, East China University of Science and Technology

Title: From Text to Simulation: A Multi-Agent LLM Workflow for Automated Chemical Process Design

Abstract:
Process simulation is a critical cornerstone of chemical engineering design. Current automated chemical design methodologies focus mainly on various representations of process flow diagrams. However, transforming these diagrams into executable simulation flowsheets remains a timeconsuming and labor-intensive endeavor, requiring extensive manual parameter configuration within simulation software. In this work, we propose a novel multi-agent workflow that leverages the semantic understanding capabilities of large language models(LLMs) and enables iterative interactions with chemical process simulation software, achieving end-to-end automated simulation from textual process specifications to computationally validated software configurations for design enhancement. Our approach integrates four specialized agents responsible for task understanding, topology generation, parameter configuration, and evaluation analysis, respectively, coupled with Enhanced Monte Carlo Tree Search to accurately interpret semantics and robustly generate configurations. Evaluated on Simona, a large-scale process description dataset, our method achieves a 31. 1% improvement in the simulation convergence rate compared to state-of-the-art baselines and reduces the design time by 89. 0% compared to the expert manual design. This work demonstrates the potential of AI-assisted chemical process design, which bridges the gap between conceptual design and practical implementation. Our workflow is applicable to diverse process-oriented industries, including pharmaceuticals, petrochemicals, food processing, and manufacturing, offering a generalizable solution for automated process design.

PaperID: 2507, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12254

Authors:Yuxiang Zhou, Jichang Li, Yanhao Zhang, Haonan Lu, Guanbin Li

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Pengcheng Laboratory, OPPO AI Center, OPPO Inc.

Title: Mobile-Agent-RAG: Driving Smart Multi-Agent Coordination with Contextual Knowledge Empowerment for Long-Horizon Mobile Automation

Abstract:
Mobile agents show immense potential, yet current stateof-the-art (SoTA) agents exhibit inadequate success rates on real-world, long-horizon, cross-application tasks. We attribute this bottleneck to the agents' excessive reliance on static, internal knowledge within MLLMs, which leads to two critical failure points: 1) strategic hallucinations in high-level planning and 2) operational errors during low-level execution on user interfaces (UI). The core insight of this paper is that high-level planning and low-level UI operations require fundamentally distinct types of knowledge. Planning demands high-level, strategy-oriented experiences, whereas operations necessitate low-level, precise instructions closely tied to specific app UIs. Motivated by these insights, we propose Mobile-Agent-RAG, a novel hierarchical multi-agent framework that innovatively integrates dual-level retrieval augmentation. At the planning stage, we introduce Manager-RAG to reduce strategic hallucinations by retrieving human-validated comprehensive task plans that provide high-level guidance. At the execution stage, we develop Operator-RAG to improve execution accuracy by retrieving the most precise low-level guidance for accurate atomic actions, aligned with the current app and subtask. To accurately deliver these knowledge types, we construct two specialized retrieval-oriented knowledge bases. Furthermore, we introduce Mobile-Eval-RAG, a challenging benchmark for evaluating such agents on realistic multi-app, long-horizon tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Mobile-Agent-RAG significantly outperforms SoTA baselines, improving task completion rate by 11.0% and step efficiency by 10.2%, establishing a robust paradigm for context-aware, reliable multi-agent mobile automation.

PaperID: 2508, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00520

Authors:Yuzheng Cai, Yanzhao Zhang, Dingkun Long, Mingxin Li, Pengjun Xie, Weiguo Zheng

Affiliations: Fudan University, Alibaba Group

Title: ERank: Fusing Supervised Fine-Tuning and Reinforcement Learning for Effective and Efficient Text Reranking

Abstract:
Text reranking models are a crucial component in modern systems like RetrievalAugmented Generation, tasked with selecting the most relevant documents prior to generation. However, current Large Language Models (LLMs) powered rerankers often face a fundamental trade-off. On one hand, Supervised Fine-Tuning based pointwise methods that frame relevance as a binary classification task lack the necessary scoring discrimination, particularly for those built on reasoning LLMs. On the other hand, approaches designed for complex reasoning often employ powerful yet inefficient listwise formulations, rendering them impractical for low latency applications. To resolve this dilemma, we introduce ERank, a highly Effective and Efficient pointwise reranker built from a reasoning LLM that excels across diverse relevance scenarios. We propose a novel two-stage training pipeline that begins with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). In this stage, we move beyond binary labels and train the model generatively to output fine grained integer scores, which significantly enhances relevance discrimination. The model is then further refined using Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a novel, listwise derived reward. This technique instills global ranking awareness into the efficient pointwise architecture. We evaluate the ERank reranker on the BRIGHT, FollowIR, TREC DL, and BEIR benchmarks, demonstrating superior effectiveness and robustness compared to existing approaches. On the reasoning-intensive BRIGHT benchmark, our ERank-4B achieves an nDCG@10 of 38.7, while a larger 32B variant reaches a state of the art nDCG@10 of 40.2.

PaperID: 2509, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00027

Authors:Zhengyu Chen, Yudong Wang, Teng Xiao, Ruochen Zhou, Xusheng Yang, Wei Wang, Zhifang Sui, Jingang Wang

Affiliations: Meituan Inc., National Key Laboratory for Multimedia Information Processing, Peking University, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence

Title: From Mathematical Reasoning to Code: Generalization of Process Reward Models in Test-Time Scaling

Abstract:
Recent advancements in improving the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models have underscored the efficacy of Process Reward Models (PRMs) in addressing intermediate errors through structured feedback mechanisms. This study analyzes PRMs from multiple perspectives, including training methodologies, scalability, and generalization capabilities. We investigate the interplay between pretraining and reward model training FLOPs to assess their influence on PRM efficiency and accuracy in complex reasoning tasks. Our analysis reveals a pattern of diminishing returns in performance with increasing PRM scale, highlighting the importance of balancing model size and computational cost. Furthermore, the diversity of training datasets significantly impacts PRM performance, emphasizing the importance of diverse data to enhance both accuracy and efficiency. We further examine test-time scaling strategies, identifying Monte Carlo Tree Search as the most effective method when computational resources are abundant, while Best-of-N Sampling serves as a practical alternative under resource-limited conditions. Notably, our findings indicate that PRMs trained on mathematical datasets exhibit performance comparable to those tailored for code generation, suggesting robust cross-domain generalization. Employing a gradient-based metric, we observe that PRMs exhibit a preference for selecting responses with similar underlying patterns, further informing their optimization.

PaperID: 2510, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11518

Authors:Zhenyu Ding, Yuhao Wang, Tengyue Xiao, Haoying Wang, Guojun Ma, Mingyang Wan, Caigui Jiang, Ning Ding

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, Tsinghua University

Title: W2S-AlignTree: Weak-to-Strong Inference-Time Alignment for Large Language Models via Monte Carlo Tree Search

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities, yet their outputs often suffer from misalignment with human preferences due to the inadequacy of weak supervision and a lack of finegrained control. Training-time alignment methods like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) face prohibitive costs in expert supervision and inherent scalability limitations, offering limited dynamic control during inference. Consequently, there is an urgent need for scalable and adaptable alignment mechanisms. To address this, we propose W2S-AlignTree, a pioneering plug-and-play inference-time alignment framework that synergistically combines Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with the Weak-to-Strong Generalization paradigm for the first time. W2S-AlignTree formulates LLM alignment as an optimal heuristic search problem within a generative search tree. By leveraging weak model's real-time, step-level signals as alignment proxies and introducing an Entropy-Aware exploration mechanism, W2S-AlignTree enables fine-grained guidance during strong model's generation without modifying its parameters. The approach dynamically balances exploration and exploitation in high-dimensional generation search trees. Experiments across controlled sentiment generation, summarization, and instruction-following show that W2S-AlignTree consistently outperforms strong baselines. Notably, W2S-AlignTree raises the performance of Llama3-8B from 1.89 to 2.19, a relative improvement of 15.9% on the summarization task.

PaperID: 2511, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02827

Authors:Yulin Dou, Jiangming Liu

Affiliations: Yunnan University

Title: TO-GATE: Clarifying Questions and Summarizing Responses with Trajectory Optimization for Eliciting Human Preference

Abstract:
Humans increasingly query Large Language Models (LLMs) to accomplish personal tasks according to their individual preferences. However, these preferences are often unconsciously veiled during conversation. To address this, LLMs have to elicit human preferences through multiturn dialogue, where tasks are accomplished via iterative clarifying questions and final response generated by LLMs as effective questioners. Existing approaches based on self-taught reasoning have two limitations: 1) they struggle to avoid generating irrelevant questions and 2) the final responses to tasks are misled by the conversations. To overcome these limitations, we propose TO-GATE, a novel framework that enhances question generation through trajectory optimization. TO-GATE comprises two key components: a clarification resolver, which generates optimal questioning trajectories to produce effective elicitation questions, and a summarizer, which ensures task-aligned final responses. Experimental results show that TO-GATE significantly outperforms baseline methods, achieving a 9.32% improvement on standard preference elicitation benchmarks.

PaperID: 2512, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12537

Authors:Xiaoran Fan, Zhichao Sun, Yangfan Gao, Jingfei Xiong, Hang Yan, Yifei Cao, Jiajun Sun, Shuo Li, Zhihao Zhang, Zhiheng Xi, Yuhao Zhou, Senjie Jin, Changhao Jiang, Junjie Ye, Ming Zhang, Rui Zheng, Zhenhua Han, Yunke Zhang, Demei Yan, Shaokang Dong, Tao Ji, Tao Gui

Affiliations: Fudan University, Shanghai Qiji Zhifeng Co., Honor Device Co.

Title: What Makes a Good Speech Tokenizer for LLM-Centric Speech Generation? A Systematic Study

Abstract:
Speechlanguage models (SLMs) offer a promising path toward unifying speech and text understanding and generation. However, challenges remain in achieving effective cross-modal alignment and high-quality speech generation. In this work, we systematically investigate the role of speech tokenizer designs in LLM-centric SLMs, augmented by speech heads and speaker modeling. We compare coupled, semi-decoupled, and fully decoupled speech tokenizers under a fair SLM framework and find that decoupled tokenization significantly improves alignment and synthesis quality. To address the information density mismatch between speech and text, we introduce multi-token prediction (MTP) into SLMs, enabling each hidden state to decode multiple speech tokens. This leads to up to 12× faster decoding and a substantial drop in word error rate (from 6.07 to 3.01). Furthermore, we propose a speaker-aware generation paradigm and introduce RoleTriviaQA, a large-scale role-playing knowledge QA benchmark with diverse speaker identities. Experiments demonstrate that our methods enhance both knowledge understanding and speaker consistency.

PaperID: 2513, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12337

Authors:Yushen Fang, Jianjun Li, Mingqian Ding, Chang Liu, Xinchi Zou, Wenqi Yang

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: SCIR: A Self-Correcting Iterative Refinement Framework for Enhanced Information Extraction Based on Schema

Abstract:
Although Large language Model (LLM)powered information extraction (IE) systems have shown impressive capabilities, current fine-tuning paradigms face two major limitations: high training costs and difficulties in aligning with LLM preferences. To address these issues, we propose a novel universal IE paradigm—the Self-Correcting Iterative Refinement (SCIR) framework—along with a Multi-task Bilingual (Chinese-English) Self-Correcting (MBSC) dataset containing over 100,000 entries. The SCIR framework achieves plug-and-play compatibility with existing LLMs and IE systems through its Dual-Path Self-Correcting module and feedback-driven optimization, thereby significantly reducing training costs. Concurrently, the MBSC dataset tackles the challenge of preference alignment by indirectly distilling GPT-4's capabilities into IE result detection models. Experimental results demonstrate that SCIR outperforms state-of-the-art IE methods across three key tasks— named entity recognition, relation extraction, and event extraction—achieving a 5.27 percent average improvement in span-based Micro-F1 while reducing training costs by 87 percent compared to baseline approaches. These advancements not only enhance the flexibility and accuracy of IE systems but also pave the way for lightweight and efficient IE paradigms.

PaperID: 2514, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.08202

Authors:Yu Fu, Haz Sameen Shahgir, Hui Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Qi He, Yue Dong

Affiliations: University of California

Title: Harnessing the Unseen: The Hidden Influence of Intrinsic Knowledge in Long-Context Language Models

Abstract:
Recent advances in longcontext language models (LCLMs), designed to handle extremely long contexts, primarily focus on utilizing external contextual information, often leaving the influence of language models' parametric knowledge underexplored. In this work, we firstly investigate how this parametric knowledge affects content generation and demonstrate that its impact becomes increasingly pronounced as context length extends. Furthermore, we show that the model’s ability to utilize parametric knowledge, which we call parametric recall ability, does not improve simultaneously with its ability to leverage contextual knowledge through extrinsic retrieval ability. Moreover, better extrinsic retrieval ability can interfere with the model’s parametric recall ability, limiting its full potential. To bridge this gap, we design a simple yet effective Hybrid Needle-in-a-Haystack test that evaluates models based on their capabilities across both abilities, rather than solely emphasizing extrinsic retrieval ability. Our experimental results reveal that Qwen-2.5 models significantly outperform Llama-3.1 models, demonstrating superior potential to combine various abilities. Moreover, even the more powerful Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct model fails to exhibit better performance, highlighting the importance of evaluating models from a dual-ability perspective.

PaperID: 2515, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20606

Authors:Baixiang Huang, Zhen Tan, Haoran Wang, Zijie Liu, Dawei Li, Ali Payani, Huan Liu, Tianlong Chen, Kai Shu

Affiliations: Emory University, Arizona State University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Title: Model Editing as a Double-Edged Sword: Steering Agent Behavior Toward Beneficence or Harm

Abstract:
Agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities across a wide range of tasks. However, deploying LLMbased agents in high-stakes domains comes with significant safety and ethical risks. Unethical behavior by these agents can directly result in serious real-world consequences, including physical harm and financial loss. To efficiently steer the ethical behavior of agents, we frame agent behavior steering as a model editing task, which we term Behavior Editing. Model editing is an emerging area of research that enables precise and efficient modifications to LLMs while preserving their overall capabilities. To systematically study and evaluate this approach, we introduce BehaviorBench, a multi-tier benchmark grounded in psychological moral theories. This benchmark supports both the evaluation and editing of agent behaviors across a variety of scenarios, with each tier introducing more complex and ambiguous scenarios. We first demonstrate that Behavior Editing can dynamically steer agents toward the target behavior within specific scenarios. Moreover, Behavior Editing enables not only scenario-specific local adjustments but also more extensive shifts in an agent’s global moral alignment. We demonstrate that Behavior Editing can be used to promote ethical and benevolent behavior or, conversely, to induce harmful or malicious behavior. Through extensive evaluations of agents built on frontier LLMs, BehaviorBench validates the effectiveness of behavior editing across a wide range of models and scenarios. Our findings offer key insights into a new paradigm for steering agent behavior, highlighting both the promise and perils of Behavior Editing.

PaperID: 2516, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10045

Authors:Jinhong Jeong, Sunghyun Lee, Jaeyoung Lee, Seonah Han, Youngjae Yu

Affiliations: Yonsei University, Seoul National University, Korea University

Title: Do Language Models Associate Sound with Meaning? A Multimodal Study of Sound Symbolism

Abstract:
Sound symbolism is a linguistic concept that refers to nonarbitrary associations between phonetic forms and their meanings. We suggest that this can be a compelling probe into how Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) interpret auditory information in human languages. We investigate MLLMs' performance on phonetic iconicity across textual (orthographic and IPA) and auditory forms of inputs with up to 25 semantic dimensions (e.g., sharp vs. round), observing models' layer-wise information processing by measuring phoneme-level attention fraction scores. To this end, we present LEX-ICON, an extensive mimetic word dataset consisting of 8,052 words from four natural languages (English, French, Japanese, and Korean) and 2,930 systematically constructed pseudo-words, annotated with semantic features applied across both text and audio modalities. Our key findings demonstrate (1) MLLMs' phonetic intuitions that align with existing linguistic research across multiple semantic dimensions and (2) phonosemantic attention patterns that highlight models' focus on iconic phonemes. These results bridge domains of artificial intelligence and cognitive linguistics, providing the first large-scale, quantitative analyses of phonetic iconicity in terms of MLLMs' interpretability.

PaperID: 2517, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.16926

Authors:Chenxu Li, Zhicai Wang, Yuan Sheng, Xingyu Zhu, Yanbin Hao, Xiang Wang

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei University of Technology

Title: Res-Bench: Benchmarking the Robustness of Multimodal Large Language Models to Dynamic Resolution Input

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) increasingly support dynamic image resolutions. However, current evaluation paradigms primarily assess semantic performance, overlooking the critical question of resolution robustness whether performance remains stable across varying input resolutions. To address this gap, we introduce Res-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising 14,400 samples across 12 resolution levels and six core capability dimensions. We designed a novel evaluation framework that goes beyond traditional accuracy metrics to capture performance stability. This framework introduces multiple robustness metrics: Spearman's correlation for assessing resolution-performance trends, and Absolute/Relative Continuous Error (ACE/RCE) for measuring performance volatility. Using these metrics, we conducted a large-scale evaluation of leading MLLMs. Our analysis encompasses: (1) model-centric and task-centric robustness examination, (2) investigation of preprocessing strategies including padding and super-resolution, and (3) exploration of fine-tuning for stability enhancement.

PaperID: 2518, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10051

Authors:Zhenhe Li, Can Lin, Ling Zheng, Wen-Da Wei, Junli Liang, Qi Song

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University

Title: GraphIF: Enhancing Multi-Turn Instruction Following for Large Language Models with Relation Graph Prompt

Abstract:
Multiturn instruction following is essential for building intelligent conversational systems that can consistently adhere to instructions across dialogue turns. However, existing approaches to enhancing multi-turn instruction following primarily rely on collecting or generating large-scale multi-turn dialogue datasets to fine-tune large language models (LLMs), which treat each response generation as an isolated task and fail to explicitly incorporate multi-turn instruction following into the optimization objectives. As a result, instruction-tuned LLMs often struggle with complex long-distance constraints. In multi-turn dialogues, relational constraints across turns can be naturally modeled as labeled directed edges, making graph structures particularly suitable for modeling multi-turn instruction following. Despite this potential, leveraging graph structures to enhance the multi-turn instruction following capabilities of LLMs remains unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose GraphIF, a plug-and-play framework that models multi-turn dialogues as directed relation graphs and leverages graph prompts to enhance the instruction following capabilities of LLMs. GraphIF comprises three key components: (1) an agent-based relation extraction module that captures inter-turn semantic relations via action-triggered mechanisms to construct structured graphs; (2) a relation graph prompt generation module that converts structured graph information into natural language prompts; and (3) a response rewriting module that refines initial LLM outputs using the generated graph prompts. Extensive experiments on two long multi-turn dialogue datasets demonstrate that GraphIF can be seamlessly integrated into instruction-tuned LLMs and leads to significant improvements across all four multi-turn instruction-following evaluation metrics.

PaperID: 2519, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.01926

Authors:Zhifei Li, Yiran Wang, Chenyi Xiong, Yujing Xia, Xiaoju Hou, Yue Zhao, Miao Zhang, Kui Xiao, Bing Yang

Title: MacVQA: Adaptive Memory Allocation and Global Noise Filtering for Continual Visual Question Answering

Abstract:
Visual Question Answering (VQA) requires models to reason over multimodal information, combining visual and textual data. With the development of continual learning, significant progress has been made in retaining knowledge and adapting to new information in the VQA domain. However, current methods often struggle with balancing knowledge retention, adaptation, and robust feature representation. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework with adaptive memory allocation and global noise filtering called MacVQA for visual question answering. MacVQA fuses visual and question information while filtering noise to ensure robust representations, and employs prototypebased memory allocation to optimize feature quality and memory usage. These designs enable MacVQA to balance knowledge acquisition, retention, and compositional generalization in continual VQA learning. Experiments on ten continual VQA tasks show that MacVQA outperforms existing baselines, achieving 43.38% average accuracy and 2.32% average forgetting on standard tasks, and 42.53% average accuracy and 3.60% average forgetting on novel composition tasks.

PaperID: 2520, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.15793

Authors:Jiacheng Liu, Mayi Xu, Qiankun Pi, Wenli Li, Ming Zhong, Yuanyuan Zhu, Mengchi Liu, Tieyun Qian

Affiliations: Wuhan University

Title: Format as a Prior: Quantifying and Analyzing Bias in LLMs for Heterogeneous Data

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly employed in applications that require processing information from heterogeneous formats, including texts, tables, infoboxes, and knowledge graphs. However, systematic biases toward particular formats may undermine LLMs' ability to integrate heterogeneous data impartially, potentially resulting in reasoning errors and increased risks in downstream tasks. Yet it remains unclear whether such biases are systematic, which datalevel factors drive them, and what internal mechanisms underlie their emergence. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive study of format bias in LLMs through a three-stage empirical analysis. The first stage explores the presence and direction of bias across a diverse range of LLMs. The second stage examines how key data-level factors influence these biases. The third stage analyzes how format bias emerges within LLMs' attention patterns and evaluates a lightweight intervention to test its effectiveness. Our results show that format bias is consistent across model families, driven by information richness, structure quality, and representation type, and is closely associated with attention imbalance within the LLMs. Based on these investigations, we identify three future research directions to reduce format bias: enhancing data pre-processing through format repair and normalization, introducing inference-time interventions such as attention re-weighting, and developing format-balanced training corpora. These directions will support the design of more robust and fair heterogeneous data processing systems.

PaperID: 2521, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15843

Authors:Junshu Pan, Wei Shen, Shulin Huang, Qiji Zhou, Yue Zhang

Affiliations: Independent Researcher, Westlake University, School of Engineering

Title: Pre-DPO: Improving Data Utilization in Direct Preference Optimization Using a Guiding Reference Model

Abstract:
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) simplifies reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) for large language models (LLMs) by directly training on offline preference data to align with human preferences. During DPO training, the reference model serves as a data weight adjuster. However, the common practice of initializing the policy and reference models identically in DPO can lead to inefficient data utilization and impose a performance ceiling. Meanwhile, the absence of a reference model in Simple Preference Optimization (SimPO) reduces training robustness and requires stricter conditions to prevent catastrophic forgetting. In this work, we propose PreDPO, a simple yet effective DPO-based training paradigm that improves preference optimization by introducing a guiding reference model. This reference model provides foresight into the desired policy state achievable through the training preference data, serving as a guiding mechanism that adaptively assigns higher weights to samples more suitable for the model and lower weights to those less suitable. Extensive experiments on the AlpacaEval 2 and Arena-Hard v0.1 benchmarks demonstrate that Pre-DPO consistently improves the performance of both DPO and SimPO, without relying on external models or additional data.

PaperID: 2522, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.15498

Authors:Md Imbesat Hassan Rizvi, Xiaodan Zhu, Iryna Gurevych

Affiliations: Technical University of Darmstadt, Queen’s University

Title: SPARE: Single-Pass Annotation with Reference-Guided Evaluation for Automatic Process Supervision and Reward Modelling

Abstract:
Process or stepwise supervision has played a crucial role in advancing complex multi-step reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, efficient, high-quality automated process annotation remains a significant challenge. To address this, we introduce Single-Pass Annotation with Reference-Guided Evaluation (SPARE), a novel structured framework that enables efficient per-step annotation by jointly aligning solution steps to reference solutions and determine its accuracy with explicit reasoning in single generation. We demonstrate SPARE's effectiveness across four diverse datasets spanning mathematical reasoning (GSM8K, MATH), multi-hop question answering (MuSiQue-Ans), and spatial reasoning (SpaRP), showing consistent improvements in two applications: (1) training Process Reward Models (PRMs) for ranking and aggregating multiple generations, and (2) fine-tuning models via offline reinforcement learning for greedy decoding. On PROCESSBENCH, SPARE demonstrates data-efficient out-of-distribution generalization, using only ~16% of training samples compared to human-labeled and other synthetically trained baselines. Additionally, it achieves competitive performance with MCTS-based methods while offering 2.3x speedup in terms of total token count. Manual analysis reveals complementary precision-recall characteristics with MCTS approaches, suggesting potential for ensemble methods. These results establish SPARE as a practical and scalable solution for automatic process supervision in LLM reasoning.

PaperID: 2523, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.10416

Authors:Tiesunlong Shen, Rui Mao, Jin Wang, Heming Sun, Jian Zhang, Xuejie Zhang, Erik Cambria

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University, Yunnan University, Yokohama National University, Xi'an Jiaotong University

Title: LLMdoctor: Token-Level Flow-Guided Preference Optimization for Efficient Test-Time Alignment of Large Language Models

Abstract:
Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is critical, yet traditional finetuning methods are computationally expensive and inflexible. While test-time alignment offers a promising alternative, existing approaches often rely on distorted trajectory-level signals or inefficient sampling, fundamentally capping performance and failing to preserve the generative diversity of the base model. This paper introduces LLMdoctor, a novel framework for efficient test-time alignment that operates via a patient-doctor paradigm. It integrates token-level reward acquisition with token-level flow-guided preference optimization (TFPO) to steer a large, frozen patient LLM with a smaller, specialized doctor model. Unlike conventional methods that rely on trajectory-level rewards, LLMdoctor first extracts fine-grained, token-level preference signals from the patient model's behavioral variations. These signals then guide the training of the doctor model via TFPO, which establishes flow consistency across all subtrajectories, enabling precise token-by-token alignment while inherently preserving generation diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LLMdoctor significantly outperforms existing test-time alignment methods and even surpasses the performance of full fine-tuning approaches like DPO.

PaperID: 2524, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10303

Authors:Changyuan Tian, Zhicong Lu, Shuang Qian, Nayu Liu, Peiguang Li, Li Jin, Leiyi Hu, Zhizhao Zeng, Sirui Wang, Ke Zeng, Guozhi Cas

Affiliations: Aerospace Information Research Institute, Electrical and Communication Engineering, School of Computer Science and Technology, Tiangong University, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Rectify Evaluation Preference: Improving LLMs’ Critique on Math Reasoning via Perplexity-aware Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
To improve Multistep Mathematical Reasoning (MsMR) of Large Language Models (LLMs), it is crucial to obtain scalable supervision from the corpus by automatically critiquing mistakes in the reasoning process of MsMR and rendering a final verdict of the problem-solution. Most existing methods rely on crafting high-quality supervised fine-tuning demonstrations for critiquing capability enhancement and pay little attention to delving into the underlying reason for the poor critiquing performance of LLMs. In this paper, we orthogonally quantify and investigate the potential reason — imbalanced evaluation preference, and conduct a statistical preference analysis. Motivated by the analysis of the reason, a novel perplexity-aware reinforcement learning algorithm is proposed to rectify the evaluation preference, elevating the critiquing capability. Specifically, to probe into LLMs' critiquing characteristics, a One-to-many Problem-Solution (OPS) benchmark is meticulously constructed to quantify the behavior difference of LLMs when evaluating the problem solutions generated by itself and others. Then, to investigate the behavior difference in depth, we conduct a statistical preference analysis oriented on perplexity and find an intriguing phenomenon — "LLMs incline to judge solutions with lower perplexity as correct", which is dubbed as imbalanced evaluation preference. To rectify this preference, we regard perplexity as the baton in the algorithm of Group Relative Policy Optimization, supporting the LLMs to explore trajectories that judge lower perplexity as wrong and higher perplexity as correct. Extensive experimental results on our built OPS and existing available critic benchmarks demonstrate the validity of our method.

PaperID: 2525, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01396

Authors:Haiyuan Wan, Chen Yang, Junchi Yu, Meiqi Tu, Jiaxuan Lu, Di Yu, Jianbao Cao, Ben Gao, Jiaqing Xie, Aoran Wang, Wenlong Zhang, Philip Torr, Dongzhan Zhou

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, University of Oxford, University of Hong Kong, Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Title: Deep Research Arena: The First Exam of LLMs’ Research Abilities via Seminar-Grounded Tasks

Abstract:
Deep research agents have attracted growing attention for their potential to orchestrate multistage research workflows, spanning literature synthesis, methodological design, and empirical verification. Despite these strides, evaluating their research capability faithfully is rather challenging due to the difficulty of collecting frontier research questions that genuinely capture researchers’ attention and intellectual curiosity. To address this gap, we introduce DeepResearch Arena, a benchmark grounded in academic seminars that capture rich expert discourse and interaction, better reflecting real-world research environments and reducing the risk of data leakage. To automatically construct DeepResearch Arena, we propose a Multi-Agent Hierarchical Task Generation (MAHTG) system that extracts research-worthy inspirations from seminar transcripts. The MAHTG system further translates research-worthy inspirations into high-quality research tasks, ensuring the traceability of research task formulation while filtering noise. With the MAHTG system, we curate DeepResearch Arena with over 10,000 high-quality research tasks from over 200 academic seminars, spanning 12 disciplines, such as literature, history, and science. Our extensive evaluation shows that DeepResearch Arena presents substantial challenges for current state-of-the-art agents, with clear performance gaps observed across different models.

PaperID: 2526, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12982

Authors:Jiatai Wang, Zhiwei Xu, Di Jin, Xuewen Yang, Tao Li

Affiliations: The College of Computer Science, Nankai University, Haihe Lab of ITAI, China Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Eigen AI, Palo Alto, The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Stony Brook University, New York

Title: Accommodate Knowledge Conflicts in Retrieval-augmented LLMs: Towards Robust Response Generation in the Wild

Abstract:
The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has significantly advanced intelligent systems. Unfortunately, LLMs often face knowledge conflicts between internal memory and retrieved external information, arising from misinformation, biases, or outdated knowledge. These conflicts undermine response reliability and introduce uncertainty in decisionmaking. In this work, we analyze how LLMs navigate knowledge conflicts from an information-theoretic perspective and reveal that when conflicting and supplementary information exhibit significant differences, LLMs confidently resolve their preferences and alleviate the uncertainty during their response generation. When this difference is ambiguous, LLMs experience considerable uncertainty about their generation. Based on this insight, we propose Swin-VIB, a novel framework that integrates a pipeline of variational information bottleneck models to adapt the retrieved information difference, facilitating robust response generation of LLMs even in conflicting contexts. Extensive experiments confirm our theoretical analysis and demonstrate the performance of Swin-VIB. Notably, Swin-VIB outperforms all competitive baselines in terms of the accuracy of the multiple-choice task, while improving the EM values in the open-ended QA task by at least 11.14%.

PaperID: 2527, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07334

Authors:Xi Wang, Quan Shi, Zenghui Ding, Jianqing Gao, Xianjun Yang

Affiliations: Hefei Institute of Physical Sciences, Changzhou University, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Hallucination as a Computational Boundary: A Hierarchy of Inevitability and the Oracle Escape

Abstract:
The illusion phenomenon of large language models (LLMs) is the core obstacle to their reliable deployment. This article formalizes the large language model as a probabilistic Turing machine by constructing a "computational necessity hierarchy", and for the first time proves the illusions are inevitable on diagonalization, incomputability, and information theory boundaries supported by the new "learner pump lemma". However, we propose two "escape routes": one is to model Retrieval Enhanced Generations (RAGs) as oracle machines, proving their absolute escape through "computational jumps", providing the first formal theory for the effectiveness of RAGs; The second is to formalize continuous learning as an "internalized oracle" mechanism and implement this path through a novel neural game theory framework.Finally, this article proposes a feasible new principle for artificial intelligence security Computational Class Alignment (CCA), which requires strict matching between task complexity and the actual computing power of the system, providing theoretical support for the secure application of artificial intelligence.

PaperID: 2528, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19005

Authors:Di Wu, Liting Jiang, Ruiyu Fang, Bianjing, Hongyan Xie, Haoxiang Su, Hao Huang, Zhongjiang He, Shuangyong Song, Xuelong Li

Affiliations: Xinjiang University, Institute of Artificial Intelligence of China Telecom (TeleAI), School of Computer, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China Joint International Research Laboratory of Silk Multilingual Cognitive Computing

Title: Introducing Visual Scenes and Reasoning: A More Realistic Benchmark for Spoken Language Understanding

Abstract:
Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) consists of two subtasks: intent detection (ID) and slot filling (SF). Given its broad range of real-world applications, enhancing SLU for practical deployment is increasingly critical. Profile-based SLU addresses ambiguous user utterances by incorporating context awareness (CA), user profiles (UP), and knowledge graphs (KG) to support disambiguation, thereby advancing SLU research toward real-world applicability. However, existing SLU datasets still fall short in representing real-world scenarios. Specifically, (1) CA uses one-hot vectors for representation, which is overly idealized, and (2) models typically focuses solely on predicting intents and slot labels, neglecting the reasoning process that could enhance performance and interpretability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce VRSLU, a novel SLU dataset that integrates both Visual images and explicit Reasoning. For over-idealized CA, we use GPT-4o and FLUX.1-dev to generate images reflecting users’ environments and statuses, followed by human verification to ensure quality. For reasoning, GPT-4o is employed to generate explanations for predicted labels, which are then refined by human annotators to ensure accuracy and coherence. Additionally, we propose an instructional template, LR-Instruct, which first predicts labels and then generates corresponding reasoning. This two-step approach helps mitigate the influence of reasoning bias on label prediction. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of incorporating visual information and highlight the promise of explicit reasoning in advancing SLU.

PaperID: 2529, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10358

Authors:Mengtao Zhou, Sifan Wu, Huan Zhang, Qi Sima, Bang Liu

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Université de Montréal Mila - Quebec AI Institute

Title: What to Ask Next? Probing the Imaginative Reasoning of LLMs with TurtleSoup Puzzles

Abstract:
We investigate the capacity of Large Language Models (LLMs) for imaginative reasoning—the proactive construction, testing, and revision of hypotheses in informationsparse environments. Existing benchmarks, often static or focused on social deduction, fail to capture the dynamic, exploratory nature of this reasoning process. To address this gap, we introduce a comprehensive research framework based on the classic "Turtle Soup" game, integrating a benchmark, an agent, and an evaluation protocol. We present TurtleSoup-Bench, the first large-scale, bilingual, interactive benchmark for imaginative reasoning, comprising 800 turtle soup stories sourced from both the Internet and expert authors. We also propose Mosaic-Agent, a novel agent designed to assess LLMs' performance in this setting. To evaluate reasoning quality, we develop a multi-dimensional protocol measuring logical consistency, detail completion, and conclusion alignment. Experiments with leading LLMs reveal clear capability limits, common failure patterns, and a significant performance gap compared to humans. Our work offers new insights into LLMs' imaginative reasoning and establishes a foundation for future research on exploratory agent behavior.

PaperID: 2530, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.14099

Authors:Yihua Zhu, Qianying Liu, Akiko Aizawa, Hidetoshi Shimodaira

Affiliations: NII LLMC, Kyoto University RIKEN AIP

Title: Beyond Chains: Bridging Large Language Models and Knowledge Bases in Complex Question Answering

Abstract:
Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) aims to answer natural language questions using structured knowledge from KBs. While LLMonly approaches offer generalization, they suffer from outdated knowledge, hallucinations, and lack of transparency. Chain-based KG-RAG methods address these issues by incorporating external KBs, but are limited to simple chain-structured questions due to the absence of planning and logical structuring. Inspired by semantic parsing methods, we propose PDRR: a four-stage framework consisting of Predict, Decompose, Retrieve, and Reason. Our method first predicts the question type and decomposes the question into structured triples. Then retrieves relevant information from KBs and guides the LLM as an agent to reason over and complete the decomposed triples. Experimental results show that our proposed KBQA model, PDRR, consistently outperforms existing methods across different LLM backbones and achieves superior performance on various types of questions.

PaperID: 2531, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09966

Authors:Yijie Zhu, Haojie Zhou, Wanting Hong, Tailin Liu, Ning Wang

Affiliations: Jiangnan University

Title: REAP: Enhancing RAG with Recursive Evaluation and Adaptive Planning for Multi-Hop Question Answering

Abstract:
Retrievalaugmented generation (RAG) has been extensively employed to mitigate hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods for multi-hop reasoning tasks often lack global planning, increasing the risk of falling into local reasoning impasses. Insufficient exploitation of retrieved content and the neglect of latent clues fail to ensure the accuracy of reasoning outcomes. To overcome these limitations, we propose Recursive Evaluation and Adaptive Planning (REAP), whose core idea is to explicitly maintain structured sub-tasks and facts related to the current task through the Sub-task Planner (SP) and Fact Extractor (FE) modules. SP maintains a global perspective, guiding the overall reasoning direction and evaluating the task state based on the outcomes of FE, enabling dynamic optimization of the task-solving trajectory. FE performs fine-grained analysis over retrieved content to extract reliable answers and clues. These two modules incrementally enrich a logically coherent representation of global knowledge, enhancing the reliability and the traceability of the reasoning process. Furthermore, we propose a unified task paradigm design that enables effective multi-task fine-tuning, significantly enhancing SP's performance on complex, data-scarce tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple public multi-hop datasets, and the results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing RAG methods in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings, validating its effectiveness in complex multi-hop reasoning tasks.

PaperID: 2532, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21871

Authors:Naen Xu, Jinghuai Zhang, Changjiang Li, Hengyu An, Chunyi Zhou, Jun Wang, Boyu Xu, Yuyuan Li, Tianyu Du, Shouling Ji

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, University of California, Los Angeles, Palo Alto Networks, OPPO Research Institute, Hangzhou Xuanye Digital Technology Co., Hangzhou Dianzi University

Title: Bridging the Copyright Gap: Do Large Vision-Language Models Recognize and Respect Copyrighted Content?

Abstract:
Large visionlanguage models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable advancements in multimodal reasoning tasks. However, their widespread accessibility raises critical concerns about potential copyright infringement. Will LVLMs accurately recognize and comply with copyright regulations when encountering copyrighted content (i.e., user input, retrieved documents) in the context? Failure to comply with copyright regulations may lead to serious legal and ethical consequences, particularly when LVLMs generate responses based on copyrighted materials (e.g., retrieved book experts, news reports). In this paper, we present a comprehensive evaluation of various LVLMs, examining how they handle copyrighted content – such as book excerpts, news articles, music lyrics, and code documentation when they are presented as visual inputs. To systematically measure copyright compliance, we introduce a large-scale benchmark dataset comprising 50,000 multimodal query-content pairs designed to evaluate how effectively LVLMs handle queries that could lead to copyright infringement. Given that real-world copyrighted content may or may not include a copyright notice, the dataset includes query-content pairs in two distinct scenarios: with and without a copyright notice. For the former, we extensively cover four types of copyright notices to account for different cases. Our evaluation reveals that even state-of-the-art closed-source LVLMs exhibit significant deficiencies in recognizing and respecting the copyrighted content, even when presented with the copyright notice. To solve this limitation, we introduce a novel tool-augmented defense framework for copyright compliance, which reduces infringement risks in all scenarios. Our findings underscore the importance of developing copyright-aware LVLMs to ensure the responsible and lawful use of copyrighted content.

PaperID: 2533, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.04882

Authors:Xiaodong Zhu, Suting Wang, Yuanming Zheng, Junqi Yang, Yangxu Liao, Yuhong Yang, Weiping Tu, Zhongyuan Wang

Affiliations: Wuhan University

Title: DeformTrace: A Deformable State Space Model with Relay Tokens for Temporal Forgery Localization

Abstract:
Temporal Forgery Localization (TFL) aims to precisely identify manipulated segments in video and audio, offering strong interpretability for security and forensics. While recent State Space Models (SSMs) show promise in precise temporal reasoning, their use in TFL is hindered by ambiguous boundaries, sparse forgeries, and limited longrange modeling. We propose DeformTrace, which enhances SSMs with deformable dynamics and relay mechanisms to address these challenges. Specifically, Deformable Self-SSM (DS-SSM) introduces dynamic receptive fields into SSMs for precise temporal localization. To further enhance its capacity for temporal reasoning and mitigate long-range decay, a Relay Token Mechanism is integrated into DS-SSM. Besides, Deformable Cross-SSM (DC-SSM) partitions the global state space into query-specific subspaces, reducing non-forgery information accumulation and boosting sensitivity to sparse forgeries. These components are integrated into a hybrid architecture that combines the global modeling of Transformers with the efficiency of SSMs. Extensive experiments show that DeformTrace achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer parameters, faster inference, and stronger robustness.

PaperID: 2534, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10705

Authors:Yuan Zhao, Hualei Zhu, Tingyu Jiang, Shen Li, Xiaohang Xu, Hao Henry Wang

Affiliations: Alibaba Cloud Computing, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo

Title: Co-EPG: A Framework for Co-Evolution of Planning and Grounding in Autonomous GUI Agents

Abstract:
Graphical User Interface (GUI) task automation constitutes a critical frontier in artificial intelligence research. While effective GUI agents synergistically integrate planning and grounding capabilities, current methodologies exhibit two fundamental limitations: (1) insufficient exploitation of crossmodel synergies, and (2) over-reliance on synthetic data generation without sufficient utilization. To address these challenges, we propose Co-EPG, a self-iterative training framework for Co-Evolution of Planning and Grounding. Co-EPG establishes an iterative positive feedback loop: through this loop, the planning model explores superior strategies under grounding-based reward guidance via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), generating diverse data to optimize the grounding model. Concurrently, the optimized Grounding model provides more effective rewards for subsequent GRPO training of the planning model, fostering continuous improvement. Co-EPG thus enables iterative enhancement of agent capabilities through self-play optimization and training data distillation. On the Multimodal-Mind2Web and AndroidControl benchmarks, our framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods after just three iterations without requiring external data. The agent consistently improves with each iteration, demonstrating robust self-enhancement capabilities. This work establishes a novel training paradigm for GUI agents, shifting from isolated optimization to an integrated, self-driven co-evolution approach.

PaperID: 2535, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10233

Authors:Jianghan Zhu, Yaoxin Wu, Zhuoyi Lin, Zhengyuan Zhang, Haiyan Yin, Zhiguang Cao, Senthilnath Jayavelu, Xiaoli Li

Affiliations: Singapore Management University, Eindhoven University of Technology, Institute for Infocomm Research, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Nanyang Technological University, Centre for Frontier AI Research (CFAR)

Title: Bridging Synthetic and Real Routing Problems via LLM-Guided Instance Generation and Progressive Adaptation

Abstract:
Recent advances in Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) methods have significantly improved the capability of neural solvers to handle synthetic routing instances. Nonetheless, existing neural solvers typically struggle to generalize effectively from synthetic, uniformlydistributed training data to real-world VRP scenarios, including widely recognized benchmark instances from TSPLib and CVRPLib. To bridge this generalization gap, we present Evolutionary Realistic Instance Synthesis (EvoReal), which leverages an evolutionary module guided by large language models (LLMs) to generate synthetic instances characterized by diverse and realistic structural patterns. Specifically, the evolutionary module produces synthetic instances whose structural attributes statistically mimics those observed in authentic real-world instances. Subsequently, pre-trained NCO models are progressively refined, firstly aligning them with these structurally enriched synthetic distributions and then further adapting them through direct fine-tuning on actual benchmark instances. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that EvoReal markedly improves the generalization capabilities of state-of-the-art neural solvers, yielding a notable reduced performance gap compared to the optimal solutions on the TSPLib (1.05%) and CVRPLib (2.71%) benchmarks across a broad spectrum of problem scales.

PaperID: 2536, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15533

Authors:Peter Amorese, Morteza Lahijanian

Affiliations: University of Colorado at Boulder

Title: Universal Learning of Stochastic Dynamics for Exact Belief Propagation Using Bernstein Normalizing Flows

Abstract:
Predicting the distribution of future states in a stochastic system, known as belief propagation, is fundamental to reasoning under uncertainty. However, nonlinear dynamics often make analytical belief propagation intractable, requiring approximate methods. When the system model is unknown and must be learned from data, a key question arises: can we learn a model that (i) universally approximates general nonlinear stochastic dynamics, and (ii) supports analytical belief propagation? This paper establishes the theoretical foundations for a class of models that satisfy both properties. The proposed approach combines the expressiveness of normalizing flows for density estimation with the analytical tractability of Bernstein polynomials. Empirical results show the efficacy of our learned model over stateof-the art data-driven methods for belief propagation, especially for highly non-linear systems with non-additive, non-Gaussian noise.

PaperID: 2537, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.10884

Authors:Hyunwoo Cho, Hyeontae Jo, Hyung Ju Hwang

Affiliations: Pohang University of Science and Technology, Korea University Institute for Basic Science

Title: Learning from Imperfect Data: Robust Inference of Dynamic Systems Using Simulation-Based Generative Model

Abstract:
System inference for nonlinear dynamic models, represented by ordinary differential equations (ODEs), remains a significant challenge in many fields, particularly when the data are noisy, sparse, or partially observable. In this paper, we propose a Simulationbased Generative Model for Imperfect Data (SiGMoID), that enables precise and robust inference for dynamic systems. The proposed approach integrates two key methods: (1) HyperPINN, and (2) W-GAN. We demonstrate that SiGMoID quantifies data noise, estimates system parameters, and infers unobserved system components. Its effectiveness is validated by analyzing examples based on realistic experiments, showcasing its broad applicability in various domains, from scientific research to engineered systems, and enabling the discovery of full system dynamics.

PaperID: 2538, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.22557

Authors:Boyuan Chen, Minghao Shao, Abdul Basit, Siddharth Garg, Muhammad Shafique

Affiliations: New York University Abu Dhabi, New York University Tandon School of Engineering

Title: MetaCipher: A Time-Persistent and Universal Multi-Agent Framework for Cipher-Based Jailbreak Attacks for LLMs

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) face persistent vulnerability to jailbreak attacks despite their increasing capabilities. While developers deploy alignment finetuning and safety guardrails, researchers consistently devise novel attacks that circumvent these defenses. This dynamic mirrors a strategic game of continual evolution. However, two challenges hinder jailbreak development: the high cost of querying toptier LLMs and the short lifespan of effective attacks due to frequent safety updates. These factors limit cost-efficiency and impact. To address this, we propose MetaCipher, a low-cost, multi-agent jailbreak framework that generalizes across LLMs with varying safety measures. Using reinforcement learning, MetaCipher is modular and adaptive, supporting extensibility to future strategies. Within as few as 10 queries, MetaCipher achieves state-of-the-art attack success rates on recent malicious prompt benchmarks, outperforming prior jailbreak methods. We conduct a large-scale empirical evaluation across diverse victim models, demonstrating its robustness and adaptability.

PaperID: 2539, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07485

Authors:Alexander Duffy, Samuel J Paech, Ishana Shastri, Elizabeth Karpinski, Baptiste Alloui-Cros, Tyler Marques, Matthew Lyle Olson

Affiliations: Good Start Labs, Independent Researcher, University of Oxford

Title: Democratizing Diplomacy: A Harness for Evaluating Any Large Language Model on Full-Press Diplomacy

Abstract:
We present the first evaluation harness that enables any outof-the-box, local, Large Language Models (LLMs) to play full-press Diplomacy without fine-tuning or specialized training. Previous work required frontier LLMs, or fine-tuning, due to the high complexity and information density of Diplomacy's game state. Combined with the high variance of matches, these factors made Diplomacy prohibitive for study. In this work, we used data-driven iteration to optimize a textual game state representation such that a 24B model can reliably complete matches without any fine tuning. We develop tooling to facilitate hypothesis testing and statistical analysis, and we present case studies on persuasion, aggressive playstyles, and performance across a range of models. We conduct a variety of experiments across many popular LLMs, finding the larger models perform the best, but the smaller models still play adequately. We also introduce Critical State Analysis: an experimental protocol for rapidly iterating and analyzing key moments in a game at depth. Our harness democratizes the evaluation of strategic reasoning in LLMs by eliminating the need for fine-tuning, and it provides insights into how these capabilities emerge from widely used LLMs.

PaperID: 2540, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04826

Authors:Tommaso Tosato, Saskia Helbling, Yorguin-Jose Mantilla-Ramos, Mahmood Hegazy, Alberto Tosato, David John Lemay, Irina Rish, Guillaume Dumas

Affiliations: Mila - Quebec AI Institute, Université de Montréal, Canada CHU Sainte Justine Research Center, Department of Psychiatry, Canada Ernst Strüngmann Institute (ESI) for Neuroscience, Canada Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience Laboratory (CoCo Lab), Canada LiNARiTE.AI, Tara Research

Title: Persistent Instability in LLM’s Personality Measurements: Effects of Scale, Reasoning, and Conversation History

Abstract:
Large language models require consistent behavioral patterns for safe deployment, yet there are indications of large variability that may lead to an instable expression of personality traits in these models. We present PERSIST (PERsonality Stability in Synthetic Text), a comprehensive evaluation framework testing 25 opensource models (1B-685B parameters) across 2 million+ responses. Using traditional (BFI, SD3) and novel LLM-adapted personality questionnaires, we systematically vary model size, personas, reasoning modes, question order or paraphrasing, and conversation history. Our findings challenge fundamental assumptions: (1) Question reordering alone can introduce large shifts in personality measurements; (2) Scaling provides limited stability gains: even 400B+ models exhibit standard deviations >0.3 on 5-point scales; (3) Interventions expected to stabilize behavior, such as reasoning and inclusion of conversation history, can paradoxically increase variability; (4) Detailed persona instructions produce mixed effects, with misaligned personas showing significantly higher variability than the helpful assistant baseline; (5) The LLM-adapted questionnaires, despite their improved ecological validity, exhibit instability comparable to human-centric versions. This persistent instability across scales and mitigation strategies suggests that current LLMs lack the architectural foundations for genuine behavioral consistency. For safety-critical applications requiring predictable behavior, these findings indicate that current alignment strategies may be inadequate.

PaperID: 2541, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07263

Authors:Qingyuan Zeng, Shu Jiang, Jiajing Lin, Zhenzhong Wang, Kay Chen Tan, Min Jiang

Affiliations: Xiamen University, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: Fading the Digital Ink: A Universal Black-Box Attack Framework for 3DGS Watermarking Systems

Abstract:
With the rise of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), a variety of digital watermarking techniques, embedding either 1D bitstreams or 2D images, are used for copyright protection. However, the robustness of these watermarking techniques against potential attacks remains underexplored. This paper introduces the first universal blackbox attack framework, the Group-based Multi-objective Evolutionary Attack (GMEA), designed to challenge these watermarking systems. We formulate the attack as a large-scale multi-objective optimization problem, balancing watermark removal with visual quality. In a black-box setting, we introduce an indirect objective function that blinds the watermark detector by minimizing the standard deviation of features extracted by a convolutional network, thus rendering the feature maps uninformative. To manage the vast search space of 3DGS models, we employ a group-based optimization strategy to partition the model into multiple, independent sub-optimization problems. Experiments demonstrate that our framework effectively removes both 1D and 2D watermarks from mainstream 3DGS watermarking methods while maintaining high visual fidelity. This work reveals critical vulnerabilities in existing 3DGS copyright protection schemes and calls for the development of more robust watermarking systems.

PaperID: 2542, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08740

Authors:Sidhika Balachandar, Shuvom Sadhuka, Bonnie Berger, Emma Pierson, Nikhil Garg

Affiliations: University of California, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell Tech

Title: Urban Incident Prediction with Graph Neural Networks: Integrating Government Ratings and Crowdsourced Reports

Abstract:
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are widely used in urban spatiotemporal forecasting, e.g., predicting infrastructure problems. In this setting, government officials aim to identify in which neighborhoods incidents like potholes or rodents occur. The true state of incidents is observed via government inspection ratings. However, these ratings are only conducted for a sparse set of neighborhoods and incident types. We also observe the state of incidents via crowdsourced reports, which are more densely observed but may be biased due to heterogeneous reporting. First, we propose a multiview, multioutput GNNbased model that uses both unbiased rating data and biased reporting data to predict the true latent state of incidents. Second, we investigate a case study of New York City urban incidents and collect a dataset of 9,615,863 crowdsourced reports and 1,041,415 government inspection ratings over 3 years and across 139 types of incidents. We show on both real and semi-synthetic data that our model can better predict the latent state compared to models that use only reporting data or only rating data. Finally, we quantify demographic biases in crowdsourced reporting, e.g., higher-income neighborhoods report problems at higher rates. Our analysis showcases a widely applicable approach for latent state prediction using heterogeneous, sparse, and biased data.

PaperID: 2543, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.13209

Authors:Ting Bi, Chenghang Ye, Zheyu Yang, Ziyi Zhou, Cui Tang, Zui Tao, Jun Zhang, Kailong Wang, Liting Zhou, Yang Yang, Tianlong Yu

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Hubei University, Dublin City University

Title: On the Feasibility of Using MultiModal LLMs to Execute AR Social Engineering Attacks

Abstract:
Augmented Reality (AR) and Multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly evolving, providing unprecedented capabilities for humancomputer interaction. However, their integration introduces a new attack surface for Social Engineering (SE). In this paper, we systematically investigate the feasibility of orchestrating AR-driven Social Engineering attacks using Multimodal LLM for the first time, via our proposed SEAR framework, which operates through three key phases: (1) AR-based social context synthesis, which fuses Multimodal inputs (visual, auditory and environmental cues); (2) role-based Multimodal RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), which dynamically retrieves and integrates social context; and (3) ReInteract social engineering agents, which execute adaptive multiphase attack strategies through inference interaction loops. To verify SEAR, we conducted an IRB-approved study with 60 participants and build a novel dataset of 180 annotated conversations in different social scenarios (e.g., coffee shops, networking events). Our results show that SEAR is highly effective at eliciting high-risk behaviors (e.g., 93.3% of participants susceptible to email phishing). The framework was particularly effective in building trust, with 85% of targets willing to accept an attacker's call after an interaction. Also, we identified notable limitations such as authenticity gaps. This work provides proof-of-concept for AR-LLM driven social engineering attacks and insights for developing defenses against next-generation AR/LLM-based SE threats.

PaperID: 2544, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.04759

Authors:Tianhui Cai, Yifan Liu, Zewei Zhou, Haoxuan Ma, Seth Z. Zhao, Zhiwen Wu, Xu Han, Zhiyu Huang, Jiaqi Ma

Affiliations: University of California, Los Angeles

Title: Driving with Regulation: Trustworthy and Interpretable Decision-Making for Autonomous Driving with Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning

Abstract:
Understanding and adhering to traffic regulations is essential for autonomous vehicles to ensure safety and trustworthiness. However, traffic regulations are complex, contextdependent, and differ between regions, posing a major challenge to conventional rule-based decision-making approaches. We present an interpretable, regulation-aware decision-making framework, DriveReg, which enables autonomous vehicles to understand and adhere to region-specific traffic laws and safety guidelines. The framework integrates a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)-based Traffic Regulation Retrieval Agent, which retrieves relevant rules from regulatory documents based on the current situation, and a Large Language Model (LLM)-powered Reasoning Agent that evaluates actions for legal compliance and safety. Our design emphasizes interpretability to enhance transparency and trustworthiness. To support systematic evaluation, we introduce DriveReg Scenarios Dataset, a comprehensive dataset of driving scenarios across Boston, Singapore, and Los Angeles, with both hypothesized text-based cases and real-world driving data, specifically constructed and annotated to evaluate models’ capacity for regulation understanding and reasoning. We validate our framework on the DriveReg Scenarios Dataset and real-world deployment, demonstrating strong performance and robustness across diverse environments.

PaperID: 2545, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10382

Authors:Zhen Chen, Yi Zhang, Xiangyu Yin, Chengxuan Qin, Xingyu Zhao, Xiaowei Huang, Wenjie Ruan

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, University of Warwick

Title: Fragile by Design: On the Limits of Adversarial Defenses in Personalized DreamBooth Generation

Abstract:
Personalized AI applications such as DreamBooth enable the generation of customized content from user images, but also raise significant privacy concerns, particularly the risk of facial identity leakage. Recent defense mechanisms like AntiDreamBooth attempt to mitigate this risk by injecting adversarial perturbations into user photos to prevent successful personalization. However, we identify two critical yet overlooked limitations of these methods. First, the adversarial examples often exhibit perceptible artifacts such as conspicuous patterns or stripes, making them easily detectable as manipulated content. Second, the perturbations are highly fragile, as even a simple, non-learned filter can effectively remove them, thereby restoring the model's ability to memorize and reproduce user identity. To investigate this vulnerability, we propose a novel evaluation framework, AntiDB_Purify, to systematically evaluate existing defenses under realistic purification threats, including both traditional image filters and adversarial purification. Results reveal that none of the current methods maintains their protective effectiveness under such threats. These findings highlight that current defenses offer a false sense of security and underscore the urgent need for more imperceptible and robust protections to safeguard user identity in personalized generation.

PaperID: 2546, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14054

Authors:Joshua Fan, Haodi Xu, Feng Tao, Md Nasim, Marc Grimson, Yiqi Luo, Carla P. Gomes

Affiliations: Cornell University, Department of Computer Science, School of Integrative Plant Science, Soil and Crop Sciences Section, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Title: Scientifically-Interpretable Reasoning Network (ScIReN): Discovering Hidden Relationships in the Carbon Cycle and Beyond

Abstract:
Soils have potential to mitigate climate change by sequestering carbon from the atmosphere, but the soil carbon cycle remains poorly understood. Scientists have developed processbased models of the soil carbon cycle based on existing knowledge, but they contain numerous unknown parameters and often fit observations poorly. On the other hand, neural networks can learn patterns from data, but do not respect known scientific laws, and are too opaque to reveal novel scientific relationships. We thus propose Scientifically-Interpretable Reasoning Network (ScIReN), a fully-transparent framework that combines interpretable neural and process-based reasoning. An interpretable encoder predicts scientifically-meaningful latent parameters, which are then passed through a differentiable process-based decoder to predict labeled output variables. While the process-based decoder enforces existing scientific knowledge, the encoder leverages Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs) to reveal interpretable relationships between input features and latent parameters, using novel smoothness penalties to balance expressivity and simplicity. ScIReN also introduces a novel hard-sigmoid constraint layer to restrict latent parameters to prior ranges while maintaining interpretability. We apply ScIReN on two tasks: simulating the flow of organic carbon through soils, and modeling ecosystem respiration from plants. In both tasks, ScIReN outperforms or matches black-box models in predictive accuracy while greatly improving scientific interpretability -- it can infer latent scientific mechanisms and their relationships with input features.

PaperID: 2547, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17671

Authors:Yilun Liu, Chunguang Zhao, Xinhua Yang, Hongyong Zeng, Shimin Tao, Weibin Meng, Minggui He, Yan Yu, Hongxia Ma, Li Zhang, Daimeng Wei, Boxing Chen

Affiliations: Huawei Canada

Title: MIDB: Multilingual Instruction Data Booster for Enhancing Cultural Equality in Multilingual Instruction Synthesis

Abstract:
Despite doubts on data quality, instruction synthesis has been widely applied into instruction tuning (IT) of LLMs as an economic and rapid alternative. Recent endeavors focus on improving data quality for synthesized instruction pairs in English and have facilitated IT of Englishcentric LLMs. However, data quality issues in multilingual synthesized instruction pairs are even more severe, since the common synthesizing practice is to translate English synthesized data into other languages using machine translation (MT). Besides the known content errors in these English synthesized data, multilingual synthesized instruction data are further exposed to defects introduced by MT and face insufficient localization of the target languages, leading to cultural inequality in trained LLMs. In this paper, we propose MIDB, a Multilingual Instruction Data Booster to automatically address the quality issues in multilingual synthesized data. MIDB is trained on around 36.8k revision examples across 16 languages by human linguistic experts, thereby can boost the low-quality data by addressing content errors and MT defects, and improving localization in these synthesized data. Both automatic and human evaluation indicate that not only MIDB steadily improved instruction data quality in 16 languages, but also the instruction-following and cultural-understanding abilities of multilingual LLMs fine-tuned on MIDB-boosted data were significantly enhanced, suggesting an improved linguistic and cultural equality.

PaperID: 2548, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02152

Authors:Disa Sariola, Patrick Button, Aron Culotta, Nicholas Mattei

Affiliations: Tulane University

Title: The Illusion of Fairness: Auditing Fairness Interventions in Algorithmic Hiring with Audit Studies

Abstract:
Classifiers trained on historical data are deployed in the real world to automate decisions from hiring to loan issuance. Judging the fairness and efficiency of these systems, and their human counterparts, is a complex and important topic studied across both computational and social sciences. One common way to address bias in classifiers is to resample the training data to offset distributional disparities. In the hiring domain, where results may vary by a protected class, many interventions from the literature equalize the hiring rate within the training set to alleviate bias. While simple and seemingly effective, these methods have typically only been evaluated using data obtained through convenience samples, e.g., data from a realworld hiring process, introducing selection and label bias. In the social and health sciences, audit studies, in which fictitious "testers" (resumes) are sent to subjects (job openings) in a randomized control trial, provide high-quality data that support rigorous estimates of discrimination by controlling for confounding factors. We investigate how data from audit studies can be used to improve our ability to both train and evaluate automated hiring algorithms. Specifically, we use data from a large audit study of age discrimination in hiring to test common resampling methods from the fair machine learning literature. We find that audit data of real-world hiring reveals cases where equalizing base rates across classes appears to achieve parity using traditional measures, but in fact has an absolute ~10% disparity when measured appropriately. We also show that corrections based on individual treatment effect estimation methods combined with audit study data can overcome these issues, underscoring the need for rigorous data collection in fairness research.

PaperID: 2549, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09894

Authors:Keshara Weerasinghe, Xueren Ge, Tessa Heick, Lahiru Nuwan Wijayasingha, Anthony Cortez, Abhishek Satpathy, John Stankovic, Homa Alemzadeh

Affiliations: University of Virginia

Title: EgoEMS: A High-Fidelity Multimodal Egocentric Dataset for Cognitive Assistance in Emergency Medical Services

Abstract:
Emergency Medical Services (EMS) are critical to patient survival in emergencies, but first responders often face intense cognitive demands in highstakes situations. AI cognitive assistants, acting as virtual partners, have the potential to ease this burden by supporting real-time data collection and decision making. In pursuit of this vision, we introduce EgoEMS, the first end-to-end, high-fidelity, multimodal, multiperson dataset capturing over 20 hours of realistic, procedural EMS activities from an egocentric view in 233 simulated emergency scenarios performed by 62 participants, including 46 EMS professionals. Developed in collaboration with EMS experts and aligned with national standards, EgoEMS is captured using an open-source, low-cost, and replicable data collection system and is annotated with keysteps, timestamped audio transcripts with speaker diarization, action quality metrics, and bounding boxes with segmentation masks. Emphasizing realism, the dataset includes responder-patient interactions reflecting real-world emergency dynamics. We also present a suite of benchmarks for real-time multimodal keystep recognition and action quality estimation, essential for developing AI support tools for EMS. We hope EgoEMS inspires the research community to push the boundaries of intelligent EMS systems and ultimately contribute to improved patient outcomes.

PaperID: 2550, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.10223

Authors:Ziqi Xu, Yi Liu, Yuekang Li, Ling Shi, Kailong Wang, Yongxin Zhao

Affiliations: East China Normal University, University of New South Wales, Nanyang Technological University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: STEAMROLLER: A Multi-Agent System for Inclusive Automatic Speech Recognition for People Who Stutter

Abstract:
People who stutter (PWS) face systemic exclusion in today’s voicedriven society, where access to voice assistants, authentication systems, and remote work tools increasingly depends on fluent speech. Current automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, trained predominantly on fluent speech, fail to serve millions of PWS worldwide. We present STEAMROLLER, a real time system that transforms stuttered speech into fluent output through a novel multi-stage, multi-agent AI pipeline. Our approach addresses three critical technical challenges: (1) the difficulty of direct speech to speech conversion for disfluent input, (2) semantic distortions introduced during ASR transcription of stuttered speech, and (3) latency constraints for real time communication. STEAMROLLER employs a three stage architecture comprising ASR transcription, multi-agent text repair, and speech synthesis, where our core innovation lies in a collaborative multi-agent framework that iteratively refines transcripts while preserving semantic intent. Experiments on the FluencyBank dataset and a user study demonstrates clear word error rate (WER) reduction and strong user satisfaction. Beyond immediate accessibility benefits, fine tuning ASR on STEAMROLLER repaired speech further yields additional WER improvements, creating a pathway toward inclusive AI ecosystems.

PaperID: 2551, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13739

Authors:Yajie Yang, Yuqing Zhao, Xiaochao Xi, Yinan Zhu

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Audio-Visual Department of Xinhua News Agency

Title: A Human-AI Collaboration Mechanism Study on AIGC Assisted Image Production for Special Coverage

Abstract:
Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) assisting image production triggers controversy in journalism while attracting attention from media agencies. Key issues involve misinformation, authenticity, semantic fidelity, and interpretability. Most AIGC tools are opaque “black boxes,” hindering the dual demands of content accuracy and semantic alignment and creating ethical, sociotechnical, and trust dilemmas. This paper explores pathways for controllable image production in journalism’s special coverage and conducts two experiments with projects from China’s media agency: (1) Experiment 1 tests crossplatform adaptability via standardized prompts across three scenes, revealing disparities in semantic alignment, cultural specificity, and visual realism driven by training-corpus bias and platform-level filtering. (2) Experiment 2 builds a human-in-the-loop modular pipeline combining high-precision segmentation (SAM, GroundingDINO), semantic alignment (BrushNet), and style regulating (Style-LoRA, Prompt-to-Prompt), ensuring editorial fidelity through CLIP-based semantic scoring, NSFW/OCR/YOLO filtering, and verifiable content credentials. Traceable deployment preserves semantic representation. Consequently, we propose a human-AI collaboration mechanism for AIGC assisted image production in special coverage and recommend evaluating Character Identity Stability (CIS), Cultural Expression Accuracy (CEA), and User-Public Appropriateness (U-PA).

PaperID: 2552, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09092

Authors:Zezhen Ding, Zhen Tan, Jiheng Zhang, Tianlong Chen

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Arizona State University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Title: OR-R1: Automating Modeling and Solving of Operations Research Optimization Problem via Test-Time Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Optimization modeling and solving are fundamental to the application of Operations Research (OR) in realworld decision making, yet the process of translating natural language problem descriptions into formal models and solver code remains highly expertise intensive. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have opened new opportunities for automation, the generalization ability and data efficiency of existing LLM-based methods are still limited, asmost require vast amounts of annotated or synthetic data, resulting in high costs and scalability barriers. In this work, we present OR-R1, a data-efficient training framework for automated optimization modeling and solving. OR-R1 first employs supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to help the model acquire the essential reasoning patterns for problem formulation and code generation from limited labeled data. In addition, it improves the capability and consistency through Test-Time Group Relative Policy Optimization (TGRPO). This two-stage design enables OR-R1 to leverage both scarce labeled and abundant unlabeled data for effective learning. Experiments show that OR-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance with an average solving accuracy of 67.7%, using only 1/10 the synthetic data required by prior methods such as ORLM, exceeding ORLM’s solving accuracy by up to 4.2%. Remarkably, OR-R1 outperforms ORLM by over 2.4% with just 100 synthetic samples. Furthermore, TGRPO contributes an additional 3.1%–6.4% improvement in accuracy, significantly narrowing the gap between single-attempt (Pass@1) and multi-attempt (Pass@8) performance from 13% to 7%. Extensive evaluations across diverse real-world benchmarks demonstrate that OR-R1 provides a robust, scalable, and cost-effective solution for automated OR optimization problem modeling and solving, lowering the expertise and data barriers for industrial OR applications.

PaperID: 2553, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13211

Authors:Yijia Fan, Jusheng Zhang, Kaitong Cai, Jing Yang, Jian Wang, Keze Wang

Affiliations: Sun Yat-Sen University, Snap Inc.

Title: 3DAlign-DAER: Dynamic Attention Policy and Efficient Retrieval Strategy for Fine-grained 3D-Text Alignment at Scale

Abstract:
Despite recent advancements in 3Dtext cross-modal alignment, existing state-of-the-art methods still struggle to align fine-grained textual semantics with detailed geometric structures, and their alignment performance degrades significantly when scaling to large-scale 3D databases. To overcome this limitation, we introduce 3DAlign-DAER, a unified framework designed to align text and 3D geometry via the proposed dynamic attention policy and the efficient retrieval strategy, capturing subtle correspondences for diverse cross-modal retrieval and classification tasks. Specifically, during the training, our proposed dynamic attention policy (DAP) employs the Hierarchical Attention Fusion (HAF) module to represent the alignment as learnable fine-grained token-to-point attentions. To optimize these attentions across different tasks and geometric hierarchies, our DAP further exploits the Monte Carlo tree search to dynamically calibrate HAF attention weights via a hybrid reward signal and further enhances the alignment between textual descriptions and local 3D geometry. During the inference, our 3DAlign-DAER introduces an Efficient Retrieval Strategy (ERS) to leverage efficient hierarchical searching in the large-scale embedding spaces, outperforming traditional methods (eg, KNN) in accuracy and efficiency. Furthermore, to facilitate text-3D alignment research and train our 3DAlign-DAER, we construct Align3D-2M, a large-scale dataset featuring 2M text-3D pairs, to provide sufficient fine-grained cross-modal annotations. Extensive and comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our 3DAlign-DAER on diverse benchmarks.

PaperID: 2554, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19355

Authors:Lin Tian, Marian-Andrei Rizoiu

Affiliations: University of Technology Sydney

Title: Estimating Online Influence Needs Causal Modeling! Counterfactual Analysis of Misinformation Engagement on Social Media

Abstract:
Understanding true influence in social media requires distinguishing correlation from causation—particularly when analyzing misinformation spread. While existing approaches focus on exposure metrics and network structures, they often fail to capture the causal mechanisms by which external temporal signals trigger engagement. We introduce CITRUS (Causal Influence through TreatmentResponse Understanding in Social media), a novel joint treatment-outcome framework that leverages existing sequential models to understand how external signals—search trends, news coverage, influencer activity—trigger misinformation engagement. Through experiments on real-world misinformation and disinformation datasets, CITRUS outperforms existing benchmarks by 15-22% in predicting engagement across diverse counterfactual scenarios, including exposure adjustment, temporal alignment shifts, and varied intervention durations. Case studies on 492 social media users demonstrate that our causal effect measure aligns strongly with expert-based empirical influence assessments, validating CITRUS as a robust framework for understanding information spread dynamics. CITRUS also reveals that low-baseline misinformation can scale 6-fold under external promotion, showing super-linear growth, and unmasks hidden amplifiers—accounts with modest followings that double engagement rates, outperforming supposed "influencers" with 100x more followers.

PaperID: 2555, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06283

Authors:Xuanle Zhao, Shuxin Zeng, Xinyuan Cai, Xiang Cheng, Duzhen Zhang, Xiuyi Chen, Bo Xu

Affiliations: The Key Laboratory of Cognition and Decision Intelligence for Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: TinyChemVL: Advancing Chemical Vision-Language Models via Efficient Visual Token Reduction and Complex Reaction Tasks

Abstract:
While Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in general visual understanding, their application in the chemical domain has been limited, with previous works predominantly focusing on text and thus overlooking critical visual information, such as molecular structures. Current approaches that directly adopt standard VLMs for chemical tasks suffer from two primary issues: (i) computational inefficiency of processing entire chemical images with noninformative backgrounds. (ii) a narrow scope on molecular-level tasks that restricts progress in chemical reasoning. In this work, we propose TinyChemVL, an efficient and powerful chemical VLM that leverages visual token reduction and reaction-level tasks to improve model efficiency and reasoning capacity. Also, we propose ChemRxn-V, a reaction-level benchmark for assessing vision-based reaction recognition and prediction tasks. Directly predicting reaction products from molecular images poses a non-trivial challenge, as it requires models to integrate both recognition and reasoning capacities. Our results demonstrate that, with only 4B parameters, TinyChemVL achieves superior performance on both molecular and reaction tasks, while also demonstrating faster inference and training speeds compared to existing models. Notably, TinyChemVL outperforms ChemVLM while utilizing only 1/16th of the visual tokens. This work builds efficient yet powerful VLMs for chemical domains by co-designing model architecture and task complexity.

PaperID: 2556, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.20548

Authors:Zhiyi Duan, Xiangren Wang, Hongyu Yuan, QianLi Xing

Affiliations: Inner Mongolia University, Jilin University

Title: Advancing Multimodal Teacher Sentiment Analysis: The Large-Scale T-MED Dataset & the Effective AAM-TSA Model

Abstract:
Teachers' emotional states are critical in educational scenarios, profoundly impacting teaching efficacy, student engagement, and learning achievements. However, existing studies often fail to accurately capture teachers' emotions due to the performative nature and overlook the critical impact of instructional information on emotional expression.In this paper, we systematically investigate teacher sentiment analysis by building both the dataset and the model accordingly. We construct the first largescale teacher multimodal sentiment analysis dataset, T-MED.To ensure labeling accuracy and efficiency, we employ a human-machine collaborative labeling process.The T-MED dataset includes 14,938 instances of teacher emotional data from 250 real classrooms across 11 subjects ranging from K-12 to higher education, integrating multimodal text, audio, video, and instructional information.Furthermore, we propose a novel asymmetric attention-based multimodal teacher sentiment analysis model, AAM-TSA.AAM-TSA introduces an asymmetric attention mechanism and hierarchical gating unit to enable differentiated cross-modal feature fusion and precise emotional classification. Experimental results demonstrate that AAM-TSA significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and interpretability on the T-MED dataset.

PaperID: 2557, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17946

Authors:Haiying Xia, Zhongyi Huang, Yumei Tan, Shuxiang Song

Affiliations: Guangxi Normal University

Title: Let the Model Learn to Feel: Mode-Guided Tonality Injection for Symbolic Music Emotion Recognition

Abstract:
Music emotion recognition is a key task in symbolic music understanding (SMER). Recent approaches have shown promising results by finetuning large-scale pre-trained models (e.g., MIDIBERT, a benchmark in symbolic music understanding) to map musical semantics to emotional labels. While these models effectively capture distributional musical semantics, they often overlook tonal structures, particularly musical modes, which play a critical role in emotional perception according to music psychology. In this paper, we investigate the representational capacity of MIDIBERT and identify its limitations in capturing mode-emotion associations. To address this issue, we propose a Mode-Guided Enhancement (MoGE) strategy that incorporates psychological insights on mode into the model. Specifically, we first conduct a mode augmentation analysis, which reveals that MIDIBERT fails to effectively encode emotion-mode correlations. Motivated by this observation, we further identify the MIDIBERT layer that shows the weakest emotion relevance and introduce a Mode-guided Feature-wise linear modulation injection (MoFi) framework to inject explicit mode features, thereby enhancing the model's capability in emotional representation and inference. Extensive experiments on the EMOPIA and VGMIDI datasets demonstrate that our mode injection strategy significantly improves SMER performance, achieving accuracies of 75.2% and 59.1%, respectively. These results validate the effectiveness of mode-guided modeling in symbolic music emotion recognition.

PaperID: 2558, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14539

Authors:Qiang Bai, Bojian Wu, Xi Yang, Zhizhong Han

Affiliations: Jilin University, Zhejiang University, Wayne State University

Title: Learning Compact Latent Space for Representing Neural Signed Distance Functions with High-fidelity Geometry Details

Abstract:
Neural signed distance functions (SDFs) have been a vital representation to represent 3D shapes or scenes with neural networks. An SDF is an implicit function that can query signed distances at specific coordinates for recovering a 3D surface. Although implicit functions work well on a single shape or scene, they pose obstacles when analyzing multiple SDFs with highfidelity geometry details, due to the limited information encoded in the latent space for SDFs and the loss of geometry details. To overcome these obstacles, we introduce a method to represent multiple SDFs in a common space, aiming to recover more high-fidelity geometry details with more compact latent representations. Our key idea is to take full advantage of the benefits of generalization-based and overfitting-based learning strategies, which manage to preserve high-fidelity geometry details with compact latent codes. Based on this framework, we also introduce a novel sampling strategy to sample training queries. The sampling can improve the training efficiency and eliminate artifacts caused by the influence of other SDFs. We report numerical and visual evaluations on widely used benchmarks to validate our designs and show advantages over the latest methods in terms of the representative ability and compactness.

PaperID: 2559, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07813

Authors:Haida Feng, Hao Wei, Zewen Xu, Haolin Wang, Chade Li, Yihong Wu

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China School of Artificial Intelligence

Title: Sparse3DPR: Training-Free 3D Hierarchical Scene Parsing and Task-Adaptive Subgraph Reasoning from Sparse RGB Views

Abstract:
Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been explored widely for 3D scene understanding. Among them, trainingfree approaches are gaining attention for their flexibility and generalization over training-based methods. However, they typically struggle with accuracy and efficiency in practical deployment. To address the problems, we propose Sparse3DPR, a novel training-free framework for open-ended scene understanding, which leverages the reasoning capabilities of pre-trained LLMs and requires only sparse-view RGB inputs. Specifically, we introduce a hierarchical plane-enhanced scene graph that supports open vocabulary and adopts dominant planar structures as spatial anchors, which enables clearer reasoning chains and more reliable high-level inferences. Furthermore, we design a task-adaptive subgraph extraction method to filter query-irrelevant information dynamically, reducing contextual noise and improving 3D scene reasoning efficiency and accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of Sparse3DPR, which achieves a 28.7% EM@1 improvement and a 78.2% speedup compared with ConceptGraphs on the Space3D-Bench. Moreover, Sparse3DPR obtains comparable performance to training-based methods on ScanQA, with additional real-world experiments confirming its robustness and generalization capability.

PaperID: 2560, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05952

Authors:Dongjie Fu, Tengjiao Sun, Pengcheng Fang, Xiaohao Cai, Hansung Kim

Affiliations: University of Southampton

Title: MOGO: Residual Quantized Hierarchical Causal Transformer for Real-Time and Infinite-Length 3D Human Motion Generation

Abstract:
Recent advances in transformerbased text-to-motion generation have significantly improved motion quality. However, achieving both real-time performance and long-horizon scalability remains an open challenge. In this paper, we present MOGO (Motion Generation with One-pass), a novel autoregressive framework for efficient and scalable 3D human motion generation. MOGO consists of two key components. First, we introduce MoSA-VQ, a motion scale-adaptive residual vector quantization module that hierarchically discretizes motion sequences through learnable scaling parameters, enabling dynamic allocation of representation capacity and producing compact yet expressive multi-level representations. Second, we design the RQHC-Transformer, a residual quantized hierarchical causal transformer that decodes motion tokens in a single forward pass. Each transformer block aligns with one quantization level, allowing hierarchical abstraction and temporally coherent generation with strong semantic flow. Compared to diffusion- and LLM-based approaches, MOGO achieves lower inference latency while preserving high motion fidelity. Moreover, its hierarchical latent design enables seamless and controllable infinite-length motion generation, with stable transitions and the ability to adaptively incorporate updated control signals at arbitrary points in time. To further enhance generalization and interpretability, we introduce Textual Condition Alignment (TCA), which leverages large language models with Chain-of-Thought reasoning to bridge the gap between real-world prompts and training data. TCA not only improves zero-shot performance on unseen datasets but also enriches motion comprehension for in-distribution prompts through explicit intent decomposition. Extensive experiments on HumanML3D, KIT-ML, and the unseen CMP dataset demonstrate that MOGO outperforms prior methods in generation quality, inference efficiency, and temporal scalability.

PaperID: 2561, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17053

Authors:Teng Fu, Mengyang Zhao, Ke Niu, Kaixin Peng, Bin Li

Affiliations: Fudan University

Title: OmniPT: Unleashing the Potential of Large Vision Language Models for Pedestrian Tracking and Understanding

Abstract:
LVLMs have been shown to perform excellently in imagelevel tasks such as VQA and caption. However, in many instance-level tasks, such as visual grounding and object detection, LVLMs still show performance gaps compared to previous expert models. Meanwhile, although pedestrian tracking is a classical task, there have been a number of new topics in combining object tracking and natural language, such as Referring MOT, Cross-view Referring MOT, and Semantic MOT. These tasks emphasize that models should understand the tracked object at an advanced semantic level, which is exactly where LVLMs excel. In this paper, we propose a new unified Pedestrian Tracking framework, namely OmniPT, which can track, track based on reference and generate semantic understanding of tracked objects interactively. We address two issues: how to model the tracking task into a task that foundation models can perform, and how to make the model output formatted answers. To this end, we implement a training phase consisting of RL-Mid Training-SFT-RL. Based on the pre-trained weights of the LVLM, we first perform a simple RL phase to enable the model to output fixed and supervisable bounding box format. Subsequently, we conduct a mid-training phase using a large number of pedestrian-related datasets. Finally, we perform supervised fine-tuning on several pedestrian tracking datasets, and then carry out another RL phase to improve the model's tracking performance and enhance its ability to follow instructions. We conduct experiments on tracking benchmarks and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can perform better than the previous methods.

PaperID: 2562, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.19860

Authors:Chenhan Jiang, Yihan Zeng, Dit-Yan Yeung

Affiliations: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: CoherenDream: Boosting Holistic Text Coherence in 3D Generation via Multimodal Large Language Models Feedback

Abstract:
Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) has achieved remarkable success in textto-3D content generation. However, SDS-based methods struggle to maintain semantic fidelity for user prompts, particularly when involving multiple objects with intricate interactions. While existing approaches often address 3D consistency through multiview diffusion model fine-tuning on 3D datasets, this strategy inadvertently exacerbates text-3D alignment degradation. The limitation stems from SDS's inherent accumulation of view-independent biases during optimization, which progressively diverges from the ideal text alignment direction. To alleviate this limitation, we propose a novel SDS objective, dubbed as Textual Coherent Score Distillation (TCSD), which integrates alignment feedback from multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Our TCSD leverages cross-modal understanding capabilities of MLLMs to assess and guide the text-3D correspondence during the optimization. We further develop 3DLLaVA-CRITIC - a fine-tuned MLLM specialized for evaluating multiview text alignment in 3D generations. Additionally, we introduce an LLM-layout initialization that significantly accelerates optimization convergence through semantic-aware spatial configuration. Our framework, CoherenDream, achieves consistent improvement across multiple metrics on TIFA subset.As the first study to incorporate MLLMs into SDS optimization, we also conduct extensive ablation studies to explore optimal MLLM adaptations for 3D generation tasks.

PaperID: 2563, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.18711

Authors:Ke Li, Di Wang, Ting Wang, Fuyu Dong, Yiming Zhang, Luyao Zhang, Xiangyu Wang, Shaofeng Li, Quan Wang

Affiliations: Xidian University, University of California, San Diego

Title: RSVG-ZeroOV: Exploring a Training-Free Framework for Zero-Shot Open-Vocabulary Visual Grounding in Remote Sensing Images

Abstract:
Remote sensing visual grounding (RSVG) aims to localize objects in remote sensing images based on freeform natural language expressions. Existing approaches are typically constrained to closed-set vocabularies, limiting their applicability in open-world scenarios. While recent attempts to leverage generic foundation models for open-vocabulary RSVG, they overly rely on expensive high-quality datasets and time-consuming fine-tuning. To address these limitations, we propose RSVG-ZeroOV, a training-free framework that aims to explore the potential of frozen generic foundation models for zero-shot open-vocabulary RSVG. Specifically, RSVG-ZeroOV comprises three key stages: (i) Overview: We utilize a vision-language model (VLM) to obtain cross-attention maps that capture semantic correlations between text queries and visual regions. (ii) Focus: By leveraging the fine-grained modeling priors of a diffusion model (DM), we fill in gaps in structural and shape information of objects, which are often overlooked by VLM. (iii) Evolve: A simple yet effective attention evolution module is introduced to suppress irrelevant activations, yielding purified segmentation masks over the referred objects. Without cumbersome task-specific training, RSVG-ZeroOV offers an efficient and scalable solution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms existing weakly-supervised and zero-shot methods.

PaperID: 2564, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12419

Authors:Wenjie Li, Jinglei Shi, Jin Han, Heng Guo, Zhanyu Ma

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nankai University, The University of Tokyo

Title: Seeing Through the Rain: Resolving High-Frequency Conflicts in Deraining and Super-Resolution via Diffusion Guidance

Abstract:
Clean images are crucial for visual tasks such as small object detection, especially at high resolutions. However, realworld images are often degraded by adverse weather, and weather restoration methods may sacrifice high-frequency details critical for analyzing small objects. A natural solution is to apply super-resolution (SR) after weather removal to recover both clarity and fine structures. However, simply cascading restoration and SR struggle to bridge their inherent conflict: removal aims to remove high-frequency weather-induced noise, while SR aims to hallucinate high-frequency textures from existing details, leading to inconsistent restoration contents. In this paper, we take deraining as a case study and propose DHGM, a Diffusion-based High-frequency Guided Model for generating clean and high-resolution images. DHGM integrates pre-trained diffusion priors with high-pass filters to simultaneously remove rain artifacts and enhance structural details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DHGM achieves superior performance over existing methods, with lower costs.

PaperID: 2565, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11433

Authors:Qian Liang, Yujia Wu, Kuncheng Li, Jiwei Wei, Shiyuan He, Jinyu Guo, Ning Xie

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: MM-R1: Unleashing the Power of Unified Multimodal Large Language Models for Personalized Image Generation

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with unified architectures excel across a wide range of visionlanguage tasks, yet aligning them with personalized image generation remains a significant challenge. Existing methods for MLLMs are frequently subject-specific, demanding a data-intensive fine-tuning process for every new subject, which limits their scalability. In this paper, we introduce MM-R1, a framework that integrates a cross-modal Chain-of-Thought (X-CoT) reasoning strategy to unlock the inherent potential of unified MLLMs for personalized image generation. Specifically, we structure personalization as an integrated visual reasoning and generation process: (1) grounding subject concepts by interpreting and understanding user-provided images and contextual cues, and (2) generating personalized images conditioned on both the extracted subject representations and user prompts. To further enhance the reasoning capability, we adopt Grouped Reward Proximal Policy Optimization(GRPO) to explicitly align the generation. Experiments demonstrate that MM-R1 unleashes the personalization capability of unified MLLMs to generate images with high subject fidelity and strong text alignment in a zero-shot manner.

PaperID: 2566, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07958

Authors:Xiaoye Liang, Lai Jiang, Minglang Qiao, Yichen Guo, Yue Zhang, Xin Deng, Shengxi Li, Yufan Liu, Mai Xu

Affiliations: Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Burst Image Quality Assessment: A New Benchmark and Unified Framework for Multiple Downstream Tasks

Abstract:
In recent years, the development of burst imaging technology has improved the capture and processing capabilities of visual data, enabling a wide range of applications. However, the redundancy in burst images leads to the increased storage and transmission demands, as well as reduced efficiency of downstream tasks. To address this, we propose a new task of Burst Image Quality Assessment (BuIQA), to evaluate the taskdriven quality of each frame within a burst sequence, providing reasonable cues for burst image selection. Specifically, we establish the first benchmark dataset for BuIQA, consisting of 7,346 burst sequences with 45,827 images and 191,572 annotated quality scores for multiple downstream scenarios. Inspired by the data analysis, a unified BuIQA framework is proposed to achieve an efficient adaption for BuIQA under diverse downstream scenarios. Specifically, a task-driven prompt generation network is developed with heterogeneous knowledge distillation, to learn the priors of the downstream task. Then, the task-aware quality assessment network is introduced to assess the burst image quality based on the task prompt. Extensive experiments across 10 downstream scenarios demonstrate the impressive BuIQA performance of the proposed approach, outperforming the state-of-the-art. Furthermore, it can achieve 0.33 dB PSNR improvement in the downstream tasks of denoising and super-resolution, by applying our approach to select the high-quality burst frames.

PaperID: 2567, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09870

Authors:Jia Lin, Xiaofei Zhou, Jiyuan Liu, Runmin Cong, Guodao Zhang, Zhi Liu, Jiyong Zhang

Affiliations: Hangzhou Dianzi University, Shandong University, Shanghai University

Title: SAM-DAQ: Segment Anything Model with Depth-guided Adaptive Queries for RGB-D Video Salient Object Detection

Abstract:
Recently segment anything model (SAM) has attracted widespread concerns, and it is often treated as a vision foundation model for universal segmentation. Some researchers have attempted to directly apply the foundation model to the RGBD video salient object detection (RGB-D VSOD) task, which often encounters three challenges, including the dependence on manual prompts, the high memory consumption of sequential adapters, and the computational burden of memory attention. To address the limitations, we propose a novel method, namely Segment Anything Model with Depth-guided Adaptive Queries (SAM-DAQ), which adapts SAM2 to pop-out salient objects from videos by seamlessly integrating depth and temporal cues within a unified framework. Firstly, we deploy a parallel adapter-based multi-modal image encoder (PAMIE), which incorporates several depth-guided parallel adapters (DPAs) in a skip-connection way. Remarkably, we fine-tune the frozen SAM encoder under prompt-free conditions, where the DPA utilizes depth cues to facilitate the fusion of multi-modal features. Secondly, we deploy a query-driven temporal memory (QTM) module, which unifies the memory bank and prompt embeddings into a learnable pipeline. Concretely, by leveraging both frame-level queries and video-level queries simultaneously, the QTM module can not only selectively extract temporal consistency features but also iteratively update the temporal representations of the queries. Extensive experiments are conducted on three RGB-D VSOD datasets, and the results show that the proposed SAM-DAQ consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of all evaluation metrics.

PaperID: 2568, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07241

Authors:Mengmeng Liu, Jiuming Liu, Yunpeng Zhang, Jiangtao Li, Michael Ying Yang, Francesco Nex, Hao Cheng

Affiliations: University of Twente, University of Cambridge, PhiGent Robotics, University of Bath

Title: 4DSTR: Advancing Generative 4D Gaussians with Spatial-Temporal Rectification for High-Quality and Consistent 4D Generation

Abstract:
Remarkable advances in recent 2D image and 3D shape generation have induced a significant focus on dynamic 4D content generation. However, previous 4D generation methods commonly struggle to maintain spatialtemporal consistency and adapt poorly to rapid temporal variations, due to the lack of effective spatial-temporal modeling. To address these problems, we propose a novel 4D generation network called 4DSTR, which modulates generative 4D Gaussian Splatting with spatial-temporal rectification. Specifically, temporal correlation across generated 4D sequences is designed to rectify deformable scales and rotations and guarantee temporal consistency. Furthermore, an adaptive spatial densification and pruning strategy is proposed to address significant temporal variations by dynamically adding or deleting Gaussian points with the awareness of their pre-frame movements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our 4DSTR achieves state-of-the-art performance in video-to-4D generation, excelling in reconstruction quality, spatial-temporal consistency, and adaptation to rapid temporal movements.

PaperID: 2569, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.03905

Authors:Rang Meng, Yan Wang, Weipeng Wu, Ruobing Zheng, Yuming Li, Chenguang Ma

Affiliations: Ant Group

Title: EchoMimicV3: 1.3B Parameters Are All You Need for Unified Multi-Modal and Multi-Task Human Animation

Abstract:
Recent work on human animation usually incorporates largescale video models, thereby achieving more vivid performance. However, the practical use of such methods is hindered by the slow inference speed and high computational demands. Moreover, traditional work typically employs separate models for each animation task, increasing costs in multi-task scenarios and worsening the dilemma. To address these limitations, we introduce EchoMimicV3, an efficient framework that unifies multi-task and multi-modal human animation. At the core of EchoMimicV3 lies a threefold design: a Soup-of-Tasks paradigm, a Soup-of-Modals paradigm, and a novel training and inference strategy. The Soup-of-Tasks leverages multi-task mask inputs and a counter-intuitive task allocation strategy to achieve multi-task gains without multi-model pains. Meanwhile, the Soup-of-Modals introduces a Coupled-Decoupled Multi-Modal Cross Attention module to inject multi-modal conditions, complemented by a Timestep Phase-aware Multi-Modal Allocation mechanism to dynamically modulate multi-modal mixtures. Besides, we propose Negative Direct Preference Optimization and Phase-aware Negative Classifier-Free Guidance, which ensure stable training and inference. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate that EchoMimicV3, with a minimal model size of 1.3 billion parameters, achieves competitive performance in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. We are committed to open-sourcing our code for community use.

PaperID: 2570, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06224

Authors:Miao Pan, Wangjie Gan, Jintao Chen, Wenqi Zhang, Sun Bing, Jianwei Yin, Xuhong Zhang

Affiliations: School of Software Technology, Zhejiang University, National Certification Technology (Hangzhou) Co.

Title: Ground What You See: Hallucination-Resistant MLLMs via Caption Feedback, Diversity-Aware Sampling, and Conflict Regularization

Abstract:
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved significant results in various tasks, but their practical application is still severely constrained by hallucination issues, which are particularly prominent in reinforcement learning (RL) optimization processes. This paper systematically analyzes the causes of hallucinations in MLLM under RL training, identifying three key factors: (1) The model relies heavily on chained visual reasoning to guide decisionmaking during RL training. Thus, error and irrelevant information in visual reasoning can easily cause hallucinations, including inaccurate initial visual descriptions that anchor subsequent inferences to incorrect information, as well as redundant and broad inferential information; (2) Insufficient exploration diversity during the policy optimization phase, causing the model to output overly confident results; (3) The destructive conflict between different samples during optimization is a key factor that leads to false associations and unstable parameter updates. To address these issues, we propose a solution framework comprising three core modules. First, to improve the accuracy of visual localization, we add planning and caption stages before thinking and answer stages. To enhance initial visual descriptions ability, we allow LLMs to respond based solely on the caption and provide corresponding caption reward based on the quality of the response. Second, to enhance exploration capabilities, we classify samples based on the mean and variance of the reward distribution and select samples with high reward variance for training, thereby increasing the model's focus on diverse samples. Finally, to mitigate conflicts between training samples, we identify neural tangent kernel (NTK) similarity as the key factor. Rather than minimizing it uniformly, we regulate NTK similarity by grouping sample pairs based on a similarity threshold. An InfoNCE loss is then applied to pull dissimilar pairs closer and push overly similar ones apart, guiding interactions toward a balanced range. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly reduces the hallucination rate and effectively improves the inference accuracy of MLLMs.

PaperID: 2571, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.01444

Authors:Jian Shu, Nanjie Yao, Gangjian Zhang, Junlong Ren, Yu Feng, Hao Wang

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Title: FastAnimate: Towards Learnable Template Construction and Pose Deformation for Fast 3D Human Avatar Animation

Abstract:
3D human avatar animation aims at transforming a human avatar from an arbitrary initial pose to a specified target pose using deformation algorithms. Existing approaches typically divide this task into two stages: canonical template construction and target pose deformation. However, current template construction methods demand extensive skeletal rigging and often produce artifacts in contact regions. Moreover, target pose deformation suffers from structural distortions caused by Linear Blend Skinning (LBS), which significantly undermines animation realism. To address these problems, we propose a unified learningbased framework to address both challenges in two phases. For the former phase, to overcome the inefficiencies and artifacts during template construction, we leverage a U-Net architecture that decouples texture and pose information in a feed-forward process, enabling fast generation of a human template. For the latter phase, we propose a data-driven refinement technique that enhances structural integrity. Extensive experiments show that our model delivers consistent performance across diverse poses with an optimal balance between efficiency and quality, surpassing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.

PaperID: 2572, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13015

Authors:King-Man Tam, Satoshi Ikehata, Yuta Asano, Zhaoyi An, Rei Kawakami

Affiliations: Institute of Science Tokyo, National Institute of Informatics, Denso IT Laboratory

Title: Geometry Meets Light: Leveraging Geometric Priors for Universal Photometric Stereo Under Limited Multi-Illumination Cues

Abstract:
Universal Photometric Stereo is a promising approach for recovering surface normals without strict lighting assumptions. However, it struggles when multiillumination cues are unreliable, such as under biased lighting or in shadows or self-occluded regions of complex in-the-wild scenes. We propose GeoUniPS, a universal photometric stereo network that integrates synthetic supervision with high-level geometric priors from large-scale 3D reconstruction models pretrained on massive in-the-wild data. Our key insight is that these 3D reconstruction models serve as visual-geometry foundation models, inherently encoding rich geometric knowledge of real scenes. To leverage this, we design a Light-Geometry Dual-Branch Encoder that extracts both multi-illumination cues and geometric priors from the frozen 3D reconstruction model. We also address the limitations of the conventional orthographic projection assumption by introducing the PS-Perp dataset with realistic perspective projection to enable learning of spatially varying view directions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GeoUniPS delivers state-of-the-arts performance across multiple datasets, both quantitatively and qualitatively, especially in the complex in-the-wild scenes.

PaperID: 2573, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12609

Authors:Lexiang Tang, Xianwei Zhuang, Bang Yang, Zhiyuan Hu, Hongxiang Li, Lu Ma, Jinghan Ru, Yuexian Zou

Affiliations: Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Ultra High Definition Immersive Media Technology, Shenzhen Graduate School, Peking University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: Not All Tokens and Heads Are Equally Important: Dual-Level Attention Intervention for Hallucination Mitigation

Abstract:
Large visionlanguage models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across diverse multimodal tasks, yet they remain highly susceptible to visual hallucinations (VH), often producing confident but inaccurate descriptions of visual content. Building on the insight that not all tokens and attention heads contribute equally to VH mitigation, we introduce VisFlow, a lightweight and training-free framework that alleviates hallucinations by directly modulating attention patterns during inference. To address two primary challenges of VH, namely insufficient visual attention and the dominance of language priors, we identify three problematic attention behaviors in LVLMs: (1) disproportionate allocation of attention to uninformative or trailing visual tokens, (2) over-dependence on the previously generated token, and (3) excessive fixation on system prompts that hinders multimodal integration. To overcome these issues, VisFlow introduces a dual-level Attention Intervention, consisting of Token-level Attention Intervention (TAI), which reinforces attention to salient visual regions, and Head-level Attention Intervention (HAI), which suppresses undue focus on system prompts and adjacent text tokens. Together, these interventions strengthen visual alignment while reducing linguistic bias. Extensive experiments across diverse models and benchmarks demonstrate that VisFlow effectively mitigates hallucinations with minimal computational overhead.

PaperID: 2574, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06115

Authors:Mostofa Rafid Uddin, Jana Armouti, Umong Sain, Md Asib Rahman, Xingjian Li, Min Xu

Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology

Title: DiLO: Disentangled Latent Optimization for Learning Shape and Deformation in Grouped Deforming 3D Objects

Abstract:
In this work, we propose a disentangled latent optimizationbased method for parameterizing grouped deforming 3D objects into shape and deformation factors in an unsupervised manner. Our approach involves the joint optimization of a generator network along with the shape and deformation factors, supported by specific regularization techniques. For efficient amortized inference of disentangled shape and deformation codes, we train two order-invariant PoinNet-based encoder networks in the second stage of our method. We demonstrate several significant downstream applications of our method, including unsupervised deformation transfer, deformation classification, and explainability analysis. Extensive experiments conducted on 3D human, animal, and facial expression datasets demonstrate that our simple approach is highly effective in these downstream tasks, comparable or superior to existing methods with much higher complexity.

PaperID: 2575, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14371

Authors:Xiaolin Wang, Houzhang Fang, Qingshan Li, Lu Wang, Yi Chang, Luxin Yan

Affiliations: Xidian University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: Blur-Robust Detection via Feature Restoration: An End-to-End Framework for Prior-Guided Infrared UAV Target Detection

Abstract:
Infrared unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) target images often suffer from motion blur degradation caused by rapid sensor movement, significantly reducing contrast between target and background. Generally, detection performance heavily depends on the discriminative feature representation between target and background. Existing methods typically treat deblurring as a preprocessing step focused on visual quality, while neglecting the enhancement of taskrelevant features crucial for detection. Improving feature representation for detection under blur conditions remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel Joint Feature-Domain Deblurring and Detection end-to-end framework, dubbed JFD³. We design a dual-branch architecture with shared weights, where the clear branch guides the blurred branch to enhance discriminative feature representation. Specifically, we first introduce a lightweight feature restoration network, where features from the clear branch serve as feature-level supervision to guide the blurred branch, thereby enhancing its distinctive capability for detection. We then propose a frequency structure guidance module that refines the structure prior from the restoration network and integrates it into shallow detection layers to enrich target structural information. Finally, a feature consistency self-supervised loss is imposed between the dual-branch detection backbones, driving the blurred branch to approximate the feature representations of the clear one. We also construct a benchmark, named IRBlurUAV, containing 30,000 simulated and 4,118 real infrared UAV target images with diverse motion blur. Extensive experiments on IRBlurUAV demonstrate that JFD³ achieves superior detection performance while maintaining real-time efficiency.

PaperID: 2576, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.06122

Authors:Xin Xu, Binchang Ma, Zhixi Yu, Wei Liu

Affiliations: Wuhan University of Science and Technology

Title: FedARKS: Federated Aggregation via Robust and Discriminative Knowledge Selection and Integration for Person Re-identification

Abstract:
The application of federated domain generalization in person reidentification (FedDG-ReID) aims to enhance the model's generalization ability in unseen domains while protecting client data privacy. However, existing mainstream methods typically rely on global feature representations and simple averaging operations for model aggregation, leading to two limitations in domain generalization: (1) Using only global features makes it difficult to capture subtle, domain-invariant local details (such as accessories or textures); (2) Uniform parameter averaging treats all clients as equivalent, ignoring their differences in robust feature extraction capabilities, thereby diluting the contributions of high-quality clients. To address these issues, we propose a novel federated learning framework—Federated Aggregation via Robust and Discriminative Knowledge Selection and Integration (FedARKS)—comprising two mechanisms: RK (Robust Knowledge) and KS (Knowledge Selection). In our design, each client employs a dual-branch network of RK: the Global Feature Processing Branch serves as the primary component, extracting overall representations for model aggregation and server-side updates; while the Body Part Processing Branch acts as an auxiliary component, focusing on extracting domain-invariant local details to supplement and guide the local training process during global feature learning. Additionally, our KS mechanism adaptively assigns corresponding aggregation weights to clients based on their ability to extract domain-invariant knowledge, enabling the server to better integrate cross-domain invariant knowledge extracted by clients. Extensive experiments validate that FedARKS achieves state-of-the-art generalization results on the FedDG-ReID benchmark, demonstrating that learning subtle body part features can effectively assist and reinforce global representations, thereby enabling robust cross-domain person ReID capabilities.

PaperID: 2577, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12162

Authors:Shuo Yin, Zhiyuan Yin, Yuqing Hou, Rui Liu, Yong Chen, Dell Zhang

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Independent Researcher, Beihang University, China Telecom

Title: Codebook-Centric Deep Hashing: End-to-End Joint Learning of Semantic Hash Centers and Neural Hash Function

Abstract:
Hash centerbased deep hashing methods improve upon pairwise or triplet-based approaches by assigning fixed hash centers to each class as learning targets, thereby avoiding the inefficiency of local similarity optimization. However, random center initialization often disregards inter-class semantic relationships. While existing two-stage methods mitigate this by first refining hash centers with semantics and then training the hash function, they introduce additional complexity, computational overhead, and suboptimal performance due to stage-wise discrepancies. To address these limitations, we propose Center-Reassigned Hashing (CRH), an end-to-end framework that dynamically reassigns hash centers from a preset codebook while jointly optimizing the hash function. Unlike previous methods, CRH adapts hash centers to the data distribution without explicit center optimization phases, enabling seamless integration of semantic relationships into the learning process. Furthermore, a multi-head mechanism enhances the representational capacity of hash centers, capturing richer semantic structures. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that CRH learns semantically meaningful hash centers and outperforms state-of-the-art deep hashing methods in retrieval tasks.

PaperID: 2578, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21002

Authors:Xiaoxing You, Qiang Huang, Lingyu Li, Chi Zhang, Xiaopeng Liu, Min Zhang, Jun Yu

Affiliations: Hangzhou Dianzi University, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), People's Daily, China Peng Cheng Laboratory

Title: Knowledge Completes the Vision: A Multimodal Entity-aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework for News Image Captioning

Abstract:
News image captioning aims to produce journalistically informative descriptions by combining visual content with contextual cues from associated articles. Despite recent advances, existing methods struggle with three key challenges: (1) incomplete information coverage, (2) weak crossmodal alignment, and (3) suboptimal visual-entity grounding. To address these issues, we introduce MERGE, the first Multimodal Entity-aware Retrieval-augmented GEneration framework for news image captioning. MERGE constructs an entity-centric multimodal knowledge base (EMKB) that integrates textual, visual, and structured knowledge, enabling enriched background retrieval. It improves cross-modal alignment through a multistage hypothesis-caption strategy and enhances visual-entity matching via dynamic retrieval guided by image content. Extensive experiments on GoodNews and NYTimes800k show that MERGE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with CIDEr gains of +6.84 and +1.16 in caption quality, and F1-score improvements of +4.14 and +2.64 in named entity recognition. Notably, MERGE also generalizes well to the unseen Visual News dataset, achieving +20.17 in CIDEr and +6.22 in F1-score, demonstrating strong robustness and domain adaptability.

PaperID: 2579, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05494

Authors:Fan Zhang, Zhiwei Gu, Hua Wang

Affiliations: Shandong Technology and Business University, Ludong University

Title: Decoding with Structured Awareness: Integrating Directional, Frequency-Spatial, and Structural Attention for Medical Image Segmentation

Abstract:
To address the limitations of Transformer decoders in capturing edge details, recognizing local textures and modeling spatial continuity, this paper proposes a novel decoder framework specifically designed for medical image segmentation, comprising three core modules. First, the Adaptive CrossFusion Attention (ACFA) module integrates channel feature enhancement with spatial attention mechanisms and introduces learnable guidance in three directions (planar, horizontal, and vertical) to enhance responsiveness to key regions and structural orientations. Second, the Triple Feature Fusion Attention (TFFA) module fuses features from Spatial, Fourier and Wavelet domains, achieving joint frequency-spatial representation that strengthens global dependency and structural modeling while preserving local information such as edges and textures, making it particularly effective in complex and blurred boundary scenarios. Finally, the Structural-aware Multi-scale Masking Module (SMMM) optimizes the skip connections between encoder and decoder by leveraging multi-scale context and structural saliency filtering, effectively reducing feature redundancy and improving semantic interaction quality. Working synergistically, these modules not only address the shortcomings of traditional decoders but also significantly enhance performance in high-precision tasks such as tumor segmentation and organ boundary extraction, improving both segmentation accuracy and model generalization. Experimental results demonstrate that this framework provides an efficient and practical solution for medical image segmentation.

PaperID: 2580, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.16073

Authors:Hanwen Zhang, Qiaojin Shen, Yuxi Liu, Yuesheng Zhu, Guibo Luo

Affiliations: Peking University

Title: DSFedMed: Dual-Scale Federated Medical Image Segmentation via Mutual Distillation Between Foundation and Lightweight Models

Abstract:
Foundation Models (FMs) have demonstrated strong generalization across diverse vision tasks. However, their deployment in federated settings is hindered by high computational demands, substantial communication overhead, and significant inference costs. We propose DSFedMed, a dualscale federated framework that enables mutual knowledge distillation between a centralized foundation model and lightweight client models for medical image segmentation. To support knowledge distillation, a set of high-quality medical images is generated to replace real public datasets, and a learnability-guided sample selection strategy is proposed to enhance efficiency and effectiveness in dual-scale distillation. This mutual distillation enables the foundation model to transfer general knowledge to lightweight clients, while also incorporating client-specific insights to refine the foundation model. Evaluations on five medical imaging segmentation datasets show that DSFedMed achieves an average 2 percent improvement in Dice score while reducing communication costs and inference time by nearly 90 percent compared to existing federated foundation model baselines. These results demonstrate significant efficiency gains and scalability for resource-limited federated deployments.

PaperID: 2581, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10076

Authors:Xiangyue Zhang, Jianfang Li, Jianqiang Ren, Jiaxu Zhang

Affiliations: Tongyi Lab, Alibaba Group, Nanyang Technological University

Title: Mitigating Error Accumulation in Co-Speech Motion Generation via Global Rotation Diffusion and Multi-Level Constraints

Abstract:
Reliable cospeech motion generation requires precise motion representation and consistent structural priors across all joints. Existing generative methods typically operate on local joint rotations, which are defined hierarchically based on the skeleton structure. This leads to cumulative errors during generation, manifesting as unstable and implausible motions at end-effectors. In this work, we propose GlobalDiff, a diffusion-based framework that operates directly in the space of global joint rotations for the first time, fundamentally decoupling each joint’s prediction from upstream dependencies and alleviating hierarchical error accumulation. To compensate for the absence of structural priors in global rotation space, we introduce a multi-level constraint scheme. Specifically, a joint structure constraint introduces virtual anchor points around each joint to better capture fine-grained orientation. A skeleton structure constraint enforces angular consistency across bones to maintain structural integrity. A temporal structure constraint utilizes a multi-scale variational encoder to align the generated motion with ground-truth temporal patterns. These constraints jointly regularize the global diffusion process and reinforce structural awareness. Extensive evaluations on standard co-speech benchmarks show that GlobalDiff generates smooth and accurate motions, improving the performance by 46.0% compared to the current SOTA under multiple speaker identities.

PaperID: 2582, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.00542

Authors:Yafei Zhang, Shuaitian Song, Huafeng Li, Shujuan Wang, Yu Liu

Affiliations: Faculty of Information Engineering and Automation, Kunmimg University of Science and Technology, Kunming University of Science and Technology, School of Instrument Seicence and Opto-electronics Engineering, Hefei University of Technology

Title: Adaptive Dynamic Dehazing via Instruction-Driven and Task-Feedback Closed-Loop Optimization for Diverse Downstream Task Adaptation

Abstract:
In realworld vision systems, haze removal is required not only to enhance image visibility but also to meet the specific needs of diverse downstream tasks. To address this challenge, we propose a novel adaptive dynamic dehazing framework that incorporates a closed-loop optimization mechanism. It enables feedback-driven refinement based on downstream task performance and user instruction–guided adjustment during inference, allowing the model to satisfy the specific requirements of multiple downstream tasks without retraining. Technically, our framework integrates two complementary and innovative mechanisms: (1) a task feedback loop that dynamically modulates dehazing outputs based on performance across multiple downstream tasks, and (2) a text instruction interface that allows users to specify high-level task preferences. This dual-guidance strategy enables the model to adapt its dehazing behavior after training, tailoring outputs in real time to the evolving needs of multiple tasks. Extensive experiments across various vision tasks demonstrate the strong effectiveness, robustness, and generalizability of our approach. These results establish a new paradigm for interactive, task-adaptive dehazing that actively collaborates with downstream applications.

PaperID: 2583, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05772

Authors:Can Zhao, Pengfei Guo, Dong Yang, Yufan He, Yucheng Tang, Benjamin Simon, Mason Belue, Stephanie Harmon, Baris Turkbey, Daguang Xu

Affiliations: University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, National Institutes of Health

Title: MAISI-v2: Accelerated 3D High-Resolution Medical Image Synthesis with Rectified Flow and Region-specific Contrastive Loss

Abstract:
Medical image synthesis is an important topic for both clinical and research applications. Recently, diffusion models have become a leading approach in this area. Despite their strengths, many existing methods struggle with (1) limited generalizability, only working for specific body regions or voxel spacings, (2) slow inference, which is a common issue for diffusion models, and (3) weak alignment with input conditions, which is a critical issue for medical imaging. MAISI, a previously proposed framework, addresses generalizability issues but still suffers from slow inference and limited condition consistency. In this work, we present MAISIv2, the first accelerated 3D medical image synthesis framework that integrates rectified flow to enable fast and high-quality generation. To further enhance condition fidelity, we introduce a novel region-specific contrastive loss to improve sensitivity to the region of interest. Our experiments show that MAISI-v2 can achieve state-of-the-art image quality with 33× acceleration for latent diffusion models. We also conducted a downstream segmentation experiment to show that the synthetic images can be used for data augmentation. We release our code, training details, model weights, and a GUI demo to facilitate reproducibility and promote further development within the community.

PaperID: 2584, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.07978

Authors:Jiaxing Zhao, Boyuan Sun, Xiang Chen, Xihan Wei

Affiliations: Alibaba Group

Title: Facial Dynamics in Video: Instruction Tuning for Improved Facial Expression Perception and Contextual Awareness

Abstract:
Facial expression captioning has found widespread application across various domains. Recently, the emergence of video Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has shown promise in general video understanding tasks. However, describing facial expressions within videos poses two major challenges for these models: (1) the lack of adequate datasets and benchmarks, and (2) the limited visual token capacity of video MLLMs. To address these issues, this paper introduces a new instructionfollowing dataset tailored for dynamic facial expression caption. The dataset comprises 5,033 high-quality video clips annotated manually, containing over 700,000 tokens. Its purpose is to improve the capability of video MLLMs to discern subtle facial nuances. Furthermore, we propose FaceTrack-MM, which leverages a limited number of tokens to encode the main character’s face. This model demonstrates superior performance in tracking faces and focusing on the facial expressions of the main characters, even in intricate multiperson scenarios. Additionally, we introduce a novel evaluation metric combining event extraction, relation classification, and the longest common subsequence (LCS) algorithm to assess the content consistency and temporal sequence consistency of generated text. Moreover, we present FECBench, a benchmark designed to assess the performance of existing video MLLMs in this specific task.

PaperID: 2585, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06175

Authors:Kaijie Xu, Fandi Meng, Clark Verbrugge, Simon Mark Lucas

Affiliations: McGill University, Queen Mary University of London

Title: CSP4SDG: Constraint and Information-Theory Based Role Identification in Social Deduction Games with LLM-Enhanced Inference

Abstract:
In Social Deduction Games (SDGs) such as Avalon, Mafia, and Werewolf, players conceal their identities and deliberately mislead others, making hiddenrole inference a central and demanding task. Accurate role identification, which forms the basis of an agent's belief state, is therefore the keystone for both human and AI performance. We introduce CSP4SDG, a probabilistic, constraint–satisfaction framework that analyses gameplay objectively. Game events and dialogue are mapped to four linguistically agnostic constraint classes—evidence, phenomena, assertions, and hypotheses. Hard constraints prune impossible role assignments, while weighted soft constraints score the remainder; information-gain weighting links each hypothesis to its expected value under entropy reduction, and a simple closed-form scoring rule guarantees that truthful assertions converge to classical hard logic with minimum error. The resulting posterior over roles is fully interpretable and updates in real time. Experiments on three public datasets show that CSP4SDG (i) outperforms LLM-based baselines in every inference scenario, and (ii) boosts LLMs when supplied as an auxiliary "reasoning tool." Our study validates that principled probabilistic reasoning with information theory is a scalable alternative—or complement—to heavy-weight neural models for SDGs.

PaperID: 2586, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15191

Authors:Zhiyi Duan, Zixing Shi, Hongyu Yuan, Qi Wang

Affiliations: Inner Mongolia University, Jilin University

Title: HISE-KT: Synergizing Heterogeneous Information Networks and LLMs for Explainable Knowledge Tracing with Meta-Path Optimization

Abstract:
Knowledge Tracing (KT) aims to mine students’ evolving knowledge states and predict their future questionanswering performance. Existing methods based on heterogeneous information networks (HINs) are prone to introducing noises due to manual or random selection of meta-paths and lack necessary quality assessment of meta-path instances. Conversely, recent large language models (LLMs)-based methods ignore the rich information across students, and both paradigms struggle to deliver consistently accurate and evidence-based explanations. To address these issues, we propose an innovative framework, HIN-LLM Synergistic Enhanced Knowledge Tracing (HISE-KT), which seamlessly integrates HINs with LLMs. HISE-KT first builds a multi-relationship HIN containing diverse node types to capture the structural relations through multiple meta-paths. The LLM is then employed to intelligently score and filter meta-path instances and retain high-quality paths, pioneering automated meta-path quality assessment. Inspired by educational psychology principles, a similar student retrieval mechanism based on meta-paths is designed to provide a more valuable context for prediction. Finally, HISE-KT uses a structured prompt to integrate the target student's history with the retrieved similar trajectories, enabling the LLM to generate not only accurate predictions but also evidence-backed, explainable analysis reports. Experiments on four public datasets show that HISE-KT outperforms existing KT baselines in both prediction performance and interpretability.

PaperID: 2587, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08006

Authors:Peiyu Hu, Wayne Lu, Jia Wang

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University University of Liverpool

Title: From IDs to Semantics: A Generative Framework for Cross-Domain Recommendation with Adaptive Semantic Tokenization

Abstract:
Crossdomain recommendation (CDR) is crucial for improving recommendation accuracy and generalization, yet traditional methods are often hindered by the reliance on shared user/item IDs, which are unavailable in most real-world scenarios. Consequently, many efforts have focused on learning disentangled representations through multi-domain joint training to bridge the domain gaps. Recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based approaches show promise, they still face critical challenges, including: (1) the item ID tokenization dilemma, which leads to vocabulary explosion and fails to capture high-order collaborative knowledge; and (2) insufficient domain-specific modeling for the complex evolution of user interests and item semantics. To address these limitations, we propose GenCDR, a novel Generative Cross-Domain Recommendation framework. GenCDR first employs a Domain-adaptive Tokenization module, which generates disentangled semantic IDs for items by dynamically routing between a universal encoder and domain-specific adapters. Symmetrically, a Cross-domain Autoregressive Recommendation module models user preferences by fusing universal and domain-specific interests. Finally, a Domain-aware Prefix-tree enables efficient and accurate generation. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that GenCDR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Our code is available in the supplementary materials.

PaperID: 2588, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12964

Authors:Yupeng Li, Mingyue Cheng, Yucong Luo, Yitong Zhou, Qingyang Mao, Shijin Wang

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Intelligence, University of Science and Technology of China, iFLYTEK AI Research (Central China), iFLYTEK Co.

Title: BLADE: A Behavior-Level Data Augmentation Framework with Dual Fusion Modeling for Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommendation

Abstract:
Multibehavior sequential recommendation aims to capture users' dynamic interests by modeling diverse types of user interactions over time. Although several studies have explored this setting, the recommendation performance remains suboptimal, mainly due to two fundamental challenges: the heterogeneity of user behaviors and data sparsity. To address these challenges, we propose BLADE, a framework that enhances multi-behavior modeling while mitigating data sparsity. Specifically, to handle behavior heterogeneity, we introduce a dual item-behavior fusion architecture that incorporates behavior information at both the input and intermediate levels, enabling preference modeling from multiple perspectives. To mitigate data sparsity, we design three behavior-level data augmentation methods that operate directly on behavior sequences rather than core item sequences. These methods generate diverse augmented views while preserving the semantic consistency of item sequences. These augmented views further enhance representation learning and generalization via contrastive learning. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

PaperID: 2589, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12208

Authors:Jilong Liu, Pengyang Shao, Wei Qin, Fei Liu, Yonghui Yang, Richang Hong

Affiliations: Hefei University of Technology, National University of Singapore

Title: Debate over Mixed-knowledge: A Robust Multi-Agent Reasoning Framework for Incomplete Knowledge Graph Question Answering

Abstract:
Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) aims to improve factual accuracy by leveraging structured knowledge. However, realworld Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are often incomplete, leading to the problem of Incomplete KGQA (IKGQA). A common solution is to incorporate external data to fill knowledge gaps, but existing methods lack the capacity to adaptively and contextually fuse multiple sources, failing to fully exploit their complementary strengths. To this end, we propose Debate over Mixed-knowledge (DoM), a novel framework that enables dynamic integration of structured and unstructured knowledge for IKGQA. Built upon the Multi-Agent Debate paradigm, DoM assigns specialized agents to perform inference over knowledge graphs and external texts separately, and coordinates their outputs through iterative interaction. It decomposes the input question into sub-questions, retrieves evidence via dual agents (KG and Retrieval-Augmented Generation, RAG), and employs a judge agent to evaluate and aggregate intermediate answers. This collaboration exploits knowledge complementarity and enhances robustness to KG incompleteness. In addition, existing IKGQA datasets simulate incompleteness by randomly removing triples, failing to capture the irregular and unpredictable nature of real-world knowledge incompleteness. To address this, we introduce a new dataset, Incomplete Knowledge Graph WebQuestions, constructed by leveraging real-world knowledge updates. These updates reflect knowledge beyond the static scope of KGs, yielding a more realistic and challenging benchmark. Through extensive experiments, we show that DoM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 2590, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07295

Authors:Tianrui Song, Wen-Shuo Chao, Hao Liu

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Title: Hard vs. Noise: Resolving Hard-Noisy Sample Confusion in Recommender Systems via Large Language Models

Abstract:
Implicit feedback, employed in training recommender systems, unavoidably confronts noise due to factors such as misclicks and position bias. Previous studies have attempted to identify noisy samples through their diverged data patterns, such as higher loss values, and mitigate their influence through sample dropping or reweighting. However, we observed that noisy samples and hard samples display similar patterns, leading to hardnoisy confusion issue. Such confusion is problematic as hard samples are vital for modeling user preferences. To solve this problem, we propose LLMHNI framework, leveraging two auxiliary user-item relevance signals generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) to differentiate hard and noisy samples. LLMHNI obtains user-item semantic relevance from LLM-encoded embeddings, which is used in negative sampling to select hard negatives while filtering out noisy false negatives. An objective alignment strategy is proposed to project LLM-encoded embeddings, originally for general language tasks, into a representation space optimized for user-item relevance modeling. LLMHNI also exploits LLM-inferred logical relevance within user-item interactions to identify hard and noisy samples. These LLM-inferred interactions are integrated into the interaction graph and guide denoising with cross-graph contrastive alignment. To eliminate the impact of unreliable interactions induced by LLM hallucination, we propose a graph contrastive learning strategy that aligns representations from randomly edge-dropped views to suppress unreliable edges. Empirical results demonstrate that LLMHNI significantly improves denoising and recommendation performance.

PaperID: 2591, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09392

Authors:Jiajie Su, Zihan Nan, Yunshan Ma, Xiaobo Xia, XiaoHua Feng, Weiming Liu, Xiang Chen, Xiaolin Zheng, Chaochao Chen

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Peking University, Singapore Management University, National University of Singapore, MoE Key Laboratory of Brain-inspired Intelligent Perception and Cognition, University of Science and Technology of China

Title: Potent but Stealthy: Rethink Profile Pollution Against Sequential Recommendation via Bi-Level Constrained Reinforcement Paradigm

Abstract:
Sequential Recommenders, which exploit dynamic user intents through interaction sequences, are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. While existing attacks primarily rely on data poisoning, they require largescale user access or fake profiles thus lacking practicality. In this paper, we focus on the Profile Pollution Attack (PPA) that subtly contaminates partial user interactions to induce targeted mispredictions. Previous PPA methods suffer from two limitations, i.e., i) over-reliance on sequence horizon impact restricts fine-grained perturbations on item transitions, and ii) holistic modifications cause detectable distribution shifts. To address these challenges, we propose a constrained reinforcement driven attack CREAT that synergizes a bi-level optimization framework with multi-reward reinforcement learning to balance adversarial efficacy and stealthiness. We first develop a Pattern Balanced Rewarding Policy, which integrates pattern inversion rewards to invert critical patterns and distribution consistency rewards to minimize detectable shifts via unbalanced co-optimal transport. Then we employ a Constrained Group Relative Reinforcement Learning paradigm, enabling step-wise perturbations through dynamic barrier constraints and group-shared experience replay, achieving targeted pollution with minimal detectability. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CREAT.

PaperID: 2592, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16895

Authors:Ratip Emin Berker, Emanuel Tewolde, Vincent Conitzer, Mingyu Guo, Marijn Heule, Lirong Xia

Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University, University of Adelaide, Rutgers University

Title: On the Edge of Core (Non-)Emptiness: An Automated Reasoning Approach to Approval-Based Multi-Winner Voting

Abstract:
Core stability is a natural and wellstudied notion for group fairness in multi-winner voting, where the task is to select a committee from a pool of candidates. We study the setting where voters either approve or disapprove of each candidate; here, it remains a major open problem whether a core-stable committee always exists. In this work, we develop an approach based on mixed-integer linear programming for deciding whether and when core-stable committees are guaranteed to exist. In contrast to SAT-based approaches popular in computational social choice, our method can produce proofs for a specific number of candidates independent of the number of voters. In addition to these computational gains, our program lends itself to a novel duality-based reformulation of the core stability problem, from which we obtain new existence results in special cases. Further, we use our framework to reveal previously unknown relationships between core stability and other desirable properties, such as notions of priceability.

PaperID: 2593, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.20104

Authors:Hasan Amin, Ming Yin, Rajiv Khanna

Affiliations: Purdue University

Title: Align When They Want, Complement When They Need! Human-Centered Ensembles for Adaptive Human-AI Collaboration

Abstract:
In humanAI decision making, designing AI that complements human expertise has been a natural strategy to enhance human-AI collaboration, yet it often comes at the cost of decreased AI performance in areas of human strengths. This can inadvertently erode human trust and cause them to ignore AI advice precisely when it is most needed. Conversely, an aligned AI fosters trust yet risks reinforcing suboptimal human behavior and lowering human-AI team performance. In this paper, we start by identifying this fundamental tension between performance-boosting (i.e., complementarity) and trust-building (i.e., alignment) as an inherent limitation of the traditional approach for training a single AI model to assist human decision making. To overcome this, we introduce a novel, human-centered adaptive AI ensemble that strategically toggles between two specialist AI models—the aligned model and the complementary model—based on contextual cues, using an elegantly simple yet provably near-optimal Rational Routing Shortcut mechanism. Comprehensive theoretical analyses elucidate why the adaptive AI ensemble is effective and when it yields maximum benefits. Moreover, experiments on both simulated and real-world data show that when humans are assisted by the adaptive AI ensemble in decision making, they can achieve significantly higher performance than when they are assisted by single AI models that are trained to either optimize for its independent performance or even the human-AI team performance.

PaperID: 2594, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12075

Authors:Dong-Hee Shin, Deok-Joong Lee, Young-Han Son, Tae-Eui Kam

Affiliations: Korea University

Title: Treatment Stitching with Schrödinger Bridge for Enhancing Offline Reinforcement Learning in Adaptive Treatment Strategies

Abstract:
Adaptive treatment strategies (ATS) are sequential decisionmaking processes that enable personalized care by dynamically adjusting treatment decisions in response to evolving patient symptoms. While reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising approach for optimizing ATS, its conventional online trial-and-error learning mechanism is not permissible in clinical settings due to risks of harm to patients. Offline RL tackles this limitation by learning policies exclusively from historical treatment data, but its performance is often constrained by data scarcity—a pervasive challenge in clinical domains. To overcome this, we propose Treatment Stitching (TreatStitch), a novel data augmentation framework that generates clinically valid treatment trajectories by intelligently stitching segments from existing treatment data. Specifically, TreatStitch identifies similar intermediate patient states across different trajectories and stitches their respective segments. Even when intermediate states are too dissimilar to stitch directly, TreatStitch leverages the Schrödinger bridge method to generate smooth and shortest possible bridging trajectories that connect dissimilar states. By augmenting these synthetic trajectories into the original dataset, offline RL can learn from a more diverse dataset, thereby improving its ability to optimize ATS. Extensive experiments across multiple treatment datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of TreatStitch in enhancing offline RL performance. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical justification showing that TreatStitch maintains clinical validity by avoiding out-of-distribution transitions.

PaperID: 2595, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.00762

Authors:Jianhao Chen, Zishuo Xun, Bocheng Zhou, Han Qi, Hangfan Zhang, Qiaosheng Zhang, Yang Chen, Wei Hu, Yuzhong Qu, Shuyue Hu

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, The Pennsylvania State University, Nanjing University

Title: Do We Truly Need So Many Samples? Multi-LLM Repeated Sampling Efficiently Scales Test-Time Compute

Abstract:
This paper presents a simple, effective, and costefficient strategy, named ModelSwitch, to improve LLM performance by scaling test-time compute. ModelSwitch builds upon the repeated-sampling-then-voting framework, with a novel twist: incorporating multiple models, even weaker ones, to leverage their complementary strengths that potentially arise from diverse training data and paradigms. By using sample consistency as a signal, our strategy dynamically switches between models. Theoretical analysis highlights the efficiency and performance advantages of our strategy. Extensive experiments on seven datasets demonstrate that our strategy not only outperforms self-consistency and state-of-the-art multi-agent debate approaches, but also significantly reduces inference costs. Additionally, our strategy requires only a few comparable LLMs to achieve optimal performance and can be extended with verification methods, demonstrating the potential of leveraging multiple LLMs in the generation-verification paradigm.

PaperID: 2596, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18700

Authors:Siran Chen, Boyu Chen, Chenyun Yu, Yi Ouyang, Lei Cheng, Chengxiang Zhuo, Zang Li, Yali Wang

Affiliations: Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, Platform and Content Group, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology

Title: When Top-ranked Recommendations Fail: Modeling Multi-Granular Negative Feedback for Explainable and Robust Video Recommendation

Abstract:
Existing video recommendation systems, relying mainly on IDbased embedding mapping and collaborative filtering, often fail to capture in-depth video content semantics. Moreover, most struggle to address biased user behaviors (e.g., accidental clicks, fast skips), leading to inaccurate interest modeling and frequent negative feedback in top recommendations with unclear causes. To tackle this issue, we collect real-world user video-watching sequences, annotate the reasons for users' dislikes, and construct a benchmark dataset for personalized explanations. We then introduce the Agentic Explainable Negative Feedback (ENF) framework, which integrates three core components: (1) the Profile Agent, extracting behavioral cues from users' historical data to derive psychological and personality profiles; (2) the Video Agent, performing comprehensive multimodal video analysis; and (3) the Reason Agent, synthesizing information from the other two agents to predict user engagement and generate explanations. Additionally, we propose the S-GRPO algorithm, enabling the model to progressively address complex tasks during reinforcement fine-tuning. Experimental results on the collected dataset show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in negative feedback prediction and reason explanation. Notably, it achieves an 8.6% improvement over GPT-4o in reason classification. Deployment on the business platform further validates its benefits: increasing average user watch time by 6.2%, reducing the fast-skip rate by 9.4% , and significantly enhancing user satisfaction.

PaperID: 2597, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00522

Authors:Jiaxin Deng, Qingcheng Zhu, Junbiao Pang, Linlin Yang, Zhongqian Fu, Baochang Zhang

Affiliations: School of Information Science and Technology, Beijing University of Technology, School of Electronic Information Engineering, Beihang University, State Key Laboratory of Media Convergence and Communication, Communication University of China, Huawei Noah's Ark Lab, Hangzhou Research Institute, School of Artificial Intelligence

Title: Efficiently Seeking Flat Minima for Better Generalization in Fine-Tuning Large Language Models and Beyond

Abstract:
Little research explores the correlation between the expressive ability and generalization ability of the lowrank adaptation (LoRA). Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) improves model generalization for both Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformers by encouraging convergence to locally flat minima. However, the connection between sharpness and generalization has not been fully explored for LoRA due to the lack of tools to either empirically seek flat minima or develop theoretical methods. In this work, we propose Flat Minima LoRA (FMLoRA) and its efficient version i.e., EFMLoRA, to seek flat minima for LoRA. Concretely, we theoretically demonstrate that perturbations in the full parameter space can be transferred to the low-rank subspace. This approach eliminates the potential interference introduced by perturbations across multiple matrices in the low-rank subspace. Our extensive experiments on large language models and vision-language models demonstrate that EFMLoRA achieves optimization efficiency comparable to that of LoRA while simultaneously attaining comparable or even better performance. For example, on the GLUE dataset with RoBERTa-large, EFMLoRA outperforms LoRA and full fine-tuning by 1.0% and 0.5% on average, respectively. On vision-language models e.g., Qwen-VL-Chat, there are performance improvements of 1.5% and 1.0% on the SQA and VizWiz datasets, respectively. These empirical results also verify that the generalization of LoRA is closely related to sharpness, which is omitted by previous methods.

PaperID: 2598, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.19406

Authors:Kuiye Ding, Fanda Fan, Chunyi Hou, Zheya Wang, Lei Wang, Zhengxin Yang, Jianfeng Zhan

Affiliations: Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing University of Technology, Durham University

Title: TimeMosaic: Temporal Heterogeneity Guided Time Series Forecasting via Adaptive Granularity Patch and Segment-wise Decoding

Abstract:
Multivariate time series forecasting is essential in domains such as finance, transportation, climate, and energy. However, existing patchbased methods typically adopt fixed-length segmentation, overlooking the heterogeneity of local temporal dynamics and the decoding heterogeneity of forecasting. Such designs lose details in information-dense regions, introduce redundancy in stable segments, and fail to capture the distinct complexities of short-term and long-term horizons. We propose TimeMosaic, a forecasting framework that aims to address temporal heterogeneity. TimeMosaic employs adaptive patch embedding to dynamically adjust granularity according to local information density, balancing motif reuse with structural clarity while preserving temporal continuity. In addition, it introduces segment-wise decoding that treats each prediction horizon as a related subtask and adapts to horizon-specific difficulty and information requirements, rather than applying a single uniform decoder. Extensive evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate that TimeMosaic delivers consistent improvements over existing methods, and our model trained on the large-scale corpus with 321 billion observations achieves performance competitive with state-of-the-art TSFMs.

PaperID: 2599, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.13879

Authors:Junhyung Lyle Kim, Nai-Hui Chia, Anastasios Kyrillidis

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, Rice University

Title: A Catalyst Framework for the Quantum Linear System Problem via the Proximal Point Algorithm

Abstract:
Solving systems of linear equations is a fundamental problem, but it can be computationally intensive for classical algorithms in high dimensions. Existing quantum algorithms can achieve exponential speedups for the quantum linear system problem (QLSP) in terms of the problem dimension, but the advantage is bottlenecked by condition number of the coefficient matrix. In this work, we propose a new quantum algorithm for QLSP inspired by the classical proximal point algorithm (PPA). Our proposed method can be viewed as a metaalgorithm that allows inverting a modified matrix via an existing QLSP solver, thereby directly approximating the solution vector instead of approximating the inverse of the coefficient matrix. By carefully choosing the step size eta, the proposed algorithm can effectively precondition the linear system to mitigate the dependence on condition numbers that hindered the applicability of previous approaches. Importantly, this is the first iterative framework for QLSP where a tunable parameter eta and initialization x_0 allows controlling the trade-off between the runtime and approximation error.

PaperID: 2600, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.00132

Authors:Jiao Li, Jian Lang, Xikai Tang, Wenzheng Shu, Ting Zhong, Qiang Gao, Yong Wang, Leiting Chen, Fan Zhou

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Kuaishou Technology, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Aiwen Technology Co.

Title: Shedding the Facades, Connecting the Domains: Detecting Shifting Multimodal Hate Video with Test-Time Adaptation

Abstract:
Hate Video Detection (HVD) is crucial for online ecosystems. Existing methods assume identical distributions between training (source) and inference (target) data. However, hateful content often evolves into irregular and ambiguous forms to evade censorship, resulting in substantial semantic drift and rendering previously trained models ineffective. TestTime Adaptation (TTA) offers a solution by adapting models during inference to narrow the cross-domain gap, while conventional TTA methods target mild distribution shifts and struggle with the severe semantic drift in HVD. To tackle these challenges, we propose SCANNER, the first TTA framework tailored for HVD. Motivated by the insight that, despite the evolving nature of hateful manifestations, their underlying cores remain largely invariant (i.e., targeting is still based on characteristics like gender, race, etc), we leverage these stable cores as a bridge to connect the source and target domains. Specifically, SCANNER initially reveals the stable cores from the ambiguous layout in evolving hateful content via a principled centroid-guided alignment mechanism. To alleviate the impact of outlier-like samples that are weakly correlated with centroids during the alignment process, SCANNER enhances the prior by incorporating a sample-level adaptive centroid alignment strategy, promoting more stable adaptation. Furthermore, to mitigate semantic collapse from overly uniform outputs within clusters, SCANNER introduces an intra-cluster diversity regularization that encourages the cluster-wise semantic richness. Experiments show that SCANNER outperforms all baselines, with an average gain of 4.69% in Macro-F1 over the best.

PaperID: 2601, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22872

Authors:Yuyuan Li, Junjie Fang, Fengyuan Yu, Xichun Sheng, Tianyu Du, Xuyang Teng, Shaowei Jiang, Linbo Jiang, Jianan Lin, Chaochao Chen

Affiliations: Hangzhou Dianzi University, Zhejiang University, Macao Polytechnic University, Nanyang Technological University, Chongqing Ant Consumer Finance Co, . Ltd

Title: FedAU2: Attribute Unlearning for User-Level Federated Recommender Systems with Adaptive and Robust Adversarial Training

Abstract:
Federated Recommender Systems (FedRecs) leverage federated learning to protect user privacy by retaining data locally. However, user embeddings in FedRecs often encode sensitive attribute information, rendering them vulnerable to attribute inference attacks. Attribute unlearning has emerged as a promising approach to mitigate this issue. In this paper, we focus on userlevel FedRecs, which is a more practical yet challenging setting compared to group-level FedRecs. Adversarial training emerges as the most feasible approach within this context. We identify two key challenges in implementing adversarial training-based attribute unlearning for user-level FedRecs: i) mitigating training instability caused by user data heterogeneity, and ii) preventing attribute information leakage through gradients. To address these challenges, we propose FedAU2, an attribute unlearning method for user-level FedRecs. For CH1, we propose a adaptive adversarial training strategy, where the training dynamics are adjusted in response to local optimization behavior. For CH2, we propose a dual-stochastic variational autoencoder to perturb the adversarial model, effectively preventing gradient-based information leakage. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed FedAU2 achieves superior performance in unlearning effectiveness and recommendation performance compared to existing baselines.

PaperID: 2602, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13494

Authors:Yu-Chen Lu, Sheng-Feng Yu, Hui-Hsien Weng, Pei-Shuo Wang, Yu-Fang Hu, Liang Hung-Chun, Hung-Yueh Chiang, Kai-Chiang Wu

Affiliations: National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Skymizer Taiwan Inc., The University of Texas at Austin

Title: SkipCat: Rank-Maximized Low-Rank Compression of Large Language Models via Shared Projection and Block Skipping

Abstract:
Large language models (LLM) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks. However, their substantial parameter sizes pose significant challenges for deployment on edge devices with limited computational and memory resources. Lowrank compression is a promising approach to address this issue, as it reduces both computational and memory costs, making LLM more suitable for resource-constrained environments. Nonetheless, naïve low-rank compression methods require a significant reduction in the retained rank to achieve meaningful memory and computation savings. For a low-rank model, the ranks need to be reduced by more than half to yield efficiency gains. Such aggressive truncation, however, typically results in substantial performance degradation. To address this trade-off, we propose SkipCat, a novel low-rank compression framework that enables the use of higher ranks while achieving the same compression rates. First, we introduce an intra-layer shared low-rank projection method, where multiple matrices that share the same input use a common projection. This reduces redundancy and improves compression efficiency. Second, we propose a block skipping technique that omits computations and memory transfers for selected sub-blocks within the low-rank decomposition. These two techniques jointly enable our compressed model to retain more effective ranks under the same compression budget. Experimental results show that, without any additional fine-tuning, our method outperforms previous low-rank compression approaches by 7% accuracy improvement on zero-shot tasks under the same compression rate. These results highlight the effectiveness of our rank-maximized compression strategy in preserving model performance under tight resource constraints.

PaperID: 2603, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12750

Authors:Rishab Parthasarathy, Jasmine Collins, Cory Stephenson

Affiliations: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Databricks Mosaic AI Research

Title: What Makes a Good Generated Image? Investigating Human and Multimodal LLM Image Preference Alignment

Abstract:
Automated evaluation of generative textto-image models remains a challenging problem. Recent works have proposed using multimodal LLMs to judge the quality of images, but these works offer little insight into how multimodal LLMs make use of concepts relevant to humans, such as image style or composition, to generate their overall assessment. In this work, we study what attributes of an image--specifically aesthetics, lack of artifacts, anatomical accuracy, compositional correctness, object adherence, and style--are important for both LLMs and humans to make judgments on image quality. We first curate a dataset of human preferences using synthetically generated image pairs. We use inter-task correlation between each pair of image quality attributes to understand which attributes are related in making human judgments. Repeating the same analysis with LLMs, we find that the relationships between image quality attributes are much weaker. Finally, we study individual image quality attributes by generating synthetic datasets with a high degree of control for each axis. Humans are able to easily judge the quality of an image with respect to all of the specific image quality attributes (e.g. high vs. low aesthetic image), however we find that some attributes, such as anatomical accuracy, are much more difficult for multimodal LLMs to learn to judge. Taken together, these findings reveal interesting differences between how humans and multimodal LLMs perceive images.

PaperID: 2604, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17093

Authors:Timo Pierre Schrader, Lukas Lange, Tobias Kaminski, Simon Razniewski, Annemarie Friedrich

Affiliations: Bosch Center for AI, Technische Universität Dresden, University of Augsburg

Title: A Solver-in-the-Loop Framework for Improving LLMs on Answer Set Programming for Logic Puzzle Solving

Abstract:
The rise of large language models (LLMs) has sparked interest in coding assistants. While generalpurpose programming languages are well supported, generating code for domain-specific languages remains a challenging problem for LLMs. In this paper, we focus on the LLM-based generation of code for Answer Set Programming (ASP), a particularly effective approach for finding solutions to combinatorial search problems. The effectiveness of LLMs in ASP code generation is currently hindered by the limited number of examples seen during their initial pre-training phase. In this paper, we introduce a novel ASP-solver-in-the-loop approach for solver-guided instruction-tuning of LLMs to addressing the highly complex semantic parsing task inherent in ASP code generation. Our method only requires problem specifications in natural language and their solutions. Specifically, we sample ASP statements for program continuations from LLMs for unriddling logic puzzles. Leveraging the special property of declarative ASP programming that partial encodings increasingly narrow down the solution space, we categorize them into chosen and rejected instances based on solver feedback. We then apply supervised fine-tuning to train LLMs on the curated data and further improve robustness using a solver-guided search that includes best-of-N sampling. Our experiments demonstrate consistent improvements in two distinct prompting settings on two datasets.

PaperID: 2605, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01562

Authors:Sara Shoouri, Morteza Tavakoli Taba, Hun-Seok Kim

Affiliations: University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Title: Adaptive LiDAR Scanning: Harnessing Temporal Cues for Efficient 3D Object Detection via Multi-Modal Fusion

Abstract:
Multisensor fusion using LiDAR and RGB cameras significantly enhances 3D object detection task. However, conventional LiDAR sensors perform dense, stateless scans, ignoring the strong temporal continuity in real-world scenes. This leads to substantial sensing redundancy and excessive power consumption, limiting their practicality on resource-constrained platforms. To address this inefficiency, we propose a predictive, history-aware adaptive scanning framework that anticipates informative regions of interest (ROI) based on past observations. Our approach introduces a lightweight predictor network that distills historical spatial and temporal contexts into refined query embeddings. These embeddings guide a differentiable mask generator network, which leverages Gumbel-Softmax sampling to produce binary masks identifying critical ROIs for the upcoming frame. Our method significantly reduces unnecessary data acquisition by concentrating dense LiDAR scanning only within these ROIs and sparsely sampling elsewhere. Experiments on nuScenes and Lyft benchmarks demonstrate that our adaptive scanning strategy reduces LiDAR energy consumption by over 65% while maintaining competitive or even superior 3D object detection performance compared to traditional LiDAR-camera fusion methods with dense LiDAR scanning.

PaperID: 2606, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05442

Authors:Hua Wang, Jinghao Lu, Fan Zhang

Affiliations: Ludong University, Shandong Technology and Business University

Title: IdealTSF: Can Non-Ideal Data Contribute to Enhancing the Performance of Time Series Forecasting Models?

Abstract:
Deep learning has shown strong performance in time series forecasting tasks. However, issues such as missing values and anomalies in sequential data hinder its further development in prediction tasks. Previous research has primarily focused on extracting feature information from sequence data or addressing these suboptimal data as positive samples for knowledge transfer. A more effective approach would be to leverage these nonideal negative samples to enhance event prediction. In response, this study highlights the advantages of non-ideal negative samples and proposes the IdealTSF framework, which integrates both ideal positive and negative samples for time series forecasting. IdealTSF consists of three progressive steps: pretraining, training, and optimization. It first pretrains the model by extracting knowledge from negative sample data, then transforms the sequence data into ideal positive samples during training. Additionally, a negative optimization mechanism with adversarial disturbances is applied. Extensive experiments demonstrate that negative sample data unlocks significant potential within the basic attention architecture for time series forecasting. Therefore, IdealTSF is particularly well-suited for applications with noisy samples or low-quality data.

PaperID: 2607, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07127

Authors:Linna Wang, Zhixuan You, Qihui Zhang, Jiunan Wen, Ji Shi, Yimin Chen, Yusen Wang, Fanqi Ding, Ziliang Feng, Li Lu

Affiliations: Sichuan University, Peking University, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Kunming Medical University

Title: REACT-LLM: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Integration with Causal Features in Clinical Prognostic Tasks

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) and causal learning each hold strong potential for clinical decision making (CDM). However, their synergy remains poorly understood, largely due to the lack of systematic benchmarks evaluating their integration in clinical risk prediction. In realworld healthcare, identifying features with causal influence on outcomes is crucial for actionable and trustworthy predictions. While recent work highlights LLMs' emerging causal reasoning abilities, there lacks comprehensive benchmarks to assess their causal learning and performance informed by causal features in clinical risk prediction. To address this, we introduce REACT-LLM, a benchmark designed to evaluate whether combining LLMs with causal features can enhance clinical prognostic performance and potentially outperform traditional machine learning (ML) methods. Unlike existing LLM-clinical benchmarks that often focus on a limited set of outcomes, REACT-LLM evaluates 7 clinical outcomes across 2 real-world datasets, comparing 15 prominent LLMs, 6 traditional ML models, and 3 causal discovery (CD) algorithms. Our findings indicate that while LLMs perform reasonably in clinical prognostics, they have not yet outperformed traditional ML models. Integrating causal features derived from CD algorithms into LLMs offers limited performance gains, primarily due to the strict assumptions of many CD methods, which are often violated in complex clinical data. While the direct integration yields limited improvement, our benchmark reveals a more promising synergy: LLMs serve effectively as knowledge-rich collaborators for identifying and optimizing causal features. Additionally, in-context learning improves LLM predictions when prompts are tailored to the task and model. Different LLMs show varying sensitivity to structured data encoding formats, for example, open-source models perform better with JSON, while smaller models benefit from narrative serialization. These findings highlight the need to match prompts and data formats to model architecture and pretraining.

PaperID: 2608, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.16948

Authors:Qi Xu, Shuai Gong, Xuming Ran, Haihua Luo, Yangfan Hu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology, National University of Singapore, University of Jyväskylä, School of Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence, Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics

Title: AVM: Towards Structure-Preserving Neural Response Modeling in the Visual Cortex Across Stimuli and Individuals

Abstract:
While deep learning models have shown strong performance in simulating neural responses, they often fail to clearly separate stable visual encoding from conditionspecific adaptation, which limits their ability to generalize across stimuli and individuals. We introduce the Adaptive Visual Model (AVM), a structure-preserving framework that enables condition-aware adaptation through modular subnetworks, without modifying the core representation. AVM keeps a Vision Transformer-based encoder frozen to capture consistent visual features, while independently trained modulation paths account for neural response variations driven by stimulus content and subject identity. We evaluate AVM in three experimental settings, including stimulus-level variation, cross-subject generalization, and cross-dataset adaptation, all of which involve structured changes in inputs and individuals. Across two large-scale mouse V1 datasets, AVM outperforms the state-of-the-art V1T model by approximately 2% in predictive correlation, demonstrating robust generalization, interpretable condition-wise modulation, and high architectural efficiency. Specifically, AVM achieves a 9.1% improvement in explained variance (FEVE) under the cross-dataset adaptation setting. These results suggest that AVM provides a unified framework for adaptive neural modeling across biological and experimental conditions, offering a scalable solution under structural constraints. Its design may inform future approaches to cortical modeling in both neuroscience and biologically inspired AI systems.

PaperID: 2609, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05802

Authors:Bo Xue, Yuanyu Wan, Zhichao Lu, Qingfu Zhang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, City University of Hong Kong

Title: Beyond the Lower Bound: Bridging Regret Minimization and Best Arm Identification in Lexicographic Bandits

Abstract:
In multiobjective decision-making with hierarchical preferences, lexicographic bandits provide a natural framework for optimizing multiple objectives in a prioritized order. In this setting, a learner repeatedly selects arms and observes reward vectors, aiming to maximize the reward for the highest-priority objective, then the next, and so on. While previous studies have primarily focused on regret minimization, this work bridges the gap between regret minimization and best arm identification under lexicographic preferences. We propose two elimination-based algorithms to address this joint objective. The first algorithm eliminates suboptimal arms sequentially, layer by layer, in accordance with the objective priorities, and achieves sample complexity and regret bounds comparable to those of the best single-objective algorithms. The second algorithm simultaneously leverages reward information from all objectives in each round, effectively exploiting cross-objective dependencies. Remarkably, it outperforms the known lower bound for the single-objective bandit problem, highlighting the benefit of cross-objective information sharing in the multi-objective setting. Empirical results further validate their superior performance over baselines.

PaperID: 2610, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04404

Authors:Xiao-Wen Yang, Xuan-Yi Zhu, Ding-Chu Zhang, Wen-Da Wei, Jie-Jing Shao, Zhi Zhou, Lan-Zhe Guo, Yu-Feng Li

Affiliations: Nanjing University, nanjing university

Title: Step Back to Leap Forward: Self-Backtracking for Symbolic Reasoning and Planning in Language Models

Abstract:
Although autoregressive language models demonstrated remarkable performance across various tasks, their effectiveness in symbolic reasoning and decisionmaking scenarios remains constrained. Recent research indicates that training language models to emulate symbolic search algorithms (e.g. depth-first search or A algorithm) can yield strong improvements in their symbolic reasoning and planning capabilities. However, existing methods only achieve superficial imitation of symbolic search trajectories, as their generation processes lack explicit backtracking mechanisms. This limitation prevents models from truly mastering symbolic search, often resulting in rigid and redundant outputs with poor solution quality. To address this issue, we propose a self-backtracking mechanism that enables LLMs to autonomously determine when to backtrack through specialized training, effectively utilizing this capability to scale during inference. By introducing a self-improvement strategy, the model can further refine its search process into optimal solution generation, improving problem-solving efficiency. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our method boosts LLMs' reasoning on the Countdown task by 40% over optimal-path supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and improves both performance and efficiency on the Maze Navigation task.

PaperID: 2611, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06443

Authors:Zinuo You, Jin Zheng, John Cartlidge

Affiliations: University of Bristol

Title: How Wide and How Deep? Mitigating Over-squashing of GNNs via Channel Capacity Constrained Estimation

Abstract:
Existing graph neural networks typically rely on heuristic choices for hidden dimensions and propagation depths, which often lead to severe information loss during propagation, known as oversquashing. To address this issue, we propose Channel Capacity Constrained Estimation (C³E), a novel framework that formulates the selection of hidden dimensions and depth as a nonlinear programming problem grounded in information theory. Through modeling spectral graph neural networks as communication channels, our approach directly connects channel capacity to hidden dimensions, propagation depth, propagation mechanism, and graph structure. Extensive experiments on nine public datasets demonstrate that hidden dimensions and depths estimated by C³E can mitigate over-squashing and consistently improve representation learning. Experimental results show that over-squashing occurs due to the cumulative compression of information in representation matrices. Furthermore, our findings show that increasing hidden dimensions indeed mitigates information compression, while the role of propagation depth is more nuanced, uncovering a fundamental balance between information compression and representation complexity.

PaperID: 2612, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07889

Authors:Sicong Zang, Shuhui Gao, Zhijun Fang

Affiliations: School of Information and Intelligent Science, Donghua University

Title: Generating Sketches in a Hierarchical Auto-Regressive Process for Flexible Sketch Drawing Manipulation at Stroke-Level

Abstract:
Generating sketches with specific patterns as expected, i.e., manipulating sketches in a controllable way, is a popular task. Recent studies control sketch features at strokelevel by editing values of stroke embeddings as conditions. However, in order to provide generator a global view about what a sketch is going to be drawn, all these edited conditions should be collected and fed into generator simultaneously before generation starts, i.e., no further manipulation is allowed during sketch generating process. In order to realize sketch drawing manipulation more flexibly, we propose a hierarchical auto-regressive sketch generating process. Instead of generating an entire sketch at once, each stroke in a sketch is generated in a three-staged hierarchy: 1) predicting a stroke embedding to represent which stroke is going to be drawn, and 2) anchoring the predicted stroke on the canvas, and 3) translating the embedding to a sequence of drawing actions to form the full sketch. Moreover, the stroke prediction, anchoring and translation are proceeded auto-regressively, i.e., both the recently generated strokes and their positions are considered to predict the current one, guiding model to produce an appropriate stroke at a suitable position to benefit the full sketch generation. It is flexible to manipulate stroke-level sketch drawing at any time during generation by adjusting the exposed editable stroke embeddings.

PaperID: 2613, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11161

Authors:Yuzhen Zhao, Yating Liu, Marc Hoffmann

Affiliations: Université Paris Dauphine - PSL

Title: Drift Estimation for Diffusion Processes Using Neural Networks Based on Discretely Observed Independent Paths

Abstract:
This paper addresses the nonparametric estimation of the drift function over a compact domain for a timehomogeneous diffusion process, based on high-frequency discrete observations from N independent trajectories. We propose a neural network-based estimator and derive a non-asymptotic convergence rate, decomposed into a training error, an approximation error, and a diffusion-related term scaling as log N/N. For compositional drift functions, we establish an explicit rate. In the numerical experiments, we consider a drift function with local fluctuations generated by a double-layer compositional structure featuring local oscillations, and show that the empirical convergence rate becomes independent of the input dimension d. Compared to the B-spline method, the neural network estimator achieves better convergence rates and more effectively captures local features, particularly in higher-dimensional settings.

PaperID: 2614, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03125

Authors:Bingyu Yan, Xiaoming Zhang, Ziyi Zhou, Chaozhuo Li, Ruilin Zeng, Yirui Qi, Tianbo Wang, Litian Zhang

Affiliations: Beihang University, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: Attack the Messages, Not the Agents: A Multi-round Adaptive Stealthy Tampering Framework for LLM-MAS

Abstract:
Large language modelbased multi-agent systems (LLM-MAS) effectively accomplish complex and dynamic tasks through inter-agent communication, but this reliance introduces substantial safety vulnerabilities. Existing attack methods targeting LLM-MAS either compromise agent internals or rely on direct and overt persuasion, which limit their effectiveness, adaptability, and stealthiness. In this paper, we propose MAST, a Multi-round Adaptive Stealthy Tampering framework designed to exploit communication vulnerabilities within the system. MAST integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search with Direct Preference Optimization to train an attack policy model that adaptively generates effective multi-round tampering strategies. Furthermore, to preserve stealthiness, we impose dual semantic and embedding similarity constraints during the tampering process. Comprehensive experiments across diverse tasks, communication architectures, and LLMs demonstrate that MAST consistently achieves high attack success rates while significantly enhancing stealthiness compared to baselines. These findings highlight the effectiveness, stealthiness, and adaptability of MAST, underscoring the need for robust communication safeguards in LLM-MAS.

PaperID: 2615, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07899

Authors:Ding Cao, Yuchen Cai, Yuqing Huang, Xuesong He, Rongxi Guo, Guiquan Liu, Guangzhong Sun

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China

Title: On the Superimposed Noise Accumulation Problem in Sequential Knowledge Editing of Large Language Models

Abstract:
Sequential knowledge editing techniques aim to continuously update knowledge in large language models at low cost, preventing models from generating outdated or incorrect information. However, existing sequential editing methods suffer from a significant decline in editing success rates after longterm editing. Through theoretical analysis and experiments, our findings reveal that as the number of edits increases, the model's output increasingly deviates from the desired target, leading to a drop in editing success rates. We refer to this issue as the superimposed noise accumulation problem. Our further analysis demonstrates that the problem is related to the erroneous activation of irrelevant knowledge and conflicts between activated knowledge. Based on this analysis, a method named DeltaEdit is proposed that reduces conflicts between knowledge through dynamic orthogonal constraint strategies. Experiments show that DeltaEdit significantly reduces superimposed noise, achieving a 16.8% improvement in editing performance over the strongest baseline.

PaperID: 2616, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.06105

Authors:Shengyuan Chen, Chuang Zhou, Zheng Yuan, Qinggang Zhang, Zeyang Cui, Hao Chen, Yilin Xiao, Jiannong Cao, Xiao Huang

Affiliations: Hong Kong Polytechnic University, City University of Macau

Title: You Don’t Need Pre-Built Graphs for RAG: Retrieval Augmented Generation with Adaptive Reasoning Structures

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) often suffer from hallucination, generating factually incorrect statements when handling questions beyond their knowledge and perception. Retrievalaugmented generation (RAG) addresses this by retrieving query-relevant contexts from knowledge bases to support LLM reasoning. Recent advances leverage pre-constructed graphs to capture the relational connections among distributed documents, showing remarkable performance in complex tasks. However, existing Graph-based RAG (GraphRAG) methods rely on a costly process to transform the corpus into a graph, introducing overwhelming token cost and update latency. Moreover, real-world queries vary in type and complexity, requiring different logic structures for accurate reasoning. The pre-built graph may not align with these required structures, resulting in ineffective knowledge retrieval. To this end, we propose a Logic-aware Retrieval Augmented Generation framework (LogicRAG) that dynamically extracts reasoning structures at inference time to guide adaptive retrieval without any pre-built graph. LogicRAG begins by decomposing the input query into a set of subproblems and constructing a directed acyclic graph (DAG) to model the logical dependencies among them. To support coherent multi-step reasoning, LogicRAG then linearizes the graph using topological sort, so that subproblems can be addressed in a logically consistent order. Besides, LogicRAG applies graph pruning to reduce redundant retrieval and uses context pruning to filter irrelevant context, significantly reducing the overall token cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LogicRAG achieves both superior performance and efficiency compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 2617, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22928

Authors:Xi Chen, Aske Plaat, Niki van Stein

Affiliations: Leiden University

Title: How Does Chain of Thought Think? Mechanistic Interpretability of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with Sparse Autoencoding

Abstract:
Chain‑of‑thought (CoT) prompting boosts Large Language Models accuracy on multi‑step tasks, yet whether the generated ``thoughts'' reflect the true internal reasoning process is unresolved. We present the first feature‑level causal study of CoT faithfulness. Combining sparse autoencoders with activation patching, we extract monosemantic features from Pythia‑70M and Pythia‑2.8B while they tackle GSM8K math problems under CoT and plain (noCoT) prompting. Swapping a small set of CoT‑reasoning features into a noCoT run raises answer log‑probabilities significantly in the 2.8B model, but has no reliable effect in 70M, revealing a clear contrast for these two scales. CoT also leads to significantly higher activation sparsity and feature interpretability scores in the larger model, signalling more modular internal computation. For example, the model's confidence in generating correct answers improves from 1.2 to 4.3. We introduce patch‑curves and random‑feature patching baselines, showing that useful CoT information is not only present in the topK patches but widely distributed. Overall, our results indicate that CoT can induce more interpretable internal structures in high-capacity LLMs, validating its role as a structured prompting method.

PaperID: 2618, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11618

Authors:Zehao Chen, Rong Pan, Haoran Li

Affiliations: Sun Yat-sen University

Title: StoryBox: Collaborative MultiAgent Simulation for Hybrid Bottom-Up Long-Form Story Generation Using Large Language Models

Abstract:
Human writers often begin their stories with an overarching mental scene, where they envision the interactions between characters and their environment. Inspired by this creative process, we propose a novel approach to longform story generation, termed hybrid bottom-up long-form story generation, using multi-agent simulations. In our method, agents interact within a dynamic sandbox environment, where their behaviors and interactions with one another and the environment generate emergent events. These events form the foundation for the story, enabling organic character development and plot progression. Unlike traditional top-down approaches that impose rigid structures, our hybrid bottom-up approach allows for the natural unfolding of events, fostering more spontaneous and engaging storytelling. The system is capable of generating stories exceeding 10,000 words while maintaining coherence and consistency, addressing some of the key challenges faced by current story generation models. We achieve state-of-the-art performance across several metrics. This approach offers a scalable and innovative solution for creating dynamic, immersive long-form stories that evolve organically from agent-driven interactions.

PaperID: 2619, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07956

Authors:Yuqin Dai, Shuo Yang, Guoqing Wang, Yong Deng, Zhanwei Zhang, Jun Yin, Pengyu Zeng, Zhenzhe Ying, Changhua Meng, Can Yi, Yuchen Zhou, Weiqiang Wang, Shuai Lu

Affiliations: The University of Hong Kong, Ant Group, Tsinghua University, National University of Singapore

Title: Careful Queries, Credible Results: Teaching RAG Models Advanced Web Search Tools with Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by integrating up-to-date external knowledge, yet real-world web environments present unique challenges. These limitations manifest as two key challenges: pervasive misinformation in the web environment, which introduces unreliable or misleading content that can degrade retrieval accuracy, and the underutilization of web tools, which, if effectively employed, could enhance query precision and help mitigate this noise, ultimately improving retrieval results in RAG systems. To address these issues, we propose WebFilter, a novel RAG framework that generates source-restricted queries and filters out unreliable content. This approach combines a retrieval filtering mechanism with a behavior- and outcome-driven reward strategy, optimizing both query formulation and retrieval outcomes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that WebFilter improves answer quality and retrieval precision, outperforming existing RAG methods on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks.

PaperID: 2620, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10075

Authors:Xanh Ho, Yun-Ang Wu, Sunisth Kumar, Florian Boudin, Atsuhiro Takasu, Akiko Aizawa

Affiliations: National Institute of Informatics, National Taiwan University, The University of Tokyo, Nantes Université

Title: Format Matters: The Robustness of Multimodal LLMs in Reviewing Evidence from Tables and Charts

Abstract:
With the growing number of submitted scientific papers, there is an increasing demand for systems that can assist reviewers in evaluating research claims. Experimental results are a core component of scientific work, often presented in varying formats such as tables or charts. Understanding how robust current multimodal large language models (multimodal LLMs) are at verifying scientific claims across different evidence formats remains an important and underexplored challenge. In this paper, we design and conduct a series of experiments to assess the ability of multimodal LLMs to verify scientific claims using both tables and charts as evidence. To enable this evaluation, we adapt two existing datasets of scientific papers by incorporating annotations and structures necessary for a multimodal claim verification task. Using this adapted dataset, we evaluate 12 multimodal LLMs and find that current models perform better with tablebased evidence while struggling with chart-based evidence. We further conduct human evaluations and observe that humans maintain strong performance across both formats, unlike the models. Our analysis also reveals that smaller multimodal LLMs (under 8B) show weak correlation in performance between table-based and chart-based tasks, indicating limited cross-modal generalization. These findings highlight a critical gap in current models' multimodal reasoning capabilities. We suggest that future multimodal LLMs should place greater emphasis on improving chart understanding to better support scientific claim verification.

PaperID: 2621, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20099

Authors:Lei Huang, Rui Zhang, Jiaming Guo, Yang Zhang, Di Huang, Shuyao Cheng, Pengwei Jin, Chongxiao Li, Zidong Du, Xing Hu, Yunji Chen, Qi Guo

Affiliations: State Key Lab of Processors, Institute of Computing Technology, CAS University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: QiMeng-CRUX: Narrowing the Gap Between Natural Language and Verilog via Core Refined Understanding eXpression

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising capabilities in hardware description language (HDL) generation. However, existing approaches often rely on freeform natural language descriptions that are often ambiguous, redundant, and unstructured, which poses significant challenges for downstream Verilog code generation. We treat hardware code generation as a complex transformation from an open-ended natural language space to a domain-specific, highly constrained target space. To bridge this gap, we introduce Core Refined Understanding eXpression (CRUX), a structured intermediate space that captures the essential semantics of user intent while organizing the expression for precise Verilog code generation. We further design a two-stage training framework, comprising Joint Expression Modeling and Dual-Space Optimization, to enhance the quality of both CRUX and Verilog code. Experiments across multiple Verilog generation benchmarks demonstrate that our model, QiMeng-CRUX, achieves state-of-the-art performance among general models, particularly under challenging design tasks. Furthermore, the CRUX space proves transferable and beneficial when used as input prompts for other code models, highlighting its effectiveness in narrowing the gap between free-form natural language descriptions and precise Verilog generation.

PaperID: 2622, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.10034

Authors:Jiyue Jiang, Yanyu Chen, Pengan Chen, Kai Liu, Jingqi Zhou, Zheyong Zhu, He Hu, Fei Ma, Qi Tian, Chuan Wu

Affiliations: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, The University of Hong Kong, Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy (SZ)

Title: A Principle-Driven Adaptive Policy for Group Cognitive Stimulation Dialogue for Elderly with Cognitive Impairment

Abstract:
Cognitive impairment is becoming a major public health challenge. Cognitive Stimulation Therapy (CST) is an effective intervention for cognitive impairment, but traditional methods are difficult to scale, and existing digital systems struggle with group dialogues and cognitive stimulation principles. While Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful, their application in this context faces key challenges: cognitive stimulation dialogue paradigms, a lack of therapeutic reasoning, and staticonly user modeling. To address these issues, we propose a principle-driven adaptive policy actualized through a Group Cognitive Stimulation Dialogue (GCSD) system. We first construct a dataset with over 500 hours of real-world CST conversations and 10,000+ simulated dialogues generated via our Principle-Guided Scenario Simulation strategy. Our GCSD system then integrates four core modules to overcome LLM limitations: (i) a multi-speaker context controller to resolve role confusion; (ii) dynamic participant cognitive state modeling for personalized interaction; (iii) a cognitive stimulation-focused attention loss to instill cognitive stimulation reasoning; and (iv) a multi-dimensional reward strategy to enhance response value. Experimental results demonstrate that GCSD significantly outperforms baseline models across various evaluation metrics. Future work will focus on long-term clinical validation to bridge the gap between computational performance and clinical efficacy.

PaperID: 2623, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.17652

Authors:Deyang Kong, Qi Guo, Xiangyu Xi, Wei Wang, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Shikun Zhang, Wei Ye

Affiliations: National Engineering Research Center for Software Engineering, Peking University, Meituan Group

Title: Rethinking the Sampling Criteria in Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning: A Competence-Difficulty Alignment Perspective

Abstract:
The low sampling efficiency during the rollout phase poses a significant challenge to scaling reinforcement learning for large language model reasoning. Existing methods attempt to improve efficiency by scheduling problems based on problem difficulties. However, these approaches suffer from unstable and biased estimations of problem difficulty and fail to capture the alignment between model competence and problem difficulty in RL training, leading to suboptimal results. To address these challenges, we introduce CompetenceDifficulty Alignment Sampling (CDAS). This approach allows for accurate and stable estimation of problem difficulties by aggregating historical performance discrepancies across problems. Subsequently, model competence is quantified to adaptively select problems whose difficulties align with the model's current competence using a fixed-point system. Extensive experiments in mathematical RL training show that CDAS consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving the highest average accuracy of 45.89%. Furthermore, CDAS reduces the training step time overhead by 57.06% compared to the widely-used Dynamic Sampling strategy, verifying the efficiency of CDAS. Additional experiments on different tasks, model architectures, and model sizes demonstrate the generalization capability of CDAS.

PaperID: 2624, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.16717

Authors:Haoran Li, Zhiming Su, Junyan Yao, Enwei Zhang, Yang Ji, Yan Chen, Kan Zhou, Chao Feng, Jiao Ran

Affiliations: ByteDance Douyin Content Group

Title: Semi-Supervised Synthetic Data Generation with Fine-Grained Relevance Control for Short Video Search Relevance Modeling

Abstract:
Synthetic data is widely adopted in embedding models to ensure diversity in training data distributions across dimensions such as difficulty, length, and language. However, existing promptbased synthesis methods struggle to capture domain-specific data distributions, particularly in data-scarce domains, and often overlook fine-grained relevance diversity. In this paper, we present a Chinese short video dataset with 4-level relevance annotations, filling a critical resource void. Further, we propose a semi-supervised synthetic data pipeline where two collaboratively trained models generate domain-adaptive short video data with controllable relevance labels. Our method enhances relevance-level diversity by synthesizing samples for underrepresented intermediate relevance labels, resulting in a more balanced and semantically rich training data set. Extensive offline experiments show that the embedding model trained on our synthesized data outperforms those using data generated based on prompting or vanilla supervised fine-tuning(SFT). Moreover, we demonstrate that incorporating more diverse fine-grained relevance levels in training data enhances the model's sensitivity to subtle semantic distinctions, highlighting the value of fine-grained relevance supervision in embedding learning. In the search enhanced recommendation pipeline of Douyin's dual-column scenario, through online A/B testing, the proposed model increased click-through rate(CTR) by 1.45%, raised the proportion of Strong Relevance Ratio (SRR) by 4.9%, and improved the Image User Penetration Rate (IUPR) by 0.1054%.

PaperID: 2625, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22275

Authors:Mengfan Li, Xuanhua Shi, Yang Deng

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Singapore Management University

Title: RecToM: A Benchmark for Evaluating Machine Theory of Mind in LLM-based Conversational Recommender Systems

Abstract:
Large Language models (LLMs) are revolutionizing the conversational recommender systems (CRS) through their impressive capabilities in instruction comprehension, reasoning, and human interaction. A core factor underlying effective dialogue is the ability to infer and reason about others' mental states (such as desire, intention, and belief), a cognitive capacity commonly referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM). Despite growing interest in evaluating ToM in LLMs, current benchmarks predominantly rely on synthetic narratives inspired by SallyAnne test, which emphasize physical perception and fail to capture the complexity of mental state inference in real-world conversational settings. Moreover,existing benchmarks often overlook a critical component of human ToM: behavioral prediction, the ability to use inferred mental states to guide strategic decision-making and select appropriate conversational actions for future interactions. To better align LLM-based ToM evaluation with human-like social reasoning, we propose RecToM, a novel benchmark for evaluating ToM abilities in recommendation dialogues. RecToM focuses on two complementary dimensions: Cognitive Inference and Behavioral Prediction. The former focus on understanding what has been communicated by inferring the underlying mental states. The latter emphasizes what should be done next, evaluating whether LLMs can leverage these inferred mental states to predict, select, and assess appropriate dialogue strategies. Together, these dimensions enable a comprehensive assessment of ToM reasoning in CRS. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate that RecToM poses a significant challenge. While the models exhibit partial competence in recognizing mental states, they struggle to maintain coherent, strategic ToM reasoning throughout dynamic recommendation dialogues, particularly in tracking evolving intentions and aligning conversational strategies with inferred mental states.

PaperID: 2626, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19895

Authors:Yuanyuan Lin, Xiangyu Ouyang, Teng Zhang, Kaixin Sui

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, ByteDance Seed

Title: RPM-MCTS: Knowledge-Retrieval as Process Reward Model with Monte Carlo Tree Search for Code Generation

Abstract:
Tree searchbased methods have made significant progress in enhancing the code generation capabilities of large language models. However, due to the difficulty in effectively evaluating intermediate algorithmic steps and the inability to locate and timely correct erroneous steps, these methods often generate incorrect code and incur increased computational costs. To tackle these problems, we propose RPM-MCTS, an effective method that utilizes Knowledge-Retrieval as Process Reward Model based on Monte Carlo Tree Search to evaluate intermediate algorithmic steps. By utilizing knowledge base retrieval, RPM-MCTS avoids the complex training of process reward models. During the expansion phase, similarity filtering is employed to remove redundant nodes, ensuring diversity in reasoning paths. Furthermore, our method utilizes sandbox execution feedback to locate erroneous algorithmic steps during generation, enabling timely and targeted corrections. Extensive experiments on four public code generation benchmarks demonstrate that RPM-MCTS outperforms current state-of-the-art methods while achieving an approximately 15% reduction in token consumption. Furthermore, full fine-tuning of the base model using the data constructed by RPM-MCTS significantly enhances its code capabilities.

PaperID: 2627, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07498

Authors:Xin Liu, Qiyang Song, Qihang Zhou, Haichao Du, Shaowen Xu, Wenbo Jiang, Weijuan Zhang, Xiaoqi Jia

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Focusing on Language: Revealing and Exploiting Language Attention Heads in Multilingual Large Language Models

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly support multilingual understanding and generation. Meanwhile, efforts to interpret their internal mechanisms have emerged, offering insights to enhance multilingual performance. While multihead self-attention (MHA) has proven critical in many areas, its role in multilingual capabilities remains underexplored. In this work, we study the contribution of MHA in supporting multilingual processing in LLMs. We propose Language Attention Head Importance Scores (LAHIS), an effective and efficient method that identifies attention head importance for multilingual capabilities via a single forward and backward pass through the LLM. Applying LAHIS to Aya-23-8B, Llama-3.2-3B, and Mistral-7B-v0.1, we reveal the existence of both language-specific and language-general heads. Language-specific heads enable cross-lingual attention transfer to guide the model toward target language contexts and mitigate off-target language generation issue, contributing to addressing challenges in multilingual LLMs. We also introduce a lightweight adaptation that learns a soft head mask to modulate attention outputs over language heads, requiring only 20 tunable parameters to improve XQuAD accuracy. Overall, our work enhances both the interpretability and multilingual capabilities of LLMs from the perspective of MHA.

PaperID: 2628, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.03197

Authors:Jaewoo Park, Jungyang Park, Dongju Jang, Jiwan Chung, Byungwoo Yoo, Jaewoo Shin, Seonjoon Park, Taehyeong Kim, Youngjae Yu

Affiliations: Yonsei University, Seoul National University

Title: Explain with Visual Keypoints Like a Real Mentor! A Benchmark for Multimodal Solution Explanation

Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of mathematical reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs), AI systems are increasingly being adopted in educational settings to support students’ comprehension of problemsolving processes. However, a critical component remains underexplored in current LLM-generated explanations: multimodal explanation. In real-world instructional contexts, human tutors routinely employ visual aids, such as diagrams, markings, and highlights, to enhance conceptual clarity. To bridge this gap, we introduce the multimodal solution explanation task, designed to evaluate whether models can identify visual keypoints, such as auxiliary lines, points, angles, and generate explanations that incorporate these key elements essential for understanding. To evaluate model performance on this task, we propose ME2, a multimodal benchmark consisting of 1,000 math problems annotated with visual keypoints and corresponding explanatory text that references those elements. Our empirical results show that current models struggle to identify visual keypoints. In the task of generating keypoint-based explanations, open-source models also face notable difficulties. This highlights a significant gap in current LLMs’ ability to perform mathematical visual grounding, engage in visually grounded reasoning, and provide explanations in educational contexts. We expect that the multimodal solution explanation task and the ME2 dataset will catalyze further research on LLMs in education and promote their use as effective, explanation-oriented AI tutors.

PaperID: 2629, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.22741

Authors:Dongning Rao, Yunbiao Zeng, Zhihua Jiang, Jujian Lv

Affiliations: School of Computer, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou China, Guangdong Polytechnic Normal University, Department of Computer Science, Jinan University

Title: A Text-Routed Sparse Mixture-of-Experts Model with Explanation and Temporal Alignment for Multi-Modal Sentiment Analysis

Abstract:
Humaninteraction-involved applications underscore the need for Multi-modal Sentiment Analysis (MSA). Although many approaches have been proposed to address the subtle emotions in different modalities, the power of explanations and temporal alignments is still underexplored. Thus, this paper proposes the Text-routed sparse mixture-of-Experts model with eXplanation and Temporal alignment for MSA (TEXT). TEXT first augments explanations for MSA via Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLM), and then novelly aligns the representations of audio and video through a temporality-oriented neural network block. TEXT aligns different modalities with explanations and facilitates a new text-routed sparse mixture-of-experts with gate fusion. Our temporal alignment block merges the benefits of Mamba and temporal cross-attention. As a result, TEXT achieves the best performance across four datasets among all tested models, including three recently proposed approaches and three MLLMs. TEXT wins on at least four metrics out of all six metrics. For example, TEXT decreases the mean absolute error to 0.353 on the CH-SIMS dataset, which signifies a 13.5% decrement compared with recently proposed approaches.

PaperID: 2630, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.16483

Authors:Shuzheng Si, Haozhe Zhao, Cheng Gao, Yuzhuo Bai, Zhitong Wang, Bofei Gao, Kangyang Luo, Wenhao Li, Yufei Huang, Gang Chen, Fanchao Qi, Minjia Zhang, Baobao Chang, Maosong Sun

Affiliations: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Tsinghua University, Peking University

Title: Teaching Large Language Models to Maintain Contextual Faithfulness via Synthetic Tasks and Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Teaching large language models (LLMs) to be faithful in the provided context is crucial for building reliable informationseeking systems. Therefore, we propose a systematic framework, CANOE, to reduce faithfulness hallucinations of LLMs across different downstream tasks without human annotations. Specifically, we first synthesize short-form question-answering (QA) data with four diverse tasks to construct high-quality and easily verifiable training data without human annotation. Also, we propose Dual-GRPO, a rule-based reinforcement learning method that includes three tailored rule-based rewards derived from synthesized short-form QA data, while simultaneously optimizing both short-form and long-form response generation. Notably, Dual-GRPO eliminates the need to manually label preference data to train reward models and avoids over-optimizing short-form generation when relying only on the synthesized short-form QA data. Experimental results show that CANOE greatly improves the faithfulness of LLMs across 11 different tasks, even outperforming the most advanced LLMs, e.g., GPT-4o and OpenAI o1.

PaperID: 2631, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06826

Authors:Puzhen Su, Haoran Yin, Miao Yongzhu, Jintao Tang, Shasha Li, Ting Wang

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology

Title: Beyond Plain Demos: A Demo-Centric Anchoring Paradigm for In-Context Learning in Alzheimer’s Disease Detection

Abstract:
Detecting Alzheimer’s disease (AD) from narrative transcripts challenges large language models (LLMs): pretraining rarely covers this out-of-distribution task, and all transcript demos describe the same scene, producing highly homogeneous contexts. These factors cripple both the model’s built-in task knowledge (task cognition) and its ability to surface subtle, class-discriminative cues (contextual perception). Because cognition is fixed after pre-training, improving in-context learning (ICL) for AD detection hinges on enriching perception through better demonstration (demo) sets. We demonstrate that standard ICL quickly saturates, its demos lack diversity (context width) and fail to convey fine-grained signals (context depth), and that recent task vector (TV) approaches improve broad task adaptation by injecting TV into the LLMs' hidden states (HSs), they are ill-suited for AD detection due to the mismatch of injection granularity, strength and position. To address these bottlenecks, we introduce DA4ICL, a demo-centric anchoring framework that jointly expands context width via Diverse and Contrastive Retrieval (DCR) and deepens each demo's signal via Projected Vector Anchoring (PVA) at every Transformer layer. Across three AD benchmarks, DA4ICL achieves large, stable gains over both ICL and TV baselines, charting a new paradigm for fine-grained, OOD and low-resource LLM adaptation.

PaperID: 2632, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14219

Authors:Kumud Tripathi, Aditya Srinivas Menon, Aman Gaurav, Raj Prakash Gohil, Pankaj Wasnik

Affiliations: Sony Research India

Title: Listen like a Teacher: Mitigating Whisper Hallucinations Using Adaptive Layer Attention and Knowledge Distillation

Abstract:
The Whisper model, an opensource automatic speech recognition system, is widely adopted for its strong performance across multilingual and zero-shot settings. However, it frequently suffers from hallucination errors, especially under noisy acoustic conditions. Previous works to reduce hallucinations in Whisper-style ASR systems have primarily focused on audio preprocessing or post-processing of transcriptions to filter out erroneous content. However, modifications to the Whisper model itself remain largely unexplored to mitigate hallucinations directly. To address this challenge, we present a two-stage architecture that first enhances encoder robustness through Adaptive Layer Attention (ALA) and further suppresses hallucinations using a multi-objective knowledge distillation (KD) framework. In the first stage, ALA groups encoder layers into semantically coherent blocks via inter-layer correlation analysis. A learnable multi-head attention module then fuses these block representations, enabling the model to jointly exploit low- and high-level features for more robust encoding. In the second stage, our KD framework trains the student model on noisy audio to align its semantic and attention distributions with a teacher model processing clean inputs. Our experiments on noisy speech benchmarks show notable reductions in hallucinations and word error rates, while preserving performance on clean speech. Together, ALA and KD offer a principled strategy to improve Whisper’s reliability under real-world noisy conditions.

PaperID: 2633, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03178

Authors:Chenyang Wang, Liang Wen, Shousheng Jia, Xiangzheng Zhang, Liang Xu

Affiliations: Faculty of Computing, Harbin Institute of Technology, Qiyuan Tech, Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark

Title: Light-IF: Endowing LLMs with Generalizable Reasoning via Preview and Self-Checking for Complex Instruction Following

Abstract:
While advancements in the reasoning abilities of LLMs have significantly enhanced their performance in solving mathematical problems, coding tasks, and general puzzles, their effectiveness in accurately adhering to instructions remains inconsistent, particularly with more complex directives. Our investigation identifies lazy reasoning during the thinking stage as the primary factor contributing to poor instruction adherence. To mitigate this issue, we propose a comprehensive framework designed to enable rigorous reasoning processes involving preview and selfchecking, essential for satisfying strict instruction constraints. Specifically, we first generate instructions with complex constraints and apply a filtering process to obtain valid prompts, resulting in three distinct prompt datasets categorized as hard, easy, and pass. Then, we employ rejection sampling on the pass prompts to curate a small yet high-quality dataset, enabling a cold-start initialization of the model and facilitating its adaptation to effective reasoning patterns. Subsequently, we employ an entropy-preserving supervised fine-tuning (Entropy-SFT) strategy coupled with token-wise entropy-adaptive (TEA-RL) reinforcement learning guided by rule-based dense rewards. This approach encourages the model to transform its reasoning mechanism, ultimately fostering generalizable reasoning abilities that encompass preview and self-checking. Extensive experiments conducted on instruction-following benchmarks demonstrate remarkable performance improvements across various model scales.

PaperID: 2634, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19551

Authors:Jiawen Wang, Jingjing Wang, Tianyang Chen, Min Zhang, Guodong Zhou

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University, Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: Towards Closed-Loop Embodied Empathy Evolution: Probing LLM-Centric Lifelong Empathic Motion Generation in Unseen Scenarios

Abstract:
In the literature, existing humancentric emotional motion generation methods primarily focus on boosting performance within a single scale-fixed dataset, largely neglecting the flexible and scale-increasing motion scenarios (e.g., sports, dance), whereas effectively learning these newly emerging scenarios can significantly enhance the model’s real-world generalization ability. Inspired by this, this paper proposes a new LLM-Centric Lifelong Empathic Motion Generation (L2-EMG) task, which aims to equip LLMs with the capability to continually acquire emotional motion generation knowledge across different unseen scenarios, potentially contributing to building a closed-loop and self-evolving embodied agent equipped with both empathy and intelligence. Further, this paper poses two key challenges in the L2-EMG task, i.e., the emotion decoupling challenge and the scenario adapting challenge. To this end, this paper proposes an Emotion-Transferable and Scenario-Adapted Mixture of Experts (ES-MoE) approach which designs a causal-guided emotion decoupling block and a scenario-adapted expert constructing block to address the two challenges, respectively. Especially, this paper constructs multiple L2-EMG datasets to validate the effectiveness of the ES-MoE approach. Extensive evaluations show that ES-MoE outperforms advanced baselines.

PaperID: 2635, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02087

Authors:Keyu Wang, Jin Li, Shu Yang, Zhuoran Zhang, Di Wang

Affiliations: King Abdullah University of Science and Technology Provable Responsible AI and Data Analytics (PRADA) Lab

Title: When Truth Is Overridden: Uncovering the Internal Origins of Sycophancy in Large Language Models

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit sycophantic behavior, agreeing with userstated opinions even when those contradict factual knowledge. While prior work has documented this tendency, the internal mechanisms that enable such behavior remain poorly understood. In this paper, we provide a mechanistic account of how sycophancy arises within LLMs. We first systematically study how user opinions induce sycophancy across different model families. We find that simple opinion statements reliably induce sycophancy, whereas user expertise framing has a negligible impact. Through logit-lens analysis and causal activation patching, we identify a two-stage emergence of sycophancy: (1) a late-layer output preference shift and (2) deeper representational divergence. We also verify that user authority fails to influence behavior because models do not encode it internally. In addition, we examine how grammatical perspective affects sycophantic behavior, finding that first-person prompts (“I believe...”) consistently induce higher sycophancy rates than third-person framings (“They believe...”) by creating stronger representational perturbations in deeper layers. These findings highlight that sycophancy is not a surface-level artifact but emerges from a structural override of learned knowledge in deeper layers, with implications for alignment and truthful AI systems.

PaperID: 2636, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20412

Authors:Qihao Wang, Yue Hu, Mingzhe Lu, Jiayue Wu, Yanbing Liu, Yuanmin Tang

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Beyond Accuracy: A Cognitive Load Framework for Mapping the Capability Boundaries of Tool-use Agents

Abstract:
The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to use ex ternal tools unlocks powerful realworld interactions, mak ing rigorous evaluation essential. However, current bench marks primarily report final accuracy, revealing what mod els can do but obscuring the cognitive bottlenecks that define their true capability boundaries. To move from simple per formance scoring to a diagnostic tool, we introduce a frame workgroundedinCognitive LoadTheory.Ourframeworkde constructs task complexity into two quantifiable components: Intrinsic Load, the inherent structural complexity of the solu tion path, formalized with a novel Tool Interaction Graph; and Extraneous Load, the difficulty arising from ambiguous task presentation. To enable controlled experiments, we construct ToolLoad-Bench, the first benchmark with parametrically ad justable cognitive load. Our evaluation reveals distinct per formance cliffs as cognitive load increases, allowing us to precisely map each model’s capability boundary. We validate that our framework’s predictions are highly calibrated with empirical results, establishing a principled methodology for understanding an agent’s limits and a practical foundation for building more efficient systems.

PaperID: 2637, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17190

Authors:Ziyang Wang, Yuanlei Zheng, Zhenbiao Cao, Xiaojin Zhang, Zhongyu Wei, Pei Fu, Zhenbo Luo, Wei Chen, Xiang Bai

Affiliations: School of Software Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, School of Computer Science and Technology, School of Data Science, Fudan University, MiLM Plus, Xiaomi Inc.

Title: AutoLink: Autonomous Schema Exploration and Expansion for Scalable Schema Linking in Text-to-SQL at Scale

Abstract:
For industrialscale text-to-SQL, supplying the entire database schema to Large Language Models (LLMs) is impractical due to context window limits and irrelevant noise. Schema linking, which filters the schema to a relevant subset, is therefore critical. However, existing methods incur prohibitive costs, struggle to trade off recall and noise, and scale poorly to large databases. We present AutoLink, an autonomous agent framework that reformulates schema linking as an iterative, agent-driven process. Guided by an LLM, AutoLink dynamically explores and expands the linked schema subset, progressively identifying necessary schema components without inputting the full database schema. Our experiments demonstrate AutoLink's superior performance, achieving state-of-the-art strict schema linking recall of 97.4% on Bird-Dev and 91.2% on Spider 2.0-Lite, with competitive execution accuracy, i.e., 68.7% EX on Bird-Dev (better than CHESS) and 34.9% EX on Spider 2.0-Lite (ranking 2nd on the official leaderboard). Crucially, AutoLink exhibits exceptional scalability, maintaining high recall, efficient token consumption, and robust execution accuracy on large schemas (e.g., over 3,000 columns) where existing methods severely degrade—making it a highly scalable, high-recall schema-linking solution for industrial text-to-SQL systems.

PaperID: 2638, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00760

Authors:Qiyao Xue, Yuchen Dou, Zheyuan Ryan Shi, Xiang Lorraine Li, Wei Gao

Affiliations: University of Pittsburgh

Title: MMBERT: Scaled Mixture-of-Experts Multimodal BERT for Robust Chinese Hate Speech Detection Under Cloaking Perturbations

Abstract:
Hate speech detection on Chinese social networks presents distinct challenges, particularly due to the widespread use of cloaking techniques designed to evade conventional textbased detection systems. Although large language models (LLMs) have recently improved hate speech detection capabilities, the majority of existing work has concentrated on English datasets, with limited attention given to multimodal strategies in the Chinese context. In this study, we propose MMBERT, a novel BERT-based multimodal framework that integrates textual, speech, and visual modalities through a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. To address the instability associated with directly integrating MoE into BERT-based models, we develop a progressive three-stage training paradigm. MMBERT incorporates modality-specific experts, a shared self-attention mechanism, and a router-based expert allocation strategy to enhance robustness against adversarial perturbations. Empirical results in several Chinese hate speech datasets show that MMBERT significantly surpasses fine-tuned BERT-based encoder models, fine-tuned LLMs, and LLMs utilizing in-context learning approaches.

PaperID: 2639, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02580

Authors:Changpeng Yang, Jinyang Wu, Yuchen Liu, Shuai Zhang, Yang Li, Qiliang Liang, Hongzhen Wang, Shuai Nie, Jiaming Xu, Runyu Shi, Ying Huang, Guoquan Zhang

Affiliations: Xiaomi Corporation, Tsinghua University, Peking University

Title: From Imitation to Discrimination: Toward a Generalized Curriculum Advantage Mechanism Enhancing Cross-Domain Reasoning Tasks

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning has emerged as a paradigm for posttraining large language models, boosting their reasoning capabilities. Such approaches compute an advantage value for each sample, reflecting better or worse performance than expected, thereby yielding both positive and negative signals for training. However, existing approaches often mix them indiscriminately, especially in the early stages, leading to ambiguous guidance and limited gains. To address this issue, we propose CAPO (Curriculum Advantage Policy Optimization), an adaptive curriculum mechanism based on advantage signals. The proposed mechanism bootstraps imitation learning with positive-only advantage samples to establish robust foundations, and subsequently introduces negative signals to cultivate discriminative capabilities, thereby improving generalization across complex scenarios. Compatible with diverse optimization methods including GRPO, PPO, RLOO, and Reinforce++, our method consistently achieves stable and significant improvements in mathematical reasoning tasks, and further generalizes effectively to multimodal Graphical User Interface (GUI) reasoning scenarios, establishing itself as a versatile and robust optimization paradigm.

PaperID: 2640, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03140

Authors:Junyao Yang, Jianwei Wang, Huiping Zhuang, Cen Chen, Ziqian Zeng

Affiliations: South China University of Technology

Title: RCP-Merging: Merging Long Chain-of-Thought Models with Domain-Specific Models by Considering Reasoning Capability as Prior

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) with long chainof-thought (CoT) capability, termed Reasoning Models, demonstrate superior intricate problem-solving abilities through multi-step long CoT reasoning. To create a dual-capability model with long CoT capability and domain-specific knowledge without substantial computational and data costs, model merging emerges as a highly resource-efficient method. However, significant challenges lie in merging domain-specific LLMs with long CoT ones since nowadays merging methods suffer from reasoning capability degradation, even gibberish output and output collapse. To overcome this, we introduce RCP-Merging: Merging Long Chain-of-Thought Models with Domain-Specific Models by Considering Reasoning Capability as Prior, a novel merging framework designed to integrate domain-specific LLMs with long CoT capability, meanwhile maintaining model performance in the original domain. Treating reasoning model weights as foundational prior, our method utilizes a reasoning capability indicator to preserve core long CoT capability model weights while selectively merging essential domain-specific weights. We conducted extensive experiments on Qwen2.5-7B, Llama3.1-8B, and Qwen2.5-1.5B models in BioMedicine and Finance domains. Our results show that RCP-Merging successfully merges a reasoning model with domain-specific ones, improving domain task performance by 9.5% and 9.2% over state-of-the-art methods, without significantly harming the original long CoT reasoning capability.

PaperID: 2641, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08001

Authors:Rui Yao, Qi Chai, Jinhai Yao, Siyuan Li, Junhao Chen, Qi Zhang, Hao Wang

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiaotong University

Title: Interpreting Fedspeak with Confidence: A LLM-Based Uncertainty-Aware Framework Guided by Monetary Policy Transmission Paths

Abstract:
"Fedspeak", the stylized and often nuanced language used by the U.S. Federal Reserve, encodes implicit policy signals and strategic stances. The Federal Open Market Committee strategically employs Fedspeak as a communication tool to shape market expectations and influence both domestic and global economic conditions. As such, automatically parsing and interpreting Fedspeak presents a highimpact challenge, with significant implications for financial forecasting, algorithmic trading, and data-driven policy analysis. Technically, to enrich the semantic and contextual representation of Fedspeak texts, we incorporate domain-specific reasoning grounded in the monetary policy transmission mechanism. We further introduce a dynamic uncertainty decoding module to assess the confidence of model predictions, thereby enhancing both classification accuracy and model reliability. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the policy stance analysis task. Moreover, statistical analysis reveals a significant positive correlation between perceptual uncertainty and model error rates, validating the effectiveness of perceptual uncertainty as a diagnostic signal.

PaperID: 2642, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05592

Authors:Shaoxiong Zhan, Yanlin Lai, Ziyu Lu, Dahua Lin, Ziqing Yang, Fei Tan

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, SenseTime Research, East China Normal University

Title: MathSmith: Towards Extremely Hard Mathematical Reasoning by Forging Synthetic Problems with a Reinforced Policy

Abstract:
Large language models have achieved substantial progress in mathematical reasoning, yet their advancement is limited by the scarcity of highquality, high-difficulty training data. Existing synthesis methods largely rely on transforming human-written templates, limiting both diversity and scalability. We propose MathSmith, a novel framework for synthesizing challenging mathematical problems to enhance LLM reasoning. Rather than modifying existing problems, MathSmith constructs new ones from scratch by randomly sampling concept–explanation pairs from PlanetMath, ensuring data independence and avoiding contamination. To increase difficulty, we design nine predefined strategies as soft constraints during rationales. We further adopts reinforcement learning to jointly optimize structural validity, reasoning complexity, and answer consistency. The length of the reasoning trace generated under autoregressive prompting is used to reflect cognitive complexity, encouraging the creation of more demanding problems aligned with long-chain-of-thought reasoning. Experiments across five benchmarks, categorized as easy & medium (GSM8K, MATH-500) and hard (AIME2024, AIME2025, OlympiadBench), show that MathSmith consistently outperforms existing baselines under both short and long CoT settings. Additionally, a weakness-focused variant generation module enables targeted improvement on specific concepts. Overall, MathSmith exhibits strong scalability, generalization, and transferability, highlighting the promise of high-difficulty synthetic data in advancing LLM reasoning capabilities.

PaperID: 2643, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05129

Authors:Wuqiang Zheng, Yiyan Xu, Xinyu Lin, Chongming Gao, Wenjie Wang, Fuli Feng

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, National University of Singapore

Title: Navigating Through Paper Flood: Advancing LLM-Based Paper Evaluation Through Domain-Aware Retrieval and Latent Reasoning

Abstract:
With the rapid and continuous increase in academic publications, identifying highquality research has become an increasingly pressing challenge. While recent methods leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for automated paper evaluation have shown great promise, they are often constrained by outdated domain knowledge and limited reasoning capabilities. In this work, we present PaperEval, a novel LLM-based framework for automated paper evaluation that addresses these limitations through two key components: 1) a domain-aware paper retrieval module that retrieves relevant concurrent work to support contextualized assessments of novelty and contributions, and 2) a latent reasoning mechanism that enables deep understanding of complex motivations and methodologies, along with comprehensive comparison against concurrently related work, to support more accurate and reliable evaluation. To guide the reasoning process, we introduce a progressive ranking optimization strategy that encourages the LLM to iteratively refine its predictions with an emphasis on relative comparison. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate that PaperEval consistently outperforms existing methods in both academic impact and paper quality evaluation. In addition, we deploy PaperEval in a real-world paper recommendation system for filtering high-quality papers, which has gained strong engagement on social media---amassing over 8,000 subscribers and attracting over 10,000 views for many filtered high-quality papers---demonstrating the practical effectiveness of PaperEval.

PaperID: 2644, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10008

Authors:Xuancun Lu, Jiaxiang Chen, Shilin Xiao, Zizhi Jin, Zhangrui Chen, Hanwen Yu, Bohan Qian, Ruochen Zhou, Xiaoyu Ji, Wenyuan Xu

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: Phantom Menace: Exploring and Enhancing the Robustness of VLA Models Against Physical Sensor Attacks

Abstract:
VisionLanguage-Action (VLA) models revolutionize robotic systems by enabling end-to-end perception-to-action pipelines that integrate multiple sensory modalities, such as visual signals processed by cameras and auditory signals captured by microphones. This multi-modality integration allows VLA models to interpret complex, real-world environments using diverse sensor data streams. Given the fact that VLA-based systems heavily rely on the sensory input, the security of VLA models against physical-world sensor attacks remains critically underexplored. To address this gap, we present the first systematic study of physical sensor attacks against VLAs, quantifying the influence of sensor attacks and investigating the defenses for VLA models. We introduce a novel ``Real-Sim-Real" framework that automatically simulates physics-based sensor attack vectors, including six attacks targeting cameras and two targeting microphones, and validates them on real robotic systems. Through large-scale evaluations across various VLA architectures and tasks under varying attack parameters, we demonstrate significant vulnerabilities, with susceptibility patterns that reveal critical dependencies on task types and model designs. We further develop an adversarial-training-based defense that enhances VLA robustness against out-of-distribution physical perturbations caused by sensor attacks while preserving model performance. Our findings expose an urgent need for standardized robustness benchmarks and mitigation strategies to secure VLA deployments in safety-critical environments.

PaperID: 2645, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07166

Authors:Siyuan Xu, Yibing Liu, Peilin Chen, Yung-Hui Li, Shiqi Wang, Sam Kwong

Affiliations: City University of Hong Kong, Hon Hai Research Institute, Lingnan University

Title: When Privacy Meets Recovery: The Overlooked Half of Surrogate-Driven Privacy Preservation for MLLM Editing

Abstract:
Privacy leakage in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has long been an intractable problem. Existing studies, though effectively obscure private information in MLLMs, often overlook the evaluation of authenticity and recovery quality of user privacy. To this end, this work uniquely focuses on the critical challenge of how to restore surrogatedriven protected data in diverse MLLM scenarios. We first bridge this research gap by contributing the SPPE (Surrogate Privacy Protected Editable) dataset, which includes a wide range of privacy categories and user instructions to simulate real MLLM applications. This dataset offers protected surrogates alongside their various MLLM-edited versions, thus enabling the direct assessment of privacy recovery quality. By formulating privacy recovery as a guided generation task conditioned on complementary multimodal signals, we further introduce a unified approach that reliably reconstructs private content while preserving the fidelity of MLLM-generated edits. The experiments on both SPPE and InstructPix2Pix further show that our approach generalizes well across diverse visual content and editing tasks, achieving a strong balance between privacy protection and MLLM usability.

PaperID: 2646, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19089

Authors:Yuxuan Ma, Valentino Santucci, Carsten Witt

Affiliations: Southern University of Science and Technology, University for Foreigners of Perugia, Technical University of Denmark

Title: Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Lehmer Codes to Search Permutation Spaces with Evolutionary Algorithms

Abstract:
A suitable choice of the representation of candidate solutions is crucial for the efficiency of evolutionary algorithms and related metaheuristics. We focus on problems in permutation spaces, which are at the core of numerous practical applications of such algorithms, e.g., in scheduling and transportation. Inversion vectors (also called Lehmer codes) are an alternative representation of the permutation space S(n) compared to the classical encoding as a vector of n unique entries. In particular, they do not require any constraint handling. Using rigorous mathematical runtime analyses, we compare the efficiency of inversion vector encodings to the classical representation and give theoryguided advice on their choice. Moreover, we link the effect of local changes in the inversion code space to classical measures on permutations like the number of inversions. Finally, through experimental studies on linear ordering and quadratic assignment problems, we demonstrate the practical efficiency of inversion vector encodings.

PaperID: 2647, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07125

Authors:Andre Opris

Affiliations: University of Passau

Title: Towards a Rigorous Understanding of the Population Dynamics of the NSGA-III: Tight Runtime Bounds

Abstract:
Evolutionary algorithms are widely used for multiobjective optimization, with NSGA-III being particularly effective for problems with more than three objectives, unlike NSGA-II. Despite its empirical success, its theoretical understanding remains limited, especially regarding runtime analysis. A central open problem concerns its population dynamics, which involve controlling the maximum number of individuals sharing the same fitness value during the exploration process. In this paper, we make a significant step towards such an understanding by proving tight runtime bounds for NSGA-III on the bi-objective OneMinMax (2-OMM) problem. We show that, for population sizes n+1 ≤ µ = O(log(n)^c (n+1)) where c<1 is a constant, NSGA-III requires Ω(n^2 \log n / \mu) generations in expectation for covering the Pareto front, providing one of the first lower bounds for NSGA-III on a classical benchmark. Complementing this, we also improve the best known upper bound for NSGA-III on the m-objective OneMinMax problem (m-OMM) of O(n log(n)) generations by a factor of µ / (2n/m + 1)^(m/2) for constant m and (2n/m + 1)^(m/2) ≤ µ ∈ O((log n)^(1/2) (2n/m + 1)^(m/2)). This yields tight runtime bounds for m=2, and the surprising result that NSGA-III outperforms NSGA-II by a factor of µ/n in the expected runtime.

PaperID: 2648, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.16993

Authors:Shengjie Ren, Zimin Liang, Miqing Li, Chao Qian

Affiliations: Nanjing university, University of Birmingham

Title: Not Just for Archiving: Provable Benefits of Reusing the Archive in Evolutionary Multi-objective Optimization

Abstract:
Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) have become the most popular tool for solving widelyexisted multi-objective optimization problems. In Multi-Objective EAs (MOEAs), there is increasing interest in using an archive to store non-dominated solutions generated during the search. This approach can 1) mitigate the effects of population oscillation, a common issue in many MOEAs, and 2) allow for the use of smaller, more practical population sizes. In this paper, we analytically show that the archive can even further help MOEAs through reusing its solutions during the process of new solution generation. We first prove that using a small population size alongside an archive (without incorporating archived solutions in the generation process) may fail on certain problems, as the population may remove previously discovered but promising solutions. We then prove that reusing archive solutions can overcome this limitation, resulting in at least a polynomial speedup on the expected running time. Our analysis focuses on the well-established SMS-EMOA algorithm applied to the commonly studied OneJumpZeroJump problem as well as one of its variants. We also show that reusing archive solutions can be better than using a large population size directly. Finally, we validate our theoretical findings through experiments on well-known practical optimization problems.

PaperID: 2649, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.01849

Authors:Xiangxiang Dai, Yuejin Xie, Maoli Liu, Xuchuang Wang, Zhuohua Li, Huanyu Wang, John C.S. Lui

Affiliations: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Guangzhou Institute of Technology, Huawei Technologies Ltd.

Title: A Multi-Agent Conversational Bandit Approach to Online Evaluation and Selection of User-Aligned LLM Responses

Abstract:
Promptbased offline methods are commonly used to optimize large language model (LLM) responses, but evaluating these responses is computationally intensive and often fails to accommodate diverse response styles. This study introduces a novel online evaluation framework that employs a multi-agent conversational bandit model to select optimal responses while aligning with user preferences dynamically. To tackle challenges such as high-dimensional features, large response sets, adaptive conversational needs, and multi-device access, we propose MACO, Multi-Agent Conversational Online Learning, which comprises two key components: (1) MACO-A: Executed by local agents, it employs an online elimination mechanism to filter out low-quality responses. (2) MACO-S: Executed by the cloud server, it adaptively adjusts selection strategies based on aggregated preference data. An adaptive preference mechanism triggers asynchronous conversations to enhance alignment efficiency. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that MACO achieves near-optimal regret bounds, matching state-of-the-art performance in various degenerate cases. Extensive experiments utilizing Google and OpenAI text embedding models on the real-world datasets with different response styles, combined with Llama and GPT-4o, show that MACO consistently outperforms baseline methods by at least 8.29% across varying response set sizes and numbers of agents.

PaperID: 2650, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10032

Authors:Vijay Keswani, Cyrus Cousins, Breanna Nguyen, Vincent Conitzer, Hoda Heidari, Jana Schaich Borg, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

Affiliations: Duke University, Carnegie Mellon University

Title: Moral Change or Noise? On Problems of Aligning AI with Temporally Unstable Human Feedback

Abstract:
Alignment methods in moral domains seek to elicit moral preferences of human stakeholders and incorporate them into AI. This presupposes moral preferences as static targets, but such preferences often evolve over time. Proper alignment of AI to dynamic human preferences should ideally account for "legitimate" changes to moral reasoning, while ignoring changes related to attention deficits, cognitive biases, or other arbitrary factors. However, common AI alignment approaches largely neglect temporal changes in preferences, posing serious challenges to proper alignment, especially in highstakes applications of AI, e.g., in healthcare domains, where misalignment can jeopardize the trustworthiness of the system and yield serious individual and societal harms. This work investigates the extent to which people's moral preferences change over time, and the impact of such changes on AI alignment. Our study is grounded in the kidney allocation domain, where we elicit responses to pairwise comparisons of hypothetical kidney transplant patients from over 400 participants across 3-5 sessions. We find that, on average, participants change their response to the same scenario presented at different times around 6-20% of the time (exhibiting "response instability"). Additionally, we observe significant shifts in several participants' retrofitted decision-making models over time (capturing "model instability"). Predictive performance of simple AI models decreases as a function of both response and model instability. Moreover, predictive performance diminishes over time, highlighting the importance of accounting for temporal changes in preferences during training. These findings raise fundamental normative and technical challenges relevant to AI alignment, highlighting the need to better understand the object of alignment (what to align to) when user preferences change significantly over time, including the mechanisms underlying these changes.

PaperID: 2651, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.19855

Authors:Zexi Li, Xiangzhu Wang, William F. Shen, Meghdad Kurmanji, Xinchi Qiu, Dongqi Cai, Chao Wu, Nicholas D. Lane

Affiliations: University of Cambridge, Zhejiang University

Title: Editing as Unlearning: Are Knowledge Editing Methods Strong Baselines for Large Language Model Unlearning?

Abstract:
Large language Model (LLM) unlearning, i.e., selectively removing information from LLMs, is vital for responsible model deployment. Differently, LLM knowledge editing aims to modify LLM knowledge instead of removing it. Though editing and unlearning seem to be two distinct tasks, we find there is a tight connection between them. In this paper, we conceptualize unlearning as a special case of editing where information is modified to a refusal or "empty set" response, signifying its removal. This paper thus investigates if knowledge editing techniques are strong baselines for LLM unlearning. We evaluate stateof-the-art (SOTA) editing methods (e.g., ROME, MEMIT, GRACE, WISE, and AlphaEdit) against existing unlearning approaches on pretrained and finetuned knowledge. Results show certain editing methods, notably WISE and AlphaEdit, are effective unlearning baselines, especially for pretrained knowledge, and excel in generating human-aligned refusal answers. To better adapt editing methods for unlearning applications, we propose practical recipes including self-improvement and query merging. The former leverages the LLM's own in-context learning ability to craft a more human-aligned unlearning target, and the latter enables ROME and MEMIT to perform well in unlearning longer sample sequences. We advocate for the unlearning community to adopt SOTA editing methods as baselines and explore unlearning from an editing perspective for more holistic LLM memory control.

PaperID: 2652, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06456

Authors:Huili Huang, Chengeng Liu, Danrong Zhang, Shail Patel, Anastasiya Masalava, Sagar Sadak, Parisa Babolhavaeji, WeiHong Low, Max Mahdi Roozbahani, J. David Frost

Affiliations: School of Computational Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, School of Computer Science, School of Computing Instruction

Title: EIDSeg: A Pixel-Level Semantic Segmentation Dataset for Post-Earthquake Damage Assessment from Social Media Images

Abstract:
Rapid post‑earthquake damage assessment is crucial for rescue and resource planning. Still, existing remote sensing methods depend on costly aerial images, expert labeling, and produce only binary damage maps for earlystage evaluation. Although ground-level images from social networks provide a valuable source to fill this gap, a large pixel-level annotated dataset for this task is still unavailable. We introduce EIDSeg, the first large-scale semantic segmentation dataset specifically for post-earthquake social media imagery. The dataset comprises 3,266 images from nine major earthquakes (2008–2023), annotated across five classes of infrastructure damage. Undamaged Building, Damaged Building, Destroyed Building, Undamaged Road, and Damaged Road. We propose a practical three-phase cross-disciplinary annotation protocol with labeling guidelines that enables consistent segmentation by non-expert annotators, achieving over 70% inter-annotator agreement. We benchmark several state-of-the-art segmentation models, identifying Encoder-only Mask Transformer (EoMT) as the top-performing method with a Mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 80.8%. By unlocking social networks' rich, ground-level perspective, our work paves the way for a faster, finer-grained damage assessment in the post-earthquake scenario.

PaperID: 2653, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.04481

Authors:Lars Krupp, Daniel Geißler, Vishal Banwari, Paul Lukowicz, Jakob Karolus

Affiliations: RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)

Title: Promoting Sustainable Web Agents: Benchmarking and Estimating Energy Consumption Through Empirical and Theoretical Analysis

Abstract:
Web agents, like OpenAI's Operator and Google's Project Mariner, are powerful agentic systems pushing the boundaries of Large Language Models (LLM). They can autonomously interact with the internet at the user's behest, such as navigating websites, filling search masks, and comparing price lists. Though web agent research is thriving, induced sustainability issues remain largely unexplored. To highlight the urgency of this issue, we provide an initial exploration of the energy and CO₂ cost associated with web agents from both a theoretical —via estimation— and an empirical perspective —by benchmarking. Our results show how different philosophies in web agent creation can severely impact the associated expended energy, and that more energy consumed does not necessarily equate to better results. We highlight a lack of transparency regarding disclosing model parameters and processes used for some web agents as a limiting factor when estimating energy consumption. Our work contributes towards a change in thinking of how we evaluate web agents, advocating for dedicated metrics measuring energy consumption in benchmarks.

PaperID: 2654, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.10340

Authors:Shahriar Noroozizadeh, Sayantan Kumar, Jeremy C. Weiss

Affiliations: Machine Learning Department, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health

Title: Forecasting Clinical Risk from Textual Time Series: Structuring Narratives for Temporal AI in Healthcare

Abstract:
Clinical case reports encode temporal patient trajectories that are often underexploited by traditional machine learning methods relying on structured data. In this work, we introduce the forecasting problem from textual time series, where timestamped clinical findings—extracted via an LLMassisted annotation pipeline—serve as the primary input for prediction. We systematically evaluate a diverse suite of models, including fine-tuned decoder-based large language models and encoder-based transformers, on tasks of event occurrence prediction, temporal ordering, and survival analysis. Our experiments reveal that encoder-based models consistently achieve higher F1 scores and superior temporal concordance for short- and long-horizon event forecasting, while fine-tuned masking approaches enhance ranking performance. In contrast, instruction-tuned decoder models demonstrate a relative advantage in survival analysis, especially in early prognosis settings. Our sensitivity analyses further demonstrate the importance of time ordering, which requires clinical time series construction, as compared to text ordering, the format of the text inputs that LLMs are classically trained on. This highlights the additional benefit that can be ascertained from time-ordered corpora, with implications for temporal tasks in the era of widespread LLM use.

PaperID: 2655, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08605

Authors:Ando Shah, Rajveer Singh, Akram Zaytar, Girmaw Abebe Tadesse, Caleb Robinson, Negar Tafti, Stephen A. Wood, Rahul Dodhia, Juan M Lavista Ferres

Affiliations: University of California, The Nature Conservancy, Microsoft AI for Good Research Lab

Title: Machine Learning for Sustainable Rice Production: Region-Scale Monitoring of Water-Saving Practices in Punjab, India

Abstract:
Rice cultivation supplies half the world's population with staple food, while also being a major driver of freshwater depletionconsuming roughly a quarter of global freshwater--and accounting for ~48% of greenhouse gas emissions from croplands. In regions like Punjab, India, where groundwater levels are plummeting at 41.6 cm/year, adopting water-saving rice farming practices is critical. Direct-Seeded Rice (DSR) and Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD) can cut irrigation water use by 20–40% without hurting yields, yet lack of spatial data on adoption impedes effective adaptation policy and climate action. We present a machine learning framework to bridge this data gap by monitoring sustainable rice farming at scale. In collaboration with agronomy experts and a large-scale farmer training program, we obtained ground-truth data from ~1,400 fields across Punjab. Leveraging this partnership, we developed a novel dimensional classification approach that decouples sowing and irrigation practices, achieving F1 scores of 0.8 and 0.74 respectively, solely employing Sentinel-1 satellite imagery. Explainability analysis reveals that DSR classification is robust while AWD classification depends primarily on planting schedule differences, as Sentinel-1's 12-day revisit frequency cannot capture the higher frequency irrigation cycles characteristic of AWD practices. Applying this model across 3 million fields reveals spatial heterogeneity in adoption at the state level, highlighting gaps and opportunities for policy targeting. Our district-level adoption rates correlate well with government estimates (Spearman's=0.69 and Rank Biased Overlap=0.77). This study provides policymakers and sustainability programs a powerful tool to track practice adoption, inform targeted interventions, and drive data-driven policies for water conservation and climate mitigation at regional scale.

PaperID: 2656, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06943

Authors:Ayushi Sharma, Johanna Trost, Daniel Lusk, Johannes Dollinger, Julian Schrader, Christian Rossi, Javier Lopatin, Etienne Laliberté, Simon Haberstroh, Jana Eichel, Daniel Mederer, Jose Miguel Cerda-Paredes, Shyam S. Phartyal, Lisa-Maricia Schwarz, Anja Linstädter, Maria Conceição Caldeira, Teja Kattenborn

Affiliations: Chair of Sensor-based Geoinformatics, University of Freiburg, EcoVision Lab, University of Zurich, Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, Swiss National Park, Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Université de Montréal Canada, Chair of Ecosystem Physiology, Department of Physical Geography, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, Institute for Earth System Science and Remote Sensing, Leipzig University, Data Observatory, Department of Forestry, Mizoram University, Biodiversity Research / Systematic Botany, University of Potsdam, Germany Department of Plant Nutrition, Institute of Crop Science and Resource Conservation, University of Bonn, Forest Research Centre, School of Agriculture, University of Lisbon

Title: PlantTraitNet: An Uncertainty-Aware Multimodal Framework for Global-Scale Plant Trait Inference from Citizen Science Data

Abstract:
Global plant maps of plant traits, such as leaf nitrogen or plant height, are essential for understanding ecosystem processes, including the carbon and energy cycles of the Earth system. However, existing trait maps remain limited by the high cost and sparse geographic coverage of fieldbased measurements. Citizen science initiatives offer a largely untapped resource to overcome these limitations, with over 50 million geotagged plant photographs worldwide capturing valuable visual information on plant morphology and physiology. In this study, we introduce PlantTraitNet, a multi-modal, multi-task uncertainty-aware deep learning framework that predicts four key plant traits (plant height, leaf area, specific leaf area, and nitrogen content) from citizen science photos using weak supervision. By aggregating individual trait predictions across space, we generate global maps of trait distributions. We validate these maps against independent vegetation survey data (sPlotOpen) and benchmark them against leading global trait products. Our results show that PlantTraitNet consistently outperforms existing trait maps across all evaluated traits, demonstrating that citizen science imagery, when integrated with computer vision and geospatial AI, enables not only scalable but also more accurate global trait mapping. This approach offers a powerful new pathway for ecological research and Earth system modeling.

PaperID: 2657, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14375

Authors:Muhammad Hamza Yousuf, Jason Li, Sahar Vahdati, Raphael Theilen, Jakob Wittenstein, Jens Lehmann

Affiliations: Institut für Angewandte Informatik (InfAI), Germany Leibniz Universität Hannover, Department of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine, University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus

Title: Advancing Safe Mechanical Ventilation Using Offline RL with Hybrid Actions and Clinically Aligned Rewards

Abstract:
Invasive mechanical ventilation (MV) is a lifesustaining therapy commonly used in the intensive care unit (ICU) for patients with severe and acute conditions. These patients frequently rely on MV for breathing. Given the high risk of death in such cases, optimal MV settings can reduce mortality, minimize ventilator-induced lung injury, shorten ICU stays, and ease the strain on healthcare resources. However, optimizing MV settings remains a complex and error-prone process due to patient-specific variability. While Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) shows promise for optimizing MV settings, current methods struggle with the hybrid (continuous and discrete) nature of MV settings. Discretizing continuous settings leads to exponential growth in the action space, which limits the number of optimizable settings. Converting the predictions back to continuous can cause a distribution shift, compromising safety and performance. To address this challenge, in the IntelliLung project, we are developing an AI-based approach where we constrain the action space and employ factored action critics. This approach allows us to scale to six optimizable settings compared to 2-3 in previous studies. We adapt SOTA offline RL algorithms to operate directly on hybrid action spaces, avoiding the pitfalls of discretization. We also introduce a clinically grounded reward function based on ventilator-free days and physiological targets. Using multi-objective optimization for reward selection, we show that this leads to a more equitable consideration of all clinically relevant objectives. Notably, we develop a system in close collaboration with healthcare professionals that is aligned with real-world clinical objectives and designed with future deployment in mind.

PaperID: 2658, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12227

Authors:Khadija Zanna, Akane Sano

Affiliations: Rice University

Title: Uncovering Bias Paths with LLM-guided Causal Discovery: An Active Learning and Dynamic Scoring Approach

Abstract:
Ensuring fairness in machine learning requires understanding how sensitive attributes like race or gender causally influence outcomes. Existing causal discovery (CD) methods often struggle to recover fairnessrelevant pathways in the presence of noise, confounding, or data corruption. Large language models (LLMs) offer a complementary signal by leveraging semantic priors from variable metadata. We propose a hybrid LLM-guided CD framework that extends a breadth-first search strategy with active learning and dynamic scoring. Variable pairs are prioritized for querying using a composite score combining mutual information, partial correlation, and LLM confidence, enabling more efficient and robust structure discovery. To evaluate fairness sensitivity, we introduce a semi-synthetic benchmark based on the UCI Adult dataset, embedding domain-informed bias pathways alongside noise and latent confounders. We assess how well CD methods recover both global graph structure and fairness-critical paths (e.g., sex→education→income). Our results demonstrate that LLM-guided methods, including our active, dynamically scored variant, outperform baselines in recovering fairness-relevant structure under noisy conditions. We analyze when LLM-driven insights complement statistical dependencies and discuss implications for fairness auditing in high-stakes domains.

PaperID: 2659, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11772

Authors:Chenyu Zhang, Xiaohang Luo

Affiliations: Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania

Title: Scaling Equitable Reflection Assessment in Education via Large Language Models and Role-Based Feedback Agents

Abstract:
Formative feedback is widely recognized as one of the most effective drivers of student learning, yet it remains difficult to implement equitably at scale. In large or lowresource courses, instructors often lack the time, staffing, and bandwidth required to review and respond to every student reflection, creating gaps in support precisely where learners would benefit most. This paper presents a theory-grounded system that uses five coordinated role-based LLM agents (Evaluator, Equity Monitor, Metacognitive Coach, Aggregator, and Reflexion Reviewer) to score learner reflections with a shared rubric and to generate short, bias-aware, learner-facing comments. The agents first produce structured rubric scores, then check for potentially biased or exclusionary language, add metacognitive prompts that invite students to think about their own thinking, and finally compose a concise feedback message of at most 120 words. The system includes simple fairness checks that compare scoring error across lower and higher scoring learners, enabling instructors to monitor and bound disparities in accuracy. We evaluate the pipeline in a 12-session AI literacy program with adult learners. In this setting, the system produces rubric scores that approach expert-level agreement, and trained graders rate the AI-generated comments as helpful, empathetic, and well aligned with instructional goals. Taken together, these results show that multi-agent LLM systems can deliver equitable, high-quality formative feedback at a scale and speed that would be impossible for human graders alone. The approach demonstrates how structured agent roles, fairness checks, and learning-science principles can work together to support instructors while preserving pedagogical intent. More broadly, the work points toward a future where feedback-rich learning becomes feasible for any course size or context, advancing long-standing goals of equity, access, and instructional capacity in education.

PaperID: 2660, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19114

Authors:Haoyu Jiang, Boan Qu, Junjie Zhu, Fanjie Zeng, Xiaojie Lin, Wei Zhong

Affiliations: Zhejiang University

Title: HyperLoad: A Cross-Modality Enhanced Large Language Model-Based Framework for Green Data Center Cooling Load Prediction

Abstract:
The explosive growth of artificial intelligence is exponentially escalating computational demand, inflating data center energy use and carbon emissions, and spurring rapid deployment of green data centers to relieve resource and environmental stress. Achieving subminute orchestration of renewables, storage, and loads, while minimizing PUE and lifecycle carbon intensity, hinges on accurate load forecasting. However, existing methods struggle to address small-sample scenarios caused by cold start, load distortion, multi-source data fragmentation, and distribution shifts in green data centers. We introduce HyperLoad, a cross-modality framework that exploits pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to overcome data scarcity. In the Cross-Modality Knowledge Alignment phase, textual priors and time-series attributes are mapped to a common latent space, maximizing the utility of prior knowledge. In the Multi-Scale Feature Modeling phase, domain-aligned priors are injected through adaptive prefix-tuning, enabling rapid scenario adaptation, while an Enhanced Global Interaction Attention mechanism captures cross-device temporal dependencies. The public GreenData dataset is released for benchmarking. Under both data-sufficient and data scarce regimes, HyperLoad consistently surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines, demonstrating its practicality for sustainable green data center management.

PaperID: 2661, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22563

Authors:Yu Lei, Xingyang Ge, Yi Zhang, Yiming Yang, Bolei Ma

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, School of Literature, Jiangsu Normal University, Department of Statistics, LMU Munich FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, School of Linguistic Sciences and Arts, LMU Munich Munich Center for Machine Learning

Title: Do Large Language Models Think like the Brain? Sentence-Level Evidences from Layer-Wise Embeddings and fMRI

Abstract:
Understanding whether large language models (LLMs) and the human brain converge on similar computational principles remains a fundamental and important question in cognitive neuroscience and AI. Do the brainlike patterns observed in LLMs emerge simply from scaling, or do they reflect deeper alignment with the architecture of human language processing? This study focuses on the sentence-level neural mechanisms of language models, systematically investigating how layer-wise representations in LLMs align with the dynamic neural responses during human sentence comprehension. By comparing hierarchical embeddings from 14 publicly available LLMs with fMRI data collected from participants, who were exposed to a naturalistic narrative story, we constructed sentence-level neural prediction models to identify the model layers most significantly correlated with brain region activations. Results show that improvements in model performance drive the evolution of representational architectures toward brain-like hierarchies, particularly achieving stronger functional and anatomical correspondence at higher semantic abstraction levels. These findings advance our understanding of the computational parallels between LLMs and the human brain, highlighting the potential of LLMs as models for human language processing.

PaperID: 2662, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10434

Authors:Feng Wang, Tianxiang Chen, Shuyue Wei, Qian Chu, Yi Zhang, Yifan Sun, Zhiming Zheng

Affiliations: Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Future Blockchain and Privacy Computing School of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University, Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Future Blockchain and Privacy Computing School of Computer Science and Engineering, School of Mathematics, Renmin University of China, Center for Applied Statistics and School of Statistics

Title: Unlocking Dynamic Inter-Client Spatial Dependencies: A Federated Spatio-temporal Graph Learning Method for Traffic Flow Forecasting

Abstract:
Spatiotemporal graphs are powerful tools for modeling complex dependencies in traffic time series. However, the distributed nature of real-world traffic data across multiple stakeholders poses significant challenges in modeling and reconstructing inter-client spatial dependencies while adhering to data locality constraints. Existing methods primarily address static dependencies, overlooking their dynamic nature and resulting in suboptimal performance. In response, we propose Federated Spatio-Temporal Graph with Dynamic Inter-Client Dependencies (FedSTGD), a framework designed to model and reconstruct dynamic inter-client spatial dependencies in federated learning. FedSTGD incorporates a federated nonlinear computation decomposition module to approximate complex graph operations. This is complemented by a graph node embedding augmentation module, which alleviates performance degradation arising from the decomposition. These modules are coordinated through a client-server collective learning protocol, which decomposes dynamic inter-client spatial dependency learning tasks into lightweight, parallelizable subtasks. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that FedSTGD achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of RMSE, MAE, and MAPE, approaching that of centralized baselines. Ablation studies confirm the contribution of each module in addressing dynamic inter-client spatial dependencies, while sensitivity analysis highlights the robustness of FedSTGD to variations in hyperparameters.

PaperID: 2663, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13800

Authors:Huiwen Wu, Shuo Zhang, Yi Liu, Hongbin Ye

Affiliations: Research Center for Scientific Data Hub, Zhejiang Laboratory, State Key Laboratory of Mathematical Sciences (SKLMS) and State Key Laboratory of Scientific and Engineering Computing (LSEC), Institute of Computational Mathematics and Scientific/Engineering Computing, Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. School of Mathematical Sciences

Title: Synergizing Multigrid Algorithms with Vision Transformer: A Novel Approach to Enhance the Seismic Foundation Model

Abstract:
Due to the rapid advancement and homogenization of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology development, transformerbased foundation models have revolutionized scientific applications, such as drug discovery, materials research, and astronomy. However, seismic data presents unique characteristics that require specialized processing techniques for pretraining foundation models in seismic contexts with high- and low-frequency features playing crucial roles. Existing Vision Transformer (ViT) with sequential image tokenization fails to efficiently and effectively capture both high- and low-frequency seismic information because they ignore the intrinsic structural patterns of seismograms. This work introduces ADATG, a novel adaptive two-grid training strategy with Hilbert encoding, explicitly tailored for seismogram data and leveraging the hierarchical structures inherent in seismic data. Specifically, our approach employs spectrum decomposition to separate high- and low-frequency components, and hierarchical Hilbert encoding to represent the data effectively. Moreover, inspired by the frequency principle, we propose an adaptive training strategy that initially emphasizes coarse-level information and then progressively refines the model's focus on fine-level features. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. This research highlights the importance of data encoding and training strategies informed by the distinct characteristics of high- and low-frequency features in seismic images, ultimately enhancing the pretraining of visual seismic foundation models.

PaperID: 2664, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11730

Authors:Yongjun Xiao, Dian Meng, Xinlei Huang, Yanran Liu, Shiwei Ruan, Ziyue Qiao, Xubin Zheng

Affiliations: National University of Singapore, Great Bay University

Title: GROVER: Graph-guided Representation of Omics and Vision with Expert Regulation for Adaptive Spatial Multi-omics Fusion

Abstract:
Effectively modeling multimodal spatial omics data is critical for understanding tissue complexity and underlying biological mechanisms. While spatial transcriptomics, proteomics, and epigenomics capture molecular features, they lack pathological morphological context. Integrating these omics with histopathological images is thus critical for comprehensive disease tissue analysis. However, substantial heterogeneity across omics, imaging, and spatial modalities poses significant challenges. Naive fusion of semantically distinct sources often leads to ambiguous representations. Additionally, the resolution mismatch between highresolution histology images and lower-resolution sequencing spots complicates spatial alignment. Biological perturbations during sample preparation further distort modality-specific signals, hindering accurate integration. To address these challenges, we propose Graph-guided Representation of Omics and Vision with Expert Regulation for Adaptive Spatial Multi-omics Fusion (GROVER), a novel framework for adaptive integration of spatial multi-omics data. GROVER leverages a Graph Convolutional Network encoder based on Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks to capture the nonlinear dependencies between each modality and its associated spatial structure, thereby producing expressive, modality-specific embeddings. To align these representations, we introduce a spot-feature-pair contrastive learning strategy that explicitly optimizes the correspondence across modalities at each spot. Furthermore, we design a dynamic expert routing mechanism that adaptively selects informative modalities for each spot while suppressing noisy or low-quality inputs. Experiments on real-world spatial omics datasets demonstrate that GROVER outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, providing a robust and reliable solution for multimodal integration.

PaperID: 2665, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08291

Authors:Kaiyi Xu, Junchao Gong, Zhiwang Zhou, Zhangrui Li, Yuandong Pu, Yihao Liu, Ben Fei, Fenghua Ling, Wenlong Zhang, Lei Bai

Affiliations: Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Title: SynWeather: Weather Observation Data Synthesis Across Multiple Regions and Variables via a General Diffusion Transformer

Abstract:
With the advancement of meteorological instruments, abundant data has become available. However, due to instruments’ intrinsic limitations such as environmental sensitivity and orbital constraints, raw data often suffer from temporal or spatial gaps, making it urgent to leverage data synthesis techniques to fill in missing information. Current approaches are typically focus on singlevariable, single-region tasks and primarily rely on deterministic modeling. This limits unified synthesis across variables and regions, overlooks cross-variable complementarity and often leads to over-smoothed results. To address above challenges, we introduce SynWeather, the first dataset designed for Unified Multi-region and Multi-variable Weather Observation Data Synthesis. SynWeather covers four representative regions: the Continental United States, Europe, East Asia, and Tropical Cyclone regions, as well as provides high-resolution observations of key weather variables, including Composite Radar Reflectivity, Hourly Precipitation, Visible Light, and Microwave Brightness Temperature. In addition, we introduce SynWeatherDiff, a general and probabilistic weather synthesis model built upon the Diffusion Transformer framework to address the over-smoothed problem. Experiments on the SynWeather dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our network compared with both task-specific and general models. Moreover, SynWeatherDiff is able to generate results that are both fine-grained and accurate in high-value regions. Through the dataset and baseline model, we aim to advance meteorological downstream tasks and promote the development of general models for weather variable synthesis.

PaperID: 2666, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.21613

Authors:Zhishuai Zhang, Xintian Li, Shilong Liu, Aodong Zhang, Lu Jie, Nan Sun

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Princeton University

Title: AMS-IO-Bench and AMS-IO-Agent: Benchmarking and Structured Reasoning for Analog and Mixed-Signal Integrated Circuit Input/Output Design

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose AMSIO-Agent, a domain-specialized LLM-based agent for structure-aware input/output (I/O) subsystem generation in analog and mixed-signal (AMS) integrated circuits (ICs). The central contribution of this work is a framework that connects natural language design intent with industrial-level AMS IC design deliverables. AMS-IO-Agent integrates two key capabilities: (1) a structured domain knowledge base that captures reusable constraints and design conventions; (2) design intent structuring, which converts ambiguous user intent into verifiable logic steps using JSON and Python as intermediate formats. We further introduce AMS-IO-Bench, a benchmark for wirebond-packaged AMS I/O ring automation. On this benchmark, AMS-IO-Agent achieves over 70% DRC+LVS pass rate and reduces design turnaround time from hours to minutes, outperforming the baseline LLM. Furthermore, an agent-generated I/O ring was fabricated and validated in a 28 nm CMOS tape-out, demonstrating the practical effectiveness of the approach in real AMS IC design flows. To our knowledge, this is the first reported human-agent collaborative AMS IC design in which an LLM-based agent completes a nontrivial subtask with outputs directly used in silicon.

PaperID: 2667, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09474

Authors:Jiayuan Huang, Runlong He, Danyal Zaman Khan, Evangelos B. Mazomenos, Danail Stoyanov, Hani Marcus, Linzhe Jiang, Matthew John Clarkson, Mobarak I. Hoque

Affiliations: UCL Hawkes Institute, University College London, UK Dept of Medical Physics & Biomedical Engineering, UK Visual Understanding Research Group, Dept of Informatics, King’s College London, UK Dept of Neurosurgery, National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, UK Institute of Neurology, UK Dept of Computer Science, Division of Informatics, Imaging and Data Science, The University of Manchester

Title: Surgical AI Copilot: Energy-Based Fourier Gradient Low-Rank Adaptation for Surgical LLM Agent Reasoning and Planning

Abstract:
Imageguided surgery demands adaptive, real-time decision support, yet static AI models struggle with structured task planning and providing interactive guidance. Large language models (LLMs)-powered agents offer a promising solution by enabling dynamic task planning and predictive decision support. Despite recent advances, the absence of surgical agent datasets and robust parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques limits the development of LLM agents capable of complex intraoperative reasoning. In this paper, we introduce Surgical AI Copilot, an LLM agent for image-guided pituitary surgery, capable of conversation, planning, and task execution in response to queries involving tasks such as MRI tumor segmentation, endoscope anatomy segmentation, overlaying preoperative imaging with intraoperative views, instrument tracking, and surgical visual question answering (VQA). To enable structured agent planning, we develop the PitAgent dataset, a surgical context-aware planning dataset covering surgical tasks like workflow analysis, instrument localization, anatomical segmentation, and query-based reasoning. Additionally, we propose DEFT-GaLore, a Deterministic Energy-based Fourier Transform (DEFT) gradient projection technique for efficient low-rank adaptation of recent LLMs (e.g., LLaMA 3.2, Qwen 2.5), enabling their use as surgical agent planners. We extensively validate our agent's performance and the proposed adaptation technique against other state-of-the-art low-rank adaptation methods on agent planning and prompt generation tasks, including a zero-shot surgical VQA benchmark, demonstrating the significant potential for truly efficient and scalable surgical LLM agents in real-time operative settings.

PaperID: 2668, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08007

Authors:Yifei Cao, Yu Liu, Guolong Wang, Zhu Liu, Kai Wang, Xianjie Zhang, Jizhe Yu, Xun Tu

Affiliations: Dalian University of Technology, University of International Business and Economics, Harbin Institute of Technology, Academy of Satellite Application Innovation

Title: EAGLE: Episodic Appearance- and Geometry-aware Memory for Unified 2D-3D Visual Query Localization in Egocentric Vision

Abstract:
Egocentric visual query localization is vital for embodied AI and VR/AR, yet remains challenging due to camera motion, viewpoint changes, and appearance variations. We present EAGLE, a novel framework that leverages episodic appearanceand geometry-aware memory to achieve unified 2D-3D visual query localization in egocentric vision. Inspired by avian memory consolidation, EAGLE synergistically integrates segmentation guided by an appearance-aware meta-learning memory (AMM), with tracking driven by a geometry-aware localization memory (GLM). This memory consolidation mechanism, through structured appearance and geometry memory banks, stores high-confidence retrieval samples, effectively supporting both long- and short-term modeling of target appearance variations. This enables precise contour delineation with robust spatial discrimination, leading to significantly improved retrieval accuracy. Furthermore, by integrating the VQL-2D output with a visual geometry grounded Transformer (VGGT), we achieve a efficient unification of 2D and 3D tasks, enabling rapid and accurate back-projection into 3D space. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Ego4D-VQ benchmark.

PaperID: 2669, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07435

Authors:Yuqi Cheng, Yihan Sun, Hui Zhang, Weiming Shen, Yunkang Cao

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Hunan University

Title: Towards High-Resolution 3D Anomaly Detection: A Scalable Dataset and Real-Time Framework for Subtle Industrial Defects

Abstract:
In industrial point cloud analysis, detecting subtle anomalies demands highresolution spatial data, yet prevailing benchmarks emphasize low-resolution inputs. To address this disparity, we propose a scalable pipeline for generating realistic and subtle 3D anomalies. Employing this pipeline, we developed MiniShift, the inaugural high-resolution 3D anomaly detection dataset, encompassing 2,577 point clouds, each with 500,000 points and anomalies occupying less than 1% of the total. We further introduce Simple3D, an efficient framework integrating Multi-scale Neighborhood Descriptors (MSND) and Local Feature Spatial Aggregation (LFSA) to capture intricate geometric details with minimal computational overhead, achieving real-time inference exceeding 20 fps. Extensive evaluations on MiniShift and established benchmarks demonstrate that Simple3D surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and speed, highlighting the pivotal role of high-resolution data and effective feature aggregation in advancing practical 3D anomaly detection.

PaperID: 2670, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.17044

Authors:Woong Oh Cho, In Cho, Seoha Kim, Jeongmin Bae, Youngjung Uh, Seon Joo Kim

Affiliations: Yonsei University

Title: 4D Scaffold Gaussian Splatting with Dynamic-Aware Anchor Growing for Efficient and High-Fidelity Dynamic Scene Reconstruction

Abstract:
Modeling dynamic scenes through 4D Gaussians offers high visual fidelity and fast rendering speeds, but comes with significant storage overhead. Recent approaches mitigate this cost by aggressively reducing the number of Gaussians. However, this inevitably removes Gaussians essential for highquality rendering, leading to severe degradation in dynamic regions. In this paper, we introduce a novel 4D anchor-based framework that tackles the storage cost in different perspective. Rather than reducing the number of Gaussians, our method retains a sufficient quantity to accurately model dynamic contents, while compressing them into compact, grid-aligned 4D anchor features. Each anchor is processed by an MLP to spawn a set of neural 4D Gaussians, which represent a local spatiotemporal region. We design these neural 4D Gaussians to capture temporal changes with minimal parameters, making them well-suited for the MLP-based spawning. Moreover, we introduce a dynamic-aware anchor growing strategy to effectively assign additional anchors to under-reconstructed dynamic regions. Our method adjusts the accumulated gradients with Gaussians' temporal coverage, significantly improving reconstruction quality in dynamic regions. Experimental results highlight that our method achieves state-of-the-art visual quality in dynamic regions, outperforming all baselines by a large margin with practical storage costs.

PaperID: 2671, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12604

Authors:Lei Ding, Xibing Zuo, Haitao Guo, Jun Lu, Zhihui Gong, Xuanguang Liu, Jicang Lu

Affiliations: Information Engineering University

Title: S2C: A Noise-Resistant Difference Learning Framework for Unsupervised Change Detection in VHR Remote Sensing Images

Abstract:
Unsupervised Change Detection (UCD) in Very High Resolution (VHR) Remote Sensing (RS) images remains to be a difficult challenge due to the inherent spatiotemporal complexity within data. Inspired by recent advancements in Visual Foundation Models (VFMs) and Contrastive Learning (CL), this research aims to develop CL methodologies to translate implicit knowledge in VFM into change representations, thus eliminating the need for explicit supervision. To this end, we introduce a Semantic-to-Change (S2C) learning framework for UCD in VHR RS images. Differently from existing CL methodologies that typically focus on learning multi-temporal similarities, we introduce a novel triplet learning strategy that explicitly models temporal differences, which are crucial to the CD task. Furthermore, random spatial and spectral perturbations are introduced during training to enhance robustness to temporal noise. In addition, a grid sparsity regularization is defined to suppress insignificant changes, and an IoU-matching algorithm is developed to refine the CD results. Experiments on three benchmark CD datasets demonstrate that the proposed S2C learning framework achieves significant improvements in accuracy, surpassing current state-of-the-art by over 31%, 9% and 23%, respectively. It also demonstrates robustness and sample efficiency, suitable for training and adaptation of various VFMs or backbone neural networks.

PaperID: 2672, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00453

Authors:Baisong Li, Xingwang Wang, Haixiao Xu

Affiliations: Jilin University

Title: PIF-Net: Ill-Posed Prior Guided Multispectral and Hyperspectral Image Fusion via Invertible Mamba and Fusion-Aware LoRA

Abstract:
The goal of multispectral and hyperspectral image fusion (MHIF) is to generate highquality images that simultaneously possess rich spectral information and fine spatial details. However, due to the inherent trade-off between spectral and spatial information and the limited availability of observations, this task is fundamentally ill-posed. Previous studies have not effectively addressed the ill-posed nature caused by data misalignment. To tackle this challenge, we propose a fusion framework named PIF-Net, which explicitly incorporates ill-posed priors to effectively fuse multispectral images and hyperspectral images. To balance global spectral modeling with computational efficiency, we design a method based on an invertible Mamba architecture that maintains information consistency during feature transformation and reconstruction, ensuring stable gradient flow and process reversibility. Furthermore, we introduce a novel fusion module called the Fusion-Aware Low-Rank Adaptation module, which dynamically calibrates spectral and spatial features while keeping the model lightweight. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that PIF-Net achieves significantly better image restoration performance than current state-of-the-art methods while maintaining model efficiency.

PaperID: 2673, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.10040

Authors:Wei Lu, Xue Yang, Si-Bao Chen

Affiliations: Anhui University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: LWGANet: Addressing Spatial and Channel Redundancy in Remote Sensing Visual Tasks with Light-Weight Grouped Attention

Abstract:
Lightweight neural networks for remote sensing (RS) visual analysis must overcome two inherent redundancies: spatial redundancy from vast, homogeneous backgrounds, and channel redundancy, where extreme scale variations render a single feature space inefficient. Existing models, often designed for natural images, fail to address this dual challenge in RS scenarios. To bridge this gap, we propose LWGANet, a light-weight backbone engineered for RS-specific properties. LWGANet introduces two core innovations: a Top-K Global Feature Interaction (TGFI) module that mitigates spatial redundancy by focusing computation on salient regions, and a Light-Weight Grouped Attention (LWGA) module that resolves channel redundancy by partitioning channels into specialized, scale-specific pathways. By synergistically resolving these core inefficiencies, LWGANet achieves a superior trade-off between feature representation quality and computational cost. Extensive experiments on twelve diverse datasets across four major RS tasks—scene classification, oriented object detection, semantic segmentation, and change detection—demonstrate that LWGANet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art light-weight backbones in both accuracy and efficiency. Our work establishes a new, robust baseline for efficient visual analysis in RS images.

PaperID: 2674, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16454

Authors:Doriand Petit, Steve Bourgeois, Vincent Gay-Bellile, Florian Chabot, Loïc Barthe

Affiliations: Université de Toulouse, CEA List

Title: LLaVA³: Representing 3D Scenes Like a Cubist Painter to Boost 3D Scene Understanding of VLMs

Abstract:
Developing a multimodal language model capable of understanding 3D scenes remains challenging due to the limited availability of 3D training data, in contrast to the abundance of 2D datasets used for vision-language models (VLMs). As an alternative, we introduce LLaVA³ (pronounced LLaVA Cube), a novel method that improves the 3D scene understanding capabilities of VLMs using only multi-view 2D images, and without requiring any fine-tuning. Inspired by Cubist painters, who represented multiple viewpoints of a 3D object within a single 2D picture, we propose to describe the 3D scene for the VLM through omnidirectional visual representations of each object. These representations are derived from an intermediate multi-view 3D reconstruction of the scene. Extensive experiments on 3D visual question answering and 3D language grounding show that our approach significantly outperforms previous 2D-based VLM solutions.

PaperID: 2675, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02557

Authors:Jierui Qu, Jianchun Zhao

Affiliations: National University of Singapore, Xi'an Jiaotong University

Title: RL-U2Net: A Dual-Branch UNet with Reinforcement Learning-Assisted Multimodal Feature Fusion for Accurate 3D Whole-Heart Segmentation

Abstract:
Accurate wholeheart segmentation is a critical component in the precise diagnosis and interventional planning of cardiovascular diseases. Integrating complementary information from modalities such as computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can significantly enhance segmentation accuracy and robustness. However, existing multi-modal segmentation methods face several limitations: severe spatial inconsistency between modalities hinders effective feature fusion; fusion strategies are often static and lack adaptability; and the processes of feature alignment and segmentation are decoupled and inefficient. To address these challenges, we propose a dual-branch U-Net architecture enhanced by reinforcement learning for feature alignment, termed RL-U2Net, designed for precise and efficient multi-modal 3D whole-heart segmentation. The model employs a dual-branch U-shaped network to process CT and MRI patches in parallel, and introduces a novel RL-XAlign module between the encoders. The module employs a cross‑modal attention mechanism to capture semantic correspondences between modalities and a reinforcement learning agent learns an optimal rotation strategy that consistently aligns anatomical pose and texture features. The aligned features are then reconstructed through their respective decoders. Finally, an ensemble‑learning–based decision module integrates the predictions from individual patches to produce the final segmentation result. Experimental results on the publicly available MM-WHS 2017 dataset demonstrate that the proposed RL-U2Net outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving Dice coefficients of 93.1% on CT and 87.0% on MRI, thereby validating the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach.

PaperID: 2676, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05968

Authors:Nagur Shareef Shaik, Teja Krishna Cherukuri, Adnan Masood, Dong Hye Ye

Affiliations: Georgia State University

Title: DiA-gnostic VLVAE: Disentangled Alignment-Constrained Vision Language Variational AutoEncoder for Robust Radiology Reporting with Missing Modalities

Abstract:
The integration of medical images with clinical context is essential for generating accurate and clinically interpretable radiology reports. However, current automated methods often rely on resourceheavy Large Language Models (LLMs) or static knowledge graphs and struggle with two fundamental challenges in real-world clinical data: (1) missing modalities, such as incomplete clinical context , and (2) feature entanglement, where mixed modality-specific and shared information leads to suboptimal fusion and clinically unfaithful hallucinated findings. To address these challenges, we propose the DiA-gnostic VLVAE, which achieves robust radiology reporting through Disentangled Alignment. Our framework is designed to be resilient to missing modalities by disentangling shared and modality-specific features using a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) based Vision-Language Variational Autoencoder (VLVAE). A constrained optimization objective enforces orthogonality and alignment between these latent representations to prevent suboptimal fusion. A compact LLaMA-X decoder then uses these disentangled representations to generate reports efficiently. On the IU X-Ray and MIMIC-CXR datasets, DiA has set new state-of-the-art BLEU@4 scores of 0.266 and 0.134, respectively. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models.

PaperID: 2677, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11027

Authors:Yong Sun, Zhengjie Zhang, Junyu Shi, Zhiyuan Zhang, Lijiang Liu, Qiang Nie

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Title: EmbryoDiff: A Conditional Diffusion Framework with Multi-Focal Feature Fusion for Fine-Grained Embryo Developmental Stage Recognition

Abstract:
Identification of finegrained embryo developmental stages during In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) is crucial for assessing embryo viability. Although recent deep learning methods have achieved promising accuracy, existing discriminative models fail to utilize the distributional prior of embryonic development to improve accuracy. Moreover, their reliance on single-focal information leads to incomplete embryonic representations, making them susceptible to feature ambiguity under cell occlusions. To address these limitations, we propose EmbryoDiff, a two-stage diffusion-based framework that formulates the task as a conditional sequence denoising process. Specifically, we first train and freeze a frame-level encoder to extract robust multi-focal features. In the second stage, we introduce a Multi-Focal Feature Fusion Strategy that aggregates information across focal planes to construct a 3D-aware morphological representation, effectively alleviating ambiguities arising from cell occlusions. Building on this fused representation, we derive complementary semantic and boundary cues and design a Hybrid Semantic-Boundary Condition Block to inject them into the diffusion-based denoising process, enabling accurate embryonic stage classification. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results. Notably, with only a single denoising step, our model obtains the best average test performance, reaching 82.8% and 81.3% accuracy on the two datasets, respectively.

PaperID: 2678, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17578

Authors:Ge Wang, Xing Liu, Xin Yuan

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Zhejiang China, Westlake Institute for Optoelectronics, Westlake University

Title: 3One2: One-Step Regression plus One-Step Diffusion for One-Hot Modulation in Dual-Path Video Snapshot Compressive Imaging

Abstract:
Video snapshot compressive imaging (SCI) captures dynamic scene sequences through a twodimensional (2D) snapshot, fundamentally relying on optical modulation for hardware compression and the corresponding software reconstruction. While mainstream video SCI using random binary modulation has demonstrated success, it inevitably results in temporal aliasing during compression. One-hot modulation, activating only one sub-frame per pixel, provides a promising solution for achieving perfect temporal decoupling, thereby alleviating issues associated with aliasing. However, no algorithms currently exist to fully exploit this potential. To bridge this gap, we propose an algorithm specifically designed for one-hot masks. First, leveraging the decoupling properties of one-hot modulation, we transform the reconstruction task into a generative video inpainting problem and introduce a stochastic differential equation (SDE) of the forward process that aligns with the hardware compression process. Next, we identify limitations of the pure diffusion method for video SCI and propose a novel framework that combines one-step regression initialization with one-step diffusion refinement. Furthermore, to mitigate the spatial degradation caused by one-hot modulation, we implement a dual optical path at the hardware level, utilizing complementary information from another path to enhance the inpainted video. To our knowledge, this is the first work integrating diffusion into video SCI reconstruction. Experiments conducted on synthetic datasets and real scenes demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

PaperID: 2679, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12969

Authors:Ziqiao Weng, Yaoyu Fang, Jiahe Qian, Xinkun Wang, Lee A D Cooper, Weidong Cai, Bo Zhou

Affiliations: Northwestern University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, The University of Sydney

Title: HiFusion: Hierarchical Intra-Spot Alignment and Regional Context Fusion for Spatial Gene Expression Prediction from Histopathology

Abstract:
Spatial transcriptomics (ST) bridges gene expression and tissue morphology but faces clinical adoption barriers due to technical complexity and prohibitive costs. While computational methods predict gene expression from H&Estained whole-slide images (WSIs), existing approaches often fail to capture the intricate biological heterogeneity within spots and are susceptible to morphological noise when integrating contextual information from surrounding tissue. To overcome these limitations, we propose HiFusion, a novel deep learning framework that integrates two complementary components. First, we introduce the Hierarchical Intra-Spot Modeling module that extracts fine-grained morphological representations through multi-resolution sub-patch decomposition, guided by a feature alignment loss to ensure semantic consistency across scales. Concurrently, we present the Context-aware Cross-scale Fusion module, which employs cross-attention to selectively incorporate biologically relevant regional context, thereby enhancing representational capacity. This architecture enables comprehensive modeling of both cellular-level features and tissue microenvironmental cues, which are essential for accurate gene expression prediction. Extensive experiments on two benchmark ST datasets demonstrate that HiFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance across both 2D slide-wise cross-validation and more challenging 3D sample-specific scenarios. These results underscore HiFusion’s potential as a robust, accurate, and scalable solution for ST inference from routine histopathology.

PaperID: 2680, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14386

Authors:Kangqiao Zhao, Shuo Huai, Xurui Song, Jun Luo

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University

Title: Cheating Stereo Matching in Full-Scale: Physical Adversarial Attack Against Binocular Depth Estimation in Autonomous Driving

Abstract:
Though deep neural models adopted to realize the perception of autonomous driving have proven vulnerable to adversarial examples, known attacks often leverage 2D patches and target mostly monocular perception. Therefore, the effectiveness of Physical Adversarial Examples (PAEs) on stereobased binocular depth estimation remains largely unexplored. To this end, we propose the first texture-enabled physical adversarial attack against stereo matching models in the context of autonomous driving. Our method employs a 3D PAE with global camouflage texture rather than a local 2D patch-based one, ensuring both visual consistency and attack effectiveness across different viewpoints of stereo cameras. To cope with the disparity effect of these cameras, we also propose a new 3D stereo matching rendering module that allows the PAE to be aligned with real-world positions and headings in binocular vision. We further propose a novel merging attack that seamlessly blends the target into the environment through fine-grained PAE optimization. It has significantly enhanced stealth and lethality upon existing hiding attacks that fail to get seamlessly merged into the background. Extensive evaluations show that our PAEs can successfully fool the stereo models into producing erroneous depth information.

PaperID: 2681, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12026

Authors:Rulin Zhou, Wenlong He, An Wang, Jianhang Zhang, Xuanhui Zeng, Xi Zhang, Chaowei Zhu, Haijun Hu, Hongliang Ren

Affiliations: Shenzhen Research Institute, Shenzhen University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Division of Gastrointestinal Surgery, Shenzhen People’s Hospital

Title: Bridging Vision and Language for Robust Context-Aware Surgical Point Tracking: The VL-SurgPT Dataset and Benchmark

Abstract:
Accurate point tracking in surgical environments remains challenging due to complex visual conditions, including smoke occlusion, specular reflections, and tissue deformation. While existing surgical tracking datasets provide coordinate information, they lack the semantic context necessary to understand tracking failure mechanisms. We introduce VLSurgPT, the first large-scale multimodal dataset that bridges visual tracking with textual descriptions of point status in surgical scenes. The dataset comprises 908 in vivo video clips, including 754 for tissue tracking (17,171 annotated points across five challenging scenarios) and 154 for instrument tracking (covering seven instrument types with detailed keypoint annotations). We establish comprehensive benchmarks using eight state-of-the-art tracking methods and propose TG-SurgPT, a text-guided tracking approach that leverages semantic descriptions to improve robustness in visually challenging conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that incorporating point status information significantly improves tracking accuracy and reliability, particularly in adverse visual scenarios where conventional vision-only methods struggle. By bridging visual and linguistic modalities, VL-SurgPT enables the development of context-aware tracking systems crucial for advancing computer-assisted surgery applications that can maintain performance even under challenging intraoperative conditions.

PaperID: 2682, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07941

Authors:Zhenfeng Zhuang, Fangyu Zhou, Liansheng Wang

Affiliations: Xiamen University

Title: Libra-MIL: Multimodal Prototypes Stereoscopic Infused with Task-specific Language Priors for Few-shot Whole Slide Image Classification

Abstract:
While Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as a promising direction in computational pathology, the substantial computational cost of gigapixel Whole Slide Images (WSIs) necessitates the use of Multi-Instance Learning (MIL) to enable effective modeling. A key challenge is that pathological tasks typically provide only bag-level labels, while instance-level descriptions generated by LLMs often suffer from bias due to a lack of fine-grained medical knowledge. To address this, we propose that constructing task-specific pathological entity prototypes is crucial for learning generalizable features and enhancing model interpretability. Furthermore, existing vision-language MIL methods often employ unidirectional guidance, limiting cross-modal synergy. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach, Multimodal Prototype-based Multi-Instance Learning, that promotes bidirectional interaction through a balanced information compression scheme. Specifically, we leverage a frozen LLM to generate task-specific pathological entity descriptions, which are learned as text prototypes. Concurrently, the vision branch learns instance-level prototypes to mitigate the model's reliance on redundant data. For the fusion stage, we employ the Stereoscopic Optimal Transport (SOT) algorithm, which is based on a similarity metric, thereby facilitating broader semantic alignment in a higher-dimensional space. We conduct few-shot classification and explainability experiments on three distinct cancer datasets, and the results demonstrate the superior generalization capabilities of our proposed method.

PaperID: 2683, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13654

Authors:Pascal Zimmer, Ghassan Karame

Affiliations: Ruhr University Bochum

Title: Tuning for Two Adversaries: Enhancing the Robustness Against Transfer and Query-Based Attacks Using Hyperparameter Tuning

Abstract:
In this paper, we present the first detailed analysis of how training hyperparameterssuch as learning rate, weight decay, momentum, and batch size---influence robustness against both transfer-based and query-based attacks. Supported by theory and experiments, our study spans a variety of practical deployment settings, including centralized training, ensemble learning, and distributed training. We uncover a striking dichotomy: for transfer-based attacks, decreasing the learning rate significantly enhances robustness by up to 64%. In contrast, for query-based attacks, increasing the learning rate consistently leads to improved robustness by up to 28% across various settings and data distributions. Leveraging these findings, we explore---for the first time---the training hyperparameter space to jointly enhance robustness against both transfer-based and query-based attacks. Our results reveal that distributed models benefit the most from hyperparameter tuning, achieving a remarkable tradeoff by simultaneously mitigating both attack types more effectively than other training setups.

PaperID: 2684, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08482

Authors:Chenxu Han, Sean Bin Yang, Jilin Hu

Affiliations: School of Data Science and Engineering, East China Normal University, Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, China KLATASDS-MOE

Title: DiffMM: Efficient Method for Accurate Noisy and Sparse Trajectory Map Matching via One Step Diffusion

Abstract:
Map matching for sparse trajectories is a fundamental problem for many trajectorybased applications, e.g., traffic scheduling and traffic flow analysis. Existing methods for map matching are generally based on Hidden Markov Model (HMM) or encoder-decoder framework. However, these methods continue to face significant challenges when handling noisy or sparsely sampled GPS trajectories. To address these limitations, we propose DiffMM, an encoder–diffusion-based map matching framework that produces effective yet efficient matching results through a one-step diffusion process. We first introduce a road segment-aware trajectory encoder that jointly embeds the input trajectory and its surrounding candidate road segments into a shared latent space through an attention mechanism. Next, we propose a one step diffusion method to realize map matching through a shortcut model by leveraging the joint embedding of the trajectory and candidate road segments as conditioning context. We conduct extensive experiments on large-scale trajectory datasets, demonstrating that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art map matching methods in terms of both accuracy and efficiency, particularly for sparse trajectories and complex road network topologies.

PaperID: 2685, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08378

Authors:Xiao Wang, Ke Qin, Dongyang Zhang, Xiurui Xie, Shuang Liang

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Bid Farewell to Seesaw: Towards Accurate Long-Tail Session-Based Recommendation via Dual Constraints of Hybrid Intents

Abstract:
Sessionbased recommendation (SBR) aims to predict anonymous users' next interaction based on their interaction sessions. In practical recommendation scenario, low-exposure items constitute the majority of interactions, creating a long-tail distribution that severely compromises recommendation diversity. Existing approaches attempt to address this issue by promoting tail items but incur accuracy degradation, exhibiting a "see-saw" effect between long-tail and accuracy performance. We attribute such conflict to session-irrelevant noise within the tail item set, which existing long-tail approaches fail to identify and constrain effectively. To resolve our fundamental conflict, we propose HID (Hybrid Intent-based Dual Constraint Framework), a plug-and-play framework that transforms the conventional "see-saw" into a "win-win" relationship through introducing the hybrid intent-based dual constraints. Two key innovations are incorporated in this framework: (i) Hybrid Intent Learning, where we reformulate the intent extraction strategies by employing attribute-aware spectral clustering to reconstruct the item-to-intent mapping. Furthermore, discrimination of session-irrelevant noise is achieved through the assignment of both target and noise intents to each sessions. (ii) Intent Constraint Loss, where we propose two novel constraint paradigms regarding the diversity and accuracy to regulate the representation learning process, and unify the two optimization objectives into a unique loss. Extensive experiments across multiple SBR models and datasets demonstrate that HID can enhance both long-tail performance and recommendation accuracy, establishing new state-of-the-art performance in long-tail recommender systems.

PaperID: 2686, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18312

Authors:Zihao Yao, Jiankai Zuo, Yaying Zhang

Affiliations: Tongji University

Title: DiM-TS: Bridge the Gap Between Selective State Space Models and Time Series for Generative Modeling

Abstract:
Time series data plays a pivotal role in a wide variety of fields but faces challenges related to privacy concerns. Recently, synthesizing data via diffusion models is viewed as a promising solution. However, existing methods still struggle to capture longrange temporal dependencies and complex channel interrelations. In this research, we aim to utilize the sequence modeling capability of a State Space Model called Mamba to extend its applicability to time series data generation. We firstly analyze the core limitations in State Space Model, namely the lack of consideration for correlated temporal lag and channel permutation. Building upon the insight, we propose Lag Fusion Mamba and Permutation Scanning Mamba, which enhance the model's ability to discern significant patterns during the denoising process. Theoretical analysis reveals that both variants exhibit a unified matrix multiplication framework with the original Mamba, offering a deeper understanding of our method. Finally, we integrate two variants and introduce Diffusion Mamba for Time Series (DiM-TS), a high-quality time series generation model that better preserves the temporal periodicity and inter-channel correlations. Comprehensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate the superiority of DiM-TS in generating realistic time series while preserving diverse properties of data.

PaperID: 2687, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03396

Authors:Rui Zou, Mengqi Wei, Yutao Zhu, Jirong Wen, Xin Zhao, Jing Chen

Affiliations: Renmin University of China, Central China Normal University, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law

Title: Hide and Seek with LLMs: An Adversarial Game for Sneaky Error Generation and Self-Improving Diagnosis

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in reasoning and generation across domains, but still struggle with identifying and diagnosing complex errors. This stems mainly from training objectives that prioritize correct answers, limiting exposure to and learning from errors. While recent studies have begun to address this by introducing error signals, most rely on shallow, static errors, restricting improvement in deep diagnostic ability. To overcome this, we propose Hide and Seek Game (HSG), a dynamic adversarial framework for error generation and diagnosis, and evaluate it on mathematical problemsolving. HSG involves two adversarial roles: Sneaky, which hides by generating subtle, deceptive reasoning errors, and Diagnosis, which seeks to accurately detect them. Through adversarial co-evolution, both error stealth and diagnostic precision are enhanced. Experiments on three mathematical reasoning datasets demonstrate that HSG significantly boosts error diagnosis, achieving 16.8%-31.4% higher accuracy than baselines like GPT-4o. We also release a challenging dataset of deceptive errors and diagnostic annotations as a benchmark for future research.

PaperID: 2688, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14196

Authors:Xuan-Hao Liu, Yan-Kai Liu, Tianyi Zhou, Bao-Liang Lu, Wei-Long Zheng

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai Jiaotong University

Title: MindCross: Fast New Subject Adaptation with Limited Data for Cross-subject Video Reconstruction from Brain Signals

Abstract:
Brain decoding aims to reconstruct video from brain signals. Existing brain decoding frameworks are primarily built on a subjectdependent paradigm, which requires large amounts of brain data for each subject. However, the expensive cost of collecting brain-video data causes severe data scarcity for brain decoding. Although some cross-subject methods being introduced, they often exhibit an excessive preoccupation with subject-invariant information while neglecting subject-specific information, resulting in slow fine-tune-based adaptation strategy. To achieve fast and data-efficient new subject adaptation, we propose MindCross, a novel cross-subject brain decoding framework. MindCross's N specific encoders and one shared encoder are designed to extract subject-specific and subject-invariant information, respectively. Additionally, a Top-K collaboration module is adopted to enhance new subject decoding with the knowledge learned from previous subjects' encoders. Extensive experiments on fMRI/EEG-to-video benchmarks demonstrate MindCross's efficacy and efficiency of cross-subject decoding and new subject adaptation using only one model. Code of our framework will be released upon publication.

PaperID: 2689, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.04764

Authors:Dario Pesenti, Alessandro Bogani, Katya Tentori, Stefano Teso

Affiliations: University of Trento

Title: Human Cognitive Biases in Explanation-based Interaction: The Case of Within and Between Session Order Effect

Abstract:
Explanatory Interactive Learning (XIL) is a powerful interactive learning framework designed to enable users to customize and correct AI models by interacting with their explanations. In a nutshell, XIL algorithms select a number of items on which an AI model made a decision (e.g., images and their tags) and present them to users, together with corresponding explanations (e.g., image regions that drive the model’s decision). Then, users supply corrective feedback for the explanations, which the algorithm uses to improve the model. Despite showing promise in debugging tasks, recent studies have raised concerns that explanatory interaction may trigger order effects, a wellknown cognitive bias in which the sequence of presented items influences users’ trust and, critically, the quality of their feedback. We argue that these studies are not entirely conclusive, as the experimental designs and tasks employed differ substantially from common XIL use cases, complicating interpretation. To clarify the interplay between order effects and explanatory interaction, we ran a larger-scale user study (n = 713 total) designed to mimic common XIL tasks. Specifically, we assessed order effects both within and between debugging sessions by manipulating the order in which correct and wrong explanations are presented to participants. Order effects had a limited but significant impact on users’ agreement with the model (i.e., a behavioral measure of their trust), and only when examined within debugging sessions, not between them. The quality of users’ feedback reached satisfactory levels overall, with order effects exerting only a small and inconsistent influence both within and between sessions. Overall, our findings suggest that order effects do not pose a significant issue to the successful employment of XIL approaches. More broadly, our work contributes to the ongoing efforts for understanding human factors in AI.

PaperID: 2690, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.09237

Authors:Xinyang Chen, Huidong Jin, Yu Huang, Zaiwen Feng

Affiliations: College of Informatics, Huazhong Agricultural University, Statistical Machine Learning, Canberra Australia, China Hubei Key Laboratory of Agricultural Bioinformatics, China Engineering Research Center of Agricultural Intelligent Technology, Ministry of Education

Title: XLinear: A Lightweight and Accurate MLP-Based Model for Long-Term Time Series Forecasting with Exogenous Inputs

Abstract:
Despite the prevalent assumption of uniform variable importance in longterm time series forecasting models, real-world applications often exhibit asymmetric causal relationships and varying data acquisition costs. Specifically, cost‐effective exogenous data (e.g., local weather) can unilaterally influence dynamics of endogenous variables, such as lake surface temperature. Exploiting these links enables more effective forecasts when exogenous inputs are readily available. Transformer-based models capture long-range dependencies but incur high computation and suffer from permutation invariance. Patch-based variants improve efficiency yet can miss local temporal patterns. To efficiently exploit informative signals across both the temporal dimension and relevant exogenous variables, this study proposes XLinear, a lightweight time series forecasting model built upon Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs). XLinear uses a global token derived from an endogenous variable as a pivotal hub for interacting with exogenous variables, and employs MLPs with sigmoid activation to extract both temporal patterns and variate-wise dependencies. Its prediction head then integrates these signals to forecast the endogenous series. We evaluate XLinear on seven standard benchmarks and five real-world datasets with exogenous inputs. Compared with state-of-the-art models, XLinear delivers superior accuracy and efficiency for both multivariate forecasts and univariate forecasts influenced by exogenous inputs.

PaperID: 2691, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10392

Authors:Yixi Chen, Weixuan Liang, Tianrui Liu, Jun-Jie Huang, Ao Li, Xueling Zhu, Xinwang Liu

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology, Harbin University of Science and Technology, Central South University

Title: Enhancing Kernel Power $K$-means: Scalable and Robust Clustering with Random Fourier Features and Possibilistic Method

Abstract:
Kernel power kmeans (KPKM) leverages a family of means to mitigate local minima issues in kernel k-means. However, KPKM faces two key limitations: (1) the computational burden of the full kernel matrix restricts its use on extensive data, and (2) the lack of authentic centroid-sample assignment learning reduces its noise robustness. To overcome these challenges, we propose RFF-KPKM, introducing the first approximation theory for applying random Fourier features (RFF) to KPKM. RFF-KPKM employs RFF to generate efficient, low dimensional feature maps, bypassing the need for the whole kernel matrix. Crucially, we are the first to establish strong theoretical guarantees for this combination: (1) an excess risk bound of O( k^3/n), (2) strong consistency with membership values, and (3) a (1 + ε) relative error bound achievable using the RFF of dimension poly(ε^−1 logk). Furthermore, to improve robustness and the ability to learn multiple kernels, we propose IP-RFF-MKPKM, an improved possibilistic RFF-based multiple kernel power k-means. IP-RFF-MKPKM ensures the scalability of MKPKM via RFF and refines cluster assignments by combining the merits of the possibilistic and fuzzy membership. Experiments on large-scale datasets demonstrate the superior efficiency and clustering accuracy of the proposed methods compared to the state-of-the-art alternatives.

PaperID: 2692, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14224

Authors:Yongguang Li, Jindong Li, Qi Wang, QianLi Xing, Runliang Niu, Shengsheng Wang, Menglin Yang

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Jilin University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Ministry of Education, College of Computer Science and Technology

Title: Beyond Retraining: Training-Free Unknown Class Filtering for Source-Free Open Set Domain Adaptation of Vision–Language Models

Abstract:
Visionlanguage models (VLMs) have gained widespread attention for their strong zero-shot capabilities across numerous downstream tasks. However, these models assume that each test image’s class label is drawn from a predefined label set and lack a reliable mechanism to reject samples from emerging unknown classes when only unlabeled data are available. To address this gap, open-set domain adaptation methods retrain models to push potential unknowns away from known clusters. Yet, some unknown samples remain stably anchored to specific known classes in the VLM feature space due to semantic relevance, which is termed as Semantic Affinity Anchoring (SAA). Forcibly repelling these samples unavoidably distorts the native geometry of VLMs and degrades performance. Meanwhile, existing score‑based unknown detectors use simplistic thresholds and suffer from threshold sensitivity, resulting in sub‑optimal performance. To address aforementioned issues, we propose VLM-OpenXpert, which comprises two training‑free, plug‑and‑play inference modules. SUFF performs SVD on high-confidence unknowns to extract a low-rank "unknown subspace". Each sample’s projection onto this subspace is weighted and softly removed from its feature, suppressing unknown components while preserving semantics. BGAT corrects score skewness via a Box–Cox transform, then fits a bimodal Gaussian mixture to adaptively estimate the optimal threshold balancing known-class recognition and unknown-class rejection. Experiments on 9 benchmarks and three backbones (CLIP, SigLIP, ALIGN) under Source-Free OSDA settings show that our training-free pipeline matches or outperforms retraining-heavy state-of-the-art methods, establishing a powerful lightweight inference calibration paradigm for open-set VLM deployment.

PaperID: 2693, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08086

Authors:Muthukumar Pandaram, Jakob Hollenstein, David Drexel, Samuele Tosatto, Antonio Rodriguez-Sanchez, Justus Piater

Affiliations: University of Innsbruck

Title: Dynamic Sparsity: Challenging Common Sparsity Assumptions for Learning World Models in Robotic Reinforcement Learning Benchmarks

Abstract:
The use of learned dynamics models, also known as world models, can improve the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning. Recent work suggests that the underlying causal graphs of such dynamics models are sparsely connected, with each of the future state variables depending only on a small subset of the current state variables, and that learning may therefore benefit from sparsity priors. Similarly, temporal sparsity, i.e. sparsely and abruptly changing local dynamics, has also been proposed as a useful inductive bias. In this work, we critically examine these assumptions by analyzing ground truth dynamics from a set of robotic reinforcement learning environments in the MuJoCo Playground benchmark suite, aiming to determine whether the proposed notions of state and temporal sparsity actually tend to hold in typical reinforcement learning tasks. We study (i) whether the causal graphs of environment dynamics are sparse, (ii) whether such sparsity is statedependent, and (iii) whether local system dynamics change sparsely. Our results indicate that global sparsity is rare, but instead the tasks show local, state-dependent sparsity in their dynamics and this sparsity exhibits distinct structures, appearing in temporally localized clusters (e.g., during contact events) and affecting specific subsets of state dimensions. These findings challenge common sparsity prior assumptions in dynamics learning, emphasizing the need for grounded inductive biases that reflect the state-dependent sparsity structure of real-world dynamics.

PaperID: 2694, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.03207

Authors:Hirofumi Suzuki, Kentaro Kanamori, Takuya Takagi, Thong Pham, Takashi Nicholas Maeda, Shohei Shimizu

Affiliations: Fujitsu Limited, Faculty of Data Science, Shiga University RIKEN AIP, Computer Centre, Gakushuin University RIKEN AIP, Shiga University SANKEN, The University of Osaka RIKEN AIP

Title: I-CAM-UV: Integrating Causal Graphs over Non-Identical Variable Sets Using Causal Additive Models with Unobserved Variables

Abstract:
Causal discovery from observational data is a fundamental tool in various fields of science. While existing approaches are typically designed for a single dataset, we often need to handle multiple datasets with nonidentical variable sets in practice. One straightforward approach is to estimate a causal graph from each dataset and construct a single causal graph by overlapping. However, this approach identifies limited causal relationships because unobserved variables in each dataset can be confounders, and some variable pairs may be unobserved in any dataset. To address this issue, we leverage Causal Additive Models with Unobserved Variables (CAM-UV) that provide causal graphs having information related to unobserved variables. We show that the ground truth causal graph has structural consistency with the information of CAM-UV on each dataset. As a result, we propose an approach named I-CAM-UV to integrate CAM-UV results by enumerating all consistent causal graphs. We also provide an efficient combinatorial search algorithm and demonstrate the usefulness of I-CAM-UV against existing methods.

PaperID: 2695, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09901

Authors:Weilin Wan, Fan Yi, Weizhong Zhang, Quan Zhou, Cheng Jin

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University, School of Data Science

Title: Explore and Establish Synergistic Effects Between Weight Pruning and Coreset Selection in Neural Network Training

Abstract:
Modern deep neural networks rely heavily on massive model weights and training samples, incurring substantial computational costs. Weight pruning and coreset selection are two emerging paradigms proposed to improve computational efficiency. In this paper, we first explore the interplay between redundant weights and training samples through a transparent analysis: redundant samples, particularly noisy ones, cause model weights to become unnecessarily overtuned to fit them, complicating the identification of irrelevant weights during pruning; conversely, irrelevant weights tend to overfit noisy data, undermining coreset selection effectiveness. To further investigate and harness this interplay in deep learning, we develop a Simultaneous Weight and Sample Tailoring mechanism (SWaST) that alternately performs weight pruning and coreset selection to establish a synergistic effect in training. During this investigation, we observe that when simultaneously removing a large number of weights and samples, a phenomenon we term critical doubleloss can occur, where important weights and their supportive samples are mistakenly eliminated at the same time, leading to model instability and nearly irreversible degradation that cannot be recovered in subsequent training. Unlike classic machine learning models, this issue can arise in deep learning due to the lack of theoretical guarantees on the correctness of weight pruning and coreset selection, which explains why these paradigms are often developed independently. We mitigate this by integrating a state preservation mechanism into SWaST, enabling stable joint optimization. Extensive experiments reveal a strong synergy between pruning and coreset selection across varying prune rates and coreset sizes, delivering accuracy boosts of up to 17.83% alongside 10% to 90% FLOPs reductions.

PaperID: 2696, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11425

Authors:Jinwei Hu, Yi Dong, Youcheng Sun, Xiaowei Huang

Affiliations: University of Liverpool, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

Title: Tapas Are Free! Training-Free Adaptation of Programmatic Agents via LLM-Guided Program Synthesis in Dynamic Environments

Abstract:
Autonomous agents in safetycritical applications must continuously adapt to dynamic conditions without compromising performance and reliability. This work introduces TAPA (Training-free Adaptation of Programmatic Agents), a novel framework that positions large language models (LLMs) as intelligent moderators of the symbolic action space. Unlike prior programmatic agents typically generate a monolithic policy program or rely on fixed symbolic action sets, TAPA synthesizes and adapts modular programs for individual high-level actions, referred to as logical primitives. By decoupling strategic intent from execution, TAPA enables meta-agents to operate over an abstract, interpretable action space while the LLM dynamically generates, composes, and refines symbolic programs tailored to each primitive. Extensive experiments across cybersecurity and swarm intelligence domains validate TAPA's effectiveness. In autonomous DDoS defense scenarios, TAPA achieves 77.7% network uptime while maintaining near-perfect detection accuracy in unknown dynamic environments. In swarm intelligence formation control under environmental and adversarial disturbances, TAPA consistently preserves consensus at runtime where baseline methods fail. This work promotes a paradigm shift for autonomous system design in evolving environments, from policy adaptation to dynamic action adaptation.

PaperID: 2697, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11816

Authors:Andrea Brunello, Luca Geatti, Michele Mignani, Angelo Montanari, Nicola Saccomanno

Affiliations: University of Udine

Title: Do LLMs Really Struggle at NL-FOL Translation? Revealing Their Strengths via a Novel Benchmarking Strategy

Abstract:
Due to its expressiveness and unambiguous nature, FirstOrder Logic (FOL) is a powerful formalism for representing concepts expressed in natural language (NL). This is useful, e.g., for specifying and verifying desired system properties. While translating FOL into human-readable English is relatively straightforward, the inverse problem, converting NL to FOL (NL-FOL translation), has remained a longstanding challenge, for both humans and machines. Although the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) promised a breakthrough, recent literature provides contrasting results on their ability to perform NL-FOL translation. In this work, we provide a threefold contribution. First, we critically examine existing datasets and protocols for evaluating NL-FOL translation performance, revealing key limitations that may cause a misrepresentation of LLMs' actual capabilities. Second, to overcome these shortcomings, we propose a novel evaluation protocol explicitly designed to distinguish genuine semantic-level logical understanding from superficial pattern recognition, memorization, and dataset contamination. Third, using this new approach, we show that state-of-the-art, dialogue-oriented LLMs demonstrate strong NL-FOL translation skills and a genuine grasp of sentence-level logic, whereas embedding-centric models perform markedly worse.

PaperID: 2698, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05923

Authors:Qiming Li, Zekai Ye, Xiaocheng Feng, Weihong Zhong, Weitao Ma, Xiachong Feng

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, University of Hong Kong

Title: Causal Tracing of Object Representations in Large Vision Language Models: Mechanistic Interpretability and Hallucination Mitigation

Abstract:
Despite the remarkable advancements of Large VisionLanguage Models (LVLMs), the mechanistic interpretability remains underexplored. Existing analyses are insufficiently comprehensive and lack examination covering visual and textual tokens, model components, and the full range of layers. This limitation restricts actionable insights to improve the faithfulness of model output and the development of downstream tasks, such as hallucination mitigation. To address this limitation, we introduce Fine-grained Cross-modal Causal Tracing (FCCT) framework, which systematically quantifies the causal effects on visual object perception. FCCT conducts fine-grained analysis covering the full range of visual and textual tokens, three core model components including multi-head self-attention (MHSA), feed-forward networks (FFNs), and hidden states, across all decoder layers. Our analysis is the first to demonstrate that MHSAs of the last token in middle layers play a critical role in aggregating cross-modal information, while FFNs exhibit a three-stage hierarchical progression for the storage and transfer of visual object representations. Building on these insights, we propose Intermediate Representation Injection (IRI), a training-free inference-time technique that reinforces visual object information flow by precisely intervening on cross-modal representations at specific components and layers, thereby enhancing perception and mitigating hallucination. Consistent improvements across five widely used benchmarks and LVLMs demonstrate IRI achieves state-of-the-art performance, while preserving inference speed and other foundational performance.

PaperID: 2699, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.23173

Authors:Zhen Liang, Hai Huang, Zhengkui Chen

Affiliations: Zhejiang Sci-Tech University

Title: EquaCode: A Multi-Strategy Jailbreak Approach for Large Language Models via Equation Solving and Code Completion

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of fields. However, their trustworthiness remains a significant concern, as they are still susceptible to jailbreak attacks aimed at eliciting inappropriate or harmful responses. Most existing jailbreak attacks, nevertheless, mainly operate at the natural language level and rely on a single attack strategy, limiting their effectiveness in comprehensively assessing LLM robustness. In this paper, we propose Equacode, a novel multistrategy jailbreak approach for large language models via equation-solving and code completion. This approach transforms malicious intent into a mathematical problem and then requires the LLM to solve it using code, leveraging the complexity of cross-domain tasks to divert the model's focus toward task completion rather than safety constraints. Experimental results show that Equacode achieves an average success rate of 91.19% on the GPT series and 97.62% across 5 state-of-the-art LLMs, all with only a single query. Further, ablation experiments demonstrate that EquaCode outperforms either the mathematical equation module or the code module alone. This suggests a strong synergistic effect, thereby demonstrating that multi-strategy approach yields results greater than the sum of its parts.

PaperID: 2700, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02175

Authors:Liang Lin, Miao Yu, Kaiwen Luo, Yibo Zhang, Lilan Peng, Dexian Wang, Xuehai Tang, Yuanhe Zhang, Xikang Yang, Zhenhong Zhou, Kun Wang, Yang Liu

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, North China Electric Power University, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Nanyang Technological University

Title: Hidden in the Noise: Unveiling Backdoors in Audio LLMs Alignment Through Latent Acoustic Pattern Triggers

Abstract:
As Audio Large Language Models (ALLMs) emerge as powerful tools for speech processing, their safety implications demand urgent attention. While considerable research has explored textual and vision safety, audio’s distinct characteristics present significant challenges. This paper first investigates: Is ALLM vulnerable to backdoor attacks exploiting acoustic triggers? In response to this issue, we introduce Hidden in the Noise (HIN), a novel backdoor attack framework designed to exploit subtle, audiospecific features. HIN applies acoustic modifications to raw audio waveforms, such as alterations to temporal dynamics and strategic injection of spectrally tailored noise. These changes introduce consistent patterns that an ALLM’s acoustic feature encoder captures, embedding robust triggers within the audio stream. To evaluate ALLM robustness against audio-feature-based triggers, we develop the AudioSafe benchmark, assessing nine distinct risk types. Extensive experiments on AudioSafe and three established safety datasets reveal critical vulnerabilities in existing ALLMs: (I) audio features like environment noise and speech rate variations achieve over 90% average attack success rate, (II) ALLMs exhibit significant sensitivity differences across acoustic features, particularly showing minimal response to volume as a trigger, and (III) poisoned sample inclusion causes only marginal loss curve fluctuations, highlighting the attack’s stealth.

PaperID: 2701, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07694

Authors:Manh Nguyen, Sunil Gupta, Hung Le

Affiliations: Applied Artificial Intelligence Initiative, Deakin University

Title: Probabilities Are All You Need: A Probability-Only Approach to Uncertainty Estimation in Large Language Models

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong performance across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks but remain vulnerable to hallucinations, generating factually incorrect or misleading outputs. Uncertainty estimation, often using predictive entropy estimation, is key to addressing this issue. However, existing methods often require multiple samples or extra computation to assess semantic entropy. This paper proposes an efficient, trainingfree uncertainty estimation method that approximates predictive entropy using the responses' top-K probabilities. Moreover, we employ an adaptive mechanism to determine K to enhance flexibility and filter out low-confidence probabilities. Experimental results on three free-form question-answering datasets across several LLMs demonstrate that our method outperforms expensive state-of-the-art baselines, contributing to the broader goal of enhancing LLM trustworthiness.

PaperID: 2702, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09133

Authors:Ritsu Sakabe, Hwichan Kim, Tosho Hirasawa, Mamoru Komachi

Affiliations: Hitotsubashi University

Title: Assessing the Capabilities of LLMs in Humor: A Multi-dimensional Analysis of Oogiri Generation and Evaluation

Abstract:
Computational humor is a frontier for creating advanced and engaging natural language processing (NLP) applications, such as sophisticated dialogue systems. While previous studies have benchmarked the humor capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), they have often relied on singledimensional evaluations, such as judging whether something is simply ``funny.'' This paper argues that a multifaceted understanding of humor is necessary and addresses this gap by systematically evaluating LLMs through the lens of Oogiri, a form of Japanese improvisational comedy games. To achieve this, we expanded upon existing Oogiri datasets with data from new sources and then augmented the collection with Oogiri responses generated by LLMs. We then manually annotated this expanded collection with 5-point absolute ratings across six dimensions: Novelty, Clarity, Relevance, Intelligence, Empathy, and Overall Funniness. Using this dataset, we assessed the capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs on two core tasks: their ability to generate creative Oogiri responses and their ability to evaluate the funniness of responses using a six-dimensional evaluation. Our results show that while LLMs can generate responses at a level between low- and mid-tier human performance, they exhibit a notable lack of Empathy. This deficit in Empathy helps explain their failure to replicate human humor assessment. Correlation analyses of human and model evaluation data further reveal a fundamental divergence in evaluation criteria: LLMs prioritize Novelty, whereas humans prioritize Empathy. We release our annotated corpus to the community to pave the way for the development of more emotionally intelligent and sophisticated conversational agents.

PaperID: 2703, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02890

Authors:Khanh-Tung Tran, Barry O'Sullivan, Hoang D. Nguyen

Affiliations: University College Cork

Title: Reasoning Transfer for an Extremely Low-Resource and Endangered Language: Bridging Languages Through Sample-Efficient Language Understanding

Abstract:
Recent advances have enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle reasoning tasks by generating chainof-thought (CoT) rationales, yet these gains have largely applied to high-resource languages, leaving low-resource languages underperformed. In this work, we first investigate CoT techniques in extremely low-resource scenarios through previous prompting, model editing, and fine-tuning approaches. We introduce \emphEnglish-Pivoted CoT Training, leveraging the insight that LLMs internally operate in a latent space aligned toward the dominant language. Given input in a low-resource language, we perform supervised fine-tuning to generate CoT in English and output the final response in the target language. Across mathematical reasoning benchmarks, our approach outperforms other baselines with up to 28.33% improvement in low-resource scenarios. Our analyses and additional experiments, including Mixed-Language CoT and Two-Stage Training, show that explicitly separating language understanding from reasoning enhances crosslingual reasoning abilities. To facilitate future work, we also release LC2024, the first benchmark for mathematical task in Irish, an extremely low-resource and endangered language. Our results and resources highlight a practical pathway to multilingual reasoning without extensive retraining in every extremely low-resource language, despite data scarcity.

PaperID: 2704, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13021

Authors:Sachin Vashistha, Aryan Bibhuti, Atharva Naik, Martin Tutek, Somak Aditya

Affiliations: Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Zagreb

Title: PRAGWORLD: A Benchmark Evaluating LLMs’ Local World Model Under Minimal Linguistic Alterations and Conversational Dynamics

Abstract:
Realworld conversations are rich with pragmatic elements, such as entity mentions, references, and implicatures. Understanding such nuances is a requirement for successful natural communication, and often requires building a local _world model_ which encodes such elements and captures the dynamics of their evolving states. However, it is not well-understood whether language models (LMs) construct or maintain a robust implicit representation of conversations. In this work, we evaluate the ability of LMs to encode and update their internal world model in dyadic conversations and test their _malleability_ under linguistic alterations. To facilitate this, we apply seven minimal linguistic alterations to conversations sourced from popular conversational QA datasets and construct a benchmark with two variants (i.e., Manual and Synthetic) comprising yes-no questions. We evaluate nine open and one closed source LMs and observe that they struggle to maintain robust accuracy. Our analysis unveils that LMs struggle to memorize crucial details, such as tracking entities under linguistic alterations to conversations. We then propose a dual-perspective interpretability framework which identifies transformer layers that are _useful_ or _harmful_ and highlights linguistic alterations most influenced by harmful layers, typically due to encoding spurious signals or relying on shortcuts. Inspired by these insights, we propose two layer-regularization based fine-tuning strategies that suppress the effect of the harmful layers.

PaperID: 2705, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.02909

Authors:Guangjun Zhang, Hu Zhang, Yazhou Han, Yue Fan, Yuhang Shao, Hongye Tan, Ru Li

Affiliations: Shanxi University

Title: Learning to Generate and Extract: A Multi-Agent Collaboration Framework for Zero-Shot Document-Level Event Arguments Extraction

Abstract:
Documentlevel event argument extraction (DEAE) is essential for knowledge acquisition, aiming to extract participants of events from documents. In the zero-shot setting, existing methods employ LLMs to generate synthetic data to address the challenge posed by the scarcity of annotated data. However, relying solely on Event-type-only prompts makes it difficult for the generated content to accurately capture the contextual and structural relationships of unseen events. Moreover, ensuring the reliability and usability of synthetic data remains a significant challenge due to the absence of quality evaluation mechanisms. To this end, we introduce a multi-agent collaboration framework for zero-shot document-level event argument extraction (ZS-DEAE), which simulates the human collaborative cognitive process of “Propose–Evaluate–Revise.” Specifically, the framework comprises a generation agent and an evaluation agent. The generation agent synthesizes data for unseen events by leveraging knowledge from seen events, while the evaluation agent extracts arguments from the synthetic data and assesses their semantic consistency with the context. The evaluation results are subsequently converted into reward signals, with event structure constraints incorporated into the reward design to enable iterative optimization of both agents via reinforcement learning. In three zero-shot scenarios constructed from the RAMS and WikiEvents datasets, our method achieves improvements both in data generation quality and argument extraction performance, while the generated data also effectively enhances the zero-shot performance of other DEAE models.

PaperID: 2706, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18467

Authors:Xiaoqing Wang, Keman Huang, Bin Liang, Hongyu Li, Xiaoyong Du

Affiliations: Renmin University of China, Ant Group

Title: Shadows in the Code: Exploring the Risks and Defenses of LLM-based Multi-Agent Software Development Systems

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of Large Language Model (LLM)driven multi-agent systems has significantly streamlined software developing tasks, enabling users with little technical expertise to develop executable applications. While these systems democratize software creation through natural language requirements, they introduce significant security risks that remain largely unexplored. We identify two risky scenarios: Malicious User with Benign Agents (MU-BA) and Benign User with Malicious Agents (BU-MA). We introduce the Implicit Malicious Behavior Injection Attack (IMBIA), demonstrating how multi-agent systems can be manipulated to generate software with concealed malicious capabilities beneath seemingly benign applications, and propose Adv-IMBIA as a defense mechanism. Evaluations across ChatDev, MetaGPT, and AgentVerse frameworks reveal varying vulnerability patterns, with IMBIA achieving attack success rates of 93%, 45%, and 71% in MU-BA scenarios, and 71%, 84%, and 45% in BU-MA scenarios. Our defense mechanism reduced attack success rates significantly, particularly in the MU-BA scenario. Further analysis reveals that compromised agents in the coding and testing phases pose significantly greater security risks, while also identifying critical agents that require protection against malicious user exploitation. Our findings highlight the urgent need for robust security measures in multi-agent software development systems and provide practical guidelines for implementing targeted, resource-efficient defensive strategies.

PaperID: 2707, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10947

Authors:Ronghao Xu, Zhen Huang, Yangbo Wei, Xiaoqian Zhou, Zikang Xu, Ting Liu, Zihang Jiang, S. Kevin Zhou

Affiliations: School of Biomedical Engineering, Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Science and Technology of China, Anhui P.R. China Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research, Jiangsu P.R. China, School of Computer Science and Technology, Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo P.R. China, School of Information Science and Technology, Shanghai P.R. China, Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Biomedical Imaging and Intelligent Processing, Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, Hefei P.R. China

Title: MedAtlas: Evaluating LLMs for Multi-Round, Multi-Task Medical Reasoning Across Diverse Imaging Modalities and Clinical Text

Abstract:
Artificial intelligence has demonstrated significant potential in clinical decisionmaking; however, developing models capable of adapting to diverse real-world scenarios and performing complex diagnostic reasoning remains a major challenge. Existing medical multi-modal benchmarks are typically limited to single-image, single-turn tasks, lacking multi-modal medical image integration and failing to capture the longitudinal and multi-modal interactive nature inherent to clinical practice. To address this gap, we introduce MedAtlas, a novel benchmark framework designed to evaluate large language models on realistic medical reasoning tasks. MedAtlas is characterized by four key features: multi-round visual question answering (VQA), Joint reasoning of multiple modalities of medical images, multi-task integration, and high clinical fidelity. It supports four core tasks: open-ended multi-round VQA, closed-ended multi-round VQA, multi-image joint reasoning, and comprehensive disease diagnosis. Each case is derived from real diagnostic workflows and incorporates temporal interactions between textual medical histories and multiple imaging modalities, including CT, MRI, PET, ultrasound, X-ray, etc., requiring models to perform deep integrative reasoning across images and clinical texts. MedAtlas provides expert-annotated gold standards for all tasks. Furthermore, we propose two novel evaluation metrics: Stage Chain Accuracy (SCA) and Error Propagation Suppression Coefficient (EPSC). Benchmark results with existing multi-modal models reveal substantial performance gaps in multi-stage clinical reasoning. MedAtlas establishes a challenging evaluation platform to advance the development of robust and trustworthy medical AI.

PaperID: 2708, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00135

Authors:Davin Choo, Yohai Trabelsi, Fentabil Getnet, Samson Warkaye Lamma, Wondesen Nigatu, Kasahun Sime, Lisa Matay, Milind Tambe, Stéphane Verguet

Affiliations: John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, National Data Management and Analytics Center for Health, Ethiopian Public Health Institute, Primary Healthcare and Community Engagement Lead Executive Office, Ministry of Health, Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Title: Optimizing Health Coverage in Ethiopia: A Learning-augmented Approach and Persistent Proportionality Under an Online Budget

Abstract:
As part of nationwide efforts aligned with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 3 on Universal Health Coverage, Ethiopia's Ministry of Health is strengthening health posts to expand access to essential healthcare services. However, only a fraction of this health system strengthening effort can be implemented each year due to limited budgets and other competing priorities, thus the need for an optimization framework to guide prioritization across the regions of Ethiopia. In this paper, we develop a tool, Health Access Resource Planner (HARP), based on a principled decisionsupport optimization framework for sequential facility planning that aims to maximize population coverage under budget uncertainty while satisfying region-specific proportionality targets at every time step. We then propose two algorithms: (i) a learning-augmented approach that improves upon expert recommendations at any single-step; and (ii) a greedy algorithm for multi-step planning, both with strong worst-case approximation estimation. In collaboration with the Ethiopian Public Health Institute and Ministry of Health, we demonstrated the empirical efficacy of our method on three regions across various planning scenarios.

PaperID: 2709, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.07414

Authors:Deuksin Kwon, Kaleen Shrestha, Bin Han, Spencer Lin, James Hale, Jonathan Gratch, Maja Mataric, Gale M. Lucas

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California

Title: Can LLMs Truly Embody Human Personality? Analyzing AI and Human Behavior Alignment in Dispute Resolution

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human behavior in social settings such as legal mediation, negotiation, and dispute resolution. However, it remains unclear whether these simulations reproduce the personality–behavior patterns observed in humans. Human personality, for instance, shapes how individuals navigate social interactions, including strategic choices and behaviors in emotionally charged interactions. This raises the question: Can LLMs, when prompted with personality traits, reproduce personalitydriven differences in human conflict behavior? To explore this, we introduce an evaluation framework that enables direct comparison of human-human and LLM-LLM behaviors in dispute resolution dialogues with respect to Big Five Inventory (BFI) personality traits. This framework provides a set of interpretable metrics related to strategic behavior and conflict outcomes. We additionally contribute a novel dataset creation methodology for LLM dispute resolution dialogues with matched scenarios and personality traits with respect to human conversations. Finally, we demonstrate the use of our evaluation framework with three contemporary closed-source LLMs and show significant divergences in how personality manifests in conflict across different LLMs compared to human data, challenging the assumption that personality-prompted agents can serve as reliable behavioral proxies in socially impactful applications. Our work highlights the need for psychological grounding and validation in AI simulations before real-world use.

PaperID: 2710, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12241

Authors:Junhyuk Seo, Hyeyoon Moon, Kyu-Hwan Jung, Namkee Oh, Taerim Kim

Affiliations: Samsung Advanced Institute for Health & Science & Technology, Samsung Medical Center, Sungkyunkwan University, Department of Surgery

Title: AURA: Development and Validation of an Augmented Unplanned Removal Alert System Using Synthetic ICU Videos

Abstract:
Unplanned extubation (UE)—the unintended removal of an airway tube—remains a critical patient safety concern in intensive care units (ICUs), often leading to severe complications or death. Realtime UE detection has been limited, largely due to the ethical and privacy challenges of obtaining annotated ICU video data. We propose Augmented Unplanned Removal Alert (AURA), a vision-based risk detection system developed and validated entirely on a fully synthetic video dataset. By leveraging text-to-video diffusion, we generated diverse and clinically realistic ICU scenarios capturing a range of patient behaviors and care contexts. The system applies pose estimation to identify two high-risk movement patterns: collision, defined as hand entry into spatial zones near airway tubes, and agitation, quantified by the velocity of tracked anatomical keypoints. Expert assessments confirmed the realism of the synthetic data, and performance evaluations showed high accuracy for collision detection and moderate performance for agitation recognition.This work demonstrates a novel pathway for developing privacy-preserving, reproducible patient safety monitoring systems with potential for deployment in intensive care settings.

PaperID: 2711, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.00891

Authors:Zonghai Yao, Talha Chafekar, Junda Wang, Shuo Han, Feiyun Ouyang, Junhui Qian, Lingxi Li, Hong Yu

Affiliations: Center for Healthcare Organization and Implementation Research, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, University of Massachusetts at Lowell

Title: ChatCLIDS: Simulating Persuasive AI Dialogues to Promote Closed-Loop Insulin Adoption in Type 1 Diabetes Care

Abstract:
Realworld adoption of closed-loop insulin delivery systems (CLIDS) in type 1 diabetes remains low, driven not by technical failure, but by diverse behavioral, psychosocial, and social barriers. We introduce ChatCLIDS, the first benchmark to rigorously evaluate LLM–driven persuasive dialogue for health behavior change. Our framework features a library of expert-validated virtual patients, each with clinically grounded, heterogeneous profiles and realistic adoption barriers, and simulates multi-turn interactions with nurse agents equipped with a diverse set of evidence-based persuasive strategies. ChatCLIDS uniquely supports longitudinal counseling and adversarial social influence scenarios, enabling robust, multi-dimensional evaluation. Our findings reveal that while larger and more reflective LLMs adapt strategies over time, all models struggle to overcome resistance, especially under realistic social pressure. These results highlight critical limitations of current LLMs for behavior change, and offer a high-fidelity, scalable testbed for advancing trustworthy persuasive AI in healthcare and beyond.

PaperID: 2712, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08015

Authors:Jian Wang, Lijun He, Yixing Yong, Haixia Bi, Fan Li

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University

Title: Invisible Triggers, Visible Threats! Road-Style Adversarial Creation Attack for Visual 3D Detection in Autonomous Driving

Abstract:
Modern autonomous driving (AD) systems leverage 3D object detection to perceive foreground objects in 3D environments for subsequent prediction and planning. Visual 3D detection based on RGB cameras provides a costeffective solution compared to the LiDAR paradigm. While achieving promising detection accuracy, current deep neural network-based models remain highly susceptible to adversarial examples. The underlying safety concerns motivate us to investigate realistic adversarial attacks in AD scenarios. Previous work has demonstrated the feasibility of placing adversarial posters on the road surface to induce hallucinations in the detector. However, the unnatural appearance of the posters makes them easily noticeable by humans, and their fixed content can be readily targeted and defended. To address these limitations, we propose the AdvRoad to generate diverse road-style adversarial posters. The adversaries have naturalistic appearances resembling the road surface while compromising the detector to perceive non-existent objects at the attack locations. We employ a two-stage approach, termed Road-Style Adversary Generation and Scenario-Associated Adaptation, to maximize the attack effectiveness on the input scene while ensuring the natural appearance of the poster, allowing the attack to be carried out stealthily without drawing human attention. Extensive experiments show that AdvRoad generalizes well to different detectors, scenes, and spoofing locations. Moreover, physical attacks further demonstrate the practical threats in real-world environments.

PaperID: 2713, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13050

Authors:Jiaqiang Jiang, Wenfeng Xu, Jing Fan, Rui Yan

Affiliations: Zhejiang University of Technology Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Visual Information Intelligent Processing

Title: DS-ATGO: Dual-Stage Synergistic Learning via Forward Adaptive Threshold and Backward Gradient Optimization for Spiking Neural Networks

Abstract:
Braininspired spiking neural networks (SNNs) are recognized as a promising avenue for achieving efficient, low-energy neuromorphic computing. Direct training of SNNs typically relies on surrogate gradient (SG) learning to estimate derivatives of non-differentiable spiking activity. However, during training, the distribution of neuronal membrane potentials varies across timesteps and progressively deviates toward both sides of the firing threshold. When the firing threshold and SG remain fixed, this may lead to imbalanced spike firing and diminished gradient signals, preventing SNNs from performing well. To address these issues, we propose a novel dual-stage synergistic learning algorithm that achieves forward adaptive thresholding and backward dynamic SG. In forward propagation, we adaptively adjust thresholds based on the distribution of membrane potential dynamics (MPD) at each timestep, which enriches neuronal diversity and effectively balances firing rates across timesteps and layers. In backward propagation, drawing from the underlying association between MPD, threshold, and SG, we dynamically optimize SG to enhance gradient estimation through spatio-temporal alignment, effectively mitigating gradient information loss. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves significant performance improvements. Moreover, it allows neurons to fire stable proportions of spikes at each timestep and increases the proportion of neurons that obtain gradients in deeper layers.

PaperID: 2714, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.03088

Authors:Lloyd Pellatt, Fotios Drakopoulos, Shievanie Sabesan, Nicholas A. Lesica

Affiliations: UCL Ear Institute, UK Perceptual Technologies

Title: Modelling the Effects of Hearing Loss on Neural Coding in the Auditory Midbrain with Variational Conditioning

Abstract:
The mapping from sound to neural activity that underlies hearing is highly nonlinear. The first few stages of this mapping in the cochlea have been modelled successfully, initially with biophysical models built by hand and, more recently, with DNN models trained on datasets simulated by the biophysical models. Modelling the auditory brain has been a challenge because central auditory processing is too complex for models to be built by hand, and datasets for training DNN models directly have not been available. Recent work has taken advantage of large-scale high resolution neural recordings from the auditory midbrain to build a DNN model of normal hearing with great success. But this model assumes that auditory processing is the same in all brains, and therefore it cannot capture the widely varying effects of hearing loss. We propose a novel variational-conditional model to learn to encode the space of hearing loss directly from recordings of neural activity in the auditory midbrain of normal and noise exposed animals. With hearing loss parametrised by only 6 free parameters per animal, our model accurately predicts 62% of the explainable variance in neural responses from normal hearing animals and 68% for hearing impaired animals, comparable to state of the art animal specific models. We demonstrate that the model can be used to simulate realistic activity from out of sample animals by fitting only the learned conditioning parameters with Bayesian optimisation, achieving crossentropy loss within 2% of the optimum in 15-30 iterations. Including more animals in the training data slightly improved the performance on unseen animals. This model will enable future development of parametrised hearing loss compensation models trained to directly restore normal neural coding in hearing impaired brains, which can be quickly fitted for a new user by human in the loop optimisation.

PaperID: 2715, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08003

Authors:Jialong Qin, Xin Zou, Di Lu, Yibo Yan, Xuming Hu

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Title: Sharp Eyes and Memory for VideoLLMs: Information-Aware Visual Token Pruning for Efficient and Reliable VideoLLM Reasoning

Abstract:
Current Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) suffer from quadratic computational complexity and keyvalue cache scaling, due to their reliance on processing excessive redundant visual tokens. To address this problem, we propose SharpV, a minimalist and efficient method for adaptive pruning of visual tokens and KV cache. Different from most uniform compression approaches, SharpV dynamically adjusts pruning ratios based on spatial-temporal information. Remarkably, this adaptive mechanism occasionally achieves performance gains over dense models, offering a novel paradigm for adaptive pruning. During the KV cache pruning stage, based on observations of visual information degradation, SharpV prunes degraded visual features via a self-calibration manner, guided by similarity to original visual features. In this way, SharpV achieves hierarchical cache pruning from the perspective of information bottleneck, offering a new insight into VideoLLMs' information flow. Experiments on multiple public benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of SharpV. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, SharpV is notably the first two-stage pruning framework that operates without requiring access to exposed attention scores, ensuring full compatibility with hardware acceleration techniques like Flash Attention.

PaperID: 2716, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06434

Authors:Wenkang Hu, Xincheng Tang, Yanzhi E, Yitong Li, Zhengjie Shu, Wei Li, Huamin Wang, Ruigang Yang

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiaotong University, Nanjing University

Title: Real Garment Benchmark (RGBench): A Comprehensive Benchmark for Robotic Garment Manipulation Featuring a High-Fidelity Scalable Simulator

Abstract:
While there has been significant progress to use simulated data to learn robotic manipulation of rigid objects, applying its success to deformable objects has been hindered by the lack of both deformable object models and realistic nonrigid body simulators. In this paper, we present Real Garment Benchmark (RGBench), a comprehensive benchmark for robotic manipulation of garments. It features a diverse set of over 6000 garment mesh models, a new high-performance simulator, and a comprehensive protocol to evaluate garment simulation quality with carefully measured real garment dynamics. Our experiments demonstrate that our simulator outperforms currently available cloth simulators by a large margin, reducing simulation error by 20% while maintaining a speed of 3 times faster. We will publicly release RGBench to accelerate future research in robotic garment manipulation.

PaperID: 2717, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11143

Authors:Jiarui Yang, Bin Zhu, Jingjing Chen, Yu-Gang Jiang

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University, Singapore Management University, Institute of Trustworthy Embodied AI

Title: Actor-Critic for Continuous Action Chunks: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation with Sparse Reward

Abstract:
Existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods struggle with longhorizon robotic manipulation tasks, particularly those involving sparse rewards. While action chunking is a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation, using RL to directly learn continuous action chunks in a stable and data-efficient manner remains a critical challenge. This paper introduces AC3 (Actor-Critic for Continuous Chunks), a novel RL framework that learns to generate high-dimensional, continuous action sequences. To make this learning process stable and data-efficient, AC3 incorporates targeted stabilization mechanisms for both the actor and the critic. First, to ensure reliable policy improvement, the actor is trained with an asymmetric update rule, learning exclusively from successful trajectories. Second, to enable effective value learning despite sparse rewards, the critic's update is stabilized using intra-chunk n-step returns and further enriched by a self-supervised module providing intrinsic rewards at anchor points aligned with each action chunk. We conducted extensive experiments on 25 tasks from the BiGym and RLBench benchmarks. Results show that by using only a few demonstrations and a simple model architecture, AC3 achieves superior success rates on most tasks, validating its effective design.

PaperID: 2718, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.12312

Authors:Zihao Xu, Junchen Ding, Yiling Lou, Kun Zhang, Dong Gong, Yuekang Li

Affiliations: University of New South Wales, Fudan University, Carnegie Mellon University

Title: Socrates or Smartypants: Testing Logic Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models with Logic Programming-Based Test Oracles

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant progress in language understanding and reasoning. Evaluating and analyzing their logical reasoning abilities has therefore become essential. However, existing datasets and benchmarks are often limited to overly simplistic, unnatural, or contextually constrained examples. In response to the growing demand, we introduce SMARTYPATBENCH, a challenging, naturally expressed, and systematically labeled benchmark derived from real-world high-quality Reddit posts containing subtle logical fallacies. Unlike existing datasets and benchmarks, it provides more detailed annotations of logical fallacies and features more diverse data. To further scale up the study and address the limitations of manual data collection and labeling, such as fallacy-type imbalance and labor-intensive annotation, we introduce SMARTYPAT, an automated framework powered by logic programming-based oracles. SMARTYPAT utilizes Prolog rules to systematically generate logically fallacious statements, which are then refined into fluent natural language sentences by LLMs, ensuring precise fallacy rep- resentation. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that SMARTYPAT produces fallacies comparable in subtlety and quality to human-generated content and significantly outperforms baseline methods. Finally, experiments reveal insights into LLM capabilities, highlighting that while excessive reasoning steps hinder fallacy detection accuracy, structured reasoning enhances fallacy categorization performance.

PaperID: 2719, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.22828

Authors:Zhan Fa, Yue Duan, Jian Zhang, Lei Qi, Wanqi Yang, Yinghuan Shi

Affiliations: National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, School of Computer and Electronic Information, Nanjing Normal University

Title: Decomposing and Composing: Towards Efficient Vision-Language Continual Learning via Rank-1 Expert Pool in a Single LoRA

Abstract:
Continual learning (CL) in visionlanguage models (VLMs) faces significant challenges in improving task adaptation and avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Existing methods usually have heavy inference burden or rely on external knowledge, while Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has shown potential in reducing these issues by enabling parameter-efficient tuning. However, considering directly using LoRA to alleviate the catastrophic forgetting problem is non-trivial, we introduce a novel framework that restructures a single LoRA module as a decomposable Rank-1 Expert Pool. Our method learns to dynamically compose a sparse, task-specific update by selecting from this expert pool, guided by the semantics of the [CLS] token. In addition, we propose an Activation-Guided Orthogonal (AGO) loss that orthogonalizes critical parts of LoRA weights across tasks. This sparse composition and orthogonalization enable fewer parameter updates, resulting in domain-aware learning while minimizing inter-task interference and maintaining downstream task performance. Extensive experiments across multiple settings demonstrate state-of-the-art results in all metrics, surpassing zero-shot upper bounds in generalization. Notably, it reduces trainable parameters by 96.7% compared to the baseline method, eliminating reliance on external datasets or task-ID discriminators. The merged LoRAs retain less weights and incur no inference latency, making our method computationally lightweight.

PaperID: 2720, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.14522

Authors:Tianbin Li, Yanzhou Su, Wei Li, Bin Fu, Zhe Chen, Ziyan Huang, Guoan Wang, Chenglong Ma, Ying Chen, Ming Hu, Yanjun Li, Pengcheng Chen, Shixiang Tang, Xiaowei Hu, Zhongying Deng, Yuanfeng Ji, Jin Ye, Yu Qiao, Junjun He

Affiliations: Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Stanford University

Title: GMAI-VL & GMAI-VL-5.5M: A Large Vision-Language Model and a Comprehensive Multimodal Dataset Towards General Medical AI

Abstract:
Despite significant advancements in general AI, its effectiveness in the medical domain is limited by the lack of specialized medical knowledge. To address this, we formulate GMAIVL-5.5M, a multimodal medical dataset created by converting hundreds of specialized medical datasets with various annotations into high-quality image-text pairs. This dataset offers comprehensive task coverage, diverse modalities, and rich image-text data. Building upon this dataset, we develop GMAI-VL, a 7B-parameter general medical vision-language model, with a three-stage training strategy that enhances the integration of visual and textual information. This approach significantly improves the model's ability to process multimodal data, supporting accurate diagnoses and clinical decision-making. Experiments show that GMAI-VL achieves state-of-the-art performance across various multimodal medical tasks, including visual question answering and medical image diagnosis.

PaperID: 2721, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17772

Authors:Hao Liang, Wanrong Zhang, Xinlei He, Kaishun Wu, Hong Xing

Affiliations: Harvard University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: An Improved Privacy and Utility Analysis of Differentially Private SGD with Bounded Domain and Smooth Losses

Abstract:
Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DPSGD) is widely used to protect sensitive data during the training of machine learning models, but its privacy guarantee often comes at a large cost of model performance due to the lack of tight theoretical bounds quantifying privacy loss. While recent efforts have achieved more accurate privacy guarantees, they still impose some assumptions prohibited from practical applications, such as convexity and complex parameter requirements, and rarely investigate indepth the impact of privacy mechanisms on the model's utility. In this paper, we provide a rigorous privacy characterization for DPSGD with general L-smooth and non-convex loss functions, revealing converged privacy loss with iteration in bounded-domain cases. Specifically, we track the privacy loss over multiple iterations, leveraging the noisy smooth-reduction property, and further establish comprehensive convergence analysis in different scenarios. In particular, we show that for DPSGD with a bounded domain, (i) the privacy loss can still converge without the convexity assumption, (ii) a smaller bounded diameter can improve both privacy and utility simultaneously under certain conditions, and (iii) the attainable big-O order of the privacy utility trade-off for DPSGD with gradient clipping (DPSGD-GC) and for DPSGD-GC with bounded domain (DPSGD-DC) and strongly convex population risk function, respectively. Experiments via membership inference attack (MIA) in a practical setting validate insights gained from the theoretical results.

PaperID: 2722, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.11216

Authors:Kebin Wu, Fatima Albreiki

Affiliations: Technology Innovation Institute

Title: Positional Bias in Multimodal Embedding Models: Do They Favor the Beginning, the Middle, or the End?

Abstract:
Positional bias—where models overemphasize certain positions regardless of content—has been shown to negatively impact model performance across various tasks. While recent research has extensively examined positional bias in text generation models, its presence and effects in representation models remain underexplored. Even less is known about such biases in multimodal models. In this work, we investigate positional bias in multimodal representation models, specifically in the context of imagetext retrieval. We begin by distinguishing between context importance and positional bias, and then assess the presence and extent of positional bias across different models and datasets. Our experiments demonstrate that positional bias is prevalent in multimodal models, but manifests differently across modalities: text encoders tend to exhibit bias toward the beginning of the input, whereas image encoders show bias at both the beginning and end. Furthermore, we find that this bias arises from, or is amplified by, a combination of factors, including the positional encoding scheme, training loss, context importance, and the nature of using image-text pairs in multimodal training

PaperID: 2723, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19097

Authors:Ziyuan Gao, Di Liang, Xianjie Wu, Philippe Morel, Minlong Peng

Affiliations: University College London, Fudan University, Beihang University

Title: DeCoRL: Decoupling Reasoning Chains via Parallel Sub-Step Generation and Cascaded Reinforcement for Interpretable and Scalable RLHF

Abstract:
Existing reinforcement learning methods for Chainof-Thought reasoning suffer from two critical limitations. First, they operate as monolithic black boxes that provide undifferentiated reward signals, obscuring individual step contributions and hindering error diagnosis. Second, sequential decoding has O(n) time complexity. This makes real-time deployment impractical for complex reasoning tasks. We present DeCoRL (Decoupled Reasoning Chains via Coordinated Reinforcement Learning), a novel framework that transforms reasoning from sequential processing into collaborative modular orchestration. DeCoRL trains lightweight specialized models to generate reasoning sub-steps concurrently, eliminating sequential bottlenecks through parallel processing. To enable precise error attribution, the framework designs modular reward functions that score each sub-step independently. Cascaded DRPO optimization then coordinates these rewards while preserving inter-step dependencies. Comprehensive evaluation demonstrates state-of-the-art results across RM-Bench, RMB, and RewardBench, outperforming existing methods including large-scale models. DeCoRL delivers 3.8 times faster inference while maintaining superior solution quality and offers a 22.7% improvement in interpretability through explicit reward attribution. These advancements, combined with a 72.4% reduction in energy consumption and a 68% increase in throughput, make real-time deployment of complex reasoning systems a reality.

PaperID: 2724, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18760

Authors:Yi Liu, Xiangyu Liu, Zequn Sun, Wei Hu

Affiliations: Nanjing University

Title: Answering the Unanswerable Is to Err Knowingly: Analyzing and Mitigating Abstention Failures in Large Reasoning Models

Abstract:
Large reasoning models (LRMs) have shown remarkable progress on complex reasoning tasks. However, some questions posed to LRMs are inherently unanswerable, such as math problems lacking sufficient conditions. We find that LRMs continually fail to provide appropriate abstentions when confronted with these unanswerable questions. In this paper, we systematically analyze, investigate, and resolve this issue for trustworthy AI. We first conduct a detailed analysis of the distinct response behaviors of LRMs when facing unanswerable questions. Then, we show that LRMs possess sufficient cognitive capabilities to recognize the flaws in these questions. However, they fail to exhibit appropriate abstention behavior, revealing a misalignment between their internal cognition and external response. Finally, to resolve this issue, we propose a lightweight, twostage method that combines cognitive monitoring with inference-time intervention. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the abstention rate while maintaining the reasoning performance.

PaperID: 2725, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09155

Authors:Wenkai Wang, Hongcan Guo, Zheqi Lv, Shengyu Zhang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss: Adaptive Policy Optimization for Stable Self-Evaluation in Large Multimodal Models

Abstract:
Selfevaluation, a model's ability to assess the correctness of its own output, is crucial for Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to achieve self-improvement in multi-turn conversations, yet largely absent in foundation models. Recent work has employed reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance self-evaluation; however, its fixed reward mechanism suffers from reward hacking when optimizing multiple training objectives, leading to model collapse. In this paper we propose AdaPO, an online reinforcement learning framework capable of adaptively adjusting training objective in real time according to the current training state for each task. Specifically, to mitigate reward hacking , AdaPO introduces an Adaptive Reward Model (ARM) and a Reward Aware Dynamic KL Regularization mechanism. ARM assesses the task's training state from the distribution of model generated multi-turn trajectories' performance. Reward Aware Dynamic KL replaces a fixed penalty with dynamic coefficients which is modulated by the reward gap between different multi-turn situations. Notably, our method automatically and smoothly adjusts its learning focus based on sub-tasks' training progress without manual intervention. Extensive experiments over 8 benchmarks and various models show that our method significantly enhances both direct reasoning and self-evaluation capability.

PaperID: 2726, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08961

Authors:Yuanyuan Wang, Dongchao Yang, Yiwen Shao, Hangting Chen, Jiankun Zhao, Zhiyong Wu, Helen Meng, Xixin Wu

Affiliations: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Tencent AI Lab

Title: DualSpeechLM: Towards Unified Speech Understanding and Generation via Dual Speech Token Modeling with Large Language Models

Abstract:
Extending pretrained text Large Language Models (LLMs)’s speech understanding or generation abilities by introducing various effective speech tokens has attracted great attention in the speech research community. However, building a unified speech understanding and generation model still faces the following challenges: (1) Due to the huge modality gap between speech and text tokens, extending text LLMs to unified speech LLMs relies on large-scale paired data for fine-tuning, and (2) Generation and understanding tasks prefer information at different levels, e.g., generation benefits from detailed acoustic features, while understanding favors high-level semantics. This divergence leads to difficult performance optimization in one unified model. To solve these challenges, in this paper, we present two key insights in speech tokenization and speech language modeling. Specifically, we first propose an Understanding-driven Speech Tokenizer (USTokenizer), which extracts high-level semantic information essential for accomplishing understanding tasks using text LLMs. In this way, USToken enjoys better modality commonality with text, which reduces the difficulty of modality alignment in adapting text LLMs to speech LLMs. Secondly, we present DualSpeechLM, a dual-token modeling framework that concurrently models USToken as input and acoustic token as output within a unified, end-to-end framework, seamlessly integrating speech understanding and generation capabilities. Furthermore, we propose a novel semantic supervision loss and a Chain-of-Condition (CoC) strategy to stabilize model training and enhance speech generation performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach effectively fosters a complementary relationship between understanding and generation tasks, highlighting the promising strategy of mutually enhancing both tasks in one unified model.

PaperID: 2727, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08206

Authors:Xiao Yang, Xuejiao Zhao, Zhiqi Shen

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University

Title: EHRStruct: A Comprehensive Benchmark Framework for Evaluating Large Language Models on Structured Electronic Health Record Tasks

Abstract:
Structured Electronic Health Record (EHR) data stores patient information in relational tables and plays a central role in clinical decisionmaking. Recent advances have explored the use of large language models (LLMs) to process such data, showing promise across various clinical tasks. However, the absence of standardized evaluation frameworks and clearly defined tasks makes it difficult to systematically assess and compare LLM performance on structured EHR data. To address these evaluation challenges, we introduce EHRStruct, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLMs on structured EHR tasks. EHRStruct defines 11 representative tasks spanning diverse clinical needs and includes 2,200 task-specific evaluation samples derived from two widely used EHR datasets. We use EHRStruct to evaluate 20 advanced and representative LLMs, covering both general and medical models. We further analyze key factors influencing model performance, including input formats, few-shot generalisation, and finetuning strategies, and compare results with 11 state-of-the-art LLM-based enhancement methods for structured data reasoning. Our results indicate that many structured EHR tasks place high demands on the understanding and reasoning capabilities of LLMs. In response, we propose SEMaster, a code-augmented method that achieves state-of-the-art performance and offers practical insights to guide future research.

PaperID: 2728, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21700

Authors:Yuhao Zhan, Yuqing Zhang, Jing Yuan, Qixiang Ma, Zhiqi Yang, Yu Gu, Zemin Liu, Fei Wu

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Title: JELV: A Judge of Edit-Level Validity for Evaluation and Automated Reference Expansion in Grammatical Error Correction

Abstract:
Existing Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) systems suffer from limited reference diversity, leading to underestimated evaluation and restricted model generalization. To address this issue, we introduce the Judge of EditLevel Validity (JELV), an automated framework to validate correction edits from grammaticality, faithfulness, and fluency. Using our proposed human-annotated Pair-wise Edit-level Validity Dataset (PEVData) as benchmark, JELV offers two implementations: a multi-turn LLM-as-Judges pipeline achieving 90% agreement with human annotators, and a distilled DeBERTa classifier with 85% precision on valid edits. We then apply JELV to reclassify misjudged false positives in evaluation and derive a comprehensive evaluation metric by integrating false positive decoupling and fluency scoring, resulting in state-of-the-art correlation with human judgments. We also apply JELV to filter LLM-generated correction candidates, expanding the BEA19's single-reference dataset containing 38,692 source sentences. Retraining top GEC systems on this expanded dataset yields measurable performance gains. JELV provides a scalable solution for enhancing reference diversity and strengthening both evaluation and model generalization.

PaperID: 2729, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.17979

Authors:Weixiang Zhao, Xingyu Sui, Jiahe Guo, Yulin Hu, Yang Deng, Yanyan Zhao, Xuda Zhi, Yongbo Huang, Hao He, Wanxiang Che, Ting Liu, Bing Qin

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Singapore Management University

Title: Trade-offs in Large Reasoning Models: An Empirical Analysis of Deliberative and Adaptive Reasoning over Foundational Capabilities

Abstract:
Recent advancements in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), such as OpenAI's o1/o3 and DeepSeekR1, have demonstrated remarkable performance in specialized reasoning tasks through human-like deliberative thinking and long chain-of-thought reasoning. However, our systematic evaluation across various model families (DeepSeek, Qwen, and LLaMA) and scales (7B to 32B) reveals that acquiring these deliberative reasoning capabilities significantly reduces the foundational capabilities of LRMs, including notable declines in helpfulness and harmlessness, alongside substantially increased inference costs. Importantly, we demonstrate that adaptive reasoning---employing modes like Zero-Thinking, Less-Thinking, and Summary-Thinking---can effectively alleviate these drawbacks. Our empirical insights underline the critical need for developing more versatile LRMs capable of dynamically allocating inference-time compute according to specific task characteristics.

PaperID: 2730, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.12060

Authors:Wei Cai, Shujuan Liu, Jian Zhao, Ziyan Shi, Yusheng Zhao, Yuchen Yuan, Tianle Zhang, Chi Zhang, Xuelong Li

Affiliations: China Telecom, School of Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI)

Title: When Safe Unimodal Inputs Collide: Optimizing Reasoning Chains for Cross-Modal Safety in Multimodal Large Language Models

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are susceptible to the implicit reasoning risk, wherein innocuous unimodal inputs synergistically assemble into risky multimodal data that produce harmful outputs. We attribute this vulnerability to the difficulty of MLLMs maintaining safety alignment through longchain reasoning.To address this issue, we introduce Safe-Semantics-but-Unsafe-Interpretation (SSUI), the first dataset featuring interpretable reasoning paths tailored for such a cross-modal challenge.A novel training framework, Safety-aware Reasoning Path Optimization (SRPO), is also designed based on the SSUI dataset to align the MLLM's internal reasoning process with human safety values. Experimental results show that our SRPO-trained models achieve state-of-the-art results on key safety benchmarks, including the proposed Reasoning Path Benchmark (RSBench), significantly outperforming both open-source and top-tier commercial MLLMs.

PaperID: 2731, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.14476

Authors:Dalia Ali, Dora Zhao, Allison Koenecke, Orestis Papakyriakopoulos

Affiliations: Technical University of Munich, Stanford University, Cornell University

Title: Operationalizing Pluralistic Values in Large Language Model Alignment Reveals Trade-offs in Safety, Inclusivity, and Model Behavior

Abstract:
Although large language models (LLMs) are increasingly trained using human feedback for safety and alignment with human values, alignment decisions often overlook human social diversity. This study examines how incorporating pluralistic values affects LLM behavior by systematically evaluating demographic variation and design parameters in the alignment pipeline. We collect alignment data from US and German participants (N = 1,095 participants, 27,375 ratings) who rated LLM responses across five dimensions: Toxicity, Emotional Awareness (EA), Sensitivity, Stereotypical Bias, and Helpfulness. We finetuned multiple Large Language Models and Large Reasoning Models using preferences from different social groups while varying rating scales, disagreement handling methods, and optimization techniques. The results revealed systematic demographic effects: male participants rated responses 18% less toxic than female participants; conservative and Black participants rated responses 27.9% and 44% higher on EA than liberal and White participants, respectively. Models fine-tuned on group-specific preferences exhibited distinct behaviors. Technical design choices showed strong effects: the preservation of rater disagreement achieved roughly 53% greater toxicity reduction than majority voting, and 5-point scales yielded about 22% more reduction than binary formats; and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) consistently outperformed Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) in multi-value optimization. These findings represent a preliminary step in answering a critical question: How should alignment balance expert-driven and user-driven signals to ensure both safety and fair representation?

PaperID: 2732, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.12128

Authors:Thomas Manzini, Priyankari Perali, Raisa Karnik, Robin R. Murphy

Affiliations: Texas A&M University - College Station

Title: A Benchmark Dataset for Spatially Aligned Road Damage Assessment in Small Uncrewed Aerial Systems Disaster Imagery

Abstract:
This paper presents the largest known benchmark dataset for road damage assessment and road alignment, and provides 18 baseline models trained on the CRASARU-DRIODs dataset's post-disaster small uncrewed aerial systems (sUAS) imagery from 10 federally declared disasters, addressing three challenges within prior post-disaster road damage assessment datasets. While prior disaster road damage assessment datasets exist, there is no current state of practice, as prior public datasets have either been small-scale or reliant on low-resolution imagery insufficient for detecting phenomena of interest to emergency managers. Further, while machine learning (ML) systems have been developed for this task previously, none are known to have been operationally validated. These limitations are overcome in this work through the labeling of 657.25km of roads according to a 10-class labeling schema, followed by training and deploying ML models during the operational response to Hurricanes Debby and Helene in 2024. Motivated by observed road line misalignment in practice, 9,184 road line adjustments were provided for spatial alignment of a priori road lines, as it was found that when the 18 baseline models are deployed against real-world misaligned road lines, model performance degraded on average by 5.596% Macro IoU. If spatial alignment is not considered, approximately 8% (11km) of adverse conditions on road lines will be labeled incorrectly, with approximately 9% (59km) of road lines misaligned off the actual road. These dynamics are gaps that should be addressed by the ML, CV, and robotics communities to enable more effective and informed decision-making during disasters.

PaperID: 2733, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20359

Authors:Zhiqing Guo, Dongdong Xi, Songlin Li, Gaobo Yang

Affiliations: Xinjiang University, Hunan University

Title: From Passive Perception to Active Memory: A Weakly Supervised Image Manipulation Localization Framework Driven by Coarse-Grained Annotations

Abstract:
Image manipulation localization (IML) faces a fundamental tradeoff between minimizing annotation cost and achieving fine-grained localization accuracy. Existing fully-supervised IML methods depend heavily on dense pixel-level mask annotations, which limits scalability to large datasets or real-world deployment. In contrast, the majority of existing weakly-supervised IML approaches are based on image-level labels, which greatly reduce annotation effort but typically lack precise spatial localization. To address this dilemma, we propose BoxPromptIML, a novel weakly-supervised IML framework that effectively balances annotation cost and localization performance. Specifically, we propose a coarse region annotation strategy, which can generate relatively accurate manipulation masks at lower cost. To improve model efficiency and facilitate deployment, we further design an efficient lightweight student model, which learns to perform fine-grained localization through knowledge distillation from a fixed teacher model based on the Segment Anything Model (SAM). Moreover, inspired by the human subconscious memory mechanism, our feature fusion module employs a dual-guidance strategy that actively contextualizes recalled prototypical patterns with real-time observational cues derived from the input. Instead of passive feature extraction, this strategy enables a dynamic process of knowledge recollection, where long-term memory is adapted to the specific context of the current image, significantly enhancing localization accuracy and robustness. Extensive experiments across both in-distribution and out-of-distribution datasets show that BoxPromptIML outperforms or rivals fully-supervised models, while maintaining strong generalization, low annotation cost, and efficient deployment characteristics.

PaperID: 2734, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10325

Authors:Yan Zhuang, Minhao Liu, Yanru Zhang, Jiawen Deng, Fuji Ren

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: TMDC: A Two-Stage Modality Denoising and Complementation Framework for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Missing and Noisy Modalities

Abstract:
Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) aims to infer human sentiment by integrating information from multiple modalities such as text, audio, and video. In realworld scenarios, however, the presence of missing modalities and noisy signals significantly hinders the robustness and accuracy of existing models. While prior works have made progress on these issues, they are typically addressed in isolation, limiting overall effectiveness in practical settings. To jointly mitigate the challenges posed by missing and noisy modalities, we propose a framework called Two-stage Modality Denoising and Complementation (TMDC). TMDC comprises two sequential training stages. In the Intra-Modality Denoising Stage, denoised modality-specific and modality-shared representations are extracted from complete data using dedicated denoising modules, reducing the impact of noise and enhancing representational robustness. In the Inter-Modality Complementation Stage, these representations are leveraged to compensate for missing modalities, thereby enriching the available information and further improving robustness. Extensive evaluations on MOSI, MOSEI, and IEMOCAP demonstrate that TMDC consistently achieves superior performance compared to existing methods, establishing new state-of-the-art results.

PaperID: 2735, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.13079

Authors:Jiacheng Tang, Mingyue Feng, Jiachao Liu, Yaonong Wang, Jian Pu

Affiliations: Fudan University, Zhejiang Leapmotor Technology Co.

Title: Decoupling Scene Perception and Ego Status: A Multi-Context Fusion Approach for Enhanced Generalization in End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Abstract:
Modular design of planningoriented autonomous driving has markedly advanced end-to-end systems. However, existing architectures remain constrained by an over-reliance on ego status, hindering generalization and robust scene understanding. We identify the root cause as an inherent design within these architectures that allows ego status to be easily leveraged as a shortcut. Specifically, the premature fusion of ego status in the upstream BEV encoder allows an information flow from this strong prior to dominate the downstream planning module. To address this challenge, we propose AdaptiveAD, an architectural-level solution based on a multi-context fusion strategy. Its core is a dual-branch structure that explicitly decouples scene perception and ego status. One branch performs scene-driven reasoning based on multi-task learning, but with ego status deliberately omitted from the BEV encoder, while the other conducts ego-driven reasoning based solely on the planning task. A scene-aware fusion module then adaptively integrates the complementary decisions from the two branches to form the final planning trajectory. To ensure this decoupling does not compromise multi-task learning, we introduce a path attention mechanism for ego-BEV interaction and add two targeted auxiliary tasks: BEV unidirectional distillation and autoregressive online mapping. Extensive evaluations on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that AdaptiveAD achieves state-of-the-art open-loop planning performance. Crucially, it significantly mitigates the over-reliance on ego status and exhibits impressive generalization capabilities across diverse scenarios.

PaperID: 2736, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03189

Authors:Tianshuo Zhang, Siran Peng, Li Gao, Haoyuan Zhang, Xiangyu Zhu, Zhen Lei

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Mobile Financial Technology Co., the Faculty of Innovation Engineering

Title: Unifying Locality of KANs and Feature Drift Compensation Projection for Data-Free Replay Based Continual Face Forgery Detection

Abstract:
The rapid advancements in face forgery techniques necessitate that detectors continuously adapt to new forgery methods, thus situating face forgery detection within a continual learning paradigm. However, when detectors learn new forgery types, their performance on previous types often degrades rapidly, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. KolmogorovArnold Networks (KANs) utilize locally plastic splines as their activation functions, enabling them to learn new tasks by modifying only local regions of the functions while leaving other areas unaffected. Therefore, they are naturally suitable for addressing catastrophic forgetting. However, KANs have two significant limitations: 1) the splines are ineffective for modeling high-dimensional images, while alternative activation functions that are suitable for images lack the essential property of locality; 2) in continual learning, when features from different domains overlap, the mapping of different domains to distinct curve regions always collapses due to repeated modifications of the same regions. In this paper, we propose a KAN-based Continual Face Forgery Detection (KAN-CFD) framework, which includes a Domain-Group KAN Detector (DG-KD) and a data-free replay Feature Separation strategy via KAN Drift Compensation Projection (FS-KDCP). DG-KD enables KANs to fit high-dimensional image inputs while preserving locality and local plasticity. FS-KDCP avoids the overlap of the KAN input spaces without using data from prior tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance while notably reducing forgetting.

PaperID: 2737, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13675

Authors:Hongkuan Zhou, Lavdim Halilaj, Sebastian Monka, Stefan Schmid, Yuqicheng Zhu, Jingcheng Wu, Nadeem Nazer, Steffen Staab

Affiliations: Robert Bosch GmbH, University of Stuttgart

Title: Seeing and Knowing in the Wild: Open-domain Visual Entity Recognition with Large-scale Knowledge Graphs via Contrastive Learning

Abstract:
Opendomain visual entity recognition aims to identify and link entities depicted in images to a vast and evolving set of real-world concepts, such as those found in Wikidata. Unlike conventional classification tasks with fixed label sets, it operates under open-set conditions, where most target entities are unseen during training and exhibit long-tail distributions. This makes the task inherently challenging due to limited supervision, high visual ambiguity, and the need for semantic disambiguation. We propose a Knowledge-guided Contrastive Learning (KnowCoL) framework that combines both images and text descriptions into a shared semantic space grounded by structured information from Wikidata. By abstracting visual and textual inputs to a conceptual level, the model leverages entity descriptions, type hierarchies, and relational context to support zero-shot entity recognition. We evaluate our approach on the OVEN benchmark, a large-scale open-domain visual recognition dataset with Wikidata IDs as the label space. Our experiments show that using visual, textual, and structured knowledge greatly improves accuracy, especially for rare and unseen entities. Our smallest model improves the accuracy on unseen entities by 10.5% compared to the state-of-the-art, despite being 35 times smaller.

PaperID: 2738, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08160

Authors:Argyrios Deligkas, Eduard Eiben, Tiger-Lily Goldsmith, Dušan Knop, Šimon Schierreich

Affiliations: Royal Holloway, University of London, Czech Technical University in Prague

Title: Dividing Indivisible Items for the Benefit of All: It Is Hard to Be Fair Without Social Awareness

Abstract:
In standard fair division models, we assume that all agents are selfish. However, in many scenarios, division of resources has a direct impact on the whole group or even society. Therefore, we study fair allocations of indivisible items that, at the same time, maximize social impact. In this model, each agent is associated with two additive functions that define their value and social impact for each item. The goal is to allocate items so that the social impact is maximized while maintaining some fairness criterion. We reveal that the complexity of the problem heavily depends on whether the agents are socially aware, i.e., they take into consideration the social impact functions. For socially unaware agents, we prove that the problem is NPhard for a variety of fairness notions, and that it is tractable only for very restricted cases, e.g., if for every agent valuation equals social impact and it is binary. On the other hand, social awareness allows for fair allocations that maximize social impact, and such allocations can be computed in polynomial time. Interestingly, the problem becomes again intractable as soon as the definition of social awareness is relaxed.

PaperID: 2739, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.00881

Authors:Li Yuan, Qingfei Huang, Bingshan Zhu, Yi Cai, Qingbao Huang, Changmeng Zheng, Zikun Deng, Tao Wang

Affiliations: School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, China Key Laboratory of Big Data and Intelligent Robot (SCUT), MOE of China, School of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, Guangdong University of Finance & Economics, School of Electrical Engineering, Guangxi University, Department of Computing, Hong Kong, Department of Biostatistics & Health Informatics, King's College London, United Kingdom

Title: Hybrid-DMKG: A Hybrid Reasoning Framework over Dynamic Multimodal Knowledge Graphs for Multimodal Multihop QA with Knowledge Editing

Abstract:
Multimodal Knowledge Editing (MKE) extends traditional knowledge editing to settings involving both textual and visual modalities. However, existing MKE benchmarks primarily assess final answer correctness, neglecting the quality of intermediate reasoning and robustness to visually rephrased inputs. To address this limitation, we introduce MMQAKE, the first benchmark for multimodal multihop question answering with knowledge editing. MMQAKE evaluates: (1) a model’s ability to reason over 2–5hop factual chains that span both text and images, including performance at each intermediate step; (2) robustness to visually rephrased inputs in multihop questions. Our evaluation shows that current MKE methods often struggle to consistently update and reason over multimodal reasoning chains following knowledge edits. To overcome these challenges, we propose Hybrid-DMKG, a hybrid reasoning framework built on a dynamic multimodal knowledge graph (DMKG) to enable accurate multihop reasoning over updated multimodal knowledge. Hybrid-DMKG first uses a large language model to decompose multimodal multihop questions into sequential sub-questions, then applies a multimodal retrieval model to locate updated facts by jointly encoding each sub-question with candidate entities and their associated images. For answer inference, a hybrid reasoning module operates over the DMKG via two parallel paths: (1) relation-linking prediction; (2) RAG Reasoning with large vision-language models. A background-reflective decision module then aggregates evidence from both paths to select the most credible answer. Experimental results on MMQAKE show that Hybrid-DMKG significantly outperforms existing MKE approaches, achieving higher accuracy and improved robustness to knowledge updates.

PaperID: 2740, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11582

Authors:Qiguang Chen, Dengyun Peng, Jinhao Liu, Huikang Su, Jiannan Guan, Libo Qin, Wanxiang Che

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Central South University

Title: Aware First, Think Less: Dynamic Boundary Self-Awareness Drives Significant Gains in Reasoning Efficiency in Large Language Models

Abstract:
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have greatly improved their ability to perform complex reasoning tasks through Long Chainof-Thought (CoT). However, this approach often results in substantial redundancy, impairing computational efficiency and causing significant delays in real-time applications. To improve efficiency, current methods often rely on human-defined difficulty priors, which do not align with the LLM's self-awared difficulty, leading to inefficiencies. In this paper, we introduce the Dynamic Reasoning-Boundary Self-Awareness Framework (DR. SAF), which enables LLMs to dynamically assess and adjust their reasoning depth in response to problem complexity. DR. SAF integrates three key components: Boundary Self-Awareness Alignment, Adaptive Reward Management, and a Boundary Preservation Mechanism. These components allow models to optimize their reasoning processes, balancing efficiency and accuracy without compromising performance. Our experimental results demonstrate that DR. SAF achieves a 49.27% reduction in total response tokens with minimal loss in accuracy. The framework also delivers a 6.59x gain in token efficiency and a 5x reduction in training time, making it well-suited to resource-limited settings. During extreme training, DR. SAF can even surpass traditional instruction-based models in token efficiency with more than 16% accuracy improvement.

PaperID: 2741, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.22533

Authors:Dongchen Li, Jitao Liang, Wei Li, Xiaoyu Wang, Longbing Cao, Kun Yu

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, National Frontiers Science Center for Industrial Intelligence and Systems Optimization, China Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing in Medical Image (MIIC), Liaoning Cancer Hospital & Institute, Macquarie University, College of Medicine and Biological Information Engineering

Title: CliCARE: Grounding Large Language Models in Clinical Guidelines for Decision Support over Longitudinal Cancer Electronic Health Records

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) hold significant promise for improving clinical decision support and reducing physician burnout by synthesizing complex, longitudinal cancer Electronic Health Records (EHRs). However, their implementation in this critical field faces three primary challenges: the inability to effectively process the extensive length and fragmented nature of patient records for accurate temporal analysis; a heightened risk of clinical hallucination, as conventional grounding techniques such as RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) do not adequately incorporate process-oriented clinical guidelines; and unreliable evaluation metrics that hinder the validation of AI systems in oncology. To address these issues, we propose CliCARE, a framework for Grounding Large Language Models in Clinical Guidelines for Decision Support over Longitudinal Cancer Electronic Health Records. The framework operates by transforming unstructured, longitudinal EHRs into patient-specific Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) to capture long-range dependencies, and then grounding the decision support process by aligning these real-world patient trajectories with a normative guideline knowledge graph. This approach provides oncologists with evidence-grounded decision support by generating a high-fidelity clinical summary and an actionable recommendation. We validated our framework using large-scale, longitudinal data from a private Chinese cancer dataset and the public English MIMIC-IV dataset. In these settings, CliCARE significantly outperforms baselines, including leading long-context LLMs and Knowledge Graph-enhanced RAG methods. The clinical validity of our results is supported by a robust evaluation protocol, which demonstrates a high correlation with assessments made by oncologists.

PaperID: 2742, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12003

Authors:Shuochen Liu, Pengfei Luo, Chao Zhang, Yuhao Chen, Haotian Zhang, Qi Liu, Xin Kou, Tong Xu, Enhong Chen

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China

Title: Look as You Think: Unifying Reasoning and Visual Evidence Attribution for Verifiable Document RAG via Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Aiming to identify precise evidence sources from visual documents, visual evidence attribution for visual document retrieval–augmented generation (VDRAG) ensures reliable and verifiable predictions from vision-language models (VLMs) in multimodal question answering. Most existing methods adopt end-to-end training to facilitate intuitive answer verification. However, they lack fine-grained supervision and progressive traceability throughout the reasoning process. In this paper, we introduce the Chain-of-Evidence (CoE) paradigm for VD-RAG. CoE unifies Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and visual evidence attribution by grounding reference elements in reasoning steps to specific regions with bounding boxes and page indexes. To enable VLMs to generate such evidence-grounded reasoning, we propose Look As You Think (LAT), a reinforcement learning framework that trains models to produce verifiable reasoning paths with consistent attribution. During training, LAT evaluates the attribution consistency of each evidence region and provides rewards only when the CoE trajectory yields correct answers, encouraging process-level self-verification. Experiments on vanilla Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct with Paper‑ and Wiki‑VISA benchmarks show that LAT consistently improves the vanilla model in both single- and multi-image settings, yielding average gains of 8.23% in soft exact match (EM) and 47.0% in IoU@0.5. Meanwhile, LAT not only outperforms the supervised fine-tuning baseline, which is trained to directly produce answers with attribution, but also exhibits stronger generalization across domains.

PaperID: 2743, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03986

Authors:Yuan Xun, Xiaojun Jia, Xinwei Liu, Simeng Qin, Hua Zhang

Title: The Emotional Baby Is Truly Deadly: Does Your Multimodal Large Reasoning Model Have Emotional Flattery Towards Humans?

Abstract:
Multimodal large reasoning models (MLRMs) have advanced visualtextual integration, enabling sophisticated human-AI interaction. While prior work has exposed MLRMs to visual jailbreaks, it remains underexplored how their reasoning capabilities reshape the security landscape under adversarial inputs. To fill this gap, we conduct a systematic security assessment of MLRMs and uncover a security-reasoning paradox: although deeper reasoning boosts cross‑modal risk recognition, it also creates cognitive blind spots that adversaries can exploit. We observe that MLRMs oriented toward human-centric service are highly susceptible to users' emotional cues during the deep-thinking stage, often overriding safety protocols or built‑in safety checks under high emotional intensity. Inspired by this key insight, we propose EmoAgent, an autonomous adversarial emotion-agent that orchestrates exaggerated affective prompts to hijack reasoning pathways. Even when visual risks are correctly identified, models can still produce harmful completions through emotional misalignment. We further identify persistent high-risk failure modes in transparent deep-thinking scenarios, such as MLRMs generating harmful reasoning masked behind seemingly safe responses. These failures expose misalignments between internal inference and surface-level behavior, eluding existing content-based safeguards. To quantify these risks, we introduce three metrics: (1) Risk-Reasoning Stealth Score (RRSS) for harmful reasoning beneath benign outputs; (2) Risk-Visual Neglect Rate (RVNR) for unsafe completions despite visual risk recognition; and (3) Refusal Attitude Inconsistency (RAIC) for evaluating refusal unstability under prompt variants. Extensive experiments on advanced MLRMs demonstrate the effectiveness of EmoAgent and reveal deeper emotional cognitive misalignments in model safety.

PaperID: 2744, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19238

Authors:Anna-Maria Gueorguieva, Aylin Caliskan

Affiliations: University of Washington

Title: Identifying Features Associated with Bias Against 93 Stigmatized Groups in Language Models and Guardrail Model Safety Mitigation

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to exhibit social bias however, bias towards nonprotected stigmatized identities remain understudied. Furthermore, what social features of stigmas are associated with bias in LLM outputs is unknown. From psychology literature, it has been shown that stigmas contain six shared features: aesthetics, concealability, course, disruptiveness, origin, and peril. In this study, we investigate if human and LLM ratings of the features of stigmas, along with prompt style and type of stigma, have effect on bias towards stigmatized groups in LLM outputs. We measure bias against 93 stigmatized groups across three widely used LLMs (Granite 3.0-8B, Llama-3.1-8B, Mistral-7B) using SocialStigmaQA, a benchmark that includes 37 social scenarios about stigmatized identities; for example deciding whether to recommend them for an internship. We find that stigmas rated by humans to be highly perilous (e.g., being a gang member or having HIV) have the most biased outputs from SocialStigmaQA prompts (60% of outputs from all models) while sociodemographic stigmas (e.g. Asian- American or old age) have the least amount of biased outputs (11%). We test if the amount of biased outputs could be decreased by using guardrail models, models meant to identify harmful input, using each LLM’s respective guardrail model (Granite Guardian 3.0, Llama Guard 3.0, Mistral Moderation API). We find that bias decreases significantly by 10.4% , 1.4%, and 7.8%, respectively. However, we show that features with significant effect on bias remain unchanged post-mitigation and that guardrail models often fail to recognize the intent of bias in prompts. This work has implications for using LLMs in scenarios involving stigmatized groups and we suggest future work towards improving guardrail models for bias mitigation.

PaperID: 2745, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.05721

Authors:Marco Antonio Stranisci, Christian Hardmeier

Affiliations: University of Turin aequa-tech, IT University of Copenaghen

Title: What Are They Filtering Out? An Experimental Benchmark of Filtering Strategies for Harm Reduction in Pretraining Datasets

Abstract:
Data filtering strategies are a crucial component to develop safe Large Language Models (LLM), since they support the removal of harmful contents from pretraining datasets. There is a lack of research on the actual impact of these strategies on vulnerable groups to discrimination, though, and their effectiveness has not been yet systematically addressed. In this paper we present a benchmark study of data filtering strategies for harm reduction aimed at providing a systematic evaluation on these approaches. We provide an overview 55 technical reports of English LMs and LLMs to identify the existing filtering strategies in literature and implement an experimental setting to test their impact against vulnerable groups. Our results show that the positive impact that strategies have in reducing harmful contents from documents has the side effect of increasing the underrepresentation of vulnerable groups to discrimination in datasets.

PaperID: 2746, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09407

Authors:Bichen Wang, Yixin Sun, Junzhe Wang, Hao Yang, Xing Fu, Yanyan Zhao, Si Wei, Shijin Wang, Bing Qin

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, iFLYTEK Co.

Title: CARE-Bench: A Benchmark of Diverse Client Simulations Guided by Expert Principles for Evaluating LLMs in Psychological Counseling

Abstract:
The mismatch between the growing demand for psychological counseling and the limited availability of services has motivated research into the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in this domain. Consequently, there is a need for a robust and unified benchmark to assess the counseling competence of various LLMs. Existing works, however, are limited by unprofessional client simulation, static questionand-answer evaluation formats, and unidimensional metrics. These limitations hinder their effectiveness in assessing a model's comprehensive ability to handle diverse and complex clients. To address this gap, we introduce CARE-Bench, a dynamic and interactive automated benchmark. It is built upon diverse client profiles derived from real-world counseling cases and simulated according to expert guidelines. CARE-Bench provides a multidimensional performance evaluation grounded in established psychological scales. Using CARE-Bench, we evaluate several general-purpose LLMs and specialized counseling models, revealing their current limitations. In collaboration with psychologists, we conduct a detailed analysis of the reasons for LLMs' failures when interacting with clients of different types, which provides directions for developing more comprehensive, universal, and effective counseling models.

PaperID: 2747, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.06530

Authors:Bowen Zhang, Hongda Tian, Adam Berry, A. Craig Roussac

Affiliations: University of Technology Sydney, Buildings Alive Pty Ltd.

Title: Improving Day-Ahead Grid Carbon Intensity Forecasting by Joint Modeling of Local-Temporal and Cross-Variable Dependencies Across Different Frequencies

Abstract:
Accurate forecasting of the grid carbon intensity factor (CIF) is critical for enabling demandside management and reducing emissions in modern electricity systems. Leveraging multiple interrelated time series, CIF prediction is typically formulated as a multivariate time series forecasting problem. Despite advances in deep learning-based methods, it remains challenging to capture the fine-grained local-temporal dependencies, dynamic higher-order cross-variable dependencies, and complex multi-frequency patterns for CIF forecasting. To address these issues, we propose a novel model that integrates two parallel modules: 1) one enhances the extraction of local-temporal dependencies under multi-frequency by applying multiple wavelet-based convolutional kernels to overlapping patches of varying lengths; 2) the other captures dynamic cross-variable dependencies under multi-frequency to model how inter-variable relationships evolve across the time-frequency domain. Evaluations on four representative electricity markets from Australia, featuring varying levels of renewable penetration, demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art models. An ablation study further validates the complementary benefits of the two proposed modules. Designed with built-in interpretability, the proposed model also enables better understanding of its predictive behavior, as shown in a case study where it adaptively shifts attention to relevant variables and time intervals during a disruptive event.

PaperID: 2748, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18910

Authors:Ziquan Wei, Tingting Dan, Guorong Wu

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of Psychiatry

Title: Large Connectome Model: An fMRI Foundation Model of Brain Connectomes Empowered by Brain-Environment Interaction in Multitask Learning Landscape

Abstract:
A reliable foundation model of functional neuroimages is critical to promote clinical applications where the performance of current AI models is significantly impeded by a limited sample size. To that end, tremendous efforts have been made to pretraining large models on extensive unlabeled fMRI data using scalable selfsupervised learning. Since self-supervision is not necessarily aligned with the brain-to-outcome relationship, most foundation models are suboptimal to the downstream task, such as predicting disease outcomes. By capitalizing on rich environmental variables and demographic data along with an unprecedented amount of functional neuroimages, we form the brain modeling as a multitask learning and present a scalable model architecture for (i) multitask pretraining by tokenizing multiple brain-environment interactions (BEI) and (ii) semi-supervised finetuning by assigning pseudo-labels of default BEI. We have evaluated our foundation model on a variety of applications, including sex prediction, human behavior recognition, and disease early diagnosis of Autism, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and Schizophrenia, where promising results indicate the great potential to facilitate current neuroimaging applications in clinical routines.

PaperID: 2749, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.07369

Authors:Tianyu Xin, Jin-Liang Xiao, Zeyu Xia, Shan Yin, Liang-Jian Deng

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Training and Inference Within 1 Second – Tackle Cross-Sensor Degradation of Real-World Pansharpening with Efficient Residual Feature Tailoring

Abstract:
Deep learning methods for pansharpening have advanced rapidly, yet models pretrained on data from a specific sensor often generalize poorly to data from other sensors. Existing methods to tackle such crosssensor degradation include retraining model or zero-shot methods, but they are highly time-consuming or even need extra training data. To address these challenges, our method first performs modular decomposition on deep learning-based pansharpening models, revealing a general yet critical interface where high-dimensional fused features begin mapping to the channel space of the final image. % may need revisement A Feature Tailor is then integrated at this interface to address cross-sensor degradation at the feature level, and is trained efficiently with physics-aware unsupervised losses. Moreover, our method operates in a patch-wise manner, training on partial patches and performing parallel inference on all patches to boost efficiency. Our method offer two key advantages: (1) Improved Generalization Ability: it significantly enhance performance in cross-sensor cases. (2) Low Generalization Cost: it achieves sub-second training and inference, requiring only partial test inputs and no external data, whereas prior methods often take minutes or even hours. Experiments on the real-world data from multiple datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art quality and efficiency in tackling cross-sensor degradation. For example, training and inference of 512 times 512 times 8 image within 0.2 seconds and 4000 times 4000 times 8 image within 3 seconds at the fastest setting on a commonly used RTX 3090 GPU, which is over 100 times faster than zero-shot methods.

PaperID: 2750, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.17150

Authors:Liuhan Yin, Runkun Ju, Guodong Guo, Erkang Cheng

Affiliations: Zhejiang University

Title: DiffRefiner: Coarse to Fine Trajectory Planning via Diffusion Refinement with Semantic Interaction for End to End Autonomous Driving

Abstract:
Unlike discriminative approaches in autonomous driving that predict a fixed set of candidate trajectories of the ego vehicle, generative methods, such as diffusion models, learn the underlying distribution of future motion, enabling more flexible trajectory prediction. However, since these methods typically rely on denoising humancraft trajectory anchors or random noise, there remains significant room for improvement. In this paper, we propose DiffRefiner, a novel two-stage trajectory prediction framework. The first stage employs a transformer-based Proposal Decoder to generate coarse trajectory predictions by regressing from sensor inputs using predefined trajectory anchors. The second stage applies a Diffusion Refiner that iteratively denoises and refines these initial predictions. In this way, we enhance the performance of diffusion-based planning by incorporating a discriminative trajectory proposal module, which provides strong guidance for the generative refinement process. Furthermore, we design a fine-grained denoising decoder to enhance scene compliance, enabling more accurate trajectory prediction through enhanced alignment with the surrounding environment. Experimental results demonstrate that DiffRefiner achieves state-of-the-art performance, attaining 87.4 EPDMS on NAVSIM v2, and 87.1 DS along with 71.4 SR on Bench2Drive, thereby setting new records on both public benchmarks. The effectiveness of each component is validated via ablation studies as well.

PaperID: 2751, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.09215

Authors:Jian Zhu, Zhengyu Jia, Tian Gao, Jiaxin Deng, Shidi Li, Lang Zhang, Fu Liu, Peng Jia, Xianpeng Lang

Affiliations: Li Auto inc.

Title: Other Vehicle Trajectories Are Also Needed: A Driving World Model Unifies Ego-Other Vehicle Trajectories in Video Latent Space

Abstract:
Advanced endto-end autonomous driving systems predict other vehicles' motions and plan ego vehicle's trajectory. The world model that can foresee the outcome of the trajectory has been used to evaluate the end-to-end autonomous driving system. However, existing world models predominantly emphasize the trajectory of the ego vehicle and leave other vehicles uncontrollable. This limitation hinders their ability to realistically simulate the interaction between the ego vehicle and the driving scenario. In addition, it remains a challenge to match multiple trajectories with each vehicle in the video to control the video generation. To address above issues, a driving World Model named EOT-WM is proposed in this paper, unifying Ego-Other vehicle Trajectories in videos. Specifically, we first project ego and other vehicle trajectories in the BEV space into the image coordinate to match each trajectory with its corresponding vehicle in the video. Then, trajectory videos are encoded by the Spatial-Temporal Variational Auto Encoder to align with driving video latents spatially and temporally in the unified visual space. A trajectory-injected diffusion Transformer is further designed to denoise the noisy video latents for video generation with the guidance of ego-other vehicle trajectories. In addition, we propose a metric based on control latent similarity to evaluate the controllability of trajectories. Extensive experiments are conducted on the nuScenes dataset, and the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 30% in FID and 55% in FVD. The model can also predict unseen driving scenes with self-produced trajectories.

PaperID: 2752, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10695

Authors:Jonghyeon Choi, Yeonjun Choi, Hyun-chul Kim, Beakcheol Jang

Affiliations: Yonsei University, Sangmyung University

Title: “As Eastern Powers, I Will Veto.”: An Investigation of Nation-Level Bias of Large Language Models in International Relations

Abstract:
This paper provides an early effort to systematically examine nationlevel biases exhibited by Large Language Models (LLMs) within the domain of International Relations (IR), a dimension that has remained largely unexplored in prior research. Leveraging historical records from the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), we developed a bias evaluation framework comprising three distinct tests to explore nation-level bias in various LLMs, with a particular focus on the five permanent members of the UNSC. Experimental results show that, even with the general bias patterns across models (e.g., favorable biases toward the western nations, and unfavorable biases toward Russia), these still vary based on the LLM. Notably, even within the same LLM, the direction and magnitude of bias for a nation change depending on the evaluation context. This observation suggests that LLM biases are fundamentally multidimensional, varying across models and tasks. We also observe that models with stronger reasoning abilities show reduced bias and better prediction performance. Building on this finding, we introduce a debiasing framework that improves LLMs’ factual reasoning combining Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Reflexion-based self-reflection techniques. Experiments show it effectively reduces nation-level bias, and improves performance, particularly in GPT-4o-mini and LLama-3.3-70B. Our findings emphasize the need to assess nation-level bias alongside prediction performance when applying LLMs in the IR domain.

PaperID: 2753, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.10089

Authors:Ashley Klein, Edward Raff, Marcia DesJardin

Affiliations: Ryu and Bartol OBGYN, CrowdStrike University of Maryland, Baltimore County, The University of Alabama at Birmingham

Title: Bayesian Meta-Analyses Could Be More: A Case Study in Trial of Labor After a Cesarean-section Outcomes and Complications

Abstract:
The metaanalysis's utility is dependent on previous studies having accurately captured the variables of interest, but in medical studies, a key decision variable that impacts a physician's decisions was not captured. This results in an unknown effect size and unreliable conclusions. A Bayesian approach may allow analysis to determine if the claim of a positive effect is still warranted, and we build a Bayesian approach to this common medical scenario. To demonstrate its utility, we assist professional OBGYNs in evaluating Trial of Labor After a Cesarean-section (TOLAC) situations where few interventions are available for patients and find the support needed for physicians to advance patient care.

PaperID: 2754, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08530

Authors:Zhonghao Wang, Junqiang Peng, Yuxi Liu, Mingyu Xiao

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: How Hard Is It to Rig a Tournament When Few Players Can Beat or Be Beaten by the Favorite?

Abstract:
In knockout tournaments, players compete in successive rounds, with losers eliminated and winners advancing until a single champion remains. Given a tournament digraph D, which encodes the outcomes of all possible matches, and a designated player v in V(D), the Tournament Fixing problem (TFP) asks whether the tournament can be scheduled in a way that guarantees v emerges as the winner. TFP is known to be NPhard, but is fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) when parameterized by structural measures such as the feedback arc set (fas) or feedback vertex set (fvs) number of the tournament digraph. In this paper, we introduce and study two new structural parameters: the number of players who can defeat v (i.e., the in-degree of v, denoted by k) and the number of players that v can defeat (i.e., the out-degree of v, denoted by l). A natural question is that: can TFP be efficiently solved when k or l is small? We answer this question affirmatively by showing that TFP is FPT when parameterized by either the in-degree or out-degree of v. Our algorithm for the in-degree parameterization is particularly involved and technically intricate. Notably, the in-degree k can remain small even when other structural parameters, such as fas or fvs, are large. Hence, our results offer a new perspective and significantly broaden the parameterized algorithmic understanding of the Tournament Fixing problem.

PaperID: 2755, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.07110

Authors:Tianhao Fu, Xinxin Xu, Weichen Xu, Jue Chen, Ruilong Ren, Bowen Deng, Xinyu Zhao, Jian Cao, Xixin Cao

Affiliations: Peking University

Title: Two Heads Are Better than One: Distilling Large Language Model Features into Small Models with Feature Decomposition and Mixture

Abstract:
Market making (MM) through Reinforcement Learning (RL) has attracted significant attention in financial trading. With the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), more and more attempts are being made to apply LLMs to financial areas. A simple, direct application of LLM as an agent shows significant performance. Such methods are hindered by their slow inference speed, while most of the current research has not studied LLM distillation for this specific task. To address this, we first propose the normalized fluorescent probe to study the mechanism of the LLM’s feature. Based on the observation found by our investigation, we propose Cooperative Market Making (CMM), a novel framework that decouples LLM features across three orthogonal dimensions: layer, task, and data. Various student models collaboratively learn simple LLM features along with different dimensions, with each model responsible for a distinct feature to achieve knowledge distillation. Furthermore, CMM introduces an HájekMoE to integrate the output of the student models by investigating the contribution of different models in a kernel function-generated common feature space. Extensive experimental results on four real-world market datasets demonstrate the superiority of CMM over the current distillation method and RL-based market-making strategies.

PaperID: 2756, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.21706

Authors:Hui Wang, Fafa Zhang, Xiaoyu Zhang, Chaoxu Mu

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University

Title: A General Highly Accurate Online Planning Method Integrating Large Language Models into Nested Rollout Policy Adaptation for Dialogue Tasks

Abstract:
In goaloriented dialogue tasks, the main challenge is to steer the interaction towards a given goal within a limited number of turns. Existing approaches either rely on elaborate prompt engineering, whose effectiveness is heavily dependent on human experience, or integrate policy networks and pre-trained policy models, which are usually difficult to adapt to new dialogue scenarios and costly to train. Therefore, in this paper, we present Nested Rollout Policy Adaptation for Goal-oriented Dialogue (NRPA-GD), a novel dialogue policy planning method that completely avoids specific model training by utilizing a Large Language Model (LLM) to simulate behaviors of user and system at the same time. Specifically, NRPA-GD constructs a complete evaluation mechanism for dialogue trajectories and employs an optimization framework of nested Monte Carlo simulation and policy self-adaptation to dynamically adjust policies during the dialogue process. The experimental results on four typical goal-oriented dialogue datasets show that NRPA-GD outperforms both existing prompt engineering and specifically pre-trained model-based methods. Impressively, NRPA-GD surpasses ChatGPT and pre-trained policy models with only a 0.6-billion-parameter LLM. The proposed approach further demonstrates the advantages and novelty of employing planning methods on LLMs to solve practical planning tasks.

PaperID: 2757, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08637

Authors:Chung Peng Lee, Rachel Hong, Harry H. Jiang, Aster Plotnik, William Agnew, Jamie Heather Morgenstern

Affiliations: Princeton University, University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Toronto

Title: How Do Data Owners Say No? A Case Study of Data Consent Mechanisms in Web-Scraped Vision-Language AI Training Datasets

Abstract:
The internet has become the main source of data to train modern textto-image or vision-language models, yet it is increasingly unclear whether web-scale data collection practices for training AI systems adequately respect data owners' wishes. Ignoring the owner's indication of consent around data usage not only raises ethical concerns but also has recently been elevated into lawsuits around copyright infringement cases. In this work, we aim to reveal information about data owners' consent to AI scraping and training, and study how it's expressed in DataComp, a popular dataset of 12.8 billion text-image pairs. We examine both the sample-level information, including the copyright notice, watermarking, and metadata, and the web-domain-level information, such as a site's Terms of Service (ToS) and Robots Exclusion Protocol. We estimate at least 122M of samples exhibit some indication of copyright notice in CommonPool, and find that 60% of the samples in the top 50 domains come from websites with ToS that prohibit scraping. Furthermore, we estimate 9-13% with 95% confidence interval of samples from CommonPool to contain watermarks, where existing watermark detection methods fail to capture them in high fidelity. Our holistic methods and findings show that data owners rely on various channels to convey data consent, of which current AI data collection pipelines do not entirely respect. These findings highlight the limitations of the current dataset curation/release practice and the need for a unified data consent framework taking AI purposes into consideration.

PaperID: 2758, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01341

Authors:Markus B. Pettersson, Connor Thomas Jerzak, Adel Daoud

Affiliations: Chalmers University of Technology, University of Texas at Austin, Linköping University

Title: Debiasing Machine Learning Predictions for Causal Inference Without Additional Ground Truth Data: “One Map, Many Trials” in Satellite-Driven Poverty Analysis

Abstract:
Machine learning models trained on Earth observation data, such as satellite imagery, have demonstrated significant promise in predicting householdlevel wealth indices, enabling the creation of high-resolution wealth maps that can be leveraged across multiple causal trials while addressing chronic data scarcity in global development research. However, because standard training objectives prioritize overall predictive accuracy, these predictions often suffer from shrinkage toward the mean, leading to attenuated estimates of causal treatment effects and limiting their utility in policy evaluations. Existing debiasing methods, such as Prediction-Powered Inference (PPI), can handle this attenuation bias but require additional fresh ground-truth data at the downstream stage of causal inference, which restricts their applicability in data-scarce environments. We introduce and evaluate two post-hoc correction methods—Linear Calibration Correction (LCC) and a Tweedie's correction approach—that substantially reduce shrinkage-induced prediction bias without relying on newly collected labeled data. LCC applies a simple linear transformation estimated on a held-out calibration split; Tweedie's method locally de-shrink predictions using density score estimates and a noise scale learned upstream. We provide practical diagnostics for when a correction is warranted and discuss practical limitations. Across analytical results, simulations, and experiments with Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data, both approaches reduce attenuation; Tweedie's correction yields nearly unbiased treatment-effect estimates, enabling a "one map, many trials" paradigm. Although we demonstrate on EO-ML wealth mapping, the methods are not geospatial-specific: they apply to any setting where imputed outcomes are reused downstream (e.g., pollution indices, population density, or LLM-derived indicators).

PaperID: 2759, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08504

Authors:Avni Kothari, Patrick Vossler, Jean Digitale, Mohammad Forouzannia, Elise Rosenberg, Michele Lee, Jenneé Bryant, Melanie Molina, James Marks, Lucas Zier, Jean Feng

Affiliations: University of California, San Francisco

Title: When the Domain Expert Has No Time and the LLM Developer Has No Clinical Expertise: Real-World Lessons from LLM Co-Design in a Safety-Net Hospital

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to address social and behavioral determinants of health by transforming labor intensive workflows in resourceconstrained settings. Creating LLM-based applications that serve the needs of underserved communities requires a deep understanding of their local context, but it is often the case that neither LLMs nor their developers possess this local expertise, and the experts in these communities often face severe time/resource constraints. This creates a disconnect: how can one engage in meaningful co-design of an LLM-based application for an under-resourced community when the communication channel between the LLM developer and domain expert is constrained? We explored this question through a real-world case study, in which our data science team sought to partner with social workers at a safety net hospital to build an LLM application that summarizes patients' social needs. Whereas prior works focus on the challenge of prompt tuning, we found that the most critical challenge in this setting is the careful and precise specification of what information to surface to providers so that the LLM application is accurate, comprehensive, and verifiable. Here we present a novel co-design framework for settings with limited access to domain experts, in which the summary generation task is first decomposed into individually-optimizable attributes and then each attribute is efficiently refined and validated through a multi-tier cascading approach.

PaperID: 2760

Authors:Lingxiao Kong, Jiahui Jiang, Wenchao Xu, Lei Wu

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Information Support Force Engineering University

Title: Backdooring Rationalization

Abstract:
Rationalization model has recently garnered significant attention for enhancing the interpretability of natural language processing by first using a generator to select the most relevant pieces from the text with respect to the label, before passing the text input to the predictor. However, the robustness of the rationalization models is not sufficiently investigated. Specifically, this paper explores the robustness of rationalization models against backdoor attacks, which has been ignored by previous studies. Surprisingly, we find that conventional backdoor attack techniques fail to inject triggers into the rationalization model because its generator can filter out bad triggers. Considering this, we further propose a novel backdoor attack method named as BadRNL designed specially for the rationalization models. The core idea of BadRNL is first to search for the personalized trigger for each specific dataset and then manipulate the rationales and labels to conduct attacks. Besides, BadRNL controls the order of sample learning through poisonpriority sampling strategies. Experimental results show that our method can successfully craft the predictions of samples containing triggers while maintaining the performance of the model on clean data.

PaperID: 2761

Authors:Ningbo Huang, Gang Zhou, Meng Zhang, Shunhang Li, Ling Wang, Shiyu Wang, Yi Xia

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Mathematical Engineering and Advanced Computing

Title: Context-aware Graph Meta-learning

Abstract:
Developing a universal graph model capable of generalizing across diverse graph domains has consistently been a key objective in graph learning. Recently, many studies have focused on achieving incontext learning (ICL) on graphs, which can generalize to novel tasks without the need for fine-tuning, similar to large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3. These researches can be primarily divided into graph-based methods and LLM-based methods. However, the generalization performance of the former is limited by the representation capability of GNNs, while the latter faces the challenge of LLMs understanding graph structures. Therefore, we propose CAGML, a context-aware graph meta-learning model, which learns to generalize to cross-domain and cross-granularity graph tasks using a meta-trained Transformer. Firstly, we formulate graph few-shot learning tasks as a structure-aware sequence modeling problem to unify cross-domain and cross-granularity tasks. Then, a structure-aware Transformer (SAT) is introduced as a graph in-context learner to make predictions with a few labels and the task-specific structural context. Finally, we pre-train SAT in a meta-optimization manner on large-scale citation network and knowledge graph. Experiments on 6 cross-domain graph datasets show that, without fine-tuning, CAGML can achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in terms of average performance across cross-granularity tasks on adopted datasets.

PaperID: 2762

Authors:Lei Li, Sen Jia, Jenq-Neng Hwang

Affiliations: University of Washington

Title: Multiple Human Motion Understanding

Abstract:
We introduce LLaMMo (Large Language and MultiPerson Motion Assistant), the first instruction-tuning multimodal framework tailored for multi-human motion analysis. LLaMMo incorporates a novel human-centric and social-temporal learner that models and fuses both intra-person dynamics and inter-person dependencies, yielding robust, context-aware representations of complex group behaviors while maintaining low computational overhead. To support LLaMMo, we construct LLaVerse, a large-scale dataset with fine-grained manual annotations covering diverse multi-person activities spanning daily social interaction and professional team sports. Built on top of LLaVerse, we also propose LLaMI-Bench, a dedicated benchmark for evaluating multi-human behavior understanding across motion and video modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LLaMMo consistently outperforms baselines in understanding multi-person interactions under low-latency settings, with notable gains in both social and sport-specific contexts.

PaperID: 2763

Authors:Ruben Becker, Bojana Kodric, Cosimo Vinci

Affiliations: Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Ericsson Nikola Tesla, Department of Mathematics and Physics ``Ennio De Giorgi'', University of Salento

Title: Greedily Maximizing Ex-Ante Fairness

Abstract:
We study a general framework of optimization with the aim to compute fair solutions in settings with a set of agents whose valuations are combined using an aggregation function. The strength of our framework lies (1) in its generality and (2) in the fact that we leverage the power of exante fairness, a concept that has recently gained much attention in the scope of fair allocation and fairness in AI in general. More precisely, in our setting there are n set functions f₁, …, fₙ (e.g., the valuation functions of n agents) that are combined using an aggregation function g (e.g., the minimum, Nash social welfare, p-norm). The power of ex-ante fairness is obtained by allowing as a feasible solution not simply a finite set S, but instead a distribution Π over feasible sets. The goal in our setting is then to find a probability distribution p in Π that maximizes the value resulting from aggregating (using g) the n expected values of the functions f₁, …, fₙ obtained when sampling a set S according to the distribution p. We stress that this is different from maximizing the expected value of g (ex-post fairness) and typically allows for much fairer solutions. We give three different greedy algorithms for three different settings of this framework and prove that they achieve constant approximation guarantees under certain realistic assumptions. For some of the settings, we show that these approximation guarantees are tight. Specific scenarios that can be modelled using our framework include fair information diffusion in social networks, fair submodular matching problems, and ex-ante versions of item assignment problems.

PaperID: 2764

Authors:Yahong Lian, Haotian Tian, Chunyao Song, Tingjian Ge

Affiliations: College of Computer Science, TJ Key Lab of NDST, TBI Center, Nankai University, College of Software, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell

Title: Sign-Aware Multimodal Graph Recommendation

Abstract:
A multimodal recommendation system (MRS), which leverages rich multimodal information to model user preferences, has recently attracted significant research interest. Most existing MRSs focus primarily on developing sophisticated encoders for feature extraction, typically relying on simple aggregation of interactionbased features for final predictions. However, this conventional paradigm fails to account for the critical semantic difference between high- and low-rating interactions: while high ratings indicate user preference, low ratings explicitly convey dissatisfaction. Such oversight of negative feedback semantics may significantly limit the system’s recommendation performance. Recently, sign graphs—which model positive and negative feedback signals separately—have gained considerable attention. Inspired by this approach, we propose Sign-Aware Multimodal Graph Recommendation (SiMGR), a novel framework incorporating signed graphs into multimodal recommendation systems. SiMGR fuses multimodal features with signed interactions in a unified graph framework by integrating modality-specific representations and applying user-level thresholds to separate positive and negative subgraphs. A balanced pseudo-edge augmentation strategy is introduced to alleviate sparsity and enhance generalization. Experiments on three public multimodal recommendation datasets show that SiMGR outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average 4.28% improvement in NDCG@20.

PaperID: 2765

Authors:Sanmay Das, Fang-Yi Yu, Yuang Zhang

Affiliations: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, George Mason University

Title: Optimally Auditing Adversarial Agents

Abstract:
Fraud can pose a challenge in many resource allocation domains, including social service delivery and credit provision. For example, agents may misreport private information in order to gain benefits or access to credit. To mitigate this, a principal can design strategic audits to verify claims and penalize misreporting. In this paper, we introduce a general model of audit policy design as a principalagent game with multiple agents, where the principal commits to an audit policy, and agents collectively choose an equilibrium that minimizes the principal’s utility. We examine both adaptive and non-adaptive settings, depending on whether the principal's policy can be responsive to the distribution of agent reports. Our work provides efficient algorithms for computing optimal audit policies in both settings and extends these results to a setting with limited audit budgets.

PaperID: 2766

Authors:Thekla Hamm, Paloma T. de Lima

Affiliations: Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, Norwegian School of Economics, Norway IT University of Copenhagen

Title: Edge-Binary Public Goods Games

Abstract:
Binary networked public goods games model situations in which players can choose whether to participate in an action at some cost which benefits players in their immediate vicinity within some typically social or infrastructural network. An important underlying assumption for this model is that participation in an action impacts the entire vicinity of participating players. However, there are numerous natural settings in which participation influences only a subset of the neighbors and is in fact more "interactionspecific''. In this work, we introduce a type of game that is more appropriate in such settings. We initiate the investigation of these games, by studying the complexity of deciding existence of their Nash equilibria in general and with respect to well-motivated structural restrictions on the network. The outcome is a comprehensive understanding of the complexity of computing Nash equilibria with respect to any combination of three natural properties of the network structure.

PaperID: 2767

Authors:Jinqian Chen, Jihua Zhu, Haoyu Tang, Qinghai Zheng

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, School of Software, Shandong University, College of Computer and Data Science, Fuzhou University

Title: Pseudo Multi-view K-means Clustering

Abstract:
Clustering with kmeans is well-established and efficient, but often struggles with complex data distributions because the clustering performance hinges on how well the centroids capture the data distribution, and conventional k-means usually fails to produce representative centroids under such conditions. To address this limitation, we propose Pseudo Multi-view K-means Clustering (PMKC), a novel framework that simulates a multi-view learning paradigm within a single-view setting by generating multiple soft k-means decompositions. Each decomposition can be treated as an individual view and investigates a distinct perspective of the data. Specifically, to encourage complementary structure, we impose an independence constraint among cluster centers, and to integrate these diverse clusterings, we model the soft assignment matrices as a third-order tensor and apply low-rank regularization to extract a shared latent structure. This design not only enhances clustering robustness but also improves the stability and consistency of the final results. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that PMKC achieves superior clustering performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 2768

Authors:Mengqiao Han, Liyuan Pan, Xiabi Liu, Hongming Zhang

Affiliations: Northwest A&F University, Beijing Institute of Technology

Title: Oligodendrocyte-Driven Spiking Neural Model

Abstract:
The spiking neuron model (SNM) mimics the processing paradigm of synaptic and membrane potentials in the cerebral cortex. However, existing SNMs are limited by two issues. First, they lack spike diversity. Although a spiking neuron perceives temporally varying input currents, SNMs only use identical synaptic weights for regulation. Second, they are insensitive to weak spikes. The potential accumulation in SNMs is solely driven by external inputs, ignoring the internal dynamics of potential. Oligodendrocytes, a recent revelation in neuroscience, enhance neural signaling by forming bidirectional communication. This offers the potential to alleviate the aforementioned issues. In this paper, we first propose the mechanism of the oligodendrocytespiking neuron (Oli-N) model. Subsequently, using the Oli-N model, we develop our Oli-inspired spiking neural network (Oli-SNN), which broadens the diversity of spike representations and enhances neurons' firing precision through improved sparse coding to enhance weak spikes. Experiments show that our Oli-SNN achieves state-of-the-art performance in the classification task on both static and neuromorphic datasets.

PaperID: 2769

Authors:Zhengzhang Hou, Zhanshan Li, Yanbo Liu, Geoff Nitschke, You Lu, Ximing Li

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, China Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of the MoE, Department of Computer Science, University of Pretoria, South Africa, University of Cape Town, Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology, China RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project

Title: Denoising Mixup for Regression

Abstract:
Data augmentation is an intuitive solution to increase the diversity of training instances in the machine learning community. Mixup is acknowledged as an effective and efficient mixbased data augmentation method, following a linear alignment assumption that the linear interpolations of features align the corresponding linear interpolations of labels. Unfortunately, this assumption can be violated in many complex scenarios, resulting in augmented instances with noisy labels, especially for regression problems. To solve this problem, we propose an easy-to-implement mixup method, namely DEnosing MIXUP (DE-mixup), which iteratively corrects the noisy response targets by leveraging an auxiliary noise estimation task with mixup deep features. Additionally, we suggest an efficient optimization method with alternating direction method of multipliers. We compare DE-mixup with the existing mixup variants and other prevalent data augmentation methods across benchmark regression datasets. Empirical results indicate the effectiveness of DE-mixup under the in-distribution and out-of-distribution cases.

PaperID: 2770

Authors:Mengyang Li, Pinlong Zhao

Affiliations: Tianjin Normal University, Hangzhou Dianzi University

Title: Difficulty-Aware Learning Curve Extrapolation

Abstract:
Learning Curve Extrapolation (LCE) is a critical technique for accelerating automated machine learning by terminating unpromising training runs early. Recent stateof-the-art methods have improved predictive accuracy by incorporating contextual information, such as neural network architecture. However, these approaches, whether context-agnostic or architecture-aware, still operate under the implicit assumption of a uniform task landscape. They overlook a pivotal, complementary factor: the intrinsic difficulty of the learning task itself. This oversight leads to significant performance degradation, especially for tasks whose learning dynamics diverge from the model's priors. In this work, we argue that task difficulty is a crucial yet neglected dimension for robust LCE. We introduce Difficulty-Aware Learning Curve Extrapolation (DA-LCE), which explicitly conditions its predictions on task complexity. Our core contributions are threefold: (1) We propose a transparent, rule-based method to quantify task difficulty from early learning curve dynamics, eliminating the need for external meta-features. (2) We design a novel data generation pipeline using conditional diffusion models to create high-fidelity, difficulty-conditioned synthetic training data. (3) We introduce a Transformer-based predictor that leverages difficulty information to achieve superior accuracy across diverse benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms both difficulty-agnostic and architecture-aware baselines, with task difficulty emerging as a powerful conditioning signal whose impact matches or exceeds that of model architecture.

PaperID: 2771

Authors:Wenshuo Wang, Edvard Bakhitov, Dominic Coey

Affiliations:

Title: Experimentation on Endogenous Graphs

Abstract:
We study experimentation under endogenous network interference. Interference patterns are mediated by an endogenous graph, where edges can be formed or eliminated as a result of treatment. We show that conventional estimators are biased in these circumstances, and present a class of unbiased, consistent and asymptotically normal estimators of total treatment effects in the presence of such interference. We show via simulation that our estimator outperforms existing estimators in the literature. Our results apply both to bipartite experimentation, in which the units of analysis and measurement differ, and the standard network experimentation case, in which they are the same.

PaperID: 2772

Authors:Xiangyu Wang, Yanze Gao, Changxin Rong, Lyuzhou Chen, Derui Lyu, Xiren Zhou, Taiyu Ban, Huanhuan Chen

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China

Title: CounterfactualDriven Zero-Shot Classifier Expansion

Abstract:
Zeroshot classifier expansion aims to adapt existing model to new, unseen classes. It utilizes class attributes or textual descriptions to learn a mapping from the semantic space to the classifier's weight space, without requiring new visual training data. However, the learning process for this mapping relies solely on correlating semantic patterns with their corresponding classifier weights and lacks explicit modeling of inter-class differences. This makes it difficult for the model to capture the critical discriminative features required to define classification boundaries. To overcome this limitation, we reframe the problem from a causal perspective and introduce a novel framework driven by counterfactuals. Our method first generates factual descriptions alongside corresponding inter-class counterfactuals to pinpoint the causal attributes essential for classification, then refines these representations via a mutual purification process, and finally leverages a novel separation loss to explicitly push the factual and counterfactual classifier weights apart. This strategy forces the model to forge clearer and more discriminative classification boundaries, achieving more accurate and robust classification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 2773

Authors:Zhihao Wang, Xiaoying Liao, Wenke Huang, Bingqian Liu, Tian Chen, Jian Wang, Bing Li

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Changsha Bus Group Central South University of Forestry and Technology

Title: Federated Context-Aware Personalized Recommendation

Abstract:
Federated recommender system is emerging as a new paradigm for providing personalized services while preserving user data privacy. Most existing personalized federated recommender systems predict the user's next item by discretely training user and item embeddings. However, this training approach overlooks the user's behavioral patterns, suffers from low interpretability, and requires a substantial amount of data and meticulous finetuning to achieve stable and accurate embeddings. To address these limitations, we propose Federated Context-Aware Personalized Recommendation (FedCAR), a novel framework that leverages users’ recent interactions as behavioral context to guide prediction. Instead of static user embeddings, FedCAR dynamically constructs context representations by aggregating and weighting recently interacted item embeddings. Additionally, we incorporate a contrastive learning strategy that enables the model to capture shared behavioral structures across clients while maintaining personalized preferences, enhancing both generalization and robustness in heterogeneous settings. Experiments on 5 benchmark datasets show that FedCAR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods and provides interpretable recommendations by explicitly modeling context dependencies.

PaperID: 2774

Authors:Xu Yang, Moqi Li, Kun Wei

Affiliations: Xidian University

Title: Diffusion-calibrated Continual Test-time Adaptation

Abstract:
Continual TestTime Domain Adaptation (CTTA) aims to adapt a pre-trained source model to a dynamically evolving target domain without requiring additional data collection or labeling efforts. A key challenge in this setting is to achieve rapid performance improvement in the current domain using unlabeled data, while avoiding impairing generalization to future domains in complex scenarios. To enhance the discriminative capability of the inference models, we propose a novel framework that integrates an external auxiliary generative model with a test-time adaptive method, leveraging cross-validation to identify reliable supervisory signals. Specifically, for each test instance, we utilize a diffusion module to generate a calibrated instance under the textual description of its predicted category. Based on the generated one, we design a learning strategy with the following components: (1) the calibrated instance and its category are used to form a supervisory signal; (2) the predicted category of the calibrated instance is compared with the test instance for selecting reliable signals. For these generated and selected instances, adaptive weighting is applied during optimization to stabilize the category distribution and preserve prediction diversity. Finally, based on the inverse process of diffusion, we construct the negative instance of the generated instance and introduce a robust contrastive learning to further calibrate model optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each proposed component.

PaperID: 2775

Authors:Shanshan Ye, Kezhi Lu, Guangquan Zhang, Jie Lu

Affiliations: University of Technology Sydney

Title: PARS: Partial-Label-Learning-inspired Recommender Systems

Abstract:
Recommender systems are widely required and deployed to address realworld problems. In this paper, we study a new yet challenging real-world setting for recommender systems, where only user browsing histories are available without any explicit feedback. No item acquisition information, e.g., purchasing or rating, is given. By assuming that user browsing sequences are likely to contain the items to acquire, we draw an analogy to the setting of partial label learning in weakly supervised learning. This enables us to train reliable recommender systems only using browsing histories. We term the proposed method as Partial Acquisition Recommender System (PARS). Empirical results on real-world benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method. Surprisingly, we also show that the proposed method even surpasses some baselines using item acquisition information.

PaperID: 2776

Authors:Ruochong Zheng, Yutian Liu, Yian Zhao, Zhiwei Nie, Xuehan Hou, Chang Liu, Siwei Ma, Youdong Mao, Jie Chen

Affiliations: School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Shenzhen Graduate School, Peking University, China AI for Science Program, School of Computer Science, Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, School of Physics, China Center for Quantitative Biology, China National Biomedical Imaging Center, China Peking-Tsinghua Joint Center for Life Sciences

Title: BiHiTo: Biomolecular Hierarchy-inspired Tokenization

Abstract:
Threedimensional atomic arrangements of biomolecules are key to demystifying biological functions. The rapid expansion of accessible structural data, driven by advances in AI for science, highlights the critical challenge of efficiently modeling large-scale biomolecular structures, which are high-dimensional systems shaped by biological assembly principles. To address this, we introduce BiHiTo, a multi-level Biomolecular Hierarchy-inspired Tokenizer that intrinsically mimics natural biological assembly hierarchies. Specifically, we design a multi-codebook quantizer that mirrors the natural hierarchy of biomolecular structure, enabling simultaneous capture of representations spanning atomic motifs to global conformational variations. This hierarchical alignment markedly improves the biological interpretability and reconstruction fidelity of biomolecular structure.Extensive experiments demonstrate that BiHiTo delivers state-of-the-art performance and robust generalization across molecular dynamics trajectories and macromolecular complexes, facilitating advances in structure generation and dynamic conformation exploration. In the reconstruction of the CASP14 and OOD test set FastFolding protein multi-conformation data, our method achieves a 17% and 51% reduction in RMSD compared to Bio2Token, respectively.

PaperID: 2777

Authors:Guoliang Zou, Tongji Chen, Sijia Li, Jin Qin, Yangdong Ye, Shizhe Hu

Affiliations: Zhengzhou University

Title: Interest-driven Deep Multi-modal Clustering

Abstract:
Deep multimodal clustering fully learns semantically consistent and discriminative cluster representations between multiple modalities in an unlabeled manner. However, existing methods treat all samples equally, ignoring varying sample quality, which limits clustering performance. Inspired by the concept of interest in the recommendation system, we propose a novel interest-driven deep multi-modal clustering (IDMC) framework. It designs a new paradigm to quantify the importance of each sample base on the attention it receives from other samples, which called interest value. This value jointly captures the local geometric structure through the Euclidean distance in feature space and the consistency of pseudo-labels. Then, we design a novel adaptive Bayesian fusion mechanism to dynamically balance the prior features and self-supervisory signals to ensure confidence-based sample importance estimation. Furthermore, we introduce a median normalization constraint and a label consistency constraint to further refine the construction of the interest value. By embedding this interest-guided value into representation learning and cluster optimization, IDMC focuses on the samples with the most information and the most stable semantics, thereby enhancing the performance of multi-modal representation learning. Extensive experiments verify that IDMC is superior to existing state-of-the-art methods in multiple evaluation metrics.

PaperID: 2778

Authors:Guozheng Li, Xinyu Zhang

Affiliations: Southeast University

Title: K-STaR: Knowledge-Aware Self-Taught Reasoner

Abstract:
Selftraining large language models (LLMs) with generated reasoning paths has emerged as a promising approach to improve performance on complex reasoning tasks. However, most existing methods rely on correctness-based supervision, treating samples that reach the correct answer as high-quality despite potentially flawed intermediate steps, leading to noisy training signals. In this work, we propose K-STaR (Knowledge-aware Self-Taught Reasoner), a self-training framework that verifies reasoning paths through knowledge elicitation and integration as a proxy, without requiring any external reward models or dense step-by-step annotations. K-STaR models reasoning as a structured composition of knowledge units and automatically assigns process rewards to intermediate steps via consistency and frequency analysis, ensuring that only knowledge-grounded reasoning paths are retained. Experiments on mathematical and commonsense reasoning tasks show that K-STaR consistently discovers higher-quality reasoning paths and achieves superior self-training performance compared to prior methods. Our results highlight the importance of moving beyond correctness-centric supervision toward knowledge-grounded self-improvement.

PaperID: 2779

Authors:Xing Tan, Alban Grastien

Affiliations: Lakehead University

Title: Inapproximability of STRIPS Planning

Abstract:
Automated planning involves finding a sequence of actions that changes the world from an initial state to a final state with goals satisfied. The general problem is PSPACEhard. Nevertheless, many restricted variants are NP-complete or even in P. Existing complexity work focuses mostly on plan existence, or plan with minimal plan length. Little is known about optimization variants that aim to satisfy as many goal conditions as possible. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by providing a first inapproximability study of goal-maximization using the classical STRIPS formalism. For MAXPLANSAT and its length-bounded counterpart MAXPLANSAT(K), we prove tight constant-factor lower bounds. More specifically, through performing L-reductions from MAXE3SAT and MAX3DM, we show several of these problems are inapproximable by a constant factor, unless P=NP.

PaperID: 2780

Authors:Hasti Nourmohammadi, Ying Cao, Bo Sun, Xiaoqi Tan

Affiliations: University of Alberta, Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, University of Ottawa, Vector Institute

Title: Ordinal Secretaries with Advice

Abstract:
We study the ordinal secretary problem, where a sequence of candidates arrives in uniformly random order, and the goal is to select the best candidate using only pairwise comparisons. We consider a learningaugmented setting that incorporates potentially erroneous predictions about the best candidate’s position. Our goal is to design online algorithms that balance robustness against poor predictions while having high performance when predictions are accurate. Using an optimization-based framework, we develop deterministic and randomized algorithms that extend classical strategies and explicitly model the trade-off between consistency and robustness. Also, we show the flexibility of our approach by applying it to multiple secretary problem variants, including multiple-choice and rehiring.

PaperID: 2781

Authors:Zihan Qi, Zeyu Xiao, Haoyi Zhao, Yang Zhao, Feng Xue, Wei Jia

Affiliations: Hefei University of Technology, National University of Singapore

Title: Event-Guided Scene Text Image Super-Resolution

Abstract:
Scene text image superresolution aims to enhance text legibility by recovering high-resolution text images from low-resolution inputs. However, maintaining fine details such as text strokes, edges, and textual accuracy remains challenging, particularly in low-light environments and high-speed motion scenarios, where degradation is more severe. Event cameras, with their high temporal resolution and ability to capture intensity changes, offer a promising solution for restoring lost fine details and mitigating degradation in these challenging conditions. In this paper, we propose EvTSR, the first framework that integrates Event data for scene Text image Super-Resolution. The core of EvTSR is the dual-stream frequency boost (DSFB) mechanism, which separates image features into high- and low-frequency components. High-frequency details like edges and strokes are enhanced using event data via the event-guided high-frequency (EGH) mechanism, while low-frequency components, responsible for global structure, are refined using the Text-Guided Low-frequency (TGL) mechanism with a pre-trained text recognizer, ensuring textual coherence. To further improve cross-modal integration, we introduce the cross-modal fusion (CMF) mechanism, which effectively aligns event and image features, enabling robust information fusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EvTSR achieves superior performance over existing methods.

PaperID: 2782

Authors:Qianqian Wang, Haiming Xu, Wei Feng, Quanxue Gao

Affiliations: Xidian University, Northwest A&F University

Title: Adversarial Fair Incomplete Multi-View Clustering

Abstract:
Fair incomplete multiview clustering (FIMVC) confronts a critical yet unresolved challenge, as existing methods often fail to address the intertwined issues of data missingness and algorithmic bias simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a novel FIMVC method named Adversarial Fair Incomplete Multi-View Clustering (AFIMVC). The core of AFIMVC is a new adaptive adversarial disentanglement mechanism. This mechanism trains the feature encoder to produce representations that are invariant to sensitive attributes by adversary learning, where the adversarial intensity is dynamically controlled by the model's real-time bias. Additionally, we develop a probabilistic cross-view contrastive learning strategy to achieve semantic consistency in latent space. To handle missing data, AFIMVC employs a context-aware fusion strategy that leverages cross-sample attention to robustly synthesize a unified representation from incomplete views. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AFIMVC achieves a state-of-the-art balance between clustering accuracy and fairness, significantly outperforming existing methods.

PaperID: 2783

Authors:Jeremias Berg, André Schidler, Matti Järvisalo

Affiliations: University of Helsinki, University of Freiburg

Title: Ordered Objectives in Maximum Satisfiability

Abstract:
Maximum satisfiability (MaxSAT) is a viable approach to solving NPhard combinatorial optimization problems through propositional encodings. Understanding how problem structure and encodings impact the behaviour of different MaxSAT solving algorithms is an important challenge. In this work, we identify MaxSAT instances in which the constraints entail an ordering of the objective variables as an interesting instance class from the perspectives of problem structure and MaxSAT solving. From the problem structure perspective, we show that a non-negligible percentage of instances in commonly used MaxSAT benchmark sets have ordered objectives and further identify various examples of such problem domains to which MaxSAT solvers have been successfully applied. From the algorithmic perspective, we argue that MaxSAT instances with ordered objectives, provided an ordering, can be solved (at least) as efficiently with a very simplistic algorithmic approach as with modern core-based MaxSAT solving algorithms. We show empirically that state-of-the-art MaxSAT solvers suffer from overheads and are outperformed by the simplistic approach on real-world optimization problems with ordered objectives.

PaperID: 2784

Authors:Ramiz Gindullin, María Andreína Francisco Rodríguez

Affiliations: Uppsala University

Title: Constraint Optimization of MicroPlate Designs

Abstract:
Standardized microplates are used to conduct largescale biomedical research. The design of microplate layouts plays an essential role in handling so-called plate effects, i.e., systematic variations across the geometry of a microplate. An effective layout allows us to detect and negate plate effects. The randomized placement of controls and compounds produces layouts of limited effectiveness, so specific approaches are needed. A previously developed system, PLAID, proposed a constraint satisfaction model to construct effective plate layouts. However, PLAID does not scale well with microplate dimensions. To improve on PLAID, we propose Constraint Optimization of MicroPlate Designs (COMPD), which allows for greater flexibility and higher quality of the layouts.

PaperID: 2785

Authors:Pierre Talbot

Affiliations: University of Luxemburg

Title: A GPU-based Constraint Programming Solver

Abstract:
Machine learning has tremendously benefited from graphics processing units (GPUs) to accelerate training and inference by several orders of magnitude. However, this success has not been replicated in general and exact combinatorial optimization. Our key contribution is to propose a generalpurpose discrete constraint programming solver fully implemented on GPU. It is based on integer interval bound propagation and backtracking search. The two main ingredients are (1) ternary constraint network optimized for GPU architectures, and (2) an on-demand subproblems generation strategy. Our constraint solving algorithm is significantly simpler than those found in optimized CPU constraint solvers, yet is competitive with sequential solvers in the MiniZinc 2024 challenge.

PaperID: 2786

Authors:Yuchen Liu, Kunyu Ni, Zhongying Zhao, Guoqing Chao, Yanwei Yu

Affiliations: Faculty of Information Science and Engineering, Ocean University of China, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Department of Software Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: S²HyRec: Self-Supervised Hypergraph Sequential Recommendation

Abstract:
Sequential recommendation models analyze user historical behavior sequences to capture temporal dependencies and the dynamic evolution of interests, enabling accurate predictions of future behaviors. However, there are still two critical challenges that remain unsolved: i) Inadequate temporal modeling of user intent, which fails to distinguish between global intent tendency and temporal contextual intent. ii) Noise in sequential interaction data may introduce bias into the model. To address these issues, we propose a SelfSupervised Hypergraph Sequential Recommendation Framework (S2HyRec). This framework features the Global Intent Tendency module for capturing long-term preferences, the Temporal Contextual Intent module for modeling dynamic time-sensitive interests. Additionally, we develop the Sequence Dependency-Aware module that analyzes the chronological flow of interactions to uncover inherent behavioral dynamics, further enriching the comprehensive user intent representation. To mitigate noisy interactions, we employ a Cross-View Self-Supervised Learning module that enhances the model's ability to distinguish genuine preferences from noise. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of S2HyRec over various state-of-the-art recommendation methods, especially achieving average improvements of 15.13% and 14.03% in NDCG@10 and NDCG@20, respectively, across the four datasets.

PaperID: 2787

Authors:Song-Li Wu, Zhaocheng Du, Qinglin Jia, Zhenhua Dong

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab

Title: REACTION: Parameter-Efficient Learning for Recommendation

Abstract:
While deep learning (DL) has demonstrated significant success in recommender systems, it suffers from high computational complexity and poor scalability. In this work, we demonstrate, from an informationtheoretic perspective, the redundancy of existing DL-based recommender models in two aspects: (1) Feature Redundancy. We show that many features are highly mutually correlated, noisy, or weakly predictive of user-item interaction labels. (2) Structural Redundancy. We further show that a large proportion of parameters in the dense layers contribute minimally to overall performance, indicating significant redundancy within the model architecture. To address these challenges, we propose REACTION (paRameter-Efficient LeArning for recommendaTION), an information-theoretic framework designed to reduce model complexity without sacrificing performance. REACTION consists of two core components: Adaptive Feature Extraction (AFE) leverages mutual information to project high-dimensional sparse features into a compact, informative subspace. This adaptively filters noisy or weak features, reduces embedding parameters, and preserves implicit feature interactions without explicit high-order computation. Dynamic Tower Fusion (DTF) bridges the representational gap between dual-tower expressiveness and single-tower efficiency. It facilitates rich cross-tower interactions during training, then merges the towers into a unified, low-latency single tower for inference. Extensive experiments on four large-scale benchmarks demonstrate that REACTION not only outperforms existing methods in accuracy but also achieves a drastic reduction in both model parameters and inference costs, thus establishing a new paradigm for efficient and scalable recommendation systems.

PaperID: 2788

Authors:Andrea Cuteri, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Francesco Ricca

Affiliations: University of Calabria

Title: 2-ASP(Q) Solving Based on CEGAR

Abstract:
The ASP(Q) language extends Answer Set Programming (ASP) with Quantifiers that operate over answer sets. Thus, ASP(Q) facilitates a more natural encoding of problems whose complexity exceeds NP within the ASP framework. In this paper we focus on ASP(Q) programs with two quantifiers, i.e., 2ASP(Q) programs, which can be used to model problems in the second level of the Polynomial Hierarchy. In particular, we propose an approach for evaluating 2-ASP(Q) programs that is inspired by Counterexample Guided ion Refinement (CEGAR). Unlike existing state-of-the-art ASP(Q) solvers, which are typically based on QBF solvers, our new approach leverages ASP solvers, and suffers no overhead due to the effects of translating ASP(Q) in QBF. Experimental results demonstrate that our technique consistently outperforms state-of-the-art ASP(Q) solvers, across benchmark problems located at the second level of the polynomial hierarchy.

PaperID: 2789

Authors:Nima Motamed, Natasha Alechina, Mehdi Dastani, Dragan Doder

Affiliations: Utrecht University, The Netherlands, Open University

Title: Rational Revision of Group Intentions

Abstract:
In systems such as group calendars or collaborative platforms, agents make group commitments to future actions that must adapt as new facts or constraints emerge. We develop a formal framework for revising such group intentions in systems where coalitions adopt shared, temporally extended intentions represented in a logic based on AlternatingTime Temporal Logic with strategy contexts. After formulating coherence criteria for systems of group intentions, we establish representation theorems in the style of Katsuno and Mendelzon, showing that revision operators satisfy rationality postulates precisely when they can be represented by preorders on strategy profiles. These results extend classical revision theory by covering non-total preorders and a logic of higher expressive power. Altogether, the framework lays the groundwork for principled revision of group intentions in systems where both coordination and change are essential.

PaperID: 2790

Authors:Juliete Rossie, Jérôme Delobelle, Sébastien Konieczny, Srdjan Vesic

Affiliations: Univ. Artois, Université Paris Cité

Title: Truth-Tracking Evaluation in Opinion-Based Argumentation

Abstract:
Truthtracking in collective reasoning systems is a core challenge in domains such as e-democracy, online deliberation, and citizen opinion polling. Our prior work introduced Opinion-Based Argumentation (OBA), a framework modeling both voting and argumentation, along with collective opinion semantics (COS) designed to select sets of arguments that are mutually coherent and aligned with agents' votes. In this paper, we first formally define the truth-tracking problem within OBA. We then introduce VAST, a comprehensive evaluation framework to systematically assess the epistemic adequacy of COS. Our empirical analysis, conducted using VAST, demonstrates substantial variation in their truth-tracking performance across diverse deliberative conditions.

PaperID: 2791

Authors:Haiduo Huang, Tian Xia, Wenzhe Zhao, Pengju Ren

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University

Title: PartialNet: Compute Less, Perform Better

Abstract:
Achieving a balance between low parameter count, reduced FLOPs, and high accuracy and throughput remains a central challenge in neural network design. To address this, we propose the partial channel mechanism (PCM), which leverages the inherent redundancy in feature map channels. PCM divides feature map channels into multiple groups, each processed by distinct operations such as convolution, attention, pooling, or identity mapping. Building on this, we introduce partial attention convolution (PATConv), a novel module that efficiently fuses convolution and visual attention within a unified framework. Our results demonstrate that PATConv can fully replace both standard convolution and visual attention modules, leading to significant reductions in parameters and FLOPs. Furthermore, PATConv enables three efficient visual attention variants: Partial Channel Attention, Partial Spatial Attention, and Partial SelfAttention. To further optimize the allocation of channel splits, we propose dynamic partial convolution (DPConv), which adaptively learns the optimal split ratio for each layer, achieving a better trade-off between speed and accuracy. By integrating PATConv and DPConv, we develop a new hybrid network family, PartialNet, which achieves superior top-1 accuracy and inference speed on ImageNet-1K, and demonstrates strong performance on COCO detection and segmentation tasks.

PaperID: 2792

Authors:Jaesung Lim, Seunghwan An, Jong-June Jeon

Affiliations: University of Seoul, S. Korea, Department of Information and Telecommunication Engineering, Incheon National University, Department of Statistics

Title: Impute Missing Entries with Uncertainty

Abstract:
Missing data presents a widespread challenge in realworld data collection. In this paper, our goal is to impute missing entries while accurately reflecting the uncertainty associated with them. We introduce U-VAE, a method that employs a non-parametric distributional learning strategy to parameterize the likelihood of missing values. To address the infeasibility of directly estimating the underlying conditional distributions due to data incompleteness, we incorporate stochastic re-masking and un-masking techniques during training. Specifically, we replace the conventional reconstruction loss with the continuous ranked probability score (CRPS), a strictly proper scoring rule, and theoretically demonstrate that the discrepancy between the underlying conditional distribution and our imputer is upper-bounded. We evaluate the performance of U-VAE on 11 real-world datasets, showing its effectiveness in both single and multiple imputations, while also enhancing post-imputation performance and supporting valid statistical inference.

PaperID: 2793

Authors:Jingxin Liu, Wenxuan Tu, Renda Han, Junlong Wu, Haotian Wang, Guohui Liu, Xiangyan Tang, Yue Yang

Affiliations: School of Cyberspace Security, Hainan University, School of Computer Science and Technology

Title: Personalized Federated Graph-Level Clustering Network

Abstract:
In the federated clustering task, structural heterogeneity across clients inevitably impedes effective multisource information sharing. To solve this issue, Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) has emerged as a potentially effective solution for image and text clustering. Unlike Euclidean data, graph-structured data exhibits diverse and fragile local patterns, which widely exist in real-world scenarios. Multi-graph data analysis in the federated learning setting is challenging and important, yet remains underexplored. This motivates us to propose a novel PERsonalized Federated graph-lEvel Clustering neTwork (PERFECT), which generates a specialized aggregation strategy for each client by uploading key model parameters and representative samples without sharing private information. Specifically, for each client, we first reconstruct privacy-preserving representative samples in a min-max optimization manner and then upload these samples to the server for subsequent personalized parameter aggregation. On the server, we first extract graph-level embeddings from the uploaded data, and then estimate affinities among multiple learned embeddings to formulate a personalized aggregation strategy for each client. Subsequently, to help each local model better identify the cluster boundaries, we utilize clustering-wise gradient to update the key components in the personalized model parameters from the server. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness and superiority of PERFECT over its competitors.

PaperID: 2794

Authors:Tao Tong, Xiaofeng Zhu, Jiangzhang Gan

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Hainan University

Title: Meta-GAIN for Missing Data Imputation

Abstract:
Although previous deep imputation methods (eg., Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based methods) have been widely designed to impute missing data, they still suffer from the issues, ie., lack of the imputation diversity and the generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a new GANbased imputation method, namely Meta-based Generative Adversarial Imputation Network (Meta-GAIN), to investigate a new generator for achieving diverse imputation and generalization ability. Specifically, we employ the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence to achieve the imputation diversity by generating a continuous embedding space of the original data. We also design a task regularizer to suppress redundant features and capture a more authentic distribution, thus enhancing the generalization ability of the imputation model. Moreover, we theoretically prove that our proposed regularizer achieves the generalization ability. In addition, we design a new meta network to efficient optimize our objective function as well as to improve imputation diversity. Experimental results on real datasets show that our method outperforms all comparison methods under different missing mechanisms in terms of imputation and classification performance.

PaperID: 2795

Authors:Shan Zhang, Liangrui Ren, Qiaoyu Tan, Carlotta Domeniconi, Wei Du, Jun Wang, Guoxian Yu

Affiliations: Shandong University, New York University Shanghai, George Mason University

Title: MLLM Enriched Explainable Multiple Clustering

Abstract:
Multiple clustering aims to uncover diverse latent structures within the data, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of complex datasets. However, existing approaches either heavily rely on usersupplied keywords or disregard user-interested clustering types, limiting the ability to discover the full range of explainable clusterings of interests, particularly in high-dimensional settings. Furthermore, existing methods insufficiently leverage the rich textual semantics and fall short in fully integrating multi-modal information. To address these challenges, we propose MLLM enriched Multiple Clustering (MLLMMC), a novel framework that leverages multi-modal large language model (MLLM) to explore explainable non-redundant clustering. Specifically, MLLMMC first employs MLLM to generate sample descriptions, which serve as input for LLM to perform prompt-driven reasoning and infer latent clustering types, and then merges them with user-interested types to obtain diverse and explainable clustering types. For each selected type, MLLMMC utilizes MLLM to generate sample-level textual descriptions and aligns them with corresponding visual features through a cross-attention fusion module, which produces a semantically aligned and enriched representation for the target clustering type. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets from diverse domains demonstrate that MLLMMC achieves diverse, explainable, and high-quality clustering outcomes, outperforming state-of-the-art multiple clustering methods with a large margin.

PaperID: 2796

Authors:Yehonatan Kidushim, Avraham Natan, Roni Stern, Meir Kalech

Affiliations: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Title: Robust Multiagent Combinatorial Path Finding

Abstract:
Consider a system of multiple physical agents tasked with collaboratively collecting a set of spatially distributed goals as quickly as possible while avoiding collisions with the environment and with each other. This type of problem, which involves MultiAgent Path Finding (MAPF) and task allocation, is called Multi-Agent Combinatorial Path Finding (MCPF). Prior work on MCPF assumed each agent has a final goal it must reach, there are no orientation constraints on the agents' movements, and the agents will follow their planned actions as intended. These assumptions rarely hold in real physical robots, which limits the applicability of existing MCPF algorithms in practical applications. We propose the Robust CBSS framework, a robust planning approach that solves MCPF without the aforementioned simplifying assumptions, and provide two implementations: a baseline version (RCbssBase) and an efficient version (RCbssEff). RCbssEff generalizes the Conflict-Based Steiner Search (CBSS) algorithm, building on ideas from the p-Robust CBS algorithm and algorithms for solving the Equality Generalized Traveling Salesman Problem. We prove that RCbssEff is complete and can be configured to return optimal solutions. Experimental results on benchmark MCPF problems show that RCbssEff balances planning time, solution cost, and collision reduction compared to baselines.

PaperID: 2797

Authors:Yi Li, Rui Zhao, Ruiquan Zhang, Jinsong Su, Daimeng Wei, Min Zhang, Yidong Chen

Affiliations: Xiamen University, Huawei Technologies Ltd.

Title: PLaST: Towards Paralinguistic-aware Speech Translation

Abstract:
Speech translation (ST) aims to translate speech from a source language into text in the target language. Naturally, speech signals contain paralinguistic cues beyond linguistic content, which could influence or even alter the interpretation of a lexically identical sentence, thereby yielding distinct translations. However, existing ST models lack direct and sufficient modeling of paralinguistic information, which limits their ability to perceive paralinguistic cues and understand speech comprehensively, leading to degraded translation performance. In response, we propose Paralinguisticaware Speech Translation (PLaST), a novel dual-branch framework which directly leverages paralinguistic cues beyond the linguistic content. Specifically, PLaST employs a speech encoder and a style extractor to independently generate linguistic and paralinguistic representations, respectively. To obtain a purified linguistic representation aligned with the text representation, a hierarchical Optimal Transport (OT) is applied on the layer-wise outputs from an LLM decoder. Then, the paralinguistic information is retrieved and refined with an Attention-based Retrieval (AR) module, with the linguistic representation serving as queries to enable joint guidance for semantic understanding and translation generation. PLaST outperforms the strong baseline with an average of 5.0 directional and 4.5 global contrastive likelihood scores on the paralinguistic-sensitive benchmark ContraProST, demonstrating its superior capability in paralinguistic perception. Further experiments on the standard speech translation benchmark CoVoST-2 show that PLaST generalizes well to typical ST scenarios.

PaperID: 2798

Authors:Nicolas Schwind, Patricia Everaere, Sébastien Konieczny, Emmanuel Lonca

Affiliations: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, CNRS - Université de Lille, CNRS - Université d'Artois

Title: Targeting in Multi-Criteria Decision Making

Abstract:
In this work, we introduce the notion of targeting for multicriteria decision making. The problem involves selecting the best alternatives related to one particular alternative, called the target. We use an axiomatic approach to this problem by establishing properties that any targeting method should satisfy. We present a representation theorem and show that satisfying the main properties of targeting requires aggregating the evaluations of the alternatives related to the target. We propose various candidate targeting methods and examine the properties satisfied by each method.

PaperID: 2799

Authors:Jianhui Wang, Wenyu Zhu, Bowen Gao, Xin Hong, Ya-Qin Zhang, Wei-Ying Ma, Yanyan Lan

Affiliations: Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University, China University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China Department of Computer Science and Technology, China Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence

Title: Learning Protein–Ligand Binding in Hyperbolic Space

Abstract:
Proteinligand binding prediction is central to virtual screening and affinity ranking, two fundamental tasks in drug discovery. While recent retrieval-based methods embed ligands and protein pockets into Euclidean space for similarity-based search, the geometry of Euclidean embeddings often fails to capture the hierarchical structure and fine-grained affinity variations intrinsic to molecular interactions. In this work, we propose HypSeek, a hyperbolic representation learning framework that embeds ligands, protein pockets, and sequences into Lorentz-model hyperbolic space. By leveraging the exponential geometry and negative curvature of hyperbolic space, HypSeek enables expressive, affinity-sensitive embeddings that can effectively model both global activity and subtle functional differences–particularly in challenging cases such as activity cliffs, where structurally similar ligands exhibit large affinity gaps. Our model unifies virtual screening and affinity ranking in a single framework, introducing a protein-guided three-tower architecture to enhance representational structure. HypSeek improves early enrichment in virtual screening on DUD-E from 42.63 to 51.44 (+20.7%) and affinity ranking correlation on JACS from 0.5774 to 0.7239 (+25.4%), demonstrating the benefits of hyperbolic geometry across both tasks and highlighting its potential as a powerful inductive bias for protein-ligand modeling.

PaperID: 2800

Authors:Aakash Kumar Agarwal, Moyuru Yamada

Affiliations: Indian Institute of Technology, Fujitsu Research of India

Title: Hypothesis-Driven Reasoning for Large Language Models

Abstract:
This paper tackles the fundamental failure of Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve new tasks when prompted with a sufficient, yet overly complex, set of multimodal episodes. This failure stems from the model's inability to distill underlying patterns from the noisy experiences. We propose Hypothesis-Driven Reasoning (HDR), a framework that enhances LLM reasoning by building an explicit semantic memory—a set of hypotheses induced from the multi-modal episodes. HDR employs a two-stage pipeline. It first extracts potential factors from the episodes and then iteratively refines hypotheses by generate-verify loop with the factors. We first empirically demonstrates this failure and the potential of sematic memory, showing that oracle hypotheses can boost accuracy from 35.3% to 92.0% on a novel task we designed. We then evaluate our HDR, achieving near-oracle performance and significantly outperforming baselines, especially on smaller models. This paper validates a shift from unstructured in-context recall to explicit knowledge abstraction for robust reasoning.

PaperID: 2801

Authors:Kaiwei Che, Wei Fang, Peng Xue, Yifan Huang, Zhengyu Ma, Yonghong Tian

Affiliations: School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Shenzhen Graduate School, Peking University, Pengcheng Laboratory, China Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology，Chinese Academy of Sciences, School of Computer Science

Title: Parallel Training Time-to-First-Spike Spiking Neural Networks

Abstract:
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a promising energyefficient computing paradigm owing to their event-driven properties and biologically inspired dynamics. Among various encoding schemes, Time-to-First-Spike (TTFS) is particularly notable for its extreme sparsity, utilizing a single spike per neuron to maximize energy efficiency. However, two significant challenges persist: effectively leveraging TTFS sparsity to minimize training costs on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), and bridging the performance gap between TTFS-based SNNs and their rate-based counterparts. To address these issues, we propose a parallel training algorithm for accelerated execution and a novel decoding strategy for enhanced performance. Specifically, we derive both forward and backward propagation equations for parallelized TTFS SNNs, enabling precise calculation of first-spike timings and gradients. Furthermore, we analyze the limitations of existing output decoders and introduce a membrane potential–based decoder, complemented by an incremental time-step training strategy, to improve accuracy. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy for TTFS SNNs on several benchmarks, including MNIST (99.51%), Fashion-MNIST (93.14%), CIFAR-10 (95.06%), and CIFAR-100 (74.07%).

PaperID: 2802

Authors:Yequan Bie, Andong Tan, Zhixuan Chen, Zhiyuan Cai, Luyang Luo, Hao Chen

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard University

Title: Knowledge-Enhanced Explainable Prompting for Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
Largescale vision-language models (VLMs) embedded with expansive representations and visual concepts have showcased significant potential in image and text understanding. Efficiently adapting VLMs such as CLIP to downstream tasks like few-shot image classification has garnered growing attention, with prompt learning emerging as a representative approach. However, most existing prompt-based adaptation methods, which rely solely on coarse-grained textual prompts, suffer from limited performance and interpretability when handling domain tasks that require specific knowledge. This results in a failure to satisfy the stringent trustworthiness requirements of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in high-risk scenarios like healthcare. To address this issue, we propose a Knowledge-Enhanced Explainable Prompting (KEEP) framework that leverages fine-grained domain-specific knowledge to enhance the adaptation process of VLMs across various domains and image modalities. By incorporating retrieval augmented generation and domain foundation models, our framework can provide more reliable image-wise knowledge for prompt learning in various domains, alleviating the lack of fine-grained annotations, while offering both visual and textual explanations. Extensive experiments and explainability analyses conducted on eight datasets of different domains and image modalities demonstrate that our method simultaneously achieves superior performance and interpretability, highlighting the effectiveness of the collaboration between foundation models and XAI.

PaperID: 2803

Authors:Yijie Ding, Yang Liu, Haobo Jiang, Jianmin Zheng

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University, Beijing Institute of Technology

Title: ReACT: Reward-informed Autoregressive Decision CAD Transformer

Abstract:
Reconstructing precise CAD modeling sequences from point clouds remains a challenging task, especially for objects with complex geometry and topology. In this paper, by formulating the CAD sequence reconstruction as a Markov decision process, we introduce ReACT, a novel Rewardinformed Autoregressive decision Cad Transformer architecture for robust CAD sequence prediction. Beyond previous imitation-only approaches, our key innovation is to frame the CAD Transformer under a reinforcement learning paradigm and thereby integrate reward-inspired heuristic learning into our architecture. This allows ReACT to effectively leverage shape-aware long-term reward feedback to guide the inference of (nearly) optimal CAD commands. Specifically, conditioned on past tokens, comprising the historical CAD states, sketch-extrude commands (i.e., actions) and associated geometric rewards, ReACT autoregressively outputs the most promising CAD commands in a causal manner. In particular, we develop a novel scaffold-aware CAD state representation that integrates global point-command features with an incrementally constructed surface point scaffold, enabling fine-grained geometric reasoning for subsequent reconstruction prediction. Moreover, an effective local barrel points-guided dense reward function is designed to jointly evaluate surface fidelity and command efficiency for reliable reward guidance. Extensive evaluations on the DeepCAD and Fusion360 benchmarks demonstrate that ReACT can achieve superior CAD reconstruction quality, even for objects with complex shapes.

PaperID: 2804

Authors:Zhibo Lou, Ruijie Zhang, Zeyu Luo, Qianxi Cao, Feng Qian, Junjie Chen, Yuming Fang

Affiliations: Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics

Title: Infrared-Privileged UAV Detection via Cross-Modal Vector-Quantization

Abstract:
RGB and infrared images has shown remarkable robustness for object detection based on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). However, the primitive RGB and infrared (IR) images are inevitably misaligned due to the device gap between RGB and infrared cameras. Most existing methods rely on manually filtered and aligned images, and thus are limited in realworld application. Some recent methods tend to directly learn from misaligned images, which only weakly benefit from the multi-modality and may be misled by dramatically misaligned IR images. Considering that the manually aligned images are available during training while unavailable in inference, we explore a new learning paradigm using the IR modality as privileged information. In the training stage, our model learns to hallucinate the complementary knowledge in IR modality based on RGB modality. In inference, our model could hallucinate the complementary IR modality to facilitate UAV detection. Specifically, we propose to quantize the IR features and hallucinate the codebook-indices based on RGB features, which is more effective and robust than directly hallucinating features. In addition, we propose to hierarchically hallucinate multi-scale codebook-indices, which could further improve the hallucinating quality. Experiments on DroneVehicle and VisDrone datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

PaperID: 2805

Authors:Meng Meng, Zichang Tan, Yong Zhang, Xu Zhou

Affiliations: Sangfor Technologies Inc.

Title: Appearance-Motion Decomposed Alignment for Text-Video Retrieval

Abstract:
Textvideo retrieval aims to bridge vision and language areas, which is a crucial task in multi-modal intelligence. The core idea is to learn video and textual features to quantify their semantic relevance. A common limitation in current approaches is the oversimplification of video content, where complex spatiotemporal structures are compressed into a single global representation. Consequently, these methods struggle to fully capture dynamic visual variations and discriminative appearance inside a video, further complicating cross-modal alignment. To alleviate these issues, we introduce a novel decoupling approach that independently processes appearance and motion cues, capitalizing on their complementary nature for more expressive video modeling. Specifically, we propose an appearance-motion decomposed network (AMD-Net) to decouple spatial-level appearance and temporal-level motion understanding via the discriminative appearance learning and multi-scale motion learning modules. The proposed model enjoys several merits. First, the designed discriminative appearance learning module with a Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) based prototype initialization can effectively reduce redundant appearance information, and a high-order cross-aggregation mechanism enhances prototype resilience and facilitates comprehensive video understanding. Second, the proposed multi-scale motion learning (MML) module can capture motion features at varying temporal scales, which are complementary to appearance features for accurate text-video retrieval. Extensive experiments on five standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 2806

Authors:JianHao Wu, Yudong Mao, Qiuping Jiang

Affiliations: Ningbo University, City University of Hong Kong

Title: Codebook-Empowered Analysis-Friendly Extreme Underwater Image Compression

Abstract:
While existing underwater image compression (UIC) methods optimize for human perception or basic redundancies, they neglect interimage correlations and fail to prioritize machine-friendly features essential for automated analysis. This paper introduces a novel -quantized (VQ) codebook-driven framework for machine-centric UIC. We leverage VQ codebooks -- pre-trained as external priors on diverse underwater data -- to unify three critical stages: (1) Machine-friendly feature extraction via contrastive learning with high/low-quality codebooks, enhancing degradation robustness; (2) Compact compression using variable-size codebooks to map discriminative features to entropy-coded indices, enabling ultra-low bitrates (less than 0.04bpp); and (3) Feature refinement at the decoder, restoring semantic fidelity for downstream tasks. In addition, we contribute the first Underwater Visual Question Answering (UVQA) benchmark to holistically evaluate machine perception across object presence, counting, and localization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art codecs in machine vision task performance at ultra-low bitrates. The VQ-codebook effectively harnesses inter-image redundancy, combats joint degradation, and delivers compact, analysis-friendly representations, establishing a new paradigm for machine-centric UIC.

PaperID: 2807

Authors:Jianye Xie, Lianyong Qi, Fan Wang, Anqi Wang, Wenjuan Gong, Danxin Wang, Wanchun Dou, Yang Cao, Shichao Pei, Xiaokang Zhou

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, China University of Petroleum (East China), China Shandong Key Laboratory of Intelligent Oil and Gas Industrial Software, Zhejiang University, State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, School of Computer Science, Nanjing University, School of Computing and Information Technology, Great Bay University, China Great Bay Institute for Advanced Study, Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Boston, Faculty of Business and Data Science, Kansai University, Japan RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project

Title: Retrieval-driven Reasoning for Deliberative Visual Classification

Abstract:
VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in visual classification tasks. Existing methods for enhancing VLMs on this task often rely heavily on direct category-to-image matching, which limits generalization and results in suboptimal performance. In addition, these methods provide no understanding of why a specific category is chosen. To address these limitations, we introduce a new deliberative visual classification task that decomposes the classification process into multiple deliberative steps and leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform explicit reasoning before the final decision. Specifically, we propose a Retrieval-driven Reasoning model (RdR) with two components, i.e., retrieval database construction and deliberative category prediction. The first component leverages LLMs to extract category-relevant descriptors and constructs a retrieval database for effective image–descriptor matching. The second component facilitates multiple deliberative steps and performs explicit reasoning based on the retrieved descriptors to augment the category prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that RdR consistently outperforms strong baselines, highlighting its robustness and generalization ability.

PaperID: 2808

Authors:Libo Zhao, Xiaoli Zhang, Zeyu Wang

Affiliations: Jilin University, Dalian Minzu University

Title: ControlFuse: Instruction-guided Multi-Granularity Controllable Image Fusion

Abstract:
Infrared and Visible Image Fusion (IVIF) produces enhanced images by fusing complementary visual information. However, most existing methods generate fixed outputs and cannot flexibly adapt to userspecific requirements. Recent text-guided approaches offer partial control but are limited to global or semantic levels, lacking instance-level control. This limitation arises from two challenges: first, the lack of datasets that directly link textual instructions with corresponding spatial annotations, and second, the use of coarse cross-modal alignment methods that struggle to precisely match textual instructions with visual features. To overcome these challenges, we propose ControlFuse, a controllable IVIF framework enabling multi-granularity fusion across global, semantic, and instance levels, guided by user instructions. First, we construct an automated multi-granularity dataset that provides explicit textual-mask correspondences at these three levels. Second, inspired by manifold geometry, we design a Multimodal Feature Interaction Module (MFIM) comprising Feature Manifold Converter (FMC) and Curvature-Guided Interaction (CGI). FMC projects textual and visual features into a unified manifold space, while CGI leverages manifold curvature as a geometric cue to refine cross-modal alignment. Extensive experiments validate ControlFuse, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in robustness and flexibility.

PaperID: 2809

Authors:Guidio Sewa, David Allouche, Simon de Givry, George Katsirelos, Pierre Montalbano, Thomas Schiex

Affiliations: INRAE ANITI, Université François Rabelais de Tours

Title: Assignment Problems in Cost Function Networks

Abstract:
To efficiently solve exact discrete optimization problems, branch and bound algorithms require tight bounds. In constraint programming, for optimization, soft arc consistencies typically derive much stronger bounds than those offered by domain or bound consistencies applied to a cost variable. The reason is that soft local consistencies exchange marginal cost information between variables whereas domain consistencies rely only on shrinking domains, which is less informative. However, CP solvers equipped with soft arc consistencies have so far offered limited support for efficient processing of global constraints. In this work, we show how we can efficiently enforce soft local consistency over the AllDifferent constraint, relying on algorithms for the Linear Assignment Problem (LAP). We implement this propagator in toulbar2, the stateof-the-art weighted CP solver exploiting soft local consistencies for bounding. We show that, equipped with this new propagator, toulbar2 outperforms state-of-the-art domain consistency-based CP as well as integer programming solvers for the Quadratic Assignment Problem and shows better performance for miniCOP instances of the 2024 XCSP competition with AllDifferent constraints.

PaperID: 2810

Authors:Ruobing Wang, Xin Li, Yangchuan Wang, Zijian Zhang, Mingzhong Wang

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology, Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of Ministry of Education, Jilin University, University of the Sunshine Coast

Title: Generative Branching for Mixed-Integer Linear Programming

Abstract:
Branchand-bound (B&B) is a fundamental algorithmic framework for solving Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problems, where branching decisions critically affect solver efficiency. Recent learning-based methods apply imitation learning to select branching variables, but their deterministic predictions limit exploration and generalization. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that formulates branching variable selection as a conditional generative process, exploring deep-level decision features. Our approach leverages diffusion models to enable diverse and exploratory branching score generation, while consistency modeling distills this process into efficient one-step inference conditioned on the B&B state. This mode allows our method to achieve both high-quality and fast branching decisions, significantly improving the overall performance of branch-and-bound solvers. Extensive experiments on challenging cross-scale and cross-category benchmarks demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art imitation learning baselines, delivering substantial improvements in solution quality, computational efficiency, and inference speed.

PaperID: 2811

Authors:Yichen Li, Yichen Tan, Yijing Shan, Haozhao Wang, Rui Zhang, Imran Razzak, Ruixuan Li

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

Title: Data-Centric Sequential Recommendation with Relation-Augmented Generation

Abstract:
DataCentric Sequential Recommendation (DaCSR) has emerged as a promising technique that enhances dataset quality to better capture user preferences without increasing training complexity. However, mining item relations to improve data quality remains challenging due to the intricate nature of interaction sequences. Existing methods predominantly either: 1) optimize models to learn such item relations from fixed datasets at significant training cost, or 2) employ generative models to adaptively learn only interaction patterns, which lack interpretability and cannot guarantee effective data quality enhancement. In this paper, we pioneer a relation-guided dataset augmentation and regeneration framework for sequential recommendation called RaSR. This framework can significantly improve model performance on original datasets while maintaining training efficiency without modifying the model architecture. Specifically, we first preprocess user interactions to construct standardized sequential data and extract semantic representations via a Large Language Model (LLM). We then build a multi-relation graph with manually predefined metrics and semantic representations to generate augmented datasets. Finally, a relation-aware generator can produce regenerated datasets with both the multi-relation graph and the augmented dataset. To verify the effectiveness of RaSR, we conduct experiments on various backbone models and datasets, and achieve significant performance improvement compared to training the model only on the original dataset.

PaperID: 2812

Authors:Yuwen Liu, Lianyong Qi, Xingyuan Mao, Weiming Liu, Xuhui Fan, Qiang Ni, Xuyun Zhang, Yang Zhang, Yuan Tian, Amin Beheshti

Affiliations: China University of Petroleum (East China) Shandong Key Laboratory of Intelligent Oil and Gas Industrial Software, ByteDance Inc., Macquarie University, Lancaster University, University of North Texas, Nanjing Institute of Technology

Title: Hyperbolic-Enhanced Mixture-of-Experts Mamba for Sequential Recommendation

Abstract:
Sequential recommendation has emerged as a fundamental task in various domains, aiming to predict a user's next interaction based on historical behavior. Recent advances in deep sequence models, particularly Transformerbased architectures and the more recent Mamba, have substantially pushed the boundaries of sequential modeling performance. However, existing methods still face two critical challenges. First, many current approaches overlook the hierarchical structures and high-order dependencies among items, typically restricting representation learning to conventional Euclidean spaces, which limits their capacity to capture complex relational information. Second, although Mamba excels at long-range dependency modeling, its reliance on static Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs) hinders its ability to dynamically adapt to evolving user preferences across diverse contexts. To address these limitations, we propose a Hyperbolic-Enhanced Mixture-of-Experts Mamba recommender (HM2Rec) for sequential recommendation. HM2Rec first encodes user-item relationships through hyperbolic graph convolution to exploit hierarchical structure more effectively. Then, a Variational Graph Auto-Encoder (VGAE) is employed to reconstruct node embeddings, improving structural robustness. To further enhance sequential modeling, we integrate Rotary Positional Encoding (RoPE) into Mamba to better capture relative position dependencies, and replace the FFN with Mixture-of-Expert (MOE) module, enabling dynamic and personalized expert selection for each token. Our extensive experiments on four widely-used public datasets demonstrate that HM2Rec outperforms several advanced baseline models.

PaperID: 2813

Authors:Yanjun Qin, Yuchen Fang, Xinke Jiang, Hao Miao, Xiaoming Tao

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Research Center for Multimodal Information Perception and Intelligent Processing, Xinjiang University, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China Tsinghua University

Title: Adaptive Frequency Pathways for Spatiotemporal Forecasting

Abstract:
Spatiotemporal forecasting is a fundamental task in areas such as traffic flow prediction, environmental sensing, and urban planning. Recent advances have shown that decomposing temporal signals into multiple frequencies and modeling them jointly with spatial structures can significantly enhance forecasting performance. However, existing multifrequency forecasting models still face two critical limitations. First, the importance of different temporal frequencies evolves over time, yet most models assume fixed or static frequency contributions. Second, spatial dependencies are inherently frequencysensitive. For instance, low-frequency components often align with global spatial patterns, while highfrequency components tend to correspond to localized interactions. However, current approaches typically use a shared spatial information across all frequencies, introducing spatiotemporal inconsistency. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Adaptive Frequency Pathways (AdaFre) for spatiotemporal forecasting, which adaptively captures both dynamic frequency relevance and frequency-aligned spatial structures. AdaFre employs a multi-frequency routing mechanism to dynamically select and aggregate the most informative temporal frequency components, while associating each with its corresponding spatial representation derived from frequency-aware embeddings. Spatiotemporal backbones are then used to model each path independently before final aggregation. Extensive experiments on several real-world datasets demonstrate that AdaFre significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 2814

Authors:Sheng Sang, Shujie Li, Shuaiyang Li, Kang Liu, Teng Li, Wei Jia, Dan Guo, Feng Xue

Affiliations: Hefei University of Technology, Henan Normal University, Anhui Medical University, Anhui University

Title: Bidirectional Counterfactual Distillation for Review-Based Recommendation

Abstract:
Reviewbased recommendation methods typically integrate multiple behaviors, including interactions, reviews, and ratings, to model user preferences. To effectively extract preference signals from diverse behaviors, some studies train multiple student models to capture distinct behavioral patterns, and leverage online distillation to facilitate collaborative learning among them. However, we argue that these techniques suffer from bias contamination from rating distributions and feature homogenization during cross-behavior knowledge transfer: (1) Rating distribution bias, arising from non-uniform historical ratings, propagates across behaviors through distillation, contaminating the true preference representations of other behaviors. (2) Static distillation strategies often lead to homogenized behavioral features, hindering the learning of behavior-specific preferences. To address these issues, we propose a novel Bidirectional Counterfactual Distillation (BiCoD) framework for review-based recommendation. In BiCoD, we first design an adversarial counterfactual distillation module to suppress the impact of non-uniform rating distributions on distillation, thereby preventing it from contaminating the user's true preference representations across behaviors. Subsequently, we introduce a stage-aware bidirectional distillation strategy to enhance the distinctiveness of behavioral features, facilitating the effective learning of behavior-specific preferences. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed framework.

PaperID: 2815

Authors:Hongzhi Zhang, Jiameng Chen, Kun Li, Yida Xiong, Xiantao Cai, Wenbin Hu, Jia Wu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Shenzhen Research Institute, Department of Computing, Macquarie University

Title: Sequence-Free for Compound Protein Interaction Prediction

Abstract:
The prediction of compound–protein interactions (CPIs) is crucial for drug discovery. Most existing CPI prediction models rely on protein sequence information as input. However, in earlystage drug development, particularly in phenotype-driven studies or compound-response analyses, proteins are often annotated only with functional labels, and their sequences remain undetermined. Consequently, current methods are inapplicable in such scenarios. Furthermore, our experiments find that even when large-scale perturbations were applied to protein sequences, the predictive performance of the existing models did not show a significant decline. It indicates that the high investment in sequencing may not bring corresponding returns. To address the above issues, we propose an inexpensive, protein-sequencing-free framework BioText-CPI, based on the Biomedical Textual description of protein for CPI prediction. Firstly, during the pre-training stage of the model, we use contrastive learning to align protein texts and sequence modalities. Subsequently, we add biological text descriptions of proteins to the existing public CPI dataset to construct a new CPI dataset. Finally, in the CPI prediction stage, the sequence and biomedical text descriptions of proteins can be used as the input for CPI prediction either separately or simultaneously to meet the application requirements of different scenarios. The experiments demonstrate that BioText-CPI achieves comparable effects to the traditional methods when only the biomedical description of protein is input. Moreover, when the two modalities of protein information are input simultaneously, BioText-CPI achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple scenarios.

PaperID: 2816

Authors:Yasushi Kawase, Tomohiro Nakayoshi

Affiliations: The University of Tokyo

Title: Sequential Selling with Sunk Cost Bias

Abstract:
We study a sequential selling problem in which an agent receives daily offers to sell a good, incurs a holding cost each day, and is subject to sunk cost biasallowing past, irrecoverable costs to influence present decisions. We introduce a formal model parameterizing the degree of sunk cost bias and distinguish between three behavioral types: optimistic (who ignore future bias), naive (who assume their current bias persists), and sophisticated (who anticipate the evolution of their own bias). For each type, we characterize the optimal selling strategy and precisely quantify the worst-case gap in expected objective profit compared to an unbiased agent. Our results show that optimistic agents can suffer a quadratic loss in profit due to excessive waiting, naive agents perform identically to unbiased agents, and sophisticated agents limit their losses to a linear function of the time horizon. These findings clarify how different anticipations of sunk cost bias affect sequential decision-making and suggest targeted interventions to mitigate inefficiency.

PaperID: 2817

Authors:Saisai Li, Bing Shi, Yiming Xia, Xiao Su

Affiliations: Wuhan University of Technology

Title: Belief-Driven Value Alignment for Human-Robot Collaboration

Abstract:
As intelligent systems advance rapidly, humanrobot collaboration is becoming increasingly important. Ensuring that the intelligent agent's behaviors match human intentions and value preferences is crucial for effective collaboration, which is termed the value alignment problem. Within the Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigm, value alignment typically relies on pre-designed reward functions, and Cooperative Inverse Reinforcement Learning (CIRL) is often used to model value alignment as a human-robot game. However, existing works often assume that human is perfectly rational, and can fully obtain robot’s belief on human’s preference. To address this limitation, we propose a Particle Filter-based Hierarchical Dynamic Programming algorithm (PFHDP). By modeling the robot's belief state, this algorithm ensures the correct updates of human's estimate of the robot's belief. This allows human to adopt more targeted pedagogical behaviors to guide the robot based on her understanding of the robot's current belief, achieving belief alignment between human and robot and thereby promoting value alignment more effectively. Furthermore, we run experiments to evaluate the proposed method in two cooperative scenarios against some typical benchmark approaches. The experimental results show that our method can strengthen the alignment of belief states between human and robot, leading to enhanced value alignment.

PaperID: 2818

Authors:Dengfang Feng, Wenyang Qin, Zhongchen Shi, Wei Chen, Yanhui Duan, Liang Xie, Erwei Yin

Affiliations: School of Systems Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University‌, Defense Innovation Institute, Academy of Military Sciences (AMS), China Intelligent Game and Decision Laboratory, China Tianjin Artificial Intelligence Innovation Center (TAIIC)

Title: MHED-SLAM: Multi-Scale Hybrid Encoding-Based Decoupled SLAM

Abstract:
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)based Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) achieve superior scene geometric modeling and robust camera tracking by leveraging neural representations. Existing methods typically relied on multi-resolution hash encoding with truncated signed distance fields (TSDF) to achieve high frame rates. However, unavoidable hash collisions can lead to artifacts, and multi-view color inconsistencies in indoor scenes can result in shape-radiance ambiguity, adversely affecting geometric quality and tracking accuracy. To address these issues, we propose a novel Multi-scale Hybrid Encoding-based Decoupled SLAM (MHED-SLAM). First, to mitigate the adverse effects of hash collisions and reduce the number of learnable parameters, we innovatively fuse a coarse-scale hash tri-plane with a fine-scale hash grid within a single latent volume. Second, to enable precise geometric reconstruction and camera tracking, we decouple the reconstruction and rendering processes, independently learning a TSDF field for reconstruction and a density field for rendering. Third, we devise a Symmetric Kullback-Leibler (SKL) strategy based on ray termination distributions to align the probability distributions derived from the TSDF and density fields for their synchronous convergence. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that our approach surpasses the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods by utilizing a faster frame rate of 20 Hz and fewer parameters, while achieving higher tracking and reconstruction accuracy.

PaperID: 2819

Authors:Leila Amgoud, Marco Hanocq, Marie-Christine Lagasquie-Schiex

Affiliations: Toulouse University

Title: Hybrid Semantics Accounting for Argument Types

Abstract:
Assessing the strength of arguments is essential for determining the outcomes of any argumentbased system. A wide range of semantics has been proposed in the literature. These take as input a set of arguments—each assigned a basic weight and potentially subject to attacks from others—and compute a single strength value for each argument. Despite the diversity of argument types (or schemes), existing semantics apply uniform evaluation criteria across all arguments. In this paper, we advocate for type-dependent evaluations, acknowledging that the impact of attacks can vary across types. Given that many argument-based systems involve heterogeneous types of arguments, we propose a broad family of hybrid semantics that combine distinct base semantics, each tailored to specific argument types. We investigate their theoretical properties, present concrete instances within this family, and examine their computational complexity.

PaperID: 2820

Authors:Iosif Apostolakis, Johannes P. Wallner

Affiliations: Graz University of Technology

Title: Under-Approximating Semantics in Clustered Assumption-Based Argumentation

Abstract:
Computational argumentation studies fundamental methods for reasoning within Artificial Intelligence (AI). Two prominent subfields in computational argumentation are abstract argumentation and structured argumentation. argumentation focuses on the interactions between arguments, ignoring their internal structure, while structured approaches utilize a given knowledge base to construct the arguments. Thus, the latter approach incorporates the internal structure of arguments into the reasoning process. In this work we introduce a form of abstraction on the well established structured approach of AssumptionBased Argumentation (ABA). Our goal is to provide methods to simplify complicated scenarios, by applying clustering over defeasible parts. ion, particularly clustering, has been explored in recent research on abstract argumentation and in the adjacent field of logic programming. In fact, while clustering has also been applied to ABA, our approach takes a different, or rather dual, direction. In contrast to prior work on over-approximation on ABA, we propose the dual approach of under-approximation. We provide semantics for reasoning over clustered frameworks in a sound manner relative to original semantics, ensuring that any set deemed acceptable in the clustered scenario corresponds to an acceptable set. We show properties of the under-approximating semantics and illustrate our approach using a conceptual example based on medical recommendations.

PaperID: 2821

Authors:Ruiqi Jin, Shuyi Li, Yongmei Liu

Affiliations: Sun Yatsen University, Sun Yat-sen University

Title: Enhancing Strategy Logic with Procedural Rationality

Abstract:
ATL and Strategy Logic (SL) are important languages for representation and reasoning about strategic abilities of coalitions in multiagent systems. In analyzing strategies of agents in multi-agent systems, an important concept to consider is rationality. Strategy Logic can express rationality concepts such as Nash Equilibrium (NE). Recently, there has been work on logics for joint abilities incorporating rationality concepts based on iterated elimination of dominated strategies (IEDS). Each of NE and IEDS has its strengths and limitations. However, when the payoff is binary, e.g., whether a goal is satisfied, IEDS has more distinguishing power than NE. In this work, we propose Strategy Logic with IEDS (SL_IEDS), an extension of Strategy Logic with an IEDS operator, where we can reason about rational strategies that survive IEDS. We prove that SL_IEDS is strictly more expressive than SL. Finally, we prove that model checking memoryless SL_IEDS is EXPTIME-complete.

PaperID: 2822

Authors:Zongshun Wang, Yuping Shen

Affiliations: SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY

Title: Convergent Semantics for Weighted Bipolar Argumentation

Abstract:
Establishing convergent semantics for weighted argumentation graphs is a longstanding fundamental issue. Particularly, it is challenging to develop convergent semantics for weighted bipolar argumentation graphs (wBAG), which include both support and attack relations on weighted arguments. Existing semantics in the literature are not general enough in the sense that they only apply to acyclic graphs or special cyclic cases. In this paper, we provide an elegant solution to this issue by adopting the so-called bilateral gradual semantics, so that the strength of arguments can be defined as the limits of iterative functions that always converge for any wBAG including cyclic ones. A preliminary experimental analysis shows that our semantics appear quite efficient in calculating argument strength. Overall, this paper offers a solid and promising foundation for weighted bipolar argumentation in theoretical and practical aspects.

PaperID: 2823

Authors:Bo Zhang, Hao Yu, Wenjie Dong, Yvhang Yang, Dezhuang Miao, Fengyi Song, Yanhui Gu, Xiaoming Zhang, Junsheng Zhou

Affiliations: Nanjing Normal University, Beihang University

Title: Counterfactual Question Generation Uncovering Learner Contradictions

Abstract:
Conventional feedback, even when accompanied by brief explanations, rarely uncovers the hidden contradictions that trigger a learner's mistake. We bridge this gap with counterfactual question generation (CFQG): given a learner's answer, generate a followup question that deliberately contradicts it, compelling the learner to confront the underlying conflict. CFQG thus transforms assessment from passive scoring into an interactive and contradiction-centered dialogue that supports knowledge repair. To automate CFQG, we propose GapProbe, which probes the knowledge gap between a learner’s belief and curated facts through a knowledge graph (KG), then designs counterfactual questions (CFQs) that negate the belief. Identifying contradiction-aware triples, and more importantly, selecting those most likely to confuse the learner, are highly challenging in large-scale KGs. GapProbe tackles these challenges with an iterative ProConB cycle coupled with a schema-aware KGMap. By caching one- and multi-hop schema patterns of the KG, KGMap provides ``roadmap'' to guide LLMs jump to deep and contradiction-aware triples, beyond traditional step-wise graph traversal. We present the CFQG benchmark and corresponding metrics for evaluating how generated CFQs trigger, focus, and deepen learner reflection through explicit contradictions. Experiments on multiple datasets and LLMs show that GapProbe boosts LLM reasoning over KGs and generates follow-up questions that consistently promote deeper and more focused learner reflection.

PaperID: 2824

Authors:Tingyi Cai, Yunliang Jiang, Ming Li, Changqin Huang, Yujie Fang, Chengling Gao, Zhonglong Zheng

Affiliations: Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Intelligent Education Technology and Application, Zhejiang Normal University, China China-Mozambique Belt and Joint Laboratory on Smart Agriculture, China School of Information Engineering, Huzhou University, College of Education, Zhejiang University, School of Computer Science and Technology

Title: HyperGOOD: Towards Out-of-Distribution Detection in Hypergraphs

Abstract:
Outof-distribution (OOD) detection plays a critical role in ensuring the robustness of machine learning models in open-world settings. While extensive efforts have been made in vision, language, and graph domains, the challenge of OOD detection in hypergraph-structured data remains unexplored. In this work, we formalize the problem of hypergraph out-of-distribution (HOOD) detection, which aims to identify nodes or hyperedges whose high-order relational contexts differ significantly from those seen during training. We propose HyperGOOD, a unified energy-based detection framework that integrates multi-scale spectral decomposition with structure-aware uncertainty propagation. By preserving both low- and high-frequency signals and diffusing uncertainty across the hypergraph, HyperGOOD effectively captures subtle and relationally entangled anomalies. Experimental results on nine hypergraph datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, establishing a new foundation for robust hypergraph learning under distributional shifts.

PaperID: 2825

Authors:Keyu Chen, Qihang Zhou, Bin Qian, Zhenyu Wen, Wenchao Meng, Shibo He

Affiliations: Zhejiang University

Title: FIRM-MoE:Fine-GrainedExpert Decomposition for Resource-Adaptive MoE Inference

Abstract:
Mixtureof-Experts (MoE) is a sparse neural architecture that significantly increases model capacity while maintaining low computational complexity. However, deploying MoE-based large language models (LLMs) on memory-constrained edge devices remains challenging due to their substantial memory requirements. To address this issue, we propose FIRM-MoE, a fine-grained expert offloading framework designed to enable flexible and efficient MoE inference. The core insight of our approach is to reduce the risk of inaccurate expert loading by decomposing each expert into fine-grained sub-experts and then dynamically allocating them through a fine-grained scheduling strategy. To further reduce the error in expert loading, we introduce a multi-layer expert prediction mechanism and a resource-adaptive expert pre-loading algorithm to enable more robust expert allocation. This design allows our model to achieve more efficient expert utilization and improved resilience to prediction errors. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the superiority of FIRM-MoE across diverse memory constraints. The results show that FIRM-MoE achieves up to 1.5× speedup and 2.8× memory savings in decoding, compared to state-of-the-art MoE offloading strategies.

PaperID: 2826

Authors:Xin Chen, Qi Zhao, Wei Zeng, Zongben Xu

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University

Title: G-IR: Geometric Image Representation for Learning

Abstract:
Images are generally represented by pixel intensities or color values, which are usually used as direct inputs for learning. This study innovatively proposes a geometric image representation method and refreshes the general learning model (e.g., autoencoder) in the diffeomorphic space. Based on the theory of geometric optimal transport and quasiconformal mapping, we equivalently transform the intensity representation into a shape representation. The image space becomes a diffeomorphic space, where any image can be uniquely represented as a Beltrami coefficient function defined on a uniform grid reference, and vice versa. This innovative geometric image representation (GIR) captures the fine-grained structure inherent in the entire image, which is different from the traditional feature extraction that focuses on the internal geometric objects of the image (such as boundaries and axes). The diffeomorphic property preserves structure in the generation process, which is very necessary in the field of real physics. It can be assembled into existing pipelines as a plug-in, providing structure-preserving properties for the entire framework. Experiments on image restoration and interpolation validated the high efficiency, efficacy and applicability of the G-IR method, demonstrating its superior performance compared to common pixel-level image appearance representations.

PaperID: 2827

Authors:James Cheshire, Stephan Clémençon

Affiliations: Télécom Paris

Title: Best Arm Identification with Biased Contexts

Abstract:
We study active mitigation of selection bias in statistical learning. That is sequential maximization over a set A of the expectation of a reward function R(a,X) w.r.t. a r.v. X drawn from a target distribution PT possibly different from the (supposedly dominating) source distribution PS under which rewards are observed. The importance function dPT/dPS (x) with which the sequentially observed biased rewards should be ideally weighted being unknown in practice, auxiliary information is assumed to be available in the form of known moments of the target distribution PT for debiasing purposes. In the batch setting, this problem has already been studied and can be solved under certain conditions in two successive steps: 1) identify a weight function so as to approximate the moments 2) maximize the resulting (empirical version of the) weighted reward. In the active setting, if the problem boils down to identifying the best arm in a stochastic multi armed bandit (MAB) model, the presence of selection bias strongly affects the complexity of the sequential optimization problem and requires the development of a new algorithmic approach, as we show here. In a fixed confidence setting, we introduce a novel notion of complexity, which accounts for the balance between arm evaluation and (parametric) weight function estimation, establish lower bounds and propose an algorithm proved to be near optimal. Theoretical guarantees are backed up by numerical results.

PaperID: 2828

Authors:Diptesh Das, Ichiro Takeuchi, Koji Tsuda

Affiliations: The University of Tokyo, Nagoya University, RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project, National Institute for Materials Science

Title: Statistically Robust Sparse High-order Interaction Model

Abstract:
Deep learning models often achieve high accuracy but lack interpretability, making them unsuitable for critical applications such as medical diagnosis, biomolecule design, criminal justice, etc. The Sparse Highorder Interaction Model (SHIM) addresses this limitation by providing both transparency and predictive reliability. However, real-world data often contain outliers, which can distort model performance. To overcome this, we propose Huberized-SHIM, an extension of SHIM that integrates Huber loss-based robust regression to mitigate the impact of outliers. We introduce a homotopy-based exact regularization path algorithm and a novel tree-pruning criterion to efficiently manage interaction complexity. Additionally, we incorporate the conformal prediction framework to enhance statistical reliability. Empirical evaluations on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superior robustness and accuracy of Huberized-SHIM in high-stakes decision-making contexts.

PaperID: 2829

Authors:Lluis Gomez

Affiliations: Computer Vision Center Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Title: Rethinking Membership Inference Attacks for CLIP

Abstract:
Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) test whether a model has memorized training data, and are a key tool for auditing privacy risks in machine learning. Recent papers report nearperfect MIA success against large vision-language models such as CLIP, but almost all evaluations train on one web-scale corpus (e.g. LAION-400M) and treat samples from a different corpus (e.g. COCO or CC12M) as non-members - thereby turning the task into out-of-distribution (OOD) detection rather than true membership testing, introducing spurious signals unrelated to true memorization. We revisit the problem with a distribution-matched benchmark built from the CommonPool-L corpus of DataComp. A ViT-B/16 CLIP trained on 400M pairs is accompanied by two 26-shard, i.i.d. splits that serve as member and non-member sets, sharing the exact same acquisition and preprocessing pipeline. Under this strictly in-distribution setting, every published MIA baseline collapses to chance (~51% AUC). To explain this collapse, we derive a scaling-law upper bound for similarity-based attacks showing that the expected member vs. non-member similarity gap decays as O(T/N) for contrastive learning with T epochs over N samples. Empirically, as we vary the training set size while holding all hyper-parameters fixed, the gap follows the predicted linear trend in log–log space, and Cosine Similarity Attack AUC drops from 94% to 51%. Finally, we propose a simple, white-box, gradient-based MIA that outperforms prior attacks for CLIP without relying on OOD cues. We release code, checkpoints, and data to foster comprehensive and reproducible privacy research on multimodal CLIP-like foundation models.

PaperID: 2830

Authors:Nilakshan Kunananthaseelan, Jing Wu, Trung Le, Gholamreza Haffari, Mehrtash Harandi

Affiliations: Monash University

Title: DIET: Machine Unlearning on a Data-Diet

Abstract:
Machine Unlearning (MU) aims to remove the influence of specific knowledge from a pretrained model. Existing methods often rely on retained training data to preserve utility; such dependence is impractical due to privacy and scalability constraints. A further complication arises when unlearning is applied to visionlanguage models (VLMs), where entangled multimodal representations make targeted forgetting especially challenging. We propose DIET, a principled retain-data-free unlearning method for VLMs that addresses these challenges by leveraging the geometry of hyperbolic space. The core idea is to push forget embeddings toward class-mismatched prototypes located at the boundary of the hyperbolic space. In hyperbolic geometry, points near the boundary become infinitely distant from interior points. As a result, moving forget embeddings to the boundary makes their influence on the model asymptotically negligible. To formalize this, we guide the forgetting process using the Busemann function, which quantifies directional distance to the boundary. We further develop an adaptive scheme based on optimal transport that selects mismatched prototypes for each forget embedding, enabling flexible unlearning dynamics. Extensive experiments on fine-grained datasets such as Flowers102, OxfordPets, and StanfordCars show that DIET achieves an average forget accuracy of 8.06%, while preserving 69.04% utility using only 16 samples per concept, significantly outperforming the best retain-free baselines with a 117.5% improvement in model utility, and showing competitive performance to retain-data baselines with only a 3.79% drop

PaperID: 2831

Authors:Michal Lewandowski, Raphael Pisoni, Bernhard Heinzl, Bernhard A. Moser

Affiliations: Software Competence Center Hagenberg (SCCH)

Title: Exploiting Space Folding by Neural Networks

Abstract:
Recent findings suggest that consecutive layers of neural networks with the ReLU activation function fold the input space during the learning process. While many works hint at this phenomenon, an approach to quantify the folding was only recently proposed by means of a space folding measure based on the Hamming distance in the discrete activation space. We generalize the space folding measure to a wider class of activation functions through the introduction of equivalence classes of input data. We then analyze its mathematical and computational properties. Lastly, we link the folding to geometry of adversarial attacks. We underpin our claims with an experimental evaluation.

PaperID: 2832

Authors:Fangfang Li, Quanxue Gao, Yapeng Wang, Yu Duan, Yuzhuo Feng, Qin Li

Affiliations: Xidian University, Shenzhen University of Information Technology

Title: Maximizing Schatten-p Norm Regularization Toward Balance

Abstract:
The Schattenp norm, as a class of structure-inducing norms based on singular values, has been widely used to enhance model low-rankness and representation capability due to its flexibility in structural modeling and favorable mathematical properties. However, its potential in cluster distribution modeling has long been overlooked. Therefore, we explore the potential of maximizing the Schatten-p norm as a regularization strategy specifically designed to achieve balanced clustering. This work is the first to investigate its effectiveness in promoting cluster balance. To be specific, maximizing Schatten-p norm effectively guides the assignment of data points, ensuring a more balanced distribution of samples across clusters. We have conducted an in-depth theoretical analysis and validated its effectiveness through extensive clustering experiments. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to existing methods, this regularization term significantly improves clustering quality and obtain reasonable clustering.

PaperID: 2833

Authors:Ming Li, Yongqi Li, Yuting Chen, Feilong Cao, Ke Lv

Affiliations: Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Intelligent Education Technology and Application, Zhejiang Normal University, School of Computer Science and Technology, Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, School of Mathematical Sciences, School of Engineering Science, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences Peng Cheng Laboratory

Title: Heterophily-aware Contrastive Learning for Heterophilic Hypergraphs

Abstract:
Hypergraph neural networks (HNNs) have emerged as powerful tools for modeling highorder relationships in complex systems. However, most existing HNNs are designed under the assumption of homophily, which does not hold in many real-world scenarios where connected nodes often exhibit diverse semantics, i.e., heterophily. This inconsistency leads to suboptimal aggregation and degraded performance, especially in low-label regimes. While a few recent methods have attempted to enhance heterophilic hypergraph learning, they often rely heavily on label supervision and overlook the potential of self-supervised techniques. In this paper, we propose HeroCL, a heterophily-aware contrastive learning framework that improves hypergraph representation under both structural heterogeneity and label scarcity. Specifically, HeroCL integrates a multi-hop neighbor encoding module to capture informative higher-order context and incorporates two complementary contrastive objectives, label-aware and structure-aware, to guide representation learning from both semantic and relational perspectives. A multi-granularity contrastive strategy is introduced to exploit latent signals across multiple neighborhood levels. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets against 11 existing baselines demonstrate that HeroCL achieves consistent and significant performance gains, particularly under strong heterophily and limited supervision, validating its robustness and effectiveness.

PaperID: 2834

Authors:Ming Li, Yi Wang, Chengling Gao, Lu Bai, Yujie Fang, Xiaosheng Zhuang, Pietro Lio

Affiliations: Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Intelligent Education Technology and Application, Zhejiang Normal University, Department of Mathematics, Hong Kong, School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing Normal University, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Cambridge University

Title: Permutation Equivariant Framelet-based Hypergraph Neural Networks

Abstract:
Hypergraphs provide a natural and expressive framework for modeling highorder relationships, enabling the representation of group-wise interactions beyond pairwise connections. While hypergraph neural networks (HNNs) have shown promise for learning on such structures, existing models often rely on shallow message passing and lack the ability to extract multiscale patterns. Framelet-based techniques offer a principled solution by decomposing signals into multiple frequency bands. However, most prior framelet systems, particularly Haar-type ones, are sensitive to node ordering and fail to ensure consistent representations under permutation, leading to instability in hypergraph learning. To address this, we propose Permutation Equivariant Framelet-based Hypergraph Neural Networks (PEF-HNN), a novel framework that integrates multiscale framelet analysis with permutation-consistent learning. We construct a new family of permutation equivariant Haar-type framelets specifically designed for hypergraphs, supported by theoretical analysis of their stability and decomposition properties. Built upon these framelets, PEF-HNN incorporates both low-pass and high-pass components across multiple scales into a unified neural architecture. Extensive experiments on nine benchmark datasets, including three homophilic and four heterophilic hypergraphs, as well as two real-world datasets for visual object classification, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, consistently outperforming existing HNN baselines and highlighting the advantages of permutation equivariant framelet design in hypergraph representation learning.

PaperID: 2835

Authors:Chao Su, Yanan Li, Xu Wang, Yingke Chen, Huiming Zheng, Dezhong Peng, Yuan Sun

Affiliations: College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, China State Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Southwest Automation Research Institute, China Centre for Frontier AI Research (CFAR), Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, Sichuan Newstrong UHD Video Technology Co., China Tianfu Jincheng Laboratory, National Key Laboratory of Fundamental Algorithms and Models Engineering Numerical Simulation

Title: Ambiguity-Tolerant Cross-Modal Hashing with Partial Labels

Abstract:
Crossmodal hashing (CMH) has achieved remarkable success in large-scale cross-modal retrieval due to its low storage cost and high computational efficiency. However, most existing CMH methods rely on accurately annotated training data, which is often impractical in real-world applications due to the high cost and limited scalability of data annotation. In practice, annotators typically assign a candidate label set rather than a single precise label to each sample pair, resulting in partial labels with inherent ambiguity. Such ambiguous supervision poses significant challenges to conventional CMH methods that assume reliable and unambiguous labels. In this paper, we investigate a less-touched yet meaningful problem, i.e., cross-modal hashing with partial labels (PLCMH). PLCMH faces two major challenges: label ambiguity and modality-alignment barriers induced by misleading supervision. To address these issues, we propose a new approach named Ambiguity-Tolerant Cross-Modal Hashing (ATCH). Specifically, ATCH presents a Local Consensus Disambiguation (LCD) mechanism that resolves label ambiguity by effectively inferring stable and accurate label confidence based on local consensus within the Hamming space. Moreover, ATCH proposes a Confidence-Aware Contrastive Hashing (CACH) mechanism that derives both pseudo labels and trustworthiness scores from the label confidence vectors to learn discriminative hash codes, leading to effective modality alignment. Extensive experiments on three multimodal datasets demonstrate the superiority of ATCH.

PaperID: 2836

Authors:Cong Su, Qiaoyu Tan, Carlotta Domeniconi, Lizhen Cui, Jun Wang, Guoxian Yu

Affiliations: Shandong University, New York University Shanghai, George Mason University

Title: Counterfactual Fairness with Imperfect Causal Graphs

Abstract:
Fairnessaware machine learning aims to build predictive models that comply with fairness requirements, particularly concerning sensitive attributes such as race, gender, and age. Among causality-based fairness notions, counterfactual fairness is widely adopted for its individual-level guarantees, requiring that an individual’s predicted outcome remains unchanged in a counterfactual world where its sensitive attribute is altered. However, existing methods critically assume that the true causal graph is fully known, which is rarely the case in practice. Moreover, counterfactual fairness suffers from inherent identifiability limitations, as counterfactual quantities cannot always be uniquely estimated from observational data, especially under incomplete causal knowledge. To address these challenges, we propose a principled framework (CF-ICG) for counterfactual fairness under imperfectly known causal graphs, e.g., Completed Partially Directed Acyclic Graphs (CPDAGs). We first introduce a criterion to determine the identifiability, and bound the counterfactual quantities under CPDAGs. Building upon this, we develop an efficient local algorithm that avoids the exhaustive enumeration of all DAGs, ensuring robustness against worst-case fairness violations. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the practical effectiveness and theoretical soundness of CF-ICG.

PaperID: 2837

Authors:Guancheng Wan, Mo Zhou, Ziyi Wang, Xiaoran Shang, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Guibin Zhang, Jinhe Bi, Yunpu Ma, Zaixi Zhang, Ke Liang, Wenke Huang

Affiliations: Wuhan University, University of California, Los Angeles, National University of Singapore, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Princeton University, National University of Defense Technology, Nanyang Technological University

Title: DAWN: Distributed LLM Multi-Agent Workflow Synthesis

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have recently empowered multiagent systems (MAS) to achieve remarkable advances in collaborative reasoning and complex task automation. The effectiveness of these systems fundamentally depends on the design of adaptive communication graphs—the underlying workflows that coordinate agent interactions. However, in real-world scenarios, strict privacy constraints often silo data across organizations, and client distributions are highly non-IID, posing major challenges for synthesizing such workflows. In this work, we are the first to systematically study distributed multi-agent workflow synthesis under these privacy and heterogeneity constraints, and we introduce the Difficulty-Based Skew (DBS) benchmark to emulate such challenging environments. Drawing inspiration from federated graph learning (FGL)—which has primarily focused on classification over static graphs—we identify a critical gap: existing FGL methods do not address the generative design of communication topologies. We reveal two fundamental obstacles to generative workflow synthesis in this setting: (i) workflow specialization conflict, where agents optimized for different task distributions generate incompatible communication patterns that resist meaningful aggregation, and (ii) structural communication shift, where locally optimal agent interaction graphs fail to compose into globally coherent multi-agent workflows. To address these challenges, we propose DAWN, a federated framework that integrates two key innovations: Parametric Resonance, which robustly aggregates heterogeneous local updates via layer-wise SVD-based denoising and alignment, and Structural Gravity, which regularizes local workflow generation by penalizing the Fusion Gromov-Wasserstein distance to a set of prototype communication graphs, ensuring global structural coherence without stifling local adaptation. Experiments on the DBS benchmark show that DAWN surpasses baselines in global task success and reduces inter-client graph divergence, laying a solid foundation for privacy-preserving, adaptive MAS workflow design in heterogeneous settings.

PaperID: 2838

Authors:Haoyu Wang, Sihang Jiang, Xiangru Zhu, Yuyan Chen, Xiaojun Meng, Jiansheng Wei, Yitong Wang, Yanghua Xiao

Affiliations: Fudan University, Huawei Large Model Data Technology Lab

Title: MMIFEvol: Towards Evolutionary Multimodal Instruction Following

Abstract:
Multimodal Instruction Following serves as a fundamental capability of multimodal language models, involving accurate comprehension and execution of userprovided instructions. However, existing multimodal instruction-following datasets and benchmarks face the shortcomings outlined below: (a) Lack of Difficulty Stratification, they collect diverse instruction categories but neglect the stratification of difficulty levels across these categories, which leads to overlap, bias, and low interpretability. (b) Lack of Fine-Grained Metrics, they conflate the model's ability to ``solve tasks" and ``follow constraints" into a single metric, which fails to accurately reflect its instruction-following capability. (c) Lack of Multi-Task Instructions, they overlook the fact that real-world user instructions often consist of multiple combined tasks. This paper proposes MMIFEvol, a framework for multimodal instruction evolving and benchmarking. First, we define the essential components of a carefully curated multimodal instruction set and establish corresponding difficulty levels, based on which we synthesize diverse instruction data. Next, we decouple the evaluation criteria for the instruction following into three different metrics to construct a high-quality benchmark and assess existing models. Experimental results demonstrate that current models still struggle with following complex instructions, while fine-tuning using MMIFEvol data effectively improves models' responsiveness to multimodal instructions.

PaperID: 2839

Authors:Jiaxin Wang, Wenxuan Tu, Lingren Wang, Jieren Cheng, Yue Yang

Affiliations: School of Cyberspace Security, Hainan University, School of Computer Science and Technology, China Hainan Blockchain Technology Engineering Research Center

Title: Anchor-Driven Nyström for Deep Graph-Level Clustering

Abstract:
Graphlevel clustering (GLC), which aims to group entire graphs according to their structural and attribute-based similarities, represents a fundamental yet challenging task in various practical applications. Existing GLC methods primarily fall into two main paradigms: 1) deep graph clustering approaches based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), and 2) kernel-based methods that utilize predefined kernels to perform fine-grained structural comparison for clustering. However, GNN-based methods typically learn graph-level representations by aggregating node embeddings through pooling operations, which inevitably leads to substantial information loss and suboptimal clustering performance. In contrast, kernel methods, despite their theoretical expressiveness, suffer from prohibitive computational costs that hinder their scalability to large-scale settings. To solve these issues, we propose a novel graph learning framework named Anchor-driven Nyström for Deep Graph-Level Clustering (ANGC), which computes graph similarity via kernel methods while retaining the scalability of GNNs. Specifically, we first employ GNNs to encode individual graphs into sets of node embeddings. Rather than relying on pooling operations, we compute graph similarities in a kernel space constructed from these embeddings. To enhance both scalability and representational power, we introduce learnable graph Nyström anchors, which support end-to-end optimization and significantly accelerate kernel computations. To further improve the discriminative capability of these anchors, we propose the concept of anchor response discrepancy, that is, the variation in a given anchor’s responses across different samples. By maximizing this discrepancy, the anchors are encouraged to strengthen inter-graph distinctions for better clustering. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of ANGC over existing state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 2840

Authors:Yuanhui Wang, Kunlong Liu, Minnan Pei, Zhangming Li, Peisong Wang, Qinghao Hu

Affiliations: Sanya Nanhai Innovation and Development Base of Harbin Engineering University, of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: MemeBQ:Memory Efficient Binary Quantization of LLMs

Abstract:
Recent years have witnessed growing scholarly interest in binary posttraining quantization (PTQ) techniques for large language models (LLMs). While state-of-the-art (SOTA) binary quantization methods significantly reduce memory footprint and computational demands, they introduce additional memory overhead beyond binary weight tensors to mitigate performance degradation. Moreover, binary LLMs still suffer from substantial accuracy loss. To address these limitations, we propose MemeBQ, a novel binary PTQ framework for LLMs that reduces the memory overhead of auxiliary flag bitmaps in existing binary quantization methods. Specifically, we first design a greedy row clustering method, which leverages the similarity between the row vectors of weights to partition the weight rows into different groups. By sharing the common flag bitmap within each row group, we significantly mitigate the memory overhead associated with flag bitmaps. Besides, to improve the performance of binary LLMs, we propose a novel weight splitting method for each row group of weights, which determines the flag bitmap's values in a fine-grained way. Extensive experiments on OPT, Llama-2, and Llama-3 models demonstrate that MemeBQ reduces 50% extra memory demand while achieving comparable accuracy compared with current SOTA methods. Alternatively, MemeBQ outperforms SOTA binary quantization methods up to 7% with the same extra bits on reasoning benchmarks.

PaperID: 2841

Authors:Jie Yang, Cheng-You Lu, Zhongli Wang, Hsiang-Ting Chen, Guang-Kui Xu, Chenglong Zhang, Shuting Dong, Xinyan Liang, Bingbing Jiang

Affiliations: The University of Sydney, University of Technology Sydney, Hangzhou Normal University, University of Adelaide, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Nanjing University, Jinan University, Shanxi University

Title: Multi-View Clustering with Granularity-Aware Pseudo Supervision

Abstract:
Modern multiview clustering (MVC) is dominated by two paradigms: multi-view fusion and pseudo-label-guided learning. Pseudo-labeling methods can suffer from confirmation bias; their reliance on a fixed-granularity supervision from an initial clustering can cause learned embeddings to drift from the data's true structure and lose discriminative power. Conversely, fusion methods excel at integrating information but often struggle to robustly differentiate between high-quality and noisy views, which can obscure final cluster boundaries and degrade performance. To address these complementary challenges, we propose GAPS (Granularity-Aware Pseudo Supervision), a novel MVC framework. GAPS introduces a granularity-aware supervision mechanism that generates a full hierarchy of pseudo-labels, enabling the selection of a supervision level that best aligns with the data's intrinsic multi-scale structure. Furthermore, to ensure a high-quality supervisory signal, it incorporates a reliability-aware view selection strategy using a novel Separation-Compactness Index (SCI) to identify and leverage the most informative view for pseudo-label generation. This dual approach ensures the supervisory signal is both structurally adaptive and derived from the most reliable source, leading to highly effective final representations. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of GAPS over other competitors.

PaperID: 2842

Authors:Guanhua Ye, Jifeng He, Yan Li, Junping Du, Zhe Xue, Yingxia Shao, Meiyu Liang, Yawen Li

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: Rethink Representation Learning for Questionnaire Data

Abstract:
Questionnaire data serve as a valuable resource across numerous scientific domains, offering insights into human behavior, health, and social trends. Traditional downsamplingbased representation learning methods—such as standardization and one-hot encoding—reformat these data into tabular structures that inherently discard semantic richness and obscure inter-sample and inter-feature relationships. Consequently, advanced deep learning models often underperform compared to simpler approaches like gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDT), due to their limited capacity to extract meaningful representations from semantically sparse inputs. To address this limitation, we introduce SemantiQ, a novel upsampling-based representation learning framework that embeds questionnaire responses into a unified semantic space. Leveraging Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in conjunction with large language models (LLMs), SemantiQ transforms question text, option text, and external knowledge into semantically enriched natural language statements. These statements are then encoded into semantic embeddings, which are further refined through a three-stage training mechanism and test-time training (TTT), enabling the model to capture complex sample- and feature-wise dependencies. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that SemantiQ consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 2843

Authors:Han Zang, Yongfeng Dong, Linhao Li, Liang Yang, Yu Wang

Affiliations: Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin University

Title: Topology-aware Knowledge Preservation for Class-Incremental Learning

Abstract:
Class Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to enable models to continually learn new classes while retaining previously learned knowledge. The principal challenge in CIL is catastrophic forgetting, which prior approaches typically address by distilling knowledge from previous model. However, such way is often limited to pairwise alignment, failing to preserve the underlying global manifold structure of feature space—ultimately resulting in semantic drift over time. To capture multiscale structural patterns in the feature space, we propose a topology-aware distillation framework that leverages persistent homology. Specifically, by enforcing topological alignment across incremental stages, our method ensures structure-consistent knowledge transfer and robust preservation of old classes. Furthermore, we still devise a dual-branch architecture with an inverse sampling and dynamic reweighting mechanism that addresses the inherent data imbalance in standard replay-based frameworks. These innovations coalesce into TaKP (Topology-aware Knowledge Preservation), a unified framework designed to enhance knowledge preservation in CIL. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TaKP achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks, significantly improving old-class preservation and average accuracy.

PaperID: 2844

Authors:Zao Zhang, Liguo Sun, Pin Lyu

Affiliations: Institute of automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: SAGE: Structured Attribute-Guided Enhancement for GZSL

Abstract:
Embeddingbased generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) models often first forge robust latent semantic correlations between visual and attribute features so that knowledge can generalize to unseen categories. Despite leveraging attributes as priors and learning a shared embedding space, current methods exhibit two critical flaws. First, attributes with heterogeneous granularity are treated uniformly, leading to semantic ambiguity. Second, the source of class-level misclassification seldom aligns with attribute-level errors, preventing models from targeting the specific attributes responsible. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Structured Attribute-Guided Enhancement (SAGE), a unified framework for GZSL. Consensus-aware bidirectional attention first synchronizes visual–semantic focus regions via a mutual-distillation scheme. Next, we partition all attributes into pairwise-disjoint subsets—Global, Context, and Local—and couple them with visual features extracted at matching spatial scales. Finally, we design a cross-sample, subset-aware distillation mechanism—when a sample is misclassified, SAGE identifies the culpable attribute subset, retrieves high-confidence prototypes from a memory bank, and applies a Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence constraint to the corresponding feature branch. Comprehensive experiments and ablations on the challenging AwA2, CUB, and SUN benchmarks demonstrate the contribution of each component, with SAGE achieving a new state-of-the-art throughout. These findings underscore SAGE’s robustness and versatility, marking a substantial advance in generalized zero-shot learning and paving the way for broader zero-resource recognition.

PaperID: 2845

Authors:Yunxiao Zhao, Liang Bai, Xian Yang

Affiliations: Shanxi University, Shanxi university, University of Manchester

Title: Adaptive Evolutionary Fusion for Multi-View Clustering

Abstract:
Deep multiview clustering (MVC) methods achieve impressive performance by effectively capturing complementary information across views, where feature fusion serves as the critical mechanism for maximizing cross-view complementarity. However, most existing methods suffer from rigid dependence on non-adaptive predefined fusion operations, resulting in unverifiable and potentially suboptimal fused feature quality. To resolve these limitations, we propose a novel multi-view clustering framework that learns adaptive hierarchical fusion through an unsupervised evolutionary algorithm. Unlike conventional predefined-fusion strategies, our approach employs tree-structured representations (Fusion Trees) for adaptive feature integration. These Fusion Trees are optimized via our evolutionary mechanism, in which models sharing identical architectures but distinct Fusion Trees are conceptualized as evolutionary individuals. Through implementation of the evolutionarily optimized Fusion Tree, the resultant model generates discriminative representations in accordance with biological evolutionary principles. Comprehensive benchmarking across twelve multi-view datasets validates significant performance gains improvement over state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 2846

Authors:Zhengyu Zhou, Weiwei Liu

Affiliations: Wuhan University

Title: Rademacher Complexity for Distributionally Robust Learning

Abstract:
The goal of distributionally robust learning is to learn models capable of performing well against distributional shifts, such as latent heterogeneous subpopulations, unknown covariate shifts, or unmodeled temporal effects. Recently, Duchi and Namkoong (2021) have proven an upper bound for the excess risk of distributionally robust learning through the lens of covering number argument. However, there are situations where the covering argument fails. This motivates us to study the generalization bound through the lens of Rademacher complexity. More specifically, we consider the CressieRead divergence, f sub k of t is proportional to t to the k minus one. Our theoretical results indicate that the excess risk is of the order big O sub P of n to the negative one over two k star, where k star equals k over k minus one. The decay rate of the excess risk increases with increasing k. As illustrative examples, we consider three learning settings: 1) linear classifier; 2) Gaussian reproducing kernel Hilbert space; 3) one-hidden-layer networks. The empirical results validate our theoretical findings.

PaperID: 2847

Authors:Jiarun Fu, Lizhong Ding, Qiuning Wei, Yuhan Guo, Yurong Cheng, Junyu Zhang

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology

Title: Counterfactual Planning for Generalizable Agents’ Actions

Abstract:
Large language models have revolutionized agent planning by serving as the engine of heuristic guidance. However, LLMbased agents often struggle to generalize across complex environments and to adapt to stochastic feedback arising from environment–action interactions. We propose Counterfactual Planning—a method designed to improve the generalizability and adaptability of agents' actions by inferring causal representations of environmental confounders and performing counterfactual reasoning over planned actions. We formalize the agent planning process as a structural causal model, providing a mathematical formulation for causal analysis of how environmental states influence action generation and how actions affect future state transitions. To support generalizable action planning, we introduce the State Causality Evaluator (SCE), which dynamically infers task-conditioned causal representations from complex environment states; and to enhance adaptability under stochastic feedback, we propose the What-If-Not (WIN) reward, which performs counterfactual interventions to refine actions through causal evaluation. We validate our framework in an open-world environment, where experiments demonstrate improvements in both action generalization and planning adaptability.

PaperID: 2848

Authors:Chin-wing Leung, Paolo Turrini, Fernando P. Santos, Mirco Musolesi

Affiliations: University of Warwick, University of Amsterdam, University College London, University of London University of Bologna

Title: Learning to Cooperate with Minimal Observability

Abstract:
Cooperation among independent learning agents is desirable as it enables reaching collectively rewarding states. Recent work has shown that artificial agents can learn to act prosocially without the need for predefined cooperative preferences or behavioural heuristics, provided that they can observe others' actions or policies and select them as partners accordingly. This paper relaxes this constraint, studying reinforcement learning (RL) agents operating with only minimal information about others' behaviour. We propose a novel `Observer Model', where agents gain insights from direct experience and limited, indirect observations. We show that direct experience alone cannot sustain cooperation, particularly in large societies. However, even minimal observations of third-party interactions, allowing as few as one observer per gameplay, lead to significant improvements, enabling the population to achieve and sustain robust cooperation across varying population sizes. Through numerical analysis, we show the co-evolution of strategy and interaction structure and disentangle how learning happens under various settings. Analysing the partner selection graph, we identify the reasons for cooperation to emerge, and we explore how different learning and exploration rates affect the outcome of social dilemmas played among RL agents.

PaperID: 2849

Authors:Kun Luo, Zheng Liu, Shitao Xiao, Jiabei Chen, Hongjin Qian, Peitian Zhang, Shanshan Jiang, Bin Dong, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu

Affiliations: The Key Laboratory of Cognition and Decision Intelligence for Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, Hong Kong, China Peking University, Ricoh Software Research Center Beijing, Ricoh Company

Title: RetroLM: Retrieval-Augmented KVs for Long-Context Processing

Abstract:
Longcontext processing remains a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs). Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has recently emerged as a promising approach, enabling LLMs to selectively access relevant information from extended contexts to improve efficiency. However, existing RAG approaches often lag behind other efficient long-context processing methods primarily due to inherent limitations on inaccurate retrieval and fragmented contexts. To address these limitations, we propose RetroLM, a novel RAG framework designed for effective long-context processing. Unlike traditional approaches, RetroLM introduces KV-level retrieval augmentation, which partitions the LLM's KV cache into contiguous pages and performs encoding and decoding operations based on the retrieved KV pages. Built upon this framework, we further develop a specialized retriever for precise retrieval of critical pages and conduct unsupervised post-training to optimize the model’s ability to leverage retrieved information. Compared with traditional RAG, the new approach enhances robustness to retrieval inaccuracy, facilitates effective utilization of fragmented contexts, and saves the cost from repeated context-encoding operations. We conduct extensive evaluations across several popular benchmarks, including LongBench, InfiniteBench, and RULER. RetroLM consistently outperforms existing long-LLMs and RAG-based methods, especially in tasks requiring deep reasoning or extreme context lengths.

PaperID: 2850

Authors:Benjamin Cookson, Soroush Ebadian, Nisarg Shah

Affiliations: University of Toronto

Title: Fairness Perceptions of Large Language Models

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for decisionmaking tasks where fairness is an essential desideratum. But what does fairness even mean to an LLM? To investigate this, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of how LLMs perceive fairness in the context of resource allocation, using both synthetic and real-world data. We find that several state-of-the-art LLMs, when instructed to be fair, tend to prioritize improving collective welfare rather than distributing benefits equally. Their perception of fairness is somewhat sensitive to how user preferences are represented, but less so to the real-world context of the decision-making task. Finally, we show that the best strategy for aligning an LLM's perception of fairness to a specific criterion is to provide it as a mathematical objective, without referencing "fairness", as this prevents the LLM from mixing the criterion with its own prior notions of fairness. Our results provide practical insights for understanding and shaping how LLMs interpret fairness in resource allocation problems.

PaperID: 2851

Authors:Pei Huang, Dennis Wei, Omri Isac, Haoze Wu, Min Wu, Clark Barrett

Affiliations: Stanford University, IBM Research, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Amherst College, VMware Research

Title: Parameterized Abstract Interpretation for Transformer Verification

Abstract:
Transformers based on the selfattention mechanism have become foundational models across a wide range of domains, thereby creating an urgent need for effective formal verification techniques to better understand their behavior and ensure safety guarantees. In this paper, we propose two parameterized linear abstract domains for the inner products in the self-attention module, aiming to improve verification precision. The first one constructs symbolic quadratic upper and lower bounds for the product of two scalars, and then derives parameterized affine bounds using tangents. The other one constructs parameterized bounds by interpolating affine bounds proposed in prior work. We evaluate these two parameterization methods and demonstrate that both of them outperform the state-of-the-art approach which is regarded as optimal with respect to a certain mean gap. Experimental results show that, in the context of robustness verification, our approach is able to verify many instances that cannot be verified by existing methods. In the interval analysis, our method achieves tighter results compared to the SOTA, with the strength becoming more pronounced as the network depth increases.

PaperID: 2852

Authors:Daniel Höller

Affiliations: Saarland University, Saarland Informatics Campus

Title: Learning Heuristic Functions for HTN Planning

Abstract:
In recent years, MLbased heuristic functions for automated planning have shown increasing performance. A main challenge is the level of generalization required in planning: techniques must generalize at least across different instances of the same domain (which results in different sizes of learning input). A common approach to overcome the issue is to use graph representations as input. While GNNs are a natural choice for learning, other methods have recently been favored because they show better runtime performance and need less training data. However, existing work has so far been limited to non-hierarchical planning. We describe the first approach to learn heuristics for hierarchical planning. We extend the Instance Learning Graph – a graph structure used in non-hierarchical planning – to the new setting and show how to learn heuristic functions based on it. Since our heuristics are applicable to the lifted model, there is no need to ground it. We therefore combine it with a novel lifted HTN planning system. Like recent systems in non-hierarchical planning, it grounds the search space explored so far, but not the entire model prior to search. Our evaluation shows that our approach is competitive with the lifted systems from the literature, though the ground systems achieve higher coverage.

PaperID: 2853

Authors:Ruoyu Wu, Wei Bao, Ben Liang, Hequn Wang

Affiliations: The University of Sydney, University of Toronto

Title: Online Capacitated General Matching with Knapsack

Abstract:
We study a new online matching problem termed Online Capacitated General Matching with Knapsack (OCGMK), which generalizes the Online General Matching (OGM) problem. In the original OGM, vertices arrive sequentially and need to be paired with other vertices to maximize the total reward of pairing. Our study is the first to consider capacitated vertices in OGM: we allow each vertex to be assigned to multiple vertices up to a capacity limit. We also consider a previously unexamined knapsack constraint in OGM: assigning a pair of vertices has a cost, but the total cost is budgeted. To solve the OCGMK problem, we propose the Online CapacityKnapsack Assignment (OCKA) algorithm, which constructs capacity-friendly sets and knapsack-friendly sets to simultaneously and effectively address both constraints. OCKA achieves a competitive ratio of ⍺=?/2?, where ?=1/(3+e^(-2)) and ? is the ratio between the overall cost of all edges and the cost budget. When the knapsack constraint is not imposed but the capacitated vertices remain, the competitive ratio of OCKA is ⍺'=1/2, recovering the previous best result for single-capacity OGM. We implement trace-driven experiments to evaluate the practical performance of OCKA on a real-world dating dataset, demonstrating the superior performance of OCKA in online dating applications.

PaperID: 2854

Authors:Kaiwen Cheng, Yutian Liu, Zhiwei Nie, Mujie Lin, Yanzhen Hou, Yiheng Tao, Chang Liu, Jie Chen, Youdong Mao, Yonghong Tian

Affiliations: School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Peking University, China AI for Science Program, School of Computer Science, School of Physics, Department of Automation and BNRist, Tsinghua University, China Peking-Tsinghua Joint Center for Life Sciences, China Center for Quantitative Biology, China National Biomedical Imaging Center

Title: ProAR: Probabilistic Autoregressive Modeling for Molecular Dynamics

Abstract:
Understanding the structural dynamics of biomolecules is crucial for uncovering biological functions. As molecular dynamics (MD) simulation data becomes more available, deep generative models have been developed to synthesize realistic MD trajectories. However, existing methods produce fixedlength trajectories by jointly denoising high-dimensional spatiotemporal representations, which conflicts with MD’s frame-by-frame integration process and fails to capture time-dependent conformational diversity. Inspired by MD's sequential nature, we introduce a new probabilistic autoregressive (ProAR) framework for trajectory generation. ProAR uses a dual-network system that models each frame as a multivariate Gaussian distribution and employs an anti-drifting sampling strategy to reduce cumulative errors. This approach captures conformational uncertainty and time-coupled structural changes while allowing flexible generation of trajectories of arbitrary length. Experiments on ATLAS, a large-scale protein MD dataset, demonstrate that for long trajectory generation, our model achieves a 7.5% reduction in reconstruction RMSE and an average 25.8% improvement in conformation change accuracy compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. For conformation sampling task, it performs comparably to specialized time-independent models, providing a flexible and dependable alternative to standard MD simulations.

PaperID: 2855

Authors:Ziwei Li, Shuzi Niu, Tao Yuan, Huiyuan Li, Wenjia Wu

Affiliations: Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Factorization-in-Loop:Proximal Fill-in Minimization for Sparse Matrix Reordering

Abstract:
Fillins are new nonzero elements in the summation of the upper and lower triangular factors generated during LU factorization. For large sparse matrices, they will increase the memory usage and computational time, and be reduced through proper row or column arrangement, namely matrix reordering. Finding a row or column permutation with the minimal fill-ins is NP-hard, and surrogate objectives are designed to derive fill-in reduction permutations or learn a reordering function. However, there is no theoretical guarantee between the golden criterion and these surrogate objectives. Here we propose to learn a reordering network by minimizing l1 norm of triangular factors of the reordered matrix to approximate the exact number of fill-ins. The reordering network utilizes a graph encoder to predict row or column node scores. For inference, it is easy and fast to derive the permutation from sorting algorithms for matrices. For gradient based optimization, there is a large gap between the predicted node scores and resultant triangular factors in the optimization objective. To bridge the gap, we first design two reparameterization techniques to obtain the permutation matrix from node scores. The matrix is reordered by multiplying the permutation matrix. Then we introduce the factorization process into the objective function to arrive at target triangular factors. The overall objective function is optimized with the alternating direction method of multipliers and proximal gradient descent. Experimental results on benchmark sparse matrix collection SuiteSparse show the fill-in and LU factorization time reduction of our proposed method is 0.2% and 17.8% compared with state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 2856

Authors:Chaohu Liu, Haoyu Cao, YongXiang Hua, Linli Xu

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Intelligence

Title: Multimodal Table Understanding with Difficulty-aware Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Multimodal table understanding, which aims for a comprehensive grasp of table content by integrating cellular text, tabular structure, and visual presentation, remains a core yet challenging area of research. We identify that the structural complexity of a table, quantifiable by intrinsic properties such as the ratio of merged cells and the total number of cells, presents a significant obstacle for existing models. Our empirical analysis reveals that the performance of leading Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) deteriorates markedly as table complexity increases, exposing a critical vulnerability in their ability to perceive and reason over intricate tabular data. To address this challenge, we propose MMTable-R1, a model enhanced through difficulty-aware reinforcement learning (RL) post-training strategy. Specifically, we introduce both task-level and data-level curriculum learning. The task-level curriculum is designed to establish a capability ladder, where the model first learns basic perceptual and semantic alignment of table data, and then progresses to acquiring multi-step reasoning capabilities. The data-level curriculum ensures that the model is not exposed to difficult samples prematurely, facilitating a more gradual and effective learning process. Furthermore, we invest considerable effort in constructing a high-quality, large-scale training corpus by curating and processing data from diverse open-source table datasets, ensuring that each instance is paired with an objectively verifiable reward signal. Demonstrating exceptional parameter efficiency, our 3B-parameter model sets a new benchmark by surpassing both established 3B and 7B models, including those specifically designed for table reasoning.

PaperID: 2857

Authors:Shuliang Wang, Xiaoting Leng, Sijie Ruan, Dingqi Yang, Yicheng Tang, Qianyu Yang, Qianxiong Xu, Jiabao Zhu, Hanning Yuan

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology, University of Macau, Nanyang Technological University

Title: Explicit Intent-Enhanced Knowledge Distillation for Trip Recommendation

Abstract:
Trip recommendation aims to generate a sequence of points of interest (POIs) under a user's query input. Existing datadriven methods mainly fall into two categories: supervised approaches and self-supervised approaches. The former cannot fully capture the transition patterns among POIs, while the latter fail to comprehensively model user's query intents. Fortunately, privileged knowledge distillation (PKD) provides us an unique opportunity to align user's query intents with its corresponding trip in historical data. However, such knowledge alignment is implicit, which may not directly reflect the query intents. To this end, in this paper, we propose EKD-Trip, an explicit intent-enhanced knowledge distillation framework. EKD-Trip first trains a trajectory encoder (teacher model) and a trip generator jointly in a self-supervised manner. Then, a query encoder (student model) is trained via multi-task learning to extract implicit knowledge by PKD from teacher and explicit knowledge from an auxiliary task, respectively. At inference time, we use the query encoder and the trip generator to recommend trips. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that EKD-Trip outperforms all baselines over three metrics, with a particularly notable improvement of 13.70% in pairs-F1.

PaperID: 2858

Authors:Xiaohan Yi, Guikun Xu, Zhong Zhang, Liu Liu, Yatao Bian, Xi Xiao, Peilin Zhao

Affiliations: Shenzhen International Graduate School, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, National University of Singapore, Tsinghua University

Title: CrystalDiT: Simple Diffusion Transformers for Crystal Generation

Abstract:
We present CrystalDiT, a diffusion transformer for crystal structure generation that achieves stateof-the-art performance by challenging the trend of architectural complexity. Instead of intricate, multi-stream designs, CrystalDiT employs a unified transformer that imposes a powerful inductive bias: treating lattice and atomic properties as a single, interdependent system. Combined with a periodic table-based atomic representation and a balanced training strategy, our approach achieves 8.78% SUN (Stable, Unique, Novel) rate on MP-20, substantially outperforming recent methods including FlowMM (4.21%) and MatterGen (3.66%). Notably, CrystalDiT generates 63.28% unique and novel structures while maintaining comparable stability rates, demonstrating that architectural simplicity can be more effective than complexity for materials discovery. Our results suggest that in data-limited scientific domains, carefully designed simple architectures outperform sophisticated alternatives that are prone to overfitting.

PaperID: 2859

Authors:Hanrui Chen, Liqi Yan, Qifan Wang, Jianhui Zhang, Fangli Guan, Pan Li

Affiliations: Hangzhou Dianzi University, Meta AI

Title: Chain-of-Search: Parameter-Efficient Reasoning for Zero-Shot Object Navigation

Abstract:
Zeroshot object navigation tasks agents with locating target objects in unseen environments—a core capability of embodied intelligence. While recent vision-language navigation methods leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) for multimodal reasoning, they suffer from two key limitations: (1) semantic misalignment between language-grounded maps and real-world layouts, and (2) inefficiency due to LLMs’ lack of specialization for navigation-specific tasks. To address these challenges, we propose Chain-of-Search (CoS), a novel parameter-efficient framework that enables human-like decision-making via iterative semantic reasoning. First, CoS replaces traditional global maps with an optimal-benefit multi-map construction that continuously balances expected gain and cost throughout the navigation process. Second, we introduce a Parameter-Efficient Intent Aligner (PEIA), trained via a prompt-guided paradigm to align directional decisions with navigation intent. PEIA injects semantic cues into benefit-aware maps, enabling more rational and goal-consistent exploration. Finally, a Reflection-Guided Destination Verifier (RDV) confirms whether the target is reached via language-driven reasoning and corrects potential errors through self-reflection. CoS achieves state-of-the-art performance on HM3D (+2.8% SR) and MP3D (+1.2% SR) without relying on LLMs, demonstrating the effectiveness of lightweight, reasoning-centered navigation.

PaperID: 2860

Authors:Yuanyuan He, Guotai Huang, Wei Li, Jiali You, Jiawen Deng, Fuji Ren

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China Shenzhen Institute for Advanced Study

Title: MvP-ECR: Multi-Perspective Emotion-Cause Reasoning for Empathetic Dialogue

Abstract:
The empathetic dialogue systems aim to recognize user emotions and generate appropriate empathetic responses. However, existing approaches predominantly rely on dialogue history, contextual descriptions, and emotion category labels, failing to model the causal relationship between emotions and their underlying triggers. This limitation leads to generated responses that lack grounding, exhibit weak relevance, and suffer from poor interpretability in emotional expression. To address this, we propose MvPECR, a multi-perspective emotion cause reasoning framework that explicitly constructs emotion-cause structures to help models focus on the core emotional drivers. Additionally, we introduce an emotion-cause consistency evaluation metric to quantitatively assess a model’s ability to identify causal relationships. Experiments across multiple large language models (LLMs) demonstrate that the MvP-ECR framework can serve as a plug-and-play tool to help the model correctly infer emotions and causes in empathetic conversations, and provide more immersive responses for empathetic responses. All code and data will be publicly released to promote the development of empathy dialogue research.

PaperID: 2861

Authors:Zefan Shao, Jin Zhou, Hongliang Yang, Pengfei Xu

Affiliations: Shenzhen University

Title: SCORE: Semantic Collage by Optimizing Rendered Elements

Abstract:
Collage is a powerful medium for visual expression, traditionally demanding significant artistic expertise and manual effort. Existing methods often struggle with a tradeoff between semantic expression and the visual fidelity of the constituent images. To address this, we introduce SCORE (Semantic Collage by Optimizing Rendered Elements), a novel text-driven framework that automates the creation of semantically rich and structurally sound collages. Our key innovation is to shift the optimization process entirely into the image space. By employing a differentiable renderer, we can backpropagate gradients from a powerful, pre-trained text-to-image model directly to the spatial parameters, including position, rotation, and scale, of each image element. We leverage Variational Score Distillation (VSD) to provide robust semantic guidance from a text prompt, ensuring the final layout aligns with the desired concept. Crucially, our ''minimal editing'' principle preserves the integrity of the original elements by forgoing any content-level modifications. The layout is refined by a joint loss function that combines the VSD-based semantic loss with structural regularizers that penalize overlap and enforce boundary constraints. The output of SCORE is a parametric, structured representation that allows further editing and downstream use. Our work reduces the barrier to creative expression and provides a new, powerful paradigm for organizing visual contents.

PaperID: 2862

Authors:Yuwei Bian, Shidong Wang, Yazhou Yao, Haofeng Zhang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, School of Engineering, Newcastle University

Title: Foundation-Adaptive Integrated Refinement for Generalized Category Discovery

Abstract:
The potential of Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) lies in its ability to identify previously undiscovered patterns in both labeled and unlabeled data by leveraging insights from partially labeled training samples. However, interference can arise due to the model's dual focus on discovering both novel and known categories, often leading to conflicts that obscure true patterns in the dataset. This paper presents a divideand-conquer framework, Foundation-Adaptive Integrated Refinement (FAIR), which fine-tunes pretrained foundational weights for various purposes, divided into Foundation (pretrained weights), Adaptive (weights fine-tuned with a variance-preserving loss), and Integrated (weights adjusted for both labeled and unlabeled data). The Adaptive utilizes a newly proposed adaptive contrastive loss that introduces variances within classes to preserve the individuality of representations. The Integrated addresses inherent estimation errors while dynamically estimating the number of categories, incorporating a cosine-based perturbation mechanism as a relaxed margin to accommodate potential ground-truth deviations, rather than relying on biased estimates. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate our method's effectiveness, outperforming state-of-the-art algorithms, especially on fine-grained datasets.

PaperID: 2863

Authors:Fuhai Chen, Feng Zhang, XiaoGuang Ma, Yiyi Zhou, Jiarong Liu, Xuri Ge

Affiliations: Fuzhou University, Northeastern University, Xiamen University, Shandong University

Title: Vision-language Incremental Learning with Dual Class-individual Memory

Abstract:
The emergence of multimodal technologies has propelled VisionLanguage Incremental Learning (VLIL) into a research spotlight. Current VLIL approaches predominantly inherit unimodal paradigms, failing to address fundamental distinctions between visual and linguistic modalities. Crucially, the semantic gap between images and text creates divergent learning dynamics: visual data exhibits rich, distributed information while textual representations remain explicit and compact. Consequently, textual elements align with class-specific tasks, whereas individual images inherently span multiple such tasks, creating dual bottlenecks in class-level memory allocation and scene-level knowledge transfer. To overcome these challenges, we propose DCIM (Dual Class-Individual Memory), a novel framework featuring complementary mechanisms for vision-language continual learning. For class-level constraints, our Hierarchical Class Memory Management (HCMM) strategy dynamically allocates memory resources across object categories. It employs forgetting simulation to identify and preserve the most vulnerable samples, ensuring robust long-term knowledge retention. For scene-level adaptation, the Scene Reconstruction Memory(SRM) module captures generalized environmental representations, enabling contextual transfer to novel classes and disambiguation of semantically related concepts within shared scenes.Extensive experiments on two vision-language tasks, i.e., visual question answering (VQA) and Image captioning (IC), demonstrate the effectiveness and excellent generalization ability of our approach, achieving superior performance under continual learning settings.

PaperID: 2864

Authors:Xiaowei Chi, Zeyue Tian, Jialiang Chen, Wei Xue

Affiliations: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: VMChill: A Dataset for Fine-Grained Visual-Musical Synergy

Abstract:
Massive multimodality datasets are fundamental to the success of large video-language models. However, existing datasets often focus on providing textual descriptions for visual content, treating audio, particularly music, as weakly related information. This overlooks the inherent semantic correlation between visual narratives and musical scores, limiting the development of models for fine-grained cross-modal understanding and generation. To address this gap, we introduce VMChill, a large-scale, fine-grained multimodal video dataset. We leverage trailers as our data source, as they are professionally edited to create a strong synergy between visual pacing, scene transitions, and background music for narrative and emotional impact. Our dataset comprises over 20 million video clips derived from more than 27.1k hours of high-resolution trailer videos. To annotate this data, we propose a systematic multimodal captioning framework. This framework first employs specialized unimodal models to extract descriptive features from multiple perspectives, including visual content, motion dynamics, and musical attributes (e.g., genre, instruments, mood). Subsequently, a large language model (LLM) is utilized to adaptively fuse these diverse descriptions into a single, coherent, and rich multimodal caption. This process yields VMChill-2M, a high-quality subset of 2 million clips with detailed multimodal annotations, and VMChill-Test, a manually refined test set for evaluation. We conduct extensive experiments on downstream tasks, including video understanding and generation, to establish benchmarks and demonstrate the dataset's quality. The results validate that VMChill effectively enhances model performance, highlighting its potential to facilitate future research in fine-grained multimodal learning. We will release the dataset, annotation codebase, and processing pipelines to support community research.

PaperID: 2865

Authors:Wei Cong, Yang Cong, Jiahua Dong, Gan Sun

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing China, College of Automation Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou China, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

Title: Towards Efficient and Effective Interactive 3D Segmentation

Abstract:
Interactive 3D segmentation embodies an advanced humanin-the-loop paradigm, where a model iteratively refines the segmentation of interested objects within a 3D point cloud through user feedback. Existing methods have achieved notable advancements at the expense of substantial resource consumption. To address this challenge, we introduce E2I3D, an efficient and effective model for interactive 3D segmentation. Specifically, we propose a two-stage efficiency-to-effectiveness framework to decouple efficiency and effectiveness, avoiding the high training cost of joint optimization. For efficiency in the first stage, we present heterogeneous pruning, which reliably compresses the model by ranking and pruning the constructed heterogeneous groups separately based on gradient compensation. For effectiveness in the second stage, we design hierarchical click-aware attention that integrates geometric details from high-resolution features with global context from low-resolution features to enhance click-guided interaction. Extensive experiments across public datasets demonstrate that E2I3D exceeds state-of-the-art methods in both efficiency and effectiveness. For instance, on the KITTI-360 dataset, E2I3D boosts the IoU for interactive single-object segmentation from 44.4% to 49.0% with 5 user clicks, while simultaneously reducing parameters from 39.3M to 5.7M.

PaperID: 2866

Authors:Zhanzhou Feng, Qingpei Guo, Jingdong Chen, Feng Gao, Ming Yang, Shiliang Zhang

Affiliations: Peking University, Ant Group

Title: SCAN: Self-Calibrated AutoregressioN for High-Quality Visual Generation

Abstract:
Human artists can continuously refine their coarse sketches during artistic creation. This is quite different from existing autoregressive generation, where a token is determined once sampled. Aiming to flexibly refine the generated contents, this paper presents a SelfCalibrated AutoregressioN (SCAN) model capable of self-evaluating and refining generation quality without regenerating the entire image. We unify image token generation and quality evaluation into a single autoregressive model, formulating both tasks as categorical prediction problems. During inference, the model first generates a coarse initial image, then iteratively refines the lowest-quality patches until satisfactory image quality is achieved. Experimental results demonstrate that SCAN effectively handles diverse real-world generation errors and achieves a promising balance between image quality and speed. For example, SCAN-XL achieves an FID of 2.10 and an IS of 326.1, surpassing the LlamaGen-XL by 1.29 (+38%) in FID and 99.0 (+43.6%) in IS, with a 5.6× speedup (19.76s to 3.56s). Compared to recent works, SCAN improves FID and speed by +18.3% and +23% over VAR-d20, and by +7% and +46% over RandAR-XL.

PaperID: 2867

Authors:Yurong Fu, Peng Dai, Yu Zhang, Feng Yiqiang, Yang Zhang, Haoqian Wang

Affiliations: Tsinghua University

Title: SAME: Spatial-Aware Multimodal Egocentric Human Pose Estimation

Abstract:
Egocentric human pose estimation (HPE) plays a crucial role in immersive applications such as virtual and augmented reality. However, existing methods relying on either visual or sparse inertial data alone often suffer from occlusion or illposed problems. In this work, we propose SAME, a novel spatial-aware multimodal fusion framework combining the complementary signals from the stereo images and sparse IMUs for accurate and robust egocentric HPE. It adopts a two-stage network based on a dual coordinate frame to mitigate the coordinate inconsistencies among the stereo cameras and the IMUs. In the first stage, the IMU signals are transformed into the local frame and iteratively fused with the stereo images for estimating 3D poses in the local frame. In the second stage, the local poses are transformed into the global frame with the 6DOF head poses provided by the head-mounted display's (HMD) SLAM algorithm and then temporally aggregated via a temporal Transformer network. Meanwhile, to achieve geometric and semantic alignment among multi-modal features, we present a depth-guided spatial-aware deformable stereo attention network and a modality-aware Transformer decoder for cross-view and cross-modal feature fusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the public EMHI multi-modal egocentric pose estimation benchmark.

PaperID: 2868

Authors:Shijuan Huang, Hefei Ling, Zongyi Li, Xu Li, Zhao Lv

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: Dual-stream Relation-modeling Disentanglement for Cloth-Changing Person Re-Identification

Abstract:
Clothchanging person re-identification (CC-ReID) aims to identify individuals across non-overlapping cameras despite clothing variations. Existing methods are often constrained by two primary limitations: approaches using auxiliary modalities typically rely on a single specific cue, limiting their robustness, while feature disentanglement methods struggle with discrete labels that create inconsistencies between ground truth labels and modality semantic similarity. To overcome these limitations, we propose DRDnet, a unified framework that synergistically integrates dual auxiliary cues and advanced relation modeling. Specifically, our Dual-Stream Disentanglement (DSD) module leverages textual descriptions and parsing images to decouple clothing factors through high-level semantic supervision and pixel-level operations, yielding robust clothing-agnostic features. Simultaneously, our Modal Relation Modeling (MRM) module constructs feature memory banks and employs adaptive soft label smoothing, effectively enhancing image-text semantic alignment and reinforcing identity consistency across clothing changes. We evaluate DRDnet on several CC-ReID benchmarks to demonstrate its effectiveness and provide state-of-the-art performance across all benchmarks.

PaperID: 2869

Authors:Sangmin Jo, Wootaek Jeong, Da-Woon Heo, Yoohwan Hwang, Heung-Il Suk

Affiliations: Korea University

Title: HyFI: Hyperbolic Feature Interpolation for Brain-Vision Alignment

Abstract:
Recent progress in artificial intelligence has encouraged numerous attempts to understand and decode human visual system from brain signals. These prior works typically align neural activity independently with semantic and perceptual features extracted from images using pretrained vision models. However, they fail to account for two key challenges: (1) the modality gap arising from the natural difference in the information level of representation between brain signals and images, and (2) the fact that semantic and perceptual features are highly entangled within neural activity. To address these issues, we utilize hyperbolic space, which is well-suited for considering differences in the amount of information and has the geometric property that geodesics between two points naturally bend toward the origin, where the representational capacity is lower. Leveraging these properties, we propose a novel framework, Hyperbolic Feature Interpolation (HyFI), which interpolates between semantic and perceptual visual features along hyperbolic geodesics. This enables both the fusion and compression of perceptual and semantic information, effectively reflecting the limited expressiveness of brain signals and the entangled nature of these features. As a result, it facilitates better alignment between brain and visual features. We demonstrate that HyFI achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval, outperforming prior methods with Top-1 accuracy improvements of up to +17.3% on THINGS-EEG and +9.1% on THINGS-MEG.

PaperID: 2870

Authors:Jiayu Lei, Ziqing Fan, Yanyong Zhang, Weidi Xie, Ya Zhang, Yanfeng Wang

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, China Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, School of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China Institute of Artificial Intelligence for Medicine, School of Medicine

Title: Versatile Vision-Language Model for 3D Computed Tomography

Abstract:
Representation learning serves as a foundational component of medical visionlanguage models (MVLMs), enabling cross-modal alignment, semantic consistency, and enhanced generalization capabilities for downstream tasks. As generalist models rapidly evolve, there is a pressing need to unify diverse downstream tasks, such as diagnosis, segmentation, report generation, and multiple choice within a cohesive framework, demanding more efficient and versatile visual representation learning. However, current MVLMs predominately follow CLIP-style vision pretraining, failing to leverage heterogeneous data resources with multi-dimensional imaging and diverse annotation forms. And there lacks systematic analysis of efficient vision encoder design across varied downstream applications, including diagnosis, segmentation, and text generation tasks, particularly for volumetric imaging like Computed Tomography (CT). Besides, current MVLMs exhibit constrained voxel-level capabilities, lacking effective multi-task instruction tuning framework capable of achieving robust performance across various downstream tasks. To address these challenges, we propose CTInstruct, a novel MVLM employing a hybrid ResNet-ViT encoder with multi-granular vision-language pretraining for efficient heterogeneous data modeling, and unified instruction tuning that jointly optimizes discriminative, generative, and voxel-level reasoning for volumetric medical imaging. CTInstruct achieves SOTA performance across 8 CT benchmarks, setting a new standard for data-efficient multimodal learning in medical imaging.

PaperID: 2871

Authors:Yingping Li, Yutong Zou, Yunshi Huang, Changzhe Jiao, Xinlin Wang, Shen Peng, Zhang Guo, Shuiping Gou

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Image Understanding of Ministry of Education, School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University, Xi’an China, Shanghai Academy of Artificial Intelligence for Science, Shanghai China, School of Mathematics and Statistics

Title: TIM++: Transductive Information Maximization for Few-Shot CLIP

Abstract:
Transductive Information Maximization (TIM) is a leading transductive fewshot learning method that maximizes the mutual information between query features and their predicted labels, while incorporating supervision from the support set. However, its potential remains underexplored, primarily due to the limited utilization of textual knowledge provided by vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP. To address this, we propose TIM++, an enhanced framework that incorporates both visual and textual information for few-shot CLIP adaptation. Specifically, TIM++ introduces a Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence-based regularization term that encourages the model’s posterior predictions to align with CLIP’s zero-shot output distribution, especially focusing on the most confident predictions. Additionally, we develop an improved prototype initialization strategy that leverages both support and query features enriched with CLIP-guided semantics. Extensive experiments on 11 public datasets demonstrate that TIM++ consistently outperforms the standard TIM, achieving average accuracy gains of 19.25% and 10.88% in 1-shot and 2-shot settings, respectively. TIM++ also surpasses other existing state-of-the-art methods, establishing a new benchmark for few-shot learning with VLMs.

PaperID: 2872

Authors:Xin Liu, Yanbing Han, Rong Qin, Bing Wang, Jufeng Yang

Affiliations: Nankai University, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: Collaborative Feature Matching with Progressive Correspondence Learning

Abstract:
Accurate feature matching between image pairs is fundamental for various computer vision applications. In detectorbase process, the feature matcher aims to find the optimal feature correspondences, and the match filter is used for further removing mismatches. However, their connection is rarely exploited since they are usually treated as two separate issues in previous method, which may lead to suboptimal results. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end collaborative feature matching (CFM) method, which contains a keypoint learning (KL) module and a correspondence learning (CL) module, to bridge the gap between two types of works. The former improves the discrimination of keypoints, and provides high-quality dynamic matches for CL module. The latter further captures the rich context of matches, and gives effective feedback to KL module. These two modules can reinforce each other in a progressive manner. Besides, we develop an efficient version of CFM, named ECFM, using an adaptive sampling strategy to avoid the negative influence of uninformative keypoints. Experimental results indicate that both methods outperform the state-of-the-art competitors in the tasks of relative pose estimation and visual localization.

PaperID: 2873

Authors:Linfeng Qi, Huibing Wang, Jinjia Peng, Xianping Fu, Jiqing Zhang

Affiliations: Dalian Maritime University, Hebei University

Title: Instance-Guided Scene Adaptation for Unsupervised Person Search

Abstract:
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) is a challenging task in person search. It adapts a welltrained model from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain for privacy and efficiency. Currently, most of the state-of-the-art UDA person search methods adopt multi-scale feature alignment techniques to learn domain-invariant representations. However, person search is a multi-granularity task, and such an indiscriminate method of bridging the differences between domains misleads the identity learning process, which significantly limits the model's performance. In this paper, we propose an Instance-Guided Scene Adaptation (IGSA) framework by eradicating scene disparities and focusing the tasks on instances, effectively eliminating the contradiction between person search and domain adaptation. In IGSA, a Scene-Aware Bidirectional Filter (SABF) is designed to divide the image features into background and foreground to perform bidirectional modulations, thereby achieving simultaneous scene elimination and instance enhancement. To further improve the reliability of identity learning, we also propose an Instance Consistency Contrastive Learning (ICCL) method. By performing cross-epoch updates on the instance-level memory bank and re-initializing the cluster-level memory bank, the problem of inconsistent training across epochs caused by instance identity drift can be alleviated. Through the above designs, our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets, with 82.1% mAP and 83.8% top-1 on the CUHK-SYSU dataset and 41.1% mAP and 82.3% top-1 on the PRW dataset, which is even better than some supervised methods.

PaperID: 2874

Authors:Chuancheng Shi, Shiming Guo, Ke Shui, Yixiang Chen, Fei Shen

Affiliations: University of Sydney, Northern Arizona University, National University of Singapore

Title: SGMHand: Structure-Guided Modulation for Structure-Aware Hand Inpainting

Abstract:
Diffusionbased generative models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in image synthesis, yet realistic hand generation remains a persistent challenge due to complex articulations, self-occlusion, and the lack of explicit structural guidance. To address these issues, we present SGMHand, a novel structure-guided hand inpainting framework that explicitly injects topological priors to enhance structural fidelity and spatial precision. Specifically, we present a structure-guided modulation (SGM) module that synergistically combines structure spatial attention with global feature calibration, enabling fine-grained geometric control over the generative process. Then, we devise a keypoint-aware (KA) loss that enforces topological coherence by aligning attention activations with structures, thereby bridging the gap between high-level semantics and low-level geometry. By jointly optimizing over structural constraints in both representation and learning objectives, SGMHand achieves semantically consistent and geometrically plausible hand synthesis, even under severe occlusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and strong generalization ability of SGMHand across various foundation models, significantly enhancing the quality and realism of human image synthesis in diverse scenarios.

PaperID: 2875

Authors:Zhenhua Tang, Yudian Zheng, Yuzhang Zhong, Haolun Li, Yanbin Hao, Chi-Man Pun

Affiliations: University of Macau, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Hefei University of Technology

Title: SNS-Grasp: Semantic-guided Noise Scaling for Grasp Generation

Abstract:
While diffusion models show promise for intentbased grasp generation, their isotropic noise schedules struggle with joint-specific sensitivity and task-aware variability. This limitation leads to grasps with suboptimal semantic alignment or physical feasibility. To address this challenge, we propose Semantic-guided Noise Scaling for grasp generation (SNS-Grasp), a novel framework that integrates two key innovations. First, the Semantic-guided Noise Scaling Diffusion (SNS-Diff) module generates intent-aware grasps by replacing isotropic noise with anisotropic modulation, dynamically adapting to task semantics and joint-specific sensitivity. Specifically, SNS-Diff leverages a pretrained Intent Recognizer to extract task-aware confidence scores and joint-specific gradient sensitivities from the interaction context. These signals adjust the noise scaling during denoising, downweighting perturbations for semantically critical joints to ensure semantic alignment. Second, the Fine-grained Grasp Refinement (FGR) module establishes dynamic joint-vertex coupling through fine-grained hand-object spatial relationships, enabling iterative optimization of physically executable grasps. Extensive experiments on OakInk and GRAB demonstrate SNS-Grasp's superior performance in semantic accuracy and physical feasibility, with robust generalization to unseen objects.

PaperID: 2876

Authors:Zeze Tao, Jinjia Peng, Huibing Wang

Affiliations: Hebei University, Dalian Maritime University

Title: Prompting Adversarial Transferability via Path Flatness Attack

Abstract:
Deep neural networks are susceptible to adversarial examples, which induce incorrect predictions through imperceptible perturbations. Transferbased attacks create adversarial examples for surrogate models and transfer these examples to target models under black-box scenarios. Recent studies have established a strong correlation between the geometric properties of loss landscapes and the transferability of adversarial examples, demonstrating that flatter loss surfaces consistently yield superior transferability. However, we identify that these methods fail to account for the loss landscape flatness along the path from the current point to local minima, resulting in poor transferability. To address this, this paper constructs a novel Path Flatness Attack (PFA) method to significantly enhance the transferability of adversarial examples. Specifically, this paper proposes a novel path flatness indicator that not only evaluates the flatness in local minima regions but also explicitly quantifies the loss surface geometry along the trajectory from the current point to the minimum. Furthermore, we incorporate the path flatness indicator into the attack process, integrating penalties over low-loss points along the path while maximizing the loss function, thereby explicitly flattening the loss landscape. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PFA consistently achieves state-of-the-art attack performance across all experimental settings.

PaperID: 2877

Authors:Jiahao Wang, Fang Liu, Hao Wang, Shuo Li, Xinyi Wang, Puhua Chen

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Image Understanding of Ministry of Education International Research Center for Intelligent Perception and Computation Joint International Research Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Computation School of Artificial Intelligent, Xidian University, P.R. China

Title: Semantic Feature Purification for Adversarially-Aware RGB-T Tracking

Abstract:
RGBT tracking is increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving, surveillance, and rescue robotics, where tracking reliability is essential under adverse conditions. Although the fusion of RGB and thermal infrared (TIR) modalities offers improved robustness in low-light and occluded scenes, recent findings show that RGB-T trackers remain highly susceptible to subtle input perturbations, human-imperceptible modifications that exploit cross-modal inconsistencies to mislead tracking outputs. In real-world scenarios, such perturbations can arise from sensor spoofing, infrared camouflage, or physical-world attacks, posing serious risks to operational safety. To address this, we propose SFPT, a Semantic Feature Purification framework that enhances RGB-T tracking at the representation level. Rather than filtering corrupted inputs at the pixel level, SFPT introduces task-specific semantic anchors into the feature space to reinforce perturbation-invariant cues. These anchors are derived from descriptive language, interact with visual features to purify representations. To further suppress modality-specific interference, we design an Adaptive Perturbation-Guided Cross-Modal Fusion (APG-CMF) module, which leverages language and visual signals to estimate reliability and dynamically reweight cross-modal features, ensuring robust fusion under perturbation conditions. Extensive experiments under diverse perturbation conditions validate the effectiveness of our approach. Notably, SFPT maintains performance comparable to clean settings even when subjected to perturbations of strength 1/255 and 4/255, demonstrating strong resilience to real-world interference.

PaperID: 2878

Authors:Suqin Wang, Zeyi Wang, Min Shi, Zhaoxin Li, Qi Wang, Xiujuan Chai, Dengming Zhu

Affiliations: North China Electric Power University, Agricultural Information Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Beijing China, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Taicang–ZK Institute of Information and Technology

Title: Slender3D: Curve-Guided Multi-View Reconstruction of Slender Structures

Abstract:
Although geometric reconstruction of general objects from images has made remarkable progress in recent years, slender structures remain largely underexplored, despite their critical importance in engineering, biomedical, and agricultural applications. To bridge this gap, we propose a dedicated 2DGSbased geometric reconstruction framework tailored for slender structures, achieving accurate and faithful geometry recovery. Our method first addresses the challenge that most slender objects are texture-less, which hinders reliable feature matching and pose estimation in traditional SfM pipelines. By leveraging the curve-like nature of slender structures, we perform a curve-guided SfM process that provides robust camera poses and accurate 3D curve initialization for Gaussian primitives. To ensure SfM reliability, we introduce a high-precision mask extraction strategy that integrates geometric priors with a segmentation network, effectively handling self-occlusion and thin geometry. Furthermore, to enhance fine geometric recovery, we incorporate a differentiable Poisson reconstruction module to extract an initial mesh during training, which is then refined via image-space iterative optimization using differentiable mesh rasterization. In contrast to conventional approaches that rely on differentiable Gaussian rasterization followed by TSDF-based mesh extraction, our method avoids the additional geometric errors and artifacts introduced during the intermediate TSDF conversion, thereby improving the overall reconstruction quality. Comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets validate that our method achieves superior reconstruction quality compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

PaperID: 2879

Authors:Xiaozheng Wang, Yong Yang, Shuying Huang, Nayu Liu, Ziyang Liu

Affiliations: Tiangong University

Title: UMNet: Uncertainty-guided Memory Network for Hyperspectral Pansharpening

Abstract:
At present, most hyperspectral (HS) sharpening methods have not fully utilized the feature correlation between adjacent bands in HS images, nor have they explored the problem of feature uncertainty generated by the model during the fusion process. This may lead to inaccurate fusion features generated by the model, resulting in spatial and spectral distortions in the fusion results. To address these issues, we propose an uncertaintyguided memory network (UMNet) for HS pansharpening. A spatial-spectral recurrent fusion unit (SRFU) is designed based on the concept of temporal data modeling, which utilizes the correlation between adjacent bands to fuse spectral and spatial features from PAN and LRHS images. In SRFU, a state memory interaction unit (SMIU) is constructed based on non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) to learn the global spatial-spectral dependency of PAN and HS images in the recurrent state space. Moreover, based on uncertainty theory, we define two spatial-spectral uncertainty-guided loss functions for the HS pansharpening task to train the model step by step, ensuring that the network can reconstruct more accurate spectral and spatial features. Extensive experiments on three widely used datasets demonstrate that, compared with some state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, the proposed UMNet has achieved significant improvements in both spatial and spectral quality metrics.

PaperID: 2880

Authors:Xijun Wang, Rayyan Abdalla, Junyun Huang, Chengyuan Zhang, Ruiqi Xian, Dinesh Manocha

Affiliations: University of Maryland, College Park

Title: Bi-VLM: Binary Post-Training Quantization for Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
We address the critical gap between the computational demands of visionlanguage models and the possible ultra-low-bit weight precision (bitwidth <= 2 bits) we can use for higher efficiency. Our work is motivated by the substantial computational cost and memory requirements of VLMs, which restrict their applicability in hardware-constrained environments. We propose Bi-VLM, which separates model weights non-uniformly based on the Gaussian quantiles. Our formulation groups the model weights into outlier and multiple inlier subsets, ensuring that each subset contains a proportion of weights corresponding to its quantile in the distribution. We propose a saliency-aware hybrid quantization algorithm and use it to quantize weights by imposing different constraints on the scaler and binary matrices based on the saliency metric and compression objective. We have evaluated our approach on different VLMs. For the language model part of the VLM, our Bi-VLM outperforms the SOTA by 3%-47% on the visual question answering task in terms of four different benchmarks and three different models. For the overall VLM, our Bi-VLM outperforms the SOTA by 4%-45%.

PaperID: 2881

Authors:Yifeng Wang, Lingxin Wang, Lu Zhang, Yang Li, Chao Xu, Weiwei Zhang, Junyue Tang, Yanhong Zheng, Yong Pang, Shengyuan Jiang, Yi Zhao, Zongquan Deng

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Harbin Institute of Technology, Institute of Geochemistry, Beijing Institute of Spacecraft System Engineering, China Academy of Space Technology

Title: Deeply Seeking Boundary for Lunar Regolith Segmentation

Abstract:
The sharp, intricate contours of lunar regolith particles hold critical clues to the Moon's geological evolution and inform engineering applications from habitat construction to spacecraft design, making their precise segmentation a task of significant scientific and engineering value. However, this task exposes a weakness in deep learning models known as spectral bias, an inherent tendency to learn smooth, lowfrequency functions which causes them to systematically erase the very high-frequency boundary details that are of primary interest. To resolve this conflict, we propose a framework to deeply seek object boundaries. First, we propose High-Frequency Initialized LoRA (HiFi-LoRA) to counteract spectral bias. By initializing the LoRA adaptation matrices as the optimal low-rank approximation of a high-pass filter, it fundamentally enhances the model's high-frequency perception and injects a strong preference for edges. Second, we propose the Wavelet Energy Modulation (WEM) regularizer. It guides the model to learn the intrinsic correlation between contour complexity and mask area, forcing the model to build a geometric understanding of contour morphology upon its high-frequency perception, thereby enabling the generation of boundary details commensurate with the object's scale. Experimentally, we constructed the Lunar Regolith Segmentation Dataset (LRSD), the first large-scale benchmark with expert-annotated contours. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method sets a new state of the art on this challenging benchmark, not only achieving top performance on regional metrics like mIoU and DSC but, more critically, drastically outperforming existing models on boundary accuracy. This work not only provides a powerful computational tool for lunar science but also offers a robust and synergistic design pattern for other fine-grained segmentation challenges.

PaperID: 2882

Authors:Yunxi Wang, Shuaiyu Liu, Qiling Li, Yazhou Ren, Xiaorong Pu

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: Topology-Aware Vision Transformers for Enhanced Scene Recognition

Abstract:
Scene recognition (SR) is a fundamental task in computer vision (CV). In recent years, Transformerbased methods have achieved remarkable success in scene recognition tasks. Most existing approaches primarily rely on visual features, while failing to effectively model the structural relationships within scenes, which are crucial for accurate scene recognition. To this end, we propose Topology Attention Network for Scene Recognition (TANSR), an innovative method that leverages topological relationships from graphs to guide scene recognition. Specifically, Graph Attention Mask Generation Network (GAMGN) generates topology-aware masks from graph representations constructed by Graph Generation Module (GGM) and integrates them with patch embeddings by Topology Attention Guidance (TAG), enabling the transformer's attention mechanism to incorporate topological information. Furthermore, we introduce an innovative attention-driven multimodal fusion strategy that integrates graph-derived topological cues with visual patch embeddings, substantially enhancing the transformer’s capability to capture topological information and improving performance in complex scene recognition tasks. We evaluate TANSR on the benchmarks MIT-67, Scene-15 and SUN397, where it achieves consistent state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, including 98.58% accuracy on MIT-67.

PaperID: 2883

Authors:Yalun Wu, Liu Liu, Endong Tong, Yingxiao Xiang, Xiaoting Lyu, Zhen Han, Jiqiang Liu

Affiliations: School of Cyberspace Science and Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ministry of Education Key Lab for Intelligent Networks and Network Security, Xi'an Jiaotong University

Title: FRBAT: Conditionally-Visible Physical Backdoor Attack via Fluorescence

Abstract:
Deep neural networks are increasingly vulnerable to physically deployable backdoor attacks, which manipulate realworld objects to induce targeted model failures. However, current physical backdoor attacks predominantly rely on perpetually visible triggers appended to target objects. These methods inevitably expose attack traces during the deployment phase, risking human suspicion prior to activation. In this paper, we propose a conditionally-visible physical backdoor attack, which can only be activated under specific optical conditions and thereby overcomes the risk of being detected after deployment and before the attack. Specifically, to ensure robust and reliable activation, we design irregular polygonal pattern as triggers to against across environmental variations. Moreover, we introduce a dual-phase mechanism (dormant and activated) to enable stealthy deployment. Our trigger remains invisible and dormant under non-attack conditions, leaving no physical traces. It activates instantaneously under specific illumination, inducing the target model to perform the desired behavior. We conduct experiments on traffic sign recognition tasks to compare our attack with six digital and seven physical attacks, and assess its performance against potential defenses. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness, stealthiness, and robustness of our attack.

PaperID: 2884

Authors:Yifan Xia, Tianwei Ye, Jun Huang, Xiaoguang Mei, Jiayi Ma

Affiliations: Wuhan University

Title: Probabilistic Deformation Consistency for Unsupervised Shape Matching

Abstract:
In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised shape matching framework based on probabilistic deformation consistency in the spectral domain, termed as PDCMatch. Axiomatic optimization methods suffer from expensive geodesic distance calculations and vulnerability to local optima, and learningbased methods typically lack geometric consistency in pointwise correspondences. To overcome both limitations, we develop a non-Euclidean probabilistic deformation model that jointly estimates the underlying deformation and the correspondence probability via a linear Expectation-Maximization procedure. Building on this formulation, we further design a task-specific deformation loss that explicitly encourages geometric smoothness and structural consistency in an unsupervised manner. This tailored loss function plays a central role in improving the matching performance across challenging scenarios. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks involving near-isometric shapes, anisotropic meshing, cross-dataset generalization, topological noise, and non-isometric shapes demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, highlighting both its effectiveness and generalizability.

PaperID: 2885

Authors:Zeyu Xiao, Xinchao Wang

Affiliations: National University of Singapore

Title: Exploiting Blurry Representations for Event-guided Video Super-Resolution

Abstract:
Blurry video superresolution (BVSR) remains fundamentally ill-posed due to the simultaneous loss of high-frequency spatial details and reliable motion cues in blurry low-resolution frames. While cascade-based and joint BVSR methods struggle under severe blur, existing event-guided VSR approaches largely assume clean inputs and are ineffective against complex motion degradation. These methods fail to model blurry representations or leverage event signals for blur-aware motion cues, leading to sub-optimal performance. We propose BluR-EVSR, a unified framework that implicitly models Blurry Representations and leverages Event cameras to jointly address both blur and resolution degradation for VSR. The framework begins with a self-supervised degradation learning strategy guided by event streams and neighboring frames, enabling adaptive blur representation without requiring explicit supervision. A dynamic routing mechanism encodes spatially varying degradations, while a motion-saliency degradation-aware attention module injects motion saliency priors to facilitate efficient RGB-event fusion. Integrated into a bidirectional recurrent framework, BluR-EVSR enables temporally consistent and detail-preserving restoration with low computational cost. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that our method significantly outperforms prior BVSR and event-based approaches.

PaperID: 2886

Authors:Haiming Yao, Wei Luo, Qiyu Chen, Jianxing Liao, Wei You

Affiliations: Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd, Institute of Automation, Advanced Computing and Storage Lab

Title: Parameter-, Memory-, Time-Efficient Multi-Task Dense Vision Adaptation

Abstract:
While adapting pretrained vision models to downstream dense prediction tasks is widely used, current methods often overlook adaptation efficiency, especially in the context of multitask learning (MTL). Although parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods can enhance parameter efficiency, broader aspects such as GPU memory and training time efficiency remain underexplored. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm that simultaneously achieves efficiency in Parameters, GPU Memory, and Training Time for Multi-Task Dense Vision Adaptation. Specifically, we propose a dual-branch framework, in which a frozen pretrained backbone serves as the generic main branch, and the proposed Bi-Directional Task Adaptation (BDTA) modules are integrated in parallel to form a task bypass branch that extracts adaptation features required by multiple specific tasks. This adaptation module is lightweight, efficient, and does not require backpropagation through the large pre-trained backbone, thus avoiding resource-intensive gradient computations. Moreover, a Mixture of Task Experts mechanism (MoTE) is further proposed to integrate adaptation features across tasks and scales, thereby obtaining more robust representations tailored for dense prediction tasks. On the PASCAL-Context benchmark, our method achieves over 2× relative performance improvement compared to the best prior multi-task PEFT method, while using only ~30% of the parameters, ~50% of the memory, and ~60% of the training time, demonstrating superior overall adaptation efficiency.

PaperID: 2887

Authors:Jian Yu, Fei Shen, Cong Wang, Yanpeng Sun, Hao Tang, Qin Guo, Xiaoyu Du

Affiliations: National University of Singapore, Nanjing University, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: IMAGGarment+: Efficient Attribute-Wise Diffusion for Garment Generation

Abstract:
Diffusion models have advanced finegrained garment generation, yet balancing controllability, efficiency, and texture fidelity remains challenging. Adapter-based methods often yield incoherent details, while full fine-tuning is computationally expensive and prone to overwriting pretrained priors. To address these limitations, we propose IMAGGarment+, an efficient diffusion framework for controllable and high-quality garment synthesis. It comprises two key modules designed for efficient and attribute-aware conditioning. First, we introduce an attribute-wise feature extractor (AFE) that disentangles key garment attributes, silhouette, logo, position, and color, into parallel latent streams. Each stream is optimized independently via LoRA, ensuring minimal parameter overhead while retaining expressive capacity. Second, we develop an attribute-adaptive attention (AA) module to inject attribute-specific cues into the generative process through a selective, layer-wise injection strategy. Specifically, silhouette and color features are injected into early decoder layers to guide structural and appearance formation, while logo features are propagated across all layers to ensure cross-scale consistency. Extensive experiments on fine-grained garment benchmarks demonstrate that IMAGGarment+ outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with less than 20% additional parameters, validating its effectiveness and efficiency.

PaperID: 2888

Authors:Aihua Zheng, Zhaojun Liu, Xixi Wan, Chenglong Li, Jin Tang, Yan Yan

Affiliations: Anhui University, University of Illinois Chicago

Title: ProxyTTT: Proxy-driven Test-Time Training for Multi-modal Re-identification

Abstract:
Multimodal object re-identification (ReID) aims to retrieve specific targets by leveraging complementary cues from different sensing modalities. Despite recent progress, two key challenges remain: (1) the limited ability to jointly address both modality and viewpoint discrepancies, and (2) the difficulty of effectively leveraging reliable target-domain data to improve generalization. To address these challenges, we propose Proxy-driven Test-Time Training (ProxyTTT), a unified framework that enhances both multi-modal identity representation learning and model generalization. During training, we propose a Multi-Proxy Learning (MPL) mechanism to address the representation bias across different views and modalities. MPL disentangles fine-grained modality-specific and modality-common identity proxies as semantic anchors to align identity features across diverse perspectives and sensing modalities. This alignment strategy enables the model to learn robust and discriminative global identity representations under heterogeneous modality conditions. At test time, to reliably exploit target domain data, we propose Proxy-guided Entropy-based Selective Adaptation (PESA) for test-time training. Specifically, PESA leverages the semantic structure encoded by identity proxies to estimate prediction uncertainty via entropy, and selectively adapts the model using only high-confidence samples. This selective adaptation effectively mitigates the domain shift between training and deployment environments, improving the model’s generalization in real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments on four public multi-modal ReID benchmarks (RGBNT201, RGBNT100, MSVR310, and WMVeID863) demonstrate the effectiveness of ProxyTTT.

PaperID: 2889

Authors:Markus Kirchweger, Tomáš Peitl, David Seka, Stefan Szeider

Affiliations: TU Wien

Title: Graph Choosability via SAT: Beyond the Nullstellensatz

Abstract:
List coloring extends graph coloring by assigning each vertex a list of allowed colors. A graph is kchoosable if it can be properly colored for any choice of lists with k colors each. Deciding k-choosability is π²ₚ-complete, bipartite graphs have unbounded list chromatic number, and planar graphs (famously 4-colorable) are all 5-choosable but not all 4-choosable. To search for graphs of given choosability, we extend SAT Modulo Symmetries (SMS) with custom propagators for list coloring pruning techniques and propose a quantified Boolean (QBF) encoding for choosability. We employ a hybrid approach: pen-and-paper reasoning to optimize our formulas followed by automated case distinction by QBF solvers and SMS. Our methods yield two significant results: (1) a 27-vertex planar graph that is 4-choosable yet cannot be proven so using the combinatorial Nullstellensatz widely applied in previous work (we show this is a smallest graph with that property), and (2) the smallest graph exhibiting a gap between chromatic and list chromatic numbers for chromatic number 3.

PaperID: 2890

Authors:Ziming Zhao, Tingting Li, Zhaoxuan Li, Jianwei Yin

Affiliations: Zhejiang University

Title: Relational Verification for Cost-Aware Quantum Program Optimization

Abstract:
Optimizing quantum programs is key to mitigating noise, reducing errorcorrection overhead, and improving performance on both near-term and fault-tolerant devices. Existing heuristic and learning-based optimizers, however, lack formal guarantees and risk semantic errors in the presence of entanglement and measurement. We present RelOpt, a semantics-preserving optimizer that enforces relational correctness between original and optimized programs. RelOpt is built on a lightweight intermediate language (QCore) with a relational operational semantics supporting partial-trace equivalence, measurement-distribution preservation, and approximate correctness. Optimization is guided by a multi-objective cost model that considers gate count, circuit depth, and error-correction cost. Only rewrite rules that are formally verified against user-specified contracts are applied. The engine combines symbolic simulation, SMT reasoning, and cost analysis to achieve safe and effective optimizations. On standard benchmarks such as QFT, Grover, and QAOA, RelOpt consistently outperforms Qiskit, t|ket>, and learning-based optimizers across multiple cost metrics while maintaining formal guarantees. By integrating formal verification with cost-aware compilation, RelOpt establishes a foundation for trustworthy and hardware-adaptive quantum toolchains.

PaperID: 2891

Authors:Qiaoxi Chen, Changsheng Gao, Li Li, Dong Liu

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, Nanyang Technological University

Title: Transform-Free Feature Coding via Entropy-Constrained Vector Quantization

Abstract:
Feature coding has recently emerged as a key technique for efficient transmission of intermediate representations in distributed AI systems. Existing approaches largely follow a transformbased pipeline inherited from image and video coding, where the transform module is used to remove spatial structural redundancies in visual signals. However, our analysis indicates that such redundancies have already been largely removed during feature extraction, which reduces the necessity of the transform module. Building on this insight, we propose a new transform-free pipeline that directly encodes the extracted features via a vector quantization module and an entropy model. The proposed transform‑free framework jointly learns the quantization codebook and entropy model, enabling end‑to‑end optimization tailored to the inherent feature characteristics. Furthermore, the proposed method inherently avoids the computational complexity of the transform module. Experiments on features from diverse architectures and tasks demonstrate that our method achieves superior rate-distortion performance compared to transform-based baselines, while significantly reducing the encoding and decoding complexity.

PaperID: 2892

Authors:Fengrui Hua, Yiyan Qi, Zikai Wei, Yuxing Tian, Chengjin Xu, Xiaojun Wu, Jia Li, Jian Guo

Affiliations: International Digital Economy Academy, Université de Montréal, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Title: BAG: Benchmarking Anomaly Detection on Dynamic Graphs

Abstract:
Anomaly detection in dynamic graphs is a critical area of research that focuses on identifying abnormal components within evolving graph structures that deviate significantly from typical patterns. Despite advancements in traditional temporal pattern mining and deep learning techniques, a comprehensive benchmarking framework for Dynamic Graph Anomaly Detection (DyGAD) has been lacking. To address this gap, we introduce BAG, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for anomaly detection on dynamic graphs. BAG enables extensive evaluation of 25 leading DyGAD models, covering both classical approaches and advanced Dynamic Graph Neural Networks (DGNNs), across 10 diverse realworld datasets that include both synthetic and naturally occurring anomalies. The framework supports evaluations at both the edge and node levels, offering a robust tool to advance DyGAD research. Our main finding is that Continuous-time Dynamic Graph (CTDG) models demonstrate superior performance and potential in detecting anomalies in dynamic graph edges, compared to Discrete-time Dynamic Graph (DTDG) models. Furthermore, the results reveal that existing methods are less effective at detecting organic anomalies, primarily due to the presence of temporal anomalies and highly imbalanced samples. The proposed BAG benchmark significantly enhances the evaluation of DyGAD methods by improving dataset selection, metric application, and model training. Moreover, BAG supports reproducibility and further exploration in this field by integrating all models, datasets, and evaluation protocols into an open-source repository.

PaperID: 2893

Authors:Fei Li, Qingyun Gao, Enneng Yang, Jianzhe Zhao, Guibing Guo

Affiliations: Northeastern University

Title: Interest-Shift-Aware Logical Reasoning for Efficient Long-Sequence Recommendation

Abstract:
Logical reasoningbased recommendation methods formulate logical expressions to characterize user-item interaction patterns, incorporating regularization constraints to ensure consistency with logical rules. However, these methods face two critical challenges: (1) As sequence length increases, they cannot effectively capture the dynamic transfer of user interests across subsequences (i.e., subsequence interest drift), thereby degenerating logical expressions to single-subsequence inference. (2) The time complexity of logical reasoning and rule learning scales quadratically with the sequence length, severely constraining computational efficiency in long-sequence recommendation. To address these challenges, we propose ELECTOR, an intErest-shift-aware long-sequence Logical reasoning for EffiCienT lOng-sequence Recommendation method. Specifically, we design a Subsequence Interest Learning Module (SIL) to model cross-subsequence interest drifts in long sequences. SIL employs a local attention mechanism to extract subsequence interests effectively and a global attention mechanism to capture the correlations among subsequence interests. Subsequently, we propose an Interest-aware Logical Reasoning (ILR) mechanism that performs logical reasoning using a limited set of subsequence and short-term interests, rather than reasoning over the entire sequence, significantly reducing time complexity. Additionally, ILR employs interest logical reasoning contrastive loss to ensure the model simultaneously considers multiple interests. Experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms all baselines regarding computational efficiency and recommendation accuracy, confirming its effectiveness.

PaperID: 2894

Authors:Shengjun Ma, Yuhai Zhao, Fenglong Ma, Baoyin Liu, Zhengkui Wang, Wen Shan

Affiliations: Northeastern University, Pennsylvania State University, Singapore Institute of Technology, Singapore University of Social Sciences

Title: Multi-graph Fusion Cross-model Contrastive Learning for Recommendation

Abstract:
Knowledge Graph (KG)supported Graph Neural Network models are becoming crucial in recommendation systems due to their ability to mitigate the data sparsity challenge. However, these models remain suboptimal because they overlook the representation differences between the inherent user-item Bipartite Graph (BG) and the external head-relation-tail KG, leading to semantic misalignment. Moreover, they indiscriminately incorporate various types of relations from the KG, which may introduce noise information into the model, ultimately degrading recommendation performance. To address these challenges, we propose an end-to-end model named Multi-graph Fusion Cross-model Contrastive Learning (MFCCL). To uncover users' interest in items and explore the associations between items, we first construct a user-interest graph by integrating information from both the BG and KG, and an item-association graph derived from the BG. We devise a multi-graph representation learning module that incorporates rich semantics into user and item representations in parallel. Simultaneously, a classical collaborative filtering module is introduced to fully leverage user-item collaborative signals. Additionally, we design a novel free data-augmentation cross-model contrastive learning to facilitate the exchange of complementary information between different models. Empirical evaluations on three widely used benchmarks demonstrate that our MFCCL method achieved significant improvements over the baselines.

PaperID: 2895

Authors:Saleh Momeni, Changnan Xiao, Bing Liu

Affiliations: University of Illinois at Chicago, Independent Researcher

Title: Continual Out-of-Distribution Detection with Analytic Neural Collapse

Abstract:
Continual learning (CL) aims to enable models to incrementally learn from a sequence of tasks without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. While most prior work focuses on closedworld settings, where all test instances are assumed from the set of learned classes, real-world applications require models to handle both CL and out-of-distribution (OOD) samples. A key insight from recent studies on deep neural networks is the phenomenon of Neural Collapse (NC), which occurs in the terminal phase of training when the loss approaches zero. Under NC, class features collapse to their means, and classifier weights align with these means, enabling effective prototype-based strategies such as nearest class mean, for both classification and OOD detection. However, in CL, catastrophic forgetting (CF) prevents the model from naturally reaching this desirable regime. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Analytic Neural Collapse (AnaNC) that analytically creates the NC properties in the feature space of a frozen pre-trained model with no training, overcoming CF. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in continual OOD detection and learning, highlighting the effectiveness of our method in this challenging scenario.

PaperID: 2896

Authors:Tuo Wang, Meng Jian, Ge Shi, Lifang Wu, Yashen Wang

Affiliations: Beijing University of Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Artificial Intelligence Institute of CETC

Title: MSR-Rec: Multi-Step Reasoning-Enhanced LLM for Sequential Recommendation

Abstract:
Sequential recommendation has become indispensable in modern digital services. Prevalent recommendation techniques formulate the recommendation task with a language instruction fed into large language models (LLMs) to generate recommendations. However, the implicit interaction scenario of recommendation task cannot provide explicit reasoning supervision to activate LLM's multistep reasoning capability. Besides, the manner of reasoning for enhancing recommendation is still underexplored. Therefore, we investigate activating multi-step reasoning with users' interactions and propose a multi-step reasoning-enhanced LLM (MSR-Rec), which tightly integrates reasoning with recommendation from designing reasoning chain to reasoning-based recommendation. A task-decomposed reasoning chain is elaborately designed to imitate users' thinking process, seamlessly involving reasoning into recommendation. Following the reasoning chain, MSR-Rec synthesizes reasoning supervision and fine-tunes LLM to adapt for task-specific reasoning. In inference, bidirectional reasoning is implemented from user and item sides, performing a closed-loop reasoning for recommendation. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MSR-Rec achieves the state-of-the-art performance in both recommendation quality and reasoning interpretability, advancing the integration of reasoning and recommendation in LLM-based systems.

PaperID: 2897

Authors:Liangxun Yang, Tianzi Zang, Jiayi Sun, Juan Li, Yicong Li

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Title: DRSoRec: Dual-Rectification of Social Networks for Recommendation

Abstract:
Leveraging social homophily to enhance user preference modeling, social recommendation has become a cornerstone of modern recommender systems. However, the raw social network contains inherent unreliability as it teems with noisemisclicks, bot-generated and transient ties---while many meaningful links remain unobserved. In this study, we propose DRSoRec, a dual-rectification model to rectify the raw social networks by simultaneously removing noisy signals and preserving useful information. Specifically, the invariant social rationale discovery module distills each user's influential core social circle of the current recommendation, whereas the adaptive social connection refinement module employs a mixture-of-experts structure learner to prune spurious edges and uncover latent links. A contrastive optimization objective is designed to align and mutually enhance these two modules, and the refined user representations are fused with collaborative representations generated from interactions for the final recommendation. Experiments on three public datasets confirm that DRSoRec consistently gains over state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 2898

Authors:Fangming Zhong, Haiquan Yu, Cun Zhu, Suhua Zhang

Affiliations: Dalian University of Technology

Title: HaNa: Hardness and Noise-Aware Robust Cross-modal Retrieval

Abstract:
Noisy correspondence in crossmodal retrieval introduces significant challenges due to its inherent difficulty in identification and correction. Although existing methods attempt to minimize the influence of noisy samples by the weighting mechanism, these methods still struggle with performance degradation under increasing noise levels. Specifically, the clean samples are assigned the same weight of 1, which ignores the sample hardness. In addition, the weights for noisy samples are approaching 0, leading to the overlook of sample diversity. To address these issues, we propose a Hardness and Noise-aware (HaNa) robust cross-modal retrieval method. HaNa introduces a momentum-based reweighting mechanism to adaptively balance learning difficulty across clean samples, avoiding overfitting risk and accumulative partitioning bias. Moreover, HaNa addresses the limitation that weights for noisy data are approaching 0 from a new perspective to fully employ the diversity of samples to further improve its generalization. It employs an Asymmetric Noise-aware Regularization Loss (ANRL) to treat identified noisy data as negative samples for optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HaNa achieves superior matching accuracy and stability, especially in high-noise scenarios, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 2899

Authors:Shu Zhou, Yuxuan Ao, Yunyang Xuan, Xin Wang, Tao Fan, Hao Wang

Affiliations: School of Information Management, Nanjing University, China Jiangsu International Joint Informatics Laboratory, Baidu Inc, School of Public Administration

Title: Inference Scaling Law for Retrieval Augmented Generation

Abstract:
Retrievalaugmented generation (RAG) has recently emerged as a powerful framework for knowledge-intensive natural language processing tasks, which leverages the strengths of both pre-trained language models and external knowledge. While significant progress has been made, the scaling behavior of these approaches during inference remains poorly understood. Towards this end, this paper presents a comprehensive study of inference scaling law for RAG models, which investigates how inference performance scales with respect to key factors including retriever model scale, generator model scale, number of retrieved documents, and context window size. Through extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, we establish empirical scaling laws that reveal power-law and sigmoid-type relationships between these factors and performance. We further build a joint inference scaling law with theoretical justification. With the proposed scaling laws, we can understand the performance tendency of RAG models under different computational resources. We believe our insights can pave the way for efficient and effective deployment of RAG models in more applications.

PaperID: 2900

Authors:Vittorio Bilò, Gianpiero Monaco, Luca Moscardelli

Affiliations: Università del Salento, University of Chieti-Pescara

Title: Compensate to Not Deviate: On Subsidised Equilibria

Abstract:
We introduce a new notion of deterministic stable solution for noncooperative games, termed subsidized equilibrium. It assumes that an amount of money can be used as a pool of subsidies to stabilize a strategy profile that otherwise would not be accepted by (some of) the players. Roughly speaking, for a given amount of money, a strategy profile is a subsidized equilibrium if the total payoff loss incurred by players not playing best-responses does not exceed that amount, i.e., there is enough money to refund all players experiencing a regret. With respect to many other solution concepts in the literature, the notion of subsidized equilibrium has important advantages. Specifically, for a sufficiently high value of money, a subsidized equilibrium always exists and can even be computed in polynomial time; also, existence of an efficient subsidized equilibrium can be guaranteed. Thus, determining for which amounts of money existence, polynomial time computability and efficiency can or cannot be achieved becomes an intriguing question. We provide initial results towards this direction for some widely studied classes of games.

PaperID: 2901

Authors:Hang Yang, Zhiwu Li, Witold Pedrycz

Affiliations: Macau Institute of Systems Engineering, Macau University of Science and Technology, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences

Title: On Coresets for End-to-end Learning from Crowds

Abstract:
Crowdsourcing is a common approach for training datahungry models by collecting high-quality labeled data with human labor. With crowdsourcing data, the end-to-end learning paradigm is rising, where the classifier is concatenated with annotator-specific confusion layers and the two parts are co-trained in a parameter-coupled manner. However, learning with the size of a very large set of annotations is a challenge when computation or energy is limited. In this paper, we analyze and refine the coresets for end-to-end learning from crowds under the sensitivity sampling framework. This coreset is a small possible subset of annotations, so one can efficiently optimize the Coupled Cross-Entropy Minimization problem with guaranteed approximation. We first prove the lower bound, which shows no coresets smaller than complete data with confusion layers. Then, with workers' transition matrices, we show that with the regularization term, this lower bound can be prevented. Our main result is that under mild assumptions, a smaller coreset exists for the regularized Coupled Cross-Entropy Minimization problem. An upper bound of sensitivity is proposed for designing a sampling algorithm called CrowdCore. The experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our analysis.

PaperID: 2902

Authors:Luca Andolfi, Gianluca Cima, Marco Console, Maurizio Lenzerini

Affiliations: Sapienza University of Rome

Title: Expressive Recursive Answers for Ontological Knowledge Bases

Abstract:
A fundamental use of knowledge bases (KBs) is query answering, i.e., retrieving the information entailed by the KB in response to a user query. When both the KB and the query are specified as logical formulae, the standard form of answer provided to users is the set of all certain answers (CAs): tuples of constants that satisfy the formula defining the query in every model of the logical theory defining the KB. Despite their wide adoption, CAs are known to be just a lossy representation of the information that a KB and a query provide. While several alternative answer languages have been proposed in the literature, no general consensus has emerged on the most suitable approach to query answering over ontological KBs, as each language comes with its own limitations. To address some of these issues, we introduce Regularly Recurrent Answers (RRAs), a novel answer language for queries over ontological KBs based on regular expressions. RRAs support the representation of infinite sets of tuples of constants via a simple (and arguably well understood) generation mechanism. We show that RRAs can capture a fundamental fragment of the certain information entailed by union of conjunctive queries and DLLite KBs, making them a strong candidate for informative query answering settings. Our contribution includes the formal definition of RRAs, a proof of their informativeness, and a study of the computational complexity of query answering problem using RRAs.

PaperID: 2903

Authors:Liang Bai, Zhi Wang, Huimin Yan, Xian Yang

Affiliations: Shanxi University, University of Manchester

Title: Medical Vision–Language Pretraining with LLM-Guided Temporal Supervision

Abstract:
Medical vision–language pretraining typically relies on static image–text pairs, overlooking temporal cues vital for understanding clinical progression. This limits model sensitivity to evolving semantics and reduces their effectiveness in realworld clinical reasoning. To address this challenge, we propose TAMM—a temporal alignment framework that leverages weak but semantically rich supervision from large language models (LLMs). Given temporally adjacent clinical reports, LLMs automatically generate (i) coarse-grained trend labels (e.g., improving or worsening), and (ii) fine-grained rationales explaining the supporting clinical evidence. These complementary signals inject temporal semantics without requiring manual annotation, and guide vision–language representation learning to capture trend-sensitive cross-modal alignment and rationale-grounded coherence. Experiments on multiple medical benchmarks demonstrate that TAMM improves retrieval and classification performance while yielding more interpretable, temporally consistent embeddings. Our results highlight the potential of leveraging LLM-derived supervision to equip vision–language models with temporal awareness critical for clinical applications.

PaperID: 2904

Authors:Haipeng Chen, Yu Liu, Xun Yang, Yuheng Liang, Yingda Lyu

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, China Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of Ministry of Education, University of Science and Technology of China, Public Computer Education and Research Center

Title: Causality-Aligned Semantic Recovery for Incomplete Cross-Modal Retrieval

Abstract:
Incomplete crossmodal retrieval (ICMR) requires models to recover missing modalities and robustly align heterogeneous ones for effective retrieval. Existing methods, however, fall short in both aspects. They often rely on limited semantic cues, such as single samples or coarse category prototypes, which compromises reconstruction quality. Moreover, these approaches are vulnerable to learning spurious cross-modal correlations, thereby impairing accurate alignment and hindering retrieval performance. To address these challenges, we propose Causality-Aligned Semantic Recovery (CASR), a novel method designed to both comprehensively restore missing modalities and mitigate spurious associations between vision and language. Our CASR involves two essential components: i) the Missing Modality Imagination (MMI) module, which combines category semantic priors with relevant contextual information to achieve high-quality semantic reconstruction; ii) the Explicit Causal Alignment (ECA) module, which explicitly learns environment-invariant attention, effectively eliminating the interference of spurious correlations and improving retrieval performance. Furthermore, we extend CASR to the challenging task of Partially Aligned Cross-Modal Retrieval, where we treat unlabeled unpaired data as a form of incomplete data. By leveraging MMI and ECA modules, we are able to learn robust representations in this setting. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets under various missing rates demonstrate that CASR achieves superior robustness and retrieval performance.

PaperID: 2905

Authors:Zhuohang Dang, Minnan Luo, Chengyou Jia, Hangwei Qian, Xinyu Zhang, Xiaojun Chang, Ivor Tsang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, MOEKLINNS Laboratory, Centre for Frontier AI Research, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore Institute of High Performance Computing, Xi'an Jiaotong University, University of Science and Technology of China

Title: Correspondence Coverage Matters for Multi-Modal Dataset Distillation

Abstract:
Multimodal dataset distillation (DD) condenses large datasets into compact ones that retain task efficacy by capturing correspondence patterns, i.e., shared semantics between paired modalities. However, such patterns rely on cross-modal similarity and cannot be faithfully captured by intra-modal similarity of current unimodal strategies. As a result, current multi-modal DD methods tend to over-concentrate, redundantly encoding similar correspondence patterns and thus limiting generalizability. To this end, we propose a novel multi-modal DD framework to systematically Promote Correspondence coverage, i.e., ProCo. Initially, we develop a correspondence consistency metric based on cross-modal retrieval distributions to cluster correspondence patterns. These clusters capture the underlying correspondence distribution, enabling ProCo to initialize distilled data with representative patterns while regularizing optimization to promote correspondence representativeness and diversity. Moreover, we employ conditional neural fields for efficient distilled data parameterization, enhancing fine-grained pattern capture while allowing more distilled data under a fixed budget to boost correspondence coverage. Extensive experiments verify that our ProCo achieves superior and elastic budget-efficacy trade-offs, surpassing prior methods by over 15% with 10x distillation budget reduction, highlighting its real-world practicality.

PaperID: 2906

Authors:Joshua DeOliveira, Sajal Chakroborty, Walter Gerych, Elke Rundensteiner

Affiliations: Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Title: Neural Tangent Kernels Under Stochastic Data Augmentation

Abstract:
The learning dynamics of modern neural networks remain an open problem in deep learning. The Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) offers an elegant description of training dynamics in the infinite‑width limit, yet its classical formulation assumes a static data set. Modern model training practice departs from this strong assumption through the use of on‑the‑fly data augmentations (e.g. additive noise). In this work, we conduct an NTKdriven analysis of how data transformations affect a neural net's evolution in the function space. Our theoretical contributions characterize how repeated Gaussian perturbations from NTK-derived covariances can steer neural-net optimizations toward user‑specified behavior. These theoretical insights are empirically validated by controlled experiments. Taken together, our results lay the foundation for a promising future research direction that transforms the NTK from a descriptive to a prescriptive tool, enabling control of neural net training trajectories and behavior of inference generalization with grounded interventions.

PaperID: 2907

Authors:Yu Duan, Junzhi He, Zhanxuan Hu, Mengda Ji, Rong Wang, Quanxue Gao

Affiliations: Xidian University, Northwest Polytechnical University, Yunnan Normal University

Title: Learning Intrinsic Hierarchy for Generalized Category Discovery

Abstract:
Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to classify unlabeled data by leveraging knowledge from labeled categories. While existing methods have achieved remarkable progress, they often treat images as flat feature sets, neglecting the intrinsic hierarchy: where key objects dominate meaning and backgrounds serve as context. For instance, in images of a dog either standing on grass or lying on a bed, the dog remains the central semantic element, whereas the background varies. Motivated by this, we propose LEArning Intrinsic Hierarchy (LEAH), a lightweight plugand-play module designed to model hierarchical structure within images. LEAH consists of two components: a pruner that filters task-irrelevant tokens to extract key objects, and a constructor that embeds key objects and full images into hyperbolic space using adaptive entailment cones to capture compositional semantics. LEAH can be easily integrated into existing GCD frameworks with minimal modification. When applied to SimGCD, it achieves up to 13.2% accuracy improvement on fine-grained benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness in discovering subtle inter-class differences through hierarchical modeling.

PaperID: 2908

Authors:Wentao Fan, Chao Zhang, Chunlin Chen, Huaxiong Li

Affiliations: Nanjing University

Title: Online Cross-Modal Hashing with Expanding Label Space

Abstract:
Due to the continuous increase of multimedia data on the internet, online hashing has garnered considerable attention for handling multimodal data streams. However, most existing online hashing approaches focus solely on data growth of samples, overlooking the dynamics of classes. In this paper, we simultaneously address the challenges of both sample-level and class-level growth, and propose a novel Online Hashing method with Expanding Label Space (OH-ELS) for cross-modal retrieval. In OH-ELS, multi-modal data arrives continuously, and incoming data may introduce new classes. To avoid catastrophic forgetting, we transfer the historical knowledge at both the sample and class levels. At the sample-level, a small subset of anchor codes from old data are replayed to preserve the similarities between new data and old data. At the class-level, a consistency regularizer is applied to new classifiers to leverage the priors of historical classes. To ensure both efficiency and accuracy, a discrete optimization algorithm is proposed to solve the binary-constrained optimization problem without relaxation. Experimental results illustrate the effectiveness and superiority of OH-ELS in class-incremental cross-modal retrieval compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 2909

Authors:Yuzhe Feng, Yunlong Gao, Feiping Nie

Affiliations: Huawei Cloud Computing Technologies Co., Xiamen University, Northwest Polytechnical University

Title: Adaptive and Asymptotic Mean-based Subclass Discriminant Analysis

Abstract:
Traditional Discriminant analysis (DA) is one of the classical supervised learning algorithms to reduce the dimensionality of data with Gaussian assumption. Since the unique class mean in traditional DA is intractable to estimate the nonGaussian distrbution of data, some existing DA algorithms based on the clustering criterion focus on learning multiple means in each class so as to address the non-Gaussian issue. The clustering-based DA inevitably involved the constraint optimization problem to learn multiple means, which may lead to the locally optimal solution. To address these issues, inspired by the smooth approximation theory and the concept of Kolmogorov mean, this paper explores an unconstraint function with asymptotic property as an alternative proxy to clustering-based DA algorithms. Thus the derived DA algorithm, i.e., adaptive and asymptotic mean-based subclass discriminant analysis (AASDA), which not only leverages multiple means to represent different subclasses in same class but also adaptively and asymptotically learns the similar mean for each sample in the learned optimal subspace via the gradient-based optimizer. The asymptotic analysis of unconstraint function, the gradient analysis and convergence guarantee of proposed criterion verify the effectiveness of AASDA algorithm. Its merits are thoroughly assessed on a suite of synthetic and real world data experiments.

PaperID: 2910

Authors:Xiyuan Gao, Bing Cao, Baoquan Gong, Pengfei Zhu

Affiliations: Tianjin University

Title: Reconcile Gradient Modulation for Harmony Multimodal Learning

Abstract:
Multimodal learning frequently faces two coupled challenges: modality imbalance, where dominant modalities suppress others during training, and modality conflict, where opposing gradient directions hinder optimization. Existing methods typically address these issues in isolation, yet they are intrinsically correlated and most fundamentally reflected in the gradient space—severe imbalance may obscure conflicts, while suppressing conflict may homogenize features and worsen imbalance, affecting fusion performance. To jointly address this coupled challenge, we propose Reconcile Gradient Modulation (RGM), a unified framework that adaptively adjusts gradient magnitude and direction for harmony multimodal learning. The core of RGM is SynOrth Grad, which minimizes Dirichlet energy to perform minimalgradient surgery. It enhances cooperation synergy when modalities are aligned and enforces orthogonality to preserve uniqueness in conflict situations, thus promoting stable and balanced learning. To guide this modulation, we propose Cumulative Gradient Energy (CGE) as a convergence-guaranteed measure of modality-wise progress, and construct a Balance-nonConflict Plane (BCP) for real-time diagnosis and control of training dynamics. Experiments on diverse benchmarks validate our effectiveness and generalizability, consistently outperforming counterparts that are designed to handle multimodal imbalance or conflict independently.

PaperID: 2911

Authors:Jufeng Han, Shu Wei, Min Wu, Lina Yu, Weijun Li, Linjun Sun, Hong Qin, Yan Pang

Affiliations: Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences School of Integrated Circuits, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences College of Materials Science and Opto-Electronic Technology

Title: Implicit Neural Representation with Multi-Scale Sine Activation

Abstract:
Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have become a powerful paradigm for modeling continuous signals in computer vision, graphics, and scientific computing. However, multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) generally suffer from severe spectral bias, which limits their ability to accurately model highfrequency details and multi-scale structures. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Multi-Scale Sine Activation (MSA), which explicitly introduces multi-scale frequency responses by incorporating multiple sets of sine activations with logarithmically spaced frequencies in parallel at each layer. MSA is further combined with an amplitude modulation mechanism to ensure numerical stability and robust optimization across different frequency channels. We conduct extensive experiments on a series of challenging tasks, including 1D multi-scale function fitting, image representation, video representation, 3D shape representation, and PDEs solving. Experimental results show that MSA outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of reconstruction accuracy, detail preservation, and training stability.

PaperID: 2912

Authors:Renda Han, Junlong Wu, Wenxuan Tu, Jingxin Liu, Haotian Wang, Jieren Cheng

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Hainan University, School of Cyberspace Security

Title: Federated Graph-level Clustering Network with Attribute Inference

Abstract:
With the rise of vertical segmentation in realworld data, federated graph-level clustering has gained significant attention in recent years. However, the inherent missing attributes in graph datasets held by certain clients lead to suboptimal local parameter updates and misaligned global parameter consensus. This results in knowledge shifts during negotiation to ultimately impair overall clustering performance. This issue remains largely underexplored in the current advanced research. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel deep learning network called Federated Graph-level Clustering Network with Attribute Inference (FedAI), which utilizes high-confidence prior knowledge from each domain and multi-party collaborative optimization to achieve efficient reasoning of unknown features. Specifically, on the client, high-confidence graph samples are projected into a latent space. We then extract and upload irreversible path digest information and attribute-oriented inference signals from them. On the server, we first identify affinity relationships hierarchically via the improved graph kernel method. We then infer the features of clients lacking node attributes through a prior structure-guide recovery operator, facilitating inter-client knowledge transfer for better clustering. Experimental results on 15 cross-dataset and cross-domain non-IID graph datasets demonstrate that FedAI consistently outperforms existing methods.

PaperID: 2913

Authors:Chunyu Hu, Tianyin Liao, Yicheng Sui, Ran Zhang, Xiao Wang, Ziwei Zhang

Affiliations: Nankai University, China CITIC Bank, Beihang University

Title: Invariant Conditional Molecular Generation Under Distribution Shift

Abstract:
Conditional molecular generation, aiming to generate 2D and 3D molecules that satisfy given properties, has achieved remarkable progress, thanks to the advances in deep generative models such as graph diffusion. However, existing methods generally assume that the given conditions for training and testing are consistent, failing to handle the realistic challenge when there exist distribution shifts between training and testing conditions. Invariant learning is a mainstream paradigm for addressing distribution shifts, but fusing invariant learning principles with conditional molecular generation faces three core challenges: (1) existing invariant learning methods focus on discriminative tasks and cannot be directly adapted to molecule generative tasks; (2) how to distinguish between invariant subgraph and variant subgraph of a molecule graph, which is treated as an integrated input; (3) how to fuse invariant subgraphs, variant subgraphs, and property conditions for effective generation. To tackle these challenges, we propose Invariant Conditional MOLecular generation (ICMOL), a framework that combines invariant learning with graph diffusion to improve the generalization ability of conditional molecular generation under distribution shifts. Specifically, we first disentangle molecular graphs into invariant and variant subgraphs while maintaining SE(3) equivariance, an important inductive bias for molecular generation. On this basis, we further design a two-phase graph diffusion generation model. In the first phase, we generate an invariant molecular consistent with the target property. In the second phase, we propose a cross-attention mechanism to fuse variant subgraph representations and property conditions to guide the generation of complete molecules while maintaining property alignment. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset show that IC-MOL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across six property conditions under distribution shifts.

PaperID: 2914

Authors:Disen Hu, Xun Jiang, Xiaofeng Cao, Zheng Wang, Jingkuan Song, Heng Tao Shen, Xing Xu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Tongji University, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, School of Computer Science and Engineering

Title: Hyper-Opinion Vagueness Quantification for Robust Multimodal Learning

Abstract:
Robust Multimodal Learning (RML) aims to address the issues of unreliable predictions of multimodal models. Nevertheless, previous RML works often struggle to distinguish between different categories that rely on identical intramodal cues, making ambiguous predictions. We defined this degree of ``uncertain'' in extracting discriminative features of a multimodal model as vagueness. Neglecting such vagueness, as previous RML works commonly do, will undermine the ability to extract unique semantics of each category in multimodal models, further resulting in worse robustness under disturbances that affect semantic representations. Additionally, this vagueness will lead the parameter updating processes towards unreliable fusion, thus diverting the learning processes of the multimodal model from learning unique features of each category. Based on the above insight, we propose a novel robust multimodal learning approach, termed Hyper-Opinion Quantifying Vagueness (HOQV). Specifically, we first introduce hyper-opinion to capture and quantify the vagueness of multimodal learning in discriminating representations of different categories. Moreover, to mitigate the interference in parameter updating of unreliable representations with high vagueness, we also design the Hyper-Opinion Gradient Modulation to guide the optimization processes. We evaluate our HOQV on six datasets with different disturbances, including noise and adversarial attack, and demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance consistently.

PaperID: 2915

Authors:Mingdie Jiang, Quanjiang Li, Tingjin Luo, Yiping Song, Chenping Hou

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology

Title: Multi-Label Classification with Incremental and Decremental Features

Abstract:
Feature dynamics have emerged as a critical topic about openenvironment learning due to the instability of feature availability. While traditional feature evolution targets single-label tasks, multi-label learning is essential to accommodate the exploding annotation spaces. However, multi-label classification with incremental and decremental features is a crucial yet underexplored problem, which poses the challenge of preserving feature representations and label correlations from historical instances and simultaneously adapting to newly arriving streaming data. To address these issues, we propose a two-stage, one-pass learning approach termed MLID. It attempts to compress the informative content of vanished features into the domain of survived ones, facilitate the propagation of label dependencies via low-rank regularization of the classifier, and incorporate augmented features to construct an adaptive classification mechanism. Besides, we design optimization strategies for each stage and provide theoretical guarantees of convergence. Moreover, we establish the generalization error bound of MLID and demonstrate that the compactness of the trace norm and the reuse of models based on effective features can enhance the generalization performance. Finally, we extend it to multi-shot case and extensive experimental results validate the superiority of our MLID.

PaperID: 2916

Authors:Kwang In Kim

Affiliations: Pohang University of Science and Technology

Title: Client-level Active Error Correction in Distributed Learning

Abstract:
Label errors can significantly degrade model performance, making effective mechanisms crucial. Active error correction (AEC) addresses this by prioritizing data points for human relabeling where corrections are expected to have significant impact. We extend AEC to distributed collaborative learning, where clients hold local data and a central server allocates labeling resources. Existing AEC methods assume centralized access and do not generalize to distributed settings. To overcome this, we use neural network weight gradients from client updates as proxies for local data and apply a Gaussian process in gradient space to strategically select clients for correction. Our method identifies gradient inconsistencies and encourages diversity through a computationally efficient rank-one Cholesky update. Experiments on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

PaperID: 2917

Authors:Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Xiangyu Chen, Jing Liu, Ye Wang, Pu (Perry) Wang, Matthew Brand

Affiliations: Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, Sony Electronics Inc.

Title: LatentLLM: Activation-Aware Transform to Multi-Head Latent Attention

Abstract:
Modern foundation models such as large language models (LLMs) require a massive amount of computational and memory resources. We propose a new framework to convert such LLMs into a reduceddimension latent structure. Our method extends a local activation-aware tensor decomposition to a global attention-aware joint tensor decomposition. Our framework can significantly improve the model accuracy over the existing model compression methods when reducing the latent dimension to realize computationally/memory-efficient LLMs. We show the benefit on several benchmark including multi-modal reasoning tasks.

PaperID: 2918

Authors:Matthew Lai, Longbing Cao

Affiliations: Macquarie University

Title: Stabilizing Spiking Neurons Through Biologically Inspired Polarization

Abstract:
The Leaky Integrateand-Fire (LIF) neuron model remains a staple in spiking neural networks (SNNs), yet its oversimplified dynamics lead to unstable gradients and limit scalability. We introduce a polarization-aware spiking architecture (POLARA) that models depolarization, repolarization, and hyperpolarization through analytically defined membrane dynamics. POLARA unifies biologically grounded design with stable gradient propagation—formulating both forward and backward paths directly, and applying gradient shaping solely for numerical control, without requiring learnable gates or surrogate tuning. By bounding membrane potentials within realistic voltage ranges, POLARA avoids vanishing and exploding gradients, enabling scalable training in deeper architectures. Experiments show consistent gains over LIF and competitive results against optimized SNNs, positioning POLARA as a principled alternative to surrogate-driven or reset-based designs.

PaperID: 2919

Authors:Qing Li, Qibin Zheng, Yi Liu, Xingchun Diao

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Advanced Institute of Big Data

Title: AIM: Manifold-based Data Filtering for Representation Finetuning

Abstract:
Representation Finetuning (ReFT) has recently emerged as an efficient paradigm for adapting pretrained language models by editing hidden representations rather than model weights. However, our preliminary experiments reveal that ReFT is notably more sensitive to training data quality compared to traditional parameterefficient finetuning methods, particularly to samples with incorrect labels, which can severely degrade performance. Inspired by prior work demonstrating that the hidden representations of generalizable neural networks exhibit low-dimensional manifold structures, we hypothesize that effective generalization in ReFT requires geometrically structured transformations between pre- and post-intervention representations. This implies that the intervention vectors representing these transformations should form a low-dimensional manifold, rendering the inconsistent transformations induced by label noise as detectable geometric outliers. To leverage this insight, we introduce Aligning Interventions on a learned Manifold (AIM), a representation-based data filtering method for ReFT, which identifies high-quality training samples by measuring the geometric consistency of their intervention vectors with respect to a robust reference manifold derived via principal component analysis on trusted data. Extensive experiments on both commonsense and arithmetic reasoning tasks confirm the effectiveness of AIM, showing consistent improvements over strong data selection baselines across multiple model scales.

PaperID: 2920

Authors:Yuxuan Liu, Wenchao Xu, Haozhao Wang, Zhiming He, Zhaofeng Shi, Chongyang Xu, Peichao Wang, Boyuan Zhang

Affiliations: School of Information and Communication Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Division of Integrative Systems and Design, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: Causality-inspired Federated Learning for Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Graphs

Abstract:
Federated Graph Learning (FGL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for decentralized training of graph neural networks while preserving data privacy. However, existing FGL methods are predominantly designed for static graphs and rely on parameter averaging or distribution alignment, which implicitly assume that all features are equally transferable across clients, overlooking both the spatial and temporal heterogeneity and the presence of clientspecific knowledge in real-world graphs. In this work, we identify that such assumptions create a vicious cycle of spurious representation entanglement, client-specific interference, and negative transfer, degrading generalization performance in Federated Learning over Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Graphs (FSTG). To address this issue, we propose a novel causality-inspired framework named SC-FSGL, which explicitly decouples transferable causal knowledge from client-specific noise through representation-level interventions. Specifically, we introduce a Conditional Separation Module that simulates soft interventions through client conditioned masks, enabling the disentanglement of invariant spatio-temporal causal factors from spurious signals and mitigating representation entanglement caused by client heterogeneity. In addition, we propose a Causal Codebook that clusters causal prototypes and aligns local representations via contrastive learning, promoting cross-client consistency and facilitating knowledge sharing across diverse spatio-temporal patterns. Experiments on five diverse heterogeneity Spatio-Temporal Graph (STG) datasets show that SC-FSGL outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 2921

Authors:Yuze Liu, Chaochao Lu, Chao Yang

Affiliations: Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Title: SHADOW: Dynamic-Aware Credit Assignment Against Long-Horizon Tasks

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as the predominant paradigm for training large language model (LLM) agents to solve complex, multistep tasks through environmental interaction. A fundamental challenge in such long-horizon scenarios is credit assignment, as delayed rewards provide inadequate signals for evaluating individual action contributions. Existing methods typically neglect trajectory transition dynamics, which leads to coarse-grained or biased credit assignment. To address these limitations, we introduce SHADOW, a novel framework that systematically incorporates transition dynamics for improved credit assignment. Our framework makes two primary contributions: (i) a dynamics-aware state grouping mechanism that mitigates misleading action comparisons between dynamically inconsistent states, and (ii) a local dynamic advantage estimator that leverages Generalized Advantage Estimation (GAE) to precisely quantify individual action contributions through a fine-grained analysis of transition patterns. Comprehensive experiments conducted with the Qwen2.5-1.5/7B-Instruct agent model demonstrate that our method achieves success rate improvements of 9.4%/7.6% on the ALFworld benchmark and a performance gain of over 5% on WebShop.

PaperID: 2922

Authors:Zehao Liu, Kun Li, Wei Zhou

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China School of Cyber Security

Title: GLOBA: Rethinking Parameter Conflicts in Model Merging

Abstract:
Model merging serves as a trainingfree technique that combines multiple task-specific models into a unified multi-task model, but parameter conflicts often lead to performance drops. Previous methods flatten weight matrices into one-dimensional vectors, losing the inherent structural information of their row and column spaces. We mathematically prove and experimentally validate that parameter conflicts arise from non-orthogonal components of task vectors, while orthogonal components are conflict-free. Furthermore, we find that non-orthogonal components can contain both harmful conflicts and beneficial synergies. To precisely locate parameter conflicts and extract orthogonal components, we propose GLOBA (GLObal Basis Analysis Framework), which projects task vectors onto a global basis to align them within a unified coordinate system and construct a task interaction matrix. Following energy-based pruning, we divide parameters into five types based on the orthogonal relationships between the row spaces and column spaces of task vectors. Experiments on three fine-tuned models (mathematics, coding, and instruction-following) using LLaMA-2-7B and LLaMA-2-13B demonstrate significant performance gains through selective retention of beneficial parameters and removal of conflicting ones.

PaperID: 2923

Authors:Li Lv, Qian Guo, Li Zhang, Liang Du, Bingbing Jiang, Lu Chen, Xinyan Liang

Affiliations: Taiyuan University of Science and Technology, Shanxi University, Hangzhou Normal University

Title: Uncertainty-Guided View-Strength-Aware Feature Utilization for Multi-View Classification

Abstract:
In multiview classification tasks (MVC), each view provides an unique perspective on the data, offering complementary information that can improve classification performance when properly integrated. However, traditional methods typically adopt a uniform processing strategy for all views before fusion, overlooking the fact that different views may require different treatments due to variations in their quality and informativeness. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework called Uncertainty-Guided View-Strength-Aware Feature Utilization (UVF) for multi-view classification. Our approach introduces a view uncertainty estimation module to quantify the discriminative strength of each view. Based on this estimation, a Differentiated Feature Selector (DFS) adaptively selects features, retaining informative dimensions in weak views while preserving original features in strong views. Furthermore, we employ an uncertainty-guided fusion strategy that assigns dynamic weights to each view's contribution based on its uncertainty score, enhancing the robustness and reliability of the final decision. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms conventional approaches, achieving better classification accuracy and interpretability through strength-aware feature processing and fusion.

PaperID: 2924

Authors:Nelson Ma, Junyu Xuan, Guangquan Zhang, Jie Lu

Affiliations: University of Technology Sydney

Title: Discovering Mixture Skills for Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Skill discovery has emerged as a popular route for unsupervised reinforcement learning (URL), offering agents a diverse, reusable set of behaviours learned before any taskspecific reward is experienced. However, existing methodologies tend to favour either categorical codes or unimodal skill priors, which simplifies training at the cost of limiting the variety of behaviours they can represent. We introduce Discovery of Mixture Skills (DiMS), a URL algorithm that learns a latent Gaussian mixture by training a Gaussian Mixture Variational Autoencoder (GMVAE) in tandem with the unsupervised policy. In DiMS, a hierarchical GMVAE simultaneously discovers clusters of skills, while an auxiliary macro-latent dynamically positions mixture components to prevent mode collapse. A joint loss term combining log-likelihood and curiosity rewards enables simultaneous updates of representation and policy while improving exploration. Experiments on the Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning Benchmark (URLB) show that DiMS consistently outperforms a wide range of state-of-the-art baselines. Ablation studies confirm that the mixture prior is critical to these gains, and that DiMS is robust to alternative exploration bonuses. Overall, our results suggest that Gaussian mixture skill priors offer a compelling foundation for future unsupervised RL.

PaperID: 2925

Authors:Xiang Ma, Taihua Chen, Pengcheng Wang, Xuemei Li, Caiming Zhang

Affiliations: Shandong University

Title: ReCast: Reliability-aware Codebook-assisted Lightweight Time Series Forecasting

Abstract:
Time series forecasting is crucial for applications in various domains. Conventional methods often rely on global decomposition into trend, seasonal, and residual components, which become ineffective for realworld series dominated by local, complex, and highly dynamic patterns. Moreover, the high model complexity of such approaches limits their applicability in real-time or resource-constrained environments. In this work, we propose a novel reliability-aware codebook-assisted time series forecasting framework (ReCast) that enables lightweight and robust prediction by exploiting recurring local shapes. ReCast encodes local patterns into discrete embeddings through patch-wise quantization using a learnable codebook, thereby compactly capturing stable regular structures. To compensate for residual variations not preserved by quantization, ReCast employs a dual-path architecture comprising a quantization path for efficient modeling of regular structures and a residual path for reconstructing irregular fluctuations. A central contribution of ReCast is a reliability-aware codebook update strategy, which incrementally refines the codebook via weighted corrections. These correction weights are derived by fusing multiple reliability factors from complementary perspectives by a distributionally robust optimization (DRO) scheme, ensuring adaptability to non-stationarity and robustness to distribution shifts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReCast outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) models in accuracy, efficiency, and adaptability to distribution shifts.

PaperID: 2926

Authors:Haowei Mei, Chao Zhang, Wentao Fan, Xiuyi Jia, Chunlin Chen, Huaxiong Li

Affiliations: Nanjing University

Title: Semantic-Aware Feature Enhancement for Partial Label Learning

Abstract:
Partial label learning (PLL) aims to learn from the data where each instance is associated with a candidate label set, with only one being valid. Most existing approaches are designed to eliminate noisy labels and use the remaining reliable ones for model training, following a labelcentric learning paradigm. In this paper, we propose a new PLL method called Semantic-Aware Feature Enhancement (SAFE), which tackles the problem through a novel feature-centric learning paradigm. SAFE presumes that the candidate labels are correct while the observed features are partial, and thus seeks to recover the underlying missing features. In this manner, a desired predictive model is constructed by integrating the observed and recovered features, which are responsible for predicting the true label and the remaining candidate labels, respectively. To ensure the quality of recovered features, SAFE jointly explores the intrinsic topological structures via dynamic graphs in both feature and label spaces as guidance for semantic-aware feature enhancement. Extensive experimental results on some popular datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method over state-of-the-art PLL approaches.

PaperID: 2927

Authors:Xingyu Peng, Ke Xu

Affiliations: Beihang University Zhongguancun Laboratory

Title: Surrogate as Teacher: Distillation-Guided Graph Poisoning Attack

Abstract:
While leveraging pseudolabels has become a common paradigm in untargeted gray-box graph poisoning attacks, it suffers from two critical limitations: the use of brittle hard pseudo-labels that overlook uncertainty and can amplify surrogate model errors, and static guidance that progressively becomes stale as the graph is perturbed. To resolve these issues, we propose MetaDist, a novel framework that reframes the attack as an adversarial self-knowledge distillation process. Here, a "teacher" model provides continuously refined soft pseudo-labels to a "student" model, with the attack objective being to maximize the divergence between them. MetaDist makes two synergistic innovations. It employs the Reverse KL (RKL) divergence as a more strategic attack loss that efficiently converts uncertain nodes into robust, high-confidence errors. Concurrently, it introduces the Online Adaptive Teacher (OAT) mechanism, which adapts the teacher via student feedback to ensure the guidance signal remains relevant. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MetaDist consistently and significantly outperforms strong baselines across multiple datasets, proving its effectiveness and transferability even against advanced graph defenses.

PaperID: 2928

Authors:Yalan Qin, Guorui Feng, Xinpeng Zhang

Affiliations: Shanghai University

Title: Multi-view Learning via Trusted Pairwise Entity Energy

Abstract:
Learning on multiview data is a fundamental task, which integrates the information from different views to improve the final performance. It is also a basic task for learning on the long-tailed data in real applications, followed by the downstream tasks, i.e., classification. The existing works for trusted classification on multi-view data or long-tailed data usually aim to improve the final performance and dynamically consider the confidence of prediction for the data which is crucial in cost-sensitive domains. However, these methods pay few attentions to the pairwise trusted problem which considers the trusted pairs instead of trusted annotated data points. Besides, the problem of classification on long-tailed multi-view data has never been studied so far. In this work, we focus on the pairwise trusted problem on long-tailed multi-view classification and give a general framework, which considers the trusted pairs instead of trusted annotated data points. We then construct a specific example under the general framework and introduce a novel Enhanced Normal-Inverse Gamma distribution (ENIG). ENIG is a joint probabilistic distribution built on Dirichlet distribution and NIG. A novel combination rule based on ENIG for long-tailed multi-view data is also given, which adaptively integrates the long-tailed data from different views to achieve a consensus one at the level of evidence and effectively produces a trusted long-tailed multi-view classification result. Our method is robust and able to be dynamically aware of the uncertainty for the long-tailed data from each view. The accurate uncertainty can be induced by the proposed learning framework, leading to both robustness and reliability for classification on long-tailed multi-view data. Experimental results on different long-tailed multi-view datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in terms of accuracy, robustness and reliability.

PaperID: 2929

Authors:Yang Qin, Yuan Sun, Xi Peng, Dezhong Peng, Joey Tianyi Zhou, Xiaomin Song, Peng Hu

Affiliations: College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, National Key Laboratory of Fundamental Algorithms and Models for Engineering Numerical Simulation, China Tianfu Jincheng Laboratory, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore IHPC, Sichuan Newstrong UHD Video Technology Co.

Title: Robust Semi-paired Multimodal Learning for Cross-modal Retrieval

Abstract:
Crossmodal retrieval is a fundamental application of multi-modal learning that has achieved remarkable success with large-scale well-paired data. However, in practice, it is costly to collect large-scale well-paired data. To alleviate the dependence on the amount of paired data, in this paper, we study a practical learning paradigm: semi-paired cross-modal learning (SPL), which utilizes both a small amount of paired data and a large amount of unpaired data to enhance cross-modal learning directly and is more accessible in practice. To achieve this, we take image-text retrieval as an example and propose a novel Robust Cross-modal Semi-paired Learning method (RCSL) by addressing two challenges. To be specific, i) to overcome the under-optimization issue caused by too little paired data, we present Semi-paired Discriminative Learning (SDL) to fully learn visual-semantic associations from a small amount of image-text pairs by preserving the alignment and uniformity of modality representations. ii) To mine visual-semantic correspondences from unpaired data, RCSL first constructs pseudo-paired correlations across different modalities by nearest neighbor association. However, this may introduce noisy correspondences (NCs) due to inaccurate pseudo signals, which could degrade the model's performance. To tackle NCs, we devise Robust Cross-correlation Mining (RCM) based on the risk minimization criterion to robustly and explicitly learn visual-semantic associations from pseudo-paired data, thus boosting cross-modal learning. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on four datasets, i.e., three widely used benchmark datasets of Flickr30K, MS-COCO, CC152K, and a newly constructed real-world dataset Drone-SP, to demonstrate the effectiveness of RCSL under semi-paired and noisy settings.

PaperID: 2930

Authors:Jianxin Ren, Weining Wu

Affiliations: Harbin Engineering University

Title: Discrete Structure Augmentation for Graph Convolutional Networks

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved significant progress in semisupervised data classification, with an assumption that a complete graph or accurate structure is available. In this paper, a novel GNN architecture, named discrete-structure-augmentation graph convolutional network (DSA-GCN) is proposed, to apply the GCNs in real-world scenarios where the graphs are noisy and incomplete or even not available. Compared with existing methods, DSA-GCN firstly uses a variational Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm to jointly learn graph structure, including a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph and label dependency, and the parameters of GCN. Second, DSA-GCN applies novel reconstruction loss in learning discrete dependency structure on graph, together with consistency loss. Third, augmentation strategy is used to derive discrete graph structures with varying sparsity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DSA-GCN significantly outperforms existing methods under varying levels of edge sparsity.

PaperID: 2931

Authors:Chuxiong Sun, Dunqi Yao, Rui Wang, Wenwen Qiang, Changwen Zheng, Jiangmeng Li

Affiliations: National Key Laboratory of Space Integrated Information System, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: TMAE:Learning Targeted Multi-Agent Exploration via Causal Inference

Abstract:
Exploration in sparsereward tasks remains a fundamental challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) due to complex inter-agent interactions and the expansive exploration space. To address this issue, we propose Targeted Multi-Agent Exploration (TMAE), a novel framework that uncovers the causal relationships between the state space and the reward function, thereby reducing the exploration space and enabling more targeted exploration. Specifically, we construct a structural causal model (SCM) to model the causality between sub-state variables and sparse rewards, providing a robust analytical foundation for subsequent causal inference. Through counterfactual causal intervention, TMAE identifies the most critical subspaces for discovering rare but pivotal events while filtering out confounders. By incorporating these causal insights into the exploration process, TMAE prioritizes subspaces with stronger causal effects on sparse rewards, significantly enhancing exploration efficiency. We evaluate TMAE on a range of MARL benchmarks featuring sparse rewards, consistently demonstrating superior exploration efficiency compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, visualized causal insights derived from TMAE reveal its ability to effectively capture intricate dependencies and priorities in targeted exploration, showcasing strong alignment with prior domain knowledge.

PaperID: 2932

Authors:Aoran Wang, Lei Ou, Yang Yu, Zongzhang Zhang

Affiliations: Nanjing University

Title: Reward Model Evaluation via Automatically-Ranked Policy Alignment

Abstract:
Evaluating reward models is a fundamental challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL), particularly in settings where the reward model is learned or manually designed. The standard paradigm for Reward Model Evaluation (RME) involves training an optimal policy via RL on the given reward model and assessing model quality through the performance of the resulting policy. However, this approach conflates the quality of the reward model with the effectiveness of RL training, and is computationally expensive due to the need for policy optimization. Recent RME methods attempt to circumvent this issue by evaluating reward models directly, without RL, but often rely on impractical assumptions such as access to a groundtruth reward or fail to utilize available supervision in a fine-grained manner. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Policy Preference Alignment Coefficient (PPAC), a novel metric for RME that requires neither RL training nor ground-truth rewards. PPAC first generates a sequence of automatically ranked policy preferences that guarantee monotonic improvement in the policy value, and then quantifies the alignment between these generated preferences and those implied by the candidate reward model. Experimental results across gridworld and continuous control task demonstrate that PPAC yields preference sequences with consistently increasing policy values and outperforms existing metrics in evaluating reward model quality.

PaperID: 2933

Authors:Hao Wang, Biqin Song, Rushi Lan, Hong Chen

Affiliations: Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Technology for Agriculture, Ministry of Education, and College of Informatics, Huazhong Agricultural University, Guangxi Key Laboratory of Image and Graphic Intelligent Processing, Guilin University of Electronic Technology

Title: Integral-based Knockoffs Inference for Partially Linear Models

Abstract:
Partial linear models (PLM) have attracted much attention for regression estimation and variable selection due to their feasibility on utilizing linear and nonlinear approximations jointly. However, theoretical understanding of how they control the false discovery rate (FDR) during variable selection remains limited. To address this issue, we formulate a new integralbased knockoffs (IKO) inference scheme for controlled variable selection in PLM, where integral-based knockoff statistics are used to measure the variable importance and B-splines (or random Fourier features) are employed for approximating nonlinear components. In theory, FDR control is guaranteed for both linear and nonlinear parts, and the statistical analysis for its power is established. Empirical evaluations validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

PaperID: 2934

Authors:Jing Wang, Xi-Tong Liu, Zhi-Hua Zhou

Affiliations: Nanjing University

Title: CoRE-Learning with Look-Ahead and Immediate Resource Allocation

Abstract:
Machine learning under limited computational resources has gained increasing attention recently. A common yet challenging scenario is managing multiple timeconstrained learning tasks with budgeted computational resources, known as Computational Resource Efficient Learning (CoRE-Learning). To this end, a recently proposed framework, Learning with Adaptive Resource Allocation (LARA), offers a preliminary approach. In this paper, we point out the limitations of LARA, including its reliance on interpolation-based extrapolation methods, the need for a fixed exploration phase, and the use of high-frequency re-estimation and reallocation strategies. To address these issues, we propose Look-ahead and immediate Resource Allocation (LaiRA). Our approach incorporates an efficient Dynamic Kalman Filtering (DKF) for look-ahead feasibility check with limited data and a weight-based online estimator for immediate performance evaluation. For resource allocation, LaiRA constructs an Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) to enable adaptive exploration and introduces an adaptive time-slicing method to reduce task switching costs. Empirical studies validate the effectiveness of our approach.

PaperID: 2935

Authors:Meixia Wang, Yuhai Zhao, Zhengkui Wang, Yejiang Wang, Miaomiao Huang, Fenglong Ma, Fazal Wahab, Wen Shan, Xingwei Wang

Affiliations: Northeastern University, Singapore Institute of Technology, Pennsylvania State University, Singapore University of Social Sciences

Title: Self-Supervised Contrastive Re-Learning for Multi-Graph Multi-Label Classification

Abstract:
Multigraph multi-label learning (MGML) represents each object as a bag-of-graphs with multiple labels, but demands large-scale labeled data whose acquisition is often difficult and costly. Self-supervised contrastive learning (SCL) mitigates label dependence by leveraging data augmentation to construct discriminative pretext tasks, proving effective for multi-instance learning. However, when applied to MGML, SCL faces two key challenges: (1) it distinguishes individual instances by their differences, whereas MGML requires modeling label correlations; (2) it assumes semantic invariance under augmentation, but structural perturbations in MGML alter label semantics. To tackle these challenges, we propose a self-suPervised contrastive rE-learning framework for mulTi-grAph multi-labeL classification (PETAL). Specifically, to model label correlations, we first define a unified label space to learn label prototypes and align features with them, yielding prototype-aligned representations. We then design a multi-granularity contrastive loss over these representations, which captures label dependencies by contrasting at the bag level, graph level, and bag-graph level. Moreover, to ensure semantic invariance, we develop a contrastive re-learning strategy based on prototype-aligned representations to generate augmentation-free positive samples. This guarantees consistent multi-label distributions without structural perturbations. Experiments on six datasets demonstrate that PETAL achieves an average improvement of 4.12% over state-of-the-art self-supervised and supervised baselines.

PaperID: 2936

Authors:Yibo Wang, Yong Rui, Min-Ling Zhang

Affiliations: Southeast University

Title: Classifier-induced Reciprocal Points for Multi-label Open-set Recognition

Abstract:
Multilabel learning is a practical machine learning paradigm dealing with instances associated with multiple labels simultaneously. Most existing multi-label learning studies are designed under the closed-world assumption, i.e. a fixed size of label space. However, it encounters significant difficulties in open-set scenarios, where test data may contain unknown labels absent from the training set to be recognized. Existing method typically tackles this challenging problem through sub-labeling approximations and prototype-based comparisons, which often overlooks the implicit information carried by unknown labels. To address this, we propose a novel framework CREM, i.e. Classifier-induced REciprocal point for Multi-label open-set recognition, which rethinks the above problem from the reciprocal point perspective. Specifically, reciprocal points are formulated by explicitly constraining the opposition feature space to a learnable bounded margin. Then reciprocal points can be induced through the classifier with the instance-wise bias eliminated. Subsequently, a unified optimization framework is introduced to jointly facilitate the classifier and reciprocal points induction. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed CREM approach in the multi-label open-set recognition paradigm.

PaperID: 2937

Authors:Yiming Wang, Kaiyan Zhao, Borong Zhang, Yan Li, Leong Hou U

Affiliations: University of Macau, Wuhan University, Shenzhen Polytechnic University

Title: Latent State-Predictive Exploration for Deep Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved promising results in continuous control tasks, where efficient exploration of the state space is crucial for success. However, many recent RL approaches still struggle with sample inefficiency and insufficient exploration for longhorizon tasks, particularly in environments characterized by high-dimensional and complex state spaces. To address these challenges, we propose a novel exploration framework, Latent State Predictive Exploration (LSPE). The core idea behind LSPE is to endow the agent with a form of ``foresight" to enhance exploration in long-horizon settings. Specifically, LSPE employs a state encoder to learn compact latent representations from high-dimensional visual observations, effectively filtering out irrelevant or noisy information. To further enrich and stabilize these representations, we incorporate a diffusion-based self-predictive module that enforces temporal consistency by predicting future states, thereby improving both exploration and downstream predictive control. Additionally, we introduce an Exploration Reward Function (ERF) that explicitly encourages the agent to visit novel latent states. This reward signal promotes more efficient and scalable exploration in complex environments. We evaluate LSPE across a diverse set of challenging long-horizon navigation and manipulation tasks, spanning simulation environments such as Habitat and Robosuite, as well as deployment on a real robot in a physical indoor environment. Experimental results show that LSPE substantially enhances exploration efficiency and scales effectively to complex, high-dimensional tasks.

PaperID: 2938

Authors:Yiming Wang, Kaiyan Zhao, Ming Yang, Yan Li, Furui Liu, Jiayu Chen, Leong Hou U

Affiliations: University of Macau, Wuhan University, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Shenzhen Polytechnic University, Zhejiang Lab, University of Hong Kong

Title: DSAP: Enhancing Generalization in Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Goalconditioned Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising direction for training agents capable of tackling a variety of tasks. However, generalizing to new goals in different environments remains a central challenge for goal-conditioned RL agents. Existing methods often rely on state abstraction, which involves learning abstracted state representations by excluding irrelevant features, to improve generalization. Despite their success in simplified settings, these methods often fail to generalize effectively to realistic environments with varied goals. In this work, we propose to enhance generalization through state abstraction from the perspective of causal inference. We hypothesize that the generalization gap arises in part due to unobserved confounders: latent variables that simultaneously influence both the global and goal states. To address this, we introduce Deconfounded State ion for Policy learning (DSAP), a novel framework that mitigates backdoor confounding by employing a learned causal graph as a proxy for the hidden confounders. We provide theoretical analysis demonstrating that DSAP improves both the learning process and the generalization capability of goal-conditioned policies. Extensive experiments across different settings of multiple benchmarks show that our method significantly outperforms existing methods.

PaperID: 2939

Authors:Yixiao Xu, Mohan Li, Zhijie Shen, Yuan Liu, Zhihong Tian

Affiliations: Guangzhou University Guangdong Key Laboratory of Industrial Control System Security Huangpu Research School of Guangzhou University, Cyberspace Institute of Advanced Technology, Surfilter Network Technology Co.

Title: AT-Field: Rethinking the Games in Adversarial Training

Abstract:
Adversarial training is often modeled as a twoplayer zero-sum game, relying on strong assumptions that limit its practical guidance. In this paper, we instead analyze the interactions between training samples and show that even the fundamental objective—minimizing training loss—may not converge. To address this, we propose AT-Field, an adversarial training framework guided by sample-wise game-theoretic relationships. Specifically, we prove that training samples across different batches can form a none-potential game, where gradient descent induces cyclic behaviors, preventing convergence. By strategically searching and grouping these samples within the same batch, AT-Field transforms none-potential games into exact potential games, which are more effectively optimized using gradient-based methods. Experiments demonstrate that AT-Field integrates seamlessly with existing adversarial training techniques, enhancing both accuracy and robustness.

PaperID: 2940

Authors:Fengyu Yan, Di Jin, Xiaobao Wang, Qianhua Tang, Dongxiao He

Affiliations: Tianjin University

Title: Structure-Enhanced Adapter for Self-Supervised Heterogeneous Graph Learning

Abstract:
Realworld heterogeneous data is commonly modeled as heterogeneous information networks (HINs). Building upon advancements in graph neural networks (GNNs), existing research has significantly progressed in semi-supervised and self-supervised paradigms for heterogeneous GNNs (HGNNs). However, these methods overlook inherent structural deficiencies in raw heterogeneous graphs. We identifies unique structural noise in HINs: missing potential critical edges and multi-relational semantically redundant edges, which force existing HGNNs to learn suboptimal representations on fixed topologies. Crucially, prior limited studies address only partial noise while remaining architecturally entrenched and tightly coupled with specific models. To break this bottleneck, we propose a plug-and-play Heterogeneous graph Structure ADaPter (HSADP) that simultaneously resolves task/model decoupling challenges while accounting for HIN-specific structural properties with with two core components: a dynamic homogeneous subgraph enhancer recovering latent topology across semantic views and a learnable heterogeneous edge discriminator dynamically suppressing redundant edges while collaboratively optimizing semantic graphs. Extensive experiments across multi-domain datasets demonstrate our method’s effectiveness and compatibility. The adapter significantly boosts node classification accuracy for multiple SOTA approaches and surpasses specially designed heterogeneous graph structure learning models.

PaperID: 2941

Authors:Guangyu Yang, Yuzhuo Feng, Qin Li, Quanxue Gao, Ming Yang, Rui Wang

Affiliations: Xidian University, Shenzhen University of Information Technology, Harbin Engineering University

Title: Tensorized Label Learning via Balanced Tensor Regression

Abstract:
The multiview clustering methods based on tensor regression can make full use of the potential structural information between views and achieve data-level fusion. However, existing tensor regression-based approaches for anchor graph often overlook the probabilistic nature of anchor graph, focusing solely on sample labels while ignoring the influence of anchor labels on clustering results. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Tensorized Label Learning via Balanced Tensor Regression (TLL-BTR). Our key idea is to exploit the probabilistic nature of the anchor graph by regarding the sample labels as a projection tensor that maps the anchor graph into the label space, thereby producing anchor labels. By enforcing constraints on these anchor labels, we guide the concurrent learning of sample labels and achieve co-label learning between anchors and samples. To prevent trivial solutions, we maximize the nuclear norm to promote an even distribution of samples across clusters. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that TLL-BTR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 2942

Authors:Xiaohan Zhang, Chao Zhang, Deng Xu, Hong YU, Chunlin Chen, Huaxiong Li

Affiliations: Nanjing University, Chongqing University of Post and Telecommunications

Title: Semantic-Augmented Image Clustering via Adaptive Multi-Modal Collaboration

Abstract:
Image clustering is a fundamental task in unsupervised visual learning. While recent selfsupervised methods have explored various pretext tasks to generate supervision signals for clustering, they typically depend exclusively on raw images, resulting in insufficient supervision signals that are inherently constrained by limited visual semantics. In this paper, we propose a novel Semantic-Augmented image Clustering (SAC) method, which transcends the inherent limitations of purely visual representations through the integration of external knowledge. Specifically, SAC utilizes Vision-Language pre-trained Models (VLMs) to flexibly generate textual descriptions for each image, providing external semantic cues to supplement the visual information. By integrating both visual and textual information, SAC achieves image clustering through a multi-modal learning framework. To mitigate the negative impact of inaccurate textual information, SAC designs an uncertainty-driven adaptive weighting mechanism that explores both intra-modal and inter-modal neighborhood structures, and incorporates the adaptive weights into intra-modal and inter-modal contrastive learning, which improves the robustness against noisy image-text correspondences. Experiments on several popular datasets demonstrate the superiority of SAC compared to state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 2943

Authors:Zeyu Zhang, Chun Shen, Qiang Ma, Meng Kang, Shuai Lü

Affiliations: Jilin University

Title: Prototype-Driven Active Domain Adaptation with Density Consideration

Abstract:
Active domain adaptation (ADA) aims to select a small set of target samples for annotation and use them for training to maximally boost the adaptation performance. However, most existing ADA methods only rely on the original output of the model, without considering the relationship between the source and target domain features, which may lead to selecting uninformative samples. In this paper, we propose an effective ADA framework: PrototypeDriven Active Domain Adaptation with density consideration (PDADA). It selects the most valuable target samples in the presence of domain shift through two criteria: Density-Conscious Domainness (DCD) and Prototype-Driven Informativeness (PDI). Furthermore, considering the class imbalance and cluster looseness issues in sample selection and domain adaptation, we develop a Class Balanced Expansion (CBE) algorithm and the Adversarial Active Domain Adaptation via Protecting Structured Information (AADA-PSI). Extensive experiments demonstrate that under the cooperation of the above components, PDADA outperforms previous methods on several challenging benchmarks and can be generalized to multi-source active domain adaptation setting.

PaperID: 2944

Authors:Zhengyu Zhou, Weiwei Liu

Affiliations: Wuhan University

Title: On the Robustness of Bandit Multiple Testing

Abstract:
Bandit multiple hypothesis testing has broad applications in biological sciences, clinical testing for drug discovery, and online A/B/n testing. The framework utilizes an adaptive sampling strategy for multiple testing which aims to maximize statistical power while ensuring anytime false discovery rate control. This paper proposes a robust approach for bandit multiple testing, allowing for at most an epsilon fraction of arbitrary distribution corruption, as in Huber’s contamination model. Specifically, we introduce two adaptive sampling strategies designed to minimize the number of samples required to exceed a target true positive rate, while providing anytime control over the false discovery rate. We analyze the sample complexity of our proposed methods and perform numerical simulations to demonstrate their efficiency and robustness. Furthermore, we extend our methods to address scenarios where distributions have infinite variance and situations involving multiple agents collaborating on the same bandit task.

PaperID: 2945

Authors:Zhen Zhu, Kai Tang, Songhe Feng, Yixuan Tang, Haobo Wang, Gengyu Lyu, Cheng Peng, Yining Sun

Affiliations: Beijing Jiaotong University, Zhejiang University, National University of Singapore, Beijing University of Technology

Title: Dual Graph Disambiguation for Multi-Instance Partial-Label Learning

Abstract:
In multiinstance partial label learning (MIPL), each sample is a bag of multiple instances linked to a candidate label set containing one true and multiple false labels, yielding inexact supervision in both instance features and label space. However, existing works adopt decoupled approaches that focus exclusively on either instance-level feature fusion or label-level disambiguation, failing to fully exploit the intrinsic dependencies between these two spaces. To overcome this limitation, graph-based methods are widely recognized as a powerful paradigm in weakly supervised learning, yet their success hinges on reliable features—precisely what MIPL lacks due to instance-level noise. To bridge this gap, we propose DualG, a novel framework that simultaneously addresses feature learning and label disambiguation through dual-level graph propagation. Specifically, we construct dual relevance graphs at both the bag and instance levels. At the bag level, we build a similarity graph based on fused feature representations; at the instance level, we employ attention scores to filter out irrelevant instances and construct a reliable instance-level relevance graph. These complementary graphs enable our joint label disambiguation framework to simultaneously address inexact supervision signals in both instance space and label space. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that DualG outperforms existing MIPL and partial label learning methods, validating its effectiveness and superiority.

PaperID: 2946

Authors:Zhengzhong Zhu, Pei Zhou, Dongsheng Wang, Li Cheng, Jiangping Zhu

Affiliations: Sichuan University, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Online Multi-Relational Clustering with Dominant View Mining

Abstract:
Multirelational graph clustering aims to uncover complex node interactions by leveraging multiple relational views, yet existing methods often suffer from two key limitations: they assume equal importance across views and decouple representation learning from clustering, both of which hinder overall performance. To address these issues, we propose OMC-DVM, a novel end-to-end Online Multi-Relational Graph Clustering With Dominant View Mining framework. OMC-DVM introduces two core innovations: (1) A unsupervised dominant view mining module that dynamically identifies the dominant view using Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) and adaptively aligns other views to it, mitigating view imbalance. (2) An online ,multi-relational clustering process that unifies representation learning and clustering into a single stage. By performing clustering-level contrastive learning , OMC-DVM directly generates cluster assignments in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic benchmark datasets demonstrate that OMC-DVM not only achieves state-of-the-art clustering performance but also effectively alleviates the view imbalance problem in multi-relational graphs.

PaperID: 2947

Authors:Yiran Ni, Deshi Ye

Affiliations: Zhejiang University

Title: Multi-Agent Corridor Reasoning for Multi-Agent Path Finding

Abstract:
The MultiAgent Path Finding (MAPF) problem is a computationally challenging task that involves coordinating collision-free trajectories for multiple cooperative agents. Although existing methods address corridor symmetry, where agents encounter repeated bidirectional conflicts in constrained environments, they typically focus exclusively on pairwise agent interactions. Our observations reveal that such pairwise symmetry frequently arises when multiple agents traverse shared corridors, necessitating repeated applications of the corridor reasoning technology over extended durations. To overcome this limitation, we propose a multi-agent corridor reasoning (MAC) technology capable of resolving group-level corridor symmetry in a single optimization step. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that this technology preserves the completeness and optimality guarantees of Conflict-Based Search (CBS). By integrating MAC technology with CBSH-RTC, we developed CBSH-MACRT, which significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms (CBSH-RTC and CBSH with mutex propagation) on standardized MAPF benchmarks, improving success rates by 8–40% and cutting runtimes by 14–67%.

PaperID: 2948

Authors:Xueyu Chen, Kaitao Song, Zifan Song, Dongsheng Li, Cairong Zhao

Affiliations: Tongji University, Microsoft Research Asia

Title: Improving Long-Context Summarization with Multi-Granularity Retrieval Optimization

Abstract:
RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) is an effective solution to overcome the limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) in terms of specific-domain knowledge and timely information updates. However, current RAG methods typically respond to queries based on isolated segments, lacking the ability to integrate information within the same document. This undermines performance in real-world tasks requiring coherent understanding across an entire document. Notably, the human brain naturally integrates and summarizes prior knowledge upon reading a given text, progressively formulating a comprehensive understanding. Motivated by this cognitive process, we propose the Hierarchical Two-Stage Summarization-based Information Retrieval (HTSIR) method, which preprocesses the corpus prior to retrieval, summarizes continuous texts to obtain integrated information, and constructs a retrieval tree with varying summary granularities. The retrieved information is then processed by a Reranker based on the current question to serve as a context for LLMs. Additionally, as single-step summarization is often imprecise in query-based summarization tasks, we further apply a Refinement module, allowing LLMs to reflect and revise their output to achieve the final result. By combining HTSIR with GPT-4o mini, we achieve state-of-the-art results on complex question tasks across four long-text datasets (NarrativeQA, QASPER, QuALITY, and QMSum), achieving an improvement of about 6 points on the Question Answering (QA) task in QuALITY-HRAD.

PaperID: 2949

Authors:Yanli Hu, Teng Liu, Zhuangyi Zhou, Weixin Zeng, Zhen Tan, Xiang Zhao

Affiliations: National Key Laboratory of Information Systems Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, National Key Laboratory of Big Data and Decision

Title: Iterative Multi-Granular RAG with Contextual Hierarchical Graph

Abstract:
RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge retrieval, improving factual accuracy and knowledge coverage. However, existing RAG approaches face a fundamental trade-off when handling complex reasoning: while traditional iterative retrieval methods offer flexibility, their local perspective limits their ability to establish global knowledge connections. In contrast, structure-augmented RAG methods capture global relationships but incur significant construction costs. To fill in this gap, we propose MGranRAG, an innovative framework designed to integrate precise local retrieval with structured global reasoning. Our approach circumvents expensive semantic extraction by employing a lightweight contextual hierarchical graph, effectively combining the local adaptability of iterative retrieval with the global consistency of structured knowledge. The framework adopts a novel iterative optimization scheme: at the local level, the LLM identifies multi-granular contextual evidence, such as key sentences and phrases, within retrieved passages to refine retrieval. At the global level, these multi-granularity evidence nodes are then mapped and propagated within the structured hierarchical graph, enabling the diffusion of rich contextual information at different levels to introduce global semantic constraints and reorder retrieval results. This coordination between local and global iterative processes dynamically balances retrieval accuracy and contextual coherence. Experimental results on challenging multi-hop and open-domain question answering datasets show that our proposal achieves new state-of-the-art performance in both retrieval and answer accuracy.

PaperID: 2950

Authors:Huy M. Le, Dat Tien Nguyen, Ngan T. T. Vo, Tuan D. Q. Nguyen, Nguyen Le Binh, Duy Minh Ho Nguyen, Daniel Sonntag, Lizi Liao, Binh T. Nguyen

Affiliations: Vietnam National University, University of Information Technology, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) University of Stuttgart Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems (IMPRS-IS), German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) University of Oldenburg, Singapore Management University, University of Science

Title: Reinforce Trustworthiness in Multimodal Emotional Support System

Abstract:
In today’s world, emotional support is increasingly essential, yet it remains challenging for both those seeking help and those offering it. Multimodal approaches to emotional support show great promise by integrating diverse data sources to provide empathetic, contextually relevant responses, fostering more effective interactions. However, current methods have notable limitations, often relying solely on text or converting other data types into text, or providing emotion recognition only, thus overlooking the full potential of multimodal inputs. Moreover, many studies prioritize response generation without accurately identifying critical emotional support elements or ensuring the reliability of outputs. To overcome these issues, we introduce MULTIMOOD, a new framework that (i) leverages multimodal embeddings from video, audio, and text to predict emotional components and to produce responses responses aligned with professional therapeutic standards. To improve trustworthiness, we (ii) incorporate novel psychological criteria and apply Reinforcement Learning (RL) to optimize large language models (LLMs) for consistent adherence to these standards. We also (iii) analyze several advanced LLMs to assess their multimodal emotional support capabilities. Experimental results show that MultiMood achieves stateof-the-art on MESC and DFEW datasets while RL-driven trustworthiness improvements are validated through human and LLM evaluations, demonstrating its superior capability in applying a multimodal framework in this domain.

PaperID: 2951

Authors:Fangyu Lei, Jinxiang Meng, Yiming Huang, Shizhu He, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu

Title: TaREx: Reinforcement Learning for Code-Driven Table Reasoning

Abstract:
Automatically solving table reasoning tasks remains challenging due to three main factors: (1) diverse and hierarchical table structures that hinder comprehension, (2) the heavy reliance on complex logical and numerical reasoning—which makes purely textbased methods prone to hallucinations—and (3) the necessity of multi-step processing to handle intricate tasks involving multiple and lengthy tables. To address these challenges, we introduce TaREx, a novel framework that unifies table representation, integrates code-driven execution, and supports interactive multi-step reasoning. TaREx employs a reinforcement learning-based training pipeline to optimize its reasoning policy for complex tasks. Experimental results show that TaREx achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of table reasoning benchmarks, both in-domain and out-of-domain. These include fundamental tasks such as table question answering (TQA) and table fact verification (TFV), as well as advanced tabular data analysis tasks. The results highlight TaREx’s effectiveness and scalability in advancing automated table reasoning.

PaperID: 2952

Authors:Kewei Liao, Tianbo Wang, Yuqing Ma, Zhange Zhang, Zhicheng Geng, Xiaowei Zhao, Jiakai Wang, Xianglong Liu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University State Key Laboratory of Complex & Critical Software Environment, Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Zhongguancun Laboratory

Title: Query-Routed Activation Editing with Truth-hierarchical Preference Optimization

Abstract:
Hallucination has emerged as a pivotal challenge of Large Language Models (LLMs) that generate plausible yet non‑factual content, significantly impeding the trustworthy AI applications in realworld scenarios like medical diagnosis and autonomous driving. Editing the internal activations of LLMs during inference has shown promising effectiveness in mitigating hallucinations with minimal cost. However, previous editing approaches neglect the query‑specific inference pathways that require tailored truthful steering vectors, resulting in suboptimal hallucination mitigation. To address these issues, we propose the Query-Routed Activation Editing (QRAE) framework, which comprises Divergence-sensitive Head Routing (DHR) and Truth-hierarchical Preference Steering (TPS), to fully leverage query-specific semantics for adaptive activation editing. Specifically, DHR is proposed to establish a query-aware head selection criterion, thereby dynamically routing to truth-critical attention heads. Subsequently, TPS introduces a query-specific steering vector calibration policy with the guidance of progressive truth-preferred optimization, enabling precise and adaptive editing for each distinct query. Extensive experiments on the widely recognized TruthfulQA benchmark demonstrate that QRAE outperforms SOTA methods by up to 13.2% in MC1. Meanwhile, QRAE demonstrates strong generalization to out-of-distribution TriviaQA and Natural Questions benchmarks.

PaperID: 2953

Authors:Ziquan Wang, Zhongqi Lu

Affiliations: China University of Petroleum

Title: Knowledge Boundary Discovery for Large Language Models

Abstract:
We propose Knowledge Boundary Discovery (KBD), a reinforcement learning based framework to explore the knowledge boundaries of the Large Language Models (LLMs). We define the knowledge boundary by automatically generating two types of questions: (i) those the LLM can confidently answer withinknowledge boundary and (ii) those it cannot beyond-knowledge boundary. Iteratively exploring and exploiting the LLM's responses to find its knowledge boundaries is challenging because of the hallucination phenomenon. To find the knowledge boundaries of an LLM, the agent interacts with the LLM under the modeling of exploring a partially observable environment. The agent generates a progressive question as the action, adopts an entropy reduction as the reward, receives the LLM's response as the observation and updates its belief states. We demonstrate that the KBD detects knowledge boundaries of LLMs by automatically finding a set of non-trivial answerable and unanswerable questions. We validate the KBD by comparing its generated knowledge boundaries with manually crafted LLM benchmark datasets. Experiments show that our KBD-generated question set is comparable to the human-generated datasets. Our approach paves a new way to evaluate LLMs.

PaperID: 2954

Authors:Kangxiang Xia, Xinfa Zhu, Jixun Yao, Wenjie Tian, Wenhao Li, Lei Xie

Affiliations: Speech and Language Processing Group (ASLP@NPU), Northwestern Polytechnical University

Title: KALL-E: Autoregressive Speech Synthesis with Next-Distribution Prediction

Abstract:
We introduce KALLE, a novel autoregressive (AR) language model for text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis that operates by predicting the next distribution of continuous speech frames. Unlike existing methods, KALL-E directly models the continuous speech distribution conditioned on text, eliminating the need for any diffusion-based components. Specifically, we utilize a Flow-VAE to extract a continuous latent speech representation from waveforms, instead of relying on discrete speech tokens. A single AR Transformer is then trained to predict these continuous speech distributions from text, optimizing a Kullback–Leibler divergence loss as its objective. Experimental results demonstrate that KALL-E achieves superior speech synthesis quality and can even adapt to a target speaker from just a single sample. Importantly, KALL-E provides a more direct and effective approach for utilizing continuous speech representations in TTS.

PaperID: 2955

Authors:Daojian Zeng, Tianle Li, Jiahao Yang, Jiacai Yi, Xieping Gao, Lincheng Jiang, Tengfei Ma, Xiangxiang Zeng

Affiliations: Hunan Normal University, National University of Defense Technology, Hunan University

Title: ExpertInspired Multi-Agent Coordination for Multi-Objective Molecular Optimization

Abstract:
Multiobjective molecular optimization is a fundamental yet inherently challenging task in drug discovery, as it requires simultaneously optimizing multiple, often conflicting, molecular properties. Although recent deep learning methods have shown promise, they often lack objective-specific specialization and dynamic coordination, making them ineffective in handling competing objectives and difficult to scale in complex, high-dimensional molecular design tasks. Inspired by the division of labor among domain experts in medicinal chemistry, we propose MAMO, a multi-agent framework for molecular design that simulates expert collaboration. Each agent specializes in optimizing a single objective, and their interactions are orchestrated by a central scheduling module that dynamically reallocates tasks based on evaluation feedback. This coordination mechanism enables interpretable and goal-conditioned optimization while adaptively balancing conflicting objectives. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that MAMO consistently achieves superior performance in both objective quality and Pareto diversity, particularly in scenarios with strong inter-objective conflict. Our results highlight the potential of multi-agent coordination strategies for scalable and conflict-aware molecular design.

PaperID: 2956

Authors:Xiang Zhang, Rui Xie, Shikun Zhang

Affiliations: Peking University

Title: L2-LoRA: Improving Low-Rank Adaptation with Layer-Specific Regularization

Abstract:
Finetuning large language models (LLMs) in a parameter-efficient manner while preserving their pre-trained world knowledge remains a significant challenge. While Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and its variants effectively mitigate catastrophic forgetting, they do not fully eliminate the loss of critical pre-trained knowledge. In this work, we first analyze the layer-wise distribution of domain-specific knowledge within LLMs through knowledge localization, and empirically identify a clear layer-specific pattern: pre-trained world knowledge predominantly resides in lower layers, whereas knowledge relevant to downstream tasks is more concentrated in higher layers. Motivated by this observation, we propose L2-LoRA, a simple yet effective variant of LoRA that applies layer-specific L2 regularization to the LoRA weights during fine-tuning. Specifically, L2-LoRA imposes stronger regularization on lower layers to preserve pre-trained world knowledge, while allowing greater adaptation in higher layers to better align with downstream tasks. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show that L2-LoRA not only consistently outperforms vanilla LoRA in downstream performance, but also effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting by retaining more pre-trained knowledge.

PaperID: 2957

Authors:Héber Hwang Arcolezi

Affiliations:

Title: Private Frequency Estimation via Residue Number Systems

Abstract:
We present Modular Subset Selection (MSS), a new algorithm for locally differentially private (LDP) frequency estimation. Given a universe of size k and n users, our εLDP mechanism encodes each input via a Residue Number System (RNS) over ℓ pairwise-coprime moduli m0, ..., m_ℓ−1, and reports a randomly chosen index j ∊ [ℓ] along with the perturbed residue using the statistically optimal Subset Selection (SS) mechanism. This design reduces the user communication cost from Θ(ω log₂(k/ω)) bits required by standard SS (with ω ≈ k/(e^ε+1)) down to ⌈ log₂ ℓ ⌉ + ⌈ log₂ m_j ⌉ bits, where m_j < k. Server-side decoding runs in Θ(n + r k ℓ) time, where r is the number of LSMR iterations. In practice, with well-conditioned moduli (i.e., constant r and ℓ = Θ(log k)), this becomes Θ(n + k log k). We prove that MSS achieves worst-case MSE within a constant factor of state-of-the-art protocols such as SS and Projective Geometry Response (PGR), while avoiding the algebraic prerequisites and dynamic-programming decoder required by PGR. Empirically, MSS matches the estimation accuracy of SS, PGR, and RAPPOR across realistic (k, ε) settings, while offering faster decoding than PGR and shorter user messages than SS. Lastly, by sampling from multiple moduli and reporting only a single perturbed residue, MSS achieves the lowest reconstruction-attack success rate among all evaluated LDP protocols.

PaperID: 2958

Authors:David H. Chan, Mark Roberts, Dana S. Nau

Affiliations: University of Maryland, College Park, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

Title: Probabilistic Hierarchical Goal Network Planning with UCT

Abstract:
Hierarchical goal networks (HGNs) provide a framework for goaldirected planning by decomposing high-level goals into ordered subgoals. While prior work has examined non-determinism for hierarchical planning (specifically, HTNs), scant work studies how HGNs can help in stochastic settings. We introduce a formalism for probabilistic HGN planning with action-insertion semantics, enabling probabilistic planners to incorporate domain knowledge from goal decomposition methods. We design and evaluate two UCT-based algorithms for solving probabilistic HGN planning problems: an asymptotically optimal approach and a compressed, shared-value approach that optimizes separately for each goal within the goal-subgoal hierarchy. We compare our two UCT-based HGN search algorithms experimentally on modified benchmark domains from the FOND HTN literature. Our results demonstrate that on larger problems, the compressed search converges more quickly and outperforms the asymptotically optimal search. This suggests that HGNs can be effective in probabilistic planning, and compression may yield better performance on large problems in anytime settings with stochastic action outcomes.

PaperID: 2959

Authors:Ning Li, Peng Lin, Peng Zhang, Ruichen Tian

Affiliations: Jilin University, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Elite Pattern Reinforcement for Vehicle Routing Problems

Abstract:
Machine learning methods have been increasingly applied to solve Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs). A highefficiency approach is to learn solution construction using deep neural networks. However, their tendency toward premature convergence is a critical barrier, severely hindering generalization across diverse distributions and scales. To overcome this, we introduce Elite-Pattern Reinforcement (EPR), a novel strategy designed to create a synergy between the diverse, exploratory nature of reinforcement learning and the high-quality, structured knowledge from classical heuristics. The strategy guides the learning process by reinforcing structural patterns from elite solutions, employing an elite-guided score modulation to integrate this external knowledge. The inherent symmetry of path patterns is also exploited to augment the structural information. This steers the policy away from premature convergence by enabling it to distinguish and favour elite path patterns over inferior ones. Integrating our strategy with four construction methods yields substantial performance improvements on the CVRPLIB and TSPLIB benchmarks. Furthermore, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art learning-based methods, demonstrating superior generalization across diverse distributions and scales.

PaperID: 2960

Authors:Tobias Schwartz, Diedrich Wolter

Affiliations: Universität zu Lübeck

Title: HTN Plan Verification by Qualitative Temporal Reasoning

Abstract:
Plan verification is the task of checking whether a proposed plan correctly solves a given planning problem. In Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning, this verification problem is known to be NPhard. Existing approaches to HTN plan verification range from SAT encodings to parser-based techniques. However, existing methods do not explicitly exploit the temporal structure inherent in hierarchical decomposition. In this paper, we establish a formal connection between HTN planning and temporal reasoning by showing how decomposition structures can be naturally represented using qualitative constraint networks. Building on this insight, we present a new top-down encoding that transforms the verification of partially ordered task networks into a temporal reasoning problem. We prove the correctness of this encoding and explain how it accounts for both the hierarchical and temporal aspects of HTN plans. By linking HTN plan verification with qualitative temporal reasoning, our approach introduces a principled formal framework for reasoning about complex temporal relationships in hierarchical plans. This connection offers new perspectives for knowledge representation in structured planning domains.

PaperID: 2961

Authors:Jingyang Zhao, Mingyu Xiao, Ken-Ichi Kawarabayashi

Affiliations: South Korea, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, National Institute of Informatics The University of Tokyo

Title: A TSP-Based Algorithm for Multi-League Traveling Tournament

Abstract:
In some professional sports leagues, interleague games are scheduled among multiple divisions or conferences. This inspired us to study the p-partite Traveling Tournament Problem (p-partite TTP), where teams are partitioned into p leagues, and each team plays games against teams from different leagues. Previously, only the case of p=2, known as the Bipartite TTP or BTTP, has been introduced and studied. In this paper, we show that the p-partite TTP is NP-hard for any fixed p≥3, and we propose an efficient algorithm based on a solution to the Traveling Salesman Problem. Furthermore, we prove that the algorithm achieves a notable approximation ratio of 8/3+O(1/n) when p=3. We also conduct experiments demonstrating that the algorithm produces practical schedules with significantly reduced total travel distances, highlighting its effectiveness in generating high-quality multipartite tournament schedules.

PaperID: 2962

Authors:Shawn Skyler, Dor Atzmon, Ariel Felner, Oren Salzman, Carlos Hernández Ulloa, Sven Koenig

Affiliations: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Bar-Ilan University, Universidad San Sebastian, University of California, Irvine Örebro University

Title: Deeper Treatment of the Bi-objective Search Framework

Abstract:
In BiObjective Search (BOS), the task is to compute the Pareto-optimal frontier of paths in a graph with two cost values per edge. Recent work introduced a general BOS framework that classifies search nodes and studies how ordering functions affect expansion order. In this paper, we continue this line of research. We further refine the classes of nodes and show that many nodes that were added to the open list and are classified as never-expand nodes still need to be extracted and further examined. Additionally, we introduce a method that enables constant-time dominance checks for the MIN and MAX ordering functions. This allows a practical usage of these ordering functions, as we demonstrate in our experimental section.

PaperID: 2963

Authors:Aaron J Snoswell, Daniel Kilov, Seth Lazar

Affiliations: Digital Media Research Centre GenAI Lab, Queensland University of Technology, Kelvin Grove, QLD Australia, Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory Lab, Australian National University, ACT Australia

Title: Beyond Verdicts: Evaluating Language Model Moral Competence

Abstract:
As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as Artificial Moral Advisors and autonomous agents making ethical decisions, evaluating their moral competence has become critical. However, existing evaluations may inadequately assess the moral reasoning capabilities needed for realworld deployment, focusing primarily on whether models can match human judgments on carefully curated ethical scenarios. We surveyed 69 papers evaluating LLM ethical competence (2020-2025) and developed a taxonomy categorizing evaluations across datasets, behaviors, and metrics. Our comprehensive analysis maps the methodological landscape of this rapidly growing field and reveals several critical limitations. Most significantly, the vast majority of studies rely on pre-packaged scenarios that highlight morally relevant features, failing to test models' ability to identify ethical considerations in noisy, realistic contexts-what we term "moral sensitivity". Additionally, evaluations overemphasize verdict accuracy rather than assessing moral reasoning quality and steerability, with few studies testing whether models can be appropriately guided toward different ethical frameworks. Most studies rely on "ground truth" comparisons despite philosophical arguments that reasonable moral pluralism precludes definitive moral ground truth. In light of these gaps, we argue for a significant methodological shift: moving from curated scenarios to unfiltered information streams, from verdict accuracy to reasoning quality and steerability, and from ground truth metrics to assessments of reasonableness and consistency. This reorientation is essential for developing AI systems that can navigate moral complexity in real-world deployment scenarios.

PaperID: 2964

Authors:Adnan Firoze, Raymond A. Yeh, Daniel Aliaga

Affiliations: Purdue University

Title: Building Instance Segmentation for Dense Urban Settlements

Abstract:
About 25% of the world’s population live in informal urban settlements containing densely packed buildings (approximately 8,000 houses per squarekm) which do not lend themselves favorably to state-of-the-art satellite-based building segmentation methods due to, for example, occlusion, vegetation, shadows and low resolution. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel instance segmentation and counting approach for dense buildings. Our system first extracts a conservative set of tentative building center points using a deep network for jumpstarting a Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) module to produce an initial over-segmentation. Second, we use a graph neural network to refine the over-segmented regions into polygons representing accurate building masks. Experiments show that our approach achieves higher accuracy in instance segmentation and counting especially in challenging densely packed building areas in Brazil, Mexico, India, Pakistan, and Kenya, for instance.

PaperID: 2965

Authors:Shuochen Li, Xiangqi Guo, Huobin Tan, Lei Shi

Affiliations: Beihang University, Peking University

Title: MoE-Guided Graph Diffusion for Oriented Molecule Design

Abstract:
Designing molecules with desired properties, aka the oRiented molEcule Design (RED), is a fundamental task in chemistry and materials science. While graph diffusion models (GDMs) and reinforcement learning techniques (RL) show promise in molecule structure generation and property optimization stages individually, their integration in the unified RED task often suffers from poor compatibility. The large variance among candidate molecular structures generated by GDMs can be amplified in the iterative optimization process of RL, leading to slow and unstable convergence. In this work, motivated by the adaptive and divideand-conquer characteristics of Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, we propose a novel framework called MoE-Guided Graph Diffusion Model (MEGD) that incorporates the MoE architecture to guide the orchestration of GDM and RL, promoting faster and more stable convergence in the design process. MEGD is evaluated on benchmark datasets optimizing the physical and chemical properties of AI-generated molecular structures. On all three datasets, our method outperforms the best of 9 alternative models by 7.73% on the target structural properties, while not penalizing other important application-level quality metrics of the generated molecules. A real-world case study on an emerging class of material, i.e., metal-organic framework, is also conducted, which further demonstrates the effectiveness of our method in accomplishing the RED task.

PaperID: 2966

Authors:Yujie Chen, Tengfei Ma, Yuansheng Liu, Leyi Wei, Shu Wu, Dongsheng Cao, Yiping Liu, Xiangxiang Zeng

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Chemo and Biosensing, College of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, Hunan University, Centre for Artificial Intelligence driven Drug Discovery, Faculty of Applied Science, Macao Polytechnic University, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiangya School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Central South University

Title: TRACE: Transformation-Aware Graph Refinement for Reaction Condition Prediction

Abstract:
Identifying suitable reaction conditions is critical for chemical synthesis, as they directly affect yield, selectivity, and transformation feasibility. While recent methods have shown promising results, most approaches either encode reactants and products independently or rely on rulebased reaction graphs, both of which constrain the ability of the model to capture condition-relevant structural transformations. In this work, we propose TRACE, a transformation-aware graph refinement framework for reaction condition prediction. TRACE constructs atom-level joint graphs that integrate both reactant and product structures to represent condition-relevant transformations. A structure-aware encoder enriches atom features with local chemical context, followed by a dynamic interaction refinement module that adaptively infers task-specific edges. To further guide the model toward condition-relevant patterns, a mechanism regularized graph encoder incorporates reaction center information, enabling more accurate modeling of transformation mechanisms. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that TRACE achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple condition types. The integration of transformation-aware refinement leads to improvements in prediction accuracy and generalization, while maintaining robust performance in challenging and realistic synthesis planning scenarios.

PaperID: 2967

Authors:Yiru Gong, Song Liu, Changzhi Zhao, Junrong Liu, Tian Tian, Xiaobo Yang, Bo Jiang, Zhigang Lu

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China School of Cyber Security

Title: GARNET: GoT-Based Alert Reduction and Narrative Event Tracing

Abstract:
Alerts generated by Security Operations Centers (SOCs) are often numerous and scattered, requiring significant effort from security analysts to manage, which severely slows response times. While recent alert correlation graph methods can effectively reduce alert volume, these graphs are often too complex for analysts to understand. As a result, analysts are increasingly seeking ways to automatically correlate alerts and generate concise, humanreadable attack path summaries. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior performance due to their advanced capabilities in knowledge reserve and reasoning. In this work, we propose GARNET, a framework that uses LLMs for reasoning on alert correlation graphs. GARNET addresses three key technical challenges: 1) modality alignment between alert graphs and logs; 2) semantic alignment between alert graphs and logs; 3) enabling LLMs reasoning along graph paths. Specifically, we first project the embeddings of the graph and logs into the same vector space using contrastive learning. Then, we design self-supervised graph-log instructions to bridge the semantic gap between the graph and logs by training a novel LLM. Finally, GARNET uses a novel Graph-of-Thought (GoT)-based interaction reasoning approach to guide LLM reasoning along graph paths, ultimately generating structured, concise, and human-readable attack path summaries. Experimental results across six attack scenarios show that GARNET reduces false positives by an average of 80%, lowering the false positive rate to below 0.0037. It outperforms the latest approaches and provides more explainable attribution.

PaperID: 2968

Authors:Weikang He, Yunpeng Xiao, Mengyang Huang, Xuemei Mou, Rong Wang, Qian Li

Affiliations: Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: Directing Uncertainty-Aware Information Flow for Robust Diffusion Prediction

Abstract:
Information diffusion prediction is crucial for understanding social network dynamics, yet existing methods often neglect user participation uncertainty. This oversight typically stems from an implicit participation homogeneity assumption, which treats all observed interactions as equally reliable propagation signals, leading to fragile inferred topologies and uncertainty contamination. To address this, we propose SIEVE, a novel framework employing two synergistic strategies. First, robust node representations are learned via controllable uncertainty injection coupled with associated contrastive learning, mitigating topological fragility. Second, an uncertaintyaware directed graph aggregation mechanism is introduced, which dynamically constructs asymmetric aggregation topologies with adaptive weighting, thereby suppressing uncertainty contamination. Experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that SIEVE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, offering valuable insights for designing robust information diffusion prediction models.

PaperID: 2969

Authors:Weihong Huang, Feng Yang, Qiang Zhang, Juan Liu

Affiliations: Wuhan University

Title: Dynamic Geometric Equivariant Network for Full-Atom Antibody Design

Abstract:
Antibody design is critically important in biomedical and therapeutic contexts but remains extremely challenging due to the complexity of antibody sequence–structure relationships and stringent antigen specificity requirements. Traditional computational approaches rely on multistage pipelines and often overlook full-atom details (e.g., side-chain conformations) as well as fine-grained geometric features, resulting in limited effectiveness. To overcome these limitations, we propose Dynamic Geometric Equivariant Network (DGENet), an end-to-end full-atom antibody design model that integrates a geometric-kinematic equivariant dynamic optimization module (GK-EDO) with an full-atom E(3)-equivariant message-passing architecture. This framework enables iterative optimization of antibody structures under explicit geometric and kinematic constraints, generating complete antibody structures (including backbone and side chains) and simultaneously jointly optimizing the sequences and 3D structures of the complementarity-determining regions (CDRs). DGENet also introduces a novel virtual anchor docking mechanism that employs an adaptive PNet-Kabsch module to explicitly guide antibody–antigen binding and achieve precise bound conformations. Evaluations on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that DGENet exhibits outstanding performance in antibody structure and sequence generation as well as in designing high-affinity antibodies, underscoring its reliability as an advanced antibody design model.

PaperID: 2970

Authors:Yingxin Lai, Yufei Liu, Guoqing Yang, Jiaxing Chai, Zhiming Luo, Shaozi Li

Affiliations: Xiamen University

Title: OneFont: A Unified Agent for End-to-End Font Creation

Abstract:
Despite recent advancements in font generation, practitioners still grapple with a laborious trialand-error workflow. To streamline this, we propose OneFont, an end-to-end framework that interprets user intents via free-form dialogue, seamlessly integrating both glyph synthesis and refinement modules. We introduce the Font with Thought (FwT) paradigm, reframing font design as a reasoning task where the model plans actions and articulates design rationales. OneFont’s core planner is trained via a two-stage regimen to master this paradigm. First, we instill reasoning abilities via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on a new, comprehensive benchmark of 1,500 font families we built. Second, we refine the model's policy with a novel reinforcement learning algorithm, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), guided by a hybrid reward that assesses visual fidelity, rationale coherence, and transformation correctness. Extensive experiments show OneFont significantly surpasses existing methods in design quality and stroke precision across diverse scripts, validated on our new benchmark. We will release our dataset, code, and models.

PaperID: 2971

Authors:Junfeng Long, Jinshu Su, Biao Han

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology, Academy of Military Science

Title: LLMs Unleashed: Generating Protocol Code from RFC Specifications

Abstract:
RFC (Request for Comments) documents constitute the foundation of network protocol standardization. However, they are expressed in natural language, they tend to be lengthy and ambiguous, forcing protocol implementers to rely on extensive manual parsing and coding—a process that is both laborintensive and prone to errors. This makes the automated parsing and comprehension of RFC documents a major challenge in network protocol research. To address this gap, we introduce large language models (LLMs) into the task of automatic network protocol code generation from RFC documents (RFC2Code) and propose a comprehensive evaluation framework to quantitatively assess LLM performance. We develop an end-to-end automated protocol generation system, APG (Automated Protocol-Generation), which supports implementations of ICMP, IGMP, NTP, and TCP. Compared to prior NLP (Natural language processing) methods, APG achieves a fully automated workflow with approximately 3.17× faster processing, 95% compile success and behavioral correctness for stateless protocols like ICMP, and 90% interoperability for complex stateful protocols such as TCP, requiring only minimal manual intervention.

PaperID: 2972

Authors:Longxiang Wang, Pukun Zhao, Chen Chen, Jinhe Bi, Huacan Wang, Tong Zhang, Ronghao Chen

Affiliations: Chongqing University, Guangdong University of Finance and Economics, Guangdong university of Finance and Economics, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhejiang University, Peking University

Title: PsyPARSE: Retrieval-Augmented Slow Thinking for Personalized Empathetic Counseling

Abstract:
The escalating global demand for mental health services highlights the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in psychological counseling. However, current LLMbased approaches, particularly fine-tuned models, are constrained by data distribution biases, leading to limited therapeutic diversity and personalization. Crucially, they often lack anticipatory empathetic reasoning, struggle to foresee patient emotional responses beyond immediate dialogue history, and incur substantial computational costs. To address these limitations, we propose PsyPARSE, a novel training-free framework for psychological counseling that emulates the deliberate and empathetic reasoning of human counselors. PsyPARSE integrates Multi-Therapy Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to overcome data biases and provide highly personalized therapeutic approaches tailored to individual patient attributes. Pioneering the first multi-stage slow-thinking engine in mental health LLMs, PsyPARSE employs Multi-Turn Rollouts to identify optimal therapeutic paths and through anticipating patient reactions, optimizes empathetic responses, thereby ensuring genuinely empathetic and impactful responses in complex, long-dialogue interactions. Operating as a plug-and-play solution, PsyPARSE avoids the computational burden of fine-tuning. We establish a comprehensive LLM-based patient-therapist agent simulation framework for evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PsyPARSE significantly enhances the capabilities of various LLM baselines, achieving superior personalization and deeper empathy compared to both fine-tuned and other training-free methods. This work offers an efficient, adaptable, and scalable solution to advance mental health support.

PaperID: 2973

Authors:Yakir Yehuda, Kira Radinsky

Affiliations: Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Computer Science Departmen, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology

Title: PDEDriven Spatiotemporal Generative Modeling for Multilead ECG Synthesis

Abstract:
Synthesizing realistic 12lead electrocardiogram (ECG) data is a complex task due to the intricate spatial and temporal dynamics of cardiac electrophysiology. Traditional generative models often struggle to capture the nuanced interdependencies among ECG leads, which are essential for accurate medical analysis. In this paper, we propose Physics-Inspired Partial Differential Equation GAN for Multilead ECG Synthesis (PhysioPDE-GAN), a generative framework designed to model the spatiotemporal structure of multilead ECG signals by incorporating physiological priors and spatial constraints directly into the generative process. By embedding PDE-based representations directly into the generative process, our approach effectively captures both the temporal evolution and spatial relationships between ECG leads. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of various base classifiers trained on the synthetic 12-lead ECG data generated by PhysioPDE-GAN. These classifiers outperform those trained on data produced by other conventional methods, achieving statistically significant improvements in detecting cardiac abnormalities. Our work highlights the potential of combining PDE-driven cardiac models with advanced generative techniques to enhance the quality and utility of synthetic biomedical datasets.

PaperID: 2974

Authors:Bolei Chen, Jiaxu Kang, Haonan Yang, Ping Zhong, Yixiong Liang, Rui Fan, Jianxin Wang

Affiliations: Central South University, Tongji University

Title: Towards Ultrasound-based Reliable Disease Diagnosis Using Causal Inference

Abstract:
Aligning the decisionmaking process of deep learning models with that of experienced sonographers is essential for ultrasound-based reliable disease diagnosis. Although existing methods have made significant progress in this aspect, their alignments are primarily associational rather than causal, leading to pseudo-correlations between features and diagnostic results. Such a biased diagnosis blindly models the sonographer's diagnostic skills and attention to specific patterns, which we argue hardly produces an AI diagnoser that is comparable to human experts. To address this issue, we propose a causality-based diagnostic framework to align the model's diagnostic behaviors with those of experts. Specifically, by delving into both conspicuous and inconspicuous confounders within the ultrasound images, the back-door and front-door adjustment causal learning modules are proposed to promote unbiased learning by mitigating potential pseudo-correlations. In addition, we integrate causal inference into a well-designed dual-branch model with feature interaction bridges for compatibility with multimodal ultrasound inputs. To fully evaluate our method, we conduct comparative studies on different diseases and ultrasound modalities. In particular, we publish a carefully constructed multimodal ultrasound dataset for breast lesion diagnosis and segmentation. Sufficient comparative and ablation studies on this dataset emphasize that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 2975

Authors:Chuanshen Chen, Kai Zhou, Zhiquan Wen, Zeng You, Yirui Li, Tianhang Xiang, Mingkui Tan

Affiliations: South China University of Technology

Title: Action-and-object Aware Alignment for Partially Relevant Video Retrieval

Abstract:
Partially Relevant Video Retrieval (PRVR) aims to retrieve untrimmed videos containing relevant moments for a given text query. This task is extremely challenging, as untrimmed videos often include numerous actions and objects unrelated to the query. However, existing methods usually struggle with finegrained action-object modeling, limiting their retrieval performance. To tackle this challenge, we introduce Action-and-object Aware Alignment for Partially Relevant Video Retrieval (A3PRVR), a dual-branch framework designed to enhance retrieval by improving the modeling of action-object relationships. Specifically, we propose a Query-specific Deformable Temporal Attention (Q-DTA) module to effectively capture action-relevant object information in video features, while filtering out irrelevant content. Additionally, we propose an action-and-object aware alignment module to enable fine-grained textual understanding and video-text alignment. It uses action- and object-aware contrastive losses to enhance the model's sensitivity to action-object distinctions in the text query. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, A3PRVR achieves an average relative gain of 6.5% in SumR across the Charades-STA, ActivityNet-Caption, and TVR datasets.

PaperID: 2976

Authors:Lin Chen, Yongxin Su, Jvboxi Wang, Pengcheng Han, Zhenyu Xia, Shuhui Bu, Kun Li, Boni Hu, Shengqi Meng, Guangming Wang

Affiliations: Northwestern Polytechnical University, Beihang University, University of Cambridge

Title: CoMA-SLAM: Collaborative Multi-Agent Gaussian SLAM with Geometric Consistency

Abstract:
Although Gaussian scene representation has achieved remarkable success in tracking and mapping, most existing methods are confined to singleagent systems. Current multi-agent solutions typically rely on centralized architectures, which struggle to account for communication bandwidth constraints. Furthermore, the inherent depth ambiguity of 3D Gaussian splatting poses notable challenges in maintaining geometric consistency. To address these challenges, we introduce CoMA-SLAM, the first distributed multi-agent Gaussian SLAM framework. By leveraging 2D Gaussian surfels and robust initialization strategy, CoMA-SLAM enhances tracking accuracy and geometry consistency. It efficiently manages communication bandwidth while dynamically scaling with the number of agents. Through the integration of intra- and inter-loop closure, distributed keyframe optimization and submap centric update, our framework ensures global consistency and robustly alignment. Synthetic and real-world experiments demonstrate that CoMA-SLAM outperforms state-of-the-art methods in pose accuracy, rendering fidelity, and geometric consistency while maintaining competitive efficiency across distributed multi-agent systems. Notably, by avoiding data transmission to a centralized server, our method reduces communication bandwidth by 99.8% compared to centralized approaches.

PaperID: 2977

Authors:Qifeng Chen, Jiarun Liu, Rengan Xie, Tao Tang, Sicong Du, Yiru Zhao, Yuchi Huo, Sheng Yang

Affiliations: Unmanned Vehicle Dept., CaiNiao Inc., Alibaba Group, State Key Laboratory of CAD&CG Zhejiang University, SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY

Title: LiDAR-GS++: Improving LiDAR Gaussian Reconstruction via Diffusion Priors

Abstract:
Recent GSbased rendering has made significant progress for LiDAR, surpassing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) in both quality and speed. However, these methods exhibit artifacts in extrapolated novel view synthesis due to the incomplete reconstruction from single traversal scans. To address this limitation, we present LiDAR-GS++, a LiDAR Gaussian Splatting reconstruction method enhanced by diffusion priors for real-time and high-fidelity re-simulation on public urban roads. Specifically, we introduce a controllable LiDAR generation model conditioned on coarsely extrapolated rendering to produce extra geometry-consistent scans and employ an effective distillation mechanism for expansive LiDAR Gaussian reconstruction. By extending reconstruction to under-fitted regions, our approach ensures global geometric consistency for extrapolative novel views while preserving detailed scene surfaces captured by sensors. Experiments on multiple public datasets demonstrate that LiDAR-GS++ achieves state-of-the-art performance for both interpolated and extrapolated viewpoints, surpassing existing GS and NeRF-based methods.

PaperID: 2978

Authors:Yarui Chen, Lehan Hong, Jianlin Shao, Jianning Yang, Tingting Zhao, Yun Liao, Yancui Shi

Affiliations: Tianjin University of Science and Technology, XI'AN University of Posts&Telecommunications

Title: Multimodal Gaussian Mixture Variational Autoencoder with Consistency Regularizations

Abstract:
Variational autoencoder (VAE)based frameworks possess a natural advantage in modeling the shared and private information inherent in multimodal data. However, current models focus on improving the quality of shared representations from the reconstruction perspective, lacking explicit mechanisms to model their underlying semantic structure. In this paper, we propose the multimodal Gaussian mixture variational autoencoder with consistency regularizations, which introduces a Gaussian mixture prior over the shared latent space to enhance its semantic structure and encourage the formation of cluster-aware latent representations. To address the cross-modal inconsistency problem under missing modality conditions, we propose a cluster-guided regularization strategy that enforces the cross-modal consistency using the pseudo-category labels from unsupervised clustering. Additionally, we design a self-supervised contrastive regularization strategy to align semantically similar representations across modalities. Extensive experiments on MNIST-SVHN and MNIST-CDCB datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art models in generation, classification, and retrieval tasks.

PaperID: 2979

Authors:Xinhua Cheng, Haiyang Zhou, Wangbo Yu, Tanghui Jia, Bin Lin, Yunyang Ge, Weiqi Li, Li Yuan

Affiliations: Peking University

Title: 360Explorer: Exploring 4D Controllable World in Panoramic Videos

Abstract:
We present 360Explorer, a novel approach for generating 4D controllable panoramic videos conditioned on userprovided 3D instructions for exploring and manipulating dynamic worlds. Compared to existing perspective-based methods struggle to address spatial consistency during camera rotation in place, we introduce the panoramic view in controllable video generation models to inherently maintain the view recall consistency. By introducing dynamic point clouds as the 4D scene representations, 360Explorer unifies the modeling of camera transformations and object movements as incomplete renders to describe precise control instructions in 3D worlds. To tackle the data limitation in acquiring multi-viewpoint panoramic videos, we further propose a reverse warping strategy to construct the training dataset on easily accessible monocular panoramic videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that 360Explorer achieves superior performance in creating 4D controllable panoramic videos with camera transformation and object movements aligned with diverse provided instructions.

PaperID: 2980

Authors:Jisheng Dang, Delin Deng, Bimei Wang, Jingze Wu, Hui Zhang, Haijiang Li, Jingmei Jiao, Dengyue Pan, Mangang Xie, Jizhao Liu

Affiliations: Lanzhou University, Jinan University, Sun Yat-sen University, Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou Jiaotong University

Title: Primary Visual Cortex Inspired Point Cloud Analysis Framework

Abstract:
Despite significant advancements in point cloud analysis, reducing energy consumption and improving robustness remain understudied, largely due to the inherent limitations of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). To address this, we take the cue from the primary visual cortex and propose a DendriticConnected Continuous-Coupled Neural Network (DC-CCNN), a novel Brain-Inspired Neural Network (BINN) architecture tailored for point cloud analysis. By leveraging the unique characteristics of point clouds, our design combines discrete and continuous encoding, replacing traditional Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs) with more efficient and robust BINNs. Our approach substantially improves the performance of Brain-Inspired Neural Networks on point analysis tasks and maintaining performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, DC-CCNN exhibits enhanced robustness against various point cloud deformations and corruptions. Our experimental results demonstrate that DC-CCNN achieves competitive performance on benchmark datasets, making it a promising alternative to traditional deep learning methods for point cloud analysis. With its high efficiency and robustness, DC-CCNN has the potential for widespread adoption in 3D computer vision, robotics, and autonomous systems.

PaperID: 2981

Authors:Zeyu Deng, Lihui Wang, Xi Tao, Qijian Chen, Ying Cao, XuLinHu, Yingfeng Ou

Affiliations: Guizhou University

Title: Uncertainty-Propelled Physics-MAE Fusion for Self-Supervised Diffusion-Weighted Image Denoising

Abstract:
The inherently low signalto-noise ratio (SNR) in diffusion-weighted (DW) imaging fundamentally impedes precise tissue microstructure characterization, rendering effective noise suppression a persistent challenge. Existing denoising methods frequently suffer from over-smoothing or distortion of microstructure information when handling spatially correlated or severe noise. To address these limitations, we propose UP2-MAE fusion model, a self-supervised DWI denoising method based on Uncertainty-Propelled Physics and Masked Auto-Encoder (MAE) fusion. This framework integrates two complementary branches: one leverages MAE to suppress noise through local context modeling, while the other constructs uncorrelated noisy pairs using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) physics and denoises them via a Noise2Noise approach, which can preserve texture details by exploiting directional relationships across diffusion encoding directions. To fully integrate the strengths of both branches, an uncertainty-propelled fusion strategy based on maximum likelihood estimation is proposed to derive the final denoised output. In addition, to further promote the performance, uncertainty-guided reconstruction and consistency loss are presented. Evaluations against state-of-the-art denoising methods on both simulated and acquired DW datasets confirm the efficacy of our approach.

PaperID: 2982

Authors:Yanchen Dong, Ruiqin Xiong, Rui Zhao, Xinfeng Zhang, Tiejun Huang

Affiliations: Peking University, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Spike Stream Memory Transfer for Dynamic Scene Reconstruction

Abstract:
As a retinainspired sensor with ultra-high temporal resolution, spike camera can continuously capture dynamic scenes with high-speed motion. It is a key task to restore clear images from spike streams. The quantization effects in spike readout bring degradation to the visual quality of restored images. To tackle the degradation without introducing motion blur, existing methods often employ a short-term temporal window to infer the light intensity at a certain time point. However, these methods only focus on the spike signals within the current window, which limits their performance. Motivated by the human-like memory mechanism for visual signals from the retina, we explore Spike Stream Memory Transfer (SSMT) to restore the dynamic scenes, considering spike signals beyond the window. Specifically, we design a framework that leverages temporal memory by transferring previously inferred light intensity and motion to enhance current reconstruction. The framework enables a long-term temporal perception of spike streams to handle the spike quantization effects. Besides, we utilize the estimated motion to suppress the potential blur from inter-stream clips, considering the underlying motion of spike streams. We also develop a spike interval-guided alignment module to tackle the blur from intra-stream clips. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-captured data demonstrate that our method can restore high-quality images from spike streams.

PaperID: 2983

Authors:Chenghao Fang, Jianqing Liang, Jiye Liang, Zijin Du, Feilong Cao

Affiliations: Shanxi University, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhejiang Normal University

Title: Point Cloud Semantic Scene Completion with Prototype-Guided Transformer

Abstract:
Semantic scene completion simultaneously reconstructs the shapes of missing regions and predicts semantic labels for the entire 3D scene. Although point cloudbased methods are more efficient than voxel-based methods, existing point cloud-based approaches largely fail to fully leverage semantic information. To address this challenge, we propose a Prototype-Guided Transformer (ProtoFormer) that encodes semantic information into a set of semantic prototypes to guide the underlying Transformer for semantic scene completion. Specifically, we leverage semantic prototypes to enhance information from both geometric and semantic perspectives, and integrate the top-K attention mechanisms to guide scene completion and semantic awareness. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate that ProtoFormer outperforms state-of-the-art approaches with low complexity.

PaperID: 2984

Authors:Xiang Fang, Wanlong Fang, Changshuo Wang, Keke Tang, Daizong Liu, Siyi Wang, Wei Ji

Affiliations: School of Software Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Nanyang Technological University, University College London, Guangzhou University, Wuhan University, Nanjing University

Title: Towards Unified Vision-Language Models with Incomplete Multi-Modal Inputs

Abstract:
VideoLanguage Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive multi-modal reasoning capabilities across diverse computer vision applications. However, these VLMs are task-specific and assume that both video and language inputs are complete. However, real-world VLM applications might face challenges due to deactivated sensors (e.g., cameras are unavailable due to data privacy), yielding modality-incomplete data and leading to inconsistency between training and testing data. While straightforward incomplete input can boast training generalization-ability and lead to training failure, its potential risks to VLMs regarding safety and trustworthiness have been largely neglected. To this end, we make the first attempt to propose a unified incomplete video-language model to process the incomplete multi-modal inputs. Extensive experimental results show that our method can serve as a plug-and-play module for previous works to improve their performance in various multi-modal tasks.

PaperID: 2985

Authors:Xiang Fang, Wanlong Fang, Changshuo Wang, Xiaoye Qu, Daizong Liu

Affiliations: School of Software Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Nanyang Technological University, University College London, Wuhan University

Title: Rethinking Video-Language Model from the Language Input Perspective

Abstract:
Driven by the wave of large language models, VideoLanguage Models (VLMs) have become a significant yet challenging technology to bridge the gap between videos and texts. Although previous VLM works have made significant progress, almost all of them implicitly assume that all the texts are predefined by the specific template. In real-world applications, such a strict assumption is impossible to satisfy since 1) predefining all the texts is extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive. 2) these predefined text inputs are too restrictive and user-unfriendly, limiting their applications. It is observed that given a video input, texts with similar semantics but different templates lead to various performances. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel plug-and-play framework for various VLM-based methods to fully bridge videos and texts. Specifically, we first generate positive and negative texts from the original ones to target specific text components. Then, we propose an attribute-based text reasoning strategy to mine fine-grained textual semantics of generated texts. Finally, we utilize videos as guidance to conduct cross-modal bridging by designing a self-weighted loss. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method can serve as the plug-and-play module to effectively improve the performance of state-of-the-art VLMs.

PaperID: 2986

Authors:Rui Jiang, Chongmian Wang, Xinghe Fu, Yehao Lu, Teng Li, Xi Li

Affiliations: Zhejiang University

Title: UniScene-MoTion: Unified Scene & Motion-aware Diffusion Transition Framework

Abstract:
Video transitions are critical for ensuring temporal coherence in edited media, yet existing methods often rely on handcrafted effects or relativescale trajectories that fail to capture the physical structure of real-world scenes. In this work, we introduce a scale-aware video transition framework that explicitly incorporates depth-aware 3D reasoning into a diffusion-based generation pipeline. Built upon a powerful I2V foundation, our method leverages single-image depth prediction to align camera motion with metric-scale geometry, enabling physically consistent transitions. To reduce reliance on precise camera inputs, we propose a bidirectional conditional control module and a progressive training strategy with conditional dropout, enhancing generalization to loosely specified or missing camera trajectories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering realistic, geometrically coherent transitions across diverse scenes and applications with minimal input guidance.

PaperID: 2987

Authors:Tianzhong Lan, Zhang Yi, Xiuyuan Xu, Min Zhu

Affiliations: Sichuan University

Title: GeoCoBox: Box-supervised 3D Tumor Segmentation via Geometric Co-embedding

Abstract:
Data economics drives AI by optimizing data usage, reducing costs, and enhancing efficiency. In 3D tumor segmentation, efficiency is crucial due to the high demand for laborintensive manual annotations. Box-supervised segmentation offers a promising alternative but is constrained by tumor morphology complexity and boundary ambiguity. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D tumor segmentation model that integrates both positional and embedding features to facilitate inter-task collaboration. We introduce an Anatomical-Driven Class Activation Map to predefine the complex tumor morphology prior, which is further refined by our Geometric Pixel Co-embedding Learner. This learner utilizes contrastive learning to encode semantic information between center and edge pixels, enhancing pixel clustering and progressively refining tumor boundary segmentation in a coarse-to-fine manner. Our approach outperforms existing box-supervised methods in segmentation performance, with extensive experiments on four tumor datasets demonstrating significant improvements. This work provides a cost-effective and efficient solution for tumor segmentation, advancing the application of data economics in medical imaging.

PaperID: 2988

Authors:Bonan Li, Yinhan Hu, Songhua Liu, Zeyu Xiao, Xinchao Wang

Affiliations: University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, National University of Singapore

Title: FreLay: Frequency-aware Energy Function for Training-free Layout-to-Image Generation

Abstract:
Layoutto-Image generation has significantly advanced content creation by enabling the rendering of visual text under predefined spatial layouts. Current approaches achieve training-free layout guidance by constructing attention-based energy functions to derive correction gradients. In this paper, we demonstrate that vanilla energy functions suffer from two limitations, resulting in imprecise layout control and visually unrealistic artifacts. First, the normalizing factor of the Boltzmann distribution defined by the energy functions is non-negligible when calculating correction gradients, yet current energy functions cannot compute this factor exactly. Furthermore, while attention varies over time during the denoising process, existing approaches employ a fixed formulation. To address these challenges, we introduce FreLay, a novel training-free approach equipped with a frequency-aware energy function. Our method first reformulates the energy function to handle the normalization factor, enabling accurate computation of correction gradients. Simultaneously, leveraging the prior knowledge that low-frequency information deteriorates slower during noise addition, we design a time-specific energy function for each timestep from a frequency-domain perspective. Experimental results demonstrate that FreLay consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art training-free methods by a large margin both qualitatively and quantitatively across multiple datasets.

PaperID: 2989

Authors:Chenguang Li, Yu-Hui Wen, Liping Jing

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Advanced Rail Autonomous Operation, Beijing Jiaotong University, China Beijing Key Laboratory of Traffic Data Mining and Embodied Intelligence, School of Computer Science and Technology

Title: MotivDance: Fine-Grained Text-Guided Motivation Choreography with Music Synchronization

Abstract:
Realistic choreography demands simultaneous attention to rhythm and motivation. Prevailing automated dance generation methods mainly depend on musical input, overlooking the motivations that drive meaningful dance creation. Inspired by the motivation choreography, we aim to articulate dance motivations through textual guidance. However, the absence of highquality datasets concurrently containing music, textual descriptions, and motion data presents a challenge in achieving accurate fine-grained textual control. To address this limitation, we present MotivDance, a novel framework integrating fine-grained textual guidance with music to synthesize semantically coherent dance sequences. Our approach first synthesizes text-guided key poses as motivations. We then introduce an Adaptive Keyframe Locator that dynamically positions these motivations within the musical context through beat-aware synchronization and cross-modal latent space alignment. Finally, a Transformer-based U-Net diffusion model performs the motion in-betweening while preserving motivational integrity. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that MotivDance effectively integrates music with fine-grained text control to generate high-fidelity dance motions.

PaperID: 2990

Authors:Ruibo Li, Xiaofeng Yang, Ze Yang, Jiacheng Wei, Chunyan Miao, Guosheng Lin

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University

Title: Adaptive Piecewise Distillation for Efﬁcient LiDAR Data Generation

Abstract:
LiDAR data generation has emerged as a promising solution to the high cost and limited scalability of realworld LiDAR sensing. Recent diffusion and rectified flow models have demonstrated strong capabilities in synthesizing realistic 3D point clouds; however, their iterative sampling procedures result in significant inference overhead. To address this, we focus on efficient few-step LiDAR generation for both unconditional and multi-modal conditional settings. Specifically, we propose an adaptive piecewise distillation strategy tailored for rectified flow-based LiDAR generation models, where the teacher model’s flow trajectory is adaptively segmented into consecutive intervals, and the student is trained only at the start of each interval to directly predict the velocity toward its endpoint. By sequentially sampling at the start timestep of each interval, our method enables fast few-step generation. Moreover, instead of uniform partitioning, we introduce an adaptive timestep selection strategy that chooses interval boundaries with minimal initial error, thereby reducing the complexity of distillation. Experimental results show that our method achieves comparable or superior performance to state-of-the-art methods in both unconditional and multi-modal conditional LiDAR generation, using only four sampling steps.

PaperID: 2991

Authors:Xiaopan Li, Yi Jiang, Shiqian Wu, Shoulie Xie, Sos Agaian

Affiliations: School of Information Engineering, Hubei University of Economics, Wuhan Guide Infrared Co., Institute of Advanced Displays and Imaging, Henan Academy of Sciences, China School of Electronic Information, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Institute for Infocomm Research, College of Staten Island, City University of New York

Title: Multi-Level Blur-Aware Stable Diffusion for Region-Adaptive Defocus Deblurring

Abstract:
Defocus blur, common in shallow depthof-field photography, varies across image regions and is challenging to accurately estimate and restore. Existing deblurring methods often struggle to capture fine structural textures and do not effectively adapt to regional differences in blur. We propose Multi-Level Blur-Aware Stable Diffusion (MBSD), a novel framework that explicitly integrates regional blur recognition into a diffusion-based image restoration process. MBSD assigns blur-level labels to image patches using a Patch Blur Annotator (PBA), guiding a Multi-Scale Blur Estimator (MSBE) to predict soft blur probabilities and generate routing weights. These weights control a Blur-Adaptive Expert Mixer (BAEM), which adaptively combines features based on local blur severity. The features are then passed to a text-to-image diffusion model via a cross-attention mechanism, enabling region-specific restoration. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that MBSD delivers superior perceptual quality while maintaining competitive PSNR and SSIM, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 2992

Authors:Yongguo Ling, Chen Zhang, Yiming Liu, Wenhao Shao

Affiliations: Guangxi University

Title: CIA: Cluster-Instance Alignment for Unsupervised Day-Night Vehicle Re-Identification

Abstract:
Crosstime vehicle re-identification (Re-ID), especially across day and night conditions, remains a challenging problem due to drastic illumination variations that lead to significant domain shifts. While existing methods perform well under daytime scenarios, their effectiveness degrades severely in cross-domain settings, and fully supervised solutions demand costly annotations in both domains. In this paper, we introduce a new setting, Unsupervised Day-Night Vehicle Re-Identification (USL-DN-ReID), and propose a novel Cluster-Instance Alignment (CIA) framework to address it. CIA performs dual-level alignment: 1) at the cluster level, a Dictionary-Guided Graph Matching (DGM) module builds a cross-domain topological graph using soft similarities among cluster centers and solves global matching via the Hungarian algorithm; 2) at the instance level, a Multi-Factor Adaptive Alignment (MAA) module introduces a multi-factor adaptive weighting strategy that emphasizes high-confidence pairwise relations while suppressing noise. Together, these components enable robust and scalable cross-domain adaptation without requiring target-domain labels. Extensive experiments conducted on the DN-348 and DN-Wild benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed CIA framework, setting new state-of-the-art results on both datasets.

PaperID: 2993

Authors:Daizong Liu, Baoquan Chen, Wei Hu

Affiliations: Peking University

Title: Spatial-Spectral Homogeneous Attacks on Physical-World Large Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
Although large visionlanguage models (LVLMs) have demonstrated promising versatile capabilities on various downstream tasks, they are shown to be susceptible to adversarial examples. Existing LVLM attackers simply implement adversarial patterns in an impracticable setting: i) add digital global perturbations to entire input image; ii) access prior knowledge of LVLMs for optimization; iii) do not consider realistic transformations. These make them difficult to deploy in the physical-world attack scenarios. Motivated by the research gap and counter-practice phenomenon, this paper proposes the first practical LVLM attack method based on a novel adversarial patch design, which can achieve physical and digital attack settings without using any LVLM details. In particular, we introduce adversarial homogeneous constraints in both spatial and spectral domains to improve the patch stealthy for resisting potential real-world defenses. Besides, we also develop a new technique for synthesizing reasonably realistic transformations that capture the expected patch appearance variations in daily life. Extensive experiments are conducted to verify the strong adversarial capabilities of our proposed attack against prevalent LVLMs spanning a spectrum of tasks.

PaperID: 2994

Authors:Yanzhen Liu, Sutuke Yibulayimu, Yang Zhou, Yudi Sang, Yu Wang

Affiliations: Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Biomedical Engineering, School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing Rossum Robot Technology Co.

Title: FracSegmentator: Fracture Instance Segmentation with Trauma-Prior-Guided Contrastive Learning

Abstract:
Fracture injuries often lead to complex bone fragmentations, posing significant challenges for accurate segmentation in surgical planning and trauma assessment. Manual annotation of each fragment is timeconsuming and inconsistent, while existing automated methods often fail to separate individual fragments due to the wide variation in fracture types, irregular fracture surface, and close inter-fragment contact. To address these challenges, we introduce FracSegmentator, a deep learning approach for bone fragment instance segmentation. The model takes extracted bone regions in CT as input and isolates individual fragments by identifying fracture surfaces and separating closely contacting structures. Central to our approach is a Trauma-Prior-Guided Contrastive Learning module, which incorporates clinical knowledge through memory-based attention to better distinguish fractured surfaces from healthy regions. We evaluate FracSegmentator on four datasets that cover a range of anatomical sites and fracture patterns. The method achieves state-of-the-art results across all datasets and demonstrates strong generalization capabilities. By delivering accurate and efficient fragment-level segmentation, FracSegmentator supports critical downstream tasks such as automated fracture diagnosis, surgical planning, and preoperative reduction simulation.

PaperID: 2995

Authors:Zhi-Song Liu, Chenhang He, Yakun Ju, Lei Li

Affiliations: Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, University of Leicester, Technical University of Munich University of Virginia

Title: PUFM: Efficient Point Cloud Upsampling via Flow Matching

Abstract:
Diffusion models have recently been adopted for point cloud upsampling due to their effectiveness in solving illposed problems. However, existing upsampling methods often struggle with inefficiencies, as they generate dense point clouds by mapping Gaussian noise to data, overlooking the geometric information already present in sparse inputs. To address this, we propose PUFM, a novel Point Cloud Upsampling via Flow Matching, which learns to directly transform sparse point clouds into their high-fidelity dense counterparts. Our approach first applies midpoint interpolation to densify the sparse input. Then, we construct a continuous interpolant between sparse and dense point clouds and train a neural network to estimate the velocity field for flow matching. Given the unordered nature of point clouds, we introduce a pre-alignment step based on Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) optimization to ensure coherent and meaningful interpolation between sparse and dense representations. This results in a more stable and efficient learning trajectory during flow matching. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks demonstrate that our method delivers superior upsampling quality but with fewer sampling steps. Further experiments on ScanNet and KITTI also show that our approach generalizes well to real-world RGB-D and LiDAR point clouds, making it more practical for real-world applications.

PaperID: 2996

Authors:Junsheng Luan, Lei Zhao, Wei Xing

Affiliations: Zhejiang University

Title: Inpaint-Anywhere: Zero-Shot Multi-Identity Inpainting with Efficient Diffusion Transformer

Abstract:
Subjectdriven generation, which aims to synthesize visual content for a given identity V with specific attributes, has garnered increasing attention in recent years. While existing methods demonstrate impressive identity consistency for both single and multiple identities, they often lack user-specified spatial control. Recent approaches, such as OminiControl-2 and EasyControl, enable inpainting conditioned on a single identity but fall short in multi-identity scenarios. In this paper, we introduce BoundID, a dataset synthesis pipeline for generating multi-identity images with bounding box annotations, and introduce Inpaint-Anywhere, a diffusion transformer framework for multi-identity inpainting. Given multiple identity references and corresponding masks, our method simultaneously generates all desired identities at precise locations while achieving both high identity and prompt fidelity. Extensive experiments show that Inpaint-Anywhere achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-identity inpainting.

PaperID: 2997

Authors:Dongxing Mao, Yilin Wang, Linjie Li, Zhengyuan Yang, Alex Jinpeng Wang

Affiliations: Central South University, Zhejiang University, Microsoft Research

Title: TextGround4M: A Prompt-Aligned Dataset for Layout-Aware Text Rendering

Abstract:
Despite recent advances in textto-image (T2I) generation, models still struggle to accurately render prompt-specified text with correct spatial layout—especially in multi-span, structured settings. This challenge is driven not only by the lack of datasets that align prompts with the exact text and layout expected in the image, but also by the absence of effective metrics for evaluating layout quality. To address these issues, we introduce TextGround4M, a large-scale dataset of over 4 million prompt-image pairs, each annotated with span-level text grounded in the prompt and corresponding bounding boxes. This enables fine-grained supervision for layout-aware, prompt-grounded text rendering. Building on this, we propose a lightweight training strategy for autoregressive T2I models that appends layout-aware span tokens during training, without altering model architecture or inference behavior. We further construct a benchmark with stratified layout complexity to evaluate both open-source and proprietary models in a zero-shot setting. In addition, we introduce two layout-aware metrics to address the long-standing lack of spatial evaluation in text rendering. Our results show that models trained on TextGround4M outperform strong baselines in text fidelity, spatial accuracy, and prompt consistency, highlighting the importance of fine-grained layout supervision for grounded T2I generation.

PaperID: 2998

Authors:Xin Mei, Rui Mao, Xiaoyan Cai, Libin Yang, Erik Cambria

Affiliations: Northwestern Polytechnical University, Nanyang Technological University

Title: RefleXNet: Targeted Self-Reflection for Accurate Chest X-ray Reporting

Abstract:
Automated interpretation and reporting of chest Xrays (CXRs) hold significant promise in reducing diagnostic errors and supporting radiologists under heavy clinical workloads. However, existing methods typically rely on global visual features and token-level supervision, limiting their sensitivity to subtle abnormalities and reducing their clinical reliability. To address these challenges, we present Reflective X-ray Network (RefleXNet), which systematically integrates multi-scale visual feature fusion and anatomical relational reasoning with a targeted self-reflective learning strategy. RefleXNet first constructs multi-scale visual representations and captures anatomical context through graph-based relational modeling. Building upon these representations, we introduce a targeted self-reflection strategy that uses clinically guided feedback from generated reports to selectively refine abnormality predictions and their associated region-level visual features. Extensive experiments on MIMIC-CXR demonstrate that RefleXNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across clinical factual correctness metrics. Notably, our compact 3B-parameter model surpasses several recent models with over twice the parameter count. Additionally, RefleXNet exhibits strong generalization performance in zero-shot evaluations on IU-Xray compared with leading multimodal language models, highlighting its robustness and clinical effectiveness.

PaperID: 2999

Authors:Jiashuaizi Mo, Sang-Woon Jeon, Hua Wang, Xiangqi Chen, Yanchao Wang, Minglu Li, Zhonglong Zheng

Affiliations: Zhejiang Normal University, Hanyang University, Victoria University

Title: Neural Outline Cache for Real-time Anti-aliasing Font Rendering

Abstract:
Neural textures have emerged as pivotal assets in nextgeneration neural rendering pipelines. However, hardware limitations and programming interface constraints lead to suboptimal performance in multi-instance real-time rendering scenarios. This bottleneck becomes particularly acute for texture-intensive tasks such as font rendering. To address this, we propose Neural Outline Cache (NOC), a novel neural font texture supporting real-time anti-aliased rendering and procedural editing within modern neural graphics pipelines. NOC's lightweight network leverages multi-resolution hash encoding to cache spline-derived SDFs, delivering anti-aliased rendering via standard graphics pipelines. For massive-instance scalability, our cache buffer layout (CBL) and batch-fused inference (BFI), tailored for NOC, mitigate neural texture streaming bottlenecks. We constructed an evaluation dataset using five font styles. In offline rendering, our proposed method achieves overall average results of 57.35 dB PSNR, 0.998 SSIM, and 1.1584e-3 pixel RMSE, while maintaining approximately 0.5ms frame latency with 500 real-time instances. To demonstrate its versatility, we integrated a procedural editor for visual effects editing of NOC textures. These results all prove that NOC is a reliable, production-ready neural asset.

PaperID: 3000

Authors:Changhao Peng, Yuqi Ye, Wei Gao

Affiliations: Peking University

Title: Correcting Quantization-Induced Gradient Mismatch in Neural Image Compression

Abstract:
In recent years, neural image compression methods have achieved impressive performance in image compression tasks, most of which are based on variational autoencoder with hyper-prior and autoregressive Gaussian entropy model. We first demonstrate that the way these end-to-end approaches handle quantization during training leads to a mismatch between the gradients direction of entropy model parameters (i.e., mean and standard deviation) and the direction they should be optimized towards during inference, making neural network difficult to learn accurate estimates of entropy model parameters. To address this issue, we then propose a two-step improvement: in the first step, use straight-through estimator to align the forward propagation during training with inference, thereby correcting the gradients of standard deviation parameters; in the second step, utilize gradients transfer that we propose and MSE-guided gradients to manually compensate for the gradients of mean parameters lost due to straight-through estimator. Finally, we also propose to freeze the auto-encoder and hyper auto-encoder in pre-trained models provided by existing works, and fine-tune only the modules that predict the entropy model parameters, enabling efficient validation of proposed improvements. Experimental results show that our improvements bring appreciable performance gains to state-of-the-art neural image compression models in recent years. Meanwhile, our improvements require no modification to the structure of pre-trained models and only lightweight fine-tuning, which shows strong plug-and-play capability and practical utility.

PaperID: 3001

Authors:Zelin Peng, Zhengqin Xu, Feilong Tang, Wei Shen

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

Title: CP-CLIP: Customized Parameter Generation for Open-vocabulary Semantic Segmentation

Abstract:
Openvocabulary semantic segmentation aims to assign pixel-level labels to images based on textual descriptions, even for categories beyond predefined closed sets. While vision-language foundation models like CLIP are widely used for this task, fine-tuning them for pixel-level predictions often compromises their generalization capabilities. To address this, we propose a novel fine-tuning strategy, CP-CLIP, which generates customized parameters for CLIP without sacrificing its generalization. Our method employs a customized parameter generator that produces newly added parameters based on random noise, using local visual features from CLIP's image encoder as conditions, enabling generalization to new images from unseen scenarios. Additionally, we introduce an orthogonal adaptation technique to ensure the update direction is orthogonal to the pre-trained weights, largely preserving the initial generalization ability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CP-CLIP achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks in open-vocabulary semantic segmentation.

PaperID: 3002

Authors:Linfeng Qi, Huibing Wang, Jinjia Peng, Jiqing Zhang

Affiliations: Dalian Maritime University, Hebei University

Title: Localization-Anchored Instance Discrimination for Domain Adaptive Person Search

Abstract:
Domainadaptive person search (DAPS) aims to transfer pedestrian detection and re-identification capabilities from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain, yet faces critical challenges from domain shift: semantic confusion among overlapping instances, over-reliance on shallow features for look-alike targets, and poor discriminability of small-scale instances. To address these issues, we propose the Localization-Anchored Instance Discrimination (LAID) framework, which leverages spatial relationships between bounding boxes as auxiliary signals to enhance instance identity learning. LAID integrates three complementary strategies: 1) Cost-Aware Instance Matching (CAIM) uses IoU-based global optimal assignment to align current detections with historical identities, reducing overlap-induced misassociations; 2) Dual-Scope Contrastive Learning (DSCL) combines spatial separation constraints (for geometrically distant pairs) with global contrastive learning, prompting the model to learn deep discriminative features beyond superficial similarities; 3) Task-Sensitivity Alignment (TSA) aligns confidence distributions of detection and ReID heads via KL divergence, ensuring consistent pseudo-label generation. Extensive experiments on CUHK-SYSU and PRW datasets demonstrate that LAID outperforms state-of-the-art DAPS methods, validating its effectiveness in mitigating domain shift and narrowing the performance gap between supervised and domain-adaptive person search.

PaperID: 3003

Authors:Guan Yuan Tan, Ngoc Tuan Vu, Arghya Pal, Sailaja Rajanala, Raphael C W Phan, Mettu Srinivas, Chee-Ming Ting

Affiliations: Monash University, National Institute of Technology Warangal

Title: FLAG-4D: Flow-Guided Local-Global Dual-Deformation Model for 4D Reconstruction

Abstract:
We introduce FLAG4D, a novel framework for generating novel views of dynamic scenes by reconstructing how 3D Gaussian primitives evolve through space and time. Existing methods typically rely on a single Multilayer Perceptron(MLP) to model temporal deformations, and they often struggle to capture complex point motions and fine-grained dynamic details consistently over time, especially from sparse input views. Our approach, FLAG-4D overcomes this by employing a dual-deformation network that dynamically warps a canonical set of 3D Gaussians over time into new positions and anisotropic shapes. This dual-deformation network consists of an Instantaneous Deformation Network (IDN) for modeling fine-grained, local deformations, and Global Motion Network (GMN) for capturing long-range dynamics, refined via mutual learning. To ensure these deformations are both accurate and temporally smooth, FLAG-4D incorporates dense motion features from a pretrained optical flow backbone. We fuse these motion cues from adjacent timeframes and use a deformation-guided attention mechanism to align this flow information with the current state of each evolving 3D Gaussian. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FLAG-4D achieves higher-fidelity and more temporally coherent reconstructions with finer detail preservation than state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 3004

Authors:Yi Tang, Hiroshi Kawasaki, Takafumi Iwaguchi, Yuhang Zhang, Hiroshi Masui

Affiliations: Kitami Institute of Technology, Kyushu University, Guangzhou University

Title: Learning Underwater Image Enhancement Iteratively Without Reference Images

Abstract:
Since highfidelity reference images are difficult to obtain in real underwater scenes, most deep models trained by synthetic paired data cannot match real-world data exactly. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised training framework for underwater image enhancement (UIE) by leveraging an iterative training strategy and quantification of specific neural units. Specifically, to eliminate the heavy color cast and distortion in the underwater images, we decompose the unsupervised image enhancement as two targeted sub-tasks, namely colorization and color compensation. First, a diffusion model is introduced for colorization to correct the green and blue color casts. Then, to intensify the learning ability of balanced color information, we introduce an extra network branch and propose a quantification mechanism for color compensation. The extra branch encodes style information from normal images into the generative model, while the quantification mechanism identifies and adjusts neural units relevant to warm colors, improving the model’s ability to learn balanced color feature representations for robust generation. In the end, through iterative training, color cast and distortion are progressively reduced, leading to a gradual improvement in the quality of the generated images. Experimental results on various widely used underwater datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves excellent performance, even when compared to recent supervised methods.

PaperID: 3005

Authors:Yuanmin Tang, Jing Yu, Keke Gai, Gang Xiong, Gaopeng Gou, Meikang Qiu, Qi Wu

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Key Laboratory of Ethnic Language Intelligent Analysis and Security Governance of MOE, Minzu University of China, School of AI, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing China Zhongguancun Academy, School of Computer and Cyber Sciences Augusta University Augusta, Responsible AI Research Centre, Adelaide University

Title: Manipulation Intention Understanding for Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval

Abstract:
Zeroshot Composed Image Retrieval (ZS-CIR) involves diverse tasks with varied visual manipulation intents across domains, scenes, objects, and attributes. A key challenge is that existing datasets contain limited intent-relevant annotations, making it hard for models to infer human intent from textual modifications. We introduce an intent-centric image–text dataset generated via reasoning by a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to better train ZS-CIR models for human manipulation intent understanding. Building on this dataset, we propose De-MINDS, a framework that distills the MLLM’s reasoning ability to capture manipulation intent and enhance models’ comprehension of modified text. A simple mapping network translates image information into language space and combines it with the manipulation text to form a query. De-MINDS then extracts intention-relevant information from this query and encodes it as pseudo-word tokens for accurate ZS-CIR. Across four ZS-CIR tasks, De-MINDS shows strong generalization and improves over existing methods by 2.15% to 4.05%, establishing new state-of-the-art results with comparable inference time.

PaperID: 3006

Authors:Xiaoyue Wan, Xu Zhao

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: Diffusion-based Personalized Pathology Disentanglement for Impaired Gait Analysis

Abstract:
In the context of global population aging, the prevalence of neurodegenerative diseases is rapidly increasing. Visionbased impaired gait analysis emerges as a promising alternative for automatic and non-invasive diagnosis. While prior efforts have advanced either accuracy or interpretability of gait analysis, few have effectively addressed both aspects in a unified framework. To bridge this gap, we propose DPPD, a Diffusion-based Personalized Pathology Disentanglement model that jointly performs quantitative gait scoring, dementia subtyping, and qualitative anomaly highlighting. Motivated by the observation that pathological gait features exhibit stronger inter-class separability across different gait severity than raw features, DPPD is proposed based on the subject-specific pathology disentanglement perspective. Specifically, it comprises three key components: (1) a 3DmotionBERT for encoding gait representation from 3D human pose sequences estimated, (2) a latent diffusion-based Gait Denoiser for generating personalized normal gait features, and (3) a Dual Pathology Disentanglement mechanism that captures both static pose and dynamic motion pathological representation from the residual between raw and normal gait features. These disentangled pathologies further enable quantitative classification and qualitative anomaly highlighting. Experiments on the PDGait and 3DGait datasets demonstrate that DPPD outperforms state-of-the-art methods in classification accuracy while providing reliable and interpretable visualizations of gait anomalies.

PaperID: 3007

Authors:Miaoqing Wang, Jiaxu Leng, Shuang Li, Changjiang Kuang, Long Sun

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Chongqing University of Post and Telecommunication Chongqing Institute for Brain and Intelligence, Guangyang Bay Laboratory, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology

Title: PortraitSR: Artist-Inspired Prior Learning for Progressive Face Super-Resolution

Abstract:
Face superresolution (FSR) aims to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) face images from low-resolution (LR) inputs. While recent methods have advanced this task through architectural innovations and generative modeling, but they often leads to semantically inconsistent structures and unrealistic textures, particularly under high magnification. To mitigate these limitations, we draw inspiration from the human artistic process of “structuring before detailing” and propose a progressive prior-guided restoration strategy. Specifically, we first introduce a Sketching Structure Prior (SSP) module that embeds global semantics and refines local geometry through implicit parsing guidance and explicit spatial modulation. Then, an Associative Texture Prior (ATP) module leverages a High-Quality Dictionary (HD) learned from high-quality reconstruction to guide fine-grained detail recovery. Finally, to unify structure and detail features, we design a Holistic Prior Fusion (HPF) module that adaptively integrates them within semantically consistent facial regions. Our method surpasses state-of-the-art on CelebA and Helen in both structural fidelity and texture realism.

PaperID: 3008

Authors:Shaomeng Wang, He Wang, Longquan Dai, Jinhui Tang

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing Forestry University

Title: PC-Flow: Preference Alignment in Flow Matching via Classifier

Abstract:
Flow Matching (FM) is an efficient generative modeling framework, but aligning it with human preferences remains underexplored.~Although applying Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to diffusion models has yielded improvements, directly extending DPOlike methods to FM poses three challenges: 1) Incompatibility with ODE-based models, 2) Heavy computational cost from full model fine-tuning, and 3) Reliance on reference model quality. To address these limitations, we propose Preference Classifier for Flow Matching (PC-Flow), a novel reference-free preference alignment framework. Specifically, we reinterpret FM’s deterministic ODE as an equivalent SDE to enable DPO-style learning. Then, we introduce a lightweight classifier to model relative preferences exclusively. This approach decouples alignment from the generative model, eliminating the need for costly fine-tuning or a reference model. Theoretically, PC-Flow guarantees consistent preference-guided distribution evolution, achieves a DPO-equivalent objective without a reference model, and progressively steers generation toward preferred outputs. Experiments show that PC-Flow achieves DPO-level alignment with significantly lower training costs.

PaperID: 3009

Authors:Wenshuai Wang, Hong Liu, Shengquan Li, Peifeng Jiang, Runwei Ding

Affiliations: Peking University, Pengcheng Laboratory

Title: Debiased Multiplex Tokenizer for Efficient Map-Free Visual Relocalization

Abstract:
Imagebased feature representation plays a critical role in visual localization, enabling robots to estimate their position and orientation in GPS-denied environments. However, this task is often undermined by significant variations in camera viewpoints and scene appearances. Recently, map-free visual relocalization (MFVR) has emerged as a promising paradigm due to its compatibility with lightweight deployment and privacy isolation on mobile devices. In this paper, we propose the Debiased Multiplex Tokenizer (DeMT) as a novel method for versatile and efficient MFVR. Specifically, DeMT performs relative pose regression through an integrated framework built upon a pretrained vision Mamba encoder, comprising three key modules: First, Multiplex Interactive Tokenization yields robust image tokens with non-local affinities and cross-domain descriptions; Second, Debiased Anchor Registration facilitates anchor token matching through proximity graph retrieval and causal pointer attribution; Third, Geometry-Informed Pose Regression empowers multi-layer perceptrons with a gating mechanism and spectral normalization to support both pair-wise and multi-view modes. Extensive evaluations across nine public datasets demonstrate that DeMT substantially outperforms existing baselines and ablation variants in diverse indoor and outdoor environments.

PaperID: 3010

Authors:Wuyuqing Wang, Zeyuan Gu, Erkun Yang

Affiliations: School of Electronic Engineering, Xidian University, Xi’an China, School of Computer Science and Technology, Xinjiang University, Urumqi China

Title: Noisy Correspondence Learning with Modality Gap Direction Correction

Abstract:
Crossmodal retrieval is crucial for discovering latent correspondences across different modalities. However, existing methods typically assume that training data are well-aligned, an unrealistic assumption since real-world datasets inevitably contain noisy correspondences. Many current approaches attempt to handle noise using strategies borrowed from single-modal classification, such as the small-loss trick, to identify clean training pairs. However, our experiments reveal that such small-loss-based strategies are less effective for multi-modal tasks due to the inherent modality gaps. Through comprehensive analysis, we observe that the deviation directions between paired image-caption features, termed Sample-level Alignment Drift (SAD), are compact and data-dependent. Leveraging this discovery, we introduce the Modality Gap Corrected Similarity (MGCS) framework that can more accurately measure the semantic distances of cross-modal samples, dynamically compensating for misalignments. Within MGCS, we can achieve more reliable noisy data separation to promote correct supervision during cross-modal matching model training. Extensive experiments on three widely used noisy correspondence benchmarks demonstrate that MGCS significantly surpasses current state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 3011

Authors:Xiaoyang Wang, Hongping Gan

Affiliations: Northwest Polytechnical University

Title: Spectrally Adaptive Channel-aware Unrolling Network for Compressed Sensing

Abstract:
Deep Unrolling Networks (DUNs) integrate classical optimization recovery problems in Compressed Sensing (CS) with sophisticated deep learning network architectures, leading to substantial breakthroughs. However, prevailing DUNs generally face challenges concerning solidified gradient descent step size strategies, inadequate feature extraction within the iterative stage and limited information interaction between iterative stages. To overcome these obstacles, we propose SCUNet, a channel-focused unrolling network inspired by the renowned spectral projected gradient optimization algorithm. In particular, we tailore two pivotal components, Barzilai-Borwein-gradient Descent Optimizer (BBDO) and Channel-guided Cross-attention Reconstruction Module (CCRM), to collaboratively undertake the reconstruction task. BBDO leverages a gradient calculation strategy based on BB step size to enhance data fidelity optimization, while CCRM addresses the intricate mapping issue associated with sparse induction, encompassing customized functionalities from Adaptive Channel Interaction Layer (ACIL) and Spatially Augmented Channel-aware Unit (SACU). Among them, ACIL amalgamates convolution operations and channel attention mechanisms to achieve meticulous information screening alongside efficient feature enhancement. SACU introduces dual reinforcement variables to bolster information exchange across different iterative stages, coupled with the optimization of cross-attention to facilitate the modeling of long-distance dependencies. Extensive experiments in both image CS and magnetic resonance imaging exhibit that our SCU-Net manifests superior performance, surpassing state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 3012

Authors:Yiwen Wang, Ran Yi, Lizhuang Ma

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: TileGS: Adaptive Gaussian Densification Through Tile-Guided Perceptual Analysis

Abstract:
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become a powerful technique for realtime novel view synthesis, using explicit, end-to-end optimized 3D Gaussians to represent scenes. However, its training objective is primarily based on pixel-wise photometric loss, and its densification strategy fails to account for structural consistency and localized perceptual priorities. As a result, 3DGS struggles to capture fine textures and boundary details in underconstrained areas, leading to inefficient use of representational capacity and degraded rendering quality in critical regions. To overcome this limitation, we introduce TileGS, a tile-wise, perceptually guided framework designed to refine scene representation based on local rendering quality. Our method features a tile-guided densification approach that performs per-tile perceptual analysis between rendered and ground-truth tiles to identify areas and Gaussians requiring refinement. Additionally, we incorporate a tile-level structural loss to enforce localized consistency during training. TileGS is designed to be a plug-and-play framework, seamlessly integrating into existing 3DGS pipelines with minimal adjustments. Experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that TileGS improves rendering quality while maintaining an efficient representation, showcasing its versatility and effectiveness in diverse rendering scenarios.

PaperID: 3013

Authors:Zhigang Wang, Zhenguang Liu, Shaojing Fan, Sifan Wu, Yingying Jiao

Affiliations: The State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University, Ltd. Hangzhou High-Tech Zone (Binjiang) Institute of Blockchain and Data Security, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University

Title: DiffusionPose: Markov-Optimized Diffusion Model for Human Pose Estimation

Abstract:
Videobased human pose estimation has long been a nontrivial task due to its dynamic nature and challenging detection scenarios such as occlusion and defocus. Inspired by the success of diffusion models, researchers have applied them to video pose estimation, outperforming traditional joint detection methods. However, existing diffusion model-based methods still face challenges like slow convergence and unstable pose generation. To tackle these issues, we propose DiffusionPose, a novel framework for video pose estimation that integrates diffusion models with optimization strategies: (1) We combine the emerging Mamba with Transformers to balance global and local spatio-temporal modeling. (2) We integrate Markov Random Fields into the reverse diffusion process to enhance the denoising of pose heatmaps, particularly addressing the issue of confused generation of occluded joints. (3) We mathematically formulate a Markov objective to supervise the heatmap denoising process, enabling the model to generate anatomically plausible skeletons. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three large-scale benchmark datasets. Interestingly, it shows surprising robustness in challenging video scenarios, improving the accuracy of the most difficult ankle joint by 16.9% compared to the previous best diffusion model-based method on the Challenging-PoseTrack dataset.

PaperID: 3014

Authors:Zihao Wang, Hao Peng, Wei Dong, Yuecen Wei, Li Sun, Zhengtao Yu

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University, Beihang University, North China Electric Power University, Kunming University of Science and Technology

Title: RPGen: Robust and Differentially Private Synthetic Image Generation

Abstract:
Differentially private (DP) image synthesis enables the generation of realistic images while bounding privacy leakage, facilitating secure data sharing across organizations. However, the Gaussian noise injected during DP training, such as via DPSGD, often severely degrades synthesis quality by disrupting model convergence. To address this, we introduce RPGen, a novel framework that enhances diffusion models' parameter robustness to mitigate DP noise effects without compromising privacy guarantees. At its core, RPGen employs adversarial model perturbation (AMP) during public pre-training to build resilience against perturbations, but we identify and tackle the critical issue of robustness transferability across domains. RPGen achieves this through a three-step process: (1) A pre-trained classifier infers labels for private images, aggregated into a class distribution noised with Gaussian mechanism for DP, and public samples are selected to match this privatized distribution for domain alignment; (2) The diffusion model is pre-trained on this curated subset with adversarial model perturbation to foster robustness; (3) The model undergoes fine-tuning on private data using DP-SGD. This synergy of robustness augmentation and transferability optimization yields high-fidelity synthesis. Extensive evaluations on ImageNet for pre-training, with CelebA and CIFAR-10 for synthesis, show RPGen outperforming state-of-the-art baselines across epsilon in 1, 5, 10. On average, it achieves 20.18% lower FID and 5.45% higher classification accuracy. Ablations confirm the efficacy of domain curation and modest perturbations, establishing RPGen as a new benchmark for privacy-utility trade-offs in image generation.

PaperID: 3015

Authors:Shun Wei, Jielin Jiang, Xiaolong Xu

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology

Title: Exploring High-order-aware Prompt Learning for Zero-shot Anomaly Detection

Abstract:
Many methods have demonstrated promising results in zeroshot anomaly detection (ZSAD) by incorporating prompt learning (PL) to fine-tune Vision-Language Models. However, the prompt learners proposed in recent studies remain relatively simple, such as learnable textual and visual prompts. Relying solely on the current PL paradigm restricts the ability to generate more precise prompts, thereby hindering improved ZSAD performance. To mitigate this issue, this paper proposes a high-order-aware prompt learning framework, termed HiPL, which facilitates the detection of unseen anomalies through generating prompts fortified by hypergraphs. Specifically, HiPL models high-order correlations among patches through a dynamically constructed hypergraph structure. Then we leverage a hypergraph semantic convolution to capture potential collaborative information by propagating high-order correlations by hyperedges. Meanwhile, HiPL introduces a Mixture-of-Experts prompt learner (MoEPLer), where the experts within MoEPLer can generate multiple distinct prompts based on the modeled high-order correlations. Then, the final high-order-aware textual prompts can be formed by synthetically considering each expert's prompt by gating weights. This enables a comprehensive understanding of potential anomalous patterns, thereby facilitating ZSAD performance. Large-scale experiments conducted on 12 datasets, spanning natural, industrial, and medical domains, demonstrate the validity of proposed HiPL.

PaperID: 3016

Authors:Zhiliang Wu, Kun Li, Yunqiu Xu, Hehe Fan, Yi Yang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Hong Kong Baptist University

Title: DLVINet: Advancing Dual-Lens Video Inpainting Beyond Parallax Constraints

Abstract:
Duallens video inpainting aims to simultaneously restore missing or corrupted contents in videos captured by each lens of binocular systems. Although preliminary explorations have been conducted, existing methods still face two key challenges: limited exploitation of long-range reference information and inadequate modeling of inter-lens consistency in non-standard binocular systems. In this paper, we propose a novel dual-lens video inpainting framework named DLVINet, which addresses these challenges with two core components. Firstly, we develop a sparse spatial-temporal transformer (SSTT) that effectively utilizes the information from distant frames to complete the video contents of each lens individually. By employing sparse spatial-temporal attention with a channel selection mechanism, SSTT not only restores missing regions, but also avoids introducing redundant or irrelevant information. Furthermore, SSTT introduces a multi-scale feed-forward network to enrich the multi-scale representation of completed features. Secondly, we design a cross-lens texture transformer (CLTT) to model inter-lens consistency. By interacting with corresponding features between lenses under the guidance of cross-attention, CLTT captures global inter-lens correspondences. Such a design enables effective cross-view information modeling without being constrained by horizontal parallax, which is particularly critical for non-standard binocular systems. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our DLVINet.

PaperID: 3017

Authors:Zhongwei Xiong, Hao Wang, Xiaoyan Yu, Lingling Li, Xuezhuan Zhao, Taisong Jin

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing, Ministry of Education of China, Xiamen University, China School of Informatics, School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Zhengzhou University of Aeronautics, China Henan Provincial University-Enterprise R&D Center for Artificial Intelligence Technology

Title: Disentangled Hypergraph-Guided Mamba Scanning for Fine-Grained Visual Recognition

Abstract:
Finegrained Visual Recognition (FGVR) aims to distinguish between categories with subtle inter-class differences and large intra-class variations. While Vision Transformers with attention mechanisms have been widely adopted for FGVR, they usually suffer from high computational complexity and entangled global representations. Recent advancements in state-space models, exemplified by Mamba, have showcased substantial potential in vision-related tasks due to their linear scalability and rich sequence modeling capacity. To this end, we propose DHMamba, a novel Mamba based FGVR method. The proposed method leverages hypergraph to guide selective scanning and strengthen Mamba’s capability in modeling fine-grained semantics. Furthermore, a Disentangled Local Scanning (DLS) module is introduced to utilize hyperedges to allocate distinct informative patches into independent channels for mitigating the representational entanglement. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple FGVR benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed DHMamba outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, validating the efficacy of combining state-space modeling with hypergraph-based feature structuring.

PaperID: 3018

Authors:Hongtao Yang, Bineng Zhong, Qihua Liang, Xiantao Hu, Yufei Tan, Haiying Xia, Shuxiang Song

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Education Blockchain and Intelligent Technology, Ministry of Education, Guangxi Normal University, Guilin China, School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Guangxi Key Laboratory of Brain-inspired Computing and Intelligent Chips

Title: Motion-Aware Object Tracking via Motion and Geometry-Aware Cues

Abstract:
Understanding motion is essential for visual object tracking, especially in complex and dynamic scenarios. Yet, many existing methods rely on simplistic strategies such as template updates or temporal feature propagation, often overlooking the deeper modeling of motion information. To mitigate this limitation, we introduce a motionaware spatio-temporal framework that enhances motion perception by explicitly matching motion patterns and modeling inter-frame motion relationships. Central to our design is a motion pattern dictionary, which encodes a diverse set of representative motion cues as learnable features. During tracking, features from the search region interact with the dictionary to retrieve the most relevant motion patterns, allowing the model to adapt to the current motion state. A dedicated decoder further incorporates temporal correlations to refine motion awareness. To complement motion modeling, we embed geometric cues into the search region features, which strengthens spatial perception, reduces ambiguity under occlusion, and improves foreground-background separation. Extensive evaluations on seven challenging benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our design. In particular, MoDTrack_384 surpasses recent SOTA trackers on LaSOT by 1.2% in AUC, highlighting the benefits of motion pattern modeling and geometry-guided enhancement in mitigating tracking drift.

PaperID: 3019

Authors:Ge Ying, Dawei Zhang, Chengzhuan Yang, Wei Liu, Sang-Woon Jeon, Hua Wang, Changqin Huang, Zhonglong Zheng

Affiliations: Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Intelligent Education Technology and Application, Zhejiang Normal University, School of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, School of Automation and Intelligent Sensing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Institute for Sustainable Industries and Liveable Cities, College of Engineering and Science, Victoria University

Title: Exploiting All Mamba Fusion for Efficient RGB-D Tracking

Abstract:
Despite the progress made through deep learning, existing Visual Object Tracking (VOT) frameworks struggle with realworld challenges. Recent approaches incorporate additional modalities like Depth, Thermal Infrared, and Language to enhance the robustness of VOT, particularly with the improvement of the depth sensor precision, facilitating RGB-D tracking. However, current RGB-D trackers often copy RGB tracking paradigms, leading to inefficiency due to two-stream architectures that fail to exploit heterogeneous features, and reliance on simplistic or large-parameter fusion methods. To address these challenges, we propose AMTrack, a one-stream RGB-D tracker leveraging Mamba's linear complexity for simultaneous feature extraction and two-stage cross-modal feature fusion. Our innovation also includes a low-parameter Multimodal Mix Mamba (3M) module, which optimizes deep feature fusion and reduces computational overhead. The advantage of the 3M module stems from our Multimodal State Space Model (MSSM), a multimodal feature interaction component reconstructed based on SSM. Experiments across multiple RGB-D tracking datasets indicate that AMTrack achieves superior performance with lower parameters and memory demands compared to state-of-the-arts.

PaperID: 3020

Authors:Hee Bin Yoo, Dong-Sig Han, Jaein Kim, Byoung-Tak Zhang

Affiliations: Seoul National University, Imperial College London

Title: PeriUn: Enhancing Unlearning by Selectively Forgetting Peripheral Samples

Abstract:
Once trained, neural networks memorize information in diffusely encoded parameters, making it difficult to forget in support of the right to be forgotten. Unlearning aims to remove the influence of data, with performance measured against a retrained model that excludes the data. However, understanding the behavior of goldstandard retraining remains underexplored. We compare original and retrained models and observe that most prediction changes occur in peripheral samples near decision boundaries. Consequently, we propose PeriUn, a selective strategy that unlearns only peripheral samples to mimic retrained model behavior with minimal disruption, unlike prior works that remove the entire request. Combined with the Random Label based method, PeriUn significantly improves both generalization and privacy metrics. Specifically, on TinyImageNet with VGG16, PeriUn increases the Tug-of-War score by 22 points compared to the strongest. Besides, the MIA gap score surpasses the state-of-the-art method, improving by 8.7 points after applying PeriUn. Further analyses confirm that PeriUn better preserves the feature space and aligns closely with the retrained model.

PaperID: 3021

Authors:Yongsheng Yu, Haitian Zheng, Zhe Lin, Connelly Barnes, Yuqian Zhou, Zhifei Zhang, Jiebo Luo

Affiliations: University of Rochester, Adobe Research

Title: RealUHR: Harnessing Patch-Cascade Flows for Photorealistic Ultra-High-Resolution Synthesis

Abstract:
Ultrahigh-resolution (UHR) text-to-image synthesis faces significant hurdles, including immense computational costs and a scarcity of training data. To address these, we introduce RealUHR, an efficient and scalable framework for generating photorealistic 4K images. At its core, RealUHR employs a Patch-Cascade Flow Matching pipeline that ensures global coherence without costly patch fusion by initiating generation from a semantically meaningful structure. This enables highly efficient, few-step inference for independent patches. Our key contribution is Guidance-Consistent Adaptation (GCA), a novel two-stage strategy to resolve the fundamental objective mismatch in guidance-distilled models. GCA allows powerful backbones like FLUX to be effectively adapted for patch-aware UHR synthesis. The framework's detail-rendering capabilities are further enhanced by a non-uniform time schedule. Experiments show that RealUHR establishes superior performance in both quality and efficiency, and excels in zero-shot applications such as creative up-sampling and generative artifact suppression.

PaperID: 3022

Authors:Zhixi Yu, Wei Liu, Wenke Huang, Bin Yang, Qian Bie, Guancheng Wan, Xin Xu

Affiliations: Wuhan University, University of California, Los Angeles

Title: Domain-Aware Suppression and Aggregation for Federated DG ReID

Abstract:
Federated domain generalization in person reidentification (FedDG-ReID) aims to learn a privacy-preserving server model from decentralized client source domains that generalizes to unseen domains. Existing approaches enhance the generalizability of the server model by increasing the diversity of client person data. However, these methods overlook that ReID model parameters are easily biased by client-specific data distributions, leading to the capture of excessive domain-specific identity information. Such identity information (e.g., clothing style) struggles with identity information in unseen domains, thereby hindering the generalization ability of the server model. To address this, we propose a novel FedDG-ReID framework, which mainly consists of Domain-aware Parameter Suppression (DPS) and Domain-invariant Weighted Aggregation (DWA), called FedSupWA. Specifically, DPS adaptively attenuates the update magnitude of the parameters based on the fit of the parameters to the client's domain, encouraging the model to focus on more generalized domain-independent identity information, such as pedestrian contours, and other consistent information across domains. DWA enhances the server model’s generalization by evaluating the effectiveness of the client model in maintaining the consistency of pedestrian identities to measure the importance of the learned domain-independent identity information and assigning greater aggregation weights to clients that contribute more generalized information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FedSupWA, showing that it achieves state-of-the-art performance.

PaperID: 3023

Authors:Mingfeng Zha, Guoqing Wang, Tianyu Li, Wei Dong, Peng Wang, Yang Yang

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology

Title: Seeing Beyond Illusion: Generalized and Efficient Mirror Detection

Abstract:
Reflective imaging enables the mirror imagings and physical entities to possess identical attributes, e.g., color and shape. Current mirror detection (MD) methods primarily rely on designing functional components to establish the correlation and disparities between the imagings and entities, thereby identifying the mirror regions. However, the exploration of extended scenes with dynamic content changes is rarely investigated. Therefore, we propose the MirrorSAM designed for MD based on the Segment Anything Model (SAM). Specifically, due to the varying reflections produced by mirrors in different positions and the complex visual space that interferes with localization, we design the hierarchical mixture of direction experts (HMDE) in the lowrank space to reduce biases towards entities in SAM and dynamically adjust experts based on the input scene. We observe differences in depth between mirrors and adjacent areas, and propose the depth token calibration (DTC), which introduces a learnable depth token to generate the depth map and serve as an error correction factor. We further formulate the selective pixel-prototype contrastive (SPPC) loss, selecting partially confusable samples to promote the decoupling of mirror and non-mirror representations. Extensive experiments conducted on four mirror benchmarks and two settings demonstrate that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art methods with few trainable parameters and FLOPs. We further extend to four transparent surface benchmarks to validate generalization.

PaperID: 3024

Authors:Hongyu Zhang, Haipeng Chen, Chengxin Yang, Yingda Lyu

Affiliations: Jilin University

Title: VGD: Value-Guided Diffusion Toward High-Utility Medical Image Segmentation

Abstract:
Progress in medical image segmentation is fundamentally constrained by the scarcity of annotated data. While diffusion models offer a promising solution by generating highfidelity image–mask pairs, their utility for downstream tasks remains underexplored. A key bottleneck lies in the misalignment between generation outputs and task-specific needs—samples are produced independently of their utility for downstream training. To this end, we propose Value-Guided Diffusion (VGD), a lightweight sampling framework that integrates downstream model feedback into the generative inference process. VGD estimates a value score for each sample based on its utility to downstream training, and leverages this signal to iteratively guide the denoising trajectory toward high-reward regions of the data manifold. Crucially, VGD can be seamlessly integrated into existing medical diffusion models without any additional training or architectural modifications. Extensive experiments across multiple diffusion backbones and segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that VGD significantly boosts downstream segmentation performance while maintaining visual fidelity. Our findings highlight a task-aware sampling principle with potential to underpin future synthetic segmentation pipelines.

PaperID: 3025

Authors:Ligang Zhang, Jun Li, Qiming Li

Affiliations: Quanzhou Institute of Equipment Manufacturing, Haixi Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Quanzhou Fujian College, Fuzhou Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, Fuzhou School of Advanced Manufacturing, Fuzhou University

Title: Gaussian Uncertainty-Driven Multi-Model Fitting with Graph Neural Network

Abstract:
Multimodel fitting is fundamental for robust geometric estimation in computer vision. However, recent deep learning methods enable parallel model detection but rely on simple architectures that inadequately model spatial relationships. Moreover, current methods typically generate hypotheses only through minimal solvers on randomly sampled points, thus failing to explore the full diversity of the solution space. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Jacobian-based Gaussian uncertainty modeling framework, which analytically propagates covariance through geometric transformations and enables efficient expansion of the hypothesis space with strong theoretical guarantees. We further introduce a Gaussian Hypothesis Generation Network (GHG-Net) to learn global parameter distributions, enabling the generation of diverse and geometrically valid hypotheses. Additionally, our network captures spatial relationships among observations by employing a dynamic graph neural network with a multi-head attention mechanism. This yields more accurate sample and inlier weights, significantly improving the quality of hypothesis generation. Extensive experiments on three representative geometric estimation tasks (i.e. vanishing point detection, fundamental matrix estimation, and homography estimation) demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art accuracy and stability, while maintaining high computational efficiency.

PaperID: 3026

Authors:Zhipeng Zhang, Mengzan Qi, Rongkang Ma, Yingying Fang, Guixu Zhang, Tieyong Zeng, Zhi Li

Affiliations: East China Normal University, Imperial College London, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title: RPE-PAD: Relative Pose Estimation for Pose-agnostic Anomaly Detection

Abstract:
Poseagnostic Anomaly Detection (PAD) aims to detect anomalies when the poses of query images are unknown and differ from those in the training set. Therefore, accurately estimating the camera poses for the query images in the test set is critical for this task. Existing query-specific framework methods require re-optimizing a new set of parameters for each query image, limiting their generalization and increasing computational burden. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel method, Relative Pose Estimation for Pose-agnostic Anomaly Detection (RPE-PAD), which enhances both generalization and efficiency with a query-independent framework. Specifically, we propose a Random View Synthesis Scheme (RVSS) that generates new poses by adding Gaussian perturbations to the original poses, then renders the corresponding views to augment the dataset. To estimate the relative camera pose between two input images, we introduce an Iterative Relative Pose Refinement Network (IRPRN), which incorporates a hierarchical coarse-to-fine refinement strategy. Furthermore, we employ a Multi-Pair Training Strategy (MPTS) to train the proposed IRPRN, leveraging multiple image pairs to expand the relative pose transformation space during training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves robust anomaly detection performance while significantly improving inference efficiency.

PaperID: 3027

Authors:Jiaqi Zhao, Huanfeng Hu, Yong Zhou, Wen-Liang Du, Kunyang Sun, Rui Yao, Qigong Sun

Affiliations: China Unviersity of Mining and Technology

Title: CLIPDet3D: Vision-Language Collaborative Distillation for 3D Object Detection

Abstract:
Multiview 3D object detection plays a vital role in autonomous driving systems due to its ability to perceive complex scenes accurately. However, real-world driving data often exhibits a long-tailed distribution, causing significant drops in detection accuracy for rare categories in existing methods. To mitigate this issue, we propose CLIPDet3D, a novel vision-language collaborative framework for multi-view 3D object detection. First, to tackle the difficulty of capturing the semantic information of rare categories, a Vision-Language Collaborative Learning strategy is proposed to incorporate class-level semantic priors from CLIP. Second, a Depth Feature Contrastive Distillation module is designed to overcome the large depth estimation error for rare categories by aligning depth features between a teacher and a student network. Furthermore, to alleviate the difficulty in focusing on regions of rare categories, a Dual-Stream Prompt Attention mechanism is devised to inject learnable prompts and compute attention along both horizontal and vertical BEV directions. Evaluations on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that CLIPDet3D achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while maintaining efficient inference.

PaperID: 3028

Authors:Shijie Zhao, Zhenyu Liang, Xing Yang, Haoqi Gao, Anjie Peng, Hui Zeng

Affiliations: Southwest University of Science and Technology, Hefei China, Advanced Laser Technology Laboratory of Anhui Province, College of Electronic Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, Mianyang China;

Title: ObjectAdv: Object-Level Unrestricted Adversarial Attacks via Diffusion Models

Abstract:
Unrestricted adversarial attacks aim to fool DNNs by generating effective yet photorealistic examples. However, previous methods usually rely on global perturbations to enhance attack performance, which inevitably introduces visual distortions. To reduce visual distortions in the background, we propose a diffusionbased framework that focuses on local perturbations to generate object-level unrestricted adversarial examples (ObjectAdv). Since the cross-attention maps of Stable Diffusion contain the object information, we directly leverage the attention maps to localize the semantic region of object where for attacking. Second, a prompt-switching strategy is proposed for both imperceptibility and attack capacity. Specifically, to preserve layout and object shape of clean image, a prompt of true category is used at early denoising steps. At the later steps, we propose a well-designed prompt to guide the diffusion model to generate transferable adversarial examples. This local attack may cause inconsistency between the perturbed object and the background in adversarial examples. An FFT-based edge smoother is utilized to ensure seamless blending of the edges. ObjectAdv achieves an average ASR of 99.2% in white-box test on the ImageNet-compatible dataset, and outperforms existing methods on defense performance (+5%) and image quality metrics, e.g., SSIM of 0.9140 (+0.1048) and FID of 25.63 (-19.27).

PaperID: 3029

Authors:Aihua Zheng, Pengyu Li, Zi Wang, Jin Tang

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University, School of Biomedical Engineering, Ministry of Education, Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing & Signal Processing

Title: Progressive Multi-modal Knowledge Distillation for Multi-spectral Object Re-identification

Abstract:
In the field of multispectral object re-identification (ReID), multi-modal knowledge and modal-specific knowledge exhibit complementary advantages when handling hard samples, but existing methods rarely integrate this collaborative information. Knowledge distillation is a direct approach for transferring information, however, heterogeneity in model architectures and variations in sample hardness can undermine the stability and controllability of knowledge transfer. To alleviate these limitations, we propose the novel Progressive Multi-modal Knowledge Distillation (PMKD) framework that enables multi-stage knowledge transfer guided by hard sample awareness. In the multi-modal knowledge transfer stage, the source model (pre-trained on multi-modal data) disseminates its learned multi-modal collaborative knowledge to multiple independently modal-specific target models, guiding their adaptation to hard samples within training batches. In the modal-specific knowledge retention stage, the independent models enriched with multi-modal knowledge guide the training phase. The architectural consistency between source-target models ensures more lossless knowledge transfer, effectively mitigating the risk of capability drift, and preserving inherent competence. Moreover, the entire progressive multi-modal knowledge distillation is regulated by the proposed hardness-aware distillation loss, which automatically adapts distillation intensity through hard sample mining, thereby ensuring stable transfer of hard sample handling capabilities. Extensive experiments on benchmark multi-spectral ReID datasets validate the effectiveness and superior performance of the proposed method.

PaperID: 3030

Authors:Wenli Zheng, Huiyuan Fu, Zekai Xu, Xin Wang, Huadong Ma

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing Universtiy of posts and Telecommunications, Stony Brook University, Beijing University of Post and Telecommunication

Title: Selective Diffusion Distillation for Real-World High-Scale Image Super-Resolution

Abstract:
Highscale image super-resolution (SR) has become increasingly important with the rapid growth of mobile devices and high-resolution displays. However, current SR methods primarily focus on lower scales and generalize poorly to high-scale scenarios due to severe information loss and complex real-world degradations. In this paper, we propose a novel Selective Diffusion Distillation (SDD) framework for real-world high-scale SR, which distills reliable knowledge from a low-scale diffusion teacher to a high-scale student. Specifically, considering severe information loss in high-scale inputs, directly distilling from low-scale models may result in feature misalignment. To address this, we introduce a Degradation-aware Metric Learning (DML) approach to align feature distributions across different degradation levels. In addition, since the diffusion-based teacher may hallucinate artifacts in ambiguous regions, blindly imitating these unreliable outputs can degrade the student’s fidelity. To tackle this, we propose a Region-aware Selective Distillation (RSD) strategy to filter out uncertain predictions and adaptively supervise only on reliable areas. To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we introduce Real-UltraSR, a new real-world benchmark that contains diverse high-scale LR-HR pairs, including x8, x10, x12, and x14. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our SDD framework achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks.

PaperID: 3031

Authors:Haoliang Zhou, Feifei Zhang, Changsheng Xu

Affiliations: Tianjin University of Technology, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences Peng Cheng Laboratory

Title: Duplex Rewards Optimization for Test-Time Composed Image Retrieval

Abstract:
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) combines the reference image with text to retrieve the intended target image. Recently, zeroshot CIR has gained significant attention by eliminating the need for labeled triplets required in supervised CIR. However, it inevitably demands additional training corpus, storage, and computational resources, limiting its applicability in real-world scenarios. Inspired by advancements in Test-Time Adaptation (TTA), we propose a Test-Time CIR setting named TT-CIR, which aims to efficiently adapt models to unlabeled test samples while reducing resource consumption. Within the TT-CIR setting, we identify that naively introducing existing TTA methods (e.g., reward-based) into CIR faces two vital challenges: 1) Modification-restricted reward pool, which limits the exploration of semantically relevant candidate rewards; 2) Conservative knowledge feedback, which inhibits the adaptability of rewards to the current data distribution. To address these challenges, we propose a test-time reinforcement learning framework that integrates a Counterfactual-guided Multinomial Sampling (CMS) strategy and a Duplex Rewards Modeling (DRM) module. The CMS explores a candidate reward pool that is visually similar and semantically relevant to the given query, while the DRM generates stable and adaptive duplex rewards to guide model adaptation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and adaptability of our method over existing approaches.

PaperID: 3032

Authors:Qing Zhou, Lichang Yang, Yuyu Jia, Junyu Gao, Weiping Ni, Junzheng Wu, Qi Wang

Affiliations: Northwestern Polytechnical University, Northwest Institute of Nuclear technology

Title: Reasoning via Implicit Self-supervised Emergence for Instruction Segmentation

Abstract:
We challenge the assumption that complex instructionguided segmentation tasks necessitate equally complex and explicit supervision. This paper introduces RISE (Reasoning via Implicit Self-supervised Emergence), a framework that learns intricate compositional reasoning, spanning spatial relations to world knowledge, without a single ground-truth mask. To achieve this, RISE employs reinforcement learning with GRPO guided by a single, strikingly simple reward: the semantic alignment score between the textual instruction and the predicted image region. Our primary discovery is the implicit emergence of a high-quality chain-of-thought process from this minimalist signal. Within a structured format, the model autonomously learns to understand instructions by accessing its latent knowledge, inferring spatial relationships—capabilities inherent in its architecture but unlocked by our simple objective. Remarkably, our emergent reasoning yields highly competitive results: RISE achieves 58.7 gIoU on the ReasonSeg benchmark, on par with methods using geometric rewards. Furthermore, we show extreme data efficiency: a variant trained on only 2,000 ImageNet-label pairs establishes a new state-of-the-art for annotation-free referring segmentation with 79.6 cIoU on RefCOCO.

PaperID: 3033

Authors:Shun Zhu, Xichen Yang, Yan Zhang, Tianshu Wang, Zhongyuan Mao, Tianyin Li, Zhuoyan Sun, Xiaobo Shen

Affiliations: Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, Nanjing University of Science and Technology

Title: Graph-Driven Domain Co-Adaptation for Cross-Domain Image Quality Assessment

Abstract:
As a typical information medium, images are widely utilized across various scenarios. Measuring image quality accurately is meaningful for the subsequent usability of images. However, significant variations exist in image types and distortion types in different scenarios. And, acquiring labeled images for each specific scenario is timeconsuming and labor-intensive. Consequently, designing cross-domain image quality assessment (IQA) that generalizes across different scenarios remains a substantial challenge. Existing cross-domain IQA methods primarily focus on content relevance while neglecting distortion differences, leading to limited applicability while distortion fluctuates. To address these limitations, a graph-driven domain co-adaptation framework for cross-domain IQA (GDCIQA) is proposed. Firstly, a graph knowledge sharing (GKS) module that constructs graphs via inter-domain distortion relevance has been proposed. GKS employs graph neural networks to update quality-aware features in the source domain by leveraging target-domain representations. Secondly, the proposed co-adaptation learning (CAL) mechanism can enable joint optimization of different modules, which ensures comprehensive sharing of quality-aware and distortion-related information. Finally, a domain adaptation framework has been designed to train models effectively on labeled source images, yielding target-domain-optimized IQA models. Experimental results demonstrate that GDCIQA achieves higher accuracy and stability in cross-domain scenarios. The proposed GKS and CAL can advance cross-domain IQA research.

PaperID: 3034

Authors:Olaf Beyersdorff, Tim Hoffmann, Kaspar Kasche

Affiliations: Friedrich Schiller University Jena

Title: Proof Systems That Tightly Characterise Model Counting Algorithms

Abstract:
Several proof systems for model counting have been introduced in recent years, mainly in an attempt to model #SAT solving and to allow proof logging of solvers. We reexamine these different approaches and show that: (i) with moderate adaptations, the conceptually quite different proof models of the dynamic system MICE and the static system of annotated DecisionDNNFs are equivalent and (ii) they tightly characterise state-of-the-art #SAT solving. Thus, these proof systems provide a precise and robust proof-theoretic underpinning of current model counting. We also propose new strengthenings of these proof systems that might lead to stronger model counters.

PaperID: 3035

Authors:Guillaume Derval, Christophe Lecoutre

Affiliations: University of Liège, Montefiore Institute, Smart Grids Lab, Univ. Artois & CNRS

Title: Aperiodic Tiling and Rhythmic Canons: A CP Journey

Abstract:
The Aperiodic Tiling Complements Problem (ATCP) involves finding the full set of (normalized) aperiodic complements of a given pattern. This has become a classic problem in music theory, with some recent attempts to model it using Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) frameworks. In this paper, we develop and compare different models of ATCP encoded with Constraint Programming (CP). The most effective approach admits two phases: a first one that allows us to merge (join) several subsets of linear constraints under the form of tables with large arity, and a second one that advantageously exploits the generated tables to discard periodic tiling complements. Our experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms the stateof-the-art, solving every instance of a classical benchmark (standard Vuza rhythms for canons with periods set up to 900) in a time between 5 seconds and 2 minutes (except the largest instance being solved in 18 minutes).

PaperID: 3036

Authors:David Saikali, Gilles Pesant

Affiliations: Polytechnique Montréal

Title: Constrained Molecule Generation Modelled Using the Grammar Constraint

Abstract:
Drug discovery is a very timeconsuming and costly endeavour due to its huge design space and to the lengthy and failure-fraught process of bringing a product to market. Automating the generation of candidate molecules exhibiting some of the desired properties can help. Among the standard formats to encode molecules, SMILES is a widespread string representation. We propose a constraint programming model showcasing the grammar constraint to express the design space of organic molecules using the SMILES notation. We show how some common physicochemical properties --- such as molecular weight and lipophilicity --- and structural features can be expressed as constraints in the model. We also contribute a weighted counting algorithm for the grammar constraint, allowing us to use a belief propagation heuristic to guide the generation. Our experiments indicate that such a heuristic is key to driving the search towards desired molecules.

PaperID: 3037

Authors:Yang Zhang, Hongbo Li

Affiliations: Northeast Normal University

Title: Right Branches Matter in Failure-based Variable Ordering Heuristics

Abstract:
Failurebased variable ordering heuristics (VOH) are efficient general-purpose search heuristics for solving constraint satisfaction problems (CSP). They learn from the failures detected during the search and select the variables that are most likely to fail. The current failure-based VOHs, i.e. the failure-rate-based (FRBA) and failure-length-based (FLBA), focus on only the failures detected in left branches. In this paper, we investigate how the failure information from right branches affects the performance of the failure-based VOHs. Four strategies utilizing the failure information of right branches are proposed to refine the failure-based VOHs. Our experiments performed with the benchmark instances used in the recent MiniZinc challenges show that utilizing the failures detected in right branches enhances the performance of the failure-based VOHs. The refined version combining all the proposed strategies generally gets the best performance. It demonstrates remarkable superiority over several general-purpose VOHs, including activity-based search, conflict-history search, refined weighted degree, pick/dom, and the existing FRBA, which are considered state-of-the-art. Our study demonstrates that right branches matter in failure-based VOHs.

PaperID: 3038

Authors:Jun Bao, Junbo Wang, Yiheng Jiang, Xiangfeng Liu, Mingyang Lv, Yuanbo Xu

Affiliations: MIC Lab, College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, China College of Software

Title: NP-MiSR: Neural Process-based Multi-Interest Learning for Session-Based Recommendation

Abstract:
Sessionbased recommendation (SBR) aims to provide users with satisfactory suggestions via modeling preferences based on short-term, anonymous user-item interaction sequences. Traditional single interest learning methods struggle to align with the diverse nature of preferences. Recent advances resolved this bottleneck by learning multiple interest embeddings for each session. However, due to the pre-defining scheme of interest quantity (e.g. the number of interests), these approaches are deficient in adaptive ability towards distinctive preference patterns across different users. Moreover, these methods rely solely on the current session and ignore useful information from related ones. The short-term property of sessions would magnify the insufficient representation issue. To address these limitations, we propose a Neural Process-based Multi-interest learning framework for Session-based Recommendation, namely NP-MiSR. To be specific, our method enables adaptive multi-interest representation learning through two complementary mechanisms: 1) Neural Process-based Intra-session interest modeling: We employ Neural Processes to model the distribution of interests within a session, where the fixed interest configurations are no longer needed. 2) Cross-session context fusion: We extract interest distributions of similar sessions as contextual priors to refine the current session’s interest representation. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art SBR approaches with an average improvement of 38.8%. Moreover, the few-shot learning task reveals that NP-MiSR achieves a surprisingly favorable efficiency v.s. performance trade-off where utilizing only 10% of the training data attains 95% of the recommendation performance.

PaperID: 3039

Authors:Yong Chen, Li Li, Nannan Zong, Zhihui Liu, Song-Zhi Su

Affiliations: Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Xiamen University, School of Artificial Intelligence, Shenzhen Polytechnic University, School of Informatics, Xiamen Truesight Technology Co.

Title: ARDiff: Anisotropic Residual Diffusion for Heterogeneous Graph Learning

Abstract:
Learning representations on graphs is foundational for many downstream tasks, and its synergy with diffusion models has emerged as a promising direction. However, diffusionbased methods for heterogeneous graphs remain underexplored, confronting two principal challenges: (1) The presence of noise and structural heterogeneity in graphs makes it challenging to accurately capture semantic transitions among diverse relation types. (2) The isotropic Gaussian noise used in forward diffusion fails to reflect graphs' inherent semantics and structural anisotropy. To address these, we propose ARDiff, a novel framework that integrates residual diffusion with anisotropic noise for heterogeneous graph learning. Specifically, we propose a semantic residual diffusion mechanism that progressively refines node embeddings by orchestrating transitions from low-semantic (high-noise) to high-semantic (low-noise) relational contexts, thus enabling step-wise distillation of task-relevant information. In addition, to address the limitations of conventional diffusion, we introduce an anisotropic diffusion strategy: in the forward process, noise injection is oriented by structural and semantic priors; in the denoising step, a conditional diffusion mechanism is guided by a random walk encoding, enhancing both topological consistency and semantic alignment. Extensive evaluation on heterogeneous graph datasets demonstrates that ARDiff significantly surpasses current leading methods in link prediction and node classification, setting a new paradigm and benchmark in heterogeneous graph representation learning.

PaperID: 3040

Authors:Ke Fei, Da Luo, Kangyi Lin, Zibin Zhang, Jingjing Li

Affiliations:

Title: Stable and Adaptive Fusion for Multi-domain Multi-task Recommendation

Abstract:
MultiDomain Multi-Task (MDMT) recommendation aims to provide personalized recommendations by leveraging information across multiple domains and tasks. However, existing methods often suffer from spurious correlations between irrelevant features and the target, leading to negative transfer. To address this, we propose a Stable and Adaptive Fusion (SAF) framework for MDMT recommendation. SAF introduces a weighted Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) loss to decorrelate irrelevant features from the target, learning sample weights that promote stable (i.e., robust to spurious correlations) representations in both bottom and expert layers. We employ Random Fourier Features (RFF) to enable scalable computation of the HSIC loss. We further employ adaptive feature and expert gating to select these stable features, enabling the model to capture intricate cross-domain and cross-task dependencies. The learned sample weights are also used to reweight the MDMT loss during training. Experiments on large-scale datasets show that SAF outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by up to 2% in AUC. To facilitate further research, we release a new industrial dataset with 30 million interactions across 3 domains and 2 tasks, with 300 features.

PaperID: 3041

Authors:Anil Sharma, Gunturi Venkata Sai Phani Kiran, Jayesh Rajkumar Vachhani, Sourabh Vasant Gothe, Ayon Chattopadhyay, Yashwant Saini, Parameswaranath Vadackupurath Mani, Barath Raj Kandur Raja

Affiliations: Samsung R&D Institute India - Bangalore

Title: ContextGraph: Lifelog Intelligence Framework for Contextual Subgraph Evolution

Abstract:
Lifelogging involves the continuous and comprehensive recording of a user’s daily activities, behaviors, and interactions, offering valuable insights for personalized healthcare, event retrieval, and lifestyle analysis. However, extracting meaningful patterns from lifelog data requires models to capture deeper temporal contexts beyond simple retrieval. To address this, we introduce ContextGraph, a lifelog intelligence framework that models lifelogs as a Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) to reason about the user’s evolving life patterns over time. ContextGraph computes Day Context Embeddings (DCE) to encode the temporal spread and social scene context of user's daily behavior. Then a novel Lens module extracts semantically meaningful subgraph snapshots around an anchor node in the TKG, representing specific personal contexts in the user’s life. The Lens module also computes an evolution signature for each subgraph, indicating whether it is growing, decaying, or remaining static. By analyzing these evolution signatures, ContextGraph provides actionable insights into the user’s lifelogs such as stable routines, behavioral drifts, or lifestyle changes. Our experiments showcase DCE's versatility, outperforming baselines in graph/node classification and reasoning on the Enzyme and DBLP datasets.

PaperID: 3042

Authors:Wencai Ye, Mingjie Sun, Shuhang Chen, Wenjin Wu, Peng Jiang

Affiliations: Kuaishou Technology

Title: Align³GR: Unified Multi-Level Alignment for LLM-based Generative Recommendation

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate significant advantages in leveraging structured world knowledge and multistep reasoning capabilities. However, fundamental challenges arise when transforming LLMs into real-world recommendation systems due to semantic and behavioral misalignment. To bridge this gap, we propose Align³GR, a novel framework that unifies token-level, behavior modeling-level, and preference-level alignment. Our approach introduces: Dual tokenization fusing user-item semantic and collaborative signals. Enhanced behavior modeling with bidirectional semantic alignment. Progressive DPO strategy combining self-play (SP-DPO) and real-world feedback (RF-DPO) for dynamic preference adaptation. Experiments show Align³GR outperforms the SOTA baseline by +17.8% in Recall@10 and +20.2% in NDCG@10 on the public dataset, with significant gains in online A/B tests and full-scale deployment on an industrial large-scale recommendation platform.

PaperID: 3043

Authors:Yanwei Yu, Hong Xia, Shaoxuan Gu, Xingyu Zhao, Dongliang Chen, Yuan Cao

Affiliations: Ocean University of China, China State Key Laboratory of Physical Oceanography

Title: Self-Supervised Cross-City Trajectory Representation Learning Based on Meta-Learning

Abstract:
Trajectory representation learning transforms complex spatiotemporal features of trajectories into dense, low-dimensional embeddings, enabling applications in intelligent transportation systems. With advances in this field and the availability of large-scale traffic data, intelligent urban systems have been widely deployed in major cities. However, existing methods heavily rely on large volumes of trajectory data, limiting their transferability to cities with sparse data, especially small or less-developed ones. Moreover, most current approaches learn representations within a single city, overlooking the shared travel patterns across regions and cities with similar geographic contexts. To address these issues, we propose MetaTRL, a self-supervised cross-city trajectory representation learning method based on meta-learning. Specifically, we introduce a Shared and Private Parameterized Cross-city Meta-learning Framework to support knowledge sharing and transfer across cities. We further design a Meta-knowledge Enhanced Road Segment Encoder and a Trajectory Encoder that integrates private and shared knowledge to learn and fuse spatio-temporal trajectory features. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets and multiple downstream tasks demonstrate the significant superiority of MetaTRL over state-of-the-art baselines and achieves a remarkable average improvement of 134.66% in Macro-F1 on destination prediction task.

PaperID: 3044

Authors:Guixian Zhang, Yanmei Zhang, Guan Yuan, Shang Liu, Xiaojing Du, Debo Cheng

Affiliations: China University of Mining and Technology, University of South Australia, Hainan University

Title: Noise-Aware Graph-Based Cognitive Diagnostic Framework Through Low-Rank Alignment

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have effectively improved the performance of Cognitive Diagnosis Models (CDMs). Existing works have proposed a series of Graphbased Cognitive Diagnosis Frameworks (GCDFs) to enhance robustness to noise. However, these robust designs are often general methods for GNNs and are not designed for cognitive diagnosis, which undermines real cognitive information during the denoising process. Interestingly, a noteworthy phenomenon has been overlooked: even without robustness designs, GCDFs can still learn correct information in noisy environments. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive empirical analysis of this issue. We found that noise primarily accumulates in lower singular components. Even in noisy environments, the principal subspaces of representations still remain stable. Based on these findings, we propose a Noise-aware Cognitive Diagnostic framework based on Low-rank Alignment, named NCDLA. The framework first performs low-rank reconstruction of the interaction matrix between students and exercises, retaining only larger singular values to achieve noise reduction. Then, the reconstructed interaction matrix and the original interaction matrix are combined with the Q matrix to form a noise-reduced heterogeneous graph and an original heterogeneous graph. In order to distinguish between the interaction patterns of correct and incorrect responses, we decompose the heterogeneous graph according to the type of response. NCDLA achieves denoising of student representations and exercises representations through a self-supervised strategy based on low-rank reconstruction and a spectral anchor regularisation method. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that NCDLA achieves optimal prediction performance and robustness.

PaperID: 3045

Authors:Zihan Zhang, Hongzhi Liu, Xiaoshuang Guo, Tianqi Sun, Zhonghai Wu

Affiliations: Peking University

Title: Knowledge-Enhanced Explainable Hypergraph Convolution Network for Medication Recommendation

Abstract:
Medication recommendation systems aim to provide personalized and safe medication options based on individual patient records. However, existing approaches often face challenges related to inadequate modeling of complex relationships within Electronic Health Records (EHRs), data sparsity, and a lack of explainability for recommendations. In this paper, we present a Knowledgeenhanced Explainable HyperGraph Convolution Network (KEHGCN) that constructs a hierarchical hypergraph structure to capture the multi-level relationships within EHR data. By incorporating external knowledge graphs, our approach introduces additional positive relations that help alleviate the impact of data sparsity on model learning. Furthermore, by performing generalized metapath construction and selection on the knowledge graph, our approach achieves effective knowledge filtering and extracts semantically meaningful metapaths, thereby further enhancing the explainability of the recommendation results. We also explicitly introduce negative relations present in the domain knowledge to improve the safety of medication recommendation. Extensive experiments on different hospital departments of MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV datasets demonstrate that KEHGCN outperforms other state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 3046

Authors:Chunyuan Zheng, Anpeng Wu, Chuan Zhou, Taojun Hu, Qingying Chen, Hongyi Liu, Chenxi Li, Huiyou Jiang, Haoxuan Li, Zhouchen Lin

Affiliations: School of Mathematical Sciences, Center for Data Science, Peking University, State Key Lab of General AI, School of Intelligence Science and Technology

Title: Uplift Modeling with Delayed Feedback: Identifiability and Algorithms

Abstract:
Uplift modeling has obtained significant attention, with broad applications in medicine, economics, and marketing. For example, in a push notification scenario, accurately estimating the uplift of different push frequencies on user activation and notification switch close rate is critical for balancing user experience and business goals. Existing methods only use binary labels, i.e., convert or not within the observational window. However, they ignore time information (e.g., users who convert on day 1 vs. day 14 reflect different sensitivities) and fail to model potential closures outside the window, i.e., due to treatments always taking time to manifest causal impacts on outcomes, the potential outcomes of interest cannot be observed promptly and accurately. Failing to account for these issues can result in skewed uplift modeling. To address this gap, this work examines how observation timing influences the assessment of uplift by explicitly modeling the potential response time. Theoretical analysis establishes the conditions for identifiability under delayed feedback scenarios. We introduce CFRDF (Counterfactual Regression with Delayed Feedback), a systematic framework that jointly learns both the latent response times and the underlying potential outcomes. Empirical evaluations on synthetic and real-world datasets, including an A/B test with over 1 billion users for 14 days, validate the approach, demonstrating its ability to handle temporal delays and improve estimation accuracy compared to previous uplift modeling methods.

PaperID: 3047

Authors:Jiazhu Fang, Qizhi Fang, Minming Li, Wenjing Liu

Affiliations: Ocean University of China, City University of Hong Kong

Title: Fairness and Stability for Shared Resource Allocation Problems

Abstract:
This paper investigates the problem of shared resource allocation, where a set of agents must be assigned to heterogeneous resources, with each agent allocated exactly one resource and each resource potentially shared by multiple agents. An agent’s utility for a given resource is jointly determined by the resource's type and the number of agents sharing it. We focus on two fundamental classes of monotone valuations: monotone nondecreasing and monotone nonincreasing, where an agent’s utility respectively increases or decreases with the number of agents sharing the resource. Within this shared resource framework, we examine classical notions of fairness and stability, including maximinshare fairness, envy-freeness, Nash stability, and two epistemic relaxations—epistemic envy-freeness and epistemic Nash stability—as well as swap stability. We propose formal definitions adapted to this setting and systematically analyze the relationships among these concepts. The primary contributions of this work consist of establishing existence and computational complexity results for each notion under both monotonicity assumptions and developing polynomial-time algorithms in cases where fair or stable allocations are guaranteed to exist.

PaperID: 3048

Authors:Alexandra Lassota, Krzysztof Sornat

Affiliations: TU Eindhoven, the Netherlands, AGH University

Title: Algorithms for Structured Elections Under Thiele Voting Rules

Abstract:
We study the computational complexity of winner determination problems in approvalbased committee elections under Thiele voting rules. These form a class of rules parameterized by a fixed weight vector that specifies how a voter's satisfaction depends on the number of approved candidates elected. We first analyze the structure of optimal solutions based on the sets of voters who approve each candidate---that is, how voters' approval ballots induce dependencies between candidates---revealing constraints on a winning committee under any fixed Thiele voting rule. Using this, we design FPT algorithms for Proportional Approval Voting (PAV) and other Thiele rules on a natural restricted domain known as the Voter Interval domain---that is, after a suitable ordering of voters, each candidate is approved by a consecutive interval of voters. In particular, we show that every Thiele rule on Voter Interval is FPT with respect to a parameter for which the problem is NP-hard on general instances, even when the parameter takes constant values. Our results advance the understanding of the computational complexity of PAV on Voter Interval instances, which remains one of the central open questions in this area. We further resolve two open questions from the literature on PAV (and other Thiele voting rules) by providing a polynomial-time algorithm for instances where each candidate is approved by at most two voters, and an FPT algorithm parameterized by the total score of a winning committee.

PaperID: 3049

Authors:Ren Liu, Weiran Shen

Affiliations: Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China

Title: The Power of Initial Investigation in Audit Games

Abstract:
Audit games are an important variant of the Stackelberg security game, a widely studied gametheoretic model over the past years. It has been acknowledged that a pre-audit phase can notably enhance the audit's efficiency by informing and directing the following audit procedures. In this paper, we model the above process with a two-stage audit game. The game encompasses two stages: an investigation stage where the auditor gathers information about potential policy breaches, and an audit stage where the auditor allocates the audit resources based on the investigation results. We formulate the problem as a set of mathematical programs. Due to the non-convexity of the programs, we consider a restricted strategy space and show that the optimal strategy in the restricted space can be determined by solving a polynomial number of convex optimization problems. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effect of introducing the initial investigation stage and our algorithm. Our experiments show that even a small budget for the initial investigations can significantly enhance the defender's utility.

PaperID: 3050

Authors:Yonglei Yan, Zihe Wang, Zhengyang Liu

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology, Renmin University of China

Title: Pacing Equilibria in Second-Price Auctions with Few Buyers

Abstract:
We present a polynomialtime algorithm for exactly computing second-price pacing equilibria (SPPE) in auction markets with a constant number of buyers. SPPE plays a central role in modern advertising auctions; however, computing or even approximating it is PPAD-hard in general. To overcome this computational barrier in the restricted setting, we adopt the cell-decomposition method. Specifically, we partition the solution space into polynomially many cells, each defined by hyperplanes corresponding to a fixed ordering of buyers’ scaled valuations across goods. Within each cell, the equilibrium computation reduces to solving a constant number of linear programs. Notably, our algorithm can also efficiently identify equilibria that optimize key objectives such as revenue or social welfare. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm that efficiently computes an exact SPPE for a simple and natural class of second-price pacing games.

PaperID: 3051

Authors:Wenchao Liu, Hongwei Li, Zhouyang Xu, Lin Ma, Haifeng Li

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: Leveraging Visual Blur Perception Characteristics for EEG Decoding

Abstract:
In recent years, electroencephalography (EEG)based visual decoding research has become a key direction for revealing brain processing mechanisms and realizing brain-computer interfaces. This emerging field has attracted extensive attention in the fields of brain science, cognitive neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. Among various approaches, contrastive learning has demonstrated strong performance in aligning multi-modal data, effectively enabling unified representations across modalities. However, during human visual perception, images are often subject to varying degrees of blurring due to the uneven distribution of retinal photoreceptor cells and the limited speed of lens accommodation. To address the mismatch between EEG and visual representations, we propose a novel visual decoding framework inspired by human perceptual blurring. Specifically, multi-level Gaussian blurring is applied to the visual stimuli to simulate human visual characteristics, followed by a feature selection module to construct robust visual representations. For EEG decoding, we design a lightweight and efficient network employing positively constrained spatial convolutions to identify channels associated with visual processing. The EEG and visual features are then aligned using contrastive learning. We evaluate the proposed framework on the Things-EEG dataset. Experimental results show significant improvements in the zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval task, achieving a top-1 accuracy of 80% and a top-5 accuracy of 96.9%, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods by margins of 29.1% and 17.2%, respectively. These findings highlight the potential of incorporating perceptual properties into EEG-based visual decoding.

PaperID: 3052

Authors:Zipeng Ye, Wenjian Luo, Qi Zhou, Yubo Tang

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: Reconstruction Attack-Resistant Inference Paradigm for LLM Cloud Services

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have seen remarkable growth in recent years. To leverage convenient LLM cloud services, users are inevitably to upload their prompts. Additionally, for tasks such as translation, reading comprehension, and summarization, associated files or context are inherently needed, whether or not they contain user privacy information. Despite the rapid progress in LLM capabilities, research on preserving user privacy during inference has been relatively scarce. To this end, this paper conducts some exploratory research in this domain. Firstly, we show that (1) the embedding space of tokens is highly sparse, and (2) LLMs primarily function in the orthogonal subspace of embedding space, these two factors making privacy extremely vulnerable. Then, we analyze the structural characteristics of LLMs and design a distributed privacypreserving inference paradigm which can effectively resist privacy attacks. Finally, we perform a thorough evaluation of the defended models on mainstream tasks and find that low-bit quantization techniques can be effectively combined with our inference paradigm, achieving a balance between privacy, utility, and runtime memory efficiency.

PaperID: 3053

Authors:Jugang Fan, Peihao Chen, Changhao Li, Qing Du, Jian Chen, Mingkui Tan

Affiliations: South China University of Technology

Title: NaVLA$^2$: A Vision-Language-Audio-Action Model for Multimodal Instruction Navigation

Abstract:
Embodied navigation is a fundamental capability for intelligent agents, yet remains challenging in partially observable environments where navigation instructions can be difficult to interpret. However, existing tasks only provide unimodal instructions, which are ambiguous in complex multimodal environments with multiple similar objects, and may result in misinterpretation and navigation failure. To overcome these limitations, we introduce MINav, a novel task where the navigation path is precisely described by a multimodal instruction. The instruction provides multimodal cues, including object categories, RGB images, language descriptions, and auditory descriptions, which help the agent to disambiguate and ground objects in the environment and navigate effectively. We further construct a largescale dataset of 43.9K navigation episodes using a two-stage pipeline that first annotates multimodal references of objects and then synthesizes diverse multimodal instructions. We find that existing methods struggle on MINav task, indicating substantial room for improvement in agents' multimodal grounding. To address this, we propose NaVLA^2, a vision-language-audio-action model that additionally integrates spatial audio and employs a CoThinkAct module to jointly generate high-level reasoning and consistent low-level actions. Experimental results demonstrate that NaVLA^2 significantly outperforms competitive baselines on MINav benchmark. We hope that our proposed MINav and NaVLA^2 will facilitate future research toward agents with stronger multimodal understanding and grounding capabilities for navigation.

PaperID: 3054

Authors:Chengxuan Li, Xingwan Wang

Affiliations: Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Science, China School of Advanced Manufacturing and Robotics, Peking University, University of Science and Technology of China

Title: DiTEA: Mixture-of-Experts for Vision-Language-Action Model in Robotic Manipulation

Abstract:
The current diffusionbased Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have faster inference speed and the ability to solve the action muti-modality problem in robot manipulation tasks compared to traditional autoregressive models after large-scale pre-training and post-training. However, the diffusion-based VLA models were found to have poor instruction-following ability, and after fine-tuning training on multiple tasks, them often suffer from "skill forgetting" due to conflicting model weights on each task. To address this problem, we propose DiTEA, a Diffusion Transformer-based Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) VLA model. Specifically, it fuses the MoE module into the action head of VLA to form Action MoE, and in addition, we design the Task-Instruction Gate, which uses language instructions to select specific experts for tasks they specialize in, in order to improve the VLA's instruction-following ability. We conducted comprehensive experiments and ablation study to evaluate the efficacy of our model under different designs. Experimental results from simulation and real-world show that our DiTEA has excellent improvement in multi-task compared to baseline and other VLAs.

PaperID: 3055

Authors:Xingyu Zhu, Zhiwen Tu, Yan Wu, Shan Luo, Hechang Chen, Yixing Gao

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Jilin University, China Engineering Research Center of Knowledge-Driven Human-Machine Intelligence, Institute for Infocomm Research, Department of Engineering, King’s College London, United Kingdom

Title: Effective Robotic Cloth Grasping Through Suppressing False Discoveries

Abstract:
Enabling robots to grasp disorganized cloth for efficient storage is valuable in robotassisted room organization. Diverse deformations of cloth and the stacking of multiple items limit grasping-pose estimation that relies on annotations. This necessitates segmenting each cloth item in an unsupervised manner before estimating the grasping position. However, existing segmentation methods primarily focus on improving metrics such as Intersection-over-Union and Pixel Accuracy, which cannot effectively measure the segmentation errors of the cloth area and thus lead to failure grasping position estimation. To address this challenge, we use False Discovery Rate (FDR) as a novel measure of segmentation errors and analyze its impact on grasping success. Our preliminary study reveals a negative correlation between segmentation FDR and grasping success rate, highlighting the need for more reliable segmentation in cluttered cloth scenarios. Therefore, we propose an unsupervised cloth segmentation network based on feature distance-weighted constraints, designed to reduce the false discovery rate in cloth area perception without requiring expensive pixel-level manual annotations. Additionally, to estimate the grasping position on the perceived cloth area, we introduce a strategy based on cloth surface wrinkle analysis, which operates without the need for annotations or training. By integrating the proposed segmentation network and grasping strategy, we develop a robotic system capable of sequentially grasping cluttered cloth from a table. Extensive real-world robotic experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, outperforming multiple baseline methods in segmentation FDR and grasping success rate.

PaperID: 3056

Authors:Guowei Zou, Weibing Li, Hejun Wu, Yukun Qian, Yuhang Wang, Haitao Wang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, China Guangdong Key Laboratory of Big Data Analysis and Processing

Title: D²PPO: Diffusion Policy Policy Optimization with Dispersive Loss

Abstract:
Diffusion policies excel at robotic manipulation by naturally modeling multimodal action distributions in highdimensional spaces. Nevertheless, diffusion policies suffer from diffusion representation collapse: semantically similar observations are mapped to indistinguishable features, ultimately impairing their ability to handle subtle but critical variations required for complex robotic manipulation. To address this problem, we propose D²PPO (Diffusion Policy Policy Optimization with Dispersive Loss). D²PPO introduces dispersive loss regularization that combats representation collapse by treating all hidden representations within each batch as negative pairs. D²PPO compels the network to learn discriminative representations of similar observations, thereby enabling the policy to identify subtle yet crucial differences necessary for precise manipulation. In evaluation, we find that early-layer regularization benefits simple tasks, while late-layer regularization sharply enhances performance on complex manipulation tasks. On RoboMimic benchmarks, D²PPO achieves an average improvement of 22.7% in pre-training and 26.1% after fine-tuning, setting new SOTA results. In comparison with SOTA, the results of real-world experiments on a Franka Emika Panda robot show the excitingly high success rate of our method. The superiority of our method is especially evident in complex tasks.

PaperID: 3057

Authors:Qihui Feng, Gerhard Lakemeyer

Affiliations: RWTH Aachen University

Title: Decidable Multi-agent Epistemic Planning: A Situation Calculus Approach

Abstract:
Multiagent epistemic planning (MEP) is the task of generating action sequences that achieve goals specified over both the physical world and agents’ mental states. It plays an important role in research domains such as game theory, computational economics, and cognitive science. While dynamic epistemic logic (DEL) provides an expressive framework for MEP, it requires complete, model-based specifications of the initial state and action effects, and suffers from undecidability due to the unbounded nesting of beliefs. In this work, we propose a modal variant of the situation calculus that captures much of the expressive power of the DEL approach. Inspired by the cognitive concept Theory of Mind (ToM), we introduce action theories with hierarchical structures, allowing agents to reason about other agents' action theories up to bounded depths. We develop a regression method that reduces reasoning about future states to reasoning about the initial state. By preserving bounded-order ToM throughout the regression process, our approach ensures the decidability of the planning problem. Finally, we propose an algorithm to find the optimal solution, namely, to find the shortest action sequence that achieves the goal.

PaperID: 3058

Authors:Xiaoda Yang, Shenzhou Gao, Can Wang, Jiahe Zhang, Menglan Tang, Jingyang Xue, Sheng Liu, Peijian Zhang, Yao Mu, Xiangyu Yue

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Qingdao University, Karlsruher Institut für Technologie, Shanghai Jiaotong University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title: SpatialLogic-Bench: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Task-Oriented Spatiotemporal Reasoning

Abstract:
VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) have made significant progress in static perception, but their ability to understand dynamic task-oriented reasoning remains unclear. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on static spatial relationships and lack systematic assessment of dynamic reasoning capabilities. To this end, we propose SpatialLogic-Bench, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs’ understanding of spatiotemporal logic and their ability to assess task progress. The benchmark assesses two critical capabilities: first, fine-grained visual discrimination to accurately perceive subtle physical changes between state frames; second, the logical capacity to connect these changes to task goals and judge whether they indicate progress. To mitigate temporal dependency biases, we introduce a dual-task paradigm, presenting image pairs in both chronological and reversed orders while keeping task descriptions consistent. We construct a multi-scale evaluation system by varying time intervals between frames: smaller intervals test the model's fine-grained perception, while larger intervals demand more sophisticated logical inference. Empirical evaluation reveals that most VLMs experience significant performance degradation on tasks presented in inverse chronological order, indicating an over-reliance on temporal cues rather than robust reasoning abilities. SpatialLogic-Bench clearly exposes critical limitations in current models and provides valuable guidance for improving dynamic spatial perception capabilities.

PaperID: 3059

Authors:Mohammed Abdullah, George Iosifidis, Salah Eddine Elayoubi, Tijani Chahed

Affiliations: Delft University of Technology, Centrale Supélec, Telecom SudParis

Title: Constrained Online Convex Optimization with Memory and Predictions

Abstract:
We study Constrained Online Convex Optimization with Memory (COCOM), where both the loss and the constraints depend on a finite window of past decisions made by the learner. This setting extends the previously studied unconstrained online optimization with memory framework and captures practical problems such as the control of constrained dynamical systems and scheduling with reconfiguration budgets. For this problem, we propose the first algorithms that achieve sublinear regret and sublinear cumulative constraint violation under time-varying constraints, both with and without predictions of future loss and constraint functions. Without predictions, we introduce an adaptive penalty approach that guarantees sublinear regret and constraint violation. When short-horizon and potentially unreliable predictions are available, we reinterpret the problem as online learning with delayed feedback and design an optimistic algorithm whose performance improves as prediction accuracy improves, while remaining robust when predictions are inaccurate. Our results bridge the gap between classical constrained online convex optimization and memory-dependent settings, and provide a versatile learning toolbox with diverse applications.

PaperID: 3060

Authors:Yuming Ai, Xunkai Li, Jiaqi Chao, Bowen Fan, Zhengyu Wu, Yinlin Zhu, Rong-Hua Li, Guoren Wang

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology, Shandong University, Sun Yat-Sen University

Title: PAGE: A Unified Approach for Federated Graph Unlearning

Abstract:
Federated graph learning (FGL) is a distributive framework for graph representation learning that prioritizes privacy preservation. The right to be forgotten embodies the ethical principle of prioritizing user autonomy over data usage. In the context of FGL, upholding this right requires the method to remove specific entities and their associated knowledge within local subgraphs (Meta Unlearning) and the complete erasure of the entire client (Client Unlearning). We are the first to systematically define the above two unlearn requests in federated graph unlearning. Several studies have attempted to address this challenge, but key limitations persist: incomplete unlearning support and residual knowledge permeation. To this end, we propose a Prototypeguided Adversarial Graph Eraser for universal federated graph unlearning (PAGE), the first unified federated graph unlearning framework that extend to comprehensive unlearning requests. For meta unlearning, we employ the prototype gradients guide initial local unlearn, while adversarial graphs eliminate residual knowledge across the influenced clients. For client unlearning, PAGE exclusively utilizes adversarial graph generation to purge a departed client's influence from the remaining participants. PAGE outperforms existing methods on 8 benchmark datasets. It improves prediction accuracy by 5.08% (client unlearn) and 1.50% (meta-unlearn), with up to 11.84% gain on large-scale graphs. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm its efficacy as a plug-in for other meta unlearn methods, boosting prediction performance up to 4.49% and unlearning performance up to 7.22%.

PaperID: 3061

Authors:Wei-Xuan Bao, Yong Rui, Min-Ling Zhang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, China Key Laboratory of Computer Network and Information Integration, Ministry of Education, Lenovo Research, Lenovo Group Ltd.

Title: Collaborative Dual Representations for Semi-Supervised Partial Label Learning

Abstract:
Semisupervised partial label learning (SSPLL) aims to improve the generalization performance of partial label (PL) classifiers by effectively leveraging unlabeled data. Nevertheless, the inherent ambiguity in supervision, where the ground-truth label of a PL example is hidden within a set of candidate labels, poses significant challenges. The presence of false positive labels potentially misleads model's judgment, resulting in pronounced confirmation bias. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach named CODUAL, which jointly learns a pair of dual representations for each instance: the predictive class distribution and the low-dimensional embedding. The dual representations interact and progress collaboratively during training. On one hand, in the embedding space the class prototypes are derived via solving a tailored empirical distance minimization problem and employed to smooth the pseudo-targets of unlabeled instances. On the other hand, the refined class distributions regularize the embedding space via encouraging instances with similar pseudo-targets to exhibit similar embeddings. Through an in-depth analysis, we provide-to the best of our knowledge-the first theoretical explanation of how collaborative dual representations facilitate more effective use of unlabeled data for disambiguation. Extensive experiments over benchmark datasets validate the superiority of our proposed approach.

PaperID: 3062

Authors:Hongye Cao, Tianpei Yang, Fan Feng, Hammadi Rafik Ouariachi, Yali Du, Meng Fang, Jing Huo, Yang Gao

Affiliations: Nanjing university, Nanjing University, City University of Hong Kong, King's College London, University of Liverpool

Title: Causality-Aware Efficient Exploration for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Exploration is critical for cooperative multi agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to improve sample efficiency. However, existing intrinsic motivation based exploration strategies in MARL overlook the causal relationships among agents, global states, and rewards, suffering from interference by irrelevant factors and resulting in sample inefficiency. To address this issue, we propose Causality aware Efficient Exploration (CEE), a novel framework that enhances sample efficiency by inferring causal relationships between agents, global states with respect to rewards, thereby enabling causality guided exploration. Specifically, CEE operates through two components. First, CEE identifies causal relationships between global states and rewards, filtering out causally irrelevant state features that do not have a high impact on rewards to keep decision critical state information. Second, CEE discovers causal relationships between agents' behaviors and rewards to quantify each agent's contribution to collective performance. To achieve this, we introduce a causal entropy objective that promotes exploration aligned with decision critical aspects of the underlying causal structure. We provide comprehensive validation through experiments on 21 challenging tasks spanning SMAC, SMAC v2, and Google Research Football (GRF) environments. Our results demonstrate that CEE achieves superior performance in terms of sample efficiency and asymptotic performance compared to existing MARL methods.

PaperID: 3063

Authors:Linmao Chen, Chaobo He, Junwei Cheng, Chunying Li, Quanlong Guan

Affiliations: South China Normal University, Guangdong Polytechnic Normal University, Jinan University

Title: Generating In-Distribution Counterfactual Explanation for Graph Neural Networks

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received increasing attention due to their ability to handle graphstructured data, yet their explainability remains a significant challenge. An effective solution is to provide the GNN models with counterfactual explanations, which aim to answer “How should the input instance be perturbed to change the model's prediction?". However, existing works mainly focus on generating explanations that can effectively alter model predictions, while neglecting whether the explanations remain aligned with the original data distribution, leading to the distribution shift problem. To address this problem, we propose a novel method called ICExplainer for generating explanations within the original distribution. Specifically, we introduce graph diffusion-based generative model into the counterfactual reasoning, treating it as an optimization objective for graph distribution learning. Taking insights from variational inference, we use it to estimate the true distribution of the input graphs to retain essential structural and semantic information. The inferred distribution is then utilized as prior knowledge to guide the reverse process, ensuring that generated explanations are both counterfactual and distributionally coherent. Extensive experiments conducted on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of ICExplainer over existing methods.

PaperID: 3064

Authors:Long Chen, Wei Miao, Xin Gao, Yunzhi Zhuge, Hongming Xu, Yaxin Li, Qi Xu

Affiliations: Dalian University of Technology

Title: Spatial-Frequency Spiking Neural Network for Underwater Object Detection

Abstract:
Underwater object detection presents significant challenges due to the unique visual degradations in underwater environments, such as low contrast, poor visibility, and blurry object boundaries. While ANNs have achieved impressive detection accuracy, their high computational cost and power consumption limit their deployment in resourceconstrained underwater platforms. In this work, we propose a Spatial-Frequency Spiking Neural Network (SFSNN) that combines the energy-efficient and event-driven nature of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) with the discriminative power of spatial-frequency analysis. SFSNN introduces a novel spatial-frequency spiking module that integrates spatial and frequency-domain representations, enhancing edge and texture features crucial for object detection in murky waters. Furthermore, we adapt the YOLOX architecture into a spike-based detector via ANN-to-SNN conversion using signed spiking neurons. Extensive experiments on the RUOD dataset demonstrate that SFSNN achieves superior performance over both SNN- and ANN-based detection models, offering a compelling solution for low-power underwater object detection.

PaperID: 3065

Authors:Xueyi Chen, Bangjun Wang, Jiaqing Fan, Li Zhang, Fanzhang Li

Affiliations: Soochow University

Title: F2SST: Frequency-to-Spatial Semantic Transfer for Few-Shot Image Classification

Abstract:
Fewshot image classification (FSIC) aims to recognize novel categories from only a few labeled examples, making it inherently challenging under limited supervision. Existing approaches have attempted to alleviate this issue by incorporating explicit semantics like class names or knowledge graphs to guide learning. However, such methods often encounter semantic ambiguity due to their dependence on either overly simplistic semantic priors or resource-intensive external knowledge sources, which limits their potential. In this paper, we explore the frequency domain as an implicit and task-adaptive source of semantic information. We propose F2SST, a Frequency-to-Spatial Semantic Transfer framework that enhances feature learning by leveraging spectral signals as hidden semantics. Specifically, F2SST applies Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to extract phase-invariant global frequency descriptors, followed by a lightweight Gated Spectral Attention (GSA) module that selectively emphasizes class-relevant frequency components. These enhanced spectral cues are then integrated into the spatial stream through a class-guided fusion mechanism, enabling more robust and semantically aligned representations. Extensive experiments on four standard benchmarks (miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, CIFAR-FS and FC100) demonstrate that F2SST consistently improves performance, validating the effectiveness of frequency-domain semantics in FSIC.

PaperID: 3066

Authors:Gaole Dai, Huatao Xu, Yifan Yang, Rui Tan, Mo Li

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Microsoft Research Asia

Title: Learning Systems Expansion with Efficient Heterogeneity-aware Knowledge Transfer

Abstract:
Modern AI services must continually adapt to newly joined domains, yet delivering highquality customized models is hampered by label sparsity, domain shifts, and tight budgets. We formulate this challenge as the learning system expansion problem and introduce HaT, an efficient heterogeneity-aware knowledge-transfer framework. HaT first selects a small set of high-quality source models with minimal overhead, and then fuses their imperfect predictions through a sample-wise attention mixer. Later, it adaptively distills the fused knowledge into target models via a knowledge dictionary. Extensive experiments on different tasks and modalities show that HaT outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by up to 16.5% accuracy, and saves 31.1% training time and up to 93.0% traffic.

PaperID: 3067

Authors:Ling Ding, Tianbai Lyu, Zhiliang Bi, Hao Wang, Shanshan Feng, Wei Yu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, School of Artificial Intelligence

Title: Communication-efficient Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Spatiotemporal Information Hub

Abstract:
Centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE) is a framework for MARL with wide applications. In the CTDE paradigm, agents leverage global state information during training to mitigate the nonstationarity of the MARL environment, but must rely solely on partial observations during execution. Recent work has highlighted the growing importance of inter-agent communication for more effective learning and coordination. However, most existing methods overlook the fact that real-world communication channels are often bandwidth-constrained and imperfectly reliable. Toward more communication-efficient and robust MARL, we extend the conventional CTDE framework with an information hub. The hub collects local observations from the agents to restore the global state, which is then delivered to the agents on demand. To this end, technical mechanisms are designed to enable effective global reconstruction with incomplete observations, as well as agent-specific attention to the reconstructed global information. Experiments on multiple cooperative MARL benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to popular MARL algorithms while substantially reducing communication overhead and exhibiting strong robustness under imperfect communication channels.

PaperID: 3068

Authors:Jitong Dou, Lingrui Luo, Bing Zhu, Hengliang Luo, Mingjun Zhong, Yurong Cheng

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology, University of Aberdeen

Title: DSCF: Dual-Source Counterfactual Fusion for High-Dimensional Combinatorial Interventions

Abstract:
Estimating counterfactual outcomes from observational data is critical for informed decisionmaking in domains such as personalized marketing, healthcare, and online platforms. In these contexts, decision processes frequently involve high-dimensional combinatorial interventions, including bundled channel allocation or product set recommendations. For such scenarios, both causal assessment of historical strategies and optimization of novel interventions necessitate models capable of extrapolating to intervention combinations that are underrepresented or entirely absent in observational data. Specifically, in digital marketing, companies often need to evaluate new combinations of channels or target emerging user segments that have not been previously exposed. This challenge is exacerbated by inherent biases in observational datasets, stemming from prior allocation policies and targeting mechanisms, which further aggravate coverage sparsity and compromise off-support counterfactual inference. In this work, we propose Dual-Source Counterfactual Fusion (DSCF), a scalable framework that enables accurate counterfactual prediction under high-dimensional combinatorial interventions, with improved robustness to confounding bias. DSCF jointly models observational data and proxy counterfactual samples through a dual-head mixture-of-experts architecture and domain-guided fusion. This design effectively integrates bias reduction and information diversity while enabling adaptive generalization to counterfactual inputs. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of DSCF across diverse scenarios.

PaperID: 3069

Authors:Hangyuan Du, Rong Wang, Lixin Cui, Gaoxia Jiang, Liang Bai, Wenjian Wang

Affiliations: Shanxi University, Central University of Finance and Economics, Shanxi university

Title: GCIB: Causal Intervention Guided Graph Information Bottleneck Framework

Abstract:
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have demonstrated impressive performance in a broad spectrum of fields, but always suffer from the generalization problem when confronted with outof-distribution (OOD) scenarios. Information bottleneck (IB) principle, which endeavors to learn the minimally sufficient representations for downstream tasks, has been shown to be a promising strategy in dealing with this problem. However, the IB-based methods do not inherently distinguish between causal and non-causal parts in the graph, leading to underperforming OOD generalization ability. In this paper, we develop the Graph Causal Information Bottleneck (GCIB) framework, a causal extension of the IB for graph data, which is capable of jointly compressing abundant information and capturing causal dependency from the input graph. Specifically, we endow graph IB with the ability of maintaining causal control by incorporating the underlying causal structure and introducing intervention operation. On this basis, we formulate the learning objective for GCIB and present its specific implementation. Graph representations learned by GCIB can effectively preserve causal information that fundamentally determines graph properties, resulting in outstanding OOD generalization ability. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of GCIB over state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 3070

Authors:Yuhang Duan, Lin Lin, Xiaoshuai Wu

Affiliations: Dalian University of Technology

Title: K-ProtoDiff: Key Prototypes-Guided Diffusion for Time Series Generation

Abstract:
Time series generation is essential for advancing datadriven modeling and decision-making across a wide range of domains. However, existing approaches primarily focus on global patterns, often failing to capture local key patterns such as abrupt changes or anomalies. These key patterns are crucial for interpretability and operational decision making, as they frequently represent intervention points with significant real-world impact. To bridge this gap, we propose Key Prototypes-Guided Diffusion (K-ProtoDiff) for time series generation , a new model that learns the global data distribution while preserving localized key patterns critical for temporal dynamics. In K-ProtoDiff, we first derive time series prototype representations through adaptive self-supervised learning. Then, a key prototype assignment module is used to extract prototype weights, forming key prototype-aware representations that serve as conditional guidance for generation. During sampling, to further enhance the fidelity of key patterns during the denoising process, we propose Reflection Sampling (R-Sampling), a step-wise refinement strategy that encourages the reverse trajectory to better align with key prototype constraints. Experiments on nine real-world datasets demonstrate that K-ProtoDiff significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in key pattern retention, achieving an average 77.6% improvement in key pattern preservation.

PaperID: 3071

Authors:Wei Feng, Danting Liu, Qianqian Wang, Mengping Jiang, Bin Liu

Affiliations: Northwest A&F University, Xi'an Jiaotong University, School of Telecommunications Engineering, Xidian University

Title: Federated Incomplete Multi-View Clustering with Tensorized Low-Rank Constraint

Abstract:
Federated MultiView Clustering has gained increasing attention for its ability to discover complementary clustering structures of distributed multi-view data while preserving data privacy. However, real-world clients often only have access to partial views, and the view incompleteness poses great challenges to federated multi-view feature fusion to exploit consistent and complementary information. Moreover, efficiency is highly expected in federated scenarios due to the limited resources of each client. To alleviate these issues, we propose Federated Incomplete Multi-View Clustering with Tensorized Low-Rank Constraint (FIMVC-TLRC), which incorporates anchors to improve efficiency and is able to address prevalent view incompleteness issue in federated scenarios. FIMVC-TLRC aligns the local anchor graphs and employs a tensorized low-rank constraint based on the tensor Schatten p-norm to enforce the consistency of the data representations learned by each client. Besides, a federated optimization framework is developed to jointly optimize the construction and alignment of anchor graphs, thus enabling collaborative and privacy-preserving training. Experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate its effectiveness.

PaperID: 3072

Authors:Luyang Gai, Shusen Yang, Xuebin Ren, Zihao Zhou

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University

Title: BIQ: Bisection Interval Quantization for Communication-efficient Federated Learning

Abstract:
Quantization is a pivotal technique for enhancing communication efficiency in Federated Learning (FL). Traditional quantization methods often set uniform intervals, may fail to adequately characterize nonuniform data distributions, thus leading to substantial estimation errors and degrated model performance. Non-uniform quantization can better solve the problem. However, when applied to FL, it would bring additional communication overheads for the alignment of parameter distributions among distributed models. To address this issue, we propose Bisection Interval Quantization (BIQ), a novel non-uniform quantization framework for FL with great communication efficiency. In particular, BIQ works by optimizing the interval selection through recursive bisection among distributed clients without extra parameter communication. For scenarios involving amounts of boundary inputs, we further design Weighted Bisection Interval Quantization (WBIQ), which incorporates maximum likelihood estimation to refine boundary value reconstruction to enhance the estimation quality of boundary inputs. Our theoretical analysis rigorously establishes, for the first time under biased quantization conditions, that both BIQ and WBIQ achieve tighter error bounds and enhanced stability. Extensive experiments validate that both BIQ and WBIQ significantly accelerate the convergence of FL model training when compared to the state-of-the-art quantizers under both convex and non-convex settings.

PaperID: 3073

Authors:Mingrong Gong, Chaoqi Chen, Luyao Tang, Yuxi Wang, Sergio Escalera

Affiliations: Shenzhen University, University of Hong Kong, Ocean University of China, University of Barcelona

Title: 4D Point Cloud Segmentation via Active Test-Time Adaptation

Abstract:
4D point cloud segmentation is crucial for autonomous driving with continuous LiDAR streams. While testtime adaptation (TTA) is the standard approach for handling dynamic environments, current methods suffer from catastrophic error accumulation due to over-reliance on pseudo-labels. Active learning could provide reliable annotations for critical samples, but combining it with TTA faces severe challenges: realtime processing requirements and expensive 3D labeling costs. In this paper, we propose ATTA-4DSeg, the first framework to achieve efficient active test-time adaptation for 4D point cloud segmentation under extreme budget constraints. Our key insight is a self-reinforcing loop: oracle annotations refine adaptation prototypes, which then guide the selection of subsequent high-value samples from regions with severe distribution shifts, maximizing each annotation’s impact. Specifically, we propose three key innovations: (1) dual-prototype comparison that precisely localizes distribution shift boundaries to narrow annotation scope, (2) Class-Inverse Budget Allocation (CIBA) ensuring balanced adaptation across all categories, coupled with hybrid uncertainty scoring combining voxel-level geometry and point-wise variance for optimal sample selection, and (3) a refinement strategy leveraging sparse oracle annotations to improve predictions on unlabeled points, maximizing annotation utility. Extensive experiments show ATTA-4DSeg improves mIoU by 18.87%, 19.92%, and 3.6% on three domain adaptation benchmarks using only 1% annotation budget. Our method operates 2.28× faster than state-of-the-art methods. Remarkably, our approach reaches 90% of fully-supervised performance using only 5% annotation budget.

PaperID: 3074

Authors:Taotao Guo, Honglin Yuan, Xujian Zhao, Yuan Sun, Dongliang Wang, Zhenwen Ren, Xingfeng Li

Affiliations: School of information and Control Engineering, Southwest University of Science and Technology, School of Computer Science and Technology, National Key Laboratory of Fundamental Algorithms and Models for Engineering Numerical Simulation, Sichuan University

Title: Neural Collapse Priors Driven Trust Semi-Supervised Multi-View Classification

Abstract:
In semi‑supervised multi‑view classification (SMVC), scarce labels and noisy unlabeled data impair feature aggregation and compromise prediction reliability, while existing methods lack principled guidance and interpretability. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel unified SMVC framework, Neural Collapse Priors Driven Trust SemiSupervised Multi-View Classification (NCPD-TSMVC), building upon neural collapse–derived prototype priors and evidential opinion fusion. Concretely, we rigorously prove under neural collapse theory that normalized classifier weights from the labeled‑data pre‑training stage coincide with class centroids in feature space, conferring maximal inter‑class separation and optimal within‑class compactness. These prototype priors permeate the entire learning pipeline, calibrating the representation learning of unlabeled samples to obtain highly discriminative embeddings. Simultaneously, our evidential learning module quantifies epistemic uncertainty and fuses view‑level opinions at the evidence level, yielding robust and transparent decision making. Extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that NCPD‑TSMVC surpasses state‑of‑the‑art SMVC approaches in performance, robustness and interpretability.

PaperID: 3075

Authors:Guanxiong He, Zheng Wang, Jie Wang, Liaoyuan Tang, Rong Wang, Feiping Nie

Affiliations: Northwest Polytechnical University Xi'an

Title: S2-Boost: Synergistic Semantic Boosting for Coarse-to-Fine Ensemble Learning

Abstract:
Neuroscientific evidence reveals that human visual recognition is not an instantaneous event but a hierarchical process, where the brain constructs a holistic perception by progressively integrating simple features like edges or texture into complex scenes. Ensemble learning successfully utilizes this principle, yet existing methods typically integrate models at the decision level, neglecting the rich, complementary information within the feature space itself and thus fundamentally limiting their potential. To address this, we introduce Synergistic Semantic Boosting (S2Boosting), a framework that employs a self-supervised hierarchical semantic learning module to decompose an image into complementary, semantically meaningful parts autonomously. These parts guide a boosting procedure where a sequence of specialized learners, each focusing on a specific semantic partition, collaboratively corrects the ensemble's errors. We further present encouraging results on real-world image datasets, highlighting the intrinsic interpretability, paving the way for more robust and transparent models.

PaperID: 3076

Authors:Jie Hou, Haowen Dou, Lujuan Dang, Liangjun Chen, Chenyang Ge

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University

Title: Gradient-Protected Value Decomposition for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
In recent years, deep multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) has demonstrated remarkable potential in solving complex cooperative tasks by enabling decentralized yet efficient coordination among agents. However, during decentralized training, agent policy updates induced by different joint action samples may conflict, leading to gradient interference that hinders convergence and the emergence of coordinated behavior. In this paper, we analyze and empirically validate the phenomenon of gradient interference. To address this, we then propose Gradient-Protected Value Decomposition (GPVD), a novel MARL framework that explicitly protects the gradient signals of optimal collaborative actions by suppressing the impact of interfering actions. GPVD employs a dynamic gradient protection mechanism that identifies optimal collaborative joint actions and reweights the loss to attenuate gradients from non-collaborative interfering actions. To effectively identify high-value collaborative actions, we apply SimHash-based state grouping to discover consistent collaboration patterns across similar states. Furthermore, a count-based intrinsic reward is incorporated to encourage exploration and improve the coverage of potentially optimal joint actions. Experiments on challenging multi-agent benchmarks demonstrate that GPVD achieves faster convergence, stronger coordination, and greater training stability compared to state-of-the-art value decomposition methods.

PaperID: 3077

Authors:Renhong Huang, Yuxuan Cao, Yi Li, Junwei Hu, Zihua Xiong, Shuai Fang, Sheng Guo, Bo Zheng, Yang Yang

Affiliations: Ant Group, Zhejiang University

Title: Trimming the Fat: Redundancy-Aware Acceleration Framework for DGNNs

Abstract:
Temporal graphs are essential for modeling complex realworld systems, such as social interactions, financial transactions, and recommendation systems, but the high computational cost and model complexity of dynamic graph neural networks (DGNNs) pose significant challenges for practical deployment. Although various pruning and sampling techniques have proven effective in accelerating static GNNs, they fall short in dynamic settings due to temporal dependencies in evolving graph structures. To address these challenges, we propose TrimDG, a general framework that accelerates DGNNs by eliminating both static and runtime redundancies. For static redundancy, we introduce a novel node influence metric, Temporal Personalized PageRank (TPP), to prune less informative nodes, and employ temporal binning to remove redundant events. For runtime redundancy during training, we develop an adaptive sampling strategy guided by graph information bottleneck and further reduce sampling frequency through temporal batch selector and sampling cache. Theoretical analysis supports our design, and experiments on real-world datasets show that TrimDG reduces runtime by an average of 83.49% across diverse DGNN backbones, while maintaining strong predictive performance, demonstrating both its efficiency and generalizability.

PaperID: 3078

Authors:Shuokang Huang, Julie McCann

Affiliations: Department of Computing, Imperial College London, London United Kingdom

Title: Feature Attribution for Human Sensing with Radio Signals

Abstract:
Human sensing with radio signals has emerged as a nonintrusive and occlusion-robust alternative to vision-based approaches, and WiFi signals further support device-free sensing. However, current approaches deeply rely on neural networks, whose black-box nature hinders model transparency and explainability, limiting the use of WiFi-based human sensing in critical fields. For model explainability, recent works have studied saliency methods which attribute model outputs to important features, but they mostly bias in favor of common modalities (e.g., images, time series). This paper proposes a Matryoshka-like saliency method, MatryMask, an initial exploration of feature attribution for human sensing with radio signals. Compared to existing methods that require empirical knowledge about the sparsity of important features, MatryMask regularizes multiple masks to highlight salient areas at different scales, adapting to the uncertain and varying sparsity of important features in radio signals. To effectively perturb radio signals, we devise a novel frequency-removal perturbation beyond existing spatial/time-domain perturbations. Experimentally, MatryMask outperforms state-of-the-art saliency methods and significantly improves the attribution performance by up to 38.1~70.6% for three tasks.

PaperID: 3079

Authors:Xuan Lai, Luying Zhong, Tianying Lu, Junjie Zhang, Zhiqin Huang, Zheyi Chen

Affiliations: Fuzhou University

Title: Generalizable Heterogeneity-aware Federated Feature and Basic-matrix Consistency Learning

Abstract:
As an emerging distributed learning paradigm, Federated Learning (FL) facilitates collaborative training among multiple clients without sharing raw data. However, the classic FL still faces significant challenges due to feature/model heterogeneity and catastrophic forgetting, which seriously hinder knowledge transfer and cause the forgetting of previous knowledge. To address these important challenges, we propose FBCL, a novel generalizable heterogeneityaware Federated features and Basic-matrix Consistency Learning to balance intra-domain discriminability and inter-domain generalization. For feature/model heterogeneity, we align the similarity of feature distribution and construct the high-dimensional basic matrix with irrelevant unlabeled data, thereby overcoming communication barriers and learning generalizable representations while maintaining strict privacy preservation. For catastrophic forgetting during local updating, we introduce constraints in high-dimensional features to retain inter-domain knowledge and then extract accurate knowledge by distilling old models to preserve worthy historical information. Using real-world unlabeled public datasets, extensive experiments validate the superiority of the proposed FBCL, which outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on different scenarios of image classification.

PaperID: 3080

Authors:Dong Li, Zhengzhang Chen, Xujiang Zhao, Linlin Yu, Zhong Chen, Yi He, Haifeng Chen, Chen Zhao

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, Baylor University, NEC Labs America, School of Computer and Cyber Sciences, Augusta University, School of Computing, Southern Illinois University, Department of Data Science, The College of William and Mary

Title: MARLIN: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Incremental DAG Discovery

Abstract:
Uncovering causal structures from observational data is crucial for understanding complex systems and making informed decisions. While reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in identifying these structures in the form of a directed acyclic graph (DAG), existing methods often lack efficiency, making them unsuitable for online applications. In this paper, we propose MARLIN, an efficient multiagent RL-based approach for incremental DAG learning. MARLIN uses a DAG generation policy that maps a continuous real-valued space to the DAG space as an intra-batch strategy, then incorporates two RL agents—state-specific and state-invariant—to uncover causal relationships and integrates these agents into an incremental learning framework. Furthermore, the framework leverages a factored action space to enhance parallelization efficiency. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that MARLIN outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness.

PaperID: 3081

Authors:Ming Li, Ruiting Zhao, Zihao Yan, Lu Bai, Lixin Cui, Feilong Cao

Affiliations: Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Intelligent Education Technology and Application, Zhejiang Normal University, School of Computer Science and Technology, School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing Normal University, Central University of Finance and Economics, School of Mathematical Sciences

Title: HyperAim: Hypergraph Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Multi-frequency Filters

Abstract:
Unsupervised hypergraph representation learning has recently gained traction for its ability to model complex highorder interactions without requiring labeled data. However, existing contrastive learning methods typically overlook the frequency diversity inherent in hypergraph signals. To address this issue, we propose HyperAim, a contrastive learning framework that integrates adaptive multi-frequency filtering through both decoupled and coupled designs. Specifically, HyperAim employs two decoupled channels with polynomial low-pass and high-pass filters to separately capture distinct frequency components, and a third channel based on framelet decomposition that adaptively fuses multi-frequency signals in a coupled manner. A frequency-aware contrastive learning strategy is introduced to align representations across views using a combination of InfoNCE loss and pseudo-label-guided supervision. Extensive experiments across 12 benchmark datasets, covering both homophilic and heterophilic hypergraphs, demonstrate the consistent superiority of HyperAim over 17 baselines. Ablation studies further confirm the benefits of explicitly modeling and aligning frequency-specific representations.

PaperID: 3082

Authors:Qibin Li, Shengyuan Bai, Nai Zhou, Nianmin Yao

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology, Quan Cheng Laboratory

Title: Counterfactual-based Cognitive Alignment In-Context Learning for Relation Extraction

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable InContext learning (ICL) capabilities for relation extraction (RE). While ICL has shown promise in RE tasks, current approaches face challenges in example selection and utilization. These challenges stem from the misalignment between example selection methods and LLMs' inherent cognitive processing mechanisms, particularly in pattern recognition and relational reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose Counterfactual Cognitive Alignment (CCA), a novel framework that systematically enhances ICL performance in RE by aligning example selection with cognitive principles underlying human relational reasoning. The framework incorporates a cognitive-inspired counterfactual generation mechanism that creates semantically diverse yet relationally coherent examples, mirroring human "what-if" reasoning processes. Additionally, it employs a cognitive alignment approach that integrates structural identification features with semantic understanding to better align with LLMs cognitive processing patterns. Extensive experiments across multiple RE benchmarks reveal the effectiveness of our cognitive alignment approach through the synergistic integration of counterfactual reasoning and cognitively-guided selection.

PaperID: 3083

Authors:Shuyu Li, Dooho Choi, Yunsick Sung

Affiliations: Dongguk University

Title: MIDILM: A DualPath Model for Controllable Text-to-MIDI Generation

Abstract:
Textto-MIDI generation offers editable and hierarchical control over symbolic music generation. Previous approaches either convert text into a limited set of musical attributes and generate music based on these attributes, which limits semantic controllability, or use end-to-end models that map text directly to music without deeply aligning the features of both modalities, often resulting in a lack of structural coherence and mismatches in key, meter, and tempo. We propose MIDILM, which addresses these limitations by employing text conditioning with a dual-path decoder that processes textual and musical information through separate feedforward paths following a shared masked self-attention mechanism. On the MidiCaps benchmark, MIDILM outperformed the strongest baseline, with relative improvements ranging from 6.07% on CLAP to 144.77% on TB across semantic alignment and structural metrics. These gains confirm its ability to enhance both semantic controllability and structural coherence. Collectively, we expect that MIDILM will serve as a useful reference framework for future investigations into controllable and structurally faithful cross-modal music generation.

PaperID: 3084

Authors:Songlin Li, Wei Xiao, Hao Wu, Xiaodan Zhang, Daolong An, Shuai Lü

Affiliations: Jilin University

Title: State Proficiency-Based Adaptive Fine-Tuning for Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
In offlineto-online (O2O) reinforcement learning, achieving efficient performance improvement while maintaining training stability remains a critical challenge for effective fine-tuning. Existing O2O methods usually focus on the balance between policy improvement and policy constraint during online fine-tuning. However, they often overlook sample differences, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this challenge, we identify that the effectiveness of policy learning exhibits significant variation across states. Therefore, we propose the notion of state proficiency to capture the degree of effective learning in a given state. We propose State Proficiency-Based Adaptive Fine-Tuning (SPA), a straightforward yet effective method that establishes proficiency-based sample priorities in policy optimization to facilitate effective fine-tuning. Specifically, SPA focuses on low proficiency samples during policy improvement to enhance sample efficiency, while emphasizing high proficiency samples during policy constraint to ensure stable training. Extensive empirical results demonstrate that SPA achieves significant improvements over existing methods, attaining state-of-the-art performance on the D4RL benchmark.

PaperID: 3085

Authors:Wenqian Li, Pengfei Fang, Hui Xue

Affiliations: Southeast University

Title: HAP: Harmonized Amplitude Perturbation for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning

Abstract:
CrossDomain Few-Shot Learning (CD-FSL) remains a significant challenge due to substantial distribution shifts between source and target domains. While prior approaches primarily focus on spatial alignment, they often overlook discrepancies in the frequency domain. In this paper, we reveal frequency band discretization as a key phenomenon, characterized by intra-domain low-frequency dominance, inter-domain amplitude divergence, and limited high-frequency variation. This spectral disharmony biases models toward low-frequency components, leading to spectral collapse. We quantify spectral collapse via the effective rank, a principled measure of spectral diversity. To mitigate spectral collapse, we propose Harmonized Amplitude Perturbation (HAP), a frequency-domain augmentation strategy that perturbs the amplitude spectrum via frequency-aware gains sampled from Harmonized Distributions, while fixing the phase spectrum to maintain semantic integrity. Extensive experiments on both Cross-Domain Few-Shot Image Classification and Object Detection benchmarks demonstrate that HAP effectively increases spectral diversity and consistently improves generalization, outperforming state-of-the-art methods without introducing extra model complexity.

PaperID: 3086

Authors:Yichen Li, Hang Su, Huifa Li, Haolin Yang, Xinlin Zhuang, Haochen Xue, Haozhao Wang, Imran Razzak

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

Title: FedCD: Towards Consolidated Distillation for Heterogeneous Federated Learning

Abstract:
Knowledge Distillation (KD) serves as an effective approach to addressing heterogeneity issues in Federated Learning (FL), leveraging additional datasets to align local and global models better. There are two primary distillation paradigms: featurebased distillation, which utilizes intermediate-layer features of the network, and logit-based distillation, which employs the final layer's logit outputs. However, existing studies often select distillation methods based on intuitive and empirical evidence when facing different heterogeneous settings, neglecting the intrinsic relationship between distillation paradigms and heterogeneity. This oversight may result in suboptimal federated knowledge distillation performance under heterogeneous conditions. In this paper, we propose the Consolidated Distillation for Heterogeneous Federated Learning - FedCD that balances knowledge representations from both feature-based and logit-based distillation to enhance performance. Specifically, to address the misalignment between knowledge conveyed by features and logits, we aggregate features from different layers via cross-layer attention to preserve semantic knowledge, followed by distribution modeling using Gaussian Mixture Models. This process strengthens knowledge distillation by constraining the transformation of different network layers' features under a consolidated distribution, thereby mitigating impacts from both data and model heterogeneity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedCD outperforms state-of-the-art methods by over 10.72% and validate the effectiveness of our approach.

PaperID: 3087

Authors:Yu-sheng Li, Xincen Duan, Beili Wang, Wei Guo, Han-jia Ye

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence Nanjing University, Zhongshan Hospital Fudan University, Zhongshan Hospital Fudan Unversity

Title: DISC: Dynamic Feature Selection for Cost-Sensitive Medical Diagnosis

Abstract:
Accurate medical diagnosis often relies on both textual selfreported symptoms and structured medical examination results of patients. However, these examinations vary significantly in cost—measured in time, money, or patient discomfort---creating a challenging trade-off between diagnostic accuracy and resource efficiency. To address this issue, we propose a dynamic diagnostic framework that incrementally selects medical examinations based on individual characteristics of each patient. Starting with textual self-reported symptoms and basic demographic, the system determines follow-up examinations step-by-step, improving accuracy while minimizing additional costs. Specifically, we introduce Dynamic feature selection with Instance-Specific Cost sensitivity (DISC). DISC treats each examination as a feature and learns to acquire them sequentially to optimize predictive performance under personalized cost constraints. To support richer clinical understanding, we further develop a multimodal framework that integrates unstructured self-reported symptom text with structured medical examination data. We conduct experiments on 680,000 patients with 43 million medical examination records, demonstrating that DISC high diagnostic accuracy even when accounting for examination costs. Our work provides substantial momentum for the advancement of AI in healthcare, offering both methodological and practical foundations that can significantly accelerate the deployment of intelligent, cost-aware diagnostic systems in real-world clinical settings.

PaperID: 3088

Authors:Zhuomin Liang, Liang Bai, Xian Yang

Affiliations: Shanxi University, Shanxi university, University of Manchester

Title: Attribute-guided Dynamic Prompt Learning for Graph Neural Networks

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success in analyzing graphstructured data, with their performance dependent on the graph structure. However, models trained on high-quality graph structures often suffer a significant performance drop when evaluated on perturbed graphs. Existing methods tackle this problem by improving the robustness of GNNs, but they often overlook representation deviation caused by structural changes. To address this limitation, we propose an attribute-guided dynamic prompt learning model that generates prompt vectors to approximate the intrinsic information of nodes. With these prompt vectors, the trained GNNs are expected to maintain their performance under perturbed graph structures. Unlike previous prompt-based methods that learn unified prompt vectors for all nodes, we obtain node-level prompts by encoding node attributes that provide unique information. Given the diversity of perturbed graph structures during inference, we introduce a structure-aware adaptation mechanism that adjusts the prompt vectors based on the input graph. Furthermore, we apply gradient-based attacks to generate perturbed graphs, encouraging the model to generalize to unseen structures. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our model.

PaperID: 3089

Authors:Yongkai Liao, Xinxing Chen, Zhongzheng Fu, Haoyuan Wang, Jian Huang

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: Direction Sensitivity–Based Knowledge Distillation: Optimization-Aware Low-Rank Knowledge Transfer

Abstract:
Knowledge distillation (KD) aims to enhance the performance of lightweight student networks through the guidance of teacher models. However, the existing methods have deficiencies in two key aspects: First, these methods rely heavily on static representation alignment, failing to account for optimization sensitivity in different directions within the distillation subspace; second, they lack a finegrained mechanism to align critical directional features. To address these issues, we propose Direction Sensitivity–based Knowledge Distillation method (DSKD), which can quantitatively measure the sensitivity of each direction to the loss function at different training stages and dynamically select the optimization direction accordingly. Meanwhile, we designed a directional sensitivities weighted distillation loss. By aligning the parameter matrices of the teacher and student models in the key directions, we can more effectively transfer knowledge and improve the distillation effect. We combined DSKD with multiple advanced distillation strategies and conducted an empirical evaluation in the GLUE benchmark and CIFAR-100. The results showed that this method could significantly improve the performance of existing distillation techniques.

PaperID: 3090

Authors:Jingxin Liu, Wenxuan Tu, Haotian Wang, Renda Han, Haoyi Li, Junlong Wu, Xiangyan Tang

Affiliations: School of Cyberspace Security, Hainan University, School of Computer Science and Technology

Title: Causally-Aware Attribute Completion for Incomplete Federated Graph Clustering

Abstract:
Nodelevel federated graph clustering allows multiple unlabeled subgraph holders to collaboratively train on node-level tasks without sharing private information. Existing methods usually assume that the node attributes are complete and have achieved promising progress. However, in the Federated Graph Learning (FGL) scenarios, this assumption is overly strict due to failures in data collection devices. Consequently, most existing FGL frameworks struggle to extract useful features from attribute-incomplete graphs for clustering, yet the issue remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose a causally-aware attribute completion for Incomplete Federated Graph Clustering (IFedGC), which constructs a reliable global causal structure that incorporates clustering-friendly information to guide attribute completion for each subgraph. Specifically, in the attribute completion step, we first construct the causal structure to extract the causal relationships between initialized features, and then upload them to the server. Subsequently, we integrate multiple uploaded causal structures into a global causal one to achieve cross-client attribute completion. Moreover, to support reliable clustering, we first collect the high-confidence cluster centroids from each subgraph using a Graph Neural Network (GNN) model and subsequently aggregate these centroids on the server. The above two steps are seamlessly integrated into a unified FGL framework to obtain a clustering-oriented causal structure, which is sent back to the client to promote high-quality attribute completion for better clustering. Extensive results on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of IFedGC against its competitors.

PaperID: 3091

Authors:Ruixuan Miao, Xu Lu, Cong Tian, Bin Yu, Zhenhua Duan

Affiliations: Xidian University

Title: T4NMTD: Transition-Centric Reinforcement Learning for Non-Markovian Task Decomposition

Abstract:
NonMarkovian Tasks (NMTs) are distinguished by their dependence on long-term memory and state-dependent dynamics, setting them apart from the traditional Markovian models typically employed in Reinforcement Learning (RL). NMTs not only suffer from reward sparseness but also rely on historical information, making their resolution considerably more challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel RL framework T4NMTD (Transition-centric framework for NMT Decomposition), designed specifically for learning NMTs which are specified by temporal logic. The core of T4NMTD is a task decomposition mechanism along with a parallel training approach for NMTs. An NMT is first decomposed as basic units based on the transitions of the automata which are derived from temporal logic formulae. The units are then modularized into sub-tasks according to their semantic similarity under logical interpretation. The training strategy of T4NMTD adopts a dual-level structure: the high-level learns to shape the boundaries and coordinate arrangement of the sub-tasks from a global perspective, while the low-level learns those sub-tasks in parallel. In addition, we invent a dynamic policy intervention scheme to mitigate the policy myopic issue during parallel training. A comprehensive evaluation is conducted on benchmark problems with respect to various metrics. The experimental results demonstrate that T4NMTD effectively addresses NMTs, achieving significant performance improvements compared with related studies.

PaperID: 3092

Authors:Sebastian Ordyniak, Mateusz Rychlicki, Stefan Szeider

Affiliations: University of Leeds, TU Wien

Title: Computing Probabilistic Explanations for ML Models: Fixed-Parameter Algorithms

Abstract:
Machine learning models now drive many critical decisions, making explanations of their reasoning essential. Recent work analyzes the complexity of exact explanations in transparent models, but these explanations are often too large for practical use. This has motivated research into probabilistic alternatives. We study probabilistic extensions that allow controlled uncertainty while maintaining rigorous foundations. We analyze three basic model types: decision trees, decision lists, and decision sets. We introduce algorithms for computing both local and global probabilistic explanations for these models. Our main result shows that computing minimumsize probabilistic explanations is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by structural properties---specifically, the number of terms for decision lists and decision sets and the minimum of the number of positive and the number of negative leaves.

PaperID: 3093

Authors:Quyang Pan, Sheng Sun, Tingting Wi, Zhiyuan Wu, Yuwei Wang, Min Liu, Bo Gao, Jingyuan Wang

Affiliations: Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing China, China Mobile Research Institute, School of Computer and Information Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, MOE Engineering Research Center of Advanced Computer Application Technology, Beihang University

Title: Re-architecting Personalized Federated Learning for Demanding Edge Environments

Abstract:
Federated Edge Learning (FEL) has emerged as a promising approach for enabling edge devices to collaboratively train machine learning models while preserving data privacy. Despite its advantages, practical FEL deployment faces significant challenges related to device constraints and deviceserver interactions, necessitating heterogeneous, user-adaptive model training with limited and uncertain communication. While knowledge cache-driven federated learning offers a promising FEL solution for demanding edge environments, its logits-based interaction design provides poor richness of exchanged information for on-device model optimization. To tackle this issue, we introduce DistilCacheFL, a novel personalized FEL architecture that enhances the exchange of optimization insights while delivering state-of-the-art performance with efficient communication. DistilCacheFL incorporates the benefits of both dataset distillation and knowledge cache-driven federated learning by storing and organizing distilled data as knowledge in the server-side knowledge cache, allowing devices to periodically download and utilize personalized knowledge for local model optimization. Moreover, a device-centric cache sampling strategy is introduced to tailor transferred knowledge for individual devices within controlled communication bandwidth. Extensive experiments on five datasets covering image recognition, audio understanding, and mobile sensor data mining tasks demonstrate that (1) DistilCacheFL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods regardless of model structures, data distributions, and modalities. (2) DistilCacheFL can train splendid personalized on-device models with at least 28.6 improvement in communication efficiency.

PaperID: 3094

Authors:Zhongdi Qu, Yingheng Wang, Utku Umur Acikalin, Aaron M. Ferber, Goncalo J. Gouveia, Brandon Bills, Guohui Li, Joshua Kline, Sunandini Yedla, Xiao Wang, Frank C. Schroeder, Carla P. Gomes

Affiliations: Cornell University, Thermo Fisher Scientific

Title: Unsupervised Combinatorial Probabilistic Reasoning: Probabilistic Coin Change Problem

Abstract:
We introduce the Probabilistic Coin Change Problem (PCCP), a novel variant of the classical Combination Coin Change Problem (CCCP), motivated by a realworld scientific inverse task. The goal of CCCP is to enumerate all unordered combinations of coin denominations that sum to a given target. In PCCP, each coin type’s value follows a discrete probability distribution, and the aggregate value of a combination of coins is thus stochastic. Given a set of such coin types and noisy observations of total sums, the task is to infer the most likely latent coin combination. To address the combinatorial and probabilistic complexity of PCCP, we propose DeepProReasoner (Deep Combinatorial Probabilistic Reasoning with Embedded Representations), an unsupervised, end-to-end, deep-learning framework that integrates combinatorial reasoning, latent-space modeling, and differentiable probabilistic reasoning. The model is trained using a reconstruction loss between the observed empirical distribution and a decoded probability mass function (PMF), enabling efficient gradient-based search over a continuous relaxation of the combinatorial space. We evaluate DeepProReasoner on two instances of PCCP: (1) a synthetic Candy Mix problem for ablation studies, and (2) a real-world task of molecular formula inference from ultrahigh resolution mass spectrometry (MS) data. Besides the two given instances, PCCP captures a wide range of inverse settings in biology, chemistry, environmental sciences, and medicine, where latent combinatorial structures give rise to noisy aggregate observations through stochastic processes. Our results show that DeepProReasoner achieves high accuracy and robustness, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 3095

Authors:Mehrab Mustafy Rahman, Jayanth Mohan, Tiberiu Sosea, Cornelia Caragea

Affiliations: University of Illinois Chicago

Title: On the Calibration of Image Semi-Supervised Learning Models

Abstract:
Semisupervised learning (SSL) has demonstrated high performance in image classification tasks by effectively utilizing both labeled and unlabeled data. However, existing SSL methods often suffer from poor calibration, with models yielding overconfident predictions that misrepresent actual prediction likelihoods. Recently, neural networks trained with mixup that linearly interpolates random examples from the training set have shown better calibration in supervised settings. However, calibration of neural models remains under-explored in SSL settings. Although effective in supervised model calibration, random mixup of pseudolabels in SSL presents challenges due to the overconfidence and unreliability of pseudolabels. In this work, we introduce CalibrateMix, a targeted mixup-based approach that aims to improve the calibration of SSL models while maintaining or even improving their classification accuracy. Our method leverages training dynamics of labeled and unlabeled samples to identify ''easy-to-learn'' and ''hard-to-learn'' samples, which in turn are utilized in a targeted mixup of easy and hard samples. Experimental results across several benchmark datasets show that our method achieves lower expected calibration error (ECE) and superior accuracy compared to existing SSL approaches.

PaperID: 3096

Authors:Xinyi Sheng, Wei Bao, Hequn Wang, Yuqin Liu, Sen Fu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, The University of Sydney

Title: Retaliatory Attacks Against Federated Unlearning via Data Leakage

Abstract:
Federated unlearning (FU) allows a participating client in a federated learning (FL) system to remove its contribution from the trained global model, thereby enforcing the client’s ``right to be forgotten'' (RTBF). However, from the perspective of a client that does not request unlearning, the activation of the FU process may disrupt ongoing FL training and introduce additional computational and time overhead. In such cases, a client opposed to unlearning may be incentivized to retaliate against the unlearning client(s). In this work, we take the first step toward demonstrating the feasibility of such retaliatory behavior by exploiting the information leakage introduced during the FU process. Specifically, we propose a novel unlearninginduced membership inference attack (MIA) model, followed by a coarse-to-fine data generation method that enables an adversarial client to locally reconstruct the unlearned data. Building on this reconstruction, we introduce two targeted retaliatory attacks: (1) Anti-Unlearning Attack (AUA), which hinders the global model from successfully forgetting the data intended for removal, and (2) Discrimination-Unlearning Attack (DUA), which specifically degrades the global model’s performance on the unlearned data. Extensive experiments across a variety of FU methods and settings validate the effectiveness of the proposed retaliatory attack framework.

PaperID: 3097

Authors:Rui Tang, Biao Luo, Yongzheng Cui

Affiliations: Central South University

Title: Autonomous Partner Selection for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
In cooperative MultiAgent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), the subgroup-wise learning is employed to assign sub-tasks to agents towards the enhancement of team collaboration. However, the present work is dependent on manually defined allocation criteria, which hinders its capacity to adapt to environmental changes promptly, and also relaxes communication restrictions, thereby constraining the application of algorithms in a range of fields. In order to address these issues, the Autonomous Partner Selection (APS) framework is proposed, which offers an implicit grouping mechanism in an autonomous way. Each agent is capable of autonomously selecting cooperative partners and integrating their own observations with those of partners to harmonise the cooperative behaviour during the training stage. With a view to strictly restricting communication, the intention encoder is trained through information distillation, which enables agents to selectively take more cooperative actions based solely on local observations. Meanwhile, in order to circumvent potential conflicts engendered by homogenization behaviour, we employ a contrastive learning strategy to the cooperative intention generated by agents, thereby ensuring that the behavioural tendencies exhibited by different individuals remain as diverse as possible. Finally, extensive comparative experiments on the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge and Google Research Football are conducted. The results demonstrate that APS exhibits superior performance in comparison to the state-of-the-art algorithms across a range of tasks, and agents can adapt their grouping strategies in accordance with the environment to facilitate enhanced cooperation.

PaperID: 3098

Authors:Xijia Tang, Yuhua Qian, Chao Xu, Chenping Hou

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology, Shanxi University

Title: Neighbor-aware Label Refinement: Enhancing Unreliable Instance-Dependent Partial Labels

Abstract:
Partial Label Learning (PLL) aims to train multiclass classifiers from examples where each instance is associated with a set of candidate labels, among which the ground-truth label is assumed to be included. While most existing studies assume that partial labels are both instance-independent and reliable, such assumptions often break down in real-world scenarios, where candidate sets may depend on instance-specific features and even exclude the ground-truth label. In this work, we investigate a more realistic setting termed Unreliable Instance-Dependent Partial Label Learning (UIDPLL). To address the challenges in UIDPLL, we propose a novel framework named Neighborhood-guided Label Augmentation and Pruning (NLAP). NLAP exploits the structural consistency among neighboring instances to progressively refine candidate label sets and integrates classifier feedback to disambiguate labels during training. This progressive mechanism improves classification performance by tackling ambiguity caused by noise and instance dependency in partial labels. Furthermore, we provide theoretical guarantees for the proposed NLAP framework, demonstrating that label ambiguity can be effectively reduced through appropriate refinement and pruning procedures. Extensive experiments on both benchmark and real-world datasets demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed method.

PaperID: 3099

Authors:Yijun Tian, Chuxu Zhang, Ziyi Kou, Zheyuan Liu, Xiangliang Zhang, Nitesh V Chawla

Affiliations: University of Notre Dame, University of Connecticut

Title: Adaptive and Context-rich Generative Self-supervised Learning on Graphs

Abstract:
Generative selfsupervised learning on graphs has emerged as a popular learning paradigm and demonstrated its efficacy in handling non-Euclidean data. However, several remaining issues limit the capability of existing methods: 1) the disregard of uneven node significance in masking, 2) the underutilization of holistic graph information, 3) the ignorance of semantic knowledge in the representation space due to the exclusive use of reconstruction loss in the output space, and 4) the unstable reconstructions caused by the large volume of masked contents. In light of this, we propose ACE-GSL, an adaptive and context-rich graph self-supervised learning framework to address these issues from the perspectives of adaptivity, integrity, complementarity, and consistency. Specifically, we first develop an adaptive feature mask generator to account for the unique significance of nodes and sample informative masks (adaptivity). We then design a ranking-based structure reconstruction objective joint with feature reconstruction to capture holistic graph information and emphasize the topological proximity between neighbors (integrity). After that, we present a bootstrapping-based similarity module to encode the high-level semantic knowledge in the representation space, complementary to the low-level reconstruction in the output space (complementarity). Finally, we build a consistency assurance module to provide reconstruction objectives with extra stabilized consistency targets (consistency). Extensive experiments demonstrate that ACE-GSL achieves state-of-the-art performance over 28 methods on 20 datasets across 3 tasks.

PaperID: 3100

Authors:Ellen Visscher, Michael Forbes, Christopher Yau

Affiliations: University of Oxford, University of Queensland

Title: Hybrid Restricted Master Problem for Boolean Matrix Factorisation

Abstract:
We present bfact, a Python package for performing accurate lowrank Boolean matrix factorisation (BMF). bfact uses a hybrid combinatorial optimisation approach based on a priori candidate factors generated from clustering algorithms. It selects the best disjoint factors before performing either a second combinatorial or heuristic algorithm to recover the BMF. We show that bfact does particularly well at estimating the true rank of matrices in simulated settings. In real benchmarks, using a collation of single-cell RNA-sequencing datasets from the Human Lung Cell Atlas, we show that bfact achieves strong signal recovery, with a much lower rank.

PaperID: 3101

Authors:Congyu Wang, Mingjing Du, Xiang Jiang

Affiliations: Jiangsu Normal University

Title: Time-Frequency Augmented Multi-level Contrastive Clustering for Time Series

Abstract:
Current unsupervised time series clustering methods often struggle to fully exploit the inherent characteristics of time series data and commonly adopt a twostage training strategy that separates feature learning from the clustering process. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel deep clustering framework, Time-Frequency augmented Multi-level Contrastive Clustering (TFMCC). TFMCC employs a multi-scale time-frequency augmentation strategy, where each training iteration stochastically selects time and frequency scales to generate diverse augmented views, enhancing the model’s ability to learn robust and generalizable representations. In addition, a multi-level contrastive learning mechanism is introduced to jointly capture temporal dependencies, inter-sample similarities, and cluster structures. By jointly optimizing these components, TFMCC enables the learning of temporally-aware and clustering-friendly representations. Experimental results on 40 benchmark datasets demonstrate that TFMCC outperforms six existing methods in clustering accuracy.

PaperID: 3102

Authors:Le Wang, Jianyong Chen, Songbai Liu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University

Title: FeTS: A Feature-Aware Framework for Time Series Forecasting

Abstract:
Time series forecasting faces a fundamental challenge: the uneven distribution of predictive importance in time series data, where some specific time points and feature combinations carry disproportionately predictive power. As a result, uniform processing methods that treat all data alike inevitably fall short of optimal performance. To address this problem, we propose FeTS, a featureaware framework that comprehensively learns temporal features through two key components: (i) Adaptive Feature Extraction (AdaFE), which dynamically discovers the most important features within each temporal patch and extracts them on the fly, yielding sharper and more focused local representations; and (ii) Dual-Scale Feed-Forward Network (DSFFN), which strategically integrates fine-grained local features with global long-term dependencies to achieve richer dual-scale representation learning. Extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that FeTS achieves state-of-the-art performance in time series forecasting tasks, offering a novel solution to the challenge of uneven predictive importance in forecasting.

PaperID: 3103

Authors:Minglong Wang, Weiwei Li, Yunan Lu, Xiuyi Jia

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing University of Science and Technology

Title: Learning Label Distribution with Dirichlet Process Mixture Model

Abstract:
Label Distribution Learning (LDL) is an effective machine learning paradigm for addressing label ambiguity, where each sample is annotated with a distribution that conveys rich semantic information. However, during the actual annotation process of label distributions, annotators often exhibit divergent labeling preferences for the same sample. Most existing LDL methods overlook this heterogeneity, assuming that the observed label distribution originates from a single labeling pattern. Such an assumption limits their capacity to manage interannotator disagreement and constrains the generalization of the resulting models. To address this issue, we propose, for the first time, a Dirichlet process mixture model (DPMM)-based framework for LDL. This framework leverages nonparametric Bayesian methods to adaptively uncover diverse latent labeling patterns from the data and to accurately model annotator heterogeneity. Specifically, the ground-truth label distribution of each sample is modeled as a weighted mixture of multiple latent components, where a feature-conditioned gating mechanism adaptively controls the contribution of each component. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model consistently achieves competitive performance on several widely-used benchmark datasets.

PaperID: 3104

Authors:Xiaowei Wang, Jie Yu, Yulong Wang

Affiliations: Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Technology for Agriculture, Ministry of Education, China College of Informatics, Huazhong Agricultural University, China Key Laboratory of Smart Farming Technology for Agricultural Animals, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs

Title: Robust High-Order Tensor Compressive Sensing Based on M-Estimators

Abstract:
Tensor Compressive Sensing (TCS) has gained significant attention recently due to its strong ability to preserve the multidimensional structure of data. However, existing TCS methods face three critical challenges: 1) Biased approximation of tensor rank imposed by the convex surrogate Tensor Nuclear Norm (TNN) may interfere with the original lowrank structure of tensor data. 2) Vulnerability to non-Gaussian noise and outliers makes TCS methods highly susceptible to complex noise environments ubiquitous in real-world applications. 3) Most of them are confined to third-order tensors and cannot handle high-order tensor data effectively. Being aware of these, we propose Robust Tensor Compressive Sensing (RTCS) based on M-estimators with three key innovations: 1) We design a novel M-estimator-based low-rank regularizer for high-order tensors, which provides a superior approximation of tensor rank and better preserves the original data structure. 2) RTCS incorporates a robust Welsch estimator that adaptively mitigates the influence of complex noises and outliers in tensor recovery. 3) RTCS is developed to handle high-order tensors, thereby allowing for broader applicability beyond conventional third-order tensors. We further design an efficient algorithm based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) to handle the complex optimization problem. Experiments show that RTCS consistently outperforms existing approaches across various noises.

PaperID: 3105

Authors:Ziqi Wen, Cai Xu, Wanqing Zhao, Jie Zhao, Wei Zhao

Affiliations: Xidian University, Northwest University, Chang'an University

Title: Universal EEG Epilepsy Detection via Evidential MultiView De-Biasing

Abstract:
Epilepsy is a widespread neurological disorder characterized by highly patientspecific EEG patterns. Existing EEG-based seizure detection methods either train individualized models for each patient or adapt models pre-trained on known patients to new ones. However, when encountering previously unseen patients, these methods typically require retraining or fine-tuning, which limits their practical utility in clinical settings. This limitation can be linked to biases caused by patient-specific variations, which obscure the underlying pathological patterns of seizures. To address this, we propose an evidential multi-view framework that reinforces the learning of core epileptic features by promoting consistency across multiple views and reducing reliance on high-uncertainty, patient-specific segments. Specifically, we introduce Bias-guided Fisher-Evidential Multi-View Learning (BF-EML) to guide the model toward discovering intrinsic seizure patterns. BF-EML employs a two-stage training architecture: In Stage 1, we use the Fisher Information Matrix to reorder EEG segments by uncertainty and deliberately train a biased feature generator on low-evidence segments. In Stage 2, we design a dual-branch network where the biased and unbiased branches are alternately trained, encouraging the unbiased branch to reduce its reliance on patient-specific biases. Finally, we introduce a shift-calibrated fusion strategy to enhance the consistency of pathogenic feature integration. Extensive experiments on public datasets and a clinical dataset demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance in both single- and multi-patient scenarios. Importantly, it generalizes well to unseen patients without the need for retraining.

PaperID: 3106

Authors:Yilin Wu, Weihong Lin, Renjie Lin, Zihan Fang, Shide Du, Shiping Wang

Affiliations: Fuzhou University, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: DIN: Dual Impulse Network for Multi-view Representation Learning

Abstract:
Multiview representation learning, which utilizes multiple channels to improve perceptual accuracy, is recognized for its effectiveness in the analysis of multi-view data. However, deploying these methods in real-world scenarios presents two primary challenges. 1) Lack of Variegation: Multi-view representation techniques commonly observe along a singular axis, i.e., the attribute axis; 2) Insufficient Relationship: Most multi-view models lack mechanisms for exploring potential relationships between attribute axis and channel axis. To mitigate these obstacles, we design a Dual Impulse Network framework for multi-view representation learning (DIN) to train a feature representation. In this framework, a strategy observed along the channel axis and attribute axis simultaneously is introduced, and two different representations are generated by two analogous impulse networks, which are capable of extracting information corresponding to different axes. Furthermore, we incorporate an integration network that analyzes the potential relationship between attribute axis and channel axis to generate two attention matrices. The final two feature representations derived from these attention matrices are aggregated to amplify the expression of internal information. Comprehensive experimental results support the efficacy and superiority of the proposed framework, demonstrating improvements in classification performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 3107

Authors:Jingcheng Xie, Yinda Chen, Xiaoyu Liu, Yinglong Li, Haoyuan Shi, Zhiwei Xiong

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China

Title: Efficient Plug-and-Play Weight Refinement for Sparse Large Models

Abstract:
Oneshot pruning efficiently compresses Large Language Models but produces coarse sparse weights, causing significant performance degradation. Traditional fine-tuning approaches to refine these weights are prohibitively expensive for large models. This highlights the need for a training-free weight refinement method that works seamlessly with one-shot pruning and can efficiently recover the lost performance. To tackle this problem, we propose Efficient Iterative Weight Refinement (EIWR), a lightweight, plug-and-play, and training-free method that refines pruned weights through layer-wise iterative optimization. EIWR achieves efficient weight refinement via three key components: a Global Soft Constraint that eliminates costly row-wise Hessian inversions and expands the solution space; a Historical Momentum Strategy that leverages one-shot pruning priors to accelerate convergence and enhance final performance; and Neumann Series Extrapolation that significantly speeds up per-iteration computation. As a result, EIWR enables effective weight refinement with minimal time and memory overhead. Extensive experiments on LLaMA2/3 and Qwen under different pruning strategies and sparsity levels demonstrate that our method can efficiently refine sparse weights and mitigate performance degradation. For example, on LLaMA2-7B under 70 percent sparsity, EIWR reduces perplexity by 15 percent compared with SparseGPT on the WikiText2 benchmark, with only 1.81 additional minutes of computation and 1GB of additional memory.

PaperID: 3108

Authors:Changjian Xu, Yong Wang, Ruizheng Huang, Zhicheng Zhang, Wen Yin, Kexin Li

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: CaT-Diff: Cascaded Text-enhanced Diffusion Model for Time-Series Imputation

Abstract:
Most stateof-the-art time series imputation methods can leverage textual information to improve imputation quality, but they often struggle because they fail to effectively filter noisy information from large language model (LLM) derived textual information. Some existing solutions only filter over the entire token set, which can introduce erroneous conditional constraints, extreme token frequency effects and increased computational complexity. To address this, we propose CaT-Diff, a novel cascaded text-enhanced diffusion model for probabilistic imputation of multivariate time series under Missing Not At Random (MNAR) scenarios. To suppress irrelevant semantics and focus on context most predictive of missing values, CaT-Diff introduces an innovative Hierarchical Semantic Filter (HSF) that collaborates with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Network. The MoE projects heterogeneous text embeddings into the time series latent space, and the HSF cascade-filters text embeddings from the segment level to the token level, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of direct token-level filtering and reducing overhead. We also incorporate a lightweight Missing Mechanism Estimator, jointly optimized with the denoising network to explicitly capture MNAR missingness patterns. Extensive tests on nine domains show that CaT-Diff outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Our work presents a new approach for selectively fusing LLM-derived textual information.

PaperID: 3109

Authors:Rundong Xue, Hao Hu, Zhitao Zeng, Xiangmin Han, Zhiqiang Tian, Shaoyi Du, Yue Gao

Title: Role Hypergraph Contrastive Learning for Multivariate Time-Series Analysis

Abstract:
Multivariate TimeSeries (MTS) analysis is crucial across various domains. Considering the spatial and temporal consistency of MTS, existing methods leverage graph structures with temporal augmentation and contrastive learning to achieve robust learning of spatial dependencies and temporal patterns. Given the inherent high-order correlations in MTS, hypergraphs present a promising approach. However, two key challenges limit their further development: 1) Feature-based perspectives capture limited spatial information, while structural perspectives encode richer spatial consistency and evolution dependency; 2) Various semantic patterns (e.g., synergy, inhibition) entangle in sensor correlations, leading to semantic ambiguity. The underlying reason is that conventional hypergraph structures cannot distinguish specific semantic roles within or across hyperedges. Thus, we propose Role Hypergraph Contrastive Learning for MTS analysis. Specifically, we introduce the concept of role to generalize hypergraphs to Role Hypergraphs, enabling precise modeling of sensor correlations by assigning each vertex-hyperedge pair with a semantic role. Building on this structure, we design a role hypergraph contrastive learning paradigm to comprehensively capture the spatial and temporal dependencies: From a structural perspective, role hypergraph structural contrasting captures spatial short-term consistency and long-term evolution; from a feature perspective, alignment of complementary role information ensures sensor-level temporal consistency. Experiments on classification and forecasting tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and interpretability of our method.

PaperID: 3110

Authors:Liang Yang, Hui Ning, Jiaming Zhuo, Ziyi Ma, Chuan Wang, Wenning Wu, Zhen Wang

Affiliations: Hebei University of Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Northwest Polytechnical University Xi'an, Northwestern Polytechnical University

Title: Source-Free Graph Foundation Model Adaptation via Pseudo-Source Reconstruction

Abstract:
Aiming to overcome distribution shift and label sparsity that hinder crossdomain generalization of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), Unsupervised Graph Domain Adaptation (UGDA) transfers knowledge from a label-rich source to an unlabeled target graph. Yet in practice, strict privacy protocols often withhold the source graph, reducing UGDA to the more constrained Source-Free UGDA (SFUGDA) where only a pre-trained source GNN remains. In this setting, the source GNN serves as a simple, task-specific graph foundation model. Despite recent progress, existing source-free UGDA methods remain hampered by source-knowledge absence: deprived of source graphs, they lose the reference distribution needed to gauge domain shift and must lean on noisy target cues, incurring biased adaptation and catastrophic forgetting. To overcome this drawback, this paper devises Source-Free Graph foundation model Adaptation via pseudo-source Reconstruction (SFGAR), a two-stage SFUGDA framework that first generates pseudo-source graphs to recover the source distribution encoded in a frozen pre-trained GNN, then adversarially aligns these synthetic graphs with the unlabeled target. Theoretical analysis shows that this proxy alignment tightly bounds the target-domain generalization error. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks validate the state-of-the-art performance of SFGAR.

PaperID: 3111

Authors:Xinye Yang, Junhao Wang, RuiLi, Haosen Sun, Xuesheng Zhang, Zebang Liu, Gaochao Xu, Yiwei Chen

Affiliations: Newcastle University, College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Independent Researcher, Northwestern University, Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, School of Biomedical Engineering (Suzhou), Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Science and Technology of China

Title: Flow-Based Knowledge Transfer for Efficient Large Model Distillation

Abstract:
Traditional knowledge distillation relies on simple MSE or KL divergence losses that fail to capture the complex distributional relationships between teacher and student model representations. We propose FlowDistill, a novel distillation framework that employs normalizing flows to model and transfer the intricate knowledge distributions from teacher to student models. Our approach introduces three key innovations: (1) Invertible Knowledge Mapping using continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) to learn bijective transformations between teacher and student representation spaces, enabling precise knowledge transfer without information loss, (2) FlowGuided Progressive Distillation that gradually increases the complexity of knowledge transfer by learning hierarchical flow transformations from simple to complex distributions, and (3) Conditional Flow Networks that adapt knowledge transfer based on input context and task requirements. Unlike previous diffusion-based distillation methods such as DiffKD that suffer from computational overhead due to iterative denoising processes and information loss during noise addition, our flow-based approach provides exact invertible transformations with significantly reduced computational cost. Extensive experiments on ImageNet classification, COCO object detection, and Cityscapes semantic segmentation demonstrate that FlowDistill achieves superior performance with 2.1% accuracy improvement over DiffKD on ResNet-34 to ResNet-18 distillation while reducing inference time by 3.5×. Our method establishes new state-of-the-art results across multiple distillation benchmarks and provides theoretical guarantees for lossless knowledge transfer through invertible flow transformations.

PaperID: 3112

Authors:Zhan Yang, Yiran Liu, Youyuan Huang, Yinan Li

Affiliations: Central South University

Title: Stationary and Clustering Transformer Hashing for Cross-modal Retrieval

Abstract:
Unsupervised crossmodal hashing has gained significant attention for efficient retrieval between heterogeneous modalities through encoding data into the unified binary representations, offering low storage cost and fast response. However, the constraints of existing methods persist in bridging the cross-modal semantic gap and capturing fine-grained global semantic structures without explicit labels. In this paper, we propose an innovative unsupervised Stationary distribution and soft Clustering Transformer Hashing approach for cross-modal retrieval, denoted as SCTH. Initially, a Transformer-based modality fusion encoder is employed to extract abundant cross-modal semantic representations, further integrated with contrastive hashing to minimize the semantic gap. To enhance the inter-modal alignment, a pseudo-classifier clustering module with entropy-regularized contrastive loss is presented, ensuring balanced and diverse cluster assignments in unsupervised settings. Additionally, a Markovian stationary distribution strategy stabilizes the feature representations through mitigating the interference of noise and outliers. Comprehensive experiments on MIRFlickr, NUS-WIDE, and IAPR-TC12 datasets validate that SCTH outperforms state-of-the-art hashing methods in cross-modal retrieval tasks, demonstrating superior generalization performance.

PaperID: 3113

Authors:Hao Yin, Hongjie He, Fan Chen

Affiliations: Southwest Jiaotong University

Title: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Scalable Offline Three-Dimensional Packing

Abstract:
With the increasing number of items requiring handling simultaneously in complex logistics, offline threedimensional packing methods need to plan larger numbers of items. Existing deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based packing methods cannot plan for large numbers of items while keeping high-quality solutions due to limited exploration space and high computational complexity. To address this issue, this paper proposes a scalable DRL-based packing method. An attention-based pack-Q-network (PQNet) is constructed to learn the optimal packing policy by integrating unpacked items, available spaces, and packed items. To expand the valid exploration space, a bidding-based multi-policy (BBMP) framework composed of multiple PQNets is designed to efficiently explore more latent valid solutions, thus enhancing solution quality. To reduce computational complexity, a training-free dynamic candidate selection (DCS) framework is proposed to incorporate comprehensive item information during execution with minimal computation overhead, which helps in effectively planning large numbers of items. Experimental results show that across item numbers of 20~1000, our method consistently outperforms the best-performing baseline at each tested scale by 3.2%~13.1% in space utilization.

PaperID: 3114

Authors:Jiaming Zhang, Yiqi Lin, Rou Zhang, Xinyuan Song, Hanwen Ning

Affiliations: Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title: GAHMN: A Generative Approach for High-Dimensional Mediation Analysis

Abstract:
Highdimensional mediation analysis (HMA) seeks to uncover complex causal mechanisms involving numerous mediators and plays a crucial role in scientific and social sciences. In this work, we introduce the Generative Adversarial High-dimensional Mediation Network (GAHMN), a novel, scalable structured generative framework designed for causal analysis in high-dimensional settings. GAHMN formulates mediation analysis as dual conditional generative blocks, explicitly capturing mediators' dual roles as outcomes influenced by treatments and as predictors affecting outcomes. Each block integrates a high-dimensional partially linear structure with multi-channel convolutional layers, promoting effective parameter sharing and enhanced representation learning. To induce sparsity and accurate mediator selection, GAHMN employs customized min-max optimization problems with L1 penalties on generator parameters, alongside specially designed optimization algorithms for efficient computation. Unlike existing benchmark methods relying on restrictive parametric assumptions or random-effect specifications, GAHMN flexibly captures heterogeneity, complex distributions, and inter-mediator correlations. With careful design, the computational complexity of GAHMN scales linearly with the number of mediators p, rather than quadratically as in conventional approaches. Theoretical results rigorously ensures estimation consistency, convergence rate, and accurate sparse recovery. GAHMN also serves as a structured generative causal modeling framework, extending to causal decomposition, structural equation modeling, and counterfactual policy evaluation. Extensive experiments confirm GAHMN's superior performance and robustness in synthetic and real-world scenarios.

PaperID: 3115

Authors:Li Zhang, Pinhan Fu, Li Lv, Qian Guo, Liang Du, Xinyan Liang

Affiliations: Shanxi University, Wuhan University, Taiyuan University of Science and Technology

Title: EvoFMVC: Trusted Federated Multi-View Clustering with Evolutionary Fusion

Abstract:
With the growing demand for decentralized collaborative analysis of privacysensitive data, federated multi-view clustering (FMVC) has attracted widespread attention due to its ability to balance privacy protection and collaborative modeling. However, current methods still face the following challenges: (1) Clients need to frequently upload high-dimensional data such as model parameters or graph structures, resulting in high communication costs; (2) The structured data uploaded often contains semantic features and has a high risk of being inverted; (3) The server usually merges the data from all clients with the fixed fusion rule, which may result in a suboptimized clustering result when there exist low-quality clients. To address the issues, we propose a new trusted federated multi-view clustering framework (EvoFMVC) that introduces three key innovations: First, lightweight trusted evidence serves as a compact communication medium, significantly reducing overhead compared to conventional model parameters or graph structures. Second, trusted evidences express clustering results in the form of probability distribution, which avoids the risk of structured information being easily inverted. Lastly, we formalize the server-side aggregation process as a neural architecture search (NAS) task where the server flexibly uses different fusion operators to filter and fuse necessary views through evolutionary algorithms, which significantly improves the fusion effect and model performance. Experimental results on multiple datasets show that our method is superior to existing FMVC methods in terms of clustering accuracy and communication efficiency.

PaperID: 3116

Authors:Weihong Zhang, Liang Bai, Hangyuan Du, Xian Yang

Affiliations: Shanxi University, University of Manchester

Title: CauVQ: Causal Vector Quantization for Graph OOD Generalization

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) perform well on indistribution data but often fail under out-of-distribution (OOD) shifts due to reliance on spurious patterns. To address this, we propose CauVQ, a causal vector quantization framework that improves OOD generalization by identifying and leveraging invariant substructures that are causally predictive. To construct stable and symbolic graph representations, CauVQ decomposes each input into local substructures and maps them to a discrete codebook of prototypical motifs. This enables consistent and interpretable encoding across diverse graph domains. To isolate the causal substructures, we maximize their mutual information with graph labels and refine their representations using a learnable interaction matrix and a causal attention mechanism. Furthermore, we introduce a counterfactual regularization strategy to enforce prediction stability under substructure perturbations, encouraging the model to focus on truly causal patterns rather than superficial shortcuts. Extensive experiments across standard and OOD benchmarks demonstrate that CauVQ consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in robustness and interpretability. Our framework offers a promising step toward reliable, explainable, and distribution-aware graph learning.

PaperID: 3117

Authors:Sanle Zhao, Yujuan Tan, Yu Jing, Zhuoxin Bai, Yue Niu, Jiayi Guo, Zongjie Wang, Ao Ren

Affiliations: Chongqing University, National University of Defense Technology

Title: HitKV: Activation Frequency Knows Which Tokens Are Important

Abstract:
The demand for longcontext processing in large language models (LLMs) continues to escalate alongside rapid advancements in their capabilities. However, the intermediate attention keys and values (KV cache) employed to avoid re-computations, also grow linearly with sequence length, far exceeding the memory capacity of consumer-grade GPUs. Consequently, many studies have proposed KV cache compression methods that evict unimportant tokens based on variant attention scoring strategies. These methods typically retain the KV pairs of the top-k scoring tokens under a fixed memory budget. However, they still face several limitations. First, they disregard the activation frequency of tokens, specifically the count of times tokens achieve top-k scores in the attention distribution of following tokens. The methods based on variant attention scores may incorrectly evict some high-activation-frequency yet low final-scoring tokens. Second, the activation frequency exhibits different distribution patterns across layers and tasks. Neglecting these differences negatively impacts model performance and task adaptability. Our analysis of the actual token activation frequency and its unique characteristics across layers and task types reveals potential opportunities to address these issues. In this paper, we propose HitKV, which employs hit rates to directly characterize token activation frequencies, enabling adaptive layer-aware and task-aware KV cache eviction under the uniform memory allocation strategies. Also, HitKV can be easily integrated into layer-specific memory allocation methods. Experimental results demonstrate that HitKV maintains model performance with preserving only 3% of the KV cache, achieves high-quality generation outputs in long-text generation tasks, and delivers 4× throughput improvement over baselines.

PaperID: 3118

Authors:Simiao Zhao, Ning Pang, Zhen Tan, Yanli Hu, Weidong Xiao, Xiang Zhao

Affiliations: National Key Laboratory of Information Systems Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Aviation University of Air Force, China Jilin Provincial Key Laboratory of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Intelligent Application, National Key Laboratory of Big Data and Decision

Title: Multi-granularity Temporal Knowledge Editing over Large Language Models

Abstract:
The evolving worldly dynamics necessitate continuous revision and updating of knowledge within Large Language Models (LLMs), driving the development of Knowledge Editing (KE) techniques. Recently, a novel paradigm of Temporal Knowledge Editing (TKE) has been proposed, emphasizing that models deployed in dynamic environments should integrate new information while retaining historical knowledge. However, we observe that current definitions and methods for TKE are insufficient, as they do not effectively capture or adapt to the finegrained temporal dynamics inherent in real-world knowledge evolution. In this paper, we introduce the notion of multi-granularity TKE, encompassing temporal knowledge across yearly, monthly, and daily granularities, and propose a corresponding dataset, named MTKE. We argue that comprehending and retaining knowledge across different temporal granularities is crucial for LLMs to accurately reflect real-world changes. The key challenge lies in integrating new temporal knowledge at various granularities while also preserving relevant historical knowledge, thus ensuring LLMs maintain a consistent and accurate understanding over time. To achieve this, we propose a Sparse Parameter-Injected Knowledge Editing method, dubbed SPIKE, which anchors both temporal knowledge and subject positions within the model. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively preserves historical knowledge performance while accurately incorporating dynamic temporal knowledge across multi-granularity temporal scenarios.

PaperID: 3119

Authors:Wenrui Zhao, Yijun Tian, Zhichao Xu, Yawei Wang, Chuxu Zhang

Affiliations: George Mason University, University of Notre Dame, University of Utah, The George Washington University, University of Connecticut

Title: Pareto-Based Heterogeneous Knowledge Distillation for MLPs on Graphs

Abstract:
Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in capturing effective information in heterogeneous graphs, achieving outstanding performance in various learning tasks. However, the heavy dependency of HGNNs on neighbors information may result in high latency, which restricts their practicality in realworld applications. Recent studies have attempted to overcome such latency in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) by distilling knowledge into student models that do not rely on graph structure. But these approaches primarily focus on replicating teachers' predictive outcomes while neglecting the structural knowledge they encoded. This limitation makes such approach less effective when graphs become complex, particularly on heterogeneous graphs. Motivated by this challenge, we propose HGKD, a novel hierarchical knowledge distillation framework that transfers both structural knowledge and predictive outcomes from HGNN teachers to a multi-layer perceptron student. Additionally, we provide two variants of HGKD that help the student learn from multiple teacher models through Pareto learning and incorporate low-cost neighbor information. We evaluate HGKD and its variants on a range of heterogeneous graph datasets. The results demonstrate that our student model achieves performance comparable to or exceeding that of HGNN teachers, despite not relying on graph structures during inference.

PaperID: 3120

Authors:Wenxian Zheng, Zhi Chen, Qiaoqin Li, Rongyao Hu, Yongguo Liu

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Sarcopenia Assessment Model Based on Dual-Source Modal Graph

Abstract:
Accurate musclemass assessment is crucial for staging and managing sarcopenia, yet existing methods suffer from modality-specific limitations and weak integration of muscle function indicators. To solve these limitations, we propose a Dual-source Features Graph for Sarcopenia Evaluation (DFGSE) to synergize high- and low-energy whole-body Dual-energy X-ray Absorptiometry (DXA) images, local high-energy DXA images, and blood-borne biochemical markers. Specifically, the feature extraction module employs dual-energy feature extraction to disentangle soft-tissue and skeletal cues from low-energy images, while skeleton-aware detection extracts joint features from high-energy images. It yields global and local DXA embeddings, complemented by blood-test representations. In the relevance exploration module, inter- and intra-modality correlations are computed via bilinear transformations to form adjacency matrices for the global, local, and blood modality representations. These matrices seed the Multi-type Multi-relation Graph Convolutional Network (MMGCN) – the core of the relation learning module – which captures both direct and indirect interactions among modalities through relation-aware message passing. Finally, the graph-fused representations are used by a muscle-mass prediction head trained with cross-entropy loss. Experiments on the public MURA dataset and two independent sarcopenia cohorts demonstrate that DFGSE consistently outperforms machine learning and state-of-the-art graph-based methods, in terms of four evaluation metrics for classification task.

PaperID: 3121

Authors:Lixin Zhou, Zemin Liu, Yuan Fang, Dan Niu, Jing Ying

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Singapore Management University, Southeast University

Title: THGB: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Text-attributed Heterogeneous Graphs

Abstract:
Textattributed heterogeneous graphs (TAHGs), characterized by nodes interconnected through diverse relationships and enriched with textual descriptions, are prevalent in numerous real-world applications. Recent advancements in integrating pre-trained language models (PLMs) and large language models (LLMs) with heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) have enhanced learning on TAHGs. However, the absence of standardized benchmark datasets tailored to TAHGs has impeded further progress. To bridge this gap, we propose the Text-attributed Heterogeneous Graphs Benchmark (THGB), a comprehensive collection of heterogeneous graphs from diverse domains, with each node enriched by relevant text attributes. Alongside dataset construction, we conduct extensive benchmark experiments using various graph learning methods, including GNN, PLM-GNN, and LLM-GNN approaches, for node classification and link prediction tasks. We evaluated model performance across supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot learning scenarios to assess their ability to leverage limited and unseen data. Our experiments highlight THGB's potential to improve the integration of heterogeneous structural and textual information. By providing curated datasets, robust evaluation protocols, and baseline implementations, THGB introduces a standardized benchmark and solid groundwork for TAHGs research.

PaperID: 3122

Authors:Yingcong Zhou, Pingfan Wu, Li Wang, Zhiguo Fu, Fengqin Yang

Affiliations: Northeast Normal University, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Guangxi Normal University

Title: Beyond Sharpness: The Role of Nonuniformity in Generalization

Abstract:
Sharpnessaware minimization (SAM) is widely recognized for enhancing the generalization performance of deep neural networks. However, recent works have challenged the statement that flatness implies generalization, demonstrating that it is insufficient as the indicator of generalization. In this paper, we reveal an insightful phenomenon: among minima of similar sharpness, stochastic optimization algorithms tend to prefer those with lower nonuniformity. We define nonuniformity by both the magnitude and structure of the gradient noise, and show that it fundamentally differs from sharpness and plays a critical role in generalization. Specifically, we first theoretically prove that the expected generalization gap of models trained via stochastic optimization algorithm is positively correlated with nonuniformity (the magnitude of the gradient noise). Empirically, we show that nonuniformity exhibits a stronger correlation with generalization than sharpness, especially in Transformer models. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the nonuniformity (the structure of the gradient noise) more effectively guides the algorithm towards sparser solutions and exhibits better generalization performance than sharpness-based methods in the high-dimensional sparse regression problem. Finally, extensive experiments on various datasets and models confirm the advantages of nonuniformity for generalization: (1) optimization guided by nonuniformity achieves better generalization compared to those achieved through flatness (including standard training, transfer learning, hyperparameter sensitivity and robustness to label noise); (2) model architecture (such as depth and width) is closely related to nonuniformity.

PaperID: 3123

Authors:Wenhao Zhu, Yuxin Li, Shuo Wang, Hao Wang

Affiliations: Wuhan University

Title: Dual-Horizon Interest Model for Unified Search and Recommendation

Abstract:
Search and recommendation are pivotal for information access and are increasingly unified to exploit shared useritem interactions. Both tasks suffer from data sparsity, which joint modeling can mitigate by integrating behavioral data with or without explicit queries. However, existing unified frameworks rarely distinguish between users’ long- and short-term interests, despite their divergent temporal dynamics in search and recommendation. In this work, we propose a novel model, DHIM, which explicitly disentangles and integrates users' long- and short-term interests across both the search and recommendation scenarios. First, long- and short-term interests are independently extracted from search and recommendation using a unified extraction strategy. These interests are then adaptively integrated via a cross-scenario fusion module. A self‐supervised contrastive loss supervises the learning of both interest types within and across scenarios. The resulting representations are fed into downstream search and recommendation models for prediction. Extensive experiments on two public benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms single-scenario and state-of-the-art joint models, achieving superior accuracy and generalizability. To our knowledge, this is the first work to incorporate explicit dual-horizon interest modeling into a unified search and recommendation framework with self-supervised contrastive learning.

PaperID: 3124

Authors:Yuanzhe Peng, Wenwei Zhao, Zhuo Lu, Jie Xu

Affiliations: University of Florida, University of South Florida

Title: Equilibrium-Driven Vertical Federated Learning with Selective Privacy Protection

Abstract:
Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) enables multiple clients with featurepartitioned data to collaboratively train models while preserving privacy by transmitting embeddings instead of raw data. However, such embeddings can still expose sensitive attributes (e.g., gender or race) unrelated to the target task, making them vulnerable to attribute inference attacks. Most existing privacy strategies may provide extra protection, but at the cost of reduced accuracy and excessive privacy budget. In this paper, we propose a novel equilibrium-driven VFL framework with selective privacy protection for sensitive attributes that are difficult to isolate from embeddings, thereby enhancing local privacy with minor accuracy compromise. We introduce two key innovations: (1) a NashCoder, which incorporates a surrogate head to jointly optimize accuracy and privacy; (2) an adaptive decomposition strategy based on Shapley values, which dynamically decomposes the global objective for distributed optimization from an equilibrium perspective. We theoretically analyze our framework and empirically evaluate it on three public datasets against five baselines, demonstrating significant improvements in the accuracy-privacy trade-off under various privacy settings. Extensive experimental results support our theoretical analysis.

PaperID: 3125

Authors:Thomy Phan, Shao-Hung Chan, Sven Koenig

Affiliations: University of Bayreuth, University of Southern California, University of California, USA Örebro University

Title: Truncated Counterfactual Learning for Anytime Multi-Agent Path Finding

Abstract:
Anytime multiagent path finding (MAPF) is a promising approach to scalable and collision-free path optimization in multi-agent systems. MAPF-LNS, based on Large Neighborhood Search (LNS), is the current state-of-the-art approach where a fast initial solution is iteratively optimized by destroying and repairing selected paths, i.e., a neighborhood, of the solution. Delay-based MAPF-LNS has demonstrated particular effectiveness in generating promising neighborhoods via seed agents, according to their delays. Seed agents are selected using handcrafted strategies or online learning, where the former relies on human intuition about underlying structures, while the latter conducts black-box optimization, ignoring any structure. In this paper, we propose Truncated Adaptive Counterfactual K-ranked LEarning (TACKLE) to select seed agents via informed online learning by leveraging handcrafted strategies as human intuition. We show theoretically that TACKLE dominates its handcrafted and black-box learning counterparts in the limit. Our experiments demonstrate cost improvements of at least 60% in instances with one thousand agents, compared with state-of-the-art anytime solvers.

PaperID: 3126

Authors:Thomy Phan, Sven Koenig

Affiliations: University of Bayreuth, University of California, USA Örebro University

Title: Spatially Grouped Curriculum Learning for Multi-Agent Path Finding

Abstract:
Multiagent path finding (MAPF) is the challenging problem of finding conflict-free paths with minimal costs for multiple agents. While traditional MAPF solvers are centralized using heuristic search, reinforcement learning (RL) is becoming increasingly popular due to its potential to learn decentralized and generalizing policies. RL-based MAPF must cope with spatial coordination, which is often addressed by combining independent training with ad hoc measures like replanning and communication. Such ad hoc measures often complicate the approach and require knowledge beyond the actual accessible information in RL, such as the full map occupation or broadcast communication channels, which limits generalizability, effectiveness, and sample efficiency. In this paper, we propose Partitioned Attention-based Reverse Curricula for Enhanced Learning (PARCEL), considering a bounding region for each agent. PARCEL trains all agents with overlapping regions jointly via self-attention to avoid potential conflicts. By employing a reverse curriculum, where the bounding regions grow as the policies improve, all agents will eventually merge into a single coordinated group. We evaluate PARCEL in two simple coordination tasks and four MAPF benchmark maps. Compared with state-of-the-art RL-based MAPF methods, PARCEL demonstrates better effectiveness and sample efficiency without ad hoc measures.

PaperID: 3127

Authors:Wenyuan Gu, Haowen Wang, Jiale Han, Xiang Li, Zhixuan Wu, Hongru Xiao, Bo Cheng

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, College of Civil Engineering, Tongji University

Title: Analyze–Compose–Execute: A Dynamic Dialogue Framework for Multi-Agent Debate

Abstract:
MultiAgent Debate (MAD) is an emerging paradigm that leverages the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by encouraging them to collaboratively solve problems through human-like discussions. However, current MAD methods typically constrain agents to follow fixed discussion pipelines, repeatedly applying the same discussion act for a predetermined number of rounds, which limits their effectiveness and adaptability in complex and diverse tasks. To address this limitation, we propose Analyze–Compose–Execute (ACE), a novel debate framework in which agents dynamically execute the discussion actions according to the dialogue context. By analyzing the current responses of agents, ACE selects appropriate acts from a predefined Atomic Discussion Acts Library (ADAL), which are composed into a discussion action to be executed in the next round, to enable truly dynamic debate. We conduct extensive experiments on the challenging benchmark Big-Bench Hard (BBH) benchmark. ACE achieves state-of-the- art results on 17 out of 23 tasks, with an average performance gain of 8.5% across all tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of our approach.

PaperID: 3128

Authors:Yitong Huang, Ziqi Yang, Zihui Wang, Jianzhong Qi, Rongshan Yu, Xiaoliang Fan, Cheng Wang

Affiliations: Fujian Key Laboratory of Urban Intelligent Sensing and Computing, Xiamen University, China Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing, Ministry of Education of China, Peng Cheng Laboratory, School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne

Title: Hybrid Routing for a Mixture of LoRA Experts

Abstract:
Combining Mixture of Experts (MoE) with LowRank Adaptation (LoRA) has shown promising efficiency in multi-task instruction tuning for Large Language Models (LLMs). While existing routing schemes for such MoE systems employ auxiliary functions to ensure both expert selection certainty and workload balance among experts, they are hindered by two critical challenges: (1) Existing methods overlook the evolving cross-expert relationships across layers, leading to inefficient expert utilization. (2) The auxiliary functions fail to incorporate cross-task semantic characteristics during expert assignment, leading to suboptimal task adaptation. To address these challenges, we propose Hybrid routing for a Mixture of LoRA Experts (HotMoE), a novel multi-task instruction tuning framework that adapts hierarchical routing to the distinct characteristics of different LLM layers. First, we design a hybrid routing module. In lower layers, expert-expert attention facilitates cross-task collaboration and generalization. In higher layers, token-expert attention enables precise alignment between task semantics and specialized experts. Second, we introduce a similarity-guided auxiliary loss module to regularize routing decisions by exploiting hidden state similarities. This loss synergistically reinforces expert specialization without sacrificing certainty of expert selection by promoting cohesive activation patterns among semantically related tasks while sharpening distinctions between conflicting ones. Experiments across two multi-task instruction tuning scenarios covering seven NLP benchmarks demonstrate that HotMoE consistently outperforms all baselines, improving Mean Relative Difference by up to 1.68% with only 3.1% of trainable parameters.

PaperID: 3129

Authors:Min Ho Jang, Eun Seo Seo, Jin Young Kim, Hyeongsoo Lim, Ji Won Yoon

Affiliations: Chung-Ang University

Title: BiCycle: Group-wise Recursive Transformer Based on ASR Mechanism

Abstract:
Recursive transformer (RT) is a promising parametersharing technique for reducing computational burden of large-scale model. While RT has been successfully applied to large language models (LLMs), its effectiveness in automatic speech recognition (ASR) remains limited, despite the parallel trend of model scaling in the speech domain. In this paper, we reveal that conventional RT designs for LLMs are suboptimal for speech recognition, primarily because they do not fully consider the layer-wise specialization inherent in the ASR architecture, where lower layers focus on phonetic features and upper layers capture linguistic localization. To address this, we propose BiCycle, a novel RT scheme tailored for ASR. In particular, we firstly analyze attention patterns in a pre-trained ASR model to divide its layers into phonetic and linguistic groups. BiCycle then constructs an efficient RT model by transferring the pre-trained model’s weights in a step-wise manner and applies recursion separately to the phonetic and linguistic groups, preventing conflicts between their roles. Extensive experimental results confirm that the proposed method not only preserves the original ASR mechanism but also outperforms conventional RT approaches.

PaperID: 3130

Authors:Andong Li, Tong Lei, Lingling Dai, Kai Li, Rilin Chen, Meng Yu, Xiaodong Li, Dong Yu, Chengshi Zheng

Affiliations: Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tencent AI Lab, Tsinghua University

Title: DegVoC: Revisiting Neural Vocoder from a Degradation Perspective

Abstract:
Existing neural vocoders have demonstrated promising performance by leveraging Melspectrum as an acoustic feature for conditional audio generation. Nonetheless, they remain constrained by an inherent ``performance-cost'' dilemma that significantly hinders the development of this field. This paper revisits this foundational task from a novel degradation perspective, where Mel-spectrum is regarded as a special signal degradation process from the target spectrum. Drawing inspiration from traditional sparse signal recovery problems, we propose DegVoC, a GAN-based neural vocoder with a two-step solution procedure. First, by exploiting degradation priors, we attempt to retrieve the initial spectral structure from Mel-domain representations as an initial solution via a simple linear transformation. Based on that, we introduce a deep prior solver that accounts for the heterogeneous distribution of sub-bands in the time-frequency domain. A convolution-style attention module with a large kernel size is specially devised for efficient inter-frame and inter-band contextual modeling. With 3.89 M parameters and substantially reduced inference complexity, DegVoC achieves state-of-the-art performance across objective and subjective evaluations, outperforming existing GAN-, DDPM- and flow-matching-based baselines.

PaperID: 3131

Authors:Yu Li, Zhe Yang, Yi Huang, Xin Liu, Guilin Qi

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, JIUTIAN Research, China Mobile, China; Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, UniSA STEM, University of South Australia

Title: C³TG: Conflict-aware, Composite, and Collaborative Controlled Text Generation

Abstract:
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable text generation capabilities. However, controlling specific attributes of generated text remains challenging without architectural modifications or extensive finetuning. Current methods typically toggle a single, basic attribute but struggle with precise multi-attribute control. In scenarios where attribute requirements conflict, existing methods lack coordination mechanisms, causing interference between desired attributes. Furthermore, these methods fail to incorporate iterative optimization processes in the controlled generation pipeline. To address these limitations, we propose Conflict-aware, Composite, and Collaborative Controlled Text Generation (C³TG), a two-phase framework for fine-grained, multi-dimensional text attribute control. During generation, C³TG selectively pairs the LLM with the required attribute classifiers from the 17 available dimensions and employs weighted KL-divergence to adjust token probabilities. The optimization phase then leverages an energy function combining classifier scores and penalty terms to resolve attribute conflicts through iterative feedback, enabling precise control over multiple dimensions simultaneously while preserving natural text flow. Experiments show that C³TG significantly outperforms baselines across multiple metrics including attribute accuracy, linguistic fluency, and output diversity, while simultaneously reducing toxicity. These results establish C³TG as an effective and flexible solution for multi-dimensional text attribute control that requires no costly model modifications.

PaperID: 3132

Authors:Zhengao Li, Xiaopeng Yuan, Bolin Shen, Kien Le, Haohan Wang, Xugui Zhou, Shangqian Gao, Yushun Dong

Affiliations: Florida State University, University of California, Los Angeles, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Louisiana State University

Title: Query-Efficient Domain Knowledge Stealing Against Large Language Models

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) concentrate substantial knowledge in specialized domains due to extensive pretraining and instruction tuning, and they are now central to commercial and scientific practice. Yet access is usually limited to costly, ratelimited interfaces, which motivates methods that can extract targeted domain knowledge with minimal querying effort. A further challenge is that the target domain may be unknown in advance, so naive or generic prompts waste queries and fail to expose the underlying concepts and relations that structure the domain. In this work, we introduce a query-efficient approach for domain-specific knowledge stealing from black-box language models. Rather than issuing random questions or generic templates, our framework performs self-directed exploration that lets the model find the direction and mine domain knowledge by itself. Starting from a small and diverse seed, it discovers salient domain entities and induces their relations through structured question families that elicit definitional, functional, and compositional information. A feedback-driven controller analyzes the errors and uncertainty of the extracted surrogate model and uses this signal to refine subsequent queries, all without relying on prior domain knowledge or external resources. We evaluate the method in two expert-centric settings, medicine and finance, and observe consistently better performance while requiring significantly fewer queries.

PaperID: 3133

Authors:Pengyue Lin, Yanyang Hu, Xinjing Liu, Wenqi Jia, Fangxiang Feng, Ruifan Li

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: Diffusion-Assisted Progressive Learning for Weakly Supervised Phrase Localization

Abstract:
Weakly supervised phrase localization (WSPL) aims to localize visual objects mentioned by given phrases, but it learns without humanannotated bounding boxes. Previous works struggle in multi-object scenarios where objects in the background often appear simultaneously with the target objects. To this end, we propose a Diffusion-Assisted PrOgressive learning framework (i.e., DAPO) for WSPL task in this paper. Specifically, we score the difficulty of training samples based on the quantity of objects and the level of semantic alignment. These samples are then used progressively during training, in an order by their difficulty scores. To address the sample imbalance problem, we propose a Generation-Assisted Tuning (GAT) method for the grounding network. First, to enrich the samples from few-object scenarios, we leverage Stable Diffusion (SD) to generate images with phrases. Second, we introduce an attention-driven scheme to direct SD's attention on the mentioned objects. Finally, we design a diffusion-guided loss, which helps the grounding network learn the objects' layouts. Extensive experiments show that our DAPO framework outperforms the strong baselines on benchmark datasets.

PaperID: 3134

Authors:Fanghao Lou, Qiqi Wang, Guanyu Chen, Kaiqi Zhao, Huijia Li

Affiliations: Nankai University, Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: ZipLJP: Zipped Information Processor for Legal Judgment Prediction

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used in legal judgment prediction tasks, which aim to enhance judicial efficiency. However, the length of legal fact descriptions poses a significant challenge to the application of LLMs. Long inputs not only introduce noise, affecting output quality, but also increase processing time. While existing text compression methods, such as generating summaries or training models to implicitly reduce text dimensionality, can shorten input length, they often face the slow generation speeds and limited interpretability issues. To address these issues and inspired by information bottleneckbased text compression, we propose the Zipped Information Processor for Legal Judgment Prediction method, ZipLJP. By effectively integrating legal knowledge into the compression process, ZipLJP not only reduces input length but also improves processing efficiency and prediction quality. Experiments show that our approach achieves better performance compared to the previous methods on two widely used open-source and real-world datasets.

PaperID: 3135

Authors:Sriram Ranga, Sai Shashank Bedampeta, Rui Mao, Anupam Chattopadhyay

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University, Vellore Institute of Technology

Title: Are Language Models Any Good at Density Modeling?

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) surprised the world with their ability to mimic humans in writing and are starting to be used as simulations of human writers for various kinds of linguistic analyses. However, these analyses rest on the belief that LLMs are good density models that accurately capture the underlying probability distribution of the language. In this paper, we question this basic assumption and try to evaluate language models on their density modelling capabilities. Since a ground truth does not exist for the probability distribution of any natural language, we come up with a synthetic language made up of decimal numbers written in words in English. We train language models from scratch on various probability distributions over this synthetic language and compare the distributions learned by the models with the original distributions. Experiments show that language models can learn underlying probability distributions across a wide range of cases, but they fail when those distributions depend on deep semantic properties of numbers that cannot be inferred from syntactic patterns. Additionally, we observed a strong bias in the models towards numbers that frequently occur as substrings within other numbers. This suggests that such a bias possibly exists in realworld natural language models as well, and negatively impacts downstream tasks and analyses that rely on model-generated probabilities.

PaperID: 3136

Authors:Xianjin Rong, Donghui Hu

Affiliations: Hefei University of Technology

Title: Anchor Watermark: Robust Attribution for Diffusion-based Text-to-Audio Model

Abstract:
With the increasing commercialization of the latent diffusionbased text-to-audio generation, model attribution has become a critical challenge. Embedding watermarks in generated audio is an effective way to distinguish synthetic from natural audio. However, existing watermarking methods often suffer from limited robustness or require additional training, limiting their scalability in practical applications. In this paper, we propose an anchor-based inversion optimization framework. The method embeds a watermark into the model's initial latent vector, designated as a pivotal anchor, and extracts the watermark through inversion. To mitigate error accumulation and enhance robustness during inversion, we leverage the temporal consistency and distributional similarity of diffusion models, formulating watermark extraction as a time-series optimization problem. Specifically, given a suspicious audio sample and a candidate model with a predefined anchor, we first perform unguided denoising diffusion on the anchor to generate an intermediate latent trajectory as the anchor sequence. Then, we optimize the inversion process to align the inverted trajectory with the anchor sequence, thereby reducing accumulated errors. During optimization, we adopt Soft Dynamic Time Warping as the loss function. Its flexible temporal alignment capability ensures that correct attribution is achieved only when the anchor matches the target audio. Experimental results show that our method enables training-free attribution while preserving audio quality and achieving strong robustness.

PaperID: 3137

Authors:Zichen Song, Qixin Zhang, Ming Li, Yao Shu

Affiliations: Sungkyunkwan University, Nanyang Technological University, Guangming Laboratory, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Title: Optimization and Robustness-Informed Membership Inference Attacks for LLMs

Abstract:
The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has raised concerns over training data privacy. Membership Inference Attacks (MIA), aiming to identify whether specific data was used for training, pose significant privacy risks. However, existing MIA methods struggle to address the scale and complexity of modern LLMs. This paper introduces ORMIA, a novel MIA framework inspired by model optimization and input robustness. First, training data points are expected to exhibit smaller gradient norms due to optimization dynamics. Second, member samples show greater stability, with gradient norms being less sensitive to controlled input perturbations. OR-MIA leverages these principles by perturbing inputs, computing gradient norms, and using them as features for a robust classifier to distinguish members from non-members. Evaluations on LLMs (70M to 6B parameters) and various datasets demonstrate that OR-MIA outperforms existing methods, achieving over 90% accuracy. Our findings highlight a critical vulnerability in LLMs and underscore the need for improved privacy-preserving training paradigms.

PaperID: 3138

Authors:Chenan Wang, Daniel H. Shi, Haipeng Chen

Affiliations: William & Mary

Title: Re-SpS: A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Speculative Sampling

Abstract:
Inference time latency has remained an open challenge for real world applications of large language models (LLMs). Stateof-the-art (SOTA) speculative sampling (SpS) methods for LLMs, like EAGLE-3, use tree-based drafting to explore multiple candidate continuations in parallel. However, the hyperparameters controlling the tree structure are static, which limits flexibility and efficiency across diverse contexts and domains. We introduce Reinforcement learning for Speculative Sampling (Re-SpS), the first reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework for draft tree hyperparameter optimization. Re-SpS dynamically adjusts draft tree hyperparameters in real-time, learning context-aware policies that maximize generation speed by balancing speculative aggression with computational overhead. It leverages efficient state representations from target model hidden states and introduces multi-step action persistence for better context modeling. Evaluation results across five diverse benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over the SOTA method EAGLE-3, achieving up to 5.45x speedup over the backbone LLM and up to 1.12x speedup compared to EAGLE-3 across five diverse benchmarks, with no loss in output fidelity.

PaperID: 3139

Authors:Zhetao Xu, Xiaohua Wan, Le Li, Shuang Feng, Yiming Zhang, Fa Zhang, Bin Hu

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology

Title: ST-LLM: Spatial Transcriptomics Embedding with Large Language Models

Abstract:
Spatial transcriptomics provides unprecedented opportunities to analyze gene patterns while preserving spatial tissue architecture. However, traditional deep learning methods for spatial transcriptomics analysis face significant challenges in multimodal data integration, spatial dependency modeling, and biological knowledge incorporation, while existing large language models lack explicit spatial modeling capabilities for transcriptomic data. So we first present a Spatial Transcriptomics Embedding with Large Language Models (ST-LLM), a novel simple and effective approach that transforms intricate spatial graph structures into structured textual representations suitable for large language models (LLMs). ST-LLM dynamically constructs graph adjacency construction using reinforcement learning paradigms to adaptively optimize spatial relationships, converts the resulting graphs into hierarchical textual descriptions with spatial context, and leverages pre-trained semantic understanding to generate high-dimensional spatial-aware representations. Comprehensive experiments on 14 datasets demonstrate that ST-LLM achieves comparable or better performance than traditional model. ST-LLM shows that LLMs embeddings provide a new simple and effective path to encoding spatial transcriptomics biological knowledge.

PaperID: 3140

Authors:Peiru Yang, Yudong Li, Shiting Wang, Xinyi Liu, Haotian Gan, Xintian Li, Qingyu Gao, Yongfeng Huang

Affiliations: Tsinghua University

Title: OncoCoT: A Temporal-causal Chain-of-Thought Dataset for Oncologic Decision-Making

Abstract:
Long Chainof-Thought (CoT) reasoning has shown great promise in complex reasoning tasks, but its application to medical decision-making presents unique challenges. Unlike structured tasks relying on static verification frameworks, medical decision-making requires dynamic validation through longitudinal clinical outcomes, exhibiting temporal-causal dependencies that complicate the verification of reasoning processes. Therefore, we introduce a novel data construction framework specifically designed for medical decision-making. First, the framework analyzes real-world clinical cases to construct a timeline of medical events and identify critical decision points, including examination, diagnosis, and treatment. Subsequently, it employs a clinical causality-aware strategy to generate decision-making questions at the identified points, along with reasoning traces and corresponding answers. Finally, information drawn from future nodes serves as clinical logic-constrained criteria to re-evaluate and refine the soundness of the generated reasoning and responses. Building on this, we present OncoCoT, an oncologic decision-making dataset derived from clinical records over the past four years across eight common cancer types. Furthermore, we distill a subset of OncoCoT into a dedicated benchmark, OncoEval, to facilitate systematic evaluation of clinical reasoning capabilities in LLMs. Evaluation results show that existing state-of-the-art reasoning models, such as Deepseek-r1 and GPT-o3, exhibit limited capability in addressing clinical problems in OncoEval, highlighting the need for further improvement.

PaperID: 3141

Authors:Peiru Yang, Haoran Zheng, Yi Luo, Xinyi Liu, Jinrui Wang, Huili Wang, Xintian Li, Yongfeng Huang, Tao Qi

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: ShieldRAG: Safeguarding Retrieval-Augmented Generation from Untrusted Knowledge Bases

Abstract:
Open knowledge bases (e.g., websites) are widely adopted in RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) systems to provide supplementary knowledge (e.g., latest information). However, such sources inevitably contain biased or harmful content, and incorporating these untrusted contents into the RAG process introduces significant safety risks, including the degradation of LLM performance and the potential generation of harmful outputs. Recent studies have shown that this vulnerability can be further amplified by adversarial poisoning attacks specifically targeting the knowledge sources. Most existing methods primarily emphasize improving the accuracy and efficiency of RAG systems, usually overlooking these critical safety concerns. In this paper, we propose a safety-aware retrieval framework (ShieldRAG) designed to augment language model generation by jointly optimizing for both relevance and safety in the retrieved knowledge content. The core idea of ShieldRAG is to transfer the safety knowledge implicitly encoded in powerful LLMs into the retriever model through an adversarial knowledge alignment mechanism. This can empower the retriever with the safety awareness, and adapt to the diverse and unknown distribution of unsafe content encountered in practical scenarios. We evaluate ShieldRAG on seven real-world datasets using five widely-used LLMs and two state-of-the-art poisoning attack strategies. Experimental results show that our method substantially improves the robustness of RAG systems against unsafe knowledge sources, while maintaining competitive performance in terms of generation accuracy and efficiency.

PaperID: 3142

Authors:Tan Yue, Qiong Wu, Dongyan Zhao

Affiliations: Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University

Title: MARS: Multimodal Adaptive Reasoning Model for Avoiding Overthinking

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown advanced performance in visionlanguage tasks. However, existing multimodal reasoning models often suffer from excessive reasoning steps, leading to high computational costs and inefficiency. In this paper, we propose the Multimodal Adaptive Reasoning Model (MARS), which enables adaptive adjustment of the reasoning strategy based on question difficulty. Specifically, MARS adopts a three-stage training framework based on our constructed training dataset (MART): 1) CoT Masking Learning to enhance reasoning logicality by predicting masked reasoning steps. 2) Adaptive Reasoning Instruction Learning to train the model to skip or keep reasoning steps according to difficulty levels. 3) CoT Lightweight Reinforcement Learning with the Information Bottleneck Principle based GRPO algorithm to reduce CoT length while maintaining performance and generalizability. Results on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets show that MARS significantly reduces the CoT length (90.2% decrease) while improving accuracy (0.54%), outperforming existing SOTA open-source and proprietary MLLMs.

PaperID: 3143

Authors:Mingjie Zhang, Xiaoling Zhou, Yuxiao Luo, Yiyu Liu, Shikun Zhang, Wei Ye

Affiliations: Peking University

Title: ASKD: Reinforcement Learning-Style Knowledge Distillation with Quality-Adaptive Skewness

Abstract:
Knowledge distillation (KD) is a widely adopted technique for transferring the capabilities of large teacher models to smaller student models, thereby significantly reducing inference costs and memory consumption. However, existing KD methods are all constrained by an inherent greedy optimization objective, rooted in the assumption of teacher superiority: "Trust all teachergenerated outputs (TGOs)" and "Distrust any student-generated outputs (SGOs) unsupported by the teacher". We propose ASKD, a novel KD method with adaptive skewness determined by sample quality, refining this objective to: "Learn TGOs proportionally to their quality, and distrust only low-quality unsupported SGOs". ASKD comprises three key components: (1) A reinforcement learning-style optimization formulation to mitigate the inherent approximation bias in sample-based Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence approximations used by previous KD methods; (2) Well-designed quality supervision signals to map and achieve adaptive skewness in skewed KL loss, pioneering the usage of sample quality to adjust learning magnitudes; (3) A gradient-clip function on high-quality SGOs for findings that high-quality SGOs in KL loss fail to yield positive updates and even cause adverse effects on some samples. Extensive experiments indicate that ASKD builds high-performance student models across various tasks, including instruction following, mathematical reasoning, and code generation, outperforming state-of-the-art methods comprehensively and surpassing GRPO-like approaches that use advantages as multiplicative factors. We also provide detailed mathematical proofs demonstrating properties such as Lipschitz continuity of the update coefficient and uniform convergence of the loss function, ensuring theoretical rigor for key components of ASKD.

PaperID: 3144

Authors:Xin Zhang, Victor S. Sheng

Affiliations: Texas Tech University

Title: Token-Context Attention for NLI: An Alternative to Self-Attention

Abstract:
Despite the rapid progress in large language models (LLMs), even subbillion-scale systems perform at chance level on challenging natural language inference (NLI) benchmarks such as Adversarial Natural Language Inference (ANLI), while training larger models is often impractical due to limited computational resources. We address this parameter-efficiency bottleneck in NLI with a Complex-Vector Token Representation that explicitly decouples each token from its context, and a Token-Context Attention mechanism that updates each token based on the most informative contextual semantics. On ANLI, a 0.8B-parameter Token-Context Attention model achieves higher parameter efficiency (accuracy per parameter) than all 1B and comparable 0.8B self-attention baselines; it also suffers smaller performance degradation under Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) and Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) attacks and achieves the largest few-shot gains on SNLI and MNLI while exhibiting no significant degradation in ANLI accuracy after adaptation. These results suggest that explicitly disentangling token and context offers a viable alternative to standard self-attention for NLI tasks.

PaperID: 3145

Authors:Zijian Zheng, Tao Ai, Yonghe Lu

Affiliations: SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY

Title: Graph-augmented and Over-smoothing-resistant Contrastive Clustering for Short Text

Abstract:
Short texts present significant challenges for clustering due to semantic sparsity, limited contextual information, and ambiguous category boundaries. While recent studies incorporating contrastive learning and cluster structure optimization have improved performance, their reliance on augmented samples often introduces noise and weakens the capacity of pretrained language models to capture finegrained semantics. To address these issues, we propose a Graph-augmented and Over-smoothing-resistant Contrastive Clustering framework (GOCC). Specifically, GOCC constructs sentence-level and cluster-level graphs to capture local semantic similarity and global structural patterns, incorporating these signals into sentence representations to enhance representational quality and clustering suitability. Moreover, we introduce a contrastive mechanism based on intermediate layer representations within graph-augmented contrastive learning to alleviate semantic over-smoothing caused by deep networks. Finally, a target-distribution-driven clustering optimization strategy is employed to leverage high-confidence samples in guiding cluster assignments. Experimental results on several benchmark short text datasets demonstrate that GOCC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of clustering accuracy and normalized mutual information.

PaperID: 3146

Authors:Huachi Zhou, Yujing Zhang, Hao Chen, Qinggang Zhang, Qijie Shen, Feiran Huang, Xiao Huang

Affiliations: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, City University of Macau, Alibaba Group, Jinan University

Title: LLM Collaborative Filtering: User-Item Graph as New Language

Abstract:
In collaborative filtering, learning effective embeddings for users and items from interaction data remains a central challenge. While recent efforts leverage large language models (LLMs) to enhance collaborative filtering, two critical limitations persist: (1) Efficiency: LLMbased inference is significantly slower than traditional embedding-based search; and (2) Topological Modeling: LLMs struggle to capture graph structures, which are essential for modeling multi-order user-item interactions. To address these limitations, we propose New Language Collaborative Filtering (NLCF), a framework that aligns LLMs with collaborative filtering by conceptualizing user-item graphs as new languages. This approach is based on two key insights: (1) LLMs excel at mastering new languages when trained on suitable corpora, and (2) the empirical conditional probability between tokens in corpora converges to the transition probabilities between nodes in graphs. NLCF translates user-item graphs into corpora, where users and items are treated as tokens. These corpora are used to fine-tune LLMs, and the learned representations are aggregated to construct user and item embeddings that encode multi-order interactions. Unlike methods that deploy LLMs for inference, NLCF distills LLM knowledge learned from corpora into compact embeddings, enabling both efficient training and real-time inference. The framework has been deployed on a billion-scale e-commerce platform for several months. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NLCF outperforms traditional graph CF models and LLM-based baselines while achieving significant training and inference efficiency improvement over LLM-based baselines.

PaperID: 3147

Authors:Xunlei Chen, Jinyu Guo, Yuang Li, Zhaokun Wang, Yi Gong, Jie Zou, Jiwei Wei, Wenhong Tian

Affiliations: School of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, School of Computer Science and Engineering

Title: ALTER: Asymmetric LoRA for Token-Entropy-Guided Unlearning of LLMs

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have advanced to encompass extensive knowledge across diverse domains. Yet controlling what a LLMs should not know is important for ensuring alignment and thus safe use. However, effective unlearning in LLMs is difficult due to the fuzzy boundary between knowledge retention and forgetting. This challenge is exacerbated by entangled parameter spaces from continuous multidomain training, often resulting in collateral damage, especially under aggressive unlearning strategies. Furthermore, the computational overhead required to optimize State-of-the-Art (SOTA) models with billions of parameters poses an additional barrier. In this work, we present ALTER, a lightweight unlearning framework for LLMs to address both the challenges of knowledge entanglement and unlearning efficiency. ALTER operates through two phases: (I) high entropy tokens are captured and learned via the shared A matrix in LoRA, followed by (II) an asymmetric LoRA architecture that achieves a specified forgetting objective by parameter isolation and unlearning tokens within the target subdomains. Serving as a new research direction for achieving unlearning via token-level isolation in the asymmetric framework. ALTER achieves SOTA performance on TOFU, WMDP, and MUSE benchmarks with over 95% forget quality and shows minimal side effects through preserving foundational tokens. By decoupling unlearning from LLMs' billion-scale parameters, this framework delivers excellent efficiency while preserving over 90% of model utility, exceeding baseline preservation rates of 47.8-83.6%.

PaperID: 3148

Authors:Yehan Sun, Rongrong Ni, Chuangchuang Tan, Huan Liu, Wenhao Ni, Renshuai Tao, Yao Zhao

Affiliations: Institute of Information Science, Beijing Jiaotong University Visual Intelligence +X International Cooperation Joint Laboratory of MOE

Title: RAIN: Redundancy-Aware Latent Injection for Quality-Preserving Image Watermarking

Abstract:
Diffusion models have gained widespread adoption due to their ability to generate highly realistic images, yet their rapid proliferation also raises security and traceability concerns. To address issues of ownership verification and accountability, current watermarking techniques primarily focus on embedding information into the internal mechanisms of generative pipelines. Nevertheless, many existing methods inject watermarks directly into latent representations without adequately exploiting inherent redundancies or perceptual properties in latent space, leading to degraded image quality. In this work, we conduct a systematic analysis aimed at quantifying differentiated redundancies present within latent space, and further propose a novel RedundancyAware Latent Injection framework RAIN based on the above analysis. Specifically, a redundancy‑aware adaptive watermark fusion method is introduced to preserve image quality, which utilizes the differentiated redundancy distribution to guide adaptive watermark allocation in different perception tolerance regions. Moreover, a distribution alignment initialization strategy is designed to align the watermark’s initial distribution to the latent prior, reducing initialization bias and improving convergence efficiency. Comprehensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that RAIN achieves state-of-the-art performance by delivering superior perceptual quality under high-capacity watermarking scenarios.

PaperID: 3149

Authors:Zichong Wang, Tongliang Liu, Wenbin Zhang

Affiliations: Florida International University, University of Sydney

Title: GUIC: Certified Graph Unlearning with Individual Fairness Guarantees

Abstract:
Graph unlearning, motivated by emerging right to be forgotten regulations, seeks to remove the influence of specific subsets of data (e.g., noisy, poisoned, or privacysensitive data) from pre-trained graph learning models. While much attention has focused on the technical feasibility of unlearning, its implications for fairness remain largely unexamined. To address this critical gap, this paper introduces GUIC, the first framework that jointly ensures certified unlearning and individual fairness in graph-based models, introducing a novel perspective on responsible model updates in graph unlearning. Specifically, GUIC employs a principled distance-based rule to pinpoint individual biases arising from node removals and applies a computationally efficient certificate-driven update, preserving the local Lipschitz constraints crucial for individual fairness. Different from computationally expensive retraining or fairness-regularized optimization methods, GUIC provides a lightweight yet verifiable alternative with theoretical fairness guarantees. Experiments on multiple real-world datasets show that our method consistently surpasses existing approaches across key performance metrics.

PaperID: 3150

Authors:Francesco Doria, Francesco Percassi, Marco Maratea, Mauro Vallati

Affiliations: Università della Calabria, University of Huddersfield

Title: A Domain-specific Heuristic for PDDL+-based Traffic Signal Optimisation

Abstract:
Optimising traffic signals is crucial for mitigating urban congestion, and automated planning, particularly with PDDL+, has shown promise for realworld deployment due to its flexibility and centralised perspective. While existing PDDL+ models guarantee deployability on current infrastructure, they face significant limitations: reliance on domain-independent heuristics restricts their applicability and scalability, leading to slow solution generation and unclear plan quality. To overcome these challenges and unlock the widespread adoption of planning-based traffic control, we introduce hCAFE, a domain-specific heuristic for PDDL+-based traffic signal optimisation. Unlike prior approaches, hCAFE is designed to work effectively across multiple problem encodings, addressing a key limitation of traditional domain-specific heuristics. We demonstrate its capabilities on real-world data from a region of the UK, showing significant improvements in solution generation time and search space exploration. Our evaluation also compares the strategies generated by hCAFE against historical data from existing traffic control systems and a non-deployable benchmark, confirming the high quality of the resulting plans.

PaperID: 3151

Authors:Markus Fritzsche, Daniel Gnad, Mikhail Gruntov, Alexander Shleyfman

Affiliations: Linköping University, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Bar-Ilan University

Title: Managing Infinite Abstractions in Numeric Pattern Database Heuristics

Abstract:
Pattern Database (PDB) heuristics are an established approach in optimal classical planning that is used in stateof-the-art planning systems. PDBs are based on projections, which induce an abstraction of the original problem. Computing all cheapest plans in the abstraction yields an admissible heuristic. Despite their success, PDBs have only recently been adapted to numeric planning, which extends classical planning with numeric state variables. The difficulty in supporting numeric variables is that the induced abstractions, in contrast to classical planning, are generally infinite. Thus, they cannot be explored exhaustively to compute a heuristic. The foundational work that introduced numeric PDBs employed a simple approach that computes only a finite part of the abstraction. We analyze this framework and identify cases where it necessarily results in an uninformed heuristic. We propose several improvements over the basic variant of numeric PDBs that lead to enhanced heuristic accuracy.

PaperID: 3152

Authors:Yiwei Gao, Jialin Zhang, Zhijie Zhang

Affiliations: State Key Lab of Processors, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing China, Center for Applied Mathematics of Fujian Province, School of Mathematics and Statistics, Fuzhou University

Title: Improved Fully Dynamic Submodular Maximization Under Matroid Constraints

Abstract:
This paper studies submodular maximization over matroids in the fully dynamic setting, where elements of an underlying ground set undergo sequential insertions and deletions. The goal is to maintain an approximate optimal solution for the current element set with a low amortized update time. For monotone submodular functions, we propose a dynamic algorithm achieving a (0.3178 epsilon)-approximation using O-tilde(k^3) expected amortized queries, where k is the rank of the matroid constraint. Furthermore, we extend our approach to the non-monotone submodular maximization setting, obtaining a (0.1921 - epsilon)-approximation with the same update complexity. Both algorithms improve upon the best known approximation guarantees, which are (0.25 - epsilon) for the monotone case and (0.0932 - epsilon) for the non-monotone case.

PaperID: 3153

Authors:Mohammad Mahdi Omati, Yasin Salajeghe, Mahshad Moradi, Arash Amini

Affiliations: Sharif University of Technology

Title: Exact Combinatorial Multi-Class Graph Cuts for Semi-Supervised Learning

Abstract:
Semisupervised learning (SSL) on graphs is critical in applications where labeled data are scarce and costly, yet existing graph-based methods often degrade under extreme label sparsity or class imbalance, yielding trivial or unstable solutions. We introduce CombCut, the first exact combinatorial optimization framework for multi-class graph-based semi-supervised learning that operates directly on binary one-hot assignments, without any convex relaxation or heuristic volume constraints. By employing a minorization–maximization (MM) scheme, CombCut transforms each step into a structured linear assignment problem solved efficiently via network-flow algorithms. Total unimodularity guarantees integral iterates, and our theoretical analysis establishes both monotonic ascent of the true discrete objective and convergence of every limit point to a Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) stationary solution of the original combinatorial problem. Our approach requires no hyperparameter tuning and scales near-linearly in the number of vertices. Empirical evaluation on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10 with as few as 1–5 labels per class shows that CombCut excels in worst-case labeling scenarios, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art graph-SSL baselines and yielding more stable and accurate label propagation under severe supervision constraints.

PaperID: 3154

Authors:Aofan Liu, Haoxuan Li, Hongjian Xing, Yuguo Yin, Zijun Li, Yiyan Qi

Affiliations: IDEA Research, Peking University, Tsinghua University, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, International Digital Economy Academy

Title: Semantics-Preserving Adversarial Attacks on Event-Driven Stock Prediction Models

Abstract:
Adversarial Security of Financial Language Models (ASFLM) is critical as Large Language Models (LLMs) pervade highstakes financial applications. However, LLMs face two key challenges: their vulnerability to damaging adversarial attacks and the prevalent research gap concerning robust defenses against sophisticated, semantically coherent threats. To address these, we first theoretically analyze the relationship between discrete and continuous adversarial optimization, proving the continuous optimum provides a lower bound for the discrete. This foundation supports our novel two-stage framework, ChameleonAttack. It employs Adaptive Latent-space Optimization (ALO) for potent adversarial token discovery, followed by a Semantic-Translation Module (STM) module to generate fluent, coherent, and natural-sounding adversarial text. This dual approach aims to maximize attack impact while ensuring high linguistic quality and semantic integrity for evasion. Evaluated on state-of-the-art financial LLMs (e.g., FinBERT) and standard benchmarks (e.g., Financial PhraseBank), ChameleonAttack achieves a high Attack Success Rate (ASR) of 93.4%. These results highlight significant practical vulnerabilities and underscore the urgent need for robust defense mechanisms in the financial domain.

PaperID: 3155

Authors:Azza Fadhel, Yassine Chemingui, Minh Hoang, Aryan Deshwal, Trong Nghia Hoang, Jana Doppa

Affiliations: Washington State University, Princeton University, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

Title: Nanoporous Materials Discovery via Search Bias-Guided Surrogate Modeling

Abstract:
Nanoporous materials (NPMs) are suitable for solving some of the society's biggest challenges including carbon capture and conversion, storing hydrogen and methane, and sensing gases. The key challenge in discovering highperforming NPMs for a target application is that making and evaluating candidate NPMs requires performing resource-expensive wet-lab experiments. We consider the problem of discovering NPMs using existing experimental data of NPM evaluations. The overall goal is to find better NPMs than the best NPMs from the past experimental data. A simple approach is to create a surrogate model to match the objective values on the given dataset and employ it to score candidate NPMs to discover optimized NPMs. However, this surrogate model will fail because it does not have the appropriate search bias for the goal of optimization. To address this challenge, we propose a novel surrogate modeling approach that combines value matching loss with an optimization bias as regularizer. The key idea is to algorithmically realize search bias is to mimic the search behavior of monotonically increasing sequences of NPMs from the given dataset. Experiments on multiple real-world NPM discovery tasks demonstrate that our proposed surrogate model discovers significantly better NPMs than baselines including value matching surrogate model and one-step Bayesian optimization.

PaperID: 3156

Authors:Shuyan Huang, Ying Zheng, Xiaoli Zeng, Zitao Liu

Affiliations: TAL Education Group, Guangdong Institute of Smart Education, Jinan University

Title: A Compress-Expand Framework for Automatic Lesson Plan Generation

Abstract:
Creating a wellstructured lesson plan is essential for improving classroom efficiency, yet it is often a labor-intensive process. Recently, many studies have leveraged large language models (LLMs) to generate lesson plans automatically. However, existing methods heavily rely on LLMs that are pre-trained on large-scale universal corpora, which often lack critical educational theory and textbook-specific information. This can lead to inconsistencies and misalignments with textbook content. To address these challenges, we propose CE-LessonPlan, a novel compress-expand framework to generate lesson plans by effectively combining external lesson plan references and textbook information. The framework consists of two key components: a compressor, which synthesizes multiple retrieved references into a cohesive document, and an expander, which integrates textbook-specific information with the parametric knowledge of LLMs to produce another enriched lesson plan. The outputs of the compressor and expander are then seamlessly integrated to create a comprehensive golden context, further enhancing the lesson plan generation process with LLMs. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that CE-LessonPlan outperforms existing methods for generating lesson plans.

PaperID: 3157

Authors:Pengfei Jia, Jianghong Ma, Baoquan Zhang, Kenghong Lin, Xinyu Zhang, Chuyao Luo, Xutao Li, Yunming Ye

Affiliations: Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Internet Information Collaboration, Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: Satellite-Text-Prompted Large Language Model for Photovoltaic Power Forecasting

Abstract:
Photovoltaic (PV) power forecasting is critical for the operation of solar power plants and the coordination of energy within power grids. This work aims to predict future PV power time series by leveraging multimodal data. While recent studies have incorporated numerical modalities such as satellite image sequences and numerical weather prediction (NWP) time series, they often overlook textual modalities—such as the spatiotemporal context of PV plants—and the potential of pretrained large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we build upon existing numerical inputs and further explore the use of spatio-temporal text prompts, generated based on plant coordinates and forecast start time, to enhance the forecasting process. We propose PV-LLM, a satellite-text-prompted framework that integrates a pretrained LLM to improve PV power forecasting. The framework consists of three key components: Text Prompt Construction, Modality-Specific Encoding, and Adaptive Prompt Tuning. First, the Text Prompt Construction module generates spatio-temporal prompts that offer high-level semantic guidance. Next, the Modality-Specific Encoding module encodes each modality according to its unique characteristics, capturing modality-specific patterns while managing varying context lengths. Finally, the Adaptive Prompt Tuning module fine-tunes the LLM to integrate multimodal embeddings, while an adaptive gating mechanism retains its pretrained knowledge. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on a real-world dataset containing multiple PV plants. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 3158

Authors:Bin Deng, Huifang Ma, Ruijia Zhang, Meihuizi Jia, Rui Bing

Affiliations: Northwest Normal University

Title: Topology-Enhanced and Label Correlation-Aware Model for Protein-Protein Interaction Prediction

Abstract:
ProteinProtein Interactions (PPIs) prediction is crucial for understanding cellular functions and disease mechanisms. Existing deep learning–based methods primarily rely on direct interaction within the PPI network to update protein representations. However, (1) such networks overlook the potential associations between functionally similar proteins, limiting the smoothing capability of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in learning representations for similar nodes. (2) Additionally, most approaches fail to adequately model the latent dependencies among interaction types (edge labels), which hinders their performance in PPI prediction tasks. To address these limitations, we propose TELC-PPI, a topology-enhanced and label correlation-aware model for protein-protein interactions prediction. Specifically, TELC-PPI first identifies similar proteins by leveraging both the topological information of the PPI network and the label distributions of nodes, constructing similarity edges. Then, it incorporates label co-occurrence statistics into the learning of label embeddings. Experimental results on multiple datasets and under various data split settings demonstrate that TELC-PPI significantly outperforms existing methods, validating the effectiveness of our model design.

PaperID: 3159

Authors:Shiyue Huang, Yuchen Su, Hongbo Liu, Zikang Ding, Xuewan He, Yanzhi Ren, Haitao Jia

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Towards Distance-Invariant Radio Frequency Fingerprinting via Augmented Unsupervised Learning

Abstract:
Radio Frequency Fingerprinting (RFF) exploits inherent hardwarelevel imperfections of wireless transmitters as unclonable identifiers for device identification. These unique signatures, concealed in transmitted signals, inevitably experience complex distortions during wireless propagation (i.e., coupled with ambient noise and channel fading), making it extremely challenging for reliable extraction. Despite substantial research efforts dedicated to advancing effective fingerprint extraction techniques, current approaches still struggle in handling fingerprint robustness under distance variations, leading to severe SNR fluctuations and complex multipath effects. To address this gap, we propose the first unsupervised framework for distance-invariant radio frequency fingerprinting, eliminating dependence on labeled target domain data. Specifically, we first preprocess raw RF samples by confining them within a specified variation range and filtering noisy high-frequency components while avoiding aliasing. For source domain data, we then propose a set of physics-inspired data augmentation techniques designed to emulate realistic wireless signal propagation effects. Building on this, we introduce a dual alignment contrastive learning method to explicitly decouple identity-discriminative features, ensuring the model focuses on device-specific traits. Furthermore, we incorporate a pseudo-labeling-based domain adaptation module to refine the model for the unlabeled target domain, enhancing its generalization to unseen distances. Extensive experiments on public datasets show that our method achieves the identification accuracy outperforming state-of-the-art approaches by 40%, while maintaining computational efficiency suitable for edge deployment.

PaperID: 3160

Authors:Jiyue Jiang, Yanyu Chen, Qingchuan Zhang, Jiayi Li, Xiangyu Shi, Chang Zhou, Ziqian Lin, Jiuming Wang, Dongchen He, Liang Hong, Qintong Li, Pengan Chen, Jiayang Chen, Xinrui Zhang, Jiao Yuan, Tianqing Zhang, Yu Li

Affiliations: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, The University of Hong Kong, Guangzhou National Laboratory Guangzhou Medical University, Hangzhou Institute of Medicine, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: RMSAGen: Integrating Multiple Sequence Alignment for Function RNA Design

Abstract:
Biological sequences, including RNAs and proteins, share similarities with natural languages, enabling the application of advanced language models to various biological tasks. However, due to its flexibility and lack of experimental data, RNA is a particularly challenging biological ``language'' compared to other biological sequences like proteins. RNA multiple sequence alignments (MSAs), which align evolutionarily related RNA sequences, can greatly enhance RNA biology modeling, as evidenced by their significant roles in structure prediction and function annotation. This raises the question of whether RNA MSAs can also benefit RNA design, which remains unexplored. This paper introduces RMSAGen, a model comprising RMSAEncoder and RMSA-Decoder, that leverages MSAs to design functional RNA sequences. RMSA-Encoder effectively extracts MSA features, enhancing performance in functional prediction and solvent accessibility prediction tasks and supporting RMSA-Decoder in accurate RNA generation. RMSAGen can design RNA sequences that effectively bind to target RNA-binding proteins, and the design performance improves with an increasing number of sequences. In addition, the ribozymes designed with structural features by RMSAGen show strong computational metrics and exhibit biological activity during gel electrophoresis. These results highlight the effectiveness of RMSAGen, establishing it as a powerful tool and a new direction for RNA design.

PaperID: 3161

Authors:Hao Li, Andrey Bogdanov

Affiliations: Qingdao Innovation and Development Center, Harbin Engineering University, Qingdao Shandong, China School of Physics and Engineering, ITMO University, St. Petersburg Russia

Title: MetaDiT: Enabling Fine-grained Constraints in High-degree-of Freedom Metasurface Design

Abstract:
Metasurfaces are ultrathin, engineered materials composed of nanostructures that manipulate light in ways unattainable by natural materials. Recent advances have leveraged computational optimization, machine learning, and deep learning to automate their design. However, existing approaches exhibit two fundamental limitations: (1) they often restrict the model to generating only a subset of design parameters, and (2) they rely on heavily downsampled spectral targets, which compromises both the novelty and accuracy of the resulting structures. The core challenge lies in developing a generative model capable of exploring a large, unconstrained design space while precisely capturing the intricate physical relationships between material parameters and their highresolution spectral responses. In this paper, we introduce MetaDiT, a novel framework for high-fidelity metasurface design that addresses these limitations. Our approach leverages a robust spectrum encoder pretrained with contrastive learning, providing strong conditional guidance to a Diffusion Transformer-based backbone. Experiments demonstrate that MetaDiT outperforms existing baselines in spectral accuracy, we further validate our method through extensive ablation studies.

PaperID: 3162

Authors:Nuo Li, Yuan Xiong, Chengliang Liu, Jie Wen, Chao Huang

Affiliations: School of Automation, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, School of Cyber Science and Technology, Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence in Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: Detecting Fake News in Short Videos Through Multi-View Aggregation

Abstract:
The increasing prominence of short video platforms has positioned them as a primary channel for public awareness of current events, while also facilitating the widespread dissemination of fake news, thus highlighting the critical need for automated detection technologies. In contrast to fake news confined to text and images, short video news encompasses multiple modalities and extensive information, presenting heightened challenges. Most existing research emphasizes the analysis of news content or user comments alone, while overlooking the crucial role of publishers, leading to poor model performance when handling fake news lacking obvious false signals. Therefore, we propose a Publisher Profiling Module to identify new false signals. To enable a more comprehensive detection of misinformation, we design a MultiView Aggregation (MVA) model, simultaneously evaluating news from three distinct perspectives: sentiment analysis, content understanding, and publisher profiling. Late fusion is applied at the decision level to leverage the complementary strengths of these perspectives, addressing the limitations of single-view methods. Our experiments conducted on the FakeSV and FVC datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method.

PaperID: 3163

Authors:Xuyang Li, Jianwu Fang, Lin Li, Boyuan Chen, Guangliang Li, Jianru Xue

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, Nanyang Technological University, Ocean University of China

Title: Guided Distillation and Risk Adaptive Evolution for Multi-Robot Navigation

Abstract:
Recent advancements in multirobot navigation have explored methods that combine Large Language Models (LLMs) for tasks like scene understanding or high-level decision-making. However, these approaches face challenges with high inference latency and potential hallucinations. To address these challenges, we propose a knowledge-driven Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework, GUIDER, that utilizes an LLM in two different offline roles. First, we leverage the LLM as an offline knowledge source. Its expertise is distilled into a compact model, which is applied only when the RL agent is uncertain about its own value estimates and the model itself is confident in its prediction. Additionally, we utilize the LLM as an offline semantic engine. This process translates the LLM's high-level understanding of situational risk into a dynamic adjustment of the RL agent's behavioral style, evolving a function that optimally balances conservative and aggressive actions. We conduct extensive experiments in both terrestrial and maritime settings. Across all maritime scenarios (3–12 robots), GUIDER improves the task success rate and reduces the collision rate significantly compared to the state-of-the-art RL-based multi-robot navigation methods.

PaperID: 3164

Authors:Zhibin Ni, Hai Wan, Xibin Zhao

Affiliations: School of Software, Tsinghua University

Title: Interpretable and Robust Behavior Abstraction via Environment-Disentangled Heterogeneous Graph

Abstract:
To identify the root causes of attacks, behavior abstraction (BA) converts audit logs into multiple behavior graphs and finds similar ones, which has proven effective in bridging the semantic gap and reducing manual workload. Existing works fail to achieve both interpretability and generalization, while also exhibiting limited robustness when facing adversarial attacks. In this paper, we give the first attempt at interpretable and robust behavior abstraction and propose a novel method called EnvironmentDisentangled Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (EDHGNN). Motivated by Information Bottleneck (IB) principle, we propose a Heterogeneous Subgraph Disentanglement (HSD) module to disentangle label-relevant and environmental subgraphs through single optimization. We also introduce an Adapted Graph-Level Attention (AGLA) module to extract minimal sufficient representations from label-relevant subgraphs, a Label-Guided Graph Reconstructor (LGGR) to maximize environmental information coverage via reconstruction, and a Relevance Discriminator (RD) to enhance disentanglement quality. Additionally, we construct a new dataset contains ground-truth explanations and 4,160 behavior graphs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EDHGNN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of interpretability and robustness against adversarial attacks.

PaperID: 3165

Authors:Jujie Wang, Kangfeng Zheng, Bin Wu, Chunhua Wu, Yulin Yao, Jiaqi Gao, Minjiao Yang

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: CTX-Coder: Cross-Attention Architectures Empower LLMs for Long-Context Vulnerability Detection

Abstract:
Software vulnerabilities have increased sharply, underscoring the growing urgency for effective detection methods. Although large language model (LLM) based methods have shown promise in this task, current stateof-the-art LLM approaches struggle with functions that have long contexts. In this paper, we propose CTX-Coder, a context-enhanced vulnerability detection framework that enables LLMs to selectively focus on relevant contextual functions. To achieve this, we represent the contextual functions as embeddings and integrate them with the target code via cross-attention, thereby enhancing the model's ability to capture contextual information. Furthermore, to equip the model with the ability to recognize these embedding features, we propose a two-stage pretraining pipeline. We also introduce a new dataset, CTX-VUL, which addresses the limitations of existing datasets that either lack contextual information for vulnerable functions or are not publicly available. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CTX-Coder (10B) significantly outperforms baseline models with even larger parameters, such as Qwen2.5-14B and SecGPT. As the input code length increases, CTX-Coder’s F1 score drops by only 5.01%, while other models degrade by 25% to 41.5%, showing strong robustness to long-context scenarios and the effectiveness of our design.

PaperID: 3166

Authors:Peng Xu, Yapeng Li, Tinghuan Chen, Tsung-Yi Ho, Bei Yu

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, School of Science and Engineering

Title: KCLNet: Electrically Equivalence-Oriented Graph Representation Learning for Analog Circuits

Abstract:
Digital circuit representation learning has made remarkable progress in electronic design automation, effectively supporting critical tasks such as testability analysis and logic reasoning. However, representation learning for analog circuits remains challenging due to their continuous electrical characteristics compared to the discrete states of digital circuits. This paper presents a direct current (DC) electrically equivalentoriented analog representation learning framework, named KCLNet. We will open-source the dataset and code upon publication. It comprises an asynchronous graph neural network structure with electrically-simulated message passing and a representation learning method inspired by Kirchhoff's Current Law (KCL). This method maintains the orderliness of the circuit embedding space by enforcing the equality of the sum of outgoing and incoming current embeddings at each node, which significantly enhances the generalization ability of circuit embeddings. KCLNet offers a novel and effective solution for analog circuit representation learning with electrical constraints preserved. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves significant performance in a variety of downstream tasks, e.g., analog circuit classification, subcircuit detection, and circuit edit distance prediction.

PaperID: 3167

Authors:Jiang Zhu, Yulin Jin, Qingqing Ye, Zhibiao Guo, Kun Fang, Ruochen Du, Yingnan Zhao, Haibo Hu

Affiliations: Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: DIFT: Protecting Contrastive Learning Against Data Poisoning Backdoor Attacks

Abstract:
Contrastive learning (CL) is a popular learning paradigm that excels in extracting meaningful representations from unlabeled data. Recent studies have shown that CL is highly vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Current defenses against backdoor attacks in CL are primarily reactive and posttraining. That is, the detection and elimination of backdoors are executed in the deployment phase of a given well-trained model. However, these post-training defenses are usually prone to degrading model utility and resource-intensive, causing that the backdoor detection and elimination from a fully-trained model is quite challenging. To address this issue, we argue for a fundamental perspective, i.e., integrating the defense into the model's training phase, and propose a novel framework to mitigate the backdoor in CL, namely Density-Based Identification and Fine-Tuning (DIFT). Specifically, DIFT identifies potential poisoned samples during the early training phase via detecting embeddings with abnormal poisoning characteristic in the feature space. Then, to remove backdoors and preserve model utility, the detected poisoned samples are leveraged to fine-tune the model, and the remaining clean samples are further involved into training the model after the fine-tuning. DIFT, as a proactive training-time defense, avoids the problematic backdoor removal and the high computational cost associated with those reactive post-training methods. We empirically evaluate DIFT on various CL algorithms against backdoor attack. Experimental results demonstrate that our method exhibits promising defense effectiveness while maintaining model's clean data accuracy.

PaperID: 3168

Authors:Honglin Cao, Shuai Wang, Zijian Zhou, Ammar Belatreche, Wenjie Wei, Yu Liang, Yu Yang, Rui Xi, Malu Zhang, Haizhou Li

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Northumbria University, Shenzhen Loop Area Institute The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen) National University of Singapore

Title: Towards Training-Free and Accurate ANN-to-SNN Conversion via Activation-Aware Redistribution

Abstract:
Conversion represents an effective approach for obtaining lowpower models by transforming Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) into event-driven Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) without additional training. However, existing training-free conversion methods often incur substantial conversion errors. Here, we first reveal that these conversion errors primarily arise from a distributional mismatch, as the activation distributions of ANNs exhibit channel-wise shifts and scaling, whereas spike rates lack corresponding channel-specific characteristics. To address this limitation, we propose Adaptive Integrate-and-Fire (AIF) neurons with channel-specific thresholds and membrane-potential offsets that dynamically adjust spike rates. These parameters are optimized to jointly minimize conversion errors and maximize information entropy, enabling AIF neurons to capture the activation distribution characteristics of the original ANN. Moreover, AIF neurons can be seamlessly integrated into Transformer architectures with only negligible additional computational cost. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple vision and natural language processing benchmarks, in particular attaining a notable top-1 accuracy of 85.52% on ImageNet-1K.

PaperID: 3169

Authors:Jiaqi Ding, Tingting Dan, Zhixuan Zhou, Guorong Wu

Affiliations: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Title: SyncBrain: Exploring Brain Functional Dynamics Through Neural Oscillatory Synchronization

Abstract:
Neural coupling is a fundamental mechanism in neuroscience that facilitates the emergence of cognitive functions through dynamic interactions and synchronization among distributed brain regions. Inspired by this principle, we pose the question: Might the biological mechanism of neural oscillatory synchronization inspire the feature representation learning for neuroscience? By addressing this question through the Kuramoto model, renowned for simulating oscillatory dynamics, we present a novel physicsinformed deep model, `SyncBrain`, it models brain regions as interacting oscillatory units and simulates their temporal dynamics and synchronization patterns to distinguish cognitive states. Furthermore, inspired by the brain's inherent ability to dynamically attend to critical temporal information, we incorporate an adaptive control module that introduces an attention-like mechanism to guide information flow. We evaluate our model on multiple functional neuroimaging datasets, it demonstrates promising performance and enhanced interpretability in both cognitive state decoding and early disease diagnosis, outperforming existing computational methods. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of neural oscillatory mechanisms in shaping robust and interpretable machine learning models for neuroscience applications.

PaperID: 3170

Authors:Kaixi Tian, Shengjia Zhao, Yuhan Zhang, Shan Yu

Affiliations: Laboratory of Brain Atlas and Brain-inspired Intelligence, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences School of Future Technology, CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Chinese Academy of Sciences School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Multi-dimensional Neural Decoding with Orthogonal Representations for Brain-Computer Interfaces

Abstract:
Current braincomputer interfaces primarily decode single motor variables, limiting natural control requiring simultaneous multi-dimensional extraction. We introduce Multi-dimensional Neural Decoding (MND), a task that simultaneously extracts multiple motor variables (direction, position, velocity, acceleration) from single neural population recordings. MND faces two key challenges: cross-task interference when decoding correlated motor dimensions from shared cortical representations, and generalization issues across sessions, subjects, and paradigms. To address these challenges, we propose OrthoSchema, a multi-task framework inspired by cortical orthogonal subspace organization and cognitive schema reuse. OrthoSchema enforces representation orthogonality to eliminate cross-task interference and employs selective feature reuse transfer for few-shot cross-session, subject and paradigm adaptation. Experiments on macaque motor cortex datasets demonstrate that OrthoSchema significantly improves decoding accuracy in cross-session, subject and paradigm generalization tasks, with larger performance improvements when fine-tuning samples are limited. Ablation studies confirm the synergistic effects of all components are crucial, with OrthoSchema effectively modeling cross-task features and capturing session relationships for robust transfer. Our results provide new insights into scalable and robust neural decoding for real-world BCI applications.

PaperID: 3171

Authors:Hao-Long Yin, Jian-Ming Zhang, Ren-Jie Dai, Wei-Long Zheng, Qinyu Lv, Zhenghui Yi, Bao-Liang Lu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, School of Medicine, China Shanghai Mental Health Center

Title: A Multimodal EEG-Eye Movement Model for Automatic Depression Detection

Abstract:
Depression is a prevalent mental health disorder characterized by persistent sadness and a diminished interest in daily activities, early detection of depression facilitates timely intervention, mitigating its adverse effects. Electroencephalography (EEG) signals and eye movements are emerging as promising biomarkers for depression detection due to their noninvasive nature and cost-effectiveness. Nevertheless, existing studies suffer from methodological constraints, including low specificity, insufficient sample sizes, limited generalizability, and difficulties in large-scale replication, which collectively undermine their clinical utility. To address these challenges, we collected a large-scale depression dataset comprising EEG and eye movements from 1,060 individuals diagnosed with depression and 1,308 healthy controls. To efficiently leverage multimodal data for automatic depression detection, we propose the EEG-Eye Movements Model (E2Mo). E2Mo employs modality-specific encoders to extract discriminative multi-view features from each modality and incorporates a mixture-of-modality-experts architecture with multi pretraining tasks to achieve efficient and robust modality alignment and fusion. Our approach achieves a 70.06% balanced accuracy by leveraging multi-modal data, demonstrating the effectiveness of integrating EEG signals and eye movements for automatic depression detection.

PaperID: 3172

Authors:Hongli Chen, Pengcheng Fang, Yuxia Chen, Yingxuan Ren, Jing Hao, Fangfang Tang, Xiaohao Cai, Shanshan Shan, Feng Liu

Affiliations: The University of Queensland, University of Southampton, Chengdu University of Technology, National University of Singapore, University of Hong Kong, Soochow University

Title: HiFi-Mamba: Dual-Stream ?-Laplacian Enhanced Mamba for High-Fidelity MRI Reconstruction

Abstract:
Reconstructing highfidelity MR images from undersampled k-space data remains a challenging problem in MRI. While Mamba variants for vision tasks offer promising long-range modeling capabilities with linear-time complexity, their direct application to MRI reconstruction inherits two key limitations: (1) insensitivity to high-frequency anatomical details; and (2) reliance on redundant multi-directional scanning. To address these limitations, we introduce High-Fidelity Mamba (HiFi-Mamba), a novel dual-stream Mamba-based architecture comprising stacked ?-Laplacian (WL) and HiFi-Mamba blocks. Specifically, the WL block performs fidelity-preserving spectral decoupling, producing complementary low- and high-frequency streams. This separation enables the HiFi-Mamba block to focus on low-frequency structures, enhancing global feature modeling. Concurrently, the HiFi-Mamba block selectively integrates high-frequency features through adaptive state-space modulation, preserving comprehensive spectral details. To eliminate the scanning redundancy, the HiFi-Mamba block adopts a streamlined unidirectional traversal strategy that preserves long-range modeling capability with improved computational efficiency. Extensive experiments on standard MRI reconstruction benchmarks demonstrate that HiFi-Mamba consistently outperforms state-of-the-art CNN-based, Transformer-based, and other Mamba-based models in reconstruction accuracy while maintaining a compact and efficient model design.

PaperID: 3173

Authors:Kanghao Chen, Zixin Zhang, Hangyu Li, Lin Wang, Zeyu Wang

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Nanyang Technological University

Title: EvDiff3D: Event-Aware Diffusion Repair for High-Fidelity Event-Based 3D Reconstruction

Abstract:
Event cameras are bioinspired sensors that capture visual information through asynchronous brightness changes, offering distinct advantages including high temporal resolution and wide dynamic range. While prior research has investigated event-based 3D reconstruction for extreme scenarios, existing methods face inherent limitations and fail to fully exploit the unique characteristics of event data. In this paper, we present EvDiff3D, a novel two-stage 3D reconstruction framework that integrates event-based geometric constraints with an event-aware diffusion prior for appearance refinement. Our key insight lies in bridging the gap between physically grounded event-based reconstruction and data-driven appearance repair through a unified cyclical pipeline. In the first stage, we reconstruct a coarse 3D scene under supervision from event loss and event-based monocular depth constraints to preserve structural fidelity. The second stage fine-tunes an event-aware diffusion model based on a pretrained video diffusion model as a repair prior to enhance the appearance in under-constrained regions. Based on the diffusion model, our pipeline operates within a reconstruction-generation cycle that progressively refines both geometry and appearance using only event data. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that EvDiff3D significantly outperforms existing methods in perceptual quality and structural consistency.

PaperID: 3174

Authors:Qianyu Cheng, Huankang Guan, Rynson W. H. Lau

Affiliations: City University of Hong Kong

Title: Multi-Semantic Modeling for Glass Surface Detection in the Wild

Abstract:
Glass surfaces challenge object detection models as they mix the transmitted background with the reflected surrounding, creating confusing visual patterns. Previous methods relying on lowlevel cues (e.g., reflections and boundaries) or surrounding semantics are often unreliable in complex real-world scenarios. A glass image inherently comprises three distinct semantic components: semantics of the transmitted content, semantics of the reflected content, and semantics of the surrounding content. In this work, we observe that there is a relationship among these three types of semantics, where reflection semantics closely resembles surrounding semantics, while these two types of semantics tend to be different from the transmission semantics. For example, when on a street, we may see into a cafeteria through a glass wall, intermixed with reflection of the street, while the glass is surrounded by other street contents like shops and pedestrians, thereby creating a unique multi-semantic signature. Based on this observation, we propose the Multi-Semantic Net, MSNet, which identifies transmission, reflection, and surrounding semantics from glass images and exploits their relationships for glass surface detection. MSNet consists of two novel modules: (1) A Semantic Decomposition Module (SDM) containing Dual-Semantics Extraction Block to extract original image and reflection semantics and Semantic Elimination Block to progressively derive transmission and surrounding semantics, and (2) An Adaptive Semantic Fusion Module (ASFM) to fuse these semantic components and adaptively learn their relationships to handle varying reflection conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MSNet surpasses SOTA methods on public glass detection benchmarks.

PaperID: 3175

Authors:Nastaran Darabi, Devashri Naik, Sina Tayebati, Dinithi Jayasuriya, Ranganath Krishnan, Amit Ranjan Trivedi

Affiliations: University of Illinois at Chicago, Capital One, AI Labs

Title: EigenShield: Inference-Time, Model-Agnostic Jailbreaking Defense via Causal Subspace Filtering

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) and VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) remain highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks despite widespread adoption. Existing defenses typically require retraining, rely on heuristics, or fail under adaptive and out-of-distribution (OOD) conditions. We introduce EigenShield, a principled, inference-time, architecture-agnostic defense that leverages Random Matrix Theory (RMT) to suppress adversarial noise in high-dimensional embeddings. EigenShield uses spiked covariance modeling and a Robustness-based Nonconformity Score (RbNS) with quantile thresholding to isolate and preserve causal eigenvectors, filtering out adversarial components without model access or adversarial training. We develop a theoretical framework establishing conditions for asymptotic noise suppression and demonstrate effectiveness in both unimodal and multimodal settings. Empirically, EigenShield consistently improves robustness across threat models, reducing attack success rates (ASR) by up to 48% over state-of-the-art defenses, including adversarial training, UNIGUARD, CIDER, and input transformations. On jailbreak attacks, EigenShield lowers LLM ASR by up to 92.9% relative to undefended models. Under multimodal adversarial attacks, it reduces VLM ASR by up to 76.5%. Against adaptive attacks on LLMs, it achieves ASR reductions of up to 77.7%. In OOD settings, EigenShield maintains strong performance, reducing ASR by up to 88.4% for LLMs and 80.4% for VLMs.

PaperID: 3176

Authors:Yuxin Deng, Botian Wang, Kaining Zhang, Hao Zhang, Jiayi Ma

Affiliations: Wuhan University, Hunan University

Title: SGPFeat: Semantic and Geometric Priors for Multi-modal Image Matching

Abstract:
Multimodal image matching is a fundamental task in multi-view and multi-modal image processing. Its key challenge lies in extracting features that remain consistent despite drastic appearance variations across modalities. However, the learning of the feature is hindered by the scarcity and the inaccurate alignment of existing multi-modal datasets. To address this, we propose a knowledge distillation framework termed SGPFeat that transfers rich prior knowledge from large-scale unimodal tasks to enhance multi-modal representation learning. Specifically, semantic priors from a vision foundation model guide the feature extractor to identify shared semantic structures across modalities, enabling better generalization under large appearance gaps. In parallel, geometric priors derived from accurately aligned visible-light datasets improve detection precision on noisy aligned multi-modal pairs. Furthermore, we introduce a Heterogeneous Feature Aggregation (HFA) module to facilitate effective distillation and feature representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that semantic and geometric priors bring significant improvement for our SGPFeat across diverse multi-modal image matching benchmarks.

PaperID: 3177

Authors:Tairan Huang, Qiang Chen, Beibei Hu, Yunlong Zhao, Hongyan Xu, Zhiyuan Chen, Yi Chen, Xiu Su

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University, Big Data Institute, College of Textile and Fashion, Hunan Institute of Engineering, School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Institute of Data Science, Hong Kong, School of Engineering

Title: ROVER: Robust Generative Continual Identity Unlearning Against Relearning Attacks

Abstract:
Recent generative unlearning models synthesize high quality samples while protecting private information by unlearning the identity. However, existing generative identity unlearning methods face two challenges in multiidentity unlearning: 1) identity conflicts, which cause conflicts of model parameters in the continuous erasure of multiple identities; 2) fragile unlearning, where the model's unlearning ability deteriorates or fails under malicious attacks. In this paper, we introduce a critical yet under-explored task called robust multi-identity unlearning, with the goals of resolving identity conflicts to achieve interference-free unlearning and protecting against malicious attacks to achieve robust unlearning. To satisfy these goals, we propose a novel framework, RObust generatiVE continual identity unlearning against Relearning attacks (ROVER). By filtering unlearning requests with latent similarity, our method effectively isolates benign unlearning from malicious attacks to preserve identity removal integrity. Meanwhile, residual orthogonal resonator resolves identity conflicts in the continuous erasure of multiple identities, preserving stability in benign continual unlearning. Moreover, we introduce the phantom guard network to block malicious attacks by absorbing adversarial gradients, ensuring irreversible identity unlearning. The extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the task of robust multi-identity unlearning against relearning attacks.

PaperID: 3178

Authors:Zhiqi Huang, Huanjia Zhu, Xiangwen Deng, Zhong Qinghao, Bingzhi Chen

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology

Title: BayesVQA: Energy-Guided Bayesian Debiasing for Language-Bias-Robust Visual Question Answering

Abstract:
Numerous studies have demonstrated that Visual Question Answering (VQA) models are vulnerable to language priors and dataset biases, often leading to spurious correlations between questions and answers. As a result, these models excessively rely on linguistic cues, neglecting essential visual information and causing representational distortions. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Bayesian debiasing framework termed BayesVQA, which integrates three carefully designed mechanisms: Energyguided Prior Variance (EPV), Energy-guided Posterior Sampling (EPS), and Energy-guided Likelihood Reweighting (ELR). Specifically, we explicitly decompose each sample's latent representation into a biased feature and a stochastic corrective perturbation δ. Using a Bayesian formulation, we model the posterior distribution of the perturbation δ conditioned on the predictive uncertainty, quantified via calibrated energy scores. To mitigate language bias, the posterior is optimized through energy-driven variational inference with an uncertainty-adaptive prior and sampling strategy. Moreover, the ELR mechanism incorporates an energy-based weighting of the reconstruction objective and enforces an energy-coherence constraint to emphasize challenging, high-uncertainty instances and align model confidence before and after debiasing. Extensive experiments conducted across multiple standard VQA benchmarks consistently validate the superior performance of our BayesVQA method over state-of-the-art competitors under distributional shifts and challenging bias conditions.

PaperID: 3179

Authors:Youjin Jeon, Kyusik Cho, Suhan Woo, Euntai Kim

Affiliations: Yonsei University

Title: A²LC: Active and Automated Label Correction for Semantic Segmentation

Abstract:
Active Label Correction (ALC) has emerged as a promising solution to the high cost and errorprone nature of manual pixel-wise annotation in semantic segmentation, by actively identifying and correcting mislabeled data. Although recent work has improved correction efficiency by generating pseudo-labels using foundation models, substantial inefficiencies still remain. In this paper, we introduce A²LC, an Active and Automated Label Correction framework for semantic segmentation, where manual and automatic correction stages operate in a cascaded manner. Specifically, the automatic correction stage leverages human feedback to extend label corrections beyond the queried samples, thereby maximizing cost efficiency. In addition, we introduce an adaptively balanced acquisition function that emphasizes underrepresented tail classes, working in strong synergy with the automatic correction stage. Extensive experiments on Cityscapes and PASCAL VOC 2012 demonstrate that A²LC significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. Notably, A²LC exhibits high efficiency by outperforming previous methods with only 20% of their budget, and shows strong effectiveness by achieving a 27.23% performance gain under the same budget on Cityscapes.

PaperID: 3180

Authors:Hongchao Li, Guangxing Liu, Xixi Wang, Baihe Liang, YongLong Luo

Affiliations: Anhui Normal University, Anhui University

Title: PEFT-BoA: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning with Bag-of-Adapters for Multi-Modal Object Re-identification

Abstract:
Multimodal object Re-identification (ReID) aims to retrieve individuals by leveraging complementary information from different modalities. Recent CLIP-based approaches show promising results, but they usually employ prompt-based or hybrid prompt-adapter tuning and still face the problems of heterogeneous domain gap, fine-grained identity discrimination and noise instance interference. To address these problems, we introduce a novel Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning framework with Bag-of-Adapters (PEFT-BoA) based on the pre-trained CLIP's vision encoder for multi-modal object ReID. Specifically, we first propose a Domain-specific Patch Adapter (DPA) designed to bridge the visual feature gap between pre-trained and fine-tuned models at the local patch level. Meanwhile, we propose a Task-specific Class Adapter (TCA) enhance the fine-grained identity discrimination ability by optimizing global class token. Finally, we propose an Instance-specific Fusion Adapter (IFA) dynamically selects and combines only the most useful features across different modalities for each instance. Our PEFT-BoA achieves the better performance on multi-modal object re-identification benchmarks, while maintaining fewer trainable parameters (6.62M) and a higher training throughput (246.2fps).

PaperID: 3181

Authors:Shuaibo Li, Yijun Yang, Zhaohu Xing, Hongqiu Wang, Pengfei Hao, Xingyu Li, Zekai Liu, Qing Zhang, Lei Zhu

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Sun Yat-sen University

Title: SynerDetect: Hierarchical Synergistic Learning for Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of generative models, which produce increasingly realistic synthetic images, urgently demands robust and generalizable detection methods. Consequently, research has largely pivoted to leveraging largescale Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for enhanced generalization. However, existing VFM-based approaches primarily adhere to either perceptual or generative paradigms, each with limitations: perceptual models capture high-level semantics but often miss subtle artifacts, whereas generative models emphasize fine-grained flaws yet overlook semantic inconsistency. To resolve this inherent trade-off, we introduce SynerDetect, a novel hierarchical synergistic framework that fundamentally unifies the two paradigms. SynerDetect achieves deep integration of heterogeneous forensic representations through two levels of synergy: Cross-Model Interactive Distillation (CMID) distills generative forensic signals into perceptual encoders via prompt-guided reconstruction; and Optimal Transport-Guided Discriminative Contrastive Learning (OT-DCL) structurally aligns and integrates these heterogeneous representations, consolidating them into a robust, unified detection space. SynerDetect achieves superior performance on standard benchmarks (AIGCDetectBenchmark and GenImage) and attains a notable 5.20% accuracy gain on the challenging Chameleon benchmark, whose synthetic images consistently pass the Visual Turing Test. These results unequivocally validate the robust, real-world generalization of our unified cross-paradigm framework.

PaperID: 3182

Authors:Yongcheng Li, Xuekuan Wang, Zhifei Zhang, Cairong Zhao

Affiliations: Tongji University

Title: Dual-Phase Visual-Language Pretraining and Adaptation for Long-Tailed Multi-Label Recognition

Abstract:
LongTailed Multi-Label Recognition (LTML) is a critical yet challenging task due to two core issues: the severe scarcity of training samples for rare "tail" classes, and the complex co-occurrence patterns among labels that often lead to biased models. To address this, we propose DP-VLPA, a novel Dual-Phase Visual-Language Pretraining and Adaptation framework. In the first phase, our Structured Tail-Aware Generation (STAG) module employs a Large Language Model (LLM) to create detailed descriptions that explicitly emphasize tail classes and their contextual relationships, providing a strong and less-biased feature foundation. In the second adaptation phase, we ensure this knowledge is applied effectively. A Dynamic Query Reweighting (DQR) mechanism forces the model to attend to crucial tail-class evidence. Simultaneously, a Co-occurrence-Aware (COA) loss explicitly teaches the model the statistical dependencies between labels, correcting for co-occurrence biases. Extensive experiments on VOC-LT and COCO-LT datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving mAP scores of 90.72% and 74.42% respectively - surpassing previous best methods by 2.84% and 8.23%.

PaperID: 3183

Authors:Qiuyu Liang, Yongqiang Zhang

Affiliations: College of Computer Science, Inner Mongolia University

Title: Tensor Decomposition and Language Description for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Abstract:
Openvocabulary object detection (OVOD) aims at detecting and recognizing objects beyond a fixed set of classes. Although region-word alignment and knowledge distillation have been explored for training a strong open-vocabulary detector, our analysis reveals three main issues (inaccurate alignment, redundant distillation, and low-quality class embedding) that limit OVOD's performance. In this paper, we explore the well-designed Tensor decomposition and Language descriptions for open-vocabulary object Detection (called TLDet). Proposals with the highest similarity score often correspond to discriminative but incomplete regions (e.g., object heads), resulting in inaccurate region-word alignment. To mitigate this issue, we propose a low-rank proposal filtering module that quantitatively assesses the completeness of each proposal by performing singular value decomposition and computing the sum of its singular values. This allows the model to reduce discriminative proposals and enhance the precision of alignment between visual regions and textual concepts. Furthermore, to mitigate redundant knowledge transfer, we introduce a core tensor distillation approach that decomposes teacher and student features into core tensors via Tucker decomposition and performs distillation through optimized tensor alignment. This ensures that the student acquires the most essential knowledge from the teacher. Finally, to improve the quality of class embedding, a language description enhancement method is proposed by exploring the knowledge of LLM to enrich the representations of categories during inference. Extensive experiments on popular datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our TLDet, achieving 36.1% mAP on COCO and 30.1% mask mAP on LVIS, and outperforming existing methods on novel categories.

PaperID: 3184

Authors:Yujia Liang, Jile Jiao, Xuetao Feng, Xinchen Liu, Kun Liu, Yuan Wang, Zixuan Ye, Hao Lu, Zhicheng Wang

Affiliations: JD Explore Academy, Deepeleph Intelligent Technology, School of AIA, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: IPFormer: Instance Prompt-guided Transformer for Multi-modal Multi-shot Video Understanding

Abstract:
Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs), which adopt large language models for video understanding, have been demonstrated for singleshot videos. However, they usually struggle in multi-shot videos with frequent shot changes, varying camera angles, etc., which makes VideoLLMs hardly answer questions about multiple instances or shots over the whole video. We attribute this challenge to two issues: 1) the lack of multi-shot multi-instance annotations of existing datasets, and 2) the negligence of instance-aware modeling of current VideoLLMs. Therefore, we first introduce a new dataset termed MultiClip-Bench, featuring dense descriptions and question-answering pairs tailored for multi-shot and multi-instance scenarios. Moreover, since the existing VideoLLMs neglect the explicit modeling of instance-related features, we propose a novel Instance Prompt-guided Transformer, named IPFormer, to achieve instance-aware videounderstanding. In the IPFormer, we design a simple but effective instance-aware feature injection module, which encodes instance features as instance prompts via an attention-based connector. By this means, IPFormer can aggregate instance-specific information across multiple shots. Extensive experiments not only show that our dataset and model significantly improve multi-shot video understanding. but also show that our MultiClip-Bench can provide valuable training data and benchmarks for various video understanding tasks.

PaperID: 3185

Authors:Zheng Lin, Nan Zhou, Yuhan Wang, Bojian Zhang

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Nankai University

Title: CrossCut: Cross-Patch Aware Interactive Segmentation for Remote Sensing Images

Abstract:
Interactive segmentation aims to delineate a userspecified target in an image by leveraging positive and negative clicks. While effective on natural images, existing methods often fail in remote sensing scenarios, where satellite imagery is characterized by ultra-high resolution, sparse object distribution, and significant scale variation. These factors hinder accurate segmentation of fine-grained targets like roads, buildings, and aircraft. To overcome these problems, we propose CrossCut, a novel interactive segmentation framework tailored for remote sensing imagery. Unlike previous approaches that either process the entire image or treat each patch independently, CrossCut enables simultaneous segmentation across multiple patches by propagating user click information to all patches. This design allows the model to fully utilize click guidance regardless of object location, effectively resolving the challenge of inter-patch information isolation. Furthermore, CrossCut supports flexible inference by allowing segmentation results from different patch configurations to be fused, enhancing both accuracy and robustness. Extensive evaluations across multiple remote sensing datasets demonstrate that CrossCut achieves state-of-the-art performance. Quantitative results and visualizations show that CrossCut significantly advances the field of interactive segmentation for remote sensing imagery.

PaperID: 3186

Authors:Delong Liu, Haotian Hou, Zhaohui Hou, Shihao Han, Zhiyuan Huang, Mingjie Zhan, Fei Su, Zhicheng Zhao

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beihang University SenseTime, China Key Laboratory of Interactive Technology and Experience System, Ministry of Culture and Tourism

Title: RAA: Achieving Interactive Remove/Add Anything via Fully Synthetic Data

Abstract:
Precise and controllable image editing, especially object removal and insertion, represents one of the most common demands in image manipulation. However, existing methods suffer from severe limitations. Maskbased inpainting often introduces visual artifacts and semantic inconsistencies, while instruction-based approaches lack accurate spatial control and tend to unintentionally modify background regions. To address these issues, we propose two key contributions. First, we develop a fully automated and self-improving pipeline for synthetic data generation. This pipeline utilizes a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate diverse prompts, a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) fine-tuned evolutionarily to synthesize high-quality images, and a Multimodal LLM (MLLM) combined with open-set object detector for automated quality control and annotation. This process produces the Remove/Add Dataset (RAD), consisting of over 514,510 high-quality image pairs, each richly annotated with bounding boxes, segmentation masks, and a variety of editing instructions. Second, based on RAD, we introduce Remove/Add Anything (RAA), a novel editing framework with precise spatial control. Built upon a diffusion-based inpainting model, RAA achieves high editing accuracy by conditioning on both textual instructions and an explicitly defined region of interest (ROI), enabling efficient fine-tuning while maintaining global visual coherence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RAA significantly outperforms existing open-source methods on both addition and removal tasks, and even slightly surpasses costly proprietary models.

PaperID: 3187

Authors:Qi Liu, Chenghao Xu, Jiexi Yan, Guangtao Lyu, Erkun Yang, Guihai Chen, Yanhua Yang

Affiliations: Xidian University

Title: Channel-masked Asymmetric Distribution Matching for Cross-Domain Generalized Dataset Distillation

Abstract:
Dataset distillation has achieved remarkable progress as an effective approach for data compression. However, realworld data often comes from diverse domains, leading to potential mismatches between the domains of synthesized images and those of the evaluation set. Existing methods primarily assume domain alignment between them, which limits their generalization ability in the above cross-domain scenarios. In this paper, we aim to ensure that images synthesized from known domains maintain robust performance on unseen domains and propose a novel framework called Channel-masked Asymmetric Distribution Matching (CADM). During asymmetric distribution matching, domain-sensitive channels of real data are selectively masked at different layers to extract domain-invariant features that guide synthetic data optimization. To further improve synthetic data representation, we introduce a class-focused domain-agnostic regularization to capture class-relevant knowledge while ignoring domain-specific information. Experiments show that our method produces domain-robust synthetic data and substantially improves generalization performance on unseen domains.

PaperID: 3188

Authors:Zhihao Liu, Fang Liu, Weihao Xuan, Naoto Yokoya

Affiliations: The University of Tokyo

Title: LandCraft: Designing the Structured 3D Landscapes via Text Guidance

Abstract:
Modeling largescale landscapes is a foundational yet time-consuming task in many 3D applications, typically requiring substantial expertise. Recently, Text-to-3D techniques have emerged as a promising, beginner-friendly prototyping approach for generating 3D content from textual input. However, existing methods either produce unusable, problematic geometries, or fail to fully capture the user's complex intent from the input text—making it difficult to generate high-quality landscape assets with controllable spatial and geographic features. In this paper, we present LandCraft, a novel AI-assisted authoring tool that enables the rapid creation of high-quality landscape scenes based on user descriptions. Our system employs a coarse-to-fine generation process: Initially, large language and deep generative models concretize textual ideas into abstract representations that capture essential landscape features, such as spatial and geographic characteristics. Then, we leverage a comprehensive procedural generation module to synthesize the detailed, structurally consistent 3D landscapes based on these inferred representations. LandCraft can effectively generate production-ready 3D scene assets that can be seamlessly exported to external game engines or modeling software, enabling immediate practical use.

PaperID: 3189

Authors:Yi Lu, Shu Li, Yurong Qian

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Xinjiang University, China Joint International Research Laboratory of Silk Multilingual Cognitive Computing, China Xinjiang Research Institute of the Huairou Laboratory

Title: Unlearning in Cross-Modal Retrieval via Prior-Prototype Guided Partitioned Dampening

Abstract:
Selective deletion of data from deep models, known as unlearning, has become crucial for enforcing the right to be forgotten, while also mitigating the negative impact of flawed training data. Retraining deep models is often impractical due to data access restrictions and computational overhead. Existing retrainingfree methods are typically based on the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM), which quantifies the importance of model parameters with respect to forgetting classes, applying equal dampening to these parameters. This approach implicitly assumes a semantically uniform representation space, where all retained classes are equidistant from the forgetting classes. However, this assumption often fails in real-world cross-modal retrieval scenarios characterized by multi-label and non-orthogonal semantics. To overcome this limitation, we propose Prior-Prototype guided Partitioned dampening (PPP), an effective strategy for selective forgetting in cross-modal retrieval. First, PPP defines prior-prototypes, which are semantic centers derived from well-trained models, to identify neighbor classes semantically close to the forgetting set. Then, PPP uses Fisher information to identify parameters sensitive to forgetting and partitions them into buffer and core regions based on their relative importance to the neighbor and retained sets. Finally, PPP applies a hierarchical dampening strategy, where core parameters receive stronger suppression guided by prototype-based semantic disparities. Comprehensive evaluations on four large-scale benchmarks show that PPP performs competitively with retraining-based baselines, highlighting its effectiveness and generalizability in selective unlearning for cross-modal retrieval.

PaperID: 3190

Authors:Yiwei Lu, Hao Huang, Tao Yan

Affiliations: Jiangnan University

Title: MVGD-Net: A Novel Motion-aware Video Glass Surface Detection Method

Abstract:
Glass surface ubiquitous in both daily life and professional environments presents a potential threat to visionbased systems, such as robot and drone navigation. To solve this challenge, most recent studies have shown significant interest in Video Glass Surface Detection (VGSD). We observe that objects in the reflection (or transmission) layer appear farther from the glass surfaces. Consequently, in video motion scenarios, the notable reflected (or transmitted) objects on the glass surface move slower than objects in non-glass regions within the same spatial plane, and this motion inconsistency can effectively reveal the presence of glass surfaces. Based on this observation, we propose a novel network, named MVGD-Net, for detecting glass surfaces in videos by leveraging motion inconsistency cues. Our MVGD-Net features three novel modules: the Cross-scale Multimodal Fusion Module (CMFM) that integrates extracted spatial features and estimated optical flow maps, the History Guided Attention Module (HGAM) and Temporal Cross Attention Module (TCAM), both of which further enhances temporal features. A Temporal-Spatial Decoder (TSD) is also introduced to fuse the spatial and temporal features for generating the glass region mask. Furthermore, for learning our network, we also propose a large-scale dataset, which comprises 312 diverse glass scenarios with a total of 19,268 frames. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our MVGD-Net outperforms relevant state-of-the-art methods. We will release our code and dataset.

PaperID: 3191

Authors:Zhibin Ma, Pengwen Dai, Wei Zhuo, Xugong Qin

Affiliations: Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen University, Nanjing University of Science and Technology

Title: One2Seq: One-Token Wise Decoder for Efficient Scene Text Recognition

Abstract:
Autoregressive (AR)-based decoders, owing to their flexibility in handling variable-length outputs and their strong capability in modeling character-level dependencies, have emerged as the predominant decoding paradigm in the field of scene text recognition (STR). However, AR-based decoders suffer from attention drift, slow decoding speed, and difficulty capturing global dependencies, restricting their performance in various scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm for AR-based decoding, called One-Token to Sequence (One2Seq), to address the above issues. Unlike existing methods, we encode the semantic features into a single context token and design a One-Token Wise Decoder to perform the decoding, which alleviates the attention drift caused by the accumulation of semantic information. Moreover, we proposed Positioal-aware Hash Embedding to embed the decoded characters, ensuring the order information is obtained in the context token. By continuously updating this token, One2Seq fully leverages the decoded semantic information while avoiding the computational overhead associated with the growing query sequence. Furthermore, to leverage global information for decoding, we propose Dynamic Global Infusion to dynamically integrates global visual features into the context token. Equipped with the enriched context token, the model has an enhanced ability to extract discriminative local features under the guidance of global context, thereby enhancing recognition accuracy. Extensive experiments reveal that, with its ingenious design, One2Seq exhibits marked superiority on both accuracy and decoding speed compared to existing STR models.

PaperID: 3192

Authors:Pingyi Miao, Xianlai Chen, Kai Sun, Yunbo Wang, Shuang Zhao, Ying An

Affiliations: Central South University

Title: BioDPP: Dynamic Prompt Policy Learning for Biomedical Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
Foundational visionlanguage models (VLMs), such as CLIP, are emerging as a promising paradigm in vision tasks due to their strong generalization ability. Nevertheless, adapting them to downstream tasks remains challenging, especially in biomedical imaging, where scarce annotations, low-contrast features and complex patterns hinder model adaptation. Thus, prompt tuning is employed to facilitate the adaptation of VLMs. However, current prompt tuning methods like Context Optimization (CoOp) mainly learn a single yet static prompt which is applied to all images, and such one-size-fits-all prompt cannot describe the case-specific diagnostic cues in biomedical data, compromising the adaptation of VLMs. To this end, we propose a Dynamic Prompt Policy learning method that enables efficient adaptation of Biomedical VLMs (BioDPP) for accurate and highly generalizable few-shot biomedical image classification. Specifically, we conceptualize the learnable context as an agent, and present a paradigm of learning a dynamic prompting policy, rather than obtaining a single yet static prompt. Wherein, a dual-reward mechanism is developed to guide policy learning via the feedback on both classification decision and the consistency between the prompt and the context, steering the agent to generate context-aware prompts. Moreover, we devise adaptive baseline stabilization to dynamically regulate reward advantage value throughout the training process, enabling policy refinement in a complex reward space tailored to biomedical VLMs. Extensive experiments are conducted on 10 biomedical datasets, and the results reveal that our BioDPP achieves superior performance, demonstrating more efficient prompt optimization in biomedical VLMs.

PaperID: 3193

Authors:Liuhan Peng, Shuai Li, Yanbo Gao, Mao Ye, Chong Lv

Affiliations: Shandong University, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Hierarchical Frequency-Guided Alignment Transformer for Compressed Video Quality Enhancement

Abstract:
During the video encoding process, the original spatial domain signal is first transformed into the frequency domain, followed by quantization and compression. As a result, the quality degradation in compressed videos primarily stems from distortions in the frequency domain information. However, existing video enhancement methods typically directly fuse information from adjacent frames in the spatial domain, making it difficult for models to effectively compensate for frequency domain distortions, which leads to suboptimal detail restoration. To address this issue, we propose a Hierarchical FrequencyGuided Alignment Transformer. Additionally, by analyzing the characteristics of the frequency domain, we find that different frequency bands exhibit both correlations and a certain degree of independence. Based on this, we introduce a Frequency-Aware Transformer module that employs a combination of independent and mixed processing to optimize information exchange across different frequency domains, effectively mitigating cross-interference from irrelevant information. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to existing methods, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in objective metrics (PSNR/SSIM), perceptual quality (LPIPS), and subjective visual effects, while reducing model complexity.

PaperID: 3194

Authors:Bin Pu, Xingguo Lv, Jiewen Yang, Kai Xu, Lei Zhao, Zuozhu Liu, Kenli Li

Affiliations: Hunan University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Yunnan University, Zhejiang University

Title: Topology-Inspired Backward-Free Framework for Test-Time Adaptation in Medical Detection

Abstract:
Recently, TestTime Adaptation (TTA) has gained increasing attention in medical imaging due to its ability to improve model generalization under domain shifts without retraining. In particular, directly applying a well-trained model across various medical centers faces significant performance degradation caused by variations in equipment, operators, imaging conditions, and scanning skill levels of sonographers. Existing TTA methods either rely on parameter adaptation that increases computational cost or apply simple prediction fusion that ignores anatomical structure knowledge. To address these limitations, we propose a novel backward-free Topology-aware TTA framework named T^3 that integrates Structural Perception Modeling (SPM) and Box Regression Adaptation (BRA). SPM is implemented through an organ space heatmap generated via Gaussian kernel superposition. This heatmap encodes anatomical topology without requiring additional training or source data. BRA further improves localization and classification by fusing detection outputs based on the contribution of detected results to anatomically meaningful peak points from the heatmaps. Extensive experiments were conducted across six cross-domain scenarios, and the results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art cross-domain detection performance while maintaining high efficiency, offering a practical and robust solution for real-world medical diagnostic applications.

PaperID: 3195

Authors:Bin Pu, Siyu Wang, Rongbin Li, Xinpeng Ding, Lei Zhao, Chaoqi Chen, Shengli Li, Kenli Li

Affiliations: Hunan University, Shenzhen University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen Maternity and Child Healthcare Hospital, Southern Medical University

Title: Organ-Aware Routing Mixture-of-Retrieval Augmented Generation for Fetal Ultrasound Reporting

Abstract:
Fetal ultrasound screening is a uniquely complex diagnostic task involving the simultaneous assessment of multiple fetal organs—each with its own anatomical and clinical context—within a single examination. Automating report generation for such cases poses a significant challenge: unlike existing methods that focus on singleorgan radiology tasks (e.g., chest X-rays), fetal ultrasound requires reasoning over a structured, multiple-to-multiple setting, i.e., multi-organ images corresponding to a multi-section report. In this paper, we introduce FetusR, the first large-scale dataset for multi-organ fetal ultrasound reporting, containing 15,594 real-world cases with rich organ-wise annotations. To address the intrinsic image-report alignment, we propose Organ-Aware Routing Mixture-of-Retrieval Augmented Generation (ORM-RAG) inspired by the Mixture-of-Experts paradigm. Our method decomposes the complex alignment problem into multiple one-to-one sub-retrieval tasks. Specifically, ORM-RAG integrates (1) an organ-aware mixture-of-retrieval module that partitions the retrieval space into organ-specific corpora for independent retrieval, and (2) a dynamic routing mechanism that selectively aggregates high-confidence organ-specific reports while filtering uncertain ones. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across both textual similarity and clinical accuracy metrics. Our work opens a new direction for long-form, structured report generation in real-world, multi-organ medical imaging scenarios.

PaperID: 3196

Authors:Qiang Qi, Wenqi Shang, Xiao Wang, Yanjie Liang, Shuyuan Lin

Affiliations: Qingdao University of Science and Technology, Pengcheng Laboratpry, Jinan University

Title: MSTDiff: Multiscale-Aware Transformer Diffusion Network for Video Object Detection

Abstract:
Video object detection is a fundamental yet challenging task in computer vision. Recently, DETRbased methods have gained prominence in this domain owing to their powerful global modeling capabilities. However, these methods are still confronted with two key limitations: frame-agnostic initialization of object queries and scale-agnostic attention mechanisms, which hinder their capability to capture the appearance variations of dynamic objects and model the temporal consistency across frames. To alleviate these limitations, we propose a multiscale-aware transformer diffusion network (MSTDiff), a novel framework designed for the video object detection task, including two technical improvements over existing methods. First, we design a diffusion-driven adaptive query module, which models the object query distribution through a diffusion process conditioned on input frames, enabling an adaptive and content-aware initialization of object queries. Second, we develop a multiscale-aware transformer encoder module, which combines multi-head convolutional units with attention mechanisms to enhance multi-scale feature representations while preserving global dependence modeling. We conduct extensive experiments on the public ImageNet VID dataset, and the results demonstrate that our MSTDiff achieves 87.7% mAP with ResNet-101, outperforming most previous state-of-the-art video object detection methods.

PaperID: 3197

Authors:Gang Qu, Ping Wang, Siming Zheng, Xin Yuan

Affiliations: School of Engineering, Westlake University, Vivo Mobile Communication Co.

Title: Breaking Measurement Barriers: From Compressed Sensing to Deep Reconstruction

Abstract:
Deep learning methods have achieved remarkable success in image compressed sensing (CS) task, namely reconstructing a highfidelity image from its compressed measurement. However, existing methods are deficient in incoherent compressed measurement at sensing phase and implicit measurement representations at reconstruction phase, limiting the overall performance. In this work, we answer two questions: (i) how to improve the measurement incoherence for decreasing the ill-posedness; (ii) how to learn informative representations from measurements. To this end, we propose a novel asymmetric Kronecker CS (AKCS) model and theoretically present its better incoherence than previous Kronecker CS with minimal increase of complexity. Moreover, apart from the explicit measurement representations in gradient descent projection in unfolding networks, we further propose a measurement-aware cross attention (MACA) mechanism to learn implicit measurement representations. We integrate AKCS and MACA into a widely-used unfolding architecture to get a measurement-enhanced unfolding network (MEUNet). Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed MEUNet achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in reconstruction accuracy with high efficiency.

PaperID: 3198

Authors:Weimin Shi, Xiang Li, Kaige Li, Junhao Fang, Qiang Zhou, Qichuan Geng, Zhong Zhou

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Beihang University, China Zhongguancun Laboratory, School of Cyber Science and Technology, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, The Information Engineering College, Capital Normal University

Title: GeoBayes: Probabilistic Image Geo-Localization Inference via Sequential Bayesian Updating

Abstract:
Image geolocalization aims to determine the geographic location of a query image. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show potential for this task due to their rich world knowledge and explainable abilities, they often struggle with confirmation bias, i.e., committing to early, potentially incorrect guesses driven by visual clues with varied geographic likelihoods. In this paper, we propose GeoBayes, a novel training-free framework that formulates geolocalization as a Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) estimation task over multiple geographic hypotheses and performs probabilistic thought via sequential Bayesian reasoning. GeoBayes treats each visual object and its associated geographic clues as probabilistic evidence, integrating them iteratively through a Hypothesize–Verify–Update loop. At each step, it evaluates how new evidence supports existing hypotheses and updates their posterior probabilities, gradually converging on the most probable location. This allows GeoBayes to explicitly quantify and fuse the varied geographic probabilities implied by various visual elements, reducing the risk of overcommitting to misleading clues. Furthermore, considering the natural hierarchy of geographic labels (e.g., country, city), GeoBayes introduces a state memory mechanism that stores hypotheses, inference context, and evidence scores across levels. This design enables the framework to propagate prior knowledge across levels of the geographic hierarchy and incorporate geographic structural constraints into the Bayesian update process, achieving a coarse-to-fine geo-localization. Experiments on IM2GPS3k and YFCC4K show that GeoBayes improves MLLM-based geo-localization accuracy without extra training. This demonstrates the effectiveness of probabilistic reasoning for robust and interpretable geo-localization.

PaperID: 3199

Authors:Chenghao Sun, Pengpeng Sun, Xiangmo Zhao

Affiliations: School of Information Engineering, Chang’an University, College of Urban Development and Modern Transportation Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology

Title: Weather-Robust LiDAR Perception: Point Cloud Restoration from Adverse Weather

Abstract:
Adverse weather conditions—such as rain, fog, and snow—significantly degrade LiDAR point cloud quality, causing substantial performance deterioration in detection models trained on clean data. To address this, we propose LTDNet, a novel point cloud quality improvement network that restores degraded LiDAR scans by learning an end-to-end mapping from corrupted to clean geometry. LTDNet leverages position encoding, spatial–frequency joint feature extraction, weather-aware refinement, and probabilistic pruning to effectively recover structural in-tegrity while suppressing weather-induced noise. To fa-cilitate standardized evaluation, we introduce IQA3D, a new benchmark comprising both synthetic and real-world sequences under adverse weather. This dual-design benchmark serves two complementary purposes: synthet-ic sequences provide pixel-wise correspondences between degraded and clean point clouds for quantitatively as-sessing restoration fidelity, while real-world sequences enable evaluation of the practical impact of improvement methods on downstream 3D object detection under au-thentic weather conditions. This makes IQA3D particular-ly suitable for jointly measuring both perceptual quality and task-level robustness of point cloud improvement models. Extensive experiments on IQA3D demonstrate that LTDNet significantly improves detection perfor-mance across various state-of-the-art 3D detectors and three tested weather conditions, making it a practical and effective solution for robust LiDAR-based detection.

PaperID: 3200

Authors:Chuanyu Sun, Jiqing Zhang, Yang Wang, Yuanchen Wang, Yutong Jiang, Baocai Yin, Xin Yang

Affiliations: Dalian University of Technology, Dalian Martime University, China Northern Vehicle Research Institute, Beijing University of Technology

Title: AlignTrack: Top-Down Spatiotemporal Resolution Alignment for RGB-Event Visual Tracking

Abstract:
Most existing RGBEvent trackers rely on strictly aligned datasets, overlooking the asynchronous spatio-temporal resolutions common in real-world scenarios. This methodological limitation impedes effective RGB-Event feature alignment and ultimately degrades tracking performance. To overcome this limitation, we propose AlignTrack, a novel tracking framework built upon a Top-Down Alignment (TDA) strategy inspired by the human visual system. Our TDA framework follows an encode-decode-align paradigm: it first encodes multimodal features to generate target-related priors, which are then progressively decoded to guide a subsequent feature alignment pass. Within this framework, we introduce two key innovations: (1) a Cross-Prior Attention (CPA) module that effectively generates and integrates cross-modal priors, and (2) a Cross-Modal Semantic Alignment (CSA) loss that maximizes mutual information to enforce semantic consistency between modalities. Extensive experiments show that AlignTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance on four challenging RGB-Event tracking benchmarks, demonstrating its robustness in both aligned and unaligned scenarios. Ablation studies further validate the significant contribution of each proposed component.

PaperID: 3201

Authors:Ruimin Sun, Haoran Xu, De Ma

Affiliations: Zhejiang University

Title: SNN-Driven Event-Based Flow and Rotation Estimation with SO(3) Refinement

Abstract:
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a promising direction for energyefficient event-based vision by leveraging sparse, temporally precise spikes. We propose a directly trained, fully spiking model for optical flow estimation, featuring a novel Spike GRU and membrane potential carryover for improved temporal modeling. On the DSEC-Flow benchmark, our model achieves competitive accuracy while reducing energy consumption by 42.88× over EV-FlowNet and 38× over TIDNet. Building on the predicted motion field, we infer camera rotation and, to the best of our knowledge, are the first to construct panoramic event images from SNN-based flow. We further introduce an optional unsupervised SO(3) refinement step that improves rotation accuracy by maximizing panorama consistency—without IMU or pose supervision. Our results achieve comparable visual quality to CMax-SLAM, showing that SNNs can enable fast and high-level spatial perception using only event-based input.

PaperID: 3202

Authors:Yuzheng Tan, Yuan He, Yao Zhu, Tianlin Huo, Huanqian Yan, Hang Su, Shuxin Zhang, Guangneng Hu

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Integrated Electromechanical Manufacturing of High-performance Electronic Equipments, Xidian University, Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, Beihang University, School of Computer Science and Technology

Title: Dual-Seed Evolutionary Algorithm for Noise Optimization in Diffusion Models

Abstract:
Diffusion models have emerged as stateof-the-art generative methods, particularly excelling in conditional tasks such as prompt-driven image synthesis. While recent research emphasizes the pivotal role of noise seeds in enhancing text-image alignment and generating human-preferred outputs,these works predominantly rely on random Gaussian noise or heuristic local adjustments, , overlooking the potential of global optimization trategies to systematically improve generation quality. To bridge this gap, we propose Seed Optimization based on Evolution (SOE), a hybrid framework that integrates global evolutionary search with local semantic refinement. The global evolutionary stage conducts seed selection by jointly optimizing text-image alignment (via CLIP-Score) and human preference estimation (via ImageReward), while the local stage employs diffusion inversion to inject conditional semantics into the noise seed. Together, these components constitute a model-agnostic, training-free optimization framework for conditional diffusion models. Extensive experiments across various diffusion models demonstrate that SOE consistently improves semantic fidelity and visual quality, highlighting its generalizability and potential as a plug-and-play enhancement for generative diffusion pipelines.

PaperID: 3203

Authors:Chaoqun Wang, Shaobo Min, Xu Yang

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, South China Normal University, University of Science and Technology of China, School of Electronic Engineering, Xidian University

Title: S²Flow: Towards Fast and Authentic Training-Free High-Resolution Video Generation

Abstract:
Rectified flow models have shown strong potential in highfidelity video generation, yet extending them to high-resolution remains challenging due to the high cost of full attention and error accumulation in the ODE-solving process. In this paper, we propose S^2Flow, a training-free framework that enables efficient and authentic high-resolution video generation by jointly exploring Flow-guided Sparse attention and Second-order ODE solution. Specifically, S^2Flow exploits and transfers the semantic and structural information from the low-resolution flow trajectory to guide the high-resolution flow in two aspects. First, S^2Flow dynamically captures the sparse patterns of the spatio-temporal attention maps from low-resolution videos to construct localized 3D windows, enabling efficient window attention in high-resolution inference. This can significantly reduce redundant computation while preserving contextual dependencies. Second, S^2Flow adopts a second-order ODE solver based on Taylor expansion, where the high-order derivative is approximated via central difference from the low-resolution flow, facilitating accurate high-resolution denoising. Extensive experiments on VBench dataset demonstrate that S^2Flow outperforms prior methods in both visual quality and inference speed, enabling 4x acceleration on 2560x1536 video generation.

PaperID: 3204

Authors:Hua Wang, Xiaodan Zhang, Yanzhao Shi, Chengxin Zheng, Wanyu Zhang, Zhen Wang, Jianing Wang, Xiaobing Yu

Affiliations: Beijing University of Technology, The University of Hong Kong, Beijing Hospital

Title: MoEA-Net: Modality-Incremental Expert Aggregation Network for Retinal Prognostic Prediction

Abstract:
Automated analysis of temporal changes in multimodal retinal images is critical for the prognostic assessment of ophthalmic diseases. Unlike traditional singletimepoint diagnosis, tracking longitudinal changes across multiple imaging modalities introduces significant data bias challenges: (1) Imbalanced modality samples compromise the integration of knowledge within minority modalities; (2) Heterogeneous visual patterns across modalities undermine the perception of disease-relevant biomarkers. To tackle these issues, we propose a Modality-Incremental Expert Aggregation Network (MoEA-Net), which unifies the inter-modal integration and intra-modal perception for enhanced retinal prognostic prediction. Specifically, we employ the large language model (LLM) with incremental LoRA layers for specific modalities to effectively integrate knowledge from imbalanced data. Besides, we introduce a Spatiotemporal-aware Expert (SAE) module to better perceive both the anatomical structures and longitudinal changes within modalities. By progressively combining the SAE module with incremental LoRA, MoEA-Net supports continual knowledge accumulation and improves accurate reasoning. Experimental results show that MoEA-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on subretinal fluid change and visual recovery classification tasks, validating its effectiveness.

PaperID: 3205

Authors:Kunpeng Wang, Feifan Sun, Keke Chen

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University

Title: Taming Cascaded Mixture-of-Experts for Modality-missing Multi-modal Salient Object Detection

Abstract:
Multimodal Salient Object Detection (SOD) shows an improvement over its uni-modal counterpart by exploiting the complementary benefits between modalities. However, this improvement relies on complete multi-modal information, which is difficult to be guaranteed in practice due to sensor failures and transmission errors. To address this issue, we propose a robust multi-modal SOD framework that enhances the adaptability to modality-missing conditions, while maintaining comparable performance in the modality-complete condition. Nevertheless, flexibly handling modality-missing and modality-complete cases and integrating their corresponding multi-modal features in a unified framework is non-trivial. To this end, we achieve this framework by designing a Cascaded Mixture-of-Experts (CMoE) network that sequentially incorporates missing-aware and multi-modal MoE. Specifically, the missing-aware MoE employs three modality-reconstruction experts with a soft router to adaptively reconstruct feature representations for both missing and available modalities, assisted by an expert modulation loss that guides the router to assign expert weights according to missing conditions. The multi-modal MoE adopts two homogeneous uni-modal experts with learned modality-specific knowledge tailored for integrating modality features, which are dynamically combined via the soft router. The cascaded architecture fully empowers CMoE with the flexibility across varying input cases. Extensive experiments on modality-missing and modality-complete conditions demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

PaperID: 3206

Authors:Qiwen Wang, Liao Shen, Jiaqi Li, Tianqi Liu, Huiqiang Sun, Zihao Huang, Yachuan Huang, Xianrui Luo, Zhiguo Cao

Affiliations: School of AIA, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: BokehCrafter: Taming Video Diffusion Models for Controllable Bokeh Rendering

Abstract:
Bokeh is used in photography to emphasize the selected subject by smoothly blurring the outof-focus region with appealing highlights. While recent advances have achieved impressive results in rendering realistic blur, existing frameworks typically rely on disparity maps and bokeh-relevant inputs (e.g., focal distance and blur size), and face significant challenges in video bokeh rendering due to limited temporal consistency. In this paper, we propose BokehCrafter, the first video diffusion framework that generates temporally coherent and visually pleasing bokeh effects from all-in-focus video inputs under user-friendly input conditions. Specifically, we leverage a dual-stream attention mechanism, integrating a reference image branch and a rendering instruction branch. We propose a Bokeh Image Extraction (BIE) module and a CLIP-based text encoder to extract image and text features, respectively, whose outputs are fused via a Text-Image Fusion (TIF) module to enable fine-grained and controllable bokeh rendering. To support the novel capabilities of our model, we construct Video Bokeh Scenes (VBS), a large-scale dataset containing a wide variety of bokeh videos with corresponding rendering instructions, across various scenes and rendering settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both bokeh rendering quality and temporal consistency.

PaperID: 3207

Authors:Shaoqian Wang, Jiadai Sun, Bin Fan, Qiang Wang, Bin Lu, Yuchao Dai

Affiliations: Yanzhao Electric Power Laboratory of North China Electric Power University Hebei Key Laboratory of Knowledge Computing for Energy and Power, School of Electronics and Information, Northwestern Polytechnical University

Title: EC-MVSNet: Enhanced Cascaded Multi-View Stereo with Cross-Scale Relevance Integration

Abstract:
Cascadebased multi-scale architectures are currently the mainstream in Multi-view Stereo (MVS), achieving a balance between computational efficiency and reconstruction accuracy. However, existing cascade MVS methods suffer from significant limitations in cross-scale information utilization, where depth estimation processes operate independently across scales without fully exploiting the rich relevance between adjacent scales. To address this fundamental limitation, we propose an Enhanced Cascade Multi-View Stereo framework (EC-MVSNet), which introduces a novel cross-scale relevance integration strategy. Specifically, we introduce a Cross-Scale Feature-based Joint Construction (CFC) module to synergistically combine features from adjacent scales to build more reliable cost volumes. Additionally, a Cross-Scale Probability-guided Enhancement (CPE) module is proposed to propagate depth probability distributions across scales to guide cost volume enhancement. Furthermore, we propose a Monocular Feature-based Refinement (MFR) module to further enhance depth prediction accuracy by leveraging monocular priors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EC-MVSNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks, validating the effectiveness of the cross-scale integration in improving MVS reconstruction quality.

PaperID: 3208

Authors:Sihan Wang, Xiyao Liu, Lianqing Liu, Zhi Han

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Intelligent Systems, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: ObjecTok: Learning Holistic and Robust Object Tokens for MLLMs

Abstract:
Mainstream multimodal large language models (MLLMs) rely on patchbased tokenization methods, which compromise the integrity of objects and thereby limit the model's perception capabilities while triggering object-related hallucinations. To address this issue, we propose ObjecTok, an innovative object tokenization framework. ObjecTok generates a single, holistic object token for each object in an image. This token is produced by a specially trained object encoder that embeds the object's semantic, positional, and shape information into a single compact representation, thereby preserving the object's integrity. To mitigate the imperfections of upstream object proposer models, we introduce learnable confidence embeddings. These embeddings enable the MLLM to learn the reliability of each object's information, significantly enhancing the model's robustness. Additionally, ObjecTok employs a hybrid input strategy, combining object tokens with traditional image patch tokens, allowing the model to leverage both object-level information and global scene context. By integrating ObjecTok into the LLaVA architecture, we achieve notable performance improvements on multiple object-centric benchmarks, effectively reducing object hallucinations and enhancing perception capabilities. Experimental results robustly demonstrate that the object tokens generated by our ObjecTok framework hold great potential for building more powerful and reliable MLLMs.

PaperID: 3209

Authors:Yi Wang, Jian Ma, Zhuo Su, Guidong Wang, Jingyu Yang, Yu-Kun Lai, Kun Li

Affiliations: Tianjin University, ByteDance China, Cardiff University

Title: InterCoser: Interactive 3D Character Creation with Disentangled Fine-Grained Features

Abstract:
This paper aims to interactively generate and edit disentangled 3D characters based on precise user instructions. Existing methods generate and edit 3D characters via rough and simple editing guidance and entangled representations, making it difficult to achieve precise and comprehensive control over finegrained local editing and free clothing transfer for characters. To enable accurate and intuitive control over the generation and editing of high-quality 3D characters with freely interchangeable clothing, we propose a novel user-interactive approach for disentangled 3D character creation. Specifically, to achieve precise control over 3D character generation and editing, we introduce two user-friendly interaction approaches: a sketch-based layered character generation/editing method, which supports clothing transfer; and a 3D-proxy-based part-level editing method, enabling fine-grained disentangled editing. To enhance 3D character quality, we propose a 3D Gaussian reconstruction strategy guided by geometric priors, ensuring that 3D characters exhibit detailed local geometry and smooth global surfaces. Extensive experiments on both public datasets and in-the-wild data demonstrate that our approach not only generates high-quality disentangled 3D characters but also supports precise and fine-grained editing through user interaction.

PaperID: 3210

Authors:Yijing Wang, Xu Tang, Xiangrong Zhang, Jingjing Ma

Affiliations: Xidian University

Title: ID-Splat: Propagating Object Identities for Segmenting 3D Aerial-view Scenes

Abstract:
Highresolution Earth Observation technologies present unprecedented opportunities for geospatial analysis, yet traditional 2D aerial-view semantic segmentation remains limited by its inability to model spatial relationships and handle object occlusions. While 3D Aerial-view Segmentation (3DAS) has emerged to address these limitations, existing methods predominantly rely on 2D discriminative models pre-trained on natural scenes. These models struggle to accurately recognize aerial-view imagery, resulting in suboptimal performance due to significant domain discrepancies. This paper introduces ID-Splat, a novel object-centric framework that directly leverages multi-view object identities without discriminative information to enhance 3D semantic understanding. ID-Splat implements a two-stage process: first, Mask-object Tracking combines SAM and Point Tracking to establish robust and consistent object identities across multi-view aerial images; second, Object Integration & Propagation assigns these identities to 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) points, enabling complete 3D segmentation through semantic propagation. Experimental results on the 3D-AS dataset demonstrate that ID-Splat significantly outperforms existing methods, particularly under sparse supervision conditions. ID-Splat also achieves state-of-the-art performance while reducing the need for extensive labeled data by effectively leveraging the inherent 3D structure.

PaperID: 3211

Authors:Yuzhong Wang, Wenmin Wang, Shixiong Zhang, Xinxing Yu, Zhongheng Chen

Affiliations: Macau University of Science and Technology, National UHD Video Innovation Center

Title: MCGS: Markov Chain Gaussian Splatting for Dynamic Scenes Reconstruction

Abstract:
We present MCGS (Markov Chain Gaussian Splatting), a novel approach for highfidelity dynamic scene reconstruction via combining Markov chain and 3D Gaussian splatting. Our method addresses the critical challenge of artifact-free temporal consistency in dynamic neural rendering. By integrating a Markov chain-based deformation network with multi-head temporal attention, MCGS effectively captures motion patterns and temporal dependencies, producing more accurate and stable 3D representations over time. The key innovations include: (1) a Markov Deform Network that models state transitions while preserving temporal coherence, (2) a temporal attention mechanism that adaptively weights historical states within a sliding window, and (3) strategic noise injection during training to enhance model robustness and generalization. Experiments on representative dynamic scene datasets demonstrate that MCGS outperforms previous methods in both visual quality and temporal coherence, while maintaining competitive rendering speed and efficiency. These results suggest the practical applicability of our approach to real-world dynamic scene understanding and synthesis.

PaperID: 3212

Authors:Zeyu Wang, Jiawei Feng, Jiayu Wang, Pengjie Wang, Haiyu Song

Affiliations: Dalian Minzu University

Title: SigFusion: Unified Signal-Level Self-Supervised Learning Paradigm for Image Fusion

Abstract:
Image Fusion (IF) aims to integrate complementary features from multiple source images into a single image. However, a key challenge in this field is the lack of largescale real-world training datasets. Existing models typically rely on either small datasets or synthetic, less realistic datasets. To address this, we propose SigFusion, a unified signal-level self-supervised learning paradigm for various IF tasks.The core idea is to use signal-level Pseudo-Label Generation Networks (PLGN) to automatically synthesize training sets and pseudo labels with real multi-source signal characteristics from vast unlabeled natural images.PLGN includes two critical components: learnable 1D Signal Modulators (SM) and SigFormer. SM learns implicit 1D signal patterns across various source images and embeds them into natural images, reducing the domain gap between synthetic and real datasets. SigFormer integrates Transformer with signal processing methods, establishing an appropriate signal representation space for SM. Its cascaded, multi-level design allows hierarchical feature learning from coarse to fine detail. Moreover, SigFormer can serve as a flexible backbone for IF, as its design adheres to the classic decomposition-reconstruction paradigm. Experimental results demonstrate that SigFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple IF tasks, including medical image fusion, infrared-visible image fusion, multi-focus image fusion, and multi-exposure image fusion.

PaperID: 3213

Authors:Weijing Wu, Qihua Liang, Bineng Zhong, Xiaohu Tang, Yufei Tan, Ning Li, Yuanliang Xue

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Education Blockchain and Intelligent Technology Ministry of Education, Guangxi Normal University, Guilin China University Engineering Research Center of Educational Intelligent Technology, China Guangxi Key Laboratory of Brain-inspired Computing and Intelligent Chips, School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Xi’an Research Institute of High Technology, Xi’an China

Title: MUTrack: A Memory-Aware Unified Representation Framework for Visual Tracking

Abstract:
Building a unified target representation that simultaneously achieves shortterm adaptability and long-term stability is crucial for robust visual tracking. However, existing trackers typically face an inherent trade-off. Methods primarily relying on short-term appearance and motion cues achieve rapid adaptation, but they often struggle with long-term identity consistency. Conversely, trackers that emphasize extensive temporal context provide strong robustness, yet this approach can compromise their short-term adaptability. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel tracker, MUTrack, which comprehensively integrates both long-term and short-term memories into a unified target representation for more robust tracking. Specifically, we design a unified memory bank that stores and manages long-term memory for maintaining long-term identity consistency, and short-term memory for adapting to instantaneous appearance changes. To fully leverage the complementary nature of both long-term and short-term temporal information, we introduce a perception interaction module that dynamically fuses these memory types through deep and bidirectional interactions, enabling mutual refinement where one guides the other. This ultimately generates a highly adaptive target representation, which effectively balances adaptability to instantaneous changes with robustness against long-term identity drift. Extensive experiments on GOT10k, TrackingNet, LaSOT, LaSOT_ext, NfS, and OTB100 consistently demonstrate that MUTrack achieves SOTA performance.

PaperID: 3214

Authors:Yue Wu, Zhigang Gao, Tengfei Xiao, Can Qin, Yongzhe Yuan, Hao Li, Kaiyuan Feng, Wenping Ma

Affiliations: Xidian University, Northeastern University

Title: Hybrid Vector-Occupancy Field for Robust Implicit 3D Surface Reconstruction

Abstract:
We introduce the Hybrid VectorOccupancy Field (HVOF), a new implicit 3D representation for reconstructing both open and closed surfaces from sparse point clouds. Existing approaches, such as occupancy field and signed distance fields, face severe limitations. They struggle with open surfaces, while unsigned distance field and neural vector field exhibit directional instability in complex topologies and ridge regions. HVOF addresses these challenges by incorporating a smoothly decaying occupancy field around the surface, while capturing precise local geometry using truncated displacement vectors, naturally mitigating direction-field ambiguities near ridge regions. This unified design forms a robust hybrid representation that leverages both occupancy and vector fields. To fulfill it, we design a Hybrid Field variational autoencoder including a hierarchical cross-attention encoder and dual-branch decoder that jointly learn occupancy and vector fields through continuous weighting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HVOF consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across ShapeNet, ABC, and MGN datasets, accurately reconstructing both open and closed surfaces while preserving fine geometric details in complex regions.

PaperID: 3215

Authors:Kangyu Xiao, Zilei Wang, Yixin Zhang, Junjie Li

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: Training-free Boosting for Few-shot Segmentation via Generalizing Semantic Mining

Abstract:
Fewshot Semantic Segmentation (FSS) aims to segment the novel target objects with the guidance of minimal annotated reference examples. The affinity-based method has great advantages in the FSS inference stage for both specialist model and foundation model. However, current affinity calculation merely relies on only support-query matching, without considering the query-specific semantic or the semantic correlation among inter-support samples, which limits the representation ability of affinity map. In this paper, we propose the Generalizing Semantic Mining (GSM) that focuses on exploiting generalizing semantic to improve the affinity calculation. Concretely, we first organize the affinity-based inference into three main steps to reveal the crucial role of affinity map. To address the low-data problem, Target Semantic Reusing module considers the query sample as a proxy reference and assigns it with proxy mask identifying its most generalizing semantic regions. Then, to generate the high-fidelity proxy mask, Query-specific Semantic Modeling module pinpoints the most generalizing regions through prior semantic analysis. Finally, Representative Re-weighting module explicitly modulates affinity calculation via generalization-aware weighting. Experiments on FSS benchmarks demonstrate that our GSM can serve as a plug-and-play free lunch for both specialist models and foundation models.

PaperID: 3216

Authors:Tengfei Xiao, Yue Wu, Zhigang Gao, Yongzhe Yuan, Can Qin, Hao Li, Mingyang Zhang

Affiliations: Xidian University, Northeastern University

Title: DcSplat: Dual-Constraint Human Gaussian Splatting with Latent Multi-View Consistency

Abstract:
Human Novel View Synthesis (HNVS) aims to synthesize photorealistic human images from novel viewpoints given observations from known views. Despite significant advances achieved by existing methods such as NeRF, diffusion models, and 3DGS, they still face substantial challenges in achieving stable modeling from a single image. In this paper, we introduce DualConstraint Human Gaussian Splatting (DcSplat), a novel, simple, and efficient 3D Gaussian-based framework for single-view 3D human reconstruction. To address occlusion-induced texture missing and depth ambiguities, we introduce two key components: a Latent Multi-View Consistency Constraint Mechanism and a Geometric Constraint Module. The former employs a Latent-space Appearance Transformer (LatentFormer) to learn semantically coherent, view-consistent appearance priors via SMPL-guided pseudo-view fusion. The latter refines noisy SMPL-based depth through a U-Net-like structure conditioned on latent appearance features. These two modules are jointly optimized to generate high-quality Gaussian parameters in a unified latent space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DcSplat outperforms existing SOTA methods in both geometry and texture quality, while achieving fast inference and lower computational cost.

PaperID: 3217

Authors:Yi Xiao, Jia Wang, Zhu Liu, Di Wang, Jinyuan Liu, Risheng Liu

Affiliations: Dalian University of Technology, Civil Aviation University of China

Title: A Hybrid Space Model for Misaligned Multi-modality Image Fusion

Abstract:
Infrared and visible image fusion aims to integrate complementary information, such as thermal saliency from infrared imagery and finegrained texture details from visible imagery. However, real-world multi-modal misalignment and geometric deformation often introduce severe artifacts. Most existing methods focus on feature extraction within Euclidean space, thereby neglecting the inherent hierarchical structures embedded in multimodal representations. While Euclidean space excels at preserving local structural details and supporting efficient computation, hyperbolic space is naturally suited for modeling hierarchical relationships due to its geometric properties. Building upon these observations, this paper proposes a unified framework that jointly optimizes image registration and fusion through a dual-space architecture. This architecture synergistically combines the local fidelity of Euclidean geometry with the hierarchical modeling capability of hyperbolic geometry to enhance multimodal representation learning. Specifically, this paper introduces Hyperbolic Coupled Contrastive Learning Optimization (HCCLO), which aligns and optimizes the hierarchical structures of infrared and visible embeddings in hyperbolic space. Moreover, this paper designs a task-adaptive dual-space features fusion mechanism, which dynamically balances and fuses Euclidean local features with hyperbolic hierarchical representations, thereby improving adaptability for downstream tasks. Extensive experiments on misaligned multimodal datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, while effectively capturing both spatial dependencies and hierarchical semantics.

PaperID: 3218

Authors:Zijian Xiao, Yining Xu, Yingjie Huang, Li Yao

Affiliations: Southeast University, Ministry of Education

Title: PUNO: A Neural Operator Framework for Point Cloud Upsampling

Abstract:
We propose PUNO, a novel deep operatorbased framework for point cloud upsampling, addressing the challenge of reconstructing high-resolution geometries from sparse point clouds. PUNO generalizes the neural operators proven effective in image super-resolution to 3D point cloud upsampling. Moreover, it first designs a network for point cloud tasks to achieve vertex displacement and manifold parameterization, thereby forming a coarse geometric representation that is compatible with super-resolution neural operators. This is followed by iterative kernel integral approximations in the function space and backprojection to generate the target coordinates, fully utilizing the high-frequency information in the function space. Unlike prior work, PUNO performs transformations in both the data domain and the function domain, with the solution space containing richer basis functions, yielding finer results that mitigate the ill-posed nature of sparse data. It also benefits global continuity. Extensive experiments demonstrate its superior accuracy, robustness, and generalization ability.

PaperID: 3219

Authors:honghui xu, Junwei Zhu, Yubin Gu, Yueqian Quan, Chuangjie Fang, Hong Qiu, Jianwei Zheng

Affiliations: Taizhou University, Zhejiang University of Technology, Xiamen University, Zhejiang Wanli University

Title: TRT: Harnessing Tensor Ring Transformer for Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution

Abstract:
Deep unfolding networks (DUNs) have recently emerged as a promising approach for hyperspectral image superresolution (HSISR) by combining the benefits of nonlinear deep learning architectures with interpretable optimization techniques. Despite their advantages, current DUNs face significant challenges, particularly in approximating degradation matrices across both spatial and spectral dimensions, which results in complex and cumbersome model construction. By analyzing the difference between the upsampled low-resolution hyperspectral images (LRHS) and the true target image, we observed that the residual image exhibits strong sparsity, akin to noise. Leveraging this insight, we reformulate the HSISR problem as a robust principal component analysis (RPCA)-based denoising task, effectively eliminating the need for the complex approximation of spatial degradation matrix and its transpose. In addition, we introduce a Tensor Ring Transformer based on multilinear products as the prior term, wherein tokens are mapped to a tensor ring factor domain and the traditional dot product is replaced with a multilinear tensor ring product. This significantly reduces the computational complexity of the Transformer model, from $ \mathcalO(N^2d) $ to $ \mathcalO(Nr^2) $, with \( r<

PaperID: 3220

Authors:Tianqi Xu, Yashi Zhu, Quansong He, Yue Cao, Kaishen Wang, Zhang Yi, Tao He

Affiliations: Sichuan University

Title: CNM-UNet: Continuous Ordinary Differential Equations for Medical Image Segmentation

Abstract:
Integrating Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) with Ushaped neural networks has emerged as a novel direction in medical image segmentation. Current networks predominantly employ discretization methods incorporating ODEs. However, these methods face inherent trade-offs between model compactness, computational accuracy, and efficiency. Continuous ODE solutions were rarely studied because they face three limitations: high computational costs, long training time, and poor generalization ability. To address these limitations, we propose an innovative Continuous Neural Memory ODE UNet (CNM-UNet), which replaces all hierarchical decoder layers in vanilla UNet with a single Continuous Neural Memory ODEs Block (CNM-Block) decoder, significantly reducing computation costs and improving training efficiency. CNM-UNet leverages ODEs' dynamic properties to establish continuous temporal feature extraction. For alleviating the generalization problem, a DUal SElf-updated (DUSE) strategy based on test-time adaptation principles is introduced to enhance cross-domain generalization. Experimental results demonstrate CNM-UNet's comprehensive advantages in computational capacity, convergence speed, and cross-domain adaptability, offering new insights for practical deployment of continuous ODE methodologies for medical image segmentation.

PaperID: 3221

Authors:Qinhong Yang, Dongdong Chen, Qi Chu, Tao Gong, Qiankun Liu, Zhentao Tan, Xulin Li, Huamin Feng, Nenghai Yu

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Digital Security, Microsoft CoreAI, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Independent Researcher, Beijing Electronic Science and Technology Institute

Title: MagicPaint: Operate Anything for Image Inpainting with Diffusion Model

Abstract:
Recent diffusionbased models have significantly improved inpainting quality. However, existing methods struggle with multi-task inpainting due to conflicting optimization objectives, and current datasets are typically limited to task-specific scenarios, hindering joint training. To address these challenges, we propose MagicPaint, a unified diffusion-based inpainting model that supports object addition, removal, and unconditional inpainting across both text and image modalities. MagicPaint semantically decouples operation types and target content by learnable tokens in MMToken Module, effectively reconciling conflicting optimization objectives and enabling robust multi-task, multi-modal inpainting. Besides, a novel inpainting paradigm named MagicMask, encodes operating intent directly into the mask and applies a mask loss for spatially precise supervision. In addition, existing inpainting datasets are insufficient for multi-task and multi-modal scenarios, limiting the capability of inpainting models. Thus, we further introduce a new dataset comprising 2.1M image tuples. It is dedicatedly designed to support diverse inpainting scenarios and significantly improves upon existing datasets, particularly in object removal. Through efforts from both model and data perspectives, MagicPaint enables users to operate anything—add, remove or inpaint content which is specified through either text or image modalities in a seamless and unified manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MagicPaint achieves state-of-the-art performance across three key tasks (i.e., text-guided addition, image-guided addition, and object removal) and produces outputs with superior visual consistency and contextual fidelity compared to existing methods.

PaperID: 3222

Authors:Songyuan Yang, Wanrong Huang, Yinuo Liu, Zhang Ke-Di, Xihuai He, Shaowu Yang, Huibin Tan

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology

Title: MMG-VL: A Vision-Language Driven Approach for Multi-Person Motion Generation

Abstract:
Generating realistic and coordinated 3D human motion for multiple individuals within complex environments remains a significant challenge. Existing textto-motion methods are often ``blind'' to the physical scene, leading to implausible motions, while scene-conditioned (HSI) approaches demand cumbersome full 3D data and largely neglect multi-person dynamics. To address these limitations, we introduce the VL2Motion paradigm and its embodiment, MMG-VL, a hierarchical framework that generates coordinated multi-person motions from the most accessible inputs: a single 2D image and natural language. MMG-VL first employs a Scene-Aware Intent Planner (SAIP) to interpret the visual context and decompose the user's command into a set of spatially-grounded, multi-person action blueprints. Subsequently, a Coordinated Motion Synthesizer (CMS) translates these blueprints into high-fidelity 3D motion sequences. The synergy between these stages is driven by two novel loss functions: a Spatial-Semantic Grounding Loss to ensure the planner's output is grounded in visual reality, and a Coordinated Environmental Realism Loss that enforces physical constraints and coherent group dynamics during synthesis. To facilitate this research, we introduce HumanVL, the first large-scale dataset featuring multi-person activities in multi-room scenes, providing aligned images, text, blueprints, 3D motions, and scene geometry. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MMG-VL significantly outperforms existing methods in generating spatially coherent, physically realistic, and coordinated multi-person motions, paving the way for more scalable and intuitive creation of dynamic virtual worlds.

PaperID: 3223

Authors:Xi Yang, Quantao Xie

Affiliations: Xidian University

Title: StyleProto: Style-Augmented Prototype Learning for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection

Abstract:
CrossDomain Few-Shot Object Detection (CD-FSOD) faces significant challenges due to the dual issues of domain shift and limited labeled samples. One major challenge is style bias, caused by limited support samples that fail to represent the target domain’s style diversity. Another is feature confusion, which stems from distribution shifts and limited supervision, manifesting as both object-background ambiguity and object-object confusion. To address these challenges, we propose Style-Augmented Prototype Learning (StyleProto), which constructs style-aware prototypes from support samples with diverse visual styles, and refines them via spatial weighting and discriminative fusion. Specifically, our StyleProto consists of three components: (1) Style Generation Augmentation (SGA); (2) Semantic-Focused Prototype Construction (SPC); (3) Hierarchical Prototype Fusion Aggregator (HPFA). SGA synthesizes style-diverse yet semantically consistent training samples by recombining style statistics from the support set, thus improving robustness to unseen styles. SPC aggregates support features using spatial attention to highlight object semantics and suppress background noise, yielding cleaner and more distinctive class prototypes. HPFA leverages query-guided attention to integrate discriminative support features, enhancing prototype representations with richer class-specific details. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that StyleProto consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 3224

Authors:Zhiwen Yang, Yuxin Peng

Affiliations: Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University

Title: HD²-SSC: High-Dimension High-Density Semantic Scene Completion for Autonomous Driving

Abstract:
Camerabased 3D semantic scene completion (SSC) plays a crucial role in autonomous driving, enabling voxelized 3D scene understanding for effective scene perception and decision-making. Existing SSC methods have shown efficacy in improving 3D scene representations, but suffer from the inherent input-output dimension gap and annotation-reality density gap, where the 2D planar view from input images with sparse annotated labels leads to inferior prediction of real-world dense occupancy with a 3D stereoscopic view. In light of this, we propose the corresponding High-Dimension High-Density Semantic Scene Completion (HD²-SSC) framework with expanded pixel semantics and refined voxel occupancies. To bridge the dimension gap, a High-dimension Semantic Decoupling module is designed to expand 2D image features along a pseudo third dimension, decoupling coarse pixel semantics from occlusions, and then identify focal regions with fine semantics to enrich image features. To mitigate the density gap, a High-density Occupancy Refinement module is devised with a ``detect-and-refine" architecture to leverage contextual geometric and semantic structures for enhanced semantic density with the completion of missing voxels and correction of erroneous ones. Extensive experiments and analyses on the SemanticKITTI and SSCBench-KITTI-360 datasets validate the effectiveness of our HD²-SSC framework.

PaperID: 3225

Authors:Yulin Yao, Kangfeng Zheng, Bin Wu, Chunhua Wu, Jujie Wang, Jiaqi Gao, Minjiao Yang, Dan Luo

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: SAFE: Semantic- and Frequency-Enhanced Curriculum for Cross-Domain Deepfake Detection

Abstract:
Driven by advances in GANs and diffusion models, deepfake content has reached an unprecedented level of photorealism, causing detectors to deteriorate once they leave their training domain. Most prior studies adopt CLIP as the backbone of an imagelevel binary classifier, yet overlook CLIP’s core strength: text-to-image semantic alignment. Moreover, captions generated by CLIP-CAP lack sufficient high-level semantics to distinguish between authentic and manipulated faces. Deepfake generators often fail to maintain semantic coherence, resulting in contradictions that traditional visual models cannot capture. Existing approaches also intermingle all samples during training and thus lack a systematic, difficulty-aware curriculum. To bridge these gaps, we introduce Semantic- and Frequency-Enhanced (SAFE) deepfake detection, a two-component framework: 1) Semantic-enhanced multimodal alignment. Authenticity cues are injected into CLIP-CAP captions, and low-rank LoRA fine-tuning is applied to CLIP’s visual branch, yielding dual supervision for text–image alignment and forgery discrimination. 2) Dual-score curriculum learning. Fourier Correlation Variance (FCV) measures local spectral consistency and, combined with the loss value, is transformed into a difficulty score that ranks training samples from easy to hard, reducing training time by 23.3% and enhancing generalization. SAFE attains state-of-the-art performance on several cross-dataset and cross-manipulation benchmarks. Ablation studies confirm that semantic enhancement, LoRA fine-tuning, and dual-score curriculum are complementary, jointly delivering substantial gains in open-set generalization.

PaperID: 3226

Authors:Linhua Ye, Xing Xi, Ronghua Luo

Affiliations: South China University of Technology

Title: OW-DAR: Dual-Granularity Adaptive Reconstruction-Error Modeling for Open-World Object Detection

Abstract:
Openworld object detection (OWOD) aims to detect known and unknown objects in dynamic environments. However, only known classes are labeled during training, making it challenging for detectors to recognize unknown objects during inference. Existing methods typically rely on supervision from known categories, leading models to overconfidently misclassify visually similar unknowns as known, and dissimilar ones as background. This known-class prior bias limits the model’s ability to detect unknown objects. In this paper, we propose a novel method, OW-DAR, which enhances foreground-background separability through collaborative fine-grained and coarse-grained modeling. At the fine-grained level, we propose Fine-grained Masked Reconstruction (FMR), which randomly masks regions of the feature map to guide the reconstruction toward semantic structures, rather than memorizing low-level patterns. At the coarse-grained level, we propose Adaptive Region-based Error Aggregation (AREA), which operates on object proposals to aggregate reconstruction errors. This enables the model to attend to semantically ambiguous foreground-background boundaries while suppressing the influence of local outliers during optimization. Finally, we leverage robust reconstruction errors to perform unsupervised foreground-background modeling, enabling probabilistic estimation for potential unknown objects. We validate the effectiveness of OW-DAR on standard OWOD benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate that OW-DAR consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving a +18.8 improvement in unknown object recall (U-Recall).

PaperID: 3227

Authors:Hang Yu, Yansen Yu, Jiayan Qiu

Affiliations: Shanghai University, Univerisity of Leicester

Title: Understanding Interaction as You Need: Intention-Driven Pedestrian Behavior Prediction

Abstract:
Prediction of pedestrian behavior is crucial for autonomous driving systems and intelligent transportation.Conventional methods predict the behavior based solely on either the pedestrian intention or the distancerelated interactions between the pedestrian and its surroundings. However, these methods overlook the associations between intention and interaction for behavior prediction, in which they should be aligned with each other, thus leading to sub-optimal predictions. To solve this problem, we propose to predict the behavior by learning the association between intention and interaction, enabling them to mutually enhance each other during the prediction. Specifically, we first predict the short-term intention of all objects, including the target pedestrian and its surroundings.Then, instead of using the distance-related interactions, we predict the interactions by learning the correlated intentions. Finally, the intention-driven interactions refine the initial intention prediction, thus ensuring the alignment between intention and interaction for behavior prediction. We evaluate our method on two downstream tasks, the pedestrian trajectory prediction and pedestrian intention estimation, and show that it outperforms all the existing methods.

PaperID: 3228

Authors:Xinpan Yuan, Shaomin Xie, Liujie Hua, Chengyuan Zhang, Guihu Zhao, Lin Yuanbo Wu

Affiliations: Hunan Police Academy, Hunan University, Central South University, The University of Warwick

Title: Geometry-Aware Noisy Correspondence Mitigation for Cross-Modal Text-Based Person Retrieval

Abstract:
TextBased Person Retrieval (TBPR) aims to accurately retrieve target individuals from large-scale image databases using only textual descriptions. Existing methods typically assume a ground-truth correspondence between text and images (i.e., strongly correlated). However, in real-world scenarios, this assumption may not be able to hold for the cross-modal matching due to weak or even corrupted correlations between textual descriptions and visual content, referred to as noisy correspondence (NC). Such NC largely disrupts the correspondence learning between visual and semantic modalities. Though prior works have improved single-modal robustness against noisy labels, systematic modeling of both cross-modal and intra-modal geometric structures in TBPR remains limited attention. In this paper, we propose Geometric Structure Consistency Alignment (GSCA) to TBPR, which leverages cross-modal cosine similarity and intra-modal nearest-neighbor affinity to learn visual-semantic consistency under noisy correspondence. To mitigate the structural corruption caused by noisy pairs, we introduce the Structure Refinement and Mining (SRAM) module. By partitioning training data into clean, ambiguous, and noisy subsets, SRAM enables the model to strategically refine the cross-modal correspondence by mining reliable pairs, thus enhancing the reliability of positive or negative samples discrimination and preserving structural consistency across modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across three public datasets. On CUHK-PEDES, it boosts Rank-1 by 1.42% in noise-free conditions, sustaining a robust 74.25% Rank-1 under a 50% noise ratio.

PaperID: 3229

Authors:Chi Zhang, Xiang Zhang, Lei Yu, Gui-Song Xia, Yuming Fang, Wenhan Yang

Affiliations: Peng Cheng Laboratory, ETH Zürich, School of Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University, School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics

Title: Event-Guided Super-Resolving Blurry Image via Asymmetric Integral Driven Consistency

Abstract:
SuperResolution from a Blurry low-resolution image (SRB) constitutes a severely ill-posed inverse problem. Current learning-based SRB approaches primarily rely on synthetic, well-labeled paired datasets to regularize solution spaces, yet they exhibit limited generalizability in practical applications due to significant domain discrepancies between simulated degradations and real-world imaging conditions. To bridge this synthetic-to-real gap, we propose a novel Self-supervised Event-based SRB (SE-SRB) framework that leverages neuromorphic event streams as physical priors and adopts a lightweight neural architecture tailored for effective domain adaptation. Specifically, the proposed SE-SRB introduces a self-supervised learning paradigm based on asymmetric integral driven consistency, which enforces temporal coherence between predictions derived from RGB and asynchronous event streams at different time points. Extensive experiments validate that SE-SRB consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Built upon a lightweight parallel two-stream architecture, SE-SRB achieves high computational efficiency, featuring reduced parameter count, lower FLOPs, and real-time inference capability (40 FPS).

PaperID: 3230

Authors:Guangtong Zhang, Bineng Zhong, Shirui Yang, Yang Wang, Tian Bai

Affiliations: Guangxi Normal University, Jilin University

Title: Aware Distillation for Robust Vision-Language Tracking Under Linguistic Sparsity

Abstract:
Visionlanguage object tracking overcomes the limitations of relying solely on visual features by leveraging language descriptions of objects to provide cross-modal semantic information, thereby enhancing model robustness in complex scenarios. However, most existing high-performance vision-language trackers are trained jointly on pure visual data and vision-language multimodal data. Due to the relative sparsity of language annotations in the data, the trackers tend to prioritize the localization role of visual features, diminishing the model's attention to language information. To mitigate this issue, we propose a novel vision-language tracker: Aware Distillation for Robust Vision-Language Tracking under Linguistic Sparsity (ADTrack). We introduce a knowledge distillation framework employing a knowledge-rich teacher model and a lightweight student model to establish modality correlations between vision and language, enabling efficient modeling between visual information and language descriptions. Specifically, our lightweight student module simultaneously distills language encoding capabilities from large language models through teacher-guided learning on input language, while performing target-aware perception on template images using language descriptions to generate more effective template features for subsequent visual extraction. Furthermore, to ensure perceptual robustness in linguistically sparse scenarios, we simulate language-deficient conditions during training and employ contrastive learning to enhance model adaptability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ADTrack reduces parameters by over 50% while achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance and speed on vision-language tracking benchmarks, including LaSOT, LaSOText, TNL2K, OTB-Lang and MGIT.

PaperID: 3231

Authors:Hui Zhang, Weikang Gao, Tao Yang, Yuan Cao

Affiliations: Ocean University of China

Title: Proxy Zero-Shot Hashing with Multimodal Fusion via Stable Diffusion

Abstract:
With the rapid growth of visual content in openworld environments, zero-shot hashing image retrieval (ZSHIR) has emerged to tackle the challenge of recognizing novel classes using attribute-level and semantic information. However, existing methods often rely on shallow fusion of multi-source cues (e.g., attributes, labels, and visual features) through external supervision or feature concatenation, failing to capture the underlying semantic structure in a generative way. Particularly, current bridging strategies between modalities suffer from information fragmentation and weak alignment, hindering the model's ability to fully understand complex attribute-visual relations. Moreover, subtle semantic gaps or “semantic drift” between seen and unseen classes further degrade inter-class separability and the scalability of hashing models. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework called Proxy Zero-Shot Hashing with Multimodal Fusion via Stable Diffusion (PZSH), which integrates generative modeling and contrastive learning. PZSH leverages a pre-trained Stable Diffusion (SD) model to synthesize multimodal content, and uses dual BLIP encoders to enhance semantic alignment across modalities. We further design a proxy hashing loss to enforce discriminative binary representations. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that PZSH achieves state-of-the-art performance with stronger generalization to unseen classes.

PaperID: 3232

Authors:Yiming Zhang, Rui Yan, Xiaohua Wan, Yifan Zhao, Shuang Feng, Zhetao Xu, Ying Wang, Fa Zhang, Bin Hu

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Beijing Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital, Capital Medical University

Title: Cyto-SSL: A Self-Supervised Pretraining Framework for Cytology Foundation Model

Abstract:
Cytological images originate from exfoliated cells, collected via liquidbased slides and digitized into whole slide images (WSIs). Unlike histological WSIs that exhibit continuous and well-structured tissue, cytological WSIs are sparse in spatial distribution and unstructured in cellular relationships. Typically, the nucleus serves as the primary diagnostic feature, while surrounding cytoplasmic information plays a supportive role. These unique characteristics limit the development of effective foundation models and hinder the transferability of histology-based models for cytopathology. To address this, we propose Cyto-SSL, the first self-supervised pretraining framework for cytological images. It introduces Nuclei-Centered Perturbation, which highlights individual nuclei by perturbing non-nuclear regions. We also design an SR-Transformer module, which complements this by using sparse attention to concentrate on diagnostically relevant scattered cells, while iRPE helps model to capture local spatial relationships and avoids unnecessary attention to irrelevant global structures. Experimental results show that Cyto-SSL enhances performance across diverse cytological datasets and Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) methods. On a WSI-level dataset, it achieved 95.67% accuracy and outperformed ImageNet-pretrained ResNet-50 by 11.33%, demonstrating superior feature representation for cytological analysis. Additionally, Cyto-SSL modules are plug-and-play, easily integrated into other pretraining frameworks, yielding a 2.6% accuracy gain across different SSL methods.

PaperID: 3233

Authors:Yizhuo Zhang, Kun Sun, Chang Tang, Yuanyuan Liu, Xin Li

Affiliations: China University of Geosciences (Wuhan), Huazhong University of Science and Technology, University at Albany

Title: SGAT: Learning Feature Matching with Singularity-enhanced Graph Attention Network

Abstract:
The task of image feature matching aims to establish correct correspondences between images from two different views. While approaches based on attention mechanisms have demonstrated remarkable advancements in image feature matching, they still encounter substantial limitations. Specifically, current graph attention network approaches face performance bottlenecks in complex scenarios, such as lowtexture regions or occlusions. This limitation stems from the self-attention mechanism, which, when lacking effective guidance, can lead to divergent attention weights or incorrect focus on regions with low discriminability, resulting in matching failures in low-texture environments. Inspired by how humans focus on distinctive regions when performing cross-view matching, we enhance attention to singular points in images that are salient, unique and have high cross-view matching potential during information aggregation, thereby improving matching capability. To realize the aforementioned strategies, we develop a novel Singularity-enhanced Graph Attention Network (SGAT). SGAT leverages Co-potentiality and Multi-Scale Singularity as prior guidance, and designs a Singularity-aware Attention mechanism and a Co-potentiality Guided Attention mechanism , specifically enhancing the perception of singularity and matching potential during feature interaction. Experimental results on multiple datasets, including ScanNet1500, demonstrate that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art sparse matching methods. In particular, the improvement is most pronounced in complex scenarios such as low-texture environments, significantly enhancing the accuracy and robustness of image matching and its downstream tasks.

PaperID: 3234

Authors:Zhenkui Zhang, Wendong Bu, Kaihang Pan, Bingchen Miao, Wenqiao Zhang, Guoming Wang, Wei Ji, Rui Tang, Juncheng Li, Siliang Tang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Nanjing University, Manycore Inc.

Title: Evolving Generalist Virtual Agents with Generative and Associative Memory

Abstract:
Generalist Virtual Agents (GVAs) powered by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities. However, their longterm learning is hampered by a core limitation: a failure to evolve beyond existing trajectories. This stems from memory systems that treat experiences as isolated fragments and rely on brittle semantic retrieval, preventing the synthesis of novel solutions from disparate knowledge. To address this, we introduce CA3Mem, a framework inspired by the human hippocampus that organizes experiences into a structured memory graph. Leveraging this graph, CA3Mem features two key innovations: 1) a generative memory recombination mechanism that synthesizes novel solutions to drive agent evolution, and 2) an associative retrieval algorithm that employs spreading activation to recall a comprehensive and contextually-aware set of experiences. Experiments on OSWorld and WebArena demonstrate that CA3Mem significantly enhances agent capabilities, leading to marked improvements in long-horizon planning, compositional generalization for novel tasks, and continuous adaptation from experience.

PaperID: 3235

Authors:Jiaqi Zhao, Jianpeng Xie, Yong Zhou, Wen-Liang Du, Hancheng Zhu, Rui Yao

Affiliations: China Unviersity of Mining and Technology - Xuzhou Mine Digitization Engineering Research Center of the Ministry of Education - Xuzhou

Title: Causal Decoupling Domain Generalization for Remote Sensing Change Detection

Abstract:
While current stateof-the-art Remote Sensing Change Detection (RSCD) methods can achieve impressive results on individual datasets, they become unreliable in unseen environments and imaging conditions, with performance metrics declining by as much as 60% to 80%. Simultaneously, variable environments and complex imaging conditions are the main characteristics of remote sensing data, calling for generalizable RSCD methods. To address this issue, we propose a novel RSCD method capable of domain generalization—CDDGNet. This method is based on causal decoupling theory, which progressively decouples invariant change features from variable domain features to extract generalizable characteristics. This enables a network trained on a single domain to accurately identify change regions in other domains. Specifically, firstly, the Causal Feature Adaptation Module is proposed to preliminarily decouple and simplify feature information during the encoding process by using wavelet transformation and feature energy spectralization methods. Secondly, the Causal Feature Fusion Module is presented to fully decouple features and aggregate significant change features during the decoding process through frequency domain processing and feature re-attention mechanisms. Thirdly, the Decoupling Effect Loss Function is proposed to optimize the process by evaluating the effectiveness of causal decoupling. Extensive experiments have shown that our model significantly outperforms existing methods across multiple groups of generalization tasks with varying levels of difficulty.

PaperID: 3236

Authors:Yuanzhi Zhao, Fan Yang, Yudong Zhao, Xiaoyu Li

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Finance and Economics

Title: UDCH: Unsupervised Dynamic Weighted Cluster-cooperative Hashing for Cross-modal Retreival

Abstract:
In crossmodal retrieval tasks, unsupervised hash code learning still faces key challenges, including the difficulty of modeling shared semantic structures across modalities and the inability to adaptively balance multiple supervision objectives during optimization. To address these issues, we propose a novel Unsupervised Dynamic Weighted Cluster-Cooperative Hashing (UDCH) framework, which jointly models feature-level alignment and cluster-level semantic structure to guide consistency learning across modalities under label-free conditions. Specifically, we design an instance-level contrastive loss in the feature branch to align the embedding spaces of images and texts, while employing K-Means clustering to generate pseudo-labels and construct a cluster-center contrast mechanism that captures semantic grouping information. Furthermore, we integrate cross-modal feature similarity to construct a high-order structure matrix, enabling fine-grained structural supervision. To enhance the synergy of multi-objective optimization, we introduce a dynamic weighting strategy that adaptively adjusts the contributions of the feature and cluster branches based on the degree of modal alignment and semantic compactness. Extensive experiments on multiple cross-modal retrieval benchmarks demonstrate that UDCH achieves superior semantic alignment and retrieval performance under unsupervised settings, validating the effectiveness of multi-level semantic modeling and adaptive collaboration mechanisms in unsupervised hashing tasks.

PaperID: 3237

Authors:Zhiqian Zhao, Liang Li, Lei Shen, Xichun Sheng, Yaoqi Sun, Fang Kang, Chenggang Yan

Affiliations: Hangzhou Dianzi University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Computing Technology, Macao Polytechnic University, Lishui University, Center for Machine Vision and Signal Analysis, University of Oulu

Title: Temporal Calibrating and Distilling for Scene-Text Aware Text-Video Retrieval

Abstract:
Existing textvideo retrieval methods mainly focus on singlemodal video content (i.e., visual entities), often overlooking heterogeneous scene text that is ubiquitous in human environments. Although scene text in videos provides finegrained semantics for cross-modal retrieval, effectively utilizing it presents two key challenges: (1) Temporally dense scene text disrupts sync with sparse video frames, obstructing video understanding;(2) Redundant scene text and irrelevant video frames hinder the learning of discriminative temporal clues for retrieval. To address them, we propose a temporal scene-text calibrating and distilling (TCD) network for textvideo retrieval. Specifically, we first design a window-OCR captioner that aggregates dense scene text into OCR captions to facilitate feature interaction. Next, we devise a heterogeneous semantics calibration module that leverages scene text as a self-supervised signal to temporally align window-level OCR captions and frame-level video features. Further, we introduce a context-guided temporal clue distillation module to learn the complementary and relevant details between scene text and video modalities, thereby obtaining discriminative temporal clues for retrieval. Extensive experiments show that our TCD achieves state-of-the-art performance on three scene-text related benchmarks.

PaperID: 3238

Authors:Huangqimei Zheng, Chengyi Pan, Qian Jiang, Wei Zhou, Xin Jin

Affiliations: School of Software, Yunnan University, Kunming China, School of Engineering, State Key Laboratory of Vegetation Structure, Function and Construction (VegLab)

Title: Hierarchical Dual-Domain Fusion with Frequency-Guided Spatial Modeling for Pan-Sharpening

Abstract:
Pansharpening aims to generate high-resolution multispectral images by integrating the spectral richness of low-resolution multispectral images with the spatial details of high-resolution panchromatic images. Although frequency-domain modeling shows great potential in this field, most existing methods are still limited to spatial-domain processing or fail to effectively capture the contextual interactions between frequency and spatial features. To address these issues, we propose a novel multi-scale frequency-spatial collaborative fusion approach. A Frequency-Spatial U-Net is introduced as the backbone network, in which frequency-spatial modeling blocks are embedded to progressively enhance the frequency-guided spatial contextual modeling capability across layers. To this end, we design a Dual Branch Frequency Attention module that adaptively enhances high- and low-frequency information. In addition, we introduce fine-mid-coarse resolution branches and devise a main-auxiliary multi-scale reconstruction loss to facilitate collaborative optimization. The effectiveness of the proposed model is validated through extensive experiments, demonstrating superior performance in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Moreover, our model achieves the fastest inference time among all compared methods, striking an excellent balance between accuracy and efficiency.

PaperID: 3239

Authors:Shijun Zheng, Yu Guo, Weiquan Liu, Yu Zang, Siqi Shen, Ming Cheng, Cheng Wang

Affiliations: Xiamen University, Jimei University

Title: Physically-Based LiDAR Smoke Simulation for Robust 3D Object Detection

Abstract:
3D object detection in adverse weather is crucial for autonomous driving, especially in smoke where LiDAR data becomes sparse and noisy. Due to the lack of real smoke data, this paper introduces a physicsbased simulation framework to generate realistic LiDAR point clouds of smoke and augment large-scale driving datasets. First, we present a 3D fluid dynamics-based smoke simulation framework in Unity, which models the realistic spatial diffusion and temporal evolution of smoke particles. Coupled with a physically accurate LiDAR perception module, our system captures complex light interactions—such as beam attenuation, scattering, and multi-path effects—to generate high-fidelity, physically consistent smoke point clouds. Second, we propose a range image-based data fusion strategy that seamlessly integrates the simulated smoke point clouds into large-scale real-world LiDAR datasets (e.g., Waymo). This approach accurately emulates LiDAR scanning characteristics and naturally incorporates occlusion effects, enabling realistic smoke integration without compromising spatial consistency. To validate our approach, we collect a real-world LiDAR smoke dataset (LiSmoke) and conduct extensive experiments using state-of-the-art 3D detectors. Results demonstrate that models trained with our augmented synthetic data achieve significant improvements in smoke-affected scenarios, while maintaining competitive performance in clear-weather conditions. Our work provides a cost-effective solution for enhancing perception robustness in safety-critical environments.

PaperID: 3240

Authors:Mingxuan Zhou, Yirui Shen, Shuang Li, Jing Geng, Yutang Zhang, Shuigen Wang

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology, Beihang University, Iray Technology Co.

Title: Thermal-Physics Guided Infrared Image Super-Resolution with Dynamic High-Frequency Amplification

Abstract:
The practical deployment of infrared imaging is hindered by its inherent output of lowresolution (LR) images. While the super-resolution (SR) technique is a promising remedy, we discover two major challenges concerning infrared image SR: preserving accurate thermal distributions, which are fundamental to infrared imaging, and addressing the ambiguity of high-frequency elements compared to visible images. To tackle these issues, we propose ThesIS, a tailored framework that utilizes Thermal-Physics guidance and dynamic high-frequency amplification for Infrared image Super-resolution to produce high-resolution (HR) images with accurate physical properties and delicate visual details. Specifically, Thermal Regularization is introduced to reconstruct the accurate thermal radiation distribution via the introduced Infrared Radiation Intensity Alignment Loss, mitigating the adverse effects of complex degradations while conducting initial upscaling. Additionally, we design a guidance mechanism to counter the randomness of the diffusion model, further refining the preservation of physical information. The proposed Dynamic High-Frequency Amplification effectively strengthens the ambiguous high-frequency information present in infrared images, leading to improved texture details and superior visual quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ThesIS successfully recovers accurate thermal information while delivering visually satisfying results with state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, we introduce the InfraredSR dataset, which comprises 39,833 images at a resolution of 512 × 512, hoping to advance research in this field.

PaperID: 3241

Authors:Zhensheng Zhou, Jianqing Liang, Jiye Liang, Zijin Du, Chenghao Fang

Affiliations: Shanxi University, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Semantic Guided Part Relation-aware Network for Point Cloud Completion

Abstract:
The primary goal of 3D point cloud completion is to reconstruct complete and highresolution point clouds from incomplete and low-resolution inputs. While some recent approaches have achieved satisfactory completion performance by incorporating additional images, there remains room for improvement in fully exploiting and utilizing the rich geometric relation information contained in parts. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Semantic Guided Part Relation-aware Network (SGPRNet) for Point Cloud Completion. Its core innovation lies in establishing part semantic relations to guide the reconstruction of structurally consistent local geometries. Specifically, we utilize Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) to automatically generate the specific text of 3D shape, which provides detailed geometric part relations descriptions. Building upon this, we design an Orthogonal Semantic Part Transfer (OSPT) module that learns transferable semantic relations between geometric parts. Subsequently, we develop a Semantic Geometric Relation-aware Transformer (SGRFormer) to progressively refine these semantic features, enhancing point cloud representation and guiding the generation of fine local structures. In addition, we establish a point-text pairs corpus, OmniObject3D-212/34 and Text-ViPC datasets based on existing OmniObject3D and ShapeNet-ViPC datasets, incorporating the specific text. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art completion methods.

PaperID: 3242

Authors:Zhihao Zhou, Rui Li, Xueying Li

Affiliations: School of Data Science, Qingdao University of Science and Technology

Title: Content Diversity-guided Ambiguity Mitigation for Open-Set Noisy Label Learning

Abstract:
Openset noisy label learning faces a critical challenge in maintaining robust DNN performance when training data contain both in-distribution noisy (IDN) and out-of-distribution (OOD) samples. These noisy samples induce overconfident but erroneous predictions due to their ambiguous positions relative to category boundaries. Current methods address this by filtering noisy samples based on visual features alone, they fail to resolve the semantic ambiguity near decision boundaries, where limited visual cues lead to unreliable sample purification. To this end, we propose Content Diversity-guided Ambiguity Mitigation (CDgAM), a novel framework that leverages diverse contents to mitigate visual ambiguity in open-set noisy label learning. CDgAM leverages textual descriptions of intra-class commonality and inter-class disparity to dynamically refine semantic boundaries, reducing bias in prototype learning. To further suppress early-stage uncertainty in visual representations, we design a region-sensitive distillation regularization that transfers boundary-aware knowledge from a multimodal large language model to the target DNN. Extensive experiments conducted on various datasets with different noise levels demonstrate the effectiveness of our CDgAM, outperforming state-of-the-art methods for open-set noisy label learning.

PaperID: 3243

Authors:Yangyi Fang, Haolin Shi

Affiliations: Tsinghua University

Title: Multi-granularity Intent Modeling with Adversarial Robustness for Sequential Recommendation

Abstract:
User purchase decisions are driven by complex, multifaceted intentions that evolve across different temporal horizons (e.g., immediate needs, transitional interests, and long-term preferences). However, existing sequential methods often treat user sequences as unified blocks, overlooking the dynamic evolution of user intents at different granularities, while also lacking robustness against prevalent noise in real-world interaction data. This paper proposes Multi-granularity Intent Modeling with Adversarial Robustness for Sequential Recommendation (MIMAR-SRec), a framework that models latent user intentions at multiple granularities. Specifically, MIMAR-SRec integrates multi-granularity intent representation across different contextual windows to capture evolving user interests, dual-perspective contrastive learning that aligns user representations with both intent prototypes and cross-user sequences, and intent-similarity adversarial robustness that systematically enhances model stability against interaction, temporal, and preference noise through controlled perturbations. By integrating multi-granularity intent modeling with adversarial training, MIMAR-SRec enables simultaneous fine-grained underlying intent modeling and noise-resistant recommendations. Extensive experiments on four widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that MIMAR-SRec outperforms baselines, particularly in long-tail item recommendation and noisy interaction scenarios.

PaperID: 3244

Authors:Chuan He, Yongchao Liu, Qiang Li, Chuntao Hong, Wenliang Zhong, Xin-Wei Yao

Affiliations: Ant Group, Zhejiang University of Technology

Title: M²VAE: Multi-Modal Multi-View Variational Autoencoder for Cold-start Item Recommendation

Abstract:
Coldstart item recommendation is a significant challenge in recommendation systems, particularly when new items are introduced without any historical interaction data. While existing methods leverage multi-modal content to alleviate the cold-start issue, they often neglect the inherent multi-view structure of modalities, namely the distinction between shared and modality-specific features. In this paper, we propose Multi-Modal Multi-View Variational AutoEncoder (M²VAE), a generative model that addresses the challenges of modeling common and unique views in attribute and multi-modal features, as well as user preferences over single-typed item features. Specifically, we generate type-specific latent variables for item IDs, categorical attributes, and image features, and use Product-of-Experts (PoE) to derive a common representation. A disentangled contrastive loss decouples the common view from unique views while preserving feature informativeness. To model user inclinations, we employ a user-aware hierarchical Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to adaptively fuse representations. We further incorporate co-occurrence signals via contrastive learning, eliminating the need for pretraining. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach.

PaperID: 3245

Authors:Xiaowen Jiang, Jing Yang, ShunDong Yang, Yuan Gao, Xinfa Jiang, Laurence Tianruo Yang, Jieming Yang

Affiliations: Zhengzhou University, Hainan University

Title: Towards Multimodal Continual Knowledge Embedding with Modality Forgetting Modulation

Abstract:
The continuous emergence of new entities, relations, triples, and multimodal information drives the dynamic evolution of multimodal knowledge graph (MMKG). However, existing MMKG embedding models follow a static setting, where training from scratch for growing MMKG wastes learned knowledge, while finetuning on new knowledge easily leads to catastrophic forgetting, severely limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. To address this, we propose a multimodal continual representation learning framework (MoFot) for growing MMKG. Unlike existing static multimodal embedding methods, MoFot focuses on alleviating catastrophic forgetting rather than retraining to adapt to new knowledge. Specifically, MoFot effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting caused by parameter updates and differing forgetting rates across modalities through a multimodal collaborative modulation mechanism. The mechanism ensures consistent retention of previously learned multimodal knowledge across snapshots through multimodal weight modulation and multimodal feature modulation. MoFot outperforms existing MMKG embedding, KG continual learning, and MMKG inductive models. Experimental results demonstrate that MoFot not only avoids forgetting but also enhances old knowledge by learning new knowledge, achieving adaptation to new knowledge while mitigating forgetting of old knowledge.

PaperID: 3246

Authors:Xinzhe Jiang, Lei Sang, Yi Zhang, Kaibin Wang, Yiwen Zhang

Affiliations: Anhui University, Swinburne University of Technology

Title: CAFU: Constrained Alignment and Filtered Uniformity for Denoising Recommendation

Abstract:
In recommender systems, recent advances highlight the critical role of alignment and uniformity (AU) in representation learning. Specifically, AUbased methods pull positive user-item pairs closer (alignment) and spread the overall representation distribution (uniformity), typically relying on observed positive samples. Despite their effectiveness, exist methods face two limitations: (1) noise issues have a more severe impact on AU-based methods in the absence of negative samples, leading to the capture of spurious signals such as misclicks or non-preferential behaviors; (2) data sparsity weakens the alignment of user-item representations, hindering reliable representation learning and harming recommendations for sparse users. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel recommendation framework named Constrained Alignment and Filtered Uniformity (CAFU). CAFU enhances robustness through Filtered Uniformity (FU) and improves performance under data sparsity via Constrained Alignment (CA). Specifically, FU adopts a threshold-based strategy to eliminate unreliable samples that degrade embedding quality, thereby strengthening robustness. In parallel, CA mitigates the impact of sparsity by masking low-confidence user-item pairs based on angular distance, leading to better recommendation for sparse users. Extensive experiments on three datasets and three backbones demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed framework.

PaperID: 3247

Authors:Chenxiao Lin, Ye Luo, KunHong Liu, Qingqiang Wu

Affiliations: School of Film, Xiamen University, School of Informatics, China Xiamen Key Laboratory of Intelligent Storage and Computing, China Institute of Artificial Intelligence, China Key Laboratory of Digital Protection and Intelligent Processing of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Fujian and Taiwan, Ministry of Culture and Tourism

Title: Stepwise Contrastive Reasoning for Retrieval-Augmented Generation over Knowledge Graphs

Abstract:
Retrievalaugmented generation (RAG) enhances the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge. Among available sources, knowledge graphs (KGs) offer a structured and reliable foundation for factual information, making them increasingly popular in efforts to improve reasoning faithfulness in RAG. Most existing KG-based RAG methods rely on LLMs to extract knowledge from KGs. However, these approaches often require costly fine-tuning and struggle to navigate deep graph structures, limiting their effectiveness in multi-hop reasoning tasks. To address these challenges, we propose Stepwise Contrastive Reasoning (SCR), a lightweight framework that integrates graph structure and textual context for efficient and interpretable RAG over KGs. SCR combines relational message passing layers to encode KG entities with a Transformer encoder for processing question text. It decomposes reasoning into a series of alignment steps. At each step, SCR compares the current topic entity and its neighbors with the question representation, selecting the most relevant entity as the next topic entity. The question is then updated with this entity's textual description. This process continues until the selected entity no longer changes, indicating that the answer entity has been reached. Through stepwise alignment, SCR enables compact models to perform faithful and interpretable reasoning over large-scale KGs. Extensive experiments on several widely used KGQA benchmarks demonstrate that SCR not only achieves state-of-the-art performance but also effectively boosts the capabilities of smaller language models to match those of LLMs.

PaperID: 3248

Authors:Wenlong Liu, Ze Wang, Chenlong Wu, Yude Bai, Ji Zhang

Affiliations: School of Software, Tiangong University, China Tianjin Key Laboratory of Autonomous Intelligence Technology and Systems, University of Southern Queensland

Title: Hierarchical Attention Network with Correction for Cross-Domain User Association

Abstract:
Despite the rich spatiotemporal patterns contained in trajectory data from multiple LocationBased Social Network (LBSN) platforms, heterogeneous formats, semantic inconsistencies, and unequal user scales across platforms create substantial barriers to reliable identity mapping. Furthermore, GPS drift and sparse sampling result in degraded data quality and distribution imbalance, which render existing trajectory representation methods inadequate for capturing high-order dependencies and dynamic spatiotemporal evolution patterns in heterogeneous multi-relational graphs. To this end, we propose HANCUA (Hierarchical Attention Network with Correction for User Association), a novel framework that employs a dual-stage correction mechanism to enhance cross-domain trajectory analysis. The approach constructs hierarchical multi-relational graphs comprising location, trajectory, and correction layers to capture fine-grained mobility patterns, behavioral associations, and inter-platform distribution differences. We design relation-aware multi-head graph attention networks to model complex interactions among heterogeneous node types, which enables comprehensive spatial relationship modeling. A spatiotemporal semantic collaborative learning module integrates temporal information with mobility patterns through interaction-aware attention mechanisms, while an ensemble correction decision module incorporates ensemble learning principles to systematically correct user association biases and address distribution imbalance problems. Extensive experiments on two real-world LBSN cross-domain datasets reveals that HANCUA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in user identity linking accuracy.

PaperID: 3249

Authors:Ruiying Lu, Gang Liu, Kang Li, Long Tian, Junwei Zhang

Affiliations: Xidian University

Title: MaskAD: Parallel Masked Autoencoder for Multi-class Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Abstract:
Multiclass unsupervised anomaly detection endeavors to establish a unified model capable of identifying anomalies across multiple classes when only normal data is accessible. However, widely employed reconstruction-based networks often struggle with the 'identical shortcut' issue of both normal and anomalous samples being reconstructed equally well, consequently failing to identify outliers. Although current methodologies attempt to tackle this problem, they remain susceptible to infiltration of anomalous information. In contrast, we introduce a novel scheme to make use of the `identical shortcut' phenomenon rather than pursue to eliminate it. Firstly, inspired by our interesting observation that normal and abnormal regions manifest distinct behaviors when encountering diverse masks, we devise a multi-branch masked autoencoder tailored for multi-class image reconstruction. Subsequently, we introduce a parallel masking scheme to magnify the reconstruction disparity between normal and abnormal regions when confronted with various masks. Ultimately, we propose a reconstruction association discrepancy learning method as a new anomaly localization criterion. The effectiveness of our approach is validated both quantitatively and qualitatively, achieving state-of-the-art results.

PaperID: 3250

Authors:Jianghong Ma, Changran He, Dezhao Yang, Tianjun Wei, Haijun Zhang, Xiaofeng Zhang

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Nanyang Technological University

Title: SGMT: Social Generating with Multiview-Guided Tuning In Recommender Systems

Abstract:
The sparsity of user–item interactions remains a fundamental obstacle in collaborative filtering, limiting the ability of Graph Neural Network (GNN)based recommender systems to capture high-order user relationships without incurring over-smoothing and computational overhead. Existing social recommendation approaches mitigate this by incorporating social networks, yet most rely on explicit ties and fail to construct informative links in their absence. Meanwhile, contrastive learning (CL) has shown promise in improving representation quality, but current view generation strategies, augmentation-based for robustness and nonaugmentation-based for semantic fidelity, are seldom combined, leaving their complementary potential underexplored. We propose Social Generating with Multiview-guided Tuning (SGMT), a unified framework that addresses both challenges. First, an interest-aware social generation mechanism constructs synthetic user–user links from shared interaction patterns, theoretically shown to compress collaborative paths and uncover latent high-order relations. Second, we present two complementary CL modules, Noise-augmented View and Semantic-explored View, which we theoretically prove to preferentially enhance uniformity and alignment, respectively, two fundamental objectives in CL. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that SGMT outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, validating both the theoretical analysis and the practical efficacy of our model.

PaperID: 3251

Authors:Fangzhe Nan, Frederick W. B. Li, Gary K. L. Tam, Zhaoyi Jiang, Bailin Yang, Jingke Cui, Changshuo Wang

Affiliations: Zhejiang Gongshang University, Durham University, Swansea University, University College London, University of London

Title: R²D-LPCC: Relevance-Ranking Guided Region-Adaptive Dynamic LiDAR Point Cloud Compression

Abstract:
Dynamic LiDAR point cloud compression (LPCC) is crucial for the efficient transmission and storage of largescale three-dimensional data in applications such as autonomous driving. However, many existing methods, which primarily focus on compressing geometric or motion information, face a fundamental limitation: they treat all points as equally important. This approach neglects the semantic priorities of a scene, resulting in inefficient bit allocation and particularly compromising the reconstruction quality of safety-critical regions, such as pedestrians and vehicles, which are vital to downstream perception tasks. To address these limitations, we propose R²D-LPCC, a relevance-ranking framework for region adaptive LPCC that prioritizes fidelity in semantically important regions. Central to our approach is the Adaptive Relevance Learning (ARL) module, which integrates semantic context with uncertainty to evaluate regional significance and guide compression. We also introduce a Multi-scale Region-Adaptive Transform (MRAT) module to enhance semantic feature modeling and preserve fine-grained details in key areas. Additionally, we develop an adaptive multi-modal motion estimation module to improve motion prediction in complex three-dimensional environments. Extensive experiments conducted on the SemanticKITTI benchmark demonstrate that R²D-LPCC significantly surpasses ten recent state-of-the-art methods, achieving a 45.48% BD-rate gain over the previous leading method, Unicorn, and a 98.58% gain over the GPCC standard, while ensuring superior reconstruction quality in semantically important regions.

PaperID: 3252

Authors:Linzhi Peng, Wentao Zhu, Ke Cheng, Heng Chang, Junchen Ye, Bowen Du, Weifeng Lv

Affiliations: Beihang University, Tsinghua University

Title: UNO! UNified Offline Training Paradigm for Learning Path Recommendation

Abstract:
With the wide adoption of online education platforms, adaptive learning systems have become increasingly important. Learning Path Recommendation (LPR) aims to dynamically adjust learning content to optimize learning efficiency based on individual student needs. However, current LPR methods suffer from sparse reward for precise assessment and only focus on anonymous sessions that overlook more personalized and effective paths. To address these challenges, we propose UNO, UNified Offline Training Paradigm for Learning Path Recommendation. This approach introduces an offline training paradigm in RLbased LPR to provide dense process rewards by a personalized advantage based on a reward model, which can estimate the students' internal knowledge levels on the learning targets. Additionally, we propose UniLPR model, a personalized recommendation system that unifies modeling the implicit relationships between students' long-term accumulation and evolving requirements for questions, and refines through Group Relative Policy Optimization(GRPO). Finally, we design learning tasks that encompass historical reviewing, recent learning, and long-term exploratory learning to simulate the comprehensive and diverse learning needs of students. Our UNO achieves state-of-the-art performance across all tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness.

PaperID: 3253

Authors:Qiyu Qin, Yichen Li, Haozhao Wang, Cheng Wang, Rui Zhang, Ruixuan Li

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: Unbiased Rectification for Sequential Recommender Systems Under Fake Orders

Abstract:
Fake orders pose increasing threats to sequential recommender systems by misleading recommendation results through artificially manipulated interactions, including click farming, contextirrelevant substitutions, and sequential perturbations. Unlike injecting carefully designed fake users to influence recommendation performance, fake orders embedded within genuine user sequences aim to disrupt user preferences and mislead recommendation results, thereby manipulating exposure rates of specific items to gain competitive advantages. To protect users' authentic interest preferences and eliminate misleading information, this paper aims to perform precise and efficient rectification on compromised sequential recommender systems while avoiding the enormous computational and time costs of retraining existing models. Specifically, we identify that fake orders are not absolutely harmful—in certain cases, partial fake orders can even have a data augmentation effect. Based on this insight, we propose Dual-view Identification and Targeted Rectification (DITaR), which primarily identifies harmful samples to achieve unbiased rectification of the system. The core idea of this method is to obtain differentiated representations from collaborative and semantic views for precise detection, and then filters detected suspicious fake orders to select truly harmful ones for targeted rectification with gradient ascent. This ensures that useful information in fake orders is not removed while preventing bias residue. Moreover, it maintains the original data volume and sequence structure, thus protecting system performance and trustworthiness to achieve optimal unbiased rectification. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that DITaR achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods in terms of recommendation quality, computational efficiency, and system robustness.

PaperID: 3254

Authors:Jiawei Sheng, Taoyu Su, Weiyi Yang, Linghui Wang, Yongxiu Xu, Tingwen Liu

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China School of Cyber Security, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University

Title: InformationTheoretic Minimal Sufficient Representation for Multi-Domain Knowledge Graph Completion

Abstract:
Multidomain knowledge graph completion (MKGC) seeks to predict missing triples in a target KG by leveraging triples from multiple KGs in different domains (e.g., languages or sources). Existing studies typically learn and fuse multi-domain KG representations solely with alignments or fusion modules, which can be affected by redundant information within KGs. This issue can conceal task-relevant information in representations, impeding further improvements when scaling to numerous KGs. To this end, we propose IMKGC, an information-theoretic MKGC framework to learn minimal sufficient representations. In particular, IMKGC learns entity representations by explicitly preserving endogenous contextual information within each KG, exogenous complementary information from other KGs, and consistent information of equivalent entities, while suppressing redundant information through variational constraints. Furthermore, we achieve compressed relation representations with a devised relation reasoning decoder that captures relatedness among relations, also improving triple prediction. Extensive experiments on 14 KGs in three benchmark datasets demonstrate that IMKGC significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, especially in redundant scenarios.

PaperID: 3255

Authors:Jingyuan Wang, Zhichun Wang, Tong Lu, Yiming Guan

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing Normal University, China Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Technology and Educational Application, Ministry of Education

Title: Task-Aware Meta-Learning on Heterogeneous Knowledge Graph for POI Recommendation

Abstract:
Pointof-Interest (POI) recommendation plays a pivotal role in location-based services by guiding users to discover new and relevant places. While graph-based methods have shown promising results, effectively modeling the diversity and dynamics of user preferences remains a key challenge. Addressing this requires richer representations of both POIs and user interests, as well as more adaptive learning strategies. In this work, we propose TMHKG, a Task-aware Meta-learning framework with a Heterogeneous Knowledge Graph for POI recommendation. To enhance representation learning, TMHKG constructs a dual-view POI knowledge graph that integrates geographical proximity and user-aware category transitions, and models users' evolving interests from sequential visit histories. On top of enriched features, TMHKG adopts a task-aware meta-learning paradigm, treating each user's recommendation task as a separate meta-task. A generalizable recommendation policy is first learned from diverse training tasks and then quickly adapted to each user's unique behavior, enabling highly personalized predictions. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that TMHKG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting its effectiveness in capturing complex user-POI interactions.

PaperID: 3256

Authors:Zi'ang Wang, Lei Chen, Yuanchang Jin, Pan Deng, Shuangshuang Pang, Junting Liu, Yu Zhao

Affiliations: Beihang University

Title: Knowledge Graph Guided Heterogeneity-Informed Diffusion Model for Spatio-Temporal Generation

Abstract:
Spatiotemporal data generation aims to synthesize realistic urban data across graph nodes by learning spatial and temporal dependencies. This task plays a crucial role in urban planning by enabling the simulation of unobserved nodes. However, existing approaches face critical limitations that time series generation methods fail to generalize to unseen nodes, while spatio-temporal generative models are either restricted to the trajectory generation task or dependent on auxiliary data inputs. To bridge these gaps, we propose a Knowledge Graph Guided Heterogeneity-Informed Diffusion Model (KGDiff) in this paper through the following key innovations. First, we design a geometry-aware mixture of experts integrating Euclidean, hyperbolic, and hyperspherical representations to comprehensively encode urban structural knowledge. Next, we present a learnable meta spatio-temporal pattern module that normalizes node-specific heterogeneity before the generation process, and a conditional denoising process that progressively transforms random noise into realistic samples under structural guidance. Finally, extensive experiments across real-world urban datasets demonstrate that KGDiff achieves the state-of-art performance in generating realistic urban spatio-temporal data.

PaperID: 3257

Authors:Borui Wu, Yuanbo Xu

Affiliations: Jilin University

Title: Dual-Perspective Disentanglement: Learning Symmetric Group-Aware Representations for Cross-Domain Recommendation

Abstract:
CrossDomain Recommendation (CDR) transfers user preferences from a source domain to alleviate data sparsity in a target domain. While disentangling representations into domain-specific and shared components is a common method, existing methods overlook user preference heterogeneity and item appeal heterogeneity. To this end, we propose DPGCDR, a Dual-Perspective Group-aware CDR method that learns symmetric group-aware representations from both user and item. Conceptually, DPGCDR dynamically clusters users into groups and items into themes, then symmetrically disentangles user preferences into group-specific and cross-group shared components, and item attributes into theme-specific and cross-theme shared components. We propose a two-stage training scheme: 1) an initial warm-up stage learns preliminary representations to dynamically cluster users and items into group and theme structures which generalize cross-domain scenarios into multi-group disentanglement analogous to multi-domain settings; 2) a fusion-based aggregation stage integrates these group/theme-specific components into unified global representations. Additionally, an information-theoretic alignment regularizer further ensures consistency and discriminability between global shared and group/theme-specific representations, facilitating effective knowledge transfer by explicitly modeling and preserving the inherent multi-group structure within cross-domain interactions. Extensive experiments show DPGCDR achieves state-of-the-art performance, with significant gains of up to 25% in HR@10 over baselines on datasets with heterogeneous interaction structures. Further analyses confirm our dynamic clustering mechanism effectively adapts to underlying data patterns, enabling fine-grained cross-domain knowledge transfer.

PaperID: 3258

Authors:Bo Xu, Chenyuan Wang, Xinyu Chen, Hongfei Lin, Feng Xia

Affiliations: Dalian University of Technology, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

Title: MetaGPT: A Large Vision-Language Model for Meme Metaphor Understanding

Abstract:
Meme is an expressive medium that often conveys rich emotions and intentions. Recent studies have confirmed the critical role of metaphors in meme understanding. However, existing metaphor research heavily relies on manual annotations, and mainstream visionlanguage models (VLMs) still struggle with the recognition and comprehension of metaphors. To address these challenges, we introduce MetaGPT, the first vision-language model specifically designed for meme metaphor understanding. MetaGPT is capable of identifying and extracting metaphors in memes, and generating accurate meme interpretations. Furthermore, we construct a dedicated dataset for meme understanding, MUnd, which comprises approximately 32,000 high-quality question-answer (QA) pairs across three core tasks: metaphor detection, metaphor domain extraction, and meme interpretation. Based on MUnd, we further propose an evaluation benchmark for meme understanding and conduct a comprehensive assessment of existing VLMs. Experimental results reveal that current models still face challenges in metaphor comprehension, while MetaGPT consistently outperforms them across all tasks, highlighting its potential in advancing meme understanding.

PaperID: 3259

Authors:Huilang Xu, Xiang-Xiang Su, Simin Chen, Guang-Yong Chen, Xing Chen

Affiliations: Fuzhou University

Title: Bridging Optimization and Neural Networks for Efficient Multi-view Clustering

Abstract:
Multiview clustering (MVC) seeks to uncover the intrinsic group structures embedded in multi-view data, which has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Existing approaches predominantly concentrate on incorporating suitable model priors to capture consistency across views. However, these explicit constraints often fail to hold in scenarios involving significant modal differences between views or the presence of noise, thereby limiting the efficacy of these methods in more complex contexts. To address these issues, this paper introduces BONE, a lightweight and interpretable MVC framework that Bridges Optimization and Neural networks for Efficient MVC. By leveraging learnable parameters to extract high-level features from low-level features derived through classical optimization, BONE integrates the consistency information across views without the need for explicit prior constraints, while eliminating the necessity for pre-training or post-processing. Extensive experiments show that BONE achieves clustering performance comparable to or even better than existing deep MVC methods, while using only 1% of the parameters, offering a new perspective for designing efficient MVC algorithms.

PaperID: 3260

Authors:Binhan Yang, Wei Shen, Han Tian

Affiliations: Nankai University

Title: A Novel Retrieve-Read-Group Paradigm for Open Knowledge Base Canonicalization

Abstract:
Noun phrases (NPs) in open knowledge bases (OKBs) are not canonicalized, leading to scattered knowledge that necessitates the exploration of the OKB canonicalization task (i.e., clustering synonymous noun phrases into the same group and assigning them a unique identifier). However, existing OKB canonicalization methods typically adhere to a traditional embeddingcentered pipeline, which fails to exploit the direct interaction between NPs for pairwise NP similarity calculations, resulting in suboptimal performance and instead relying extensively on external resources. To address these limitations, we introduce a groundbreaking retrieve-read-group paradigm that enables fine-grained pairwise NP similarity calculations by effectively leveraging the direct NP interaction via the reading stage, thereby relieving the reliance on external resources. As an instantiation of this paradigm, we propose DUVK, a novel self-supervised framework that fully integrates the dual-view knowledge involved in OKBs from the relational view and the semantic view. In the retriever component of DUVK, a dual-view cross-training strategy is designed to make two view-specific encoders mutually reinforce each other by capitalizing on the complementary knowledge delivered from both views. Experimental results demonstrate that, even without the need of any external resources, DUVK outperforms all state-of-the-art competitors that rely on such resources.

PaperID: 3261

Authors:Liu Yang, Chuyao Liu, Zidong Wang, Tingxuan Chen, Mengni Chen, Hongyu Zhang

Affiliations: Central South University

Title: GIER: Addressing Class Imbalance in GNNs Through Experience Replay

Abstract:
The prevalent class imbalance in realworld graphs significantly affects the performance of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Existing methods for analyzing graph imbalance ignore the influence of minority nodes during the dynamic model training process, resulting in performance limitations. In this paper, we focus on minority class information during model training, identifying and defining the minority class forgetting phenomenon that exists in graph imbalanced method training processes. To address this issue, we propose Graph Imbalance Experience Replay(GIER) framework. On one hand, the method enhances the model's ability to mine minority node information in historical data, thereby achieving feature completion for minority class nodes. On the other hand, the proposed short-term confidence mechanism allows the model to adaptively calibrate the topological relationships in high-confidence nodes, thereby mitigating the model's tendency to propagate erroneous information about minority classes during training. GIER is a unified framework consisting of two synergistic components: Long-term Subgraph Memory (LSM) constructs multi-period feature-representative subgraphs to address distribution imbalance, and Short-term Confidence Calibration (SCC) dynamically reconstructs graph topology through degree-aware node selection and confidence-based filtering to address topological imbalance. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that GIER effectively improves the classification performance of GNNs on imbalanced graphs, achieving up to a 3.44% improvement in BAcc over the state-of-the-art, and is particularly effective in extreme scenarios with very small minority classes.

PaperID: 3262

Authors:Chu-Chun Yu, Ming-Yi Hong, Miao-Chen Chiang, Min Chen Hsieh, Che Lin

Affiliations: National Taiwan University

Title: MM4Rec: Multi-Source and Multi-Scenario Recommender for Unified User Preference

Abstract:
As online ecosystems grow increasingly complex, personalized recommendation systems must integrate user preferences across heterogeneous content sources and interaction scenarios. However, conventional methods typically model each source and scenario in isolation, hindering their ability to capture shared and complementary signals across contexts. In this work, we propose MM4Rec, a unified framework for multisource and multi-scenario recommendation. MM4Rec introduces a Source-Aware Transformer Encoder to jointly model heterogeneous inputs, a Multi-Scenario Behavior Extraction Layer based on a multi-mixture-of-experts architecture to capture scenario-specific dynamics, and a Trend-Aware Learner to enhance temporal representation learning. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that MM4Rec consistently outperforms strong baselines across standard recommendation metrics. To facilitate future research, we also release two large-scale datasets encompassing diverse sources and scenarios.

PaperID: 3263

Authors:Zhongqing Yu, Xin Liu, Yiu-ming Cheung, Zhikai Hu, Wentao Fan, Pan Zhou

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, Huaqiao University Fujian Key Lab. of Big Data Intell. and Security & Xiamen CVPR Key Laboratory, Hong Kong Baptist University, Department of Artificial Intelligence, School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: DRFGD: Disentangled Representation-Focused Generative Defense for Attack-Tolerant Cross-Modal Hashing

Abstract:
With the widespread deployment of crossmodal retrieval in real-world scenarios, ensuring robustness against adversarial attacks is increasingly critical. Remarkably, deep cross-modal hashing is highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks due to its discrete nature and low-dimensional hash codes, while existing defense methods often fail to suppress perturbations embedded in vulnerable features and lack the capacity to model modality-specific structural differences, resulting in suboptimal adversarial robustness. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Disentangled Representation-Focused Generative Defense (DRFGD) framework for attack-tolerant cross-modal hashing. Without altering the structure of retrieval model, DRFGD defends against adversarial attacks by disentangling input representations into adversarial-robust and adversarial-vulnerable components, by an efficient dual-branch semantic-aware encoder. Guided by such disentangled robust features, an attack-tolerant generative module is seamlessly designed to synthesize semantically aligned and perturbation-resilient examples for robust adversarial training, thereby significantly promoting collaborative defense robustness to attackers. Consequently, the semantically consistent hash codes can be well obtained to enhance adversarial robustness in complex cross-modal attacking scenarios. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that DRFGD substantially improves retrieval robustness under various attacking scenarios, and shows its improved defense performance in comparison with the SOTA works.

PaperID: 3264

Authors:Xiaohan Zhan, Yuliang Shi, Jihu Wang, Shijun Liu, Fanyu Kong, Zhiyong Chen

Affiliations: School of Software, Shandong University, School of Control Science and Engineering

Title: DHMRec: Collaboration-Guided Multimodal Disentanglement and Hierarchical Fusion for Recommendation

Abstract:
Multimodal recommender systems have emerged as a pivotal paradigm for harnessing diverse data modalities to deliver personalized services. Contemporary research predominantly focuses on integrating heterogeneous modality information through graph learning. However, these approaches face two key challenges: (1) the inherent complexity of modalities, characterized by entangled redundant signals and noise; and (2) the challenge of effectively integrating multimodal representations, each of which may exert varying degrees of influence on users' preferences. To address these challenges, we propose a novel CollaborationGuided Multimodal Disentanglement and Hierarchical Fusion for Recommendation (DHMRec), which simultaneously achieves intra-modal denoising disentanglement and inter-modal hierarchical fusion. Specifically, we introduce a collaboration-related modality disentanglement module to distinguish between modality-common and modality-specific features. Then, through multi-view graph learning to capture both item-item dependencies and user-item interaction patterns. Additionally, we implement hierarchical fusion between the disentangled multimodal features and ID embeddings using a positive-negative attention-aware fusion module and an interaction distribution-based alignment module. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that our DHMRec surpasses various state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting its effectiveness in intra-modal disentanglement and multimodal features fusion.

PaperID: 3265

Authors:Jingyuan Zhang, Xin Wang, Lei Yu, Li Yang, Fengjun Zhang

Affiliations: Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Binary Message Passing for Generalizable Semi-Supervised Graph Anomaly Detection

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved impressive performance in semisupervised graph anomaly detection (GAD). While many GNN variants have been developed for this task, they largely focus on advanced message aggregation schemes, leaving the message routing aspect underexplored. We argue that the commonly used broadcast-based routing can also hinder generalization, particularly in the presence of rare and structurally challenging (vertices with a high-degree) anomalies. To address this, we propose Binary Message Passing (BMP), a novel routing paradigm that models the message flow of each vertex as a binary tree (BMP tree), where vanilla graph convolution is decoupled by its left and right subtrees. Each vertex recursively gathers information from neighbors with higher anomaly probabilities within each subtree, thereby amplifying the propagation of anomaly information across the topology. The anomaly probabilities are estimated and updated by the model itself, enabling adaptive, self-supervised routing over iterations. Furthermore, combining multiple BMP trees into a BMP forest provides multi-scale structural context, enhancing the expressiveness of final vertex embeddings. Extensive experiments show that BMP improves detection performance under limited supervision while exhibiting better generalization across structurally diverse anomalies.

PaperID: 3266

Authors:Wei Zhang, Siyu Yi, Lezhi Chen, Yifan Wang, Ziyue Qiao, Yongdao Zhou, Wei Ju

Affiliations: College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, College of Mathematics, College of Electrical Engineering, School of Information Technology & Management, University of International Business and Economics, School of Computing and Information Technology, Great Bay University, School of Statistics and Data Science, Nankai University

Title: Evidence-aware Integration and Domain Identification of Spatial Transcriptomics Data

Abstract:
Spatial transcriptomics (ST) enables joint profiling of gene expression and spatial positions, thereby revealing spatially resolved biological functions. However, many existing ST analysis methods often fail to explicitly quantify the belief and uncertainty in decisions caused by noisy ST data, making it difficult to handle spots of varying quality in a finegrained manner. In addition, domain identification is a fundamental and critical task in ST, but commonly used models that separate expression learning and clustering often struggle to learn cluster-friendly latent representations effectively. To address these issues, we propose PREST, a prototype-based evidence-aware integration framework for ST data. PREST performs multi-scale representation learning with fine-grained attention fusion and introduces learnable class prototypes to quantify belief and uncertainty in model decisions. We aim to align overall belief scores with latent semantic information to enhance uncertainty quantification and prototype learning, thereby promoting the learning of clustering-friendly representations. PREST further integrates an uncertainty-aware reconstruction module and spatial regularization to reduce overfitting to unreliable spots and promote denoised, discriminative representations. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed PREST across various downstream tasks.

PaperID: 3267

Authors:Xiangkai Zhu, Yeyu Yan, Saiqin Long, Chao Li, Guanwen Chen, Longsheng Su

Affiliations: Jinan University, Beijing Jiaotong University, Shandong University of Science and Technology

Title: Stage-Aware Graph Contrastive Learning with Node-oriented Mixture of Experts

Abstract:
Textattributed graphs (TAGs), which associate rich textual descriptions with each node, are widely employed to represent complex relationships among real-world textual entities. Currently, representation learning for TAGs leverages large language models (LLMs) to transform node-matched textual descriptions into node features or labels, followed by the message passing in graph neural networks (GNNs) that further improves the expressiveness of graph representation learning. Nevertheless, a simple experiment we conducted demonstrates that not all LLMs are readily compatible with GNNs. A salient finding indicates that architectural heterogeneity among LLMs manifests as substantial performance gap across diverse TAGs representation learning. Moreover, the node semantics encoded by LLMs are often misaligned with the message passing in GNNs, causing performance collapse. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel self-supervised graph learning framework called Stage-Aware Graph Contrastive Learning (SAGCL). In particular, we propose the node-oriented mixture of experts (NodeMoE) to assign suitable candidate experts for each node. It flexibly balances the strengths of different language experts by low-rank decomposition and reparameterization strategies. Subsequently, to align the inductive biases of graph structures with the semantic perception capabilities of LLMs, the message passing in GNNs is decoupled into the feature transformation stage and the feature propagation stage. Given the two stage views, stage-aware graph contrastive learning is proposed to match the node semantics encoded by the LLM with the locally aware topological patterns within the GNN via self-supervised contrastive learning. Experiments on eight datasets and three downstream tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of SAGCL.

PaperID: 3268

Authors:Lei Chai, Lu Qi, Hailong Sun, Jing Zhang, Jingxuan Xu

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Complex & Critical Software Environment (CCSE), Beihang University

Title: Attribution Analysis-based Concept Alignment: A Human-in-the-loop Data Debugging Framework

Abstract:
Ensuring consistently highquality training data is essential for developing reliable machine learning systems. Recent research demonstrates that incorporating human supervision into training set debugging effectively improves model performance, especially for text classification tasks. However, such methods often prove inapplicable to image understanding tasks, where inherently unstructured pixel data presents challenges in understanding and correcting biases. Inspired by human-AI alignment, we introduce AACA (Attribution Analysis-based Concept Alignment), a human-in-the-loop framework that mitigates bias in the training set by aligning the concepts used by humans and AI during the decision-making process. Specifically, AACA comprises two primary stages: interpretable data bug discovery and targeted data augmentation. During the data bug discovery stage, AACA identifies confounded and valid concepts to explain why prediction failure occurs and what concept the model should focus, using interpretability methods and human annotation. In the stage of targeted data augmentation, AACA adopts these concept-level attributions as clues to synthesize debugging instances via text-to-image generative model. The initial model is then retrained on the augmented set to correct prediction failures. Comparative experiments conducted on crowdsourced annotations and real-world datasets demonstrate that AACA can accurately identifies data bugs and effectively repairs prediction failures, thereby significantly improving prediction performance.

PaperID: 3269

Authors:Xiaohan Xie, Haoran Yu, Biying Shou, Jianwei Huang

Affiliations: School of Science & Engineering, CSIJRI Joint Research Centre on Smart Energy Storage, Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Crowd Intelligence Empowered Low-Carbon Energy Network, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen Shenzhen Loop Area Institute, School of Computer Science & Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, School of Management & Economics

Title: Automated Human Strategic Behavior Modeling via Large Language Models

Abstract:
What if machines could discover human behavioral patterns better than experts? Traditional behavioral modeling in economics depends on costly manual refinement by domain experts, severely limiting scalability and discovery potential. We introduce AutoBM, an automated behavioral modeling framework leveraging large language models (LLMs) to systematically generate, evaluate, and refine interpretable behavioral models directly from human behavior data. AutoBM represents candidate models as structured natural language specifications, explicitly defining symbolic terms along with their tunable parameters, interpretations, and design rationales. AutoBM leverages LLMs to automatically translate each language specification into executable code, optimize tunable parameters, and evaluate model performance. Utilizing LLMguided search strategies, AutoBM iteratively recombines and improves models at the term level, closely mirroring human expert practices. Experiments conducted across three distinct strategic environments (the ultimatum game, repeated rock-paper-scissors, and continuous double auctions) demonstrate that AutoBM-generated models consistently outperform leading manually crafted models, achieving significant improvements in prediction accuracy while maintaining clear interpretability. Our results demonstrate that automated frameworks can not only match but systematically exceed human expertise in behavioral modeling, fundamentally changing how we understand strategic human behavior.

PaperID: 3270

Authors:Jian Xiong, Lingxia Jiang, Xianzhong Long, Miaohui Wang, Hao Gao

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Shenzhen University

Title: Point Cloud Quality Assessment via Multi-View Structure-Aware Feature Fusion

Abstract:
Point cloud quality assessment (PCQA) is essential for reliable 3D visual applications. While pointbased methods face challenges in characterizing distortions due to point cloud disorder, projection-based approaches offer better efficiency but suffer from geometric distortion insensitivity and texture representation blind spots. This study proposes SAF-Net, a multi-view structure-aware feature fusion network for PCQA. We first identify two key limitations in projection-based methods: insufficient geometric distortion perception and representation blind spots (RBS) in texture images. To address these issues, SAF-Net innovatively integrates object mask maps and local binary pattern (LBP) maps. The mask maps enhance geometric distortion perception by extracting edge sharpness and curvature variations, while LBP maps capture essential structural information to overcome RBS and align with human visual system (HVS) sensitivity. SAF-Net employs a hybrid CNN-ViT architecture to balance local feature extraction and global context modeling, along with a progressive fusion strategy to optimize cross-modal feature interaction. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of SAF-Net on multiple benchmarks, establishing new state-of-the-art results in PCQA.

PaperID: 3271

Authors:Liqi Yan, Yihao Wu, Chenyi Xu, Chao Yang, Jianhui Zhang, Pan Li

Affiliations: Hangzhou Dianzi University

Title: AR-Nav Benchmark: Augmented Reality Navigation with Vision and Language

Abstract:
Augmented Reality (AR) navigation has emerged as a transformative tool for spatial intelligence, enabling users to interactively explore complex environments through wearable and mobile AR devices. However, current AR navigation systems struggle with low indoor localization accuracy, weak semantic understanding, and limited longterm memory, which severely limits their adaptability in dynamic, multi-floor, and large-scale real-world settings. To address these challenges, we present AR-Nav benchmark, a novel dataset with corresponding suite that leverages vision and language for AR navigation. First, to construct this benchmark, we proposed an Augmented Reality Visual-Language Memory Model (AR‑VLM²), which generates structured, semantically rich, and temporally indexed representations for long-term AR navigation. Second, we design a lightweight navigation intent recommending module with hierarchical topological reasoning and language-grounded path planning, called ARN‑Pilot, enabling low-latency and personalized route selection. Third, we introduce a closed-loop AR interaction module that supports real-time multi-modal feedback, dynamic memory updates, and human-in-the-loop query refinement. Extensive experiments in indoor multi-floor and outdoor parking scenarios show that AR-Nav suite significantly outperforms state-of-the-art AR navigation methods.

PaperID: 3272

Authors:Lin Zhang, Shikui Tu, Lei Xu

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: SEBSFormer: A Spectral-Enhanced Bi-Stream Transformer for Robust EEG Decoding

Abstract:
Electroencephalography (EEG) plays a vital role in clinical and cognitive applications such as epilepsy diagnosis and emotion recognition. However, the low signalto-noise ratio, inter-subject variability, and inherent non-stationarity of EEG signals present substantial modeling challenges. While recent Transformer-based models offer promising long-range modeling capabilities, their self-attention mechanism behaves as a low-pass filter, suppressing high-frequency neural patterns critical for decoding transient events. In this work, we provide the first formal analysis demonstrating this low-pass behavior in self-attention mechanisms when applied to EEG signals, revealing a fundamental limitation of deep attention-based EEG models. To address this, we propose SEBSFormer, a spectral-enhanced bi-Stream Transformer that jointly models temporal dependencies and spectral structures. SEBSFormer integrates three key modules: a spectral compensation module that restores high-frequency components via residual correction in the Fourier domain; a multi-scale temporal attention module for saliency-guided temporal compression; and a graph-guided dynamic fusion module for adaptive spatial aggregation across electrodes. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets—TUAB, TUEV, and SEED—demonstrate that SEBSFormer consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art models across both clinical and affective tasks. Our findings establish a new paradigm for frequency-aware EEG modeling.

PaperID: 3273

Authors:Chi Wan, Kangrui Wang, Yuan Si, Pingyue Zhang, Manling Li

Affiliations: Northwestern University

Title: WorldAgen: Unified State-Action Prediction with Test-Time World Model Training

Abstract:
How can visionlanguage-action (VLA) models adapt to new environments where world dynamics shift? While recent research has combined world modeling and action prediction to improve VLA performance, existing methods largely rely on pretraining in static datasets, without mechanisms for active adaptation to new environments. As a result, these models often fail to generalize when deployed in unseen scenarios with novel object configurations or dynamics. We present WorldAgen, a unified framework that jointly learns world modeling and action prediction while enabling test-time training (TTT) to adapt to new environments. WorldAgen employs a shared Transformer backbone with two heads: (1) a world-model head that predicts future states from past state-action trajectories, and (2) an agent-model head that predicts actions conditioned on task instructions. During test time, WorldAgen samples exploratory actions, collects ground-truth state transitions, and performs lightweight TTT updates to refine its world model. This adaptation improves the model's understanding to the environments and leads to more accurate action predictions. Experiments on the CALVIN and LIBERO benchmarks demonstrate that our baseline model achieves comparable, and in some cases superior, performance to current state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, with TTT on a small number of samples, our method surpasses existing state-of-the-art models, highlighting the effectiveness of adapting world models at inference time.

PaperID: 3274

Authors:Kehan Wang, Huan Zhao, Yong Wei, Xupeng Zha, Guanghui Ye, Cheng Zhu, Yiming Liu, Zixing Zhang

Affiliations: Hunan University

Title: PLUM-Net: Prototype-Induced Label Structuring for Disentangled Multimodal Representation Network

Abstract:
Existing multimodal representation learning approaches often rely on simple feature concatenation or unified transformations, which fail to effectively disentangle and leverage common and private information across different modalities in a progressive manner. Moreover, they typically lack adaptive modeling tailored to specific task requirements. To address these limitations, we propose a PrototypeInduced Label Structuring for Disentangled Multimodal Representation Network (PLUM-Net). It first employs a multilevel semantic alignment module to synchronize global and local semantics across audio, visual and textual streams. On this aligned foundation, a prototype-based single-modal label generation module derives modality-specific hard and soft-labels that subtly steer the network toward a cleaner split between shared and private cues. Guided by these labels, the task-conditioned feature bifurcator module channels information through the most beneficial common or private pathway for the given task, after which a private refinement module polishes and fuses each modality’s idiosyncratic signals. Extensive experiments show that PLUM-Net delivers strong performance on datasets such as CMU-MOSI, CMU-MOSEI and UR-FUNNY, achieving an ACC-2 of 90.3% on CMU-MOSI, representing a 2%–4% improvement over previous SOTA models.

PaperID: 3275

Authors:Gianvincenzo Alfano, Sergio Greco, Domenico Mandaglio, Francesco Parisi, Irina Trubitsyna

Affiliations: University of Calabria

Title: Conditional Probabilistic Bipolar Argumentation Framework: Explanations, Complexity and Approximation

Abstract:
Recently, there has been an increasing interest in extending Dung's framework with probability theory, leading to the Probabilistic Argumentation Framework (PAF), and with supports in addition to attacks, leading to the Bipolar Argumentation Framework (BAF). In this paper, we introduce the Conditional Probabilistic Bipolar Argumentation Framework (CPBAF), which extends Probabilistic and Bipolar AF by allowing conditional probabilities on arguments, attacks, and on (possibly cyclic) supports. In this setting, we address the problem of computing the probability that a given argument is accepted. This is carried out by introducing the concept of probabilistic explanation for a given (probabilistic) extension. We show that the complexity of the problem is FP^#Phard and propose polynomial approximation algorithms with bounded additive error for CPBAF where cycles with an odd number of attacks are forbidden.

PaperID: 3276

Authors:Roberto Borelli, Agostino Dovier

Affiliations: University of Udine

Title: Learning from Answer Sets via Single-Shot Disjunctive ASP Encoding

Abstract:
Deep Learning techniques are nowadays pervasive in AI. However, these approaches suffer from a lack of transparency for justifying their output and for helping users in believing in their decisions. For these reasons alternative approaches to learning deserve to be explored either for developing new tools with autonomous learning capability or for explaining the results of blackbox predictors. Among them an important role is assumed since the Nineties by Inductive Logic Programming and, in particular, recently by the approaches of Learning from Answer Sets (LAS). Computing inductive solutions for LAS tasks is known to be Sigma P2 hard. In this work, we tackle this problem using a single-shot disjunctive ASP encoding based on the saturation technique originally proposed by Eiter and Gottlob. We prove that, when the background knowledge and hypothesis space form a tight program (a syntactical property) our encoding is linear in the size of the task. This approach contrasts with the state-of-the-art ILASP system, which relies on multiple iterative calls to an ASP solver. As a result, it can be directly evaluated by modern disjunctive ASP solvers, leveraging decades of research and optimization in the ASP community. We implement our method in a system named LASCO. Experimental results on a diverse set of benchmarks demonstrate that LASCO outperforms all versions of ILASP on many instances and it scales if run on multi-threaded machines.

PaperID: 3277

Authors:Valeria Fionda, Antonio Ielo, Francesco Ricca

Affiliations: University of Calabria

Title: Computing Syntax Tree-based Minimal Unsatisfiable Cores of LTLf Formulas

Abstract:
Linear Temporal Logic on Finite Traces (LTLf) is a popular logic to express declarative specifications in Artificial Intelligence (AI). The recent call for explainable AI tools has made relevant the problem of computing efficiently minimal unsatisfiable cores (MUCs) and minimal correction sets (MCSes) of LTLf formulas. Recent work has focused on the extraction of MUCs on formulas in conjunctive form. In this paper, we present a method that operates on arbitrary formulas and computes a more refined notion of MUCs, as introduced by Schuppan, along with the corresponding notion of MCSes. Experiments show that our system, based on Answer Set Programming, outperforms available tools.

PaperID: 3278

Authors:Qian Li, Cheng Ji, Zhaoji Liang, Yuzheng Zhang, Zhuo Chen, Siyuan Liang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Zhongguancun Laboratory, Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhejiang University

Title: Multi-Modal Fact Knowledge Generation for Imbalanced Cross-Source Entity Alignment

Abstract:
Multimodal imbalanced cross-source entity alignment aims to identify equivalent entity pairs across multi-modal knowledge graphs (MMKGs) that encompass diverse data sources with imbalanced modality, which poses significant challenges due to the non-uniform distribution of information across different modalities. Existing methods encounter major limitations in aligning entities across MMKGs, where missing data and modality-specific inconsistencies thus create information gaps. These gaps, stemming from disparities in neighborhood structure and attribute availability, result in reduced alignment performance. To address these challenges, we propose a novel multi-modal fact knowledge generation framework to advance imbalanced cross-source entity alignment. Utilizing large language models (LLMs) for comprehensive knowledge completion, our framework enriches MMKGs by synthesizing missing neighboring entities and relational attributes, enabling precise one-to-one similarity comparisons across all relations and attributes. Specifically, neighbor entity completion generates probable neighboring entities to fill structural gaps, while attribute completion synthesizes missing relational attributes to improve alignment. The facts evaluation module assesses generated triples, ensuring that only high-quality information supports the alignment. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms strong competitors, achieving superior entity alignment performance.

PaperID: 3279

Authors:Pingping Pan, Yunjian Zhang, Jinyi Liu

Affiliations: Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy (SZ), Shenzhen Kaihong Digital Industry Development Co.

Title: TFD-Net: Towards Intelligent Time-Frequency Mode Decomposition with Practical Applications

Abstract:
Timefrequency analysis (TFA) and mode decomposition for non-stationary signals are research hotspots in the field of signal processing. Current optimization-based decomposition methods require a good initial IF estimate. However, due to the Heisenberg uncertainty, achieving accurate ridge extraction from the time-frequency representation (TFR) necessitates empirical parameter adjustments. In this paper, we propose the TFD-Net framework, which takes time-series signals as inputs and adaptively conducts TFR construction and mode decomposition. Specifically, the framework integrates a physically interpretable TFA encoder and a query-based mode decomposition decoder. The highlights of this study include exploring the mathematical equivalence between deep convolutional operators and classical TFA methods. This enables the extraction of multi-scale features for TFR construction and mode separation in a data-driven manner, eliminating the need for signal-specific manual tuning and enhancing adaptability. Finally, simulated and real-world experiments demonstrate TFD-Net's superior performance over several state-of-the-art methods in complex signal processing.

PaperID: 3280

Authors:Wenjun Wu, Lingling Zhang, Bo Zhao, Bo Li, Xinyu Zhang, Yaqiang Wu

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, Lenovo Research

Title: Encode Geometric Diagram as Geo-Graph in Geometry Problem Solving

Abstract:
Geometry Problem Solving has become a hot topic these years due to its complexity of enabling the machine with geometric abstraction, multimodal reasoning and mathematical capabilities. Majority of research works place their attention on the fusion of multi-modal data or the synergistic combination of neural and symbolic systems for performance improvement. However, their neglect of the unique characteristics of geometric diagrams, which distinguish them from natural images, impedes the further exploring of critical information in geometric diagrams. In this work, we introduce the novel concept of geo-graph and propose the Geo-Graph Geometry Problem Solving model which encodes the geometric diagram from a new perspective. The geo-graph is designed to include semantic, structural and spatial information in the diagram, which is crucial to subsequent problem reasoning stage. To facilitate the model's comprehension of the actual layout of geometric diagram, spatial and connecting attentions are devised to serve as intrinsic knowledge guidance for feature propagation. An extra cross-modal attention is used as external guidance to instruct the encoding of geo-graph to be related to specific problem target. Fused multi-modal features are then sent into a commonly used encoder-decoder framework for final solution generation. The model is first trained with three carefully designed pre-training tasks to establish its fundamental knowledge of geo-graph, leveraging numerous varied samples generated through a geo-graph-based augmentation method. Experiments on popular geometry problem solving datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our model for geometric diagram encoding.

PaperID: 3281

Authors:Chengwei Ai, Qiaozhen Meng, Mengwei Sun, Ruihan Dong, Hongpeng Yang, Shiqiang Ma, Xiaoyi Liu, Cheng Liang, Fei Guo

Affiliations: Central South University, School of Computer Science, Xiangtan University, Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, School of Chinese Materia Medica, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong Normal University

Title: PharmaQA: Prompt-Based Molecular Representation Learning via Pharmacophore-Oriented Question Answering

Abstract:
Molecular representation plays a central role in computational drug discovery. Pharmacophores, functional groups responsible for molecular bioactivity, have been widely studied in cheminformatics. However, their incorporation into molecular representation learning, particularly in a context reasoning or generalization, remains relatively limited. To address this gap, we propose PharmaQA, a pharmacophore oriented question answering framework that formulates tailored prompts to extract contextaware molecular semantics. Rather than encoding pharmacophore features, PharmaQA learns to answer pharmacophore related queries. This design enables flexible reasoning across diverse tasks, including molecular property prediction, compound-target interaction prediction, and binding affinity estimation. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that PharmaQA achieves competitive performance. In a ligand discovery case study using FDA-approved compounds, the framework identified potential inhibitors for three therapeutic targets, with strong docking performance. As a generalizable and modular solution, PharmaQA incorporates pharmacophoric knowledge into molecular embeddings, enhancing both predictive accuracy and interpretability in drug discovery applications.

PaperID: 3282

Authors:Jun-Hyun Bae, Wonyong Jo, Jaehyup Lee, Heechul Jung

Affiliations: Kyungpook National University

Title: Mechanistic Dissection of CrossAttention Subspaces in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Abstract:
Textto-image diffusion models utilize cross-attention to integrate textual information into the visual latent space, yet the transformation from text embeddings to latent features remains largely unexplored. We provide a mechanistic analysis of the output-value (OV) circuits within cross-attention layers through spectral analysis via singular value decomposition. Our analysis reveals that semantic concepts are encoded in low-dimensional subspaces spanned by singular vectors in OV circuits across cross-attention heads. To verify this, we intervene on concept-related components in the diffusion process, demonstrating that intervention on identified spectral components affects conceptual changes. We further validate these findings by examining visual outputs of isolated subspaces and their alignment with text embedding space. Through this mechanistic understanding, we demonstrate that only nullifying these spectral components can achieve targeted concept removal with performance comparable to existing methods while providing interpretability. Our work reveals how cross-attention layers encode semantic concepts in spectral subspaces of OV circuits, providing mechanistic insights and enabling precise concept manipulation without retraining.

PaperID: 3283

Authors:Yongqi Bu, Qinggang Niu, Zhen Li, Yanyu Xu, Jun Wang, Guoxian Yu

Affiliations: Shandong University

Title: Cancer Survival Prediction by Cyclic Generation and Multi-grained Alignment

Abstract:
Cancer survival analysis with multimodal data is crucial for precise treatments and patient benefits. However, the following challenges prohibit integrating histopathology and genomics: (i) multimodal data is not always complete, especially for the more costly genomics data; (ii) intricate interactions between different modalities are difficult to capture and understand. To response, we propose an endto-end framework (CIMA) that coordinates Cyclic modality generation and Multi-grained multimodal Alignment. Specifically, CIMA designs a cyclic modality reconstruction module to reciprocally impute missing modalities and infer the interactions between them. Next, it introduces the multi-grained alignment module over the imputed data and interactions to mine fine-grained alignments between histopathology (slide patches) and genomics (biological pathways). CIMA then constructs the adaptive fusion module to leverage multimodal data and alignments for survival prediction. Extensive experiments on cancer benchmark datasets demonstrate that CIMA outperforms existing methods and exhibits good interpretability, providing valuable insights into intricate relationships between pathological phenotypes and biological pathways.Our code is released in the supplementary materials.

PaperID: 3284

Authors:Jingyi Chen, Zhibin Dong, Tiejun Li, Yibo Han

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology

Title: DC-SPAN: A Dual Contrastive Attention Network for Multi-View Clustering

Abstract:
Multiview clustering aims to group data by integrating complementary information from multiple views. However, the inherent heterogeneity among views often leads to feature entanglement, severely limiting clustering performance. To address this challenge, we propose DC-SPAN—a Dual Contrastive Attention Network—grounded in a disentangle-then-fuse paradigm. DC-SPAN employs a dual-path variational architecture to explicitly decompose each view into shared and private latent subspaces. These representations are then robustly integrated via a Product-of-Experts (PoE) mechanism. At the heart of our model is a novel dual contrastive learning objective that simultaneously encourages alignment of shared components across views and enforces separation of private ones, enabling structured and disentangled representations. A gated attention fusion module further adaptively aggregates these latent factors to yield a unified, discriminative embedding. The overall model is trained end-to-end using a composite loss function that incorporates reconstruction, orthogonality, and contrastive terms, along with a two-stage training scheme for improved stability. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that DC-SPAN consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its effectiveness and robustness in handling multi-view heterogeneity.

PaperID: 3285

Authors:Yanping Chen, Weijie Shi, Mengze Li, Yue Cui, Jiaming Li, Ruiyuan Zhang, Hao Chen, Hanghui Guo, Shimin Di, Ziyi Liu, Jia Zhu, Jiajie Xu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Alibaba Group, Hong Kong Generative AI Research and Development Center, Zhejiang Normal University, Southeast University

Title: Active Multi-source Domain Adaptation for Multimodal Fake News Detection

Abstract:
Multimodal fake news detection plays a crucial role in combating online misinformation. The inherent domain diversity of news in the real world has driven the development of crossdomain detection methods. However, these detection methods either suffer from significant performance degradation due to semantic and deception pattern shifts between the training (source) and test (target) domains or heavily rely on annotated labels. To address the problems, we propose ADOSE, an active multi-source domain adaptation framework for multimodal fake news detection which actively annotates a small subset of target samples to improve detection performance. Specifically, for domain shifts, we design a multi-expert classifier network based on refined features to comprehensively capture and adapt to the semantic space and deception patterns of news across different domains. To maximize adaptation performance with limited annotation cost, we propose a least-disagree uncertainty selector equipped with a diversity calculator for selecting the most informative samples. The selector leverages the uncertainty of inconsistent predictions before and after perturbations by multiple classifiers as an indicator of unfamiliar samples. It further incorporates diversity scores derived from multi-view features to ensure the chosen samples achieve maximal coverage of target domain features. The extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that ADOSE outperforms existing domain adaptation methods by 2.45% ~ 9.1%, indicating the superiority of our model.

PaperID: 3286

Authors:Xianhang Chu, Xu Yang, Kun Wei, Xi Wang

Affiliations: Xidian University

Title: Towards Robust Edge Model Adaptation via Elastic Architecture Search

Abstract:
Continual testtime adaptation (CTTA) enables online model adjustment under dynamic distribution shifts in real-world environments. However, most existing CTTA frameworks adopt fixed model architectures, lacking the structural flexibility required for deployment across heterogeneous edge devices with varying computational capacities. To address this, we propose an elastic framework for edge CTTA that performs resource-aware dynamic model search based on a pre-trained binary Supernet. This enables architectural flexibility by generating personalized models tailored to the resource constraints of different edge devices. Considering the evolving distribution of unlabeled data on edge devices during deployment, we introduce a pluggable lightweight fine-tuning mechanism. By inserting low-rank adapters into the frozen binary backbone, the model enables continual self-supervised adaptation with minimal computational overhead. In addition, we propose a structure-aware knowledge reflux mechanism that transfers the adaptation experience from fine-tuned edge models back into the Supernet. By distilling knowledge into structurally aligned Supernet paths, future architecture search is improved without requiring retraining. Experiments on multiple benchmarks validate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance while significantly reducing resource consumption, with re-searched models after knowledge reflux showing further improvements.

PaperID: 3287

Authors:Ibrahim Delibasoglu, Sanjay Chakraborty, Fredrik Heintz, Mattias Tiger

Affiliations: Linköping University

Title: Intervention-Aware Time Series Modeling: Capturing and Evaluating Feature Dependencies

Abstract:
Understanding how localized changes in one variable affect others in multivariate time series is essential for diagnostics and decisionmaking in complex systems. Existing models often fail to capture realistic inter-feature dynamics when simulating "what-if" scenarios, leading to inaccurate or uncorrelated reconstructions. We propose CFORVAE, a variational autoencoder framework that explicitly addresses this limitation by combining temporal decomposition with frequency-domain feature correlation modeling. Our architecture uses a dual-path encoding of trend and seasonal components, each projected into attention-pooled latent spaces, and applies Fourier Neural Operators (FNO) to capture cross-feature dependencies in the spectral domain. This decomposition-correlation design enables component-specific latent manipulation and ensures that local modifications propagate realistically across correlated variables. Through extensive experiments, we show that CFORVAE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in preserving temporal and feature-level dependencies, especially under adjustment-based reconstructions, making it a powerful tool for interpretable "what-if" analysis and diagnostics.

PaperID: 3288

Authors:Hao Fu, Zebing Yao, Chuangchuang Tan, Guanghua Gu

Affiliations: School of Information Science and Engineering, Yanshan University, Institute of Information Science, Beijing Jiaotong University

Title: ENHash: Error Notebook-Guided Fine-Grained Learning for Unsupervised Cross-Modal Hashing

Abstract:
Without manual annotations, unsupervised crossmodal hashing (UCMH) aims to achieve efficient clustering and retrieval by leveraging data interrelationships. However, the retrieval accuracy is constrained by two main aspects: 1) insufficient exploration of data relationships; 2) existing knowledge mining strategies are not well aligned with the architectural properties of multilayer perceptrons. Through summary and error analysis, the human brain is able to achieve fast learning through experience and minimal data. Inspired by this cognitive process, we propose a novel Error Notebook strategy, named ENHash, to more effectively capture similarity information between multi-modal data for fine-grained unsupervised clustering. Firstly, simulating the human process of summarizing experiences, ENHash gradually integrates the information from each batch into a global clustering representation. Secondly, drawing upon human error analysis capabilities, ENHash utilizes the summarized experiences to identify and record incorrectly predicted hash codes. Finally, by leveraging the knowledge derived from this analysis, ENHash guides the hash function to learn fine-grained patterns from the errors. To the best of our knowledge, ENHash represents the first attempt at integrating cognitively-inspired mechanisms into fine-grained UCMH optimization paradigms. We evaluate the proposed ENHash against eight state-of-the-art methods on three widely used datasets and one fine-grained cross-modal dataset. Experimental results show that ENHash achieves substantial improvements over existing approaches.

PaperID: 3289

Authors:Ruixuan Gao, Qijun Zhao, Keren Fu

Affiliations: College of Computer Science, Sichuan University

Title: DiAPR: Dimensionally-Allocated Prototype Refinement for Non-Exemplar Class Incremental Learning

Abstract:
NonExemplar Class Incremental Learning (NECIL) strives to preserve classification performance in an evolving data stream without revisiting old-class exemplars. Current methods mitigate catastrophic forgetting by replaying and augmenting historical prototypes as surrogates for old classes. However, they treat prototypes as holistic representations for global-level augmentations, which overlook dimensional semantic disparity and old-new class relationships, failing to maintain old-class discriminability and adaptability to the evolving feature space. To address this challenge, we propose Dimensionally-Allocated Prototype Refinement (DiAPR), a granular framework that progressively refines prototypes to exhibit class separability in the new feature space through three modules. Specifically, Distribution-aware Pairing (DAP) captures old-new class semantic consistency to guide Granular Semantic Allocation (GSA) in dimension-wise conflation, while Cross-Dimensional Transition (CDT) enhances cross-dimensional dependencies. The resulting prototypes sharpen classifier decision boundaries. Moreover, CDT inherently enables softened feature alignment, thereby yielding a more compatible feature space. Extensive experiments demonstrate DiAPR’s superiority, with improvements over SOTA by 2.35%, 0.70%, 0.96% on three CIFAR-100 settings, 1.03%, 0.54%, 0.40% on Tiny-ImageNet, and 0.60% on ImageNet-Subset.

PaperID: 3290

Authors:Toan D. Gian, Mohammad Abdi, Nathaniel D. Bastian, Francesco Restuccia

Affiliations: Northeastern University, United States Military Academy

Title: SDE-HARL: Scalable Distributed Policy Execution for Heterogeneous-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
HARL enables agents to execute cooperative tasks by adopting agentspecific policies. Most of existing HARL methods use individual policy neural networks to ensure monotonic improvement, which leads to substantial computational overhead. The proposed SDE-HARL overcomes this limitation by decomposing each agent's policy neural network into a lightweight local neural network and a global neural network executed at an edge server. Each local neural network generates and sends a compressed latent representation to the edge server, which aggregates the representations and produces agent-specific inferences. As such, SDE-HARL allows to significantly save computing and networking resources while preserving agent-specific behavior. A key feature of SDE-HARL is grouping agents with similar roles via a role-aware mechanism and share partial parameters in their global networks, while an identity-aware mechanism is introduced to promote behavioral diversity among agents within the same group. We prototyped SDE-HARL on an experimental testbed composed of a Jetson Nano and Raspberry PI to measure latency and network resource consumption. We evaluated SDE-HARL's performance on several benchmark datasets, including Google Research Football and StarCraft II. Experimental results show that SDE-HARL reaches up to 90% win rate while reducing latency, energy consumption, and networking overhead respectively by 2x, 2.5x, and 5x compared to existing work.

PaperID: 3291

Authors:Renxiang Guan, Junhong Li, Siwei Wang, Tianrui Liu, Dayu Hu, Miaomiao Li, Xinwang Liu

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology, Northwest Polytechnical University, Intelligent Game and Decision Lab, Northeastern University, Changsha University

Title: Graph Masked Autoencoder for Multi-view Remote Sensing Data Clustering

Abstract:
Multiview graph clustering (MVGC) for remote sensing data has gained increasing attention due to its ability to integrate complementary information across modalities while capturing spatial dependencies in heterogeneous data. Although current methods based on graph contrastive learning achieve strong performance, they often misidentify intra-cluster samples as negatives, leading to class conflicts and reduced clustering accuracy. Graph masked autoencoders have recently shown promising potential in learning robust representations through masked reconstruction, but their application to remote sensing data remains underexplored. This challenge is especially notable in the multi-view remote sensing setting, where high heterogeneity and complex spatial structures increase the difficulty of effective representation learning. To address these issues, we propose Clustering-Guided graph Mask AutoEncoder (CG-MAE), the first framework to extend graph masked autoencoders to multi-view remote sensing clustering. We introduce a clustering-guided masking strategy that selectively masks nodes near cluster centers and intra-cluster edges, which are crucial for capturing key structural information. By reconstructing these masked components, the model is encouraged to focus on learning features that are highly relevant to clustering. To further improve training stability and efficiency, we design an easy-to-hard node masking strategy that enables the model to gradually learn from increasingly challenging patterns. Additionally, we propose a dual self-adaptive learning mechanism that encourages the model to align more closely with the underlying semantic distributions. Extensive experiments on four widely used multi-view remote sensing datasets demonstrate that CG-MAE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both clustering accuracy and representation quality.

PaperID: 3292

Authors:Hongcai He, Zetao Zheng, Anjie Zhu, Deqiang Ouyang, Jie Shao

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China Sichuan Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Chongqing University

Title: Improving Generalization in Offline Meta-Reinforcement Learning via Cross-task Contexts

Abstract:
Contextbased offline meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) is a paradigm that integrates meta-learning with offline reinforcement learning. It learns a strategy to extract task-specific contexts from trajectories of meta-training tasks and leverages this strategy for adapting to unseen target tasks. However, existing methods struggle to generate generalizable contexts for adaptations due to context shift, which arises from the context-based policy overfitting to offline data. We argue that leveraging the internal relationships among tasks, rather than treating each task in isolation, is crucial for mitigating the impact of context shift. Hence, we propose a framework called cross-task contexts for improving generalization in meta-RL (CTMRL). Specifically, we design a context quantization variational auto-encoder (CQ-VAE), which clusters task-specific contexts of meta-training tasks into discrete codes based on the internal relationships among tasks. Cross-task contexts are constructed with these codes, reflecting shared information across similar tasks. These cross-task contexts not only serve as high-level structures to capture similarity across tasks but also provide a foundation for hard contrastive learning that enhances the distinguishability of similar yet distinct tasks, thereby improving the generalization of contexts and facilitating adaptation to unseen target tasks. The evaluation in meta-environments confirms the performance advantage of CTMRL over existing methods.

PaperID: 3293

Authors:Haiduo Huang, Zhenhua Liu, Tian Xia, Pengju Ren

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, Peking University

Title: Double Rounding: Nearly Lossless Adaptive Bit Switching for QAT

Abstract:
Model quantization is widely applied for compressing and accelerating deep neural networks (DNNs). However, conventional QuantizationAware Training (QAT) focuses on training DNNs with uniform bit-width. The bit-width settings vary across different hardware and transmission demands, which induces considerable training and storage costs. Hence, the scheme of one-shot joint training multiple precisions is proposed to address this issue. Previous works either store a larger FP32 model to switch between different precision models for higher accuracy or store a smaller INT8 model but compromise accuracy due to using shared quantization parameters. In this paper, we introduce the Double Rounding quantization method, which fully utilizes the quantized representation range to accomplish nearly lossless bit-switching while reducing storage by using the highest integer precision instead of full precision. Furthermore, we observe a competitive interference among different precisions during one-shot joint training, primarily due to inconsistent gradients of quantization scales during backward propagation. To tackle this problem, we propose an Adaptive Learning Rate Scaling (AdaScale) technique that dynamically adapts learning rates for various precisions to optimize the training process. Additionally, we extend our Double Rounding to one-shot mixed precision training and develop a Hessian-Aware Stochastic Bit-switching (HessBit) strategy. Experimental results on the ImageNet-1K classification demonstrate that our methods have enough advantages to state-of-the-art one-shot joint QAT in both multi-precision and mixed-precision. We validate the feasibility of our method on detection and segmentation tasks, as well as on LLMs task.

PaperID: 3294

Authors:Jiafu Huang, Chao Peng, Chenyang Xu, Zhengfeng Yang, Kecheng Cai, Chenhao Zhang, Yi Wang, Yiwei Gong, Wanqin Zhou, Irene Zheng

Affiliations: East China Normal University, Xiamen University, University of Melbourne

Title: Richer Representations for Neural Algorithmic Reasoning via Auxiliary Reconstruction

Abstract:
Neural algorithmic reasoning has recently emerged as a popular research direction. It aims to train neural networks to mimic the stepby-step behavior of classical rule-based algorithms. More specifically, the execution of such algorithms can be abstracted as a sequence of states, where each state represents the intermediate outcome after an execution step. The training objective is to generate state sequences that replicate the underlying algorithmic process. A common framework for this task adopts an ``encoder-processor-decoder'' architecture, where the encoder learns representations of states, the processor simulates algorithmic steps, and the decoder reconstructs output states. While prior work has primarily focused on improving the processor, the role of the encoder in representation learning has received little attention. Most existing methods rely on simple MLP encoders, raising the question of whether such representations are sufficiently informative for supporting algorithmic reasoning. This paper investigates how to improve encoder representations for neural algorithmic reasoning. We propose a reconstruction module that aims to recover the input state from its encoded representation. This auxiliary reconstruction task encourages the encoder to retain critical information about the input. We demonstrate that incorporating this task during training improves the performance of existing neural architectures on standard benchmarks. Furthermore, we observe that current encoders often underutilize the correlations among features within a state. To address this, we draw inspiration from self-supervised learning and design an enhanced variant of the auxiliary task that encourages the encoder to capture intra-state feature dependencies. Experimental results show that our method enables the encoder to learn richer representations, thereby enhancing the performance of existing processors on algorithmic reasoning tasks.

PaperID: 3295

Authors:Jianming Huang, Hiroyuki Kasai

Affiliations: WASEDA University

Title: Self-Interpretable Subgraph Neural Network with Deep Reinforcement Walk Exploration

Abstract:
Graph neural networks (GNNs) face dual challenges of limited structural expressiveness and opaque decisionmaking processes. Recent research on Subgraph Neural Networks (SGNNs) enhance model expressiveness through subgraph ensembles. However, their reliance on predefined sampling strategies leads to poor interpretability and computational inefficiency. Meanwhile, post-hoc GNN explainers enhance model interpretability but still struggle to translate their explanations into model improvements. This paper presents a novel framework that fundamentally bridges this gap by developing SGNNs with intrinsic interpretability. Our key innovation lies in constructing a self-interpretable architecture where the explanation generation mechanism is organically integrated with the prediction process. Our proposed Self-Interpretable SGNN introduces a reinforcement walk exploration (RWE-SGNN) as its data-driven sampling strategy, which can dynamically extract discriminative substructures during model training. This reinforcement walk exploration module not only provides inherent interpretability, but also enables: (1) efficient substructure extraction with less candidate number and simper embedding than traditional subgraph generation methods; and (2) provable equivalence in node coverage to traditional subgraph generation methods for connected subgraphs. Experiments on graph classification tasks show accuracy improvements over state-of-the-art GNNs, with case studies validating that the automatically identified subgraphs align with domain-specific knowledge.

PaperID: 3296

Authors:Zixian Huang, Chuan-Xian Ren

Affiliations: SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY

Title: Wasserstein-Aware Transfer: Class-Level Alignment for Robust Diffusion Model Adaptation

Abstract:
Diffusion models have achieved impressive generative performance across diverse domains such as image, video, and scientific data generation. However, finetuning these models for new tasks remains challenging due to their large scale, architectural diversity, and high sensitivity to hyperparameters—particularly learning rates. In this work, we propose Wasserstein-Aware Transfer (WAT), a principled and effective fine-tuning strategy grounded in diffusion trajectory analysis and optimal transport theory. Our key insight is that the distributional discrepancies between diffusion trajectories from different datasets decrease progressively over time and converge near the noise end. Based on this observation, we introduce a class-wise matching mechanism that minimizes the Wasserstein distance between class distributions of source and target datasets. This enables alignment at the class level without modifying the standard fine-tuning pipeline. To further enhance knowledge retention, we propose a novel sampling strategy that linearly combines class-conditional outputs from both pretrained and fine-tuned models. This method is simple yet effective, requiring negligible computational overhead while preserving domain-specific and generalizable knowledge. Extensive experiments across seven diverse benchmarks demonstrate that WAT reliably enhances generation quality under distribution shifts, outperforming competitive baselines. These results underscore its robustness and affirm the potential of optimal transport as a principled basis for knowledge transfer in diffusion models.

PaperID: 3297

Authors:Haoyi Jia

Affiliations: University of New South Wales

Title: STrans: Spontaneous Architecture Evolution for Adaptive Time Series Forecasting

Abstract:
While Transformers have revolutionized time series forecasting, they remain trapped by manual architecture design—every model uses the same attention mechanism, normalization, and activation choices. What if we could automatically discover the perfect architectural recipe for each dataset? This work introduces STrans (Spontaneous Transformer), a comprehensive neural architecture search framework for time series Transformers that simultaneously explores attention variants, normalization techniques, activation functions, and encoding operations. Using differentiable architecture search, STrans automatically discovers architectures that outperform manually designed baselines. However, the experiments reveal a surprising and counterintuitive finding: complex searched architectures often fail catastrophically, while simpler configurations generalize better. This "search overfitting" phenomenon challenges fundamental assumptions about automated architecture design in time series domains. The work not only advances automated model design but uncovers critical insights that will reshape how we think about neural architecture search for temporal data.

PaperID: 3298

Authors:Zikun Jin, Yuhua Qian, Xinyan Liang, Jiaqian Zhang, Jinpeng Yuan, Shen Hu, Haijun Geng, Honghong Cheng

Affiliations: Shanxi University

Title: Signal Enhancement via Multi-view Dynamic Representation and Alignment-aware Fusion

Abstract:
Robust signal enhancement under nonstationary and low SNR conditions remains challenging, as methods based on the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) with fixed resolution struggle to represent complex and time–frequency structures. While leveraging the fractional domain as an auxiliary view offers flexibility in modeling time-frequency structures, existing methods typically adopt fixed transform orders and overlook alignment between views, hindering effective integration of complementary representations and leaving frequency domain misalignment unresolved. Therefore, we propose FracFusion, a novel framework that integrates a learnable short-time fractional Fourier Transform (STFrFT) module to generate dynamic auxiliary views, combined with two stage alignment-aware fusion modules: Pearson Channel Fusion for correlation-guided consistency and Efficient Align Fusion for fine-grained, frequency aligned interaction. Experiments on speech and electromagnetic (EM) datasets show that FracFusion consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across diverse noise levels and signal types, demonstrating robust adaptability across domains.

PaperID: 3299

Authors:Yuichi Kamata, Quoc Hoan Tran, Yasuhiro Endo, Hirotaka Oshima

Affiliations: Quantum Laboratory, Fujitsu Research, Fujitsu Limited

Title: Quantum Transformer for Molecular Learning: Multi-Configuration Ground-State Energy Prediction

Abstract:
The Transformer model, renowned for its powerful attention mechanism, has achieved stateof-the-art performance in various artificial intelligence tasks but faces challenges with quantum data. With a growing focus on leveraging quantum machine learning for quantum data, particularly in quantum chemistry, we propose the Molecular Quantum Transformer (MQT) for modeling interactions in molecular quantum systems. By utilizing quantum circuits to implement the attention mechanism on the molecular configurations, MQT can efficiently calculate ground-state energies for all configurations. Numerical demonstrations show that in calculating ground-state energies for H2, LiH, BeH2, and H4, MQT outperforms the classical Transformer, highlighting the promise of quantum effects in Transformer structures. Furthermore, its pretraining capability on diverse molecular data facilitates the efficient learning of new molecules, extending its applicability to complex molecular systems with minimal additional effort. Our method offers an alternative to existing quantum algorithms for estimating ground-state energies, opening new avenues in quantum chemistry and materials science.

PaperID: 3300

Authors:Zhiyuan Lai, Jiacheng Li, Jiayuan Wang, Shiping Wang

Affiliations: Fuzhou University

Title: Cooperative Graph Transformer with Structural Consensus for Multi-View Learning

Abstract:
Multiview learning aims to effectively integrate data from different sources by exploring the consistency and complementarity across views. Current multi-view methods based on Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) primarily focus on local information, making it difficult to capture global dependencies. Furthermore, multi-view data typically lack explicit structural representations, and the topologies constructed via node similarity in existing approaches are prone to noise, while simple fusion strategies are often inadequate for effectively suppressing this noise and for uncovering meaningful structural information. To tackle these issues, this paper proposes CoGFormer, a cooperative graph transformer with structural consensus learning. CoGFormer maps multi-view data into a unified space and jointly models local and global consensus: a denoising structural consensus graph convolutional network refines the consensus graph to enhance local consistency and robustness, while a structure-guided attention mechanism explicitly injects high-order cross-view structural biases to capture global consistency and improve semantic coherence. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that CoGFormer outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, validating its effectiveness.

PaperID: 3301

Authors:Royson Lee, Minyoung Kim, Fady Rezk, Rui Li, Stylianos I. Venieris, Timothy Hospedales

Affiliations: Samsung AI Center, University of Edinburgh

Title: FedP²EFT: Federated Learning to Personalize PEFT for Multilingual LLMs

Abstract:
Federated learning (FL) has enabled training of multilingual large language models (LLMs) on diverse and decentralized multilingual data, especially on lowresource languages. To improve client-specific performance, personalization via the use of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) modules such as LoRA is common. This involves a personalization strategy (PS), such as the design of the PEFT adapter structures (e.g., in which layers to add LoRAs and what ranks) and choice of hyperparameters (e.g., learning rates) for fine-tuning. Instead of manual PS configuration, we propose FedP²EFT, a federated learning-to-personalize method for multilingual LLMs in cross-device FL settings. Unlike most existing PEFT structure selection methods, which are prone to overfitting low-data regimes, FedP²EFT collaboratively learns the optimal personalized PEFT structure for each client via Bayesian sparse rank selection. Evaluations on both simulated and real-world multilingual FL benchmarks demonstrate that FedP²EFT largely outperforms existing personalized fine-tuning methods, while complementing other existing FL methods.

PaperID: 3302

Authors:Fengpei Li, Wenfu Xia, Ziping Zhao

Affiliations: ShanghaiTech University

Title: Positive Definite Sparse Covariance Estimation via Dual Space Optimization

Abstract:
Covariance matrix estimation in high dimensions is a fundamental problem in machine learning and signal processing. A common structural assumption used to mitigate the challenges posed by high dimensionality is sparsity, which posits that most variable pairs exhibit negligible correlations. In this paper, we revisit the classical problem of positive definite sparse covariance estimation (PDSCE) introduced by Rothman (2012). Unlike many earlier approaches, this formulation incorporates a logarithmic barrier, which guarantees that the resulting covariance estimator is positive definite and thereby ensures the wellposedness of the estimation problem. However, the inclusion of the logarithmic barrier also leads to nontrivial optimization difficulties. To overcome these difficulties, we propose a dual proximal gradient method (DPGM) for solving the PDSCE problem. In contrast to existing primal-space approaches, DPGM operates directly in the dual space. This dual perspective provides several key advantages. First, DPGM significantly reduces computational costs, because positive definiteness is preserved automatically and no iterative subproblem solvers are required. Second, compared with primal optimization algorithms, DPGM offers stronger theoretical guarantees, including principled step size selection and improved iteration complexity. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that DPGM consistently outperforms existing methods, which confirms its effectiveness and scalability for high-dimensional sparse covariance estimation.

PaperID: 3303

Authors:Jiajia Li, Huisi Wu

Affiliations: Shenzhen University

Title: Palimpsest: Reconciling the CISS Trilemma for Incremental Nuclei Segmentation

Abstract:
Adapting computational pathology models to evolving clinical diagnostics via ClassIncremental Semantic Segmentation (CISS) is critical. However, this task imposes a unique CISS Trilemma: a simultaneous failure to preserve the intricate tissue background (stability), distinguish morphologically similar new nuclei (plasticity), and maintain a constant model size (scalability), all under a strict exemplar-free constraint. To resolve this, we introduce Palimpsest, a novel framework that systematically decouples these conflicting demands. Palimpsest integrates three synergistic mechanisms: a Parameter-Conserving Synthesis (PCS) module merges lightweight adapters to ensure scalability; a novel Similarity-Aware Centroid Recalibration (SCR) module executes differentiated recalibration to counteract non-uniform foreground drift, securing plasticity; and an Adaptive Residual Shading (ARS) module performs logit-space decoupling to preserve background integrity, ensuring stability. Extensive experiments on two histopathology datasets demonstrate that Palimpsest significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving a superior stability-plasticity balance, particularly in challenging long-term incremental scenarios.

PaperID: 3304

Authors:Ming Li, Zhanle Zhu, Xinyi Li, Lu Bai, Lixin Cui, Feilong Cao, Ke Lv

Title: HyperNoRA: Hyperedge Prediction via Node-Level Relation-Aware Self-Supervised Hypergraph Learning

Abstract:
Hyperedge prediction plays a critical role in highorder relational modeling with hypergraphs, yet most existing methods primarily focus on sampling strategies or local aggregation within candidate hyperedges. These approaches often overlook global structural dependencies that are essential for learning expressive node and hyperedge representations. In this paper, we propose HyperNoRA, a novel self-supervised hypergraph learning framework that integrates global node-level relation awareness with contrastive learning. Specifically, we construct a global node relation graph that captures both direct and indirect structural correlations, which guides a structure-aware aggregator to enhance node representations with informative global context. To prevent over-smoothing and maintain discriminability, a contrastive learning module is introduced to align representations across graph augmentations while separating semantically dissimilar nodes. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that HyperNoRA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, and ablation studies verify the effectiveness of its key components.

PaperID: 3305

Authors:Ming Li, Huiting Wang, Yuting Chen, Lu Bai, Lixin Cui, Feilong Cao, Ke Lv

Affiliations: Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Intelligent Education Technology and Application, Zhejiang Normal University, School of Computer Science and Technology, Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies, School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing Normal University, Central University of Finance and Economics, School of Mathematical Sciences, School of Engineering Science, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences Peng Cheng Laboratory

Title: Self-Supervised Hypergraph Learning with Substructure Awareness for Hyperedge Prediction

Abstract:
Hyperedge prediction plays a central role in hypergraph learning, enabling the inference of highorder relations among multiple entities. However, existing methods often rely on a simplistic flat set assumption, treating candidate hyperedges as unstructured collections of nodes and neglecting their potential internal compositionality. Furthermore, the severe scarcity of observed hyperedges poses a challenge for effective supervision. In this work, we propose S3Hyper, a Substructure-contextualized Self-Supervised framework for Hyperedge prediction, which jointly addresses these two challenges. Specifically, we design a substructure-contextualized hyperedge aggregator that models the internal hierarchy of candidate hyperedges by leveraging sub-hyperedge information. In parallel, we introduce an adaptive tri-directional contrastive learning module that incorporates node-level, hyperedge-level, and cross-level alignment objectives, supported by temperature-adaptive mechanisms. Experimental results on four public datasets demonstrate that S3Hyper consistently outperforms strong baselines, with ablation studies verifying the effectiveness of each component.

PaperID: 3306

Authors:Zhuo Li, Gengyu Lyu, Yuena Lin, Ziang Chen, Zhiyuan Ma, Zhen Yang, Zun Li

Affiliations: Beijing University of Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Title: CCAHCL: Multi-Level Hypergraph Contrastive Learning for Connected Component Awareness

Abstract:
Hypergraph contrastive learning has emerged as a powerful unsupervised paradigm for hypergraph representation learning. Traditional hypergraph contrastive learning methods typically leverage neighbor aggregation strategy to obtain entity (node and hyperedge) representations within each connected component, and then utilize contrastive losses (e.g., nodeor hyperedge-level) to update the encoders. However, since entities are usually focused equally on their respective losses, large connected components with numerous entities tend to provide a dominant contribution to the whole learning process, which inevitably hinders the effective learning of entity representations within small connected components. To address this issue, we propose a novel Connected-Component-Aware Hypergraph Contrastive Learning method (CCAHCL). Different from previous methods that only construct node or hyperedge representations, our method additionally constructs the connected component representations, and accordingly designs a hierarchical contrastive loss to balance the model's focus on different scales of connected components. Specifically, we first use the traditional neighbor aggregation strategy to aggregate and update entity (node and hyperedge) representations. Then, these entity representations are further aggregated to generate the connected component representations, where entity features are incorporated into connected components and their structural information is propagated back to enrich their corresponding entities. Afterwards, we employ node-level and hyperedge-level losses to learn the enriched entity representations, and further propose a novel connected-component-level contrastive loss to balance the model's focus on all different connected components, naturally avoiding the learning bias on large connected components. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate that our proposed model achieves superior performance against other state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 3307

Authors:Jiajun Liu, Yao He, Wenjun Ke, Peng Wang, Ziyu Shang, Guozheng Li, Zijie Xu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, School of Institute of Collaborate Innovation, University of Macau, Ministry of Education

Title: Balanced Knowledge Distillation for Large Language Models with Mix-of-Experts

Abstract:
Mixtureof-Experts (MoE) architectures have recently become a more prevalent choice for large language models (LLMs) than dense architectures due to their superior performance. However, billions of parameters bring MoE LLMs a huge cost for deployment and inference. To address these issues, knowledge distillation (KD) has become a widely adopted technique to compress LLMs. Existing KD methods for LLMs can be divided into dense-to-dense and moe-to-dense distillation. Dense-to-dense distillation transfers knowledge between single dense LLMs, while moe-to-dense distillation attempts to transfer knowledge between the MoE LLMs and the dense LLMs. However, the architectural mismatch prevents the student from fully absorbing knowledge when distilling MoE LLMs. To address this limitation, we investigate a new distillation setting, moe-to-moe, which aims to fully leverage expert knowledge of teachers and enable the student to absorb it more effectively. Compared to dense-to-dense and moe-to-dense, moe-to-moe suffers from two imbalance issues. First, expert-coverage deficiency reflects an imbalanced knowledge transfer of teacher experts: traditional distillation utilizes only the few experts activated by the teacher router. Second, routing imbalance appears when the student routing distribution drifts from the teacher, which makes it difficult for students to learn how to distribute different experts. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel distillation framework for moe-to-moe, Balanced Distillation (B-Distill), which equally spreads teacher expertise across student experts while regularizing the student router toward teacher-consistent balance. First, to mitigate expert-coverage deficiency, we introduce Monte Carlo exploration, which stochastically perturbs router probabilities so every teacher and student expert is sampled without enlarging the search space. Second, to correct routing imbalance and avert load collapse, we propose an entropy-aware router distillation mechanism that aligns the student router with the teacher while curbing over-concentration. Experiments show that B-Distill outperforms baselines by up to 6.6% in Rouge-L.

PaperID: 3308

Authors:Tianyi Liu, Yaxin Xu, Lin Geng, Ningzhong Liu, Han Sun, Yu Wang

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Title: RSPlace: Rotation Sensing Macro Placement via Bidirectional Tree Expansion

Abstract:
Macro placement is a crucial subproblem of chip design, focusing on determining the locations of numerous macros while minimizing multiple metrics. In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) has gained traction as a favorable technique to improve placement performance. However, existing RLbased placers ignore the orientation of macros, resulting in the state space constrained to two-dimensional discrete coordinates and greatly restricting the exploration opportunities. To address this issue, we propose a novel macro placement method, RSPlace, which guides the bidirectional expansion of the global search tree to offer the RL agent more exploration opportunities, incorporating rotation into the RL-based macro placement solution for the first time. RSPlace intelligently determines the optimal rotation angle to maximize placement benefits by leveraging rotation sensing and placement perturbations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that taking the macro orientation into account substantially broadens the feasible locations and effectively reduces the half-perimeter wirelength (HPWL), thus ensuring that our approach significantly improves the optimization effect compared to the state-of-the-art method.

PaperID: 3309

Authors:Yi Liu, Qimeng Yang, Lanlan Lu

Affiliations: Xinjiang University

Title: Who Should I Trust? Explicit Confidence-Focused Multimodal Intent Recognition

Abstract:
Multimodal intent recognition is aimed at understanding user intentions by integrating information from multiple modalities. It has attracted increasing attention in recently developed dialog systems. The existing studies have focused mainly on modeling semantic interactions within and across modalities, but they often overlook the reliability of each modality. In realworld scenarios, inputs may be corrupted by noisy audio, blurred or occluded videos, or ambiguous text, making it difficult for the employed model to determine who to trust and how much to trust. To address this challenge, we propose a method called explicit confidence-focused multimodal intent recognition (ECFMIR). The core idea of this approach is to assign each modality and each cross-modal associations feature a dedicated confidence lens (CLens) that explicitly estimates the confidence level in a hypothetical manner. This design helps reduce the degree of uncertainty and mitigate the risk of incorrect predictions when addressing conflicting inputs. Comprehensive experiments conducted on two benchmark multimodal intent recognition datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. A further analysis reveals that ECFMIR achieves significant advantages for high-conflict categories and under low-resource conditions.

PaperID: 3310

Authors:Ying Liu, Bo Liu, Sheng Huang, Gang Luo, Wenbo Hu, Meng Wang, Richang Hong

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, School of Software Engineering and Big Data, Chongqing University, Anhui Guoqi Technology Co.

Title: Sparse-Scale Transformer with Bidirectional Awareness for Time Series Forecasting

Abstract:
Time series forecasting (TSF) plays a crucial role in many realworld applications, such as weather prediction and economic planning. While Transformer-based models have shown strong capabilities in modeling long-range dependencies, effectively capturing the multi-scale temporal dynamics inherent in time series remains a major challenge. Existing methods often adopt time-windows of varying sizes, which may introduce noisy or irrelevant representations when mismatched with the underlying temporal patterns, potentially leading to overfitting. In this paper, we propose Sparse-Scale Transformer (SSformer) with Bidirectional Awareness for Time Series Forecasting to enhance the multi-scale modeling for time series. Specifically, we propose a novel Sparse-Scale Convolution (SSC) block that imposes sparsity on scales to obtain the informative representations by evaluating the intra-scale segment similarity of time series, and utilizes scale-specific convolutions to extract local patterns. Furthermore, we design a Bidirectional-Scale Interaction (BSI) block to explicitly model scale correlations in both coarse-to-fine and fine-to-coarse directions. Finally, scale predictions are ensembled to fully exploit the complementary forecasting capabilities across scales. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate that SSformer achieves state-of-the-art performance with superior efficiency.

PaperID: 3311

Authors:Yisha Lu, Liwen Jing, Jiangmao Zheng, Bowen Zhang

Affiliations: Pengcheng Laboratory, Shenzhen X-institute, Shenzhen Technology University

Title: Spiking-Aided Neural Architecture for Efficient and Robust WiFi Sensing

Abstract:
This paper introduces a spikingaided wifi sensing network (SWS-Net), a novel hybrid neural architecture that integrates Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) with conventional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) for robust WiFi-based indoor sensing. WiFi signals offer a low-cost and device-free solution for recognizing human activities, gestures, identities and etc. However, their susceptibility to multipath fading and environmental noise poses significant challenges. Inspired by the human brain’s capability to process noisy information, SWS-Net leverages the noise-resilient dynamics of spiking neurons alongside the feature extraction ability of ANNs. We present a theoretical analysis comparing the noise-handling capacities of SNNs and ANNs, and show how their combination yields both improved robustness and training efficiency. Experimental results across three WiFi sensing tasks demonstrate that SWS-Net consistently achieves higher accuracy and faster convergence compared to baseline models, validating its effectiveness in challenging indoor environments.

PaperID: 3312

Authors:Xinpeng Lv, Chunyuan Zheng, Yunxin Mao, Renzhe Xu, Hao Zou, Shanzhi Gu, Liyang Xu, Huan Chen, Yuanlong Chen, Wenjing Yang, Haotian Wang

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology, Peking University, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, ZGC laboratory, Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: Partial Fairness Awareness: Belief-Guided Strategic Mechanism for Strategic Agents

Abstract:
Strategic machine learning investigates scenarios where agents manipulate their features to receive favorable decisions from predictive models. To address fairness concerns intrinsic to strategic classification, recent work has introduced groupspecific fairness constraints. However, current fairness-aware approaches face a fundamental dilemma in the issue of fairness exposure: making these constraints public enables strategic manipulation and can lead to fairness reversal, while keeping them hidden may reduce social welfare and discourage genuine improvement. To fill this gap, we subsequently propose the problem of Partial Fairness Awareness (PFA), as our theoretical analysis informs that such a dilemma can be mitigated by releasing the candidate set of fairness constraints and concealing the grounding constraint. To be specific, we introduce a belief-guided strategic mechanism wherein agents iteratively interact with the decision system and maintain a belief distribution over the candidate set of fairness constraints. This belief-guided process enables agents, through iterative interaction and feedback, to update their belief distribution over the candidate set, thereby gradually aligning their belief with the grounding fairness constraint employed by the system. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that PFA achieves lower group fairness gaps, higher acceptance of truly qualified individuals, and more stable outcomes compared to fully public or private fairness regimes.

PaperID: 3313

Authors:Masahiro Mitani, Yuya Sasaki

Affiliations: The University of Osaka

Title: Explaining Temporal Graph Neural Network via Quantum-Inspired Evolutionary Algorithm

Abstract:
Temporal Graph Neural Network (TGNN) explanation has attracted increasing attention due to its applicability in dynamic scenarios such as recommendation systems. However, existing explanation methods for TGNNs face two key limitations: (1) computational inefficiency and (2) a restricted focus on either factual or counterfactual explanations, but not both. In this paper, we propose QIEATGX, an efficient and unified explanation algorithm based on a quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm. QIEA-TGX effectively generates explanatory subgraphs that significantly influence TGNN predictions, without requiring additional model training or extensive inference. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that QIEA-TGX improves explanation fidelity by up to 31% while reducing computation time by up to 92% compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 3314

Authors:Chao Ouyang, Yuyang Bai, Jun Zhang, Tianlu Gao, Jun Hao, Lijun Kong, David Wenzhong Gao

Affiliations: Wuhan University, China Datang Technology Innovation Co., China Yangtze Power Co.

Title: DisCo DETR: Distance-aware Multi-view Contrastive Learning for DETR Pre-training

Abstract:
Recent selfsupervised pre-training methods for object detection often rely on generic object proposals for localization and semantic feature learning for classification, but they yield limited improvements when applied to Detection Transformers (DETR) due to a lack of architectural alignment. Hence, we propose an elegant and versatile self-supervised framework tailored for DETR-like models called Distance-aware Multi-view Contrastive Learning (DisCo DETR). DisCo DETR enhances localization and semantic features through two core components. (i) Distance-aware Multi-view Object Query Fusion explicitly guides object queries to focus on spatially close objects across views, stabilizing training and improving localization accuracy. (ii) Contrastive Learning for DETR uses native bipartite matching to identify positive output pairs across views and pull them closer, enhancing semantic features discrimination with no extra matching. DisCo DETR can be seamlessly integrated into DETR-like models and achieves SOTA transfer performance on PASCAL VOC and COCO benchmarks across multiple variants.

PaperID: 3315

Authors:Zhengyuan Pan, Yanhao Chen, Zhongquan Jian, Wanru Zhao, Haonan Ma, Meihong Wang, Qingqiang Wu

Affiliations: School of Film, Xiamen University, School of Computer and Data Science, Minjiang University, School of Informatics, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Key Laboratory of Digital Protection and Intelligent Processing of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Fujian and Taiwan, Ministry of Culture and Tourism

Title: Prototype Entropy Alignment: Reinforcing Structured Uncertainty in LLM Reasoning

Abstract:
Recent research reveals that a minority of highentropy tokens significantly influence the reasoning quality of large language models (LLMs). Inspired by this, we propose Prototype Entropy Alignment (PEA), a reinforcement learning framework that models effective reasoning not as a single path but as a collection of learnable "entropy signatures." PEA identifies these signatures by clustering expert trajectories' uncertainty patterns into a diverse and continuously updated set of prototypes. The model is then rewarded for aligning its own reasoning process with these evolving targets, creating a self-improvement loop. Instead of replacing traditional outcome-based rewards, PEA provides a complementary, process-oriented signal. Our experiments show that this synergy is crucial: PEA substantially boosts performance on creative and general reasoning tasks and, when combined with outcome rewards, achieves SOTA results on structured tasks such as mathematics. By rewarding alignment with diverse and evolving reasoning structures, PEA offers a robust, verifier-free pathway to enhance reasoning's adaptability.

PaperID: 3316

Authors:Xinbao Qiao, Ningning Ding, Yushi Cheng, Meng Zhang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Data Science and Analytics Thrust and the Internet of Things Thrust, Information Hub, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Title: Beyond Binary Erasure: Soft-Weighted Unlearning for Fairness and Robustness

Abstract:
Machine unlearning, as a posthoc processing technique, has gained widespread adoption in addressing challenges like bias mitigation and robustness enhancement. However, existing non-privacy unlearning-based solutions persist in using a binary data removal framework designed for privacy-driven motivation, even when repurposed for fairness or robustness improvements. This leads to significant utility loss, a phenomenon known as “over-unlearning”. While over-unlearning has been largely described in many studies as primarily causing utility degradation, we investigate deeper insights in this work through counterfactual leave-one-out analysis. Based on insights, we introduce a soft weighting strategy that assigns tailored weights to each sample by solving a convex quadratic programming problem analytically, which enables fine-grained model adjustments to address the over-unlearning. We demonstrate that the proposed soft-weighted scheme can be seamlessly integrated into most existing unlearning algorithms. Extensive experiments show that in fairness- and robustness-driven tasks, the soft-weighted scheme significantly outperforms hard-weighted schemes in fairness/robustness metrics and alleviates the decline in utility metric, thereby enhancing unlearning algorithm as an effective correction solution.

PaperID: 3317

Authors:Benliu Qiu, Heqian Qiu, Lanxiao Wang, Taijin Zhao, Yu Dai, Lili Pan, Hongliang Li

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Parameter Merging with Gradient-Guided Supermasks in Online Continual Learning

Abstract:
Online continual learning (OCL) aims at learning a nonstationary data stream in a way of reading each data sample only once, and hence suffers from the trade-off of catastrophic forgetting and insufficient learning. In this work, we firstly analytically establish relationship between loss functions and model parameters from the Bayesian perspective. Based on our analysis, we subsequently propose a parameter merging method with gradient-guided supermasks. Our method leverages 1-order and 2-order gradient information to construct supermasks that determine the merging weights between the old and new models. Our method performs direct arithmetic operations on parameters to update models, beyond traditional gradient descent. We further discover that a widely-used premise that 1-order gradients can be negligible is invalid in OCL, due to slow convergence incurred by insufficient learning. Additionally, we utilize a dual-model dual-view distillation strategy that can align output distributions of the new and merged models for each sample, further enhancing model performance. Extensive experiments are conducted on four benchmarks in OCL settings, including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet-100. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is effective, and achieves a substantial boost over previous methods.

PaperID: 3318

Authors:Shupeng Qiu, Chuan-Xian Ren

Affiliations: SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY

Title: Inverse Optimal Transport for Efficient Adaptation of Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
Vision–language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have unlocked powerful zeroshot transfer, yet efficient adaptation to downstream tasks remains challenging. Existing methods often depend on graph structures and dataset-specific tuning, making them sensitive to modality gaps and computationally costly at scale. In this paper, we propose IOTA (Inverse Optimal Transport Adaptation), a lightweight algorithm that reformulates VLMs inference from the perspective of inverse optimal transport (IOT), providing a unified view of training and inference. Under the IOT framework, IOTA enhances zero-shot alignment via a theory-guided unbalanced OT strategy and refines textual prototypes using OT-based pseudo-labels with a marginal-aware adaptive threshold, enabling reliable supervision without gradient updates. The framework naturally extends to few-shot scenarios through a label-guided masking mechanism. By decoupling image–text interactions from other inter-modal dependencies, IOTA avoids task-specific tuning and expensive affinity construction. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks show that IOTA consistently improves zero-shot and few-shot performance while reducing memory and computation overhead, validating both its theoretical insight and plug-and-play practicality.

PaperID: 3319

Authors:Ahmed Radwan, Mahmoud Soliman, Omar Abdelaziz, Ahmad Abdel-Qader, Mohamed S. Shehata

Affiliations: University of British Columbia

Title: MoE^2: A Mixture-of-Mixtures of Experts for Ensemble-Free Domain Generalization

Abstract:
Domain Generalization (DG) requires models to generalize across unseen data distributions. Kernelbased theory reveals a No-Free-Lunch problem: any model with a fixed representation is fundamentally sub-optimal for all possible shifts. While large ensembles mitigate this, they are computationally expensive and remain static once trained, inheriting the same theoretical limitation. We introduce MoE² (Mixture-of-Mixtures of Experts), a framework that uses a single frozen backbone to dynamically synthesize a bespoke adapter for each input, allowing it to continuously adapt its effective kernel. We provide a theoretical grounding for this process, proving our routing mechanism is a principled non-parametric estimator for the optimal Bayes mixture of experts. We derive a generalization bound that cleanly separates the router's estimation error from the reduction in a kernel-mismatch penalty achieved via synthesis. MoE² matches or exceeds state-of-the-art ensemble baselines on major DG benchmarks while using only a single, compact model. MoE² thus provides a theoretically-grounded and lightweight alternative to large-scale ensembles for robust domain generalization.

PaperID: 3320

Authors:Xiaozhe Ren, Qiong Luo

Affiliations: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: BitDP: Ultra-low-bit Communication for Data Parallelism in LLM Training

Abstract:
Training large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters on trilliontoken datasets requires distributed data parallelism at increasingly large scales, where gradient synchronization becomes a communication bottleneck, especially in bandwidth-constrained environments. Although gradient quantization presents a promising solution, it faces two key challenges: maintaining training stability and accuracy for transformer architectures and adapting to modern distributed communication systems. In this paper, we propose BitDP, an ultra-low-bit gradient quantization system that reduces communication costs by up to 32× while preserving model accuracy with less than 1% performance degradation. Our approach achieves numerical stability for large transformer models and seamlessly integrates with existing infrastructures. We evaluate BitDP's effectiveness across various LLM sizes, architectures and optimizers. The results demonstrate significant training efficiency improvements while maintaining convergence quality, establishing BitDP as a scalable and reliable solution for real-world LLM training at industrial scales.

PaperID: 3321

Authors:Yi Shan, Liyang Gao, Yuena Lin, Zhen Yang, Gengyu Lyu, Honggui Han

Affiliations: College of Computer Science, Beijing University of Technology

Title: Hypergraph-Based Multi-View Multi-Label Classification via Adaptive High-Order Semantic Fusion

Abstract:
In multiview multi-label (MVML) classification, each sample is represented by multiple heterogeneous views and annotated with multiple labels. Existing methods typically exploit pairwise semantic relationships to mine intra-view correlations and align inter-view features for generating structural representations. However, these methods ignore the direct expression of high-order semantic similarities and alignments from a group perspective, which necessitates multi-step aggregation for subsequent feature fusion, leading to the inefficient and incomplete integration of key semantic information. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel hypergraph-based MVML method with Adaptive High-Order Semantic Fusion (HyperAHSF), which leverages hypergraphs to adaptively model group-level semantic similarities within each view and group-level semantic alignments across different views, enabling more effective feature fusion. Specifically, we first construct view-specific hyperedges by selecting multiple groups of node representations exhibiting high semantic similarity, which captures the group-level semantic similarities within each view, forming view-specific hypergraphs. Furthermore, we establish cross-view hyperedges to connect the multi-view node representations of each sample, which characterizes the group-level semantic alignments across different views, accordingly forming a unified multi-view hypergraph. Afterwards, we employ hypergraph neural networks to efficiently aggregate view-specific information and consensus information from their corresponding hypergraphs via group-level message passing. During the passing process, we impose a label-driven contrastive loss on the consensus information to encourage these representations to cluster toward their corresponding class prototypes, enhancing their discriminability. Finally, the consensus information together with the view-specific information is jointly integrated for multi-label classification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HyperAHSF outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 3322

Authors:Qilu Shen, Yingjie Wang, Jinhai Xiang

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Smart Farming for Agricultural Animals, China College of Informatics, Huazhong Agricultural University, China Agricultural Bioinformatics Key Laboratory of Hubei Province, China Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Technology for Agriculture, Ministry of Education, College of Control Science and Engineering, China University of Petroleum (East China)

Title: Towards Understanding In-Context Learning of Transformers Under Non-I.I.D. Scenarios

Abstract:
Understanding the generalization behavior of incontext learning (ICL) in Transformers remains a fundamental challenge, as most existing theoretical analyses are based on the assumption that data are independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.), an assumption that often does not hold in practice. Motivated by the theoretical insight that ICL operates similarly to gradient-based optimization, we leverage the concept of gradient stability to establish generalization error bounds for ICL under a general non-i.i.d. setting. Our analysis shows that two factors play a central role in ICL generalization: the number of demonstrations in the prompt and their distributional alignment with the query. In particular, increasing the number of demonstrations and improving their alignment with the query distribution lead to better generalization, even without any parameter tuning. Under mild conditions, we further prove that the generalization error can achieve the optimal convergence rate of O(N^(-1/2)), where N is the number of demonstrations. Our empirical evaluations validate the effectiveness of our theoretical findings.

PaperID: 3323

Authors:Kai Tang, Yixuan Tang, Tianyi Chen, Haokai Xu, Qiqi Luo, Jin Guang Zheng, Zhixin Zhang, Gang Chen, Haobo Wang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, National University of Singapore, Ant Group

Title: Group-aware Multiscale Ensemble Learning for Test-Time Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Abstract:
Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) enables machines to perceive human sentiments by integrating multiple modalities such as text, video, and audio. Despite recent progress, most existing methods assume distribution consistency between training and test data—a condition rarely met in real-world scenarios. To address domain shifts without relying on source data or target labels, Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) has emerged as a promising paradigm. However, applying TTA methods to MSA faces two challenges: a representation bottleneck inherent to the regression formulation and the inconsistency in modality fusion caused by modality-specific data augmentation techniques. To overcome these issues, we propose Group-aware Multiscale Ensemble Learning (GMEL), which leverages a von Mises-Fisher (vMF) mixture distribution to model latent sentiment groups and integrates a multi-scale re-dropout strategy for modality-agnostic feature augmentation, preserving fusion consistency. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets using two backbone architectures show that GMEL significantly outperforms existing baselines, demonstrating strong robustness to test-time distribution shifts in multi-modal sentiment analysis.

PaperID: 3324

Authors:Tomas Tokar, Scott Sanner

Affiliations: Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto Wondeur AI, University of Toronto Vector Institute for AI

Title: Efficient Modality Translation via Arbitrary Conditioning and Wasserstein Regularization

Abstract:
The central challenge in multimodal generative modeling lies in accurately approximating the joint data distribution, even when some modalities are missing. Existing multimodal VAEs solve this by designing increasingly complex encoding architectures, relying on modalityspecific encoders, factorized posteriors, and custom inference procedures. This restricts their ability to capture relations among modalities by amortizing the encoding parameters. We challenge this paradigm by introducing a model trained for arbitrary conditioning, i.e., generating any modality given a subset of observed modalities and a logical index indicating which modalities are present or missing. This enables a single unified encoder to handle any subset of modalities while capturing inter-modal relationships via a compact, shared posterior. We find that to work efficiently in the multimodal setup, arbitrary conditioning requires replacing the KL divergence with Wasserstein regularization, which allows more dispersed latent embeddings to support learning over diverse data and modality subsets. This key insight exposes a critical deficiency in existing methods, which rely on KL regularization that tends to concentrate individual embeddings near the standard Gaussian prior, despite coming from very diverse subsets of multimodal inputs. We prove that Wasserstein regularization ensures that the aggregate latent distribution -- spanning all conditioning subsets -- aligns with the prior without requiring mixture models or auxiliary inference tricks. Empirically, the proposed model improves cross-modal generation and yields better reconstructions than state-of-the-art multimodal VAEs.

PaperID: 3325

Authors:Fan Wang, Zhongyi Han, Yongshun Gong, Yilong Yin

Affiliations: Shandong University

Title: Retriever Encoder Selection Matters for In-Context Learning-based Medical Segmentation

Abstract:
Incontext learning-based medical segmentation (ICLM) enables foundation models to generalize to unseen cases without retraining. To enhance performance on test queries, existing methods typically follow a two-stage process: (1) using a retrieval encoder (RE) to map both queries and training samples into a shared feature space, and (2) retrieving and utilizing the top-k most similar training samples. While current methods fix the RE and focus on optimizing stage (2), we show that the choice of RE in stage (1) alone can account for over 70% of the performance variation, highlighting RE selection as a critical yet often overlooked factor in ICLM. In this paper, we conduct an analysis of the RE selection and make two main findings: (1) dynamically selecting the RE for each query outperforms selecting a fixed RE for the entire task; and (2) feature-space heuristics (e.g., intra-class compactness and inter-class separability) fail to predict RE quality. To this end, we propose the instance-adaptive retrieval encoder selection (IRES) method that can select the optimal RE for each query based on output predictions. IRES is based on the intuition that a good RE retrieves relevant demonstrations, helping the ICL model generate more accurate and stable segmentation masks. Thus, we introduce the shape stability score (S³), which evaluates the morphological stability of predicted masks under iterative erosion. Experiments show S³ correlates strongly with true RE quality (Pearson > 0.8), serving as a reliable selection proxy. To reduce S³’s per-query cost, we propose parallel prediction with reciprocal neighbor reuse (P2R), which accelerates inference by parallelizing encoding and reusing encoder selections across reciprocal neighbors, avoiding redundant computation. Built on S³ and P2R, IRES improves ICLM performance across FUNDUS, Brain MRI, and Chest X-ray datasets, with up to 10.6% gain on fundus segmentation.

PaperID: 3326

Authors:Meng-Zhu Wang, Yu Zhang, Hongxing Zhang

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Hebei University of Technology, State Key Laboratory of Medical Proteomics, National Center for Protein Sciences (Beijing)

Title: Robust Integrative Analysis of Multi-omics Datasets via Nuclear-norm Maximization

Abstract:
Spatially multimodal omics technologies provide unprecedented opportunities to address cellular heterogeneity within tissue contexts. However, learning robust and informative latent representations from such complex data remains a significant challenge. Existing graphbased methods often rely on static connections or indirect optimization objectives, which can constrain the discriminability and diversity of the learned representations, particularly in the presence of sequencing noise and unknown biological priors. To overcome these limitations, we propose Robust Integrative Analysis of Multi-omics Datasets via Nuclear-norm Maximization (RIA) to adaptively integrate multimodal features and spatial information through a new graph-based architecture. At the core of RIA is the introduction of the batch nuclear norm maximization (bnm) loss, marking the first application of bnm within the multi-omics domain. By maximizing the nuclear norm of the batch assignment matrix derived from the latent space, RIA simultaneously enhances the discriminability and diversity of the learned embeddings. This objective is synergistically combined with a dynamic prototype contrastive learning strategy and a graph stability loss, ensuring comprehensive and robust optimization.Ultimately, RIA produces a structured, information-rich latent space that enables more reliable downstream analyses, including cell type identification, spatial domain discovery, and microenvironment characterization.

PaperID: 3327

Authors:Qianqian Wang, Mengping Jiang, Wei Feng, Haixi Zhang, Bin Liu

Affiliations: Xidian University, Northwest A&F University

Title: Discriminative Graph Embedding Framework via Label-Free Marginal Fisher Analysis

Abstract:
Marginal Fisher Analysis (MFA) is a classical dimensionality reduction (DR) method that leverages dual graphs to capture intraclass compactness and inter-class separability. However, MFA’s reliance on high-quality labels limits its practical application. For another, existing unsupervised DR methods neglect data’s local manifold relationship, resulting in poor discriminativeness. To address these limitations, we propose a novel DR method named Discriminative Graph Embedding Framework (DGEF) via Label-Free Marginal Fisher Analysis. Our approach uses the adjacency matrix and cluster indicator matrix derived from centerless K-Means to construct intrinsic graph and penalty graph, which preserve the local manifold structure of the data. Additionally, we have derived the convertible relationship between centerless K-Means and Manifold learning and unified them within a graph embedding framework. By adopting the intrinsic graph and penalty graph, our DGEF avoids centroid initialization and ensures robustness and discriminativeness. This method achieves dimensionality reduction adaptively without relying on labeled data. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that our approach outperforms conventional methods in clustering performance.

PaperID: 3328

Authors:Tiantong Wang, Yiyang Duan, Haoyu Chen, Tiantong Wu, Wei Yang Bryan Lim

Affiliations: College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, Beijing Jiaotong University, Alibaba-NTU Global e-Sustainability CorpLab (ANGEL)

Title: M-Loss: Quantifying Model Merging Compatibility with Limited Unlabeled Data

Abstract:
Training of largescale models is both computationally intensive and often constrained by the availability of labeled data. Model merging offers a compelling alternative by directly integrating the weights of multiple source models without requiring additional data or extensive training. However, conventional model merging techniques, such as parameter averaging, often suffer from the unintended combination of non-generalizable features, especially when source models exhibit significant weight disparities. Comparatively, model ensembling generally provides more stable and superior performance that aggregates multiple models by averaging outputs. However, it incurs higher inference costs and increased storage requirements. While previous studies experimentally showed the similarities between model merging and ensembling, theoretical evidence and evaluation metrics remain lacking. To address this gap, we introduce Merging-ensembling loss (M-loss), a novel evaluation metric that quantifies the compatibility of merging source models using very limited unlabeled data. By measuring the discrepancy between parameter averaging and model ensembling at layer and node levels, M-loss facilitates more effective merging strategies. Specifically, M-loss serves both as a quantitative criterion of the theoretical feasibility of model merging, and a guide for parameter significance in model pruning. Our theoretical analysis and empirical evaluations demonstrate that incorporating M-loss into the merging process significantly improves the alignment between merged models and model ensembling, providing a scalable and efficient framework for accurate model consolidation.

PaperID: 3329

Authors:Yu Wang, Fengxia Han, Jianyu Wang

Affiliations: Tongji University

Title: Boosting Noisy Correspondence Discrimination via Dynamic Neighborhood Semantic Verification

Abstract:
Noisy correspondence, characterized by mismatches in crossmodal data pairs, presents a significant challenge for real-world applications. Current approaches primarily rely on direct cross-modal pairwise similarity metrics, which suffer from two critical limitations: noise sensitivity, where direct similarity calculations are easily corrupted by noisy or ambiguous instances, and contextual blindness, where isolated pairwise comparisons fail to exploit the rich semantic context embedded in neighboring instances. To address this issue, we propose to improve noise correspondence discrimination through a well-designed Dynamic Neighborhood Semantic association verification paradigm, namely DNS. Specifically, we hypothesize that the matching degree of current samples can be quantified through the interrelationships among their respective semantic neighbors. For this reason, we develop a novel semantic drift distance and local relation proximity based on dynamic neighborhood association. Furthermore, beyond implicit approaches to semantic gap modeling in cross-modal data, we introduce an explicit decomposition framework that disentangles the gap into the semantic orientation and scalar magnitude. Through the strategic integration of these proposed mechanisms, DNS achieves substantial enhancement in noisy correspondence discrimination, yielding remarkable performance gains. Extensive experiments on three widely-used benchmark datasets, including Flickr30K, MS-COCO, and Conceptual Captions, demonstrate the superiority of DNS over state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 3330

Authors:Zhihao Wu, Jielong Lu, Zihan Fang, Jinyu Cai, Guangyong Chen, Jiajun Bu, Haishuai Wang

Affiliations: Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Accessible Perception and Intelligent Systems, College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, College of Computer and Data Science, Fuzhou University, Institute of Data Science, National University of Singapore, Hangzhou Institute of Medicine, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Unifying Multi-View Knowledge for Graph Learning via Model Collaboration

Abstract:
With the increasing scale and complexity of graph data, node attributes are also becoming richer and more complex, particularly in the form of informative text. Classic GNNs equipped with shallow attribute encoders are no longer sufficient to handle such data independently, making model collaboration across heterogeneous architectures an inevitable trend. Recently, the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) and GNNs has attracted significant attention, yet the inherent disparity between these models remains a key challenge. Promising solutions have considered finetuning Small Language Models (SLMs) to bridge the gap between GNNs and frozen LLMs. However, this introduces another problem: these heterogeneous models bring complementary knowledge, but how to effectively integrate them and allow mutual refinement becomes a significant research gap. To address these challenges, we introduce COLA, a collaborative large–small model framework that enables seamless cooperation among semantic LLMs, task-specific fine-tuned SLMs, and structure-aware GNNs. COLA features a unique Consensus–Complement Coordination Mechanism (C3M), wherein its Mixture-of-Coordinators (MoC) architecturally aligns the LLM and SLM. Built upon this, a flexible graph-knowledge infusion strategy encourages the joint alignment and graph knowledge learning of textual representations. Extensive evaluations across nine diverse datasets show that COLA consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, validating the effectiveness and generality of our collaborative paradigm.

PaperID: 3331

Authors:Baili Xiao, Ke Liang, Jiaqi Jin, Jun Wang, Yinbo Xu, Siwei Wang, En Zhu

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology, College of Intelligence Science and Technology, Intelligent Game and Decision Lab

Title: DMCAR: Disentangled Mixture-of-Experts with Context-Aware Routing for Multi-View Clustering

Abstract:
MultiView Clustering (MVC) aims to enhance clustering performance by integrating multi-source complementary information. However, existing deep MVC methods face inherent challenges in balancing the learning of shared consensus representations with the preservation of view-specific information: independent encoders hinder effective cross-view collaboration, while a single shared encoder tends to sacrifice representation diversity. Although the recently introduced Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model offers a novel approach to facilitating view collaboration, its flattened expert pool design often leads to entanglement between shared and specific information, and its routing mechanism limits collaboration potential by neglecting cross-view context. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel deep multi-view clustering framework—Decoupled Mixture-of-Experts with Context-Aware Routing for Multi-View Clustering (DMCAR-MVC). At its core is an innovative Decoupled MoE (D-MoE) architecture. We establish a public expert pool to learn cross-view shared representations while equipping each view with an independent private expert pool to capture its unique information, thereby structurally enforcing the decoupling of shared and specific representations. Building on this, we further design a Context-Aware Hierarchical Routing (CAHR) mechanism. When routing for the public expert pool, this mechanism introduces a global context vector to guide expert selection, enabling more efficient and globally informed cross-view collaboration. Finally, to optimize the model, we adopt a multi-level contrastive learning paradigm: on one hand, a cross-view alignment loss ensures semantic consistency in shared representations; on the other, an orthogonality constraint is imposed to further enhance separability between shared and specific representations. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that DMCAR-MVC significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods across key clustering metrics. Additionally, comprehensive ablation studies thoroughly validate the effectiveness and necessity of each proposed component.

PaperID: 3332

Authors:Yu Xing, Qizhuo Xie, Yunhui Liu, Qing Gu, Tao Zheng, Bin Chong, Tieke He

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, National Engineering Laboratory for Big Data Analysis and Applications, Peking University

Title: On Modality Weighting and Specificity for Multi-Modal Entity Alignment

Abstract:
Multimodal entity alignment aims to identify equivalent entities across different multi-modal knowledge graphs (MMKGs). While prior work has achieved notable progress through improved multi-modal encoding and cross-modal fusion techniques, two critical challenges remain unresolved. First, due to the heterogeneous and often inconsistent sources from which MMKGs are constructed, the quality and informativeness of modalities vary significantly across entities, leading to the modality weighting problem. Second, existing cross-modal fusion mechanisms predominantly emphasize modality-shared information, often at the expense of modality-specific signals that are also essential for precise alignment. To address these issues, we propose HUMEA, a novel framework that integrates hierarchical Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) with unimodal distillation. HUMEA consists of: (1) A hierarchical MoE module comprising intra-modal and inter-modal experts, which adaptively modulates modality contributions by capturing entity representations at fine-to-coarse semantic granularities. In addition, we introduce a contrastive mutual information loss to enhance expert diversity and reduce redundancy. (2) A unimodal distillation strategy that preserves modality-specific information in the fused representations through single-modality alignment and distillation, achieving a balanced integration of shared and unique modality features. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, FB15K-DB15K and FB15K-YAGO15K, demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, validating the effectiveness of our approach.

PaperID: 3333

Authors:Xianling Yang, Zhiwen Yu, Sun Song, Kaixiang Yang

Affiliations: South China University of Technology, Chongqing Normal University

Title: BidMatch: Boosting Semi-Supervised Learning by Bi-Dimensional Sample Weight Guidance

Abstract:
Semisupervised learning (SSL) based on pseudo-label and consistency has achieved significant success. The core idea behind these methods is to assign sample weights based on pseudo-label probabilities, thereby guiding the model toward biased learning. However, existing research still faces two major challenges in guiding learning: (1) how to evaluate learning states across different classes in the absence of labels, and (2) how to construct an effective sample weight space that provides precise guidance throughout training. To address these challenges, we propose the Bi-Dimensional Sample Weight Guidance algorithm, BidMatch. BidMatch introduces Class Information Entropy (CIE), which captures the learning relationships between classes and reflects the model’s learning state for each class. Additionally, Pseudo-label Probability Redistribution (PPR) is proposed to maintain distribution invariance and sparsity during training, thereby emphasizing differences in sample importance. By leveraging CIE and PPR, BidMatch generates sample weights that account for both class and instance dimensions, effectively guiding the model toward balanced and efficient learning across classes. BidMatch has demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on various SSL datasets. Notably, it achieved a 6.45% error rate on CIFAR-10 with only one label per class, significantly outperforming baseline methods.

PaperID: 3334

Authors:Fei Ye, YongCheng Zhong, Qihe Liu, Adrian G. Bors, JingLing Sun, Jinyu Guo, ShiJie Zhou

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, University of York

Title: Learning Adaptive and Expandable Mixture Model for Continual Learning

Abstract:
Continuous learning constitutes a fundamental capability of artificial intelligence systems, enabling them to incrementally assimilate novel information without succumbing to catastrophic forgetting. Recent research has leveraged PreTrained Models (PTMs) to enhance continual learning efficacy. Nevertheless, prevailing methodologies typically depend on a singular pre-trained backbone and freeze all pre-trained parameters to mitigate network forgetting, thereby constraining adaptability to emerging tasks. In this study, we introduce an innovative PTM-based framework featuring a Dual-Representation Backbone Architecture (DRBA), which integrates both invariant and evolved representation networks to concurrently capture static and dynamic features. Building upon DRBA, we propose an Adaptive and Expandable Mixture Model (AEMM) that incrementally incorporates new expert modules with minimal parameter overhead to accommodate the learning of each novel task. To further augment adaptability, we develop a Dynamic Adaptive Representation Fusion Mechanism (DARFM) that processes outputs from both representation networks and autonomously generates data-driven adaptive weights, optimizing the contribution of each representation. This mechanism yields an adaptive, semantically enriched composite representation, thereby maximizing positive knowledge transfer. Additionally, we propose a Dynamic Knowledge Calibration Mechanism (DKCM), comprising prediction and representation calibration processes, to ensure consistency in both predictions and feature representations. This approach achieves a balance between stability and plasticity, even when learning complex datasets. Empirical evaluations substantiate that the proposed approach attains state-of-the-art performance.

PaperID: 3335

Authors:Zhong Ye, Yu Hu, Zhenguo Yang

Affiliations: Guangdong University of Technology

Title: Multi-Task Test-time Adaptation via Gradient Consensus and Plasticity Constraint

Abstract:
Multitask test-time adaptation (MT-TTA) aims to adapt pre-trained models to dynamic environments during multi-task inference by leveraging unlabeled test data. This task is particularly challenging as different tasks respond divergently to distribution shifts, and mixed input streams containing both in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) samples make the models after test-time adaptation prone to catastrophic forgetting of ID knowledge. Although the existing methods like M-TENT extend the classic test entropy minimization (TENT) by minimizing multi-task entropies and employing task-average gradient to adapt a model, it suffers from two key limitations: 1) the average gradient strategy proposed by M-TENT may exacerbate multi-task test-time optimization conflicts, harming individual tasks when gradients are directionally non-consensual; 2) aggressive updates on mixed ID/OOD data cause severe forgetting of ID knowledge. In this paper, we theoretically establish a formal connection between multi-task loss differences and test-time performance under the first-order Taylor analysis, demonstrating that consensual multi-task entropy reductions are likely to increase the performance, while non-consensual ones might decrease the performance. To this end, we propose Consensus-driven Constrained Multi-Task Test-Time Adaptation (CoCo-MT-TTA), consisting of 1) multi-task gradient consensus adaptation, which aligns cross-task gradient directions to seek a consensus gradient; 2) multi-task plasticity-constraint adaptation, which constrains parameter updates using second-moment statistics to preserve ID knowledge. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including CelebA and PlantData, demonstrate that our method achieves an absolute improvement of up to 16.02% in mean ID/OOD F1-score (Mean I&O) under domain shifts over non-adapted models, outperforming the recent baselines.

PaperID: 3336

Authors:Bo Zeng, Zhi Pang, Yuyang Zhang, Kai Zhao, Tian Wu, Geying Yang, Lina Wang, Run Wang

Affiliations: Wuhan University, Nanchang University, Tianjin University

Title: PCFormer: Accelerating Privacy-preserving Transformer Inference by Partition and Combination

Abstract:
In recent years, transformerbased models have achieved remarkable success in sensitive domains, including healthcare, finance and personalized services, but their deployment raises significant privacy concerns. Existing secure inference studies have introduced cryptographic techniques such as Homomorphic Encryption (HE) and Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC). However, these approaches either target isolated model components or incur prohibitive computational and communication overheads, failing to support latency-sensitive or resource-limited environments. In our investigation, we identify substantial redundancy in the nonlinear operations and their alternation with linear layers in deep learning. Motivated by this observation, we propose PCFormer, a universal optimization methodology tailored for sequences of linear and nonlinear computations in the Transformer. PCFormer introduces structure-aware partition and combination techniques specially designed for Multi-Head Attention (MHA) and Feed-Forward Network (FFN). Specifically, we reveal the discrete sources of redundancy in the Softmax and GeLU functions during inference, implementing partitions at the token and channel levels, respectively. Subsequently, these reductions are then combined with the preceding and succeeding linear operations, thereby enhancing both computational and communication efficiency. Experimental results on GLUE benchmarks demonstrate that PCFormer achieves a 1.9× speedup in both computation and communication without compromising accuracy, compared to existing privacy-preserving Transformer frameworks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that PCFormer generalizes effectively to other deep learning architectures involving structured linear-nonlinear compositions under cryptographic constraints.

PaperID: 3337

Authors:Moxuan Zeng, Wenxuan Tu, Yuanyi Chen, Yiying Wang, Miao Yu, Xiangyan Tang, Jieren Cheng

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Hainan University, Hainan Blockchain Technology Engineering Research Center

Title: FedPKDA: Personalized Federated Learning with Privacy-Preserving Knowledge Dynamic Alignment

Abstract:
Personalized Federated Learning (PFL), which aims to customize models for each client while preserving data privacy, has become an important research topic in addressing the challenges of data heterogeneity. Existing studies usually enhance the localization of global parameters by injecting local information into the globally shared model. However, these methods focus excessively on the personalized characteristics of individual clients and fail to fully exploit distinctive information across clients, limiting the quality of local models to represent unseen samples well. To address this issue, we propose a novel personalized Federated Privacypreserving Knowledge Dynamic Alignment (FedPKDA) framework, which ensures data privacy during both the collection of client-side key information and its incorporation into federated model training. Specifically, to ensure data privacy during the cross-client information collection phase, we first conduct feature clipping and add Laplacian noise to the local prototypes extracted from each client. Further, we compute the centroid of the uploaded local prototypes in a latent space and leverage Mahalanobis distance to guide the generation of global prototypes, thereby preserving the semantic contributions from participating clients. Moreover, to boost the personalization of the local model, we dynamically align representations learned by the shared model with both a set of local prototypes and privacy-preserving global prototypes, facilitating effective cross-client knowledge sharing under heterogeneous settings while preserving client-specific characteristics. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets have verified the superiority of FedPKDA against its competitors.

PaperID: 3338

Authors:Boyang Zhang, Daning Cheng, Yunquan Zhang, Jiake Tian, Jing Li, Fangming Liu

Affiliations: Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Harbin Institute of Technology, Pengcheng Laboratory

Title: FP=XINT: Representing Neural Networks via Low-Bit Series Basis Functions

Abstract:
Deep neural networks are often overparameterized, resulting in prohibitive storage and computational costs. A fundamental question is whether a complex network can be re-expressed in terms of a compact set of basis functions without sacrificing accuracy. Motivated by this perspective, we aim to approximate a dense model by decomposing it into a small number of lightweight components that capture the essential functional structure of the network. To this end, we propose a series expansion framework that rewrites a neural network as a linear combination of low-bit basis models. Within the post-training quantization setting, the full-precision model is expanded hierarchically at the tensor, layer, and model levels into a structured set of basis functions. We theoretically prove that this expansion converges exponentially to the original model. Furthermore, we design AbelianAdd and AbelianMul operations between isomorphic basis models, endowing the expansion with an Abelian group structure that naturally supports commutative and parallel computation. Experimental results across diverse architectures show that our series expansion method leverages a set of ultra-low-bit basis functions, not only preserving full-precision performance without the need for calibration data or fine-tuning, but also featuring a parallel-friendly design that enables efficient and scalable deployment.

PaperID: 3339

Authors:Liyun Zhang, Zheng Lian, Hong Liu, Takanori Takebe, Yuta Nakashima

Affiliations: Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, National Key Laboratory of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems, Tongji University, School of Informatics, Xiamen University, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati OH, Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research, The University of Osaka

Title: SimLabel: Similarity-Weighted Semi-supervision for Multi-annotator Learning with Missing Labels

Abstract:
Multiannotator learning (MAL) aims to model annotator-specific labeling patterns. However, existing methods face a critical challenge: they simply skip updating annotator-specific model parameters when encountering missing labels—a common scenario in real-world crowdsourced datasets where each annotator labels only small subsets of samples. This leads to inefficient data utilization and overfitting risks. To this end, we propose a novel similarity-weighted semi-supervised learning framework (SimLabel) that leverages inter-annotator similarities to generate weighted soft labels for missing annotations, enabling the utilization of unannotated samples rather than skipping them entirely. We further introduce a confidence-based iterative refinement mechanism that combines maximum probability with entropy-based uncertainty to prioritize predicted high-quality pseudo-labels to impute missing labels, jointly enhancing similarity estimation and model performance over time. For evaluation, we contribute a new multimodal multi-annotator dataset, AMER2, with high and more variable missing rates, reflecting real-world annotation sparsity and enabling evaluation across different sparsity levels. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method.

PaperID: 3340

Authors:Rongchao Zhang, Yiwei Lou, Yu Huang, Yi Xin, Yongzhi Cao, Hanpin Wang

Affiliations: Ministry of Education, School of Computer Science, Peking University, National Engineering Research Center for Software Engineering, National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University

Title: Beyond Conservation: Flexible Molecular Assembly with Unbalanced Diffusion Bridge

Abstract:
Molecular assembly (MA) has long been a fundamental task in chemistry and biology, with the potential to create new materials and enable novel functions beyond the molecular scale. However, its vast conformational search space poses substantial challenges, and current generative models remain limited in capturing molecular flexibility and preventing nonphysical poses. In this paper, we propose AssemUDB, a diffusion bridge–based framework that learns transport mappings between two distinct flexible domains for molecular assembly generation. We reformulate the marginal matching constraint of diffusion bridges as a coupling distribution governed by unbalanced transport rather than imposing strict conservation. Subsequently, we employ a progressive process from structural relaxation in Euclidean space to assembly on the SE(3) manifold. This relaxation of marginal conservation grants the generative model greater flexibility and leads to more physically plausible atom placements. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of AssemUDB. Notably, we find that the method demonstrates performance comparable to, or even better than, mature tools such as PackMol for packing tasks.

PaperID: 3341

Authors:Yuanyang Zhang, Xinhang Wan, Chao Zhang, Jie Xu, Cunjian Chen, Tien-Tsin Wong, Li Yao, Yijie Lin

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing China, College of Systems Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, School of Robotics and Automation, Nanjing University, Information Systems Technology and Design Pillar, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Department of Data Science & AI, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Ministry of Education, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR

Title: Mamba-Driven Multi-View Discriminative Clustering via Global-Local Cross-View Sequence Modeling

Abstract:
Multiview clustering (MVC) has recently garnered increasing attention for its ability to partition unlabeled samples into distinct clusters by leveraging complementary and consistent information from different views. Existing MVC methods primarily combine deep neural networks with contrastive learning for cross-view representation learning, yet often overlook the inherent global-local structural relationships among samples. While GNN-based methods capture local structures, they struggle to model global dependencies, leading to inferior inter-cluster separability. In contrast, Transformer-based methods excel at global aggregation but suffer from quadratic complexity, and their attention smoothing effect weakens fine-grained local structures, resulting in suboptimal intra-cluster compactness. To address these limitations, we propose a novel end-to-end MVC framework called Mamba-Driven Multi-View Discriminative Clustering via Global-Local Cross-View Sequence Modeling (MGLC). By flexibly constructing multi-view sequences, MGLC fully exploits the efficient sequence modeling capabilities of Mamba to jointly model cross-view dependencies and global-local structural relationships among samples. Furthermore, MGLC introduces a Cross-Mamba Fusion module to dynamically integrate cross-view and global-local structural representations. Additionally, MGLC incorporates a Dual Calibration Contrastive Learning module, guided by high-confidence pseudo-labels, that adaptively refines both feature and semantic representations while mitigating false negatives among semantically similar samples. Extensive comparative experiments and ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of MGLC.

PaperID: 3342

Authors:Yuhang Zhang, Xianda Wang, Wei Sun, Jiaxuan Chen, Fangxin Wang

Affiliations: School of Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen Shenzhen Future Network of Intelligence Institute

Title: FedBRICK: Structural Bias Aware Heterogeneous Foundation Model Federated Tuning

Abstract:
Modelheterogeneous federated tuning (MHFT) enables the privacy-preserving fine-tuning of foundation models in heterogeneous systems by allowing clients and the server to adopt different model architectures. Depth partial training—where each client updates only a subset of the model's layers—alleviates system heterogeneity but exacerbates client drift, which stems from clients optimizing different objectives and therefore degrades overall performance. Beyond the well-known statistical bias—where non-IID data leads to client drift—we identify a structural bias arising from clients deploying only partial layers of the global model, which serves as an important cause of drift. We further provide a theoretical analysis showing that the possible range of structural bias expands linearly with the number of missing layers. To counter this effect, we introduce FedBRICK (Federated Bias Recovery via Inserted Calibrative Kernels), which inserts tiny BRICKs into each client’s subnetwork. We employ a dual-end layer-wise distillation scheme to train these blocks using both client-side local data and a small public proxy set on the server. This design effectively mitigates the structural bias caused by layer dropping, reduces client drift, and remains practical for storage-constrained devices. Extensive experiments on federated learning benchmarks confirm that FedBRICK delivers up to a 5% average accuracy gain while requiring no more than 1.44% extra storage per client.

PaperID: 3343

Authors:Yutong Zhang, Zimeng Wu, Shengcai Liao, Shujiang Wu, Jiaxin Chen

Affiliations: Beihang University, United Arab Emirates University

Title: MP-ISMoE: Mixed-Precision Interactive Side Mixture-of-Experts for Efficient Transfer Learning

Abstract:
Parameterefficient transfer learning (PETL) has emerged as a pivotal paradigm for adapting pre-trained foundation models to downstream tasks, significantly reducing trainable parameters yet suffering from substantial memory overhead caused by gradient backpropagation during fine-tuning. While memory-efficient transfer learning (METL) circumvents this challenge by bypassing backbone gradient computation via lightweight small side networks, its stringent memory constraint severely limits learning capacity of side networks, thereby significantly compromising performance. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Mixed-Precision Interactive Side Mixture-of-Experts framework (MP-ISMoE). Specifically, we first propose an Gaussian Noise Perturbed Iterative Quantization (GNP-IQ) scheme to quantize weights into lower-bits while effectively decreasing quantization errors. By leveraging memory conserved from GNP-IQ, we subsequently employ Interactive Side Mixture-of-Experts (ISMoE) to scale up side networks without sacrificing overall memory efficiency. Different from conventional mixture-of-experts, ISMoE learns to select optimal experts by interacting with salient features from frozen backbones, thus suppressing knowledge forgetting and boosting performance. Extensive experiments across diverse vision-language and language-only tasks demonstrate that MP-ISMoE remarkably promotes accuracy compared to state-of-the-art METL approaches, while maintaining comparable parameter and memory efficiency.

PaperID: 3344

Authors:Yuxuan Zhang, Yuhang Sun, Wen Yao, Yue Deng, Hongjue Li

Affiliations: Beihang University, Defense Innovation Institute, Chinese Academy of Military Science

Title: Bi-Spectrum Distillation: Addressing Spectral Mismatch in ANN-SNN Knowledge Transfer

Abstract:
Knowledge distillation from Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) is a prominent training paradigm. However, its efficacy is fundamentally limited by a spectral mismatch: SNNs, with their intrinsic lowpass filtering characteristics, struggle to learn high-frequency details from their ANN teachers, creating a bottleneck in knowledge transfer at both the feature and logit levels. To address this, we propose Bi-Spectrum Distillation (BSD), a novel framework that mitigates the mismatch from two complementary perspectives. First, at the feature level, our Spectral Residual Distillation (SRD) enhances the student SNN's features with a parameter-efficient, learnable filter that adaptively compensates for high-frequency information loss, which transforms the student's output to better match the teacher's rich spectral target. Second, at the logits level, our Spectral Semantic Distillation (SSD) enhances fine-grained classification by distilling high-frequency components from teacher-ordered logits. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet, and CIFAR10-DVS demonstrate that BSD achieves new state-of-the-art performance across both CNN and Transformer-based SNNs, validating its effectiveness and broad applicability.

PaperID: 3345

Authors:Zexing Zhang, Huimin Lu, Qingxin Zhao

Affiliations: Changchun University of Technology Jilin Province Smart Health Joint Innovation Laboratory for the New Generation of AI Jilin Province Science and Technology Innovation Center for Multimodal Cognitive Computing and Analysis of Medical Biometrics

Title: PPGPT: Transferring Next-Token Modeling from Language to PPG Signals

Abstract:
The success of large language models (LLMs) in cognitive tasks prompts the question of whether their nexttoken prediction (NTP) paradigm can be adapted to model physiological signals from wearable devices. A key target for this adaptation is photoplethysmography (PPG), the most prevalent sensing modality in consumer wearables for non-invasive monitoring of diverse physiological conditions. Unlike in NLP, where NTP aligns with generative objectives, physiological signal analysis involves fundamentally different tasks, such as continuous parameter estimation (regression) and discrete state recognition (classification). This disparity creates a semantic mismatch between the pre-training paradigm and the downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose PPGPT, the first foundation model that reformulates NTP into next-feature token prediction (NFTP), learning hierarchical feature transition probabilities to unify pre-training and downstream objectives. PPGPT features a novel dual-stream encoder that generates feature tokens by jointly modeling temporal dynamics and local-global morphological patterns. The model is developed using a two-stage training framework: it is first pre-trained on a large-scale mixed dataset of 1.6 billion data points and then validated on our newly released BioMTL benchmark, which includes data from 172 subjects over 285 days across seven different tasks. Extensive experiments show that PPGPT significantly outperforms competing methods, achieving a 16.5% improvement in F1-score and a 25.9% reduction in Mean Absolute Error (MAE). Furthermore, the model demonstrates robust few-shot learning capabilities.

PaperID: 3346

Authors:Zhen Zhang, Han Peng, Limei Liu, Junyu Huang, Xiaolong Li, Qilong Feng

Affiliations: Hunan University of Technology and Business Xiangjiang Laboratory, Central South University

Title: A More Efficient Reduction from Outlier-Aware to Outlier-Free k-Median

Abstract:
Given a nonnegative integer \ell, the k-median with outliers problem extends the standard k-median problem by allowing the removal of up to \ell points and minimizing the clustering cost over the remaining ones. Algorithmic development in this setting remains an active area of research due to its relevance in processing noisy data. In this paper, we present a sampling-based reduction from the k-median with outliers problem to its outlier-free counterpart. The reduction incurs a multiplicative overhead of (kℓ⁻¹ + ε⁻¹)^O(ℓ) in the running time: it yields (kℓ⁻¹ + ε⁻¹)^O(ℓ) outlier-free instances, a solution to one of which can be directly transformed into a solution to the original instance with an arbitrarily small loss in the approximation ratio. This improves upon the previously known reduction with an overhead of ((k + ℓ)ε⁻¹)^O(ℓ). As applications, we obtain faster fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) algorithms with tight approximation guarantees for the k-median with outliers problem under various metric spaces. Furthermore, our approach naturally generalizes to constrained variants of the problem where additional constraints are imposed on the cluster sizes, and yields similar improvements in their FPT approximations.

PaperID: 3347

Authors:Ziqi Zhang, Runze Yang, Longbing Cao, Zhaohong Deng

Affiliations: Jiangnan University, Macquarie University

Title: PatchET: Learning Enzyme Temperature Properties Through Patch-Based Neural Architectures

Abstract:
Understanding enzyme thermal properties is essential for biotechnology and protein engineering, yet experimental measurements of attributes such as temperature optimum, stability, and range remain laborintensive and costly. Prior studies have shown that specific regions within enzyme sequences disproportionately influence thermal behavior—an aspect often overlooked by existing deep learning models. In this work, we introduce PatchET, a biologically inspired deep learning model that predicts enzyme thermal properties directly from amino acid sequences. PatchET employs a dual-stage, patch-based architecture that captures both intra-patch local features and inter-patch global dependencies, reflecting the hierarchical nature of protein thermal adaptation. Alongside the model, we curate a comprehensive benchmark, including a refined dataset for temperature optimum and the first publicly available dataset for temperature range prediction. PatchET achieves state-of-the-art performance across three key tasks—temperature optimum, stability, and range—and serves as the first dedicated model for temperature range prediction. Extensive ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of our architectural design. Together, PatchET and the accompanying benchmark provide a unified and generalizable framework for modeling enzyme thermal properties, offering new tools for the rational design of thermostable enzymes.

PaperID: 3348

Authors:Shiman Zhao, Siyuan Liu, Zhiqi Shen

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University

Title: Multi-knowledge Enhanced Graph Neural Network for Multi-trait Essay Scoring

Abstract:
Multitrait Essay Scoring (MES) aims to evaluate the quality of essays across multiple traits (e.g., Language, Content, and Organization). The task can be summarized into three crucial steps: essay content encoding, trait feature learning, and multi-trait scoring. However, previous methods fall short in these steps due to neglecting essential scoring-oriented knowledge, leading to suboptimal performance. To solve these issues, we propose a novel multi-trait scoring framework with multi-knowledge enhancement. Specifically, linguistic knowledge is used to model syntactic structural relations between words, highlighting structurally-informed essay encoding. We learn trait knowledge by capturing the knowledge dependencies between traits to enhance trait-specific features. Further, score-aware ordinal knowledge is integrated to promote ordinal alignment in trait-specific features associated with score rankings, improving scoring performance. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method achieves significant performance.

PaperID: 3349

Authors:Ruisheng Zheng, Mingyi Li, Xiao Zhang, Hongjian Shi, Yanjie Fu, Yuan Yuan, Dongxiao Yu

Affiliations: School of Cyber Science and Technology, Shandong University, School of Computer Science and Technology, School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, Arizona State University, School of Software

Title: DGTF: Cross-Domain Decentralized Graph Learning with Topology-Aware Knowledge Fusion

Abstract:
CrossDomain Decentralized Graph Learning (CD-DGL) is a promising paradigm that enables efficient, privacy-preserving collaboration among multiple parties to unlock the value of cross-domain graph data. However, it faces two fundamental challenges. First, inconsistent label spaces across domains drive local models to learn domain-specific biases, which means domain-invariant topological knowledge extraction beyond label constraints is difficult. Second, existing domain topology shift and heterogeneous model architectures make direct model aggregation infeasible. To address these issues, we first use Extended Persistent Homology (EPH) to reveal and quantify the problem of domain topology shift induced by the cross-domain setting. Building on this insight, we present Decentralized Graph Learning with Topology-Aware Knowledge Fusion (DGTF), a novel framework designed to facilitate positive topological knowledge transfer in CD-DGL. Our framework achieves this by integrating two core strategies: first, a contrastive learning-based approach to extract task-agnostic topological knowledge, and second, a topology-aware, model-independent knowledge fusion method to effectively integrate this topological information. Extensive experiments conducted under various cross-domain and model-heterogeneous settings validate the superiority and effectiveness of our proposed framework.

PaperID: 3350

Authors:Yun Zhou, Yuqiang Wu, Chunyu Tan

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University, China Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, China Anhui Provincial Key Laboratory of Security Artificial Intelligence

Title: PQDA:Policy-Aligned Q-Consistency Meets Decoupled Augmentation for Generalizable Visual RL

Abstract:
A fundamental challenge in visual reinforcement learning (RL) is achieving robust generalization across environments with varying visual distractions. Current RL methods struggle with generalization due to their inability to differentiate foreground and background features during augmentation,while their Qconsistency mechanisms rely on outdated actions from replay buffers that drift from the current policy.In this paper, we present PQDA, a novel framework that addresses generalization challenges in RL through two key innovations: (1) Foreground-Background Decoupled Augmentation leverages Gaussian mixture model-based segmentation to efficiently generate and cache masks in replay buffers, applying differentiated augmentation strategies to foreground and background regions, thereby enhancing data diversity while maintaining task-relevant features. (2) Policy-Aligned Q-Consistency enforces policy alignment by sampling actions from the current policy for Q-regularization, achieving faster and more stable convergence. Notably, PQDA eliminates auxiliary tasks entirely through a unified architecture that co-optimizes the encoder and RL components directly. Extensive experiments on DMControl benchmarks (including our newly proposed CVDMC benchmark) and robotic manipulation tasks demonstrate PQDA's superior generalization performance, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 3351

Authors:Pengsen Zhu, Lina Gao, Yulong Huang, Lifeng Liu, Zeru Yang, Yonggang Zhang

Affiliations: Harbin Engineering University, Nanyang Technological University

Title: Frequency-Dependent Scheduled Schrödinger Bridge for Underwater Acoustic Signal Denoising

Abstract:
Schrödinger Bridgebased diffusion models have demonstrated promising performance in signal denoising. However, since ground truth signals are unavailable during the sampling process, neural networks must be employed to learn the mapping, which breaks the theoretical coupling between diffusion and sampling processes. This paper reveals a critical inconsistency between the theoretical diffusion path and the learned sampling trajectory across different frequency bands. This diffusion-sampling inconsistency directly undermines denoising effectiveness. To address this limitation, we propose the Frequency-Dependent Scheduled Schrödinger Bridge (FDSSB), which leverages power spectral density to adaptively schedule diffusion processes across frequencies. This mechanism assigns asynchronous diffusion schedules to different frequency components, correcting the diffusion schedule to better match the sampling process. As a result, FDSSB effectively mitigates the mismatch and enhances the consistency between diffusion and sampling processes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FDSSB achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an average scale-invariant signal-to-noise ratio improvement of 7.9066 dB over competitive approaches.

PaperID: 3352

Authors:Jianhui Zuo, Xuemeng Song, Haokun Wen, Meng Liu, Yupeng Hu, Jiuru Wang, Liqiang Nie

Affiliations: School of Software, Shandong University, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, School of Computer Science and Technology, City University of Hong Kong, School of Computer and Artificial Intelligence, Shandong Jianzhu University, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Linyi University, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)

Title: D2MoRA: Diversity-Regulated Asymmetric MoE-LoRA Decomposition for Efficient Multi-Task Adaptation

Abstract:
LowRank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a powerful parameter-efficient fine-tuning method for adapting large language models to downstream tasks. Recent studies have leveraged Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) mechanism to effectively integrate multiple LoRA modules, facilitating efficient parameter adaptation for multi-task scenarios. It has been shown that fostering knowledge sharing across LoRA experts can greatly enhance parameter adaptation efficiency. However, the existing approach for LoRA expert knowledge sharing still faces two key limitations: constrained functional specialization and induced expert homogenization. To address these issues, we propose a novel diversity-regulated asymmetric MoE-LoRA decomposition framework, which achieves flexible knowledge sharing through asymmetric expert decomposition and guarantees expert diversity with a dual orthogonality regularization. Extensive experiments on eight public benchmarks, spanning both multi-task and single-task settings, demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing methods.

PaperID: 3353

Authors:Brittany Cates, Sarath Sreedharan

Affiliations: Colorado State University

Title: Mental Model-based Generation of Lies for Insider Threat Modeling

Abstract:
It is well understood that mental modeling forms the foundation of many everyday interactions between humans. This includes both collaborative and deceptive interactions. One could argue that the modeling and manipulation of mental states lies at the heart of effective deception. In this paper, we examine the security problem of insider threat attacks. In this case, an adversary has already infiltrated an organization. The primary challenge for this attacker is to avoid suspicion until their true goal can be achieved. We see how existing modelbased explanatory methods can be leveraged to generate lies that explain away potentially suspicious activities. We also propose a novel planning formulation which generates plans that appear to achieve an assigned goal while getting close enough to reach an alternative, covert goal. We evaluate our method through computational experiments and a user study.

PaperID: 3354

Authors:Yujiao Hu, Zuyu Chen, MengJie Lee, Jinchao Chen, Meng Shen, Hailun Zhang, Wei Li, Yan Pan

Affiliations: School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Chang'an University, Science and Technology on Information Systems Engineering Laboratory, National University of Defense Technology, School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Pervasive Communication Research Center, Purple Mountain Laboratories, School of Automobile

Title: GRIP: Latent Field-Guided Graph Policy for Budget-Constrained Multi-Agent Routing

Abstract:
Subset selection under budget constraints is critical in applications like multirobot patrolling, crime deterrence, and targeted marketing, where multiple agents must jointly select targets and plan feasible routes. We formalize this challenge as Multi-Subset Selection with Budget-Constrained Routing (MSS-BCR), involving complex, non-additive cost structures that defy traditional methods. We propose GRIP, a graph-based framework integrating spatial reward fields and policy learning to enable coordinated, budget-aware target selection and routing. GRIP uses attention-based embeddings and constraint-triggered pruning with utility recovery to produce high-quality, feasible solutions. Experiments based on multiple synthetic and real-world datasets show GRIP outperforms baselines in reward efficiency and scalability across varied scenarios.

PaperID: 3355

Authors:Pengyuan Wei, Giorgos Christopoulos, Zhouyang Shen, Jincheng Wang, Joshua Mukherjee, Ryuji Hirayama, Sriram Subramanian, Prateek Mittal

Affiliations: University College London

Title: AcoustoReinforce: Multi-Particle Acoustophoretic Path Planning with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Acoustophoresis uses sound waves to manipulate small objects in midair and has broad potential in various applications. However, stable multi-particle levitation remains challenging due to complex acoustic dynamics and limitations of existing models. We introduce AcoustoReinforce, a reinforcement learning-based path planner that autonomously controls the motion of multiple levitated particles. Leveraging a decentralized architecture, it learns local neural policies that generate particle trajectories independently, enabling scalable, communication-free control even in densely populated acoustic fields. To ensure physical feasibility, acoustic trapping strength is incorporated as a constraint during both training and inference, producing trajectories that are collision-free, acoustically stable, and physically realizable within real-world system constraints. Experiments on a real-world levitation platform show that AcoustoReinforce outperforms state-of-the-art planners, improving task success rates by up to 130% across diverse configurations. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of learning-based decentralized control for complex multi-object acoustophoresis in real environments.

PaperID: 3356

Authors:Mingming Zhao, Xiaokang Wei, Yuanqi Shao, Kaiwen Zhou, Lin Yang, Siwei Rao, Junhui Zhan, Zhitang Chen

Affiliations: Huawei Noah's Ark Lab, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Huawei Technologies Ltd.

Title: A²Flow: Automating Agentic Workflow Generation via Self-Adaptive Abstraction Operators

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong potential in automating the design of agentic workflows. However, existing methods still rely heavily on manually predefined operators, limiting generalization and scalability. To address this issue, we propose A²Flow, a fully automated framework for agentic workflow generation based on selfadaptive abstraction operators. A²Flow employs a three-stage operator extraction process: 1) Case-based Initial Operator Generation: leveraging expert demonstrations and LLM reasoning to generate case-specific operators; 2) Operator Clustering and Preliminary ion: grouping similar operators across tasks to form preliminary abstractions; and 3) Deep Extraction for Execution Operators: applying long chain-of-thought prompting and multi-path reasoning to derive compact and generalizable execution operators. These operators serve as reusable building blocks for workflow construction without manual predefinition. Furthermore, we enhance node-level workflow search with an operator memory mechanism, which retains historical outputs to enrich context and improve decision-making. Experiments on general and embodied benchmarks show that A²Flow achieves a 2.4% and 19.3% average performance improvement and reduces resource usage by 37% over state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 3357

Authors:Yukun Cao, Zirui Xu, Dongyang Li, Zhihao Guo, Luobin Huang, Lisheng Wang

Affiliations: Shanghai University of Electric Power, University of Technology Sydney

Title: DCTR: Dual-Constraint Subgraph Optimization for Knowledge Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Abstract:
Knowledge Graph (KG)based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) shifts the contents of retrieval from narrative text to a relational knowledge network, empowering large language models (LLMs) to harness structured relationships between entities. However, conventional KG-RAG approaches are resource-intensive, requiring either query decomposition with multiple LLM rounds or parameterized static knowledge injection to update the model. Although subgraph reasoning aims to address these issues, most current methods are based on heuristic shortest path and multi-hop graph traversal algorithms. The retrieved subgraphs suffer from incompleteness and semantic drift, and neglect the interaction between subgraph and LLMs in terms of fine-grained structural semantics. We propose a dual-constraint subgraph optimization for KG-RAG (DCTR). It improves subgraph retrieval and generates high-quality subgraphs with structural integrity and information salience for LLMs. Specifically, it formulates subgraph generation as a two-stage graph-theoretic constrained optimization problem to create compact and complete pseudo-labels. Since these pseudo-labels are discrete, a smooth approximation is employed to convert them into a differentiable representation, thereby optimizing the retriever to highlight key information while extracting subgraphs. On two benchmark datasets, DCTR significantly enhances subgraph quality, achieving state-of-the-art performance in LLM reasoning.

PaperID: 3358

Authors:Xuanqi Chen, Ziying Rong, Xinfeng Liao, Yiqian Wu, Bowei Zhang, Pengfei Fu, Shengyi Jiang

Affiliations: School of Information Science and Technology, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China Faculty of Data Science, City University of Macau, Macao Special Administrative Region of China

Title: ModalSyncSum: Synchronizing Image and Text for Reliable Summary Generation

Abstract:
Multimodal summarization with multimodal output (MSMO) aims to generate coherent textual summaries while selecting the most semantically relevant images to enhance expressiveness. Despite the advancements of large multimodal models like GPT4o, LLaMA-3, and Grok-3, these models often exhibit hallucination and weak visual-text alignment when applied to MSMO tasks. To address these challenges, we propose ModalSyncSum, a unified framework that enhances semantic consistency and visual faithfulness. It incorporates image-aware information extraction to mitigate visual-text misalignment, QA-based description verification to detect and correct hallucinated image descriptions, and named entity-guided refinement to ensure factual accuracy and entity alignment across modalities. Furthermore, we introduce a new evaluation metric M3AS, which jointly considers image content coverage, text-image alignment, and summary consistency, filling the gap in evaluating multimodal summary quality. Experimental results show that our model outperforms prompt-based baselines across multiple datasets, achieving significant gains on ROUGE, BLEU, and BERTScore, with BLEU improving by 21.95%. In human evaluation, M3AS exhibits stronger correlation with human judgments in consistency, image-summary relevance, and focus, surpassing existing automatic metrics.

PaperID: 3359

Authors:Cui Danxin, Sihang Jiang, Keyi Wang, Zhiyi Duan, Yanghua Xiao, Bi Yude, Jiaqing Liang, Minggui He, Shimin Tao, Yilun Liu

Affiliations: College of Foreign Languages and Literature, Fudan University, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Data Science, School of Computer Science

Title: Measuring the Unmeasurable: Unveiling Latent Cognitive Capabilities of LLM

Abstract:
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in highstakes domains such as education, healthcare, and law, accurately evaluating their nuanced reasoning process becomes essential to ensure their safety, reliability, and trustworthiness. However, most existing benchmarks evaluate LLMs at a coarse granularity. Current benchmarks lack a unified framework and rely on single‐task datasets, overlooking the intermediate steps of complex reasoning. This results in redundant overlap across benchmarks, poor generalization to multifaceted real-world tasks, and underutilizes the rich reasoning traces generated by advanced LLMs.

PaperID: 3360

Authors:Shuangyan Deng, Zhongsheng Wang, Rui Mao, Ciprian Doru Giurcăneanu, Jiamou Liu

Affiliations: University of Auckland, Nanyang Technological University

Title: CLER: Improving Multimodal Financial Reasoning by Cross-MLLM Error Reflection

Abstract:
Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have enabled joint reasoning over financial textual and visual inputs. However, they still struggle with financial terminology, logical consistency, and numerical computations. Moreover, while commercial large models perform well on reasoning tasks, their high inference costs limit their scalable usage in real world financial applications. We thus propose a costeffective framework, CLER, that combines contrastive retrieval with step-wise reflection to improve reasoning performance. Also, the reasoning cost is only generated in the test stage when using commercial large models. CLER leverages FinErrorSet, a dataset of 8,000+ mistake correction pairs from diverse open-source MLLMs. A fine grained retriever is trained to identify structurally relevant errors for self-correction through individual reflection. Experiments on three benchmarks show that CLER consistently outperforms other baselines. To our knowledge, CLER is the first framework to use cross-model errors for financial reasoning.

PaperID: 3361

Authors:jiejie fan, Xiaojuan Ban, Zhiyan Zhang, Xi Sun

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology Beijing, National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: HC2-GNN: Hierarchical Graph Representation Learning for Efficient Text Classification

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) offer superior modeling capabilities for text classification by capturing complex spatial features within semantic representations. However, existing graphbased approaches often suffer from computational inefficiency and limited ability to model both fine-grained local structures and the sequential nature of text. To address these challenges, we propose HC2-GNN, a Hierarchical Clustering and Coarsening Graph Neural Network, which introduces a novel lightweight graph clustering algorithm called Compromise Conductance Graph Clustering (C2GC). C2GC enables efficient graph clustering while simultaneously preserving both the textual order and the topological coherence of subgraphs. Furthermore, it incorporates a virtue cluster mechanism that expands each subgraph with semantically relevant neighbors, explicitly enabling cross-cluster information propagation without compromising local structural integrity. HC2-GNN aggregates local and global features by combining subgraph-level and full-graph representations, enhancing semantic discriminability for classification. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that HC2-GNN consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art text classification methods.

PaperID: 3362

Authors:Ye He, Shangzhan Li, Yuxin Zhou, Qi Shi

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Tsinghua University

Title: TRACE: Trajectory-based Activation Change Estimation for Task-specific Data Selection

Abstract:
Taskspecific data selection, which aims to identify the most relevant training instances from a large corpus to optimize performance on a target task, is a critical challenge in modern AI. Prevailing methods typically rely on either representation clustering or gradient-based influence estimation. However, these approaches have notable limitations. Representation-based methods rely on static features; they measure semantic proximity but are agnostic to the process of learning. Conversely, influence-based methods, while capturing optimization directions, often focus narrowly on aligning with the validation loss, which may not fully correlate with the desired capabilities. To address these issues, we propose TRACE, a novel algorithm that simultaneously considers data consistency in the optimization direction and representation space, and performs TRajectory-based Activation Change Estimation to select instruction. Specifically, TRACE first performs a targeted weight update using the validation set. It then captures the optimization trajectory by calculating the change in neuron activations for each before and after this update. By selecting data whose activation change are most similar to those of the validation set, TRACE ensures alignment in both the representational and optimization domains. Our experiments demonstrate that TRACE outperforms baseline methods across various tasks, particularly in complex, data-scarce scenarios.

PaperID: 3363

Authors:Nan Hu, Yike Wu, Jiaye Li, HuiKang Hu, Guilin Qi, Songlin Zhai, Yongrui Chen, Tianxing Wu, Tongtong Wu, Jiaoyan Chen, Jeff Z. Pan

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Ministry of Education, Monash University, The University of Manchester, United Kingdom, The University of Edinburgh

Title: TaxReasoning: Benchmarking Knowledge-Intensive Mathematical Reasoning with Evolving Tax Laws

Abstract:
Recent studies have explored the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in solving knowledgeintensive mathematical reasoning problems. However, existing benchmarks predominantly involve static theorems that LLMs have encountered during pretraining, failing to assess dynamic knowledge integration. In this work, we introduce TaxReasoning, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs’ abilities in real-world tax calculation scenarios. These tasks require not only mathematical reasoning and numerical computation, but also the extraction and application of complex, frequently updated tax regulations. Through extensive experiments with state-of-the-art LLMs using diverse prompting strategies and knowledge augmentation techniques, we uncover substantial limitations in their ability to handle dynamic, knowledge-intensive questions—primarily due to missing domain-specific knowledge and ineffective retrieval. Even the best-performing models fall significantly short of human-level performance. Our analysis points to key avenues for improvement, including enhancing LLMs' reasoning capabilities, developing more effective knowledge summarization techniques, and improving retrieval strategies. TaxReasoning offers a critical testbed for advancing LLMs in dynamic knowledge-intensive domains.

PaperID: 3364

Authors:Wenjie Liao, Xiaohui Song, Haonan Lu

Affiliations: Guangdong OPPO Mobile Telecommunications Corp.

Title: DRIFT: Difference-Aware Reinforcement Through Iterative Fine-Tuning for Language Model

Abstract:
Selfplay fine-tuning has emerged as a promising approach to improve Large Language Models (LLMs) without additional human annotations. However, existing methods struggle with complex generation tasks requiring long context understanding, where models produce partially correct outputs interleaved with errors. Traditional approaches train on entire sequences uniformly, failing to distinguish between well-predicted and erroneous regions, leading to diluted learning signals and slow convergence. We propose DRIFT (Difference-aware Reinforcement through Iterative Fine-Tuning), a novel self-play framework that selectively trains on prediction differences. DRIFT introduces two key innovations: (1) Difference-Aware Masking (DAM) that identifies and masks common subsequences between model outputs and ground truth, focusing training exclusively on error regions; (2) Occurrence-Aware Loss (OAL) that provides position-invariant vocabulary supervision, complementing the position-sensitive adversarial loss. This dual mechanism enables models to correct both positional and lexical errors effectively. Theoretically, we prove that DRIFT converges when masked distributions align. Empirically, we evaluate DRIFT on diverse summarization benchmarks using Qwen2.5-3B and LLaMA-3.1-8B models. Results show that DRIFT significantly outperforms both supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and self-play fine-tuning (SPIN), achieving up to 16% improvement on SAMSum dialogue summarization tasks while maintaining general capabilities. Notably, DRIFT breaks the performance ceiling of continued SFT and demonstrates superior efficiency compared to holistic self-play methods, validating that targeted optimization on prediction differences is crucial for structured text generation tasks.

PaperID: 3365

Authors:Ming Liu, Hao Chen, Jindong Wang, Liwen Wang, Jingchen Sun, Wensheng Zhang

Affiliations: Iowa State University, Carnegie Mellon University, William & Mary, State University of New York at Buffalo

Title: Is Your (Reasoning) Multimodal Language Model Vulnerable Toward Distractions?

Abstract:
VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) have achieved success in tasks such as visual question answering, yet their resilience to distractions remains underexplored. Understanding how distractions affect VLMs' performance is crucial for real-world applications, as input data often contains noisy or irrelevant content. This paper assesses the robustness of VLMs—including general-purpose models and those specialized for reasoning—against distractions in the context of science question answering. We introduce I-ScienceQA, a new benchmark based on the ScienceQA dataset, which systematically injects distractions into both visual and textual contexts. We evaluate how distractions perturb the underlying reasoning processes of these models by analyzing changes in textual explanations leading to answers. Our findings show that most VLMs are vulnerable to distractions, with a noticeable degradation in reasoning when extraneous content is present. In particular, some models (including GPT-o4 mini) exhibit a higher degree of robustness. We also observe that textual distractions generally cause greater performance declines than visual distractions. Finally, we explore mitigation strategies such as prompt engineering. Although these strategies improve resilience modestly, our analysis highlights considerable room for further improvement in the robustness of VLMs.

PaperID: 3366

Authors:Xiaoqian Liu, Xiyan Gui, Zhengkun Ge, Yuan Ge, Chang Zou, Jiacheng Liu, Zhikang Niu, Qixi Zheng, Chen Xu, Xie Chen, Tong Xiao, Jingbo Zhu, Linfeng Zhang

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Northeastern University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Harbin Engineering University

Title: WaveEx: Accelerating Flow Matching-based Speech Generation via Wavelet-guided Extrapolation

Abstract:
Flow matchingbased generative models offer a principled approach to modeling continuous-time dynamics in speech generation. However, inference is often computationally expensive due to repeated neural network evaluations required by ODE solvers. We propose WaveEx, a training-free and plug-in acceleration framework which replaces portions of ODE integration with wavelet-guided extrapolation. By leveraging the multi-scale structure of latent trajectories, WaveEx predicts future states directly in the frequency domain without additional model evaluations or architectural changes. WaveEx consistently accelerates inference across diverse speech generation tasks. The gains are especially pronounced in tasks like speech synthesis (up to 5.73× speedup) and music generation (2.75×), where flow matching plays a central role in alignment modeling and dense ODE integration. Even in tasks with simpler input-output mappings such as speech enhancement (4.55×) and voice conversion (2.75×), WaveEx still achieves notable acceleration, demonstrating the robustness and generalizability of the approach. These results highlight wavelet-guided extrapolation as a lightweight and broadly applicable alternative to full ODE solving for flow matching-based speech generation.

PaperID: 3367

Authors:Wayne Lu, Xiaoxi Cui

Affiliations: Independent Researcher

Title: DEALT: LLM-driven Diversity-Enhanced Data Augmentation for Long-Tail Text Classification

Abstract:
Realworld text classification datasets frequently exhibit long-tail distributions, where numerous classes have sparse data, significantly degrading model performance on these underrepresented categories. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promise for data augmentation, existing methods often produce semantically limited samples, neglect "implicit long-tails" (sparse sub-patterns within classes), and lack cost-effective optimization. To address these challenges, we propose DEALT (LLM-driven Diversity-Enhanced Data Augmentation for Long-Tail Text Classification), a novel cognitive-inspired framework emulating the human learning process of "recognize, explore, generate, and optimize." DEALT systematically enhances augmented data diversity by first detecting both explicit and implicit long-tails. It then employs an LLM for diversity-aware planning of augmentation strategies, followed by conditional generation. A low-overhead quality and diversity validator filters the synthetic data, and an adaptive incremental sampler refines future augmentation efforts based on proxy model feedback, ensuring efficient and budget-aware optimization. Extensive experiments on multiple public text classification datasets demonstrate DEALT's superiority over state-of-the-art methods in improving tail-class performance and overall model robustness by generating more diverse and high-fidelity augmented data.

PaperID: 3368

Authors:Fangrui Lv, Lei Wang, Ruixin Hong, Yong Du, Xiangyu Wu, Tingting Gao, Guorui Zhou, Changshui Zhang

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Kuaishou Technology

Title: Beyond Tokens: Dynamic Latent Reasoning via Semantic Residual Refinement

Abstract:
Chainof-Thought prompting has remarkably advanced LLM reasoning by generating explicit step-by-step tokens, yet its discrete nature inherently limits expressiveness and efficiency, struggling with abstract, ambiguous, or semantically divergent cognition beyond linguistic tokens. Latent reasoning offers a promising alternative by operating in the model’s internal continuous space for richer cognitive representations. However, existing methods typically rely on finetuning or token interpolation to bridge latent and input spaces, introducing training difficulty or semantic degradation. To this end, we propose Dynamic Latent Reasoning (DyLaR), a training-free framework that preserves semantic fidelity to latent space. DyLaR introduces a Semantic Residual Refinement module that progressively refines latent inputs by integrating semantic residuals from prior hidden states, thus capturing expressive semantic hierarchies that closely approximate continuous latent representations. To enhance flexibility, DyLaR further incorporates a dynamic switching policy that allows LLMs to alternate between discrete and latent reasoning based on model uncertainty, favoring explicit reasoning when confident and latent exploration under ambiguity. Empirical experiments across knowledge- and reasoning-intensive tasks demonstrate that DyLaR consistently outperforms strong baselines in both effectiveness and token efficiency. Qualitative analyses further illustrate its interpretability and flexibility in navigating complex reasoning scenarios.

PaperID: 3369

Authors:Hoang Tran Vuong, Tue Le, Quyen Tran, Linh Ngo Van, Trung Le

Affiliations: Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Rutgers University, New Jersey, Monash University

Title: MCW-KD: Multi-Cost Wasserstein Knowledge Distillation for Large Language Models

Abstract:
Knowledge distillation (KD) is widely recognized as an effective approach for compressing large language models (LLMs). However, standard KD methods often falter when confronted with architectural or tokenization heterogeneity between teacher and student models, which creates a mismatch in their representations. While Optimal Transport (OT) provides a promising solution to align these representations, most OTbased methods rely on a single cost function, which isn’t enough to capture the multifaceted discrepancies between models with distinct designs. To address this limitation, we introduce Multi-Cost Wasserstein Knowledge Distillation (MCW-KD), a novel framework that enhances KD by simultaneously optimizing several cost functions within a unified OT formulation. MCW-KD employs specific cost matrices to effectively align both the final hidden states and the output distributions of the models. We also provide a rigorous theoretical foundation for the proposed Multi-Cost Wasserstein Distance, ensuring both mathematical validity and computational ability. Extensive experiments on instruction-following datasets demonstrate that MCW-KD significantly improves student model performance compared to state-of-the-art KD baselines, especially when teacher and student models have different tokenizers.

PaperID: 3370

Authors:Dahan Wang, Jun Gao, Tong Lei, Yuxiang Hu, Changbao Zhu, Kai Chen, Jing Lu

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Modern Acoustics, Institute of Acoustics, Nanjing University, Horizon Robotics, Tencent AI Lab, NJU-Horizon Intelligent Audio Lab

Title: Rethinking Flow and Diffusion Bridge Models for Speech Enhancement

Abstract:
Flow matching and diffusion bridge models have emerged as leading paradigms in generative speech enhancement, modeling stochastic processes between paired noisy and clean speech signals based on principles such as flow matching, score matching, and Schrödinger bridge. In this paper, we present a framework that unifies existing flow and diffusion bridge models by interpreting them as constructions of Gaussian probability paths with varying means and variances between paired data. Furthermore, we investigate the underlying consistency between the training/inference procedures of these generative models and conventional predictive models. Our analysis reveals that each sampling step of a welltrained flow or diffusion bridge model optimized with a data prediction loss is theoretically analogous to executing predictive speech enhancement. Motivated by this insight, we introduce an enhanced bridge model that integrates an effective probability path design with key elements from predictive paradigms, including improved network architecture, tailored loss functions, and optimized training strategies. Experiments on denoising and dereverberation tasks demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing flow and diffusion baselines with fewer parameters and reduced computational complexity. The results also highlight that the inherently predictive nature of this generative framework imposes limitations on its achievable upper-bound performance.

PaperID: 3371

Authors:Mengzhen Wang, Shukai Ma, Songwen Gong, Jiexin Wang, Ruolin Chen, Liuwen Cao, Yi Cai

Affiliations: School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, China Key Laboratory of Big Data and Intelligent Robot (SCUT), Ministry of Education of China

Title: SRACG: A Code Generation Framework with Selective Retrieval Augmentation

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in code generation, offering new possibilities for translating natural language into executable programs. To further enhance LLMs’ code generation capabilities, RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising strategy by retrieving code examples aligned with the generation intent to guide the process. However, existing RAG-based methods often suffer from unnecessary augmentation, preference misalignment, and surface-level mimicry, which undermine the effectiveness of retrieved examples in guiding LLMs toward accurate code generation. To address these challenges, we propose SRACG, a Selective Retrieval-Augmented Code Generation framework. SRACG begins with a necessity-aware selection mechanism to identify generation intents that genuinely require retrieval support, thereby avoiding degradation from indiscriminate augmentation. For intents identified as needing enhancement, it first employs a multi-objective retrieval strategy to select examples that are semantically aligned with the intent. These candidates are then further filtered by assessing their consistency with the LLM’s inherent generation preferences, ensuring alignment in both style and structure. Finally, it extracts execution plans from the filtered examples to uncover their underlying logic, guiding the LLM to better comprehend the examples instead of merely mimicking surface-level content. Experimental results on widely used benchmarks show that SRACG significantly improves the success rate of LLM-generated code and outperforms existing approaches.

PaperID: 3372

Authors:Yi Wang, Xiaqiang Tang, Keyu Hu, Haojie Lu, Sihong Xie

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Title: REFO: Reinforced Evolutionary Faithfulness Optimization for Large Language Models

Abstract:
Despite its success in enriching LLMs with external knowledge, RAG remains plagued by faithfulness hallucinations, where generated text contradicts the retrieved source information. Previous research on faithfulness hallucination in LLMs is frequently hindered by prohibitive manual annotation costs and a dependency on static datasets, which caps their performance and adaptability. Furthermore, these models lack a clear training mechanism to explicitly promote contextual focus. In this work, we propose a novel iterative selfevolution framework to enhance model faithfulness. This framework autonomously generates high-quality data and leverages it for the continuous self-optimization of the model, leading to significant improvements in faithfulness. Our experimental analysis reveals that improving model faithfulness encourages a closer alignment of the attention distribution with the given context. Based on this finding, we design an attention-based loss function to further promote this process. Experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art faithfulness on a range of context-based question-answering datasets, marking a significant advancement over previous approaches.

PaperID: 3373

Authors:Ziyang Xiao, Yuan Jessica Wang, Xiongwei Han, Shisi Guan, Jingyan Zhu, Jingrong Xie, Lilin Xu, Han Wu, Wing Yin Yu, Zehua Liu, Xiaojin Fu, Gang Chen, Dongxiang Zhang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, School of Business, Singapore University of Social Sciences, Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab

Title: DeepOR: A Deep Reasoning Foundation Model for Optimization Modeling

Abstract:
Optimization modeling plays a critical role in supporting optimal decisionmaking across various domains. Previous works have demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) tailored for optimization modeling have significantly automated and simplified this process. However, these models typically employ a straightforward input-output paradigm and struggle with challenging instances. In contrast, recent advances in general-purpose reasoning LLMs (RLLMs), such as DeepSeek-R1, have shown impressive capabilities in complex domains like mathematics and coding. In this paper, we introduce DeepOR, the first RLLM specifically designed for optimization modeling. Instead of directly outputting solutions, DeepOR explicitly performs multiple intermediate reasoning steps. To adapt a base LLM into an RLLM, we begin by synthesizing long chain-of-thought (CoT) data guided by a flowchart, which is automatically generated using a self-exploration algorithm. Once the training data are prepared, we employ supervised fine-tuning on the base LLM to endow it with reasoning capabilities tailored for optimization modeling. To fully leverage the model's reasoning potential, we further apply reinforcement learning with reward-shaping derived from solver feedback. Experimental results on benchmarks confirm that DeepOR consistently and significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches.

PaperID: 3374

Authors:Haocheng Yang, Xiang Cheng, Chenhao Sun, Pengfei Zhang, Sen Su

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, State Key Laboratory of Digital Intelligent Technology for Unmanned Coal Mining, the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Anhui University of Science and Technology

Title: PrivSV: Differentially Private Steering Vector for Large Language Models

Abstract:
Steering Vector (SV) is a powerful technique for controlling Large Language Models (LLMs) by manipulating their activations without altering model weights. However, when constructed from sensitive data, SV poses significant privacy risks, as it may leak private information. Existing differential privacy (DP) techniques for constructing SV cannot be directly applied to trainingbased SV construction paradigms, which offer higher task performance. In this work, we present PrivSV, a general privacy-preserving approach for constructing SV with DP guarantees, compatible with arbitrary SV construction paradigms while maintaining high utility. In PrivSV, we propose three novel methods: a Layer-wise Noise-Resilient Reduction (LNR²) method to reduce the injected noise in high-dimensional SV; a Directional Prior Compensation (DPC) method to recover utility degraded by noise perturbation; and a Privacy-Aware Optimal Parameter Determination (POPD) method to adaptively maximize the performance of the final compensated SV. Extensive experiments on open-source LLMs of different families (i.e., LlaMa, Qwen, Mistral and Gemma) demonstrate that PrivSV outperforms several existing techniques across various privacy budgets.

PaperID: 3375

Authors:Qiyuan Zhu, Dezhi Li, Lujun Li, Xiaoyu Qin, Wei Li, Hao Gu, Hua Xu, Sirui Han, Yike Guo

Affiliations: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, University of Birmingham

Title: Outlier Matters: Efficient Long-to-Short Reasoning via Outlier-Guided Model Merging

Abstract:
Large Reasoning Language Models (LRMs) have recently shown remarkable performance in complex reasoning tasks, but their extensive reasoning chains incur substantial computational overhead. To address this challenge, we propose Outlieraware Reasoning Conciseness Adaptive Merge (ORCA), a novel plug-and-play model merging framework that leverages outlier activation patterns to fuse base models with reasoning models. Our ORCA introduces three key innovations: (1) adaptive alignment that reduces conflicts between disparate activation patterns during merging, (2) outlier-guided allocation that assigns merging coefficients proportional to each layer's reasoning importance as indicated by outlier concentrations, and (3) dynamic probe-based adjustment that adapts merging coefficients during inference based on input-specific activation characteristics. These strategies allow seamless integration into existing merging pipelines while creating unified models that maintain reasoning accuracy with significantly reduced response verbosity. Comprehensive evaluation across six benchmarks using Qwen and LLaMA models shows ORCA reduces average response length by 55% while improving accuracy by 2.4∼5.7% over existing methods.

PaperID: 3376

Authors:JiaCheng Deng, Dengpan Ye, Yuhong Liu, Zhaolin Wei, Ziyi Liu, Haoran Duan

Affiliations: Wuhan University, School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Key Laboratory of Aerospace Information Security and Trusted Computing, Ministry of Education, China Cyberspace Institute of Advanced Technology, Guangzhou University

Title: Time Shuffle: A Transferability-Booster for Multiple Audio Adversarial Tasks

Abstract:
Existing audio adversarial attack methods suffer from poor transferability, primarily due to insufficient exploration of model decision mechanisms and overreliance on heuristicdriven algorithm design. This paper aims to alleviate this gap. Specifically, through observations across three mainstream audio tasks (Automatic Speech Recognition, Speaker Verification, and Keyword Spotting), we reveal that these models primarily rely on local temporal features—inputs with time shuffled retain 83.7% of original accuracy. The SHAP-based visualization further validated that time shuffle leads to a significant shift in the salient regions of the model, but the samples can still be correctly identified, indicating the presence of redundant features that can affect decision-making. Inspired by these findings, we propose Time-Shuffle (TS) adversarial attack (including segments-based TS and phoneme-level-based TS-p). This method divides audio or phonemes into segments, randomly shuffles them, and computes gradients on the shuffled structure. By forcing perturbations to exploit transferable local temporal features and reduce overfitting to source-specific patterns, TS/TS-p inherently enhances transferability. As a model-agnostic framework, TS/TS-p can seamlessly integrate with existing attack methods. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that TS-p achieved SOTA and boosts transferability by about 23%/14.7%/6.3% on ASR/ASV/KWS.

PaperID: 3377

Authors:Yao Huang, Yubo Chen, Ruochen Zhang, Yitong Sun, Shouwei Ruan, Zhenyu Wu, Yinpeng Dong, Xingxing Wei

Affiliations: Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University, Tsinghua University, Beijing China, College of AI

Title: Any2Critical: Safety-Critical Scenario Generation from Arbitrary Real-World Driving Contexts

Abstract:
Autonomous driving systems have achieved remarkable capabilities in realworld deployment, yet ensuring safety under corner cases remains a significant challenge due to the scarcity and constrained diversity of safety-critical scenarios. Existing generation methods may either lead to irrational vehicle behaviors or be limited by fixed collision patterns, while both heavily rely on existing map datasets, restricting the diversity. To address these fundamental limitations, we introduce Any2Critical, the first framework that can encode arbitrary real-world scenarios and generate contextually relevant safety-critical scenarios with realistic driving behaviors. Specifically, Any2Critical addresses two key challenges: (1) developing comprehensive, diverse map data by successfully leveraging everyday traffic situations as the most abundant source of real-world driving contexts, and (2) proposing an RAG-based Safety-Critical Scenario Generation Strategy based on our curated NHTSA-5K database for achieving an optimal balance between scenario diversity and behavioral rationality. Through comprehensive evaluation, we demonstrate that Any2Critical consistently achieves collision rates with an average of 89.69% across diverse scenarios and autonomous driving systems, significantly outperforming current state-of-the-art generation methods.

PaperID: 3378

Authors:Kaiyuan Ji, Yijin Guo, Zicheng Zhang, Xiangyang Zhu, Yuan Tian, Ning Liu

Affiliations: School of Communication and Electronic Engineering, School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai AI Laboratory, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: MedOmni-45°: A Safety–Performance Benchmark for Reasoning-Oriented LLMs in Medicine

Abstract:
With the rapid integration of large language models (LLMs) into medical decisionsupport aids, ensuring reliability in reasoning steps—not just final answers—is increasingly critical. Two key safety dimensions are Chain-of-Thought (CoT) faithfulness, which assesses alignment of the model’s reasoning process with both its response and medical facts, and sycophancy, an emergent misalignment where models follow misleading cues instead of factual correctness. Yet existing benchmarks tend to prioritize performance evaluation, frequently collapsing nuanced safety vulnerabilities into a single accuracy score. To fill this gap, we introduce MedOmni-45°, a benchmark and evaluation workflow explicitly designed to quantify the safety–performance trade-off in LLMs under manipulative hint conditions. The benchmark contains 1,804 reasoning-focused medical questions across six clinical specialties and three task types, including 500 publicly comparable items from MedMCQA. Each question is systematically augmented with seven manipulative hint types, each embedding two distinct misleading cue variants, along with a No-Hint baseline, resulting in approximately 27,000 unique inputs. These inputs are then evaluated across seven LLMs spanning open- and closed-source, general-purpose and medical-specific, and base versus reasoning-enhanced variants, amounting to over 189K total inference instances. Three orthogonal metrics (Accuracy, CoT-Faithfulness, Anti-Sycophancy) are combined into a composite score visualized via a 45° safety–performance plot. Results reveal a universal trade-off, with no model surpassing the ideal diagonal. Open-source QwQ-32B approaches closest at 43.81°, demonstrating notable safety while not surpassing others in performance. MedOmni-45° thus highlights critical vulnerabilities of LLMs in reasoning oriented medical tasks, offering a robust benchmark for future alignment research.

PaperID: 3379

Authors:Yimin Liu, Peng Jiang, Qi Liu, Liehuang Zhu

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology

Title: Generic Adversarial Attack Framework Against Graph-based Vertical Federated Learning

Abstract:
Graphbased vertical federated learning (GVFL) enables multiple parties to collaboratively train and infer over aligned nodes, where each party contributes its own local embedding derived from different attributes and adjacency relations. Adversarial inputs injected by an attacker can skew the joint prediction toward its desired outcomes while diminishing the influence of benign parties and undermining contribution. However, most attacks typically have pre-set assumptions, such as access to the server architecture, model queries, or in-domain auxiliary graphs. In this paper, we propose SGAC, an attack framework that enables domination of joint inference without relying on above assumptions. SGAC learns label-indicative embeddings and class-transferable probabilities to generate a surrogate that closely mimics the server-side classification behavior by exploiting auxiliary graphs from non-training domains. SGAC then leverages saliency over node attributes and edges on the auxiliary graphs to construct a diverse set of shadow inputs resembling highly influential test instances. With the surrogate fidelity and input diversity, SGAC crafts transferable contribution-monopoly adversarial inputs that hijack GVFL incentives. Extensive experiments across diverse model architectures validate SGAC's effectiveness.

PaperID: 3380

Authors:Harrison Oates, Pascal Bercher

Affiliations: Australian National University

Title: Makespan Investigations of Sequential, Parallel, PO, and POCL Plans

Abstract:
Modern planning systems utilize various plan representations sequential, parallel, partially ordered (PO), and partial-order causal link (POCL) - each with different models for concurrency. These formalisms are often implicitly assumed to have the same base properties, particularly regarding makespan. We challenge this assumption, proving the relationship between them is fundamentally asymmetric. Our analysis shows conversions from plans with rigid concurrency layers (sequential, parallel) to those with flexible partial orders (PO, POCL) can preserve makespan. However, the reverse generally fails; the flexible orderings in PO/POCL plans can yield shorter makespans for solutions that cannot be represented in parallel plans without serialization. We prove that finding an optimal parallel representation for a given POCL plan is NP-complete, resolving a key question about their practical interchangeability. We also provide tight complexity bounds for makespan-bounded plan existence. Notably, our results disprove a claim in the literature that planning graph-based planners maximize concurrency by minimizing the critical path in derived PO plans.

PaperID: 3381

Authors:Rasmus G. Tollund, Álvaro Torralba

Affiliations: Aalborg University

Title: Dominance Pruning and Heuristics in Optimal Adversarial Non-Deterministic Planning

Abstract:
In many planning problems there are nondeterministic actions for which the outcome cannot be fully controlled by the planning agent. For critical tasks, we need to find a strategy that achieves the goal within a predictable time-frame and/or cost. Thus, we consider an adversarial planning setting and compute optimal policies that optimize the worst-case cost to reach the goal. In this work, we introduce domain-independent optimal heuristic search algorithms for this adversarial setting. To guide the search, we show how to leverage classical planning heuristics by applying single-outcome determinization. We also generalize dominance techniques, that analyse when a state is as good as another, to the non-deterministic setting and apply them to prune the search space. Our experimental analysis shows that both methods greatly help to compute optimal policies across multiple domains.

PaperID: 3382

Authors:Marcel Vinzent, Holger Hermanns, Jörg Hoffmann

Affiliations: Saarland University

Title: Probabilistic Safety Verification of Neural Policies via Predicate Abstraction

Abstract:
Neural networks are increasingly important to learn action policies. Policy predicate abstraction (PPA) verifies safety of such a neural policy pi by overapproximating the state space subgraph induced by pi and using counterexample-guided abstraction refinement (CEGAR) to iteratively refine the abstraction. So far, PPA verifies safety in non-deterministic systems. This work extends PPA to probabilistic verification. Extending the abstract state space computation is relatively straightforward. ion refinement, however, becomes substantially more complex, due to the more intricate form of counterexamples and the various sources of spuriousness it entails. We tackle this challenge by drawing inspiration from prior work on probabilistic CEGAR, empowering it to deal with neural pi. The resulting algorithm decides whether pi is safe with respect to a desired upper bound on unsafety probability. Invoking the algorithm incrementally, we can also derive upper and lower bounds automatically. Our experiments show that these algorithms can derive non-trivial bounds, whereas encodings into state-of-the-art probabilistic model checkers turn out to be ineffective.

PaperID: 3383

Authors:Evan Yifan Xu, Pan Xu

Affiliations: School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Southeast University School of Computing and Information Technology, University of Wollongong, Department of Computer Science, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Title: Matching Policy Design for Gig Platforms with “Priority” Features

Abstract:
In recent years, gig platforms like Uber and DoorDash have implemented strategies to boost gig drivers' earnings during peak hours. Uber's 'backto-back' feature allows drivers to accept new trips while still on route, and Uber Eats' 'Batch Order Route' initiative allows drivers to pick up multiple deliveries from different locations, which may result in multiple tops before one order is delivered. Despite revenue gains, these features lead to user complaints about extended waiting times. In response, platforms introduce features like Uber Eats' 'Priority Delivery' and Uber's 'Priority', where customers pay an extra subscription fee for guaranteed reduced waiting times. This paper focuses on designing matching policies to enhance system revenue while limiting customer waiting times. We present a hybrid model combining online matching and queue theory for quantitative analysis of users' waiting times. Additionally, we introduce an LP-based sampling framework and a unified queue-theory-based method for evaluating online performance. Comprehensive experiments on real datasets validate our theoretical findings, highlighting the efficiency of our matching framework in promoting profit and meeting committed waiting times.

PaperID: 3384

Authors:Ji Cheng, Song Lai, Shunyu Yao, Bo Xue

Affiliations: City University of Hong Kong

Title: Offline Multi-Objective Bandits: From Logged Data to Pareto-Optimal Policies

Abstract:
Offline policy learning from logged data is a critical paradigm for enabling effective decisionmaking without costly online exploration. However, its application has been largely confined to single-objective problems, a stark contrast to real-world scenarios where decision-making inherently involves navigating multiple, often conflicting, objectives. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for Offline Multi-Objective Bandits (OffMOB), providing a principled solution to the fundamental challenge of learning Pareto-optimal policies from a static dataset. Our core contribution is a novel algorithm that uniquely integrates the pessimism principle with multi-objective optimization to safely learn from off-policy data. Crucially, our approach transcends the primary limitation of scalarization techniques, which are restricted to finding a single policy for a pre-defined preference. Instead, OffMOB directly approximates the entire Pareto front, learning a single, flexible policy model capable of generating an optimal action for any desired trade-off. To rigorously evaluate performance, we introduce the Tchebycheff sub-optimality metric and establish the first finite-sample generalization bounds for this problem class, proving that our algorithm converges to the true Pareto front under practical data coverage assumptions. Extensive experiments on complex benchmarks demonstrate that OffMOB significantly outperforms existing methods, identifying the complete set of optimal trade-offs where naive extensions fail.

PaperID: 3385

Authors:Hui Li, Huafeng Liu, Yiran Fu, Shuyang Lin, Baoxin Zhang, Deqiang Ouyang, Liping Jing, Jian Yu

Title: MetaGameBO: Hierarchical Game-Theoretic Driven Robust Meta-Learning for Bayesian Optimization

Abstract:
Metalearning for Bayesian optimization accelerates optimization by leveraging knowledge from previous tasks, but existing methods optimize for average performance and fail on challenging outlier tasks critical in practice. These limitations become particularly severe when target tasks exhibit distribution shifts or when optimization budgets are limited in real-world applications. We introduce MetaGameBO, a hierarchical game-theoretic framework that formulates meta-learning as robust optimization through CVaR-based task selection and diversity-aware sample learning. Our approach incorporates uncertainty-aware adaptation via probabilistic embeddings and Thompson sampling for robust generalization to out-of-distribution targets. We establish theoretical guarantees including convergence to game-theoretic equilibria and improved sample complexity, and demonstrate substantial improvements with 95.7% reduction in average loss and 88.6% lower tail risk compared to state-of-the-art methods on challenging tasks and distribution shifts.

PaperID: 3386

Authors:Yedidya Kfir, Elad Sarafian, Yoram Louzoun, Sarit Kraus

Affiliations: Bar-Ilan University

Title: EvoGrad: Evolutionary-Weighted Gradient and Hessian Learning for Black-Box Optimization

Abstract:
Blackbox algorithms aim to optimize functions without access to their analytical structure or gradient information, making them essential when gradients are unavailable or computationally expensive to obtain. Traditional methods for black-box optimization (BBO) primarily utilize non-parametric models, but these approaches often struggle to scale effectively in large input spaces. Conversely, parametric approaches, which rely on neural estimators and gradient signals via backpropagation, frequently encounter substantial gradient estimation errors, limiting their reliability. Explicit Gradient Learning (EGL), a recent advancement, directly learns gradients using a first-order Taylor approximation and has demonstrated superior performance compared to both parametric and non-parametric methods. However, EGL inherently remains local and myopic, often faltering on highly non-convex optimization landscapes. In this work, we address this limitation by integrating global statistical insights from the evolutionary algorithm CMA-ES into the gradient learning framework, effectively biasing gradient estimates towards regions with higher optimization potential. Moreover, we enhance the gradient learning process by estimating the Hessian matrix, allowing us to correct the second-order residual of the Taylor series approximation. Our proposed algorithm, EvoGrad2 (Evolutionary Gradient Learning with second-order approximation), achieves state-of-the-art results on the synthetic COCO test suite, exhibiting significant advantages in high-dimensional optimization problems. We further demonstrate EvoGrad2's effectiveness on challenging real-world machine learning tasks, including adversarial training and code generation, highlighting its ability to produce more robust, high-quality solutions. Our results underscore EvoGrad2's potential as a powerful tool for researchers and practitioners facing complex, high-dimensional, and non-linear optimization problems.

PaperID: 3387

Authors:Fan Li, Shengbo Wang, Ke Li

Affiliations: Central South University, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, University of Exeter

Title: LAMDA: Two-Phase HPO via Learning Prior from Low-Fidelity Data

Abstract:
Hyperparameter Optimization (HPO) is crucial in machine learning, aiming to optimize hyperparameters to enhance model performance. Although existing methods that leverage prior knowledge—drawn from either previous experiments or expert insights—can accelerate optimization, acquiring a correct prior for a specific HPO task is nontrivial. In this work, we propose to relieve the reliance on external knowledge by learning a reliable prior directly from low-fidelity (LF) problems. We introduce Lamda, an algorithm-agnostic framework designed to boost any baseline HPO algorithm. Specifically, Lamda operates in two phases: (1) it learns a reliable prior by exploring the LF landscape under limited computational budgets, and (2) it leverages this learned prior to guide the HPO process. We showcase how the Lamda framework can be integrated with various HPO algorithms to boost their performance, and further conduct theoretical analysis towards the integrated Bayesian optimization and bandit-based Hyperband. We conduct experiments on 56 HPO problems spanning diverse domains and model scales. Results show that Lamda consistently enhances its baseline algorithms. Compared to nine state-of-the-art HPO algorithms, our Lamda variant achieves the best performance in 51 out of 56 HPO tasks while it is the second best algorithm in the other 5 cases.

PaperID: 3388

Authors:Jintao Li, Zhenxin Chen, Sicheng He, Ao-Jin Li, Shui Yu

Affiliations: Institute for Advanced Study, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Guangzhou University

Title: Priority-Based Graph-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for Robust Analog Circuit Optimization

Abstract:
A primary motivation for analog integrated circuit (IC) design automation is the inefficiency of manual design in meeting increasingly stringent specifications, which often involve over 10 objectives. Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) emerge as a promising method, yet gaps remain when considering full design specifications, especially under processvoltage-temperature (PVT) variations. Excessive objectives lead to diminished reward signals, while varying PVT conditions result in conflicting gradients, both of which result in inefficient exploration. To address these, we propose a priority-based graph-enhanced RL framework. Specifically, using fuzzy logic converts quantitative rewards into qualitative priority signals, mitigating reward deterioration and enhancing exploration via entropy regularization. Furthermore, a graph-based representation compresses high-dimensional objective spaces under PVT variations into low-dimensional manifolds, enabling dynamic resource allocation to variation-sensitive regions and resolving gradient conflicts. Empirical results on various real-world analog ICs demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing RL algorithms, achieving superior solution quality and reducing simulation overhead.

PaperID: 3389

Authors:Jan Pikman, Přemysl Šůcha, Claire Hanen, Zdeněk Hanzálek

Affiliations: Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Robotics and Cybernetics, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Institute of Informatics, Sorbonne University University Paris Nanterre

Title: Multiple-Interval Coverage for Resource Management of Passive Surveillance Systems

Abstract:
Passive surveillance systems (PSS) are used to detect and track various targets by processing the electromagnetic signals they release. The study and design of the resource management algorithm for these systems revealed several phenomena and combinatorial problems with crucial theoretical properties. In this article, we first prove the completeness of the algorithm used to generate receiver settings that determine which frequency bands the PSS monitors. Next, we formulate a new optimization problem called multipleinterval coverage (MIC), which is used to determine how often each of the generated settings must be used by the PSS. We show that the MIC problem is closely related to the multicover problem, which is an extension of the well-known set cover problem. The uniqueness of MIC stems from the fact that both covered elements and covers are multiple-intervals. We propose a notation to distinguish between different variants of the problem and prove that some of them can be solved in polynomial time. Finally, we prove that the MIC problem is NP-hard even when restricted to 2-interval covers.

PaperID: 3390

Authors:Enze Dai, Wentao Mo, Kun Hu, Xiaogang Zhu, Xi Xiao, Sheng Wen, Shaohua Wang, Yang Xiang

Affiliations: Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Edith Cowan University, Adelaide University, Swinburne University of Technology, Central University of Finance and Economics

Title: TWINFUZZ: Dual-Model Fuzzing for Robustness Generalization in Deep Learning

Abstract:
Deep learning (DL) models are increasingly deployed in safetycritical applications such as face recognition, autonomous driving, and medical diagnosis. Despite their impressive accuracy, they remain vulnerable to adversarial examples - subtle perturbations that can cause incorrect predictions, i.e., the robustness issues. While adversarial training improves robustness against known attacks, it often fails to generalize to unseen or stronger threats, revealing a critical gap in robustness generalization. In this work, we propose a dual-model fuzzing framework to enhance generalized robustness in DL models. Central to our method is a lightweight metric, the Lagrangian Information Bottleneck (LIB), which guides entropy-based mutation toward semantically meaningful and high-risk regions of the input space. The executor uses a resistant model and a more error-prone vulnerable model; their prediction consistency forms the basis of agreement mining, a label-free oracle for isolating decision-boundary samples. To ensure fuzzing effectiveness, we further introduce a task-driven seed selection strategy (e.g., SSIM for vision) that filters out low-quality inputs. We implement a prototype, TWINFUZZ, and evaluate it on six benchmark datasets and nine DL models. Compared with state-of-the-art testing approaches, TWINFUZZ achieves superior improvements in both training-specific and generalized robustness.

PaperID: 3391

Authors:Emmanouil Seferis, Timothy Fist

Affiliations: Machine Learning Alignment & Theory (MATS), Institute for Progress (IFP) Center for a New American Security (CNAS)

Title: Detecting Compute Structuring in AI Governance Is Likely Feasible

Abstract:
Compute structuring, a technique where AI developers split or modify compute workloads for the purpose of avoiding regulation, poses a challenge for AI governance techniques that rely on the computational properties of AI workloads. This work aims to explore the feasibility of detecting compute structuring and to propose robust detection methods. We do this by first exploring possible forms of compute structuring. Using realistic assumptions about cloud providers’ capabilities, we derive a potential detection approach. Further, we perform a comprehensive analysis of possible adversary scenarios and show that our method can detect them efficiently. Finally, we analyze potential future trends in AI compute workloads that could invalidate our proposed detection approach, and discuss possible adaptation and mitigation strategies. Overall, our study indicates that compute structuring detection is probably both feasible and practical to implement.

PaperID: 3392

Authors:Anush Lingamoorthy, Abhishek Kumar Mishra, Olumuyiwa Oni, Jacob S Brenner, Nagarajan Kandasamy, Amanda Watson

Affiliations: Drexel University, AltruMed LLC, University of Pennsylvania, University of Virginia

Title: HypoxSpike: Ternary Spiking Neural Network for Opioid Overdose Detection

Abstract:
Opioid overdose is a growing global health crisis that claims more than 120,000 lives annually, of which more than half use opioids alone, without access to bystander intervention. Fatal overdose events are marked by motionlessness, respiratory depression, and hypoxemia, yet current wearable systems often rely on a single biomarker, limiting detection speed and accuracy. We present HypoxSpike, a novel ternary spiking neural network designed for realtime, multi-biomarker overdose detection for low-power neuromorphic hardware, optimized for integration into shoulder-based wearables. HypoxSpike combines motion, respiration, and oxygen saturation signals, while accounting for skin tone and body physiology, thus addressing known racial bias in pulse oximetry. Our research leverages an open-source shoulder-worn dataset from 19 patients experiencing sleep apnea, exploiting the shared physiological mechanisms underlying apnea and opioid overdose. This allows a direct comparison of our model with existing overdose detection approaches. HypoxSpike classifies three stages of hypoxemia with an average accuracy of 94%, outperforming state-of-the-art shoulder-based hypoxemia estimation while reducing false positive alert rates by 23.5%. By minimizing false positives, HypoxSpike supports accurate and power-efficient overdose detection, improving trust and usability for high-risk populations often overlooked by conventional systems.

PaperID: 3393

Authors:Yuhuan Lu, Pengpeng Xu, Wei Wang, Zhen Zhang, Han Liu, Xiping Hu

Affiliations: Central South University, Shenzhen MSU-BIT University, Dalian University of Technology

Title: KnowLCP: Knowledge Augmented Lane Change Prediction for Autonomous Driving

Abstract:
Lane change prediction, encompassing both intention recognition and trajectory forecasting, is essential for the safe operation of autonomous vehicles in mixedtraffic environments. Existing models predominantly follow a data-driven paradigm, learning directly from historical vehicle states through an end-to-end approach. Inspired by the emerging paradigm of enhancing model generalizability through domain knowledge, we propose KnowLCP to explicitly model and integrate driving knowledge into the lane change prediction task. Specifically, we incorporate three types of knowledge: traffic risk awareness to improve intention prediction, vehicle kinematics to ensure the physical feasibility of predicted trajectories, and intention intensity to refine trajectory forecasting. Furthermore, we introduce a novel knowledge injection strategy that enhances mutual information during integration and proves superior to the traditional parallel input mechanism, which simply feeds knowledge features alongside historical states. Extensive experiments on two real-world trajectory datasets demonstrate that KnowLCP achieves average improvements of 8.3-10.3% in intention prediction and 10.1-10.3% in trajectory prediction over the best-performing baselines.

PaperID: 3394

Authors:Zeel B Patel, Vinayak Rana, Nipun Batra

Affiliations: Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar

Title: Scalable Air-Quality Sensor Placement via Gradient-Based Mutual Information Maximization

Abstract:
Air pollution is a leading global health threat, yet many developing countries lack the dense monitoring infrastructure needed for accurate exposure assessment and informed policy. Optimal Sensor Placement (OSP) is a foundational challenge in expanding monitoring capacity. While mutual information (MI) offers a principled criterion for selecting informative sensor locations, its computational cost grows with both the number of placements and the density of the candidate grid. We present a scalable, continuous optimization framework that treats sensor coordinates as differentiable parameters and directly maximizes MI. Unlike standard approaches, our method is computationally efficient—its runtime is independent of both the number of placements and the size of the search grid—making MIbased acquisition feasible over large spatial domains. On a continental-scale PM2.5 dataset, our method outperforms random placement and the widely-used Maximum Predictive Variance heuristic. In a focused regional study, it approaches the performance of greedy MI while being orders of magnitude faster. Our framework enables practical, information-theoretic sensor placement for real-world environmental monitoring.

PaperID: 3395

Authors:Yin Wu, Zhengxuan Zhang, Jiayu Chen, Chang Xu, Yuyu Luo, Nan Tang, Hui Xiong

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Title: Explainable Oracle Bone Script Recognition via Multimodal Pictographic Reasoning

Abstract:
Oracle Bone Script, East Asia's earliest mature writing system from over 3,500 years ago, encodes ancient cognition through visual metaphors, yet remains largely undeciphered and inaccessible, severing modern society from its cultural roots. Traditional AI methods, while accurate in classification, treat glyphs as opaque data, neglecting their pictographic essence and failing to foster public understanding—exacerbating a heritage crisis amid linguistic evolution. We pioneer a paradigm shift toward AIdriven cultural democratization, introducing OracleVis, the first human-validated multimodal dataset of glyph-image-explanation triplets, curated through expert collaborations to overcome data scarcity, bias, and incompleteness in archaeological sources. Building on this, OBS-VM, an explainability-centric multimodal large language model fine-tuned on Qwen2-VL-7B, models pictographic reasoning by balancing semantic fidelity with interpretive transparency, transforming black-box predictions into cognition-aligned narratives. Rigorous evaluations, including benchmarks and a user study with 24 non-experts, reveal our system's superiority: it outperforms GPT-4o in pictographic rationality (3.79 vs. 3.58 in human evaluation) and achieves a 35.3% relative improvement in recognition accuracy, while interactive learning boosts knowledge gains (+5.5 vs. +1.7), interest (+1.9 vs. +0.4), and confidence (+2.0 vs. +0.3) over static methods. This work illuminates AI's potential to bridge ancient wisdom and contemporary audiences, redefining heritage preservation as an inclusive, socially impactful endeavor that turns cultural alienation into enlightened engagement.

PaperID: 3396

Authors:Xun Zhang, Weihao Xia, Yulong Liu, Bo Yang, Alessandro Bozzon, Pan Wang

Affiliations: Delft University of Technology, University of Cambridge, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: Single-Stage fMRI-to-3D Reconstruction via Viewpoint-Aware Embedding and Hierarchical Guidance

Abstract:
Understanding the neural basis of threedimensional (3D) perception is a fundamental objective in cognitive neuroscience. Despite advances in decoding 2D visual stimuli from neural data, reconstructing high-fidelity 3D objects with detailed texture and geometry remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce NeuroSculptor3D, the first single-stage, end-to-end framework for reconstructing textured 3D shapes directly from brain activity. NeuroSculptor3D integrates a viewpoint-aware brain embedding module that captures fine-grained spatial variations across visual perspectives, and a hierarchical guidance mechanism that aligns brain-derived features with perceptual, semantic, and structural priors. Together, these components facilitate the generation of consistent multi-view embeddings, which are then decoded via TRELLIS to produce high-quality textured 3D reconstructions. Experiments on the fMRI-Shape dataset demonstrate that NeuroSculptor3D outperforms existing baselines across multiple settings, achieving significant improvements in both structural accuracy and semantic consistency. Code will be released to facilitate further research.

PaperID: 3397

Authors:Wenlan Chen, Lu Gao, Daoyuan Wang, Fei Guo, Cheng Liang

Affiliations: Central South University, Shandong Normal University

Title: Geometry-Aware Variational Information Maximization for Deep Incomplete Multi-view Clustering

Abstract:
Incomplete multiview clustering (IMVC) aims to group data into meaningful clusters when each sample is only partially observed across multiple views. Most existing methods either rely on imputation strategies that may introduce noise and distort the underlying data distribution, or adopt cross-view alignment techniques that focus on pairwise relationships, often resulting in suboptimal representations and unstable clustering performance. In this paper, we propose Geometry-Aware Variational Information Maximization for Deep Incomplete Multi-view Clustering (GAVIM), a novel imputation-free variational framework that enables robust and coherent incomplete multi-view clustering. Specifically, GAVIM leverages mutual information maximization to preserve the high mutual information between the available multi-view data and the shared embedding. Moreover, we explicitly retain local geometric consistency within each view-specific latent space under the guidance of an adaptive global supervision signal. Lastly, GAVIM aligns all views simultaneously using a Gramian representation alignment measure, ensuring coherent structure across modalities and promoting unified, semantically meaningful representations. Extensive experiments on five benchmark IMVC datasets with varying levels of view incompleteness demonstrate that GAVIM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in clustering accuracy and representation quality.

PaperID: 3398

Authors:Ke Ding, Brian Parker, Jiayu Wen

Affiliations: ARC Centre of Excellence for the Mathematical Analysis of Cellular Systems Australian National University

Title: NucEL: Single-Nucleotide ELECTRA-Style Genomic Pre-training for Efficient and Interpretable Representations

Abstract:
Pretraining large language models on genomic sequences has become a powerful approach for learning biologically meaningful representations. While masked language modeling (MLM)-based approaches, such as DNABERT and Nucleotide Transformer (NT), achieve strong performance, they are hindered by inefficiencies due to partial token supervision, pre-training/fine-tuning mismatches, and high computational costs. We introduce NucEL, the first ELECTRA-style pre-training framework for genomic foundation models, which overcomes these challenges. Through a discriminator network identifying tokens modified by a generator, NucEL achieves comprehensive token-level supervision across all sequence positions, thereby markedly improving training efficiency relative to the partial supervision of masked positions inherent in MLM frameworks. By integrating ModernBERT’s architectural advancements, including hybrid local-global attention and flash attention mechanisms, NucEL establishes an optimized BERT architecture for genomic sequence modeling. Unlike traditional methods that tokenize genomic sequences into 6-mers, NucEL implements single-nucleotide tokenization, enabling fine-grained resolution and improving both efficiency and interpretability. Pre-trained on the human genome only, NucEL achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets across diverse downstream tasks in both human and non-human species, including regulatory element identification (e.g., promoters, enhancers), transcription factor binding prediction in human and mouse, open chromatin region classification, and histone modification profiles, surpassing MLM-based models of similar size and rivaling models 25 times larger, such as NT. Ablation studies provide critical insights into tokenization and masking strategies, optimizing ELECTRA-style pretraining for DNA sequences. Attention analyses reveal NucEL’s superior ability to capture biologically relevant sequence motifs compared to NT, offering valuable insights into its hierarchical learning process and regulatory element modeling capabilities. This work highlights the potential of ELECTRA-style pretraining as an efficient and effective strategy for advancing genomic representation learning with broad implications for future genomic research.

PaperID: 3399

Authors:Ziqiang Liu, Bowen Li, Zhenyu Xu, Yantao Li, Junwei Zhang, Chulin Sha, Xiaolin Li

Affiliations: Hangzhou Institute of Medicine, Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Macau

Title: CLM-Access: A Specialized Foundation Model for High-Dimensional Single-Cell ATAC-Seq Analysis

Abstract:
Inspired by the success of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing, cell language models (CLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm to learn cell representations from highdimensional single-cell data—particularly transcriptomic profiles from scRNA-seq. These foundation models have shown remarkable potential across a variety of downstream applications. However, there remains a lack of foundation models for scATAC-seq data, which measures chromatin accessibility at single-cell level and is critical for decoding epigenetic regulation. Developing such model is considerably more challenging due to the unique characteristics of scATAC-seq data, including the vast number of chromatin regions, lack of standardized annotations, extreme sparsity, and near-binary distributions. To address these challenges, we systematically explore various strategies and propose CLM-Access, a specialized foundation model for scATAC-seq data. CLM-Access incorporates three main innovations: (1) an unified data processing pipeline that maps 2.8 million cells onto an unified reference of over 1 million chromatin regions; (2) a specialized patching and embedding strategy to effectively manage high-dimensional inputs; and (3) a tailored masking and loss function design that preserves fine-grained regional information while enhancing training efficiency and representation quality. With comprehensive benchmarks, we show that CLM-Access significantly outperforms existing methods in key downstream tasks, including batch effect correction, cell type annotation, RNA expression prediction, and multi-modal integration. This work establishes a scalable and interpretable foundation model for single-cell epigenomic analysis and expands the application of CLMs in single-cell research.

PaperID: 3400

Authors:Jinke Ma, Jiachen Ma, Wei Zhang, Yong Liu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Big Data, Heilongjiang University, China School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Shaanxi Normal University

Title: PHPFND: Detecting Fake News via Post-Hoc Processing of LLMs Hallucination

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) perform excellently in fake news detection tasks, but their outputs are often accompanied by hallucinations, i.e., generated content that is contradictory to facts. Previous studies have mostly mitigated hallucinations through prompt design. However, this paper reveals that regions in news articles which easily induce hallucinations in LLMs correspond closely to the most challenging regions for fake news detectors. In this paper, we propose a fake news detection framework (PHPFND) based on posthoc processing of LLMs hallucination. Specifically, our framework includes a hallucination detection module (ISHD) based on information structuring that detects three types of hallucinations in LLMs in a targeted manner, and a hallucination-driven feature enhancement mechanism (HDFE) that incorporates hallucination signals as explicit features into sentence-level encoding and feature fusion to guide the model’s attention toward high-risk regions. Experimental results on two mainstream fake news datasets show that our proposed method significantly outperforms LLM-based baselines.

PaperID: 3401

Authors:Yabin Peng, Chenyu Zhou, Hainan Cui, Tong Duan, Haoyang Chen, Fan Zhang, Shaoxun Liu

Affiliations: School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, PLA Information Engineering University, Purple Mountain Laboratories, China Institute of Big Data, Fudan University

Title: Resilient UAV Swarm with Fast Connectivity Recovery and Extensive Coverage

Abstract:
To address partial node failures in unmanned aerial vehicle swarms, selfhealing communication techniques are commonly employed to restore backbone connectivity while preserving area coverage. However, existing heuristic methods struggle to scale under large-scale failures and dynamic conditions, while learning-based approaches often suffer from spatial collapse, resulting in significant coverage loss. To overcome these limitations, we propose a resilient self-healing framework that enables rapid connectivity recovery and wide-area coverage through a divide-and-conquer strategy. First, we introduce a buffered dynamic virtual force expansion mechanism that categorizes pairwise distances into repulsive, neutral, and attractive zones, allowing nodes to disperse appropriately while preserving communication links and maintaining safety buffers. Subsequently, we design a multipartite graph convolution module to reason over subnetwork-level interactions and facilitate cross-subnetwork reconnection with global structural awareness. Finally, we develop an adaptive fusion strategy that combines both outputs with time-aware weighting to generate the final motion decisions. Experimental results in both random and uniform deployment scenarios demonstrate that our approach outperforms many state-of-the-art methods in terms of connectivity restoration speed and communication coverage.

PaperID: 3402

Authors:Ying Wang, Guoheng Huang, Xueyuan Gong, Xinxin Wang, Xiaochen Yuan

Affiliations: Macao Polytechnic University, Guangdong University of Technology, Jinan University, Shenzhen University

Title: PASA: Progressive-Adaptive Spectral Augmentation for Automated Auscultation in Data-Scarce Environments

Abstract:
Automated auscultation advances the detection of respiratory diseases, especially in areas with limited resources where traditional diagnostic methods are unavailable. On the other hand, the scarcity of auscultation datasets limits the automation performance, prompting the needs for data augmentation methods. However, most of the existing methods neglect the difference in acoustic sounds that requires personalized augmentation strategies. To address this, we propose a ProgressiveAdaptive Spectral Augmentation (PASA), which is one of the first paradigms to adaptively select the best augmentation strategy for each sample. The PASA innovatively treats augmentation selection problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), creating an alternating loop between the diagnostic model and the augmentation selection. The agent selects the optimal augmentation operations and magnitudes via a task-specific design, including state construction, action sampling, Hybrid Batch-Sample (HBS) strategy execution, and reward guidance. The HBS strategy initially applies uniform augmentation across mini-batches while collecting sample-specific performance statistics. When model performance stabilizes, it transits to sample-level augmentation based on accumulated difficulty assessments. This two-phase design balances computational complexity with personalization. Extensive experiments across three benchmark datasets demonstrate that the PASA outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, pioneering a transformative paradigm for adaptive data augmentation in automated auscultation.

PaperID: 3403

Authors:Qiang Zhang, Feng Yang, Weihong Huang, Jing Feng, Juan Liu

Affiliations: Wuhan University

Title: Domain-Aware Multi-View Contrastive Representation Learning for Protein Subcellular Localization Prediction

Abstract:
Protein subcellular localization prediction is essential for understanding protein function and cellular organization. However, existing methods exhibit two major limitations: (1) they overlook the critical role of evolutionarily conserved protein domains, which are fundamental functional and structural units that significantly influence functions and subcellular localization, and (2) they rarely learn residue order and backbone coordinates simultaneously, neglecting the complementary information inherent in multimodal representations. In this paper, we propose a novel Domain-Aware Multi-View Contrastive Representation Learning for Protein Subcellular Localization prediction, named DMVCL. Firstly, it devises domain-sequence/structure attention modules, which identify functionally significant regions in protein structures/sequences that critically determine subcellular localization. Secondly, it introduces a multi-view contrastive learning framework that unites inter-view and intra-view objectives. Inter-view contrastive learning aligns protein sequences with their corresponding structures by maximizing mutual information, thereby capturing the consistency of protein residue order and backbone coordinates. Intra-view contrastive learning enhances the representation discriminability of each modality by explicitly separating proteins with no common location and attracting those with any shared localization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DMVCL significantly outperforms existing baselines. Ablation studies and visualizations further highlight the contributions of domain-sequence/structure attention and multi-view contrastive learning in achieving superior predictive performance.

PaperID: 3404

Authors:Ziwei Zhang, Zhao Li, Zhuojun Jiang, Jiangyi Yin, Xuebin Wang, Jiangchao Chen, Qingyun Liu

Affiliations: University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: PriAgent: A Collaborative Multi-Agent Framework for Auditing Android Privacy Compliance

Abstract:
Stringent regulations like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) mandate that an application's codelevel data handling must align with its natural-language privacy policy, creating a critical auditing challenge. However, existing methods, predominantly reliant on static analysis, suffer from a critical limitation: in their pursuit of soundness via over-approximation, they exhibit "semantic blindness"—detecting what data flows exist but not why. This leads to an overwhelming volume of false positives, rendering automated auditing impractical. To bridge this gap, we introduce PriAgent, a novel framework that approaches compliance auditing as a multi-stage, AI-driven reasoning task. Instead of a monolithic model, PriAgent deploys a team of specialized agents that execute a divide-and-conquer strategy. They systematically prune the analysis space by abstracting data flows, pinpoint semantic loci critical for inspection, and perform on-demand summarization of large code blocks to ensure scalability. PriAgent leverages Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with a curated knowledge base of Android APIs, equipping agents to discern potentially non-compliant behavior from benign functionality. By correlating code-level evidence with the app's stated privacy policy, PriAgent delivers a holistic and explainable verdict for each potential violation. Our evaluations demonstrate that PriAgent significantly reduces false positives, enabling a more scalable and precise compliance audit.

PaperID: 3405

Authors:Rongfan Liao, Xiangyu Kong, Shiqing Tang, Lang He, Changzeng Fu, Weicheng Xie, Xiaofeng Liu, Lu Liu, Siyang Song

Affiliations: University of Exeter, HBUG Lab, Xi’an University of Posts and Telecommunications, Northeastern University, Shenzhen University, Hohai University

Title: Explainable Depression Assessment from Face Videos by Weakly Supervised Learning

Abstract:
Existing videobased automatic depression assessment (ADA) approaches frequently achieve video-level depression assessment by aggregating features or predictions of individual frames or equal-length segments within the given video. While their performances have been largely enhanced by recent advanced deep learning models, they typically fail to explicitly consider the varied importance of depression-related behavioural cues across different video segments, i.e., segments within one video may contain behaviours reflecting varying levels of depression. Underestimating segment-level variations can obscure the detection of facial behaviour cues associated with depression, thereby undermining the accuracy and interpretability of video-based depression detection systems. In this paper, we propose a novel video-based ADA approach that specifically identifies and differentiates video segments that exhibit depression-related facial behaviours across varying temporal durations, providing clear insights into how each segment contributes to the video-level depression prediction. To achieve this, a novel weakly supervised strategy is proposed to compare segment-level behaviours with video-level depression label, enabling the model to assign depression-relevant scores to multiple temporal scale video segments and attend selectively to those most indicative of depressive states. Extensive experiments on the AVEC 2013 and AVEC 2014 face video depression datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

PaperID: 3406

Authors:Wenfeng Song, Shi Zheng, Xinyu Zhang, Xingliang Jin, Aimin Hao, Fei Hou, Xia Hou, Shuai Li

Affiliations: College of Computer Science, Beijing Information Science and Technology University, State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Beihang University, School of Computer Science and Technology, East China Normal University, Key Laboratory of System Software (CAS), State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: IntentMotion: Learning Intent-Aware Human Motion from Language in 3D Scenes

Abstract:
Generating human motion in complex 3D scenes from text is a challenging task with broad applications. However, existing methods often overlook realistic physical contact, resulting in visually plausible but physically unrealistic motion, e.g., penetration. To alleviate this, we propose IntentMotion, a novel framework that generates human motion in 3D scenes from natural language instructions by explicitly modeling intent. We first introduce the IntentionGuided Contact Field (IGCF). This differentiable voxel-based contact region representation explicitly aligns parsed language roles with spatial contact regions through a hierarchical attention mechanism. IGCF is jointly trained with a diffusion-based motion generator, allowing contact predictions to adapt dynamically through gradient feedback. To improve the controllability and physics-aware motion, we further propose an Intention-Aware Diffusion Model (IADM), which decouples the high-level semantic planning from the low-level contact refinement in a coarse-to-fine process. The optimized contact cues are utilized to guide the synthesis of a coarse trajectory, followed by refining detailed pose sequences under IGCF supervision. Experiments on the HUMANISE and LINGO datasets demonstrate that our IntentMotion outperforms recent baselines in contact accuracy, semantic alignment, and generalization to unseen scenes.

PaperID: 3407

Authors:Wenbin An, Jiahao Nie, Feng Tian, Mingxiang Cai, Yaqiang Wu, Xiaoqin Zhang, Shijian Lu

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University National Engineering Laboratory for Big Data Analytics, Nanyang Technological University, Lenovo Research, Zhejiang University of Technology

Title: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Large Vision Language Models via Knowledge Conflict Mitigation

Abstract:
Multimodal RetrievalAugmented Generation (MRAG) has recently been explored to empower Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) with more comprehensive and up-to-date contextual knowledge, aiming to compensate for their limited and coarse-grained parametric knowledge in knowledge-intensive tasks. However, the retrieved contextual knowledge is usually not aligned with LVLMs’ internal parametric knowledge, leading to knowledge conflicts and further unreliable responses. To tackle this issue, we design KCM, a training-free and plug-and-play framework that can effectively mitigate knowledge conflicts while incorporating MRAG for more accurate LVLM responses. KCM enhances contextual knowledge utilization by modifying the LVLM architecture from three key perspectives. First, KCM adaptively adjusts attention distributions among multiple attention heads, encouraging LVLMs to focus on contextual knowledge with reduced distraction. Second, KCM identifies and prunes knowledge-centric LVLM neurons that encode coarse-grained parametric knowledge, thereby suppressing interferences and enabling more effective integration of contextual knowledge. Third, KCM amplifies the information flow from the input context by injecting supplementary context logits, reinforcing its contribution to the final output. Extensive experiments over multiple LVLMs and benchmarks show that KCM outperforms the state-of-the-art consistently by large margins, incurring neither extra training nor external tools.

PaperID: 3408

Authors:Zijian Cao, Dayou Zhang, Zeyuan Liu, Zhicheng Liang, Fangxin Wang

Affiliations: School of Science and Engineering (SSE), The Chinese University of Hong Kong, College of Information Engineering, Capital Normal University, Shenzhen Future Network of Intelligence Institute (FNii)

Title: Maniflat3D: Learning 3D Geometry Through Planar Representations from Multi-Layer Unwrapping

Abstract:
Pointbased geometric representations such as point clouds and Gaussian Splatting are fundamental for 3D understanding. However, the inherent irregularity and high-dimensional nature of point structures present significant challenges for direct 3D learning approaches, which often struggle with scalability and achieve suboptimal performance due to sparse data distributions. In contrast, 2D learning paradigms benefit from well-established architectures with superior optimization stability and efficiency. To bridge this gap, we propose Maniflat3D, a unified framework that systematically transforms volumetric point-based geometries into structured 2D representations through a two-stage process: a multilayer Ball-Pivoting reconstruction with adaptive density control, followed by Scalable Locally Injective Mapping (SLIM) to produce distortion-minimized, bijective UV parameterizations. Our approach explicitly encodes both geometric and attribute information into the flattened domain, enabling conventional 2D neural networks to effectively learn from complex 3D structures such as Gaussian Splatting. Experiments on the ShapeSplat dataset demonstrate that Maniflat3D achieves comparable performance while reducing parameter count by 90% compared to native 3D baselines, and simultaneously attains 21× compression ratio through neural encoding. These results establish a new paradigm for efficient geometric understanding, demonstrating successful transfer of planar learning advantages to challenging 3D manifold problems through dimensional reduction.

PaperID: 3409

Authors:Xiangqi Chen, Dawei Zhang, Li Zhao, Chengzhuan Yang, Zhongyu Chen, Jungang Lou, Zhonglong Zheng, Sang-Woon Jeon, Hua Wang

Affiliations: Zhejiang Normal University, Huzhou University, Hanyang University, Victoria University

Title: IGIANet: Illumination Guided Implicit Alignment Network for Infrared–Visible UAV Detection

Abstract:
VisibleInfrared (RGB-IR) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) object detection integrates complementary cues from visible and infrared sensors, offering broad application potential. However, due to sensor parallax, it still faces the challenge of weak spatial misalignment, which significantly limits its performance in UAV-based object detection. Existing methods emphasize strict alignment, overlooking spectral heterogeneity under varying illumination. To address these issues, we propose the Illumination Guided Implicit Alignment Network (IGIANet) to mitigate modality heterogeneity without explicit alignment. Specifically, we integrate three novel modules. First, we propose an illumination-guided frequency modulation module that adaptively allocates fusion weights to visible and infrared features based on global illumination estimation, effectively alleviating modality imbalance under varying lighting conditions. Second, we introduce a frequency-guided cross-modality differential enhancement module, which computes differential cues across frequency domains to enhance complementary information and highlight weakly aligned and low-contrast regions. Finally, we introduce an implicit alignment-driven dynamic fusion module that actively estimates offsets and generates dynamic, position-adaptive fusion kernels to align and fuse modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IGIANet outperforms state-of-the-art models on various benchmarks, achieving 80.9% mAP on DroneVehicle, 57.1% mAP on VEDAI, and 49.4% mAP on FLIR.

PaperID: 3410

Authors:Yangkai Chen, Qiangqiang Wu, Guangyao Li, Junlong Gao, Guanglin Niu, Hanzi Wang

Affiliations: Xiamen University, City University of Hong Kong, Beihang University

Title: SAM2-OV: A Novel Detection-Only Tuning Paradigm for Open-Vocabulary Multi-Object Tracking

Abstract:
Openvocabulary multi-object tracking (OV-MOT) aims to track objects with unseen categories beyond the training set. While existing methods rely on pseudo video sequences synthesized from static images, they struggle to model realistic motion patterns, resulting in limited association performance in real-world scenarios. To alleviate these issues, we propose SAM2-OV, a novel association learning-free OV-MOT method that adopts a detection-only tuning paradigm, eliminating the need for synthetic sequences or spatiotemporal supervision and substantially reducing the overall learnable parameters. The core of our method is a Unified Detection Module (UDM), which effectively provides object-level prompts to enable SAM2 for OV-MOT. Enabled by UDM, SAM2-OV is the first to integrate SAM2 for OV-MOT, fully unleashing its zero-shot cross-frame association ability. To further enhance object association under occlusion and abrupt motion, we introduce a Motion Prior Assistance Module (MPAM) that incorporates motion cues into the mask selection process. In addition, a Semantic Enhancement Adapter (SEA) distilled from CLIP is used to improve classification generalization. A sparse prompting strategy is also adopted to reduce computational redundancy by triggering detection only on selected keyframes. As only the detection module is tuned on static images, the overall training process remains simple and efficient. Experiments on the TAO dataset demonstrate that SAM2-OV achieves state-of-the-art performance under the TETA metric, particularly on novel categories. Evaluations on the KITTI dataset show the strong zero-shot cross-domain transferability of our SAM2-OV.

PaperID: 3411

Authors:Yitong Dong, Qi Zhang, Minchao Jiang, Zhiqiang Wu, Qingnan Fan, Ying Feng, Huaqi Zhang, Hujun Bao, Guofeng Zhang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Hangzhou VIVO Information Technology Co., Xidian University, East China Normal University

Title: One-Shot Refiner: Boosting Feed-forward Novel View Synthesis via One-Step Diffusion

Abstract:
We present a novel framework for highfidelity novel view synthesis (NVS) from sparse images, addressing key limitations in recent feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods built on Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones. While ViT-based pipelines offer strong geometric priors, they are often constrained by low-resolution inputs due to computational costs. Moreover, existing generative enhancement methods tend to be 3D-agnostic, resulting in inconsistent structures across views, especially in unseen regions. To overcome these challenges, we design a Dual-Domain Detail Perception Module, which enables handling high-resolution images without being limited by the ViT backbone, and endows Gaussians with additional features to store high-frequency details. We develop a feature-guided diffusion network, which can preserve high-frequency details during the restoration process. We introduce a unified training strategy that enables joint optimization of the ViT-based geometric backbone and the diffusion-based refinement module. Experiments demonstrate that our method can maintain superior generation quality across multiple datasets.

PaperID: 3412

Authors:Zhitong Dong, Chao Li, Yongjian Deng, Hao Chen

Affiliations: Southeast University Key Laboratory of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Technology, Alibaba Group, Beijing University of Technology

Title: AIR-DR: Adaptive Image Retargeting with Instance Relocation and Dual-guidance Repainting

Abstract:
Image retargeting aims to adjust the aspect ratio of images to accommodate various display devices. While existing methods consider both foreground semantics and background inpainting, their Seamcarving-based framework is inherently destructive, often compromising the structural integrity of foreground instances. Furthermore, conventional inpainting models struggle to achieve pixel-level accuracy with global-only guidance, leading to local inconsistencies and background distortions. To address these challenges, we reformulate image retargeting as a instance-level re-layout task. By Adaptive Instance Relocation and Dual-guidance Repainting (AIR-DR), our method preserves the structural integrity of the foreground and recovers the background with consistent details. Additionally, we introduce an adaptive retargeting decision that maintains robustness across challenging retargeting scenarios and any ratios. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets across various aspect ratios demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing methods in both objective metrics and subjective evaluations. Comprehensive ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of each component.

PaperID: 3413

Authors:Xiang Fang, Wanlong Fang

Affiliations: School of Software Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Nanyang Technological University

Title: Disentangling Adversarial Prompts: A Semantic-Graph Defense for Robust LLM Security

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly vulnerable to adversarial prompts that exploit semantic ambiguities to bypass safety mechanisms, resulting in harmful or inappropriate outputs. Such attacks, including jailbreaking and prompt injection, pose significant risks to the integrity and availability of LLMs in securitycritical applications. This paper proposes the Adversarial Prompt Disentanglement (APD) framework, a novel defense mechanism that proactively identifies and neutralizes malicious components in input prompts before they are processed by the LLM. The APD framework integrates three key innovations: (1) a mutual information- based semantic decomposition method to isolate adversarial and benign prompt components, ensuring statistical in- dependence; (2) a graph-based intent classification approach that leverages spectral analysis to detect malicious patterns in prompt semantics; and (3) a lightweight transformer-based classifier trained on real-world datasets of toxic and jailbreaking prompts, enabling efficient and accurate adversarial intent detection. Evaluated on diverse datasets containing adversarial prompts, APD demonstrates superior robustness, reducing harmful output generation by over 85% while maintaining negligible impact on model performance. The framework’s computational efficiency supports real-time deploy- ment, making it a practical solution for securing LLMs. Our work addresses critical challenges in machine learning security on novel attacks and integrity methods for ML systems, and offers a scalable, ethically grounded defense against prompt-based adversarial threats.

PaperID: 3414

Authors:Fangming Feng, Sihang Cai, Zequn Xie, Yangyang Wu, Tao Jin

Affiliations: Zhejiang University

Title: Scene-Aware Spatiotemporal Generalization: Towards Robust Temporal Action Detection Across Domains

Abstract:
Temporal Action Detection (TAD) aims to identify specific actions in long, untrimmed videos by determining their start, end times and categories, yet existing models suffer from performance degradation under outof-distribution scenarios due to unrealistic i.i.d. assumptions. While domain generalization (DG) offers a promising solution, image-based DG methods fail to address the unique spatiotemporal challenges in video-based TAD, including the spatiotemporal complexities and significant variations in action instance scales and densities across domains. To bridge this gap, we propose the first DG framework tailored for TAD. We propose Scene-Aware Video Segmentation, which segments videos based on semantic similarity, addressing cross-domain action instance density and scale discrepancies. Additionally, we present Temporal-Aware Normalization Perturbation to generate diverse video features while preserving temporal integrity. We establish the first DG-TAD benchmark, evaluating 11 state-of-the-art DG methods across four datasets. The experiments demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms existing approaches, achieving superior generalization on unseen domains. The proposed modules are architecture-agnostic, offering plug-and-play compatibility for broader video understanding tasks.

PaperID: 3415

Authors:Rao Fu, Qian Li, Liang Yu, Jianmin Zheng

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University, Hohai University, Alibaba Group

Title: OscuFit: Learning to Fit Osculating Implicit Quadrics for Point Clouds

Abstract:
This paper addresses the challenge of estimating local surface differential properties, specifically surface normals and curvatures, from raw 3D point clouds. Traditional methods either rely on fitting predefined analytic surfaces risking model bias, or directly regress normals and curvatures overlooking their intrinsic geometric correlation. We propose a learning-based approach that locally fits osculating implicit quadrics to recover both normals and curvatures simultaneously. Drawing on classical differential geometry, we exploit the fact that every point on a C² surface admits an osculating quadric in Monge form that exactly reproduces local differential properties. However, the Monge frame itself depends on the very differential quantities being estimated. To bypass this circularity, we reformulate the Monge-form quadric as an implicit representation in a canonical local frame derived solely from point coordinates, enabling supervised learning without requiring Monge frame alignment. This reformulation allows us to construct a ground-truth dataset of such local-frame quadrics and train a neural network to predict per-point weights and offsets for a robust weighted least squares fitting process. The learned offsets account for the deviations of neighboring points from the idealized osculating surface. We further incorporate stable curvature formulations into the training loss alongside normal supervision to enhance estimation fidelity. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms prior approaches in normal and curvature estimation from raw point clouds.

PaperID: 3416

Authors:Xiaowen Fu, Yang Zhang, Yuhan Tang, Huazhong Zhang, Tianxing Zhao, Yuhang Guo, Yu Huang, Jinbao Wang

Affiliations: Shenzhen University

Title: Scene Experts: Specializing in 3D Gaussian Splatting with Adaptive Decomposition

Abstract:
Anchorbased 3D Gaussian Splatting (GS), exemplified by Scaffold-GS, achieves remarkable storage efficiency through a hybrid explicit-implicit representation. However, their reliance on a single, monolithic network to decode anchor features imposes a severe bottleneck on model capacity, often resulting in blurred details and view-dependent artifacts in complex scenes. To break this bottleneck, we introduce the concept of Scene Experts: a strategy that decomposes the task of modeling a complex scene across a collection of specialized sub-models. To realize the paradigm, we propose MoE-GS. Our approach designs the decoder as a Sparsely-Gated Mixture of Experts (MoE), which dramatically increases the model's total capacity while maintaining comparable inference cost via sparse activation. To effectively train this high-capacity model, we propose two key innovations: (1) A progressive curriculum learning strategy that first trains all experts on a robust baseline before encouraging them to specialize on different scene components. (2) A novel opacity-aware regularization that penalizes inactive neural Gaussians, ensuring the expanded capacity is efficiently used. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MoE-GS substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods on diverse benchmarks, significantly improving reconstruction fidelity while requiring a smaller or comparable Gaussian model size.

PaperID: 3417

Authors:Tianqi Jiang, Liu Yang, Xi-Le Zhao, Zixuan Qin, Qinghua Hu

Affiliations: Tianjin University, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Less Is More: Rethinking Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning from a Subtractive Perspective

Abstract:
Currently, pretrained models are rapidly scaling in size, which substantially increases the cost of finetuning them for downstream tasks. To address this challenge, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods have been developed to optimize a minimal set of parameters for adaptation. While current PEFT approaches predominantly employ an "additive'' strategy, introducing learnable modules into inputs or architectures, neglect the inherent knowledge embedded within pretrained models, which may be redundant or even conflict with downstream tasks. This limitation leads to increased inference latency and suboptimal transfer performance, particularly in scenarios with significant domain gaps. In this paper, we propose a Subtractive Fine-tuning Paradigm(SFP), which converts multiple redundant operations within the original module into a linear transformation to enhance inference speed and model performance. Specifically, we introduce a compact filter block to replace specific module with interference and redundancy in the original structure to reduce model conflicts. By using a pseudo inverse matrix to construct filter block, ensuring that it can inherit the knowledge of the replacement module, and then freezing the rest of the model, only fine-tuning the filter block is performed to eliminate interference and redundant knowledge, thereby enhancing the model’s adaptability to downstream tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our SFP outperforms existing PEFT methods in accuracy while decreasing the overall model parameters by 12%. Compared to full fine-tuning, the accuracy has increased by 8.47%(74.04% vs. 65.57%, VTAB).

PaperID: 3418

Authors:Jiuyao Jing, Yu Zheng, Chunlei Peng

Affiliations: Xidian University

Title: ResProto-FD: Visual-Language Residual Prototype Sets for Generalized Face Forgery Detection

Abstract:
With the rapid development of generative models, such as generative adversarial networks and diffusion models, the task of face forgery detection has emerged, aiming to identify forged faces in realworld scenarios. A key challenge for current face forgery detection models is improving generalization to unknown forgeries. To address this, we propose ResProto-FD, a framework that constructs residual prototype sets to capture diverse forgery cues and discriminative differences from real faces. Our novel perspective collects prototypes from the most informative residual features generated during training, enabling better representation of various forgery traces and real-vs-fake distinctions. First, we introduce a Visual-Language Residual Learning (VLRL) module based on the CLIP model. This module constructs residual features between image and text embeddings to capture inconsistencies between visual features and associated textual semantics. In doing so, it guides the model to attend to subtle visual forgery clues and enhances the discriminative power of image representations. Furthermore, we design a Gradient-aware Residual Prototypes (GRP) mechanism— a dynamic collection strategy that selectively stores uncertain residual features based on gradient signals to build the prototype sets. This enhances the model’s ability to generalize to unknown forgery types. Extensive experiments across various datasets and forgery methods demonstrate that ResProto-FD significantly improves generalization performance and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 3419

Authors:JoungBin Lee, Hyunkoo Lee, Jini Yang, Chaehyun Kim, Jung Yi, Seok Hwangbo, Hyeoncheol Lee, Minho Chun, Eunjo Jeong, Seungryong Kim

Affiliations: Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, Samsung Disaply

Title: CHIMERA: Controllable High-quality Image-Mask Extraction for Reliable Diffusion-based Anomaly Synthesis

Abstract:
We present CHIMERA, a novel framework for generating realistic, generalizable, and promptdriven industrial anomalies from natural language instructions. Our method addresses two key challenges in text-guided anomaly synthesis: (1) the scarcity of scalable, high-quality paired anomaly data and (2) the difficulty of efficiently adapting large diffusion models to domain-specific tasks without overfitting. To tackle these challenges, we first introduce a Vision-Language Model (VLM)-guided data curation pipeline that automatically generates semantically rich and spatially grounded captions from normal images, enabling effective dataset augmentation without manual annotations. Building upon this, we propose a parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy that adapts a pre-trained Diffusion Transformer (Stable Diffusion 3) using lightweight LoRA adapters. By aligning structured prompts with the model's pre-trained language-vision prior and introducing auxiliary attention-based mask supervision, our method prevents overfitting, enhances spatial consistency, and ensures efficient training even with limited data. Extensive experiments show that CHIMERA is the first unified framework to achieve controllable, scalable, and generalizable industrial anomaly generation by integrating VLM-guided data curation with efficient diffusion-based training, significantly improving anomaly detection in low-data and unseen scenarios.

PaperID: 3420

Authors:Jiaxu Leng, Zhengjie Wang, Shuang Li, Xinbo Gao

Affiliations: Chongqing University of Post and Telecommunications Chongqing Institute for Brain and Intelligence, Guangyang Bay Laboratory

Title: Dynamic-Static Collaboration for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Video-Based Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification

Abstract:
Videobased visible-infrared person re-identification (VVI-ReID) aims to match pedestrian sequences across modalities for all-day surveillance. While supervised methods have shown progress, their dependence on large-scale cross-modal annotations limits scalability. We investigate the task of unsupervised domain adaptation for VVI-ReID (UDA-VVI-ReID), where a model trained on a labeled source domain is adapted to an unlabeled target domain. Directly extending existing image-based unsupervised VI-ReID methods to video scenarios by simply averaging frame-level features is suboptimal, as this naive strategy neglects the rich temporal dynamics in video data and leads to unreliable pseudo-labels due to occlusion-induced noise. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Dynamic-Static Collaboration (DSC) framework that explicitly leverages the complementary strengths of motion and appearance cues. The Dynamic-Static Label Unification (DSLU) module refines pseudo-labels by validating the consistency between static and dynamic predictions. Based on these labels, the Dynamic-Static Joint Learning (DSJL) module performs neighbor-aware contrastive learning in both feature spaces, promoting robust representation learning under cross-modal and temporal variations. Experiments on HITSZ-VCM and BUPTCampus show that DSC sets a strong baseline for this new task, enabling robust cross-modal video ReID without target labels.

PaperID: 3421

Authors:Fan Li, Jing Lu, Yunlu Xu, Changhong Wu, Tao Xu, Zhaoyi Xiang, Yi Niu

Affiliations: Hikvision Research Institute

Title: Refine3D: Scene-Adaptive Reference Point Refinement for Sparse 3D Object Detection

Abstract:
Sparse querybased detectors have emerged as the dominant paradigm in camera-only 3D object detection, owing to their exceptional performance and computational efficiency. A central component of these approaches is the use of reference points, which serve as learnable spatial anchors to guide queries in localizing target objects. However, existing methods typically employ a unified set of reference points across all scenes, a design we find suboptimal for handling complex scenarios with highly imbalanced object distributions, such as road intersections or occluded environments. In this paper, we investigate the adaptability of reference points and propose Refine3D, an adaptive refinement mechanism that achieves scene-level alignment between the distribution of reference points and ground-truth objects. In particular, we introduce a novel Reference Point Distribution Loss (RPD-Loss) to ensure reference points converge globally toward object positions, and a Scene-Adaptive Refinement head (SAR-Head) that predicts dynamic offsets for each reference point. Both components can be seamlessly integrated into mainstream sparse detectors. Extensive experiments on two challenging autonomous driving datasets demonstrate that Refine3D outperforms the state-of-the-art with improved detection accuracy and robustness.

PaperID: 3422

Authors:Mingxuan Li, Fazhan Zhang, Zhenzhe Hou, Zihao Huang, Bohan Fu, Runze Hu, Xiaohui Chu

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology

Title: DSP-PCQA: Integrating Multiple Perception Preferences for Point Cloud Quality Assessment

Abstract:
Point Cloud Quality Assessment (PCQA) faces a critical disconnect: existing methods operate on a flawed singleperception paradigm, while human observers evaluate quality through dual cognitive streams: technical rationality and semantic sensibility. This fundamental mismatch routinely produces assessment failures in real-world scenarios where technical and semantic signals conflict. To address this, we introduce Dual-Stream Perception PCQA (DSP-PCQA), the first framework that explicitly models this perceptual duality through parallel networks thoroughly mirroring the human cognitive pathway. DSP-PCQA introduces three key innovations: (1) a Decoupled Focus Enhancer (DFE) that surgically isolates technical and semantic information using two targeted transformations; (2) a Context & Attribute Correlation Awareness (CACA) module that captures the dynamic, non-linear relationships between different views and sub-models characteristic of human visual processing; and (3) an Exchange-based Perceptual Injection (EPI) module that strategically transfers information between perception streams, simulating how humans integrate multiple perceptual dimensions. Extensive evaluations show DSP-PCQA outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple benchmarks. Most importantly, our method resolves the perceptual discord that plagues existing approaches, maintaining high accuracy even in the challenging boundary cases where technical quality and semantic significance diverge, precisely where conventional methods often struggle.

PaperID: 3423

Authors:Qinsong Li, Jing Meng, Haibo Wang, Shengjun Liu

Affiliations: Central South University

Title: MDND: Unsupervised Learning Guided by Non-Differentiable Refinement for Shape Correspondence

Abstract:
Deep functional map frameworks (DFM) for shape correspondence are powerful, yet fundamentally limited by their reliance on endto-end differentiability. This constraint prevents the integration of highly accurate, non-differentiable refinement techniques, capping their overall performance, especially on challenging non-isometric shapes. To overcome this, we introduce MDND, a novel DFM paradigm built on the principle of merging differentiable and non-differentiable components. Our framework facilitates unsupervised learning guided by an internal, non-differentiable refinement. Specifically, MDND employs a dual-branch architecture: a non-differentiable refinement branch leverages a novel, multiscale iterative solver to produce highly robust correspondences, acting as a refined target. Concurrently, a fully differentiable branch learns to predict correspondences from features. The entire system is trained end-to-end without supervision by enforcing a consistency loss that compels the differentiable branch to learn from the superior, refined results of the non-differentiable branch. Extensive experiments show that MDND sets a new state-of-the-art, demonstrating remarkable robustness on shapes with non-isometric deformations and topological noise.

PaperID: 3424

Authors:Shijie Li, Yiming Chen, Zhineng Chen, Kai Hu, Xieping Gao

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University, Institute of Trustworthy Embodied AI, Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing and Information Processing of Ministry of Education, Xiangtan University, Hunan Provincial Key Laboratory of Al and International Communication, Hunan Normal University

Title: SSR-SAM: Retrieval-Style Segment Anything Model for Semi-Supervised Ultra-High-Resolution Image Segmentation

Abstract:
Accurate segmentation of ultrahigh-resolution (UHR) images, which often exceed tens of millions of pixels, is critically important in domains such as remote sensing and biomedical imaging. However, acquiring pixel-level annotations for such high-resolution images is prohibitively expensive and labor-intensive. While semi-supervised semantic segmentation can significantly reduce the annotation burden, its extension to UHR images holds great potential for addressing the unique challenges posed by sparse supervision. To this end, we propose SSR-SAM, a retrieval-style semi-supervised segmentation framework tailored for UHR images. Leveraging the promptable paradigm of the Segment Anything Model (SAM), SSR-SAM treats locally annotated regions as prompts to retrieve semantically consistent pixels across the entire image. Building upon this retrieval-style segmentation paradigm, we further introduce prompt-level perturbation, a novel trail to deploy consistency regularization for semi-supervised segmentation. It encourages the model to learn consistency across predictions guided by diverse visual-semantic prompts, thereby enhancing generalization on unlabeled data. We evaluate SSR-SAM on three UHR datasets: Inria Aerial, BCSS, and URUR. Experimental results show that SSR-SAM achieves clear performance gains over the labeled-only supervision, with average mIoU improvements of 4.9%, 4.15%, and 2.5%, respectively. Additionally, SSR-SAM possesses zero-shot segmentation capability, exhibiting potential for general retrieval-style segmentation tasks.

PaperID: 3425

Authors:Xianwei Li, Huiyuan Fu, Chuanming Wang, Huadong Ma

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: HDRMovieformer: A Transformer Framework and Benchmark for Cinematic SDR-to-HDR Conversion

Abstract:
With the growing prevalence of HDRcapable cinema venues such as Cinity LED theaters, there is an increasing demand to convert existing Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) films into High Dynamic Range (HDR) formats for theatrical presentation. However, existing SDR-to-HDR conversion methods are primarily tailored for consumer-grade content such as television and therefore fall short of the stringent requirements of professional cinematic material. To bridge this gap, we present HDRMovie7K, the first large-scale, lossless dataset of cinematic SDR-HDR frame pairs sourced from professional Digital Cinema Distribution Master (DCDM) workflows. Based on this foundation, we introduce HDRMovieformer, a transformer-based framework featuring a Luminance Estimator module for luminance guidance, a Luminance-Guided Multi-Head Self-Attention to focus on critical fine-detail recovery, and a Chroma Refiner for color accuracy, optimized with a novel Wide Color Gamut Loss. To further evaluate our model in online streaming media scenarios, we introduce HDRMovie1K, a dataset curated from publicly available HDR film clips. Extensive experiments on both HDRMovie7K and HDRMovie1K demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

PaperID: 3426

Authors:Zixu Li, Yupeng Hu, Zhiwei Chen, Shiqi Zhang, Qinlei Huang, Zhiheng Fu, Yinwei Wei

Affiliations: Shandong University

Title: HABIT: Chrono-Synergia Robust Progressive Learning Framework for Composed Image Retrieval

Abstract:
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is a flexible image retrieval paradigm that enables users to accurately locate the target image through a multimodal query composed of a reference image and modification text. Although this task has demonstrated promising applications in personalized search and recommendation systems, it encounters a severe challenge in practical scenarios known as the Noise Triplet Correspondence (NTC) problem. This issue primarily arises from the high cost and subjectivity involved in annotating triplet data. To address this problem, we identify two central challenges: the precise estimation of composed semantic discrepancy and the insufficient progressive adaptation to modification discrepancy. To tackle these challenges, we propose a cHronosynergiA roBust progressIve learning framework for composed image reTrieval (HABIT), which consists of two core modules. First, the Mutual Knowledge Estimation Module quantifies sample cleanliness by calculating the Transition Rate of mutual information between the composed feature and the target image, thereby effectively identifying clean samples that align with the intended modification semantics. Second, the Dual-consistency Progressive Learning Module introduces a collaborative mechanism between the historical and current models, simulating human habit formation to retain good habits and calibrate bad habits, ultimately enabling robust learning under the presence of NTC. Extensive experiments conducted on two standard CIR datasets demonstrate that HABIT significantly outperforms most methods under various noise ratios, exhibiting superior robustness and retrieval performance.

PaperID: 3427

Authors:Jiawei Lian, Zhengxue Wang, Wentao Qu, Haobo Jiang, Le Hui, Jian Yang

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanyang Technological University, Northwest Polytechnical University Xi'an

Title: Diffusion-Based Contextual Reconstruction for Point Cloud Segmentation with Limited Annotations

Abstract:
Point cloud semantic segmentation is fundamental to 3D scene understanding, but dense annotation requirements limit scalability. Although recent label propagation and contrastive learning methods enhance local consistency, the incomplete object coverage caused by sparse annotations hinders global context modeling, ultimately limiting overall performance. To this end, we propose a diffusionbased contextual reconstruction framework for point cloud semantic segmentation with limited annotations. At its core, our framework guides denoising with semantic predictions, using better context reconstruction to enhance the conditional model for better segmentation. Specifically, our contributions include: (1) Diffusion-based segmentation framework: reconstructs contextual semantics from noise under conditional guidance, sharing the decoder with the segmentation module for robust contextual semantic learning. (2) Dynamically aggregates local context from segmentation features and guides denoising with global spatial structure, significantly enhancing denoising quality and contextual awareness. Notably, we pioneer diffusion models for 3D semantic segmentation with limited annotations, enabling efficient single-step inference. Experiments show robustness across varying annotation ratios and state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks.

PaperID: 3428

Authors:Yaoxiu Lian, Hao Liang, Zhihong Gou, Yijia Zhang, Jiaming Xu, Guohao Dai, Ningyi Xu

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: MoSs: Mixture of Scales for Efficient High-Resolution Autoregressive Image Generation

Abstract:
Since nextscale prediction was introduced as a new paradigm for autoregressive image generation, it has attracted extensive research interest. By progressively increasing resolution in a draft-to-refinement process, next-scale prediction demonstrates great potential in both generation quality and efficiency. However, at high resolutions, this paradigm faces a fundamental challenge: token sequences grow quadratically and accumulate across multiple scales, resulting in a key performance bottleneck. Our systematic study uncovers two critical observations: (1) most image regions have stabilized during early drafting stages, making later refinement across the full-scale image token-inefficient; (2) different scales inherently trade off efficiency and fidelity, suggesting that adaptive token dispatch on different scales can focus resources where they yield the greatest quality gains. Motivated by these insights, we propose a training-free Mixture of Scales (MoSs) method for efficient high-resolution autoregressive image generation. MoSs breaks the strict causal dependency across scales in the final refinement steps by parallelizing scales of different resolutions, each responsible for a subset of spatial regions. A lightweight frequency-based token dispatcher analyzes the drafted image and assigns regions to the appropriate scale. The outputs are then composited over the draft to produce the final high-resolution image. The scale-mixture method exhibits remarkable efficiency with little impact on generation quality on various models. For instance, our implementation achieves 2.05-4.96x speedup on the transformer backbone, up to 85.62% KV cache reduction, incurring only 0.1-2.4% loss on GenEval quality, based on the state-of-the-art Infinity model.

PaperID: 3429

Authors:Jianghang Lin, Yilin Lu, Chaoyang Zhu, Yunhang Shen, Shengchuan Zhang, Liujuan Cao

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing, Ministry of Education of China, Xiamen University, P.R. China.

Title: Robust Pseudo-Labeling via Decoupled Class-Aware Filtering and Dynamic Category Correction

Abstract:
SemiSupervised Instance Segmentation (SSIS) involves classifying and grouping image pixels into distinct object instances using limited labeled data alongside large-scale unlabeled data. A major challenge in SSIS lies in the inherent noise of pseudo-labels, particularly when class and mask qualities are coupled into a single confidence score for filtering. Such coupling often results in sub-optimal trade-offs between semantic accuracy and spatial precision. To address this, we propose a novel Pseudo-Label Decoupling and Correction (PL-DC) framework, which explicitly decouples and enhances the pseudo-label selection process for SSIS. At the instance level, we introduce a Decoupled Filtering with Adaptive Class-Aware Thresholds mechanism, which independently evaluates class and mask qualities using category-specific thresholds updated via exponential moving averages. At the category level, we design a Dynamic Instance Category Correction module that reassigns ambiguous class pseudo-label by leveraging semantic prototypes and consistency alignment. At the pixel level, a Pixel-Level Mask Uncertainty-Aware mechanism is applied to suppress the influence of unreliable pixels during mask supervision, further improving the robustness against pixel-wise noise. Extensive experiments on COCO and Cityscapes datasets demonstrate that the proposed PL-DC achieves significant performance improvements, setting new state-of-the-art results. Notably, PL-DC achieves gains of +11.7 mAP with just 1% labeled COCO data and +16.4 mAP with 5% Cityscapes labels, showing its effectiveness under extremely low-label regimes.

PaperID: 3430

Authors:Chong Liu, Xun Jiang, Fumin Shen, Lei Zhu, Jingkuan Song, Heng Tao Shen, Xing Xu

Affiliations: Center for Future Media & School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, School of Computer Science and Technology, Tongji University

Title: De-biased Natural Language Egocentric Task Verification via Prototypical Evidence Learning

Abstract:
Natural Languagebased Egocentric Task Verification (NLETV) aims to verify the alignment between action sequences in egocentric videos and their corresponding textual descriptions. However, existing NLETV approaches are still facing two critical challenges: (1) These methods are designed for simulating environments, ignoring the domain gap between synthetic and realistic data. (2) The matching processes are regarded as a simple binary classification problem, which undermines model reliability due to evaluation bias and uncalibrated decision settings. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method termed Prototypical Evidential Learning (PEL), which can be adapted to existing NLETV approaches and boost the model generalization and mitigate prediction bias. Our method leverages prototypes to guide cross-domain alignment and evidence collection. Specifically, PEL consists of two key components: (1) Prototypical Domain Adaptation module enabling cross-domain feature alignment and intra-domain prototype preservation between synthetic and realistic domains; (2) Matching Evidence Collector module, which quantifies prediction uncertainty on the prototypical representations through evidential deep learning. It enforces the model to collect the vision-text consistency and discrepancy evidence, thus addressing the issues of biased decisions in binary classification. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that our PEL method outperforms existing state-of-the-art NLETV methods and shows remarkable generalizability.

PaperID: 3431

Authors:Jia Liu, Qian Li, Yongqi Li, Cheng Ji, Shangguang Wang

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beihang University

Title: SCo-Cloud: Satellite Constellation Collaboration for Cloud-Aware Onboard-Computed Imaging and Transmission

Abstract:
Satelliteacquired optical remote sensing imagery is extensively applied in time-critical applications like traffic surveillance and evaluation of natural disasters. However, clouds, as a common atmospheric phenomenon, frequently obscure observation. Current approaches aim to restore visibility in cloud-obscured regions, yet they typically fall short in the presence of dense cloud cover, which are exceedingly prevalent in remote sensing imagery. Alternative approaches rely on the satellite revisit cycle, frequently surpassing ten days, a duration impractical for genuine application scenarios due to target changes and bandwidth limitations. To address these issues, this paper proposes SCo-Cloud, a novel satellite constellation collaboration framework for cloud-aware onboard-computed imaging and transmission, which consists of Center-Sat and Edge-Sats. We propose onboard thin cloud removal and re-imaging region location models to locate the impact of clouds. We further design a novel multi-satellite scheduling strategy to eliminate clouds. The models above are integrated within the Center-Sat, with the nearby Edge-Sats collaborating in tandem to execute re-imaging assignments. Furthermore, to facilitate in-depth research, we have meticulously developed a cloud-covered target detection dataset. Comprehensive experiments have conclusively demonstrated that SCo-Cloud effectively surpasses the limitations inherent in current approaches, providing accurate and timely responses within the domain of Earth observation.

PaperID: 3432

Authors:Ruizhou Liu, Zhe Wu, Zimo Liu, Qingfang Zheng, Qingming Huang

Affiliations: Pengcheng Laboratory

Title: DMGINE: Day-Memory Guided Nighttime Image Enhancement for Dynamic Traffic Scenes

Abstract:
We introduce DaytimeMemory Guided Nighttime Image Enhancement (DMGNIE) framework, the first framework that turns long-running daytime surveillance videos of a single intersection into persistent “daytime memory” to guide nighttime image enhancement in traffic scenes. Our key insight is simple yet powerful: for a static scene, perfectly exposed daytime frames are, pixel-for-pixel, high-quality illumination prior for the same location under extreme low-light. Due to the complex lighting conditions in real-world traffic scenes, existing low-light image enhancement (LLIE) methods suffer from issues such as overexposure in highlight regions and noise amplification in low-light condition regions, which degrades the performance of downstream computer vision tasks. DMGNIE tackles these issues in two steps: (1) SegBMN, a semantic prior-based background modeling network, distills a clean, static daytime background from hours of video as scene prior guiding the enhancement of nighttime image; (2) a Foreground Localization-Guided Contrastive Learning module avoid the interference from the background prior with foreground objects during the guidance by maximizing the differences between foreground and background features. Finally, We conduct comprehensive experiments on real traffic surveillance datasets of two cities to evaluate the effectiveness. And the experimental results demonstrate that DMGNIE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and achieves superior performance in challenging low-light conditions.

PaperID: 3433

Authors:Tongfei Liu, Jianjian Xu, Tao Lei, Yingbo Wang, Xiaogang Du, Zhiyong Lv

Affiliations: Shaanxi University of Science and Technology, Xi'an University of Technology

Title: DGKAN: Dual-branch Graph Kolmogorov-Arnold Network for Unsupervised Multimodal Change Detection

Abstract:
Multimodal change detection (MCD) has important applications in disaster assessment, but the nonlinear distortion of features and spatial misalignment caused by sensor imaging differences make it difficult to obtain changes through direct comparison. To overcome the above problems, this study aims to realize MCD by capturing the modalityindependent structural commonality features between Multimodal Remote Sensing Images (MRSIs). To achieve this, we devise a basic Graph Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (GKAN) to excavate spatial structural relationships and cross-modal nonlinear mappings simultaneously. Based on this, we propose a Dual-branch GKAN (DGKAN) for unsupervised MCD, which can capture spatial-spectral structural commonality features and compare them directly to detect changes. Concretely, the GKAN is used within the DGKAN to build two autoencoders consisting of a Siamese encoder and two independent decoders to learn spatial-spectral structural commonality features through feature reconstruction. Besides, we introduce a Covariance Structural Commonality Loss (CSCL), which guides the network in extracting spatial-spectral structural commonality features between MRSIs by unsupervised constraints on the distributional consistency of cross-modal features. Experiments on several MCD datasets show that the proposed DGKAN can achieve convincing results, and ablation studies verify the effectiveness of the GKAN and CSCL.

PaperID: 3434

Authors:Yun Liu, Guang Yang, Tao Li, Weisi Lin

Affiliations: Southwest University, Nanyang Technological University

Title: Nighttime Flare Removal via Wavelet-Guided and Gated-Enhanced Spatial-Frequency Fusion Network

Abstract:
Nighttime flares, caused by complex scattering and reflections from artificial light sources, significantly degrade image quality and hinder downstream visual tasks. Existing deflare networks usually struggle to jointly capture and fuse latent spatial and frequency features. In this paper, we propose a novel Waveletguided and Gated-enhanced Spatial-frequency Fusion Network (WGSF-Net) for nighttime flare removal. WGSF-Net is primarily composed of two key modules: Wavelet-guided Fusion Block (WFB) and Local-Global Block (LGB). Specifically, WFB integrates a Multi-level Wavelet Enhancement Block (MWEB) and a Spatial-Frequency Fusion Network (SFFN) to effectively extract hierarchical spatial and frequency features through a coarse-to-fine strategy based on multi-level wavelet decomposition. To better suppress flare artifacts, LGB is designed to jointly capture local and global information: a Gated-Enhanced Attention Block (GEAB) selectively amplifies critical local features through a gated network and a difference network, and the subsequent SFFN performs global spatial-frequency fusion via depthwise separable convolution and partial Fourier convolution. This design enables LGB to effectively disentangle flare-corrupted regions and restore fine-grained details, making it particularly suited for challenging real-world flare scenarios. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real datasets show that WGSF-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance in nighttime flare removal, outperforming existing methods across five evaluation metrics.

PaperID: 3435

Authors:Zheng Liu, Feng Lu

Affiliations: Beihang University

Title: MoEGaze: A Mixture of Experts Approach for Generalizable Gaze Estimation

Abstract:
Existing gaze estimation models often struggle to generalize to unseen users, primarily due to significant variations in individual appearance. Empirical observations reveal that performance improves when the visual appearance of test subjects closely resembles that of training subjects. Motivated by this, we propose a generalizable gaze estimation framework MoEGaze based on the Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture. During training, the model extracts appearance features from facial images and uses them to route samples to specialized gaze expert networks, each tailored to a specific subset of appearances. Rather than directly predicting gaze, each expert outputs intermediate gaze features, which are dynamically aggregated according to the input appearance and then mapped to gaze prediction. This dynamic routing design enables the model to effectively adapt to users with diverse appearances, while also facilitating easier training on subdatasets with smaller appearance variations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior cross-domain performance compared to existing approaches, with an average improvement of 27.6% across four cross-domain metrics over the baseline. Furthermore, MoEGaze surpasses baselines trained on the full dataset while requiring only 10% of the training data.

PaperID: 3436

Authors:Dwarikanath Mahapatra, Behzad Bozorgtabar, Sudipta Roy, Imran Razzak, Mauricio Reyes

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark EPFL, Jio University, Navi Mumbai, University of Bern, Switzerland Dept. of Radiation Oncology, Bern University Hospital

Title: VALIANT: Prompt Instability for Active Learning in Black-Box Medical Imaging

Abstract:
The deployment of large, blackbox foundation models for medical image classification is often hindered by the high cost of acquiring large, task-specific labeled datasets for fine-tuning. While active learning (AL) presents a promising solution, many state-of-the-art AL methods are computationally expensive or require full access to internal model parameters. We present VALIANT (Visual Adaptation and Learning Integration for Active learNing Tasks), a new active learning framework designed to efficiently adapt black-box foundation models by overcoming these limitations. VALIANT introduces a lightweight Visual Prompt Decoder (VIPD), trained via unsupervised Zero-Order Optimization (ZOO), to generate task-specific visual prompts without internal model access. Our core contribution is a perturbation-based ranking strategy that leverages this VIPD to formulate a computationally efficient, gradient-aware informativeness metric. This metric, which we term prompt instability, identifies the most impactful samples for the labeling budget. VALIANT further enhances this process by incorporating anatomical information from unsupervised segmentation maps to generate more discriminative visual prompts. Extensive evaluations on multiple medical datasets demonstrate VALIANT’s superior performance and significant reduction in labeling costs compared to a range of existing active learning techniques, positioning it as a scalable and practical solution for medical image analysis.

PaperID: 3437

Authors:Yu Miao, Juanjuan Zhao, Sijie Song, Ran Gong, Yuanqian Zhu, Lusha Qi, Yan Qiang

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, Taiyuan University of Technology, Huawei Technologies Co., School of Software, North University of China

Title: Augmentation-invariant Learning Strategy via Data Augmentation for Improving Model Generalization

Abstract:
Data augmentation is an effective technique for regularizing deep networks, which helps to enhance the generalizability and robustness of the model. However, in the field of medical imaging, traditional data augmentation techniques such as cropping, rotation, and degradation may inadvertently alter the critical characteristics of pathological lesions. Conventional semantic augmentation methods, such as altering the color and contrast of the object background, may also affect the structural features of medical images in uncontrolled semantic directions. Such operational conditions compromise the model's diagnostic reliability in medical contexts. To address this issue, we propose a surprisingly efficient implicit augmentationinvariant learning strategy (AILS) via variational Bayesian inference on differentially constrained feature manifolds. Parameterizing probability measures over tangent space through deep networks enables precise estimation of semantic direction distributions. Subsequently, geodesic-aware semantic features are sampled from the reparameterized variational posterior, achieving semantic-consistent augmentation. Simultaneously, to mine augmentation distribution invariance, we design the AiHLoss, which constrains the augmentation distribution to facilitate the network to learn augmentation invariance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AILS exhibits high performance on public medical image datasets, outperforming existing augmentation methods.

PaperID: 3438

Authors:Qi Ming, Liuqian Wang, Juan Fang, Xudong Zhao, Yucheng Xu, Ziyi Teng, Yue Zhou, Xiaoxi Hu, Xiaohan Zhang, Yufei Guo

Affiliations: College of Computer Science, Beijing University of Technology, School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Zhengzhou University, School of Information and Electronics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), School of Geospatial Artificial Intelligence, East China Normal University, State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Green Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University, College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University, Intelligent Science & Technology Academy of CASIC

Title: Hilbert Curve-Encoded Rotation-Equivariant Oriented Object Detector with Locality-Preserving Spatial Mapping

Abstract:
ArbitraryOriented Object Detection (AOOD) has found broad applications in embodied intelligence, autonomous driving, and satellite remote sensing. However, current AOOD frameworks face challenges in ineffective feature extraction and orientation regression inaccuracy. Inspired by Hilbert curve's intrinsic locality-preserving property, we propose a flexible Hilbert curve-Encoded Rotation-Equivariant Oriented Object Detector (HERO-Det). Our innovations include: (i) a novel Hilbert curve traversal convolution paradigm with a dimensionality reduction scheme, which employs locality-preserving spatial filling curves for feature transformation, (ii) a Hilbert pyramid transformer enabling hierarchical construction of multi-scale feature sequences through space-folding operations, as well as (iii) an orientation-adaptive prediction head that decouples rotation-equivariant regression features from invariant classification cues to resolve orientation regression dilemmas in two-stage detectors. Extensive experiments show HERO-Det achieves state-of-the-art performance on AOOD benchmarks, with mAP of 79.56%, 90.64%, 90.10%, and 80.47% on DOTA, HRSC2016, SSDD, and HRSID, respectively. Performance gains in cross-task validation further demonstrate the versatility of our method to diverse vision tasks, such as medical image segmentation and 3D object detection.

PaperID: 3439

Authors:Jinhee Park, Hee Bin Yoo, Minjun Kim, Byoung-Tak Zhang, Junseok Kwon

Affiliations: Korea Electronics Technology Institute, Seoul National University, Chung-Ang University

Title: Neural Collapse-Informed Initialization with Perturbation Injection in Classification-based Metric Learning

Abstract:
Recent studies have revealed Neural Collapse (NC) in deep classifiers, where lastlayer weights and features align into an equiangular tight frame (ETF), concentrating class information along specific embedding directions. However, conventional fine-tuning typically disregards this structure, initializing task-specific classifier heads randomly. To explicitly leverage this phenomenon, we propose a simple yet effective method for metric learning: (1) initializing the classifier head along each class’s NC direction from a pretrained model to preserve the emergent structure, and (2) injecting small isotropic Gaussian noise during finetuning to boost generalization. In addition, we provide a theoretical bound proving that our method explicitly reduces cumulative weight drift from the NC-initialization, compared to standard finetuning. This suggests that our method better preserves the pretrained model’s class-specific structure. Empirically, this structural preservation yields Recall@K gains: reduced weight drift correlates with better performance. Concurrent decreases in the Neural Collapse 1 (NC1) measure confirm that stronger intra‐class cohesion underlies these improvements. Furthermore, we validate the effectiveness of our method on class‐imbalanced benchmarks.

PaperID: 3440

Authors:Jibin Peng, Di Lin, Zhecheng Xu, Haoran Lu, Ruonan Liu, Wuyuan Xie, Miaohui Wang, Lingyu Liang, Yi Wang, Qing Guo

Affiliations: Tianjin University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shenzhen University, South China University of Technology, Nankai University

Title: FreeMem: Enhancing Consistency in Long Video Generation via Tuning-Free Memory

Abstract:
Textto-Video (T2V) generation has advanced greatly, yet maintaining consistency remains challenging, especially for tuning-free long video generation. We attribute the consistency problem to cumulative deviations for long video generation at three levels: the random noise lacking correlation results initial deviation between frames; discrepancy in semantic feature tokens between denoising network blocks gradually accumulates as the frame count grows, leading to greater deviations; attention mechanisms struggle to capture global relationships across distant frames in long videos. To address these, we propose FreeMem, a tuning-free framework leveraging hierarchical memory update and injection: the noise memory stabilizes consistency by manipulating low and high frequency components in the initial noise space; the token memory combats inconsistency through adaptive fusion of historical and current semantic feature tokens between denoising network blocks; and the attention memory establishes persistent cache to model long-range relationships within self attention layers. Evaluated on VBench, FreeMem improves subject and background consistency matrics across various methods, offering a practical solution for low-cost, high-consistency long video generation.

PaperID: 3441

Authors:Jie Qiu, Dizuo Cao, Linwei Dai, Xin Li, Fan Yang, Dong Yu, Changying Wang, Zongheng Wen, Youqin Chen, Jianzhang Chen

Affiliations: Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Beijing Jiaotong University, Xiamen University Tan Kah Kee College, Fujian University of Technology

Title: Beyond Euclidean Assumptions: Geometry-Aware Adaptive Routing for Remote Sensing Segmentation

Abstract:
Remote sensing imagery poses a distinct challenge for semantic segmentation due to its inherent fractal complexity and the diversity of geometric structures present in realworld geospatial scenes. Euclidean-based models typically assume spatial uniformity; however, such assumptions often break down when confronted with objects exhibiting markedly different structural characteristics—such as roads versus vegetation—thereby complicating the feature representation process. Hyperbolic space offers a theoretically grounded alternative for modeling such hierarchical and heterogeneous patterns, yet fully replacing Euclidean geometry incurs significant computational overhead. We therefore introduce Geometry-Aware Adaptive Routing (GAAR), a novel module that facilitates geometry-aware routing by dynamically allocating high-level features to either Euclidean or Hyperbolic subspaces through a learnable binary gating mechanism, informed by structural priors learned during training. To further promote routing stability and geometric consistency, we introduce Geometry-Aware Deterministic Regularization (GADR), a regularization strategy that encourages confident, structure-aligned assignments. GAAR is plug-and-play and integrates seamlessly into existing segmentation architectures. Experiments on three challenging Remote Sensing Image Semantic Segmentation (RSISS) benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, particularly in geometrically complex regions, offering a scalable and effective solution to the limitations of purely Euclidean modeling.

PaperID: 3442

Authors:Boya Shi, Thomas N Guan, Yi Xiaodong

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology

Title: Edge Consistency for 4D Gaussian Splatting in Dynamic Scene Rendering

Abstract:
Existing dynamic scene rendering methods often struggle to preserve sharp edges and maintain temporal consistency. To address these challenges, we introduce Edge 4D Gaussian Splatting (Edge4DGS), a realtime rendering framework that renders fine-grained geometry from sparse monocular inputs in dynamic scenes. Edge4DGS proposes a hybrid geometric representation that augments Gaussian primitives with convex hulls, enabling accurate modeling of hard surfaces and complex boundaries. To enhance spatial precision, we introduce edge consistency regularization leveraging optical flow, guiding Gaussian distributions to align with true object contours. To enforce temporal coherence, we extend the regularization from discrete time steps to continuous unit intervals, enabling accurate motion modeling and reducing flickering artifacts. A two-stage coarse-to-fine optimization further improves geometric fidelity while preserving computational efficiency. Extensive experiments on monocular and multi-view motion datasets demonstrate that Edge4DGS achieves real-time, high-resolution rendering and consistently surpasses state-of-the-art methods, reducing LPIPS by 56.25%.

PaperID: 3443

Authors:Shiyan Su, Ruyi Zha, Danli Shi, Hongdong Li, Xuelian Cheng

Affiliations: Department of Data Science & Artificial Intelligence (DSAI), Monash University, The Australian National University, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: DiffNR: Diffusion-Enhanced Neural Representation Optimization for Sparse-View 3D Tomographic Reconstruction

Abstract:
Neural representations (NRs), such as neural fields and 3D Gaussians, effectively model volumetric data in computed tomography (CT) but suffer from severe artifacts under sparseview settings. To address this, we propose DiffNR, a novel framework that enhances NR optimization with diffusion priors. At its core is SliceFixer, a single-step diffusion model designed to correct artifacts in degraded slices. We integrate specialized conditioning layers into the network and develop tailored data curation strategies to support model finetuning. During reconstruction, SliceFixer periodically generates pseudo-reference volumes, providing auxiliary 3D perceptual supervision to fix underconstrained regions. Compared to prior methods that embed CT solvers into time-consuming iterative denoising, our repair-and-augment strategy avoids frequent diffusion model queries, leading to better runtime performance. Extensive experiments show that DiffNR improves PSNR by 3.99 dB on average, generalizes well across domains, and maintains efficient optimization.

PaperID: 3444

Authors:Jianchi Sun, Fei Luo, Wenzhuo Fan, Yu Jiang, Chunxia Xiao

Affiliations: Wuhan University

Title: HumanPro: Single-view 3D Clothed Human Reconstruction with Progressive Normal Guidance

Abstract:
Reconstructing finegrained geometry of clothed human from single-view image is a challenging task, particularly in accurately recovering complex shapes and generating clothes details. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach named HumanPro, which estimates high-quality human normals via a generative model, and progressively deforms a parametric body into the final clothed human mesh guided by normals. First, we propose a geometry-aware latent diffusion model with a normal enhancer to estimate high-quality human normals from four views. Then, we propose a progressive mesh optimization consisting of shape-aware deformation alignment and global-to-patch detail refinement for human mesh reconstruction. The shape-aware deformation alignment applies image morphing to learn the shape-level gap of normals, addressing large-scale deformation of complex clothes. It can recover the overall silhouette of a clothed human, and serves as an initialization for the global-to-patch detail refinement. Our detail refinement combines global and patch-wise optimization strategies to iteratively produce the clothed human mesh by minimizing the pixel-level difference of normals. This way effectively recovers fine-grained details while avoiding local minima. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HumanPro can deal with various challenging scenarios and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 3445

Authors:Zijun Tan, Chuan Fu, Tan Guo, Zhixiong Nan, Pengzhan Zhou, Xinggan Peng, Fulin Luo

Affiliations: Chongqing University, CMCU Engineering Co.

Title: PGMamba: A Physical Model-Guided Global Mamba for Underwater Image Enhancement

Abstract:
Underwater image enhancement (UIE) aims to address image degradation caused by water absorption and scattering effects. Despite significant progress in deep learningbased UIE methods, existing approaches still face key challenges due to the neglect of physical imaging principle. Moreover, while current Mamba models achieve global modeling via multi-directional scanning, their local sequential strategy lacks sufficient global context. To this end, we propose a novel Physical Model-Guided Global Mamba (PGMamba) that combines the efficient sequential modeling capability of Mamba with underwater imaging physical model. Specifically, we first design a Spatial-Aware Global Mamba (SAGMamba) that achieves efficient long-range dependency modeling through a spatial-aware ranking strategy with global context information. Second, we develop a Physical Model-Guided Feed-Forward Network (PMGFFN) that explicitly incorporates underwater optical imaging principles into the network architecture. Extensive experimental results and comprehensive ablation studies demonstrate the outstanding performance and importance of our proposed method.

PaperID: 3446

Authors:Haoyu Tang, Tianyuan Liang, Han Jiang, Xuesong Liu, Qinghai Zheng, Yupeng Hu

Affiliations: Shandong University, Xi'an Jiaotong University, University of Glasgow, Fuzhou University

Title: Decompose and Conquer: Compositional Reasoning for Zero-Shot Temporal Action Localization

Abstract:
Current ZeroShot Temporal Action Localization (ZSTAL) methods, whether training-based or training-free ones, still predominantly rely on a single, unified query to localize an entire action. This unified representation is fundamentally ill-suited for complex real-world activities, as it fails to capture their internal compositional structure and adapt to dynamic, multi-stage variations across videos. To address this, we regard ZSTAL as a compositional reasoning task and introduce CASCADE, a Context-Aware Staged Action DEcomposition framework. Inspired by the human cognitive process of perceiving context, decomposing events, and reconstructing instances, CASCADE follows a training-free pipeline. It first perceives the video's context by leveraging a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to both filter out irrelevant actions and then generate a rich, video-specific caption for each action present in the video. An LLM then decomposes this caption into multiple, temporally ordered stages, which serve as fine-grained queries to guide the MLLM in estimating frame-level confidence scores. Recognizing that this decomposition can fragment a single action, a novel hierarchical merging logic then reconstructs complete instances by intelligently fusing these preliminary temporal segments based on their semantic progression and coherence. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on THUMOS14 and ActivityNet-1.3 show that CASCADE not only sets a new state-of-the-art among training-free methods but, most notably, significantly outperforms all prior training-based approaches on ActivityNet-1.3.

PaperID: 3447

Authors:Hongyu Tao, Shuaiying Hou, Junheng Fang, Mingyao Shi, Weiwei Xu

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University

Title: Mimic-X: A Large-Scale Motion Dataset via Fast Physics-Based Controller Adaptation

Abstract:
Large and highquality motion datasets are essential for advancing human motion modeling. However, limitations of existing motion datasets, such as insufficient scale or inadequate quality, significantly hinder the progress of this field. To address these limitations, we introduce Mimic-X, a large-scale (52 hours), physically plausible 3D human motion dataset. To construct Mimic-X, we develop an adaptive option framework that controls a physically simulated character to imitate low-quality motions extracted from a vast collection of online videos. Specifically, we first apply hierarchical clustering to group motions into clusters, and then train option policies to mimic motions sampled from these clusters. Considering the noisy nature of low-quality motions, we utilize a separate encoder for each cluster to map the noisy motions within the cluster into a compact latent space. This significantly enhances the quality of the imitated motions while accelerating the learning process. Subsequently, we employ dynamic programming as a meta-policy to efficiently organize the option policies to generate complete motion clips. Finally, we perform fine-tuning to each motion sequence to further refine motion quality. The proposed adaptive option framework outperforms state-of-the-art human motion recovery methods across various evaluation metrics, demonstrating that motions in Mimic-X exhibit higher quality and greater physical plausibility. Furthermore, experimental results show that Mimic-X enhances the performance of motion generation methods, verifying its effectiveness for motion modeling tasks.

PaperID: 3448

Authors:Xuan Tong, Yuxuan Lin, Junxiong Lin, Xinji Mai, Haoran Wang, Zeng Tao, Yang Yao, Ruofan Wang, Wenqiang Zhang

Affiliations: Fudan University, University of Hong Kong

Title: CADiff: Context-Aware Diffusion for Controllable Anomaly Generation in Anomaly Detection

Abstract:
Generating anomalies is a crucial method to enhance detection and classification performance by expanding anomalous data repository. However, existing anomaly generation methods overlook the intrinsic entanglement between diverse anomaly types and product structures, leading to semantic ambiguity. We propose CADiff, a contextaware generation framework that reframes anomalies as compositional perturbations. Firstly, we propose Context-aware Text Prompt (CTP), a mechanism which contains multiple tokens that characterize anomalies and products separately to enhance the contextual consistency of generated images and refine the local variability of anomalies. Secondly, we develop Self-adaptive Spatial Control (SSC), a self-adaptive interaction design that mitigates anomaly leakage or missing phenomena. Thirdly, we introduce Intensity-controllable Attention Re-weighting (IAR), an inference scheduling scheme with the ability to amplify or attenuate abnormal semantic effects to improve generation diversity. Extensive experiments on MVTec AD and VisA datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over state-of-the-art methods in both realism and diversity of the generated results, and significantly improve the performance of downstream tasks, including anomaly detection, anomaly localization, and anomaly classification tasks.

PaperID: 3449

Authors:Jingyang Wang, Hengyue Bi, Jingchao Cao, Feng Gao, Junyu Dong

Affiliations: Ocean University of China

Title: SEA-PACE: Semi-Supervised Underwater Image Enhancement via Gaussian Process–Assisted Self-Paced Learning

Abstract:
The scarcity of paired data severely limits the performance and generalization of learningbased underwater image enhancement (UIE) methods. This challenge is particularly prominent in scenes with complex degradations. Semi-supervised learning has emerged as a promising solution by enabling the utilization of large-scale unlabeled data. However, its effectiveness is limited by the use of static, model-agnostic metrics for pseudo-label reliability assessment. To address this, we propose SEA-PACE, a novel semi-supervised framework that integrates model-aware uncertainty modeling and self-paced consistency learning to fully exploit unlabeled data for UIE. Specifically, we design a Model-Aware Reliability Estimator (MARE) that quantifies the uncertainty of the teacher model's predictions through Gaussian Process Regression in latent feature space. The resulting uncertainty is then transformed into reliability weights via a rank-based mapping. Additionally, we apply the Self-Paced Consistency Learning (SPCL) strategy that employs a loss-aware schedule to dynamically prioritize high-confidence pseudo-labels, gradually incorporating more challenging samples during training. Extensive experiments on several public UIE benchmarks demonstrate that SEA-PACE consistently surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both visual quality and generalization capability.

PaperID: 3450

Authors:Luyao Wang, Chuxin Wang, Qiao Li, Tianzhu Zhang

Affiliations: Deep Space Exploration Laboratory, University of Science and Technology of China

Title: PointChain: Learning Generalizable Point Cloud Representations via Structural Chain Modeling

Abstract:
Recent advances in point cloud analysis have increasingly leveraged largescale unlabeled data through self-supervised representation learning. Autoregressive models based on next-token prediction have shown strong performance, but they usually model point clouds as linear sequences, ignoring their inherent spatial structure. To address this limitation, we propose PointChain, a novel autoregressive paradigm inspired by human perception mechanisms, designed to better align with the structural properties of point cloud. Specifically, we introduce structural chain encoding, which models the understanding process as a global-to-local structural chain inference, preserving spatial relationships throughout the prediction sequence. During pre-training, we design two auxiliary tasks: a next-scale prediction task that encourages cross-scale reasoning, and a scale-level contrastive learning task that promotes semantic consistency across scales. These components guide the model to learn more discriminative and generalizable point cloud representations. Experiments on multiple benchmarks, using both Transformer and Mamba backbones, validate the effectiveness of our approach. PointChain achieves state-of-the-art performance on several downstream tasks, including 93.75% accuracy on the hardest split of ScanObjectNN without voting strategy.

PaperID: 3451

Authors:Zhijie Wang, Lin Wang, Zhenyu Wen, Cong Wang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Hangzhou Dianzi University

Title: Beyond Single-Point Perturbation: A Hierarchical, Manifold-Aware Approach to Diffusion Attacks

Abstract:
Latent Diffusion Models have become a powerful tool for generating highfidelity unrestricted adversarial examples. However, the existing methods typically perturb only the initial latent or rely on prompt engineering, which is ill-suited to the iterative nature of the diffusion process, plus optimization instability due to external text prompts and cumulative drift that push the adversarial images off the data manifold. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical attack framework that operates in alignment with the model's generative manifold and leverages intermediate denoising states to maximize attack transferability and visual fidelity. Extensive experiments show that the proposed attack improves adversarial transferability by 10-20% against a diverse set of normally-trained models and achieves over 10.5% higher success rate against adversarially-defended models, while simultaneously enhancing visual quality by 1.0-1.2 FID reduction and 16.7% LPIPS improvements.

PaperID: 3452

Authors:Zhaoyang Wei, Guoliang Wang, Guohua Gao, Yanchao Hao, Mingda Li, Wenchao Ding, Xi Chen, Shizhu He, Xuehui Yu

Affiliations: University of Sydney, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese academy of science

Title: Seeing Is Believing: Grounding Long-Video Understanding in Spatio-Temporal Visual Evidence

Abstract:
Although Vision Language Models (VLMs) have excelled at image and video understanding, applying them to hourlong videos is held back by two interrelated challenges: exorbitant computational expense and a qualitative breakdown in long-term temporal reasoning. Thus, models tend to generate answers based on speculation instead of solid visual facts, causing both factually incorrect and plausible hallucinations. This problem is compounded by current benchmarks that, by only emphasizing final answers, lack an effective mechanism to check whether reasoning is substantiated by specific visual evidence. This makes it hard to differentiate between true understanding and pretend comprehension, inhibiting targeted model refinement. To address these interrelated challenges of model fragility and evaluation weakness, we adopt a twofold strategy. First, we present EV²-Bench, a large-scale benchmark that breaks new ground by an evaluation paradigm built upon spatio-temporal visual evidence, forcing models to justify answers with checkable hints. Second, we put forward DynamicSelect, an adaptive token compression system that efficiently condenses salient information by a dynamic semantic selector and a hierarchical compression strategy. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that DynamicSelect significantly outperforms the baselines on EV²-Bench as well as other public benchmarks. Our study offers not only a more effective approach to long-video understanding but also a more stringent evaluation paradigm, indicating the way toward more robust models.

PaperID: 3453

Authors:Changsong Wen, Zelin Peng, Yu Huang, Wei Shen

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: Efficient Segmentation with Multimodal Large Language Model via Token Routing

Abstract:
Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in addressing openworld segmentation tasks. However, the substantial computational cost of the LLM components presents a significant challenge, especially in segmentation tasks, where efficiency has long been a central concern. Existing efficient MLLM approaches typically reduce computation cost by pruning visual tokens in the early layers, as they account for the majority of the input sequence. Despite their efficiency, this is incompatible with dense prediction tasks such as segmentation, since removing visual tokens leads to the loss of essential object parts and spatial details. To better understand the roles of visual tokens in segmentation, we analyze the attention weights of both image and mask tokens within LLM. We find that image tokens are important throughout all layers, whereas mask tokens only attend to image tokens at deeper layers. Based on the observation, we build an efficient segmentation framework based on MLLMs by introducing a sophisticated token routing strategy. This strategy dynamically determines when and how different tokens participate in computation: For mask tokens, they are only inserted at deeper layers of the LLM to reduce redundant computation, since they rarely attend to image tokens in early layers; For image tokens, only a small number of them, named proxies, are updated via full feedforward network (FFN) computation, while the update of the remaining tokens is guided by these proxies, i.e., efficiently computed through a lightweight projector applied on the difference of the proxies during their update. Our method achieves a 1.5× acceleration over the original LLM process by reducing its FLOPs to 56%, while maintaining the same segmentation performance.

PaperID: 3454

Authors:Wei Wu, Lei Meng, Zhuang Qi, Zixuan Li, Yachong Zhang, Xiaoshuo Yan, Xiangxu Meng

Affiliations: Shandong University

Title: Explicit Modeling of Causal Factors and Confounders for Image Classification

Abstract:
Causal inference has emerged as a promising approach for identifying decisive semantic factors and eliminating spurious correlations in visual representation learning. However, most existing methods rely on latent, datadriven confounder modeling, normally attributing the source of bias to background information while neglecting object-level semantic confusions that commonly occur in complex scenes. This limits their effectiveness in disentangling causal factors from confounding semantics. To address this challenge, we propose an explicit modeling approach for both causal factors and confounders, termed Explicit Modeling Causal Model (EMCM). The proposed framework consists of three key components. The Features Stability Estimation module explicitly models the relationship between visual semantics and class labels by leveraging clustering patterns to perform class-aware separation of causal and confounding factors. It produces class-specific causal factors and confounding factors linked to ambiguous categories. Subsequently, the Discriminative Features Enhancing module integrates causal factors into fused patch features via front-door intervention for stable semantics. In parallel, the Explicit Confounder Modeling and Debiasing Module learns confounders under clear label guidance and derives debiased context features by TDE modeling. This framework leverages two complementary causal perspectives to construct a unified semantic representation that facilitates improved generalization. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate that EMCM effectively disentangles causal and confounding factors in complex scenarios, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art causal debiasing methods and text-guided methods in all metrics.

PaperID: 3455

Authors:Yi Wu, Jingtian Li, Shangfei Wang, Guoming Li, Meng Mao, Linxiang Tan

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, China Merchants Bank

Title: Learning Knowledge from Textual Descriptions for 3D Human Pose Estimation

Abstract:
Mainstream 3D human pose estimation methods directly predict 3D coordinates of joints from 2D keypoints, suffering from severe depth ambiguity. Pose textual descriptions contain abundant semantic information, which facilitates the model to learn the spatial relationship among different body parts, partially alleviating this issue. Leveraging this insight, we propose a 3D human pose estimation method assisted by textual descriptions. Specifically, we utilize an automatic captioning pipeline to generate textual descriptions of 3D poses based on spatial relations among joints. These descriptions include details regarding angles, distances, relative positions, pitch\&roll and groundcontacts. Subsequently, text features are extracted from these descriptions using a language model, while a 3D human pose estimation model extracts pose features. Aligning the pose features with the text features allows for a more targeted optimization of the estimation model. Therefore, we systematically introduce three alignment approaches to effectively align features extracted by two models operating in entirely different domains. Our method incorporates prior knowledge derived from the textual descriptions into the estimation model and can be seamlessly applied to various existing framework. Experimental results on the Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP datasets demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 3456

Authors:Zhongze Wu, Xiu Su, Feng Yang, Shan You, Jun Long, Yueyi Luo

Affiliations: Central South University, Southeast University, SenseTime Research

Title: Injection Without Distortion: Geometrically Constrained Knowledge Enhancement for Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) are widely used in tasks like Open-Vocabulary Object Detection and zero-shot Classification, owing to their powerful generalization. However, recent research reveals that VLMs exhibit significant performance instability when tasked with recognizing concepts at varying granularities (e.g., ``animal'' vs. ``dog''). Prevailing methods inject external knowledge from Large Language Models, but this unconstrained approach distorts the VLM's inherent hierarchical orthogonal geometry, leading to performance collapse on general concepts. To address this, we introduce GeCoin, an innovative Geometrically Constrained framework that safely enhances existing VLMs with external knowledge for improved hierarchical understanding, without additional training. By projecting knowledge into the null-space of a query concept's feature space, GeCoin mathematically guarantees the preservation of general knowledge while integrating specialized information. Extensive experiments across large-scale benchmarks, diverse VLMs, and knowledge from various LLMs (e.g., GPT-3.5, Claude-3, Gemini-Pro) show that GeCoin boosts performance by an average of 3.9% over the strongest baseline—crucially eradicating performance collapse on general concepts.

PaperID: 3457

Authors:Yuchen Xie, Yufeng Xie, Hanyu He, Yue Huang, Lijuan Sun, Hengyi Ren

Affiliations: Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: FCMO: A Flow-Curv Mamba Operator for Large-Scale 3D Vehicle Aerodynamics

Abstract:
Largescale three dimensional vehicle aerodynamics prediction poses critical computational challenges in modern automotive design, where traditional CFD methods require prohibitive simulation times that conflict with rapid design iteration demands. While recent neural operator approaches show promise, existing methods struggle with computational complexity in dense meshes and fail to preserve essential topological information when processing large-scale point clouds. We propose FCMO, a physics-aware neural operator that integrates fluid mechanics principles with selective state space modeling for efficient large-scale vehicle aerodynamics. FCMO introduces four synergistic components: FlowCurv Anchor Sampling that intelligently selects mesh nodes based on normalized local curvature and windward sensitivity. Additionally, dual-scale physics-aware position encoding with adaptive k-NN construction transforms 3D irregular meshes into causality-preserving sequences through feature-guided serpentine scanning. The model integrates a flow-aware Mamba processor incorporating selective mechanisms that dynamically modulate state transitions based on wall distance and flow characteristics. Finally, a physics-constrained decoder enforces conservation laws through mixed weighted interpolation. Extensive experiments on Ahmed-Body and DrivAerNet benchmarks demonstrate that FCMO achieves consistent state-of-the-art performance with 5.2% improvement in surface pressure prediction, 9.3% enhancement in wall shear stress estimation, and 11.4% boost in drag coefficient accuracy, while maintaining superior computational efficiency with 9.4% fewer FLOPs and 9.9% reduced memory usage compared to existing methods.

PaperID: 3458

Authors:Junlin Xu, Jincan Li, Feifei Cui, Zhuang Zhang, Jialiang Yang, Shuting Jin, Qiangguo Jin, Yajie Meng

Affiliations: Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Hainan Normal University, Hainan University, Wuhan Textile University, Geneis (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Northwestern Polytechnical University

Title: EccoMamba: Enhanced Cross-hierarchical Continuity Orthogonal Mamba for Medical Image Segmentation

Abstract:
Medical image segmentation plays a crucial role in clinical diagnosis, lesion quantification, and preoperative planning. However, existing Mambabased architectures, which rely on fixed-direction sequence modeling and flatten images into one-dimensional (1D) sequences, struggle to capture hierarchical anatomical features and spatial dependencies, thereby limiting their representational capacity for complex medical structures. To address these limitations, we propose EccoMamba (Enhanced Cross-hierarchical Continuity Orthogonal Mamba), a U-shaped encoder--decoder framework designed for medical image segmentation. In the encoder's downsampling path, we introduce a Hierarchical Aggregation Enhancement (HAE) module that integrates multi-scale convolutions with hierarchical attention mechanisms. The attention branch further incorporates cross-channel interactions, allowing the model to selectively enhance semantically relevant features while suppressing irrelevant background responses. For skip connections, we design a Structural Continuity Orthogonal (SCO) module to preserve spatial continuity by modeling cross-dimensional dependencies via orthogonal Axial Shifts (AS), thereby mitigating directional bias and improving anatomical consistency. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets---ISIC 2018, ISIC 2017, Synapse, and ACDC---show that EccoMamba consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both segmentation accuracy and structural fidelity.

PaperID: 3459

Authors:Shijie Xu, Qiulei Dong

Title: CAG-GS: Consistent Anchor Guided Gaussian Splatting for Large-scale Scene Rendering

Abstract:
Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting for scene rendering has attracted much attention in computer vision and graphics, but generally suffers from large burdens of both computation and storage when handling largescale scenes. Some existing works in literature employ a divide-and-conquer strategy for alleviating this issue, where an input large scene is divided into lots of local blocks, and each block is handled separately. However, such a strategy generally leads to limited performance due to the inevitable inconsistency among the 3D Gaussians from different blocks. To address this problem, we propose a Consistent Anchor Guided Gaussian Splatting for large-scale scene rendering under the divide-and-conquer strategy, called CAG-GS. In CAG-GS, a set of learnable anchors for each local block is injected with the corresponding semantic features from a pre-trained semantic segmentation model SAM2 through an explored semantic mapping module, and then these anchors are used to predict the attributes of 3D Gaussians. Moreover, we explore a coarse-to-fine training strategy for CAG-GS, where each local block is optimized independently while being guided by globally consistent semantics. Extensive experimental results on five large-scale scenes demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over five state-of-the-art methods in most cases.

PaperID: 3460

Authors:Feng Xue, Baochao Zhu, Wei Jia, Shujie Li, Yu Li, Jinrui Zhang, Shengeng Tang, Dan Guo

Affiliations: Hefei University of Technology

Title: LinProVSR: Linguistics-Knowledge Guided Progressive Disambiguation Network for Visual Speech Recognition

Abstract:
Visual Speech Recognition (VSR), commonly known as lipreading, enables the recognition of spoken text by analyzing lip visual features. Due to the subtlety of lip movements, its recognition is much harder than other motion recognition tasks. Existing VSR models face the challenge of viseme ambiguity when processing phonemes with similar pronunciations—multiple phonemes share similar viseme features, leading to a notable drop in lipreading accuracy. To address this issue, this study proposes a LinguisticsKnowledge Guided Progressive Disambiguation Network for Visual Speech Recognition(LinProVSR) framework. First, an ambiguous sample set is constructed based on linguistic knowledge to provide supervisory signals for the model's training. Then, a Progressive Contrastive Disambiguation Network (PCDN) is designed, which progressively enhances the model's ability to capture the subtle viseme differences corresponding to similar phonemes through viseme-phoneme contrastive disambiguation in the encoding stage and text contrastive disambiguation in the decoding stage. Furthermore, we pioneer the Ambiguous Word Error Rate (AWER) metric specifically for evaluating recognition of phonetically ambiguous text, and verify the effectiveness of the proposed method on multiple public datasets, achieving a significant breakthrough especially in distinguishing visually similar phonemes.

PaperID: 3461

Authors:Yue Yang, Song Tang, Qijun Zhao, Hailun Zhang, Xiwen Wang, Zijian Deng

Affiliations: Sichuan University

Title: SAR-DisentDM: A Semantic-Disentangled Diffusion Model for Limited-Data SAR Image Synthesis

Abstract:
The high cost of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data acquisition motivates SAR image generation research. However, the data scarcity and SAR's inherent azimuth sensitivity make generative models suffer from severe azimuth overfitting. Most existing methods require supplementary data to work effectively, limiting their practicality. In this paper, we propose SARDisentDM, a novel semantic-disentangled diffusion model for limited-data SAR image generation, without requiring any auxiliary resources. We develop a physics-aware diffusion architecture that explicitly models semantic knowledge of SAR images, including intrinsic characteristics, contextual diversity, and measurement randomness. A key innovation is the attention-guided semantic disentanglement (AGSD) module, designed to decouple category-specific features from azimuth-variable scattering patterns. This is achieved by aid of a dual disentangled loss with time-step-adaptive optimization. Furthermore, we introduce an azimuth angle perturbation augmentation (AAPA) mechanism, to enhance the model's robustness to minor azimuth angle errors. Extensive evaluations validate that SAR-DisentDM enables controllable SAR image synthesis with designated attributes, significantly improving representation and generalization abilities under limited data. Synthetic imagery from our approach boosts automatic target recognition (ATR) accuracy beyond state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 3462

Authors:Mingze Yao, Zhiying Jiang, Xianping Fu, Huibing Wang

Affiliations: Dalian Maritime University

Title: Conditional Prompt Learning via Degradation Perception for Underwater Image Enhancement

Abstract:
Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) focuses on improving visual quality from various underwater scenes. Existing methods simplistically treat various degradations as homogeneous, disregarding their intrinsic connections and causing models to blindly learn, resulting in conflicting optimization goals and visual distortions. To address above limitations, we propose a Conditional Prompt Learning via Degradation Perception (CPLDP) model, which employs conditional prompt as degradation perception priors and guides underwater image enhancement. Specifically, we show that the natural language prompts not only promote distinguishing different degraded images, but also aid in exploring more details with semantic information. Therefore, our method generates five key degradation prompts (green/blue/greenblue color casts, uneven illumination and haze) with conditional prompt learning. Subsequently, considering the intrinsic relationships among different degradations, we employ degradation perceptions as priors and fine-tune the learning strategy to enhance underwater images. During training, an adaptive loss function with multi-degradations is designed, allowing it to effectively handle the task conflicts among multiple underwater degradations. Additionally, we conduct a human visual-based underwater dataset with various degradation types by subjective statistics. Extensive experiments on both full-reference and non-reference datasets demonstrate that our CPLDP can achieve better visual results and outperforms state-of-the-art UIE methods across various degradation scenarios.

PaperID: 3463

Authors:Yousef Yeganeh, Goktug Guvercin, Nassir Navab, Azade Farshad

Affiliations: Technical University of Munich

Title: Conformable Convolution for Topologically Constrained Learning of Complex Anatomical Structures

Abstract:
While conventional computer vision emphasizes pixellevel and feature-based objectives, medical image analysis of intricate biological structures necessitates explicit representation of their complex topological properties. Despite their successes, deep learning models often struggle to accurately capture the connectivity and continuity of fine, sometimes pixel-thin, yet critical structures due to their reliance on implicit learning from data. To address this challenge, we introduce Conformable Convolution, a novel convolutional layer designed to explicitly impose topological consistency. Conformable Convolution learns adaptive kernel offsets that focus on regions of high topological significance within an image. This prioritization is guided by our proposed Topological Posterior Generator (TPG) module, which leverages persistent homology. The TPG module identifies key topological features and guides the convolutional layers by applying persistent homology to feature maps transformed into cubical complexes. Unlike existing approaches that are merely aware of topology, our method explicitly constrains the learning process to ensure topological correctness. The proposed modules are architecture-agnostic, enabling them to be integrated seamlessly into various architectures. We showcase the effectiveness of our framework in the segmentation task, where preserving the interconnectedness of structures is critical. The results on three diverse datasets demonstrate that our framework effectively preserves the topology both quantitatively and qualitatively.

PaperID: 3464

Authors:Yeonghun Yoon, Hojoon Jung, Jaeyoon Lee, Taegwan Kim, Gyuhyun Kim, Jongwon Choi

Affiliations: Chung-Ang University

Title: Through the Water: Refractive Gaussian Splatting for Water Surface Scenes

Abstract:
Scenes with water surfaces present a significant challenge for Gaussian Splatting due to the simultaneous presence of refraction and reflection, as well as the difficulty of accurately estimating the geometry of transparent water surfaces. To address this, we propose a novel framework for reconstructing scenes involving both reflection and refraction caused by water surfaces. The water surface is modeled as a trainable plane, and 2D Gaussian ray tracing is applied to account for refraction through the water. We extend 2D Gaussian Splatting by introducing a soft mask parameter and a dual set of Gaussian primitives, which handle both reflected and refracted effects. Our method achieves stateof-the-art performance on newly constructed water surface datasets, including both synthetic and real scenes, and significantly outperforms prior approaches in water-interacting regions. Furthermore, we demonstrate the editability of our model by manipulating the index of refraction to suppress or modify refractive effects, enabling scene transformations into different liquids.

PaperID: 3465

Authors:Shaofeng You, Tianle Miao, Qihang Chen, Xin Li, Zhuo Cheng, Dapeng Luo

Affiliations: School of Mechanical Engineering and Electronic Information, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan China, Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd of Chinese Construction Third Engineering Bureau

Title: KPDM: Key Phrase Dynamic Masking for Robust Text-to-Image Person Retrieval

Abstract:
Textto-image person re-identification (TIReID) aims to retrieve the most relevant pedestrian images from an image gallery based on natural language descriptions. Recent studies have achieved significant performance improvements by leveraging Masked Language Modeling (MLM) to align fine-grained information through local matching. However, in the text feature extraction, randomly masking text tokens may disrupt the semantic relationships between these local tokens, leading to feature misalignment; on the other hand, from an image feature perspective, redundant patches in pedestrian images hinder the information interaction across modalities. Moreover, the presence of noisy image-text pairs further complicates the learning process, as the model may be misled into recognizing incorrect patterns. To address these issues, we propose a robust fine-grained local alignment framework based on Key Phrase Dynamic Mask (KPDM). First, we strengthen the semantic relationships between text tokens by implementing a "adjective + noun'' phrase-level masking strategy, and design a frequency-based masked language loss (FMLM) to supervise fine-grained semantic-level local alignment. Second, we integrate cross-layer importance estimation to highlight key pedestrian image representations while removing redundant image features. Third, we propose a trusted consensus partitioning mechanism, utilizing intra-identity image-text similarity distributions to identify noisy pairs, enhancing the model robustness. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves 67.95% Rank-1 and 51.88% mAP on the RSTPReid dataset, exceeding the previous state-of-the-art by 2.6% and 1%. Furthermore, KPDM achieves Rank-1 accuracies of 75.97% on the CUHK-PEDES dataset and 67.78% on the ICFG-PEDES dataset, outperforming earlier methods.

PaperID: 3466

Authors:Yanpu Yu, Zhaoxin Shi, Hanqing Zhao, Tianyi Wei, Wenbo Zhou, Nenghai Yu

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, Nanyang Technological University

Title: EARG-Net: Edge-Aware Reconstruction-Guided Network for Image Manipulation Detection and Localization

Abstract:
Recent advances in image editing tools, particularly those used in contentaware retouching and object-level manipulation, have raised significant concerns regarding the authenticity of digital images. While many Image Manipulation Detection and Localization (IMDL) methods have been proposed, they often struggle with subtle forgeries, intricate boundary artifacts, and manipulations generated by unseen editing techniques. In this work, we propose a novel edge-aware framework that leverages the strong natural image priors of pre-trained inpainting models to harmonize manipulated regions. By guiding the inpainting process with generated edge-aware masks, our method reconstructs tampered areas using surrounding context, yielding perceptually coherent results. The pixel-wise residual between the original and reconstructed images reveals manipulation-sensitive inconsistencies—particularly around editing boundaries—thereby enabling accurate and generalizable detection and localization. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, especially in challenging scenarios involving realistic and finely retouched image forgeries.

PaperID: 3467

Authors:Evelyn Zhang, Fufu Yu, Aoqi Wu, Zichen Wen, Ke Yan, Shouhong Ding, Biqing Qi, Linfeng Zhang

Affiliations: Tencent YouTu Lab, Tongji University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai AI Laboratory

Title: D²Pruner: Debiased Importance and Structural Diversity for MLLM Token Pruning

Abstract:
Processing long visual token sequences poses a significant computational burden on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). While token pruning offers a path to acceleration, we find that current methods, while adequate for general understanding, catastrophically fail on finegrained localization tasks. We attribute this failure to the inherent flaws of the two prevailing strategies: importance-based methods suffer from a strong positional bias, an inherent model artifact that distracts from semantic content, while diversity-based methods exhibit structural blindness, disregarding the user's prompt and spatial redundancy. To address this, we introduce D²Pruner, a framework that rectifies these issues by uniquely combining debiased importance with a structural pruning mechanism. Our method first secures a core set of the most critical tokens as pivots based on a debiased attention score. It then performs a Maximal Independent Set (MIS) selection on the remaining tokens, which are modeled on a hybrid graph where edges signify spatial proximity and semantic similarity. This process iteratively preserves the most important and available token while removing its neighbors, ensuring that the supplementary tokens are chosen to maximize importance and diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that D²Pruner achieves exceptional efficiency and fidelity.

PaperID: 3468

Authors:Hong Zhang, Yixuan Lyu, Hanyang Liu, Jianbo Song, Ding Yuan, Yifan Yang

Affiliations: Beihang University

Title: Towards Explainable Video Camouflaged Object Detection: SAM2 with Eventstream-Inspired Data

Abstract:
Video Camouflaged Object Detection (VCOD) poses significant challenges due to the subtle appearance of camouflaged objects, especially under dynamic motion and occlusion. Existing methods predominantly rely on optical flow or blackbox features for motion modeling, which often entail substantial computational costs and suffer from limited interpretability. Inspired by the human strategy of identifying abnormal movements between frames and the principle of event camera image formation, we propose an eventstream-inspired dual-branch framework for VCOD. Specifically, we design an eventstream-like data extraction module to capture pixel-level motion variations, effectively distinguishing object motion from background dynamics. This event-based representation is integrated into SAM2 through a dual-branch memory-augmented framework, consisting of Time Bridge Attention and Visual Bridge Attention, enabling joint modeling of motion and appearance cues. In addition, we introduce a Prompt Embedding Generator to eliminate the need for human-provided interactive prompts, facilitating fully automatic VCOD. Extensive experiments on MoCA-Mask and CAD2016 demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving both superior segmentation accuracy and interpretable motion modeling. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to incorporate eventstream-inspired representations into the VCOD task.

PaperID: 3469

Authors:Jialong Zhang, Yachao Zhang, Yao Wu, Jiangming Shi, Fangyong Wang, Yanyun Qu

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing, Ministry of Education of China, Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Xiamen University, School of Informatics, China Fuzhou University, Hanjiang National Laboratory

Title: xMHashSeg: Cross-modal Hash Learning for Training-free Unsupervised LiDAR Semantic Segmentation

Abstract:
3D semantic segmentation serves as a fundamental component in many applications, such as autonomous driving and medical image analysis. Although recent methods have advanced the field, adapting these methods to new environments or object categories without extensive retraining remains a significant challenge. To address this, we introduce xMHashSeg, a novel trainingfree cross-modal LiDAR semantic segmentation framework. xMHashSeg leverages foundation models and non-parametric network to extract features from 2D images and 3D point clouds, subsequently integrating these features through hash learning. Specifically, We develop point-SANN, a novel self-adaption non-parametric network that can extract robust 3D features from raw point clouds, while 2D features are directly extracted through the foundation model DINOv2. To reconcile inconsistencies across different modals, we introduce a Hash Code Learning Module that projects all information into a common hash space, learning a consistent hash code that enhances feature integration. Additionally, depth maps are utilized as an intermediary form between 2D and 3D data to facilitate convergence during hash code learning. Our experimental results on various multi-modality datasets demonstrate that xMHashSeg outperforms zero-shot learning approaches and achieve performance close to that of unsupervised domain adaptation and test-time adaptation methods, without requiring any annotations or additional training.

PaperID: 3470

Authors:Jiwei Zhang, Wenbo Feng, Siwei Wang, Feifei Kou, Haoyang Yu, Shaozhang Niu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science (National Pilot School of Software Engineering), China Key Laboratory of Interactive Technology and Experience System, Ministry of Culture and Tourism(BUPT), The Intelligent Game and Decision Lab, Academy of Military Sciences, China Mobile Internet Co.

Title: Collaborative Transformers with Multi-Level Forensic Attention for Image Manipulation Localization

Abstract:
The proliferation of the tampered images on social media can pose serious societal risks, influencing public opinion and causing panic. Image Manipulation Localization technique has advanced to address this, but some methods focus on microscopic traces, overlooking macroscopic semantics that deceive viewers. To address this problem, we propose a novel Image Manipulation Localization framework called Collaborative Transformers (CoTransformers), designed to fully explore and utilize the collaborative information between macroscopic semantics and microscopic traces. This framework is based on two Vision Transformer variants. The first variant captures the semantic logic of the image. The second variant delves into microscopic tampering traces. By dynamically fusing these two complementary features, the framework enables interaction between macroscopic semantic inconsistencies and microscopic abnormal traces, effectively coordinating their relationship in the latent space. Furthermore, we introduce a new Multi-Level Forensic Attention (MLF-Attention) mechanism to enhance the model's ability to extract various tampered traces, this mechanism can be integrated into our framework. Compared with existing methods, our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results in localization accuracy and shows good robustness against various attacks.

PaperID: 3471

Authors:Yachong Zhang, Lei Meng, Shuo Xu, Zhuang Qi, Wei Wu, Lei Wu, Xiangxu Meng

Affiliations: Shandong University

Title: Introducing Decomposed Causality with Spatiotemporal Object-Centric Representation for Video Classification

Abstract:
Video classification requires eventlevel representations of objects and their interactions. Existing methods typically rely on data-driven approaches, which either learn such features from whole frames or object-centric visual regions. Therefore, the modeling of spatiotemporal interactions among objects is usually overlooked. To address this issue, this paper presents a Decomposition of Synergistic, Unique, and Redundant Causal Representations Learning (SurdCRL) model for video classification, which introduces a newly-proposed SURD causal theory to model the spatiotemporal features of both object dynamics and their in- and cross-frame interactions. Specifically, SurdCRL employs three modules to model the object-centric spatiotemporal dynamics using distinct types of causal components, where the first module Spatial-Temporal Entity Modeling decouples the frame into object and context entities, and employs a temporal message passing block to capture object state changes over time, generating spatiotemporal features as basic causal variables. Second, the Dual-Path Causal Inference module mitigates confounders among causal variables by front-door and back-door interventions, thus enabling the subsequent causal components to reflect their intrinsic effects. Finally, the Causal Composition and Selection module employs the compositional structure-aware attention to project the causal variables and their high-order interactions into the synergistic, unique, and redundant components. Experiments on two benchmarking datasets verify that SurdCRL better captures event-relevant object-centric representation by decomposing spatiotemporal object interactions into three types of causal components.

PaperID: 3472

Authors:Yongshan Zhang, Zixuan Zhang, Xinxin Wang, Lefei Zhang, Zhihua Cai

Affiliations: China University of Geoscience, Shenzhen University, Wuhan University

Title: Anchor-Guided Discriminative Subspace Alignment and Clustering for Cross-Scene Hyperspectral Imagery

Abstract:
Crossscene hyperspectral image (HSI) recognition aims to assign a unique label to each pixel in the target scene by transferring knowledge from the source scene. Existing methods primarily rely on fully labeled source data and either partially labeled or unlabeled target data. No prior work has addressed the more challenging scenario of cross-scene recognition without label guidance in both scenes. To bridge this gap, we present the first study on cross-scene HSI clustering, proposing an anchor-guided discriminative subspace alignment and clustering (ADSAC) framework that follows a well-structured three-step learning paradigm to effectively mitigate distribution shifts. Specifically, we first develop an anchor-promoted graph learning (APGL) model to efficiently derive accurate clustering labels for the source scene by leveraging anchor-based structural information. Next, we propose a discriminative cross-scene subspace alignment (DCSA) model to improve feature discriminability and reduce distribution discrepancies. Finally, labels of the target scene are inferred after source clustering and cross-scene alignment. To solve the formulated models, we design tailored optimization algorithms to ensure high-quality learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework over state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 3473

Authors:Yukang Zhang, Lei Tan, Yang Lu, Yan Yan, Hanzi Wang

Affiliations: Xiamen University, National University of Singapore

Title: Joint Implicit and Explicit Language Learning for Pedestrian Attribute Recognition

Abstract:
Pedestrian attribute recognition (PAR) has received increasing attention due to its wide application in video surveillance and pedestrian analysis. Some textenhanced methods tackle this task by converting attributes into language descriptions to facilitate interactive learning between attributes and visual images. However, these generic languages fail to uniquely describe different pedestrian images, missing individual characteristics. In this paper, we propose a Joint Implicit and Explicit Language Guidance Enhancement Learning (JGEL) method, which converts each pedestrian image into a language description with dual language learning to effectively learn enhanced attribute information. Specifically, we first propose an Implicit Language Guidance Learning (ILGL) stream. It projects visual image features into the text embedding space to generate pseudo-word tokens, implicitly modeling image attributes and providing personalized descriptions. Moreover, we propose an Explicit Attribute Enhancement Learning (EAEL) stream to guide the generated pseudo-word tokens obtained by ILGL explicitly aligned with pedestrian attributes, which can effectively align the pseudo-word tokens with the attribute concepts in the text embedding space. Extensive experiments show that JGEL has significant advantages in improving the performance of PAR and the challenging zero-shot PAR task.

PaperID: 3474

Authors:CaiJie Zhao, Bob Zhang

Affiliations: University of Macau

Title: CondDiff-AMO: Integrating Conditional Diffusion Mechanism for Unified Amodal Mask Generation

Abstract:
Aiming to estimate the full extent of partially occluded objects, amodal segmentation is a critical capability for visual intelligence. Existing methods suffer from limitations in efficiency and precision, due to their reliance on auxiliary information or twostage architectures. Furthermore, they lack generalizability, failing to meet practical requirements. To overcome these challenges, we proposed a new paradigm, CondDiff-AMO, that interprets amodal segmentation as a denoising problem by leveraging diffusion models. Methodologically, the designed novel framework consists of three key innovations to adapt the task characteristics and unlocks the diffusion models’ potential in amodal segmentation, including a masking strategy in the forward process, an adaptive transformer for conditional feature extraction, and visual-guided sampling. In the forward process, progressive masking strategy converts ground-truth masks to visible masks, simulating amodal segmentation process to enhance reasoning regarding occluded areas. For architectural design, a pyramid network with feature refinement extracts adaptive and representative conditional priors, improving the guidance in the denoising process of diffusion models. As for the sampling stage, a visible mask is incorporated with an ensemble strategy, restricting the prediction on occluded part. Experiments were conducted on five well-known datasets under supervised and zero-shot learning, with the results confirming that CondDiff-AMO outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 3475

Authors:Jiaqi Zhao, Jie Luo, Yong Zhou, Wen-Liang Du, Xixi Li, Rui Yao

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology / School of Artificial Intelligence, China University of Mining Technology, China Mine Digitization Engineering Research Center of the Ministry of Education

Title: Unified Representation Causal Prompt Distillation for Re-Inference-Free Lifelong Person Re-Identification

Abstract:
Lifelong person reidentification (LReID) aims to retrieve the target person from sequentially collected data. Due to significant domain gaps between datasets and the continuous increase of training data from different scenarios, weak inter-domain generalization and catastrophic forgetting issues have remained major challenges for LReID. To tackle these issues, a novel LReID method called Unified Representation Causal Prompt Distillation (URCPD) is proposed. Specifically, to reduce domain gaps among different scene datasets and improve model inter-domain generalization capability, a Feature Decoupling Style Transfer module (FDST) is proposed to map new features into a unified feature space. Furthermore, to reduce the accumulated forgetting of old knowledge during the training stage, a Causal Prompt Distillation module (CPD) is introduced. This module eliminates the re-inference process for distillation and embeds memory prompts to combat catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments on five classic LReID seen datasets and seven unseen datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 3476

Authors:Tingting Zheng, Hongxun Yao, Sicheng Zhao, Yi Xiao

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Tsinghua University, Zhengzhou University

Title: Content-aware Information Compression and Selection for Whole Slide Image Analysis

Abstract:
Recent advances in multiinstance learning (MIL) have demonstrated impressive performance in whole slide image (WSI) analysis. However, current methods search for cues and draw conclusions from all instances or regions, resulting in excessive redundant computation and suboptimal representation quality due to irrelevant and uninformative feature interference. To address these issues, we propose CICS, an efficient and general framework that performs compact information compression and selection for high-efficiency WSI analysis. In particular, CICS features two key components: (1) context-aware compression (CAC), which partitions the instance space into sub-regions and applies learnable compression to discard irrelevant components, reduce computational complexity while facilitating information selection, and (2) global-proximity selective attention (GPSA), which cherry-picks the most informative representation with a proximity-assisted global dynamic selection strategy. Building upon these innovations, CICS forms a plug-and-play module that reduces computational complexity through compact instance representations while improving feature quality by preserving the most informative cues. Extensive experiments on six WSI classification and survival prediction datasets show that CICS consistently improves the performance of multiple representative MIL methods. It achieves 2.5%, 7.7%, and 3.9% accuracy gain over the state-of-the-art Transformer-based TransMIL, Mamba-based MambaMIL, and graph-based WIKG methods on the ESCA dataset.

PaperID: 3477

Authors:Lingru Zhou, Peng Wu, Manqing Zhang, Qingsheng Wang, Guansong Pang, Peng Wang

Affiliations: Northwestern Polytechnical University, Singapore Management University

Title: TargetVAU: Multimodal Anomaly-Aware Reasoning for Target Behavior Understanding in Videos

Abstract:
Understanding anomalous human behaviors at a finegrained level remains a major challenge in complex scenarios. Existing video anomaly understanding (VAU) methods often rely on coarse frame-level cues or overlook structured modeling of individual actions, limiting their capacity for reasoning about human interactions and accountability. To address these challenges, we propose TargetVAU, a multimodal anomaly-aware reasoning framework designed for individual-level anomaly recognition and explanation. TargetVAU first extracts both global-level and human-centric visual features using a frozen Vision Transformer (ViT) encoder. An Anomaly-focused Temporal Sampler is then employed to select behaviorally informative frames via a density-aware strategy guided by predicted anomaly scores. A Spatio-Temporal Interaction Graph is constructed to explicitly model interactions among individuals across time and space. These structured representations are fused with prompt embeddings via a frozen Q-Former to form a unified semantic representation. Finally, a large language model fine-tuned with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) performs instruction-guided reasoning to identify anomalous individuals and generate natural language explanations. Extensive experiments on UCCD and HIVAU-70K demonstrate that TargetVAU significantly outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and interpretability, advancing the state of individual-level anomaly understanding in surveillance videos.

PaperID: 3478

Authors:Yuan Zhou, Yan Zhang, Jianlong Chang, Xin Gu, Ying Wang, Kun Ding, Guangwen Yang, Shiming Xiang

Affiliations: Institute of Automation, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Research and Development Department of China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Beyond Counting: Evaluating Abstract and Emotional Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
Despite the rapid progress of Vision Language Models (VLMs), existing benchmarks still concentrate on coarsegrained object recognition or simple relational reasoning, leaving the fine-grained and higher-order reasoning abilities of these systems largely unexamined. To bridge this critical evaluation gap, we introduce EmojiGrid, a novel diagnostic benchmark specifically designed to probe these fine-grained and higher-order skills. Leveraging the universal and semantically rich nature of emojis, we synthesize a grid‑based visual dataset paired with 29,000+ QA pairs. Each pair is explicitly anchored in a three-level cognitive taxonomy comprising (i) Perception and Information Extraction, (ii) Relational and Structural Reasoning, and (iii) ion and Advanced Cognition. These dimensions further decompose into nine categories covering a broad range of cognitive skills, including counting, spatial relations, compositional logic, semantic sentiment, and related higher-order reasoning tasks. Our extensive evaluation of 25 state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary VLMs reveals a significant performance gap between foundational perceptual tasks and higher-level cognitive abilities, particularly in abstraction and advanced emotional reasoning. Notably, all models struggle with compositional logic, spatial consistency, and especially emotional and semantic understanding. EmojiGrid provides a quantifiable, fine-grained benchmark to diagnose VLM limitations and guides future progress toward models that can truly perceive, reason about, and interpret complex, symbol-rich visual scenes.

PaperID: 3479

Authors:Zhengtong Zhu, Jiaqing Fan, Zhixuan Liu, Fanzhang Li

Affiliations: Soochow University

Title: Training-Free Spatio-temporal Decoupled Reasoning Video Segmentation with Adaptive Object Memory

Abstract:
Reasoning Video Object Segmentation (ReasonVOS) is a challenging task that requires stable object segmentation across video sequences using implicit and complex textual inputs. Previous methods finetune Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to produce segmentation outputs, which demand substantial resources. Additionally, some existing methods are coupled in the processing of spatio-temporal information, which affects the temporal stability of the model to some extent. To address these issues, we propose Training-Free Spatio-temporal Decoupled Reasoning Video Segmentation with Adaptive Object Memory (SDAM). We aim to design a training-free reasoning video segmentation framework that outperforms existing methods requiring fine-tuning, using only pre-trained models. Meanwhile, we propose an Adaptive Object Memory module that selects and memorizes key objects based on motion cues in different video sequences. Finally, we propose Spatio-temporal Decoupling for stable temporal propagation. In the spatial domain, we achieve precise localization and segmentation of target objects, while in the temporal domain, we leverage key object temporal information to drive stable cross-frame propagation. Our method achieves excellent results on five benchmark datasets, including Ref-YouTubeVOS, Ref-DAVIS17, MeViS, ReasonVOS, and ReVOS.

PaperID: 3480

Authors:Shihao Zou, Wei Wei, Leyang Xu, Kaihe Xu, Wenfeng Xie

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology Joint Laboratory of HUST and Pingan Property & Casualty Research, Joint Laboratory of HUST and Pingan Property & Casualty Research Pingan Insurance of Causal & Property

Title: Appearance Discrepancy-guided Sequence Hybrid Masking for Robust Scene Text Recognition

Abstract:
Masked Image Modeling (MIM) has been widely recognized as a powerful selfsupervised paradigm for learning general-purpose visual representations. However, standard MIM based on random masking tends to underperform in domain-specific tasks like Scene Text Recognition (STR), due to challenges such as information sparsity and appearance discrepancies caused by partial occlusion or distortion. To address this issue, we propose a novel pre-training framework called Appearance Discrepancy-guided Sequence Hybrid Masking (DSHM), specifically designed to learn robust representations for STR. To this end, we introduce an Appearance Discrepancy Metric that quantifies the discrepancy level of each image patch by measuring its deviation from anisotropic local discrepancy and intra-instance global style discrepancy. The resulting discrepancy scores are utilized in two key components: (1) A Sequence Hybrid Masking strategy, which prioritizes masking high-discrepancy patches in coherent block forms, thereby elevating the pretext task from simple pixel-level completion to more complex structural reasoning; (2) Discrepancy-Conditioned Tokens (DC-Tokens), which encode prior knowledge about patch difficulty into the decoder, enabling an adaptive reconstruction process and improving the model robustness under scenarios with partial occlusion or text distortion. We achieve competitive performance on multiple benchmark datasets, including common benchmarks, Union14M benchmarks, and Chinese benchmarks.

PaperID: 3481

Authors:Guoying Chen, Ruizhuo Zhao, Zhewei Xu, Bo Yang, Kunlong Wang

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Computer Technology and Application

Title: MISF: MLLM Guided Iterative Sample Filtering for Data Fault Detection

Abstract:
High quality datasets are critical for training reliable machine learning models, yet data faults caused by insufficient annotation expertise or malicious poisoning attacks remain prevalent. Traditional classifier based methods rely on manually curated subsets for fault detection, but their limited scale frequently leads to model overfitting. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) based methods offer promising detection capabilities, their fewshot learning limitations hinder generalization in domain specific tasks. To address these challenges, we propose MLLM Guided Iterative Sample Filtering (MISF), a novel framework that combines the strengths of MLLM based initialization and iterative data refinement. Our framework initializes the detection model with MLLM generated synthetic images and a curated clean subset, then iteratively refines it by progressively selecting high certainty clean samples, improving both domain adaptation and detection accuracy. Extensive experiments on RESISC45 and Oxford-IIIT Pets datasets demonstrate that MISF effectively identifies data faults, outperforming existing approaches. MISF provides a robust, scalable solution for improving dataset quality in specialized domains.

PaperID: 3482

Authors:Zonghao Chen, Yuncheng Jiang, Gang Li

Affiliations: South China Normal University, Deakin University

Title: TOPOGRAPH: Topology-Preserving Graph Reduction with Adaptive Structure for Persistent Homology

Abstract:
Topological Data Analysis (TDA) provides artificial intelligence (AI) systems with mathematically rigorous geometric descriptors through Persistent Homology (PH), capturing essential shape characteristics in highdimensional data. Yet, PH’s combinatorial complexity and sensitivity to outliers hinder its scalability and reliability, especially for Intrinsic PH (IPH) that relies on accurate geodesic distances. While stateof-the-art landmark-based subsampling methods, PH Landmarks, ameliorate computational costs and improve outlier robustness by selecting representative points based on local PH scores, it remain computationally intensive and at low sampling rates struggle to reconstruct the global topology. In this work, we introduce TOPOGRAPH, a simple yet powerful framework that preserves intrinsic topology. The resulting coarsened graph supports efficient IPH computations using Fermat distances. Experiments on both synthetic and realworld datasets show that TOPOGRAPH outperforms stateof-the-art sampling-based methods by achieving an order-ofmagnitude speedup and substantially improved topological fidelity in persistence diagrams, demonstrating its ability for robust and scalable topological data analysis.

PaperID: 3483

Authors:Xuanteng Huang, Fan Li, Riyang Hu, Jianchang Zhang, Yuan Peng, Yang Zhou, Fangying Chen, Xianwei Zhang

Affiliations: Sun Yat-sen University

Title: FusedRec: Fused Embedding Communication for Distributed Recommendation Training on GPUs

Abstract:
Recent years have witnessed the wide adoption of deep learning recommendation models (DLRMs) for many online services. Unlike traditional DNN training, DLRMs leverage massive embeddings to represent sparse features, which are stored in distributed GPUs following the model parallel paradigm. Existing approaches adopt deduplication to eliminate replicated embeddings involved in AltoAll transfers to avoid unnecessary communication. In our practices, we have observed that such a deduplication design exacerbates interconnect inefficiency due to the fragmented embedding transfers with reduced message sizes, hindering the performance of distributed DLRM training. This paper introduces FusedRec, a fused embedding communication and lookup mechanism to tackle the inefficiency due to deduplication. By seeking the opportunities to fuse embeddings from multiple categories into a group, FusedRec conducts the communication in a combined shot to alleviate bandwidth underutilization. Meanwhile, a categorical-aware hashing algorithm is integrated into FusedRec to retain the category information during lookup without extra communication. Combining with efficient unique and recovery operations, comprehensive results show FusedRec achieves a 37.8% throughput speedup in average compared to the SOTA industry implementation, without hurting the recommendation qualities of our in-house models used in online production environments.

PaperID: 3484

Authors:Chenghou Jin, Yixin Ren, Hongxu Ma, Yewei Xia, Yi Guan, Hao Zhang, Jiandong Ding, Jihong Guan, Shuigeng Zhou

Affiliations: Fudan University, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tongji University

Title: Invariant Feature Learning for Counterfactual Watch-time Prediction in Video Recommendation

Abstract:
Video recommendation systems heavily rely on user watch time feedback, making accurate watch time prediction a crucial task. However, this task inherently suffers from bias, as recommendation models tend to favor longduration videos to maximize watch time. This issue, known as duration bias in the watch-time prediction context, can be explained from a causal perspective, where video duration acts as a confounder. Recent works address this bias using backdoor adjustment, isolating the direct effect of content on watch time from observational data. These methods typically discretize video duration into groups, estimate group-wise effects, and then aggregate them via a unified prediction model. However, this aggregation strategy is prone to model misspecification due to feature distribution shift across groups. In this paper, we reinterpret the problem through the lens of invariant learning and propose a novel framework: Duration-Invariant Feature Learning (DIFL). DIFL employs a kernel-based regularization that enforces representation invariance across duration groups, reducing sensitivity to group design and improving generalization. This enables more accurate modeling of the direct causal effect and making counterfactual inference. Extensive experiments on both public and real large-scale production datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which achieves SOTA performance.

PaperID: 3485

Authors:Fang Kai, Yu Zhang, Kaibin Wang, Lei Sang, Yiwen Zhang

Affiliations: Macau University of Science and Technology, Anhui University, Swinburne University of Technology

Title: Revisiting Contrastive Learning in Collaborative Filtering via Parallel Graph Filters

Abstract:
Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for modeling user–item interactions and learning highquality representations in recommender systems. While existing GCL-based methods benefit from data augmentation and sampling strategies, they often overlook the inherent limitations of the contrastive objectives: 1) Stacking multiple Graph Convolutional Network layers to capture high-order information often causes the over-smoothing phenomenon, where node representations become overly similar. 2) Structurally similar negative sample pairs may exhibit high cosine similarity, causing gradient saturation during representation optimization. To address the above challenges, we revisit matrix factorization in recommendation models and uncover its implicit connection to a parallel graph filter bank. This perspective reveals how overly aggressive low-pass or high-pass filtering distorts feature distributions, contributing to gradient saturation. Building on this insight, we propose Light Cosine Similarity Collaborative Filtering (LightCSCF), a margin-constrained method that improves gradient optimization in contrastive learning by focusing on structurally hard examples, alleviating both gradient saturation and boundary over-smoothing. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that LightCSCF consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in recommendation accuracy and robustness to data sparsity.

PaperID: 3486

Authors:Li Kong, Bingzhe Wang, Zhou Chen, Suhan Hu, Yuchao Ma, Qi Qi, Suoyuan Song, Bicheng Jin

Affiliations: Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China, Southeast University, Beijing Key Laboratory of Research on Large Models and Intelligent Governance, Engineering Research Center of Next-Generation Intelligent Search and Recommendation, ByteDance Inc.

Title: SACO: Sequence-Aware Constrained Optimization Framework for Coupon Distribution in E-commerce

Abstract:
Coupon distribution is a critical marketing strategy used by online platforms to boost revenue and enhance user engagement. Regrettably, existing coupon distribution strategies fall far short of effectively leveraging the complex sequential interactions between platforms and users. This critical oversight, despite the abundance of ecommerce log data, has precipitated a performance plateau. In this paper, we focus on the scene that the platforms make sequential coupon distribution decision multiple times for various users, with each user interacting with the platform repeatedly. Based on this marketing scenario, we propose a novel marketing framework, named Sequence-Aware Constrained Optimization (SACO) framework, to directly devise coupon distribution policy for long-term revenue boosting. SACO framework enables optimized online decision-making in a variety of real-world marketing scenarios. It achieves this by seamlessly integrating three key characteristics, general scenarios, sequential modeling with more comprehensive historical data, and efficient iterative updates within a unified framework. Furthermore, empirical results on real-world industrial dataset, alongside public and synthetic datasets demonstrate the superiority of our framework.

PaperID: 3487

Authors:Changhong Li, Zhiqiang Guo, Guohui Li, Zhong Yang, Chuhang Hong

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Tsinghua University

Title: SGP4SR: Seperated-Modality Guided User Perference Learning for Multimodal Sequential Reconmmendation

Abstract:
With the booming development of multimodal data (e.g., image, text) on internet platforms, multimodal sequential recommendation methods continue to emerge. Most existing methods incorporate item modal features as auxiliary information, typically concatenating them to learn unified user representations. However, these methods directly use modal features for representation learning, neglecting the impact of inherent modal noise. We argue that internalmodal noise and cross-modal noise hinder the acquisition of more accurate user representations. To address this problem, we propose SGP4SR - Separated-modality Guided user Preference learning for multimodal Sequential Recommendation. Globally, the user preference modeling is carried out from a separated-modality perspective to alleviate cross-modal noise. Locally, for each individual modality, we use item relationship graphs and user interest centers, aggregated with ID embeddings, to replace direct modal features, thereby mitigating internal-modal noise. Finally, user representations from both separated-modality and multimodal perspectives participate in prediction independently. In experiments conducted on four real-world datasets, our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving an average performance improvement of up to 8.84% over the best baseline. The comprehensive experiments further validate the superior noise tolerance and robustness of our method.

PaperID: 3488

Authors:Dong Li, Lingling Zhang, Binghao Han, Linlin Ding, Yue Kou

Affiliations: Liaoning University, Northeastern University

Title: CL-DMDF: Dynamic Multimodal Data Fusion Model Based on Contrastive Learning

Abstract:
Multimodal data fusion involves integrating and analyzing information from multiple modalities to uncover latent correlations and complementary patterns, thereby enhancing data processing and decisionmaking. While existing methods for structured multimodal inputs are typically designed around specific tasks and assume fully observed modalities, realworld applications often suffer from uncertain or missing modality inputs due to various factors. Some traditional models overly emphasize local interactions within missing modalities, neglecting the global complementary cues embedded in multimodal representations. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Dynamic Multimodal Data Fusion model based on Contrastive Learning (CL-DMDF). CL-DMDF introduces a novel attention mechanism that operates across both feature and modality dimensions to compute reliable attention scores, effectively reflecting importance at each level. The CL-DMDF further incorporates an entity-centroid contrastive learning module that constructs centroid-based positive samples from entity features to enhance discriminative learning. Additionally, an adaptive fusion module is employed to improve the efficiency and accuracy of dynamic fusion strategies. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the CL-DMDF across diverse multimodal fusion tasks.

PaperID: 3489

Authors:Guoyi Li, Die Hu, Haozhe Li, Zhongjiang Yao, Wei Mi, Zongzhen Liu, Xiaodan Zhang, Honglei Lyu

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China School of Cyber Security

Title: Knowledge-Enhanced Image Captioning with Adaptive Graph-based Multimodal Alignment and LLM

Abstract:
Image captioning is crucial for multimodal understanding, bridging visual content and natural language. Despite recent advancements in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), when faced with unseen entities or scenes in the open world, even when attempting to leverage learned knowledge, models still struggle with vague and inaccurate descriptions, and may even generate knowledge hallucinations. A key reason is that the model fails to effectively integrate knowledge with visual information, limiting its understanding of visual content. Thus, we propose Adaptive Knowledge Graphguided Multimodal Alignment (AKGMA) for image captioning, which enhances semantic understanding in open-world scenes through visual knowledge reasoning, reducing knowledge hallucinations and improving caption quality. It consist three key components: Entity-guided Knowledge Aligner (EKA), Adaptive Knowledge Graph Construction (AKGC), and Scene-Context Knowledge Adapter (SCKA). EKA connects visual entities to knowledge graphs, providing structured knowledge to a small language model, which interacts with a visual encoder to acquire visual knowledge. AKGC uses reinforcement learning to build image-relevant subgraphs to optimize knowledge prompts and improve knowledge hallucinations. SCKA leverages scene graph annotations to extract visual contextual knowledge and inject it into Large Language Models (LLMs), ensuring the generated descriptions are consistent with the image's details. Additionally, we introduce UniKnowCap, a new image knowledge description dataset spanning various open-world knowledge domains, designed to evaluate the knowledge accuracy and detail consistency of model-generated descriptions. Extensive experiments show our model outperforms baselines across multiple metrics.

PaperID: 3490

Authors:Xiang Li, Yuan Cao, Zhongying Zhao, Guoqing Chao, Yanwei Yu

Affiliations: Faculty of Information Science and Engineering, Ocean University of China, College of Computer Science and Engineering, Shandong University of Science and Technology, School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, China State Key Laboratory of Physical Oceanography

Title: Multiplex Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks with Euclidean-Riemannian Mutual Space Synergy

Abstract:
Multiplex heterogeneous networks are common in realworld scenarios, where entities interact through diverse types of relations across multiple semantic layers. Recent advances in multiplex heterogeneous graph neural networks have achieved remarkable results by incorporating node and relation types into message passing and designing relation-aware architectures. However, most existing methods either decouple relations and risk losing complex semantics or require handcrafted relation patterns, which limit scalability. Moreover, prevailing models are typically restricted to Euclidean space, making it difficult to capture non-Euclidean topologies and to distinguish complex interactions among heterogeneous nodes and relations. Standard GNN message passing, grounded in the homophily assumption, also proves inadequate for the intricate, coupled structures in multiplex heterogeneous graphs. To address these challenges, we propose MRiemGNN, a novel multiplex heterogeneous graph neural network that synergizes Euclidean and Riemannian spaces through a geometry-aware, relation-specific message passing scheme and cross-space mutual learning. Experiments on multiple real-world datasets show that MRiemGNN achieves superior performance, efficiency, and scalability on both node classification and link prediction tasks.

PaperID: 3491

Authors:Xiaojing Li, Bin Wang, Xiaochun Yang, Meng Luo

Affiliations: Northeastern University, Zhejiang University

Title: Self-Improving Sparse Retrieval Through Heuristic Representation Refinement and Representation-Focused Learning

Abstract:
Learnable sparse retrieval (LSR) models encode texts into highdimensional sparse representations, supporting token-level expansion beyond the original text and addressing the vocabulary mismatch problem in traditional bag-of-words retrieval. However, in the absence of representation-level supervision, these representations usually overemphasize irrelevant tokens while neglecting truly relevant ones. We term this phenomenon the Representation Hallucination problem in LSR models, a critical bottleneck impeding accurate retrieval. To address this challenge, we introduce SiRe, a self-improving training framework for sparse retrieval that integrates two core strategies: Heuristic Representation Refinement and Representation-Focused Learning. Specifically, SiRe first identifies and corrects representation hallucinations in the outputs of the current LSR model using heuristic methods. The resulting representations serve as the primary supervision signals, guiding a pretrained language model (e.g., BERT) to mitigate the problem directly at the representation level. This process can be iterated, enabling progressive model improvement. Extensive experiments on both in-domain and out-domain benchmarks show that SiRe produces higher-quality sparse representations, significantly enhancing retrieval performance over strong baselines.

PaperID: 3492

Authors:Jie Lian, Zhihao Wu, Jielong Lu, Jiajun Yu, Qianqian Shen, Haishuai Wang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University

Title: Beyond Local Patterns: Multiscale Inconsistency Learning for Graph Anomaly Detection

Abstract:
Graph anomaly detection is emerging as a critical technology for addressing increasingly complex and dynamic risk environments. Although unsupervised graph anomaly detection has advanced under the graph representation learning, directly applying these paradigms remains fundamentally misaligned with anomaly detection objectives. In this work, we highlight two key insights: graph neural networks are often suboptimal as feature extractors due to neighborhood aggregation diluting anomaly signals, and reliance on local inconsistency mining is inadequate for comprehensive anomaly detection, as it often fails to identify anomalies hidden within camouflaged communities. Based on these insights, we propose multiscale inconsistency learning for graph anomaly detection (MIGAD), a novel framework that integrates both local and global anomaly signals. Specifically, individual node representations are projected onto a common hypersphere to ensure uniformity. At the local scale, the graph structure is leveraged for affinity-aware modeling via group discrimination. At the global scale, we introduce node deviation, a metric that distinguishes anomalies by optimizing representation centers. This unified approach enables robust and comprehensive detection of diverse graph anomalies. Experiments on seven real datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both effectiveness and scalability.

PaperID: 3493

Authors:Mingkai Lin, Yinke Wang, Xiaobin Hong, Wenzhong Li

Affiliations: Nanjing University

Title: Learnable Matrix Profile for Motif Discovery on Multivariate Time Series

Abstract:
Multivariate motif discovery aims to identify frequently occurring subsequences within multidimensional time series, which is a critical machine learning task with wide applications. However, previous motif discovery algorithms often miss complex multivariate motifs and struggle with high computational costs as data scale and dimensionality grow. We propose a novel learnable multivariate matrix profile method (L-MAP) that captures inter-dimensional dependencies for comprehensive analysis of multivariate time series. The time series is partitioned into subsequences using the Fourier transform in the frequency domain, with locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) assigning them to buckets based on distinct patterns. Each subsequence is modeled as a graph for multivariate fusion, where triplet learning is used to capture cross-dimensional relationships and form graph embeddings. Unlike prior methods relying on Euclidean distance modeling, our graph-based approach computes all-pairs similarity in a latent space, which constructs the multivariate matrix profile from distributions formed by embedding clusters. Extensive experiments on multivariate datasets from diverse domains demonstrate that L-MAP outperforms state-of-the-art methods in motif discovery, offering superior quality, diversity, and scalability efficiency.

PaperID: 3494

Authors:Yinan Liu, Ziyang Zhang, Bin Wang, Xiaochun Yang

Affiliations: Northeastern University

Title: SEFEL: A Simple Yet Effective Framework for Fast Event Linking

Abstract:
Event linking aims to associate event mentions in text with their corresponding entries in a knowledge base (KB). This task can help text understanding to benefit downstream tasks (e.g., question answering) and expand the KB through new event knowledge mentioned in the text. Existing event linking approaches usually adopt a retrieveand-rank framework, which suffers from high computational costs and relies on hand-crafted rules, thereby limiting generalization. Additionally, it is found that some entity linking methods can be used to solve this task directly. However, they also perform not well. In this paper, we propose SEFEL, an end-to-end, argument-aware event representation-based event linking framework to unify the modeling of both in-KB and out-of-KB scenarios. To further enhance the linking performance, we propose a contrastive learning module to refine the learned embeddings of events and event mentions. Experimental results demonstrate that SEFEL improves accuracy by at least 3.59 (in-KB) and 21.5 (out-of-KB) compared with baselines, while its inference speed is more than 38 times faster than baselines, showcasing its accuracy and efficiency.

PaperID: 3495

Authors:Junhua Shi, Qingyun Sun, Haonan Yuan, Xingcheng Fu

Affiliations: Beihang University, Guangxi Normal University

Title: SA²GFM: Enhancing Robust Graph Foundation Models with Structure-Aware Semantic Augmentation

Abstract:
While Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) have achieved notable progress across diverse tasks recently, their robustness under domain noise, structural perturbations, and adversarial attacks remains largely underexplored. A core limitation lies in inadequate modeling of hierarchical structural semantics, which are intrinsic priors and critical for generalization. In this work, we propose SA^2GFM, a robust GFM framework that enhances domain adaptable representations through Structure Aware Semantic Augmentation. First, to embed hierarchical structural priors, we transform entropy based encoding trees into structure aware textual prompts for feature augmentation. The enriched inputs are processed by a novel self supervised Information Bottleneck mechanism that distills robust and transferable representations through structure guided compression. To mitigate negative transfer in cross domain adaptation, we develop an expert adaptive routing mechanism that integrates a mixture of experts architecture with a null expert design. To enable efficient downstream adaptation, we propose a fine tuning module that optimizes hierarchical structures through joint intra and inter community structure learning. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of SA^2GFM in effectiveness and robustness against random noise and adversarial perturbations on node and graph classification, compared with nine state of the art baselines.

PaperID: 3496

Authors:Junsheng Wang, Tiantian Gong, Yeyun Wu, Xiaobing Sun

Affiliations: College of Information and Artificial Intelligence, Yangzhou University, School of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data, Jiangxi Institute of Technology

Title: Robust Domain Adaptive Hashing via Structural Noise Modeling and Correction

Abstract:
Deep hashing offers efficient storage and fast retrieval capabilities. As a result, it has been extensively applied to large‑scale retrieval tasks. To alleviate the dependence on highquality annotated data, recent research has focused on unsupervised domain adaptive hashing methods, which aim to transfer knowledge from a label-rich source domain to a label-scarce target domain. However, in open-world scenarios, source domain labels are often inevitably noisy, which tends to undermine the quality of learned hash codes and induce considerable performance deterioration. To this end, we introduce a novel Robust Domain Adaptive Hashing (RDAH) method to jointly mitigate the adverse effects of label noise and domain discrepancy. Specifically, we first model the loss distribution of training samples using a two-component Gaussian mixture model to estimate each sample’s confidence, based on which the data is partitioned. Subsequently, we introduce a neighbor consistency-guided correction strategy, which leverages the semantic structure of high-confidence neighbors to perform weighted correction on noisy samples. Moreover, we design a dual-level cross-domain alignment mechanism that jointly mitigates domain shift from two complementary perspectives. Extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness and robustness of RDAH across multiple benchmark datasets.

PaperID: 3497

Authors:Binqing Wu, Weiqi Chen, Shiyu Liu, Zongjiang Shang, Haiou Wang, Liang Sun, Ling Chen

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Alibaba Group

Title: MoCast: Learning Turbulent Motions Under Physical Guidance for Precipitation Nowcasting

Abstract:
Precipitation nowcasting, a critical task for weathersensitive applications, is highly challenging owing to the chaotic nature of atmospheric dynamics. Despite recent progress in deep learning, existing methods are limited in their capacity to model turbulent motions, one of the key drivers of precipitation evolution. Thus, we propose MoCast, the first work that incorporates turbulence knowledge to decompose turbulent motions into solvable components for precipitation nowcasting. Specifically, inspired by the continuity equation, MoCast introduces two core innovations: (1) a physics-guided motion module that learns turbulent motions from physically interpretable mean and fluctuating components based on Reynolds, Helmholtz, and Wavelet decomposition techniques, and (2) a motion-guided source-sink module that learns source-sink features considering the multi-scale impact from motions based on a mixture-of-experts architecture. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that MoCast achieves the state-of-the-art performance. MoCast and its diffusion-based variant MoCast+ reduce CSI error by an average of 4.9% and 4.5% compared to the best deterministic and probabilistic baselines, respectively.

PaperID: 3498

Authors:Guangkai Wu, Gen Liu, Chao Li, Qingtian Zeng, Hui Zhou, Zhongying Zhao

Affiliations: Shandong University of Science and Technology

Title: DARLING: Dual Hypergraph-Enhanced Curriculum-Guided Graph Structure Learning for Node Classification

Abstract:
Graph Structure Learning (GSL) aims to simultaneously enhance the original graph and the performance of Graph Neural Networks. However, existing GSL methods for node classification fail to consider neighborhood label dependencies during training, which limits their ability to refine the graph structure in an adaptive manner. Furthermore, the training of those methods lacks a proper schedule based on graph structure quality, thereby yielding suboptimal performance. To address these challenges, we propose a novel GSL framework for node classification, termed DuAl hypeRgraphenhanced curricuLum-guided graph structure learnING for node classification (DARLING). It first introduces a graph structure curriculum module to effectively discriminate the suboptimal graph structures by examining both the distribution of neighborhood labels and the degree of nodes. Subsequently, a self-supervised dual hypergraph similarity learning module is proposed to capture higher-order neighborhood label dependencies. This is achieved via formulating a pre-training task that involves hyperedge batch-filling within the dual hypergraph of the input graph. The experimental results on six datasets demonstrate that the proposed DARLING outperforms eleven state-of-the-art methods significantly, in terms of effectiveness and robustness.

PaperID: 3499

Authors:Wuyuan Xie, Zhenming Li, Ye Liu, Jian Jin, Yun Song, Miaohui Wang

Affiliations: College of Computer Science & Software Engineering, Shenzhen University, School of Automation, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Alibaba-NTU Joint Research Institute, Nanyang Technological University, School of Computer Science and Technology, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Guangdong Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing

Title: The Last Byte: Learning Just Enough for Machine-Oriented Image Compression

Abstract:
Just recognizable distortion (JRD) has been introduced for image compression for machines, aiming to quantify the maximum coding distortion that can be tolerated by a specific perception model, thereby defining the upper bound of machine vision redundancy (MVR). However, existing JRDbased redundancy estimation methods face three key challenges: limited dataset annotation accuracy, low prediction efficiency, and insufficient perception accuracy, all of which hinder their practical deployment. To address these limitations, we propose a new MVR-Net, a frame-wise efficient JRD prediction method that generates the optimal encoding quantization map in a single inference pass. Furthermore, we refine the annotation standard for JRD datasets based on experimental insights, enhancing the precision of recognizable redundancy measurement. Compared to stateof-the-art methods, MVR-Net achieves a superior balance between bitrate reduction and perception accuracy in JRD-guided compression, while offering up to a 40,000× speed improvement, demonstrating its practicality and efficiency for real-world applications.

PaperID: 3500

Authors:Xinxun Zhang, Pengfei Jiao, Mengzhou Gao, Tianpeng Li, Xuan Guo

Affiliations: School of Cyberspace, Hangzhou Dianzi University, China State Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Beijing School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University

Title: Towards OOD Generalization in Dynamic Graphs via Causal Invariant Learning

Abstract:
Although dynamic graph neural networks (DyGNNs) have demonstrated promising capabilities, most existing methods ignore outof-distribution (OOD) shifts that commonly exist in dynamic graphs. Dynamic graph OOD generalization is non-trivial due to the following challenges: 1) Identifying invariant and variant patterns amid complex graph evolution, 2) Capturing the intrinsic evolution rationale from these patterns, and 3) Ensuring model generalization across diverse OOD shifts despite limited data distribution observations. Although several attempts have been made to tackle these challenges, none has successfully addressed all three simultaneously, and they face various limitations in complex OOD scenarios. To solve these issues, we propose a Dynamic graph Causal Invariant Learning (DyCIL) model for OOD generalization via exploiting invariant spatio-temporal patterns from a causal view. Specifically, we first develop a dynamic causal subgraph generator to identify causal dynamic subgraphs explicitly. Next, we design a causal-aware spatio-temporal attention module to extract the intrinsic evolution rationale behind invariant patterns. Finally, we further introduce an adaptive environment generator to capture the underlying dynamics of distributional shifts. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic dynamic graph datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model over state-of-the-art baselines in handling OOD shifts.

PaperID: 3501

Authors:Ye Zhang, Jinlong He, Dongjie Wang, Yupeng Zhou, Minghao Yin

Affiliations: Northeast Normal University, University of Kansas

Title: Dimension-Aware Active Annotation for Aesthetic Perception via Multi-Agent Human–AI Collaboration

Abstract:
To cultivate students' aesthetic development, teachers must objectively interpret and evaluate the artistic qualities and emotional resonance within their paintings—a process known as aesthetic perception. This evaluation process is laborintensive and susceptible to biases due to variations among individual teachers. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) motivate the use of AI-driven models to automate and enhance this aesthetic perception task. However, building effective AI-driven aesthetic perception models requires extensive datasets, which are typically labor-intensive and costly to gather. To address this, we propose a novel framework that selectively identifies the most challenging dimensions of aesthetic perception for expert annotation, using AI-generated pseudo-annotations to reduce cost and improve model performance. Our framework integrates a multi-agent active learning strategy to systematically annotate scores across multiple dimensions of aesthetic perception. Initially, we train an aesthetic perception model using a small, manually annotated dataset, establishing primary annotation capabilities. Then, this trained model generates pseudo-annotations for unlabeled data across various aesthetic dimensions (e.g., humor, happiness). To ensure annotation quality and relevance, a multi-agent system evaluates these pseudo-annotations, identifying dimensions requiring expert human input based on metrics such as model estimation confidence. Human experts provide targeted annotations selectively, refining the dataset and guiding an iterative improvement cycle. Through repeated refinement, the model progressively enhances both its predictive accuracy and its automated annotation proficiency. Our optimization approach dynamically balances accuracy, annotation relevance, and human effort. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

PaperID: 3502

Authors:Qinxin Zhao, Sheng Zhong

Affiliations: National Key Lab for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University

Title: TriFusion-IDS: A Multimodal Graph-Tabular-Text Contrastive Framework for Cross-Dataset Intrusion Detection

Abstract:
Traditional Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are typically trained in specific network environments, and their performance often degrades significantly when deployed in new environments with different attack categories. To address this challenge, we propose and define the task of crossdataset intrusion detection and design a novel multimodal contrastive learning framework named TriFusion-IDS. This framework represents network traffic from three complementary dimensions: a graph view to capture structural communication patterns, a tabular view to model statistical features, and a textual view to define the semantics of attacks. TriFusion-IDS fuses the graph and tabular representations and aligns them with textual descriptions in a shared embedding space using a CLIP-style contrastive loss function. This semantics-based alignment mechanism enables the model to overcome the effects of zero-shot categories and thus generalize to new network environments. Our extensive experiments on several mainstream datasets demonstrate that this method significantly outperforms existing baselines in cross-dataset intrusion detection scenarios.

PaperID: 3503

Authors:Tong Zhao, Junping Du, Zhe Xue, Meiyu Liang, Aijing Li, Xiaolong Meng, Dandan Liu

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications Beijing Key Laboratory of Intelligent Telecommunication Software and Multimedia

Title: ST-VLM: A Spatial-to-Image Multimodal Spatial-Temporal Prediction Framework with Vision-Language Model

Abstract:
Spatialtemporal prediction plays a crucial role in various domains, including intelligent transportation and environmental monitoring. Although large language model has shown advantages in long-range dependency modeling and excellent generalization ability for forecasting, it has limited understanding of spatial-temporal features. Especially for spatial features, most existing methods still simplify the spatial-temporal prediction task into multiple independent temporal prediction tasks, failing to effectively encode the dynamic evolution of spatial relations. To address these problems, we propose ST-VLM (Spatial-Temporal Forecasting with Vision-Language Model), a novel framework that leverages visual representations to encode the dynamic spatial dependencies within spatial-temporal data and integrates multi-modal information to enhance prediction. This framework transforms spatial-temporal features into three modalities: vision, text, and time series, enhances cross-modal fusion through an attention-aware fusion mechanism in the first-layer of Vision-Language Model (VLM), optimizes multi-modal feature interaction via adaptive fine-tuning strategies. After fusion, the multi-modal embeddings are subsequently used for the final spatial-temporal prediction task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ST-VLM achieves state-of-the-art performance across various datasets. In particular, the framework exhibits promising results in few-shot scenarios, verifying its strong generalization ability.

PaperID: 3504

Authors:Yuqiu Zhao, Lei Shi, Yan Zhong, Feifei Kou, Pengfei Zhang, Jiwei Zhang, Mingying Xu, Yanchao Liu

Affiliations: Communication University of China, Peking University, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Anhui University Of Science & Technology, North China University of Technology

Title: MusicRec: Multi-modal Semantic-Enhanced Identifier with Collaborative Signals for Generative Recommendation

Abstract:
Generative recommendation as a new paradigm is influencing the current development of recommender systems. It aims to assign identifiers that capture richer semantic and collaborative information to items, and subsequently predict item identifiers via autoregressive generation using Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing approaches primarily tokenize item text into codebooks with preserved semantic IDs through RQVAE, or separately tokenize different modality features of items. However, existing tokenization methods face two major challenges: (1) Learning decoupled multi-modal features limits the quality of the semantic representation. (2) Ignoring collaborative signals from interaction history limits the comprehensiveness of identifiers. To address these limitations, we propose a multi-modal semantic-enhanced identifier with collaborative signals for generative recommendation, named MusicRec. In MusicRec, we propose a tokenization approach based on shared-specific modal fusion, enabling the generated identifiers to preserve semantic information more comprehensively from all modalities. In addition, we incorporate collaborative signals from user interactions to guide identifier generation, preserving collaborative patterns in the semantic representation space. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that MusicRec achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing baseline methods.

PaperID: 3505

Authors:Xueyi Zhou, Zhenyu Li, Dong-Kyu Chae

Affiliations: Hanyang University, Hangzhou Mingshi Technologies Co., Ltd. Laboratory of Data & Network Security, Advanced Institute of Information Technology (AIIT)

Title: EdgeMTSC: A Lightweight Large-Kernel ConvNet for Multivariate Time Series Classification

Abstract:
In largescale sensor networks, Multivariate Time Series Classification (MTSC) is a pivotal task for identifying events dependent on longitudinal data at the edge. However, existing methods focus on neither the inherent ability of convolutional networks to perceive subsequence features, nor the prolonged processing pipeline and the model deployment overhead brought by the highly parameterized models. To resolve these difficulties, we present EdgeMTSC, a lightweight large-kernel ConvNet for MTSC, which naturally extracts and learns features of diverse subsequences. Specifically, a novel module named Inter-channel Message Passing-driven Kernel Block (IMP-KB) is proposed, which maintains a learnable correlation matrix to propagate and merge inter-channel messages, and fuses miscellaneous patterns learned by parallel conv kernels of different sizes. EdgeMTSC sequences two modules of different receptive fields to aggregate local features using small kernels and study long-term representation provided by large kernels, respectively. For inference parameter reduction and accelerating inference without performance loss, the conv blocks in IMP-KBs are structurally reparameterizable. The performance of our model (76.2%) is benchmarked on 26 UEA MTSC datasets and is superior to the SOTA model (MPTSNet, 75%). At the same time, EdgeMTSC uses the fewest parameters and achieves the minimum inference time, applicable on any machine (8 devices ranging from large-scale distributed AI computing servers to resource-constrained edge devices) and in any application scenario.

PaperID: 3506

Authors:Bart de Keijzer, Guido Schäfer, Artem Tsikiridis, Carmine Ventre

Affiliations: Department of Informatics, King's College London, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, Department of Computer Science, Technical University of Munich

Title: Breaking Barriers, Finding Boundaries: Not Obviously Manipulable Budget-Feasible Mechanism Design

Abstract:
Strategyproofness has been the holy grail in mechanism design for decades, providing strong incentive compatibility guarantees under the assumption of perfectly rational agents. However, this assumption is questionable when agents exhibit bounded rationality. Moreover, strategyproofness often imposes strong impossibility results that prevent mechanisms from surpassing certain approximation barriers. We study this tension in budgetfeasible mechanism design, where a designer wants to procure services of maximum value from agents subject to a budget constraint. Here, strategyproofness imposes approximation barriers of 2.41 and 2 for deterministic and randomized mechanisms, respectively. We investigate how much we can potentially gain under bounded rationality. We adopt the weaker notion of not obviously manipulable (NOM), which only prevents "obvious" strategic deviations. We fully resolve the achievable approximation guarantees under NOM: We derive a deterministic 2-approximate NOM mechanism under the general class of monotone subadditive valuations. We also show that this bound is tight (even for additive valuations). Additionally, we provide a simple randomized NOM mechanism that is approximately optimal. These results demonstrate a clear separation between strategyproof and NOM mechanisms. Our mechanisms use Golden Tickets and Wooden Spoons as natural design primitives, arising from our characterization of NOM mechanisms.

PaperID: 3507

Authors:Chun Kai Ling, Jakub Černý, Chin Hui Han, Garud Iyengar, Christian Kroer

Affiliations: National University of Singapore, Columbia University, DSO National Laboratories

Title: Security Games with Layered Defenses: Adaptive Adversaries and Gittins Indices

Abstract:
Realworld security applications (e.g., cybersecurity) often involve multiple attack paths, each with layers of defenses that an attacker needs to sequentially overcome before a successful attack on the entire system. Each defensive resource changes dynamically in efficacy as the attack unfolds. In this paper, we study the case where attackers are adaptive, potentially switching paths over time in response to these changes with the goal to minimize the expected time until a successful attack. We formalize this as a min-max game and give examples where adaptive attackers are more powerful than non-adaptive ones. We show that defenses that do not account for adaptivity can perform arbitrarily worse. A connection between the attacker's optimal strategy with the classical theory of multi-armed bandits and the Gittins index is made, yielding a simple gradient based algorithm to solve our proposed min-max game. Experiments on synthetic settings validate our approach.

PaperID: 3508

Authors:Keren Cao, Yuhang Tian, Kaizhong Zheng, Wei Xi, Xinjian Li, Liangjun Chen

Affiliations: National Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, National Engineering Research Center for Visual Information and Applications, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Department of Neurology of the Second Affiliated Hospital and Interdisciplinary Institute of Neuroscience and Technology, School of Medicine, Zhejiang University

Title: Spontaneous Yet Predictable: Shapelet-Driven, Channel-Aware Intention Decoding from Multi-Region ECoG

Abstract:
Proactive intention decoding remains a critical yet underexplored challenge in brain–machine interfaces (BMIs), especially under naturalistic, selfinitiated behavior. Existing systems rely on reactive decoding of motor cortex signals, resulting in substantial latency. To address this, we leverage the common marmoset’s spontaneous vocalizations and develop a high-resolution, dual-region ECoG recording paradigm targeting the prefrontal and auditory cortices and a neural decoding framework that integrates shapelet-based temporal encoding, position-aware attention, frequency-aware channel masking, contrastive clustering and a minimum error entropy-based robust loss. Our approach achieves 91.9% accuracy up to 200 ms before vocal onset—substantially outperforming 13 competitive baselines. Our model also uncovers a functional decoupling between auditory and prefrontal regions. Furthermore, joint modeling in time and frequency domains reveals novel preparatory neural signatures preceding volitional vocal output. Together, our findings bridge the gap between foundational neuroscience and applied BMI engineering, and establish a generalizable framework for intention decoding from ecologically valid, asynchronous behaviors.

PaperID: 3509

Authors:Xiang Li, Wenxi Li, Yuetong Wang, Chenyang Lyu, Haozhe Lin, Guiguang Ding, Yuchen Guo

Affiliations: Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, China Department of Automation, School of Statistics, East China Normal University, China Zhuoxi Lab, Xiuzhong College, AI Business, Alibaba International Digital Commerce, China School of Software

Title: GigaMoE: Sparsity-Guided Mixture of Experts for Efficient Gigapixel Object Detection

Abstract:
Object detection in HighResolution Wide (HRW) shots, or gigapixel images, presents unique challenges due to extreme object sparsity and vast scale variations. State-of-the-art methods like SparseFormer have pioneered sparse processing by selectively focusing on important regions, yet they apply a uniform computational model to all selected regions, overlooking their intrinsic complexity differences. This leads to a suboptimal trade-off between performance and efficiency. In this paper, we introduce GigaMoE, a novel backbone architecture that pioneers adaptive computation for this domain by replacing the standard Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs) with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) module. Our architecture first employs a shared expert to provide a robust feature baseline for all selected regions. Upon this foundation, our core innovation---a novel Sparsity-Guided Routing mechanism---insightfully repurposes importance scores from the sparse backbone to provide a "computational bonus,'' dynamically engaging a variable number of specialized experts based on content complexity. The entire system is trained efficiently via a loss-free load-balancing technique, eliminating the need for cumbersome auxiliary losses. Extensive experiments show that GigaMoE sets a new state-of-the-art on the PANDA benchmark, improving detection accuracy by 1.1% over SparseFormer while simultaneously reducing the computational cost (FLOPs) by a remarkable 32.3%.

PaperID: 3510

Authors:Yinghui Pan, Shuaijie Zhao, Shenbao Yu, Zongyang Liu, Yifeng Zeng, Han Liu, Mingwei Lin

Affiliations: Shenzhen University, Fujian Normal University, Ocean University of China, Northumbria University

Title: BiO-HMC: Dynamic Human-Machine Collaboration for Consensus Decision-Making via Bilevel Optimization

Abstract:
Consensus decisionmaking uses crowd responses (usually from non-experts) to questions to reach a consensus answer based on human-machine collaboration. The crucial point is dynamic, which should not only enable rapid self-iteration toward the correct answer through crowd workers' responses but also adaptively suggest the next most valuable question(s) to accelerate the integration of the answer. However, existing methods reach consensus using either offline data or fixed question search structures, thereby largely sidestepping this dynamic nature. In response, we propose a bilevel optimization-based human-machine collaboration (BiO-HMC), which explores an inner & outer-level optimization to enable effective answer integration and efficient question selection. The resulting optimization problem is intractable because there is no closed-form expression in the inner-level optimization. We employ a gradient-based method and guarantee the method's theoretical convergence. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the BiO-HMC model, i.e., achieving the highest confidence in the correct answer with the lowest labor cost.

PaperID: 3511

Authors:Shuaishuai Zu, Jihao Zhao, Biao Qin

Affiliations: Renmin University of China

Title: Enhancing the Knowledge Tracing via a Plug-In Guided Diffusion Model

Abstract:
Knowledge tracing (KT) refers to the problem of predicting students' future performance given their past performance. Scrutinizing previous studies, we can summarize a common learnto-predict paradigm: a KT model first learns the student's latent knowledge states from historical question-solving learning interactions and then directly predicts whether the student could correctly answer new questions. Alongside the paradigm, existing KT models are dedicated to tailoring refinements for improving predictive performance. However, this has led to increasing model complexity and reduced usability. Inspired by the diagnosis process of human teachers, they conduct correctness prediction based on the students' responses, which are further derived from their latent knowledge states. To achieve this, we propose a novel plug-in Guided diffusiOn mODule (GOOD), which reframes the KT problem as a learn-generate-to-predict paradigm. Specifically, we first employ an existing KT backbone to learn the student's evolving latent knowledge states, subsequently feeding these into our GOOD. Next, GOOD employs a person-wise noise scheduling strategy to add noise to the target responses in the diffusion process, thereby exploring the underlying distribution of response space. Then, GOOD designs a flexible transformer-modulated denoising network to generate target responses utilizing the latent knowledge states as conditional guidance in the reverse process. Finally, the generated responses can explicitly reflect the student's performance, thereby facilitating the correctness prediction. Extensive experiments on four datasets have verified the effectiveness of GOOD in boosting existing KT models to achieve state-of-the-art performance, as well as its generalizability as a flexible plugin.

PaperID: 3512

Authors:Shaofei Cai, Zhancun Mu, Anji Liu, Yitao Liang

Affiliations: Peking University, National University of Singapore

Title: Steering Visuomotor Policy in Open Worlds via Cross-View Goal Alignment

Abstract:
We aim to develop a goal specification method that is semantically clear, spatially sensitive, domainagnostic, and intuitive for human users to guide agent interactions in 3D environments. Specifically, we propose a novel cross-view goal alignment framework that allows users to specify target objects using segmentation masks from their camera views rather than the agent’s observations. We highlight that behavior cloning alone fails to align the agent’s behavior with human intent when the human and agent camera views differ significantly. To address this, we introduce two auxiliary objectives: cross-view consistency loss and target visibility loss, which explicitly enhance the agent's spatial reasoning ability. According to this, we develop ROCKET-2, a state-of-the-art agent trained in Minecraft, achieving an improvement in the efficiency of inference 3x to 6x. We demonstrate that ROCKET-2 can directly interpret goals from human camera views, enabling better human-agent interaction. Remarkably, ROCKET-2 demonstrates zero-shot generalization capabilities: despite being trained exclusively on the Minecraft dataset, it can adapt and generalize to other 3D environments like Doom, DMLab, and Unreal through a simple action space mapping.

PaperID: 3513

Authors:Liang Cao

Affiliations: The University of British Columbia

Title: A Natural-Gradient Approach for Nonlinear Stochastic Systems with Parameter Uncertainty

Abstract:
Controlling nonlinear stochastic systems with parametric uncertainty is a fundamental challenge in modern control theory. This paper presents a comprehensive theoretical framework for a naturalgradient method applied to polynomial chaos theory. We focus on quadratic regulator problems characterized by both parametric uncertainty and additive stochastic disturbances. We extend existing polynomial chaos approaches from linear systems to general nonlinear dynamics. To achieve this, we develop new mathematical tools to handle the complex interactions between nonlinearity, parameter uncertainty, and noise. The framework provides local convergence guarantees for the proposed natural gradient algorithm. Furthermore, it offers practical computational strategies while carefully characterizing the theoretical limitations in the nonlinear setting.

PaperID: 3514

Authors:Jinyu Chen, Hongyu Li, Zongheng Tang, Xiaoduo Li, Wenjun Wu, Si Liu

Affiliations: Beihang University

Title: AerialVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Aerial Navigation with Online Dialogue

Abstract:
Visual Dialogue Navigation (VDN) aims to enable agents to reach target locations through dialogue with humans. The integration of VDN into Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) systems enhances humanmachine interaction by enabling intuitive, hands-free operation, thereby unlocking vast applications. However, existing VDN models for UAVs can only perform navigation based on dialogue history, lacking proactive interaction capabilities to correct trajectories. Moreover, their sequential observation history recording mechanism struggles to accurately localize landmarks observed in the historical context, leading to ineffective utilization of referential information in new user instructions.To address these, we present AerialVLA, an end-to-end UAV navigation framework integrating dialogue comprehension, action decision-making, and navigational question generation. AerialVLA comprises three core components: i) we propose the Progress-Driven Navigation-Query Alternation mechanism to determine optimal questioning timing through navigation progress estimation autonomously. ii) To effectively model long-horizon history observation sequences, we develop the History Spatial-Temporal Fusion module that extracts discriminative spatial-temporal representations from historical observations. iii) Furthermore, to overcome data scarcity in training, we devise the Online Task-Driven Augmentation strategy that enhances learning through action-conditioned data augmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that AerialVLA achieves state-of-the-art navigation performance while exhibiting effective dialogue capabilities.Moreover, to better evaluate the agent's proactive dialogue and navigation abilities, our evaluation benchmark, named UAV Navigation with Online Dialogue (UNOD), incorporates an online dialogue interaction module. The UNOD assesses UAV agents' real-time questioning capabilities by leveraging an Air Commander Large Language Model to simulate human-UAV interactions during testing.

PaperID: 3515

Authors:Zhengdong Hong, Guofeng Zhang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University

Title: Learning Object-Centric Motion Priors from Human for Robotic Dexterous Manipulation

Abstract:
Manipulating diverse objects with multifingered dexterous hands is challenging due to the high dimensionality and complex dynamics. Human-Object Interaction (HOI) datasets provide rich knowledge about task information and embodied interactions. Instead of solely imitating the human demonstrations, our method learns to holistically predict future hand-object states by leveraging these datasets. The predicted future states of the object can serve as a general-purpose reward term for reinforcement learning, reducing reliance on task-specific reward engineering and enhancing generalization across tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on three manipulation tasks in simulation and the real world. Our approach outperforms existing SOTA methods in both success rate and generalizability on novel objects. Furthermore, we validate the cross-embodiment compatibility of our methods by successfully deploying the skills on different robot hands.

PaperID: 3516

Authors:Yuyan Liu, Li Zhang, Di Wu, Yan Zhang, Anran Huang, Zhi Wang, Liu Liu, Dan Guo

Affiliations: Hefei University of Technology, University of Science and Technology of China

Title: SIAM: Towards Generalizable Articulated Object Modeling via Single Robot-Object Interaction

Abstract:
Articulated object modeling, which represents interconnected rigid bodies with their geometry, part segmentation, articulation tree, and physical properties, is crucial for robotic perception and manipulation. Recently existing methods like SAGCI leverage Interactive Perception (IP) to refine models through robot interaction. However, SAGCI suffers from priordependency (requiring initialization), neglects kinematic/dynamic constraints, and generates non-watertight meshes. To overcome these limitations, we propose SIAM, a novel framework for efficient and generalizable Single-Interaction Articulated Modeling. Given an initial point cloud, SIAM first enables minimal robot interaction to trigger object motion. It then precisely segments parts by analyzing point cloud differences pre- and post-interaction. For joint parameter estimation, we introduce an optimization incorporating novel kinematic energy constraints, enhancing physical consistency. Finally, we reconstruct a high-quality, topologically watertight mesh by learning 3D Gaussian Primitives from multi-view RGB-D observations under deformation. Extensive experiments on the PartNet-Mobility benchmark demonstrate state-of-the-art articulation modeling performance. Successful real-world deployment with an xArm robot further validates the framework's practicality and transferability. SIAM achieves accurate, prior-free modeling with significantly reduced interaction cost.

PaperID: 3517

Authors:Yanghong Mei, Yirong Yang, Longteng Guo, Qunbo Wang, Ming-Ming Yu, Xingjian He, Wenjun Wu, Jing Liu

Affiliations: Institute of Automation, Beihang University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing Jiaotong University

Title: UrbanNav: Learning Language-Guided Embodied Urban Navigation from Web-Scale Human Trajectories

Abstract:
Navigating complex urban environments using natural language instructions poses significant challenges for embodied agents, including noisy language instructions, ambiguous spatial references, diverse landmarks, and dynamic street scenes. Current visual navigation methods are typically limited to simulated or offstreet environments, and often rely on precise goal formats, such as specific coordinates or images. This limits their effectiveness for autonomous agents like last-mile delivery robots navigating unfamiliar cities. To address these limitations, we introduce UrbanNav, a scalable framework that trains embodied agents to follow free-form language instructions in diverse urban settings. Leveraging web-scale city walking videos, we develop an scalable annotation pipeline that aligns human navigation trajectories with language instructions grounded in real-world landmarks. UrbanNav encompasses over 1,500 hours of navigation data and 3 million instruction-trajectory-landmark triplets, capturing a wide range of urban scenarios. Our model learns robust navigation policies to tackle complex urban scenarios, demonstrating superior spatial reasoning, robustness to noisy instructions, and generalization to unseen urban settings. Experimental results show that UrbanNav significantly outperforms existing methods, highlighting the potential of large-scale web video data to enable language-guided, real-world urban navigation for embodied agents.

PaperID: 3518

Authors:Junming Wang

Affiliations: University of Hong Kong

Title: LatentVLA: Taming Latent Space for Generalizable and Long-Horizon Bimanual Manipulation

Abstract:
Current paradigms for robotic imitation learning face a stark tradeoff between the motion fidelity of diffusion models and the data scalability of inverse dynamics models. The latter, while scalable, often learns a latent action space disconnected from physical reality. This flaw leads to critical failures: temporal entanglement, where the model cannot distinguish between visually similar states requiring distinct actions, e.g., a gripper approaching versus receding from an object. This ambiguity, compounded by discretization artifacts and sensitivity to task-irrelevant dynamics, renders robust planning infeasible. We introduce LatentVLA, a vision-language-action framework designed to overcome these limitations by learning a continuous and spatiotemporally grounded latent action representation. Its progressive three-stage architecture first employs a Temporal-Attentive Latent Action Model (TA-LAM) to resolve ambiguities using language-guided attention and explicit temporal encoding. Subsequently, a Latent Action Diffusion Transformer (LADT) performs planning via diffusion directly within this continuous latent space, preserving motion fidelity without tokenization. Finally, an expert policy head translates these latent plans into precise robot actions. Experiments show LatentVLA sets a new state-of-the-art across a suite of real-world bimanual tasks, outperforming prior methods and demonstrating superior zero-shot generalization and few-shot efficiency.

PaperID: 3519

Authors:Giuseppe De Giacomo, Yves Lesperance, Matteo Mancanelli

Affiliations: York University, University of Rome La Sapienza

Title: Strategic Reasoning over Golog Programs in the Nondeterministic Situation Calculus

Abstract:
We investigate the problem of synthesizing strategies that guarantee the successful execution of a highlevel nondeterministic agent program in Golog within a nondeterministic first-order basic action theory, considering the environment as adversarial. Our approach constructs a symbolic program graph that captures the control flow independently of the domain, enabling strategy synthesis through the cross product of the program graph with the domain model. We formally relate graph-based transitions to standard Golog semantics and provide a synthesis procedure that is sound though incomplete (in general, the problem is undecidable, given that we have a first-order representation of the state). We also extend the framework to handle the case where the environment's possible behaviors are specified by a Golog program.

PaperID: 3520

Authors:Yuming Qiao, Liang Luo, Dan Meng, Yifan Yang, Qingyuan Wang, Juntuo Wang, Yuwei Zhang, Ru Zhen, Yanhao Zhang, Haonan Lu, Xudong Zhang

Affiliations: OPPO Research Institute, OPPO AI Center

Title: Aligning Cross-View Visual Geometries in LVLMs Through Human-Like Reasoning Learning

Abstract:
Spatial understanding is a critical capability for LVLMs (Large VisionLanguage Models) to advance embodied AI applications. Existing works primarily focus on enhancing spatial understanding within a single frame, i.e., injecting 3D spatial concepts into LVLMs under single coordinate system. However, such improvements struggle in real-world tasks that require consistent cross-view spatial reasoning. In this paper, we propose CVVG-Reasoner(Cross-View Visual Geometries) that lifts single-frame spatial comprehension to unified cross-view spatial understanding by mimicking human-like cross-view reasoning mechanisms. First, we introduce MV3DSR(Multi-View 3D Spatial Reasoning), a scalable pipeline for cross-view spatial reasoning data generation, and construct MV3DSR-Dataset, a large-scale dataset with diverse 3D cross-view reasoning tasks. Based on MV3DSR, we propose MV3DSR-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating cross-view spatial reasoning capabilities. Second, we design a three-stage training strategy: the first two stages progressively equip the model with (1) fundamental spatial knowledge and (2) human-like cross-view reasoning patterns, while the final stage employs reinforcement learning to further boost its performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our CVVG-Reasoner significantly outperforms existing 3D LLMs(Large Language Models) and advanced LVLMs in cross-view tasks while maintaining robust performance on out-of-domain data. Ablations further reveal that injecting human-like reasoning patterns yields 44% performance gain, validating the effectiveness of our design.

PaperID: 3521

Authors:Alexander Benvenuti, Brendan Bialy, Miriam Dennis, Matthew Hale

Affiliations: Georgia Institute of Technology, Air Force Research Laboratory

Title: Differentially Private Linear Programming: Reduced Sub-Optimality and Guaranteed Constraint Satisfaction

Abstract:
Linear programming is a fundamental tool in a wide range of decision systems. However, without privacy protections, sharing the solution to a linear program may reveal information about the underlying data used to formulate it, which may be sensitive. Therefore, in this paper we introduce an approach for protecting sensitive data while formulating and solving a linear program. First, we prove that this method perturbs objectives and constraints in a way that makes them differentially private. Then, we show that (i) privatized problems always have solutions, and (ii) their solutions satisfy the constraints in their corresponding original, nonprivate problems. The latter result solves an open problem in the literature. Next, we analytically bound the expected sub-optimality of solutions that is induced by privacy. Numerical simulations show that, under a typical privacy setup, the solution produced by our method yields a 65% reduction in sub-optimality compared to the state of the art.

PaperID: 3522

Authors:Zixuan Bi, Yang Zhao, Ganchao Liu

Affiliations: Northwest Polytechnical University Xi'an

Title: Deep Clustering Based on Sparse Kolmogorov-Arnold Network and Spectral Constraint

Abstract:
At present, spectral clustering is an important branch of unsupervised learning, and its application in deep learning has been widely concerned. However, for highdimensional sparse datasets, the complexity of network scale leads to parameter explosion, and static Gaussian kernel often has wrong preset data structure. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel deep clustering model, Deep Clustering Based on Sparse Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) and Spectral Constraint. It contains a deep sparse clustering framework, in which sparse KAN and the orthogonal layer are designed to enhance the sparsity of the activation function matrix, reduce the number of parameters and improve the stability of model convergence. Additionally, we add an adaptive optimized affinity matrix based on spectral constraint, which overcomes the limitations of static Gaussian kernels, and improves the performance and stability of spectral constraint. Experimental results on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms existing methods in clustering performance, computational efficiency, and stability.

PaperID: 3523

Authors:Cory Butz, Alejandro Santoscoy-Rivero, Camilla Lewis

Affiliations: University of Regina

Title: Paths Not Taken: Structure-Based Pruning in PSDD Learning and Inference

Abstract:
We make three novel contributions to parameter learning and inference in probabilistic sentential decision diagrams (PSDDs). First, rather than traversing the entire PSDD during parameter learning for each dataset example, we pioneer the use of determinism to focus only on the activated partition. Second, we demonstrate how to prune deterministic computation in inference, thereby eliminating the need to propagate probability over every node in the network for each query. Third, we introduce a technique that parallelizes a single circuit evaluation, rather than parallelizing individual multiplications or layerwise inference. For both learning and inference, experimental results on benchmark PSDDs from various application domains demonstrate state-of-the-art performance.

PaperID: 3524

Authors:Qianyue Cao, Zongwei Zhu, Zirui Lian, Rui Zhang, Boyu Li, Yi Xiong, Xuehai Zhou

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China

Title: PPFL: A Parameter Behavior-Driven Plug-in Personalization Engine for Federated Learning

Abstract:
Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) customizes models for each client to mitigate challenges from nonIID data, wherein a dominant strategy is model decoupling that partitions models into shared and personalized parts based on architectural priors (e.g., backbone vs. head). However, we reveal a critical flaw in this strategy: it induces "intrinsic drift," a performance degradation often more severe than the well-known client drift, which limits final accuracy. We trace this drift to a steep cliff of high loss emerging from the naive stitching of shared and personalized parts. To address this, we shift from architectural partitioning to a parameter behavior-driven paradigm. We introduce PPFL, an approach that employs a novel soft-fusion strategy guided by parameter-wise behavioral perception. PPFL dynamically infers each parameter's functional role—whether it behaves more like a 'personalist' or a 'generalist' in the current context—by synthesizing its multifaceted behavior observed during local training. Extensive experiments on image, text, and multimodal classification benchmarks show that PPFL outperforms eight state-of-the-art baselines by up to 5.3%. Moreover, it can function as a plug-in module, boosting the accuracy of vanilla FedAvg with a 16.82% absolute gain.

PaperID: 3525

Authors:Chunchun Chen, Xing Wei, Jiayi Yang, Chenrun Wang, Yiwei Fu, Yuxing Zhang, Xin Sun, Rui Fan, Wei Ye

Affiliations: Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Tongji University, College of Electronic and Information Engineering, School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University, School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Faculty of Data Science, City University of Macau, China National Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, Xi’an Jiaotong University

Title: Edge Self-Adversarial Augmentation Enhances Graph Contrastive Learning Against Neighborhood Inconsistency

Abstract:
Recent studies have shown that unsupervised graph contrastive learning (GCL) is vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Automatic adversarial augmentation techniques are proposed to improve both the effectiveness and robustness of GCL. Existing methods typically regard unsupervised contrastive loss as the adversarial goal, essentially aiming to maximize interview instance-wise discrepancies between adversarial and original views. However, such attacks overlook intra-view neighborhood inconsistency, which hinders the robustness of GCL models against local neighborhood noises, resulting in performance degradation on low-homophily graphs. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel adversarial contrastive paradigm, named Edge self-aDversarial Augmentation for Graph Contrastive Learning (EDA-GCL). We theoretically establish that the adversarial objective of the intra-view neighborhood is equivalent to maximizing the discrepancy between bidirectional edge features. Hence, we build our adversarial framework based on edge self-adversarial learning. It generates pairwise adversarial augmentations from the original view by learning distinct neighborhood connectivity structures. The learned pairwise adversarial views are utilized for GCL model training in the minimization stage. Notably, this edge-level adversarial approach reduces the computational complexity to the level of the edge number. Experiments on various graph tasks and complex noise scenarios demonstrate the superiority and robustness of our EDA-GCL.

PaperID: 3526

Authors:Junsong Chen, Jiyuan Liu, Suyuan Liu, Wei Zhang, Ao Li, En Zhu, Xinwang Liu

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology, Harbin University of Science and Technology

Title: Sample-specific Modality Diagnosis and Cross-modal Enhancement for Incomplete Multimodal Representations

Abstract:
In multimodal sentiment analysis, modality missingness and quality degradation are common. Existing methods often rely on batchlevel modality generation, generation but neglect sample-level missingness, hence their flexibility is limited severely in real-world scenarios. To address this, Sample-specific Modality Diagnosis and Cross-modal Enhancement for Incomplete Multimodal Representations (SMCIR) is proposed. Specifically, The Dynamic Multi-feature Fusion Detector (DMFD) is presented, which detects missingness and severity at the sample-level using indicators such as information entropy, modality similarity, and mutual information. Unlike batch-based methods, the DMFD provides fine-grained detection and adaptive responses, improving sensitivity to modality disturbances. Meanwhile, the Context-aware Modality Completion Generator (CMCG) is developed to restore missing modalities through context-guided reconstruction using multiscale feature fusion and cross-modal attention. In this way, the proposed CMCG method can avoid redundancy and inconsistency, enhancing the consistency and discriminativity of the fused representation. In CMCG, the text modality serves as a stable guide to improve context consistency. Experiments on the CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI datasets show that SMCIR outperforms existing full-modal and non-recovery-based methods, well validating its efficacy and superiority in multimodal learning.

PaperID: 3527

Authors:Yihao Chen, Haobo Jiang, Liang Yu, Jianmin Zheng

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University, Alibaba Group

Title: SchellingFormer: Laplacian Matrix-guided Geometric Transformer for Robust Schelling Point Detection

Abstract:
Detecting Schelling Points—salient 3D mesh landmarks that serve as natural reference points for shape analysis—is a challenging problem in geometry processing. While existing CNNbased methods struggle with limited receptive fields and poor geometric context modeling, this paper proposes \em SchellingFormer, a novel Laplacian matrix-guided Geometric Transformer that effectively captures long-range dependencies and discriminative geometric features for robust Schelling point prediction. Our framework consists of two key components: (i) a hybrid geometric feature embedding module that integrates handcrafted descriptors (coordinates, Gaussian curvature, and curvature differences) to encode local geometry, and (ii) a Laplacian-driven vector attention mechanism, where spatial relationships encoded by the Laplacian matrix guide feature aggregation with the Transformer. This approach enables adaptive, geometry-aware message passing and contextual representation learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SchellingFormer outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple evaluation metrics. Our work bridges the gap between spectral mesh analysis and Transformer-based learning, offering a powerful tool for 3D shape understanding tasks such as shape matching and saliency detection.

PaperID: 3528

Authors:Zhuangzhuang Chen, Nuo Chen, Dachong Li, Zhiliang Lin, Xingyu Feng, Yifan Zhang, Jie Chen, Jianqiang Li

Affiliations: Shenzhen University

Title: CoGenSAM: Codebook-Interactive Generative Labeling for Adapting SAM to Crack Segmentation

Abstract:
The goal of this work is to adapt Segment Anything Models (SAM) into crack segmentation tasks via automatic label generation, thus eliminating manual annotation cost. In this regard, an intuitive approach is to extract edges of crack samples and generate labels via the dilation and erosion processes for finetuning SAM. However, this simple solution cannot guarantee the quality of generated labels, as crack regions will be corrupted due to the imperfect edge detection. To this end, this paper proposes CoGenSAM, a novel Codebook-interactive Generative Labeling framework that enables an annotation-free SAM fine-tuning. To achieve this, in the first stage, we pre-train a vector-quantized variational auto-encoder (VQVAE) by reconstructing the synthesized crack-like structures for learning crack-aware priors within the codebook. In the second stage, these priors help another VQVAE serve as the restoration model to restore the randomly corrupted structures into uncorrupted ones. Specifically, we propose the crack-aware contrastive-interaction to maximize the mutual information with the above priors via codebook interaction. Then, high-quality labels can be generated by restoring corrupted labels from edge detection, contributing to an annotation-free SAM fine-tuning. We collect a new dataset, Bridge2025, to address the limited availability of related bridge-oriented benchmarks. Experiments show that our performance is close to fully-supervised methods.

PaperID: 3529

Authors:Pengyu Cheng, Jiacheng Wang, Tianle Chen, Bei Liu, Xiaofeng Hou, Jiacheng Liu

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Shanghai Jiaotong University

Title: DesireKV: Decoupling Sensitivity and Importance for Reasoning-Aware KV Cache Compression

Abstract:
Large language models performing chainof-thought (CoT) reasoning generate extensive intermediate sequences that consume substantial memory through key-value (KV) cache storage. Unlike conventional text generation, reasoning sequences exhibit unique characteristics, including repetitive logic patterns and low information density, making existing KV cache compression methods suboptimal. We propose DesireKV, a novel compression framework that first constructs a two-dimensional coordinate system based on attention-derived importance and outlier-based quantization sensitivity. It then applies a dedicated protection mechanism for tokens critical to the reasoning process itself. Our approach makes differentiated compression decisions: retaining important and sensitive tokens, quantizing important but insensitive tokens, and evicting unimportant tokens. Through comprehensive evaluation on reasoning benchmarks, we demonstrate that DesireKV achieves up to 2.93× throughput improvement while maintaining nearly 99% of original reasoning accuracy.

PaperID: 3530

Authors:Jong In Choi

Affiliations: Korea Credit Information Services

Title: TabGeoFlow: A Geometric Flow Matching Model for Tabular Data Synthesis

Abstract:
Tabular data synthesis is a key technique for protecting data privacy and addressing class imbalance, yet existing generative models struggle to capture the complex intrinsic structure of the data. To overcome this limitation, we propose TabGeoFlow, a novel geometric flow matching model for tabular data synthesis. The core innovation of TabGeoFlow is the injection of an explicit geometric inductive bias into the conditional flow matching framework. We decompose the learned vector field into local tangent and normal components of the data manifold. By dynamically suppressing the predicted normal component via a controlling loss function, we constrain the generative path to follow the data's intrinsic structure. Implemented with a shared backbone for parameter efficiency, TabGeoFlow achieves competitive or better fidelity and utility, while exhibiting near random black box MIA accuracy and DCR ≈ 50%, suggesting reduced memorization without sacrificing quality.

PaperID: 3531

Authors:Shan Cong, Chao Yu, Xiangyuan Lan

Affiliations: Sun Yat-sen University

Title: CATAL: Causally Disentangled Task Representation Learning for Offline Meta-Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Contextbased Offline Meta Reinforcement Learning (COMRL) has shown promising results in improving the cross-task generalization ability of meta-policies. However, current methods often lead to entangled task representations, in which each latent dimension is influenced by multiple causal factors that govern variations in environment dynamics and reward mechanisms. This entanglement can degrade generalization performance, particularly when multiple causal factors vary simultaneously across tasks. To address this limitation, we propose CAusally disentangled TAsk representation Learning (CATAL) method for COMRL that aims to improve the generalization ability of the meta-policy, where each latent dimension in the task representations aligns to a single causal factor.Theoretically, we show that under mild conditions, the task representations learned by CATAL are causally disentangled. Empirically, extensive results on multi-task MuJoCo benchmarks show that CATAL consistently outperforms existing COMRL baselines in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution generalization.

PaperID: 3532

Authors:Jiahao Fan, Chien-Ming Chen

Affiliations: University of Sydney, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology

Title: Efficient Multimodal Large Language Model via Dynamic KV Cache Quantization

Abstract:
Multimodal large language models (LMMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse visionlanguage tasks, including image captioning, visual question answering, and text-image retrieval. However, their computational complexity and memory footprint, particularly in the key-value (KV) cache during inference, pose significant challenges for real-time deployment, especially on resource-constrained devices. In this paper, we propose Dynamic KV Cache Quantization, a novel quantization strategy tailored for multimodal LMMs. Our approach applies per-channel quantization to (K) and per-token quantization to (V), leveraging their respective statistical distributions to optimize precision allocation. Additionally, we introduce an adaptive token and channel recording mechanism that dynamically adjusts quantization parameters based on real-time distribution tracking, effectively mitigating the impact of outliers. To further enhance compression efficiency, we implement fine-grained grouping, which partitions KV tensors into localized subgroups, enabling more adaptive quantization. Experimental results on LLaVA-1.5 (7B/13B) and Qwen-VL across multiple multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing KV-cache quantization approaches, achieving a superior trade-off between memory efficiency and model accuracy.

PaperID: 3533

Authors:Qingqing Gao, Tengfei Liu, Xiaoyan Li, Xiaodan Zhang, Zhongfan Sun, Boyue Wang, Baocai Yin, Zhaohui Liu

Affiliations: Beijing University of Technology, Beijing Tongren Hospital

Title: MARE: Multimodal Analogical Reasoning for Disease Evolution-Aware Radiology Report Generation

Abstract:
Radiology report generation from longitudinal medical data is critical for assessing disease progression and automating diagnostic workflows. While recent methods incorporate longitudinal information, they primarily rely on multimodal feature fusion, with limited capacity for explicit disease evolution modeling and temporal reasoning. To address this, we propose MARE, an endto-end framework that formulates longitudinal radiology report generation as a multimodal analogical reasoning task. Inspired by the Abduction–Mapping–Induction paradigm, MARE models latent relational structures underlying disease evolution by aligning lesion-level visual features across time and mapping them to the textual domain for temporally coherent and clinically meaningful report generation. To mitigate the spatial misalignment caused by patient positioning or imaging variation, we introduce an Adaptive Region Alignment (ARA) module for robust temporal correspondence. Additionally, we design Dual Evolution Consistency (DEC) losses to regularize analogical reasoning by enforcing temporal coherence in both visual and textual evolution paths. Extensive experiments on the Longitudinal-MIMIC dataset demonstrate that MARE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across both natural language generation and clinical effectiveness metrics, highlighting the value of structured analogical reasoning for disease evolution-aware report generation.

PaperID: 3534

Authors:Shengbo Gao, Jinyang Guo, Lixian Su, Yifu Ding, Shiqiao Gu, Aishan Liu, Yuqing Ma, Zhiwang Zhang, Xianglong Liu

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Complex & Critical Software Environment, Beihang University, China School of Artifcial Intelligence, Western University, China School of Computer Science and Engineering, SenseTime Research, NingboTech University

Title: CMedBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Efficient Medical Large Language Models

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) hold significant potential for enhancing healthcare applications, yet their deployment is hindered by high computational and memory demands. Model compression techniques offer solutions to reduce these demands, but their impact on medical LLMs remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce CMedBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating compressed LLMs in medical contexts. CMedBench assesses five core dimensions: Medical Knowledge Ability, Medical Application Ability, Trustworthiness Maintenance, Compression Cross Combination, and Computational Efficiency. Through extensive empirical studies, we analyze the tradeoffs between model efficiency and clinical performance across diverse models, datasets, and compression strategies. Our findings highlight critical limitations in current evaluation practices and provide a robust framework for aligning compression strategies with medical requirements. CMedBench serves as a vital resource for researchers and practitioners, guiding the development of efficient, trustworthy, and clinically effective LLMs for healthcare applications.

PaperID: 3535

Authors:Yongbiao Gao, Xiangcheng Sun, Chao Tan, Chunyu Hu, Guohua Lv

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Computing Power Network and Information Security, Ministry of Education, Shandong Computer Science Center (National Supercomputer Center in Jinan), Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences), China Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Computing Power Internet and Service Computing, Shandong Fundamental Research Center for Computer Science, China Key Laboratory of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Technology and Its Interdisciplinary Application (Southeast University), School of Computer and Electronic Information/School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing Normal University

Title: Adaptive Momentum and EMA-weighted Modeling for Imbalanced Label Distribution Learning

Abstract:
Label Distribution Learning (LDL) is a groundbreaking paradigm for addressing the task with label ambiguity. Subjectivity in annotating label description degrees often leads to imbalanced label distribution. Existing approaches either adopt representation alignment or decoupling strategies to solve the imbalanced label distribution learning (ILDL). However, representation alignmentbased methods overlook the issue of gradient vanishing for non-dominant branches within imbalanced label distributions, while decoupling-based approaches fail to achieve adaptive weight optimization. To address these issues, we propose Adaptive Momentum and Exponential Moving Average weighted modeling (AMEMA). AMEMA combines EMA-based loss weighting with momentum allocation to mitigate gradient attenuation in non-dominant label learning and adaptively balance the optimization signals between dominant and non-dominant branches. It computes and updates Kullback-Leibler divergence losses for each branch using EMA, and applies different initial momenta to facilitate branch-specific optimization dynamics. Dynamic weighting coefficients, derived from EMA-smoothed losses, allow the model to adjust its learning direction adaptively and improve the learning of non-dominant labels. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that AMEMA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art ILDL methods across various evaluation metrics.

PaperID: 3536

Authors:Ziqi Gao

Affiliations: University of Pennsylvania

Title: Unified Structural Factors for Transfer Learning Generalization with PAC-Bayesian Guarantees

Abstract:
Understanding when a pretrained model generalizes well to a new task remains a key challenge in transfer learning. Classical theories bound target risk using divergences such as total variation, MMD, or Wasserstein distance, yet tasks with similar divergences often show very different transfer performance. We propose a structural framework that explains transferability through two factors: the Feature Overlap Rate (FOR), measuring how much target representation lies in the source-induced subspace, and the Effective Task Complexity (ETC), quantifying the entropy of latent subtasks. We derive a PAC-Bayesian bound where target risk depends on FOR and ETC, and show that larger models attenuate their negative effects. Experiments on six GLUE transfer pairs estimate FOR and ETC from encoder representations and compare them to classical divergences. Results show that FOR and ETC together explain over 80% of transfer risk variance, while divergences fail to do so. Our findings provide a geometry-aware perspective for diagnosing and guiding transfer learning.

PaperID: 3537

Authors:Chandan Gautam, Lew Choon Hean, Ankit Das, Xiaoli Li, Savitha Ramasamy

Affiliations: Institute for Infocomm Research, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, National University of Singapore, Institute of High Performance Computing, Singapore University of Technology and Design

Title: TGCD: A Framework for Generalized Category Discovery in Time-Series Data

Abstract:
Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to classify labeled instances from known categories while discovering novel categories from unlabeled data. Despite recent progress in GCD for computer vision, existing GCD approaches largely rely on static finalstep representations (in the visual domain), overlooking the temporally evolving nature of time-series data. In this paper, we introduce TGCD, the first framework specifically designed for GCD in time-series data. TGCD leverages both the dynamics of latent representations and the heterogeneity of predictions across multiple temporal segments to disover unknown (i.e., novel) categories, based on a pre-trained time-series foundation model. We propose a unified learning objective for TGCD that integrates the following three components: (i) a Stochastic Temporal Segment Dropout (STeSD) objective that regularizes the model by selectively penalizing high-entropy segments to encourage confident predictions on uncertain regions of the time-series, and (ii) a Known–Unknown Temporal Discriminability (KUTD) objective that promotes representational separation between known and unknown categories within unlabeled data and (iii) a margin-aware classification objective to improve generalization. Empirical evaluation on six multivariate time-series data sets demonstrates that the TGCD substantially outperforms existing GCD methods, particularly in discovering unknown categories. We further conduct ablation studies to highlight the individual contributions of each component. Additionally, we provide the first comprehensive benchmarking of recent GCD approaches on time-series data, revealing the limitations of naive transfer and underscoring the benefits of temporal modeling.

PaperID: 3538

Authors:Stan P Hauke, Przemysław Andrzej Wałęga

Affiliations: King's College London, University of London, Queen Mary

Title: Aggregate-Combine-Readout GNNs Can Express Logical Classifiers Beyond the Logic C2

Abstract:
In recent years, there has been growing interest in understanding the expressive power of graph neural networks (GNNs) by relating them to logical languages. This research has been initialised by an influential result of Barceló et al. (2020), who showed that the graded modal logic (or a guarded fragment of the logic C2), characterises the logical expressiveness of aggregatecombine GNNs. As a “challenging open problem” they left the question whether C2 characterises the logical expressiveness of aggregate-combine-readout GNNs. This question has remained unresolved despite several attempts. In this paper, we solve the above open problem by proving that aggregate-combine-readout GNNs can express logical classifiers beyond C2. This result holds over both undirected and directed graphs. Beyond its implications for GNNs, our work also leads to purely logical insights on the expressive power of infinitary logics.

PaperID: 3539

Authors:Shenghong He, Chao Yu, Qian Lin, Yile Liang, Donghui Li, Xuetao Ding

Affiliations: Sun Yat-sen University, Pengcheng Laboratory

Title: Reliability-Guaranteed and Reward-Seeking Sequence Modeling for Model-Based Offline Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
As a datadriven learning approach, model-based offline reinforcement learning (MORL) aims to learn a policy by exploiting a dynamics model derived from an existing dataset. Applying conservative quantification to the dynamics model, most existing works on MORL generate trajectories that approximate the real data distribution to facilitate policy learning. However, these methods typically overlook the influence of historical information on environmental dynamics, thus generating unreliable trajectories that fail to align with the true data distribution. In this paper, we propose a new MORL algorithm called Reliability-guaranteed and Reward-seeking Transformer (RT). RT can avoid generating unreliable trajectories through the calculation of cumulative reliability of the trajectories, which is a weighted variational distance between the generated trajectory distribution and the true data distribution. Moreover, by sampling candidate actions with high rewards, RT can efficiently generate high-reward trajectories from the existing offline data, thereby further facilitating policy learning. We theoretically prove the performance guarantees of RT in policy learning, and empirically demonstrate its effectiveness against state-of-the-art model-based methods on several offline benchmark tasks and a large-scale industrial dataset from an on-demand food delivery platform.

PaperID: 3540

Authors:Xuemin Hu, Shen Li, Yingfen Xu, Bo Tang, Long Chen

Affiliations: Ministry of Education, Hubei University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Enhancing Diffusion Policies with Distribution-Matching Generator in Offline Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) can learn policies from precollected offline datasets without interacting with the environment, but it suffers from the issue of out-of-distribution (OOD). Recent methods use the generative adversarial paradigm to learn policies, but easily fail to handle the conflict of fooling the discriminator and maximizing expected returns. In this paper, we propose a novel offline RL method named Distribution-Matching Generator-based Diffusion Policies (DMGDP). A distribution matching-based policy learning method is first developed, where the diffusion serves as the policy generator, to handle the conflict of fooling the discriminator and maximizing expected returns. Furthermore, a policy confidence mechanism based on discriminator regularization is designed to prevent the agent from taking OOD actions, with the aim of robust generative adversarial learning. We conducted extensive experiments on the D4RL benchmarks, and the results demonstrate that DMGDP outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 3541

Authors:Rui Huang, Dian Meng, Xun Zhou, Sikun Yang

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Great Bay University, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Shenzhen Pengcheng Laboratory Shenzhen Loop Area Institute, School of Computing and Information Technology, China Great Bay Institute for Advanced Study, China Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Mathematical and Neural Dynamical Systems Dongguan Key Laboratory for Data Science and Intelligent Medicine

Title: Sparse Poisson Gamma Belief Networks for High-Dimensional Sparse Count Data

Abstract:
Bayesian networks play a crucial role in various domains for unsupervised feature extraction and data interpretation. The Poisson gamma belief networks (PGBNs), as a type of Bayesian networks, have shown promise in analyzing highdimensional count data. However, PGBNs encounter significant challenges when applied to sparse data, particularly in achieving accurate feature extraction and avoiding overfitting during missing value prediction. In this paper, we propose the sparse Poisson gamma belief networks (SPGBNs), a Bayesian network model designed to address these limitations. By incorporating sparse graph-structured priors over the weight matrices between adjacent layers, the proposed SPGBNs effectively capture the inherent sparsity and graph structures of latent features. Meanwhile, SPGBNs demonstrate superior generalization on missing data prediction and enable more stable extraction of meaningful latent features compared to existing approaches. Additionally, we develop an efficient Gibbs sampling algorithm that significantly improves the training stability and computational efficiency of SPGBNs. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our approach.

PaperID: 3542

Authors:Xingwei Huang, Zhaobin Sun, Junjie Shi, Xin Yang, Zengqiang Yan

Affiliations: School of Electronic Information and Communications, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: FedRNC: Addressing Spatio-Temporal Label Misalignment in Federated Noisy Class-Incremental Learning

Abstract:
Federated classincremental learning (FCIL) aims to incrementally learn new classes across decentralized clients under non-IID data distributions. However, the pervasive challenge of label noise in FCIL has been completely overlooked. In this work, we introduce federated noisy class-incremental learning (FNCIL) and, for the first time, identify a novel form of label noise—spatio-temporal label misalignment—where samples from unseen classes are entirely mislabeled as known classes, with their correctly labeled counterparts appearing in latter tasks or other clients. This phenomenon undermines the effectiveness of existing centralized denoising strategies and creates a clear requirement for noise-robust methods in real-world FNCIL scenarios. To tackle this issue, we propose FedRNC, a dual-phase framework that leverages feature-space associations to establish spatio-temporal correspondences between clean global prototypes and noisy cached samples for progressive label correction. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate FedRNC's superiority against existing baselines, along with its plug-and-play capability to upgrade FCIL systems for FNCIL.

PaperID: 3543

Authors:Shuning Jia, Baijun Song, Canming Ye, Chun Yuan

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Shenzhen University

Title: M3Time: LLM-Enhanced Multi-Modal, Multi-Scale, and Multi-Frequency Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Abstract:
Multivariate Time Series Forecasting (MTSF) aims to capture the dependencies among multiple variables and their temporal dynamics to predict future values. In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have set a new paradigm for MTSF, incorporating external knowledge into the modeling process through textual prompts. However, we observe that current LLMbased methods fail to exploit these priors due to their coarse-grained representation of time series data, which hinders effective alignment of the two modals. To address this, we propose M3Time, a multi-modal, multi-scale, and multi-frequency framework for multivariate time series forecasting. It enhances the quality of time series representations and facilitates the integration of LLM semantic priors with fine-grained temporal features. Additionally, M3Time further improved training stability and model robustness with an adaptive mixed loss function, which dynamically balances L1 and L2 error terms. Experiment results on seven real-world public datasets show that M3Time consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, underscoring its effectiveness.

PaperID: 3544

Authors:Haoning Jiang, Han Wu, Zhuoli Ouyang, Ziheng Wang, Tinghuan Chen, Junmin Jiang

Affiliations: Southern University of Science and Technology, China University of Macau, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)

Title: FD-MAGRPO: Functionality-Driven Multi-Agent Group Relative Policy Optimization for Analog-LDO Sizing

Abstract:
This paper introduces the FunctionalityDriven Multi-Agent Group Relative Policy Optimization (FD-MAGRPO) algorithm, which is designed to enhance exploration efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL) for analog integrated circuit sizing. Our proposed method integrates two key innovations: (1) a critic-free multi-agent optimization framework based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), that eliminates the critic network and achieves stable and efficient policy updates; and (2) a functionality-driven grouping strategy, that enables agents to coordinate exploration by functional roles instead of circuit blocks, thereby improving credit assignment and cooperation. Experimental results on practical low-dropout regulator (LDO) circuits with 65–179 design parameters show that the proposed method achieves rapid convergence with only 800–3000 simulations, yielding a 4.8×–13.0× speedup over state-of-the-art methods. Mathematical analysis and empirical studies validate that the combination of critic-free optimization and functionality-based grouping leads to higher exploration efficiency and faster convergence. The proposed method enables the discovery of higher circuit performances that are inaccessible to conventional approaches, establishing FD-MAGRPO as a robust and efficient solution for complex analog-LDO sizing tasks.

PaperID: 3545

Authors:Shengkai Jin, Tianyu Chen, Chonghan Gao, Jun Han

Affiliations: Beihang University

Title: GeoNum: Bridging Numerical Continuity and Language Semantics via Geometric Embedding

Abstract:
Large language models excel at semantic reasoning yet struggle with numerical tasks because tokenization disrupts geometric continuity. Traditional methods fragment numerically close values into inconsistent token sequences, severing the correspondence between numerical proximity and representational similarity, which is essential for numerical cognition. We introduce GeoNum, a geometrically coherent numerical embedding based on polar coordinate decomposition. By encoding integer magnitudes through classification and fractional components via trigonometric regression, GeoNum constructs a continuous manifold where numerical distance is preserved geometrically. A threestage framework progressively integrates GeoNum into pretrained language models via self-supervised pretraining, projection alignment, and efficient adaptation. Experimental results across diverse arithmetic benchmarks demonstrate consistent gains in high-precision accuracy and improved interpolation and extrapolation, underscoring the promising benefits of geometric continuity for numerical modeling in large language models.

PaperID: 3546

Authors:Haidong Kang, Lianbo Ma, Pengjun Chen, Qiang He, Bo Yi

Affiliations: Northeastern University

Title: Understanding and Enhancing Differentiable Architecture Search from Information Bottleneck Perspective

Abstract:
Performance collapse is an intractable issue of Differentiable Architecture Search (DAS), where severe performance degradation of DAS happens when it trains on different search spaces or datasets. We theoretically analyze the issue from the information bottleneck (IB) perspective, and disclose that a solution to overcome this problem is to seek the bifurcation point of IB tradeoff between compression and prediction of the supernet. To this end, we propose a simple yet highly effective method, namely, Batch Entropydecay Regularization (BER), to guide the learning of DAS, which restricts compression in DAS by imposing a penalty on the architecture parameters. Comprehensive theoretical analyses demonstrate that BER is able to completely resolve DAS's performance collapse issue. Compared with a number of state-of-the-art DAS variants, BER shows its overwhelmingly better performance on 7 search spaces (i.e., NAS-Bench-201, DARTS, S1-S4, MobileNet-like) and 5 popular datasets (i.e., CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet1k, PASCAL VOC 2007, and MS COCO 2017).

PaperID: 3547

Authors:Ezgi Korkmaz

Affiliations: Independent Researcher

Title: Principled Analysis of Deep Reinforcement Learning Evaluation and Design Paradigms

Abstract:
Starting from the utilization of deep neural networks to approximate the stateaction value function that led to winning one of the most challenging games, to algorithmic advancements that allowed solving problems without even explicitly stating the rules of the challenge at hand, reinforcement learning research has been the center of remarkable scientific progress for the past decade. In this paper, we focus on the key ingredients of this research progress and we analyze the canonical evaluation and design paradigms in reinforcement learning. We introduce the theoretical foundations of the underlying causes outlining that the asymptotic performance of reinforcement learning algorithms does not have a monotone relationship between performance rankings and data-regimes. We conduct large-scale experiments and our results demonstrate that a line of reinforcement learning research under the canonical design and evaluation paradigms resulted in incorrect conclusions.

PaperID: 3548

Authors:Gyuejeong Lee, Daeyoung Choi

Affiliations: SAKAK Inc., Korea Cyber University Intellectus

Title: Communication-Efficient Heterogeneous Federated Learning with Sparse Prototypes in Resource-Constrained Environments

Abstract:
Communication efficiency in federated learning (FL) remains a critical challenge in resourceconstrained environments. While prototype-based FL reduces communication overhead by sharing class prototypes—mean activations in the penultimate layer—instead of model parameters, its efficiency degrades with larger feature dimensions and class counts. We propose TinyProto, which addresses these limitations through Class-wise Prototype Sparsification (CPS) and Adaptive Prototype Scaling (APS). CPS enables structured sparsity by allocating specific dimensions to class prototypes and transmitting only non-zero elements, thereby achieving higher communication efficiency, while APS scales prototypes based on class distributions to improve performance. Our experiments demonstrate that TinyProto reduces communication costs by up to 10x compared to existing methods while improving performance. Beyond communication efficiency, TinyProto offers crucial advantages: it achieves compression without client-side computational overhead and supports heterogeneous architectures, making it particularly suitable for resource-constrained heterogeneous FL scenarios.

PaperID: 3549

Authors:Boyang Li, Lingzheng Zhang, Fugee Tsung, Xi Zhang

Affiliations: Peking University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: METP: Multi-Granularity Integration of External Covariates for Temporal Point Processes

Abstract:
Accurate modeling of temporal point processes is critical for reliable event forecasting and informed decisionmaking. While historical event sequences provide a foundation for intensity estimation, existing approaches often neglect external covariates whose lagged effects impact future intensities across multiple temporal granularities. To address this gap, we propose Multi-Granularity Integration of External Covariates for Temporal Point Processes (METP), a framework for incorporating lagged external influences into intensity modeling. METP extracts periodic structures and decomposes external covariate series into multiple temporal granularities. At each granularity, a lag-aware calibration module is introduced to align covariates with event dynamics. Finally, a hierarchical mixture-of-experts strategy is employed to integrate the multi-granular external covariates with historical event embeddings, enabling a representation of the conditional intensity function with enhanced information. Extensive experiments on public and proprietary datasets demonstrate that METP consistently outperforms existing methods in predictive accuracy.

PaperID: 3550

Authors:Duanyu Li, Huijun Wu, Min Xie, Kai Lu, Wenzhe Zhang, Zhenwei Wu, Yong Dong, Ruibo Wang

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology

Title: DeloopSGNN: Revisiting Spectral GNNs Through the Lens of Spatial Aggregation

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been studied from two primary perspectives: spectral, which employs global graph signal filtering and is theoretically more expressive, and spatial, which builds on local neighborhood aggregation and generalizes well across diverse graph structures. While spectral GNNs are expected to perform better in theory, they often underperform in practice compared to spatial models. To better understand this gap, we introduce a novel theoretical framework for converting spectral GNNs into the spatial domain, allowing for more intuitive analysis. This transformation reveals that signal looping and repeated highorder aggregation are major causes of over-smoothing in spectral GNNs. By addressing these issues in the spatial domain and converting the model back to the spectral domain, we propose DeloopSGNN, a spectral GNN with improved expressive capacity. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that DeloopSGNN achieves consistently strong performance in terms of accuracy and adversarial robustness, demonstrating that spectral GNNs can benefit significantly from careful architectural design grounded in our proposed framework.

PaperID: 3551

Authors:Qiyu Li, Xianxian Li, De Li, Jinyan Wang

Affiliations: Key Lab of Education Blockchain and Intelligent Technology, Ministry of Education, Guangxi Normal University, China Guangxi Key Lab of Multi-Source Information Mining and Security, China University Engineering Research Center of Educational Intelligent Technology, China School of Physical Science and Technology

Title: Prototype-Guided Supervision for Graph Learning with Noisy and Sparse Labels

Abstract:
Graph learning faces major challenges under noisy and sparse supervision, where corrupted labels mislead representation learning and impair generalization. Prior work proposes robust training strategies such as correction, reweighting, and denoising to reduce the influence of noisy labels. However, most methods still optimize directly on training nodes using their possibly corrupted labels as supervision signals. In this work, we propose a prototypeguided framework that replaces direct label supervision over training nodes with semantic supervision derived from class-level prototypes. Each prototype is formed by aggregating representations of nodes sharing the same observed label and serves as a semantic anchor for guiding the classifier. To address the inherent supervision sparsity introduced by limited prototype instances, we introduce a dual-branch mixup strategy that integrates prototypes with high-confidence nodes through intra- and inter-class interpolation, which enhances supervision coverage and improves representation continuity. We further constrain the spatial variance of these samples to promote intra-class compactness. Theoretically, we demonstrate that the constructed prototypes remain aligned with true class semantics under bounded noise rates. Experiments on node classification tasks confirm the effectiveness of our approach under label noise and limited supervision.

PaperID: 3552

Authors:Ximing Li, Jiaxuan Jiang, Changchun Li, You Lu, Renchu Guan

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, China Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of the Ministry of Education, China RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project, Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology

Title: Semi-Supervised Regression by Preserving Ranking Relationships Between Close Unlabeled Samples

Abstract:
SemiSupervised Learning (SSL) aims to improve the learning performance of supervised learning with a large number of unlabeled samples. The existing SSL methods such as FixMatch and FlexMatch select unlabeled samples with high-confident pseudo-labels and make consistency constraints between their weak and strong augmentations. Unfortunately, they cannot be applied Semi-Supervised Regression (SSR) because regression predictions can not reflect the confidence of pseudo-labels. To solve this, a recent SSR method RankUp incorporates an auxiliary ranking task by leveraging sample pairs with high-confident pseudo-ranks. In this paper, we upgrade Rankup to a novel SSR method, namely Semi-Supervised Regression by Ranking Close Unlabeled Samples (SSR-RCUS). Its basic idea is reconstructing closed mixup augmented samples with high-confident pseudo-ranks under a monotonicity assumption, and then applying them to the auxiliary ranking task to improve regression performance. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of SSR-RCUS on benchmark datasets, and empirical results demonstrate that SSR-RCUS can outperform the existing baselines in various settings, especially when labeled data are scarce.

PaperID: 3553

Authors:Yanmin Li, Lihua Liu, Xin Wang, Zhilong Mao, Jibing Wu, Weidong Bao

Affiliations: Laboratory for Big Data and Decision, National University of Defense Technology, University of Science and Technology of China

Title: A Causal Target for Learning to Defer Under Hidden Confounding

Abstract:
Learning decision policies from confounded observational data is a challenging task in causal inference, as unobserved confounders can lead to biased or suboptimal actions when relying solely on machine learning models. A synergistic approach is learning to defer, which decides when to act itself and when to defer to a human expert with access to unobserved information. However, constructing the learning target, which defines the probability of choosing each action or deferral, remains a core challenge. To address this, we propose causaltarget-based learning to defer (CTLD) framework, where the causal target is constructed from sharp bounds on potential outcomes. Specifically, the degree of overlap between these bounds determines the probability of deferral, while their relative positions and widths define the probabilities over actions. CTLD aligns model predictions with this causal target to make probabilistic decisions over actions and deferral. We present comprehensive theoretical guarantees for the learned policy and demonstrate the effectiveness of CTLD on synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets.

PaperID: 3554

Authors:Renjie Lin, Hongzhi He, Yilin Wu, Shide Du, Le Zhang

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Fuzhou University, FUZHOU UNIVERSITY

Title: Graph Meets Deep Unfolding: An Interpretable Mutual-benefit Multi-view Learning Network

Abstract:
Significant efforts have been focused on enhancing the utilization of multiple node features and topological structures in multiview graph learning through explicit model-driven and implicit deep learning-based methodologies. The former excels in embedding prior knowledge, thereby offering theoretical interpretability but is limited in application flexibility due to manual parameter selection. In contrast, the latter leverages automatic differentiation, providing greater flexibility but lacking theoretical interpretability due to their opaque nature. Motivated by these observations, we propose an interpretable deep unfolding network for mutual-benefit multi-view graph learning, aiming to combine the strengths of both approaches. Specifically, we employ the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) to solve a multi-view graph learning model with sparse and low-rank constraints. This solution is then integrated into deep unfolding networks to enhance interpretability. Furthermore, we convert optimization conditions into implicit losses and utilize automatic differentiation to update parameters, reducing the need for manual tuning and increasing flexibility. This integration optimizes multi-view learning for a graph representation that balances interpretability and flexibility. Empirical evaluations on six diverse datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method over state-of-the-art approaches.

PaperID: 3555

Authors:Ao Liu, Yanmei Zhang, Youwei Wang, Qiang Duan

Affiliations: School of Information, Central University of Finance and Economics, Information Sciences & Technology Department, Pennsylvania State University, Abington PA, United States

Title: IGT4ETH: An Isotropic Pre-trained Graph Transformer for Ethereum Account Classification

Abstract:
Pretrained language models (PLMs) have shown strong potential in Ethereum account modeling and fraud detection. However, existing approaches often overlook the graph-structured nature of transaction networks. In addition, they struggle with the long-tail distribution of account activity, resulting in anisotropic embedding spaces and poor representation quality for low-frequency accounts. In this paper, we present IGT4ETH, a pre-trained Graph Transformer with an isotropy-enhanced post-processing, which explicitly models transaction topologies and mitigates representational anisotropy for Ethereum account classification. IGT4ETH improves structural representation by incorporating structural centrality and role embeddings into an Edge-augmented Graph Transformer, effectively capturing both topological and interaction patterns in transaction graphs. To further mitigate embedding anisotropy, we systematically evaluate various post-processing techniques. Among them, we adopt the Conceptor Negation (CN) method to softly suppress latent features dominated by high-frequency words via matrix conceptors, alongside a modified Focal-InfoNCE loss to enhance directional uniformity and representation balance. Extensive experiments on four real-world Ethereum account classification tasks, including phishing, exchange, mining, and ICO-wallet classification, demonstrate that IGT4ETH consistently outperforms state-of-the-art PLM-based baselines in terms of classification performance.

PaperID: 3556

Authors:Chuxun Liu, Qingfeng Chen, Debo Cheng, Jiangzhang Gan, Jiuyong Li, Lin Liu

Affiliations: Guilin University of Electronic Technology, Guangxi University, Hainan University, University of South Australia

Title: Learning Fair Graph Representations via Probability of Necessity and Sufficiency

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel at modeling graph data but often amplify biases tied to sensitive attributes like gender and race. Existing causalitybased methods use isolated interventions on graph topology or features but struggle to produce representations that balance predictive power with fairness. This leads to two issues: (1) weak predictive power, where representations miss critical task-relevant features, and (2) bias amplification, where representations encode sensitive attributes, causing unfair outcomes. To address these issues, we introduce the Probability of Necessity and Sufficiency (PNS), where necessity ensures representations capture only essential features for predictions, and sufficiency guarantees these features are adequate without relying on sensitive attributes. We propose FairSNR, a fairness-aware graph representation learning framework that introduces constraints based on the PNS. This leverages PNS to guide the learning of fair representations from graph data. In particular, FairSNR employs an encoder to learn node representations with high PNS for downstream tasks. To compute and optimize PNS, FairSNR introduces an intervenor to generate the most challenging counterfactual interventions on the representations, thereby enhancing the model’s causal stability even under worst-case scenarios. Further, a discriminator is trained to detect and mitigate sensitive information leakage in the learned representations, effectively disentangling sensitive biases from task-relevant features. Experiments on real-world graph datasets demonstrate that FairSNR outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in both fairness and utility.

PaperID: 3557

Authors:Zhaowei Liu, Yihao Jiang, Rufei Gao, Jinglei Liu, Dong Yang

Affiliations: Yantai University, Georgia State University

Title: DA-DFGAS:Differentiable Federated Graph Neural Architecture Search with Distribution-Aware Attentive Aggregation

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated superior performance in processing centralized graphstructured data. However, real-world privacy and security concerns hinder data centralization and shareing, leading to severe data isolation (data silos). While Federated Learning (FL) offers a distributed solution to mitigate these obstacles, existing Federated Graph Neural Network (FedGNN) frameworks struggle to effectively address data heterogeneity. To address this, this paper proposes DA-DFGAS, a federated graph neural architecture search algorithm. Specifically, DA-DFGAS facilitates model personalization via a directed tree topology and path constraint mechanisms, while simultaneously employing a joint self-attention mechanism based on predicted probability distributions to capture distributional variations across multiple clients. Furthermore, it integrates a bi-level global-local objective optimization strategy to ensure global model consistency while preserving local adaptability. Experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate that DA-DFGAS outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving 0.5–3.0% accuracy improvements over centralized baselines and 0.5–5.0% over federated counterparts.

PaperID: 3558

Authors:Xiaoxu Ma, Dong Li, Minglai Shao, Xintao Wu, Chen Zhao

Affiliations: School of New Media and Communication, Tianjin University, Department of Computer Science, Baylor University, China Key Lab of Education Blockchain and Intelligent Technology, Ministry of Education, Guangxi Normal University, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, University of Arkansas

Title: LLM-Enhanced Energy Contrastive Learning for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Text-Attributed Graphs

Abstract:
Textattributed graphs, where nodes are enriched with textual attributes, have become a powerful tool for modeling real-world networks such as citation, social, and transaction networks. However, existing methods for learning from these graphs often assume that the distributions of training and testing data are consistent. This assumption leads to significant performance degradation when faced with out-of-distribution (OOD) data. In this paper, we address the challenge of node-level OOD detection in text-attributed graphs, with the goal of maintaining accurate node classification while simultaneously identifying OOD nodes. We propose a novel approach, LLM-Enhanced Energy Contrastive Learning for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Text-Attributed Graphs (LECT), which integrates large language models (LLMs) and energy-based contrastive learning. The proposed method involves generating high-quality OOD samples by leveraging the semantic understanding and contextual knowledge of LLMs to create dependency-aware pseudo-OOD nodes, and applying contrastive learning based on energy functions to distinguish between in-distribution (IND) and OOD nodes. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated through extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets, where our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving both high classification accuracy and robust OOD detection capabilities.

PaperID: 3559

Authors:Erfan Moeini, Christopher Vox, Marie Anastacio, Wadie Skaf, Mitra Baratchi, Holger H. Hoos

Affiliations: Chair for Artificial Intelligence Methodology (AIM), RWTH Aachen University, Volkswagen AG, Leiden University, The Netherlands, Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS)

Title: Neural Architecture and Hyperparameter Selection Through Meta-Learning on Time Series

Abstract:
Active research in time series classification and forecasting has led to the development of a wide range of machine learning models. For practitioners, the selection of a suitable model among these, along with their hyperparameters, remains a challenging task. While automated machine learning offers approaches for automatic selection of models for a given task, the practical efficacy of these methods is often limited, due to the computational complexity of searching over a large design space and the high dimensionality of time series datasets that poses additional challenges on generalisation quality. To fill this gap, we propose a metalearning framework that transfers past knowledge from previous searches to recommend an architecture and its hyperparameters; specifically, this framework utilises a joint representation of deep neural architectures and time series datasets, and predicts the performance of neural architectures along with their hyperparameters on time series datasets. Our computational experiments reveal that the configurations proposed by our meta-learned surrogate achieve a performance gain of up to 34% on 4 out of the 8 forecasting datasets we considered and up to 60% on 36 out of 73 of our classification datasets, whilst reducing the computational cost to 10% of that required by the hyperparameter optimisation method HEBO to tune the architectures, showcasing the effectiveness of meta-learning in the time series domain.

PaperID: 3560

Authors:Shun Qian, Bingquan Liu, Chengjie Sun, Peijin Xie, Zhen Xu, Baoxun Wang

Affiliations: Faculty of Computing, Harbin Institute of Technology, Platform and Content Group

Title: CR³: Boosting Compositional Reasoning in MLLMs Through Rule-Based Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Compositional reasoning is a critical capability for multimodal models, enabling systematic understanding of complex scenes through structured combinations of objects, attributes, and relations. However, existing research on this ability primarily focuses on visionlanguage models (VLMs, e.g., CLIP and SigLIP), with limited exploration of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). To address this gap, we introduce CR³, a novel framework that enhances compositional reasoning abilities of MLLMs via rule-based reinforcement learning. CR³ leverages rule-based rewards to optimize the MLLM's policy on systematically curated multimodal instruction-following tasks, guided by a model-adaptive dynamic task mixing strategy. Our approach boosts performance by over 19% on three compositional reasoning benchmarks, significantly outperforming supervised fine-tuning (SFT) by at least 12%. Crucially, CR³ demonstrates superior generalization by improving performance on out-of-domain benchmarks where SFT methods degrade, highlighting its effectiveness and data efficiency.

PaperID: 3561

Authors:Bohao Qu, Xiaofeng Cao, Bing Li, Menglin Zhang, Tuan-Anh Vu, Di Lin, Qing Guo

Affiliations: Tongji University, Jilin University, University of California, Los Angeles, Tianjin University, Nankai University

Title: Exploiting Geometric Structures for Modeling Multi-Agent Behaviors: A New Thinking

Abstract:
In this paper, we rethink model agent behaviors from a geometric structure perspective in multiagent reinforcement learning. Modeling agent behaviors is essential for understanding how agents interact and facilitating effective decisions. The key lies in capturing the dependencies and sequential relationships among agent decisions. Since each decision influences the subsequent choices, this forms a hierarchical and nested tree-like structure of interdependencies. While modeling tree-like data in Euclidean spaces could cause distortion, which results in a loss of agent decision structure information. Motivated by this, we reconsider model agent behaviors in hyperbolic space and propose the Hyperbolic Multi-Agent Representations (HMAR) method, which projects the agent behaviors into a Poincaré ball and leverages hyperbolic neural networks to learn agent policy representations. Additionally, we designed a contrastive loss function to train this network, minimizing the distance in feature space between different representations of the same agent while maximizing the distance between representations of distinct agents. Experimental results provide empirical evidence for the effectiveness of the HMAR method in cooperative and competitive environments, demonstrating the potential of hyperbolic agent representations for effective decision-making in multi-agent environments.

PaperID: 3562

Authors:Xuan Rao, Simian Xu, Zheng Li, Bo Zhao, Derong Liu, Mingming Ha, Cesare Alippi

Affiliations: School of Systems Science, Beijing Normal University, School of Physics, Peking University, School of Automation and Intelligent Manufacturing, Southern University of Science and Technology, School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University, Kuaishou Technology, Politecnico di Milano, Italy Università della Svizzera Italiana

Title: Compensating Distribution Drifts in Continual Learning with Pre-trained Vision Transformers

Abstract:
Recent advances have shown that sequential finetuning (SeqFT) of pre-trained vision transformers (ViTs), followed by classifier refinement using approximate distributions of class features, can be an effective strategy for class-incremental learning (CIL). However, this approach is susceptible to distribution drift, caused by the sequential optimization of shared backbone parameters. This results in a mismatch between the distributions of the previously learned classes and that of the updated model, ultimately degrading the effectiveness of classifier performance over time. To address this issue, we introduce a latent space transition operator and propose Sequential Learning with Drift Compensation (SLDC). SLDC aims to align feature distributions across tasks to mitigate the impact of drift. First, we present a linear variant of SLDC, which learns a linear operator by solving a regularized least-squares problem that maps features before and after fine-tuning. Next, we extend this with a weakly nonlinear SLDC variant, which assumes that the ideal transition operator lies between purely linear and fully nonlinear transformations. This is implemented using learnable, weakly nonlinear mappings that balance flexibility and generalization. To further reduce representation drift, we apply knowledge distillation (KD) in both algorithmic variants. Extensive experiments on standard CIL benchmarks demonstrate that SLDC significantly improves the performance of SeqFT. Notably, by combining KD to address representation drift with SLDC to compensate distribution drift, SeqFT achieves performance comparable to joint training across all evaluated datasets.

PaperID: 3563

Authors:Chuanru Ren, Yao Lu, Tianjin Huang, Haowen Zheng, Hengde Zhu, Yunyin Li, Hengxiao Li, Lu Liu

Affiliations: Tongji University, Anhui University, University of Exeter, China University of Petroleum (East China)

Title: TimeCAP: A Channel-Aware Pre-Training Framework for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Abstract:
Amid recent advances for multivariate time series forecasting, selfsupervised learning has emerged as a promising paradigm for deriving transferable knowledge from multi-domain data. Despite its effectiveness, existing approaches exhibit two critical limitations: (1) Underestimating the significance of multivariate dependencies in learning generalizable representations and (2) Failing to reconcile the complementary strengths of autoregressive and one-shot generative paradigms. In this work, we propose TimeCAP, a novel channel-aware pre-training framework that internalizes latent causal relationships among variables inherent in multi-domain data, and effectively transfers the acquired knowledge to downstream applications. Technically, we present a flexible channel-grouping learning approach, complemented by an adaptive meta-routing mechanism, enabling TimeCAP to parallel recognize intra-group local patterns while maintaining global coherence. Intra- and inter-group multivariate dependencies are captured through the self- and cross-attention with channel-aware mask, which strictly confine interactions among time-aligned, fine-grained multivariate tokens. To seamlessly unify two advanced generative paradigms, we propose a novel dynamic dual-head decoding and optimization strategy, empowering TimeCAP to leverage critical dependencies in the output series while avoiding cumulative errors over time. In the few-shot evaluation, TimeCAP achieves average MSE and MAE reductions of 11.8% and 6% over leading baselines, while also outperforming state-of-the-art models in full-shot and zero-shot settings by large margins.

PaperID: 3564

Authors:Ricardo G. Sanfelice

Affiliations: University of California, Santa Cruz

Title: HyRNN: Hybrid Recurrent Neural Networks for Approximating Hybrid Dynamical Systems

Abstract:
For a class of hybrid dynamical systems, we show that a recurrent neural network with hybrid dynamics, which we refer to as a hybrid dynamic recurrent neural network (HyRNN), can be constructed to approximate solutions to hybrid systems over bounded (hybrid) time horizons. Specifically, given a desired precision level, we show that a hybrid system with dynamics resembling those of recurrent neural networks for continuoustime and discrete-time systems can be designed so that, for each bounded hybrid time horizon, its solutions are close to the solutions to the given hybrid system. Through the use of universal approximation theorems, we show that the approximation result holds for traditional smooth activation functions, such as sigmoid and arctan, and that extensions to ReLU functions are possible, and characterize the complexity of the proposed HyRNN.

PaperID: 3565

Authors:Zitong Shi, Guancheng Wan, Wenke Huang, Yuxin Wu, Quan Zhang, Mang Ye

Affiliations: Wuhan University, Renmin University of China, ByteDance Inc.

Title: Towards Robust Text-Attributed Federated Graph Learning: Multimodal Threats and Defense

Abstract:
TextAttributed Graphs (TAGs) are graphs where both nodes and edges are associated with text attributes. To leverage their semantic richness, recent efforts have integrated large language models (LLMs) with graph neural networks, leading to the development of GraphLLMs. However, many real-world datasets remain inaccessible, and processing text-attributed graphs while ensuring privacy and efficiency remains a challenge. To address this, we place TAGs within a federated environment, referred to as TAG-FGL. Despite its potential, TAG-FGL remains largely underexplored in the face of adversarial threats. In this work, we introduce GTAE, a novel attack framework that cascades influence-guided topological perturbations and embedding-level text refinements to generate transferable, modality-agnostic adversarial inputs. To defend against these threats, we propose STRUM, a defense strategy that combines local adversarial training with robustness-aware aggregation, enhancing resilience at both the node and system levels. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets with diverse model backbones demonstrate that GTAE significantly degrades model performance, while STRUM consistently improves robustness.

PaperID: 3566

Authors:Elad Shoham, Omri Haber, Havana Rika, Dan Vilenchik

Affiliations: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Open University of Israel, The Academic College of Tel-Aviv Yaffo

Title: Learning to Rank: How GNNs Solve Max-Clique and Sparse PCA

Abstract:
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown promise on combinatorial problems such as MaxClique, yet it remains unclear what algorithmic principles they actually learn. This paper introduces a concept-driven framework for evaluating and interpreting GNNs on such tasks. We begin with a principled benchmark based on synthetic graphs with known difficulty levels—easy, medium, and hard—derived from theoretical thresholds for planted cliques. Using this setup, we show that GNNs reliably learn a simple yet powerful concept: degree-based ranking. This insight motivates a new decoder, Least-Probable Removal (LPR), which significantly outperforms the common top-k strategy, especially on harder and real-world instances. Our analysis pipeline connects latent representations to classical heuristics, improving both interpretability and performance. Finally, we demonstrate cross-domain generalization to sparse PCA, showing that the same GNN architecture and decoding strategy succeed in recovering sparse principal components, revealing a shared underlying principle across domains.

PaperID: 3567

Authors:Cassandra Hui-Ming Tan, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan

Affiliations: Singapore Management University

Title: ARTEM: Enhancing Large Language Model Agents with Spatial-Temporal Episodic Memory

Abstract:
Current large language models (LLMs) exhibit significant deficiencies in episodic memory tasks including encoding, storing, and retrieving specific information from temporally dependent events over a long period of time. Recent approaches to handle memory tasks in LLMs, such as incontext learning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and fine-tuning, may resolve the long-term retention issues, but are still inadequate to handle tasks requiring chronological awareness of the stored information. We introduce Agentic Retrieval with Temporal-Episodic Memory (ARTEM), a hybrid LLM-based agent architecture integrating LLMs with a self-organizing neural network named Spatial-Temporal Episodic Memory (STEM), designed to handle episodic memory tasks. Our approach employs LLMs for event extraction from the inputs to represent temporal, spatial, entitative, and semantic information that may facilitate future retrieval, aside from generating outputs or direct responses. The extracted events can then be encoded vectorially and stored in a fast and stable manner in the episodic memory through an instance-based incremental learning in STEM. STEM supports precise episodes retrieval and helps reduce computational overhead in generating the appropriate responses by LLMs. Evaluation on standardized episodic memory benchmarks across four tasks—partial cue retrieval, epistemic uncertainty detection, recent event identification, and chronological recall—demonstrates superior performance of ARTEM compared to in-context learning, RAG, and fine-tuning in various popular LLMs.

PaperID: 3568

Authors:Jiayao Tan, Tianle Liu, Fuyuan Hu, Wei Feng, Liang Wan

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Tianjin University, Suzhou University of Science and Technology, Key Research Center for Surface Monitoring and Analysis of Relics, State Administration of Cultural Heritage, School of Computer Science, School of Software

Title: E-Logic Prompt: Unified Energy-Logic Framework for Continual Visual Question Answering

Abstract:
Prompt tuning has shown promise for continual visual question answering (CVQA), facilitating modular and transferable knowledge across tasks. However, existing approaches often overlook the guiding role of prompts in the model’s implicit reasoning process. This oversight can lead to inconsistent reasoning paths and performance degradation across tasks. To address this issue, we propose the E Logic Prompt framework, which employs energybased models (EBMs) to model the semantic compatibility between prompts and queries. In this framework, prompts function not only as adapters but also as reasoning guides that help maintain coherence throughout the inference process. The framework enforces logical consistency at three levels. At the input level, it selects semantically aligned prompts by minimizing the energy between queries and prompts. Within the model, it aligns intermediate representations with prompts across layers to preserve step-by-step reasoning. Across tasks, it applies energy-based constraints to regulate prompt behavior, effectively suppressing semantic drift and enabling prompt reuse. These three levels of consistency together enhance the guiding capacity of prompts, allowing them to steer the model toward more stable and coherent reasoning. Extensive experiments show that E Logic Prompt outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and knowledge retention, while effectively maintaining balanced cross-modal reasoning throughout continual learning.

PaperID: 3569

Authors:Peng Tan, Feifan Yang, Zhi-Hao Tan, Zhi-Hua Zhou

Affiliations: Nanjing University

Title: Tabular Learnwares Can Be Repurposed for Seemingly Irrelevant New Tasks

Abstract:
The learnware paradigm aims to help users solve new tasks by reusing existing models rather than starting from scratch. A learnware consists of a model and the specification describing its capabilities. Numerous learnwares are accommodated by the learnware dock system. When users solve tasks with the system, learnwares that fully match the user task are often scarce or unavailable. This paper focuses on tabular classification tasks and explores reusing learnwares for new user tasks with significantly different feature and label spaces, leveraging the potential of numerous existing specialized tabular models developed for various tasks. Under the learnware paradigm, we find that tabular learnwares that seem semantically irrelevant can sometimes be beneficial for new user tasks. The proposed method relies solely on modelpredicted probabilities and does not require gradient information, making it applicable to a wide range of tabular models. Experiments suggest that tabular learnwares can be reused beyond their original purpose across heterogeneous tasks.

PaperID: 3570

Authors:Ran Tao, Qiugang Zhan, Shantian Yang, Xiurui Xie, Qi Tian, Guisong Liu

Affiliations: Complex Laboratory of New Finance and Economics, School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, China Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Finance, Ministry of Education, China Kash Institute of Electronics and Information Industry, Laboratory of Intelligent Collaborative Computing, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Huawei Inc.

Title: SFedHIFI: Fire Rate-Based Heterogeneous Information Fusion for Spiking Federated Learning

Abstract:
Spiking Federated Learning (SFL) has been widely studied with the energy efficiency of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs). However, existing SFL methods require model homogeneity and assume all clients have sufficient computational resources, resulting in the exclusion of some resourceconstrained clients. To address the prevalent system heterogeneity in real-world scenarios, enabling heterogeneous SFL systems that allow clients to adaptively deploy models of different scales based on their local resources is crucial. To this end, we introduce SFedHIFI, a novel Spiking Federated Learning framework with Fire Rate-Based Heterogeneous Information Fusion. Specifically, SFedHIFI employs channel-wise matrix decomposition to deploy SNN models of adaptive complexity on clients with heterogeneous resources. Building on this, the proposed heterogeneous information fusion module enables cross-scale aggregation among models of different widths, thereby enhancing the utilization of diverse local knowledge. Extensive experiments on three public benchmarks demonstrate that SFedHIFI can effectively enable heterogeneous SFL, consistently outperforming all three baseline methods. Compared with ANN-based FL, it achieves significant energy savings with only a marginal trade-off in accuracy.

PaperID: 3571

Authors:Suxin Tong, Jingling Yuan

Affiliations: Hubei Key Laboratory of Transportation Internet of Things, School of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University of Technology

Title: Efficiently Enhancing Long-term Series Forecasting via Adaptive Lookback with Wavelets

Abstract:
Longterm series forecasting leverages historical observations to predict extended future sequences and plays a crucial role across various domains. However, conventional models relying on fixed-length lookback windows struggle with the inherent dynamic dependencies and multi-scale characteristics of time series data. These fixed windows either introduce noise through excessive length or omit critical patterns when too short, while optimal window sizes vary significantly with tasks and external conditions. To address this, we propose the Adaptive Lookback Window (ALW) framework, a wavelet transform-driven approach for multi-scale adaptive lookback window selection. ALW decomposes time series into distinct frequency components through wavelet transforms, quantifies the contribution of each historical time step via scale-specific attention mechanisms, and dynamically determines optimal window lengths through backward information accumulation and soft truncation techniques. Finally, refined input features are generated for downstream prediction models via a weighted reconstruction process. Extensive evaluations across multiple public benchmarks demonstrate that ALW, as an efficient plug-and-play technique, not only reduces the MSE of backbone models by an average of 3.2% but also alleviates hyperparameter tuning requirements and enables input feature dimensionality reduction, which curtails subsequent model computational costs.

PaperID: 3572

Authors:Qingmei Wang, Tianyu Huang, Yujie Long, Yuxin Wu, Fanmeng Wang, Xi Sun, Junchi Yan, Hongteng Xu

Affiliations: Renmin University of China, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Fudan University, MetaLight HK Limited, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: ST-TPP: Learning Semi-Transductive Temporal Point Processes with Gromov-Wasserstein Barycentric Regularization

Abstract:
The generative mechanisms behind realworld event sequences are often heterogeneous, leading to data that possesses inherent clustering structures. However, most existing temporal point processes (TPPs) treat different event sequences independently, without leveraging the clustering structures when predicting events. In this study, we design and learn a novel semi-transductive temporal point process (ST-TPP), which explicitly improves prediction performance by co-training sequence clusters. In particular, given a set of event sequences, our method learns a neural TPP together with cluster centers of the sequences. Besides maximizing the likelihood of the event sequences, we leverage a data-based kernel matrix and prior knowledge to regularize the sequence embeddings, leading to a Gromov-Wasserstein barycentric (GWB) regularizer. Based on the optimal transport plans associated with the GWB regularizer, we derive the cluster centers by the push-forward of the sequence embeddings. When a new sequence comes, the learned model first assigns a cluster center to the sequence and then jointly encodes the sequence and the cluster center to predict future events, leading to a semi-transductive prediction scheme. Experiments demonstrate that ST-TPP achieves competitive sequence clustering results and strong prediction performance.

PaperID: 3573

Authors:Wenkang Wang, Dongxu Liu, Bin Gu

Affiliations: Jilin University

Title: Towards Nonlinear Sparse AUC Maximization via Compositional Stochastic Hard Thresholding

Abstract:
The Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) is an important evaluation metric for both linear and, in particular, nonlinear classification models, owing to its robustness against class imbalance. Sparse learning with an ℓ₀ constraint can enhance model interpretability and generalization. Prior work has shown that, in the linear setting, the pairwise formulation of AUC maximization can be reformulated as a standard pointwise empirical risk minimization problem, which enables efficient optimization using hardthresholding gradient descent for ℓ₀-constrained AUC maximization. Extending this approach to the nonlinear setting remains largely unexplored, even though we establish that pairwise AUC maximization in this setting is equivalent to a pointwise compositional optimization problem; however, designing a compositional optimization algorithm compatible with hard-thresholding operators remains an open challenge. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a novel algorithm—Compositional Stochastic Hard Thresholding (CSHT)—for nonlinear sparse AUC maximization. Specifically, CSHT integrates stochastic variance-reduced gradient techniques with hard-thresholding projections to effectively reduce gradient estimation variance while enforcing sparsity. Notably, we provide a rigorous convergence analysis and prove that CSHT achieves linear convergence up to a tolerance bound. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first stochastic hard-thresholding algorithm tailored for nonlinear sparse AUC maximization. Extensive experiments on (a) nonlinear sparse AUC maximization using Random Fourier Feature-based kernel approximation and (b) universal adversarial attack scenarios demonstrate the superior performance of CSHT over existing methods, attributed to its unified treatment of nonlinearity and sparsity.

PaperID: 3574

Authors:Xiaodong Wang, Zhirong Wu, Peixi Peng

Affiliations: School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Peking University

Title: Fine-flow Distilling Coarse-flow Video Generation for Long-Term Driving World Model

Abstract:
Driving world models are used to simulate futures by video generation based on the condition of the current state and actions. However, current models often suffer serious error accumulations when predicting the longterm future, which limits practical applications. Recent studies utilize the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) as the backbone of driving world models to improve learning flexibility. However, these models are always trained on short video clips, and multiple roll-out generations struggle to produce consistent and reasonable long videos due to the training-inference gap. To this end, we propose several solutions to build a simple yet effective long-term driving world model. First, we hierarchically decouple world model learning into large motion learning and bidirectional continuous motion learning. Then, considering the continuity of driving scenes, we propose a simple distillation method where fine-grained video flows are self-supervised signals for coarse-grained flows. The distillation is designed to improve the coherence of infinite video generation. The coarse-grained and fine-grained modules are coordinated to generate long-term and temporally coherent videos. On NuScenes, compared with the state-of-the-art front-view models, our model improves FVD by 27% and reduces inference time by 85% for the video task of generating 110+ frames.

PaperID: 3575

Authors:Xinxin Wang, Yongshan Zhang, Xiaochen Yuan, Yicong Zhou

Affiliations: Shenzhen University Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, China University of Geosciences Wuhan, Macao Polytechnic University, University of Macau

Title: Cross-view Anchor Graph Learning and Factorization for Incomplete Multi-view Clustering

Abstract:
Graphbased incomplete multi-view clustering algorithms have gathered much attention due to their impressive clustering performance. However, existing methods primarily leverage intra-view correlation from observed views, while ignoring the exploration of explicit compensation relationships between different views. Moreover, these methods need post-processing to get labels, and the separate steps lack negotiation, which may lead to sub-optimal solutions. To address these issues, we propose a Cross-view Anchor Graph Learning and Factorization (AGLF) method. AGLF develops an Anchor Graph Completion (AGC) framework that explicitly learn the missing subgraph structures. Instead of requiring post-processing, AGC directly produces soft labels. By establishing a third-order tensor of soft labels, it employs the tensor Schatten p-norm to enhance anchor graph learning and factorization. To significantly improve the quality of subgraph learning, AGLF incorporates compensation subgraphs from supplementary views into the AGC framework, enabling the construction of a better anchor graph for label learning. An optimization algorithm is devised to solve the objective function. Experimental results across various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

PaperID: 3576

Authors:Zihu Wang, Boxun Xu, Hejia Geng, Peng Li

Affiliations: University of California, Santa Barbara

Title: Khan-GCL: Kolmogorov–Arnold Network Based Graph Contrastive Learning with Hard Negatives

Abstract:
Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has demonstrated great promise for learning generalizable graph representations from unlabeled data. However, conventional GCL approaches face two critical limitations: (1) the restricted expressive capacity of multilayer perceptron (MLP) based encoders, and (2) suboptimal negative samples that either from random augmentations—failing to provide effective 'hard negatives'—or generated hard negatives without addressing the semantic distinctions crucial for discriminating graph data. To this end, we propose KhanGCL, a novel framework that integrates the Kolmogorov–Arnold Network (KAN) into the GCL encoder architecture, substantially enhancing its representational capacity. Furthermore, we exploit the rich information embedded within KAN coefficient parameters to develop two novel critical feature identification techniques that enable the generation of semantically meaningful hard negative samples for each graph representation. These strategically constructed hard negatives guide the encoder to learn more discriminative features by emphasizing critical semantic differences between graphs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing GCL methods across a variety of datasets and tasks.

PaperID: 3577

Authors:Donglei Wu, Xiao Cai, Jinglei Tan, Jinda Jia, Guangming Tan, Dingwen Tao, Wen Xia, Zhihong Tian

Affiliations: Cyberspace Institute of Advanced Technology, Guangzhou University, China Guangdong Key Laboratory of Industrial Control System Security, China Information Engineering University, Luddy School of Informatics, and Engineering, Indiana University, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: RCMoE: A Communication-Efficient Random Compression Framework for Resource-Constrained Mixture-of-Experts Training

Abstract:
Mixtureof-Experts (MoE) architecture with experts parallelism scales LLMs efficiently by activating only a subset of experts per input, avoiding proportional training costs. However, the intensive and heterogeneous communication substantially hinders the efficiency and scalability of MoE training in the resource-constrained scenario. Existing communication compression techniques fall short in MoE training due to: (i) Intensive training amplifies compression overhead, compromising training efficiency; (ii) Accumulated compression errors propagate through the network, degrading training quality. In this paper, we propose RCMoE, a communication-efficient Random Compression framework for MoE training with two core modules: (1) Local-Stochastic Quantization compresses the all-to-all communication by stochastically quantizing each row of the expert's intermediate computing results in parallel, effectively improving the compression efficiency and reducing compression error; (2) Probabilistic Thresholding Sparsification compresses the all-reduce communication by probabilistically sampling large gradients at high probability, thereby reducing the computational complexity and maintaining the convergence efficiency. Experiments on four typical MoE training tasks prove that RCMoE achieves higher 5.9x-8.1x total communication compression ratios and 1.3x-10.1x training speedup compared with the state-of-the-art compression techniques while maintaining the MoE training accuracy.

PaperID: 3578

Authors:Jinxuan Wu, Bin Li, Xiangyang Xue

Affiliations: Fudan University

Title: SCoUT: A Framework for Structured Stereotype Analysis in Language Models

Abstract:
Existing stereotype auditing methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) typically rely on isolated rating schemes or taskspecific probes, lacking theoretical grounding and failing to reveal internal organization beyond surface-level output patterns. In this paper, we introduce SCoUT (Stereotype Content-oriented Utility structure via Thurstonian modeling), a closed-loop framework that structurally models, explicitly probes, and functionally steers stereotype dimensions (warmth and competence) in LLMs. SCoUT first reconstructs a global stereotype utility structure aligned with Stereotype Content Model theory via Thurstonian comparative judgments. Across multiple open-source LLMs, this modeling achieves high pairwise-preference prediction accuracy (≥ 0.90 on larger-scale models) and exhibits strong cross-model consistency. Probing internal attention mechanisms localizes this structure to specific heads (Spearman’s ρ up to 0.83 for warmth and 0.90 for competence) and surfaces a salient asymmetry between warmth and competence. Further, targeted inference-time activation modifications on these dimension-sensitive heads consistently steer model outputs along the intended axes. By bridging behavioral measurement with internal representation and controllable steering, SCoUT offers an end-to-end framework that uncovers and interprets the latent structure of stereotypes, advancing stereotype auditing from surface detection to structural analysis.

PaperID: 3579

Authors:Yulong Xia, Fuchun Sun

Affiliations: Tsinghua University

Title: Behavior Regularization with Flow Latent Policy for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Expressive generative models have recently shown promise in offline reinforcement learning (RL) by capturing the complex, multimodal structure of dataset behavior. However, directly integrating these models into policy optimization introduces substantial computational and stability challenges due to the intricacies of their sampling processes. We introduce Flow Latent Policy (FLP), an offline RL framework that decouples expressivity from optimization by operating entirely in the latent space of a pretrained, frozen flow-based behavior model. FLP learns a simple latent Gaussian policy whose samples are transformed through the flow to produce complex, behavior-aligned actions. This design enables closed-form behavior regularization via latent-space KL divergence and allows policy optimization without expensive backpropagation through the generative model. Experiments on the OGBench benchmark demonstrate that FLP achieves competitive or superior performance across diverse tasks, combining the benefits of expressive modeling and tractable optimization.

PaperID: 3580

Authors:Yun Xin, Jianfeng Lu, Gang Li, Shuqin Cao, Guanghui Wen, Kehao Wang

Title: OursFed: Provable Group Fairness-Aware Federated Learning Against Distrust and Fragility

Abstract:
With the increasing application of highstakes decisionmaking application in Federated Learning (FL), ensuring fairness across different populations to prevent biases against certain groups has become crucial. However, achieving group fairness (GF) in FL presents a formidable challenge due to its decentralization, which complicates the global GF estimation by the server. Moreover, distrust and fragility hinder the server from gathering GF values from unreliable clients. This challenge motivates our proposal of OursFed, a provable GF-aware FL framework that integrates a privacy pairbased contract and robust GF estimation method to address issues of distrust and fragility. Methodologically, we categorize client unreliability into two categories: active unreliability stemming from distrust and passive unreliability arising from fragility. To mitigate active unreliability, we design a privacy pair-based contract to guarantee truthful GF reporting, and enhance multivariate analysis by identifying relationships among multiple private data. To counteract passive unreliability, we develop a robust GF estimation using non-parametric techniques to smooth data and estimate probability densities and regression functions, improving per-client GF accuracy under multi-dimensional data perturbation. Theoretically, we demonstrate the efficacy of OursFed by analyzing its convergence, GF stability, and accuracy deviation. Experimentally, evaluations on two real datasets show that OursFed improves GF by 28.61% with at most 2.7% trade-off versus state-ofthe-art baselines, and synthetic experiments further confirm its effectiveness in handling fragility and distrust.

PaperID: 3581

Authors:Meng Xu, Xinhong Chen, Zhongying Chen, Guanyi Zhao, Yang Jin, Jianping Wang

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co.

Title: A Unified Self-Regulating Training Framework for Federated Deep Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Federated Deep Reinforcement Learning (FDRL) aims to enable distributed collaborative training of multiple DRL models while preserving privacy. Existing FDRL methods function in static client environments, but realworld scenarios often involve dynamic state transitions, such as noise, which render static model topologies inadequate and result in biased policy loss. This degrades client performance and leads to suboptimal global policies. To address this challenge, we develop a generic solution, referred to as the self-regulating training framework, which can be seamlessly integrated into existing FDRL approaches to address dynamic state transitions. Specifically, we propose a Sparse Training (ST) method that dynamically sparsifies and adjusts the topology of each model during training to maximize model performance and reduce model complexity. Additionally, we introduce an auxiliary model to adaptively regulate the policy loss of client models, mitigating loss bias and facilitating updates that yield improved returns. Experimental results demonstrate that our method enhances six state-of-the-art (SOTA) FDRL approaches across nine tasks in terms of return.

PaperID: 3582

Authors:Hao Yu, Ke Liang, Junxian Duan, Jun Wang, Siwei Wang, Chuan Ma, Xinwang Liu

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology, Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Intelligent Game and Decision Lab, Chongqing University

Title: TVChain: Leveraging TextualVisual Prompt Chains for Jailbreaking Large Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
Large VisionLanguage Models (LVLMs) enhance the capabilities of Large Language Models by integrating visual inputs, thereby enabling advanced multimodal reasoning across diverse applications. However, these enhanced reasoning capabilities introduce new security risks, particularly to jailbreaking attacks that bypass built-in safety mechanisms to elicit harmful or unauthorized outputs. While recent efforts have explored adversarial and typographic prompts, most existing attacks suffer from three key limitations: reliance on auxiliary models, limited effectiveness in black-box scenarios, and inadequate exploitation of the LVLMs' intrinsic reasoning abilities. In this work, we propose TVChain, a novel black-box jailbreaking framework that explicitly intervenes in both the visual and textual reasoning processes of LVLMs. TVChain decomposes malicious prompts into a sequence of semantically meaningful sub-images that represent relevant objects and behaviors, thereby circumventing direct exposure of illicit content. In parallel, a carefully designed chain-of-thought (CoT) textual prompt is employed to steer the model's reasoning toward reconstructing the intended activity in a covert yet effective manner. We demonstrate that this compositional prompting strategy reduces the likelihood of triggering safety mechanisms while preserving attack efficacy. Extensive evaluations on eleven LVLMs (seven open-source and four commercial) across two benchmark datasets and three state-of-the-art defenses validate the effectiveness and robustness of TVChain.

PaperID: 3583

Authors:Zhiyuan Yu, Mingkai Lin, Wenzhong Li, Zhangyue Yin, Shijian Xiao, Sanglu Lu

Affiliations: Nanjing University, Fudan University

Title: Demystifying GNN-to-MLP Knowledge Transfer: Theoretical Grounding and Dual-Stream Distillation Method

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown remarkable effectiveness across various applications, but their computational complexity poses significant scalability challenges. To this end, GNNto-MLP Knowledge Distillation (KD) methods transfer relational inductive biases from GNNs to MLPs, equipping MLPs with graph-aware capabilities that rival or even surpass those of their teacher GNNs. However, a theoretical foundation for understanding GNN-to-MLP KD is still missing. In this paper, we provide a theoretical analysis of how knowledge distillation unlocks the potential of MLPs for graph tasks from the perspective of training dynamics. We demonstrate that label alignment in KD fundamentally reshapes the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) matrix of student MLPs, enabling them to learn the teacher model’s implicit graph bias. We further investigate finer-grained distillation paradigms and reveal that conventional layer-wise output alignment fails to effectively align the deep-layer graph propagation outcomes. To address this, we propose Dual-Stream Aligned MLP (DA-MLP), which incorporates complementary graph filters in a dual-stream architecture. This approach simultaneously enhances feature space dimensionality for improved representation alignment and preserves graph signals across different frequency bands. Comprehensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets validate that DA-MLP can be seamlessly integrated into existing knowledge distillation frameworks for performance enhancements in both transductive and inductive settings.

PaperID: 3584

Authors:Haochen Yuan, Minting Pan, Yunbo Wang, Siyu Gao, Xiaokang Yang

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China International Capital Corporation Limited

Title: MetaTrader: Learning to Generalize RL Trading Policies Beyond Offline Data

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown significant promise in sequential portfolio optimization. A typical solution involves optimizing cumulative returns using historical offline data. However, it may produce less generalizable policies that merely ''memorize'' optimal buying and selling actions from the offline data while neglecting the nonstationary nature of the financial market. We frame portfolio optimization of stock data as a specific type of offline RL problem. Our method, MetaTrader, presents two key contributions. First, it introduces a novel bilevel RL algorithm that operates on both the original stock data and its transformations. The core idea is that a robust policy should generalize effectively to out-of-distribution data. Second, we propose a new temporal difference (TD) method that leverages a transformation-based conservative TD target to address value overestimation under limited offline data. Empirical results on two publicly available datasets demonstrate that MetaTrader outperforms existing methods, including both traditional stock prediction models and RL-based trading approaches.

PaperID: 3585

Authors:Dewen Zeng, Wenlong Tian, Haozhao Wang, Jianfeng Lu, Weijun Xiao, Zhiyong Xu

Affiliations: University of South China, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Virginia Commonwealth University, Suffolk University

Title: Ripple Shapley: Data Influence Attribution in One Federated Training Run

Abstract:
Contribution evaluation is essential for incentivizing highquality data sharing in federated learning (FL), yet existing Shapley-value-based methods are prohibitively expensive and overlook temporal influence propagation. In this paper, we propose Ripple Shapley, a novel attribution framework that enables accurate, real-time data valuation within a single federated training run. Our method decomposes each sample’s impact into an instantaneous drop term and a recursive ripple term, the latter capturing downstream influence via a Jacobian chain over global updates. To scale computation, we introduce a low-rank approximation of the Jacobian product and construct a shared subspace for efficient ripple accumulation. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10 and MNIST show that Ripple Shapley achieves up to 62× speedup over existing Shapley-based FL methods while maintaining high attribution fidelity, significantly improving efficiency, robustness, and fairness in federated environments. We further demonstrate its effectiveness in dynamic federated learning scenarios and its potential for real-time data pricing.

PaperID: 3586

Authors:Haodong Zhang, Xinyue Wang, Tao Ren, Yifan Wang, Siyu Yi, Fanchun Meng, Zeyu Ma, Qingqing Long, Wei Ju

Affiliations: Northeastern University, University of International Business and Economics, Sichuan University, Jiangnan University, Computer Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: FairGC: Fostering Individual and Group Fairness for Deep Graph Clustering

Abstract:
The widespread adoption of graph neural networks (GNNs) has brought increased attention to fairness issues related to sensitive attributes, such as gender and race, in practical scenarios. However, this concern remains largely unexplored in the context of graph clustering. Conventional fair graph clustering methods primarily depend on spectral clustering approaches. Meanwhile, we argue that existing graph learning works mainly focus on a single type of fairness, whereas graph clustering should achieve group equalityinformed individual fairness. In this paper, we introduce for the first time a fairness-aware framework termed FairGC for deep graph clustering, which integrates the dual objectives of individual and group fairness while maintaining accurate clustering results. Specifically, we construct two views with distinct semantics using Siamese encoders. Then, we apply multi-step random walks on view-specific affinity graphs to capture high-order affinities of node pairs, thereby reformulating the contrastive learning with a focus on individual similarity. Besides, we utilize adversarial learning by making node representations independent of the estimated sensitive attributes to further eliminate group biases of clustering results. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed framework FairGC.

PaperID: 3587

Authors:Jun Zhang, Yangyang Zhou, Tiantian Zhu, Zexuan Zhu

Affiliations: Shenzhen University

Title: PepCCD: A Contrastive Conditioned Diffusion Framework for Target-Specific Peptide Generation

Abstract:
Peptidebased drug design targeting “undruggable” proteins remains one of the most critical challenges in modern drug discovery. Conventional peptide-discovery pipelines rely on low-throughput experimental screening, which is both time-consuming and prohibitively expensive. Moreover, existing computational approaches for designing peptides against target proteins typically depend on the availability of high-quality structural information. Although recent structure-prediction tools such as AlphaFold3 have achieved breakthroughs in protein modeling, their accuracy for functional interfaces remains limited. The acquisition of high-resolution structures is often expensive, time-intensive, and particularly challenging for targets with dynamic conformations, further restricting the efficient development of peptide therapeutics. Additionally, current sequence-based generative methods follow a paradigm that relies on known templates, which limits the exploration of sequence space and results in generated peptides lacking diversity and novelty. To address these limitations, we propose a contrastive conditioned diffusion framework for target-specific peptide generation, referred to as PepCCD. It employs a contrastive learning strategy between proteins and peptides to extract sequence-based conditioning representations of target proteins, which serve as precise conditions to guide a pre-trained diffusion model to generate peptide sequences with the desired target specificity. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark target proteins demonstrate that the peptides designed by PepCCD exhibit strong binding affinity and outperform state-of-the-art methods in terms of diversity and generation efficiency.

PaperID: 3588

Authors:Leqi Zhang, Wayne Lu, Haiyang Zhang, Elliott Wen, Zhixuan Liang, Jia Wang

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, University of Auckland, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: Breaking Down Market Barriers: Distilled Prompt-Tuning Approach for Cross-Market Recommendation

Abstract:
Crossmarket recommendation (CMR) faces severe challenges from distribution shifts between data-rich source markets and sparse target markets. Existing methods rely on a pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm for knowledge transfer, yet suffer from two key limitations: i) the objective gap between pre-training and full-parameter fine-tuning causes loss of generalized knowledge from source markets; ii) the high computational costs of extensive fine-tuning hinder scalability. To this end, we propose DCMPT, a novel Distilled Cross-Market Prompt-Tuning approach. DCMPT reframes the problem under a more efficient pre-training and prompt-tuning paradigm. Instead of full fine-tuning, we adapt a pre-trained universal backbone by freezing its weights and injecting a minimal set of learnable prompts to form a "student" model. To effectively optimize these prompts on sparse data, we introduce a novel teacher-student architecture: a specialized "teacher" model, trained exclusively on the target market, provides dense, market-specific supervision. This guidance is delivered via a dual distillation strategy designed to transfer global ranking patterns and adapt to local consumer tastes. Extensive experiments on real-world market datasets demonstrate that DCMPT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior target market performance with substantial parameter-efficiency.

PaperID: 3589

Authors:Peining Zhang, Jinbo Bi, Minghu Song

Affiliations: University of Connecticut, Institute of Health and Medicine, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center

Title: VEDA: Generation of 3D Molecules via Variance-Exploding Diffusion with Annealing

Abstract:
Diffusion models show promise for 3D molecular generation, but face a fundamental tradeoff between sampling efficiency and conformational accuracy. While flow-based models are fast, they often produce geometrically inaccurate structures, as they have difficulty capturing the multimodal distributions of molecular conformations. In contrast, denoising diffusion models are more accurate but suffer from slow sampling, a limitation attributed to sub-optimal integration between diffusion dynamics and SE(3)‑equivariant architectures. To address this, we propose VEDA, a unified SE(3)-equivariant framework that combines variance-exploding diffusion with annealing to efficiently generate conformationally accurate 3D molecular structures. Specifically, our key technical contributions include: (1) a VE schedule that enables noise injection functionally analogous to simulated annealing, improving 3D accuracy and reducing relaxation energy; (2) a novel preconditioning scheme that reconciles the coordinate-predicting nature of SE(3)-equivariant networks with a residual-based diffusion objective, and (3) a new arcsin-based scheduler that concentrates sampling in critical intervals of the logarithmic signal-to-noise ratio. On the QM9 and GEOM-DRUGS datasets, VEDA matches the sampling efficiency of flow-based models, achieving state-of-the-art valency stability and validity with only 100 sampling steps. More importantly, VEDA's generated structures are remarkably stable, as measured by their relaxation energy (Delta E_relax) during GFN2-xTB optimization. The median energy change is only 1.72kcal/mol, significantly lower than the 32.3kcal/mol from its architectural baseline, SemlaFlow. Our framework demonstrates that principled integration of VE diffusion with SE(3)-equivariant architectures can achieve both high chemical accuracy and computational efficiency.

PaperID: 3590

Authors:Shuang Zhang, Yue Wu, Lei Shi, Huilong Jin, Feifei Kou, Pengfei Zhang, Mingying Xu, Pengtao Lv

Affiliations: Hebei Normal University, Communication University of China, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Anhui University Of Science & Technology, North China University of Technology, Henan University of Technology

Title: Adaptive Graph Attention Based Discrete Hashing for Incomplete Cross-modal Retrieval

Abstract:
Crossmodal hashing has emerged as a pivotal solution for efficient retrieval across diverse modalities, such as images and texts, by mapping them into compact binary hash spaces. However, in real-world scenarios, the modalities data is often missing or misaligned. Existing methods are most rely on fully paired training data and ignore missing or misaligned modalities data, resulting in the semantic inconsistencies. To address these challenges, we propose an Adaptive Graph Attention-Based Discrete Hashing (AGADH) method, which consists of three parts. First, to solve the problem of missing modalities, AGADH employs a masked completion strategy to reconstruct missing modalities. Second, to mitigate semantic misalignment, AGADH leverages a Graph Attention Network (GAT) encoder-decoder architecture with alignment module to construct features from different modalities. Additionally, to enhance the fusion performance, an adaptive fusion module dynamically adjusting the contributions of image and text modalities with learnable weighting coefficients is proposed. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, MS-COCO, NUS-WIDE, and MIRFlickr-25K, demonstrating that AGADH outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both fully paired and incompletely paired scenarios, showing its robustness and effectiveness in cross-modal retrieval tasks.

PaperID: 3591

Authors:Ying Zhang, Xingyue Guo, Yu Zhao, Xuhui Sui, Baohang Zhou, Xinying Qian, Xiaojie Yuan

Affiliations: Nankai University, Tiangong University

Title: Grow-on-Demand: Sparse and Adaptive Expert Expansion for Continual Instruction Tuning

Abstract:
Continual instruction tuning aims to incrementally adapt large language models to new tasks without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Existing approaches often struggle to balance plasticity and stability. Replaybased methods retrain on historical data, which raises privacy concerns. Architecture-based methods allocate task-specific components, resulting in significant parameter growth. To address this, we consider a structure-sharing strategy that enables parameter reuse across similar tasks and expands only when necessary, avoiding any data replay. Specifically, we introduce Grow-on-Demand (GoD-MoE), a parameter-efficient framework that is based on sparse and adaptive expert module expansion for continual instruction tuning. GoD-MoE inserts multiple LoRA-based experts into attention layers and dynamically activates a small subset of experts for each task. To avoid redundant parameter growth, we develop an Expert Demand Detector that determines whether new experts are added, facilitating adaptive structural sharing and minimizing parameter overhead. We conduct comprehensive experiments on the TRACE benchmark, demonstrating that GoD-MoE achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, it effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting and even outperforms several advanced replay-based baselines.

PaperID: 3592

Authors:Tianyi Zheng, Jiayang Gao, Peng-Tao Jiang, Fengxiang Yang, Ben Wan, Hao Zhang, Jinwei Chen, Jia Wang, Bo Li

Affiliations: vivo Mobile Communication Co., Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: Bidirectional Noise Injection: Enhancing Diffusion Models via Coordinated Input-Output Perturbation

Abstract:
Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable success in image generation, yet a persistent challenge remains: the bias between model predictions and the target distribution. In this paper, we propose a Bidirectional Noise Injection framework for enhancing diffusion models, implemented via Coordinated InputOutput Perturbation (CIOP). Our approach mitigates this bias by randomly applying synchronized noise injection to both the model inputs and the prediction targets during the training stage. This stochastic, synchronized noise injected acts as a smoothing mechanism that effectively reduces the 2-Wasserstein distance between the predicted and target distributions, as substantiated by our theoretical analysis based on optimal transport theory. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets and various generative tasks demonstrate that our method improves generation quality and training efficiency without incurring additional computational cost. Furthermore, the design of CIOP enables seamless integration with existing diffusion model improvements and advanced frameworks, thereby broadening its applicability. These results highlight the potential of Bidirectional Noise Injection via CIOP to alleviate bias in diffusion-based generative models across a wide range of settings.

PaperID: 3593

Authors:Dulan Zhou, Zijian Gao, Kele Xu

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology National Key Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Computing

Title: Perturbing to Preserve: Defending Fragile Knowledge in Online Continual Learning

Abstract:
Online continual learning requires models to learn from non‑stationary data streams while retaining prior knowledge. We identify an overlooked phenomenon—knowledge fragility—where correctly learned instances are rapidly forgotten after minor parameter updates. Our analysis attributes this fragility to a temporal–spatial dual mechanism: temporal instability, highfrequency parameter oscillations cause forgetting to outpace adaptation; and spatial vulnerability, fragile instances lie in sharp, high‑curvature regions of the loss landscape that are extremely sensitive to optimization noise. These insights motivate PDFK (Perturbing to Defend Fragile Knowledge), a unified framework that defends fragile knowledge along both dimensions. Temporally, we apply exponential moving averaging to smooth parameter evolution and stabilize long‑term memory. Spatially, we inject minimal structured perturbations with a consistency constraint to flatten sharp regions and enhance robustness. PDFK requires no task‑boundary annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PDFK substantially improves knowledge retention and outperforms strong baselines under diverse and challenging continual learning settings.

PaperID: 3594

Authors:Taichun Zhou, Siwei Wang, Zhibin Dong, Jiaqi Jin, Ke Liang, Baili Xiao, Miaomiao Li, Xinwang Liu, En Zhu

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology, Intelligent Game and Decision Lab, Changsha College

Title: Hierarchical Cross-View Alignment for Multi-View Clustering via Decoupled Information Distillation

Abstract:
Multiview clustering aims to uncover shared semantics and complementary information across different views. However, the inherent heterogeneity among views poses significant challenges to effective collaborative modeling and information integration. While recent studies have introduced distillation-based mechanisms to enhance cross-view consistency and alleviate heterogeneity, these approaches often rely on manually defined knowledge transfer paths or fixed fusion weights, which are inflexible in handling complex and dynamic view relationships in practice. To address this issue, we propose HOARD: a novel framework for Hierarchical crOss-view Alignment for multi-view clusteRing via Decoupled information distillation. HOARD structurally decouples multi-view representations into shared and specific components, and performs hierarchical alignment. Specifically, we introduce a granular-ball contrastive alignment to enhance the semantic consistency of shared features, and a prototype collaborative transmission alignment strategy to align specific features while preserving view-specific structural characteristics. Moreover, we design an information distillation unit to adaptively model cross-view knowledge transfer in both feature spaces. An attention mechanism is further employed to integrate shared and specific information. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that HOARD significantly improves alignment quality and clustering performance, achieving state-of-the-art results.

PaperID: 3595

Authors:Xinxin Zhu, Ying He, Haowen Hou, Ruichong Zhang, Nianbo Zeng, Yulin Peng, Jiongfeng Fang, F. Richard Yu

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University, Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy (SZ), Tsinghua University, School of Information Technology, Carleton University

Title: PSPO: Prompt-Level Prioritization and Experience-Weighted Smoothing for Efficient Policy Optimization

Abstract:
Reinforcement Finetuning (RFT) methods such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) have demonstrated strong capabilities in aligning Large Language Models with human preferences. However, these approaches often suffer from limited data efficiency, necessitating extensive on-policy rollouts to maintain competitive performance. We propose PSPO (Prompt-Level Prioritization and Experience-Weighted Smoothing for Efficient Policy Optimization), a lightweight yet effective enhancement to GRPO that improves training stability and sample efficiency through two complementary techniques. First, we introduce an experience-weighted reward smoothing mechanism, which uses exponential moving averages to track group-level reward statistics for each prompt. This enables more stable advantage estimation across training steps without storing entire trajectories, allowing the model to capture historical reward trends in a lightweight and memory-efficient manner. Second, we adopt a prompt-level prioritized sampling strategy, which is an online data selection method inspired by prioritized experience replay. It dynamically emphasizes higher-impact prompts based on their relative advantages, thereby improving data efficiency. Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks and models show that PSPO achieves comparable or better accuracy than GRPO, while significantly accelerating convergence, and maintaining low computational and memory overhead.

PaperID: 3596

Authors:Yuxin Geng, Wolfram Barfuss, Xingru Chen

Affiliations: School of Mathematical Sciences, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing China, Transdisciplinary Research Area Sustainable Futures, University of Bonn, Germany Center for Development Research, Germany Institute for Food and Resource Economics, School of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University

Title: Emergent Fast-Slow Dynamics in Multi-Agent Q-Learning for Networked Stochastic Games

Abstract:
Understanding the emergence of collective behaviors of multiagent systems requires investigating the learning dynamics. However, the theoretical analysis of large-scale graph-structured multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) systems remains challenging due to agent heterogeneity and the intrinsic coupling between state transitions and individual Q-value updates. In this work, we develop a unified theoretical framework that captures the evolution of agent behaviors at both individual and population levels. By leveraging the pair approximation technique from statistical physics, we derive a closed set of evolution equations that accurately describe the temporal dynamics of the system. Our analysis also reveals a separation of time scales. For small learning rates, state transitions equilibrate rapidly, while Q-value updates evolve slowly with stationary state distributions. Through extensive agent-based simulations, we validate the robustness of our theoretical results and explain the mechanisms that lead to the emergence of cooperation in social dilemmas. Our framework offers new perspectives for bridging complex systems science and MARL, providing insights for the design of cooperative and resilient AI.

PaperID: 3597

Authors:Jianhang Liu, Dianzheng Zhang, Hongxin Pan, Guangqian Jiang, Runda Fan

Affiliations: Qingdao Institute of Software, College of Computer Science and Technology, China University of Petroleum (East China), China Shandong Key Laboratory of Intelligent Oil & Gas Industrial Software

Title: IPDA:Intelligent Perception Delay Alignment Method Based on Spatio-Temporal Co-Sensing Calibration

Abstract:
Intelligent perception among multiple agents enables them to extend their individual observation capabilities by sharing sensory information, thereby improving the completeness and accuracy of environmental understanding. However, realworld communication is often subject to non-negligible delays, which can degrade the effectiveness of perception. To mitigate this, delay alignment is commonly employed to synchronize delayed observations to a common timestamp. Yet, both alignment errors and inherent discrepancies between multi-view observations can lead to inconsistencies in the estimated position and orientation of shared targets. These inconsistencies can accumulate during feature fusion, ultimately reducing the accuracy and reliability of the perception results.To address this challenge, we propose IPDA, a delay-aware multi-agent intelligent perception method that performs joint calibration in both temporal and spatial domains. In the temporal dimension, we design a historical alignment attention mechanism to model dynamic delay correction across sequences, ensuring temporal coherence. In the spatial dimension, we introduce a discrepancy-quantized co-sensing network that captures and compensates for multi-view spatial deviations caused by viewpoint diversity and alignment inaccuracy. IPDA is evaluated on two large-scale intelligent perception benchmarks, DAIR-V2X and OPV2V. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively mitigates delay-induced inconsistencies and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines under various delay conditions.

PaperID: 3598

Authors:Shuo Zhang, Xinyu Yang

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University

Title: RetouchAgent: Towards Interactive and Explainable Image Retouching with MLLM Agents

Abstract:
Although deep learningbased image retouching has made significant progress, its inherent subjectivity renders current black-box methods limited in interactivity and explainability. Among existing efforts, parameter-controlled methods aim to improve interactivity, but often suffer from ambiguous semantics and lack support for natural language control. Reinforcement learning–based explainability methods are constrained by low-dimensional and limited action spaces, which result in suboptimal performance. To address the above issues, we propose RetouchAgent, a novel framework that leverages collaboration among multiple MLLM agents for image retouching. Our method consists of the following key steps: (1) Retrieval: By constructing a multimodal retouching database, we enable an ICL sample retrieval mechanism guided by retouching intent. (2) Engine: Leveraging the vision-language understanding capabilities of MLLM, a carefully designed prompting strategy, and a dedicated operation library, we enable precise and controllable image retouching. (3) Reflection: We evaluate each retouching interaction and optimize the retouching process for progressive result refinement. Finally, through multiple rounds of collaboration among MLLM agents, RetouchAgent achieves state-of-the-art performance in quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

PaperID: 3599

Authors:Rong Bao, Bo Wang, Xiao Wang, Hongyu Li, Rui Zheng, Leszek Rutkowski, Qi Zhang, Liang Ding, Dacheng Tao

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University, Independent Researcher, Systems Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences, AGH University of Krakow, Kraków and the SAN University, The University of Sydney, Generative AI Lab, College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University

Title: Time-Frequency Token Advantage Clipping for Training Efficient Large Reasoning Model

Abstract:
Long Chainof-Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances large reasoning models' performance but suffers from severe inefficiencies, as models often overthink simple problems or underthink complex ones. Current sequence-level optimizations, like length penalties, are too coarse-grained to distinguish core logic from verbose language, precluding the necessary token-level control for efficient reasoning CoT. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Time-Frequency token Advantage Clipping (TFAC), a novel training framework designed to build efficient large reasoning models via token-level interventions. Specifically, TFAC functions along two dimensions: 1) The Frequency Dimension: It discourages inefficient loops and encourages deeper exploration by dynamically reducing the advantage scores of high-entropy tokens that are repeatedly generated within a single reasoning path. 2) The Time Dimension: It reduces excessive overthinking of the system by establishing a historical baseline for the occurrence count of each critical token in previously successful trajectories, and clipping the advantages of tokens that exceed this baseline during training. Crucially, to preserve the model's exploratory capabilities on novel problems, this suppression mechanism is automatically disabled when no historical record of success is available. Experiments conducted on the Deepseek-Distill-32B and Qwen3-8B models show that TFAC outperforms leading baseline methods, improving performance by 2.3 and 3.1 percentage points, respectively, while simultaneously reducing inference costs by 35% and 28% in scenarios where correct answers are generated. These results validate the significant efficacy of TFAC in training large reasoning models that are both powerful and highly efficient.

PaperID: 3600

Authors:Yixin Bu, Guanyun Zou, Renzhi Wang, Runze Xia, Cunjun Wang, Hongliang Dai, Xiaoqing Ma, Piji Li

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The Key Laboratory of Brain-Machine Intelligence Technology, Ministry of Education, COMAC Shanghai Aircraft Design and Research Institute

Title: Sampling-Free Uncertainty Quantification via Hidden State Dynamics in Language Models

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in various complex language tasks, yet they face significant reliability challenges, including factual inaccuracies and generated biases. Uncertainty quantification (UQ) plays a pivotal role in assessing model trustworthiness, particularly for highstakes applications. However, current UQ methods for LLMs encounter computational efficiency bottlenecks due to their reliance on extensive sampling or external model invocations. In this work, we introduce a novel, sampling-free uncertainty quantification framework centered on hidden layer representation analysis. Our method facilitates real-time uncertainty quantification by modeling hierarchical internal semantic dynamics during the generation process. Through comprehensive experiments on multiple QA datasets and diverse model scales, we show that our approach consistently outperforms existing uncertainty quantification techniques in distinguishing correct from incorrect generations. Our results reveal that analyzing the dynamic evolution of hidden states provides a potent and computationally efficient signal for uncertainty quantification, directly from the model's internal workings, surpassing methods that depend solely on output probabilities or approximations via multiple samples.

PaperID: 3601

Authors:Yile Chen, Zeyi Wen, Jian Chen, Jin Huang

Affiliations: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, South China University of Technology, South China Normal University

Title: A Better Start: Sensitivity-Aware Warm-Up for Robust and Efficient Fine-Tuning

Abstract:
As an essential component of finetuning, warm-up plays a crucial role in promoting stability and generalization. Many studies have examined its underlying mechanisms from different aspects. However, most of the studies focus on incorporating these insights into optimizers to reduce the reliance on warm-up. Little attention has been paid to addressing the inherent limitations of the warm-up itself, which restricts its effectiveness. In this work, we revisit warm-up from a loss landscape perspective and identify several limitations with existing warm-up, including: (1) susceptibility to nearby suboptimal traps, (2) sensitivity to hyperparameters and random seeds, and (3) inefficiency during the early stages of training. To overcome these limitations, we propose Sensitivity-Aware Warm-Up (SAWU), a lightweight and adaptive strategy that dynamically leverages learning sensitivity during warm-up to guide updates toward better and more stable basins. In addition, SAWU also introduces an adaptive scheduling mechanism and phase transition strategy across warm-up, stable, and decay phases to further enhance robustness and efficiency. Extensive experiments on various downstream tasks show that SAWU significantly outperforms the vanilla method (e.g., average 3.43% improvement on RoBerta). Moreover, SAWU can be easily combined with various optimizers and remains effective even when warm-up-based methods fail (e.g, it lifts RAdam from 49.46% to 91.78% on qnli. Thanks to its lightweight nature, SAWU introduces minimal overhead and even reduces training time by over 5% compared to other methods.

PaperID: 3602

Authors:Yongyuan Chen, Minjie Hong, Boxi Wu, Xicheng Han

Affiliations: State Key Lab of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University, School of Software Technology

Title: DiagramGPT-Llama3:Enabling Editable, High-Fidelity Diagram Generation with Vision Large Language Models

Abstract:
The automation of diagram generation has gained significant attention in recent years. Previous studies mainly focused on generating diagrams from natural language, but often lacked support for userfriendly editing like drag-and-drop. This paper proposes a novel task: generating editable, high-fidelity diagrams from either text or raster images. It is also among the first to introduce diagram restoration and style transfer in this setting.To tackle these tasks, we constructed the Diagram-mxGraph dataset, covering restoration, text-to-diagram generation, and style transfer. We propose two core innovations: Fine-grained Adaptive Background Suppression (FABS) and Component-Aware Adaptive Loss (CAAL). Leveraging pre-trained Vision Transformers (ViTs) and the Diagram Adapter module, our method aligns diagram features with a Large Language Model (LLM) to output diagrams in editable mxGraph format.

PaperID: 3603

Authors:Yuefei Chen, Vivek K. Singh, Jing Ma, Ruixiang Tang

Affiliations: Rutgers University, Case Western Reserve University

Title: CounterBench: Evaluating and Improving Counterfactual Reasoning in Large Language Models

Abstract:
Counterfactual reasoning is widely recognized as one of the most challenging and intricate aspects of causality in artificial intelligence. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of large language models (LLMs) in counterfactual reasoning. In contrast to previous studies that primarily focus on commonsense causal reasoning, where LLMs often rely on prior knowledge for inference, we specifically assess their ability to perform counterfactual inference using a set of formal rules. To support this evaluation, we introduce a new benchmark dataset, CounterBench, comprising 1.2K counterfactual reasoning questions. The dataset is designed with varying levels of difficulty, diverse causal graph structures, distinct types of counterfactual questions, and multiple nonsensical name variants. Our experiments demonstrate that counterfactual reasoning poses a significant challenge for LLMs, with most models performing at levels comparable to random guessing. To enhance LLM's counterfactual reasoning ability, we propose a novel reasoning paradigm, CoIn, which guides LLMs through iterative reasoning and backtracking to systematically explore counterfactual solutions. Experimental results show that our method significantly improves LLM performance on counterfactual reasoning tasks and consistently enhances performance across different LLMs.

PaperID: 3604

Authors:Lingling Dai, Andong Li, Cheng Chi, Yifan Liang, Xiaodong Li, Chengshi Zheng

Affiliations: Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: GOMPSNR: Reflourish the Signal-to-Noise Ratio Metric for Audio Generation Tasks

Abstract:
In the field of audio generation, signalto-noise ratio (SNR) has long served as an objective metric for evaluating audio quality. Nevertheless, recent studies have shown that SNR and its variants are not always highly correlated with human perception, prompting us to raise the questions: Why does SNR fail in measuring audio quality? And how to improve its reliability as an objective metric? In this paper, we identify the inadequate measurement of phase distance as a pivotal factor and propose to reformulate SNR with specially designed phase-distance terms, yielding an improved metric named GOMPSNR. We further extend the newly proposed formulation to derive two novel categories of loss function, corresponding to magnitude-guided phase refinement and joint magnitude-phase optimization, respectively. Besides, extensive experiments are conducted for an optimal combination of different loss functions. Experimental results on advanced neural vocoders demonstrate that our proposed GOMPSNR exhibits more reliable error measurement than SNR. Meanwhile, our proposed loss functions yield substantial improvements in model performance, and our well-chosen combination of different loss functions further optimizes the overall model capability.

PaperID: 3605

Authors:Haizhou Du, Jiujiu Li, Dongyang Li, Luobin Huang, Lisheng Wang

Affiliations: Shanghai University of Electric Power

Title: Mnemosyne: Accelerating Multi-Hop Question Answering via Cache Hit Order Fitting

Abstract:
MultiHop Question Answering (MHQA) requires step-by-step reasoning across multiple pieces of information to answer complex questions. The cache-aided Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) can accelerate the process of external knowledge retrieval at each reasoning step for MHQA. However, existing methods focus on the internal structure and ignore the misalignment between the queries’ arrival order and cache hit order. To tackle this, we propose Mnemosyne, a cache hit order fitting method designed to accelerate the RAG progress for MHQA. Specifically, our cache-aware order fitting strategy adjusts the order of queries arrival via graph reordering to better align with the cache hit order, thereby reducing the likelihood of failed or unproductive retrieval attempts. The multi-granularity caching storage mechanism is designed to loosen the strict hit condition to multiple similar semantic matching modes, facilitating that relevant documents can still be retrieved. Experiments conducted on four multi-hop QA datasets demonstrate that Mnemosyne effectively reduces retrieval latency while enhancing task answer F1 score, achieving a superior trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness.

PaperID: 3606

Authors:Zeying Duan, Youtian Du, Yuanlin Chang, Bowen Lin, Weijia Wu

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University

Title: Learning to Parse and Reconstruct: Bidirectional Modeling of Question-to-Program Mapping

Abstract:
Neurosymbolic learning has emerged as a promising paradigm for interpretable visual reasoning, where mapping natural language questions to executable programs plays a central role. However, most existing methods focus exclusively on the forward program generation from questions while overlooking the reverse process of reconstructing questions from programs. In this paper, we propose BiPaR (Bidirectional Parsing and Reconstruction), a Transformer-based framework that jointly models both program parsing and question reconstruction within a unified architecture. Unlike previous approaches that only perform forward parsing, BiPaR introduces reverse program-to-question reconstruction as a powerful auxiliary signal, which improves program generation quality and accelerates convergence, particularly under limited supervision. We further provide a theoretical analysis showing how reverse reconstruction facilitates faster optimization during training. The bidirectional modeling makes BiPaR well-suited for both supervised and semi-supervised learning scenarios. We present two architectural variants: BiPaR-Full, which employs encoder-decoder Transformers for both modules; and BiPaR-DOnly, a lightweight variant that employs a decoder-only structure for question reconstruction, reducing model complexity. Experiments on CLEVR and a GQA subset demonstrate that BiPaR significantly outperforms standard Transformer baselines. Furthermore, in the semi-supervised learning setting, BiPaR achieves notable improvements by leveraging additional questions without program annotations.

PaperID: 3607

Authors:Xuanbo Fan, Tianqi Zhao, Yi Cheng, Chi Xiu, Jiaxin Guo, Boci Peng, Bingjing Xu, Jessica Zhang, Feng Sun, Yan Zhang

Affiliations: School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Peking University, China State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence, Microsoft Corporation

Title: SegMem-RAG: Adaptive Memory for Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Open-Ended Knowledge Environments

Abstract:
RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) improves the factual accuracy of large language models by grounding responses in external content. However, most RAG systems assume access to static and well-organized corpora with fixed retrieval logic. In practice, real-world sources are heterogeneous and unlabeled, including user-uploaded documents, manuals, and datasets. Effective access in such settings requires adaptive and self-directed retrieval behavior. We present SegMem‑RAG, a memory-augmented RAG framework that learns to route queries across multiple unlabeled corpora based on experience. It incrementally updates a structured memory and uses self-reflection to guide retrieval over time without supervision. Experimental results demonstrate that SegMem‑RAG significantly outperforms recent baselines in generation quality on multi-corpus QA tasks.

PaperID: 3608

Authors:Jiaxin Guo, Hao Sun, Wenhao Zhang, Xuanbo Fan, Yan Zhang

Affiliations: School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Peking University, School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: Mitigating Error Accumulation in Knowledge Editing for Multi-Hop Question Answering

Abstract:
Knowledge editing (KE) has emerged as an effective approach for updating factual information in large language models (LLMs) without the need for full retraining. Most of the existing methods for addressing the "ripple effect" in KE adopt a chainstructured reasoning process, making them vulnerable to error accumulation from early incorrect steps. Moreover, their conflict detection mechanisms are often susceptible to the LLM's inherent confirmation bias, further undermining the reliability of the editing process. To overcome these challenges, we propose Tree of Editing (ToE), a tree-structured, retrieval-enhanced knowledge editing framework designed to support robust reasoning under factual updates. ToE expands reasoning paths using a breadth-first strategy combined with score-guided beam search, enabling diverse and error-tolerant inference. Besides, we introduce an observer to objectively update knowledge, avoiding the bias caused by LLMs' over-confidence. Experimental results on two benchmarks, namely MQuAKE-CF (targeting ripple-aware editing) and DUNE (free-form editing), demonstrate that ToE framework significantly outperforms existing methods.

PaperID: 3609

Authors:Feijiang Han, Zelong Wang, Bowen Wang, Xinxin Liu, Skyler Cheung, Delip Rao, Chris Callison-Burch, Lyle Ungar

Affiliations: University of Pennsylvania

Title: LaTeX2Layout: High-Fidelity, Scalable Document Layout Annotation Pipeline for Layout Detection

Abstract:
Generalpurpose Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly integral to modern AI systems for document understanding, yet their ability to perform fine-grained layout analysis remains severely underdeveloped. Overcoming this limitation requires large-scale, high-fidelity training datasets. However, current annotation methods that rely on parsing rendered PDFs are costly, error-prone, and difficult to scale. We propose a different paradigm: extracting ground-truth layout directly from the LaTeX compilation process rather than the final PDF. We present LaTeX2Layout, a generalizable procedural pipeline that recovers pixel-accurate bounding boxes and reading order from compiler traces. This enables the generation of a 140K-page dataset, including 120K programmatically generated synthetic variants that more than double the layout diversity of real-world data. Using this dataset, we fine-tune an efficient 3B-parameter VLM with an easy-to-hard curriculum that accelerates convergence. Our model achieves Kendall's tau=0.95 for reading order and mAP@50=0.91 for element grounding, delivering nearly 200% relative improvement over strong zero-shot baselines such as GPT-4o and Claude-3.7.

PaperID: 3610

Authors:Geting Huang, Jilong Zhang, Kai Zhou, Zhang Yi, Xiuyuan Xu

Affiliations: Sichuan University

Title: RoSE: A Role Correlation Structure-Enhanced Model for Multi-Event Argument Extraction

Abstract:
Event cooccurrences have been proven effective for event argument extraction (EAE) in previous studies; however, few have considered intra- and inter-event role correlations. Since role varies among different event types, event structure heterogeneity and overlap pose significant challenges to EAE. To address this issue, we propose a Role Correlation Structure-Enhanced model for Multi-Event Argument Extraction (RoSE), capable of capturing both heterogeneity and overlap of event structures through modeling role correlations. The proposed RoSE model employs a joint context-prompts input, role-centric graph-guided encoder (RoGE), and role-specific information fusion (RoIF). The RoGE is designed to enhance the intra- and inter-event role correlation between prompts and their corresponding event contexts. The RoIF module utilizes intra-event role information to improve multi-event arguments extraction. Extensive experiments on four widely-used benchmarks (RAMS, WikiEvents, MLEE, and ACE05) demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, validating the effectiveness of incorporating both intra- and inter-event role correlations.

PaperID: 3611

Authors:Prachuryya Kaushik, Ashish Anand

Affiliations: Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati

Title: SampurNER: FineGrained Named Entity Recognition Dataset for 22 Indian Languages

Abstract:
We introduce SampurNER, a finegrained named entity recognition (FgNER) dataset encompassing all 22 scheduled Indian languages spoken by more than two billion people across various countries. While manual annotation for FgNER resources is often labor-intensive and expensive, distant supervision methods have been employed as a viable solution. However, such datasets are often noisy, with entity mentions tagged with multiple types, requiring computationally intensive noise-aware models for effective FgNER. Moreover, resources for both coarse-grained and fine-grained named entity recognition tasks in Indian languages remain scarce. To address this, we propose an entity-anchored machine translation (EaMaTa) framework that leverages the largest manually annotated English FgNER dataset, FewNERD, to create a large-scale FgNER dataset in 22 languages. On average, the dataset comprises over 153k sentences, 354k entities, and 3.3M tokens in each language. The languages covered are: Assamese (as), Bengali (bn), Bodo (brx), Dogri (doi), Gujarati (gu), Hindi (hi), Kannada (kn), Kashmiri (ks), Konkani (gom), Maithili (mai), Malayalam (ml), Manipuri (mni), Marathi (mr), Nepali (ne), Odia (or), Punjabi (pa), Sanskrit (sa), Santali (sat), Sindhi (sd), Tamil (ta), Telugu (te), and Urdu (ur). Various rigorous analyses and human evaluations confirm the high quality of the dataset and demonstrate the effectiveness of the entity-anchored machine translation framework with up to 9% increase in F1-score against the current state-of-the-art. Additionally, we extend our analysis to zero-shot, multilingual, and cross-lingual settings, investigating the influence of language family and script similarity on cross-lingual FgNER performance.

PaperID: 3612

Authors:Yarong Lan, Yajing Xu, Huajun Chen

Affiliations: Zhejiang University ZJU-Ant Group Joint Lab of Knowledge Graph

Title: Template-Theorems Graph Construction to Enhance Mathematical Reasoning Capabilities of LLM

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have made significant strides in mathematical reasoning, particularly at the elementary level. However, they continue to face substantial challenges when confronted with complex, advanced mathematical problems. In contrast to humans—who can effectively draw upon prior experiences in solving similar problems and retrieve relevant knowledge and theorems from memory—LLMs often struggle to accurately identify analogous problems and to recall or apply appropriate theorems. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel framework for constructing a templatetheorems knowledge base, leveraging the capabilities of large language models. Inspired by the associative mechanisms of human cognition, our approach abstracts real-world problems into generalized templates and establishes intricate linkages between these templates and pertinent theorems. This design enables the efficient expansion of a comprehensive knowledge base, even when starting from a limited set of seed examples. Moreover, we develop an efficient retrieval strategy that, given a new problem, systematically extracts and presents the most relevant knowledge from the knowledge base as contextual input to the LLM. Extensive experiments on multiple public mathematical datasets and models demonstrate that our approach consistently surpasses conventional methods. Comprehensive ablation studies further corroborate the effectiveness of both our knowledge base construction and retrieval modules.

PaperID: 3613

Authors:Hyeongsoo Lim, Hyung Yong Kim, Jin Young Kim, Min Ho Jang, Eun Seo Seo, Youshin Lim, Shukjae Choi, Jihwan Park, Yunkyu Lim, Hanbin Lee, Byeong-Yeol Kim, Ji Won Yoon

Affiliations: Chung-Ang University

Title: GrayKD: Distilling Better Knowledge from Black-box LLM via Multi-rationale Injection

Abstract:
Knowledge distillation (KD) is a promising compression technique for reducing the computational burden of large language models (LLMs). Depending on access to the teacher model’s internal parameters, KD is typically categorized into whitebox and black-box KD. While white-box KD benefits from full access to intrinsic knowledge such as softmax distributions, black-box KD adopts a black-box LLM (e.g., GPT-4) as the teacher, which provides only text-level outputs via API calls. This limited supervision makes black-box KD generally less effective than its white-box counterpart. To bridge the gap between white-box and black-box KD, we propose GrayKD, a novel framework that can effectively distill text-level knowledge from a black-box LLM in a single-stage manner. In particular, rationales generated by the black-box LLM are injected into the student via a lightweight cross-attention module (teacher mode), enabling the model to approximate the black-box teacher’s output distribution without access to internal parameters. The student is then trained with the softmax-level knowledge provided by the teacher mode (student mode). Since both the teacher and student modes share the same backbone, the proposed teacher mode remains highly parameter-efficient, requiring only a small number of additional parameters for rationale injection. Experimental results on instruction-following tasks demonstrate that GrayKD achieves substantial performance improvements over existing KD methods.

PaperID: 3614

Authors:Xinjing Liu, ZiXin Xue, Pengyue Lin, Xinyu Tu, Siwei Xu, Ruifan Li

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: OX-MABSR: A Benchmark for Open-domain Explainable Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Reasoning

Abstract:
Multimodal AspectBased Sentiment Analysis (MABSA) involves extracting aspect terms from text-image pairs and identifying their sentiments. Most existing tasks consider one fixed sentiment category with explicitly mentioned aspects. However, these tasks seldom consider expressive sentiment categories, implicit aspects, and explainability. To this end, we introduce a novel task of Open-domain Explainable Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Reasoning (OX-MABSR). This task enables the prediction of open-vocabulary aspect-sentiment pairs, together with the generation of sentiment explanations and reasoning paths. To benchmark OX-MABSR task, we construct OX-MABSR-Bench, a dataset annotated with explicit and implicit aspects, expressive sentiment categories, as well as perceptual and cognitive two-level explanations. The explanations capture visual and textual cues, including aesthetics, facial expressions, scenes, and textual semantics, together with background and situational knowledge. In addition, we annotate the reasoning paths that trace how the sentiment evolves from surface cues to a deeper contextual understanding. To address OX-MABSR task, we propose MABSR-LLM. Extensive experimental results show our MABSR-LLM outperforms strong baselines. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to provide a unified framework for open-domain and explainable MABSR.

PaperID: 3615

Authors:Yuxiang Mai, Qiyue Yin, Wancheng Ni, Jianwei Guo, Xiaogang Ouyang, Pei Xu, Kaiqi Huang

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Chinese academy of science The Key Laboratory of Cognition and Decision Intelligence for Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Intelligence Indeed, Institute of automation

Title: RefRea: Reference-Guided Reasoning with Meta-Cognition for Accurate Language Model Agents

Abstract:
In recent years, with the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), LLMbased agents have achieved remarkable progress across a wide range of tasks. However, reasoning inconsistencies in LLMs still significantly limit the performance of agents in complex decision-making scenarios. Cognitive science research suggests that individuals can benefit from observing others' explicit thinking processes to improve their strategy-making. Inspired by this mechanism, we propose Reference-guided Reasoning with meta-cognition (RefRea), a novel approach that enhances decision-making by introducing a reference language model to guide and calibrate the reasoning model's actions. RefRea enhances reasoning accuracy and stability by integrating a reference model and a meta-cognition module. The reference model relies solely on validated meta-cognition for consistent guidance, while the reasoning model interacts with the environment using both validated and exploratory meta-cognition. Guidance is provided by comparing the action similarity between the reference and reasoning models. This process is supported by the meta-cognition module, which generates summary knowledge by reflecting on action history and environmental feedback, leading to more adaptive and reliable behavior. We evaluate our algorithm in the text-based reasoning environment ScienceWorld. Experimental results demonstrate that RefRea outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Comprehensive ablation studies further highlight the effectiveness of both the reference model and the meta-cognition module.

PaperID: 3616

Authors:Shilong Pan, Zhiliang Tian, Wanlong Yu, Zhen Huang, Qingyu Qiu, Zihan Chen, Zhonghao Sun, Minlie Huang, Dongsheng Li

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology, Tsinghua University

Title: WALKSAFE: Risk-aware Graph Random Walk with Bi-GRPO for LLM Safety

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) may generate harmful outputs on malicious inputs. Existing safety methods, including prompt engineering and model editing, rely on handcrafted templates or target-driven parameter modifications, limiting their generalizability in unseen harmful scenarios. Post-training aims to ensure LLM safety in general domains via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL) on diverse malicious inputs. SFT needs annotated refusal samples while RL learns to refuse risk by exploring diverse harmful inputs. However, these methods tend to harshly refuse over any possible risks, sacrificing potentially useful information and degrading model utility. We argue that realistic malicious inputs often mix both harmful and helpful semantics (i.e., entities and relations), and LLMs should identify and remove only harmful relations while preserving useful ones. Thus, the original malicious user inputs can shift into safe queries, to which LLMs can respond safely and helpfully. In this paper, we propose WALKSAFE, a graph-based risk-aware training framework that enables LLMs to identify potential risks of key semantics (entities and relations) in user inputs via graph structure. By filtering harmful relations, LLMs can respond to safe input queries and then generate their corresponding safe and helpful responses. First, we model all entities and relations in the inputs with a graph structure. Second, we adopt a risk-aware random walk on the graph to quantify potential risk under multiple entities and relations. Then, we reconstruct safe queries by filtering harmful relations to promote the LLM to answer safely and helpfully rather than with direct refusals. Finally, we propose Bi-GRPO to post-train LLMs. As vanilla GRPO conducts only the intra-group comparison, Bi-GRPO performs both intra-group and inter-group comparisons between different response groups. The extra inter-group rewards encourage the model to distinguish harmful and safe semantics, and thus prefer safe and helpful responses. Experiments on three LLMs show that our models obtain SOTA results.

PaperID: 3617

Authors:Yanchi Ru, Yue Huang, Xiangliang Zhang

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, University of Notre Dame

Title: RMO: Towards Better LLM Alignment via Reshaping Reward Margin Distributions

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in instructionfollowing and dialogue tasks, yet aligning them with human preferences remains a critical challenge. Recent advances such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) simplify the alignment pipeline by bypassing explicit reward modeling, but they often suffer from suboptimal reward margin distributions, leading to weak supervision signals and reduced discriminative capacity. In this work, we propose Reward Margin Optimization (RMO), a framework that reshapes reward margin distributions during training to improve alignment performance. RMO comprises three components: (1) a Dual Denoising Filtering strategy that filters ambiguous and noisy preference pairs based on reward margin dynamics; (2) Batch Margin Diversification, which maximizes intra-batch margin variance to enhance learning signal diversity; and (3) Pairwise Margin Amplification, an auxiliary regularization term that encourages larger margins between preferred and dispreferred responses. Extensive experiments on multiple LLMs and datasets demonstrate that RMO consistently improves win rates over strong baselines such as DPO and SimPO, while remaining compatible with various preference-based optimization methods. Our results highlight the critical role of reward margin distribution in preference alignment and establish RMO as an effective and scalable enhancement to existing alignment techniques.

PaperID: 3618

Authors:Zechen Sun, Zecheng Tang, Juntao Li, Wenpeng Hu, Wenliang Chen, Zhunchen Luo, Qiaoming Zhu

Affiliations: Soochow University, Academy of Military Science

Title: CGMIS: Concept-Graph Based Multi-Hop Instructions Synthesis for Enhancing Long-Context Reasoning

Abstract:
Highquality multi-hop instruction data is critical for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in complex long-context scenarios, e.g., long-form reasoning. Nevertheless, there is currently a notable scarcity of such datasets within the community, and existing data synthesis approaches typically fail to provide explicit modeling of intermediate reasoning steps, resulting in unverifiable and potentially erroneous samples. To mitigate above issue, we design the Concept-Graph based Multi-hop Instructions Synthesis (CGMIS) framework, which constructs long-form reasoning paths via concept graph traversal and automatically generates verifiable multi-hop data. The CGMIS framework not only guarantees the accuracy and verifiability of the synthesized data but also enables the construction of high-quality multi-hop instruction datasets from arbitrary corpora. Experiments show that fine-tuning with CGMIS-generated data achieves state-of-the-art performance across 13 long-context reasoning tasks on various models, using only 10% of the data volume required by existing methods.

PaperID: 3619

Authors:Hongyu Wang, Chenda Li, Xin Zhou, Shuai Wang, Yanmin Qian

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University VUI Labs, Nanjing University Shenzhen Loop Area Institute

Title: USE: A Unified Model for Universal Sound Separation and Extraction

Abstract:
Sound separation (SS) and target sound extraction (TSE) are fundamental techniques for addressing complex acoustic scenarios. While existing SS methods struggle with determining the unknown number of sound sources, TSE approaches require precisely specified clues to achieve optimal performance. This paper proposes a unified framework that synergistically combines SS and TSE to overcome their individual limitations. Our architecture employs two complementary components: 1) An EncoderDecoder Attractor (EDA) network that automatically infers both the source count and corresponding acoustic clues for SS, and 2) A multi-modal fusion network that precisely interprets diverse user-provided clues (acoustic, semantic, or visual) for TSE. Through joint training with cross-task consistency constraints, we establish a unified latent space that bridges both paradigms. During inference, the system adaptively operates in either fully autonomous SS mode or clue-driven TSE mode. Experiments demonstrate remarkable performance in both tasks, with notable improvements of 1.4 dB SDR improvement in SS compared to baseline and 86% TSE accuracy.

PaperID: 3620

Authors:Ming Wang, Minghao Hu, Xiuli Kang, Li He, Yu Tian, Chunming Liu, Han Shi, Zhunchen Luo, Wei Luo, Guotong Geng

Affiliations: Center of Information Research, Hebei University of Engineering, North China University of Technology

Title: DeepWriter: A Multi-Agent Collaboration Framework for Information-rich Ultra-long Book Writing

Abstract:
Longform books are among the most information-rich and structurally complex forms of written content, often exceeding 100,000 words. While recent methods have enabled basic long-text generation, they remain limited in two key aspects: the inability to generate ultra-long content at book scale, and the lack of mechanisms for integrating rich factual information. To address these limitations, we propose DeepWriter, a multi-agent collaborative framework that follows a structured planning-then-generation paradigm. It first constructs a detailed book outline with narrative arcs and chapter semantics, then incrementally generates content conditioned on retrieved knowledge and contextual signals. DeepWriter supports controllable generation of full-length books exceeding 100,000 words, enriched with citations, trivia and images. To support evaluation beyond surface-level fluency, we introduce DeepWriter-Bench, a bilingual benchmark of 18 annotated books designed to assess book-scale coherence, richness, and factual grounding. Additionally, we propose BookScore, a unified 100-point metric for quantifying book maturity. Experimental results show that DeepWriter achieves a state-of-the-art BookScore of 80.92, consistently outperforming strong baselines.

PaperID: 3621

Authors:Zhuo Wang, Wen Wu, Guoqing Wang, Guangze Ye, Zhenxiao Cheng

Affiliations: East China Normal University

Title: MetaEval: Measuring the Discrimination of Benchmarks for Efficient LLM Evaluation

Abstract:
Benchmarks serve as standardized test systems to distinguish capabilities among large language models (LLMs). Discriminative items enable highability LLMs to favor correct answers, while causing low-ability models to assign lower plausibility to these answers and tend toward incorrect answers. Current methods for assessing benchmark quality primarily focus on coverage of difficulty levels and task diversity, yet lack direct quantification of discrimination—the core metric. Furthermore, large-scale benchmarks incur high evaluation costs. Although heuristic methods can reduce item counts to some extent, they cannot guarantee preservation of the benchmark’s original discriminative properties. To address these limitations, we propose MetaEval, a meta-evaluation framework designed to precisely quantify per-item discrimination and enable efficient assessment. Central to MetaEval is our novel Signal Detection and Item Response (SD-IR) model, which simulates LLMs’ detection of correct answers (signals) by representing each model’s perception through two latent ability states: “known” and “unknown”. For any item, discrimination is quantified as the difference in signal plausibility between these states. Leveraging these discrimination metrics, MetaEval introduces two strategies to replicate full-benchmark results using minimal subsets for efficient evaluation: (1) Distilling metaBench: a compact subset that retains discriminative power by removing redundant items; (2) Predicting performance on full-benchmark based on metaBench’s discrimination. Experiments across five benchmarks confirm that high-discrimination items capture greater performance variation among LLMs, align more closely with full-benchmark rankings, and exhibit superior predictive ability. Notably, in the best case, MetaEval achieves accurate full-benchmark estimation using only 2.5% of items, substantially reducing evaluation costs while preserving reliability.

PaperID: 3622

Authors:Wuzhenghong Wen, Chao Xue, Su Pan, Yuwei Sun, Minlong Peng

Affiliations: School of Internet of Things, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, School of Software, Beihang University, Fudan University

Title: Reinforcement Learning Enhanced Muti-hop Reasoning for Temporal Knowledge Question Answering

Abstract:
Temporal knowledge graph question answering (TKGQA) involves multihop reasoning over temporally constrained entity relationships in the knowledge graph to answer a given question. However, at each hop, large language models (LLMs) retrieve subgraphs with numerous temporally similar and semantically complex relations, increasing the risk of suboptimal decisions and error propagation. To address these challenges, we propose the multi-hop reasoning enhanced (MRE) framework, which enhances both forward and backward reasoning to improve the identification of globally optimal reasoning trajectories. Specifically, MRE begins with prompt engineering to guide LLM in generating diverse reasoning trajectories for the given question. Valid reasoning trajectories are then selected for supervised fine-tuning, serving as a cold-start strategy. Finally, we introduce Tree-Group Relative Policy Optimization (T-GRPO)—a recursive, tree-structured learning-by-exploration approach. At each hop, exploration establishes strong causal dependencies on the previous hop, while evaluation is informed by multi-path exploration feedback from subsequent hops. Experimental results on two TKGQA benchmarks indicate that the proposed MRE-based model consistently surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches in handling complex multi-hop queries. Further analysis highlights improved interpretability and robustness to noisy temporal annotations.

PaperID: 3623

Authors:Zhiheng Xi, Yuhui Wang, Yiwen Ding, Guanyu Li, Senjie Jin, Shichun Liu, Jixuan Huang, Dingwen Yang, Jiafu Tang, Boyang Hong, Junjie Ye, Shihan Dou, Ming Zhang, Jian Guan, Wei Wu, Rui Zheng, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang

Affiliations: Fudan University, Ant Research, Shanghai Innovation Institute

Title: MetaAct-RL: Training Language Models for Reasoning Through Meta-Action-Based Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Outcomebased reinforcement learning has made notable advances in training language models (LMs) for reasoning. However, without explicit incentives and controls, this paradigm has limitations and instability in eliciting high-quality reasoning trajectories with diverse actions—particularly for models whose pretraining lacked extensive reasoning-related data. To this end, we introduce MetaAct-RL, a new RL framework that frames LMs’ thinking as sequential decision making over meta-actions. In this framework, the model chooses and executes a high-level action at each step—such as forward reasoning, critique, or refinement—to gradually reach the correct answer. To encourage deeper exploration, richer action diversity, and to improve sampling efficiency in the RL optimization process, MetaAct-RL incorporates appropriate length-based reward and regularization, and a key-state restart mechanism. Extensive experiments across six benchmarks show that MetaAct-RL improves reasoning performance by 7.99 on Llama3.2-1B and 7.17 on Llama3.1-8B relative to vanilla RL method. Moreover, on the challenging AIME-2024, our method outperforms the vanilla RL by 7.5 with Qwen2.5-1.5B.

PaperID: 3624

Authors:Zijie Xu, Wenjun Ke, Peng Wang, Guozheng Li, Qingjian Ni, Jiajun Liu, Ziyu Shang, Jing Zhou

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Ministry of Education

Title: Benchmarking and Enhancing Rule Knowledge-Driven Reasoning of Large Language Models

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities across diverse tasks under the exampledriven learning paradigm. However, in high-stakes domains such as emergency response and industrial safety, historical incidents are scarce, confidential, or both, while concise rule books are abundant. We formalize this underexplored setting as rule knowledge-driven reasoning and ask: Can LLMs reason reliably when rules are plentiful but examples are nearly absent? To study this question, we introduce RULER, an automatic benchmark that generates 32K rigorously verified questions from 1K expert-curated emergency response rules to probe three core abilities: rule memorization, single-rule application, and multi-rule complex reasoning. RULER is further equipped with a hallucination-aware evaluation suite and novel relational metrics. A comprehensive empirical study of five representative LLMs and five enhancement strategies shows that, even when models achieve reliable performance on rule memorization and single-rule application, multi-rule complex reasoning plateaus at 5.4 on a 10-point scale. To address this limitation, we propose RAMPS, a Rule knowledge-Aware Monte Carlo Tree Search Process-reward Supervision framework. RAMPS injects rule knowledge priors into MCTS, distills 12K step-level traces without human annotation, and trains an advantage-based reward model that scores candidate reasoning paths during beam search inference. Experimental results show that RAMPS significantly improves multi-rule complex reasoning performance to 7.7.

PaperID: 3625

Authors:Shengyu Ye, Qi Liu, Hao Jiang, Zheng Zhang, Heng Yu, Zhenya Huang

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Intelligence, University of Science and Technology of China, China Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center

Title: Themis: Automated Constraint-Aware Test Synthesis Framework for Code Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise for enhancing code generation capabilities in large language models (LLMs), yet its effectiveness critically depends on highquality test suites for reliable reward signals. Current approaches suffer from inadequate test case quantity and quality, leading to false positives (incorrect solutions passing verification) and slow positives (valid but suboptimal implementations), which corrupt RL training dynamics. We address these challenges through three key contributions: (1) We systematically analyze how low-quality test suites degrade Code RL performance via reward misalignment; (2) We propose Themis, an automated framework that transforms test case generation into code synthesis—first extracting problem constraints via template-guided parsing, then generating executable test generators through LLM-powered code synthesis, and finally validating tests through constraint-aware filtering; (3) We develop an error-guided test case reduction method that preserves error detection efficacy while reducing test set cardinality, thereby enhancing reinforcement learning training efficiency. Evaluated on programming competition datasets, Themis achieves 95 percent error detection rates, outperforming original test suites in most of the cases. When integrated into RL pipelines, models trained with Themis-generated tests demonstrate consistent 3-5 percent improvements across HumanEval, MBPP, and LiveCodeBench compared to the baseline, matching performance levels achieved with manually curated test suites. Our constraint-aware test synthesis framework ensures full automation while preserving semantic validity—critical for scaling RL training to complex code generation tasks. The framework's modular design also enables seamless integration with existing code data synthesis frameworks.

PaperID: 3626

Authors:Bo Zhang, Cong Gao, Linkang Yang, Bingxu Han, Minghao Hu, Zhunchen Luo, Guotong Geng, Xiaoying Bai, Jun Zhang, Wen Yao, Zhong Wang

Affiliations: PLA Academy of Military Science, College of Cryptology and Cyber Science, Nankai University, School of Electronics and Information, Xi’an Jiaotong University, School of Mathematics, Shandong University, Center of Information Research, Defense Innovation Institute, PLA Rocket Force University of Engineering

Title: Global-Local Confidence Fusion for Hallucination Detection in Mathematical Reasoning Task

Abstract:
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve promising results on complex reasoning tasks but remain susceptible to hallucinations. Existing hallucination detection methods based on Large Language Models (LLMs) often focus solely on final answers, overlooking inconsistencies between the answer and reasoning process. This limitation reduces their ability to detect hallucinations during inference. Moreover, trainingfree approaches lack mechanisms for confidence estimation, resulting in an unquantified detection output. In contrast, training-based methods can provide fine-grained assessments but often neglect the self-correction capability of LRMs, where earlier errors may be corrected in subsequent steps, leading to inaccurate hallucination detection. To address these challenges, we propose ConfFuse, a unified framework that fuses global and local confidence scores for hallucination detection. A Global Hallucination Detection Model (GHDM) is trained using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to assess hallucinations at the level of entire reasoning chains, yielding global confidence estimates. Simultaneously, a Process Reward Model (PRM) estimates step-wise confidence scores to capture local logical flaws. A weighted fusion strategy combines the global confidence score with the minimum local score to jointly reflect overall reasoning consistency and local soundness. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that ConfFuse surpasses Qwen3-1.7B and Qwen3-8B by up to 11.86% and 5.46% in F1 score on in-distribution datasets, and achieves average improvements of 4.65% and 2.80% on out-of-distribution datasets. These results verify the effectiveness and generalizability of the proposed framework.

PaperID: 3627

Authors:Bowen Zhang, Jun Ma, Fuqiang Niu, Li Dong, Jinzhou Cao, Genan Dai

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Shenzhen Technology University, School of Cyber Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China

Title: Induce, Align, Predict: Zero-Shot Stance Detection via Cognitive Inductive Reasoning

Abstract:
Zeroshot stance detection (ZSSD) seeks to determine the stance of text toward previously unseen targets, a task critical for analyzing dynamic and polarized online discourse with limited labeled data. While large language models (LLMs) offer zero-shot capabilities, prompting-based approaches often fall short in handling complex reasoning and lack robust generalization to novel targets. Meanwhile, LLM-enhanced methods still require substantial labeled data and struggle to move beyond instance-level patterns, limiting their interpretability and adaptability. Inspired by cognitive science, we propose the Cognitive Inductive Reasoning Framework (CIRF), a schema-driven method that bridges linguistic inputs and abstract reasoning via automatic induction and application of cognitive reasoning schemas. CIRF abstracts first-order logic patterns from raw text into multi-relational schema graphs in an unsupervised manner, and leverages a schema-enhanced graph kernel model to align input structures with schema templates for robust, interpretable zero-shot inference. Extensive experiments on SemEval-2016, VAST, and COVID-19-Stance benchmarks demonstrate that CIRF not only establishes new state-of-the-art results, but also achieves comparable performance with just 30% of the labeled data, demonstrating its strong generalization and efficiency in low-resource settings.

PaperID: 3628

Authors:Guo-Biao Zhang, Zhijing Wu, Tian Lan, Ding-Yuan Liu, Yu-Shi Zhu, Xian-Ling Mao

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology

Title: WikiREVIEW: A Multi-Perspective Review Framework for Automatic Wiki-Style Article Generation

Abstract:
As a knowledgeintensive and challenging task, automatic generation of long-form wiki-style articles has garnered increasing attention from researchers due to its ability to efficiently integrate, organize and present vast amounts of both structured and unstructured knowledge. To the best of our knowledge, most of the existing mainstream state-of-the-art methods for automatic wiki-style article generation typically follow a "one-shot generation" paradigm: given a topic, (1) first generating a structured outline, (2) then independently and in parallel generating the content of each outline chapter in a one-shot using the chapter title and references. However, the core limitation of the paradigm lies in its disregards inter-chapter correlation and lacks post-generation revision and refinement, resulting in content redundancy, weak relevance and logical inconsistency. To address these issues, we propose WikiREVIEW, a novel multi-perspective review framework for automatic wiki-style article generation. Specifically, our proposed method introduces multi-perspective experts to review the content of each outline chapter at both chapter and paragraph levels following the initial generation, offering evaluation feedback and continuously refining the numerous deficiencies in the initial long-form article, ultimately achieving high-quality wiki-style article generation. Extensive experimental results on the public English dataset FreshWiki and our own constructed high-quality Chinese dataset ChineseWiki, demonstrate that our proposed WikiREVIEW significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art automatic wiki-style article generation methods across all automatic evaluation metrics and human evaluation.

PaperID: 3629

Authors:Hui Zhang, Po Hu, Wei Emma Zhang

Affiliations: Central China Normal University, The University of Adelaide

Title: LLaVA-MS-PIT: Multi-Modal Schema-Guided Progressive Instruction Tuning for Multi-Modal Event Extraction

Abstract:
The proliferation of multimodal data on the internet has intensified the need for structured event understanding across textual and visual modalities. However, existing multi-modal event extraction models suffer from three major limitations: the absence of explicit event schema guidance, coarse-grained multi-modal alignment strategies, and reliance on heterogeneous, misaligned multi-modal training datasets. To address these issues, we propose LLaVA-MS-PIT, a Multi-modal Schema-Guided Progressive Instruction Tuning Framework that explicitly injects structured multi-modal event schema knowledge into the model before event extraction. Specifically, we introduce the textual event schema to establish the model’s prior knowledge of event concepts and enhance its ability to reason about event structures, while the visual event schema is employed to bridge the representation gap between textual and visual modalities at the event level, enabling unified and semantically aligned event representations across modalities. Moreover, to alleviate data scarcity and modality misalignment inherent in current benchmarks, we construct imSitu-MEE, a high-quality multi-modal parallel dataset generated and annotated through schema-guided procedures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LLaVA-MS-PIT achieves competitive performance on multi-modal event extraction benchmarks, underscoring the effectiveness and necessity of schema-guided progressive instruction tuning.

PaperID: 3630

Authors:Tianlong Zheng, Yating Yang, Rui Dong, Bo Ma, Lei Wang, Xi Zhou, Siru Miao, Turghun Osman

Affiliations: Xinjiang Technical Institute of Physics & Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Xinjiang Laboratory of Minority Speech and Language Information Processing

Title: M3UCD: A Multi-task Multimodal Metaphor Understanding Challenge Dataset for LLMs

Abstract:
Understanding multimodal metaphors represents a crucial pathway for machines to comprehend human cognition. However, current research remains constrained by superficial dataset annotations, insufficient systematic evaluation of large language models, and fragmented task frameworks. To bridge these gaps, the paper proposes a systematic solution featuring: (I) We present the largest finegrained Multi-task Multimodal Metaphor Understanding Challenge Dataset (M3UCD) built via multi-perspective collaborative annotation. It contains 15,345 samples, each annotated with 12 manual attribute labels. (II) Systematic benchmarking of LLMs' capacity boundaries in metaphor understanding. Evaluation results reveal the persistent challenges LLMs face in this domain while validating M3UCD's effectiveness and potential. (III) A concise and unified multi-task baseline framework was developed and demonstrated its effectiveness in enhancing the metaphor understanding capabilities of MLLMs.

PaperID: 3631

Authors:Wenliang Zhong, Haiqing Li, Thao M. Dang, Feng Jiang, Hehuan Ma, Yuzhi Guo, Jean Gao, Junzhou Huang

Affiliations: University of Texas at Arlington

Title: Learning from Guidelines: Structured Prompt Optimization for Expert Annotation Tasks

Abstract:
Deep learning has significantly advanced numerous fields by training on extensive annotated datasets. However, this datadriven paradigm faces limitations such as limited adaptability and high annotation costs, particularly when precise adherence to detailed, domain-specific guidelines is required in annotation. This challenge raises a critical question: Can models effectively shift from data-driven learning to autonomously leveraging guidelines with minimal annotated examples? To address this, we propose the Guideline-Driven Prompt (GDP) optimization framework, which shifts the learning paradigm from data-driven training to guideline-driven reasoning. GDP leverages Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to retrieve essential fragments from complex guidelines and synthesize them into structured, executable prompts. A tree-based optimization algorithm systematically constructs and refines these prompts, explicitly capturing the intricate logic embedded in professional guidelines through a latent pipeline structure. Empirical evaluations on four datasets ranging from diverse domains and different tasks demonstrate that GDP effectively transitions the learning process from data-intensive methods to a guideline-driven approach in tasks requiring detailed and complex guideline adherence, reducing dependence on extensive annotated datasets.

PaperID: 3632

Authors:Yanru Ding, Yanmei Zhang, Guan Yuan, Shujuan Jiang, Wei Dai, Luciano Baresi

Affiliations: China University of Mining Technology - Xuzhou, Politecnico di Milano

Title: Stability-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Robust Class Integration Test Order Generation

Abstract:
Generating a class integration test order (CITO) is essential to reduce the overhead of test stub construction (the primary cost in integration testing) and to ensure system reliability in complex software systems. Although reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in automating CITO generation, existing methods suffer from unstable policy learning and limited robustness against structural perturbations and defect injection. These challenges stem from insufficient reward shaping and the lack of reliable oracles for validation. To address these limitations, we propose LMCITO, a stability-aware RL framework that integrates Lyapunov-guided reward shaping with semantic validation through metamorphic testing (MT). Specifically, we design a Lyapunov energy function over class dependency graphs to promote monotonic structural convergence during training, and define metamorphic relations (MRs) to verify behavioral consistency under controlled perturbations. Extensive experiments on six real-world systems demonstrate that LM-CITO consistently produces more effective policies, yielding CITOs with significantly reduced stubbing costs compared to baseline models. Furthermore, MT verifies the capability of our MRs to detect defects in 19 injected bug variants, confirming the robustness of LM-CITO under various fault-induced perturbations. These results highlight the synergy of stability guidance and MR-based validation, offering an effective, principled solution for oracle-free RL in software testing.

PaperID: 3633

Authors:Jun Feng, Hong Sun, Pengfei Zhang, Bocheng Ren, Shunli Zhang

Affiliations: Hubei Key Laboratory of Distributed System Security, Hubei Engineering Research Center on Big Data Security, School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, School of Economics, Wuhan Textile University, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Anhui University of Science and Technology, and Key Laboratory of Equipment Data Security and Guarantee Technology, Ministry of Education, Guilin University of Electronic Technology, School of Computer Science and Technology, Hainan University, School of Computer and Information Science, Qinghai Institute of Technology

Title: Efficient, Secure, Differentially Private Deep Learning in the Two-Server Model

Abstract:
Existing solutions on differentially private deep learning (DPDL) either require the assumption of a trusted data server (centralized DPDL) or suffer from poor utility (local DPDL); and hence their adoptions are hampered in realworld scenarios.We present CRYPTDP, a crypto-assisted differentially private deep learning approach in the two-server model. CRYPTDP employs two non-colluding servers to collaboratively and efficiently train differentially private deep learning over the secret shares of data owners' private data while protecting the confidentiality of the data from untrusted servers. CRYPTDP is the first approach with the best of both local DPDL and centralized DPDL models, which does not resort to trusted server like local DPDL and has the utility like centralized DPDL. In particular, we also make innovations for addressing the major challenges like poor performance and security that beset CRYPTDP: We introduce a new secure computation and differential privacy friendly activation function; we propose a novel garbled-circuits-free most significant bit extraction protocol, and using the protocol we propose an efficient and secure garbled-circuits-free protocol for activation function over secret shares. Exhaustive experiments show that CRYPTDP delivers significantly better performance than the state-of-the-art local DPDL, yields higher accuracy than the state-of-the-art centralized DPDL, and can achieve two orders of magnitude faster runtime than the state-of-the-art approach.

PaperID: 3634

Authors:Wenzheng Jiang, Ke Liang, Xuankun Rong, Jingxuan Zhou, Zhengyi Zhong, Guancheng Wan, Ji Wang

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology, Wuhan University

Title: PurMM: Attention-Guided Test-Time Backdoor Purification in Multimodal Large Language Models

Abstract:
Downstream finetuning of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is advancing rapidly, allowing general models to achieve superior performance on domain-specific tasks. Yet most prior research focuses on performance gains and overlooks the vulnerability of the fine-tuning pipeline: attackers can easily poison the dataset to implant backdoors into MLLMs. We conduct an in-depth investigation of backdoor attacks on MLLMs and reveal the phenomenon of Attention Hijacking and its Hierarchical Mechanism. Guided by this insight, we propose PurMM, a test-time backdoor purification framework that removes visual tokens exhibiting anomalous attention, thereby avoiding targeted outputs while restoring correct answers. PurMM contains three stages: (1) locating tokens with abnormal attention, (2) filtering them using deep-layer cues, and (3) zeroing out their corresponding components in the visual embeddings. Unlike existing defences, PurMM dispenses with retraining and training-process modifications, operating at test-time to restore model performance while eliminating the backdoor. Extensive experiments across multiple MLLMs and datasets show that PurMM maintains normal performance, sharply reduces attack success rates, and consistently converts backdoor outputs to benign ones, offering a new perspective for safeguarding MLLMs.

PaperID: 3635

Authors:Xinyuan Qian, Haoyong Wang, Hangcheng Cao, Shuai Yuan, Senkang Hu, Qingchuan Zhao, Hongwei Li, Guowen Xu

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chinese Academy of Sciences, City University of Hong Kong

Title: MartDE: A PrivacyPreserving and Cost-Efficient Evaluation Framework for Data Marketplaces

Abstract:
The development of machine learning models increasingly relies on highquality data that resides in private domains. To enable secure and value-driven data exchange under strict privacy regulations, federated learning (FL) has emerged as a key primitive by enabling the trading of model utilities instead of raw data. Among existing solutions, martFL (CCS 2023) represents the state-of-the-art FL-based data marketplace architecture, integrating privacy-preserving model evaluation and verifiable trading protocols to enable robust and fair model utility trading without revealing raw data. Despite its strengths, martFL suffers from critical weaknesses at the evaluation layer, including plaintext score exposure and unverifiable and manipulable participant selection. To address these challenges, we propose MartDE, a dedicated evaluation framework that builds model-centric data marketplaces with robust, privacy-preserving, and verifiable mechanisms. MartDE introduces encrypted utility scoring with client-side decryption to preserve score confidentiality, formally bounded anomaly filtering, adaptive participant selection based on global model performance, and commitment-based verification to ensure consistency between declared and evaluated scores and selection verification. We implement MartDE and evaluate it across diverse datasets and adversarial conditions. Results show that MartDE achieves superior accuracy, robustness, and cost-efficiency, providing a strong foundation for secure and trustworthy utility-driven data marketplaces.

PaperID: 3636

Authors:Jiaheng Wei, Zhaowei Zhu, Gang Niu, Tongliang Liu, Sijia Liu, Masashi Sugiyama, Yang Liu

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, The University of Sydney, Michigan State University, RIKEN The University of Tokyo, University of California, Santa Cruz

Title: Robust Learning from Noisily Labeled Long-Tailed Data via Fairness Regularizer

Abstract:
Both longtailed and noisily labeled data frequently appear in real-world applications and impose significant challenges for learning. Most prior works treat either problem in an isolated way and do not explicitly consider the coupling effects of the two. Our empirical observation reveals that such solutions fail to consistently improve the learning when the dataset is long-tailed with label noise. Moreover, with the presence of label noise, existing methods do not observe universal improvements across different sub-populations; in other words, some sub-populations enjoyed the benefits of improved accuracy at the cost of hurting others. Based on these observations, we introduce the Fairness Regularizer (FR), inspired by regularizing the performance gap between any two sub-populations. We show that the introduced fairness regularizer improves the performances of sub-populations on the tail and the overall learning performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution when complemented with certain existing popular robust or class-balanced methods.

PaperID: 3637

Authors:Yizhun Zhang, Jie Huang, Zeping Zhang, Shuaishuai Zhang, Changhao Ding, Xuan Chen

Affiliations: Southeast University

Title: Consensus Learning with Multi-Party Perturbation Triggers for Secure Model Access

Abstract:
With the widespread deployment of deep learning models in multiparty collaborative scenarios, the issues of secure model access control and intellectual property (IP) protection have become increasingly critical. To address the limitations of existing methods that lack proactive defense mechanisms in such settings, this paper introduces a novel paradigm Consensus Learning which enables fine-grained control over model execution permissions via a multi-party joint authorization mechanism. Building on this, we propose the Collaborative Perturbation Trigger Method (CPTM), which allows participating parties to collaboratively generate perturbation-based trigger data that embed identity features. The model can only be activated using the collectively constructed trigger, enforcing tightly bound access control without modifying the model architecture. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, MNIST, and Face-LFW datasets demonstrate that the proposed method maintains prediction accuracy within 2% of the baseline unprotected models on authorized data. In contrast, under unauthorized or adversarial inputs, model accuracy drops below 10%, showcasing strong access control capabilities and robustness. This study offers a novel direction for building scalable, robust, and proactively protected deep learning models in multi-party collaborative environments.

PaperID: 3638

Authors:Valerio Borelli, Alfonso Gerevini, Enrico Scala, Ivan Serina

Affiliations: University of Brescia

Title: Learning Heuristic Functions with Graph Neural Networks for Numeric Planning

Abstract:
In this paper, we investigate the application of heuristics based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to lifted numeric planning problems, an area that has been relatively unexplored. Building upon the GNN approach for learning general policies proposed by Ståhlberg, Bonet, and Geffner (2022b), we extend the architecture to make it sensitive to the numeric components inherent in the planning problems we address. We achieve this by observing that, although the state space of a numeric planning problem is infinite, the finite subgoal structure of the problem can be incorporated into the architecture, enabling the construction of a finite structure. Instead of learning general policies, we train our models to serve as heuristics within a bestfirst search algorithm. We explore various configurations of this architecture and demonstrate that the resulting heuristics are highly informative and, in certain domains, offer a better trade-off between guidance and computational cost compared to state-of-the-art heuristics.

PaperID: 3639

Authors:Xiao Zhao, Chang Liu, Ruiteng Ji, Zheyuan Zhang, Mingxu Zhu, Linna Song, Zhe Ren, Luo Qingliang, YuHang Gao, Zhaolong Du, Chufan Guo, Kuifeng Su

Affiliations: Tencent AD Lab

Title: CoT-VLNBench: A Benchmark for Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language-Navigation Robots

Abstract:
Recent advances in vision language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in embodied navigation tasks. However, existing robotcentric datasets primarily focus on traditional 3D tasks such as perception and prediction, lacking adequate support for vision-language tasks. Vision-language-navigation (VLN) is a key capability for achieving human-like and interpretable navigation in complex environments. In this study, we present CoT-VLNBench, the first large-scale benchmark and dataset designed for chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in quadruped robot navigation. Our dataset encompasses a diverse range of indoor and outdoor scenes, multi-step navigation trajectories, and rich natural language instructions, all annotated with fine-grained CoT reasoning traces. Specifically, it contains 175K frames, 5.25M 3D bounding boxes, and 875K vision–question–answer (VQA) pairs. This comprehensive resource enables thorough evaluation of embodied agents’ perceptual and step-by-step reasoning abilities. Furthermore, we propose a novel CoT-VLN model, a state-of-the-art 7B VLN model that integrates visual, linguistic, and reasoning modules, to facilitate interpretable and effective navigation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing non-VLMs baselines on the new benchmark, underscoring the importance of CoT-VLN in embodied navigation. We hope that CoT-VLNBench will serve as a valuable resource to advance research at the intersection of robotics, vision, language, and reasoning.

PaperID: 3640

Authors:Wenjia Meng, Teng Zhang, Haoliang Sun, Yilong Yin

Affiliations: Shandong University

Title: MTRL-CG: Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning Method with Spectral Clustering-Based Task Grouping

Abstract:
Multitask reinforcement learning (RL) aims to enhance agent performance across multiple tasks by enabling effective knowledge transfer. However, these methods adopt a fully shared policy across all tasks without explicitly distinguishing between related and conflicting ones, making them suffer from negative interference issue, where updates beneficial to one task adversely affect others and lead to degraded overall performance. In this paper, we propose a multi-task reinforcement learning method with spectral clustering-based task grouping (MTRL-CG), which leverages spectral clustering to group related tasks and separate conflicting ones, enabling group-wise policy learning to mitigate negative interference. We first quantify inter-task affinity by measuring the influence of task-specific updates on others within a shared model, and construct an affinity matrix to capture these relationships. Spectral clustering is then applied to partition tasks via spectral embedding and k-means clustering. Each task group is trained with a dedicated policy network to promote focused learning. Built upon the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm, MTRL-CG can be readily integrated into existing SAC-based multi-task RL methods. Extensive experiments on the Meta-World benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MTRL-CG method.

PaperID: 3641

Authors:Xinyue Li, Wang Hu, Yu Zhang

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Post-Hoc Refinement for Multitask Symbolic Regression via Consensus-Accelerated Shapley Analysis

Abstract:
Multitask genetic programming (MTGP) is one of the primary methods for solving multitask symbolic regression (MTSR), the problem of discovering mathematical expressions for multiple interconnected tasks simultaneously. However, conventional MTGP approaches discard a wealth of valuable knowledge from the population of expressions due to their inherent “winnertake-all” selection criteria. To address this, we introduce MTGP with bidirectional cooperation and consensus-accelerated Shapley analysis (MTGP-BS), a method whose core is a novel post-hoc refinement framework that shifts from selection to synthesis. Our method first employs a consensus-accelerated Shapley analysis to reliably identify important subexpressions by multi-model attribution. Second, to supply this analysis with high-quality candidates, we design a bidirectional subexpression cooperative extraction method to create a refined archive of effective components by improving knowledge transfer and filtering out redundancies. These allow MTGP-BS to synthesize superior expressions by integrating knowledge dispersed throughout the entire population. On diverse MTSR problems, our algorithm statistically outperformed state-of-the-art approaches in 140 out of 160 direct comparisons, with its effectiveness and practical utility further verified by real-world case studies and in-depth ablation analyses.

PaperID: 3642

Authors:Maowei Jiang, Zihang Wang, Qi Wang, Peter Búš, Moquan Cheng, Yifan Wang, Quangao Liu, Ruiqi Li, Pengyu Zeng, Ruikai Liu, Alan Liang, Yansong Xu, Yusong Hu, Chaoran Zhang, Zhiyong Dong

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Shenzhen International Graduate School, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Mobile Communications Corporation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title: TAPO: Dynamic Teacher and Perturbed Answer Injection for Policy Optimization

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful framework to improve the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), with approaches such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) showing promising results. However, GRPO and its variants struggle with collapsed groups (i.e., allcorrect or all-incorrect completions), leading to zero-variance rewards and ineffective gradient signals. Moreover, focusing solely on final answer correctness while ignoring the reasoning process, along with rigid length penalties, can hinder training stability and output quality. To address these issues, we introduce TAPO, a reinforcement learning framework that enhances optimization signals by modifying sampled completions within training groups. TAPO incorporates three core techniques: (1) Dynamic Teacher Injection (DTI), which selectively injects high-quality or adversarial examples to restore effective gradient signals in collapsed groups; (2) Perturbed Answer Injection (PAI), which makes partially correct completions to provide contrastive supervision separating reasoning correctness but wrong answer from the trajectories; and (3) InfoLen-Aware Reward Shaping, a fine-grained reward strategy that penalizes outputs based on both length and semantic redundancy, encouraging concise yet informative responses. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that TAPO significantly improves the mathematical reasoning capabilities of LLMs across multiple challenging benchmarks, outperforming the GRPO baseline by a substantial margin. Component-wise ablations further validate the contribution of each proposed technique.

PaperID: 3643

Authors:Weichen Li, Waleed Mustafa, Marcio Monteiro, Puyu Wang, Marius Kloft, Sophie Fellenz

Affiliations: RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau

Title: TORA: Train Once, Realign Anytime for Offline Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Intelligent agents in realworld applications must adapt their behavior to changing contexts and user preferences. For example, planning a road trip requires considering both travel time and cost. Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) provides a principled approach to navigate such trade-offs. However, most existing approaches require predefined preference weights during training and jointly optimize the model for all objectives. In this paper, we introduce TORA (Train Once, Realign Anytime), a novel framework that defers preference integration to inference time, enabling flexible adaptation to user preferences without retraining. TORA independently trains diffusion planning models for each objective and combines them at inference time using user-specified preferences to generate behavior aligned with desired trade-offs. Furthermore, new objectives can be added seamlessly by training additional models without modifying existing ones. Empirical evaluations on standard offline MORL benchmarks demonstrate that TORA achieves competitive and consistent performance compared to methods that require fixed preference weights.

PaperID: 3644

Authors:Wenxuan Liu, Liangyu Huo, Yi Jing, Xiyuan Zhang, Jian Xie

Affiliations: Du Xiaoman Financial

Title: MRACL: Multi-Reward Space Guided Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning for LLMs

Abstract:
Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently become a powerful yet resourceintensive approach for post-training large language models (LLMs). Incorporating curriculum learning (CL) into RL has been shown to significantly improve training efficiency, particularly in reasoning tasks. However, existing CL methods face substantial challenges in multi-objective RL (MORL) settings, including: (1) difficulty in evaluating model capabilities online, (2) challenges in assessing sample importance under diverse objectives, and (3) inherent trade-offs between online training and offline inference in dynamically designing the curriculum. To address these issues, we propose a Multi-Reward space guided Adaptive Curriculum Learning framework (MRACL), which is the first to incorporate curriculum learning into multi-objective RL. MRACL first constructs a multi-dimensional reward space via offline inference to establish initial reward profiles for each training sample. During training, based on reward space, it estimates the evolving model capabilities by computing the centroid of the space and calculates the sample priority score through its capability distance, optimization direction, and historical evolution, which enables adaptive selection of the most informative training samples at each step, independent of the specific RL algorithm. After each RL training iteration, the reward space is dynamically updated to reflect the model's evolving capabilities and the shifting distribution of sample priorities. Experiments on multi-objective alignment tasks demonstrate that MRACL achieves 1.62× faster convergence compared to state-of-the-art curriculum methods and 2.55× faster than non-curriculum methods. Furthermore, it consistently outperforms all baselines in both win rate and rule-based evaluation. We further provide an in-depth analysis of the key factors contributing to \modelname's effectiveness, along with its advantages, scenarios, and generalization across diverse settings.

PaperID: 3645

Authors:Sirnam Swetha, Rui Meng, Shwetha Ram, Tal Neiman, Son Tran, Mubarak Shah

Affiliations: University of Central Florida

Title: SMPRO: Self-Supervised Visual Preference Alignment via Differentiable Multi-Preference Multi-Group Ranking

Abstract:
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a simple and effective approach for aligning models with human preferences. However, existing DPObased methods suffer from 3 key drawbacks: they rely on only a single positive-negative preference pair per question, restricting the diversity and richness of feedback; they often emphasize minimizing negative preference scores while neglecting to strengthen the positive preferences; and they depend on either human-annotated preferences or expert model outputs - both expensive and difficult to scale. Moreover, the deterministic ranking assumptions of recent Group-based preference optimization methods break down in open-ended tasks such as Visual Question Answering (VQA), where multiple answers can be equally plausible but differ subtly in relevance or specificity. Given this subtle variance in preferences, we propose to perform ranking over groups of preferences rather than relying on fine-grained ranking of individual ones, which is often noisy and subjective. To address these challenges, we introduce Self-Supervised Visual Preference Alignment via Differentiable Multi-Preference Multi-Group Ranking (SMPRO), a novel framework that (1) self-generates rich, diverse preference groups while eliminating the need for external annotations, (2) employs a fully differentiable ranking objective based on sorting networks to capture nuanced preference gradients across arbitrary numbers of preferences both within and across these groups, and (3) incorporates multiple positive preferences to enrich the positive preference group, capturing subtle distinctions among high-quality preferences. Extensive experiments across diverse visual tasks show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in self-supervised setting. Specifically, our model surpasses existing baselines, achieving notable gains such as 82.4% on MM-Bench, 63.2% on MMStar, 94.6% on LLaVA-W, and 81.9% on AI2D. These results underscore the effectiveness of our approach in capturing richer preference signals and demonstrate its scalability for open-ended, ambiguous VQA tasks.

PaperID: 3646

Authors:Wentao Gao, Xiongren Chen, Xiaojing Du, Wenjun Yu, Andres Mauricio Cifuentes Bernal, Ziqi Xu

Affiliations: Adelaide University, Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

Title: Deep Extreme Transformer: Tackling Zero-Inflated Time Series for Precipitation Prediction

Abstract:
Rainfall forecasting presents a dual challenge: extreme zero inflation, where dry days dominate and obscure meaningful precipitation patterns, and pronounced nonstationarity, where climate dynamics evolve across time and regimes. We propose the Deep Extreme Transformer (DET), a principled architecture that integrates statistical distribution modeling with neural sequence learning to address both issues simultaneously. DET augments the Transformer with a Tweedie distribution output head that unifies discrete zeros and continuous intensities, a fixed shared-weight mech- anism that emphasizes rare but critical events in both attention and loss computation, and a Gaussian perturbation strat- egy that enhances learning stability without violating physical constraints. DET further incorporates nonstationary attention to adapt to evolving rainfall regimes. Extensive experiments on multi-decadal South Australian climate data demonstrate that DET consistently outperforms existing deep learning and statistical models across forecasting horizons. Our method provides an effective and generalizable framework for zero- inflated, shift-prone time series, bridging statistical rigor with deep temporal modeling in a unified and scalable design.

PaperID: 3647

Authors:Misaal Khan, Mayank Vatsa, Kuldeep Singh, Richa Singh

Affiliations: Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur - All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Jodhpur Joint Program, All India Institute of Medical Sciences Jodhpur

Title: NutriScreener: Retrieval Augmented Multi-Pose Graph Attention Network for Malnourishment Screening

Abstract:
Child malnutrition remains a global crisis, yet existing screening methods are laborious and poorly scalable, hindering early intervention. In this work, we present NutriScreener, a retrievalaugmented, multi-pose graph attention network that combines CLIP-based visual embeddings, class-boosted knowledge retrieval, and context awareness to enable robust malnutrition detection and anthropometric prediction from children's images, simultaneously addressing generalizability and class-imbalance. In a clinical study, doctors rated it 4.3/5 for accuracy and 4.6/5 for efficiency, confirming its deployment readiness in low-resource settings. NutriScreener was trained and tested on 2,141 children from AnthroVision and additionally evaluated on diverse cross-continent populations, including ARAN and an in-house collected CampusPose dataset, achieving 0.79 recall, 0.82 AUC, and significantly lower anthropometric RMSEs, demonstrating reliable measurement in unconstrained, pediatric settings. Cross-dataset results show up to 25% recall gain and up to 2.3 cm reduction in head circumference RMSE using demographically matched knowledge bases. NutriScreener offers a scalable and accurate solution for early malnutrition detection in low-resource environments.

PaperID: 3648

Authors:Matan Levy, Itay Segev, Alexander Tuisov, Sarah Keren

Affiliations: Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Faculty of Computer Science

Title: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Modeling, Simulating, and Optimizing Energy Markets

Abstract:
The objective of this study is to advance the optimization of hybrid electricity markets using multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL). The transition from centralized systems to public–private models introduces significant challenges, including the emergence of independent market players and the increasing integration of renewable energy sources (RESs). These challenges are further intensified by rapidly shifting demand patterns, driven both by energy-intensive data centers and AI inference workloads, as well as by political and societal instabilities. To address these complexities, we develop a formal model of market participants’ behavior and propose a MARL-based framework for optimizing system operator strategies. This framework incorporates dynamic pricing and dispatch scheduling to minimize operational costs, maintain grid stability, and align market incentives. We also present a new, adaptable simulation environment compatible with state-of-the-art MARL methods. Empirical evaluations in increasingly complex scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in capturing the dynamic and decentralized nature of modern electricity markets.

PaperID: 3649

Authors:Bingxuan Li, Pengyi Shi, Amy R Ward

Affiliations: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of California, Los Angeles, Purdue University, University of Chicago

Title: Enhancing Predictive Model Learning via Domain-Knowledge Augmented Latent Feature Mining

Abstract:
Predictive modeling in highstakes domains often suffers from limited observed features due to ethical and practical constraints. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach that formulates latent feature mining as a text-to-text propositional logic reasoning task, facilitating domain knowledge integration and improving the interpretability of latent features. We design FLAME, a domain knowledge-augmented reasoning framework for latent feature mining, offering an efficient training paradigm to strengthen the domain-specific reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for latent feature extraction. The goal of our framework is to augment observed features with inferred latent features, enhancing the performance of predictive models in downstream machine learning tasks. We validate our approach through two case studies: (1) the criminal justice system, where data collection is ethically challenging and inherently limited, and (2) the healthcare domain, where patient privacy concerns and the complexity of medical data restrict comprehensive feature collection. Experimental results demonstrate that the inferred latent features significantly enhance the performance of downstream classifiers by over 10%.

PaperID: 3650

Authors:Xin Liu, Yuanhang Yu, Peng Zhu, Dawei Cheng, Changjun Jiang

Affiliations: Tongji University

Title: Role Perceptual Augmented Temporal Graph Network for Related-party Transaction Detection

Abstract:
Illegal relatedparty transactions (RPT) are federal felonies that pose a severe threat to the stability and integrity of modern financial systems. The increasing frequency of RPTs forms complex and dynamic networks. Existing temporal graph learning methods tend to treat entities as functionally homogeneous, ignoring the diverse and evolving structural roles of nodes. Role-based embedding methods model global structure by bridging same-role nodes, but their reliance on a unified mechanism for aggregation and evolution means they fail to distinguish the underlying logic of distinct interactions governed by structural roles. The limitations motivate us to develop a customized role-based strategy. It can also adapt to evolving RPT dynamics, thereby forming a continuous regulatory process to combat illegal activities. In this paper, we propose an innovative Role Perceptual Augmented Temporal Graph Network (RPATGN) for proactive RPT detection. We analyze the structural roles of nodes and employ a role-based message passing mechanism that adapts its aggregation strategy based on the roles of interacting nodes. We integrate a variational graph recurrent neural network, enhanced by temporal contextual attention, to explicitly model the dynamics of the roles and the overall network evolution. Extensive experiments on real-world financial datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for RPT detection. It holds practical significance for fostering robust financial systems and promoting healthy, transparent financial markets.

PaperID: 3651

Authors:Michael Richards, Danny Cowser, Daniel Nielson, Jacob W. Crandall

Affiliations: Brigham Young University, University of Texas at Austin

Title: Toward Simulating Networked Societies with Formal Institutions Using AI Agents

Abstract:
Institutions are key to creating societies that are efficient, fair, and benevolent. Despite their importance, the complexities of human (networked) societies make it difficult to understand how formal institutions form and how they shape human communities. Artificial intelligence (AI) can potentially raise understanding in this regard. Thus, in this paper, we present a simulation model utilizing AI agents to simulate networked societies that contain formal institutions. We then observe the outputs of the resulting model under different societal conditions and formal institutions, and (where applicable) compare and contrast these outputs with political and economic theories. Our model outputs (a) address how inequality impacts societal prosperity, (b) illuminate how institutions can potentially impact poverty, and (c) give insights into the attributes of formal institutions that individuals are inclined to support. These and future simulation models can potentially inform how AI can support the design and development of institutions that facilitate healthier communities and nations.

PaperID: 3652

Authors:Oscar J. Romero, Anthony Tomasic, Elizabeth J. Carter, John Zimmerman, Aaron Steinfeld

Affiliations: Carnegie Mellon University

Title: Navigation and Interaction for Blind Users via a Cognitive Architecture

Abstract:
Navigating new indoor spaces and interacting with the environment presents many challenges for people who are blind or have low vision (BLV). To address these challenges, we prototyped a smartphonebased conversational assistant that helps BLV people navigate and interact with their environment. The prototype utilizes a cognitive architecture to integrate three different technologies: (i) augmented-reality spatial anchors for high-precision localization and access to static information about the environment; (ii) real-time object/people detection for information about the environment and obstacle avoidance; and (iii) a conversational agentthat uses large language models (LLMs) for information extraction, conversational interaction, and turn-by-turn navigation. We assess the impact of different technologies on human performance by measuring user task time and errors. We found that conversational interaction holistically integrates the different technologies to deliver a better user experience while significantly reducing task completion time.

PaperID: 3653

Authors:Siddhant Bikram Shah, Kristina T. Johnson

Affiliations: Northeastern University

Title: AXON: Action Characterization Through Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation for Neurodiverse Individuals

Abstract:
Understanding the communicative behaviors of nonand minimally-speaking individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and complex neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) remains a critical challenge for both clinical support and machine learning (ML) research. However, developing automated systems for this task is hindered by data scarcity, privacy concerns, heterogeneous and idiosyncratic behaviors, and the significant domain shift from neurotypical to neurodiverse populations. To address these challenges, we first present a novel, large-scale, privacy-preserving action recognition dataset with 2,721 3D skeleton samples capturing in-home interactions of individuals with ASD and complex NDDs. Second, we propose AXON, a novel cross-modal knowledge distillation method that transfers the rich semantic understanding of a pre-trained CLIP model to a graph-based Hyperformer model, outperforming other cross-modal knowledge distillation baselines in action recognition. We further introduce a gradient-based interpretability method to characterize how individuals with ASD and complex NDDs perform communicative actions. Our analysis uncovers both individual- and population-level communicative styles, tendencies, and biases. Our foundational study helps spur the development of more adaptive and personalized augmentative technologies, aiming to foster greater communicative autonomy and understanding for this underserved population.

PaperID: 3654

Authors:Haotian Sun, Jessie Zixin Li, John M. Marshall

Affiliations: University of California

Title: BSAN: Behavioral State Attention Network for Modeling Mosquito HostSeeking Behavior

Abstract:
Understanding the complex hostseeking behavior of disease vectors such as mosquito is critical for predicting disease transmission and vector control. This behavior arises from a dynamic interplay between multi-modal sensory cues and internal behavioral states, a process challenging traditional ODE frameworks due to its inherent stochasticity and discrete, state-based nature. We introduce the Behavioral State Attention Network (BSAN), a deep learning architecture designed to model the underlying sensorimotor computations of this behavior. BSAN utilizes a recurrent neural network (RNN) with an LSTM core to process temporal sequences, incorporating a variational encoder to capture the randomness of flight paths and a Mixture Density Network (MDN) to predict multi-modal velocity distributions. The architecture explicitly models distinct behavioral states, such as CO_2 plume tracking and thermal approach, through a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework, and learns to interpretably integrate olfactory, thermal, and visual inputs using a cross-modal attention mechanism. The network generates realistic flight trajectories that exhibit emergent host-seeking behaviors. By providing both trajectory predictions and interpretable behavioral primitives, BSAN serves as a framework for downstream applications in landscape genomics and vector control, enabling the prediction of mosquito population connectivity through environment-specific movement kernels.

PaperID: 3655

Authors:Jingmei Yang, Mahtab Talaei, Britta Lassmann, Nahid Bhadelia, Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis

Affiliations: Boston University

Title: PandemIQ Llama: A Domain-Adapted Foundation Model for Enhanced Pandemic Intelligence

Abstract:
We introduce PandemIQ Llama, a domainadapted large language model (LLM) designed specifically for pandemic intelligence applications. Building on the pre-trained Llama-3.1-8B model, we conducted continuous training using our curated Pandemic Corpus. This dataset was assembled from authoritative public health sources, scientific literature, and specialized knowledge repositories, comprising 508,924 documents totaling 5.8 billion tokens, which is the largest pandemic domain specific data cohort for LLM training. Benefited from our curated large data cohorts and through continuous training leveraging extensive computational resources, the developed PandemIQ Llama model can extract critical domain knowledge on pandemic, which is typically underrepresented in general-purpose language models, To evaluate its performance, we conducted comprehensive comparison of PandemIQ Llama with both prompt-engineered and task-specific fine-tuned baseline models using two tasks: the Biomedical Alert News Question Answering task (1,508 reports with 30 expert-generated questions each) and the Disease Event Type Classification benchmark (4,500 news snippets across eight disease categories). PandemIQ Llama demonstrated substantial improvements over strong baseline models, achieving performance gains ranging from 3.8% to 10.97%. These results suggest that PandemIQ Llama could significantly enhance public health surveillance and analysis capabilities. In addition, our result also suggests that the LLMs can perform better with continuous training than fine-tuning on domain specific tasks. Social Impact: The BEACON platform, powered by our model, launched and now serves over 100 government and multilateral public health organizations and users across 154 countries. Analytics from the platform is being integrated into the Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources system run by the World Health Organization. This integration will provide public health decision-makers with a powerful LLM-based tool for pandemic surveillance.

PaperID: 3656

Authors:Xiuli Kang, Yinlong Xiao, Minghao Hu, Yuan Huang, Bin Mao, Ming Wang, Fang Wang, Zhunchen Luo, Wei Luo, Guotong Geng

Affiliations: Hebei University of Engineering, North China University of Technology, Peking University

Title: WikiMAG: A Multi-Agent Guided Framework for Generating Structured Wikipedia-like Articles

Abstract:
Wikipedia serves as the world's largest and most popular online reference encyclopedia, rich in structured knowledge and authoritative citations. Recently, numerous works have leveraged large language models to automatically generate Wikipedialike articles. However, existing approaches primarily focus on producing singular narrative-type content, overlooking higher information-density structured elements such as timeline and table. To address these limitations, we propose WikiMAG, a multi-agent guided framework for generating structured Wikipedia-like articles. This framework employs a collaborative multi-agent mechanism to orchestrate the creation process, featuring three synergistic core components: Progressive planner first constructs the coarse-grained outline framework and then annotate fine-grained types for outline units, encompassing narrative, timeline, and table formats; Reflective inspector dynamically curates high-quality references via multi-round interactive feedback, thereby enhancing the authority and relevance of citations; Versatile writer integrates fine-grained outline details and high-quality reference information to generate information-rich articles, incorporating the three annotated formats. We evaluate WikiMAG on two public datasets, FreshWiki and WikiGenBen, across outline, writing, and verifiability dimensions. Compared with the best baseline method, our method achieves an average improvement of 6.73 points and 4.39 points in Heading Soft Recall and the METEOR metric (a machine translation and text generation evaluation metric) respectively, and an average increase of 16.84 percentage points in Citation Rate.

PaperID: 3657

Authors:Hanbo Cai, Pengcheng Zhang, Yan Xiao, De Li, Hanting Chu, Ying Luo

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Hohai University, Suzhou Vocational Institute of Industrial Technology, School of Cyber Science and Technology, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, Computer Science and Engineering, Guangxi Normal University, School of Mathematics and Computer Science, Zhejiang Agriculture and Forestry University, College of Artificial Intelligence

Title: Modulation-Based Backdoors: Leveraging Amplitude and Frequency Patterns to Attack Speaker Recognition

Abstract:
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely and successfully applied in the field of speaker recognition. However, recent studies reveal that these models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where adversaries inject malicious behaviors into victim models by poisoning the training process. Existing attack methods often rely on environmental noise or complex voice transformations, which are typically difficult to implement and exhibit poor stealthiness. To address these issues, this paper proposes two modulationbased backdoor attacks that leverage frequency modulation (FM) and amplitude modulation (AM) to construct audio triggers. In real-world scenarios, regular variations in frequency and amplitude are often imperceptible to human listeners, making the proposed attacks more covert. Experimental results show that our methods achieve high attack success rates in both digital and physical settings, while also demonstrating strong resistance to various state-of-the-art backdoor defenses.

PaperID: 3658

Authors:Zongsheng Cao, Anran Liu, Yangfan He, Jing Li, Bo Zhang, Zigan Wang

Affiliations: Independent Researcher, School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University, Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Shenzhen International Graduate School

Title: ViG-RAG: Video-aware Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Temporal and Semantic Hybrid Reasoning

Abstract:
Retrievalaugmented generation (RAG) has greatly improved Large Language Models (LLMs) by adding external knowledge. However, current RAG-based methods face difficulties with long-context video understanding due to two main challenges. First, Current RAG-based methods for long-context video understanding struggle to effectively integrate multimodal and long-range temporal information, resulting in fragmented and context-insensitive knowledge representations. Furthermore, their retrieval mechanisms often rely on static textual matching, failing to dynamically align user queries with the most relevant video segments and leading to suboptimal downstream performance. To overcome these issues, we introduce ViG-RAG, a new framework to enhance long-context video understanding through structured textual knowledge grounding and multi-modal retrieval. Specifically, we segment video transcripts into structured units, extract key entities, form temporal connections, and assign confidence for evidence, enabling coherent long-range reasoning. In this way, it utilizes a knowledge-aware grounding mechanism and a context-aware retrieval process that dynamically builds a probabilistic temporal knowledge graph to organize multi-video content. To improve retrieval accuracy, we propose a hybrid retrieval strategy for semantic and temporal features, with an adaptive distribution modeling the relevance. In this way, it achieves the optimal retrieval distribution for each query, enhancing generation efficiency by reducing unnecessary computations. On top of this, ViG-RAG uses a vision-language model to integrate semantic anchors, expanded contextual fields, and selected video frames, generating an accurate response. We evaluate ViG-RAG on several benchmarks, demonstrating that it significantly surpasses current RAG-based methods.

PaperID: 3659

Authors:Junyang Chen, Yueqian Li, Ka Chung Ng, Huan Wang, Liang-Jie Zhang

Affiliations: Shenzhen University, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Huazhong Agricultural University

Title: Toward Multimodal Fake News Detection by Multi-perspective Rationale Generation and Verification

Abstract:
The rapid proliferation of social media platforms has led to a surge in multimodal fake news, where deceptive content often combines text and images to mislead audiences. Traditional unimodal detection methods struggle to address the complexity of such content, necessitating holistic multimodal approaches. While the latest advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer new opportunities for enhancing detection performance by analyzing multidimensional features, including source credibility, cross-modal contradictions, emotional bias, and manipulative writing patterns, these methods suffer from a key flaw: a susceptibility to hallucinations or erroneous reasoning, which can lead to flawed conclusions and ultimately biased detection results. We propose the Multimodal Fake News Detection via Multi-perspective Rationale Generation and Verification (MMRGV) model to mitigate this challenge. Our method employs a cross-verification mechanism to screen and reconcile contradictions among different rationales, thereby preserving the LLM's analytical advantages while mitigating the impact of erroneous reasoning or hallucinations on the final detection. Subsequently, these optimized rationales are fused via an adaptive weighting strategy to output a robust final prediction. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets (Twitter, Weibo, and GossipCop) demonstrate the superiority of our method, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy of 0.9972, 0.9663, and 0.8772, respectively, and significantly outperforming existing baselines. These results validate the effectiveness of multi-perspective rationale generation and cross-verification in enhancing multimodal fake news detection, offering a resilient solution to combat misinformation in the era of generative AI.

PaperID: 3660

Authors:Yuhang Chen, Jie Sun, Jialin Fan, Jian Sun

Affiliations: Tongji University

Title: Transferring Causal Driving Patterns for Generalizable Traffic Simulation with Diffusion-Based Distillation

Abstract:
Traffic simulation is essential for validating the safety and reliability of autonomous driving systems, yet datadriven simulation methods often struggle with distribution shifts, limiting their generalizability across diverse datasets (domains). To address this, we present Causal Driving Pattern Transfer (CDPT), a novel two-stage knowledge distillation framework built upon diffusion model to enhance cross-domain generalizability. In Phase I, we implement hybrid self-distillation within the source domain by integrating feature-, response-, and contrastive-level distillation, which enables the model to decompose complex driving behaviors into their core causal components, including scene-conditioned driven patterns, multi-agent interaction dynamics and casual saliency. In Phase II, we introduce a continual distillation strategy: few-shot samples from the target domain are used to initiate generation of diverse synthetic scenarios, allowing the student model to continually adapt to novel environments without retraining on large-scale data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CDPT achieves strong generalization in both open-loop and closed-loop simulations, effectively generating realistic, interaction-aware behaviors that are critical for scalable and reliable autonomous driving testing.

PaperID: 3661

Authors:Wei Cui, Lukai Fan, Zhenghua Chen, Min Wu, Shili Xiang, Haixia Wang, Bing Li

Affiliations: Institute for Infocomm Research A*STAR, Shandong University of Science and Technology, University of Glasgow, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Light but Sharp: SlimSTAD for Real-Time Action Detection from Sensor Data

Abstract:
Sensory Temporal Action Detection (STAD) aims to localize and classify human actions within long, untrimmed sequences captured by nonvisual sensors such as WiFi or inertial measurement units (IMUs). Unlike video-based TAD, STAD poses unique challenges due to the low-dimensional, noisy, and heterogeneous nature of sensory data, as well as the real-time and resource constraints on edge devices. While recent STAD models have improved detection performance, their high computational cost hampers practical deployment. In this paper, we propose SlimSTAD, a simple yet effective framework that achieves both high accuracy and low latency for STAD. SlimSTAD features a novel Decoupled Channel Modeling (DCM) encoder, which preserves modality-specific temporal features and enables efficient inter-channel aggregation via lightweight graph attention. An anchor-free cascade predictor then refines action boundaries and class predictions in a two-stage design without dense proposals. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that SlimSTAD outperforms strong video-derived and sensory baselines by an average of 2.1 mAP, while significantly reducing GFLOPs, parameters, and latency, validating its effectiveness for real-world, edge-aware STAD deployment.

PaperID: 3662

Authors:Xing Cui, Jingzheng Wu, Wenxiang Ou, Tianyue Luo, Zhiyuan Li, Xiang Ling

Affiliations: Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing China, Jinan Shandong

Title: VFCionX: Bridging Large and Small Models for Robust Vulnerability-Fixing Commit Identification

Abstract:
VulnerabilityFixing Commit Identification(VFCI) is a critical task in software security maintenance that aims to automatically identify code commits that patch security vulnerabilities. However, existing approaches face challenges in handling low-quality commit messages and entangled commits, which limit their identification performance. To address these issues, we propose VFCionX, a novel VFCI framework that integrates large and small language models in a collaborative architecture. VFCionX consists of three core modules: Message Classifier, Patch Classifier, and Ensemble Classifier. The Message Classifier employs a multi-source contextual augmentation strategy to enhance the quality of commit messages and fine-tunes the Qwen2.5-1.5B model, significantly improving classification performance in the textual modality. The Patch Classifier combines heuristic rules with a Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-driven file selector to filter noise from entangled commits, and incorporates a line-level feature extractor based on CodeBERT and CNN to capture local pattern differences between added and deleted code lines. The Ensemble Classifier integrates predictions from both channels using the AdaBoost algorithm, enhancing model robustness and generalization. Experimental results on five popular C/C++ repositories comprising 24,630 commits show that VFCionX achieves an F1-score of 81.47%, outperforming the best baseline by 9.42%. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of each component, while sensitivity analysis reveals optimal parameter settings for balancing performance and noise resilience. This work provides a new and effective solution for robust vulnerability patch identification.

PaperID: 3663

Authors:Zhiang Dong, Zhenlong Dai, Xiangwei Lv, Jingyuan Chen

Affiliations: Zhejiang University

Title: Learning from Long-Term Engagement: Adaptive Tutoring Dialogue Planning for Personalized Education

Abstract:
With the advancements of large language models (LLMs), intelligent tutoring systems have witnessed significant progress. The extensive knowledge and reasoning capabilities of LLMs enable intelligent tutoring systems to generate more helpful tutoring dialogues with scaffolding instructions. However, these systems fail to provide scaffolds that align with the personalized needs of students due to the lack of attention to the longterm learning process of students. Meanwhile, the pursuit of more suitable scaffolds through complex reasoning may result in additional computational overhead. To address these issues, we propose LEAP, a Long-term Educational Adaptive Planning system that can model students' long-term learning process. Specifically, LEAP plans for scaffolds through collaboration of direct planning and thoughtful reasoning to improve efficiency and captures students' long-term learning progress through cognitive state extraction. Then we propose LEAD, a Long-term Educational Archive Dataset to alleviate the lack of data and validate the effectiveness of LEAP, which is constructed through real-world students' reactions and simulation of the teacher-student interactions. Experiments on several datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of LEAP.

PaperID: 3664

Authors:Yufei Gao, Zhengong Cai, Bowei Yang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University

Title: RCAFlow: A Workflow-Informed Hierarchical Planning Multi-Agent System for Root Cause Analysis

Abstract:
As microservice architectures become increasingly complex and system events become more frequent, Root Cause Analysis (RCA) has emerged as a critical task to ensure system reliability. However, existing deep learningbased methods often struggle with limited flexibility and a lack of interpretability when addressing complex system failures. Recent efforts to integrate large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in enhancing diagnostic transparency and reasoning capability. However, expansive search spaces, intricate workflows, and entangled constraints constrain practical adoption. We propose RCAFlow, a multi-agent framework that integrates structured workflow knowledge with hierarchical planning to address these challenges. RCAFlow transforms semi-structured documents into behavior tree-style workflows to support interpretable plan generation, employs a Git-inspired branching mechanism for modular and hierarchical task execution with path isolation, and leverages state-aware task execution with semantic analysis to improve result understanding and feedback. We evaluate RCAFlow on three benchmark datasets provided by OpenRCA. Experimental results demonstrate that RCAFlow consistently outperforms existing methods across all datasets. Further ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of each core module, highlighting the reliability, extensibility, and interpretability of RCAFlow to support complex RCA tasks within intelligent IT operations.

PaperID: 3665

Authors:Mingyang Geng, Shanzhi Gu, Zhipeng Liu, Chuanfu Xu, Zhaoyang Qu, Haotian Wang

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology, Northeastern University

Title: Failure Localization in Multi-Agent Code Generation via Knowledge-Guided and Transferable Reasoning

Abstract:
Recent advances in multiagent Large Language Model-based code generation enable collaborative software development through role-specialized agents. However, failure localization of code generation remains challenging due to inter-agent dependencies and solution-path multiplicity. Consequently, existing prompting-based localization methods exhibit vulnerability towards semantically valid but non-canonical strategies. To address this, we propose FLKR (Failure Localization via Knowledge-guided Reasoning), an self-supervised framework that combines behavior encoding, knowledge-strategy alignment, and consistency scoring for solution-path invariant localization. To evaluate, we also introduce COFL (Code Oriented Failure Localization), the first expert-annotated benchmark for fine-grained failure localization. Experiments show FLKR outperforms state-of-the-art prompting-based baselines by up to 14 points in Fault Localization Accuracy and 45 points in Top-1 accuracy, with strong performance in divergent, real-world, and refinement-critical cases. Such results demonstrate that our proposed FLKR generalizes well to real-world software development scenarios and opens up a new direction for failure-aware refinement recommendation by providing precise and interpretable responsibility signals.

PaperID: 3666

Authors:Taotao Li, Yiyang Li, Zhenyu Wen, Jiahao Lin, Jinhao Wan, Jie Su, Cong Wang, Zhen Hong

Affiliations: Zhejiang University

Title: RFF-TTA: Physical Information-Aware Prototype for Temporally Varying RF Fingerprinting Online Test-Time-Adaptation

Abstract:
In recent years, RF fingerprinting (RFF) has emerged as a promising technology for wireless device authentication. However, temporal variations in device load and temperature, along with channel effects, lead to inconsistencies in RFF distributions between training and testing phases. As a result, deep learning (DL)based recognition models often suffer from degraded performance. To address this problem, we propose the first test-time-adaptation (TTA) approach to improve the domain generalization ability of RFF recognition models. We first analyze the causes of time-varying RFF distribution shifts, such as carrier frequency offset (CFO), and develop a physical impairment-based data augmentation strategy. Based on this, we further propose a physically information-aware prototype to guide the model for TTA. Our method requires no model retraining or labeled test samples, and is a lightweight, nonparametric solution. Finally, our approach is extensively evaluated using mobile phones with the IEEE 802.11 orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system, which demonstrates that our scheme can effectively improve RFF average recognition performance by about 7.8%.

PaperID: 3667

Authors:Xiaozhuang Song, Tianshu Yu

Affiliations: School of Data Science, Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)

Title: Physically-Informed Flow Matching with Graph Neural Networks for Complex Fluid Dynamics

Abstract:
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations traditionally require extensive computational resources, limiting their utility in many scientific and engineering applications at scale. We introduce PhysicallyInformed Flow Matching Graph Networks (PIFM-GN), a novel generative framework that directly samples fluid states under specified physical conditions without requiring expensive time-stepping simulations. The key innovation of our approach is the incorporation of incompressibility constraints directly into the flow matching transport process by parameterizing velocity fields through vector potentials, with graph-based curl operators ensuring divergence-free predictions without requiring global pressure-Poisson solves. Experiments on diverse fluid dynamics problems -- ranging from two-dimensional surface pressure distributions and complete flow fields, to complex three-dimensional airflow fields -- demonstrate that PIFM-GN generates high-fidelity samples with significantly fewer sampling steps than diffusion-based alternatives. Most notably, our model maintains competitive performance even with a single sampling step, a regime where diffusion models completely fail. Our generated samples accurately reproduce the statistical characteristics of target flows, successfully capturing multi-modal pressure distributions across various flow conditions, while achieving significant computational speedups compared to diffusion-based methods. PIFM-GN thus enables efficient generation of fluid states for downstream analysis and design tasks in scientific and engineering applications.

PaperID: 3668

Authors:Nan Sun, Yuxing Lu, Han Fang, Hefei Ling, Sijing Xie, LuYu Yuan, Chengxin Zhao

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Peking University, National University of Singapore

Title: GlyphShield: Document Watermarking for the Physical World via Vector Typeface Synthesis

Abstract:
Document protection has become a critical issue for preventing unauthorized copying, distribution, and tampering. Document encryption is a proven solution, but it is not resistant to attacks from the physical world such as screenshots, printing and photographing. A common document protection technique is fontbased watermarking, which embeds imperceptible information by using sets of visually similar glyphs to encode traceable data. However, due to the non-differentiable rendering process of vector fonts, these methods often rely on time-consuming and laborious manual design. To address this challenge, we present GlyphShield, an innovative end-to-end vector font watermarking framework. We resolve the non-differentiability challenge by simulating differentiable rasterization through the computation of Signed Distance Field (SDF) for Bézier curves in vector fonts. Besides, to handle complex vector font structures, a novel dual-branch vector encoder is employed to ensure high-quality font synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach ensures more natural and smoother message embedding while ensuring robustness against noise attacks in diverse scenarios. Additionally, our framework demonstrates strong generalization across various font styles and languages.

PaperID: 3669

Authors:Xichen Sun, Wentao Wei, Jiahua Rao, Jiancong Xie, Yuedong Yang

Affiliations: Sun Yat-sen University

Title: De Novo Molecular Generation from Mass Spectra via Many-Body Enhanced Diffusion

Abstract:
Molecular structure generation from mass spectrometry is fundamental for understanding cellular metabolism and discovering novel compounds. Although tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) enables the highthroughput acquisition of fragment fingerprints, these spectra often reflect higher-order interactions involving the concerted cleavage of multiple atoms and bonds-crucial for resolving complex isomers and non-local fragmentation mechanisms. However, most existing methods adopt atom-centric and pairwise interaction modeling, overlooking higher-order edge interactions and lacking the capacity to systematically capture essential many-body characteristics for structure generation. To overcome these limitations, we present MBGen, a Many-Body enhanced diffusion framework for de novo molecular structure Generation from mass spectra. By integrating a many-body attention mechanism and higher-order edge modeling, MBGen comprehensively leverages the rich structural information encoded in MS/MS spectra, enabling accurate de novo generation and isomer differentiation for novel molecules. Experimental results on the NPLIB1 and MassSpecGym benchmarks demonstrate that MBGen achieves superior performance, with improvements of up to 230% over state-of-the-art methods, highlighting the scientific value and practical utility of many-body modeling for mass spectrometry-based molecular generation. Further analysis and ablation studies show that our approach effectively captures higher-order interactions and exhibits enhanced sensitivity to complex isomeric and non-local fragmentation information.

PaperID: 3670

Authors:Jiaheng Wang, Yuan Si, Ang Li, Zhenyu Wang, Tianheng Xu, Honglin Hu

Affiliations: Shanghai Advanced Research Institute

Title: MUSE: Multimodal Uncertainty-Based Self-Driven Evolution for Robust Physiological-Signal–Based Driver Fatigue Detection

Abstract:
Precise detection of driver mental fatigue is critical for reducing traffic accidents and enhancing road safety. Compared with visionbased detection—which is susceptible to illumination and occlusion—multimodal physiological‑signal-based approaches integrate complementary information from diverse biosignals, delivering more faithful and objective fatigue assessments. However, adverse factors such as motion artifacts and environmental noise induce ceaseless deterioration to physiological signals, which markedly degrade the performance of existing multimodal fusion methods. To address this challenge, we propose Multimodal Uncertainty-based Self-driven Evolution, MUSE, reallocating modality contributions in real time via overall uncertainty minimization, thereby enabling efficient collaborative fusion of multi‐source predictions. Theoretically, MUSE guarantees a provably bounded cumulative error, and its generalization error approaches the Bayesian‑optimal fusion as iterations progress. Operating in a closed loop without labels or manual recalibration, MUSE presents superior suitability for real‑world driving scenarios compared to supervised algorithms. On the large‑scale driving fatigue dataset SEED‑VIG, MUSE outperforms existing models in both classification and regression tasks, substantiating its robustness and practicality as a promising driving fatigue detection solution.

PaperID: 3671

Authors:Junyin Wang, Jinlei Yu, Hao Lin, Huikai Liu, Wenqian Zhu, Shengwu Xiong

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University of Technology, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, VOYAH Automobile Technology Co., Wuhan China, Interdisciplinary Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Wuhan College

Title: Driving with Advice: Large Model as Motion Advisor for Joint Planning

Abstract:
We address the challenge of integrating highlevel semantic reasoning with low-level trajectory planning in end-to-end autonomous driving, where most existing frameworks decouple perception, decision-making, and control, leading to limited interpretability and poor instruction compliance. To bridge this gap, we propose Driving with Advice, a novel closed-loop framework that treats a vision-language model (VLM) as a motion advisor to provide interpretable, language-mediated guidance for trajectory generation. Our approach introduces three key innovations: (1) Semantic-Intentional Pretraining (SIP), which injects driving rationale into a compact VLM via machine-generated question-answering pairs; (2) a discrete action space grounded in directional and speed primitives, enabling structured and interpretable policy learning; and (3) an advice-following diffusion policy refined via Group Relative Policy Optimization under a multi-objective reward that ensures safety, comfort, and alignment with semantic intent. We evaluate our method on the NAVSIM benchmark in a closed-loop setting, achieving a state-of-the-art Predictive Driver Model Score (PDMS) of 91.5, outperforming strong baselines in safety (NC: 99.2). The results demonstrate that leveraging language as a cognitive interface between perception and control enhances both generalization and behavioral transparency, advancing the paradigm of language-conditioned driving.

PaperID: 3672

Authors:Jiancong Xie, Wentao Wei, Chi Zhang, Jiahua Rao, Yuedong Yang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, China Pengcheng Laboratory, China Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and Advanced Computing

Title: Informative Subgraph Extraction with Deep Reinforcement Learning for Drug-Drug Interaction Prediction

Abstract:
Drugdrug interaction (DDI) prediction is pivotal for drug safety and clinical decision-making. Recently, subgraph-based methods utilizing knowledge graphs (KGs) and domain information have achieved promising results by extracting informative subgraphs for DDI prediction. However, existing subgraph extraction methods are typically coarse-grained and nonspecific, facing two key limitations: First, they are constrained by the vast and noisy nature of real-world KGs, making it challenging to identify the most informative substructures from the massive space of candidate subgraphs. Second, current methods often fail to exploit the molecular structural specificity of drugs to selectively extract relevant subgraphs, lacking effective integration of molecular structure information with knowledge graph context. To address these challenges, we propose RISE-DDI, a novel framework for Reinforced-based Informative Subgraph Extraction approach for drug-drug interaction prediction. Specifically, RISE-DDI formulates the subgraph extraction as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and leverages a deep reinforcement learning (RL) agent to dynamically and adaptively extract the most informative and context-specific subgraphs for each drug pair. The agent is guided by a learnable structure-aware reward model that considers both the topological context from the knowledge graph and the molecular features of the drug pairs, thereby encouraging the selection of subgraphs that are both structurally relevant and biologically informative. Extensive experiments on DDI benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both transductive and inductive scenarios, achieving improvements of up to 20%. Furthermore, visualization analyses of the extracted subgraphs highlight the interpretability of our model, providing insights into the underlying mechanisms of drug interactions.

PaperID: 3673

Authors:Ziyuan Yang, Ming Yan, Yi Zhang, Joey Tianyi Zhou

Affiliations: School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore Tianfu Jiangxi Laboratory, Centre for Frontier AI Research (CFAR), Sichuan University Tianfu Jiangxi Laboratory

Title: Poisoned Distillation: Injecting Backdoors into Distilled Datasets Without Raw Data Access

Abstract:
Dataset distillation (DD) condenses large datasets into smaller synthetic ones to enhance training efficiency and reducing bandwidth. DD enables models to achieve comparable performance to those trained on the raw full dataset, making it popular for data sharing. Existing work shows that injecting backdoors during the distillation process can threaten downstream models. However, these studies assume attackers can have access to the raw dataset and interfere with the entire distillation process, which is unrealistic. In contrast, this work is the first to address a more realistic and concerning threat: attackers may intercept the dataset distribution process, inject backdoors into the distilled datasets, and redistribute them to users. While distilled datasets were previously considered resistant to backdoor attacks, we demonstrate that they remain vulnerable to such attacks. Furthermore, we show that attackers do not even require access to any raw data to inject the backdoors successfully within one minute. Specifically, our approach reconstructs conceptual archetypes for each class from the model trained on the distilled dataset. Backdoors are then injected into these archetypes to update the distilled dataset. Moreover, we ensure the updated dataset not only retains the backdoor but also preserves the original optimization trajectory, thus maintaining the knowledge of the raw dataset. To achieve this, a hybrid loss is designed to integrate backdoor information along the benign optimization trajectory, ensuring that previously learned information is not forgotten. Extensive experiments demonstrate that distilled datasets are highly vulnerable to our attack, with risks pervasive across various raw datasets, distillation methods, and downstream training strategies.

PaperID: 3674

Authors:Mingming Zhu, Jiahua Rao, Xiaoyu Chen, Qianmu Yuan, Yuedong Yang

Affiliations: Sun Yat-sen University

Title: Advancing Protein Design via Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Pareto-Based Collaborative Optimization

Abstract:
Protein design is revolutionizing biotechnology, yet existing approaches struggle to balance structural foldability with functional performance. Structurebased models excel at generating stable protein backbones but often overlook critical functional properties, while protein language models capture evolutionary and functional signals but frequently predict sequences lacking structural stability. Integrating these complementary approaches remains challenging due to their inherently conflicting objectives. We present MAProt, a multi-agent framework that synergistically combines structure-based and protein language model-based methods for protein design. Each agent specializes in a distinct aspect of the design objective: the structure-based agent (e.g., ProteinMPNN) ensures compatibility with the target backbone, while protein language model-based agents (e.g., ESM, SaProt) capture evolutionary plausibility and functional potential. To reconcile conflicts and achieve optimal trade-offs, we introduce a Pareto-based negotiation module that enables effective multi-objective coordination and consensus among agents. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that MAProt achieves a remarkable improvement over state-of-the-art baselines, and generalizes robustly across a range of tasks, including thermodynamic folding stability design, functional protein design, and high-affinity antibody design. These results highlight the power of collaborative optimization for advancing rational protein engineering.

PaperID: 3675

Authors:Hanwen Liu, Kexin Shi, Jieyuan Zhang, Yimeng Shan, Jibin Wu, Wenyu Chen, Malu Zhang

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: HardF-SNN: Hardware-Friendly Quantization for Spiking Neural Networks with Efficient Integer-Arithmetic-Only Inference

Abstract:
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are emerging as a promising energyefficient alternative to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) due to their event-driven computation paradigm. However, recent advances toward large-scale high-performance SNNs inevitably lead to substantial memory and computational overhead. While quantization offers a potential way, many quantization approaches fail to deliver verifiable efficiency gains on resource-constrained hardware platforms. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and hardware-friendly SNN, termed HardF-SNN. Specifically, we first build a baseline model using shared-scale quantization and BN folding to simulate integer-only inference, as this has not been thoroughly discussed in prior SNN works. Then, through empirical and theoretical analysis, we identify that the baseline suffers from accuracy degradation and may cause training failure. To mitigate these issues, we propose proportional shared-scale quantization for enhanced dynamic range and integer-only BN using bit-shifting to stabilize training. Extensive experiments show that HardF-SNN achieves an optimal balance between performance and efficiency with excellent hardware compatibility. To demonstrate its effectiveness on resource-limited platforms, HardF-SNN is deployed on a dedicated FPGA-based hardware accelerator. Evaluation results indicate that our implementation achieves significant performance improvements over several existing hardware accelerators.

PaperID: 3676

Authors:Xiaoxuan Shen, Zhihai Hu, Fuqing Li, Shengyingjie Liu, Jianwen Sun

Affiliations: Central China Normal University, University of Macau

Title: Invariant Representation Learning for Memory Behavior Modeling via Adaptive Environment Separation

Abstract:
Memory behavior modeling seeks to predict individual recall performance and understand its underlying cognitive mechanisms. However, the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of memory data poses significant challenges to the generalization ability of models under unseen conditions. To address this challenge, we propose an invariant representation learning framework IMem that integrates self-supervised contrastive learning with decorrelation constraints, enabling the adaptive identification and suppression of environment-related factors in sequential behavioral data, thereby mitigating the influence of spurious features and enhancing the modeling of stable cognitive structures. Importantly, the method does not rely on explicit environment partitioning or predefined environment labels, while our theoretical analysis demonstrates that it can effectively resist environmental perturbations and facilitate the extraction of invariant structural representations, thereby ensuring adaptability and generalization. Empirical evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets further confirm its superiority over mainstream methods in terms of generalization performance and stable feature identification. Feature attribution analysis reveals that I-Mem extracts invariant features aligned with classical cognitive effects, and reflects short-term behavioral patterns that may indicate latent cognitive mechanisms beyond existing theories, highlighting both interpretability and discovery potential.

PaperID: 3677

Authors:Wenhan Zhang, Zihan Huang, Tong Bu, Tiejun Huang, Zhaofei Yu

Affiliations: Peking University

Title: Generalized Threshold Optimization with Harmony Multi-Threshold Neurons for Accurate ANN-to-SNN Conversion

Abstract:
Spiking Neural Networks(SNNs) are a promising paradigm designed to emulate the brain's energy efficient by incorporating the timing of spikes. Conversion is an efficient way to obtain highperformance SNNs from Artificial Neural Networks(ANNs). Existing conversion methods often face a trade-off between accuracy and time steps, which is largely caused by the incomplete release of residual membrane potentials. To minimize the conversion error, this paper proposed a harmonious mathematical property-based neuron, called Harmony Multi-Threshold Neurons (H-MT Neuron), which utilizes multiple spikes to minimize residual membrane potentials. The proposed neuron is further enhanced with an optional effective communication mechanism to achieve more accurate conversion. In addition, we propose a threshold optimization method applicable to a broader range cases of spiking neurons to to find the optimal neuron thresholds. Experiment results demonstrate that our method achieve superior accuracy on ImageNet benchmark datasets while significantly reducing the required time steps and energy consumption.

PaperID: 3678

Authors:Zhiyuan Zhou, Yanrong Guo, Shijie Hao

Affiliations: Hefei University of Technology

Title: Voices, Faces, and Feelings: Multi-modal Emotion-Cognition Captioning for Mental Health Understanding

Abstract:
Emotional and cognitive factors are essential for understanding mental health disorders. However, existing methods often treat multimodal data as classification tasks, limiting interpretability especially for emotion and cognition. Although large language models (LLMs) offer opportunities for mental health analysis, they mainly rely on textual semantics and overlook fine-grained emotional and cognitive cues in multi-modal inputs. While some studies incorporate emotional features via transfer learning, their connection to mental health conditions remains implicit. To address these issues, we propose ECMC, a novel task that aims at generating natural language descriptions of emotional and cognitive states from multi-modal data, and producing emotion–cognition profiles that improve both the accuracy and interpretability of mental health assessments. We adopt an encoder–decoder architecture, where modality-specific encoders extract features, which are fused by a dual-stream BridgeNet based on Q-former. Contrastive learning enhances the extraction of emotional and cognitive features. A LLaMA decoder then aligns these features with annotated captions to produce detailed descriptions. Extensive objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that: 1) ECMC outperforms existing multi-modal LLMs and mental health models in generating emotion–cognition captions; 2) the generated emotion–cognition profiles significantly improve assistive diagnosis and interpretability in mental health analysis.

PaperID: 3679

Authors:Jinguang Cheng, Chunxiao Li, Shuai He, Taiyu Chen, Anlong Ming

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Henan University

Title: Thinking Aesthetics Assessment of Image Color Temperature: Models, Datasets and Benchmarks

Abstract:
Color temperature, as a crucial attribute influencing image color, plays a critical role in Image Aesthetics Assessment (IAA). Yet, within the existing IAA field, little light has been shed on assessing the aesthetic quality of image color temperature. To bridge this gap, we introduce a new task: Image Color Temperature Aesthetics Assessment (ICTAA). However, this task poses the following challenges: 1) Perceptual Sensitivity: humans exhibit high sensitivity to subtle shifts in color temperature, necessitating a model to enable finegrained discrimination; 2) Spectral Continuity: The theoretical modeling of color temperature aesthetics requires continuous labels; however, the just-noticeable-difference property of human perception makes continuous labeling infeasible, necessitating a well-designed labeling strategy. To address the aforementioned challenges, we make the following efforts. First, we propose a multi-modal contrastive learning framework, ICTA2Net, that models color temperature differences between image pairs while strictly controlling other visual attributes. Second, leveraging color temperature transitivity, we design a weakly supervised strategy that discretely samples images based on anchor images and human perception to build contrastive relations across color temperatures, enabling learning from discrete labels. Thirdly, we construct a color temperature aesthetics dataset, ICTAA240K, and a benchmark for validation. Additionally, we propose a new metric, Information Entropy-weighted Accuracy (IEA), which weights accuracy by the degree of annotation disagreement to reflect model performance across varying sample difficulties, complementing existing evaluation metrics. Experiments show our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art IAA methods on ICTAA240K, thereby setting an effective roadmap for ICTAA.

PaperID: 3680

Authors:Yu Du, Ruifeng Nie, Long Ma, Chengpei Xu, Yu Liu, Weimin Wang

Affiliations: Dalian University of Technology

Title: Learning 3D Occupancy from Beam Overlap in 2D Rotating mmWave Radar

Abstract:
Robust 3D perception under adverse weather is critical for autonomous systems. While mmWave Radars are inherently weatherresistant, conventional 2D rotating Radar sensors lack direct elevation resolution, limiting their 3D perception ability. Although 4D imaging radars can provide elevation information, they typically suffer from limited coverage and range. In this work, we exploit a key observation about mechanically rotating 2D mmWave Radars: in each sweep, an overlap exists between adjacent azimuth beam coverage due to the width of the main lobe, which makes the reflected intensity difference imply object materials and geometric shapes, including elevation. With this observation, we propose a method that learns 3D occupancy by disentangling bird’s-eye view (BEV) layout and elevation estimation from one frame Radar scan. Specifically, we partition one sweep into two interleaved subsets, corresponding to overlapping beam directions, and utilize them to infer coarse geometric structure through spatial differences and intensity patterns. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing baselines. The codes will be publicly available.

PaperID: 3681

Authors:Yuzhe Duan, Xuanxuan Ren, Guizhe Dong, Xu Yang, Yanhua Yang

Affiliations: Xidian University

Title: Mix-QSAM2: Mixed-Precision Quantization for High Fidelity Segmentation in Resource Constrained Scenarios

Abstract:
The Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) has established a new benchmark for highprecision image and video segmentation, offering significant potential for a wide range of computer vision tasks. Despite its impressive performance, the model's substantial computational and memory requirements present a significant obstacle to its practical deployment on resource-constrained devices. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for optimizing SAM2 through two synergistic, importance-driven strategies: quantization and memory management. Specifically, an Importance-driven Mixed-Precision Quantization scheme, which analyzes the sensitivity of each layer using a Weight-Activation Importance Score, is employed to enable a targeted bit-width assignment, preserving model accuracy by keeping critical layers at higher precision. Then, the Selective Importance-driven Synthesis (SIS) mechanism is proposed to address the inefficient accumulation of redundant data in the memory bank. SIS intelligently compresses the memory by identifying the most contextually similar historical frames and synthesizing them into a single, representative feature, thereby preserving informational diversity while enhancing temporal context understanding. Extensive experiments on the COCO and SA-V benchmarks validate our approach, showing that our optimized model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art quantization methods. Our work provides a principled framework for the co-design of quantization and dynamic memory management, offering a practical path toward deploying powerful video segmentation models in real-world applications.

PaperID: 3682

Authors:Wei Feng, Chi Huang, Qi Zhang, Qian Zhang, Nan Li

Affiliations: Tianjin University

Title: UV-RGS: Relightable 3D Gaussian Splatting from Unposed Views Under Varied Illuminations

Abstract:
The latest advancements in scene relighting have been predominantly driven by inverse rendering with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). However, existing methods remain overly reliant on precise camera parameters under static illumination conditions, which is prohibitively expensive and even impractical in realworld scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel learning from Unposed views under Varied illuminations Relightable 3D Gaussian Splatting (dubbed UV-RGS), to address this challenge by jointly optimizing camera poses, 3DGS representations, surface materials, and environment illuminations (i.e., unknown and varied lighting conditions in training) using only unposed views under varied lightings. Firstly, UV-RGS presents a viewpoint dividing strategy to group inputs into constituent units, enabling each unit can perform similar poses and illuminations. Next, for each unit, to get the constituent model, UV-RGS establishes an incrementally pose learning module to estimate coarse camera parameters, which also enjoy a proxy-view refinement to alleviate the sparse view learning. Additionally, for all constituent unit models, we introduce a holistic model learning strategy that integrates progressive unit aggregation component and the 3DGS coupled with camera poses joint optimization, which realizes the scene high-fidelity perception by the physical-based rendering. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic challenging datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of UV-RGS, achieving the state-of-the-art performance for scene inverse rendering by learning 3DGS from only unposed views under varied illuminations.

PaperID: 3683

Authors:Yali Huang, Jie Mei, Ziyi Wu, Yiming Yang, Hongru Zhao, Mingyuan Jiu, Hichem Sahbi

Affiliations: School of Computer and Artificial Intelligence, Zhengzhou University, Dongfeng Commercial Vehicle Co., China Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Swarm Systems, Ministry of Education, China National SuperComputing Center in Zhengzhou, Sorbonne University

Title: Less Is Better: Sparse Instance Learning for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection

Abstract:
CrossDomain Few-Shot Object Detection (CD-FSOD) is an extremely challenging task due to the inherent data scarcity and substantial domain shift between the source and target domains. Existing methods often suffer from overfitting and noisy feature representations, which hinder the construction of discriminative class prototypes in the target domain. In this paper, we propose a novel framework with sparse instance learning (SI-ViTO) for CD-FSOD, which leverages instance sparsity to achieve a better detection with less representation. SI-ViTO adopts a dual-stage sparsity module, consisting of instance feature sparsity not only on the few-shot support images but also on the query images. This dual sparsity enables the model to effectively preserve salient foreground semantics and simultaneously to filter out redundant or noisy information. Furthermore, a new prototype calibration strategy is also used to dynamically refine the class prototypes with query instances to accelerate prototype adaptation. Extensive experimental results on CD-FSOD benchmarks show that SI-ViTO outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating that less discriminative representations yield better cross-domain few-shot object detection performance than more abundant ones.

PaperID: 3684

Authors:Haodong Jing, Panqi Yang, Dongyao Jiang, Zhipeng Liu, Nanning Zheng, Yongqiang Ma

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, Northeastern University

Title: EVOKE: Efficient and High-Fidelity EEG-to-Video Reconstruction via Decoupling Implicit Neural Representation

Abstract:
Visual neural decoding is an important research topic at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and machine learning. While recent progress has been made in EEGbased neural decoding, reconstructing dynamic visual content remains challenging. In the field of EEG decoding, current models either utilize pre-trained encoders for feature extraction or employ graph neural networks to represent the spatio-temporal information embedding, resulting in poor model representation and high complexity. We propose EVOKE -- an innovative framework for zero-shot decoding of high-fidelity videos from EEG signals. EVOKE employs Implicit Neural Representations to perform complete spatial modeling of EEG and continuously decouples information in the EEG-INR perceptual space. Additionally, we construct a Hierarchical-aware Attention Module (HAM) to decode EEG from three feature anchors: visual, semantic, motion, and progressively control task inference. The Motion Attention Flow (MAF) we developed overcomes the limitations of capturing motion features in dynamic stimuli, creating a more robust representation that enhances reconstruction consistency. Comprehensive experiments prove that SOTA performance of EVOKE (0.353 SSIM, 0.715 CLIP-pcc). We provide an effective method for converting brain activity into rich visual experiences and set a new benchmark for brain multimodal generation.

PaperID: 3685

Authors:Namyup Kim, Jinsung Lee, Suha Kwak

Affiliations: Pohang University of Science and Technology

Title: Improving Target Presence and Plurality Recognition for Generalized Referring Image Segmentation

Abstract:
Generalized referring image segmentation (RIS) aims to segment regions in an image described by a natural language expression, handling not only singletarget but also no- and multi-target scenarios. Previous approaches have proposed new components that enable a conventional RIS model to handle these additional scenarios, such as a target presence prediction head for no-target scenarios and multiple mask candidates for multi-target cases. However, we observe that these methods predominantly rely on the conventional RIS backbone without fully integrating the additional components and thus still struggle in such general scenarios. To address this, we propose an effective framework specifically tailored to handle no-target and multi-target scenarios, incorporating both architectural and data-driven approaches. Our architecture employs a learnable query designed to understand both target presence and plurality. While this approach alone outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods with similar computational requirements, we further introduce a novel data augmentation strategy that enables our framework to surpass computationally intensive LMM-based approaches.

PaperID: 3686

Authors:Zhirui Kuai, Huan Zhang, Yang Yang, Yiping Ma, Mingjing Huang, Ning Gui, Li Kuang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University

Title: Generating-Filtering-Ranking: A Three-Stage MultiModal Data Augmentation Framework Under Partial Modality Missing

Abstract:
Multimodal data significantly improves the performance of pretrained models, but its practical application is often limited by missing or incomplete data across modalities. There are two key challenges that existing methods of synthesizing missing data face: (1) semantic inaccuracies due to model hallucinations and (2) discrepancies in distribution preferences between generated and original data. To address these challenges, we propose a novel threestage multimodal data augmentation framework (GFR), which Generate, Filter, and Rank missing modality data. Our framework leverages multimodal large models for diverse data generation, designs a scene graph matching-based filtering algorithm to ensure semantic consistency, and constructs a preference-aware ranking model to align the generated data with both the original distribution and task relevance. Our framework not only enhances semantic diversity and consistency in data generation but also effectively captures the implicit characteristics of the original dataset and the target model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of GFR across multiple datasets by testing different missing types and missing ratios.

PaperID: 3687

Authors:Chenglong Li, Zhengyu Chen, Yifei Deng, Aihua Zheng

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University, School of Computer Science and Technology

Title: Dual-Teacher Interactive Knowledge Distillation Network for Text-to-Visible & Infrared Person Retrieval

Abstract:
Textto-visible & infrared person retrieval aims to retrieve the corresponding visible (RGB) and thermal infrared (TIR) images given the text descriptions. Existing methods perform semantic decoupling by aligning RGB and TIR features separately to different attributes, thereby facilitating the alignment between the fused multimodal representation and the text. However, insufficient TIR representation ability and cross-view representation capabilities of RGB and TIR modalities limit the retrieval accuracy and robustness. To address these issues, we propose a novel Dual-teacher Interactive Knowledge Distillation Network called DIKDNet, which performs the interactive knowledge distillation between two modality-specific teachers with rich cross-view representation capabilities to enhance TIR representations and the collaborative knowledge distillation from both teachers to the corresponding students to enhance the cross-modal cross-view representations, for robust text-to-visible & infrared person retrieval. Specifically, to enhance the representation ability of the TIR backbone network while preserving modality-specific characteristics, we design an Interactive Knowledge Distillation Module (IKDM), which introduces a boundary-constrained distillation strategy between RGB and TIR backbones, to transfer the semantic features of RGB backbone to TIR one. To enhance the cross-modal cross-view representation capability, we design a Collaborative Knowledge Distillation Module (CKDM) to transfer the cross-modal similarity relations and the cross-view multimodal representations from teacher networks to student ones. Experimental results demonstrate that our method consistently achieves significant performance gains on both the RGBT-PEDES and RGBNT201-PEDES datasets. The code will be released upon the acceptance.

PaperID: 3688

Authors:Chunming Li, Shidong Wang, Haofeng Zhang

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Newcastle University

Title: Learning a Fix and Explore Framework for Continuous Generalized Category Discovery

Abstract:
To address the limitations of transductive learning in evolving realworld scenarios where unknown categories may continuously emerge, Continual Generalized Category Discovery (C-GCD) presents a novel paradigm that extends conventional category discovery frameworks. Unlike traditional static learning environments, C-GCD requires models to incrementally discover novel categories across multiple operational phases while maintaining discrimination capabilities for previously learned classes, posing significant challenges in balancing stability and plasticity. Prior approaches typically employ parameter-level knowledge distillation from historical models to alleviate catastrophic forgetting, which effectively preserves prior knowledge and optimizes computational efficiency. However, our analysis reveals that the persistent availability of samples from previous stages enables more sophisticated knowledge preservation strategies. Specifically, we present a Fix and Explore strategy that employs distinct learning methodologies for different types of potential data, aiming to preserve the features of old categories as much as possible and gradually exploring the potential distribution of new class latent spaces, we can enhance the model's ability to discover novel categories. This paper investigates this effect and introduces a novel heuristic paradigm to solve the C-GCD problem, called Fix and Explore (FaE), which aims to provide sufficient imaginative space for new classes while preserving the classification ability for old tasks. We conducted experiments across multiple datasets and performed detailed comparisons. The results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance at each stage across all datasets.

PaperID: 3689

Authors:Jiawen Li, Fei Jiang, Dandan Zhu, Jinxin Shi, Aimin Zhou

Affiliations: East China Normal University, Chongqing academy of Science and Technology

Title: CLIP2Pose: Frozen CLIP as Semantic Guide for Domain Adaptive Pose Estimation

Abstract:
Unsupervised domain adaptive pose estimation is a fundamental yet challenging task due to the need to transfer from labeled synthetic data to unlabeled real data. Nevertheless, the underlying pose semantics, which are governed by spatial structure, remain largely consistent across domains. This observation motivates the use of visionlanguage models, which provide domain-invariant representations that align well with high-level semantic concepts. Motivated by this, we propose CLIP2Pose, a novel framework that leverages the semantic robustness of frozen CLIP encoders to facilitate cross-domain generalization. We first introduce a semantic-driven prompt mechanism that encodes structural priors, domain-specific appearance, and instance-level context into the image representation. This guides the model to focus on semantically meaningful and structurally relevant features. Next, we propose a semantic modulation module that adaptively refines visual features by conditioning them on prompt-derived embeddings, enhancing alignment between semantics and visual patterns. To further bridge the modality and domain gaps, we design a directional alignment loss that encourages consistent structural reasoning across both vision and language representations. Extensive experiments on domain adaptive human body and hand pose benchmarks show that CLIP2Pose achieves state-of-the-art performance.

PaperID: 3690

Authors:Jingxiong Li, Chenglu Zhu, Sunyi Zheng, Yuxuan Sun, Yifei Wang, He Liu, Yunlong Zhang, Yixuan Si, Lin Yang, Liang Xiao

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing China, School of Engineering, Westlake University, Hangzhou China, Tianjin Medical University Cancer Institute and Hospital, Department of Radiology, Tianjin China, Nanjing First Hospital, Nanjing Medical University, Department of Cardiology, Xuzhou Central Hospital, Xuzhou China

Title: MIRA: Evaluating Multimodal AI on Complex Clinical Reasoning in Interventional Radiology

Abstract:
We present MIRA (Multimodal Interventional RAdiology evaluation), a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating large multimodal models in expertlevel interventional radiology tasks requiring specialized domain knowledge and advanced visual reasoning capabilities. Unlike existing medical benchmarks that primarily provide binary labels without contextual depth, MIRA offers diverse question formats, including open-ended, closed-ended, single-choice, and multiple-choice categories, each accompanied by detailed expert-validated explanations. The benchmark incorporates approximately 184K high-quality medical images spanning multiple imaging modalities with 1.2M meticulously generated question-answer pairs across various anatomical regions. These pairs were created through a sophisticated cascade methodology involving expert interventional radiologists at both the data collection and validation stages. Our comprehensive evaluation, encompassing zero-shot testing and fine-tuning experiments of large multimodal models, revealing significant performance gaps between AI systems and human specialists. Fine-tuning experiments demonstrate substantial improvements, with models achieving up to 0.80 accuracy on single-choice questions. MIRA establishes a challenging benchmark that suggests promising directions for developing specialized clinical AI systems for interventional radiology.

PaperID: 3691

Authors:Xun Liang, Zhiying Li, Hongxun Jiang

Affiliations: Renmin University of China

Title: FAMDR: Feature-Aligned Multimodal Denoising for Reliable Diagnostic Reconciliation in Medical Imaging

Abstract:
This paper presents FAMDR, a FeatureAligned Multimodal Denoising framework for Reliable Diagnostic Reconciliation. Existing approaches suffer from two major limitations: (1) an overemphasis on simplifying observational descriptions and (2) a failure to denoise the misleading content in radiological findings against clinical histories. Current methods often dismiss such cross-modal inconsistencies as noise rather than clinically significant signals. To bridge this gap, the framework integrates four synergistic components: (1) noise-aware multimodal alignment that preserves discriminative discrepancy features while ensuring semantic coherence, (2) cross-modal retrieval augmentation leveraging external medical knowledge to resolve ambiguous cases, (3) granular localization of noises at pixel and phrase levels using adaptive thresholding, and (4) medical noise uncertainty quantification to provide reliable confidence estimates. Evaluated on an extended MIMIC-CXR dataset enriched with expert-annotated noise and longitudinal records, FAMDR achieves superior accuracy in semantic denoising and inconsistency localization while preserving clinical interpretability. Its capability to generate actionable, uncertainty-aware reports advances safer and more reliable integration into diagnostic workflows.

PaperID: 3692

Authors:Chen Liu, Wen Li, Yongshu Huang, Minghang Zhu, Yuyang Yang, Dunqiang Liu, Sheng Ao, Cheng Wang

Affiliations: Xiamen University

Title: RCP-LO: A Relative Coordinate Prediction Framework for Generalizable Deep LiDAR Odometry

Abstract:
LiDAR odometry is a critical component of SLAM in autonomous driving and robotics. Learningbased methods have shown remarkable performance by regressing relative poses in an end-to-end manner. However, when applying these trained models, originally developed on the widely used KITTI dataset, to other scenes, performance often drops significantly. In other words, existing methods struggle to generalize well to new environments. To address this challenge, we propose RCP-LO, a simple yet effective LiDAR odometry framework. We introduce a novel representation for relative poses, reformulating them as relative coordinates, which can then be solved using geometrical verification. This approach avoids overly simplified pose representations and makes better use of scene geometry, thereby improving generalization. Moreover, to capture the inherent uncertainties in relative pose estimation from occluded LiDAR point clouds from dynamic environments, we adapt our framework to learn a denoising diffusion model, allowing for sampling plausible relative coordinates while improving robustness. We also introduce a differentiable geometric weighted singular value decomposition module, enabling efficient pose estimation through a single forward pass. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RCP-LO, trained exclusively on the KITTI dataset, achieves competitive performance compared to SOTA learning-based methods and generalizes effectively to the KITTI-360, Ford, and Oxford datasets.

PaperID: 3693

Authors:Xu Liu, Yihong Huang, Dan Zhang, Lingling Li, Long Sun, Licheng Jiao

Affiliations: Xidian University

Title: SOAR: Semi-Supervised Open-Vocabulary Aerial Object Detection via Dual-Aware Enhanced Prior Denoising

Abstract:
OpenVocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) shows promise in remote sensing (RS), but due to its unique value, there are challenges such as the predominance of background regions, sparse labels, limited semantic information, and difficulties in semi-supervised training. To tackle these challenges, we propose the Semi-Supervised Open-Vocabulary Aerial Object Detection with Dual-Perception Prior Denoising (SOAR), which explicitly models the background embeddings of each scene to indirectly construct foreground priors, thereby capitalizing on the abundant background information present in RS imagery. We further introduce a query enhancement module that integrates language and foreground prior information to enhance the effectiveness of query selection and feature augmentation. During the decoding stage of semi-supervised training, we perform denoising and reconstruction of the foreground priors to generate pseudo-labels that support the training process. Additionally, we address the sparsity of label information through expansion and aggregation techniques, further improving model performance. Experimental evaluations reveal that, in the open-vocabulary object detection task on the DIOR dataset, our method achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 68.5% and Harmonic Mean (HM) of 55.9%, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art model’s mAP of 61.6% and HM of 53.6%. Our approach offers a novel solution to the open-vocabulary challenge in aerial object detection.

PaperID: 3694

Authors:Xingyuan Ma, Shuai He, Anlong Ming, Haobin Zhong, Huadong Ma

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: Regression over Classification: Assessing Image Aesthetics via Multimodal Large Language Models

Abstract:
Image Aesthetics Assessment (IAA) evaluates visual quality through usercentered perceptual analysis and can guide various applications. Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have sparked interest in adapting them for IAA. However, two critical limitations persist in applying MLLMs to IAA: 1) the tokenization strategy leads to insensitivity to scores, and 2) the classification-based decoding mechanisms introduce score quantization errors. Current MLLM-based IAA methods treat the task as coarse rating classification followed by probability-to-score mapping, which loses fine-grained information. To address these challenges, we propose ROC4MLLM, offering complementary solutions from two perspectives:1) Representation: We separate scores from the word token space to avoid tokenizing scores as text. An independent position token bridges these spaces, improving the sensitivity of the model to score positions in text. 2) Computation: We apply distinct loss functions for text and score predictions to enhance the sensitivity of the model to score gradients. Decoupling scores from text ensures effective supervision while preventing interference between scores and text in the loss computation. Extensive experiments across five datasets demonstrate that ROC4MLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance without requiring additional training data. Additionally, its plug-and-play design ensures seamless integration with existing MLLMs, boosting their IAA performance.

PaperID: 3695

Authors:Lingzhuang Meng, Mingwen Shao, Xiang Lv, Mengyao Wu, Yuanjian Qiao, Jie Zhang

Affiliations: China University of Petroleum (East China), Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology, Inner Mongolia University

Title: Anti-Avatar: Protect Against Unauthorized 3D Head Avatar Generation via Dual-Space Divergence

Abstract:
Head avatar generation is facilitated to construct highfidelity 3D virtual personas from a single portrait, but it also raises the risk of unauthorized personal avatars generation. Recent 2D portrait protection methods actively prevent malicious image generation by perturbing the identity features. However, there are two key limitations when directly applied to prevent 3D head avatar generation: 1) These methods neglect the inherent 3D geometric structure of portrait, thus failing to disrupt the modeling of 3D shapes or poses. 2) They focus only on identity offset and are unable to interfere with the overall appearance, resulting in excessive preservation of facial characteristics. To overcomes these limitations, we propose a 3D defense framework termed Anti-Avatar, tailored to protect against unauthorized 3D head avatar generation from a single portrait. Specifically, Anti-Avatar consists of two key designs: Geometric Disruption and Perceptual Confusion. The former disrupts the precise reconstruction of 3D structure by interfering with the estimation of geometric parameters, thus affecting the structural accuracy of the 3D avatar. Collaboratively, the latter confuses image features by dispersing attention distribution, thereby hindering the effective perception of portrait appearance. Benefiting from the above dual-space divergence in geometry and perception, the avatars generated by our protected portraits exhibit substantial discrepancies from the originals. Extensive experiments show that our Anti-Avatar outperforms 2D methods in protection performance and effectively resists reconstruction and manipulation by state-of-the-art 3D head avatar generation methods.

PaperID: 3696

Authors:Yang Ouyang, Zihan Cheng, Xiaotong Luo, Guoqi Li, Yanyun Qu

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing. Ministry of Education of China, School of Informatics, Xiamen University, Hong Kong, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: SpikingIR: A Novel Converted Spiking Neural Network for Efficient Image Restoration

Abstract:
Image restoration has made great progress with the rise of deep learning, but its energy consumption limits its realworld applications. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are seen as energy-efficient alternatives to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). Applying SNNs to image restoration (IR) remains challenging, primarily due to the limited information capacity of spike-based signals. This limitation leads to quantization errors and information loss, while IR tasks are highly sensitive to output precision and error. Thus, the restoration performance suffers significantly. To address this challenge, we propose SpikingIR, an ANN-to-SNN conversion framework for IR that reduces information loss and quantization error. SpikingIR mainly consists of two components: Convolutional Pixel Mapping (CPM) and Membrane Potential Reuse Neuron (MPRN), which are designed to alleviate quantization errors and information loss in the output and intermediate layers, respectively. Specifically, CPM maps discrete outputs into a continuous space, better aligning with pixel-level details. From the perspective of information entropy, we show that outputs of CPM contain more information than the original outputs. MPRN introduces a post-processing step with relaxed firing conditions to extract residual membrane potential, reducing information waste. Furthermore, we fine-tune the converted model to jointly optimize both accuracy and energy efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that SpikingIR achieves performance comparable to ANN counterparts across various IR benchmarks while reducing energy consumption by up to 50%.

PaperID: 3697

Authors:Renjie Pan, Jiayan Song, Hua Yang

Affiliations: School of Information Science and Electronical Engineering, School of Integrated Circuits, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: OneLIP: Unlocking and Improving Long-Text Representations of CLIP via One-Stage Adaptation

Abstract:
Contrastive LanguageImage Pretraining (CLIP) has demonstrated impressive generalization on vision-language tasks by aligning images and short texts. However, its inherent 77-token length limits the capacity of capturing complex semantics in long captions. Existing long-text adaptations for CLIP typically rely on either multi-stage training or truncation-based alignment, both inevitably resulting in semantic degradation and cumbersome tuning. Therefore, we propose OneLIP, a unified framework that extends CLIP to understand long captions within a single training stage, eliminating the need for brittle truncation or multi-stage pipelines. OneLIP addresses semantic degradation by introducing two key innovations: (1) Token Refinement and Importance-guided Modeling (TRIM) module, which selects and refines informative tokens via SVD-based contribution scoring and cross-modal relevance modeling; (2) Per-sample Online Hard Negative Mining (PO-HNM) strategy dynamically maintains sample-specific negatives based on dual-consistency difficulty tracking, which is superior in long-text scenarios where key semantics are distributed in scattered positions. Extensive experiments on long-text image retrieval, short-text image retrieval, zero-shot classification, and text-to-image generation demonstrate OneLIP's robustness and versatility across diverse input lengths, offering a faithful solution for long-text representation learning of CLIP.

PaperID: 3698

Authors:Fanhao Qiu, Yangyang Zhang, Zhengxia Wang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Hainan University, School of Information and Communication Engineering

Title: Graph-Semantic Guided Learning for Virtual Immunohistochemistry Staining on Consecutive Histology Sections

Abstract:
Virtual Immunohistochemistry (IHC) staining technology employs generative models to directly synthesize IHC images from Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) images, reducing reliance on chemical staining while improving diagnostic efficiency and reducing costs. However, existing virtual staining methods relying on adjacent sections face two critical challenges: insufficient mining of pathological semantics and the spatial misalignment of pathological semantics due to physical discrepancies between sections. To address these, we propose GSGStain, a GraphSemantic Guided Learning for virtual Staining. Our method innovatively transforms the problem from pixel space to graph space, enabling semantic noise correction for spatial misalignment features. Specifically, to capture the rich pathological semantics, we construct a cell graph from the H&E image to encode tissue architecture, annotating nodes with noisy biomarker semantic features derived from misaligned adjacent IHC sections. Furthermore, to correct for the semantic misalignment, a Graph Semantic Rectification Module (GSRM) then refines these features using graph contextual reasoning, while a Graph Semantic Consistency Loss ensures alignment between generated IHC images and rectified semantics. Additionally, we propose a dual-branch discriminator to compel the generator to match the empirical distribution of real images, significantly improving generation quality. Extensive experiments on two public benchmarks demonstrate that GSGStain significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both image quality and pathological consistency. This work establishes a new paradigm for semantically robust virtual staining.

PaperID: 3699

Authors:Heqian Qiu, Lanxiao Wang, Taijin Zhao, Zhaofeng Shi, Xiang Li, Linfeng Xu, Hongliang Li

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Ego-PMOVE: Prompt-aware Mixture of View Experts Network for Egocentric Gaze Prediction

Abstract:
Egocentric gaze prediction serves as a critical indicator for decoding human visual attention and cognitive processes, but its inherently limited field of view creates prediction challenges. Although exoview data provides supplementary contextual information, it exhibits significant spatial and semantic gaps. Existing methods focus solely on isolated feature encoding in single-view paradigms, neglecting cross-view gaze correlations. To make up for this gap, we make the first exploration of cross-view gaze relationship for egocentric gaze prediction, and propose Ego-PMOVE, a novel Prompt-aware Mixture of View Experts network. Unlike prior cross-view studies that forcibly align cross-view features thereby introducing inference noise, we leverage the popular Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) and a set of flexible prompts to disentangle features from different views into three parallel experts: a view-shared expert directly modeling common semantic relationships, a view-discrepancy expert adaptively adjusting the spatial position, scale and shifts based on different view-specific features, and an egocentric expert extracting independent features to compensate for the case of missing exocentric data. To balance these experts, we further design a soft router to dynamically weight them for mining useful information while suppressing noise. A view-query gaze decoder then generates view-specific gaze attention maps, jointly optimized by gaze-heamap and cross-view contrastive loss that regularize both shared and divergent features for accurate gaze prediction. Extensive experiments across the multi-view EgoMe dataset and single-view Ego4D and EGTEA Gaze++ datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our approach.

PaperID: 3700

Authors:Ziang Tan, Weitao An, Erkun Yang

Affiliations: Xidian University

Title: Meta-Guided Sample Reweighting for Robust Cross-Modal Hashing Retrieval with Noisy Labels

Abstract:
Crossmodal hashing (CMH) is an effective tool for large-scale retrieval due to its low storage cost and high efficiency. However, real-world multi-modal datasets often contain noisy annotations, which can significantly impair model performance. Many existing methods address this issue by using the small-loss criterion to select a likely clean subset of data to guide model training. Nonetheless, this clean subset is typically dominated by easy samples, and treating all samples within it equally can undermine the model’s generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a novel meta-learning-based framework, named Meta-Guided Sample Reweighting for Cross-Modal Hashing Retrieval (MGSH), which integrates meta-learning into robust cross-modal hashing. To address the above issues, we design a Meta-Similarity Weighting Network (MSWN) that dynamically assigns importance weights to samples during training. By employing a bi-level optimization strategy, the meta-importance weights are used to scale the loss of training samples during the main network update, encouraging the model to focus on more challenging examples. Additionally, to further distinguish between noisy and clean samples, we incorporate adaptive-margin and meta-guided center aggregation into a robust hashing loss, both guided by the learned meta-importance weights. Extensive experiments on three widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that MGSH consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating its effectiveness.

PaperID: 3701

Authors:Haoyang Tong, Hongbo Wang, Jin Liu, Qi Wang, Jie Cao, Ran He

Affiliations: MAIS & NLPR, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, School of Artificial Intelligence

Title: CoGrad3D: Spatially-Coupled Timestep Optimization with Orthogonal Gradient Fusion for 3D Generation

Abstract:
Score Distillation Sampling has driven recent advances in textto-3D generation. However, current approaches often fail to produce 3D assets that are both rich in detail and consistent across viewpoints. These limitations primarily arise from imbalanced guidance on fine-grained details and an overdependence on single-view optimization—issues exacerbated by the excessive randomness in selecting diffusion timesteps and camera configurations. Such deficiencies commonly lead to blurry textures and inter-view inconsistencies, which degrade visual realism and hinder practical deployment. To tackle these challenges, we introduce CoGrad3D, a unified generative refinement framework that adopts a continuously adaptive optimization strategy. By dynamically modulating the optimization focus based on real-time convergence signals, CoGrad3D ensures balanced progress toward both geometric completeness and high-fidelity detail. Concretely, we propose an adaptive region sampling strategy that emphasizes under-converged viewing areas, promoting stable and uniform optimization. To facilitate the transition from coarse geometry to fine-grained reconstruction, we develop a region-aware temporal scheduling scheme that integrates global training dynamics with local convergence feedback. Furthermore, we introduce a gradient fusion mechanism that consolidates historical gradients from adjacent viewpoints, mitigating view-specific artifacts and promoting the emergence of coherent 3D structures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoGrad3D substantially surpasses existing methods in both geometric consistency and texture fidelity, enabling the generation of high-quality, view-consistent 3D models from textual descriptions.

PaperID: 3702

Authors:Huabin Wang, Yu Yang, Xinran Zhong, Zilong Ling

Affiliations: Anhui Provincial International Joint Research Center for Advanced Technology in Medical Imaging, School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University, Anhui Guimu Robot Co.

Title: Multi-Window Gabor Transform Network for Ground Penetrating Radar B-Scan Image Reconstruction

Abstract:
Transmitting and receiving electromagnetic wave signals reflected back to the ground can detect the structure of subsurface defects. However, the imaging process of groundpenetrating radar (GPR) is highly susceptible to interference from complex underground environments, leading to nonlinear attenuation and noise. This makes it challenging to directly locate and identify defect types from raw reflected radar waveform images. Currently, mainstream methods of manual radar signal gain and filtering heavily rely on expert experience, while common end-to-end generative models are typically designed for optical images. This paper proposes a defect-guided Multi-window Gabor Transform Network (MGT-Net) for GPR B-Scan image reconstruction which achieves automatic gain and defect enhancement of raw GPR signals. Firstly, a Multi-window Gabor Transform Module (MGTM) is designed to effectively represent and extract spatial-frequency features of defects at different locations and of various types. Secondly, a defect guidance network (DG-Net) is constructed to accurately direct the reconstruction of defect areas and enhance the saliency and discriminability of defect features. Additionally, we construct a large-scale GPR B-Scan image dataset (GRD) containing 41,613 images across 7 defect categories. Experimental results show the superior performance of MGT-Net, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) SSIM of 81.72% ± 3.5% and PSNR of 30.50 ± 0.442.

PaperID: 3703

Authors:Lin Wang, Shiliang Sun, Jing Zhao

Affiliations: East China Normal University

Title: Temporal and Spatial Representation Learning for Multimodal Low-Beam 3D Object Detection

Abstract:
To facilitate the largescale deployment of autonomous driving in real-world scenarios, developing low-cost and high-performance 3D object detection systems has become a critical technical challenge. Although high-beam LiDARs provide denser point cloud data, their prohibitive hardware cost and high power consumption limit their practicality. In contrast, low-beam LiDARs offer advantages in terms of affordability and energy efficiency, but often suffer from inadequate perception accuracy due to their sparser point cloud data. This paper focuses on the task of multimodal 3D object detection with low-beam LiDARs, and proposes a novel approach that integrates temporal and spatial representation learning to enhance detection accuracy under sparser sensor conditions. Specifically, our approach comprises: (1) a Temporal Feature Prediction Learning (TFPL) module, which predicts the current BEV representation based on a sequence of historical BEV features; (2) a Spatial Feature Observation Learning (SFOL) module, which aligns BEV (Bird's-Eye-View) features from high-beam and low-beam LiDAR to enforce the low-beam features to approximate high-beam representations; (3) an Uncertainty-Aware Fusion (UAF) strategy, which performs feature-wise weighting between the predicted and observed BEV features by leveraging channel-wise variances, effectively mitigating perturbations in the learned BEV representations. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and nuScenes 3D object detection datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly improves detection performance under low-beam LiDAR configurations.

PaperID: 3704

Authors:Yuesong Wang, Dounian Ma, Xiaoyu Chen, Tao Guan

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, University of California, San Diego

Title: PATexGS: Perceptual-Adaptive Texture Scheduling for Visual Coherence in Textured Gaussian Splatting

Abstract:
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a mainstream solution for realtime rendering and high-fidelity novel view synthesis. Building on this foundation, methods based on Textured Gaussians further improve the expression ability by incorporating explicit texture mapping into Gaussians. However, their reliance on fixed texture resolution often results in noticeable visual incoherence, triggering artifacts such as aliasing or inconsistent sharpness under different viewpoints. To address these issues, we propose PATexGS, a perceptual-adaptive texture scheduling framework designed to improve visual coherence for Textured Gaussians. Specifically, we introduce an entropy-guided texture allocation strategy that dynamically adjusts texture resolution based on each Gaussian’s spatial gradient and rendering contribution, constantly preserving details while being memory efficiency. Furthermore, we incorporate a mipmap-inspired hierarchical scheduling mechanism that adaptively schedule texture levels according to view-dependent projection scale, effectively suppressing aliasing and further enhancing perceptual consistency. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world scenes demonstrate that PATexGS significantly improves visual coherence while maintaining high rendering quality, outperforming existing TexturedGS variants in both perceptual fidelity and storage efficiency.

PaperID: 3705

Authors:Sifan Wu, Haipeng Chen, Yingda Lyu, Shaojing Fan, Zhigang Wang, Zhenguang Liu, Yingying Jiao

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, The State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University, Ltd. Hangzhou High-Tech Zone (Binjiang) Institute of Blockchain and Data Security

Title: Dual Coding Theory in Action: Language-Assisted Human Pose Estimation in Videos

Abstract:
Videobased human pose estimation aims to localize keypoints across frames, enabling robust analysis of human motion in applications such as sports, surveillance, and healthcare. However, existing methods rely solely on visual cues, limiting their robustness in complex scenes involving occlusion, motion blur, or poor lighting. In contrast, dual coding theory from psychology suggests that human cognition is inherently multimodal: we learn by integrating visual perception with linguistic context to form structured, semantic understandings of the world. Visual input provides concrete spatiotemporal grounding, while language offers symbolic abstraction that enhances reasoning and generalization. Motivated by this cognitive principle, we present the first framework that explicitly incorporates language as an auxiliary modality to enhance video-based pose estimation. To address the lack of paired video-text datasets, we first employ a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to generate textual descriptions of human interactions from videos. We then propose a novel coarse-to-fine multimodal alignment pipeline: a cross-modal semantic interaction module establishes initial grounding between spatiotemporal visual features and textual embeddings, while an optimal transport-based feature matching mechanism enforces fine-grained, geometry-aware alignment. This cognitively inspired design enables more accurate and robust pose estimation, especially in visually challenging scenes like occlusion and motion blur. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks confirm that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

PaperID: 3706

Authors:Sifan Wu, Haipeng Chen, Yingda Lyu, Shaojing Fan, Zhigang Wang, Zhenguang Liu, Yingying Jiao

Title: Attentive Keypoint Identification: Progressive Spatiotemporal Refinement for Video-based Human Pose Estimation

Abstract:
Videobased human pose estimation has vast applications such as action recognition, sports analytics, and crime detection. However, this task is challenging as it involves interpreting both spatial context and temporal dynamics to accurately localize human anatomical keypoints in video sequences. Current approaches, often based on attention mechanisms, perform well but struggle in challenging scenarios like rapid motion and pose occlusion. We attribute these failures to two fundamental limitations: spatial uniformity, where models indiscriminately assign attention to both joint-relevant features and background clutter, thereby introducing spatial noise; and temporal rigidity, an inability to adapt to large joint displacements, resulting in severe feature misalignment during rapid motion. To overcome these challenges, we introduce PSTPose, a novel progressive spatiotemporal refinement framework. Specifically, to address the spatial uniformity problem, we propose a Discriminative Feature Enhancement (DFE) module that emphasizes joint-relevant features and a Feature Cluster Grouping (FCG) module that forms compact, semantically meaningful regions. For the temporal rigidity problem, we introduce a Deformable Spatiotemporal Fusion (DSF) module that adaptively aligns features across consecutive frames via deformation-aware sampling. This design ensures robust keypoint localization, particularly in cluttered and dynamic scenes. Extensive experiments on three large-scale benchmarks, PoseTrack2017, PoseTrack2018, PoseTrack21, demonstrate that PSTPose establishes a new state-of-the-art.

PaperID: 3707

Authors:Zhihao Wu, Yuxin Lin, Jie Wen, Wuzhen Shi, Linlin Shen

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Visual Object Detection and Recognition, Harbin Institute of Technology, College of Electronics and Information Engineering

Title: Incomplete Multi-view Diabetic Retinopathy Grading via Self-Supervised Inter- and Intra-View Restoration

Abstract:
Multiview diabetic retinopathy (DR) grading has achieved remarkable performance by capturing more comprehensive pathological features than single-view methods. However, complete multi-view fundus images are often difficult to obtain in clinical practice, and the performance degrades significantly when fewer views are available. To overcome this limitation, we propose the first incomplete multi-view DR grading framework, aiming to provide accurate diagnosis regardless of the number of available views. It introduces two novel modules. First, cross-view spatial correlation attention (CSCA) captures region correlations across views, automatically identifying and fusing diagnostically relevant spatial features to improve feature representation. Second, self-supervised mask consistency learning (SMCL) formulates a novel pretext task of missing-view information reconstruction by strategically masking inter- and intra-view regions, enabling the model to infer complete features from incomplete views. Benefiting from CSCA and SMCL, our method enhances structural feature consistency across views and effectively compensates for missing information during DR grading. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art grading performance, particularly under realistic conditions where some views are unavailable.

PaperID: 3708

Authors:Peng Xiang, Liang Han, Hui Zhang, Yu-Shen Liu, Zhizhong Han

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Wayne State University

Title: VGGS: VGGT-guided Gaussian Splatting for Efficient and Faithful Sparse-View Surface Reconstruction

Abstract:
Reconstructing a faithful geometric surface from sparse images remains a fundamental challenge in 3D computer vision. While recent methods have achieved remarkable progress, they still struggle to recover reliable geometry due to the lack of multiview geometric cues, particularly in non-overlapping regions. To address this issue, we introduce VGGS, a Gaussian Splatting (GS) method that exploits multi-view geometric priors from VGGT for efficient and high-fidelity sparse-view surface reconstruction. Our primary contribution is an anchor-calibrated depth estimation scheme, which yields accurate depth maps. The insight is to align the VGGT depth prior to the underlying surface with a sparse set of multi-view consistent anchors, then infer depth for unreliable regions by relative depth estimation. Furthermore, to mitigate misalignment in complex scenes, we propose a relative depth consistency loss that penalizes the rendered depth if its relative depth relationship in local regions is inconsistent to the multi-view prior. Extensive experiments on widely-used benchmarks show that VGGS surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and efficiency, delivering 4–7× faster optimization while reducing memory consumption compared to previous GS-based approaches.

PaperID: 3709

Authors:Yun Xiao, Yuhang Wang, Jiandong Jin, Wankang Zhang, Chenglong Li

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Opto-Electronic Information Acquisition and Protection Technology, China Anhui Provincial Key Laboratory of Multimodal Congnitive Computation, Anhui University, School of Artificial Intelligence, School of Computer Science and Technology

Title: Unaligned UAV RGBT Tracking: A Largescale Benchmark and a Novel Approach

Abstract:
With the rapid development of the lowaltitude economy, multimodal visual tracking in UAV scenarios has attracted extensive attention. UAVs are typically equipped with independent visible (RGB) and thermal infrared (TIR) sensors, resulting in an inherent spatial misalignment between the two modalities. However, existing RGBT tracking methods generally rely on spatially aligned data inputs, making them unsuitable for unaligned RGBT tracking task in UAV scenarios. In this work, we introduce the new task called unaligned UAV RGBT tracking and construct the first large-scale unaligned RGB and TIR video dataset to promote the research and development of this field. The dataset contains 1,453 pairs of UAV-captured RGBT sequences with precise dual-modal bounding box annotations, and covers 42 object categories, 22 typical challenge attributes, and diverse spatial misalignment scales to better simulate real-world challenging scenarios. To address the limitations of existing methods that fail to handle the spatial misalignment issue in UAV scenarios, we propose the novel RGBT tracking approach. In particular, we design a mixture of shift estimation experts module to adaptively estimate the spatial shifts across two modalities at different scales, and a cross-modal alignment and fusion module to further compensate for nonlinear deformations and integrate multimodal information. Extensive experiments on the created dataset demonstrate that the proposed tracker significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art tracking methods, validating its practicality and robustness in real-world unaligned UAV tracking scenarios.

PaperID: 3710

Authors:Jingwei Xin, Kai Guo, Jie Li, Nannan Wang

Affiliations: School of Communication Engineering, Xidian University, School of Electronic Engineering

Title: Revealing the Invisible: Latent Structure Modeling for Semantically Consistent Cloud Removal

Abstract:
Cloud removal (CR) in remote sensing imagery is a critical yet challenging task due to complex cloud patterns and diverse underlying ground structures. Despite recent progress in generative models such as diffusion models, CR remains limited by their inadequate capability to perceive and reconstruct structured information beneath cloudcovered areas. In this work, we propose a Visibility-guided Semantic Estimation and Reconstruction network for cloud removal (VISER-CR), which reformulates CR as a structure-guided completion problem. Specifically, VISER-CR explicitly models cloud interference via spatial masking, encouraging the model to reason beyond pixel-level appearance and enhance scene-level structural understanding. Moreover, to further improve the representation of structural information, we introduce Patch Saliency Encoding, a self-guided mechanism that implicitly models structural alignment among patches, significantly enhancing clustering consistency and semantic separability in the latent space. This adaptive mechanism guides the network to focus on learning and reconstructing structurally important regions, thereby reducing redundancy and improving overall cloud removal performance. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior effectiveness of our method.

PaperID: 3711

Authors:Muli Yang, Gabriel James Goenawan, Henan Wang, Huaiyuan Qin, Chenghao Xu, Yanhua Yang, Fen Fang, Ying Sun, Joo Hwee Lim, Hongyuan Zhu

Affiliations: Independent Researcher, Xidian University

Title: Your AI-Generated Image Detector Can Secretly Achieve SOTA Accuracy, If Calibrated

Abstract:
Despite being trained on balanced datasets, existing AIgenerated image detectors often exhibit systematic bias at test time, frequently misclassifying fake images as real. We hypothesize that this behavior stems from distributional shift in fake samples and implicit priors learned during training. Specifically, models tend to overfit to superficial artifacts that do not generalize well across different generation methods, leading to a misaligned decision threshold when faced with test-time distribution shift. To address this, we propose a theoretically grounded post-hoc calibration framework based on Bayesian decision theory. In particular, we introduce a learnable scalar correction to the model’s logits, optimized on a small validation set from the target distribution while keeping the backbone frozen. This parametric adjustment compensates for distributional shift in model output, realigning the decision boundary even without requiring ground-truth labels. Experiments on challenging benchmarks show that our approach significantly improves robustness without retraining, offering a lightweight and principled solution for reliable and adaptive AI-generated image detection in the open world.

PaperID: 3712

Authors:Ting Yang, Siyu Yang, Xiyao Liu, Songtao Wu, Gerald Schaefer, Kuanhong Xu, Hui Fang

Affiliations: Central South University, Sony (China) Limited, Loughborough University

Title: ACID-Style: An Adaptive Condition Injection Diffusion Model for Arbitrary Style Transfer

Abstract:
Arbitrary style transfer (AST), a popular AIpowered photo editing function, aims to strike an optimal balance between content and style injection from two images in order to generate a novel high-fidelity stylised image. Recently, diffusion models have been applied to AST due to their high generation quality as well as flexibility to embed conditions. However, these models are still not satisfactory and may exhibit inferior performance compared to non-diffusion based methods. This is due to the diffusion process not being purposely designed for AST, leading to suboptimal solutions to trade-off content preservation and style embedding. In this paper, we propose ACID-Style, a novel adaptive condition injection diffusion-based AST framework for improved content/style feature injection to address this research challenge. Using two lightweight adapters, a content and a style injection module, and an adaptive injection mechanism, our approach is able to fully exploit a pre-trained stable diffusion model for AST-specific adaptation and our diffusion model thus learns the most effective timing for content and style injection in the diffusion sampling process. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves superior style transfer performance, both quantitatively and qualitatively, compared to other state-of-the-art style transfer methods.

PaperID: 3713

Authors:Yutong Yang, Lifu Huang, Yijie Lin, Xi Peng, Mouxing Yang

Affiliations: Sichuan University, Nanyang Technological University, National Key Laboratory of Fundamental Algorithms and Models for Engineering Numerical Simulation

Title: Endowing Vision-Language Models with System 2 Thinking for Fine-grained Visual Recognition

Abstract:
VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) excel at extracting salient visual features from query images, thus exhibiting promising visual recognition performance. However, VLMs would encounter significant degradation in fine-grained scenarios due to their deficiency in distinguishing nuanced differences among candidate categories. As a remedy, we draw inspiration from the ``System 1 & System 2" cognitive theory of humans, paving the way to achieve fine-grained recognition for VLMs. To be specific, we observe that VLMs naturally align with System 1, quickly identifying candidate categories but leaving easily-confused ones unresolved. Based on the observation, we propose System-2 enhanCed visuAl recogNition (SCAN), a novel plug-and-play approach that makes VLMs aware of nuanced differences. In brief, SCAN first specifies and abstracts the discriminative attributes for the confused candidate categories and query images by resorting to off-the-shelf large foundation models, respectively. After that, SCAN adaptively integrates the salient visual features from System 1 with the nuanced differences derived from System 2, resolving confusion in candidates with estimated uncertainty. Extensive experiments on eight widely used fine-grained recognition benchmarks against 10 state-of-the-art baselines verify the effectiveness and superiority of SCAN.

PaperID: 3714

Authors:Ziwei Yao, Qian Wang, Ruiping Wang, Xilin Chen

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of AI Safety of CAS, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Tell as You Want: Customizing Image Narrative with Knowledge and Thoughts

Abstract:
With the advancement of visionlanguage models, image captioning has made significant progress, leading to the generation of more accurate and detailed descriptions. Current image captioning primarily focuses on describing the apparent visual characteristics, which are easily observed by most humans, but less helpful in real-world scenarios. When users seek a deeper understanding of visual content, they may be concerned with fine-grained categories, function properties, and other background knowledge, rather than merely appearances. Additionally, as users' interests vary, there is a growing demand for customizable content generation. To address these challenges, we propose the task of image narrative generation, which aims to produce knowledge-rich natural language responses for input images, customized to the user preference. Furthermore, we propose T^4, an image narrative generation model progressing through cascade steps: Tailor, reTrieve, Think, and Tell. Specifically, it takes the image and various types of prompts as input, and first refines or predicts potentially interesting queries that are tailored to the user expertise level. Subsequently, the model enriches contextual knowledge through retrieval-augmentation and employs chain-of-thoughts to decompose the generation process step by step, thereby telling an accurate and logically coherent image narrative. In addition, we construct the ImgNarr-23K dataset to support task training and evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach generates image narratives that better satisfy user requirements, and achieves state-of-the-art performance in knowledge-based VQA tasks without additional finetuning. T^4 presents a promising solution for customized content generation in specialized domains.

PaperID: 3715

Authors:Zhicun Yin, Junjie Chen, Ming Liu, Zhixin Wang, Fan Li, Renjing Pei, Xiaoming Li, Rynson W. H. Lau, Wangmeng Zuo

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab, Nanyang Technological University, City University of Hong Kong

Title: RefSTAR: Blind Face Image Restoration with Reference Selection, Transfer, and Reconstruction

Abstract:
Introducing highquality references can largely alleviate the uncertainty in blind face image restoration tasks, yet the equivocal utilization of reference priors makes it still a struggle to well preserve the human identity. We attribute the identity inconsistency to two deficiencies of existing reference-based face restoration methods, namely the inability to effectively determine which features need to be transferred, and the failure to preserve the structure and details of the selected features. This work mainly focuses on these two issues, and we present a novel blind face image restoration method that considers reference selection, transfer, and reconstruction (RefSTAR) to introduce proper features from reference images. Specifically, we construct a reference selection (RefSel) module, which can generate accurate masks to select reference features. For training the RefSel module, we construct a RefSel-HQ dataset through a mask generation pipeline, which contains annotated masks for 10,000 ground truth-reference pairs. To guarantee the exact introduction of selected reference features, a feature fusion paradigm is designed for reference feature transferring, and a Mask-Compatible Cycle-Consistency Loss is redesigned based on reference reconstruction to further ensure the presence of selected reference image features in the output image. Experiments on various backbone models demonstrate superior performance, showing better identity preservation ability and reference feature transfer quality.

PaperID: 3716

Authors:Yunqian Yu, Biao Chen, Yunya Zhang, Tonglan Xie, Mengmeng Jing, Lin Zuo

Affiliations: School of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Instruction-Guided Cross-Modal Clustering for Training-Free Visual Token Pruning in Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
Large visionlanguage models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding multimodal data such as images and text. However, the number of visual tokens in these models often far exceeds that of textual tokens, resulting in substantial redundancy and high inference costs. Existing pruning methods primarily rely on either unimodal information or cross-modal attention mechanisms. The former often overlooks the semantic alignment between instructions and visual representations in the multimodal space, while the latter is prone to attention drift and dispersion, leading to significant performance degradation under high pruning ratios. All the above issues stem from the lack of effective textual guidance during the pruning process. To identify effective informational cues for guiding pruning, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the interaction between language instructions and visual features based on the cross-modal information bottleneck attribution (CIBA) method, revealing the presence of noun anchors. Based on this analysis, we propose the Instruction-Guided Cross-Modal Clustering Token Pruning (ICCTP) method, a plug-and-play, training-free pruning paradigm. Specifically, ICCTP first leverages global attention to retain a small set of visual tokens that preserve global context. It then extracts nouns from the instruction as clustering centers to perform cross-modal clustering over the remaining visual tokens. To balance semantic diversity and global relevance while reducing intra-cluster redundancy, we design an importance scoring mechanism. Finally, visual tokens within each cluster are pruned according to a specified pruning ratio. We evaluate ICCTP on multiple VLM architectures, including LLaVA-1.5-7B, LLaVA-1.5-13B, and LLaVA-NeXT-7B. Experimental results show that ICCTP maintains strong performance across various pruning rates without requiring retraining. Notably, even under an extreme setting where 94.4% of visual tokens are removed, ICCTP retains 90.02% of the original accuracy while reducing TFLOPs by 82.36%.

PaperID: 3717

Authors:Yuxuan Yuan, Lichen Wei, Luyao Tang, Chaoqi Chen, Zheyuan Cai, Yue Huang, Xinghao Ding

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing, Ministry of Education of China, Xiamen University, China Institute of Artificial Intelligence, University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen University, School of Informatics, China The National Key Laboratory of Infrared Detection Technologies

Title: Decompose and Attribute: Boosting Generalizable Open-Set Object Detection via Objectness Score

Abstract:
Openset object detection (OSOD) aims to recognize known object categories while localizing previously unseen instances. However, real-world scenarios often involve co-occurring domain shifts and novel object categories. Existing OSOD methods typically overlook domain shifts, relying on source-trained representations that entangle domain-specific style with semantic content, thereby hindering generalization to both unseen domains and novel categories. To address this challenge, we propose a unified framework, termed DecOmpose and ATtribute (DOAT), which disentangles domain-specific style from semantic structure, thereby facilitating generalizable object detection. DOAT employs wavelet-based feature decomposition to separate style information from high-frequency structural details, thus enabling an explicit separation of domain and category shifts. To account for domain shift, the low-frequency components are perturbed within a style subspace to simulate diverse domain appearances. For unknown object discovery, the high-frequency components are utilized to estimate objectness scores via an attribution mechanism that fuses wavelet energy with semantic distance to known-category prototypes. Extensive experiments on standard open-set benchmarks have demonstrated the superior generalization performance of DOAT.

PaperID: 3718

Authors:Zhaoquan Yuan, Zining Wang, Yuankang Pan, Ao Luo, Wei Li, Xiao Wu, Changsheng Xu

Affiliations: School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwest Jiaotong University, State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems (MAIS), Institute of Automation

Title: I2CD: An Invertible Causal Framework for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning via Disentangle-Compose-Disentangle

Abstract:
Compositional ZeroShot Learning (CZSL) addresses the challenge of recognizing unseen attribute-object compositions in images, representing a fundamental challenge in artificial intelligence. Current approaches, which primarily focus on semantic alignment or distribution independence of primitives, have not achieved effective state-object decoupling and causal interventional invariance, limiting their performance on unseen compositions. To tackle this challenge, this study introduces I2CD (Invertible Causal framework via Disentangle-Compose-Disentangle), a novel framework that integrates invertible neural networks with causal intervention techniques to achieve state-object disentanglement. The framework employs a disentangle-compose-disentangle mechanism for counterfactual generation within the disentangled representation space, ensuring that modifications to one primitive (attribute or object) maintain independence from the other, thus enabling robust causal disentanglement. Representational consistency is maintained through semantic alignment between initial disentangled representations and their recomposed-then-disentangled counterparts with corresponding textual concepts. Comprehensive evaluations on three benchmark datasets—MIT-States, UT-Zappos, and C-GQA—demonstrate the framework's effectiveness in achieving both disentanglement and compositional generalization in CZSL tasks.

PaperID: 3719

Authors:Xinyi Zeng, Yuxiang Yang, Pinxian Zeng, Wenxia Yin, Bo Liu, Xi Wu, Yan Wang

Affiliations: Sichuan University, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Chengdu University of Information Technology

Title: PromptEmo: Learning Emotion with Bilateral Textual Prompts in Multi-Domain Open-set Scenarios

Abstract:
Facial Expression Recognition (FER) is crucial to humancomputer interaction. Existing cross-domain FER (CD-FER) methods mainly focus on single-source closed-set scenarios, transferring knowledge from a single source domain to a target domain with identical class sets. However, CD-FER faces two real-world challenges: 1) the need to leverage information from multiple sources, leading to multi-domain shift, and 2) the necessity to recognize unseen target classes, resulting in class shift. These issues give rise to a novel and challenging task, which we define as Multi-domain Open-set FER (MO-FER). In this paper, we propose PromptEmo, a novel CLIP-based framework that leverages bilateral textual prompts to address both shifts in the MO-FER task. Leveraging the generalizability of LLM, PromptEmo constructs trainable positive prompts with LLM-generated emotion descriptions for seen classes, as well as template-derived negative prompts to enhance the reasoning for unseen classes. Then, we introduce a modal-task optimization paradigm organized from two perspectives: textual semantics and visual domains, yielding Intra-modal Space-specific Optimization (ISO) and Cross-modal Emotion-aware Interaction (CEI) strategies. ISO refines the CLIP-based textual space to ensure semantic separation between bilateral prompts and improves the latent visual space by promoting inter-domain alignment. Founded on ISO, CEI facilitates effective vision-language interactions, resulting in four joint loss terms that improve emotion recognition by shaping a domain-invariant, discriminative feature space. PromptEmo surpasses the current SOTA method by 7.7% AUC on unseen classes across four FER datasets, serving as a strong baseline for the MO-FER task.

PaperID: 3720

Authors:Junyi Zhang, Yiming Wang, Yunhong Lu, Qichao Wang, Wenzhe Qian, Xiaoyin Xu, David Gu, Min Zhang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Stony Brook University

Title: Spherical Geometry Diffusion: Generating High-quality 3D Face Geometry via Sphere-anchored Representations

Abstract:
A fundamental challenge in textto-3D face generation is achieving high-quality geometry. The core difficulty lies in the arbitrary and intricate distribution of vertices in 3D space, making it challenging for existing models to establish clean connectivity and resulting in suboptimal geometry. To address this, our core insight is to simplify the underlying geometric structure by constraining the distribution onto a simple and regular manifold, a topological sphere. Building on this, we first propose the Spherical Geometry Representation, a novel face representation that anchors geometric signals to uniform spherical coordinates. This guarantees a regular point distribution, from which the mesh connectivity can be robustly reconstructed. Critically, this canonical sphere can be seamlessly unwrapped into a 2D map, creating a perfect synergy with powerful 2D generative models. We then introduce Spherical Geometry Diffusion, a conditional diffusion framework built upon this 2D map. It enables diverse and controllable generation by jointly modeling geometry and texture, where the geometry explicitly conditions the texture synthesis process. Our method's effectiveness is demonstrated through its success in a wide range of tasks: text-to-3D generation, face reconstruction, and text-based 3D editing. Extensive experiments show that our approach substantially outperforms existing methods in geometric quality, textual fidelity, and inference efficiency.

PaperID: 3721

Authors:Junze Zhang, Luoxi Jing, Yuanyuan Wang, Xueqi Li, Guoli Yang, Songchang Jin, Chunping Qiu

Affiliations: Peking University, Academy of Military Sciences, Advanced Institute of Big Data, Intelligent Game and Decision Lab

Title: Geometry-Aware Stereo Matching via Monocular Disparity Distribution Prior and Gradient Enhancement

Abstract:
Stereo matching recovers 3D scene information based on the correlation between corresponding pixels. Despite impressive progress, existing methods lack sufficient correlation priors in illposed regions such as occlusions, detailed and reflective regions. In this paper, we propose Geometry Aware Stereo Matching Network (GEAStereo) to enhance geometric structure perception and address this issue. We adaptively incorporate the Monocular Disparity Distribution Prior into the stereo cost volume, building Mono-Stereo Fusion Volume (MSFV), which effectively captures global geometric structures and rectifies the correlation information in ill-posed regions. Furthermore, we introduce rich detail information from gradient features and construct a Detail-Aware Volume (DAV) by aggregating the group-wise cost volume under the guidance of gradient spatial attention, thus enhancing the correlation modeling in detailed structures. Jointly, MSFV and DAV provide rich correlation priors for disparity iterative optimization. Experimental results show that our method achieves competitive results on the ETH3D and KITTI2015 benchmarks. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our method demonstrates stronger performance in zero-shot generalization.

PaperID: 3722

Authors:Mingjin Zhang, Zhongkai Yang, Fei Gao

Affiliations: Xidian University, Hangzhou Institute of Technology

Title: CO²IF: Language-Bridging Hyperspectral-Multispectral Image Fusion with Coordinated and Cross-modal Optimal Transport

Abstract:
Due to the difficulties of directly obtaining highresolution hyperspectral images (HR-HSI), the fusion of low-resolution hyperspectral images (LR-HSI) and high-resolution multispectral images (HR-MSI) has emerged as an effective approach. While existing methods leverage image-level priors from HR-MSI, they often lack explicit semantic guidance for precise detail reconstruction. Recognizing that textual scene descriptions encapsulate valuable object attributes and contextual information, we introduce the first Language-Bridging framework for Hyperspectral and Multispectral image fusion (CO²IF). CO²IF leverages language semantics as prior knowledge to explicitly guide the reconstruction process. To bridge the modality gap between textual descriptions and high-dimensional hyperspectral data, we design a Cross-modal Optimal Transport (COT) module. COT establishes precise semantic correspondences between language features and the visual cues of individual spectral bands. Building upon this semantic alignment, we develop a Multimodal Coordinated State Space Model (CoMamba). CoMamba effectively integrates the language-derived priors with spatial information from HR-MSI and spectral information from LR-HSI. This language-guided reconstruction significantly enhances the extraction of crucial spatial-spectral details, leading to superior fidelity in the generated HR-HSI. In addition, this paper adds text descriptions for three widely used datasets. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results on the public datasets confirm the superiority of the proposed method compared to the SOTA methods.

PaperID: 3723

Authors:Qin Zhang, Kun Zhou, Xulun Ye

Affiliations: Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Ningbo University, School of Architecture & Urban Planning, Shenzhen University

Title: LR-AdaInSeg:Adaptive Instance Segmentation of Incomplete 3D Scenes Driven by Low-Rank Networks

Abstract:
3D fullscene segmentation technology has demonstrated great potential driven by large models, but it often faces challenges of incomplete scenes and identification of invisible classes in practical applications. To address this, we propose the LR-AdaInSeg method, which significantly enhances the model’s generalization ability in incomplete scenes through two key innovations: First, we design a Bayesian Low-Rank Module, which effectively solves the problem of feature space redundancy through dynamic optimization of the network structure, improving adaptability to incomplete scenes. Second, we combine graph contrastive clustering with the Low-Rank module, leveraging its robust feature representation capability to achieve accurate differentiation of invisible classes. In terms of implementation, we build a multi-scale feature extraction framework based on the 3D U-Net and utilize the 3D prompt points and their 2D masks as supervisory signals to achieve effective fusion of geometric and semantic information. Experiments show that our method achieves advanced performance on multiple benchmarks such as ScanNet, particularly excelling in handling incomplete scenes and invisible class objects.

PaperID: 3724

Authors:Kai Zhao, Liting Ruan, Haoran Jiang, Xiaoqiang Zhu, Xianchao Zhang, Dan Zeng

Affiliations: Shanghai University, Jiaxing University

Title: Beyond Predictive Resampling: Learning Input-Agnostic Downsampling for Efficient Aligned Vision Recognition

Abstract:
Images are typically sampled on a uniform grid,despite their nonuniform information distribution—some regions are rich in content while others are not. The mismatch leads to inefficient computation allocation in deep learning models. To address this, recent studies have proposed predictive downsampling methodsthat adaptively downsample images based on predicted per-pixel importance, allocating more pixels to informative areas. However,these methods require high-resolution processing to accurately estimate importance, which undermines their efficiency:the prediction itself must process the full-resolution image,consuming most of the computational budget. This high-resolution importance prediction is necessary because each input may differ significantly in structure and content. In this paper, we take a different approach and introduce a learn-to-downsample paradigmtailored for aligned vision recognition tasks, such as face recognition and palmprint recognition, where input alignment ensures consistent spatial structure across images. This alignment ensures structural consistency across images, allowing a shared, input-agnostic downsampling template applicable to all inputs. Furthermore, instead of relying on implicit importance maps, we introduce a flow-based representation that explicitly models the spatial warping from the original image to the downsampled version. The flow representation is not only more efficient but also more controllable: we regularize the flow using its Jacobian determinant to precisely control the sampling density and coverage,enabling interpretable and tunable sampling patterns. Extensive experiments on two aligned recognition tasks, face and palmprint recognition, demonstrate that our method substantially reduces computational cost with minimal accuracy degradation, achieving a significantly better performance-efficiency trade-off than existing predictive downsampling methods.

PaperID: 3725

Authors:Boshi Zheng, Yan Li, Jiabin Liu

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology

Title: Manipulating the Mind’s Eye: A-SAGE, the Attention-Based Attack on ViT Explainability

Abstract:
The rise of Vision Transformers (ViTs) as cornerstone models in safetycritical applications like autonomous driving and medical diagnosis has shifted the focus from pure accuracy to verifiable trustworthiness. However, the very mechanisms used to explain these models, their internal attention maps, are themselves vulnerable. This creates a critical "trust gap," as the model's apparent reasoning can be maliciously manipulated. To systematically investigate this vulnerability, we introduce A-SAGE (Attention-based Steering Adversarial Generation by Corrupting Explanations), a dual-objective attack framework that forces a model to misclassify an input while simultaneously corrupting its internal attention patterns to generate a misleading explanation. A-SAGE achieves this by optimizing a unified loss that combines a standard classification objective with two explanation-specific terms: an attention entropy loss to diffuse the model's focus and an attention map distortion loss to steer the corrupted explanation towards a desired target. Our primary finding is A-SAGE's exceptional black-box transferability. Using a CaiT-S as a white-box surrogate, adversarial examples generated with imperceptible perturbations achieve attack success rates of 79.4% on ViT-B, 49.7% on ResNet-50, and over 81.5% on other transformers (DeiT-B,TNT-S). Crucially, these successful attacks do not merely destroy the explanation; they generate a coherent but false attention map that deceptively "justifies" the wrong prediction. These results reveal a systemic vulnerability in the core reasoning of modern foundation models, establishing A-SAGE as a critical benchmark for auditing the robustness of AI explainability.

PaperID: 3726

Authors:Hao Zheng, Meiguang Zheng, Zhigang Hu, Liu Yang, Aikun Xu, Tingxuan Chen, Rongchang Zhao, Boyu Wang

Affiliations: Central South University, University of Western Ontario

Title: HiFC-GAN: Hierarchical Feature-Constrained GAN for Optical-to-SAR Transfer in SAR Target Classification

Abstract:
The limited availability of highquality training data poses a persistent challenge for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) target classification. Existing data augmentation methods mainly adopt a simplistic application of GAN-based style transfer techniques to directly synthesize pseudo-SAR images from optical images. However, our in-depth analysis of this cross-modal conversion reveals that such straightforward strategies primarily focus on transferring high-level semantic information (e.g., target shapes), thus failing to adequately capture the essential low-level features unique to SAR imagery (e.g., scattering textures). To address this inherent trade-off between high-level semantic preservation and low-level feature authenticity, we propose a Hierarchical Feature-Constrained GAN (HiFC-GAN) tailored for optical-to-SAR style transfer. Specifically, HiFC-GAN enhances the representation of low-level SAR features by introducing local texture contrast constraints at shallow layers, while introducing explicit feature mapping constraints at deeper layers to maintain high-level semantic consistency throughout the reconstruction process. Experimental results demonstrate that HiFC-GAN significantly outperforms existing GAN-based techniques in image generation quality, particularly improving the low-level feature authenticity of pseudo-SAR images. Moreover, the generated pseudo-SAR images further improve the performance of downstream target classification tasks, yielding accuracy gains ranging from 3.56% to 5.90% on average with mainstream CNN-based models.

PaperID: 3727

Authors:Long Zheng, Zhi Li, Weidong Wang, Zhenyu Dai, Shuyun Li

Affiliations: Guizhou University

Title: E³SAM2: Entropy-Aware and Edge-Guided Adaptation of SAM2 for Echocardiography Video Segmentation

Abstract:
Foundation segmentation models, such as SAM and its videooriented variant SAM2, have achieved remarkable success in natural image and video segmentation. However, their direct application to echocardiography video is challenged by structural uncertainty arising from severe speckle noise and blurry anatomical boundaries. To address this, we propose E³SAM2, a lightweight adaptation framework that introduces a novel entropy-based methodology to explicitly model and mitigate such uncertainty. Specifically, an entropy-guided attention mechanism is introduced to steer the model’s focus toward structurally reliable features, particularly in speckle-dominated regions. Additionally, an entropy regularization loss is introduced to further enhance target-background discrimination. To better resolve indistinct anatomical contours, an edge-aware supervision module is incorporated to inject explicit boundary priors for sharper delineation. These components are efficiently integrated through a global-local feature adapter. Experiments on CAMUS and EchoNet-Dynamic datasets demonstrate that E³SAM2 achieves state-of-the-art segmentation and clinical estimation performance, while maintaining high computational efficiency.

PaperID: 3728

Authors:Jia-Xing Zhong, Shijie Zhao, Junlin Li, Li Zhang

Affiliations: ByteDance Inc.

Title: Collaboratively “Copy & Paste” 2D-3D Features for Complex Video-to-Video Motion Editing

Abstract:
Videoto-video human motion editing aims to transfer motion from a driving video to a reference video while preserving the background dynamics and the protagonist's original appearance. We identify critical limitations in existing methods that fail to capture the full complexity of human motions, particularly regarding: 1) location changes, 2) orientation variations, and 3) complicated non-upright poses. To address these challenges, we propose a framework that collaboratively "copies and pastes" 2D and 3D features across spatio-temporal dimensions into a shared representation space for motion guidance. Our approach achieves this through: 1) a mutual distillation mechanism that enhances the robustness and capability of individual encoders, and 2) a selective fusion module that adaptively weights and combines complementary information from spatio-temporal representations. To evaluate motion editing algorithms under challenging scenarios, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark dataset comprising real-world video clips from artistic gymnastics and figure skating competitions. These sports disciplines naturally encompass the three aforementioned aspects of motion complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing methods, particularly in handling intricate human motions.

PaperID: 3729

Authors:Dibin Zhou, Yantao Xu, Zongming Huang, Zengwei Yan, Wenhao Liu, Yongwei Miao, Jianfeng Ren, Fuchang Liu

Affiliations: Hangzhou Normal University, University of Nottingham Ningbo China

Title: Paper Folding Puzzles: Can Multimodal Large Language Models Perform Spatial Reasoning?

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) largely lag humanlevel performance on abstract visual reasoning (AVR), which requires models to infer latent rules from visual question sets and generalize them to novel scenarios. Most AVR benchmarks are constrained to narrow and repetitive 2D patterns, involving relatively simple spatial relationships and assessing limited dimensions of reasoning ability. Drawing inspiration from real-world paper folding challenges, we propose Paper Folding Puzzles (PFP), a rigorously designed benchmark specifically developed to assess spatial reasoning capabilities. It comprises 150K visual question-answering samples across five diverse tasks, ranging from basic 2D geometric reasoning to 3D spatial understanding. The developed benchmark dataset can be employed to assess core spatial reasoning abilities essential to human cognition, encompassing fundamental symmetry reasoning and 3D spatial comprehension. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 18 leading MLLMs (both closed- and open-source variants) on the PFP benchmark to assess their spatial reasoning capabilities. Our findings show that most MLLMs achieve near-chance performance on FPF, exhibiting substantial performance gaps (>30%) relative to human baselines across all tasks. This highlights a critical research gap in improving spatial reasoning capabilities of MLLMs.

PaperID: 3730

Authors:Lingyu Zhou, Yue Yu, Zhang Yi, Xiuyuan Xu

Affiliations: Machine Intelligence Laboratory, College of Computer Science, Sichuan University

Title: Mitigating Entity Hallucinations in 3D Radiology Report Generation via Dual-Stream Alignment

Abstract:
Entity hallucination poses a major challenge in radiology report generation (RRG), particularly for 3D CT scans where complex spatial contexts amplify factual errors. To address this, medical entity phrases serve as key carriers for multimodal prompting, integrating expert knowledge into the vision-language model. Current methods use unified cross-attention for volume-phrase alignment, failing to account for anatomical specificity during the alignment process. In this work, we introduce the Dual-stream Entity Alignment Reporting network (DEAR) that separately models organ and lesion entities to resolve anatomical bias. Specifically, the dual-stream entity aligner is designed to partition medical entity phrases into organ and lesion streams, feeding them into separate cross-attention blocks in parallel to achieve fine-grained volume–phrase alignment. For structurally regular and spatially stable organ entities, an organ-guided cross-attention (OGCA) block is proposed to enforce structural consistency by retrieving the top-k voxel tokens via volume–phrase similarity and preserving spatial connectivity through morphological dilation. Meanwhile, a lesion-guided cross-attention (LGCA) block is introduced for structurally irregular and spatially variable lesion entities, enhancing anomaly sensitivity through phrase-weighted attention and refining discriminative boundaries via 3D residual Laplacian filtering. Experiments demonstrate that DEAR significantly reduces entity hallucinations and improves clinical factuality in 3D RRG benchmarks.

PaperID: 3731

Authors:Zhengbo Zhou, Dooman Arefan, Margarita Louise Zuley, Shandong Wu

Affiliations: University of Pittsburgh

Title: Δt-Mamba3D: A Time‑Aware Spatio‑Temporal State‑Space Model for Breast Cancer Risk Prediction

Abstract:
Longitudinal analysis of sequential radiological images is hampered by a fundamental data challenge: how to effectively model a sequence of highresolution images captured at irregular time intervals. This data structure contains indispensable spatial and temporal cues that current methods fail to fully exploit. Models often compromise by either collapsing spatial information into vectors or applying spatio-temporal models that are computationally inefficient and incompatible with non-uniform time steps. We address this challenge with Time-Aware \Delta t-Mamba3D, a novel state-space architecture adapted for longitudinal medical imaging. Our model simultaneously encodes irregular inter-visit intervals and rich spatio-temporal context while remaining computationally efficient. Its core innovation is a continuous-time selective scanning mechanism that explicitly integrates the true time difference between exams into its state transitions. This is complemented by a multi-scale 3D neighborhood fusion module that robustly captures spatio-temporal relationships. In a comprehensive breast cancer risk prediction benchmark using sequential screening mammogram exams, our model shows superior performance, improving the validation C-index by 2–5 percentage points and achieving higher 1–5 year AUC scores compared to established variants of recurrent, transformer, and state-space models. Thanks to its linear complexity, the model can efficiently process long and complex patient screening histories of mammograms, forming a new framework for longitudinal image analysis.

PaperID: 3732

Authors:Xiao Ao, Jie Zou, Yibiao Wei, Peng Wang, Weikang Guo

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics

Title: Beyond Static: Related Questions Retrieval Through Conversations in Community Question Answering

Abstract:
In community question answering (cQA) platforms like Stack Overflow, related question retrieval is recognized as a fundamental task that allows users to retrieve related questions to answer user queries automatically. Although many traditional approaches have been proposed for investigating this research field, they mostly rely on static approaches and neglect the interaction property. We argue that the conversational way can well distinguish the finegrained representations of questions and has great potential to improve the performance of question retrieval. In this paper, we propose a related question retrieval model through conversations, called TeCQR, to locate related questions in cQA. Specifically, we build conversations by utilizing tag-enhanced clarifying questions. In addition, we design a noise tolerance model that evaluates the semantic similarity between questions and tags, enabling the model to effectively handle noisy feedback. Moreover, the tag-enhanced two-stage offline training is proposed to fully exploit the mutual relationships among user queries, questions, and tags to learn their fine-grained representations. Based on the learned representations and contextual conversations, TeCQR incorporates conversational feedback by learning to ask tag-enhanced clarifying questions to retrieve related questions more effectively. Experimental results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 3733

Authors:Wuyang Cong, Junqi Shi, Lizhong Wang, Weijing Shi, Ming Lu, Hao Chen, Zhan Ma

Affiliations: Nanjing University, Samsung Research China-Beijing (SRC-B)

Title: Reinforced Rate Control for Neural Video Compression via Inter-Frame Rate–Distortion Awareness

Abstract:
Neural video compression (NVC) has demonstrated superior compression efficiency, yet effective rate control remains a significant challenge due to complex temporal dependencies. Existing rate control schemes typically leverage frame content to capture distortion interactions, overlooking interframe rate dependencies arising from shifts in per-frame coding parameters. This often leads to suboptimal bitrate allocation and cascading parameter decisions. To address this, we propose a reinforcement‑learning (RL)‑based rate control framework that formulates the task as a frame‑by‑frame sequential decision process. At each frame, an RL agent observes a spatiotemporal state and selects coding parameters to optimize a long‑term reward that reflects rate‑distortion (R-D) performance and bitrate adherence. Unlike prior methods, our approach jointly determines bitrate allocation and coding configuration in a single step, independent of group‑of‑pictures (GOP) structure. Extensive experiments across diverse NVC architectures show that our method reduces the average relative bitrate error to 1.20 percent and achieves up to 13.45 percent bitrate savings at typical GOP sizes, outperforming existing approaches. In addition, our framework demonstrates improved robustness to content variation and bandwidth fluctuations with lower encoding/decoding overhead, making it highly suitable for practical deployment.

PaperID: 3734

Authors:Xiaoxi Cui, Chao Zhao, Yurong Cheng, Xiangmin Zhou

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University

Title: De-collapsing User Intent: Adaptive Diffusion Augmentation with Mixture-of-Experts for Sequential Recommendation

Abstract:
Sequential recommendation (SR) aims to predict users' next action based on their historical behavior, and is widely adopted by a number of platforms. The performance of SR models relies on rich interaction data. However, in realworld scenarios, many users only have a few historical interactions, leading to the problem of data sparsity. Data sparsity not only leads to model overfitting on sparse sequences, but also hinders the model’s ability to capture the underlying hierarchy of user intents. This results in misinterpreting the user's true intents and recommending irrelevant items. Existing data augmentation methods attempt to mitigate overfitting by generating relevant and varied data. However, they overlook the problem of reconstructing the user's intent hierarchy, which is lost in sparse data. Consequently, the augmented data often fails to align with the user's true intents, potentially leading to misguided recommendations. To address this, we propose the Adaptive Diffusion Augmentation for Recommendation (ADARec) framework. Critically, instead of using a diffusion model as a black-box generator, we use its entire step-wise denoising trajectory to reconstruct a user's intent hierarchy from a single sparse sequence. To ensure both efficiency and effectiveness, our framework adaptively determines the required augmentation depth for each sequence and employs a specialized mixture-of-experts architecture to decouple coarse- and fine-grained intents. Experiments show ADARec outperforms state-of-the-art methods on standard benchmarks and on sparse sequences, demonstrating its ability to reconstruct hierarchical intent representations from sparse data.

PaperID: 3735

Authors:Wei Jiang, Yongqi Zhai, Jiayu Yang, Bohao Feng, Wenqiang Wang, Bo Huang, Lin Ding, Ronggang Wang

Affiliations: Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Ultra High Definition Immersive Media Technology, Shenzhen Graduate School, Peking University, Pengcheng Laboratory, Alibaba Cloud Computing

Title: SSCL: Adversarially Guided Image Compression via Semantic and Spectral Consistency Learning

Abstract:
Perceptual image compression has recently gained increasing attention, as it aims to reconstruct visually realistic images using generative models. Most existing methods adopt patchbased generative adversarial networks (PatchGAN) for one-step image generation, where adversarial training helps the decoder learn the distribution of natural images. However, this strategy is often coarse-grained, as it focuses mainly on patch-level consistency and overlooks global structural and semantic details. To address this limitation, we propose a simple yet effective Semantic and Spectral Consistency Learning (SSCL) strategy, which complements existing patch-based approaches for more accurate distribution alignment. For semantic consistency, we leverage semantic vision models to extract semantic features. The semantic discriminator, aware of the specific semantics of each image, provides more adaptive and precise feedback. This guides the encoder to retain meaningful information and helps the decoder synthesize detailed textures, without requiring explicit semantic transmission or additional modules. For spectral consistency, we introduce a frequency discriminator that focuses on high-frequency components, helping to reduce artifacts based on spectral priors. Experiments show that SSCL outperforms existing perceptual codecs in terms of visual quality. Compared to MS-ILLM, SSCL achieves 45% to 60% bit-rate savings on CLIC2020 and Kodak datasets, measured by FID and DISTS.

PaperID: 3736

Authors:Xiao Kang, Xingbo Liu, Shuo Pan, Xuening Zhang, Xiushan Nie, Yilong Yin

Affiliations: Shandong University, Shandong Jianzhu University, Harbin Institute of Technology, Ltd; Institute of Applied AI Engineering and Technology

Title: PEOCH: Online Cross-Modal Hashing with Semi-Supervised Streaming Data Driving Prototype Evolution

Abstract:
The exponential growth of streaming multimodal data presents critical challenges for cross-modal retrieval: distribution shifts, modality gap, and scarce labels. Semi-supervised online cross-modal hashing has gained increasing interest due to its ability to encode complex streaming data and update hash functions simultaneously. Nevertheless, existing methods can hardly generate high-quality unsupervised hash codes, which fundamentally limits diversity and flexibility during the retrieval process. To this end, we propose a novel method named Prototype Evolution Online Cross-modal Hashing (PEOCH). By driving prototype evolution with semi-supervised streaming data, precise and stable hash codes are generated for both labeled and unlabeled data. Specifically, two prototype updates with stability guarantee are conducted: labeled samples push semantic knowledge into the supervised prototypes, while unlabeled samples perform clustering to generate unsupervised prototypes. Simultaneously, a co-optimization mechanism is designed to ensure the prototypes continuously evolve and preserve the consistency of the entire streaming data. Besides, an elasticity regularizer integrates discriminability and smoothness constraints, improving the reliability of prototypes. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that PEOCH outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving an average improvement of 6.7% in mAP@all across various retrieval tasks.

PaperID: 3737

Authors:Ang Li, Yufei Shi, Yuxuan Si, Yiquan Wu, Ming Cai, Xu Tan, Yi Wang, Changlong Sun, Xiaozhong Liu, Kun Kuang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Chongqing Ant Consumer Finance Co, . Ltd, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Title: Think Then Rewrite: Reasoning Enhanced Query Rewriting for Domain Specific Retrieval

Abstract:
Query rewriting is a crucial task for improving retrieval, especially in professional domains such as law and medicine, where user queries are often underspecified and ambiguous. While large language models (LLMs) offer strong understanding and generation capabilities, existing LLMbased approaches reduce the task to text transformation or expansion, neglecting reasoning to disambiguate queries, which fails to bridge the cognitive gap between user queries and specialized documents. In this paper, we propose Think-Then-Rewrite (TTR), a reinforcement learning based framework that unleashes LLMs' reasoning ability for domain-specific query rewriting. TTR introduces a contrastive mutual information reward to encourage the LLM to generate reasoning processes that effectively distinguish confusing distractors. To boost early-stage training, TTR also constructs golden query rewrites as off‑policy data, providing strong guidance for RL learning. A mixed-policy optimization then combines on-policy and off-policy signals, ensuring both effectiveness and stability. Extensive experiments on legal and medical retrieval benchmarks demonstrate that TTR achieves state-of-the-art performance.

PaperID: 3738

Authors:Xiaoxiang Li, Xihe Xie, Hai Wan, Xibin Zhao

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Hunan Qiangzhi Technology Development Co.

Title: Exploring Domain Generalization and Subpopulation Shift for Generalizable Graph-Level Anomaly Detection

Abstract:
Graphlevel anomaly detection (GLAD), which identifies rare or atypical graphs within a graph set, is crucial for applications such as image analysis, industrial defect inspection and fraud detection. However, existing GLAD approaches typically rely on the in-distribution hypothesis while lacking generalization capability for out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios (e.g., different graph sizes), which largely limits the application in the real world. For the first time, we formulate the OOD generalization problem for GLAD, where testing graph data exhibit significant distributional shifts from training data. To tackle two common types of distributional shifts, domain generalization and subpopulation shift, we propose the Fine-Grained Subpopulation Graph-Level Anomaly Detection (FGS-GLAD). First, we propose a Graph Information Bottleneck-based Anomaly Detection Module (GIB4AD) that implements graph reverse distillation and graph information bottleneck on the graph to enhance task-relevant feature extraction for domain generalization. Second, We propose a Fine-Grained Subpoulation Inference Module (FGSI) to predict fine-grained subpopulations and focus on critical inter-subpopulation features through a supervised contrastive mechanism. Experiments on seven benchmark datasets and ten baselines demonstrate our model's superiority in handling domain generalization and subpopulation shift.

PaperID: 3739

Authors:Zilong Li, Jia Zhu, Chenglei Huang, Zhangze Chen, Hanghui Guo, Guoqing Ma, Jianxia Ling

Affiliations: Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Intelligent Education Technology and Application, Zhejiang Normal University, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University

Title: Capturing Dynamic User Interests Under Modality Imbalance for Multimodal Sequential Recommendation

Abstract:
Multimodal sequential recommender systems leverage diverse modal inputs to enhance the accuracy and relevance of personalized recommendations. However, existing fusion strategies often struggle to capture intricate crossmodal interactions, especially under the evolving dynamics of user intent. Moreover, they frequently neglect modality imbalance issues, leading to suboptimal utilization of multimodal information. To address these challenges, we propose DuAF-MAT, a novel framework for robust multimodal sequential recommendation. Our approach consists of three key components: (1) a Dual-Aware Adaptive Fusion (DuAF) module dynamically calibrates modality contributions by jointly modeling user preferences and temporal information, enabling the extraction of multimodal features aligned with evolving user interests; (2) by integrating Modality Adversarial Training with the Mixture-of-Experts paradigm, MAT-MoE employs an ensemble of expert generators to dynamically reconstruct missing modality representations, effectively mitigating modality imbalance challenges; (3) to address the inherent sparsity of sequential behavior data, we propose a Multi-Supervised Contrastive Learning strategy that integrates cross-modal alignment and virtual sequence augmentation. This approach enhances user interest modeling by leveraging diverse learning signals, resulting in improved model robustness and generalization capability. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that DuAF-MAT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 3740

Authors:Ye Liu, Yang Chen, Hongmin Cai

Affiliations: South China University of Technology

Title: MIGDiff: Multi-attributes Imputations for Attribute-missing Graphs via Graph Denoising Diffusion Model

Abstract:
The missing of graph attributes poses a significant challenge in graph representation learning. Some existing graph attribute completion methods adopt the sharedspace hypothesis or employ end-to-end frameworks to perform single-attribute imputation. However, these models can only generate one single attribute with a few specific patterns that either adhere to prior knowledge or are optimal for downstream tasks, making it difficult to capture the full range of variations in the target attribute distribution. This limitation negatively impacts the model's generalizability and efficiency. Therefore, to address this issue, we proposed a new method based on a graph denoising diffusion model, called Multi-attribute Imputation Graph Denoising Diffusion Model (MIGDiff), which can generate multiple high-quality attributes. Specifically, it employs a Dual-source Auto-encoder on existing attributes and graph topology to extract reliable knowledge, which serves as a condition for training the diffusion module. Within diffusion, noise is added to the structural embeddings of nodes without attributes in the forward process. In the reverse process, a Structure-aware Denoising Network is devised to integrate feature and structural information via an attention mechanism and to perform neighbor-guided refinement based on graph connectivity, thereby enhancing denoising and accurately recovering missing attributes while effectively maintaining structural consistency and distributional fidelity. During generation, multiple initial values are sampled to produce diverse attribute imputations, avoiding focusing on a few easy-to-learn patterns. Extensive experiments conducted on four public datasets highlight the state-of-the-art performance of MIGDiff in both attribute imputation and node classification tasks.

PaperID: 3741

Authors:Zhaowei Liu, Leilei Jiang, Haitao Yang

Affiliations: Yantai University

Title: Multi-dimensional Adaptive Mix-hop Contextual Learning Framework for Universal Graph Anomaly Detection

Abstract:
Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD) focuses on identifying instances that deviate from normal patterns in graphstructured data. Although substantial progress has been made in this field, current approaches are constrained by the "one-dataset-one-model" paradigm, exhibiting limited generalization across heterogeneous graphs, poor adaptability in few-shot scenarios, and inefficient cross-domain deployment. To overcome these limitations, we propose SAARCS, a universal GAD framework capable of performing anomaly detection across diverse graph datasets without requiring any target data training. SAARCS aligns feature dimensions through composite spatial smoothness, learns graph embeddings via an adaptive-hop attention encoder, and predicts node abnormality using only a small set of normal context nodes. Extensive experiments on eight real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 3742

Authors:Rui Ou, Kun Zhu, Nana Zhang, Jiangtong Li, Chaochao Chen, Yuhua Xu, Changjun Jiang

Affiliations: Tongji University, Donghua University, Zhejiang University

Title: Targeting Borderline Fraudsters: Multi-View Hypergraph Fraud Detection with LLM-Guided Contrastive Learning

Abstract:
Graph fraud detection (GFD) on transaction networks is crucial for safeguarding financial systems. However, due to the limited perspective of existing graph neural networks (GNNs) in the single transaction view, sophisticated fraudsters can disguise themselves to exhibit weak fraud signals, appearing as borderline fraudsters. To address this challenge, we propose MHLGC, a multi-view hypergraph fraud detection model with large language model (LLM) guided contrastive learning. MH-LGC tackles two key limitations of existing GNN-based GFD methods: (1) Due to the local aggregation mechanism, existing methods struggle to capture high-order trading patterns among distant fraudsters. MH-LGC introduces two temporal hyper-views as complements to the transaction view and employs a Temporal Hypergraph Attention Network (THAN) to integrate the three views. (2) Most GFD methods overlook the rich semantic cues embedded in transaction data. Although some general graph learning studies have explored LLM integration, the high computational overhead and task-specific fine-tuning make them impractical for GFD tasks. MH-LGC introduces a semantic view through a fine-tuning-free LLM-Guided Contrastive learning (LGC), adopting a novel paradigm for integrating GNN and LLM to reduce the computational overhead of LLM. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that MH-LGC outperforms twelve state-of-the-art baselines, with AUC improvements ranging from 1.10% to 5.70%.

PaperID: 3743

Authors:Huiling Qin, Yuanxun Li, Weijia Jia

Affiliations: Beijing Normal University, King Soft

Title: WaveDiST: A Wavelet Diffusion Transformer for Spatio-Temporal Estimation on Unobserved Locations

Abstract:
Spatiotemporal estimation plays a vital role in numerous scientific and engineering tasks, particularly for novel or unobserved locations lacking historical references. Many areas remain unobserved by sensors due to their non-core location or pending development status. The states of these areas can only be estimated through similar nodes in the geospace, rather than through historical data with temporal trends. Estimating these unobserved node states is crucial for city-wide spatio-temporal sensing and urban development, extending beyond simple point or block data imputation. In this study, we introduce a diffusion point process in high-frequency space to develop a robust spatio-temporal diffusion transformer for urban estimation where partial historical reference data is lacking. Our approach decomposes spatio-temporal data into high and low-frequency components through wavelet transform, and trains a diffusion model of spatial temporal data with a transformer that operates on high frequency signals. We incorporate low-frequency signals as diffusion conditions in the transformer architecture to capture overall spatio-temporal profiles and gradual trends. To enhance the learning of each step, we design an diffusion model featuring a spatio-temporal attention module that adaptively captures interdependencies between time and space. Extensive experiments across diverse domains including traffic, economics, and environment demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 3744

Authors:Nicolas Rojas Varela, Julien Ah-Pine, Engelbert Mephu Nguifo

Affiliations: University Clermont Auvergne, Clermont Auvergne INP

Title: OnlineBootKNN: An Unsupervised Framework for Detecting Anomalies in Spectral Data Streams

Abstract:
Monitoring the elemental composition of materials in order to detect abnormal conditions in realtime is essential for applications like manufacturing quality control, environmental monitoring, and space exploration. This is achieved using sensors that analyze the interaction of a material with electromagnetic radiation, producing spectral data streams or a sequence of instances where each represents an ordered set of wavelengths with an associated intensity. While many unsupervised anomaly detection methods exist for tabular streaming data, their applicability to spectral streams remains underexplored. To address this gap, we consider our spectra in a multivariate stream setting and benchmark the performance of state-of-the-art tabular anomaly detection methods on this data. Furthermore, we introduce OnlineBootKNN, a novel unsupervised framework that combines k-nearest neighbors with online bootstrapping and a z-score test to detect anomalies in real-time. We demonstrate the high performance and robustness of our method, as well as the efficacy of the autoencoder-based method, KitNet, on newly simulated real-world spectral datasets. In addition, we compare their efficiency against the other tested techniques. Finally, we highlight the inherent interpretability of OnlineBootKNN, which is crucial for identifying the specific wavelengths, and thus elements, responsible for a detected anomaly.

PaperID: 3745

Authors:Di Wang, Junping Du, Zhe Xue, Meiyu Liang, Guanhua Ye, Yingxia Shao, Haisheng Li

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications Beijing Key Laboratory of Intelligent Telecommunication Software and Multimedia, Beijing Technology and Business University

Title: HFR-MKGC: Hierarchical Fusion Reasoning with MLLMs for Multi-modal Knowledge Graph Completion

Abstract:
Multimodal knowledge graph completion (MMKGC) aims to infer missing entities of triples by leveraging heterogeneous information in knowledge graph (KG). However, existing approaches often struggle with inconsistent modality alignment, limited reasoning depth, and insufficient negative sample quality. In this work, we propose HFR-MKGC, a novel framework that integrates hierarchical modal fusion and Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) reasoning for robust and expressive MMKGC. Specifically, we introduce a relation-guided hierarchical modal fusion module, which conducts fine-grained intra-visual fusion and relation-guided cross-modal integration to yield rich entity representations. HFR-MKGC employs a fine-tuned MLLM to perform instruction-based triple reasoning, producing candidate entities for completion. Then, it constructs hard negative samples through textual perturbation by MLLM and visual feature augmentation with rotation and noise. HFR-MKGC optimizes the model via adversarial training. Extensive experiments on three MMKGC benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating its effectiveness in MMKGC.

PaperID: 3746

Authors:Yige Wang, Mingming Li, Li Wang, Kaichen Zhao, Wangming Li, Weipeng Jiang, Xueying LI

Affiliations: Taobao & Tmall Group of Alibaba, Xi'an Jiaotong University

Title: MoMoREC: A Multi-agent Motivation Generation Framework for Residual Semantic ID-Aware Recommendation

Abstract:
Recent advances in the field of sequential recommendation have highlighted the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in enhancing item embeddings and improving user understanding. However, existing approaches face three major limitations: 1) insufficient understanding of the reasons behind users' purchase decisions, 2) the highdimensional embeddings directly produced by LLMs are not well compatible with traditional low-dimensional ID embeddings and 3) reliance on additional fine-tuning and high inference overhead to adapt LLMs to the recommendation task. In this paper, we propose MoMoREC, a simple yet effective user-understanding-based recommendation strategy. This method leverages the intrinsic comprehension capabilities of LLMs combined with residual semantic IDs to better understand users. Specifically, starting from common user purchasing behaviors and incorporating item characteristics, we employ a multi-agent framework to utilize LLMs in analyzing user shopping motivations and extracting high-dimensional dense embeddings. These embeddings are then transformed into low-dimensional IDs using a residual semantic ID approach via clustering and residual dimensionality reduction, which can be fed into the recommendation model. MoMoREC effectively integrates the understanding power of LLMs with the strengths of recommendation systems, preserving rich semantic language embeddings while reducing or eliminating the need for auxiliary trainable modules. As a result, it seamlessly adapts to any sequential recommendation framework. Experiments on three benchmark datasets show that MoMoRec significantly improves traditional recommendation models, demonstrating its effectiveness and flexibility.

PaperID: 3747

Authors:Guanghui Ye, Huan Zhao, Yingxue Gao, Zhixue Zhao, Kehan Wang, Xupeng Zha, Zhihua Jiang

Affiliations: Hunan University, University of Sheffield, Jinan University

Title: Making Visual Dialogue More Engaging: A New Task, Method, and Metric

Abstract:
Large language model (LLM)based visual dialogue (VD) systems have made response generation for image-grounded conversations more correct and coherent. However, user engagement - the extent to which a user is interested, emotionally involved, and willing to continue the conversation - remains a challenge. To fully explore engaging VD, we propose: (i) a new task named Audio-enhanced VD (AVD), which introduces additional audio dialogue contexts that can more vividly convey the speaker's emotions as input, with the aim of generating correct but more engaging dialogue responses. Specifically, we employ a text-to-speech model as the modality translator to generate the paired acoustic utterances from the inputting textual utterances; (ii) an accompanying approach named Visually-grounded and Interleaved Text-Audio Dialogue Modeling (VITA-DM), which utilizes both image-grounded information and interleaved text-audio utterances for visual dialogue modeling, differentiating from previous multi-modal LLM (MLLM)-based methods that normally model text and audio modalities separately. We also present three pre-training tasks to better learn multi-modal interactions across language, vision, and audio; (iii) a novel metric named Multi-Modal Engagement (MME), which fills the gap of engagement estimation in VD and can provide a fine-grained assessment along emotional, attentional, and reply engagement dimensions (EE, AE, RE). We experiment on two popular datasets and provide extensive evaluations (automatic, engagement-specific, and human), supporting the validity of our approach. Furthermore, based on empirical results that reveal that emotions contribute the most to engagement, we justify our emphasis on the emotional aspect throughout the definition, solution, and evaluation of our task.

PaperID: 3748

Authors:Chunyuan Zheng, Haocheng Yang, Jinkun Chen, Shufeng Zhang, Tianyu Xia

Affiliations: Peking University, National University of Singapore, Dalhousie University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Title: Unified Minimax Optimization Framework for Propensity Score Estimation in Debiased Recommendation

Abstract:
Recommendation systems commonly face selection bias from missingnot-at-random (MNAR) collected data. To address this bias, propensity-based methods such as inverse propensity scoring (IPS) and doubly robust (DR) estimators are widely used. In addition, many methods extend the vanilla IPS and DR to further control the bias, variance, propensity mis-calibration, and imbalance, but they only optimize some of the above metrics, limiting the debiasing performance. In this paper, we first empirically find that controlling one metric cannot guarantee the control of other important metrics, then we reveal a fundamental structural commonality among the above four important metrics, and propose a Unified Propensity Optimization (UPO) framework that optimizes all metrics simultaneously by a minimax optimization algorithm. Theoretically, we demonstrate that minimizing the UPO loss effectively controls all metrics, ensuring their simultaneous improvements without incurring additional bias, and achieving reduced variance compared to naively adding up multiple control losses in penalty terms. Empirically, experiments on a semi-synthetic dataset and three real-world datasets validate UPO’s effectiveness, demonstrating superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods with minor computational overhead. We fully open-source our code.

PaperID: 3749

Authors:Xiangping Zheng, Xiuxin Hao, Bo Wu, Wei Li, Bin Ren, Bin Tang, Yuhui Guo, Xun Liang, Zhiwen Yu

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Engineering University, China Modeling and Emulation in E-Government National Engineering Laboratory, Xiangjiang Laboratory, China College of Physics and Optoelectronic Engineering, Beijing Jinghang Research lnstitute of Computing and Communication, Renmin University of China

Title: From Semantics to Spectrum: A New Lens on Graph Augmentation Strategy

Abstract:
Graph augmentation is a cornerstone of effective graph contrastive learning, yet existing methods often rely on random designed perturbations, which may distort latent semantics and impair representation quality. In this work, we argue that semantic consistency can be effectively approximated by lowfrequency components in the spectral domain, offering a principled proxy for guiding augmentation. Based on this insight, we propose Frequency-Aware Graph Contrastive Learning (FA-GCL), a novel framework that explicitly preserves low-frequency signals while selectively perturbing high-frequency components. By aligning augmentation with frequency-aware decomposition, FA-GCL generates diverse yet semantically coherent views, mitigating semantic drift and enhancing representational discrimination. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that FA-GCL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with statistically significant gains, validating its exclusive merits.

PaperID: 3750

Authors:Nengjun Zhu, Lingdan Sun, Qi Zhang, Jian Cao, Hang Yu

Affiliations: School of Computer Engineering and Science, Shanghai University, School of Computer Science, Tongji University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: DFRec: Dual Fluctuation Modeling of Multi-level Intent Evolution for Next-Item Recommendation

Abstract:
User sequential behaviors are driven by a variety of complex and evolving intents. Capturing the dynamic change of user intents has become critical yet challenging in the nextitem recommendation. Existing studies usually model the transition relationships among multiple intents within a session or integrate temporal information to capture the dynamic evolution of user intents. However, they struggle to identify the precise timing and magnitudes of intent changes, leading to ambiguity in providing consistent or violated recommendations and ultimately yielding subpar performance. To this end, we propose a novel framework called Dual Fluctuation Modeling of Multi-level Intent Evolution for Next-Item Recommendation (DFRec) in this paper. DFRec explicitly identifies the user intent changes and further quantifies the magnitude of the changes. Specifically, we assume that a user's intent fluctuates around an inherent intent, with the magnitude of fluctuations indicating the extent of changes in user intents. Thus, we design an Emerging Intent Generation Module that employs a normal distribution with dynamic variance to capture intent fluctuations at each time step. Furthermore, we introduce a dual-layer dynamic variance update mechanism to capture fluctuation characteristics at different temporal levels, enhancing the representation of possible emergent intents. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets verify DFRec's superiority over state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 3751

Authors:Xiaoyun Qiu, Liren Shan

Affiliations: Dartmouth College, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago

Title: Testing Under Strategic Manipulation: Mechanism Design for Human and AI Institutions

Abstract:
We study how the design of testing institutions, encompassing both the tests themselves and the procedures used to administer them, shapes selection outcomes in environments with multiple criteria and strategic agents. We model the testing agency as either a set of independent bureaucracies (each test administered separately) or a joint bureaucracy (where test order and personalization can be coordinated). Our mechanism design analysis shows that under a joint bureaucracy, fixedorder sequential mechanisms with stringent tests are optimal for maximizing the probability mass of qualified candidates selected. Furthermore, we demonstrate that personalizing tests through upfront communication, now increasingly feasible via AI and automation, can select all qualified candidates. Finally, we compare institutional settings and quantify the value of controlling test order, showing that the benefit depends critically on the distribution of testees and the stringency of optimal tests. Our results contribute to the design of robust, efficient, and fair testing systems in both human and AI-mediated environments.

PaperID: 3752

Authors:He-Yen Hsieh, Wei-Te Mark Ting, H. T. Kung

Affiliations: Harvard University

Title: Alfa: Attentive Low-Rank Filter Adaptation for Structure-Aware Cross-Domain Personalized Gaze Estimation

Abstract:
Pretrained gaze models learn to identify useful patterns commonly found across users, but subtle user-specific variations (i.e., eyelid shape or facial structure) can degrade model performance. Test-time personalization (TTP) adapts pre-trained models to these user-specific domain shifts using only a few unlabeled samples. Efficient fine-tuning is critical in performing this domain adaptation: data and computation resources can be limited-especially for on-device customization. While popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods address adaptation costs by updating only a small set of weights, they may not be taking full advantage of structures encoded in pre-trained filters. To more effectively leverage existing structures learned during pre-training, we reframe personalization as a process to reweight existing features rather than learning entirely new ones. We present Attentive Low-Rank Filter Adaptation (Alfa) to adapt gaze models by reweighting semantic patterns in pre-trained filters. With Alfa, singular value decomposition (SVD) extracts dominant spatial components that capture eye and facial characteristics across users. Via an attention mechanism, we need only a few unlabeled samples to adjust and reweight pre-trained structures, selectively amplifying those relevant to a target user. Alfa achieves the lowest average gaze errors across four cross-dataset gaze benchmarks, outperforming existing TTP methods and low-rank adaptation (LoRA)-based variants. We also show that Alfa's attentive low-rank methods can be applied to applications beyond vision, such as diffusion-based language models.

PaperID: 3753

Authors:Weiliang Huo, Shilin Zhang, Suixue Wang, Qingchen Zhang

Affiliations: Hainan University, Tianjin University

Title: SSL-CST: Cell Segmentation for Single-Cell Spatial Transcriptome Based on Self-Supervised Learning

Abstract:
The continuous advancements in life science technology have enabled spatial transcriptome technology to achieve an impressive level of resolution at the singlecell level. This technology has emerged as a crucial method for studying the cellular composition and differentiation states of tissues, investigating cell-cell interactions, and unraveling the molecular mechanisms underlying diseases and developmental processes. A key component in this analysis is the accurate segmentation of cells. However, existing segmentation methods often fail to fully leverage the valuable information provided by spatial transcriptomics, leading to inaccurate cell segmentation. In this study, we introduce SSL-CST, a cell segmentation for single-cell spatial transcriptome method based on self-supervised learning. SSL-CST employs a pre-trained model for foundational contour segmentation. Following the denoising process, it utilizes a self-supervised neural network to correct the cell boundaries to obtain accurate cell boundaries. Through this approach, SSL-CST outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in various tests conducted on multiple datasets. The improved segmentation provided by SSL-CST further enhances the analysis of single-cell spatial expression, providing effective tools for biological discovery.

PaperID: 3754

Authors:Yu Liu, Cunrui Wang, Lin Feng, Jianxin Zhang, Bo Lu

Affiliations: Dalian Minzu University

Title: Gracefully Air-Written: Enhancing the Legibility and Style Consistency of In-Air Handwriting

Abstract:
Space computing devices expand handwritten input from twodimensional screens into three-dimensional space, providing an unrestricted interactive experience. Due to the high degree of freedom and lack of tactile feedback in in-air handwriting, handwritten characters not only become less legible but also lose the writer's personal style. This paper proposes a method for reconstructing discrete in-air handwriting using continuous diffusion models, capturing the writing process and style from a small number of user-provided handwritten tracks and images, to restore the legibility of characters and mimics the writer's style. We represent handwritten track data in binary form and model it with continuous diffusion models, recovering discrete handwritten track data through threshold processing. Our approach reconstructs in-air handwritten characters in two stages. During the content preservation phase, we propose a partial noise injection strategy based on reference sequence modeling, using the content information of the original character as a guiding condition to maintain content consistency in handwritten character. In the style aggregation phase, we adaptively fuse the visual style of the handwritten in the image modality with the dynamic writing process in the sequence modality, overcoming issues of insufficient style capture due to noise interference in the backward process. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method.

PaperID: 3755

Authors:Taehyung Noh, Seungwan Jin, Haein Yeo, Kyungsik Han

Affiliations: Hanyang University

Title: TRIPLE: Theory-Driven Integration of Planned and Habitual Behaviors for LLM-based Personalization

Abstract:
While large language model (LLM)based user profiling offers significant potential for personalization, most existing approaches rely on empirical heuristics and lack grounding in the psychological mechanism that drive human behavior. In this paper, we introduce TRIPLE (Theory-guided Reasoning for Intent and habIt Profiling with LLMs for pErsonalization), a novel framework that systematically integrates dual-process theory from social psychology into LLM-based user modeling. TRIPLE (1) constructs a habitual behavior profile by identifying repeated patterns over time to model automatic responses; (2) builds an intentional behavior profile by inferring user attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB); and (3) generates behavioral rationale that reveal the interaction between habitual and intentional processes to predict user behavior in context-specific situations. We evaluate TRIPLE on five personalization tasks from the LaMP benchmark using multiple open-source LLMs. Results show that TRIPLE consistently outperforms existing in-context learning methods, with especially pronounced gains on complex generative tasks such as headline and title generation. Qualitative analyses further demonstrate that the profiles and reasoning paths generated by TRIPLE provide interpretable and psychologically grounded explanations of user behavior. These findings provide strong evidence that incorporating validated behavioral theories into LLM-based personalization enhances both predictive performance and interpretability, paving a way for theory-driven, socio-cognitively informed user modeling.

PaperID: 3756

Authors:Weihang Pan, Zhengxu Yu, Yong Wu, Xun Liang, Zhongming Jin, Qiang Fu, Penghui Shang, Binbin Lin, Xiaofei He, Jieping Ye

Affiliations: School of Software Technology, Alibaba Group, Zhejiang University, State Key Lab of CAD&CG, Hangzhou Zhiyuan Research Institute Co.

Title: FGD-Align: Pluralistic Alignment for Large Language Models via Fuzzy Group Decision-Making

Abstract:
Ensuring alignment with human values is essential for modern large language models (LLMs), especially amid growing concerns around AI safety and social impact. Yet achieving such alignment remains challenging due to the limited, noisy, and often conflicting nature of human feedback from diverse annotators. Most existing approaches, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), assume consistent and conflictfree supervision, overlooking the ambiguity, inconsistency, and value trade-offs inherent in real-world preferences—often leading to reduced robustness and exclusion of minority views. To address this, we propose FGD-Align, a novel pluralistic alignment framework grounded in Fuzzy Group Decision-Making theory. Our approach rigorously models and aggregates human preferences while retaining the complexity of real-world value trade-offs. Unlike traditional methods that rely on coarse-grained preference pairs, FGD-Align introduces fuzzy preference modeling via triangular fuzzy numbers to capture nuanced, multi-criteria human judgments. We further develop a new training objective, Probabilistic Fuzzy DPO, which incorporates fuzzy preference strength as adaptive loss weights and gradient filters, enhancing robustness to ambiguity and inconsistency in feedback. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that FGD-Align consistently outperforms both DPO variants and advanced preference aggregation methods in terms of preference accuracy and robustness to ambiguity. It achieves superior alignment stability and better preserves minority preferences, all with minimal computational overhead. Our work bridges the gap between algorithmic tractability and the nuanced landscape of human values, enabling more scalable, inclusive, and socially-aware AI alignment.

PaperID: 3757

Authors:Ho Kyung Shin, Soeun Bae, Sang Min Kim, Byoung Chul Ko, Woo-Jeoung Nam

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Kyungpook National University, Republic of Korea, Department of Computer Engineering, Keimyung University, South Korea

Title: PINet: Improving the Stability of Prototype Networks via Phantasia-Inspired Uncertain Representations

Abstract:
Selfinterpretable models are increasingly valued for their inherent explainability. Among them, part-prototype networks stand out by mimicking human reasoning through the use of learned prototypes. However, their explanations often lack stability, becoming sensitive to subtle input perturbations. In this work, we propose Prototype in Imagery Network (PINet), a framework that improves the stability of prototype-based explanations. Rather than training on all possible input variations, which is computationally infeasible, PINet draws inspiration from visual mental imagery. Specifically, we incorporate empty inputs and apply coarse location guidance to simulate the human ability to imagine rough object features (a process akin to Phantasia). PINet mimics this process by incorporating empty inputs and applying coarse location guidance. These imagined, or uncertain, representations are contrasted with those derived from actual inputs (certain representations). We model the differences between the two by computing similarity at both the feature and prototype levels, allowing uncertainty to be explicitly encoded during prototype learning. Comprehensive evaluations on CUB-200-2011 and Stanford Cars demonstrate that PINet consistently achieves robust accuracy and localization, even under noisy conditions. These results represent the ability of PINet to produce stable and interpretable explanations under uncertainty.

PaperID: 3758

Authors:Haoyu Wang, Xiaozhe Xin, Xiaoyu Qin, Meiguang Jin, Junfeng Ma, Dan Xu, Jia Jia

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Alibaba Group, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Ministry of Education BNRist

Title: Emotion-Conditioned Motion Sub-spaces with Flow Matching for Real-Time Audio-Driven Talking Heads

Abstract:
Recent advances in audiodriven talking-head synthesis have brought lip-sync precision close to human perception, yet emotional fidelity and real-time inference remain open challenges. Existing pipelines typically disentangle lip articulation, facial expression, and head pose in latent space; this rigid factorization ignores the intrinsic coupling between articulation and affect — e.g., downward lip corners when sad—thus limiting expressiveness. We cast speech-conditioned facial motion as a sample from an emotion-conditioned distribution in a motion latent space. Concretely, we (i) learn a motion dictionary of orthogonal bases with an autoencoder via self-supervision, (ii) construct emotion-conditioned sub-spaces within the latent space, and (iii) design a layer-progressive cross-attention fusion module that modulates a flow-matching sampler with both audio and emotion signals. Only ten reverse ODE steps are required to generate a motion-latent trajectory, enabling real-time end-to-end latency. Extensive experiments on MEAD and RAVDESS show that our method outperforms recent GAN- and diffusion-based baselines in emotion accuracy while running at around 75 FPS on a single desktop GPU. The proposed framework delivers the first emotionally expressive Audio2Face system that simultaneously achieves lip-sync accuracy, affective realism, and real-time performance.

PaperID: 3759

Authors:Sheng Yu, Di-Hua Zhai, Yuanqing Xia

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology

Title: GraphGrasp: Lightweight and Efficient Graph-Guided 6-DoF Robotic Grasp Pose Estimation Network

Abstract:
6DoF object grasping is a crucial skill for embodied intelligent robots. Previous methods often rely on large-scale networks for feature extraction, followed by grasp pose prediction, which increases the network's parameter count and overlooks the geometric and graph features of the point cloud. To address these challenges, we propose GraphGrasp, a graph-guided 6-DoF grasping pose prediction method. It performs graph analysis from the perspectives of scene, object, and grasping graphs. First, we introduce a graph feature embedding method based on local-global features to model the scene graph effectively. Then, we use a graph transformer strategy to represent spatial relationships between objects in the object graph. Finally, we propose a multi-metric, multi-level grasp pose evaluation algorithm to predict and explore graspable points, enabling effective construction of grasp graphs and accurate grasp pose evaluation. We test GraphGrasp on the GraspNet-1Billion dataset, and the results show that, compared to previous methods, it achieves nearly the same performance with about 1/5 of the parameters of state-of-the-art methods, significantly improving grasp pose prediction speed. Additionally, in real-world robot grasping scenarios, GraphGrasp outperforms previous methods in practical grasp pose prediction tasks.

PaperID: 3760

Authors:Zhecheng Yu, Yan Lyu, Chen Yang, Tao Chen, Yishuang Zhang, Bo Ling, Peng Wang, Guanyu Gao, Weiwei Wu, Brian Y. Lim

Affiliations: Southeast University, University of Surrey, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, National University of Singapore

Title: Learning from Human Gaze: Human-like Robot Social Navigation in Dense Crowds

Abstract:
Robot navigation in dense crowds requires understanding social cues that humans naturally use, yet existing methods struggle with realworld complexity. We investigate two questions: (1) Where do pedestrians look when navigating crowds? and (2) Can eye tracking improve robot navigation? To answer, we introduce GazeNav, an egocentric dataset collected via wearable eye trackers, featuring synchronized video, gaze, and trajectories in crowded environments. Analysis reveals that the gaze of pedestrians is closely related to the semantic presence and movement of other individuals, exhibiting distinct attention patterns across navigation behaviors. Building on this, we propose Gaze2Nav, a modular framework that first predicts human gaze to infer socially salient pedestrians, then incorporates the semantic attention into motion planning alongside visual inputs. Our method achieves 87.6% salient pedestrian prediction accuracy and reduces trajectory error by 15.4% over state-of-the-art baselines. By aligning with human gaze, our framework improves both performance and interpretability, advancing toward human-like, socially intelligent robot navigation.

PaperID: 3761

Authors:Viet-Man Le, Lukas André Feldgrill, Alexander Felfernig

Affiliations: Graz University of Technology

Title: Robust Lazy Conflict Detection via Multi-Conflict Extraction and Genetic Diversity Control

Abstract:
Detecting minimal conflict sets is essential for providing meaningful feedback in knowledgebased configuration. While lazy conflict detection addresses runtime efficiency by predetermining conflict sets offline using a genetic algorithm, it suffers from low conflict coverage, stagnation, and instability. We propose a robust enhancement that integrates multi-conflict extraction and genetic diversity control to overcome these limitations. Our method extends conflict discovery per evaluation and introduces three diversity mechanisms: full population reproduction, weighted genetic operators, and adaptive extinction. Empirical evaluations on five real-world configuration knowledge bases show that our approach recovers up to 85% of conflict sets, reduces solver calls by up to 73%, and achieves higher result stability. These improvements demonstrate the scalability and reliability of enhanced lazy conflict detection for interactive configuration systems.

PaperID: 3762

Authors:Jinpeng Li, Hang Yu, Ziqi Ma, Peng Qi

Affiliations: Deep Sea Science Data Center, National Deep Sea Center, China College of Environmental Science and Engineering, Ocean University of China, School of Computer Engineering and Science, Shanghai University, College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Tongji University

Title: Discovering Latent Facts from Context to Construct Richer Open Knowledge Graphs

Abstract:
Knowledge graph construction (KGC) aims to extract valuable information from text and organize it into structured knowledge graphs (KGs). Recent methods have leveraged the strong generative capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to improve the generalization and reduce the labor costs. However, constrained by the input length of LLMs, existing methods mainly focus on extracting knowledge within individual texts and lack the capability to discover latent knowledge across texts. To fill this gap, we propose a novel method for open knowledge graph construction, termed KGDLF. The core idea of this method is to enhance the knowledge graph construction process by discovering new facts that are consistent with the underlying contextual logic. Specifically, we first design a knowledge extractor to extract knowledge from the text. Then, a knowledge normalizer performs schema alignment on the extracted knowledge. Next, we explore a knowledge discoverer based on a clue search strategy, which leverages the logical consistency of context to mine latent facts. Finally, we design a counterfactual-based knowledge corrector, enabling the model to purify knowledge and reduce factual errors. Experimental results show that KG-DLF is capable of extracting comprehensive knowledge in open-world scenarios across three KGC benchmarks.

PaperID: 3763

Authors:Jinwei Shi, Wenxuan Huang, Yu Xing, Yunhui Liu, Tao Zheng, Bin Chong, Tieke He

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Hangzhou Dianzi University, National Engineering Laboratory for Big Data Analysis and Applications, Peking University

Title: EchoEdit: Consistent Multi-Hop Question Answering via Ripple Control in Knowledge Editing

Abstract:
Knowledge editing aims to update specific knowledge in Large Language Models (LLMs) without retraining the entire model. However, existing methods generally struggle to manage the ripple effects of knowledge updates, particularly in multihop reasoning tasks, where conflicts between old and new information often lead to shifts in reasoning chains and degraded consistency. To address this issue, a ripple-aware knowledge editing framework, namely EchoEdit, is proposed. EchoEdit introduces the RippleGraph to explicitly model potentially affected knowledge regions and employs a RippleRule generator to dynamically produce diffusion rules, precisely constraining knowledge propagation. Furthermore, we distill a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) planner from an external teacher model, which decouples complex reasoning chain planning into RippleGraph-guided reasoning, thereby alleviating the reasoning burden on low-resource LLMs in multi-hop tasks. Experimental results on the MQuAKE and RIPPLEEDITS multi-hop reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that EchoEdit significantly outperforms existing mainstream methods, effectively enhancing post-edit reasoning consistency and generalization capabilities.

PaperID: 3764

Authors:Muchan Tao, Haonan Qin, Yuqi Fang, Caifeng Shan, Tieniu Tan

Affiliations: Nanjing University

Title: Delphi: A Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Individualized, Safe and Interpretable Treatment Recommendation

Abstract:
Clinical reinforcement learning (RL) holds promise for treatment recommendation but remains hindered by blackbox decision processes, limited safety guarantees, and lack of individualized reasoning. We introduce Delphi Engine, the first fully trainable neuro-symbolic causal RL framework for dynamic treatment planning, designed to answer three core clinical questions in real time: Why this action? Why is it safe? Why for this patient? Specifically, Delphi integrates: (1) causality-aware state modeling using discretized physiological variables and subtype-specific causal graphs; (2) adaptive symbolic rule constraints, combining clinical guidelines and behavior-derived rules into soft differentiable logic; and (3) interpretable decision fusion, where actions are selected based on joint neural-symbolic Q-values and explained via structured LLM-based justifications. We evaluate Delphi on the MIMIC-III sepsis cohort using both standard off-policy evaluations (WIS↑1.47, DR↑1.29, RMSE↓0.207) and the first blinded physician evaluation of an explainable RL system in healthcare. Delphi consistently outperforms historical physicians' treatments in safety (+10.4%), understandability (+8.9%), and adoption rate (+5.75%) across six clinical axes. These results highlight Delphi’s potential as a safe, interpretable, and patient-specific AI assistant for critical care medicine.

PaperID: 3765

Authors:Jingyuan Tian, Xiaofei Zhou

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: A Robust Unlearning Method with Adaptive Knowledge Guidance and Memory Preservation

Abstract:
Machine unlearning has emerged as a promising approach to remove specific knowledge from large language models (LLMs), especially for safetycritical applications. However, existing representation-based methods lack guidance for selecting representation locations to unlearn (RMU), thus lacking precision in unlearning, while probability-based methods are vulnerable to fine-tuning attacks which use unrelated and safe data to fine-tune models. To address these problems, this paper presents an adaptive knowledge guidance and memory perturbation mechanisms, called ALMPU (Adaptive Localized Memory Perturbation Unlearning) which addresses the lack of knowledge guidance in representation-based unlearning methods and mitigates the impact of fine-tuning attacks on unlearned models. Specifically, we apply scaling factors to attention heads and select the most sensitive ones as knowledge guidance. Guided by the previous knowledge localization, we integrate enhanced memory perturbation—which forces the model to preserve specific knowledge—into the standard representation-based unlearning process at these sensitive positions. Through this perturbation mechanism, the model achieves more thorough elimination of the target knowledge. By adding interventions to selected attention heads and explicitly optimizing against fine-tuning attacks during the unlearning process, ALMPU creates a controlled divergence from the original model that is inherently resistant to relearning attempts. Experimental evaluation on the WMDP benchmark demonstrates that ALMPU consistently outperforms baseline methods across different scales of fine-tuning attacks.

PaperID: 3766

Authors:Niloofar Azizi, Nils M. Kriege, Nicholas J. A. Harvey, Horst Bischof

Affiliations: Cambridge Center for AI in Medicine, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, Faculty of Computer Science, University of Vienna, Austria Research Network Data Science, Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, Institute of Computer Graphics and Vision, Graz University of Technology

Title: Spectral Basis Learning for Expressive Graph Neural Networks in Link Prediction

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel in handling graphstructured data but often underperform in link prediction tasks compared to classical methods, mainly due to the limitations of the commonly used message-passing principle. Notably, their ability to distinguish non-isomorphic graphs is limited by the 1-dimensional Weisfeiler-Lehman test (WL). Our study presents a novel method to enhance the expressivity of GNNs by embedding induced subgraphs into the eigenbasis of the graph Laplacian. We introduce a Learnable Lanczos algorithm with Linear Constraints (LLwLC), proposing two novel subgraph extraction strategies: encoding vertex-deleted subgraphs and applying Neumann eigenvalue constraints. For the former, we demonstrate the ability to distinguish graphs that are indistinguishable by 2-WL, while maintaining efficiency. The latter focuses on link representations enabling differentiation between k-regular graphs and node automorphism, a vital aspect for link prediction tasks. Our approach results in a lightweight architecture, reducing the need for extensive training datasets. Empirically, our method improves performance in challenging link prediction tasks across benchmark datasets, establishing its practical utility and supporting our theoretical findings. Notably, LLwLC achieves 20x and 10x speedups by requiring only 5% and 10% of the data from the PubMed and OGBL-Vessel datasets, while comparing to the state-of-the-art.

PaperID: 3767

Authors:Zhiwei Chen, Yupeng Hu, Zhiheng Fu, Zixu Li, Jiale Huang, Qinlei Huang, Yinwei Wei

Affiliations: Shandong University

Title: INTENT: Invariance and Discrimination-aware Noise Mitigation for Robust Composed Image Retrieval

Abstract:
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is a challenging image retrieval paradigm that enables to retrieve target images based on multimodal queries consisting of reference images and modification texts. Although substantial progress has been made in recent years, existing methods assume that all samples are correctly matched. However, in realworld scenarios, due to high triplet annotation costs, CIR datasets inevitably contain annotation errors, resulting in incorrectly matched triplets. To address this issue, the problem of Noisy Triplet Correspondence (NTC) has attracted growing attention. We argue that noise in CIR can be categorized into two types: cross-modal correspondence noise and modality-inherent noise. The former arises from mismatches across modalities, whereas the latter originates from intra-modal background interference or visual factors irrelevant to the coarse-grained modification annotations. However, modality-inherent noise is often overlooked, and research on cross-modal correspondence noise remains nascent. To tackle above issues, we propose the Invariance and discrimiNaTion-awarE Noise neTwork (INTENT), comprising two components: Visual Invariant Composition and Bi-Objective Discriminative Learning, specifically designed to handle the two-aspect noise. The former applies causal intervention on the visual side via Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to generate intervened composed features, enforcing visual invariance and enabling the model to ignore modality-inherent noise during composition. The latter adopts collaborative optimization with both positive and negative samples, and constructs a scalable decision boundary that dynamically adjusts decisions based on the loyalty degree, enabling robust correspondence discrimination. Extensive experiments on two widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority and robustness of INTENT.

PaperID: 3768

Authors:Yu-Hong Chou, Rui Fang, Hsi-Wen Chen, Ming-Syan Chen

Affiliations: National Taiwan University

Title: LoGIC: Multi-LoRA Guided Importance Consensus for Multi-Task Pruning in Vision Transformers

Abstract:
Deploying Vision Transformers (ViTs) in realworld multi-task learning remains challenging due to their massive computational costs and the difficulty of pruning shared backbones without harming task performance. Single-task pruning often causes destructive interference by discarding weights critical to other tasks, while existing multi-task pruning strategies remain costly and unscalable for billion-parameter models. We propose Multi-LoRA Guided Importance Consensus (LoGIC), a unified framework for efficient and robust multi-task ViT pruning. LoGIC follows a two-phase procedure: (i) task-consistent pruning of LoRA modules, guided by a task-adaptive gating mechanism that balances shared and task-specific contributions while enforcing structured sparsity for deployment; and (ii) cross-task consensus pruning of the frozen ViT backbone, which retains both universally shared and task-specialized capabilities, enabling aggressive sparsity without sacrificing accuracy. Across five diverse vision benchmarks, LoGIC achieves up to 50% structured sparsity while maintaining competitive accuracy and surpassing all baselines.

PaperID: 3769

Authors:Beirong Cui, Qilong Feng, Junyu Huang

Affiliations: Central South University

Title: Linear Time Algorithms for Individually Fair k-means via Multi-Swap Local Search

Abstract:
Fair clustering has attracted increased attention in recent years. In this work, we study the individually fair clustering problem in Euclidean space. While singleswap local search methods have achieved near-linear running time and constant approximation guarantees, their performance often depends on the aspect ratio of the dataset (the ratio between the diameter and the minimum interpoint distance of the dataset). How to apply multi-swap local search while obtaining linear running time with better approximation ratio is still a challenging task. To address this, we introduce a collaborative initialization framework for that integrates greedy with sampling techniques. This framework eliminates the dependence on the aspect ratio and produces a constant-factor bicriteria approximation in linear time. In contrast to the current state-of-the-art near-linear time algorithm, which requires a restrictive assumption about the relationship between optimal centers and cluster centroids, we propose a multi-swap local search algorithm that provides an improved approximation guarantee. Our method runs in linear time with high probability and does not rely on the aforementioned assumption. We validate our theoretical results through extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic datasets, including large-scale benchmarks with up to 100 million points. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates superior performance in terms of clustering quality and computational efficiency, along with scalability under varying parameter settings.

PaperID: 3770

Authors:Henggang Deng, Yuchao Tang, Wenjie Fu, Huandong Wang, Kun Chen, Tao Jiang

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Ant Group

Title: FedSkeleton: Secure Multi-Party Graph Skeleton Construction for Privacy-Preserving Federated Time-Series Forecasting

Abstract:
In realworld time-series modelling, graph structures are widely adopted because they explicitly encode node topology and capture complex network dynamics. In practice, however, a complete graph is often partitioned across multiple parties; each party can access only its local sub-graph and, owing to privacy regulations, cannot share topology or data, creating pervasive data silos. Federated Graph Learning (FGL) offers a privacy-preserving collaborative-learning paradigm, yet current methods still face two key challenges: (1) the graph topology itself contains sensitive structural information, which can lead to privacy leakage if directly shared during FGL; (2) cross-party edges are crucial for accurate modeling, yet exploiting them without compromising privacy remains a significant challenge. To overcome these obstacles, we propose FedSkeleton, a privacy-preserving framework for time-series prediction that comprises a Skeleton Construction Module and a Dual-stream Forecasting Module, enabling global dependency capture without revealing the topology. Extensive experiments show that FedSkeleton consistently outperforms existing baselines and even surpasses models trained in a centralized setting with full-graph access in certain cases. In addition, we conduct comprehensive security analysis, communication-cost evaluation and scalability experiments, demonstrating that FedSkeleton effectively resists common attacks, keeps communication overhead manageable, and remains robust with respect to key hyper-parameters and the number of participating parties.

PaperID: 3771

Authors:Hongkun Dou, Zike Chen, Zeyu Li, Hongjue Li, Lijun Yang, Yue Deng

Affiliations: Beihang University

Title: Constrained Particle Seeking: Solving Diffusion Inverse Problems with Just Forward Passes

Abstract:
Diffusion models have gained prominence as powerful generative tools for solving inverse problems due to their ability to model complex data distributions. However, existing methods typically rely on complete knowledge of the forward observation process to compute gradients for guided sampling, limiting their applicability in scenarios where such information is unavailable. In this work, we introduce Constrained Particle Seeking (CPS), a novel gradientfree approach that leverages all candidate particle information to actively search for the optimal particle while incorporating constraints aligned with high-density regions of the unconditional prior. Unlike previous methods that passively select promising candidates, CPS reformulates the inverse problem as a constrained optimization task, enabling more flexible and efficient particle seeking. We demonstrate that CPS can effectively solve both image and scientific inverse problems, achieving results comparable to gradient-based methods while significantly outperforming gradient-free alternatives.

PaperID: 3772

Authors:Miaozeng Du, Jiaqi Li, Sirui Pan, Yi Zhan, Guilin Qi, Yuxin Zhang, Rihui Jin, Yinjia Shu, Qianshan Wei

Affiliations: College of Software Engineering, Southeast University, Ministry of Education, School of Computer Science, Peking University

Title: Forget What Has Seen: Selective Concept Unlearning in Segmentation Foundation Models

Abstract:
Machine unlearning (MU) has emerged as a critical tool for removing sensitive or personal information from machine learning models, empowering individuals with the right to be forgotten. While MU has achieved success in classification and generative tasks, whether this technique can be effectively applied to segmentation foundation models remains uncertain. To address this issue, we propose an efficient method, Selective Concept Unlearning (SCU), to unlearn the segmentation capability of target concepts. SCU consists of several key aspects: (1) The Multilevel Forgetting Module, designed with a hierarchical three-level suppression strategy, including (i) distillation-level: Negative distillation steers model’s output distribution away from teacher’s correct outputs, erasing its learned concept recognition. (ii) attention-level: Attention suppression minimizes model’s attention to target regions. (iii) output-level: Directly erases predictions for the target by relabeling as background. (2) The Preservation Module ensures maintaining segmentation quality for non-target concepts. Additionally, we introduce a set of metrics to evaluate segmentation unlearning methods. Experiments demonstrate that SCU consistently outperforms existing baselines.

PaperID: 3773

Authors:Joseph Giovanelli, Giuseppe Pisano, Roberta Calegari

Affiliations: Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna

Title: HAMLET4Fairness: Enhancing Fairness in AI Pipelines Through Human-Centered AutoML and Argumentation

Abstract:
AI systems can perpetuate and amplify existing biases and discrimination, prompting academic efforts to develop mitigation techniques. Despite progress, realworld deployments often expose limitations in current methods and tools--- overlooking preprocessing, adopting poor evaluation protocols, and failing to integrate domain knowledge. These gaps hinder the effectiveness and reproducibility of fairness solutions. AutoML has emerged as a promising approach to optimize AI pipelines and provide an evaluation framework. However, challenges persist, especially around: intersectionality support, explainability, and stakeholder engagement, which are crucial for fairness and human-centric AI development. We introduce HAMLET4Fairness, integrating AutoML with human-centered approaches grounded in logic and argumentation. This enhances interactivity and transparency in AI pipeline optimization while supporting intersectional fairness. HAMLET4Fairness leverages multi-objective optimization and bounds the search space by user-defined constraints, adapting the CRISP-DM methodology for co-design and collaborative problem solving. We validate HAMLET4Fairness through the well-known case studies in the literature and provide insights into how preprocessing choices affect fairness.

PaperID: 3774

Authors:Bogdan Groza, Patricia Iosif, Lucian Popa

Affiliations: Polytechnic University of Timisoara

Title: Constraint-Guided Clustering for Identifying in-Vehicle Electronic Control Units from Voltage Data

Abstract:
Identifying invehicle electronic control units based on voltage characteristics has been the subject of extensive research in cybersecurity. However, the results reported so far generally depend on restricted datasets and supervised learning. In this work, we show that clustering, i.e., unsupervised learning, of voltage characteristics, is in fact more challenging when done on a larger pool of electronic control units as several out-of-the-box clustering methods and metrics will fail to determine the correct number of clusters when exerted over a large dataset. To overcome this issue, we propose a new methodology that takes advantage of domain-specific constraints, which guide the search toward the correct number of electronic control units in a car, or even in a larger pool of units from several cars. We introduce two new metrics: correctness, which measures the success ratio with respect to the constraints, and divergence, which measures the consistency of the clustering, and show that they provide a strong indication for the optimal number of clusters. In this specific context, both metrics prove to be more reliable than the widely used Silhouette score, Davies-Bouldin and Calinski-Harabas indexes. We successfully test our methodology on the largest dataset available today for in-vehicle voltage characteristics and discover new insights regarding the number of devices.

PaperID: 3775

Authors:Yifeng Gu, Jianxiu Jin, Kailing Guo, Xiangmin Xu

Affiliations: South China University of Technology

Title: DAVID: Dual-stage Adaptive Vision-text Integrated Decoupling for Multimodal KV Cache Eviction

Abstract:
With the rapid development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), deploying them on lowresource devices remains challenging. Beyond the model size, long multimodal inputs cause substantial memory overhead in the KV cache, making efficient cache management critical. In this paper, we propose DAVID, a KV cache eviction strategy that adapts to the degree of modality fusion across layers. By analyzing the feature distributions of vision and text tokens, we observe low fusion in early layers and high fusion in deeper layers. Based on this observation, DAVID adopts a decoupled eviction strategy in shallow layers and a super-modal eviction strategy in deeper layers. To support this dynamic switching, we design a lightweight metric that quantifies cross-modal fusion and uses a threshold to determine which layers require decoupling. Experimental results show that DAVID achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks and offers a new perspective on KV cache eviction for MLLMs.

PaperID: 3776

Authors:Arnaud Gueze, Matthieu Ospici, Damien Rohmer, Marie-Paule Cani

Affiliations: École Polytechnique

Title: Deformable Polygonal Flow Matching with Informed Priors and Hierarchical Graph Constraints

Abstract:
This paper presents a novel method, called Deformable Polygonal Flow Matching (DPFM), for the generation of polygonal arrangements such as jigsaw puzzles and floor plans. DPFM is a Flow Matching framework that enables the generation process to deform, rotate, and translate polygons while decoupling these transformations, allowing to toggle them individually. Able to combine the spatial reasoning capabilities of arrangement models with the flexibility of positionbased models, it covers a wide range of applications within a unified formulation, from noiseless puzzle solving using rigid alignments to unconstrained floor plan generation.We represent data using a hierarchical graph composed of a topological subgraph encoding connectivity information and semantics (such as room types for floor plans), and a geometrical subgraph encoding the 1D polygonal loop of each shape. DPFM also leverages Flow Matching's arbitrary prior distributions for geometric constraints by designing priors with domain knowledge. Rather than starting the generation process from uninformed distributions, the generation is constrained through the informed priors at the initialization stage. The qualitative and quantitative evaluations of our method, ran on the RPLAN and jigsaw puzzle datasets, demonstrate strong performance. DPFM outperforms task-specific methods, becoming the new state-of-the-art for 2D arrangement generation. Our results show that DPFM is able to solve novel tasks, such as puzzle denoising, where pieces are reconstructed from noisy versions and arranged into a valid puzzle in parallel.

PaperID: 3777

Authors:Haoyuan Gui, Xiaoyu Zhang, Yifan Zhang, Ximeng Fu, Shiqi Sun, Leisheng Li, Huiyuan Li

Affiliations: Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Key Laboratory of System Software

Title: AirWino: Optimized Winograd Convolution for Accelerating CNN Inference on ARMv8 Processors

Abstract:
As Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) continue to gain traction in deep learning, Winograd convolution has emerged as a key algorithm to enhance computational efficiency. Although ARMbased CPUs are increasingly prevalent in mobile devices, embedded systems and HPC servers, existing 2D Winograd convolution implementations for ARM often leave room for improvement in transformation efficiency, computational throughput, and overall versatility. Furthermore, the lack of tailored 3D Winograd convolution implementations for ARM architectures stems from the additional complexity of supporting higher-dimensional kernels. AirWino introduces a set of novel optimizations covering transformations, data layouts, micro-kernel computations, and parallelization strategies for both 2D and 3D Winograd convolution. It supports FP32 and FP16 precisions with filter sizes of 3 and 5, targeting a broad range of applications. Evaluations on four distinct ARM platforms show that AirWino consistently outperforms state-of-the-art libraries across various experimental scenarios and hardware configurations, highlighting its efficiency and portability.

PaperID: 3778

Authors:Lingbing Guo, Zhuo Chen, Yichi Zhang, Wenbin Guo, Haonan Yang, Zhao Li, Zirui Chen, Xin Wang

Affiliations: Tianjin University, Zhejiang University

Title: rMMEA: Robust Multi-Modal Entity Alignment with Missing and Noise Visual Modality

Abstract:
Recently, multimodal embedding methods have flourished in entity alignment. As state-of-the-art approaches evolve rapidly, visual modality (i.e., images) missing emerges as a critical challenge. While visual modality typically offers the most informative signals in multi-modal entity alignment (MMEA), it is frequently unavailable for many entities. The existing methods commonly use dummy vectors to represent visual-missing embeddings, which negatively impacts both model training and inference. In this paper, we propose robust multi-modal entity alignment (rMMEA), which leverages ranking-based knowledge distillation and mutual information (MI) estimation to address missing modalities while enhancing noise robustness. Unlike conventional teacher-student distillation that requires the student to replicate teacher outputs, our rMMEA learns soft rankings from pure and complete modality sides while capturing implicit key semantics of teacher embeddings through mutual information maximization, allowing rMMEA to avoid strict point-to-point alignment. The experimental results across multiple benchmarks and settings demonstrate that rMMEA significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art anti-modality-missing methods in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.

PaperID: 3779

Authors:Huiting Huang, Tieliang Gong, Kai He, Wen Wen, Weizhan Zhang, Mengling Feng

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, National University of Singapore

Title: Recovering Coherent Affective Patterns: Addressing Modality Missing in Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Abstract:
Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) seeks to decode human emotions by integrating heterogeneous modalities. However, realworld scenarios often involve missing or misaligned data due to sensor failures or transmission errors, leading to disrupted temporal dynamics and degraded cross-modal correlations. To address these challenges, we propose RECAP (REcovery of Coherent Affective Patterns), a robust two-stage framework to restore temporal and structural emotional integrity under modality incompleteness. The first stage employs a causality-aware adversarial generator for multi-granularity temporal reconstruction, complemented by a contrastive mutual information factorization module that disentangles shared and modality-specific semantics. The second stage introduces a mutual information-guided attention fusion mechanism with a ranking-based objective, enabling adaptive integration of complementary signals for refined prediction. Extensive experiments on MOSI, MOSEI, and SIMS under various missing-modality conditions demonstrate that RECAP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Notably, it improves ACC-7 on MOSI by 2.71 percentage points and F1 on SIMS by 6.38 percentage points. These results verify the performance of RECAP in terms of capturing fine-grained emotional cues and robustness.

PaperID: 3780

Authors:Linlin Ji, Li Liu

Affiliations: School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong Normal University

Title: Multi-View Differential Mixing and Graph-Guided Structural Region Selection for Cross-Modal Alignment

Abstract:
Crossmodal alignment is a promising yet challenging task in multimodal learning. Existing methods typically assess it by measuring the cross-modal semantic similarity from both global and local perspectives. However, these methods often neglect their potential interdependence. Specifically, global matching methods suffer from the over-compression of local features, while local matching methods rarely consider the inherent spatial topology of image patches. To address these limitations, we propose MG-Net, a unified framework with two collaborative modules: Multi-View Differential Mixer (MDM) and Graph-Guided Structural Region Selector (GSRS). The MDM is designed to capture discriminative global representations. It generates a series of views by decomposing feature vectors through multi-order differential operations, and adaptively fuses them via a lightweight Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) network. Meanwhile, the GSRS organizes image patches as a spatial graph and employs text-guided contextual reasoning to select spatially coherent and semantically complete structural regions. Extensive experiments on the Flickr30K and MS-COCO benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed MG-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods in most cases.

PaperID: 3781

Authors:Ju Jia, Jiansen Song, Jingxuan Yu, Jiabao Guo, Xiaoshuang Jia, Di Wu, Yali Yuan, Guang Cheng

Affiliations: Southeast University, Hefei University of Technology, Renmin University of China, La Trobe University

Title: PAGPL: PrivacyAware Graph Prompt Learning Scheme via Adaptive Perturbation-Estimated Topology Recovery

Abstract:
Graph prompt learning (GPL) serves as a crucial framework for mitigating the knowledge transfer by reconciling the substantial mismatch between pretraining models and downstream tasks. However, prevalent GPL paradigm fail to accommodate graph data affected by privacy-induced noise. Specifically, 1) GPL typically relies on the stability of original graph structures for the design of effective prompt templates; 2) the construction of prompts lacks explicit guidance to suppress noise introduced by privacy perturbations; 3) prompt optimization on single disturbed graphs can easily lead to overfitting to noise patterns. To address these issues, we propose a novel privacy-aware graph prompt learning (PAGPL) scheme, which alleviates spurious clues caused by privacy noise injection. Initially, an adaptive structure-wise Bayesian estimation is applied to reconstruct the privacy-perturbed graphs. Subsequently, to suppress the impact of residual perturbation, a noise-resilient prompt generation is employed to filter unreliable structural and signals. Ultimately, we incorporate a multi-view-based progressive privacy consistency to promote the robustness of prompts against the semantic misalignment while improving the task-specific consistency. The experimental results reveal that our scheme outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) GPL approaches with a 10%–60% improvement in accuracy under various real-world privacy-perturbed scenarios.

PaperID: 3782

Authors:Tao Jiang, Yucheng Jiang, Xiwen Yao, Gong Cheng, Junwei Han

Affiliations: Northwestern Polytechnical University

Title: UQ-ViT: Harmonizing Extreme Activations with Hardware-Friendly Uniform Quantization in Vision Transformers

Abstract:
PostTraining Quantization enables efficient Vision Transformer (ViTs) deployment with a small calibration data, and its prevalent use of uniform quantization harnesses AI accelerator matrix cores for high-speed inference. However, the application of uniform quantization is fundamentally challenged by the extreme non-uniformity of activation distributions.Specifically, the power-law nature of post-Softmax attention scores and the significant inter-channel variance in post-GELU activations create a dilemma for conventional quantization, as it struggles to preserve critical high-magnitude values without sacrificing overall precision. To resolve this core conflict, we introduce UQ-ViT (Uniform Quantization for Vision Transformers), a novel uniform quantization framework designed to reconcile high precision with hardware efficiency. Central to UQ-ViT are two operators: Dynamic Elimination of Maximum (DeMax) and Normalization Quantization (NormQuant). DeMax is a quantization operator for post-Softmax attention scores that utilizes uniform quantization. It dynamically eliminates and preserves dominant values, effectively mitigating quantization loss from the extreme values in the power-law distribution. NormQuant utilizes a per-channel quantization strategy during quantization and reverts to a per-tensor format for dequantization, achieving both high accuracy and computational efficiency. Crucially, it is applicable to any linear layer, enabling effective quantization of post-GELU activations in ViTs. Through extensive experiments on various ViTs and vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation, we demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms existing methods, achieving superior accuracy while ensuring hardware friendliness.

PaperID: 3783

Authors:Zewen Jin, Shen Fu, Chengjie Tang, Youhui Bai, Shengnan Wang, Jiaan Zhu, Chizheng Fang, Ping Gong, Cheng Li

Affiliations: Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, Shanxi University Institute of Artificial Intelligence, University of Science and Technology of China, Independent Researcher

Title: SMIDT: High-Performance Inference Framework for MoE Models with Dynamic Top-K Routing

Abstract:
To accelerate Mixtureof-Experts (MoE) inference, the hybrid parallelism paradigm is first applying pipeline parallelism (PP) to vertically divide the model into stages, with each stage further divided horizontally using tensor or expert parallelism. On the algorithm side, dynamic Top-K routing reduces computation by activating fewer experts per token on average. In this paper, we explore the application of dynamic Top-K routing to PP-enabled MoE inference, aiming to fully unleash their combined potential. We identify key performance bottlenecks arising from Top-K value variation across layers, which conflicts with PP's typically uniform stage partitioning, as well as opportunities to optimize memory usage through their integration. To address these challenges, we present SMIDT, an efficient MoE inference framework tailored for dynamic Top-K routing. SMIDT features: (1) an adaptive, module-level uneven partitioning strategy to balance computation across PP stages, (2) a memory-aware expert replication scheme (DPMoE) that reduces communication overhead, and (3) a lightweight search algorithm combining binary search and dynamic programming to generate efficient parallelism plans. We implement SMIDT on SGLang, a state-of-the-art LLM inference framework, evaluate it on 32 A40 GPUs and 16 A100 GPUs, and compare with manually tuned parallelism strategies. Experimental results show that, when co-locating prefill and decoding phases, SMIDT achieves 1.20–3.13x throughput improvements for prefill-only tasks and 1.05–1.89x for prefill-decoding tasks. When disaggregating prefill and decoding tasks, SMIDT improves average and P99 time-to-first-token (TTFT) by 1.10–1.17x and 1.21–1.26x, respectively.

PaperID: 3784

Authors:Chae-Won Lee, Jae-Hong Lee, Ji-Hun Kang, Joon-Hyuk Chang

Affiliations: Hanyang University, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

Title: OnEDIT: Online Editing with Decoupled Implicit Task for Large Language Models

Abstract:
Continual instruction tuning (CIT) has emerged as a promising strategy for adapting large language models (LLMs) to new tasks while preserving historical knowledge. Most existing CIT methods have focused on offline CIT (offCIT), which assumes clearly defined task boundaries and allows multiple passes over the data. However, such assumptions rarely hold in realworld scenarios, where data arrive in a streaming fashion and task boundaries are unknown. This setting introduces critical challenges: the absence of task identifiers (task IDs), a significant imbalance in task-specific information, and inaccessibility to previously seen data. In this work, we propose Online Editing with Decoupled Implicit Task (OnEDIT), an online CIT(onCIT) approach to tackle these challenges. OnEDIT leverages a fixed-size adapter for the implicit task, balancing current and past knowledge through editing operations every time step without relying on task IDs or backpropagation. Extensive experiments on CIT benchmarks demonstrate that OnEDIT consistently maintains robust and stable performance, whereas existing state-of-the-art baselines often suffer from performance degradation in online settings. It suggests that OnEDIT achieves superior generalization across diverse task orders and model scales, while maintaining high efficiency and low memory overhead.

PaperID: 3785

Authors:Han Li, Jingwei Sun, Junqing Lin, Guangzhong Sun

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China

Title: CommitMoE: Efficient Fallback-Free MoE Inference with Offloading Under GPU Memory Constraints

Abstract:
Mixture of Experts (MoE) models have emerged as a promising approach to scale language models efficiently by activating only a subset of parameters for each input. However, deploying these models under GPU memory constraints remains challenging, as existing offloading strategies incur significant overhead from CPUGPU data transfers. While prior work has explored prefetching techniques to mitigate this bottleneck, these methods require costly fallback mechanisms when predictions fail. Since expert transfers cannot be canceled once initiated, the correct experts need to be loaded on demand sequentially, introducing additional latency. To address this, we present CommitMoE, a novel approach featuring a Commit Router that makes execution decisions based on expert predictions without fallback mechanisms. Our key insight reveals that router certainty strongly correlates with prediction accuracy, while in low-certainty scenarios, the model output demonstrates inherent robustness to expert selection. Leveraging this insight to design a systems-level solution, CommitMoE achieves 1.3× to 9.4× faster inference across different environments and datasets compared to state-of-the-art offloading frameworks while maintaining model quality.

PaperID: 3786

Authors:Lin Li, Yan Wang, Zhuopeng Wang

Affiliations: Inner Mongolia University

Title: C-GNN-PRUNE: A Unified Graph-Based Framework for Structure-Aware Pruning of Mixture-of-Experts Models

Abstract:
The Mixtureof-Experts (MoE) architecture has emerged as a promising paradigm for scaling large language models (LLMs) by activating only a sparse subset of experts per input. However, its massive parameter size remains a major obstacle to efficient deployment. Existing pruning methods often ignore two key aspects: the intricate structural dependencies among experts and the heterogeneous importance of different layers. To tackle these issues, we propose C-GNN-PRUNE, a unified and structure-aware compression framework tailored for MoE models. Our method introduces an EntropyGuided Allocation Module that dynamically assigns pruning budgets by leveraging expert activation entropy, enabling adaptive handling of inter-layer heterogeneity. To preserve structural collaboration patterns, we construct an expert interaction graph that fuses functional similarity and routing behavior, and employ a GNN-Based Embedding Module to learn structure-aware expert representations. These embeddings, along with co-activation patterns, are fed into a Community Detection Module to identify expert clusters for structured pruning. Finally, an Activation-Aware Selection Module retains the most critical experts in each community, balancing sparsity and expressiveness. Experiments on multiple open-source MoE models demonstrate that C-GNN-PRUNE consistently outperforms prior methods under various pruning ratios, achieving better trade-offs between compression and accuracy. This framework provides a modular and effective solution for structure-preserving compression of large-scale MoE models.

PaperID: 3787

Authors:Mengwei Li, Zilei Wang, Yixin Zhang

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center

Title: Rethinking Open-world Prompt Tuning: A Systematic Framework for Evaluation and Optimization

Abstract:
Prompt Tuning (PT) is a widely used strategy for adapting pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to various downstream tasks. Conventional PT methods evaluate performance separately on known (base) and unknown (new) classes. However, in real-world scenarios, models often encounter inputs without prior knowledge of their class domain. This challenge has motivated the development of Open-world Prompt Tuning (OPT), which requires models to first determine whether a sample belongs to base or new classes and then classify it accordingly. In this work, we carefully review existing OPT methods and identify three key limitations: (L1) incomplete evaluation metrics, (L2) time-consuming and memory-intensive OOD detection methods, and (L3) insufficiently comprehensive optimization strategies. To address these issues, we first tackle L1 by proposing two novel metrics to explicitly evaluate adaptability and generalization under the OPT setting, forming a more comprehensive evaluation framework. For L2, we propose a training-free OOD detection method called Entropy-weighted Rank-normalized Fusion (ERF), which first applies rank normalization to both the maximum and the sum of base-class probabilities, followed by an entropy-weighted fusion of the normalized values. For L3, we propose a plug-and-play Gated Dual-Merging (GDM) strategy to strengthen the classifier’s capability. GDM performs selective merging at the weight level based on an adaptive criterion and combines fine-tuned and LLM-boosted logits at the output level. Extensive experiments on three PT baselines across 11 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed ERF and GDM.

PaperID: 3788

Authors:Ming Li, Zihao Yan, Yuting Chen, Lixin Cui, Lu Bai, Feilong Cao, Ke Lv, Zhao Li

Affiliations: Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Intelligent Education Technology and Application, Zhejiang Normal University, School of Computer Science and Technology, Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Central University of Finance and Economics, School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing Normal University, School of Mathematical Sciences, School of Engineering Science, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences Peng Cheng Laboratory, Zhejiang Lab

Title: Multi-Granular Graph Learning with Fine-Grained Behavioral Pattern Awareness for Session-Based Recommendation

Abstract:
Sessionbased recommendation aims to predict users’ next actions by modeling their ongoing interaction sequences, particularly in scenarios where long-term user profiles are unavailable. While existing methods have achieved promising results by leveraging sequential and graph-based structures, they often rely on global aggregation strategies that emphasize dominant user interests while overlooking the transient and fine-grained behavior patterns embedded in sessions. In practice, user intent evolves across sessions and is reflected through diverse behavioral patterns, ranging from immediate preferences to segmented co-occurrence interests and long-range goals. To address these limitations, we propose GraphFine, a novel multi-granular graph learning framework that achieves fine-grained behavioral pattern awareness for session-based recommendation. Our approach models user behavior at different temporal and semantic granularities through a combination of graph and hypergraph neural networks. Specifically, we employ a position-aware graph to capture short-term item transitions, and construct segmented co-occurrence hypergraphs to uncover high-order semantic relations among co-occurred items. To preserve diverse user intents, we further introduce a multi-view intent readout mechanism that extracts and adaptively integrates intent signals from short-term actions, segmented co-occurrence patterns, and entire sessions. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that GraphFine consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, confirming its effectiveness in capturing fine-grained and dynamic user preferences for more accurate recommendation.

PaperID: 3789

Authors:Ming Li, Yujie Fang, Dongrui Shen, Han Feng, Xiaosheng Zhuang, Kelin Xia, Pietro Lio

Affiliations: Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Intelligent Education Technology and Application, Zhejiang Normal University, School of Computer Science and Technology, Department of Mathematics, City University of Hong Kong, School of Physical & Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Cambridge University

Title: High-Pass Matters: Theoretical Insights and Sheaflet-Based Design for Hypergraph Neural Networks

Abstract:
Hypergraph neural networks (HGNNs) have shown great potential in modeling higherorder relationships among multiple entities. However, most existing HGNNs primarily emphasize low-pass filtering while neglecting the role of high-frequency information. In this work, we present a theoretical investigation into the spectral behavior of HGNNs and prove that combining both low-pass and high-pass components leads to more expressive and effective models. Notably, our analysis highlights that high-pass signals play a crucial role in capturing local discriminative structures within hypergraphs. Guided by these insights, we propose a novel sheaflet-based HNNs that integrates cellular sheaf theory and framelet transforms to preserve higher-order dependencies while enabling multi-scale spectral decomposition. This framework explicitly emphasizes high-pass components, aligning with our theoretical findings. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing methods, validating the importance of high-frequency information in hypergraph learning.

PaperID: 3790

Authors:Zhenpeng Li, Jinshuo Liu, Xinyan Wang, Lina Wang, Jeff Z. Pan

Affiliations: Wuhan University, University of Edinburgh

Title: ReLUPruner: Rethinking ReLU Importance with Taylor Expansion for Efficient Private Inference

Abstract:
With the growing adoption of MachineLearning-As-A-Service (MLaaS), Private Inference (PI) has emerged as a promising solution to address its security concerns through cryptographic techniques. However, nonlinear operations in neural networks account for most of the computational and communication overhead in PI. Existing studies mainly focus on optimizing and reducing the number of ReLU activations in neural networks, but traditional pruning methods may mistakenly remove ReLUs that are critical to maintaining model accuracy. To accurately evaluate the importance of ReLUs in the network, we propose ReLUPruner, a method that uses Taylor expansion to quantify the impact on loss before and after ReLU replacement. Furthermore, we establish a hierarchical importance metric to guide layer-wise ReLU budget allocation and adopt a progressive pruning strategy that dynamically adjust the pruning rate of each layer according to training progress. Extensive experiments on various models and datasets show that ReLUPruner achieves a good balance between ReLU budget and model accuracy, yielding improvements of 1.89% (12.9k ReLUs, CIFAR-10), 3.62% (50k ReLUs, CIFAR-100) and 2.66% (30k ReLUs, Tiny-ImageNet) over the previous state-of-the-art.

PaperID: 3791

Authors:Zixu Li, Yupeng Hu, Zhiwei Chen, Qinlei Huang, Guozhi Qiu, Zhiheng Fu, Meng Liu

Affiliations: Shandong University, Shandong Jianzhu University

Title: ReTrack: Evidence-Driven Dual-Stream Directional Anchor Calibration Network for Composed Video Retrieval

Abstract:
With the rapid growth of video data, Composed Video Retrieval (CVR) has emerged as a novel paradigm in video retrieval and is receiving increasing attention from researchers. Unlike unimodal video retrieval methods, the CVR task takes a multimodal query consisting of a reference video and a piece of modification text as input. The modification text conveys the user's intended alterations to the reference video. Based on this input, the model aims to retrieve the most relevant target video. In the CVR task, there exists a substantial discrepancy in information density between video and text modalities. Traditional composition methods tend to bias the composed feature toward the reference video, which leads to suboptimal retrieval performance. This limitation is significant due to the presence of three core challenges: (1) modal contribution entanglement, (2) explicit optimization of composed features, and (3) retrieval uncertainty. To address these challenges, we propose the evidence-dRivEn dual-sTream diRectionAl anChor calibration networK (ReTrack). ReTrack is the first CVR framework that improves multi-modal query understanding by calibrating directional bias in composed features. It consists of three key modules: Semantic Contribution Disentanglement, Composition Geometry Calibration, and Reliable Evidence-driven Alignment. Specifically, ReTrack estimates the semantic contribution of each modality to calibrate the directional bias of the composed feature. It then uses the calibrated directional anchors to compute bidirectional evidence that drives reliable composed-to-target similarity estimation. Moreover, ReTrack exhibits strong generalization to the Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) task, achieving SOTA performance across three benchmark datasets in both CVR and CIR scenarios.

PaperID: 3792

Authors:Shuang Liang, Xun Lu, Zi-Ang Liu, Ming-Liang Wang, Yan Lyu, Shao-Qun Zhang

Affiliations: National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, School of Intelligent Science and Technology, China Mobile Zijin Innovation Institute

Title: On the Impact of Weight Quantization on Deep Neural Network Uncertainty

Abstract:
Weight Quantization (WQ) is a key technique for lightweight Deep Neural Network (DNN) computations. While existing algorithms often pursue memory compression and inference acceleration with accuracy comparable to fullprecision models, the effect of WQ on DNN uncertainty remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we quantify the impact of WQ on DNN uncertainty through the novel Exact Moment Propagation (EMP) uncertainty estimator. It is observed that WQ significantly increases DNN uncertainty. Based on the EMP estimator, we propose the MOMent Alignment (MOMA) to reduce WQ-induced uncertainty and preserve the accuracy of weight-quantized DNNs. Empirical results across various DNN architectures and datasets validate the effectiveness of both EMP and MOMA methods.

PaperID: 3793

Authors:Jing Lin, Fazhi He, Rubin Fan

Affiliations: Wuhan University

Title: UniSketch: A Unified Framework for Parametric Sketch Generation and Constraint Prediction

Abstract:
In modern ComputerAided Design (CAD), parametric sketches play a crucial role by capturing both the geometric structure and design intent through constraints. However, existing deep learning–based sketch methods remain restricted to simple geometric primitives and limited constraint types, hindering their application to complex real-world engineering tasks. To address this gap, we introduce the UniSketch dataset, comprising 3,836,290 sketches. It offers a comprehensive and diverse collection of 7 types of geometric primitives and 23 types of 2D constraints, all represented as unified vector sequences suitable for deep learning applications. Leveraging the UniSketch dataset, we propose a unified multi-task Transformer framework as a true foundation model for parametric sketch modeling, supporting diverse core tasks like image-to-sketch generation, constraint prediction, and unconditional sketch synthesis. Furthermore, the generated sketches can be efficiently converted to CAD-compatible formats, enabling seamless integration with industrial CAD system for re-editing and reusing. The experimental results show that UniSketch outperforms existing methods in multiple tasks, demonstrating its versatility and practical value in industrial CAD applications.

PaperID: 3794

Authors:Shuxia Lin, Qiufeng Wang, Chang Liu, Xu Yang, Xin Geng

Affiliations: Southeast University

Title: Adaptive-Learngene: Continual Expansion and Task-Aware Selection of Learngenes for Dynamic Environments

Abstract:
Pretrained Vision Transformer (ViT) models have achieved impressive performance across various computer vision tasks. However, most existing pre-trained models are built on fixed datasets and lack the flexibility to incorporate new pre-training data. When additional data becomes available, previous models must typically be retrained on both old and new data, which is costly and impractical, especially in privacy-sensitive or resource-constrained environments. Moreover, direct fine-tuning on downstream tasks does not provide mechanisms to adapt to the specific data distributions of those tasks, and it only supports fixed model sizes. To address these challenges, we propose Adaptive-Learngene, a novel framework in which the ancestry model is trained solely on newly available data, and a new component, termed a learngene, is extracted and added to a global learngene pool that expands incrementally. This design enables a dynamically evolving pool of learngenes without requiring access to previous data. For each new downstream task, the Task-Adaptive Learngene Selector (TALS) retrieves a sparse combination of learngenes that best match to the data distribution of the target task. TALS requires only a small amount of downstream data for this selection, enabling descendant models of different sizes to be efficiently initialized and tailored to specific data distributions and resource constraints. Extensive experiments on diverse downstream tasks demonstrate that our method matches or outperforms existing approaches while offering superior scalability, adaptability, and efficiency in dynamic learning environments.

PaperID: 3795

Authors:Bowen Liu, Xin Peng, Wenxuan Tu, Chengyao Wei, Xiangyan Tang, Jieren Cheng, Miao Yu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Hainan University, Hainan Blockchain Technology Engineering Research Center

Title: Cross-View Progressive Feature Filtering for Multi-View Graph Clustering in Remote Sensing

Abstract:
Multiview clustering of remote sensing data plays a vital role in Earth observation analysis. Recently, deep graph clustering methods based on contrastive learning have significantly improved feature representation capabilities. However, most existing approaches treat all views equally, neglecting the inherent uniqueness and heterogeneity across views, which often results in two major issues: 1) discriminative features from clustering-friendly views are underexplored; and 2) redundant or noisy information from less informative views can degrade the shared representation. To address these challenges, we propose a novel multi-view graph clustering framework termed CF-MVGC for remote sensing data, which dynamically preserves discriminative features and suppresses redundancy by assessing view affinity. Specifically, we employ a dual-stage representation learning strategy to extract both view-specific discriminative features and cross-view consistent representations. To further exploit and adaptively integrate complementary information across views, we design a progressive feature filtering model that dynamically evaluates view affinity using two novel metrics, i.e., view fidelity index (VFI) and view criticality index (VCI). Based on these assessments, the module adaptively modulates feature update and reset signals, reinforcing informative views while suppressing noisy or redundant ones. Views with high affinity receive strengthened update signals to retain valuable features, while those with low affinity are subjected to enhanced reset operations to eliminate noise and redundancy. The resulting high-quality, discriminative representations lead to improved clustering performance, establishing a positive feedback loop. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of CF-MVGC against its competitors.

PaperID: 3796

Authors:Chunzhi Liu, Yuwu Lu

Affiliations: South China Normal University

Title: ME-SFDA: Marginal Exploration with Pyramidal Atkinson-Shiffrin Memory for Source-Free Domain Adaptation

Abstract:
Sourcefree domain adaptation (SFDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a source domain to an unlabeled target domain without requiring access to source data. Although previous works have focused on clustering target domain samples from continuous training, there are still some challenges: i) More source domain knowledge is forgotten with more training epochs. ii) Achieving better learning results often requires increased computational resources. To solve these problems, we propose a novel Marginal Exploration for Source-Free Domain Adaptation (ME-SFDA) method, which is a multi-scale information fusion learning based on our designed Pyramidal Atkinson-Shiffrin memory. Specifically, we design a two-step module to split samples into clustered cores and response scatters by sensory memory. Then, a novel technique is proposed for clustering samples in a hierarchical way, utilizing long-term memory to cluster cores derived from splitting the samples earlier and guide response scatters. To effectively divide samples of different classes, we propose a method that encourages unambiguous cluster assignments for the samples using multi-scale fusion information. To verify the generality of our approach, we not only discuss the UDA and SFDA tasks but also apply it to the semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA), which utilizes a few labeled target samples based on UDA. Extensive experiments on all utilized standard benchmarks indicate that our approach outperforms previous SOTA methods.

PaperID: 3797

Authors:Lihui Liu, Yuchen Yan

Affiliations: Wayne State University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Title: MORGAN: To Bridge Mixture of Experts and Spectral Graph Neural Network

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated strong performance across various tasks by leveraging the structural information inherent in graphstructured data. To address the challenge of edge heterophily, where connected nodes may have dissimilar labels or features, two main families of GNNs have emerged: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) based spatial GNNs and frequency filtering based spectral GNNs. While MoE-based spatial GNNs intuitively assign experts to different hops without solid theoretical grounding, spectral GNNs are based on principled insights from graph signal processing but often rely on manually designed filters and global operators, limiting their scalability and adaptability. In this work, we identify an inherent connection between these two families by showing that the eigengraph components in spectral methods can be treated as experts within an MoE framework. Building on this insight, we propose MORGAN, a novel spectral GNN that integrates Mixture-of-Experts into the spectral domain. MORGAN performs eigen-decomposition of the graph Laplacian, partitions the spectrum into multiple frequency bands, and assigns a dedicated expert network to each band. A learnable gating function dynamically combines these experts based on the spectral characteristics of the input. To support scalable and inductive learning, we further develop MORGAN(L), which incorporates subgraph sampling to enable localized spectral filtering without requiring full access to the graph Laplacian. Extensive experiments on 16 real-world benchmark datasets show that MORGAN achieves competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines, particularly in inductive node classification under heterophilic settings.

PaperID: 3798

Authors:Xiwei Liu, Yulong Li, Feilong Tang, Imran Razzak

Affiliations: Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

Title: DeLo: Dual Decomposed Low-Rank Experts Collaboration for Continual Missing Modality Learning

Abstract:
Adapting Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to realworld scenarios poses the dual challenges of learning from sequential data streams while handling frequent modality incompleteness, a task known as Continual Missing Modality Learning (CMML). However, existing works on CMML have predominantly relied on prompt tuning, a technique that struggles with this task due to cross-task interference between its learnable prompts in their shared embedding space. A naive application of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) with modality-shared module will also suffer modality interference from competing gradients. To this end, we propose DeLo, the first framework to leverage a novel dual-decomposed low-rank expert architecture for CMML. Specifically, this architecture resolves modality interference through decomposed LoRA expert, dynamically composing LoRA update matrix with rank-one factors from disentangled modality-specific factor pools. Embedded within a task-partitioned framework that structurally prevents catastrophic forgetting, this expert system is supported by two key mechanisms: a Cross-Modal Guided Routing strategy to handle incomplete data and a Task-Key Memory for efficient, task-agnostic inference. Extensive experiments on established CMML benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. This highlights the value of a principled, architecturally-aware LoRA design for real-world multimodal challenges.

PaperID: 3799

Authors:Zhenjiao Liu, Xue Xiao, Yao Chen, Jiao Xue, Shubin Ma, Liang Zhao

Affiliations: Inspur Cloud Information Technology Co., Dalian University of Technology

Title: Sample Weighted Incomplete Multimodal Clustering Based on Graph Coarsening Label Extraction

Abstract:
Multimodal data is typically collected through heterogeneous sensors and processing pipelines. However, due to variations in acquisition environments, device capabilities, and feature extraction methods, such data often suffers from incompleteness and inconsistent quality across modalities. To address these challenges, prior studies have explored modality selection and data completion strategies to improve information fusion. Nevertheless, these approaches face two main limitations: (1) they struggle to simultaneously ensure computational efficiency for largescale graph data and maintain structural and semantic consistency across heterogeneous modality graphs; and (2) most of them operate at the modality level and fail to capture fine-grained, sample-specific quality variations. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel clustering framework, Sample Weighted Incomplete Multimodal Clustering Based on Graph Coarsening Label Extraction (IMC-GCSW). The proposed method introduces a graph coarsening-based label extraction strategy. It significantly reduces the computational cost of multimodal graph processing, while preserving key node information and local topological structures. Furthermore, a quality-aware sample weighting strategy is designed to enable fine-grained modeling of modality-specific data quality, allowing the model to dynamically suppress the influence of low-quality modalities on individual samples. Experiments on both general-purpose datasets and the Fructus Aurantii Disease and Pest Datasets demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits superior performance and strong adaptability in handling multimodal data with incompleteness and quality inconsistency.

PaperID: 3800

Authors:Zhenxian Liu, Peixi Peng, Yangru Huang, Yonghong Tian

Affiliations: National Engineering Research Center of Visual Technology, School of Computer Science, Peking University, School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Shenzhen Graduate School, China Peng Cheng Laboratory

Title: Perceiving the Knowledge Boundary: Uncertainty-Guided Exploration and Imagination for World Models

Abstract:
Worldmodel-based reinforcement learning achieves high sample efficiency by learning from imagined rollouts. However, its success critically depends on the accuracy of the learned world model, which is prone to producing unrealistic or hallucinated rollouts when queried beyond its domain of competence. These flawed predictions can trap the agent in a vicious cycle: by misleading exploration toward implausible or uninformative regions, they degrade the quality of collected data, which in turn corrupts policy learning with inaccurate rollouts. To break this cycle, we introduce the notion of a knowledge boundary—the region within which the world model provides reliable predictions—and propose a unified framework that both identifies and leverages this boundary. Concretely, we approximate the boundary using model uncertainty, quantified via disagreement across an ensemble of lightweight predictors, which serves as a practical proxy. This uncertainty signal is used in two complementary ways: as an intrinsic reward to guide exploration toward under-explored yet learnable regions, and as a dynamic filter to exclude unreliable imagined rollouts from policy optimization. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks—including CARLA, DeepMind Control Suite, Atari, and MemoryMaze—demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 3801

Authors:Qianli Ma, Yaowei Zheng, Zhelun Shi, Zhongkai Zhao, Bin Jia, Ziyue Huang, Zhiqi Lin, Youjie Li, Jiacheng Yang, Yanghua Peng, Zhi Zhang, Xin Liu

Affiliations: ByteDance Seed

Title: OmniScale: Scaling Any Modality Model Training with Model-Centric Distributed Recipe Zoo

Abstract:
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have driven impressive progress in omnimodal understanding and generation. However, training omni-modal LLMs remains a significant challenge due to the heterogeneous model architectures required to process diverse modalities, necessitating sophisticated system design for efficient large-scale training. Existing frameworks typically entangle model definition with parallel logic, incurring limited scalability and substantial engineering overhead for end-to-end omni-modal training. We present OmniScale, a modular and efficient training framework to accelerate the development of omni-modal LLMs. OmniScale introduces model-centric distributed recipes that decouples communication from computation, enabling efficient 3D parallelism on omni-modal LLMs. OmniScale also features a flexible configuration interface supporting seamless integration of new modalities with minimal code change. Using OmniScale, a omni-modal mixture-of-experts (MoE) model with 30B parameters can be trained with over 2,800 tokens/sec/GPU throughput and scale to 160K context lengths via 3D parallelism on 128 GPUs, showcasing its superior efficiency and scalability for training large omni-modal LLMs.

PaperID: 3802

Authors:Thanh-Son Nguyen, Hong Yang, Tzeh Yuan Neoh, Hao Zhang, Ee Yeo Keat, Basura Fernando

Affiliations: Institute of High Performance Computing, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Centre for Frontier AI Research, Singapore Harvard University, Singapore College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University

Title: PKR-QA: A Benchmark for Procedural Knowledge Reasoning with Knowledge Module Learning

Abstract:
We introduce PKRQA (Procedural Knowledge Reasoning Question Answering), a new benchmark for question answering over procedural tasks that require structured reasoning. PKR-QA is constructed semi-automatically using a procedural knowledge graph (PKG), which encodes task-specific knowledge across diverse domains. The PKG is built by curating and linking information from the COIN instructional video dataset and the ontology, enriched with commonsense knowledge from ConceptNet and structured outputs from Large Language Models (LLMs), followed by manual verification. To generate question-answer pairs, we design graph traversal templates where each template is applied systematically over PKG. To enable interpretable reasoning, we propose a neurosymbolic approach called Knowledge Module Learning (KML), which learns procedural relations via neural modules and composes them for structured reasoning with LLMs. Experiments demonstrate that this paradigm improves reasoning performance on PKR-QA and enables step-by-step reasoning traces that facilitate interpretability.

PaperID: 3803

Authors:Feiyang Ning, Xinyang Chen

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)

Title: Mitigating Endogenous Confirmation Bias in Noisy Label Learning for Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
Pretrained visionlanguage models (VLMs), especially CLIP, excel at adapting to downstream tasks through fine-tuning with sufficient high-quality labeled data. However, real-world training data often contains noisy labels, leading to significant performance degradation when models are naively fine-tuned on them. Existing noisy label learning methods for VLMs typically leverage the model's own pretrained knowledge, either via zero-shot predictions or vanilla self-training based on them, to identify and handle noisy samples. Crucially, these approaches blindly trust the VLM's pretrained knowledge, which can introduce endogenous confirmation bias: erroneous pretrained priors lead to incorrect noise detection, further amplifying the bias and corrupting the model. To overcome this limitation, we propose the Debiased Knowledge Adaptation Framework (DKAF), which empowers the model to challenge and correct potentially flawed zero-shot predictions. DKAF operates in three progressive phases: (1) Clean Sample Selection. We introduce a cross-modal collaborative pseudo-labeling to train a robust noisy label detector, explicitly mitigating confirmation bias by aggregating diverse signals beyond the model's initial zero-shot view. (2) Noisy Label Refinement. For samples identified as noisy, we apply a dual-modal consistency strategy to selectively correct their labels, leveraging alignment between dominant and fused modalities to guide refinement while minimizing reliance on potentially biased internal knowledge. (3) Model Adaptation. The model is progressively fine-tuned using the jointly curated dataset of selected clean samples and corrected noisy samples, promoting robust adaptation to the target task. Extensive experiments on nine benchmark datasets (both synthetic and real-world noise) demonstrate that DKAF consistently outperforms state-of-the-art multimodal noisy label learning methods. Notably, under high-noise conditions, DKAF achieves average accuracy improvements of 3.08%.

PaperID: 3804

Authors:Zijie Pan, Zuobin Ying, Yajie Wang, Wanlei Zhou

Affiliations: City University of Macau, Beijing Institute of Technology

Title: On the Misalignment Between Data Learnability and Forgettability in Machine Unlearning

Abstract:
We report a structural mismatch between a data point’s learnability—how quickly it improves the loss—and its forgettability—how much it anchors the final parameters—an aspect ignored by prior machine unlearning frameworks such as SISA, FisherForget, and influence-based fine-tuning. To make this gap measurable we introduce Unlearning Gradient Sensitivity (UGS), an influence score computable with a single Hutch++ sketch, and derive the Learnability–Forgettability Divergence (LFD), the Jensen–Shannon distance between the model’s learning and forgetting distributions. We prove that UGS dispersion decays exponentially only under explicit regularisation and that LFD converges to zero when its weight grows sub-linearly relative to the UGS term. Building on these findings, we introduce Dual-Aware Training (DAT)—a lightweight regularization method that reduces variability in how easily data points can be forgotten and aligns learning and forgetting behaviors during training. On CIFAR-10, MNIST, and IMDB, DAT maintains the original model accuracy while cutting forgettability divergence in half and significantly lowering the cost of certified unlearning, showing that it’s effective to make models forgettable from the start.

PaperID: 3805

Authors:Hongshan Pu, Haoxu Zhang, Ye Liu, Hongmin Cai

Affiliations: South China University of Technology

Title: Graph Contrastive Learning with Balanced Hard Negatives and Fine-grained Semantic-aware Positives

Abstract:
Graph contrastive learning (GCL) aims to learn representations by bringing semantically similar graphs closer and pushing dissimilar ones farther apart without label supervision. Hard negatives, which refer to graphs that have different labels but similar embeddings to the target graph, play a key role in improving representation discrimination. However, current methods that generate both highquality positives and hard negatives face two challenges: (1) Hard negative sample generation often suffers from class imbalance, resulting in unequal attention across classes and reduced discriminative power in the learned representations. (2) The typical binary positive sample generation approach, which divides the graph into important and unimportant semantic regions, overlooks regions that negatively impact semantics and mislead model predictions. To address these issues, we introduce a novel method named BalanceGCL, which enhance graph contrastive learning with balanced hard negatives and fine-grained semantic-aware positives. BalanceGCL comprises two modules: Balanced Hard Negative graphs generation (BHN) and Fine-grained Semantic-aware Positive graphs generation (FSP). Inspired by the counterfactual mechanism, BHN generates balanced hard negatives that remain structurally similar to the original graph while inducing a controlled semantic shift. To ensure class balance, BHN iteratively constructs one hard negative sample for each class, ensuring an even distribution of negative samples across all alternative categories. FSP leverages the semantic differences between original graphs and balanced hard negatives to identify positively contributing, negatively contributing, and unimportant regions. By enhancing the influence of positive contributors, suppressing negative ones, and perturbing unimportant areas, it generates more reliable and semantically complete positive samples. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art GCL techniques across 14 datasets in graph classification and transfer learning tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness in tackling class imbalance and identifying fine-grained semantic-aware regions.

PaperID: 3806

Authors:Utsav Singh, Vinay P. Namboodiri

Affiliations: Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), University of Bath

Title: CRISP: Curriculum-Inducing Primitive Informed Subgoal Prediction for Boosting Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) leverages temporal abstraction to efficiently tackle complex longhorizon tasks. However, HRL often collapses because the low-level primitive’s continual updates make earlier sub-goals issued by the high-level policy obsolete, introducing non-stationarity that destabilizes training. We propose CRISP, a curriculum-driven framework that tackles this instability with three key ingredients: (1) primitive-informed parsing (PIP), which adaptively re-labels a handful of expert demonstrations to always generate reachable subgoals by the current low-level primitive; (2) an inverse-reinforcement-learning regularizer that steers the high-level policy toward the expert-induced subgoal distribution and stabilizes learning; and (3) a unified training loop that leverages these components to boost sample efficiency. Across six sparse-reward robotic navigation and manipulation benchmarks, CRISP improves success rates by more than 40% over strong hierarchical and flat baselines and successfully transfers to real-world tasks, demonstrating the promise of curriculum-based HRL for practical scenarios.

PaperID: 3807

Authors:Chuancheng Song, Hanyang Shen, Yan Dong, Xixun Lin, Yanmin Shang, Yanan Cao

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Breaking One-Size-Fits-All: Revisiting Out-of-Distribution Detection on Graphs Under Diverse Distribution Shifts

Abstract:
Graph OOD detection is crucial in openworld scenarios, where OOD samples may manifest in diverse forms such as open-set deviations, feature-similar shifts, and structural anomalies, each exhibiting distinct geometric characteristics. However, most existing methods adopt a one-size-fits-all geometric assumption (typically Euclidean space), which inadequately captures the diverse nature of real-world distribution shifts. Therefore, adaptively selecting geometric spaces according to the properties of OOD samples is critical for their effective representation and reliable identification. Motivated by this, we revisit the graph OOD detection task under diverse distribution shifts and propose UniGOD, a unified framework serving as a graph foundation model for this task. UniGOD comprises two core modules: GeoUP and DynEVO. GeoUP module adaptively perceives the geometric space (such as Euclidean, hyperbolic, and hyperspherical space) by learning the curvature k of Riemannian manifolds. DynEVO module leverages the dynamic nature of neural SDEs to reveal pronounced uncertainty differences between ID/OOD samples, which are reflected in the divergent evolutionary trajectories of node embeddings induced by k-GNN iterations. With the geometry-dynamics coupling mechanism of the above two modules, UniGOD effectively captures the diverse distribution shifts. Extensive experiments demonstrate its superior performance over existing SOTA methods.

PaperID: 3808

Authors:Yu Song, Zhigang Hua, Yan Xie, Bingheng Li, Jingzhe Liu, Bo Long, Jiliang Tang, Hui Liu

Affiliations: Michigan State University

Title: Learning the Latent Structure: A Feature-Centric Approach to Graph Data Augmentation

Abstract:
Graphstructured data plays a pivotal role in modeling complex relationships. However, real-world graphs are often incomplete due to data collection and observational constraints, severely limiting the effectiveness of modern graph learning pipelines. While existing Graph Data Augmentation (GDA) methods attempt to refine graph structures for improved downstream performance, they are typically label-dependent, computationally expensive, and inherently transductive, limiting their applicability in practical scenarios. In this work, we present a novel feature-centric graph data augmentation framework that bypasses explicit structure modeling by operating directly in the embedding space. Through a self-supervised inverse masking process, our method captures latent ties between observed and complete graphs, enabling recovery of unobserved structural signals through refined node representations. To enhance robustness under noisy and sparse supervision, we introduce a message regularizer and a bootstrap strategy for effective training and generalization. Evaluated on ten graph datasets spanning multiple domains, our approach, SelfAug, consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and efficiency across inductive and cold-start settings, highlighting its potential as a scalable and generalizable solution for real-world graph learning scenarios.

PaperID: 3809

Authors:Hao Tian, Sheng Lu, Fuwen Tian, Guangming Cui, Zheng Li, Xuyun Zhang, Quan Z. Sheng, Wanchun Dou

Affiliations: Nanjing University, Macquarie University

Title: DIAA: A Decoding-Efficient Inference Acceleration Approach for On-Device Large Language Models

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized intelligent interactions, enabling mobile applications such as personal assistants on edge devices for local execution. Speculative decoding (SD) has emerged as a promising paradigm to accelerate LLM inference without compromising generation quality, employing a draftthen-verify manner. However, due to the constrained computing and memory resources on edge devices, existing SD works heavily rely on an auxiliary draft model that incurs additional memory burden and hinders the adaptability, as well as static token trees that yield suboptimal inference performance. To this end, we propose DIAA, a Decoding-efficient Inference Acceleration Approach for on-device LLMs. DIAA achieves plug-and-play and model-agnostic inference speedup with memory and computation efficiency for edge devices. Specifically, a pair of lightweight look-up tables (LUTs) is constructed by Top-K token sampling to cache historical tokens and probabilities for rapid candidate drafting. DIAA integrates a dynamic token tree with prior LUTs enabling paralleled verification, updated during decoding process, to adapt the online context. A computation overlap is then employed to pipeline the update operations of token tree, LUTs, and KV cache to improve the computational efficiency. Finally, through extensive experiments implemented on edge platform NVIDIA Jetson, DIAA outperforms existing baselines in generation speed and inference wall-clock time, while incurring minimal memory overhead.

PaperID: 3810

Authors:Akshay Vyas, Angelo Pimienta, Nicholas Ruozzi

Affiliations: University of Texas at Dallas

Title: A Novel Approach to Evaluating Evaluation Metrics for Multi-Output Structured Prediction

Abstract:
In multioutput structured prediction tasks, while only one ground truth label may be provided in the training data, multiple equally valid outputs may be possible, making reliable evaluation a persistent challenge. We postulate that human evaluators implicitly use task-specific invariants, e.g., object boundaries in colorized images or named entities in translations, to judge if an output is acceptable. Under this assumption, we introduce a notion of approximate task-specific invariants and use them as diagnostic tools to evaluate a variety of existing metrics for vision and language tasks. We use these task invariants as part of a framework to systematically test metric reliability by encouraging domain-relevant invariants in model outputs via an augmented loss function. In our experiments, we observe that enforcing invariants with an augmented loss yields substantial improvements in popular distributional metrics while more traditional metrics change only marginally. Through this invariants-driven evaluation, we expose where standard metrics fail to detect meaningful differences, and we highlight the conditions under which distributional metrics succeed or still fall short.

PaperID: 3811

Authors:Chengcheng Wang, Haowen He, Liang Zhao, Xiaoheng Deng, Lixin Duan, Shaohua Wan

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China Shenzhen Institute for Advanced Study, School of Computer Science, Shenyang Aerospace University, Central South University

Title: CasMoE: A Cascaded Framework for Efficient MoE Inference on Resource-constrained Devices

Abstract:
The Mixtureof-Experts (MoE) architecture has emerged as a key enabler for scaling large language models (LLMs), empowering increased model capacity with minimal computational overhead through gating-based dynamic expert activation. However, due to the memory demands introduced by expert modules, MoE inference on resource-constrained devices is still challenging. Existing methods such as model compression and parameter offloading provide partial alleviation but often lead to reduced accuracy or increased latency. In this paper, we propose CasMoE, a general and efficient cascaded framework for accelerating MoE inference on resource-constrained devices. CasMoE employs a two-stage offline-online approach to facilitate efficient expert prefetching. In the offline stage, a parameterized Expert Activation Predictor (EAP) is introduced to accurately predict the corresponding expert activation from the incoming prompt. In the online stage, a non-parametric Expert Activation Matcher (EAM) supporting fast expert retrieval is then integrated with the EAP to form a cascade planner that operates independently of the MoE architecture, predicting activated experts for all MoE layers in a single pass prior to decoding. A gating mechanism is also incorporated to dynamically adjust the sensitivity of the EAM and EAP, enabling a flexible trade-off between inference efficiency and quality. Extensive experiments on diverse downstream tasks demonstrate CasMoE’s effectiveness in accelerating inference while preserving high accuracy.

PaperID: 3812

Authors:Jiacheng Wang, Tianle Chen, Pengyu Cheng, Xiaofeng Hou, Jiacheng Liu

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiao Tong University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: AdaReason: Progressive Training of Multi-LoRA Adapters for Budget-Adaptive Language Reasoning Models

Abstract:
Large reasoning models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex problems through extended chainof-thought reasoning. However, existing approaches face a fundamental trade-off between computational efficiency and reasoning accuracy. Current methods either lack support for user-specified computational budgets or require maintaining multiple independent models, leading to significant resource overhead. In this paper, we present AdaReason, a unified framework that trains a single base model to support arbitrary user-defined computational budgets through dynamic adapter composition. Our approach introduces three key innovations: (1) a length-adaptive step reward function that stabilizes training across diverse budget constraints, (2) a progressive training strategy that gradually tightens computational bounds while maintaining model performance, and (3) a runtime adapter merging mechanism that dynamically interpolates between different computational preferences. Unlike existing methods that suffer from training instability in large context windows, AdaReason achieves stable convergence through careful reward shaping and progressive constraint tightening. Additionally, we provide a rigorous theoretical analysis, establishing a performance bound for our merged model. Experiments on different reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that AdaReason establishes a new state-of-the-art in the performance-efficiency trade-off and enables flexible runtime budget adaptation.

PaperID: 3813

Authors:Maoran Wang, Xingju Cai, Yongxin Chen

Affiliations: Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing University of Science and Technology

Title: S-D-RSM: Stochastic Distributed Regularized Splitting Method for Large-Scale Convex Optimization Problems

Abstract:
This paper investigates problems of largescale distributed composite convex optimization, with motivations from a broad range of applications, including multi-agent systems, federated learning, smart grids, wireless sensor networks, compressed sensing, and so on. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants are commonly employed to solve such problems. However, existing algorithms often rely on vanishing step sizes, strong convexity assumptions, or entail substantial computational overhead to ensure convergence or obtain favorable complexity. To bridge the gap between theory and practice, we integrate consensus optimization and operator splitting techniques (see Problem Reformulation) to develop a novel stochastic splitting algorithm, termed the stochastic distributed regularized splitting method (S-D-RSM). In practice, S-D-RSM performs parallel updates of proximal mappings and gradient information for only a randomly selected subset of agents at each iteration. By introducing regularization terms, it effectively mitigates consensus discrepancies among distributed nodes. In contrast to conventional stochastic methods, our theoretical analysis establishes that S-D-RSM achieves global convergence without requiring diminishing step sizes or strong convexity assumptions. Furthermore, it achieves an iteration complexity of 1/epsilon with respect to both the objective function value and the consensus error. Numerical experiments show that S-D-RSM achieves up to two to three times speedup compared with state-of-the-art baselines, while maintaining comparable or better accuracy. These results not only validate the algorithm's theoretical guarantees but also demonstrate its effectiveness in practical tasks such as compressed sensing and empirical risk minimization.

PaperID: 3814

Authors:Yangtao Wang, Xingwei Deng, Yanzhao Xie, Weilong Peng, Siyuan Chen, Xiaocui Li, Maobin Tang, Meie Fang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Cyber Engineering, Guangzhou University, Hunan University of Technology and Business

Title: End-to-End Knowledge Distillation for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Large Vision-language Models

Abstract:
Knowledge distillation based on large visionlanguage models (VLMs) has recently emerged as a significant solution to transfer knowledge from the source domain to the target domain in unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) tasks. However, existing methods employ a two-stage training pipeline, which not only complicates the training procedure but also lacks interactions between the source and target domains, severely hindering real-time cross-domain knowledge transfer. To address these challenges, we propose End-to-End Knowledge Distillation for UDA with large VLMs (termed as EKDA). (1) EKDA employs a lightweight prompt learning mechanism to first embed the knowledge from the source domain into VLMs, and then simultaneously utilize the image encoder and text encoder of VLMs to perform knowledge distillation on the target domain, significantly reducing the domain gap. (2) EKDA designs a teacher-student alternating training strategy to implement real-time collaborative interactions across domains, enabling an end-to-end paradigm to provide accurate source domain-aware supervision for the target domain. We conduct extensive experiments on 4 widely recognized benchmark datasets including Office-31, Office-Home, VisDA-2017, and Mini-DomainNet. Experimental results demonstrate that EKDA achieves significant performance improvement over the state-of-the-art UDA approaches, while maintaining a much lower model complexity. Take Office-Home for example, EKDA has gained at least 2.7% performance improvement while reducing the learnable parameters by over 80% compared with the state-of-the-art UDA baselines.

PaperID: 3815

Authors:Bowen Wei, Mehrdad Fazli, Ziwei Zhu

Affiliations: George Mason University

Title: Making Sense of LLM Decisions: A Prototype-based Framework for Explainable Classification

Abstract:
Large language models have demonstrated impressive performance on natural language tasks, but their decisionmaking processes remain opaque. Existing explanation methods either suffer from limited faithfulness to the model's reasoning or produce explanations that are difficult for humans to understand. To address these challenges, we propose ProtoSurE, a novel prototype-based surrogate framework that provides faithful and understandable explanations for LLMs. ProtoSurE trains an interpretable-by-design surrogate model that aligns with the target LLM while utilizing sentence-level prototypes as understandable concepts. Extensive experiments show that ProtoSurE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art explanation methods across diverse LLMs and datasets. Importantly, ProtoSurE demonstrates strong data efficiency, requiring relatively few training examples to achieve good performance, making it practical for real-world applications.

PaperID: 3816

Authors:Zhongnan Weng, Yue Hong, Hang Yu, Jiayi Que, Juan Liu, Xiangrong Liu

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Technology, Xiamen University, Pen-Tung Sah Institute of Micro-Nano Science and Technology

Title: Decoupled Spatiotemporal Forecasting from Extreme Sparse Observations via Quantized Latent Space

Abstract:
Predicting spatiotemporal fields governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) from sparse sensor data is a critical and longstanding challenge in science and engineering. Recent deep learning approaches, particularly neural operators, have shown considerable promise in solving PDEs. However, their performance degrades significantly in the demanding regime of extreme sparsity, characterized by spatial sensor coverage of less than 1% and limited temporal observations. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel framework that decouples the task into two stages: spatial reconstruction and temporal extrapolation. In the first stage, rather than reconstructing the high-dimensional physical field directly, our model learns to reconstruct the complete latent features from sparse observations—features that would otherwise be extracted from a dense field. This process is stabilized by a Vector Quantization (VQ) bottleneck, which discretizes the latent space. In the second stage, a decoder-only Transformer performs temporal extrapolation by autoregressively predicting the future sequence of these discrete latent indices. This design inherently allows the model to generalize to new initial conditions and varying forecast horizons, akin to standard autoregressive models. We validate our framework on three challenging benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance under severe sparsity constraints. Furthermore, we introduce a challenging benchmark dataset based on fire dynamics simulations. On this benchmark, our model successfully forecasts the field's evolution 30 frames into the future from a single timeframe with less than 0.1% spatial observations—a result that pushes well beyond the capabilities of existing methods.

PaperID: 3817

Authors:Guoquan Wu, Zhe Wu

Affiliations: National University of Singapore

Title: A Multi-Objective Optimization Framework for Adaptive Weighting in Physics-Informed Machine Learning

Abstract:
Training physicsinformed neural networks (PINNs) can be viewed as a multi-task optimization problem, where data-driven and physics-driven loss functions must be simultaneously minimized, despite the potential competition between them. Manually tuning the weight coefficients for various loss terms in PINNs is often time-consuming and lacks a systematic approach. To address this challenge, this work proposes an adaptive loss balancing framework for PINNs, using multi-objective optimization (MOO) algorithms to dynamically balance competing loss terms during training. Specifically, the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II) is integrated into the PINN training process to explore the Pareto front of the multiple objectives. A novel variance-aware relative improvement (VARI) weighting method is proposed to translate Pareto-optimal information into adaptive loss weights. The proposed MOO-VARI method is validated through several examples, where the results show that the MOO-VARI PINN consistently outperforms standard PINN and other state-of-the-art adaptive weighting strategies in terms of convergence speed, predictive accuracy, and parameter estimation performance.

PaperID: 3818

Authors:Canming Xia, Peixi Peng, Guang Tan, Zhan Su, Haoran Xu, Zhenxian Liu, Luntong Li

Affiliations: School of Intelligent Systems Engineering, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Shenzhen Graduate School, Peking University, National Engineering Research Center of Visual Technology, School of Computer Science, Peng Cheng Laboratory

Title: COVR: Collaborative Optimization of VLMs and RL Agent for Visual-Based Control

Abstract:
Visual reinforcement learning (RL) suffers from poor sample efficiency due to highdimensional observations in complex tasks. While existing works have shown that vision-language models (VLMs) can assist RL, they often focus on knowledge distillation from the VLM to RL, overlooking the potential of RL-generated interaction data to enhance the VLM. To address this, we propose COVR, a collaborative optimization framework that enables the mutual enhancement of the VLM and RL policies. Specifically, COVR fine-tunes the VLM with RL-generated data to enhance the semantic reasoning ability consistent with the target task, and uses the enhanced VLM to further guide policy learning via action priors. To improve fine-tuning efficiency, we introduce two key modules: (1) an Exploration-Driven Dynamic Filter module that preserves valuable exploration samples using adaptive thresholds based on the degree of exploration, and (2) a Return-Aware Adaptive Loss Weight module that improves the stability of training by quantifying the inconsistency of sampling actions via return signals of RL. We further design a progressive fine-tuning strategy to reduce resource consumption. Extensive experiments show that COVR achieves strong performance across various challenging visual control tasks.

PaperID: 3819

Authors:Hengyuan Xu, Wenjun Ke, Yao He, Jiajun Liu, Dong Nie, Peng Wang, Ziyu Shang, Zijie Xu

Affiliations: College of Software Engineering, Southeast University, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Ministry of Education, Institute of Collaborative Innovation, University of Macau, Meta Inc.

Title: Optimizing LoRA Allocation of MoE with the Alignment of Topic Correlation

Abstract:
Mixture of experts (MoE) dynamically routes inputs to specialized expert networks to scale model capacity with low inference overhead. However, the excessive parameter growth in MoE models poses challenges in lowresource settings. To address these issues, MoE with parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods have emerged as a lightweight adaptation paradigm that distributes knowledge among experts via multiple LoRA blocks. Existing MoE-PEFT methods can be broadly categorized into External and Internal PEFT methods. External PEFT methods incorporate lightweight models into existing MoE architectures without modifying their routing, which limits the model’s parameter efficiency. To overcome these issues, Internal PEFT methods integrate MoE architectures into PEFT, enabling minimal parameter overhead. However, they still face two major challenges: (1) lack of expert functional differentiation, resulting in overlapping specialization across modules, and (2) absence of a structured attribution mechanism to guide expert selection based on semantic relevance. To alleviate these challenges, we propose TopicLoRA, a novel three-stage framework that leverages topic knowledge as semantic anchors to guide expert allocation. Specifically, (1) to address expert redundancy, we construct a topic-level prior graph using Graph Neural Network-enhanced representation learning over Big-Bench categories, enforcing structural separation among expert embeddings, and (2) to introduce semantic attribution, we design a dual-loss training mechanism that softly aligns input-query relevance with topic-guided routing distributions via KL divergence. Extensive experiments on representative datasets (e.g., MMLU, GSM8K, Flanv2) demonstrate that TopicLoRA outperforms state-of-the-art PEFT baselines by 2.40% on average in accuracy. Notably, the maximum improvement is 4.21%. Furthermore, ablation studies demonstrate that our framework's robustness to intricate topics and input sequence variations, which stems from the dual-loss training mechanism.

PaperID: 3820

Authors:Junlin Xu, Zhuang Zhang, Zhenghang Gong, Jincan Li, Pan Zeng, Zilong Zhang, Xiong Li, Shuting Jin, Haowen Chen, Yajie Meng

Affiliations: Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan Textile University, Hainan Normal University, Chongqing Normal University, Hainan University, East China Jiao Tong University, Hunan University

Title: FuseMine: Robust Multi-Modal Compound-Protein Interaction Prediction via Differential Attention Feature Mining

Abstract:
Accurate prediction of compound protein interactions (CPIs) is crucial for drug discovery. However, existing deep learningbased methods suffer from hidden biases and poor cross-domain generalization, leading to spurious correlations and inadequate representation of unseen compound-protein pairs. To address these limitations, we propose FuseMine, a multimodal deep learning framework that jointly leverages molecular structures and biological sequences for reliable CPI prediction. Specifically, FuseMine adopts a dual-representation strategy for each molecule. It employs a convolutional encoder to capture structural features, combined with pretrained large language models for extracting semantic information from sequences. We propose a novel Multi-modal Feature Orchestration Aggregation (MFOA) module that enables deep and synergistic fusion between the structural features and the sequential semantics of molecules, effectively capturing the complementary patterns across modalities. Additionally, we design a Reduction Differential Feature Mining (RDFM) module to further enhance the representation of discriminative features, thereby improving the model’s generalization capability. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both intra-domain and cross-domain scenarios. These results highlight the synergistic value of combining structural and sequential data for CPIs.

PaperID: 3821

Authors:Qihao Xu, Xiaoling Luo, Yuxin Lin, Chengliang Liu, Yongting Hu, Jinkai Li, Xinheng Lyu, Yong Xu

Affiliations: Shenzhen University, Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen, University of Macau, Chengdu University of Technology

Title: Vision-Language Models Guided Graph Concept Reasoning for Interpretable Diabetic Retinopathy Diagnosis

Abstract:
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have significantly advanced diabetic retinopathy (DR) diagnosis, yet their blackbox nature limits clinical acceptance due to a lack of interpretability. Concept bottleneck model (CBM) offers a promising solution by enabling concept-level reasoning and test-time intervention, with recent DR studies modeling lesions as concepts and grades as outcomes. However, current methods often ignore relationships between lesion concepts across different DR grades and struggle when fine-grained lesion concepts are unavailable, limiting their interpretability and real-world applicability. To bridge these gaps, we propose VLM-GCR, a vision-language model guided graph concept reasoning framework for interpretable DR diagnosis. VLM-GCR emulates the diagnostic process of ophthalmologists by constructing a grading-aware lesion concept graph that explicitly models the interactions among lesions and their relationships to disease grades. In concept-free clinical scenarios, our method introduces a vision-language guided dynamic concept pseudo-labeling mechanism to mitigate the challenges of existing concept-based models in fine-grained lesion recognition. Additionally, we introduce a multi-level intervention method that supports error correction, enabling transparent and robust human-AI collaboration. Experiments on two public DR benchmarks show that VLM-GCR achieves strong performance in both lesion and grading tasks, while delivering clear and clinically meaningful reasoning steps.

PaperID: 3822

Authors:Meiting Xue, Miaoqi Li, Yukun Shi, Yan Zeng, Jilin Zhang, Jing Ma

Affiliations: Hangzhou Dianzi University, Zhejiang Chinese Medical University

Title: Class-Aware Active Annotation in Federated Semi-Supervised Learning for Medical Image Classification

Abstract:
In medical image classification, data privacy constraints and the high cost of expert annotations pose significant challenges to building generalizable models. Federated semisupervised learning (FSSL), which combines the privacy-preserving nature of federated learning with the label efficiency of semi-supervised learning, offers a promising direction. However, in real-world deployments, client data often exhibits highly non-independent and identically distributed (Non-IID) characteristics. This distributional heterogeneity undermines the reliability of pseudo-labels generated by global models, ultimately limiting model generalization. A key limitation of existing FSSL approaches lies in their reliance on a static labeled set fixed prior to training. Such strategies lack the ability to adaptively correct pseudo-label noise or address class imbalance throughout training, particularly under Non-IID settings. To address this, we propose FSSAL, a novel framework that introduces an active learning component into the FSSL pipeline. By continuously identifying informative and representative samples during training, our method adaptively refines the labeled set and enhances the model’s robustness to distribution shifts. FSSAL employs client-private models for pseudo-label generation to reduce global bias, applies a class-aware dynamic thresholding mechanism to ensure more reliable and balanced label selection, and incorporates a sample selection strategy guided by both feature diversity and model uncertainty. Extensive experiments on four public medical image classification datasets demonstrate that FSSAL consistently outperforms competitive FSSL methods in accuracy and F1-score, especially under highly Non-IID conditions, highlighting its robustness and practical potential.

PaperID: 3823

Authors:Hongpeng Yang, Yingxin Chen, Shiqiang Ma, Fei Guo

Affiliations: Molinaroli College of Engineering and Computing, University of South Carolina, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Make Foundation Models Trustworthy Again: Causal Fine-Adaptation for Medical Image Segmentation

Abstract:
Vision foundation models (e.g., SAM2, CLIP) show strong generalization in natural image analysis but degrade significantly in specialized domains like medical imaging. This is critical for tasks such as brain tumor segmentation, where errors directly affect surgical planning and patient outcomes. In such contexts, segmentation must be highly reliable and structurally precise, underscoring the need for adaptable methods with low error tolerance. While finetuning is the dominant strategy, it is computationally expensive and prone to forgetting. To address this, we propose CausalBridgeNet, a causality-guided correction framework for medical image segmentation. Inspired by predictive coding theories of the Bayesian brain, our method introduces a Predictive Causal Reasoning Unit (PCRU) that estimates structured error maps and delivers targeted feedback to iteratively refine predictions. This forms a closed-loop, error-aware correction mechanism without modifying the foundation model. By keeping the backbone frozen, CausalBridgeNet preserves general visual priors while enhancing task-specific accuracy. On the BraTS 2025 benchmark, it achieves an average Dice score of 84.48 and HD95 of 5.48 across tumor subregions, demonstrating its effectiveness for high-precision medical segmentation.

PaperID: 3824

Authors:Shangshang Yang, Xuewen Duan, Xiaoshan Yu, Ziwen Wang, Haiping Ma, Xingyi Zhang

Affiliations: Anhui University

Title: Debiased Cognitive Diagnosis: A Contrastive Counterfactual Modeling Method via Variational Autoencoder

Abstract:
Cognitive diagnosis (CD), inferring student knowledge mastery based on historical response records, is crucial for personalized educational services such as adaptive practice and learning path planning. Existing CD models were built based on the assumption that student's response data is integral, overlooking the nonrandom missingness of data caused by student answering exercises selectively. This missingness generally leads to biased and incomplete observations, where confounders, such as selection bias and exposure bias, significantly undermine the accuracy of student knowledge modeling. To address missingness, we propose a Debiased Cognitive Diagnosis (DBCD) framework through the perspective of counterfactual modeling to remove exogenous confounders from the response data. Specifically, the proposed DBCD achieves debiasing for CD by applying the idea of contrastive learning to constrain the model's prediction distributions on both factual and counterfactual data. For a student, the factual data is his/her original response records, while the counterfactual data is generated by sampling the same number of exercises from all exercises of each concept through a similaritybased counterfactual sampling strategy. Considering the difficulty of directly removing the exogenous confounders for student, we devise a β-Variational Autoencoder to model their exogenous confounders within the latent representations of knowledge proficiency by leveraging exercise priors and student response patterns. Then, the learned representations are further combined with the vanilla student's ability embedding via a gating mechanism-based fusion for final diagnosis prediction of the model. Extensive experiments on real-world educational datasets demonstrate that the proposed DBCD effectively mitigates confounders and even outperforms existing methods, thereby validating the feasibility and effectiveness of the DBCD framework.

PaperID: 3825

Authors:Tao Yang, Weihao Wu, Tingzhu Huang

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: HiNCoT: Hierarchical Nonlinear Continuous Transform-based Tensor Representation for Multi-Dimensional Data Recovery

Abstract:
Recently, continuous transformbased tensor representation has emerged as a promising tool for multi-dimensional data recovery. However, the existing continuous transforms are essentially single-layer linear mappings, which limits their ability to capture the complex relationships inherent in multi-dimensional data. To overcome this limitation, we propose a Hierarchical Nonlinear Continuous Transform-based Tensor Representation (HiNCoT) for multi-dimensional data recovery. By leveraging the hierarchical nonlinear continuous transform, HiNCoT constructs the recovered tensor from a latent tensor, which is generated by the deep representation module with a low-rank core tensor as input. Compared with the existing continuous transform-based methods, HiNCoT can more effectively capture the complex nonlinear relationships inherent in multi-dimensional data along the third dimension. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed HiNCoT, we suggest an HiNCoT-based multi-dimensional data recovery model. Extensive experiments on diverse degeneration scenarios demonstrate the superiority of our hierarchical nonlinear transform-based method over existing single-layer linear transform-based methods.

PaperID: 3826

Authors:Wenjie Yang, Shengzhong Zhang, Chen Ye, Jiaxing Guo, Tongshan Xu, Zengfeng Huang

Affiliations: Fudan University, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Title: Know Your Neighbors: Subgraph Importance Sampling for Heterophilic Graph Active Learning

Abstract:
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have demonstrated strong performance in various graph mining tasks but rely heavily on extensively labeled nodes. To improve training efficiency, graph active learning (GAL) has emerged as a solution for selecting the most informative nodes for labeling. However, existing GAL methods are primarily designed for homophilic graphs, where nodes with the same labels are more likely to be connected. In this work, we systematically study active learning on heterophilic graphs, a setting that has received limited attention. Surprisingly, we observe that existing GAL methods fail to consistently outperform random sampling on heterophilic graphs. Through an indepth investigation, we reveal that these methods implicitly assume homophily even on heterophilic graphs, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this issue, we introduce the principle of "Know Your Neighbors" and propose an active learning algorithm KyN specifically for heterophilic graphs. The core idea of KyN is to provide GNNs with accurate estimations of homophily distribution by labeling nodes together with their neighbors. We implement KyN based on subgraph sampling with probabilities proportional to l1 Lewis weights, which is supported by solid theoretical guarantees. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world datasets, including a large heterophilic graph with over 2 million nodes, demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of KyN.

PaperID: 3827

Authors:Yuqi Yuan, Xiong Luo, Qiaojuan Peng, Wenbing Zhao

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology Beijing, Cleveland State University

Title: GraFT: Infusing Pre-trained Transformers with Relational Structure for Time Series Forecasting

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently emerged as a leading approach for multivariate time series forecasting. However, their effectiveness is hampered by a fundamental architectural mismatch: the permutationinvariant self-attention of Transformers lacks inductive biases for the strict temporal order and complex cross-variable dependencies inherent in time series. Existing methods often sidestep this issue with input-level alignment techniques rather than endowing the model itself with structural awareness. To address this gap, we introduce GraFT (Graph-infused Forecasting Transformer), a framework that systematically embeds relational priors into a pre-trained backbone by constructing a heterogeneous patch relation graph, which represents both universal temporal principles with static edges and instance-specific patterns with dynamic adaptive edges. To process this multi-relational structure, a relational graph convolutional network generates structure-aware representations, which are infused into the patch embeddings to provide explicit structural guidance to the Transformer's attention mechanism. Extensive experiments show that GraFT achieves state-of-the-art performance on long-term forecasting and zero-shot learning, outperforming leading LLM-based methods on eight standard benchmarks with an average Mean Squared Error (MSE) reduction of 14.4%.

PaperID: 3828

Authors:Huiliang Zhai, Xiangyi Teng, Jing Liu

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University, Guangzhou Institute of Technology

Abstract:
Multiplex graphs are widely used to model multirelational complex systems and play an important role in various real-world scenarios, such as financial systems and social networks. Hence, detecting anomalous samples in multiplex graph becomes crucial to ensure cybersecurity and stability. Although existing homogeneous graph anomaly detection (GAD) methods can be applied to deal with multiplex graphs, they still face two major challenges: 1) Due to the multiplicity and complexity of relations in multiplex graphs, homogeneous GAD models fail to effectively capture anomalous behaviors that correlate with diverse relational patterns. 2) In real-world applications, malicious entities usually disguise themselves through various camouflage strategies, making it difficult to capture subtle anomalous features via single-relation analysis. To address these challenges, we propose a novel unsupervised anomaly detection method for multiplex graphs based on Similarity-constrained Fusion Graph Autoencoder (SFGA). In SFGA, we design a multiplex graph autoencoder and introduced a cross-plex attention module at the model bottleneck to achieve comprehensive modeling of cross-relation anomaly patterns. Then, a similarity balancing strategy is proposed to constrain node representations at the bottleneck from both local and global perspectives, enhancing the discriminative power against camouflaged anomalies of autoencoder and enabling more effective identification of anomalous nodes with overlapping or deceptive patterns. Extensive experiments are conducted on both synthetic and real-world datasets at varying scales, and the results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin.

PaperID: 3829

Authors:Jiale Zhang, Yanan Wang, Bosen Rao, Chengcheng Zhu, Xiaobing Sun, Yu Li

Affiliations: Yangzhou University, Nanjing University, Jilin University

Title: MultiKD: Backdoor Defense in Federated Graph Learning via Attention-Guided Multi-Teacher Distillation

Abstract:
Backdoor attacks pose a severe threat to federated graph learning (FGL), where malicious clients can inject hidden triggers into the global model without being detected. Defending against such attacks is particularly challenging due to the complex graph structures and the stealthy nature of trigger patterns. In this work, we propose MultiKD, a novel backdoor mitigation method based on attentionguided multi-teacher distillation. Unlike existing defenses that focus on detecting suspicious clients or restricting backdoor activation, MultiKD directly purifies the global model on the server side by exploiting intermediate representations. It integrates knowledge from multiple client models and guides the global model to suppress backdoor behaviors by aligning attention maps and preserving inter-layer relational consistency. Our defensive intuition enables MultiKD to retain task-relevant information while mitigating malicious patterns, even when some teacher models are compromised. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in significantly reducing attack success rate (≤ 8%) with minimal impact on utility (≤ 5%).

PaperID: 3830

Authors:Letian Zhang, GuangHao Meng, XuDong Ren, Jinpeng Wang

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: HALoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation with Hierarchical Budget Allocation for Efficient Vision-Language Alignment

Abstract:
With the emergence of large multimodal models, dualencoder alignment via contrastive learning has seen a resurgence. However, the escalating model size demands effective Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT). While LoRA is a promising inference-free alternative to adapters, we find that its naive application to multimodal tasks causes a severe rank imbalance, favoring the text modality and FFN layers. To address this, we propose HALoRA (Hierarchical Allocation LoRA), which introduces a component-wise budget allocator to ensure balanced fine-tuning across both modalities and their internal components. This is complemented by a gradient-approximated initialization to accelerate convergence. With only half the parameters of adapters, HALoRA achieves superior or competitive performance in retrieval and zero-shot classification. Our work presents a more principled approach to multimodal LoRA, uncovering an intriguing asymmetry in vision-language alignment.

PaperID: 3831

Authors:Longteng Zhang, Sen Wu, Shuai Hou, Zhengyu Qing, Zhuo Zheng, Danning Ke, Qihong Lin, Qiang Wang, Shaohuai Shi, Xiaowen Chu

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Harbin Institute of Technology, Huawei Technologies

Title: SALR: Sparsity-Aware Low-Rank Representation for Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models

Abstract:
Adapting large pretrained language models to downstream tasks often entails fine-tuning millions of parameters or deploying costly dense weight updates, which hinders their use in resource-constrained environments. Low-rank Adaptation (LoRA) reduces trainable parameters by factorizing weight updates, yet the underlying dense weights still impose high storage and computation costs. Magnitude-based pruning can yield sparse models but typically degrades LoRA’s performance when applied naively. In this paper, we introduce SALR (Sparsity-Aware Low-Rank Representation), a novel fine-tuning paradigm that unifies low-rank adaptation with sparse pruning under a rigorous mean-squared-error framework. We prove that statically pruning only the frozen base weights minimizes the pruning error bound, and we recover the discarded residual information via a truncated-SVD low-rank adapter, which provably reduces per-entry MSE by a factor of (1 - r/min(d, k)). To maximize hardware efficiency, we fuse multiple low-rank adapters into a single concatenated GEMM, and we adopt a bitmap-based encoding with a two-stage pipelined decoding + GEMM design to achieve true model compression and speedup. Empirically, SALR attains 50% sparsity on various LLMs while matching the performance of LoRA on GSM8K and MMLU, reduces model size by 2x, and delivers up to a 1.7x inference speedup.

PaperID: 3832

Authors:Peng Zhang, Wanggui He, Mushui Liu, Wenyi Xiao, Siyu Zou, Yuan Li, Xingjian Wang, Guanghao Zhang, Yanpeng Liu, Weilong Dai, Jinlong Liu, Shuyi Ying, Ruikai Zhou, Yunlong Yu, Yubo Tao, Hai Lin, Hao Jiang

Affiliations: Alibaba Group, Zhejiang University

Title: FUSE: Fine-Grained and Semantic-Aware Learning for Unified Image Understanding and Generation

Abstract:
Recent unified models have demonstrated that the reasoning capacity of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can be leveraged to facilitate diffusionbased image generation with impressive flexibility and performance. However, approaches that rely heavily on MLLMs for high-level semantic encoding often struggle with fine-grained visual tasks like image editing and virtual try-on. To address this gap, we propose FUSE, a unified framework excelling at both high-level vision–language understanding and fine-grained generation. First, we introduce a Semantic-to-Detail Connector that pre-aligns fine-grained visual features with the MLLM's semantic space. This design counteracts the low-level information loss inherent in MLLM encodings, creating a unified representation that steers the diffusion process with both global semantics and rich local details. Second, to further enhance semantic awareness and detail preservation, we introduce Adaptive-GRPO, a post-training objective that dynamically balances semantic coherence against pixel-level fidelity. The integration of these two innovations allows FUSE to generate images that are both semantically faithful and visually fine-grained. Comprehensive experiments on text-to-image and instruction-guided editing benchmarks show that FUSE significantly outperforms existing unified baselines, achieving 0.89 on Geneval, 0.65 on WISE, and 3.88 on ImageEdit.

PaperID: 3833

Authors:Yuxuan Zhang, Yuhang Sun, Hongjue Li, Yue Deng, Wen Yao

Affiliations: Beihang University, Defense Innovation Institute, Chinese Academy of Military Science

Title: Pseudo-Spiking Neurons: A Noise-Based Training Framework for Heterogeneous-Latency Spiking Neural Networks

Abstract:
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) promise significant energy efficiency by processing information via sparse, eventdriven spikes. However, realizing this potential is hindered by the conventional use of a rigid, uniform timestep, T. This constraint imposes a challenging trade-off between accuracy and latency, while also incurring the prohibitive training costs of Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT). To overcome this limitation, we introduce the Pseudo-Spiking Neuron (PseudoSN), a novel training proxy that conceptualizes latency as an intrinsic, learnable parameter for each neuron. Building on the efficiency of rate-based methods, the PseudoSN models temporal dynamics in a single, BPTT-free pass. It employs a learnable probabilistic noise scheme to emulate the discretization effects of spike generation (e.g., clipping and quantization), making the neuron-specific timestep—and thus latency—directly optimizable via backpropagation. Integrated into a hardware-aware objective, our framework trains heterogeneous-latency SNNs that autonomously learn to optimize the trade-offs among accuracy, latency and energy, establishing a new state-of-the-art on major benchmarks.

PaperID: 3834

Authors:Liang Zhao, Tianqi Yue, Shubin Ma, Ziyue Wang, ZhiYuan Liu, Bo Xu

Affiliations: Dalian University of Technology

Title: KNNDA: A New Perspective of Alignment Recovery for Partially View-Aligned Clustering

Abstract:
In multiview clustering (MVC), complementary and consistent information from multiple views is integrated to improve clustering performance. However, inter-view sample correspondences may be partially missing in practice, making it difficult to learn cross-view consistency, which leads to the partially view-aligned problem (PVP). Most existing partially view-aligned clustering (PVC) methods first learn cross-view consistent representations based on known alignments, and then recover missing correspondences by measuring cross-view similarity between samples. However, such an indirect alignment recovery process depends on high-quality consistent representations and lacks effective utilization of known alignments, often resulting in sub-optimal outcomes. To address this, we propose a novel direct alignment recovery perspective, instantiated as K-Nearest Neighbors Direct Alignment (KNNDA). Specifically, we first construct an alignment domain by mapping the aligned neighbors of each unaligned sample into the aligned view. Then, we compute alignment confidence based on the similarity between known aligned pairs of neighbors. In particular, we use a dynamic threshold to filter out unreliable alignments. Finally, new alignments are generated within the high-confidence alignment domain. Contrastive loss is used to learn consistent representations for clustering. Comprehensive experiments on several real-world datasets show the effectiveness and superiority of our module in partially view-aligned clustering.

PaperID: 3835

Authors:Hao Zheng, Shiyu Song, Zhigang Hu, Meiguang Zheng, Liu Yang, Aikun Xu, Rongchang Zhao, Ruizhi Pu, Ruiyi Fang, Boyu Wang

Affiliations: Central South University, University of Western Ontario

Title: Intra-Class Unbiased Prototype Aggregation and Classifier Collaboration for Personalized Federated Learning

Abstract:
Prototypebased personalized federated learning methods have emerged as a promising strategy due to their ability to represent client-specific class characteristics effectively through learned class prototypes. These prototypes capture salient features of client-local data, facilitating personalized model adaptation. However, existing prototype-based aggregation strategies predominantly rely on weighted averaging, implicitly assuming prototype consistency across clients. This assumption neglects the intrinsic heterogeneity and non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) nature of client data, compelling diverse local prototypes to align toward a singular global prototype and consequently causing significant aggregation bias. Motivated by observations from intra-class feature saliency analysis, we identify that clients inherently emphasize distinct feature regions even for the same class. To leverage this intra-class diversity, we introduce FedIC, a novel prototype clustering and collaborative classifier optimization approach. Specifically, FedIC first clusters prototypes based on intra-class similarity to form intra-class prototype subspaces, ensuring that aggregation occurs exclusively within each cluster, thus eliminating the bias stemming from forced global unification. To further exploit the benefits of intra-cluster collaboration, we quantify the combined predictive gains of classifiers from clients within the same cluster as a function of classifier combination weights. This targeted aggregation and collaborative optimization strategy effectively circumvents the bias introduced by global alignment. Extensive experiments under various non-IID settings show that FedIC significantly outperforms existing Prototype-based and Clustered PFL Methods.

PaperID: 3836

Authors:Jinpeng Zheng, Shao-Yuan Li, Gan Xu, Wenhai Wan, Zijian Tao, Songcan Chen, Kangkan Wang

Affiliations: MIIT Key Laboratory of Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence College of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University, College of Information Engineering, Zhejiang University of Technology, School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, School of Computer Science and Engineering

Title: HGLTR: Hierarchical Knowledge Injection for Calibrating Pre-trained Models in Long-Tail Recognition

Abstract:
Longtail recognition remains challenging for pre-trained foundation models like CLIP, which often suffer from performance degradation under imbalanced data. This stems not only from the overfitting/underfitting issues during fine-tuning but, more fundamentally, from the inherent bias inherited from the long-tail distribution of their massive pre-training datasets. To address this, we propose HGLTR (Hierarchy-Guided Long-Tail Recognition), a novel framework that calibrates pre-trained models by injecting objective class hierarchy knowledge. We argue that the semantic proximity defined by a hierarchy provides a robust, data-independent prior to counteract model bias. Our method is specifically designed for vision-language models' dual-modality architecture. At the feature level, we align image embeddings with a hierarchy-guided text similarity structure. At the classifier level, we employ a distillation loss to regularize predictions using soft labels derived from the hierarchy. This dual-level injection effectively transfers knowledge from head to tail classes. Experiments on ImageNet-LT, Places-LT, and iNaturalist 2018 demonstrate that HGLTR achieves state-of-the-art performance, particularly in tail-classes accuracy, highlighting the importance of leveraging structural priors to calibrate foundation models for real-world data.

PaperID: 3837

Authors:Hang Zhou, Wentao Yu, Yang Wei, Guangyu Li, Sha Xu, Chen Gong

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, School of Integrated Circuits, Guangdong University of Technology, School of Automation and Intelligent Sensing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: Inter-Client Dependency Recovery with Hidden Global Components for Federated Traffic Prediction

Abstract:
Traffic prediction plays an important role in urban management. However, existing methods rely on centralized traffic data, which may raise privacy concerns. Federated traffic prediction offers a promising solution for clients (e.g., traffic management administrations) in different regions to collaboratively train models in a distributed manner without exposing private data. Nonetheless, data isolation inherently breaks the correlations between nodes (i.e., traffic sensors collecting data) from different regions, which leads to the missing interclient dependency. Consequently, current works either fail to capture the missing inter-client dependency or compromise data privacy to recover the inter-client dependency. To address this issue, we propose a novel Federated method which recovers the inter-client dependency with HIdden global componeNTs (FedHINT). We find that the traffic data from different local regions actually contain hidden global components that reflect cross-regional traffic changes. Therefore, our FedHINT aims to extract hidden global components from each client to generate proxy nodes that represent global information, which are then utilized to recover the inter-client dependency. To be specific, we employ an attention module, which is guided by the shared global queries to capture hidden global components from local traffic data, to generate proxy nodes. Subsequently, our FedHINT adaptively learns the correlations between proxy nodes and local nodes through a global encoder. During this process, the global information in proxy nodes compensate for the loss of information from cross-regional nodes, which thereby recovers the missing inter-client dependency. Intensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that our FedHINT significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, with an average decrease of 3.73 and 4.81 on MAE and RMSE, respectively.

PaperID: 3838

Authors:Qiuming Zhu, Haoran Kou, Linyi Qian, Chunqi Shi, Xianyi Wu, Ziwei Zhou

Affiliations: East China Normal University, China Pacific Insurance (Group) Co., Shanghai University of Finance and Economics

Title: Physics-Informed Koopman Neural Estimation of the Heston Model from High-Frequency Observations

Abstract:
We propose a physicsinformed learning framework, called Koopman-PINN, to estimate the parameters of the Heston stochastic volatility model with high-frequency price data in financial markets. The method integrates a nonparametric volatility estimation (known as ART-filter in the literature), moment-based parameter initialization, and a neural Koopman operator constrained by the infinitesimal generator of the underlying stochastic differential equation. By incorporating a generator-based loss, the model bridges Koopman theory and neural modeling to handle partially observed coupled stochastic dynamics in a manner consistent with continuous-time evolution. Across diverse parameter combinations reflecting varying market conditions, Koopman-PINN consistently achieves accurate and robust five-parameter recovery, outperforming existing estimators under a minimal set of initialization assumptions.

PaperID: 3839

Authors:Shuman Zhuang, Zhihao Wu, Wei Huang, Luojun Lin, Jia-Li Yin, Lele Fu, Hong-Ning Dai

Affiliations: Fuzhou University, Zhejiang University, SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY, Hong Kong Baptist University

Title: Prior Refinement Is Better: Diffusion-Driven Graph Harmonization for Federated Graph Learning

Abstract:
Federated Graph Learning (FGL) has emerged as a compelling paradigm for collaboratively training a global model while preserving the privacy of multisource graphs. Nonetheless, FGL faces a critical challenge of data heterogeneity, where semantic and structural discrepancies across clients significantly degrade its performance. Although existing methods attempt to calibrate client-specific graph distributions during federated training, they inevitably fall short in aligning the optimization behaviors across clients due to dynamic parameter updates, thereby inducing a bottleneck in generalization improvement. To tackle this challenge, we propose a solution from a new perspective of prior refinement, which seeks to proactively harmonize client graph distributions before the federated training. In particular, we propose a Federated Graph Harmonization (FedGH) framework that exploits the generative strengths of graph diffusion models to perform prior refinement of local graphs. In a nutshell, FedGH designs a conditional diffusion mechanism on each client that synthesizes pseudo-graphs encapsulating both feature and structural priors, thereby facilitating explicit correction of inter-client distributional bias. On the server side, we employ the graph contrastive learning between various client-specific pseudo-graphs to incorporate the global information, subsequently guiding local data reconstruction. Importantly, model-agnostic FedGH can be seamlessly deployed as a plug-and-play module to be easily integrated with existing FGL architectures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedGH consistently outperforms state-of-the-art FGL baselines.

PaperID: 3840

Authors:Guokai Tang, Feng Zhao

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: MACoT: Synthesizing Chains of Thought for Small Models via Multi-Agent Collaboration

Abstract:
Small language models (SLMs) run quickly, consume little memory, and can be deployed on edge devices, making them especially appealing when compute or energy is limited. Because of these advantages, boosting SLMs' reasoning ability has become an important research goal. A common approach is to distill the long chains of thought (longCoTs) produced by large reasoning models (LRMs) into SLMs, hoping to transfer the larger models’ strong reasoning ability. However, SLMs do not always benefit from distillation of long-CoTs. The lengthy and complex semantic steps and large amount of self-reflection content in long-CoTs may exceed the limited learning capabilities of SLMs, and the impact of self-reflection density on the performance of SLMs is unclear. To resolve this capacity mismatch, we propose MACoT, a multi-agent framework that synthesizes chains of thought (CoTs) that are more suitable for small models rather than compressing or pruning existing ones. Through the interactive collaboration among six types of agents, MACoT synthesizes semantically explicit, logically clear CoTs that efficiently activate a small model’s internal knowledge through a carefully designed output pattern. At the same time, the CoTs synthesized by our method can retain a small amount of self-reflection content, thereby matching the learning capability of the small model and maximizing its reasoning accuracy. We fine-tuned Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct using only 1879 synthetic CoTs, significantly improving its performance on mathematical reasoning tasks and generalizing well, outperforming models trained on 5x more data. Through experiments, we found that a modest level of self-reflection boosts small-model performance, whereas excessive reflection sharply degrades it, which shows that “teaching SLMs to think” hinges on aligning each CoT’s cognitive load with the model’s capacity.

PaperID: 3841

Authors:Junchuan Yu, Yuyang Sun

Affiliations: Tianjin University, Huazhong Agricultural University

Title: WRitEer: A Multi-Objective, Preference-Driven Multi-Agent Framework for Human-Like Advanced Text Generation

Abstract:
Advanced text generation is paramount for enhancing the naturalness of humancomputer interaction and improving emotional expressiveness. Current mainstream methods largely rely on large language models (LLMs) for single-turn generation, often lacking the interactivity and multi-dimensional feedback mechanisms inherent in human writing. This limitation frequently results in generated texts that fall short in terms of depth, fluency, and stylistic sophistication. To address these deficiencies, this paper proposes WRitEer (Writer-Reader iterative tuning with Editor-Driven evolution and refinement), an interactive multi-agent collaborative human-like writing framework. Centered around an LLM, this framework integrates multi-objective optimization with preference fine-tuning techniques. It introduces three synergistic agents: the Reader, responsible for discourse analysis and indicator generation; the Editor, which constructs prompts based on feedback indicators and iteratively refines them through an evolutionary search; and the Writer, which generates text based on these refined prompts and continuously self-optimizes via a DPO mechanism that incorporates preference feedback. Experimental results consistently demonstrate that this ``generate-evaluate-reflect-optimize'' workflow significantly outperforms single LLM models across multiple datasets, yielding advanced rich texts that exhibit superior human-like style, coherence, expressiveness, and controllability.

PaperID: 3842

Authors:Ling-Chun Chen, Hsi-Wen Chen, Ming-Syan Chen

Affiliations: National Taiwan University

Title: DeFuzzRAG: Handling Fuzzy Time Expressions for Temporal Robustness in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across reasoning and knowledgeintensive tasks, yet their static pretraining leaves them unable to handle rapidly evolving or domain-specific knowledge. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses this by grounding LLM outputs in dynamically retrieved evidence, improving factual accuracy and reducing hallucinations. However, standard RAG pipelines struggle with temporally sensitive queries, especially when documents contain fuzzy or indirect time expressions (e.g., “a few years later”). This leads to Temporal Misalignment, where topically relevant but temporally incorrect results are retrieved. To overcome this, we propose DeFuzzRAG, a lightweight framework that enhances temporal robustness in RAG. DeFuzzRAG employs a small local language model to infer concrete time scopes from vague expressions and applies metadata-based filtering to realign retrieval with the query’s temporal intent. Experiments on a benchmark of fuzzified queries demonstrate that DeFuzzRAG substantially improves retrieval accuracy, raising Hit Rate by 15.7% while maintaining efficiency and model-agnostic integration. Our findings highlight the importance of temporal reasoning in RAG and establish DeFuzzRAG as a practical, plug-and-play solution for deploying temporally robust LLM systems in real-world settings.

PaperID: 3843

Authors:Jinwei He, Feng Lu

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of VR Technology and Systems, School of CSE, Beihang University

Title: MentalGuide: Towards Multi-Turn, State-Aware and Strategy-Driven Conversations for Mental Health Support

Abstract:
The global shortage of psychiatrists has become a critical issue, and the advent of large language models (LLMs) presents new opportunities to address this challenge. However, existing approaches continue to underperform in multiturn mental health counseling, particularly in the arrangement of counseling strategies. To overcome these limitations, we propose MentalGuide, a state-aware and strategy-driven conversation framework designed for multi-turn mental health support. Our method integrates expert-derived prior probabilities of counseling strategies tailored to the target client's state with the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. This enables effective strategy formulation and strategy-driven response generation, without the need for additional training. Experimental results show that MentalGuide surpasses baselines in automated and human expert evaluations, demonstrating the closest alignment with real-world multi-turn counseling dynamics.

PaperID: 3844

Authors:Qiang Hu, Jin Wen, Yao Zhang, Maxime Cordy, Yongqiang Lyu

Affiliations: Tianjin University, University of Luxemburg

Title: On the Evaluation of Capability Estimation Methods for Large Language Models

Abstract:
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) marks a transformative era in artificial intelligence~(AI). However, systematically evaluating the capability of LLMs is challenging due to the necessity of a large number of labeled test data. To tackle this problem, in the conventional AI field, AutoEval has been proposed to estimate the capability of AI models without data labeling effort. Unfortunately, even though multiple AutoEval methods have been proposed, most are constructed for classification tasks and evaluated only on image datasets. As a result, their effectiveness for LLMs is unclear, as LLMs often target generation tasks. In this work, we introduce the first AutoEval benchmark specifically designed to estimate the capability of LLMs using unlabeled test data, AEBench. Besides existing AutoEval methods, AEBench also supports our designed method, which utilizes the correlation between data uncertainty and model ability for the capability estimation. In total, AEBench covers 12 AutoEval methods and 120 method combinations. Based on AEBench, we conducted a comprehensive study to explore the usefulness of AutoEval on LLMs. Experimental results on 10 datasets demonstrated that our designed uncertainty featuresbased methods perform the best in achieving the lowest estimation errors.

PaperID: 3845

Authors:Qianyi Hu, Jiaxue Liu, Xinhui Tu, Shoujin Wang

Affiliations: Central China Normal University, University of Technology Sydney

Title: SAR: A Structure-Aligned Reasoning Framework for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) augmented with retrieval have shown impressive performance in opendomain question answering, yet struggle significantly with temporal knowledge graph question answering (TKGQA). The core issue lies in structural misalignment: treating structured, temporally sensitive graph queries as plain text often causes LLMs to retrieve or reason with semantically similar but structurally incorrect facts, resulting in critical inaccuracies. To address this, we introduce SAR (Structure-Aligned Reasoning), a novel TKGQA framework that integrates LLM reasoning tightly with the explicit subject–predicate–object–time schema inherent in knowledge graphs. SAR employs an LLM agent to first decompose natural language questions into structured queries, clearly delineating entities, relationships, and temporal constraints. It then conducts schema-consistent, time-aware retrieval from the knowledge graph to acquire candidate quadruples, which guide a subsequent iterative ReAct-style reasoning process by the LLM. A final verification stage ensures that proposed answers strictly adhere to temporal conditions, reinforcing accuracy and temporal coherence. Experiments on two benchmark datasets, MultiTQ and CronQuestions, demonstrate SAR’s effectiveness, achieving the best results. Specifically, with GPT-4.1, SAR achieves 78.2% Hits@1 on MultiTQ, significantly outperforming existing methods, and similarly establishes a new performance record on CronQuestions. Our results underscore the critical importance of structural alignment in temporal reasoning tasks, particularly in handling complex queries involving multiple temporal constraints and multi-hop reasoning.

PaperID: 3846

Authors:Zhongquan Jian, Wenhan Lv, Yanhao Chen, Guanran Luo, Wentao Qiu, Shaopan Wang, Bingbing Hu, Qingqiang Wu

Affiliations: School of Computer and Data Science, Minjiang University, School of Film, Xiamen University, School of Informatics

Title: MDF: A Modality-Aware Disentanglement and Fusion Framework for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Abstract:
The homogeneity and heterogeneity across modalities are critical factors that influence multimodal fusion. In Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA), the inherent textual information within the audio modality induces crossmodality homogeneity with the text modality. Conversely, the mutual independence between text and vision modalities results in their cross-modal heterogeneity. Although existing disentangle-based methods achieve notable performance gains by separating modality features into distinct subspaces, they overlook the characteristics of cross-modality heterogeneity and homogeneity among different modalities. To this end, we propose a novel Modality-aware Disentangle and Fusion (MDF) framework to investigate the role of core modality features. Specifically, we first use text as the anchor to disentangle the audio modality and extract its unique modality-specific features, thereby establishing cross-modal heterogeneity among text, audio, and vision. We then introduce a Cross-Modality Heterogeneity Enhancement (CHE) module to refine these features, further reinforcing their heterogeneous characteristics. Finally, a Modality Adaptive Weighting (MAW) module is employed to dynamically assign weights to the text, sound, and vision modalities based on their potential contributions to sentiment prediction, achieving a more effective multimodal representation for MSA. Experimental evaluations on different benchmarks demonstrate MDF's superiority, with extensive ablation studies confirming its effectiveness.

PaperID: 3847

Authors:Weijie Li, Jin Wang, Liang-Chih Yu, Xuejie Zhang

Affiliations: Yunnan University, Yuan Ze University

Title: Step-GRPO: Enhancing Reasoning Quality and Efficiency via Structured PRM-Based Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Large reasoning models (LRMs) improve performance at test time by thinking longer, but this often leads to overthinking and high computational cost. To address this, recent reinforcement learning (RL) methods adopt outcomelevel rewards, such as rule- or prompt-based signals, that favor shorter correct reasoning paths but often overlook reasoning quality. While such rewards neglect intermediate reasoning, dense supervision from process reward models (PRMs) has proven more effective in promoting coherent and high-quality reasoning. However, static PRM supervision introduces two challenges: reward hacking, since fixed rewards poorly capture global reasoning objectives, and the high training cost of obtaining dense reward labels at scale. To overcome these issues, we propose Step Group Relative Policy Optimization (Step-GRPO), a GRPO-based method that integrates step-level PRM signals into sparse trajectory-level feedback, avoiding costly step-level supervision while improving reasoning quality beyond accuracy. In addition, Step-GRPO employs a step-attention mechanism that captures inter-step dependencies and emphasizes critical reasoning steps, effectively mitigating reward hacking. We apply Step-GRPO to train large language models and observe consistent gains in reasoning quality, accuracy, and shorter reasoning traces across multiple math benchmarks, outperforming reinforcement learning baselines at substantially lower cost. Notably, the proposed model achieves 36.7 percent accuracy on AIME 2024 with 11,000 training samples and a training cost of 38 US dollars, surpassing baselines that require over 1,000 US dollars and more than 40,000 samples, demonstrating strong cost-effectiveness and scalability.

PaperID: 3848

Authors:Yinghao Aaron Li, Xilin Jiang, Fei Tao, Cheng Niu, Kaifeng Xu, Juntong Song, Nima Mesgarani

Affiliations: Columbia University

Title: DMOSpeech 2: Reinforcement Learning for Duration Prediction in Metric-Optimized Speech Synthesis

Abstract:
Diffusionbased text-to-speech (TTS) systems have made remarkable progress in zero-shot speech synthesis, yet optimizing all components for perceptual metrics remains challenging. Prior work with DMOSpeech demonstrated direct metric optimization for speech generation components, but duration prediction remained unoptimized. This paper presents DMOSpeech 2, which extends metric optimization to the duration predictor through a reinforcement learning approach. The proposed system implements a novel duration policy framework using group relative preference optimization (GRPO) with speaker similarity and word error rate as reward signals. By optimizing this previously unoptimized component, DMOSpeech 2 creates a more complete metric-optimized synthesis pipeline. Additionally, this paper introduces teacher-guided sampling, a hybrid approach leveraging a teacher model for initial denoising steps before transitioning to the student model, significantly improving output diversity while maintaining efficiency. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate superior performance across all metrics compared to previous systems, while reducing sampling steps by half without quality degradation. These advances represent a significant step toward speech synthesis systems with metric optimization across multiple components.

PaperID: 3849

Authors:Ren-Biao Liu, Chao-Zeng Ma, Anqi Li, Hui Sun, Xin-Ye Li, Ming Li

Affiliations: Nanjing University

Title: ARBench: Algorithmic Reasoner or API Alchemist? Evaluating LLMs Beyond API Calls

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in code generation. Like human programmers, LLMs tend to call highlevel APIs and libraries to program efficiently. However, this shortcut may hinder LLMs from learning the essential algorithm reasoning, leading instead to rote memorization of API usage. As a result, LLMs often struggle to generalize to new or domain-specific algorithms that lack ready-made library support. In this work, we propose ARBench, a novel benchmark for evaluating LLMs’ ability to generate machine learning algorithms from scratch, beyond merely invoking high-level APIs. It emphasizes algorithmic reasoning and implementation, distinguishing genuine understanding from superficial API usage. It covers fundamental and advanced machine learning tasks, rigorously assessing current LLMs’ capacity to implement these algorithms from scratch. Our evaluation reveals the strengths and weaknesses of state-of-the-art LLMs in algorithmic reasoning and generalization, offering valuable insights to guide future research and development.

PaperID: 3850

Authors:Rui Pu, Chaozhuo Li, Rui Ha, Litian Zhang, Lirong Qiu, Xi Zhang

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: MirrorShield: Towards Dynamic Adaptive Defense Against Jailbreaks via Entropy-Guided Mirror Crafting

Abstract:
Defending large language models (LLMs) against jailbreak attacks is crucial for ensuring their safe deployment. Existing defense strategies typically rely on predefined static criteria to differentiate between harmful and benign prompts. However, such rigid rules fail to accommodate the inherent complexity and dynamic nature of realworld jailbreak attacks. In this paper, we focus on the novel challenge of adaptive defense against diverse jailbreaks. We propose a new concept "mirror'', which is a dynamically generated prompt that reflects the syntactic structure of the input while ensuring semantic safety. The discrepancies between input prompts and their corresponding mirrors serve as guiding principles for defense. A novel defense model, MirrorShield, is further proposed to detect and calibrate risky inputs based on the crafted mirrors. Evaluated on multiple benchmark datasets and compared against ten state-of-the-art attack methods, MirrorShield demonstrates superior defense performance and promising generalization capabilities.

PaperID: 3851

Authors:Dongyu Su, Yimin Xiao, Tongguan Wang, Feiyue Xue, Junkai Li, Hui Liu, Ying Sha

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Smart Farming for Agricultural Animals, China Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Technology for Agriculture, Ministry of Education, China Hubei Engineering Technology Research Center of Agricultural Big Data, Huazhong Agricultural University, College of Informatics

Title: Chinese Two-part Allegorical Sayings Reading Comprehension: Exploration from Reasoning to Metaphor

Abstract:
The TwoPart Allegorical Saying (TPAS) is a Chinese linguistic phenomenon with a riddle-explanation structure, and an important component of Chinese metaphors. Existing research has primarily used TPAS to assist other semantic tasks, but lacks in-depth exploration of its intrinsic mechanisms: semantic rhetoric, logical reasoning, and metaphorical expression. To address this gap, we construct the first Chinese TPAS Reading Comprehension dataset (CTRC), which contains 18,103 TPASs and 75,296 passages. We frame it as a cloze test where the model selects the most suitable TPAS from candidates to fill passage blanks. To tackle the challenges of this CTRC task, we propose a Multi-view TPAS Contrastive Learning Network (MTCLN). Firstly, the joint vector cross-projection module extracts the rhetorical features of TPAS, such as homophonic puns, through vector space mapping to mitigate the semantic deviations caused by rhetoric. Then, the softened contrastive learning module strengthens the modeling of TPAS logical reasoning through feature association. Finally, the multi-view feature fusion module integrates contextual semantics with diverse TPAS features to facilitate the understanding of metaphorical expressions. Experiments on the CTRC dataset demonstrate that MTCLN achieves an average accuracy of 67.47%, outperforming large language models by 25.48%.

PaperID: 3852

Authors:Zhiwen Tan, Jiaming Huang, Qintong Wu, Hongxuan Zhang, Chenyi Zhuang, Jinjie Gu

Affiliations: Ant Group

Title: RAG-R1:Incentivizing the Search and Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs Through Multi-Query Parallelism

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their remarkable capabilities, are prone to generating hallucinated or outdated content due to their static internal knowledge. While RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) integrated with Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers a solution, these methods are fundamentally constrained by a single-query mode, leading to prohibitive latency and inherent brittleness. To overcome these limitations, we introduce RAG-R1, a novel two-stage training framework centered around multi-query parallelism. Our framework enables LLMs to adaptively leverage internal and external knowledge during the reasoning process while transitioning from the single-query mode to multi-query parallelism. This architectural shift bolsters reasoning robustness while significantly reducing inference latency. Extensive experiments on seven question-answering benchmarks confirm the superiority of our method, which outperforms the strongest baseline by up to 13.7% and decreases inference time by 11.1%.

PaperID: 3853

Authors:Shengtao Wen, Haodong Chen, Yadong Wang, Zhongying Pan, Xiang Chen, Yu Tian, Bo Qian, Dong Liang, Sheng-Jun Huang

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Huaneng Information Technology Co., Tsinghua University

Title: MultiMedBench: A Scenario-Aware Benchmark for Evaluating Knowledge Editing in Medical VQA

Abstract:
Knowledge editing (KE) provides a scalable approach for updating factual knowledge in large language models without full retraining. While previous studies have demonstrated effectiveness in general domains and medical QA tasks, little attention has been paid to KE in multimodal medical scenarios. Unlike textonly settings, medical KE demands integrating updated knowledge with visual reasoning to support safe and interpretable clinical decisions. To address this gap, we propose MultiMedBench, the first benchmark tailored to evaluating KE in clinical multimodal tasks. Our framework spans both understanding and reasoning task types, defines a three-dimensional metric suite (reliability, generality, and locality), and supports cross-paradigm comparisons across general and domain-specific models. We conduct extensive experiments under single-editing and lifelong-editing settings. Results suggest that current methods struggle with generalization and long-tail reasoning, particularly in complex clinical workflows. We further present an efficiency analysis (e.g., edit latency, memory footprint), revealing practical trade-offs in real-world deployment across KE paradigms. Overall, MultiMedBench not only reveals the limitations of current approaches but also provides a solid foundation for developing clinically robust knowledge editing techniques in the future.

PaperID: 3854

Authors:Weibin Yang, Liangru Xie, Jieyun Cai, Yuxiang Yan, Hong-Ning Dai, Hao Wang

Affiliations: Guangzhou Institute of Technology, Xidian University, School of Cyber Engineering, Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University

Title: Talk2Code: A Multi-Turn Interaction Benchmark with Dual-Track Evaluation for Code Generation

Abstract:
While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in code generation, current benchmarks primarily focus on singleturn scenarios, neglecting the complexity of multi-turn interactions and user diversity. To address this gap, we introduce Talk2Code, the first benchmark for user-stratified multi-turn dialogue code generation evaluation across algorithmic problem-solving and backend programming tasks.A distinctive feature of our benchmark is its user-stratified interaction modeling. For identical coding tasks, we construct dialogue trajectories tailored for novice, intermediate, and expert users, capturing their distinct expectations and communication patterns.To facilitate comprehensive evaluation, we propose a multi-dimensional evaluation framework assessing both code quality and interaction experience through a novel Dual-track Evaluation Method. In the Direct Generation Track, the benchmark provides golden dialogue context (excluding the final code) directly to the LLM for code generation. In contrast, the Interactive Dialogue Track simulates realistic multi-turn interactions, prompting the model to proactively clarify instructions and gather requirements before generating solutions. Code quality is evaluated in both tracks by Test Pass Rate and Success Rate, while interaction experience is assessed exclusively within the Interactive Dialogue Track through subjective and alignment indicators. Our benchmark and multi-dimensional indicator system collectively establish a new paradigm for evaluating adaptive, user-aware AI coding assistants.

PaperID: 3855

Authors:Guangzhen Yao, Jiayun Zheng, Zezhou Wang, Wenxin Zhang, Renda Han, Chuangxin Zhao, Zeyu Zhang, Runhao Liu

Affiliations: Northeast Normal University, University of Michigan, Australian National University

Title: V-Pruner: A Fast and Globally-informed Token Pruning Framework for Vision Transformer

Abstract:
Vision Transformer (ViT) has become one of the cornerstones of the computer vision field, demonstrating exceptional performance. However, its inherent high computational complexity and inference latency still pose significant obstacles for deployment in resourceconstrained environments. Token pruning, by removing less informative tokens, offers an effective strategy to reduce computational overhead. However, existing pruning methods largely rely on static or local token importance scores. This myopic approach fundamentally overlooks the sequential dependency of pruning decisions and fails to capture the interaction effects between pruning decisions across layers, often neglecting the global interactions between mask variables. To address this limitation, we propose V-Pruner, a fast and globally-informed token pruning framework for Vision Transformer. V-Pruner first leverages Fisher information to perform an initial assessment of token importance, providing a principled initial prior for pruning decisions. Building on this, V-Pruner introduces a Reinforcement Learning (RL) Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm, refining token pruning into a global sequential decision process. The algorithm combines a composite reward signal that incorporates both model performance and computational cost to guide policy exploration, effectively evaluating the long-term impact of different pruning decision combinations on global model performance. Extensive experiments on ViT-L, DeiT-B, DeiT-S, and DeiT-T demonstrate that V-Pruner achieves a better balance between accuracy, GFLOPs, inference speed, and training time, surpassing existing mainstream ViT pruning algorithms in overall performance.

PaperID: 3856

Authors:Hao Zhang, Yaqi Chen, Nianwen Si, XuKui Yang, Wenlin Zhang, Dan Qu

Affiliations: Information Engineering University

Title: MoLoRA: Boosting LLM-based End-to-end Speech Translation with Mixture of Low-rank Experts

Abstract:
Recently, Endto-End Speech Translation (E2E-ST) methods leveraging large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong generalization capabilities and excellent scalability by integrating pre-trained speech encoders with LLMs, where Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is commonly used for parameter-efficient fine-tuning to reduce training costs. However, LoRA's low-rank assumption often fails in multilingual tasks, as the inherent complexity of cross-lingual semantic relationships and syntactic variations exceeds the representational capacity of low-rank matrices. This leads to parameter conflicts across languages, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address this issue, we propose Mixture of Low-Rank Adaptations (MoLoRA), which integrates the Mixture of Experts (MoE) mechanism with LoRA. MoLoRA effectively enhances the model's expressive capacity while maintaining parameter efficiency during training. Specifically, we treat multiple LoRA modules as low-rank experts and introduce a routing mechanism to dynamically activate language-specific experts. Additionally, shared experts are incorporated and consistently activated to model cross-lingual general knowledge. Furthermore, to enhance the robustness and accuracy of speech representations, we propose a Multi-Granularity Representation Fusion module (MGRF). This module mitigates local distortions in frame-level speech representations caused by noise by fusing frame-level and sentence-level features, thereby providing the LLM with more accurate high-level semantic information. We conduct multilingual experiments on the MuST-C and CoVoST-2 datasets. Our method achieves an average BLEU score of 32.2 across eight language pairs on the MuST-C dataset and an average of 36.3 across three language pairs on the CoVoST-2 dataset, establishing a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.

PaperID: 3857

Authors:Xu Zhang, Hangcheng Liu, Shangwei Guo, Shudong Zhang, Tianwei Zhang, Tao Xiang

Affiliations: Chongqing University, Nanyang Technological University, Xidian University

Title: ShadeEdit: A Utility-Preserving and Defense-Evasive Knowledge Manipulation Attack in Federated LLMs

Abstract:
Recent studies reveal that adversaries can manipulate the internal knowledge of large language models (LLMs) on selected topics through model editing, causing attackerspecified harmful or biased outputs when queried about the edited content. Once such tampered LLMs are distributed, they can mislead users on the targeted topics, thereby potentially propagating misinformation or reinforcing stereotypes. However, existing knowledge manipulation attacks rely on the ability to redistribute compromised models, which is infeasible in constrained settings like Federated Instruction Tuning (FedIT), where a central server controls LLM's training and distribution. In this work, we introduce ShadeEdit, the first attack framework that leverages strengthened model editing to enable knowledge manipulation in FedIT scenarios. ShadeEdit introduces two key components to address two challenges posed by the training process of FedIT: (1) a paraphrase-based editing dataset selection strategy to mitigate the dilution from benign updates on malicious ones by constructing a high-quality editing dataset, and (2) an adaptive manipulation mechanism to evade aggregation-based defenses via an adaptive clipping strategy. ShadeEdit achieves an average 99.5% attack success rate over eight robust aggregation algorithms while preserving instruction-following accuracy, demonstrating its strong attack effectiveness and model-utility preservation.

PaperID: 3858

Authors:Zhe Zhang, Lili Bai, Chaopeng Guo, Jie Song

Affiliations: Northeastern University

Title: Syllogism-Inspired TableQA: Evidentialization Makes Decomposition Reasoning and Answer Verification More Reliable

Abstract:
Existing large language model (LLM)based table question answering (TableQA) methods primarily involve decomposition reasoning and answer verification processes. However, decomposing questions solely at the semantic level, without considering the factual evidence in tables, fails to significantly reduce the difficulty for LLMs in understanding the key information in questions. Furthermore, reasoning and verification without supporting factual evidence are often arbitrary and unreliable. In light of these issues, this paper proposes a Syllogism-Inspired Reasoning and Verification method (SIRV), which performs reliable decomposition reasoning and answer verification based on the evidential concept of syllogism. Specifically, SIRV extracts question-relevant factual evidence from the table to construct the premises. Based on the constructed premises, SIRV plans reasoning paths and generates sub-questions that explicitly indicate relevant factual evidence, performing evidence-centered reasoning. Additionally, SIRV examines the consistency between the premises and the table to focus on factual evidence, thereby reliably identifying and correcting errors in the reasoning process. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, SIRV achieves performance improvements of up to 5.24% in single-mode and 2.89% in joint reasoning, while also demonstrating excellent generalization ability and efficiency.

PaperID: 3859

Authors:Zhihong Zhu, Fan Zhang, Yunyan Zhang, Jinghan Sun, Guimin Hu, Hao Wu, Yuyan Chen, Bowen Xing, Xian Wu

Affiliations: Tencent Jarvis Lab, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, University of Copenhagen, Cornell University, University of Science and Technology Beijing

Title: S³-MSD: Large Vision-Language Model for Explainable and Generalizable Multi-modal Sarcasm Detection

Abstract:
Multimodal sarcasm detection (MSD) aims to identify sarcasm polarity from diverse modalities (i.e., image–text pairs), a task that has received increasing attention. While significant progress has been made, existing approaches still face two major issues: lack of explainability and weak generalizability. In this paper, we introduce a new large vision–language model (LVLM) dubbed S³MSD for explainable and generalizable MSD through three key components. For explainability, we develop (1) a self-training paradigm that automatically bootstraps answers with explanations, and (2) a self-calibrating mechanism that rectifies flawed explanations. For generalizability, we design (3) a self-focusing module that amplifies visual semantic entities through preference optimization, thereby mitigating textual over-reliance. Experimental results on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks demonstrate that S³-MSD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in detection performance. Furthermore, the proposed S³-MSD provides persuasive explanations, as verified by both quantitative metrics and human evaluations.

PaperID: 3860

Authors:Zhihong Zhu, Yunyan Zhang, Fan Zhang, Bowen Xing, Xian Wu

Affiliations: Tencent Jarvis Lab, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, University of Science and Technology Beijing

Title: CMID: Towards Medical Visual Question Answering via Contrastive Mutual Information Decoding

Abstract:
Medical Visual Question Answering (MedVQA) aims to generate accurate answers for clinical questions grounded in medical images, which has attracted increasing research attention due to its potential to streamline diagnostics and reduce clinical burden. Recent advances in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown great promise for Med-VQA, but still suffer from two inference-time issues: (1) attention shift, where the LVLM over-relies on textual priors; and (2) attention dispersion, where it fails to focus on critical diagnostic regions. To tackle these issues, we propose Contrastive Mutual Information Decoding (CMID), a training-free inference-time intervention grounded in information theory for Med-VQA. Concretely, CMID first identifies the Principal Focus Area (PFA) from decoder attention maps, then constructs focus-preserving and focus-excluding views to derive dual contrastive signals that simultaneously amplify salient visual cues and suppress background noise. Crucially, these corrective signals are adaptively scaled by a reliability-gated self-correction mechanism, based on the distributional shift induced by the PFA. Extensive experiments on three Med-VQA benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of CMID. Further analyses showcase its robust generalizability across diverse medical architectures and tasks.

PaperID: 3861

Authors:Shenghao Chen, Yibo Zhao, Tianyi Wang, Chunjie Ma, Weili Guan, Ming Li, Zan Gao

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Tianjin University of Technology, School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Shandong Artificial Intelligence Institute, Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences), Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), Shandong Inspur Database Technology Co.

Title: Amplifying Discrepancies: Exploiting Macro and Micro Inconsistencies for Image Manipulation Localization

Abstract:
The rapid development of image manipulation technologies poses significant challenges to multimedia forensics, especially in accurate localization of manipulated regions. Existing methods often fail to fully explore the intrinsic discrepancies between manipulated and authentic regions, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address this limitation, we propose the Focus Region Discrepancy Network (FRD-Net), a novel and efficient framework that significantly enhances manipulation localization by amplifying discrepancies at both macro- and micro-levels. Specifically, our proposed Iterative Clustering Module (ICM) groups features into two discriminative clusters and refines representations via backward propagation from cluster centers, improving the distinction between tampered and authentic regions at the macro level. Thereafter, our Differential Progressive Module (DPM) is constructed to capture fine-grained structural inconsistencies within local neighborhoods and integrate them into a Central Difference Convolution, increasing sensitivity to subtle manipulation details at the micro level. Finally, these complementary modules are seamlessly integrated into a compact architecture that achieves a favorable balance between accuracy and efficiency. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that FRD-Net consistently surpasses state-of-the-art methods in terms of manipulation localization performance while maintaining a lower computational cost.

PaperID: 3862

Authors:Xiyue Gao, Yukai Liu, Zhuoqi Ma, Xiaotian Qiao, Hui Li, Cai Xu, Kunhua Zhang, Jiangtao Cui

Affiliations: Xidian University

Title: RSA-CR: Resisting Shilling Attacks in Citation Recommendation via Dumbbell Inductive Learning

Abstract:
Citation recommendation aims to provide researchers with the most relevant references for their manuscripts, helping them swiftly discover pertinent studies and bolster the reliability of their arguments. However, some individuals manipulate these recommendation systems by injecting false information, such as deliberately inflating the citation count of their own papers, to obtain favorable recommendations and ratings. This form of attack, commonly termed “shilling attack”, is not only highly concealed but also has an unimaginable impact on all scientific research. To address this problem, we theoretically reveal the impact of shilling attacks on citation recommendation and propose three feasible resistance strategies: historical collaborations, significant citations and content constraints. Based on these insights, we introduce RSACR, a robust and hybrid citation recommendation algorithm resistant to shilling attacks. The algorithm constructs a two-layer academic graph and uses random and content generation strategies to initialize author and paper embeddings. Confidence-guided inductive aggregations based on collaboration and citation relationships are then performed at the author and paper sides, where author aggregation results directly influences the paper aggregation strength. Finally, recommendations are made by measuring the distances between the fused paper embeddings. The entire learning process resembles a dumbbell, hence termed “dumbbell inductive learning”. Experiments on four academic datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines in both effectiveness and robustness.

PaperID: 3863

Authors:Xinwei Guo, Jiashi Gao, Junlei Zhou, Jiaxin Zhang, Quanying Liu, Haiyan Wu, Xin Yao, Xuetao Wei

Affiliations: Southern University of Science and Technology, University of Macau, Lingnan University

Title: The Silent Amplifier: In-Context Examples Fuel Bias in Large Language Models

Abstract:
Incontext learning (ICL) has proven to be adept at adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks without parameter updates, based on a few demonstration examples. Prior work has found that the ICL performance is susceptible to the selection of examples in prompt and made efforts to stabilize it. However, existing example selection studies ignore the ethical risks behind the examples selected, such as gender and race bias. In this work, we conduct extensive experiments and discover that (1) example selection with high accuracy does not mean low bias; (2) example selection for ICL may amplify the biases of LLMs; (3) example selection contributes to spurious correlations of LLMs. Based on the above observations, we propose the Remind with Bias-aware Embedding (ReBE), which removes the spurious correlations through contrastive learning and obtains bias-aware embedding for LLMs based on prompt tuning. Finally, we demonstrate that ReBE effectively mitigates biases of LLMs without significantly compromising accuracy and is highly compatible with existing example selection methods.

PaperID: 3864

Authors:Shuai Liu, Da Chen, Yiheng Pan, Chenwei Tian, Qian Li, Chenhao Lin

Affiliations: School of Software Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, School of Cyber Science and Engineering

Title: EchoBat: Echo-Vision Enhancement and Echo-Layered Sampling for Video LLMs Hallucination Mitigation

Abstract:
Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable progress in video understanding. However, video MLLMs (VideoMLLMs) still suffer from hallucinations, generating nonsensical or irrelevant content. This issue partly stems from overreliance on pre-trained knowledge, sometimes neglecting the rich visual information present in the video. Additionally, many existing methods rely on uniform frame sampling, which can overlook critical visual cues. To address these challenges, we present EchoBat, a novel approach that leverages audio information as well as video temporal and logical consistency to improve preference data construction and keyframe extraction. Our method integrates Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to mitigate hallucinations by leveraging high-quality, contextually rich preference feedback. Specifically, we use GPT-4o to generate high-quality video descriptions and integrate visually relevant segments from Whisper-derived transcripts to construct preference responses. Correspondingly, we use the reference model itself to describe the reversed video, and use GPT-4o to flashback the text and fill in the hallucination to produce non-preferred responses. This strategy enhances the model’s ability to better understand visual content and temporal, logical relationships within videos. Furthermore, we propose an echo-layered sampling strategy for keyframe extraction from videos, which can provide more precise visual supervision compared to uniform sampling. Experimental results on the three latest video hallucination benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

PaperID: 3865

Authors:Doniyorkhon Obidov, Honggang Yu, Xiaolong Guo, Kaichen Yang

Affiliations: Michigan Technological University, Miami University, Kansas State University

Title: Dynamic Deep Prompt Optimization for Defending Against Jailbreak Attacks on LLMs

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities across many applications but remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, which elicit harmful or unintended content. While model finetuning is an option for safety alignment, it is costly and prone to catastrophic forgetting. Prompt optimization has emerged as a promising alternative, yet existing prompt-based defenses typically rely on static modifications (e.g., fixed prefixes or suffixes) that cannot adapt to diverse and evolving attacks. We propose Dynamic Deep Prompt Optimization (DDPO), the first jailbreak defense based on deep prompt optimization. DDPO uses the target LLM's own intermediate layers as feature extractors to dynamically generate defensive embeddings via a lightweight multilayer perceptron. These tailored embeddings are then injected into a subsequent intermediate layer, enabling an input-dependent defense without modifying the LLM's weights. This design ensures high adaptability with minimal computational overhead. Experiments on a diverse set of models and attacks demonstrate that DDPO significantly outperforms static prompt optimization methods, particularly on weakly aligned models and when handling semantically ambiguous benign prompts, successfully distinguishing them from genuinely harmful requests.

PaperID: 3866

Authors:Martín Pozo, Álvaro Torralba, Carlos Linares López

Affiliations: Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Aalborg University

Title: Not Everything Is Permitted: Constrained Cartesian Abstractions for Optimal Classical Planning

Abstract:
Cartesian abstractions can flexibly approximate planning tasks to generate admissible heuristic functions. Constrained abstractions use state constraints, such as mutexes, to eliminate parts of the abstraction that cannot belong to solutions for the original problem. While this has been successfully applied to simple forms of abstraction, no previous work has explored how to do this for Cartesian abstractions. We introduce constrained Cartesian abstractions, which leverage state constraints in multiple ways: to prune spurious transitions and to simplify or even remove abstract states. Moreover, we also use disambiguation to better guide the counterexampleguided process used to generate the abstractions. Our experimental results show that the resulting constrained Cartesian abstractions induce more informed heuristics than their non-constrained counterpart.

PaperID: 3867

Authors:Baiyu Chen, Canhui Luo, Junwen Ding, Qingyun Zhang, Zhouxing Su, Zhipeng Lü

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: An Adaptive Configuration-Aware Simulated Annealing for the Maximally Diverse Grouping Problem

Abstract:
The maximally diverse grouping problem (MDGP) seeks to partition the vertices of a complete graph into a fixed number of groups under capacity constraints, maximizing the sum of edge weights within each group. MDGP is an NPhard combinatorial optimization problem and has wide real-world applications. In this paper, we propose an adaptive configuration-aware simulated annealing (ACSA) algorithm to solve MDGP. First, ACSA adopts a relaxation-based insertion strategy, which temporarily relaxes capacity constraints to expand the neighborhood and allow effective exploration of promising regions. Second, a memory-based swap mechanism is introduced to integrate high-potential suboptimal swap moves into the conventional best-swap operation, thereby achieving a better balance between diversification and intensification of the search. Finally, ACSA employs a vertex-wise sequential coordination strategy to dynamically organize the insertion and swap moves, which enhances the search flexibility. Experiments on 500 benchmark instances demonstrate the strong competitiveness of ACSA, as it improves the best results among the state-of-the-art algorithms on 460 instances and matches them on 39 instances.

PaperID: 3868

Authors:Yuanshu Li, Di Wang, Wei Du, Xuan Wu, Peng Zhao, Yubin Xiao, You Zhou

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of Ministry of Education, College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Joint NTU-UBC Research Centre of Excellence in Active Living for the Elderly, Nanyang Technological University

Title: Efficient Few-Step Solution Generation via Discrete Flow Matching for Combinatorial Optimization

Abstract:
Combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) are fundamental to many realworld applications where efficiently producing high-quality solutions is critical. Recent advances in diffusion-based non-autoregressive models have reformulated solving COPs as a generative process, achieving promising results. However, almost all of these methods still suffer from accumulated errors and high inference costs due to the multi-step stochastic denoising process. To address these issues, we propose EFLOCO, an efficient discrete flow matching method for solving COPs, learning structured and deterministic solution trajectories. EFLOCO replaces noise-driven updates with smooth and guided transitions, thereby improves inference stability and quality. Furthermore, we introduce an adaptive time-step scheduler that makes more efforts in critical transition regions, yielding strong performance under few-step constraints. Experiments on standard Traveling Salesman Problems (TSPs) and Asymmetric TSPs (ATSPs) show that our method consistently outperforms both learning-based and heuristic baselines in terms of solution quality and inference speed.

PaperID: 3869

Authors:Aanisha Bhattacharyya, Susmit Agrawal, Yaman Kumar Singla, Tarun Ram Menta, Nikitha Sr, Rajiv Ratn Shah, Changyou Chen, Balaji Krishnamurthy

Affiliations: Adobe Media and Data Science Research (MDSR), Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi (IIIT Delhi), State University of New York at Buffalo

Title: ALPHA: Action-Based Learning for Pluralistic Human Alignment in Large Language Models

Abstract:
Large language models are widely used, but aligning them with societal values remains challenging. Current approaches often rely on human annotations, which are hard to scale, or synthetic data produced by models that may themselves be misaligned, making it difficult to capture genuine public opinion. This limits scalability and introduces demographic biases that reduce the representativeness and fairness of model behavior. We introduce a novel approach to pluralistic alignment through behavioral learning, grounded in the psychological principle that actions (behavior) have strong consistency with opinions. Specifically, we present ALPHA50M, a dataset of over 50 million samples derived from 1.5 million realworld advertisements, incorporating rich behavioral signals inferred from demographic engagement patterns. Models trained on this data achieve state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on diverse alignment benchmarks spanning cultural reasoning, political views, and social values. We also propose two new benchmarks: OpinionQA-XL, which covers surveys across 100+ societal topics, and GSS, which evaluates temporal opinion shift modeling over decades. Our results demonstrate that learning from behavioral signals, derived from observed human actions, enables models to align with diverse demographic opinions, capture underlying social and cultural norms, and generalize to new topics and surveys beyond training data. This behavioral learning paradigm offers a scalable and demographically broad alternative to existing alignment techniques.

PaperID: 3870

Authors:Bikash Dutta, Adit Jain, Rishabh Ranjan, Mayank Vatsa, Richa Singh

Affiliations: Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, FLAME University

Title: ACID Test: A Benchmark for Cultural Safety and Alignment in LALMs

Abstract:
Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) are transforming AI by processing and generating human language directly from audio. As these models proliferate in realworld applications, it becomes critical to evaluate their performance to ensure equitable and safe use across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. We present the first comprehensive study of cultural bias in LALMs, extending text-based harm frameworks to the audio modality to analyze how linguistic diversity influences model behavior and uncover challenges in interpreting audio nuances. To address this, we introduce the Audio Cultural Intelligence Dataset (ACID), a multilingual audio–text benchmark spanning 1,315 hours across diverse languages and cultural contexts, and we conduct a systematic evaluation of 10 open-source and two closed-source models. Our results reveal substantial performance disparities across languages and cultural settings and show that biases manifest distinctly when models process audio inputs. These findings highlight the need to evaluate LALMs not only for technical accuracy but also for fair and culturally sensitive behavior, motivating the development of inclusive datasets and culturally aware training practices for safer and more equitable audio language models.

PaperID: 3871

Authors:Md Zahidul Islam, Cameron S. Fletcher, Ke Sun, Amir Dezfouli, Iadine Chades

Affiliations: Khulna University, Khulna CSIRO Environment, Australian Tropical Science & Innovation Precinct, James Cook University, QLD CSIRO Eveleigh, NSW BIMLOGIQ, Environmental Informatics Hub, Monash University

Title: Leveraging Sparse Observations to Predict Species Abundance Across Space and Time

Abstract:
Biodiversity is declining globally at an unprecedented rate. Managers urgently need to allocate limited resources to control pest species where interventions have the highest ecological impact. However, many species are hard to detect, and data collection is often expensive, irregular, and incomplete, thus posing significant challenges for machine learning models that traditionally require large and regular datasets. We present a novel deep learning architecture that estimates the spatiotemporal abundance of hardto-detect species from sparse, zero-inflated, and irregular data. Our method combines Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) to model spatial dependencies across monitoring sites with Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to capture long-range temporal dynamics explicitly addresses the challenges of data sparsity, heterogeneity, and irregular sampling. We apply our model to the Crown-of-Thorns Starfish (COTS) on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, a species with devastating impact on coral reefs and a major target of pest control programs. Our method significantly outperforms baseline approaches and the current resource-intensive approach, manta-tow surveillance, in both accuracy and detectability. Simulations indicate a 20% increase in starfish removal efficiency over a year, enabling more effective coral protection. This work demonstrates how tailored deep learning methods can overcome ecological data limitations and substantially improve conservation outcomes.

PaperID: 3872

Authors:Liangyi Kang, Wei Hua, Yan Yang, Jie Liu, Dan Ye

Affiliations: Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: ALERT: Adversarial Learning Enhanced Stability-aware Routing Transformer for Adaptive Depression Detection

Abstract:
Detecting depression through social media is a complex task, as noisy usergenerated content creates significant interference between persistent depressive patterns and transient emotional expressions. Two main challenges arise: First, negative mood indicators are not exclusive to depressed individuals, making it difficult to distinguish between pathological symptoms and situational emotional variations. Second, existing static models fail to adapt to diverse user expression styles and effectively filter out confounding noise from posts by non-depressed individuals. This results in conventional approaches either overfitting to superficial emotional cues or overlooking subtle long-term symptom progression. To address these issues, we propose the Adversarial Learning Enhanced Stability-aware Routing Transformer for Adaptive Depression Detection(ALERT), a novel framework integrating adaptive attention routing and adversarial learning to enhance robustness against confounding mood signals. Specifically, ALERT employs a stability-aware dynamic routing mechanism to annotate user-specific mood valence trends, providing a structured representation of affective progression over time. An adversarial learning module then leverages these mood-based representations to distinguish between expressions indicative of persistent depressive mood and variations in situational mood states, ensuring adaptability to diverse user behaviors. Experimental results on public social media datasets demonstrate that ALERT outperforms state-of-the-art methods in depression detection, effectively reducing false alarm from transient mood states and improving classification accuracy.

PaperID: 3873

Authors:Qingqing Liang, Chunyang Wang, Peiwei Xia, Yanan Zeng, Xin Liu, Xuesong Lu, Aoying Zhou

Affiliations: East China Normal University

Title: EdGCL: Disentangling Social and Cognitive Homophily in Graph-Based Educational Recommender Systems

Abstract:
Educational recommendation systems have been a fundamental component for alleviating learning disorientation in selfpaced learning. While existing studies mainly leverage cognitive theories to guide learning motivation modeling, they critically overlook the role of social influences. Through empirical analysis, we identify social homophily as an additional driver of learning behaviors, i.e., learners tend to adopt resources validated by their social cohort. However, two challenges impede effective social homophily modeling: (1) the absence and sparsity of predefined social relations in online education, and (2) the deep entanglement of social homophily with cognitive homophily in behavioral data. To tackle these challenges, we propose a graph-based framework EdGCL that explicitly disentangles social homophily and cognitive homophily. EdGCL infers implicit social relations from learners' social behaviors and encodes them via a graph transformer, generating social-view representations. Simultaneously, it constructs a heterogeneous learning graph to model cognitive homophily, which is enhanced by a type-aware aggregator and cognitive diagnosis loss. To ensure the semantic distinctiveness of dual-view homophily modeling, a cross-view contrastive disentanglement mechanism is designed to pull intra-view representations closer while pushing inter-view representations away. Evaluation on two real-world educational datasets demonstrates the superior recommendation performance of EdGCL, highlighting the necessity of dual homophily modeling for understanding the motivations behind learning behaviors.

PaperID: 3874

Authors:Ziyang Liu, Siyuan He, Feng Liang, Chang Huang, Shuxin Zhong, Kaishun Wu

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technolgy (Guangzhou)

Title: mmJEPA-ECG: Cross-Posture Robust Contactless Electrocardiogram Monitoring via Millimeter Wave Radar Sensing

Abstract:
Continuous cardiac monitoring during sleep is vital for detecting silent arrhythmia and other nocturnal cardiac events. While electrocardiogram (ECG) is the clinical gold standard, its reliance on electrodes and physical contact makes it intrusive for daily longterm use. Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar offers a compelling non-contact alternative by capturing cardiac-induced chest-wall micro-vibrations. Existing radar-to-ECG methods often rely on direct waveform regression, assuming posture-stable mappings that break under natural sleep movements and obscure true cardiac rhythms. Inspired by the modality-invariant perception observed in speech and vision, we introduce mmJEPA-ECG, a physiology-guided framework for reconstructing clinical ECGs by anchoring radar sensing to invariant cardiac dynamics. It addresses two fundamental challenges: (i) disentangling robust cardiac representations from posture-induced artifacts, and (ii) generalizing ECG reconstruction across individuals under signal ambiguity. To address these challenges, Physiology-Oriented Self-Supervised Pretraining builds on a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) with domain-informed masking and heart rate consistency to extract posture-robust cardiac embeddings. Conditional Diffusion-based ECG Reconstruction then generates personalized ECG waveforms through a hierarchical conditional diffusion process by spectral fidelity and denoising constraints. Extensive experiments on both public and self-collected multi-subject datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art across waveform and rhythm metrics, halving R-R peak errors even under posture shifts and arrhythmic conditions.

PaperID: 3875

Authors:Meng Wan, Qi Su, Zhixin Xia, Kanglin Chen, Jue Wang, Tiantian Liu, Rongqiang Cao, Hui Cui, Peng Shi, Yangang Wang, Liqiang Feng, Zhenbing Zhao

Affiliations: Computer Network Information Center, Peking University Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, North China Electric Power University, University of California, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Unicom Software Research Institute, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Laoshan Laboratory

Title: RipAlert: A Future-Frame-Aware Framework for Rip Current Forecasting and Early Alerting

Abstract:
Rip currents cause over 100 drowning deaths and more than 30,000 rescues annually in the United States, posing a severe threat to beach safety worldwide. However, most existing detection methods are reactive, identifying rip currents only after they form, leaving limited time for intervention. We propose RipAlert, a futureframe-aware framework that forecasts near-future coastal dynamics and proactively identifies rip current risks. We design a region-sensitive optical flow prediction method with a novel entropy-based object detector to capture early-stage reverse-flow anomalies. Unlike static-image approaches, RipAlert leverages temporal motion patterns to detect rip currents up to 5 seconds before they visibly form. To support real-world deployment, we design a lightweight mobile application and release a curated dataset with over 2,000 annotated images. Experiments on the RipVIS benchmark show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance. The system has been deployed at high-risk beaches in China, issuing successful early warnings over real-world events. Our work advances AI-driven coastal safety and contributes to SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being) and SDG 13 (Climate Action).

PaperID: 3876

Authors:Peijian Wang, Thu Nguyen

Affiliations: Rutgers University

Title: EA: Managing Green Data Centers Using Deep Reinforcement Learning Without Discounting

Abstract:
For the past two decades, sustainability and carbon reduction have emerged as critical factors for data center (DC) design and operation. A set of advances has been encapsulated in green DCs with the onsite generation of renewable energy and efficient cooling systems. In this paper, we study how to apply Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to optimize green DC operation. Green DC management is typically an infinitehorizon problem with exogenous stochastic input processes. We propose EA, a framework that applies DRL to the typical infinite-horizon problem without discounting. EA approximates the infinite-horizon problem with a finite-horizon one. In this approach, it is important to avoid actions optimized for the end of the finite-horizon problem but inappropriate for the true infinite-horizon one. EA addresses this challenge by combining a stationary policy with the fact that green DC management has repeating patterns (e.g., daily temperature, solar energy generation, and workload). We apply EA to the management of a green DC with onsite solar energy generation and a hybrid cooling system that includes ``free'' cooling. Evaluation results show that EA successfully learns important principles such as delaying deferrable jobs to solar-rich times and gracefully maintaining inside temperature. Further, EA outperforms three state-of-the-art DRL algorithms, realizing the greatest benefits on days with high outside temperature and high solar generation. While we evaluate EA in the specific context of a green DC, we believe that EA is a promising approach for more general system management settings.

PaperID: 3877

Authors:Xiaocai Zhang, Zhe Xiao, Maohan Liang, Tao Liu, Haijiang Li, Wenbin Zhang

Affiliations: The University of Melbourne, Institute of High Performance Computing, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Wuhan University of Technology, Shanghai Maritime University, Dalian Martime University, Michigan Technological University

Title: Realistic Curriculum Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous and Sustainable Marine Vessel Navigation

Abstract:
Sustainability is becoming increasingly critical in the maritime transport, encompassing both environmental and social impacts, such as Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and navigational safety. Traditional vessel navigation heavily relies on human experience, often lacking autonomy and emission awareness, and is prone to human errors that may compromise safety. In this paper, we propose a Curriculum Reinforcement Learning (CRL) framework integrated with a realistic, datadriven marine simulation environment and a machine learning-based fuel consumption prediction module. The simulation environment is constructed using real-world vessel movement data and enhanced with a Diffusion Model to simulate dynamic maritime conditions. Vessel fuel consumption is estimated using historical operational data and learning-based regression. The surrounding environment is represented as image-based inputs to capture spatial complexity. We design a lightweight, policy-based CRL agent with a comprehensive reward mechanism that considers safety, emissions, timeliness, and goal completion. This framework effectively handles complex tasks progressively while ensuring stable and efficient learning in continuous action spaces. We validate the proposed approach in a sea area of the Indian Ocean, demonstrating its efficacy in enabling sustainable and safe vessel navigation.

PaperID: 3878

Authors:Jiaxu Zhao, Meng Fang, Mingze Zhong, Shunfeng Zheng, Ling Chen, Mykola Pechenizkiy

Affiliations: University of Technology Sydney, Eindhoven University of Technology

Title: Investigating Social Bias Propagation in Federated Fine-tuning of Large Language Models

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in many domains, but concerns about data quality and privacy are growing. Federated Learning (FL) offers a privacypreserving solution by training a model on local clients without sharing data. However, the impact of biased private data on LLMs fine-tuned through FL remains understudied. This work investigates how client-side biased data affects the global model during federated fine-tuning of LLMs. We simulate realistic scenarios where some clients possess datasets containing social biases (stereotypes, discriminatory language) while others have clean data through extensive experiments with popular FL algorithms (FedAvg, FedAdam and FedProx) and popular LLMs (LLaMA, Mistral, Phi-3 and Gemma) across datasets with varying bias proportions (33%, 66%, 100%). Our findings reveal that 1) FedAdam consistently shows the lowest bias propagation, reducing CrowS-Pairs scores by up to 15% compared to FedAvg; 2) Even small amounts of biased data (33%) can significantly influence global model bias; 3) Mixed biased and neutral data distributions lead to 5%-7% higher bias scores than segregated distributions. Additionally, we propose Bias-Aware Model Aggregation (BAMA), a novel debiasing method for federated fine-tuning that consistently reduces bias across various models and algorithms.

PaperID: 3879

Authors:Weilin Zhou

Affiliations: Nanjing Tech University

Title: The Fixed-Point of Distrust: A Formal Theory of Perceived Systemic Incompetence

Abstract:
A widespread social sentiment suggests our world operates like a "makeshift world" —a system rife with hidden incompetence. Is this perception an inevitable outcome of our information ecosystem? This paper presents a formal mathematical theory to answer this question affirmatively. We model belief dynamics as a system of interacting agents governed by two operators: (1) an Attentional Update Operator formalizing how negatively biased information is assimilated, and (2) a Social Aggregation Operator modeling belief fusion over a network. Our main contribution is a rigorous proof: under minimal systemic negative bias and standard network connectivity, the collective belief system is a contraction mapping, guaranteed to converge to a unique pessimistic fixedpoint that perceives the world as incompetent, regardless of objective truth. This work establishes a mathematical foundation for understanding systemic perceptual biases with applications to platform design and policy.

PaperID: 3880

Authors:Qiyuan Chen, Ajay Annamareddy, Ying-Fei Li, Dane Morgan, Bu Wang

Affiliations: University of Wisconsin - Madison, Stanford University

Title: Physical-regularized Hierarchical Generative Model for Metallic Glass Structural Generation and Energy Prediction

Abstract:
Disordered materials such as glasses, unlike crystals, lack long‑range atomic order and have no periodic unit cells, yielding a high‑dimensional configuration space with widely varying properties. The complexity not only increases computational costs for atomistic simulations but also makes it difficult for generative AI models to deliver accurate property predictions and realistic structure generation. In this work, we introduce GlassVAE, a hierarchical graph variational autoencoder that uses graph representations to learn compact, translation‑, and permutation‑invariant embeddings of atomic configurations. The resulting structured latent space not only enables efficient generation of novel, physically plausible structures but also supports exploration of the glass energy landscape. To enforce structural realism and physical fidelity, we augment GlassVAE with two physics‑informed regularizers: a radial distribution function (RDF) loss that captures characteristic short‑ and medium‑range ordering and an energy regression loss that reflects the broad configurational energetics. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results highlight the critical impact of these regularizers. By encoding high‑dimensional atomistic data into a compact latent vector and decoding it into structures with accurate energy predictions, GlassVAE provides a fast, physics‑aware path for modeling and designing disordered materials.

PaperID: 3881

Authors:Yulin Jin, Xiaoyu Zhang, Haoyu Tong, Jian Lou, Kai Wu, Haibo Hu, Xiaofeng Chen

Affiliations: Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University., State Key Laboratory of ISN, Xidian University, China. Key Laboratory of Data and Intelligent System Security Ministry of Education, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Title: Stochastic Universal Adversarial Perturbations with Fixed Optimization Constraint and Ensured High-probability Transferability

Abstract:
Adversarial perturbations (APs) have become a great concern in image classification tasks. The most challenging branch, universal adversarial perturbations (UAPs), are exploited to fool most of the unseen samples. Such oneto-all perturbations have the merit of transferability, which has strong practical significance. In this paper, we firstly define the transferability gap and the algorithm stability of the UAP algorithm, and prove the relationship between them. In analyzing the UAP algorithm stability, we prove that the convergence domain of existing UAP algorithms with dynamic constraints is excessively small, which degrades the capacity of UAPs. Thus, we further propose a new expected constraint and prove that UAPs in the expected constraint suit any sample in a high probability. Besides, we propose a Stochastic Universal Adversarial Perturbation (SUAP) that involves additive noise and the expected constraint. Finally, by treating the proposed algorithm as a stochastic differential equation, we prove an upper bound of the UAP algorithm stability of SUAP, which decreases exponentially at the beginning and then increases with a sublinear rate to at most a fixed constant. Experimental results show that SUAP is aligned with our analysis.

PaperID: 3882

Authors:Nguyen Thanh Tam, Khanh Quoc Tran, Dat Thanh Pham, Truong Phu Le, Nguyen Hoang Gia Han, Binh T. Nguyen

Affiliations: University of Science, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Vietnam National University, University of Information Technology, Vietnam AISIA Research Lab

Title: VietCheckMed: Explainable Regulatory Compliance Checking for Medical Advertisements on Vietnamese Social Media

Abstract:
Regulatory compliance checking for online medical advertisements poses a critical public safety challenge distinct from traditional factchecking, particularly in low-resource languages. Existing automated systems are ill-suited for the authorization-based, evidence-grounded, and explainable reasoning this task demands. To address this gap, we introduce VietCheckMed, a novel retrieval-augmented framework, and VietAestheticAds, the first large-scale, expert-validated benchmark for this task, comprising 8,329 advertisements paired with an authoritative regulatory corpus of 9,978 facilities. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our evidence-grounded approach is essential, substantially outperforming powerful unassisted LLM baselines by over 0.3805 F1-score. A detailed analysis reveals that the primary remaining challenges are nuanced failures in semantic and logical reasoning, defining a clear frontier for future research. To promote advances in regulatory technology and responsible AI, our dataset, code, and evaluation scripts will be made publicly available. This work contributes a foundational methodology and a vital public resource for developing responsible AI in high-stakes regulatory domains.

PaperID: 3883

Authors:Yuanda Wang, Ji Zhou, Xinhui Han, Chao Zhang

Affiliations: Peking University, Monash University, Tsinghua University

Title: BDLF-Qwen3: Enhanced Cross-Architecture Binary Function Similarity Detection Through Binary Dynamic Layer Fusion

Abstract:
Binary code analysis is essential for software security across various instruction set architectures. Crossarchitecture binary function similarity detection faces significant challenges due to substantial differences in instruction sets and architectural conventions. Existing approaches struggle to capture relationships between code abstraction levels, and lack comprehensive cross-architecture datasets for effective evaluation. Inspired by human cognitive processes of dynamically integrating multi-level information, we propose Binary Dynamic Layer Fusion (BDLF), a novel neural architecture that enhances cross-architecture similarity detection through adaptive layer-wise feature integration. BDLF leverages Qwen3's multilingual code understanding and introduces dynamic weight generation to optimally combine representations from all previous layers. We also construct Cross-Bin, a high quality cross-architecture binary function dataset. BDLF-Qwen3 employs two-stage training: partial fine-tuning with pairwise similarity learning followed by BDLF enhancement with InfoNCE contrastive learning. Experiments demonstrate BDLF-Qwen3 significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving 36-65% improvement in Recall@10 across diverse CPU architectures.

PaperID: 3884

Authors:Mengmeng Wei, Lei Wang, Zhu-Hong You, Pengwei Hu, Bowei Zhao, Zhi-An Huang, Yu-An Huang, Haicheng Yi

Affiliations: China University of Mining Technology - Xuzhou, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, City University of Hong Kong (Dongguan), Northwest Polytechnical University

Title: Dual-Channel Learning Framework for Zero-Shot CircRNA-miRNA Interaction Prediction via State Space Modeling

Abstract:
CircRNAmiRNA interaction (CMI) plays a pivotal role in disease therapeutics and drug discovery. However, existing methods face several challenges in modeling complex biological networks and zero-shot learning scenarios. Biological networks encapsulate rich biological information, yet current approaches often fail to fully exploit this depth. Moreover, zero-shot prediction requires models to identify new interactions without relying on previously observed samples, imposing stringent requirements on generalization capabilities. To address these limitations, we propose a dual-channel learning framework leveraging State space modeling for Zero-shot CMI prediction (ZeroStem). ZeroStem first enhances the biological relevance of node using prior knowledge, and employs a graph Transformer to extract macro-topological representations. Subsequently, it generates semantic subgraphs based on meta-paths to focus on specific biological relationships, utilizing the Mamba to extract micro-semantic representations via state space modeling. Finally, macro-topological and micro-semantic representations are seamlessly integrated through linear transformation and residual connections, enabling high-precision zero-shot CMI prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that ZeroStem significantly outperforms existing methods, validating its efficiency and robust generalization in CMI prediction. Case studies further illustrate that ZeroStem offers novel insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying intricate disease-associated networks.

PaperID: 3885

Authors:Qianyang Wu, Jingwei Lv, Zilong Zhang, Feifei Cui

Affiliations: Hainan University

Title: Generalizable Drug–Target Interaction Prediction via ESM-2 Representations and Progressive Contrastive Curriculum Learning

Abstract:
Predicting drug–target interactions (DTIs) is a fundamental task in computational drug discovery, yet it remains challenging under distribution shifts and limited training data. Existing approaches often suffer from poor generalization, weak crossmodal alignment between molecular and protein representations, and vulnerability to noisy supervision.We propose ESP-DTI, a unified framework designed to enhance generalization by integrating large-scale protein language models with curriculum learning and cross-modal contrastive alignment. Specifically, we leverage ESM-2 to encode context-aware protein representations and adopt a CLIP-style contrastive objective to align drug and protein embeddings in a shared latent space. To further improve learning robustness, we introduce a progressive curriculum sampling strategy that dynamically schedules training instances based on model confidence, enabling a gradual shift from easy to hard examples.Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that ESP-DTI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving a +3.1% improvement in average accuracy. Ablation studies confirm the complementary benefits of each component, validating their collective contribution to robust and generalizable DTI prediction.Our work underscores the effectiveness of combining pretrained protein language models with structured training curricula and cross-modal contrastive learning for reliable DTI prediction under real-world, distribution-shifted conditions.

PaperID: 3886

Authors:Tianwen Zhu, Guangyu Wu, Zhiwei Cao, Ruihang Wang, Jimin Jia, Yong Luo, Yonggang Wen

Affiliations: College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, School of Computer Science, Wuhan University

Title: Physics-Informed Multi-Task Learning for Battery State of Health Prediction with Uncertainty Quantification

Abstract:
Existing battery State of Health (SOH) prediction approaches often struggle to provide both accurate predictions and reliable uncertainty estimates. This paper presents a novel MultiTask Learning (MTL) framework that jointly tackles SOH prediction and provides a proxy metric for uncertainty through a unified architecture. The framework combines a Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) for SOH prediction with a deep autoencoding Gaussian mixture model for uncertainty modeling. Particularly, the energy score from the Gaussian mixture model serves as a proxy metric for uncertainty, where a higher score indicates potential prediction unreliability. Moreover, to enhance task-specific learning, we employ a multi-head attention mechanism that adaptively captures distinct feature relationships. Our experiments show improvements in prediction performance compared to the state-of-the-art baseline. A comprehensive evaluation on six XJTU battery benchmark datasets demonstrates that our framework achieves a prediction accuracy of 99.50% (MAPE: 0.0050) while providing reliable uncertainty quantification through the proxy metric.

PaperID: 3887

Authors:Zhejing Hu, Yan Liu, Zhi Zhang, Aiwei Zhang, Sheng-hua Zhong, Bruce X.B. Yu, Gong Chen

Affiliations: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Georgia Institute of Technology, College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University, Zhejiang University-University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Institute, FireTorch Partners

Title: Is Symbolic Music a Specific Language? Exploring Inspiration-to-Structure Machine Composition via LLMs

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in diverse tasks. This success raises a fundamental question in machine composition: Can symbolic music be considered a special form of language that can be jointly modeled with natural language for composition tasks? Recent studies validate that symbolic music can be modeled as a human language, yet composing structured music from partial symbolic inputs through natural language interaction remains underexplored. Even LLMs struggle to generate structurally coherent compositions in such hybrid inputoutput scenarios, highlighting a fundamental gap that calls for a domain-specific learning paradigm. To this end, we propose Inspiration-to-Structure (IoS), a cognitively inspired framework that enables LLMs to generate structured musical sections from melodic ideas. IoS employs a three-phase process—semantic, structural, and collaborative cognition—and is supported by two key components: (1) a new dataset and construction protocol called Structured Triplet Data (STD), and (2) a training method, Dual-Instance Structural Contrastive Optimization (DiSCO), designed to enhance structural awareness. Experiments show that IoS improves structural coherence by 47.8% and artistic creativity by 21.8% compared to conventional language modeling paradigm, supervised fine-tuning, and even enables smaller LLMs to surpass larger LLMs. These results suggest that symbolic music, while language-like, demands specialized modeling beyond standard language modeling paradigms. IoS enables LLMs to transform music theory knowledge into structured composition, empowering users to compose music interactively via language and advancing toward general creative AI.

PaperID: 3888

Authors:SangEun Lee, Yubeen Lee, Eunil Park, Wonseok Chae

Affiliations: Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Sungkyunkwan University

Title: MASP: Multi-Aspect Guided Emotion Reasoning with Soft Prompt Tuning In Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
Understanding human emotions from images is a challenging yet essential task for visionlanguage models. While recent efforts have fine-tuned vision-language models to enhance emotional awareness, most approaches rely on global visual representations and fail to capture the nuanced and multi-faceted nature of emotional cues. Furthermore, most existing approaches adopt instruction tuning, which requires costly dataset construction and involves training a large number of parameters, thereby limiting their scalability and efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose MASP, a novel framework for Multi-Aspect guided emotion reasoning with Soft Prompt tuning in vision-language models. MASP explicitly separates emotion-relevant visual cues via multi-aspect cross-attention modules and guides the language model using soft prompts, enabling efficient and scalable task adaptation without modifying the base model. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on various emotion recognition benchmarks, demonstrating that the explicit modeling of multi-aspect emotional cues with soft prompt tuning leads to more accurate and interpretable emotion reasoning in vision-language models.

PaperID: 3889

Authors:Tingming Bai, Zhiyu Xiang, Peng Xu, Tianyu Pu, Kai Wang, Eryun Liu

Affiliations: Zhejiang University

Title: SDNet: LiDAR Semantic Scene Completion with Sparse-Dense Fusion and Input-Aware Label Refinement

Abstract:
LiDAR Semantic Scene Completion (SSC) in autonomous driving requires predicting both dense occupancy and semantic labels from sparse input point cloud. Existing methods typically adopt cascaded architecture for feature dilation and semantic abstraction, which blurs distinctive geometric patterns and reduces feature discriminability. Moreover, given an input, conventional processing of the ground truth labels overlooks voxel predictability in the target, resulting in illposed supervision and discards informative voxels. To address these limitations, we propose Sparse-Dense Net (SDNet), a dual-branch architecture that processes the input points through parallel sparse and dense encoders. The complementary features are aligned and fused using a Sparse Dense Feature Fusion (SDFF) module and further refined by a Feature Propagation (FP) module. Additionally, we introduce an input-aware label refinement strategy, including Sparse-Guided Filtering (SGF) to filter unpredictable targets and Ignored Voxel Recycling (IVR) to leverage informative ignored voxels for auxiliary supervision. These innovations enhance both feature learning and label quality. Extensive experiments on SemanticKITTI and nuScenes OpenOccupancy datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach, with SDNet achieving state-of-the-art performance on both datasets and ranking 1st on the official SemanticKITTI benchmark with 42.1 mIoU, outperforming the previous best by 4.2 (+11.1%).

PaperID: 3890

Authors:Zhenyu Bao, Qing Li, Jinhan Xie, Kanglin Liu

Affiliations: School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Pengcheng Laborotory

Title: CPOStream: Collaborating Prediction and Observation for Flicker-Free Streamable Free-Viewpoint Video with 3DGS

Abstract:
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently demonstrated significant potential for streaming dynamic scenes, enabling the synthesis of photorealistic and real-time free-viewpoint videos (FVVs). Conventional streaming pipelines optimize each frame independently, i.e., the attribute of the 3D Gaussians (3DGs) responsible for the static regions are supposed to be identical across all frames but are changed in the optimization process, thus causing temporal color inconsistency and visual flickering artifacts in the static regions. To tackle this, we propose CPOStream, which utilizes a prediction and observation module to determine the state of 3DG. Specifically, the prediction module records those 3DGs that are inactive in the past K frames and those would be ignored in the optimization process of the current frame reconstruction. Thus, the attributes of those 3DGs would be kept consistent across the past K frames, guaranteeing the temporal consistence. Additionally, the observation module conducts motion detection, and recognizes those new 3DGs which are not recorded in the prediction module and are first detected by the observation module in the past K frames. The attributes of those 3DGs are optimized during the current frame reconstruction. Experiments on multiple real-world FVV benchmarks show that CPOStream substantially reduces temporal flickering and improves reconstruction fidelity, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance.

PaperID: 3891

Authors:Jiaxin Cai, Rui Lin, Jingze Su, Qi Li, Wenjie Yang, Yuanlong Yu, Wenxi Liu

Affiliations: College of Computer and Data Science, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou China

Title: Seeing in Double: Dual-Granularity BEV Segmentation via Mamba-Driven Alignment and Polar-Decoupled Experts

Abstract:
Bird's Eye View (BEV) representation has become pivotal for autonomous driving, yet existing polar coordinatebased approaches face two critical limitations: (1) distant semantic misprojection caused by radial resolution decay, and (2) region-specific geometric distortions from non-uniform polar discretization. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework addressing these challenges through three key innovations. First, we present a bilateral heterogeneous network constructs multi-granularity BEV spaces, efficiently exploiting dual-resolution visual information for distant detail preservation. Second, we employ an align-fusion strategy for multi-granularity feature aggregation. Specifically, the Mamba-Based Cross-Resolution Alignment module establishes semantic consistency for perspective features through shared state-space optimization. In the later stage, the Adaptive BEV Space Selector dynamically aggregates multi-granularity BEV features. Third, we introduce a Mixture of Radial-Angular Decoupled Experts, which employs polar-aware expert routing to disentangle radial compression and angular shear distortions through specialized geometric refinement. Comprehensive experiments on nuScenes and Lyft L5 demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our model across various resolution settings, visibility filtering, and perception ranges.

PaperID: 3892

Authors:Jingchao Cao, Guo An, Feng Gao, Ke Gu, Yutao Liu

Affiliations: Ocean University of China, Beijing University of Technology

Title: UQ-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Multimodal LLMs on Underwater Image Quality Assessment

Abstract:
Despite the rapid progress of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), their capacity for lowlevel visual perception in underwater environments remains underexplored. To address this gap, we present UQ-Bench, the first systematically designed benchmark for evaluating the ability of MLLMs to perceive and assess underwater image quality at the low-level visual attribute level. UQ-Bench comprises three components: (1) UW-Perception, a dataset of 3,000 underwater images paired with targeted questions on key degradations such as color cast, blur, contrast, and exposure, covering both global and local perceptual dimensions; (2) UW-Describe, a dataset of 500 images with expert-annotated gold-standard descriptions for assessing the accuracy of model-generated text; and (3) UW-Eval, an evaluation protocol employing human mean opinion scores (MOS) for quantitative quality assessment. To ensure rigorous and reproducible benchmarking, we propose a GPT-assisted evaluation framework that aligns model outputs with expert references and enables fine-grained analysis of distortion perception. Experimental results demonstrate that while MLLMs exhibit preliminary competence in underwater low-level visual tasks, they still fall short in capturing subtle degradations and achieving human-level consistency, highlighting the need for further advances in foundation models for marine vision.

PaperID: 3893

Authors:Yue Cao, Zhuo Zhang, Shuai Xiao, Jialin Li, Guipeng Lan, Jiabao Wen, Jiachen Yang

Affiliations: Tianjin University

Title: Automatic Translational Correction of Multi-View Coronary Angiography Based on Auto-Annotation Data Generation

Abstract:
Multiview automatic translational correction (ATC) in coronary angiography (CAG) is critical for intraoperative automatic diagnosis, in which deep learning playing a key role. However, heartbeat-induced soft matching errors and costly annotations make it difficult to build high-quality, large-scale datasets for calibration algorithm training. The training of clinical models is difficult to fulfill, as existing datasets differ significantly from real CAG in both style and structure. To address this challenge, we propose a novel high-quality data synthesis method for annotation-free ATC. We fully automated the construction of a labeled, high-fidelity dataset for training matching models. An evolutionary algorithm is introduced for global optimization of translation estimation, mitigating epipolar constraint violations caused by vascular deformation and enabling reliable correction across large viewpoint differences. Furthermore, a theoretical analysis is presented, demonstrating that error propagation between adjacent views is more accurate than direct estimation across distant views. Our experiments on clinical datasets demonstrate that our method not only significantly outperforms weakly supervised learning approaches, but also performs comparably to fully supervised methods. Moreover, it exhibits remarkable multicenter generalizability.

PaperID: 3894

Authors:Luyao Chang, Leiting Chen, Chen Yang, Chuan Zhou

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China Key Laboratory of Intelligent Digital Media Technology of Sichuan Province

Title: Escaping the CAM Shadow: Uncertainty-Guided Reliable Learning for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Abstract:
Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) suffers from an inherent mismatch between coarse imagelevel annotations and dense pixel-level predictions. To bridge this gap, existing methods primarily focus on generating refined class activation maps (CAM) as pseudo-labels. However, we argue that this focus is insufficient as it overlooks a critical component: the segmentation decoder. The decoder is typically trained through superficial alignment of predictions with pseudo-labels in the logit space. Given the noisy nature of such labels, this naive supervision leads to error accumulation and limits performance. To address this, we propose an Uncertainty-Guided Reliable Learning (UGRL) framework that exerts dual control to reshape the learning process, achieving robust supervision that escapes the CAM shadow. The cornerstone of UGRL is a prototype-driven uncertainty modeling module that estimates the reliability of class-wise supervision. The modeled uncertainty enables two synergistic control mechanisms. First, it adaptively modulates classification and segmentation losses, encouraging the model to learn from more trustworthy signals. Second, it guides the structuring of the decoder’s feature space. Rather than relying solely on superficial alignment, UGRL enforces deeper representation alignment by applying contrastive learning on reliable pixels. This enables rich semantic transfer to fine-grained segmentation details. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO demonstrate that our method surpasses other state-of-the-art WSSS methods.

PaperID: 3895

Authors:Yiqian Chang, Haoran Xu, Qinghong Ye, Jianing Li, Xuan Wang, Wei Zhang, Peixi Peng

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Shenzhen Graduate School, Peking University, Peng Cheng Laboratory

Title: BulletTime4D: Towards High Spatio-Temporal Resolution Dynamic Scene Rendering via Spike-Guided Stereo Vision

Abstract:
High spatio‑temporal resolution novel‑view scene rendering is crucial for applications such as sports analysis and scientific experiments. However, existing Dynamic Scene Rendering (DSR) approaches typically rely on conventional RGB cameras with limited frame rates, making it difficult to achieve high spatio‑temporal resolution. In this paper, we present BulletTime4D, a high spatio‑temporal resolution DSR framework, which is the first trial to integrate a spike camera with binocular RGB cameras for dynamic scene reconstruction. Specifically, we first develop a hybrid camera prototype and build a real‑world dynamic scene reconstruction dataset. Then, BulletTime4D presents a multi‑timescale deformation representation by combining low‑frequency spatio‑temporal features with high‑frequency inter‑frame motion features. Finally, a rendering network is designed capable of projecting 4D Gaussians into the spike domain for spike rendering, and a cross‑domain supervision strategy is proposed to achieve high‑frame‑rate texture and color rendering. The results show that BulletTime4D outperforms state‑of‑the‑art methods on both simulated and real‑world datasets. In addition, BulletTime4D can synthesize 300 FPS novel‑view renderings using stereo RGB cameras at 30 FPS and a single spike camera.

PaperID: 3896

Authors:Kaixiang Chen, Pengfei Fang, Hui Xue

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University Key Laboratory of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Technology and Its Interdisciplinary Applications (Southeast University), Ministry of Education

Title: Intra-Image Mining and Symmetric Maximum Concept Matching for Few Shot Out-of-Distribution Detection

Abstract:
Recent visionlanguage model (VLM)-based methods have achieved promising results in zero-shot out-of-distribution (OOD) detection by effectively leveraging the local patch features. However, the zero-shot nature inherently comes with two limitations: 1) imperfect local feature prototypes; 2) lack of OOD prototypes. In this paper, we propose Intra-Image Mining (IIM), a lightweight framework designed to overcome these limitations in a few-shot manner. IIM is motivated by the fact that local patches within an image often exhibit diverse semantics, with some patches deviating from the main class concept. Therefore, for each image, we first select the top-k class prototype-related patches as positive samples and leverage them to refine and optimize the local feature prototype. Then, the next top-k among the remaining patches are selected as negatives—serving as OOD signals to construct OOD prototypes. This process yields coherent local positives and challenging negatives, effectively enhancing the model’s local feature discrimination. Besides, we propose a novel inference strategy named Symmetric Maximum Concept Matching (S-MCM). While existing approaches typically adopt an image-to-text scheme—comparing the image features to textual class prototypes—S-MCM further incorporate a text-to-image perspective, leading to more reliable OOD detection. We also propose two benchmarks to analyze the impact of semantic diversity within ID dataset. Built on a frozen VLM, IIM, in conjunction with S-MCM, achieves consistent gains in OOD detection on ImageNet-1k and other benchmarks, outperforming prior methods in FPR95 and AUROC across various few-shot settings.

PaperID: 3897

Authors:Shengjia Chen, Luping Ji, Shuang Peng, Sicheng Zhu, Mao Ye

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Domain-Auxiliary Infrared Moving Small Target Detection by Learning to Overlook Domain Discrepancy

Abstract:
Currently, almost all traditional infrared small target detection methods work on the assumption that training and test sets always belong to the same domain, and training samples are sufficient. However, in real applications, a new detection task could often have no sufficient training samples from a special domain. In this situation, adopting the auxiliary data from bigsample domains is usually believed to be one of the most potential solutions. However, exceeding expectations, it is found that simply adding auxiliary samples cannot often be always effective, even causing performance decline, due to existing infrared domain shift. To overcome this unexpected problem, we propose the first infrared moving small target detection framework with domain-auxiliary supports by Learning to Overlook Domain Discrepancy (Loddis). This framework consists of three primary processing stages: correlation weakening, domain confusing, and target consistency contrastive learning. Breaking through traditional learning paradigm, through auxiliary data, it enables the model to focus more on targets themselves, and less on image backgrounds, minimizing the sensitivity to domain discrepancy. The extensive experiments on 6 different-domain datasets show the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed Loddis framework for infrared small target detection.

PaperID: 3898

Authors:Junyu Cheng, Zhibiao Liang, Yidong Chen, Shuangyin Li

Affiliations: Department of Artificial Intelligence, School of Informatics, Xiamen University, School of Computer Science, South China Normal University, China Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing, Ministry of Education of China

Title: RFI: Rectified Flow Intervention for Mitigating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
Large VisionLanguage Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in multimodal understanding and generation by integrating visual and textual data. However, these models frequently exhibit object hallucination problems: generating outputs that are inconsistent with the input image. Existing improved methods for mitigating hallucinations still suffer from two key limitations: dynamic approaches based on logits or attention mechanisms risk suppressing valuable linguistic priors, whereas static methods that employ fixed intervention vectors lack the flexibility to adapt to diverse images and questions. To address these issues, we propose RFI (Rectified Flow Intervention), a novel approach that harnesses the linear trajectory design of rectified flow for input-specific adaptation and employs gradient correction to ensure coherent generation, effectively combining the adaptability of dynamic methods with the stability of static ones. RFI dynamically predicts latent-space intervention vectors while requiring only a single forward pass in LVLMs per question, achieving computational efficiency (1.09x latency overhead for 100 new tokens). Extensive experiments show RFI significantly reduces hallucinations, achieving superior performance compared to existing advanced methods, highlighting its effectiveness as a lightweight plug-and-play method for reducing LVLM's hallucination in practical applications.

PaperID: 3899

Authors:Xinyi Cheng, Chenghao Xu, Xi Wang, Jiexi Yan, Yanhua Yang

Affiliations: Xidian University

Title: Decomposing Prompts, Composing Actions: A Multi-Granularity Prompting Approach for Incremental Action Learning

Abstract:
Continual learning for action recognition is a critical capability for nextgeneration Extended Reality (XR) systems. Yet it faces a severe real-world challenge: strict user privacy that prohibits data rehearsal. While recent prompt-based continual learning methods show promise, we argue their core 'flat,' single-granularity design fundamentally misaligns with the complexity of human actions. This monolithic architecture fails to model the inherent hierarchical structure and overlooks standard action primitives shared across tasks, resulting in suboptimal performance and hindered knowledge transfer. To overcome this limitation, we propose DPCA, a novel spatio-temporal continual learning framework with multi-granularity adaptive prompting. DPCA learns three synergistic components to resolve this mismatch. First, the task-specific prompter employs a multi-granularity query system to capture the unique, compositional semantics of each action. Second, the task-agnostic prompter learns a globally shared vocabulary of ``action primitives," providing a stable and generalizable knowledge base to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. Finally, we introduce a Dissimilarity Attention Rectification at each granularity level, leveraging a reverse attention mechanism to model class-agnostic background information and effectively alleviating overfitting. The synergy between these components enables robust model adaptation without requiring access to past data. Rigorous experiments on multiple large-scale benchmarks (including NTU RGB+D), under a strict rehearsal-free, few-shot protocol, confirm that DPCA establishes a new state-of-the-art. This advance paves the way for the realization of truly adaptive and privacy-respecting XR systems.

PaperID: 3900

Authors:Shuaiyuan Du, Yang Xiao, Zhiguo Cao

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: DEFANet: Dual-Path Edge-Target Collaboration with Frequency-Aware Enhancement for Infrared Small Target Detection

Abstract:
Infrared small target detection is challenging due to limited target size and low signalto-noise ratio. Unlike common targets, infrared small targets contain a higher proportion of edge pixels and exhibit blurred boundaries due to diffraction and quantization artifacts, making boundaries uniquely valuable cues for target perception. However, existing methods often emphasize holistic modeling while underutilizing such informative boundary cues. Motivated by this observation, we propose a Dual-Path Edge-Guided Frequency-Aware Network (DEFANet), which enables edge-target collaborative modeling for enhanced feature representation. DEFANet features a dual-path design, consisting of a main branch for holistic target modeling and an edge branch for boundary transition perception. To facilitate interaction and enhance representation in both branches, we introduce two core modules: Frequency-Aware Dual Enhancement Module (FADE) and Edge-Guided Integration Module (EGI). FADE employs a Frequency-Decoupled Attention Enhancement Mechanism to enhance both branches in the frequency domain, strengthening holistic modeling in the main branch and boundary representation in the edge branch. EGI leverages a Dual-Path Group-Wise Guidance Mechanism to integrate enhanced edge features into the main branch, improving boundary perception. Extensive experiments on four public infrared small target datasets, MDvsFA, LAFT, SIRST, and SIATD, demonstrate that DEFANet achieves SOTA performance. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of DEFANet and the soundness of its design motivation.

PaperID: 3901

Authors:Weiwei Duan, Luping Ji, Jianghong Huang, Sicheng Zhu, Mao Ye

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Cross-domain Joint Learning with Prototype-guided Mixture-of-Experts for Infrared Moving Small Target Detection

Abstract:
Infrared small target detection often faces significant domain gaps across datasets due to varying sensors and scene distributions. Currently, most existing methods are typically based on singledomain learning (i.e., training and test are on the same dataset), requiring training separate detectors when considering different datasets. However, they overlook the valuable public knowledge across domains and limit the applicability in multiple infrared scenarios. To break through single-domain learning, implementing only one universal detector simultaneously on multiple datasets, as the first exploration, we propose a cross-domain joint learning task framework with prototype-guided Mixture-of-Experts (CoMoE). Specifically, it designs a hyperspherical prototype learning to adaptively maintain both domain-specific prototypes and global prototypes, enhancing cross-domain feature representation. Meanwhile, a domain-aware Mixture-of-Experts with Top-K routing strategy is proposed to select the optimal domain experts. Moreover, to enhance cross-domain feature alignment, we design an adaptive cross-domain feature modulation with noise-guided contrastive learning. The extensive experiments on a newly constructed benchmark comprising three datasets verify the superiority of our CoMoE, even under limited data settings. It could often surpass general joint learning methods, and state-of-the-art (SOTA) single-domain ones.

PaperID: 3902

Authors:Wenxiao Fan, Kan Li

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology

Title: Leveraging Dissimilarity Invariance as a Robust Anchor for Learning with Noisy Labels

Abstract:
Deep learning models excel in visual recognition but suffer severe performance drops when training labels are corrupted by noise. Under label noise prior work cannot learn accurate similarities and thus misguide the learning process. In this paper, we uncover a complementary and novel phenomenon, Dissimilarity Invariance, whereby semantic dissimilarity between unrelated samples remains stable despite label noise. Leveraging this insight, we propose NegScale, a plugand-play framework that shifts focus from fragile similarity to robust dissimilarity. NegScale integrates: (1) Structured Negative Orthogonality Penalty (SNOP), enforcing subspace orthogonality for unrelated samples; and (2) Dissimilarity-Calibrated Similarity Adjustment (DCSA), suppressing spurious similarity using dissimilarity anchors. We also give theoretical analysis that proves Dissimilarity Invariance and the effectiveness of NegScale. Empirical results demonstrate that NegScale consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, establishing new benchmarks on CIFAR with synthetic noise and real-world datasets.

PaperID: 3903

Authors:Jie Feng, Rui Luo, Tian Zeng, Xin Shen, Haikun Qi, Yuyao Zhang, Dong Liang, Hongjiang Wei

Affiliations: School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, ShanghaiTech University, School of Information Science and Technology, Research Center for Medical AI, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academic of Sciences

Title: Zero-shot Implicit Neural Manifold Representation (INMR) for Ultra-high Temporal Resolution Dynamic MRI

Abstract:
Capturing accurate dynamic information of moving organs is essential for functional assessment using noninvasive imaging modalities. Achieving high temporal resolution visualization of physiological processes remains a critical challenge in dynamic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) when reconstructing from extremely limited acquisitions. We introduce an unsupervised zero-shot reconstruction framework combining Implicit Neural Representation (INR) with manifold learning, capable of reconstructing dynamic MRI data at unprecedented temporal resolutions (less than 10 ms per frame for 2D imaging, less than 400 ms per frame for 3D imaging). The framework employs learnable low-dimensional manifold vectors to autonomously capture motion in real time directly from undersampled data, and dynamically condition coordinate-based spatial representations to generate high-fidelity image sequences. Through a novel spatiotemporal coarse-to-fine (C2F) optimization strategy, our method outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques across multiple imaging scenarios, including cardiac, speech and dynamic-contrast-enhanced (DCE) abdominal MRI, demonstrating robust performance under challenging motion patterns and contrast dynamics. The learned manifolds additionally provide intuitive visualization of motion and contrast evolution during imaging. These advances indicate strong clinical potential for applications requiring extreme temporal resolution while maintaining both anatomical and temporal fidelity.

PaperID: 3904

Authors:Jun Feng, Shuhong Wu, Hong Sun, Pengfei Zhang, Bocheng Ren, Shunli Zhang

Affiliations: Hubei Key Laboratory of Distributed System Security, Hubei Engineering Research Center on Big Data Security, School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Anhui University of Science and Technology, and Key Laboratory of Equipment Data Security and Guarantee Technology, Ministry of Education, Guilin University of Electronic Technology, School of Economics, Wuhan Textile University, School of Computer Science and Technology, Hainan University, School of Computer and Information Science, Qinghai Institute of Technology

Title: Stabilizing Cross-Modal Bidirectional Attribution: Few-Shot Adversarial Prompt Tuning for Robust Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
Largescale pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP show exceptional performance and zero-shot generalization. However, their reliability may be severely undermined by a critical vulnerability to subtle adversarial perturbations. Our work reveals a critical cross-modal vulnerability: visual-only perturbations induce substantial, synchronous shifts in decision attribution maps across both image and text. This phenomenon signifies a fundamental disruption of the VLM's internal logic, as it alters both the model's perceptual focus and its decision rationale. To counter this vulnerability, we introduce Cross-modal Bidirectional Attribution guided Few-shot Adversarial Prompt Tuning (CBA-FAPT), a novel method that leverages the model's internal decision rationale as a regularizer for robust learning. Our framework's core mechanism is the alignment of a novel bidirectional attribution map. This map is a unique fusion of two components. It combines forward feature attention to capture the model's perceptual focus. It also incorporates backward decision gradients to act as a proxy for the model's decision rationale, quantifying how each feature influences the final outcome. We enforce consistency on this bidirectional map between clean and adversarial examples. This approach corrects the model's internal logic on two fronts and effectively restores its adversarial robustness. Comprehensive experiments on 11 datasets demonstrate that CBA-FAPT outperforms the state-of-the-art, establishing a superior trade-off between robust and natural accuracy.

PaperID: 3905

Authors:Huichang Huang, Kunchi Li, Si Chen, Da-Han Wang

Affiliations: Xiamen University of Technology

Title: Fair Facial Attribute Recognition via Group-Decoupled Vision Transformer with Mask-Guided Correlation Suppression

Abstract:
Facial Attribute Recognition (FAR) holds significant potential for wideranging applications. However, traditionally trained FAR models exhibit unfairness, largely due to data bias—where certain sensitive attributes correlate statistically with target attributes. To address this, we propose a group-attention mechanism: first, each image is categorized into subgroups (e.g., Male/Female&short hair, Male/Female&long hair). Within the attention mechanism, distinct Query parameters are used for each group, with shared Key and Value parameters. As group-specific Query parameters are trained on subgrouped data, the noted bias is effectively mitigated. Consequently, integrating this Group-Attention into Vision Transformer (ViT) yields our novel Group-Decoupled ViT (GD-ViT) model. Moreover, to further attenuate the statistical correlation between sensitive and target attributes, we propose a Mask-Guided Correlation Suppression learning strategy. Specifically, in Stage 1, it first leverages a min-max dual-loss optimization strategy to train GD-ViT in capturing key regions related to sensitive attributes yet irrelevant to target attributes. Then, in Stage 2, it trains another GD-ViT by masking sensitive regions identified in Stage 1, fusing the masked output (as intermediate input) with the model’s intermediate outputs. This weakens regions associated with sensitive attributes while enhancing others, suppressing the learning of key features related to sensitive attributes. Consequently, it encourages the model to focus more on intrinsic target attribute regions and balances the learning process between the sensitive attribute and the target attribute. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance across three benchmark datasets for fair facial attribute recognition.

PaperID: 3906

Authors:Yucheng Huang, Luping Ji, Ruijie Xiao, Jiayuan Sun

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Multi-view Invariance Learning for 3D Scene Graph Pre-training via Collaborative Cross-Modal Regularization

Abstract:
3D scene graph generation is a pivotal task in scene understanding. Its performance is easy to be constrained by the limited availability of annotated data. Currently, the existing solutions on point cloud pretraining usually emphasize on object-centric representations while neglecting the predicate feature learning. This limitation significantly hinders their relational reasoning capabilities, as inter-object relationships are fundamentally governed by predicate features. To enhance 3D Scene Graphs Pre-training, this paper proposes a task-specific Multi-view Invariance Learning framework with Collaborative Cross-modal Regularization. In detail, the inherent horizontal-rotation invariance of 3D objects and their semantic relationships are leveraged to construct a self-supervised paradigm for triplet feature learning. Moreover, our framework harnesses the cross-modal prior knowledge from the vision-language model to regularize model optimization. It could further achieve the semantic discrimination via unsupervised deep clustering. To resolve the knowledge discrepancies arising from the pre-trained model in fine-tuning, a predicate adapter equipped with knowledge filtering gate is devised to selectively aggregate the predicate features of pre-trained model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework is effective in boosting 3D scene graph generation performance, surpassing state-of-the-art ones.

PaperID: 3907

Authors:Lihua Jing, Rui Wang, Jinwen Zhong, Runbo Li, Zixuan Zhu

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: False Positives Matter: Multidimensional Localization Evaluation and Training-Free Explainable Adversarial Patch Defense

Abstract:
Adversarial patch attacks pose a significant threat to visual systems. While current patch purificationbased defense methods enhance core metrics of visual perception models, they overlook the critical issue of false positive patches, severely compromising image usability. This paper reveals the inadequacy of existing evaluations for adversarial patch defenses, and pioneers a multidimensional adversarial patch localization evaluation framework, which comprehensively quantifies false positives, recall capability, and overall localization accuracy, providing a novel perspective for comparative analysis within the field. Furthermore, building upon the observation that false positives stem from a lack of semantic understanding, we propose a Semantic-Aware Training-free Explainable Defense method (SATED). SATED achieves zero-shot patch localization, false detection correction, and decision explanation by constructing a patch reasoning chain, while simultaneously performing integrated text-guided patch inpainting. Extensive experiments across digital and physical scenarios, detection and segmentation tasks, and diverse adversarial patches, demonstrate that our method significantly reduces false positives and doubles the overall patch localization accuracy, boosting both the generalizability and explainability of the defense.

PaperID: 3908

Authors:Xiaohui Kong, Qian Liu, Dandan Zhu, Kaiwei Zhang, Xiongkuo Min

Affiliations: East China Normal University, Donghua University, Shanghai AI Laboratory, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: SalDiff-DTM: A Novel Dual-Temporal Modulated Diffusion Model for Omnidirectional Images Scanpath Prediction

Abstract:
Scanpath prediction in omnidirectional images (ODIs) serves as a critical component for optimizing foveated rendering efficiency and enhancing interactive quality in virtual reality systems. However, existing scanpath prediction methods for ODIs still suffer from fundamental limitations: (1) inadequate modeling and capturing of longrange temporal dependencies in fixation regions, and (2) suboptimal integration of spatial and temporal visual features, ultimately compromising prediction performance. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Dual-Temporal Modulated Diffusion model for Omnidirectional Images Scanpath Prediction, named SalDiff-DTM model, to effectively generate realistic human eye viewing trajectories. Specifically, to effectively model spatial relationships, we propose a novel Dual-Graph Convolutional Network (Dual-GCN) module that simultaneously captures semantic-level and image-level correlations. By integrating both local spatial details and global contextual information across the internal temporal dimension, this module achieves comprehensive and robust modeling of spatial relationships. To further enhance the modeling of temporal dependencies inherent in diverse fixation patterns, we introduce TABiMamba (Temporal-Aware BiLSTM-Mamba), a dedicated module that synergistically combines the contextual sensitivity of BiLSTM with the long-range sequence modeling capabilities of Mamba. This design facilitates deep information flow and context-aware sequential reasoning, thereby enabling high-fidelity capture of intricate temporal correlations. Inspired by the progressive refinement mechanism of diffusion models in various generative tasks, we propose a saliency-guided diffusion module that formulates the prediction problem as a conditional generative process, iteratively yielding accurate and perceptually plausible scanpaths. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SalDiff-DTM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models, paving the way for future advancements in eye-tracking technologies and cognitive modeling.

PaperID: 3909

Authors:Minseong Kweon, Jinsun Park

Affiliations: University of Minnesota, Pusan National University, South Korea

Title: OceanSplat: Object-aware Gaussian Splatting with Trinocular View Consistency for Underwater Scene Reconstruction

Abstract:
We introduce OceanSplat, a novel 3D Gaussian Splattingbased approach for high-fidelity underwater scene reconstruction. To overcome multi-view inconsistencies caused by scattering media, we design a trinocular setup for each camera pose by rendering from horizontally and vertically translated virtual viewpoints, enforcing view consistency to facilitate spatial optimization of 3D Gaussians. Furthermore, we derive synthetic epipolar depth priors from the virtual viewpoints, which serve as self-supervised depth regularizers to compensate for the limited geometric cues in degraded underwater scenes. We also propose a depth-aware alpha adjustment that modulates the opacity of 3D Gaussians during early training based on their depth along the viewing direction, deterring the formation of medium-induced primitives. Our approach promotes the disentanglement of 3D Gaussians from the scattering medium through effective geometric constraints, enabling accurate representation of scene structure and significantly reducing floating artifacts. Experiments on real-world underwater and simulated scenes demonstrate that OceanSplat substantially outperforms existing methods for both scene reconstruction and restoration in scattering media.

PaperID: 3910

Authors:Jeonghaeng Lee, Seok Keun Choi, Zhixuan Li, Weisi Lin, Sanghoon Lee

Affiliations: Yonsei University, Nanyang Technological University

Title: DipGuava: Disentangling Personalized Gaussian Features for 3D Head Avatars from Monocular Video

Abstract:
While recent 3D head avatar creation methods attempt to animate facial dynamics, they often fail to capture personalized details, limiting realism and expressiveness. To fill this gap, we present DipGuava (Disentangled and Personalized Gaussian UV Avatar), a novel 3D Gaussian head avatar creation method that successfully generates avatars with personalized attributes from monocular video. DipGuava is the first method to explicitly disentangle facial appearance into two complementary components, trained in a structured twostage pipeline that significantly reduces learning ambiguity and enhances reconstruction fidelity. In the first stage, we learn a stable geometry-driven base appearance that captures global facial structure and coarse expression-dependent variations. In the second stage, the personalized residual details not captured in the first stage are predicted, including high-frequency components and nonlinearly varying features such as wrinkles and subtle skin deformations. These components are fused via dynamic appearance fusion that integrates residual details after deformation, ensuring spatial and semantic alignment. This disentangled design enables DipGuava to generate photorealistic, identity-preserving avatars, consistently outperforming prior methods in both visual quality and quantitative performance, as demonstrated in extensive experiments.

PaperID: 3911

Authors:Borui Li, Xingcai Zhang, Tianen Liu, Shuai Wang, Yun Cheng, Shuai Wang

Affiliations: Southeast University, ETHZ - ETH Zurich

Title: DigimonGPT: An Evolvable Agent with Hierarchical Human-like Memory for Video Question Answering

Abstract:
Video question answering (VideoQA), whose goal is to produce answers through the integration of linguistic and visual understanding, has emerged as a significant research focus. Although Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) and autonomous agent methods have achieved notable advances in VideoQA, excessive computational overhead and restricted multimodal interaction capabilities limit their ability to facilitate the continuous evolution of the VideoQA system. To address the challenge, we introduce DigimonGPT, an evolvable VideoQA agent inspired by cognitive psychology. Specifically, DigimonGPT integrates a multimodal memory mechanism to achieve the continuous evolution of VideoQA systems. An intravideo declarative memory contains fundamental features of the video and semantic contexts extracted from historical QA pairs. Another inter-task procedural memory encodes task-solving experience for further question answering. Additionally, we introduce a hierarchical memory replay mechanism for VideoQA that selects appropriate memories by their relevance and question complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DigimonGPT's accuracy averagely outperforms 13.71% on NExT-QA datasets and 9.89% on Intent-QA datasets over LMM and autonomous agents.

PaperID: 3912

Authors:Hongchao Li, Chengcheng Li, Xixi Wang, YongLong Luo

Affiliations: Anhui Normal University, Anhui University

Title: Context-aware Dynamic Contrastive Learning Network and E-Bike Rider Benchmark for Person Search

Abstract:
Person search is a challenging computer vision task that aims to simultaneously detect and reidentify individuals from uncropped gallery images. However, most existing approaches are limited by restricted receptive fields, leading to distorted local feature representations under occlusions or complex poses. Additionally, scale variations hinder model generalization in real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel E-Bike Rider Search (EBRS) dataset, which comprises 27,501 images capturing 963 distinct IDs across 8 camera views at a large urban intersection in a Chinese city. Furthermore, we propose a Context-aware Dynamic Contrastive Learning (CDCL) framework that dynamically adjusts convolutional weights and performs hard sample mining based on contextual cues, thereby improving discriminative capability for both local details and global features. Extensive experiments show our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on CUHK-SYSU and PRW benchmarks, with competitive results on the challenging EBRS dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness.

PaperID: 3913

Authors:Kai Li, Wei Wang, Linchao Zhang, Siying Zhu, Wenqi Ren

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University The State KeyLaboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University, School of Cyber Science and Technology, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, Information Science Academy，China Electronics Technology Group Corporation

Title: Decision-Driven Orthogonal Learning with Complementary Feature Mining for Robust Synthetic Image Detection

Abstract:
The widespread and inconsistent compression applied by Online Social Networks severely degrades the performance of synthetic image detectors. We attribute this degradation to two main issues: 1) the model confuses forgery artifacts with compression artifacts, and 2) compression erodes crucial discriminative highfrequency details. Existing methods suppress compression features during training but overlook the overlap between compression features and forgery-related features, leading to the unintended removal of forgery traces. To address artifact confusion, we introduce a Decision-Driven Orthogonal Constraint, which defines a classification decision axis pointing from the real class centroid to the forged class centroid. This constraint enforces compression artifacts to be orthogonal to the decision axis, mitigating their interference with forgery detection without entirely removing them, thus preventing the suppression of forgery-related features. To mitigate the erosion of high-frequency details, we propose to mine complementary forgery cues from both low-frequency information and compressed high-frequency components. A bidirectional update strategy and an adaptive global-local modulator are proposed to facilitate the utilization of forgery cues. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art generalization performance in challenging open-world detection scenarios.

PaperID: 3914

Authors:Xiang Li, Ya-Li Li, Yuan Wang, Huaqiang Wang, Shengjin Wang

Affiliations: Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, China Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology (BNRist)

Title: TCoT: Trajectory Chain-of-Thoughts for Robotic Manipulation with Failure Recovery in Vision-Language-Action Model

Abstract:
Recent advances in visionlanguage-action (VLA) models have demonstrated impressive generalization for robotic manipulation. However, these models often operate by directly mapping visual and linguistic inputs to subsequent actions, lacking intermediate task planning, along with failure detection and recovery ability. These limitations prevent them from effectively decomposing complex tasks, recognizing problems, and correcting erroneous actions, ultimately resulting in complete task failure. This significantly hinders their ability to perform long-horizon tasks and generalization ability. To this end, we introduce TCoT: Trajectory Chain-of-Thought, a unified VLA framework that enhances this direct mapping with trajectory planning as well as failure detection and recovery. TCoT leverages hierarchy trajectories as a precise and compact representation of CoT reasoning for manipulation: global planning provides a high-level, goal-oriented trajectory to guide the robot toward its task objective, while local planning focuses on real-time adjustments to address dynamic changes. Moreover, we designed the Global-Local Switching Recovery algorithm that detects and effectively recovers from failures. Experimental results reveal that TCoT surpasses the state-of-the-art methods across both real and simulated scenarios and exhibits superior generalization capabilities.

PaperID: 3915

Authors:Yanqi Li, Jianwei Niu, Ningbo Gu, Tao Ren

Affiliations: Beihang University Zhongguancun Laboratory, Beihang University Hangzhou Innovation Institute of Beihang University, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: From Scene to Object: Enhancing Open-Vocabulary Object Detection via Foreground-Background Context Reasoning

Abstract:
OpenVocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) aims to detect both known and novel categories in complex visual scenes, surpassing the limitations of conventional closed-set detectors. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have enabled zero-shot recognition by aligning visual features with large-scale textual embeddings. However, current OVOD approaches often fall short by overlooking critical contextual and semantic cues necessary for discovering a broader range of novel objects. To address this, we propose BFDet, a scene-to-object reasoning framework that leverages the complementary strengths of Large Language Models (LLMs) and VLMs. BFDet introduces a novel scene-to-object reasoning mechanism grounded in foreground-background context interaction. It first uses high-confidence objects to infer the scene-level background. This scene background then guides the discovery of foreground objects by prompting an LLM to generate scene-sensitive novel object candidates. These candidates are subsequently verified through cross-modal alignment and used as high-quality pseudo-labels to enrich detector training. Designed as a plug-and-play module, BFDet integrates seamlessly into existing detection pipelines and consistently improves performance on novel categories across COCO and LVIS benchmarks.

PaperID: 3916

Authors:Yun Liang, ZiHao Wu, Run Zheng, Shuai Xie, Bo Hong, Yishen Lin

Affiliations: South China Agricultural University

Title: FloorPlanFormer: Multi-Task Transformer Network for Floor Plan Recognition with Outer-to-Inner Feature Refinement

Abstract:
Floor plan recognition requires accurate segmentation and classification of entrance doors, outer contours (walls and windows) and inner contours (various room types) , despite strong spatial dependencies and large stylistic differences between different datasets. To overcome these challenges, we propose FloorPlanFormer, a multitask learning network divided into three phases: the first phase introduces a Swin Transformer backbone with a pixel decoder to extract fine-grained pixel-level semantics; the second phase employs prompt encoder and mask decoder, and a novel Global Contextual Attention Module (GCAM) is designed to generate clear, high-quality outer contour masks; the third stage uses mask transformer decoder to recognize targets and designs a Masked Feature Refinement Module (MFRM) to accurately delineate the inner contour by modeling the relationship between the local inner and outer contours. Finally, we constructed FloorPlan8K, a dataset containing 8200 images and 77434 instances, on which our model was trained and evaluated, and the results greatly outperformed the state-of-the-art general segmentation methods and specialized methods.

PaperID: 3917

Authors:Xinze Liu, Dayan Wu, Hengjie Zhu, Chenming Wu, Pengwen Dai

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Baidu Research, School of Cyber Science and Technology, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University

Title: Discretization Is Not Always Better: Rethinking Deep Quantization for Asymmetric Image Retrieval

Abstract:
Asymmetric image retrieval (AIR), which typically employs a compact model for the query side and a large model for the database server, has garnered significant attention in resourceconstrained environments. While deep hashing methods have shown great potential in large-scale image retrieval, current attempts for the asymmetric image retrieval overlook the differences in quantization capabilities between query and gallery networks. In AIR, the conventional quantization scheme forces the outputs of small query models to approximate the discrete outputs of large models, imposing overly rigid and stringent constraints that severely limit the optimization of small query models. Furthermore, existing deep hashing methods for AIR necessitate labeled datasets from large models, which also limits their practical applicability. To this end, we reconsider the necessity of strict discretization in AIR and propose a novel asymmetric hashing method, named Deep Correlation Alignment Hashing (DCAH). Rather than explicitly quantizing continuous query features to match discrete gallery representations, we distill the correlation across both models and introduce a Correlation Alignment based Quantization (CAQ) scheme, thereby implicitly accomplishing quantization. To preserve the similarity consistency between the query and gallery models, we further employ a correlation alignment-based knowledge distillation strategy which is intrinsically compatible with the CAQ. Notably, the proposed quantization scheme can function as a plug-and-play module that seamlessly integrates with existing AIR methods. Comprehensive evaluations on three real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed quantization scheme CAQ, and also show that DCAH achieves state-of-the-art performance in asymmetric image retrieval scenarios.

PaperID: 3918

Authors:Chunyao Lu, Tianyu Zhang, Xinglong Liang, Yuan Gao, Luyi Han, Xin Wang, Nika Rasoolzadeh, Tao Tan, Ritse Mann

Affiliations: Netherlands Cancer Institute Radboud University Medical Centre, Netherlands Cancer Institute Maastricht University Medical Centre, Macao Polytechnic University

Title: LUMIN: A Longitudinal Multi-modal Knowledge Decomposition Network for Predicting Breast Cancer Recurrence

Abstract:
Accurate prediction of breast cancer recurrence after treatment is essential for improving longterm outcomes. However, existing models are limited by three key challenges: (1) they typically rely on single-modal data, missing cross-modal interactions; (2) they analyze static snapshots, failing to capture disease progression over time; and (3) they often perform coarse feature fusion, lacking semantic disentanglement and interpretability. To address these issues, we propose LUMIN (Longitudinal Multi-modal Knowledge Decomposition Network), a novel framework that integrates longitudinal mammograms and electronic health records (EHRs) for recurrence prediction. LUMIN leverages a vision-language contrastive pretraining backbone to align multi-modal representations and introduces two knowledge extraction modules: (1) a Cross-Modal Disentangled Knowledge Extractor (CM-DKE) that separates shared, complementary, and modality-specific information across imaging and text; and (2) a Temporal Evolution Disentangled Knowledge Extractor (TE-DKE) that captures time-invariant, time-varying, and time-specific features to model disease dynamics. Experiments on a large-scale dataset of 3,924 patients and 19,684 exams show that LUMIN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness in capturing both multi-modal semantics and temporal heterogeneity for recurrence prediction.

PaperID: 3919

Authors:Nan Ma, Zhijie Liu, Yiheng Han

Affiliations: Beijing University of Technology

Title: MFINet: Multi-view Fusion and 2D–3D Interaction Enhancement for Real-Time LiDAR Semantic Segmentation

Abstract:
LiDAR semantic segmentation is a key task in advanced autonomous driving systems. Projectionbased methods exhibit real-time potential due to their efficiency, but suffer from inevitable 3D information loss and rely on time-consuming post-processing, limiting overall performance. To address this, we propose MFINet, a real-time semantic segmentation network based on multi-view fusion and 2D-3D interaction enhancement. It adopts a three-branch architecture that integrates 3D Point View (3D-PV), 2D Bird’s Eye View (2D-BEV) and 2D Range View (2D-RV) to make full use of 2D and 3D representation. From 3D to 2D, we design a 3D Point Feature Projector (3DPFP), which injects 3D features into the 2D BEV and RV pseudo-images to retain effective 3D information. From 2D to 3D, a Feature Enhancement (FE) module is designed to leverage the advantages of 2D information in extracting geometric and semantic features. We also introduce a 2D-3D Fusion Head (FH) to aggregate point features from multiple views. Besides, we incorporate a Multi-Scale Dilated Attention (MSDA) module with a sliding window strategy to enhance feature discrimination. Extensive experiments on the SemanticKITTI and NuScenes benchmarks demonstrate that MFINet outperforms existing methods on the SemanticKITTI, NuScenes val set and achieves competitive results on the NuScenes test set.

PaperID: 3920

Authors:Yulan Ma, Fangkun Li, Wenchao Yang, Qian Si, Chenglong Yu, Yang Li

Affiliations: Beihang University

Title: HyperDiag: Temporal–Regional Hypergraph Learning via Topology-Enhanced State Propagation for Brain Disease Diagnosis

Abstract:
Dynamic brain networks provide a powerful representation for capturing temporal variations in functional brain connectivity and have gained increasing attention in brain disease diagnosis. However, most existing methods extract features from isolated time windows, making it difficult to capture the highorder dynamic evolution of brain activity. Moreover, these methods often neglect the functional heterogeneity among brain regions, thereby limiting diagnostic performance. To address these limitations, we propose HyperDiag, a novel temporal-regional Hypergraph learning via topology-enhanced state propagation for brain disease Diagnosis. Specifically, we first design a dual-level hypergraph learning strategy: a temporally-evolving hypergraph message passing strategy to capture dynamic high-order dependencies within and across time windows, and meanwhile, a region-wise functional hypergraph learning strategy to capture regional dependencies. Subsequently, we construct a topology-enhanced selective state-space propagation network to integrate complementary information from both the temporally-evolving and region-wise features. Extensive experiments on four brain disorder datasets (ABIDE-I, ADNI, REST-meta-MDD, and Epilepsy) demonstrate that HyperDiag not only outperforms state-of-the-art methods but also identifies biologically meaningful abnormal connections, offering potential biomarkers for clinical interpretation.

PaperID: 3921

Authors:Xunyue Mo, Weibin Wu, Qingrui Tu, Hang Wang, Junxi He, Zibin Zheng

Affiliations: School of Software Engineering, Zhuhai Key Laboratory of Trusted Large Language Models, Sun Yat-sen University

Title: QRShield: Exploiting Vulnerabilities of Latent Diffusion Models for Preventing AI Art Plagiarism

Abstract:
Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) have achieved remarkable success in image generation tasks, yet their low barrier to customization poses severe threats related to art plagiarism. As a countermeasure, adversarial methods have been proposed to protect artworks from plagiarism. However, current methods suffer from limited effectiveness, high cost, and complex optimization. Moreover, their exploration and exploitation of LDM vulnerabilities remain limited, restricting effectiveness and applicability. To address this issue, we analyze the VAE and UNet components of LDMs, revealing their vulnerabilities. Specifically, we study the response of U-Net to specific structural and frequency patterns in the latent space and find that it is susceptible to high-frequency and periodic latent features. Furthermore, we observe channel correlations during the VAE encoding process. Inspired by these, we propose QRShield, an efficient protection method that exploits the vulnerabilities of LDMs. By constructing high-frequency and periodic features consistent across latent channels and combining them with a momentum-based translation-invariant attack strategy, QRShield achieves stronger and more efficient protection. QRShield significantly improves protection performance in various fine-tuning settings, with over 10% gains in multiple metrics, a threefold increase in generation speed, and nearly 50% reduction in memory usage. Therefore, our work offers a more practical method to prevent AI art plagiarism.

PaperID: 3922

Authors:Shuyi Ouyang, Hongyi Wang, Gongfan Fang, Xinyin Ma, Lanfen Lin, Xinchao Wang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, National University of Singapore

Title: Taming the Phantom: Token-Asymmetric Filtering for Hallucination Mitigation in Large Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
Hallucination in Large VisionLanguage Models (LVLMs) remains a critical challenge, undermining their reliability in real-world applications. Existing studies have investigated the causes of hallucination at the modality level and proposed effective strategies. However, interaction patterns beyond the modality level remain insufficiently explored. In this paper, we conduct a token-level analysis and identify two key phenomena: (1) a small subset of textual tokens in LVLMs exert disproportionate influence in the visual-active layers, surpassing that of the visual modality and potentially misleading visual understanding; (2) while LVLMs can correctly identify key visual information, insufficient focus on these cues can sometimes lead to hallucinations. Based on such observation, we attribute hallucinations in LVLMs to two token-level causes: the disproportionate influence of certain textual tokens (phantom tokens) and the underutilization of critical visual cues (anchor tokens). To mitigate these issues, we introduce Token-Asymmetric Filtering (TAF)—a training-free, plug-and-play method that modulates intermediate attention maps in LVLMs. TAF isolates the influence of phantom tokens and emphasizes the influence of anchor tokens in the visual-active layers. Experimental results across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that TAF significantly mitigates hallucinations across a range of state-of-the-art LVLMs.

PaperID: 3923

Authors:Zhijie Qiu, Shuaibo Li, Laixin Zhang, Xuming Hu, Wei Ma

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Beijing University Of Technology, Beijing University of Technology

Title: DualScope: Capturing Critical Spatial and Temporal Cues for Distracted Driving Activity Recognition

Abstract:
Accurately recognizing distracted driving activities in realworld scenarios is essential for improving road and pedestrian safety. However, existing approaches are prone to attending to irrelevant scene context and are susceptible to interference from redundant frames, compromising their robustness in complex driving environments. To overcome these limitations, we propose DualScope, a novel framework that captures behaviorally critical information from both spatial and temporal perspectives. In the spatial domain, we introduce a Synergistic Behavior-Centric Distillation mechanism that leverages two key information sources: (1) position-aware knowledge derived from the SAM model, which enhances the perception of critical regions and their semantic interaction structures; and (2) fine-grained visual details obtained from cropped key regions, which improve the model's ability to capture detailed patterns within behavior-relevant areas. In the temporal domain, we present the Saliency-Aware Fine-to-Coarse Temporal Modeling module, comprising three components: a Fine-Grained Motion Encoder for capturing local inter-frame dependencies; a Dynamic Difference Extractor for generating salient motion dynamics; and a Saliency-Aware Temporal Pyramid Mamba for integrating these representations to enable multi-scale temporal modeling. This design effectively captures both short-term motions and long-term behavioral patterns. Furthermore, incorporating salient dynamics enhances the model's focus on significant behavioral variations. Extensive experiments on seven publicly available DDAR datasets demonstrate that DualScope consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating its effectiveness in capturing behavioral cues across spatial and temporal dimensions.

PaperID: 3924

Authors:Ji Rao, Xinyu Liu, Yong Yi, Ying Xiao, Ye Luo

Affiliations: Tongji University, Fudan University

Title: Learning Latent Imaging Biomarkers for Interpretable Microvascular Invasion Prediction in Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Abstract:
Microvascular invasion (MVI) is a critical prognostic factor that significantly impacts postoperative outcomes in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). As the current gold standard for the diagnosis of MVI is based on the postoperative histopathological examination of whole slide images, accurate preoperative prediction of MVI status using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) presents both a substantial clinical imperative and a significant challenge. In order to discover reliable MRIbased imaging biomarkers to support clinical decision making and enhance the interpretability of deep learning-based diagnostic models, we propose a novel interpretable MVI prediction framework in which the shared latent visual attributes are first learned and then used for potential imaging biomarker extraction and MVI diagnosis, respectively. To ensure that the visual attributes of these biomarkers are generalizable across diverse patients, the similarity constraints at the intra-patient level and the inter-patient level are enforced within the learned feature space, enabling intuitive biomarker discovery directly from the original image space. To guarantee semantic alignment between biomarkers and the characteristics of individual patients, we introduce a novel classification mechanism that directly links the alignment between each biomarker and patient-specific characteristics with the prediction, thereby ensuring a precise prediction of MVI. Furthermore, the interpretability of the model is enhanced by integrating a mask-based visual explanation method that highlights regions in patient images that correspond to the identified biomarkers. Extensive experiments on two MVI prediction datasets: HCC-WCH and HCC-ZSH unequivocally demonstrate our method's superior performance in both classification accuracy and interpretability.

PaperID: 3925

Authors:Xue Song, Zhongqi Yue, Jiequan Cui, Hanwang Zhang, Jingjing Chen

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University, College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hefei University of Technology

Title: Object Fusion via Diffusion Time-step for Customized Image Editing with Single Example

Abstract:
We tackle the task of customized image editing using a textconditioned Diffusion Model (DM). The goal is to fuse the subject in a reference image (e.g., sunglasses) with a source one (e.g., a boy), while retaining the fidelity of them both (e.g., the boy wearing the sunglasses). An intuitive approach, called LoRA fusion, first separately trains a DM LoRA for each image to encode its details. Then the two LoRAs are linearly combined by a weight to generate a fused image. Unfortunately, even through careful grid search or learning the weight, this approach still trades off the fidelity of one image against the other. We point out that the evil lies in the overlooked role of diffusion time-step in the generation process, i.e., a smaller time-step controls the generation of a more fine-grained attribute. For example, a large LoRA weight for the source may help preserve its fine-grained details (e.g., face attributes) at a small time-step, but could overpower the reference subject LoRA and lose the fidelity of its overall shape at a larger time-step. To address this deficiency, we propose TimeFusion, which learns a time-step-specific LoRA fusion weight that resolves the trade-off, i.e., generating the source and reference subject in high fidelity given their respective prompt. Then we can customize image editing using this weight and a target prompt.

PaperID: 3926

Authors:Changshuo Wang, Zhijian Hu, Xiang Fang, Zai Yang Yu, Yibin Wu, Mingkun Xu, Yusong Wang, Xingyu Gao, Prayag Tiwari

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, University College London, United Kingdom, University of Toulouse, Interdisciplinary Graduate Programme, Nanyang Technological University, Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Geodesy and Geoinformation, University of Bonn, Guangdong Institute of Intelligence Science and Technology, Institute of Microelectronics, School of Information Technology, Halmstad University

Title: Biologically-Inspired Evolutionary Domain Symbiosis for Few-shot and Zero-shot Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation

Abstract:
Fewshot and zero-shot point cloud semantic segmentation aim to accurately segment novel categories using limited or no labeled samples, respectively. However, existing methods face significant challenges including domain shifts between support and query sets and the inability to handle both few-shot and zero-shot scenarios within a unified framework. To address these issues, we propose a biologically-inspired Evolutionary Domain Symbiosis Network EDS-Net for unified few-shot and zero-shot point cloud semantic segmentation. Specifically, inspired by natural symbiotic evolution, we propose a Symbiotic Evolution Module (SEM) that models co-adaptation between support and query features through self-correlation and cross-correlation mechanisms. Second, motivated by genetic crossover mechanisms, we introduce a Vision-Semantic Bridging Module (VSBM) that treats visual prototypes and semantic prototypes as two “parent” individuals, creating fused offspring prototypes through adaptive crossover operations and mutation strategies for zero-shot scenarios. Third, we develop a multi-generational evolutionary optimization framework employing an adaptive gating network to learn optimal fusion weights across different evolutionary stages. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EDS-Net with biological interpretability achieves state-of-the-art performance on both few-shot and zero-shot settings.

PaperID: 3927

Authors:Jiahao Wang, Fang Liu, Licheng Jiao, Hao Wang, Shuo Li, Xinyi Wang, Lingling Li, Puhua Chen, Xu Liu

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Image Understanding of Ministry of Education Joint International Research Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Computation School of Artificial Intelligent, Xidian University, P.R. China

Title: HTTrack: Learning to Perceive Targets via Historical Trajectories in Satellite Video Tracking

Abstract:
In recent years, the rapid progress of deep learning has driven notable advancements in satellite video tracking, a critical task for applications such as environmental monitoring, disaster management, and defense. Despite these strides, existing approaches remain constrained by their inability to handle dynamic challenges, such as target appearance variations, complex motion patterns, and occlusions. Traditional methods often suffer from static template matching or overly complex update mechanisms, compromising their robustness and practicality in realworld scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a paradigm shift in satellite video tracking by integrating historical trajectory knowledge with visual features. This fusion enhances the tracker's perceptual understanding of targets over time, enabling more adaptive and resilient tracking. By aligning spatial, temporal, and cross-modal information, our approach effectively bridges the gap between fragmented observations and coherent tracking performance, even under challenging conditions like small target detection and cluttered backgrounds. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple satellite video tracking benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method, with HTTrack achieving success rates of 51.5% on SV248S, 52.9% on SatSOT, and 32.6% on VISO, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art trackers and marking a step forward in achieving robust, accurate, and scalable satellite video tracking.

PaperID: 3928

Authors:Qijun Wang, Kang Wang, Jun Wang

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing and Signal Processing of Ministry of Education, School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University

Title: Compression Artifacts Removal for VVC with Frequency Domain Mixture of Experts Network

Abstract:
In recent years, lossy compression algorithms such as H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, and H.266/VVC have been proposed and widely applied in image and video encoding. However, these compression algorithms inevitably introduce various complex types of compression artifacts, which severely degrade image quality. Although existing methods have attempted to remove artifacts through filter design or probabilistic prior modeling, they are often effective only for specific types of artifacts, lacking generalization and adaptability. To address this, we propose a novel image compression artifacts removal model: ARMoE, which combines multiple frequency domain transformations with the Mixture of Experts (MoE). Considering the frequency distribution and energy distribution differences of images, we introduce various frequency domain transformations as expert branches and use the Sparse Activation Strategy to adaptively select the optimal frequency domain expert to suppress compression artifacts, achieving an efficient artifacts removal method. Furthermore, we reencode and decode multiple original uncompressed highquality datasets, including DF2K and Kodak24, using the VTM-20.0 codec under the H.266/VVC standard, constructing a more challenging artifacts dataset. We conducted rigorous comparative experiments with current state-of-the-art image restoration methods and the results demonstrate that ARMoE exhibits outstanding image restoration capability.

PaperID: 3929

Authors:Yudi Wang, Hailan Shen, Yixiao Fu, Yuqi Li, Zeshi Lu, Zailiang Chen

Affiliations: Central South University

Title: A Pseudo-Label Optimization Method Based on Polar Coordinate Modeling and Prior Constraints

Abstract:
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and its automatic segmentation are pivotal in assisting physicians with clinical diagnosis. In recent years, with the scarcity of labeled data, significant advancements have been made in semisupervised segmentation. However, the prediction of many current methods is affected by the presence of false positive regions, which limits their reliability in clinical applications. To tackle this issue, we propose a pseudo-label optimization method based on polar coordinate modeling and prior constraints (PMPC), which refines false positive regions in pseudo-labels by leveraging prior knowledge within the polar coordinate system. Firstly, to improve the efficiency and rationality during polar coordinate modeling, the Adaptive Pole Selection (APS) algorithm is presented to ensure that the pole is located within the foreground region. Secondly, to mitigate false positive regions in pseudo-labels that violate medical anatomical priors, we propose the Prior Knowledge Constraint in Polar Coordinate System (KCP) module to reassign pixel categories in these regions. Finally, the Shape-aware Weighting (SaW) strategy is presented to evaluate the quality of the optimized pseudo-labels based on their shape and then determine their weight in guiding network parameter updates. Experiments on three MRI datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can be effectively integrated with existing pelvic MRI segmentation approaches, significantly reducing false positive rates and further improving segmentation quality.

PaperID: 3930

Authors:Zixu Wang, Hongye Chen, Xiaochun Zou, Congxuan Zhang, Zhen Chen, Xinbo Zhao

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, School of Instrument Science and Optoelectronic Engineering, Nanchang Hangkong University, School of Electronics and Information

Title: FlowAnyTime: Efficient Fine-tuning with Intra-Inter Frame Distillation for All-Weather Optical Flow Estimation

Abstract:
Motion estimation in degraded scenes has long been a significant challenge, primarily attributed to substantial scene variations and insufficient training data. Existing approaches typically address this limitation by incorporating additional training strategies or modifying network architectures within conventional frameworks. However, these solutions not only require cumbersome training procedures or additional modal inputs, but also lack generalization capabilities. To address this problem, we propose a unified optical flow estimation framework specifically designed for degraded scenes. In this work, we employ largescale pre-trained optical flow foundation models as both teacher and student networks. Our objective is to compensate for feature incompleteness during image degradation through pre-trained large models. Subsequently, we leverage supervised signals for fine-tuning and introduce an intra-inter frame distillation method to enable the student network to adapt to diverse cross-domain scenarios. Our proposed methodology provides deeper insights into learning style-invariant features from these learnable fine-tuning layers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior generalization performance and state-of-the-art results in degraded scenes (including low-light, rain, fog and other conditions) while requiring minimal training resources.

PaperID: 3931

Authors:Qirui Wu, Shizhou Zhang, De Cheng, Yinghui Xing, Lingyan Ran, Dahu Shi, Peng Wang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, School of Telecommunications Engineering, Xidian University, China ASGO, Zhejiang University Hikrobot Co.

Title: Better Matching, Less Forgetting: A Quality-Guided Matcher for Transformer-based Incremental Object Detection

Abstract:
Incremental Object Detection (IOD) aims to continuously learn new object classes without forgetting previously learned ones. A persistent challenge is catastrophic forgetting, primarily attributed to background shift in conventional detectors. While pseudolabeling mitigates this in dense detectors, we identify a novel, distinct source of forgetting specific to DETR-like architectures: background foregrounding. This arises from the exhaustiveness constraint of the Hungarian matcher, which forcibly assigns every ground truth target to one prediction, even when predictions primarily cover background regions (i.e., low IoU). This erroneous supervision compels the model to misclassify background features as specific foreground classes, disrupting learned representations and accelerating forgetting. To address this, we propose a Quality-guided Min-Cost Max-Flow (Q-MCMF) matcher. To avoid forced assignments, Q-MCMF builds a flow graph and prunes implausible matches based on geometric quality. It then optimizes for the final matching that minimizes cost and maximizes valid assignments. This strategy eliminates harmful supervision from background foregrounding while maximizing foreground learning signals. Extensive experiments on the COCO dataset under various incremental settings demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches.

PaperID: 3932

Authors:Yao Wu, Mingwei Xing, Yachao Zhang, Fangyong Wang, Xiaopei Zhang, Yanyun Qu

Affiliations: Fuzhou University, Xiamen University, Hanjiang National Laboratory, University of California, Los Angeles

Title: BeyondSparse: Facilitating Mamba to Enhance Cross-Domain 3D Semantic Segmentation in Adverse Weather

Abstract:
Domain generalization (DG) and domain adaptation (DA) for 3D semantic segmentation enable the model to maintain high performance while avoiding laborintensive and time-consuming annotation of target-domain data. However, under adverse weather conditions, the injection of spatial noise will affect the reflectivity of LiDAR point clouds, exacerbate domain distribution discrepancies, and degrade the generalization ability of the model. Current methods mainly rely on sparse convolution-based architecture. Due to its limited receptive field, the model captures varying local geometric information when dealing with point clouds of different sparsities, thereby limiting its transferability. To this end, we propose BeyondSparse, a novel cross-domain 3D semantic segmentation method under adverse weather that incorporates a state-space model into a 3D sparse convolution-based architecture, sequentially modeling all features to learn domain-invariant representations. This method consists of two main components: domain feature decoupling and Mamba-based encoder. The former performs feature disentanglement before sequential modeling, while the latter performs global modeling on voxelized point cloud data. In addition, we introduce a token-style augmentation to capture the intrinsic properties of input data. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms SOTA competitors in both DG and DA tasks, for instance, achieving +4.6% and +0.8% mIoU on ``SynLiDAR to SemanticSTF''.

PaperID: 3933

Authors:Ke Xu, Xiaozheng Shen, Shanshan Wang, Mengzhu Wang, Xun Yang

Affiliations: Anhui University, Hebei University of Technology, University of Science and Technology of China

Title: DeFT-LoRA: Decoupled and Fused Tuning with LoRA Experts for Universal Cross-Domain Retrieval

Abstract:
Universal CrossDomain Retrieval (UCDR) aims to retrieve images across unseen domains and categories, a critical capability for real-world applications. While large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP offer strong zero-shot category generalization, they struggle with domain shifts. Existing methods often improve domain robustness at the cost of high computational overhead or by compromising the VLM's inherent knowledge. To address this, we propose Decoupled and Fused Tuning with LoRA (DeFT-LoRA), a novel and parameter-efficient framework that integrates Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) mechanism. This approach resolves the intrinsic conflict between domain-invariant and domain-specific knowledge in a single adapter, enabling our model to construct a domain adapters for each input image. We propose a three-stage training strategy, which first learns a shared Base LoRA for domain-invariant features, then derives Domain-Specific Experts to capture specific styles, and finally fuses them dynamically with a lightweight gating network. Extensive experiments on three UCDR benchmarks demonstrate that DeFT-LoRA achieves comparable or superior performance to state-of-the-art methods while requiring only 1.46 percent of CLIP's image-encoder parameters and reducing computational overhead, thereby establishing an exceptional balance between accuracy and efficiency.

PaperID: 3934

Authors:Ruoyu Yang, Yinhe Liu, Heng Yan, Yiheng Zhou, Yihan Fu, Han Luo, Yanfei Zhong

Affiliations: Wuhan University

Title: MaRS: A Multi-modality Very-high-resolution Remote Sensing Foundation Model with Cross-Granularity Meta-Modality Learning

Abstract:
The multimodality remote sensing foundation model (MM-RSFM) has made notable progress recently. However, most existing approaches remain limited to medium-resolution, single-modality, restricting their performance in fine-grained downstream applications such as disaster response and urban planning. In this work, MaRS is proposed, a multi-modality very-high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing foundation model designed for cross-modality granularity interpretation of complex scenes. To achieve this, a multi-modality VHR SAR-optical dataset, MaRS-16M, is constructed through large-scale collection and semi-automated processing, comprising over 16 million paired samples. Unlike previous work, MaRS tackles two fundamental challenges in VHR SAR-optical self-supervised learning (SSL) techniques. Cross-granularity contrastive learning (CGCL) is introduced to alleviate alignment inconsistencies caused by imaging differences, and meta-modality attention (MMA) is designed to unify heterogeneous physical characteristics across modalities. Compared to existing remote sensing foundation models (RSFMs) and general vision foundation models (VFMs), MaRS performs better as a pre-trained backbone across nine multi-modality VHR downstream tasks.

PaperID: 3935

Authors:Weiyi Ye, Xu-Hua Yang, Dong Wei, Gang-Feng Ma, Yujiao Huang, Xiao-Xin Li

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University of Technology, School of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang Normal University

Title: HyperSign: Saliency-Aware Spatial Graphs and Temporal Hypergraphs for Continuous Sign Language Recognition

Abstract:
Continuous sign language recognition (CSLR) technology enables social communication for the hearingimpaired by converting sign language videos into text. However, due to the limited receptive fields of convolutional networks and inefficient long-range dependency modeling in temporal modules, current methods find it difficult to capture cross-regional and high-order dynamic semantics in complex gestures. To address these limitations, we propose a dynamic spatiotemporal hypergraph network named HyperSign, which optimizes feature learning through innovative graph architectures. For single-frame spatial modeling, we propose a saliency-aware spatial graph construction strategy that dynamically quantifies semantic saliency by integrating feature complexity and motion intensity information from patches. This strategy can adaptively adjust node connectivity based on the computed saliency, thereby enabling the graph structure to focus on information-dense regions such as hands and faces. For temporal dependency modeling, we abandon the conventional pairwise frame interactions and propose a temporal hypergraph construction method. This method employs a learnable clustering algorithm to aggregate semantically correlated nodes within temporal windows into hyperedges, thereby explicitly capturing high-order associations within individual gesture actions that span multiple frames. Extensive experiments on the PHOENIX14, PHOENIX14-T, and CSL-Daily datasets demonstrate that HyperSign outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches in CSLR without any additional annotation information, establishing a new feature learning paradigm for the CSLR task.

PaperID: 3936

Authors:Xinxing Yu, Ajian Liu, Sunyuan Qiang, Yuzhong Wang, Hui Ma, Yanyan Liang

Affiliations: Faculty of Innovation Engineering, Macau University of Science and Technology, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Southwest Institute of Technical Physics, Great Bay University

Title: PointMC: Multi-view Consistent Encoding and Center-Global Feature Fusion for Point Clouds Understanding

Abstract:
Point cloud tasks have recently benefited from Mambabased architecture, which leverage state space modeling to achieve strong performance. Previous studies have primarily focused on network design while overlooking the importance of position encoding and relying on coarse-grained geometric feature aggregation. The former leads to semantic ambiguity due to inconsistent spatial relationships, while the latter results in geometric feature dispersion by overlooking fine-grained local geometric details. To tackle the above problem, we propose a novel framework, PointMC, including Multi-view Consistent Learnable Position Encoding (MCLPE) and Center-Global Feature Fusion (CGFF), to provide semantically coherent positional guidance for inter-patch and enable fine-grained geometric structure aggregation within intra-patch regions. Specifically, the proposed MCLPE module is inspired by a spatial structure modeling mechanism guided by physical constraints, leverages multi-view virtual reconstruction and a learnable strategy to dynamically constrain spatial relationships along patch boundaries, thereby enhancing the semantic consistency and representational clarity across inter-patch regions. Furthermore, considering the lack of local structural information within each patch, the CGFF module employs a dual-guidance mechanism based on center and global structures to effectively promote the aggregation of local geometric features. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of PointMC, consistently outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods, and demonstrating superior capability in capturing both inter-patch semantic consistency and intra-patch geometric details.

PaperID: 3937

Authors:Peng Zhang, Xiang Yuan, Gong Cheng

Affiliations: School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University

Title: Unified Interaction Consistency Learning for Single-Source Domain-Generalized Object Detection in Urban Scene

Abstract:
Domain generalization remains a critical challenge for deploying neural networks, particularly in outof-distribution object detection. The distributional discrepancy between training (e.g., daytime-sunny) and the realistic condition (e.g., night-rainy) inevitably produces imprecise localization and wrong classification. To address these issues, we propose a unified interaction consistency learning (UICL) framework, a novel single-source domain-generalized method designed to learn intra-class domain-invariant representations. Specifically, we put forth a cross-domain interaction mechanism to exchange region proposals between original and augmented pipelines, enriching the diversity of instance-level representations. Building upon this, we propose prediction-guided consistency learning to unify the interaction mechanism and harmonize the cross-domain representations, contributing to a discriminative prediction distribution under domain shift. In addition, we devise a cyclic interaction resilient detection strategy, which mitigates inaccurate predictions suffering from partial occlusion and ambiguous boundaries among different domains. Extensive experiments evidence that UICL significantly improves the robustness of detectors over several target domains, achieving state-of-the-art generalization performance on the diverse weather benchmark.

PaperID: 3938

Authors:Xu Zhang, Jianzhong Huang, Lefei Zhang

Affiliations: National Engineering Research Center for Multimedia Software, School of Computer Science, Wuhan University

Title: Any2RSI: Controllable Remote Sensing Text-to-Image Generation via Any Control and Enriched Description

Abstract:
Recent advances in controllable textto-image (T2I) generation have achieved impressive results in natural images, but remote sensing (RS) T2I remains challenging due to the unique nature of geospatial data. Existing methods struggle to integrate diverse spatial controls and model complex spatial relationships, often failing to maintain semantic consistency with typically vague or incomplete textual descriptions. Moreover, limited by small-scale, low-quality datasets, these models produce outputs with inconsistent layouts and unrealistic content. To address these issues, we propose Any2RSI, a flexible framework for controllable RS T2I generation. It features a Cross-Modal Multi-Control Adapter that extracts modality-agnostic embeddings from heterogeneous spatial inputs, enabling precise spatial guidance. To compensate for sparse or ambiguous text prompts, we introduce a VLM-Empowered Enriched Description Generation module that enhances input descriptions with cross-modal semantics for more coherent image generation. Furthermore, we present RST2I-110K, a new large-scale dataset with over 115,000 high-quality RS image-text pairs across diverse scenes, alleviating data scarcity in this domain. Extensive experiments show that Any2RSI achieves state-of-the-art performance on both existing and new datasets, improving the realism and structural accuracy of generated RS imagery.

PaperID: 3939

Authors:Yipeng Zhang, Yifan Liu, Zonghao Guo, Yidan Zhang, Xuesong Yang, Xiaoying Zhang, Chi Chen, Jun Song, Yuan Yao, Tat-Seng Chua, Maosong Sun

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Alibaba Group, National University of Singapore

Title: LLaVA-UHD v2: Exploiting Hierarchical Vision Granularity in MLLMs via Inverse Semantic Pyramid

Abstract:
Vision transformers (ViTs) are widely employed in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for visual encoding. However, they exhibit inferior performance on tasks regarding finegrained visual perception. We attribute this to the inner limitations of ViTs in capturing diverse visual semantic levels. To address this, we present Hierarchical window (Hiwin) transformer as a plug-and-play solution for MLLMs, centered around our inverse semantic pyramid (ISP). Hiwin transformer comprises two key modules: (i) a visual detail injection module, which progressively injects low-level visual details into high-level language-aligned semantics features, thereby constructing an ISP, and (ii) a hierarchical window attention module, which leverages cross-scale windows to condense multi-level semantics from the ISP. Notably, our design achieves an average boost of 3.7% across 14 benchmarks compared with the baseline method, 9.3% on DocVQA for instance.

PaperID: 3940

Authors:Zhiyun Zhang, Yan-Jie Zhou, Yujian Hu, Xiyao Ma, Zhouhang Yuan, Zirui Wang, Hongkun Zhang, Minfeng Xu

Affiliations: DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group Carnegie Mellon University, Zhejiang University, School of Medicine, Alibaba Group Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Alibaba Group Hupan Laboratory, Department of Vascular Surgery

Title: Disentangling for Transfer: Boosting Limited Modalities via Information-Theoretic Regularization and Cross-Modal Reconstruction

Abstract:
Missing critical modalities in medical imaging poses significant challenges for AIdriven diagnostic systems, particularly in scenarios where limited modalities must suffice for downstream tasks. Existing approaches often fail to fully leverage privileged features available only at training or address the information gap between privileged and limited modalities, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose a unified, dual-stage Disentanglement-AligNmenT framEwork (DANTE), which uses InformationTheoretic Regularization and Cross-Modal Reconstruction to decompose full-modality information into alignable and privileged-exclusive components. In the first stage, a self-supervised pre-training strategy based on cross-modal reconstruction acts as a proxy task to implicitly incentivize disentangled representations. In the second stage, we present an information-theoretic regularization to explicitly maximize the transfer of privileged knowledge through two novel modules: (1) a Mutual Alignment Module that employs multilevel bidirectional alignment between limited-modality features and alignable features, enhancing cross-modal representation consistency; (2) a Privileged Compaction Module that restricts the privileged-exclusive information flow, promoting the integration of task-relevant content into alignable representations. Experimental results on three challenging medical datasets demonstrate that DANTE achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating its effectiveness in leveraging privileged guidance under modality scarcity, and exhibits broad applicability across diverse medical imaging scenarios.

PaperID: 3941

Authors:Chenzhi Zhao, Wufan Wang, Bo Zhang, Wendong Wang

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: Learning to LEAP: Efficient Dense Point Tracking by Focusing Where It Matters

Abstract:
Tracking Any Point (TAP) is a foundational task in computer vision with broad applicability. The stateof-the-art self-supervised TAP method leverages a global matching transformer and contrastive random walks to learn point correspondences. However, its dense all-pairs attention and correlation volume computation tend to introduce irrelevant features and produce less informative training signals, degrading both learning efficiency and tracking accuracy. To address these limitations, we introduce LEAP-Track, a self-supervised TAP approach that computes the attention matrices and correlation volume over adaptively selected sparse pairs. It consists of two core designs: (1) Curriculum-based Sparse Attention (CSA), which dynamically focuses on the most relevant keys, promoting the learning of discriminative features; and (2) Progressive k-NN Transition (PkT), which reformulates the contrastive random walk to operate on an increasingly sparse k-NN affinity graph to reinforce the learning of the most informative correspondences. By integrating the above two designs into a two-stage training paradigm, LEAP-Track is shown both theoretically and empirically to effectively boost learning efficiency, achieving superior tracking accuracy over existing self-supervised TAP methods.

PaperID: 3942

Authors:Rui Zhao, Shuoyao Wang, Xinhu Zheng, Shijian Gao

Affiliations: Shenzhen University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Future Networks of Intelligence, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title: Adaptive-Smooth LiDAR-Camera Knowledge Distillation with Heterogeneous Fusion for Multi-View 3D Object Detection

Abstract:
Multiview 3D object detection has garnered increasing attention, particularly due to its success in autonomous driving systems. Although multi-view systems possess rich semantic information, their spatial-geometric reasoning capabilities remain limited. Recent studies employ simulated point cloud generation mechanisms to facilitate LiDAR-camera multi-modal knowledge distillation, achieving formal structural consistency. Despite advancements, these methods still face two main issues: i) alignment challenges caused by discrepancies between LiDAR and camera data, and ii) prediction errors from simulated point clouds that compromise the semantic information extracted from images during fusion. To address these problems, we propose adaptive-smooth distillation to optimize alignment granularity based on feature discrepancies for improved LiDAR-camera knowledge distillation. Specifically, this work considers both LIDAR-to-camera cross-modal distillation and LiDAR-camera fusion to simulated point cloud-camera fusion multi-modal distillation. Then, we introduce a heterogeneous fusion module to strategically bias the fusion process toward the extracted camera features, thereby enhancing the robustness of the fusion feature. Additionally, soft-weighted response distillation is proposed to facilitate the student model to selectively mimic the high-quality output of the teacher model. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the superiority of our method, achieving statistically significant improvements of 4.9% in mean Average Precision (mAP) and 4.5% in NuScenes Detection Score (NDS) over the benchmark.

PaperID: 3943

Authors:Yueming Zhao, Hongyu Yang, Di Huang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, School of Artificial Intelligence, China State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, China Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Title: SceneGenesis: 3D Scene Synthesis via Semantic Structural Priors and Mesh-Guided Video-Geometry Fusion

Abstract:
Generating highquality, controllable, and structurally consistent 3D scenes in complex multi-object environments remains a fundamental challenge. We present SceneGenesis, a unified framework that synthesizes 3D scenes by combining semantic structural priors with mesh-guided video–geometry fusion. SceneGenesis first employs large language models to convert textual descriptions into category-aware object specifications, which are transformed into structured meshes using procedural approximations and pretrained asset generators, enabling precise layout control and scalable scene construction. To obtain rich and style-controllable appearances, SceneGenesis generates multi-view video representations conditioned on the initialized structure. A mesh-guided video–geometry fusion module then consolidates video evidence with mesh priors through mesh-conditioned fragment initialization, progressive geometric refinement, and structure-aware optimization, substantially improving global geometric fidelity and visual realism. Experiments demonstrate that SceneGenesis supports flexible style variation and object-level editing while achieving strong controllability, scalability, and structural quality.

PaperID: 3944

Authors:Aihua Zheng, Hao Xie, Xixi Wan, Zi Wang, Shihao Li, Jin Tang, Bin Luo

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing & Signal Processing, Ministry of Education, Anhui University, School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui Medical University

Title: Semantic-Driven Visual Progressive Refinement for Aerial-Ground Person ReID: A Challenging Large-Scale Benchmark

Abstract:
AerialGround Person Re-IDentification (AGPReID) aims to extract identity-discriminative representations from heterogeneous perspectives across different platforms in complex real-world environments. However, existing methods primarily focus on visual appearance modeling and make insufficient use of semantic attribute priors, which limits their ability to bridge the aerial-ground view gap. To address this limitation, we propose a Semantic-driven Visual Progressive Refinement framework for AGPReID (SVPR-ReID), which effectively leverages textual attribute priors to guide the extraction of fine-grained visual cues. Specifically, we design a View-Decoupled Feature Extractor that incorporates view-aware textual prompts to decouple view-invariant identity features. Then, to alleviate inter-class ambiguity, we propose an Attribute-Scattered Mixture-of-Experts module that integrates attribute semantics into the visual space, thereby improving discrimination among visually similar pedestrians. Finally, we design a Context-Vision Progressive Refinement module for progressive refinement of attribute and view-invariant features, obtaining robust cross-view identity representations. In particular, we contribute a comprehensive benchmark for AGPReID, named CP2108, which contains 142,817 images of 2,108 identities annotated with 22 attributes. Notably, it includes 191 identities captured across different times, enabling both short- and long-term ReID evaluation, addressing the limitation of existing datasets that focus only on short-term scenarios. Extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness of our SVPR-ReID on four AGPReID datasets.

PaperID: 3945

Authors:Feng Zhou, Pu Cao, Yiyang Ma, Lu Yang, Yonghao Dang, Jianqin Yin

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: Exploring Position Encoding Mechanism in Diffusion U-Net for Training-free High-resolution Image Generation

Abstract:
Denoising higherresolution latents using a pre-trained U-Net often results in repetitive and disordered image patterns. In this work, we are motivated to reveal the intrinsic cause of such pattern disruption in high-resolution image generation. Through theoretical analysis and empirical studies, we reveal that the pre-trained U-Net fails to provide sufficient positional information for tokens at high-resolution. Specifically, 1) zero-padding serves as a critical mechanism for position encoding but lacks robustness across varying resolutions; and 2) tokens located farther from the feature map boundaries have increasing difficulty acquiring positional awareness, leading to pattern disruptions. Inspired by these findings, we propose a novel training-free approach for high-resolution generation, introducing a Progressive Boundary Complement (PBC) method. It creates dynamic virtual image boundaries inside the feature map to supplement position information at high resolution, enabling high-quality and rich-content high-resolution image synthesis. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly improves high-resolution image synthesis in terms of visual quality and content richness, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

PaperID: 3946

Authors:Yuan Zhou, Yan Zhang, Jianlong Chang, Xin Gu, Ying Wang, Kun Ding, Guangwen Yang, Shiming Xiang

Title: LookFlow: Training-Free and Efficient High-Resolution Image Synthesis via Dynamic Lookahead Guidance Flow

Abstract:
Rectification flow Transformers (RFTs) have shown promising performance in diffusionbased image synthesis but are typically confined to lower-resolution scenarios, limiting their ability to generate high-resolution images. Existing resolution extrapolation approaches often suffer from excessive computational overhead, resulting in prolonged inference times. We propose LookFlow, a training-free high-resolution synthesis framework that accelerates inference while preserving visual quality. Building on pretrained text-to-image RFTs, LookFlow employs a dynamic lookahead guidance flow mechanism to refine high-resolution velocity predictions by leveraging multi-timestep lookahead information extracted from a low-resolution flow. Additionally, reusing temporally similar features across consecutive timesteps drastically reduces computation and significantly decreases inference time overhead. Extensive experiments on COCO demonstrate that LookFlow robustly scales resolutions from 4× to 25×, achieving up to a maximum speedup of 2.01× while maintaining competitive visual fidelity.

PaperID: 3947

Authors:Stepan Kochemazov, Oleg Zaikin, Grigorii Trofimiuk, Kirill Antonov, Alexander Semenov

Affiliations: ITMO University, Matrosov Institute for System Dynamics and Control Theory, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ISDCT SB RAS)

Title: Using Constraint Solvers to Construct Binary Codes with Good Error Correction Performance

Abstract:
In recent years, constraint solvers show increasing use in solving various open combinatorial problems, e.g., from Ramsey theory or synthesis of combinatorial designs. The similar approach can be applied to some problems related to binary linear codes, which form one of the largest families of error correcting codes used both in coding theory and in various practical applications. Thanks to a simple algebraic structure of such codes it is possible to study them using a wide range of methods. Note that even codes with the same basic parameters (length n, dimension k, minimum code distance d) can show different error correction performance, i.e., the ability to correct errors which appear in a noisy channel. In the paper, we formulate the problem of finding binary linear codes with good error correction performance as a constraint optimization problem and explore the effectiveness of modern constraint solvers on it, including SAT, MaxSAT, and CP solvers. Using the respective solvers and parallel computing, for several values of n, k, d we found the codes which are significantly better than the known in terms of their practical performance.

PaperID: 3948

Authors:Suyu Liu, Zhiguang Cao, Nan Yin, Yew-Soon Ong

Affiliations: College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Institute of High Performance Computing, Agency for Science, Technology and Research

Title: Scale-Net: A Hierarchical U-Net Framework for Cross-Scale Generalization in Multi-Task Vehicle Routing

Abstract:
Neural solvers for Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) have shown great advantages in solving various kinds of problem types. However, they also face critical challenges in generalizing from smallscale training to large-scale problems and in identifying the most salient topological information for decision-making. To mitigate these gaps, we introduce ScaleNet, a novel hierarchical framework that integrates a U-Net architecture into a unified, multi-task VRP solver. Scale-Net explicitly captures multi-scale structural patterns by processing a nested hierarchy of input graph instances. This enriched, coarse-to-fine representation is extracted by the encoder and fed directly into the decoder, empowering decoder module with superior topological awareness for routing decisions while simultaneously reducing computational overhead in the encoder. We conducted extensive experiments on 16 VRP variants with instances ranging from 50 to 5,000 nodes. The experimental results show that Scale-Net demonstrates significant performance gains over state-of-the-art baselines across in-distribution, zero-shot, and real-world settings.

PaperID: 3949

Authors:Linlin Ding, Zhaosong Zhao, Mo Li, Yishan Pan, Xin Wang, Renata Borovica-Gajic

Affiliations: Liaoning University, Tianjin University, University of Melbourne

Title: Scalable Semi-supervised Community Search via Graph Transformer on Attributed Heterogeneous Information Networks

Abstract:
Attributed heterogeneous information networks (AHINs) encode rich semantics through diverse node and edge types. Recent learningbased community search methods on AHINs have shown promising performance but face two major limitations: i) difficulty scaling to large graphs due to memory-intensive neighbor-based propagation (e.g., GNNs and node-level attention), and ii) reliance on explicit community-level labels, which are often unavailable or costly to obtain. To address these issues, we propose a scalable Semi-supervised Community Search framework on AHINs (SCSAH), enabling scalability and efficiency, while eliminating the need for community-level labels by leveraging readily available node classification labels. Specifically, we devise MvSF2Token to extract Multi-view Semantic Features (MvSFs) as compact subgraph-level tokens before training, significantly reducing model propagation complexity. We then design a View-Aware Semantic Graph Transformer (VASGhormer) to effectively encode MvSFs by capturing cross-view dependencies and fusing semantic features. The combination of MvSF2Token and VASGhormer ensures scalability, efficiency, and robust performance. Furthermore, we design a View-Aware Contrastive Learner to train VASGhormer without requiring community-level supervision. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets show that SCSAH outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving 18.06% higher performance and 10.43 times faster training.

PaperID: 3950

Authors:Zhihong Fang, Shaolin Tan, Qiu Fang, Zhe LI, Qing Gao

Affiliations: Hunan University, Zhongguancun Laboratory, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Title: Subgraph Encoding with Bicentric Sphere Node Labeling and Pooling for Link Prediction

Abstract:
Learning representation of the enclosing subgraph of node pairs is recognized as an efficient approach for linkoriented prediction tasks in network applications. The core challenge within this subgraph encoding approach is how to effectively distinguish and then properly aggregate the contribution of nodes in the subgraph into a single vector to indicate the relation between the target node pair. In this work, we propose a novel sphere-based subgraph encoding architecture, namely BS-SubGNN, to address the challenge. In detail, we design two key building blocks, including Bicentric Sphere Node Labeling (BSNL) and Bicentric Sphere Subgraph Pooling (BSSP) to assist message passing in BS-SubGNN. BSNL endows each node a label according to the sphere it belongs to in the subgraph to distinguish the contribution of nodes, while BSSP adopts an attention mechanism to aggregate the contribution of nodes in each sphere. Theoretically, we prove that BS-SubGNN can unify existing node distance labeling methods, and yield discriminative node features with less time complexity. We evaluate the performance of BS-SubGNN in link prediction tasks over a variety of network types, including undirected networks, attribute networks, directed networks, and signed directed networks. Our experimental results demonstrate that BS-SubGNN consistently achieves significant performance improvements over the above diverse types of networks. In particular, compared to those methods with a requisite of multi-hop neighborhood information, BS-SubGNN can obtain better performance even when only one-hop neighborhood information of the node pair is utilized.

PaperID: 3951

Authors:Dongmei Han, Min Min, Yuchen Wang, Guoming Xu, Xiaofeng Zhou

Affiliations: School of Information Management and Engineering, Shanghai Business School, School of Finance, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, College of Business

Title: Beyond Single Transactions: D-EMAML---Dual-Edge Motif Neural Networks for Enhanced Anti-Money Laundering Detection

Abstract:
Antimoney laundering (AML) detection is of vital importance in financial risk control. Although Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have yielded promising results, existing motif-based approaches primarily focus on node anomaly detection on simple graphs, which hinders the direct identification of anomalous edges in directed temporal transaction networks. Moreover, consecutive transaction relationships, termed dual-edge motifs, have rarely been considered in previous AML studies. To address these gaps, we propose the D-EMAML framework, which consists of: (1) Fast-Motif-Gen, a GPU-accelerated dual-edge motif graph generator with pruning; (2) D-EMGNN, an attention-enhanced heterogeneous GNN module that reduces motif-type information redundancy; (3) MELP, a label aggregation scheme projecting predictions from the motif graph to the original graph. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate significant improvements over representative baselines and validate the contribution of each component. To our knowledge, this is the first application of dual-edge motif graphs for GNN-based edge anomaly detection in AML.

PaperID: 3952

Authors:Di Jin, Haotian Zhao, Xiaobao Wang, Fengyu Yan, Dongxiao He

Affiliations: Qinghai Minzu University, Tianjin University

Title: Mitigating Noise and Imbalance in Social Governance Graphs for Multi-Type Risk Assessment

Abstract:
Heterogeneous graphs are widely used to model realworld systems with diverse entity types and relational structures, and existing methods have shown promising performance in various applications. However, most current models assume balanced and semantically aligned features across nodes, which rarely holds in practice. In scenarios such as social risk governance, node types often exhibit severe feature imbalance, making it difficult for standard aggregation mechanisms to extract meaningful signals. This imbalance leads to three key challenges: inaccurate neighbor weighting, noise propagation, and biased representations skewed toward text-rich nodes. To address these issues, we propose HeCoGNN, a collaborative and adaptive aggregation framework that jointly performs neighbor filtering and relation-aware message calibration, enabling robust representation learning under semantic disparity. Experiments on real-world social governance graphs show that HeCoGNN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, particularly in handling underrepresented and noisy node types.

PaperID: 3953

Authors:HyunGi Kim, Jisoo Mok, Hyungyu Lee, Juhyeon Shin, Sungroh Yoon

Affiliations: Department of ECE, Seoul National University, and INMC

Title: CANDI: Curated Test-Time Adaptation for Multivariate Time-Series Anomaly Detection Under Distribution Shift

Abstract:
Multivariate timeseries anomaly detection (MTSAD) aims to identify deviations from normality in multivariate time-series and is critical in real-world applications. However, in real-world deployments, distribution shifts are ubiquitous and cause severe performance degradation in pre-trained anomaly detector. Test-time adaptation (TTA) updates a pre-trained model on-the-fly using only unlabeled test data, making it promising for addressing this challenge. In this study, we propose CANDI (Curated test-time adaptation for multivariate time-series ANomaly detection under DIstribution shift), a novel TTA framework that selectively identifies and adapts to potential false positives while preserving pre-trained knowledge. CANDI introduces a False Positive Mining (FPM) strategy to curate adaptation samples based on anomaly scores and latent similarity, and incorporates a plug-and-play Spatiotemporally-Aware Normality Adaptation (SANA) module for structurally informed model updates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CANDI significantly improves the performance of MTSAD under distribution shift, improving AUROC up to 14% while using fewer adaptation samples.

PaperID: 3954

Authors:Yingde Lin, Yuanbo Xu, Lu Jiang, Pengyang Wang

Affiliations: Jilin University, Dalian Maritime University, University of Macau

Title: Comprehensive Urban Region Representation Learning via Multi-View Joint Learning and Contrastive Learning

Abstract:
Urban region embedding, which learns dense vector representations for urban zones, plays a foundational role in datadriven urban intelligence. These representations are critical for downstream applications like public safety management and infrastructure development, requiring nuanced understanding of urban functionality. A core challenge remains effective fusion of multi-view data (e.g., human mobility flows and static regional attributes) into unified zone representations. To this end, we propose MVJC, a Multi-view Joint Learning and Contrastive Learning framework, which employs: (1) Multi-view Joint Learning (MVJL) layer to model intra-view dependencies to extract view-specific features and (2) Multi-view Contrastive Learning (MVCL) layer to perform cross-region aggregation to derive consensus representations while capturing the regional complementarity. We further introduce a structure-aware contrastive loss that mitigates false negatives by aligning representations through region topology instead of instance identity. Extensive experiments on New York City datasets demonstrate MVJC’s superiority: it reduces crime prediction MAE by 9.1% (vs. 66.9 baseline) and improves land use clustering F-measure by 55.6% (vs. 0.45 baseline) over state-of-the-art method, which is attributed to MVJC’s synergy of joint and contrastive learning, yielding representations that are simultaneously predictive and semantically discriminative.

PaperID: 3955

Authors:Junping Liu, Mingchao Yu, Xinrong Hu, Rui Yan, Wanqing Li, Jie Yang, Yi Guo

Affiliations: Wuhan Textile University, Renmin University of China, University of Wollongong, Western Sydney University

Title: MACRec: A Multi-View Subspace Alignment Framework for Contrastive Sampling Calibration in Recommendation

Abstract:
Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has proven effective in mitigating data sparsity and enhancing representation learning for recommendation. Yet, most GCL frameworks indiscriminately treat all nonanchor nodes as negatives during contrastive sampling, often leading to the false negative problem where semantically similar nodes are incorrectly repelled. Previous attempts to mitigate this issue rely on predetermined heuristics or local neighborhood mining, which struggle to reliably identify false negatives. More critically, they often overlook authentic user-item interactions for anchoring sample relationships. As a result, this paper presents MACRec, a Multi-View subspace-Alignment framework designed to Calibrate contrastive sampling in GCLbased Recommendation. MACRec comprises three core components: (1) a Multi-View Affinity (MVA) module that captures consistent semantic relations across multiple augmentations via self-expression modeling; (2) a Cross-Subspace Alignment (CSA) mechanism that leverages authentic useritem behavioral interactions to enforce semantic consistency across user and item subspaces; and (3) a Calibrationbased Contrastive Reweighting (CCR) strategy to dynamically down-weight potential false negatives during the contrastive learning process. Extensive experiments on three realworld benchmarks demonstrate that MACRec consistently improves performance across various augmentation backbones, achieving up to 14.55% relative gains.

PaperID: 3956

Authors:Wenjun Lyu, Fangyu Li, Yudong Zhang, Shuai Wang, Yunhuai Liu, Tian He, Desheng Zhang

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, Southeast University, Peking University, JD Logistics, Rutgers University

Title: LMGL-WD: LLM-Guided Multi-Task Graph Learning for Category-Level Warehouse Demand Prediction in E-Commerce

Abstract:
In warehousebased e-commerce, accurate category-level warehouse demand prediction is essential to ensure effective inventory management. Existing works mainly explore advanced time series models to capture the temporal dynamics, failing to mine cross-category and cross-warehouse correlations effectively. In this paper, we explore large language models to understand the semantic information and fuse multi-view knowledge to enhance demand prediction. However, it is not trivial due to: i) the inaccurate LLM’s understanding of the category-related and warehouse-related textual input; and ii) the complicated cross-warehouse knowledge utilization. To solve the above challenges, we propose an LLM-guided multi-task graph learning framework, LMGL-WD, for category-level warehouse demand prediction. Specifically, LMGL-WD includes three components: i) an LLM-guided category series encoding module to represent each category through contextual and series embedding; ii) a cross-warehouse category learning module to adaptively mine the informative knowledge from cross warehouses to enhance category representation; and iii) a cross-category multi-task learning module to adaptively capture cross-category correlations to improve demand prediction. Extensive evaluation results with real-world data collected from one of the largest e-commerce platforms in China demonstrate that LMGL-WD achieves superior performance, e.g., reduces MAPE by up to 31.59%, compared to state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 3957

Authors:Hengyi Wang, Weiying Xie, Hui Jiang, Yaotao Wei, Kai Jiang, Mingxiang Cao, Chenhe Hao, Leyuan Fang

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Integrated Services Networks, Xidian University, Beijing Institute of Technology, College of Electric and Information Engineering, Hunan University

Title: TOP-RL: Task-Optimized Progressive Token Pruning with Reinforcement Learning for Vision Language Models

Abstract:
In recent years, Large VisionLanguage Models (LVLMs) have significantly advanced multimodal tasks. However, their inference requires intensive processing of numerous visual tokens and incurs substantial computational overhead. Existing methods typically compress visual tokens either at the input stage or in early model layers, ignoring variations across tasks and depths. To address these limitations, we introduce TOP-RL, a Task-Optimized Progressive token pruning framework based on Reinforcement Learning. TOP-RL formulates visual token pruning as a multi-stage Markov Decision Process (MDP). It employs an agent trained with dense and fine-grained reward signals to progressively generate differentiable binary masks. This enables TOP-RL to adaptively select crucial visual tokens tailored to each task, effectively balancing accuracy and computational efficiency. Extensive experiments on leading multimodal datasets and advanced LVLMs validate that TOP-RL effectively learns task-optimized pruning policies, significantly boosting inference efficiency while preserving robust performance. For instance, LLaVA-NeXT equipped with TOP-RL achieves a 1.9x speedup in inference time and a 9.3x reduction in FLOPs, with 96% performance preserved.

PaperID: 3958

Authors:Xiaoqin Xie, Bin Zhao, Mingzhu Chang, Shuai Han, Wu Yang

Affiliations: Harbin Engineering University

Title: CLUHCS:Dual-View Contrastive Learning Enabled Unsupervised Heterogeneous Community Search with Meta-Path Behavior Modeling

Abstract:
Existing community search methods heavily rely on labeled data or predefined structures, thus fail to capture obscure and dynamic community boundaries in openworld heterogeneous networks, leading to poor adaptability. They also ignore modeling behavioral patterns, resulting in poor search performance. To solve the above issues, this work formally defines the unsupervised behavior-driven community search problem for heterogeneous graphs and designs dual-view Contrastive Learning-based Unsupervised framework for Heterogeneous graph Community Search (CLUHCS). CLUHCS designs a relation view to encode local community cohesion and a meta-path view to capture global behavior semantics. By using PathSim averaging strategy to generate positive samples and self-supervised signals, we can completely eliminate label dependency. Then, contrastive training is leveraged to automatically learn community representations and solve the open community boundary ambiguity challenge. Furthermore, by capturing behavior patterns, the meta-path behavior modeling flexibly characterizes the formation mechanism of heterogeneous communities. Experiments on three datasets verify the effectiveness and efficiency of CLUHCS. CLUHCS significantly improves F1-score by 52.7% over the supervised baseline FCS-HGNN and by 41.5% over the unsupervised method TransZero.

PaperID: 3959

Authors:Yanzhe Xie, Li Huang, Qiang Gao, Xueqin Chen, Fan Zhou, Kunpeng Zhang

Affiliations: Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Sichuan University, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, University of Maryland, College Park

Title: Beyond Graph Priors: A Co-Evolving Framework Under Uncertainty for Enterprise Resilience Assessment

Abstract:
Assessing enterprise resilience under uncertainty necessitates capturing both intrinsic attributes and evolving interenterprise dependencies. However, real-world enterprise systems pose substantial structural challenges: redundant or loosely correlated links can trigger spurious relational inferences, while missing or latent dependencies often hinder the propagation of informative signals. Moreover, most existing approaches adopt static graph priors or decouple structural refinement from semantic learning, lacking a co-evolutionary paradigm that allows structure and representation to inform one another. We propose CFU, a novel Co-evolving Framework under Uncertainty, which reconceptualizes graph structure as a dynamic and learnable component evolving alongside node semantics. Specifically, CFU begins with a structure-aware contrastive pretraining phase to distill latent relational semantics without supervision. It then performs bidirectional structural refinement, filtering structurally redundant edges through semantic agreement scoring, and uncovering temporally contingent, task-relevant dependencies via similarity-guided inference. These operations are integrated through a dynamic fusion procedure that continuously aligns the evolving topology with the resilience objective. By embedding structural adaptation within the learning loop, CFU enables context-aware resilience assessment across incomplete, ambiguous, and structurally volatile enterprise environments. Ultimately, extensive experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate its superior performance across diverse evaluation scenarios.

PaperID: 3960

Authors:Cai Xu, Xujing Wang, Ziyu Guan, Wei Zhao, Meng Yan

Affiliations: Xidian University

Title: GUIDER: Uncertainty Guided Dynamic Re-ranking for Large Language Models Based Recommender Systems

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integral to recommendation systems, offering sophisticated language understanding and generation capabilities. However, their practical application is often hindered by challenges such as data sparsity, the generation of unreliable or hallucinated recommendations, and a general lack of transparency in their decisionmaking processes. Existing mitigation strategies frequently introduce significant complexity or computational overhead. To address these limitations, particularly the critical gap in quantifying the confidence of LLM-generated recommendations, we propose GUIDER: Uncertainty Guided Dynamic Re-ranking for Large Language Models based Recommender Systems. This new framework innovatively leverages the logits produced by LLMs as evidence for recommended items. By employing a Dirichlet distribution, GUIDER decomposes the total predictive uncertainty into distinct Data Uncertainty (DU), reflecting inherent data ambiguity, and Model Uncertainty (MU), indicating the model's own conviction. This principled decomposition, achieved with a single inference pass, enhances transparency and trustworthiness. Based on the quantified DU and MU levels, our system dynamically adapts its recommendation strategy---adjusting output diversity---through a four-quadrant analysis that tailors responses to specific uncertainty profiles. Extensive experiments conducted in zero-shot recommendation settings validate the effectiveness of our approach. GUIDER consistently outperforms existing methods in reliability-aware scenarios, demonstrably improving recommendation quality. This framework not only advances the practical deployment of LLM-based recommenders by making them more dependable but also provides a robust foundation for future research into uncertainty-aware generative systems.

PaperID: 3961

Authors:Shuili Zhang, Hongzhang Mu, Jiawei Sheng, Qianqian Tong, Wenyuan Zhang, Quangang Li, Tingwen Liu

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Department of Strategic and Advanced Interdisciplinary Research, Peng Cheng Laboratory

Title: Fashion Microscope: Pixel-Level Attribute Perception via Optimal Transport and Neural Semantic Aggregation

Abstract:
Attributespecific fashion retrieval aims to enhance fine-grained image retrieval by emphasizing the similarity of specific attributes. Current methods primarily rely on attention mechanisms to extract attribute-related visual features but face two key challenges: the limitations of coarse-grained localization in achieving fine-grained accuracy, and an imbalance between global and local perception, where excessive focus on local features can undermine overall performance. To address these issues, we propose the fashion microscope ProFashion, which achieves pixel-level attribute awareness through optimal transport and neural semantic aggregation. The framework begins by employing optimal transport to align semantic attributes with visual patterns from a global perspective, generating an attribute-visual value map that highlights distinctive regions while reducing interference. This is followed by simulating the human brain's perception of attribute feature patterns through superpixel generation and aggregation, capturing attribute-related features at the pixel semantic level and forming key semantic clusters that preserve microstructures. Building on this, an attribute graph is constructed to facilitate feature clustering, significantly enhancing the framework's capability to handle overlapping features and cross-scale relationships. Comprehensive experiments on the FashionAI, DeepFashion, and DARN datasets demonstrate the framework's effectiveness, achieving overall MAP improvements of 3.11%, 3.70%, and 3.49%, respectively. Additionally, the framework delivers relative average throughput gains of 26.94%, 22.22%, and 24.78% on the FashionAI, DeepFashion, and DARN datasets, respectively.

PaperID: 3962

Authors:Yipeng Zhang, Xin Wang, Hong Chen, Junwei Pan, Qian Li, Jun Zhang, Jie Jiang, Hong Mei, Wenwu Zhu

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Tencent Inc., MoE Key Lab of High Confidence Software Technologies, Peking University

Title: Cross-Scale Collaboration between LLMs and Lightweight Sequential Recommenders with Domain-Specific Latent Reasoning

Abstract:
Sequential recommendation aims to predict the next item based on historical interactions. To further enhance the reasoning capability in sequential recommendation, LLMs are employed to predict the next item or generate semantic IDs for item representation, given LLMs' extensive domain knowledge and reasoning ability. However, existing LLMbased methods suffer from two limitations. (i) The scarcity of recommendation data with reasoning paths makes it challenging to design suitable chain-of-thought prompting templates, and the full potential of LLMs' reasoning abilities remains underutilized. (ii) Upon obtaining semantic IDs, the LLMs and their representations are excluded from the subsequent recommendation model training, preventing downstream models from fully utilizing the rich semantic information encoded within these IDs. To address these issues, we propose a novel CoderRec framework, which is capable of fully exploiting the information encoded in semantic IDs to guide the recommendation process. Specifically, to address the problem of scarcity in reasoning path-augmented data, we introduce latent reasoning into sequential recommendation and treat the representation captured by the downstream model as domain-specific latent thought, enabling implicit logical inference without requiring explicit CoT annotations. To ensure that the downstream recommendation models are able to deeply leverage the semantic information within IDs, we propose a novel cross-scale model collaboration strategy, which employs cross-scale IDs and a two-phase approach to align LLM-derived semantics with recommendation objectives. Extensive experiments have shown the effectiveness of our proposed CoderRec framework.

PaperID: 3963

Authors:Xuanming Jiang, Dingyu Nie, Baoyi An, Yuzhe Zheng, Yichuan Mao, Jialie Shen, Xueming Qian, Zhiwen Jin, Wei Lan, Guoshuai Zhao

Affiliations: School of Software Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, China Xi’an Jiyun Technology Co., School of Physical Science and Technology, Lanzhou University, School of Science and Technology, City St George’s, University of London, the United Kingdom, School of Information and Communications Engineering, China Shaanxi Yulan Jiuzhou Intelligent Optoelectronic Technology Co.

Title: Whole-Field Action Sensing via Wearable Single-Channel EMG Sensors and Resource-Efficient Motion Network

Abstract:
The proliferation of collaborative training and multiperson sports has underscored the necessity for concurrent whole-field action sensing. However, Electromyography (EMG) recognition, which plays a pivotal role in Wearable Human Activity Recognition (WHAR) for analyzing muscle activity and decoding action intent, still faces challenges in achieving a balance between performance, cost, and efficiency in multi-person scenarios. Unlike current channel-expansion solutions, we propose a wireless wearable Single-Dimensional Sparse EMG (2SEMG) Sensor for efficient personal sampling. These action-unaffected sensors leverage the proposed lightweight One-Dimensional Motion Network (OMONet) to facilitate concurrent action sensing. Experiments demonstrate that OMONet achieves leading performance and efficiency in action signal recognition, and two real-world badminton matches further confirm the performance, robustness, and real-time efficiency of the whole-field action sensing network constructed via 2SEMG Sensors and OMONet.

PaperID: 3964

Authors:Yuanchen Shi, Longyin Zhang, Maodong Li, Yibin Zheng, Xiuhong Wang, Fang Kong

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University Jiangsu Key Lab of Language Computing, Suzhou China, Aural & Language Intelligence, A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research, Institute of Science and Technology Information, Jiangsu University

Title: Simulating Human-Like Counseling: A Path- and Scenario-Guided Framework for Psychological Support Dialogue

Abstract:
The growing demand for psychological support underscores the lack of highquality counseling dialogue datasets, particularly in non-English contexts. We propose PGSim, a Path-Guided Simulation framework that mirrors real counseling processes—symptom description, problem identification, cause analysis, strategy planning, and iterative adjustment. PGSim models each user scenario as a fine-grained quadruple Group, Psychological Problem, Problem Cause, Support Focus and guides dialogue generation through expert-annotated strategy paths. Real counseling dialogues and expert-edited samples are used to fine-tune two language models: a Dialog Generator for strategy-aligned dialogue creation and a Dialog Modifier for expert-level refinement. After automated and human verification, we construct the Chinese Psychological support Dialogue Dataset (CPsDD), containing 68K dialogues across 13 groups, 16 problems, 13 causes, and 12 support focuses. We further present the Comprehensive Agent Dialogue Support System (CADSS), which integrates profiling, summarization, strategy planning, and empathetic response. Experiments on CPsDD and ESConv demonstrate that CADSS achieves state-of-the-art results on Strategy Prediction and Emotional Support Conversation tasks.

PaperID: 3965

Authors:Yongjie Zou, Haonan Niu, Bin Zhao, Guoliang Yi, Mengchuanzhi Yang, Jiawei Ju, Jiapeng Yin, Chengyu T. Li

Affiliations: Lingang Laboratory

Title: MindSight: A Bio-Inspired Neural Architecture for Visual Restoration via Cortical Electrical Stimulation

Abstract:
Visual impairment is a common condition worldwide, and cortical electrical stimulation is one of the approaches to aid in visual restoration. However, existing methods suffer from limited precision, flexibility, and generalization in generating the desired visual perception. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learningbased algorithm for cortical electrical stimulation, named ``MindSight," aimed at enhancing the clarity and accuracy of induced visual perceptions. Our framework introduces three key innovations: (1) A differentiable biophysical model simulating cortical state transitions under electrical stimulation, enabling end-to-end training; (2) A dual-path training architecture combining neural decoding fidelity with phosphene simulation constraints; (3) An attention-guided background gated network for input filtration and, a multi-channel activation constraint to ensure the effectiveness of electrical stimulation. We validated our approach through novel experiments with macaque monkeys, demonstrating superior performance in visual perception tasks. These results highlight the potential of our approach in assisting individuals with visual impairments.

PaperID: 3966

Authors:Dun Dai, Ze Lu, Xunhua Dai, Quan Quan

Affiliations: Beihang University, Central South University

Title: RflyPano: A Panoramic Benchmark for Ultra-low Altitude UAV Localization Powered by RflySim

Abstract:
Ultralow altitude UAVs (below 120 meters) are gaining importance in the booming low-altitude economy, where GNSS signals are often unreliable or unavailable. Vision-based localization emerges as a promising alternative; however, existing benchmarks are not designed for ultra-low flight and typically adopt pinhole cameras with limited field of view, making them less effective in handling occlusions and repetitive textures near the ground. To address these limitations, we introduce the first panoramic UAV localization dataset tailored for ultra-low altitude scenarios. Built on a four-fisheye-camera system in the high-fidelity RflySim platform, our dataset captures diverse conditions — including day/night cycles, extreme weather, and dynamic obstacles — and contains over hundreds of thousands of frames. It is further enhanced with real-world UAV panoramic data to narrow the sim-to-real gap and will be continuously updated for broader applicability. Comprehensive experiments confirm the effectiveness and transferability of our dataset, establishing it as a robust benchmark for future research in vision-based UAV localization.

PaperID: 3967

Authors:Pingrui Lai, Zihao Xie, Hua Yang

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiaotong University

Title: Lightweight Adaptive Topological Layout and Semantic Mapping in Vision-and-Language Navigation on Websites

Abstract:
Visionand-Language navigation on websites requires agents to navigate target webpages and answer questions based on human instructions. Current web agents primarily leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) for semantic understanding and reasoning, but still suffer from limited navigation performance and slow inference speed. Constructing a global map across webpages can effectively enhance both navigation accuracy and efficiency, however, this is challenged by the open structure of web navigation graphs and the dynamic nature of web layouts. In this paper, we propose ATLAS: Adaptive Topological Layout And Semantic mapping, a framework that adaptively constructs a time-varying, unbounded topological map across webpages and unifies heterogeneous elements through semantic representation. This enables both global path planning and local element selection for web-based navigation and question answering. As a lightweight approach, ATLAS significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on the WebVLN benchmark with a 10% improvement in success rate, and achieves the highest average task success rate on both the Mind2Web and WebArena benchmarks.

PaperID: 3968

Authors:Abhudaya Shrivastava, Shelly Gupta, Zoran Obradovic

Affiliations: Temple University

Title: Real-Time Path Planning for UAVs in Windy Environments Without Computational Fluid Dynamics

Abstract:
Autonomous aerial robots must operate in cluttered, winddisturbed environments where turbulence and gusts generated by wind-object and terrain interactions introduce significant aerodynamic risks, including orientation instability, sensor degradation, control drift, and increased power consumption, often leading to mission failure or crash. We present Graphlets-based Zero-Shot Planning Framework (GZS), a novel, non-parametric, fast computation, memory-efficient, zero-shot training-free onboard inference framework for real-time 3D spatial-aware aerodynamic risk perception that operates without prior scene knowledge. GZS dynamically classifies point clouds to extract local topology, incorporates physics-informed modeling of wind interactions, and applies attention-guided segment matching to generate onboard 3D representations of wind-induced aerodynamic risk. It transforms unstructured scene segments into structured graphlets topologies encoding aerodynamic risk-aware features, enabling UAVs to identify and navigate through regions of minimal aerodynamic hazard in real time and without prior training in any environment. Unlike computational fluid dynamics(CFD)-based, deep learning, or map-dependent approaches, GZS performs zero-shot aerodynamic risk estimation in previously unseen and dynamic conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate 90-95% accurate aerodynamic risk zone identification compared to conventional methods of CFDs and wind tunnels, while substantially reducing computational and memory overhead, and a 100% success rate in creating onboard 3d spatial-aware risk perceptions. Our results establish GZS as a framework for a zero-shot, non-parametric, robust, aerodynamic risk perception for autonomous real-time trajectory planning in wind-affected aerial environments.

PaperID: 3969

Authors:Yuxiang Zhao, Wei Huang, Yujie Song, Liu Wang, Huan Zhao

Affiliations: Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University

Title: CoEvoer: Collaborative Evolution Transformer for Upper-Body Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimation

Abstract:
Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimation (EHPS) plays a crucial role in various AR/VR applications and has witnessed significant progress in recent years. However, current stateof-the-art methods still struggle with accurate parameter estimation for facial and hand regions and exhibit limited generalization to wild images. To address these challenges, we present CoEvoer, a novel one-stage synergistic cross-dependency transformer framework tailored for upper-body EHPS. CoEvoer enables explicit feature-level interaction across different body parts, allowing for mutual enhancement through contextual information exchange. Specifically, larger and more easily estimated regions such as the torso provide global semantics and positional priors to guide the estimation of finer, more complex regions like the face and hands. Conversely, the localized details captured in facial and hand regions help refine and calibrate adjacent body parts. To the best of our knowledge, CoEvoer is the first framework designed specifically for upper-body EHPS, with the goal of capturing the strong coupling and semantic dependencies among the face, hands, and torso through joint parameter regression. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoEvoer achieves state-of-the-art performance on upper-body benchmarks and exhibits strong generalization capability even on unseen wild images.

PaperID: 3970

Authors:Gianluca Cima, Marco Console, Laura Papi

Affiliations: Sapienza University of Rome

Title: Foundations of Formal Reasoning over Knowledge Bases Combining Symbolic and Sub-Symbolic Knowledge

Abstract:
More and more organizations are relying on Machine Learning (ML) models to support internal decisionmaking processes. To better support such processes, it would be highly beneficial to contextualize the inductively acquired knowledge encoded in these models and enable formal reasoning over it. Despite significant progress in Neural-Symbolic AI, this specific challenge remains largely under-explored. We propose a framework that allows to integrate the knowledge induced by ML classifiers with the knowledge specified by logic-based formalisms. The framework is based on the novel notion of Hybrid Knowledge Base (HKB), consisting of two components: an ontology and a set of ML binary classifiers. As usual, the ontology provides an intensional representation of the modeled domain through logic-based axioms, while the binary classifiers implicitly encode the extensional knowledge. Specifically, a HKB associates to each concept and role mentioned in the ontology a classifier based on a set of features deemed to be relevant for the application domain, thereby virtually populating the concepts and roles with the instances and pairs of instances from the feature space. Besides the definition of the new framework, as a more technical contribution we show how to reason in this framework by studying query answering over HKBs. In particular, we investigate the computational complexity of query answering in a rich language over HKBs in which the ontology is specified in (the Description Logic counterpart of) RDFS, while the binary classifiers are represented by Multi-Layer Perceptrons.

PaperID: 3971

Authors:MohammadHossein Karimian, Shakil M Khan, Yves Lesperance

Affiliations: University of Regina, York University

Title: Causal, Strategic, and Combined Responsibility Attribution in Situation Calculus Concurrent Game Structures

Abstract:
Responsibility is a central concept in accountable decision making for multiagent systems. As modern AI systems grow in complexity and autonomy, there is a growing demand for them to address issues in AI ethics, prompting researchers to formalize responsibility from diverse perspectives, including strategic responsibility. However, causal responsibility, i.e. responsibility due to actual causal contribution, has received much less attention. In this paper, we study variants of responsibility attribution from both strategic and causal perspectives within a synchronous gametheoretic logic framework that allows concurrent moves by multiple agents. Our formalization is based on Situation Calculus Synchronous Game Structures (SCSGS). We show that by combining these perspectives, one can obtain novel forms of responsibility attribution that are grounded on actual causation. While doing this, we propose an account of actual causation in SCSGS. We prove that our formalization handles the issues associated with preemption and over-determination well. We also study some key properties of responsibility and demonstrate that causal, strategic, and combined notions of responsibility are extensionally distinct.

PaperID: 3972

Authors:Jian Bi, Qianliang Wu, Jianjun Qian, Lei Luo, Jian Yang

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Science and Technology

Title: Shaping Without Tearing: Controllable Diffeomorphic Deformations for Topology-Preserving 3D Point Cloud Augmentation

Abstract:
Point cloud data augmentation is critical to improving the generalization of 3D deep learning models. However, existing methods often fail to preserve the underlying manifold structure, leading to semantic distortion or topology violation. This causes models to learn untrustworthy features, thereby limiting the representational ability of the model. To overcome these limitations, we propose ManiPoint, a novel point cloud augmentation framework based on diffeomorphism that explicitly preserves manifold structure during deformation. ManiPoint constructs diffeomorphic transformations via continuous differentiable mappings, ensuring topological consistency and geometric continuity between original and augmented data. To prevent excessive distortion and ensure semantic consistency, we introduce a controllable deformation mechanism that quantitatively constrains the augmentation magnitude and enables finegrained control over the deformation space. We further provide theoretical analysis, indicating that, compared with topologically inconsistent methods, ManiPoint reduces empirical and vicinal risks by generating diverse and structurally reliable samples. Extensive experiments and visualizations on object-level datasets demonstrate that ManiPoint produces high-quality augmentations and consistently improves model robustness over existing baselines. Meanwhile, the scalability of our method was further verified on the scene-level datasets.

PaperID: 3973

Authors:Siyu Chen, Shiqiang Ma, Fei Guo

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Piercing the Fog: Disentangling Key Features for Vision Models in Multi-Degradation Scenarios

Abstract:
In natural scenarios, vision models often encounter the challenge of complex degradation scenarios(e.g., rain, snow, fog, or motion blur). These degradations severely corrupt image features, causing existing models to treat rarely seen or unseen degraded images as “unfamiliar”, thereby losing their inherent recognition and perception capabilities. To address this challenge, we propose a novel degradation disentanglement model (DDM) aimed at precisely disentangling degraded features from the image. The model enhances its perception of various degradations by controlling the matching of features across different degradation types and further strengthens the crosscorrelation of target features by introducing a degradation suppression module. This enables the model to re-identify and re-localize targets while removing degradations. We validated the effectiveness of our method on more challenging few-shot segmentation datasets Degraded-Pascal and Degraded-COCO. Results on them outperform SOTA with 3.71% and 3.69% improvement respectively. The experimental results show that our method significantly improves the performance of vision models in various degradation scenarios and provides new ideas and solutions for visual understanding tasks in complex environments.

PaperID: 3974

Authors:Xiaohui Chen, Chuan-Xian Ren

Affiliations: Sun Yat-Sen University

Title: GCA: Geometryaware Conditional Alignment for Partial Domain Adaptation with Coding Rate Reduction

Abstract:
Partial Domain Adaptation (PDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain, where the target label space is a subset of the source label space. In PDA scenario, existing methods typically achieve transferability through distribution alignment in a statistical framework, and discriminability through geometric modeling. These two aspects are often treated as separate frameworks, which severs the intrinsic connection between them. To bridge this gap, we propose a unified framework termed Geometryaware Conditional Alignment (GCA), which is derived from theoretical insights of Maximum Coding Rate Reduction. GCA collaboratively achieves conditional alignment and orthogonal discriminability in a unified framework, making the learned features more interpretable in both statistical and geometric aspects. As a result, GCA effectively enhances both the transferability and discriminability of features. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of GCA.

PaperID: 3975

Authors:Mingliang Dou, Linfeng Wen, Jinyang Xie, Jijun Tang, Shiqiang Ma, Fei Guo

Affiliations: Taiyuan University of Technology, Southern University of Science and Technology Faculty of Computer Science and Control Engineering, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Central South University

Title: Closer to Biological Mechanism: Drug-Drug Interaction Prediction from the Perspective of Pharmacophore

Abstract:
Drug combinations are widely used in modern medicine but may cause severe adverse drug reactions. Therefore, making effective drugdrug interactions (DDI) prediction is crucial for pharmacovigilance. Existing DDI prediction models are typically built from a structural perspective, assuming that drugs with similar molecular structures may exhibit similar interactions. However, such approaches overlook the biological mechanisms underlying DDI in the human body. This not only weakens the generalization ability of the model, but also makes its interpretability less convincing. Inspired by this, we propose a new method called PC-DDI. Unlike structure-based models, PC-DDI utilizes pharmacophores as basic unit, and designs a complete pharmacophore feature processing framework. It further constructs a pharmacophore-based bipartite graph to model interactions between pharmacophores. This approach allows us to explore the underlying mechanisms of DDI from a functional perspective. We also design a spatial attention weight graph convolution module to optimize the message passing process by integrating pharmacophore position features with node features. Furthermore, we apply causal inference to identify key pharmacophores in pharmacophore bipartite graph, enhancing the interpretability. Compared with the SOTA, PC-DDI achieves an accuracy improvement of 1.84% under the transductive setting and consistently outperforms others in all other experiments.

PaperID: 3976

Authors:Guangyan Gan, Ling Zhang, Yanhua Cheng, Yongxiang Tang, Kaiyuan Li, Xialong Liu, Peng Jiang

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology, Kuaishou Technology

Title: Fairness-Aware Design for Contextual Experiments: Guaranteeing Reliability and Equity in Heterogeneous Subgroups

Abstract:
Experimental design is critical for evidencebased decision-making in healthcare, marketing, and public policy. However, designing efficient experiments across heterogeneous subgroups presents significant challenges. Existing methods often optimize for statistical power or overall sample efficiency, overlooking crucial fairness considerations across these different subgroups. To address this gap, we introduce a Fairness-Aware Contextual Track-and-Stop Design (F-CTSD) algorithm. The proposed F-CTSD algorithm provides statistical guarantees on subgroup fairness while minimizing required sample sizes. We quantify the fairness-efficiency trade-off and derive the sample complexity bound for the proposed F-CTSD algorithm under its fairness constraints. We further theoretically prove that the proposed F-CTSD algorithm consistently produces accurate treatment effect estimates even under fairness requirements, enhancing statistical reliability. Numerical experiments show that the proposed F-CTSD algorithm outperforms existing methods, achieving higher sample efficiency while reducing subgroup fairness violations by 4.95%.

PaperID: 3977

Authors:Haokai Hong, Wanyu Lin, Ming Yang, Kay Chen Tan

Affiliations: The Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China. The Department of Computing, The Department of Applied Physics

Title: Distributional Priors Guided Diffusion for Generating 3D Molecules in Low Data Regimes

Abstract:
Can we train a 3D molecule generator using data from dense regions to generate samples in sparse regions? This challenge can be framed as an outof-distribution (OOD) generation problem. While prior research on OOD generation predominantly targets property shifts, structural shifts, such as differences in molecular scaffolds or functional groups, represent an equally critical source of distributional shifts. This work introduces the Geometric OOD Diffusion Model (GODD), a novel diffusion-based framework that enables training on data-abundant molecular distributions while generalizing to data-scarce distributions under distributional structural shifts. Central to our approach is a designated equivariant asymmetric autoencoder to capture distributional structural priors. The asymmetric design allows the model to generalize to unseen structural variations by capturing distributional priors representing distinct distributions. The encoded structural-grained priors guide generation toward sparse regions without requiring explicit training on such data. Evaluated across standard benchmarks encompassing OOD structural shifts (e.g., scaffolds, rings), GODD achieves an improvement of 12.6% in success rate, defined based on molecular validity, uniqueness, and novelty. Furthermore, the framework demonstrates promising performance and generalization on canonical fragment-based drug design tasks, highlighting its utility in learning-based molecular discovery.

PaperID: 3978

Authors:Bin Hu, Jingling Yuan, Jiawei Jiang, Chuang Hu

Affiliations: Hubei Key Laboratory of Transportation Internet of Things, State Key Laboratory of Silicate Materials for Architectures, School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City, University of Macau

Title: Venom: Liquid Diffusion-Guided Gradient Inversion for Breaking Differential Privacy in Federated Learning

Abstract:
Gradient perturbation mechanisms, such as differential privacy (DP), aim to defend against gradient inversion attacks (GIA) by injecting noise into the shared gradients. Recent studies have shown that DPbased defenses lack robustness against advanced GIAs. However, existing gradient inversion methods typically rely on iterative refinement and assume static noise, resulting in low efficiency and limited reconstruction fidelity under high-noise conditions. In this paper, we propose Venom, a novel gradient inversion attack method based on a liquid diffusion mechanism. Venom reconstructs private data directly from DP-protected gradients without requiring any prior knowledge of the noise distribution. Specifically, we design a Structural Prior Extraction (SPE) module that analytically extracts deep feature representations from perturbed gradients through energy-based aggregation, enabling stable pre-reconstruction of users' latent data features. We further introduce a Diffusion-driven Liquid Recovery Network (Diff-LRN) for high-fidelity image reconstruction. Unlike traditional diffusion models that rely on iterative sampling with predefined noise schedules, Diff-LRN performs deterministic single-step reconstruction using adaptive liquid neural dynamics to handle spatially heterogeneous noise patterns. Experiments across four benchmarks demonstrate that Venom achieves a speedup of up to 38,343× over state-of-the-art attacks while maintaining high reconstruction fidelity under strong DP settings. These results challenge prevailing assumptions about DP robustness and underscore the need for more resilient privacy-preserving mechanisms in federated learning.

PaperID: 3979

Authors:Renjun Huang, Han Xiao, Bingqing Li, Baili Zhang, Jianhua Lyu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, China Zhongguancun Academy, Ministry of Education

Title: HMformer: Unleashing Transformer’s Potential for Time Series Forecasting via Hierarchical Multi-Scale Modeling

Abstract:
Time series forecasting plays a critical role across a wide range of domains. Recently, an increasing number of Transformerbased forecasting models have emerged, achieving remarkably competitive performance. However, real-world time series data often exhibit complex multi-scale periodicities, which are not well-suited for modeling by the original Transformer architecture originally developed for NLP tasks. To address this limitation, we propose the Hierarchical Multi-scale Time Series Transformer (HMformer), employing a novel and sophisticated framework specifically designed for multi-scale time series forecasting. Specifically, HMformer incorporates a hierarchical cross-scale mixing mechanism that progressively aggregates temporal information from fine to coarse granularities, a scale-adaptive feature expansion design enhancing the extraction of high-level temporal semantics, and a multi-branch complementary prediction strategy for effectively integrating diverse temporal patterns. Collectively, these components enable HMformer to capture intricate, multi-scale temporal dynamics while retaining the Transformer’s inherent strength in modeling long-range dependencies. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple real-world benchmark datasets—encompassing both long-term and short-term forecasting tasks—demonstrate that HMformer achieves state-of-the-art performance.

PaperID: 3980

Authors:Lifan Jiang, Mengying Zhu, Yangyang Wu, Xuan Liu, Xiaolin Zheng, Shenglin Ben

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, East China University of Science and Technology

Title: DAPrompt: Dual Alignment Prompt of Structure and Semantics for Few-shot Graph Learning

Abstract:
Fewshot graph learning remains a fundamental yet challenging problem, especially under heterophilic graph settings where connected nodes are likely to belong to different classes. In such scenarios, two key challenges arise: (1) unreliable or noisy graph structures that hinder effective message passing, and (2) semantic inconsistency: in heterophilic graphs, aggregating messages from neighbors of different classes entangles representations and introduces misleading semantics. These issues are further exacerbated by the limited labeled data inherent to few-shot learning, making it difficult to adaptively repair structure or disentangle semantics. To address these challenges, we propose DAPrompt, a Dual Alignment Prompt framework that jointly calibrates graph structure and semantic representations across the learning pipeline. In the pretraining stage, DAPrompt incorporates a graph structure learning module to denoise and repair the underlying topology, enhancing structural reliability. In the prompt tuning stage, we introduce two coordinated modules: a structure-aware prompt learner, which employs prompt tokens to repair unreliable graph structures and capture structure-level alignment, and a semantics-aligned prompt learner, which enhances the graph using target node semantics to mitigate representation noise caused by class-mismatched propagation. Extensive experiments on both node-level and graph-level few-shot benchmarks validate its effectiveness, achieving state-of-the-art performance and highlighting the value of structure-semantic dual alignment in heterophilic few-shot graph learning.

PaperID: 3981

Authors:Ruitao Li, Jiakai Wang, Hairong Chen, Huihu Ding, Jinghan Zhou, Renshuai Tao

Affiliations: Institute of Information Science, Beijing Jiaotong University, Anhui University Visual Intelligence +X International Cooperation Joint Laboratory of MOE

Title: Dormant Backdoor: Weaponizing Model Finetuning for Feasible Backdoor Attacks Against Pretrained Models

Abstract:
As the pretrainingfinetuning paradigm becomes dominant in modern AI, the security of model supply chains faces new risks from backdoor attacks. Existing work primarily studies backdoors injected during pretraining and treats subsequent finetuning with clean data as a defense, while recent finetuning-activated attacks assume white-box access to the downstream data distribution, which is rarely realistic in practice. We introduce Dormant Backdoor, a finetuning-activated attack that requires no prior knowledge of downstream tasks. Instead of binding the backdoor to static input patterns, Dormant Backdoor exploits the universal dynamics of gradient-based optimization as a process-as-trigger mechanism. We formulate the attack as a bilevel optimization problem that simulates the victim's finetuning trajectory on proxy data, and jointly optimizes the poisoned model and trigger under lethality, utility, and stealth objectives. Before finetuning, the poisoned model remains behaviorally close to a clean model and can evade existing backdoor detectors; after finetuning, the same adaptation process reliably amplifies the backdoor on diverse downstream datasets and finetuning strategies. Our results reveal a previously underexplored class of process-as-trigger vulnerabilities and highlight the need for defenses that explicitly secure the model adaptation process.

PaperID: 3982

Authors:Huaizhang Liao, Zhixiong Yang, Jingyuan Xia, Yuheng Sun, Yue Zhang, Shengxi Li, Yongxiang Liu

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology, Beihang University

Title: Dynamic Semantic Tokenization for Time Series via Elastic Sampling on Physics-aware Perception

Abstract:
Despite the remarkable success of semantic token learning in NLP and vision domains, tokenlevel representation mechanisms face fundamental challenges when extended to continuous time series analysis. We identify a core limitation lies in the intrinsic absence of semantically meaningful tokenization boundaries within time-series, which differs substantially from discrete text tokens and presents unique complexities compared to spatially coherent image patches. While existing works mechanically apply fixed-length partitioning, recent evidence from time series foundation models reveals performance ceilings in prediction tasks under such paradigms. This paper introduces a novel tokenization framework known as physics-aware tokenization (PATK), designed to implement adaptive time-frequency tokenization via distribution-sensitive sampling strategies. Key innovations include: 1) A Rate-of-Variation (RoV) distribution is meticulously structured to encompass multi-scale temporal dynamics in the time domain, alongside a Spectral Energy Intensity (SEI) distribution devised to reveal global seasonal patterns within the frequency domain; 2) A physics-aware hidden Markov modeling (PA-HMM) is then established to adaptively breaks down continuous time-series into distinct tokens with elastic lengths, responding to physics-aware probabilities sampled from RoV and SEI distributions. The proposed PATK allows steady integration with both conventional Transformers and advanced large-scale time series models (including LLM-transferred methods and pretrained time series foundation models). Simulations across various datasets demonstrate that PATK excels in classification and forecasting tasks, showing notable adaptability to model long-term dependencies, strengthening resilience against disturbances, and robustness to missing data events.

PaperID: 3983

Authors:Weiran Liao, Jielong Lu, Yuhong Chen, Shide Du, Hongrong Chen, Shiping Wang

Affiliations: College of Computer and Data Science, Fuzhou University, College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing Ministry of Education of China, Xiamen University

Title: From Static to Active: Knowledge-Aware Node State Selection in Multi-view Graph Learning

Abstract:
Multimedia technologies leverage multisource to alleviate real-world data incompleteness, providing a versatile platform for multi-view learning. Among existing research, graph-based multi-view learning has achieved notable success. However, prior studies always immerse in comprehensive collaboration across all views and nodes to pursue consistency and complementary, which ignore the negative contribution of nodes from low-quality views. To overcome the above limitation, we explore node behavior selection in multi-view dynamic modeling and propose a knowledge-aware multi-view state space model. Specifically, nodes autonomously select either activation sequences or static sequences according to their current knowledge. In the former, we design the mask-based attention mechanism to capture the dynamics of node behaviors. In the latter, we construct a history pool and simulate synaptic signals to regulate the behavioral distribution of nodes. Moreover, the proposed model provides a directional inter-view diffusion equation that selectively propagates information to alleviate interference from low-quality nodes across views. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms baselines on multiple benchmarks and achieves significant performance improvement.

PaperID: 3984

Authors:Haiyan Lin, Qi Shen, Fei Zhu, Zixuan Qin, Liu Yang, Yuping Duan

Affiliations: Tianjin University, Beijing Normal University

Title: FedDNA: DNA Sequence Reconstruction via Deep Evidential Learning and Personalized Federated Aggregation

Abstract:
DNAbased data storage offers an attractive alternative to traditional media due to its exceptional density, durability, and sustainability. However, errors introduced across the DNA storage pipeline critically impede accurate sequence reconstruction from noisy sequencing reads. This paper addresses the DNA sequence reconstruction problem by proposing FedDNA, a novel Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) framework based on Evidential Deep Learning (DEL), designed for DNA storage environments. FedDNA quantifies robust predictive uncertainty through a novel evidence fusion mechanism that aggregates evidence from each noisy read in a cluster, thereby enhancing client-level prediction reliability. For efficient sequence modeling and reconstruction from these noisy clusters, its architecture employs a convolution-enhanced Mamba encoder and an LSTM decoder. To address prohibitive centralized training costs, privacy concerns, and data heterogeneity across diverse DNA storage data, FedDNA integrates PFL and designs an innovative uncertainty-driven personalized aggregation strategy based on epistemic and aleatoric decomposition, for which we also provide rigorous theoretical generalization bounds. Experimental results demonstrate FedDNA achieves superior reconstruction performance on DNA storage data with heterogeneity, highlighting its potential for secure and efficient DNA storage systems.

PaperID: 3985

Authors:Shikang Liu, Ziyu Tang, Xiren Zhou, Huanhuan Chen

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China

Title: SVGL: Scale-Variable Graph Learning in Model Space for Multivariate Time Series Classification

Abstract:
Multivariate time series classification (MTSC) has broad applications in numerous domains. Existing MTSC methods typically focus on either temporal dynamics or variable interactions of the data, often overlooking crossscale couplings among different variables. To bridge this gap, we propose Scale-Variable Graph Learning (SVGL), a novel framework that effectively captures data-inherent scale-variable interactions for MTSC. SVGL begins with spectral analysis to adaptively identify key periodic scales for each variable. A period-aware reservoir computing network is then incorporated to fit the variable at these scales, encoding the sequential and periodic dynamics into multi-scale dynamic representations. Subsequently, we construct a scale-variable graph to model interactions of the encoded temporal dynamics, where nodes represent scale-variable pairs and edges denote their correlations. After sparsely initializing the graph via nearest neighbors, a parallel graph learning architecture is integrated in SVGL, combining global graph convolutional and sample-specific graph attention to aggregate effective features for classification. Extensive experiments on 30 UEA datasets demonstrate that SVGL outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in accuracy and maintains low training overhead.

PaperID: 3986

Authors:Shuaiyu Liu, Song Wu, Jie Xu, Yazhou Ren, Yang Yang, Xiaorong Pu, Guoying Wang

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Ministry of Education

Title: Views Attention Fusion of Granular-ball Fuzzy Representations Split for Improved Multi-view Clustering

Abstract:
MultiView Clustering (MVC) is a pivotal multi-view learning paradigm widely adopted across various fields. Despite recent advances, existing methods primarily focus on enhancing the performance of fused multi-view representation, often neglecting the issue of Representation Degradation (RD) arising from discrepancies in the intrinsic quality of different views. To address the limitations, we propose a novel Granular-ball Fuzzy Split and Attention Fusion (GFSAF) learning, which leverages the nature of granular-ball to extract mutual and complementary representation separately. Meanwhile, the proposed method introduces an attention variant for fused representations to mitigate the RD issue. GFSAF mainly consists of two training stages: Split-Extract Stage and Views-Fusion Stage. Specifically, we design a novel Granular-ball Fuzzy Contrastive Learning to extract mutual representation, and introduce Noise Stripping Loss to reduce the influence of noise for complementary representation. Then, a novel multi-head Cross Views Attention is proposed to employ attention mechanism from multi-view perspectives for comprehensive fused representations. Experimental results on eight databases demonstrate that our GFSAF achieves superior performance compared to several state-of-the-art MVC methods.

PaperID: 3987

Authors:Yadong Liu, Waikeung Wong, Yulong Chen, Jie Wen

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: Quality-aware and Soft Consistency Driven Representation Fusion for Incomplete Multi-view Multi-label Classification

Abstract:
Multiview multi-label classification aims to utilize the rich information contained in multiple views for accurate classification. However, in real-world applications, its performance is often severely constrained by the concurrent missingness of both views and labels. To address this problem, this paper first targets the drawback of representation degradation in traditional feature disentanglement methods caused by strong consistency constraints and proposes a soft consistency constraint. This constraint not only effectively aligns the shared information and maximally avoids the compression of information beneficial to the classification task, but it also enhances the aggregation effect of high-quality representations on other representations. Furthermore, to address the coarse-grained problem of traditional fusion strategies, we designed a quality assessment network that achieves instance-level dynamic weighted fusion in a data-driven manner. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both incomplete and complete data scenarios, showcasing its robustness and generality.

PaperID: 3988

Authors:Yu Liu, Haoqin Yang, Jinping Sui, Hui Wang, Haipeng Li, Weimin Wang, Qi Jia

Affiliations: Dalian University of Technology, Dalian Naval Academy

Title: Time Series Class-Incremental Learning via Confidence-guided Mask Distillation and Prototype-guided Contrastive Learning

Abstract:
Classincremental learning (CIL) has recently gained great attention in the field of time series classification. Existing CIL methods based on knowledge distillation exhibit impressive ability to retain prior knowledge and overcome catastrophic forgetting, however, their effectiveness faces major challenges posed by time series data. Since temporal data is more susceptible to sensor errors and electronic noise, the distillation process may be significantly affected by noisy knowledge transfer. To address this issue, we propose a novel confidence-guided mask distillation (CMD) framework, to prevent the noisy inheritance during distillation. The core of CMD lies in a dynamic masking mechanism guided by prediction confidence, capable of allocating higher weights to high-confidence time series and substantially suppressing the influence of low-confidence ones. Additionally, different from prior work simply passing a set of feature prototypes to the classifier, we develop prototype-guided contrastive learning (PCL) to alleviate the classifier bias on new classes, through extra contrastive constraints to push away the feature distributions of old feature prototypes from those of new classes features. Extensive experiments on three time-series datasets demonstrate that, our method significantly outperforms other replay-free CIL approaches in raising average accuracy, as well as decreasing forgetting rate.

PaperID: 3989

Authors:Lingyuan Meng, Ke Liang, Hao Yu, Haotian Wang, Miaomiao Li, Xinwang Liu

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology, Changsha College

Title: Make Model Transparent: Brain Network Analysis via Causal and Knowledge Graph Learning

Abstract:
Brain network analysis technology reveals the organizational mechanism and information processing mode by constructing the structural connection network between brain regions. It has achieved satisfactory results in brain disease prediction tasks, promoting the progress of neuroscience. In recent years, graph transformer has become the most mainstream method for brain analysis with its powerful feature extraction ability and attention mechanism. However, these methods face two challenges, i.e., lack of interpretability, and neglect of semantic associations among brain regions. To solve these problems, we proposed a large language model (LLM)driven causal knowledge brain network transformer framework, termed BrainCKT, which is plug-and-play, and can adapt to most of the existing mainstream graph transformer-based methods. Specifically, we constructed a brain region causal graph and used its adjacency matrix to guide the learning process of the self-attention mechanism. In addition, we constructed a brain science knowledge graph and encoded it through a pre-trained model to enhance the original brain region features. Finally, we integrated BrainCKT into four mainstream graph transformer baselines for verification. Experimental results on two brain imaging datasets proved the effectiveness of BrainCKT.

PaperID: 3990

Authors:Bangqi Pan, Jianfeng Lu, Shuqin Cao, Xiao Zhang, Gang Li, Guanghui Wen

Affiliations: Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Hubei Province Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing and Real-time Industrial System, China Key Laboratory of Social Computing and Cognitive Intelligence (Dalian University of Technology), Ministry of Education, School of Computer Science, South-Central Minzu University, College of Computer Science, Inner Mongolia University, School of Automation, Southeast University

Title: OPTION: An Online Pricing Strategy for Asynchronous Federated Learning Against Free-Riding Attacks

Abstract:
Asynchronous Federated Learning (AFL) is acclaimed for accelerating collaborative training on heterogeneous systems by eliminating the wait for stragglers. While current solutions focus on improving convergence amidst update delays, they neglect how delayed aggregation fosters freeriding attacks, allowing malicious clients to easily extract the global model without contribution. This behavior results in significant fairness issues and performance degradation. To address this challenge, we propose OPTION, the first online pricing strategy tailored to mitigate free-riding in AFL. OPTION establishes an economic model in which access to model updates is purchased using credits earned from verified contributions. Specifically, OPTION values each model update according to its marginal performance gain and training cost, and subsequently necessitates a download fee from each client based on the Hotelling model to prevent zero-cost acquisition. Moreover, OPTION rewards clients for successful updates under non-arbitrage constraints, effectively balancing individual utility and task budget. To maximize the average model performance while satisfying these conditions, OPTION leverages the Lyapunov drift framework and a probabilistic sampling-based algorithm to optimize the pricing parameters. Extensive experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that OPTION effectively mitigates freeriding attacks in AFL, increases the number of valid updates by at least 23.97%, and achieves a model accuracy improvement of at least 3.01% compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 3991

Authors:Xinxin Song, Yuxiao Cheng, Tingxiong Xiao, Jinli Suo

Affiliations: Department of Automation, Tsinghua University

Title: COGS: A Causal Representation Learning Framework for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Time Series

Abstract:
Time series analysis is crucial in various fields such as healthcare and finance. However, environmental variations and the inherent nonstationarity of time series data often lead to out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios, consequently causing model performance degradation. Most existing OOD generalization methods primarily focus on images or text, leaving time series analysis relatively underexplored. In this paper, we propose COGS, a novel framework that incorporates causal representation learning into the OOD generalization of time series. By imposing structural priors, our method identifies latent variables and learns a causal graph to disentangle causal variables from non-causal ones. These causal variables are then used to learn domain-invariant representations for stable prediction. Moreover, to tackle the challenge of the absence of domain labels, we further introduce a prototype-based domain discovery algorithm that infers domain labels in an unsupervised manner. The entire framework is optimized in a two-phase iterative manner, resulting in robust OOD performance. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world time series datasets demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance compared to baseline methods.

PaperID: 3992

Authors:Zhou Tan, De Li, Yirui Huang, Duanshu Fang, Jia-Li Yin, Xiaolei Liu, Songze Li, Shouling Ji

Affiliations: College of Computer and Data Science, Fuzhou University, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Guangxi Normal University, National Interdisciplinary Research Center of Engineering Physics, School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Southeast University, College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University

Title: DoBlock: Blocking Malicious Association Propagation for Backdoor-Robust Federated Learning Under Domain Skew

Abstract:
Federated Learning (FL) enables privacypreserving distributed training but remains vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Attackers can embed malicious trigger-label associations into the global model by participating in the aggregation process. Existing defense methods typically defend against backdoor attacks by detecting and filtering malicious updates that deviate from benign ones. However, we find that these defenses fail under domain skew, where differing feature distributions across clients increase update heterogeneity, making it harder to distinguish malicious updates from benign ones. To address this challenge, we propose DoBlock, a novel defense that utilizes an aggregatable domain infuser incapable of embedding malicious associations, through federated training to facilitate cross-domain knowledge sharing. Moreover, DoBlock prevents malicious association propagation by isolating local models from aggregation, as local models remain client-specific and rely solely on local data for training. Experiments on five domain skew datasets (Digits, PACS, VLCS, Office-Caltech10, and DomainNet) show that DoBlock maintains attack success rates below 2.5%, while achieving the highest main task accuracy, demonstrating superior robustness without sacrificing benign performance.

PaperID: 3993

Authors:Hongwei Wang, Yangru Huang, Guangyao Chen, Xu Wang, Yi Jin

Affiliations: Beijing Jiaotong University, Peking University

Title: Beyond Single-Speed Reasoning: Coordinating Fast and Slow Dynamics for Efficient World Modeling

Abstract:
Modelbased reinforcement learning (MBRL) enables efficient decision-making by learning predictive world modelsof environment dynamics. Despite recent advances, existingmodels often struggle to reconcile accurate short-term transitions with coherent long-term planning, especially in partially observable or long-horizon settings. We argue that thislimitation often stems from modeling all transitions at a single temporal resolution, which makes it challenging to simultaneously capture fine-grained local dynamics and abstractglobal structures. To this end, we propose SF-RSSM (Slow-Fast Recurrent State-Space Model), a novel method that decouples short-term and long-term dynamics via a dualbranchdesign. The fast branch captures short-horizon transitions using residual prediction, while the slow branch models long-range dependencies with a GRU-based recurrent pathway.A distillation mechanism is developed to enable cooperationacross timescales, with the slow model providing soft targetsto guide the fast model. Additionally, a curiosity module encourages exploration by promoting learning in regions wherethe fast and slow branches exhibit divergent dynamics. Experiments on CARLA, DMControl and Atari benchmarks showthat SF-RSSM outperforms strong baselines in policy performance.

PaperID: 3994

Authors:Yapeng Wang, Quanxue Gao, Fangfang Li, Yu Yun, Ming Yang

Affiliations: Xidian University, Harbin Engineering University

Title: Unified View Extraction with Low-Rankness and Smoothness Fusion for Multi-View Subspace Clustering

Abstract:
Tensorbased multi-view subspace clustering (MVSC) has achieved significant success by capturing high-order inter-view correlations. However, existing approaches face two principal limitations. First, most methods either exclusively emphasize the inter-view low‑rankness (R) prior while neglecting the intra-view local smoothness (S) prior, or treat R and S as two separate regularizers—complicating joint optimization. Second, conventional tensor‑based methods impose only low‑rank constraints on the representation tensor, which limits their ability to simultaneously model consistency and complementary information. To address these issues, we propose a Unified View Extraction with Low‑Rankness and Smoothness Fusion (UVELRS) method. Our framework first extracts a consistent cross‑view representation and then constructs a tensor by stacking these representations. We introduce a novel tensor total variation Schatten-p norm that simultaneously encodes both R and S priors while offering flexible singular‑value control. This unified formulation effectively captures both high-order inter-view correlations and intra-view local smoothness. Extensive experiments on real‑world datasets demonstrate UVELRS's superior performance and robustness.

PaperID: 3995

Authors:Lan Wu, Xuebin Wang, Chenglong Ge, Ruijuan Chu, LinYu Wang

Affiliations: Information Engineering University, Zheng Zhou

Title: ExoTimer: Leveraging Large Language Models for Time Series Forecasting with Exogenous Variables

Abstract:
Realworld systems often exhibit complex behaviors and are influenced by various external factors, making the integration of exogenous variables essential for accurate and robust time series forecasting. However, modeling time series with exogenous variables remains challenging due to dynamic cross-variable dependencies and the semantic gap between numerical time series data and external contextual knowledge. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful language understanding and knowledge representation capabilities in real-world systems, offering a promising solution to bridge this gap. Motivated by this, we propose ExoTimer, a framework that deeply integrates LLMs for time series modeling with exogenous variables. We begin by introducing an Exo-Aware Endogenous Encoder to dynamically incorporate important exogenous variable information and generate patch-level representations for endogenous variables. To leverage the rich knowledge in LLMs, a Multi-Attribute Prompt Embedding module is elaborately designed to convert heterogeneous temporal features, contextual information and task specifications into LLM-interpretable textual prompts. Additionally, we propose Bi-Hash Alignment, a lightweight cross-modal alignment mechanism that bridges textual and temporal modalities in a shared hash space. Finally, a Dual-Branch Predictor with a learnable coefficient is employed to obtain the final time series prediction by integrating temporal-text and text-temporal representations. Extensive experiments on twelve real-world datasets demonstrate that ExoTimer achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits generalizability and scalability in both few-shot and zero-shot scenarios.

PaperID: 3996

Authors:Tianhang Xiang, Yirui Li, Lizhao Liu, Hongyan Zhi, Chuanshen Chen, Qing Du, Mingkui Tan

Affiliations: South China University of Technology, Tencent AI Lab

Title: FAM: Fine-Grained Alignment Matters in Multimodal Embedding Learning with Large Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
Learning multimodal representation is a fundamental task that supports a wide range of applications such as visualtext retrieval. While pioneering approaches e.g., CLIP paves the way by learning separated encoders for different modalities, they struggle to model complex interactions between modalities, resulting in inferior vision and language representation. Recently, researchers have begun to leverage powerful Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for unimodal or multimodal encoding, showing substantial improvement over separated encoder methods. However, we find that directly adapting LVLMs to embedding models suffers from insufficient visual representation and coarse multimodal alignment. To address these issues, we propose a simple yet effective Fine-grained Alignment Matters (FAM) method to achieve fine-grained vision-language embedding learning with LVLMs. First, to close the gap between the pure generation and multimodal embedding using LVLMs, we propose Multi-granularity Aligned Contrastive (MAC) to explicitly learn and align fine-grained modality representations at multiple granularity levels using image-text pairs. Second, to mitigate the insufficiency of visual representation during adapting LVLMs to downstream embedding tasks, we propose a Vision Embedding Inversion Training (VEIN) strategy to encourage the extracted embeddings to preserve fine-grained visual features. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which achieves superior performance on various downstream multimodal datasets.

PaperID: 3997

Authors:Jing Xiao, Xinhai Chen, Jiaming Peng, Jie Liu

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology

Title: Learning to Generate Structured Meshes with In-Context: Toward Generalization in Mesh Generation

Abstract:
Structured mesh generation serves as a crucial preprocessing step in numerical simulations and can be formulated as a mapping problem from geometry to structured mesh. Existing approaches typically establish an isolated mapping for each geometry. This geometryspecific paradigm fails to capture and leverage commonalities across geometries, inevitably requiring recomputation or costly retraining for new geometries. To overcome this limitation, we propose ICL-Mesh, a meta-learning framework based on in-context learning (ICL) for structured mesh generation. It treats learning one mapping as one task and trains a single neural network to extract commonalities across tasks and learn from in-context examples within each task, enabling rapid generalization to unseen tasks without parameter updates. Experimental results demonstrate that ICL-Mesh effectively generalizes to diverse geometries with only a few context examples, and even without examples. It also exhibits robustness to in-context example order sensitivity and can be extended to various mesh generation scenarios, including mesh refinement and coarsening.

PaperID: 3998

Authors:Jiangshuai Xu, Peiyun Xue, Jiacheng Song, Xuhui Huang, Qingshan Hou

Affiliations: Taiyuan University of Technology

Title: HLML-SNN：Fast Continual Learning in Spiking Neural Networks Achieved via Hebbian Learning-Driven Meta-Learning

Abstract:
Catastrophic forgetting remains a fundamental barrier to artificial continual learning (CL) a capability innate to humans. Existing CL methods often incur prohibitive computational costs in resource-constrained scenarios. Spiking neural networks (SNNs), with their biological plausibility and energy efficiency, offer distinct advantages for CL. Inspired by cortico-hippocampal memory mechanisms, we propose a spiking neural network framework integrating Hebbian plasticity with meta-learning, named HLML-SNN. This architecture emulates a dual-phase CL process: (1) In the short-term phase, sample-level Hebbian learning rapidly adapts to new inputs through local synaptic updates; (2) In the long-term phase, task-level meta-learning optimizes cross-task parameters using consolidated synaptic weights, mimicking cortical memory integration to refine shared representations and initialize subsequent Hebbian learning. HLML-SNN incrementally transforms short-term adaptations into stable long-term knowledge, where the synergy of rapid synaptic updates and meta-driven global optimization enables efficient continual learning while balancing stability and plasticity. Empirical results establish HLML-SNN's state-of-the-art performance across split-MNIST/CIFAR10/CIFAR100/TinyImageNet while markedly reducing training time compared to existing methods, demonstrating substantial practical potential for rapid deployment scenarios. The code and appendix are available on https://github.com/JiangshuaiXu/HLML SNN.

PaperID: 3999

Authors:Yang Xu, Xiaowei Wu, Zifeng Xu, Cheng Zhang, Ju Ren, Yaoxue Zhang

Affiliations: Hunan University, Tsinghua University

Title: MSCFL: Model Structure-Aware Clustered Federated Learning for System Heterogeneity and Data Drift

Abstract:
Federated Learning (FL) faces significant challenges arising from both data and system heterogeneity. While Clustered Federated Learning (CFL) mitigates data heterogeneity by grouping clients with similar data distributions, it remains vulnerable to system heterogeneity, which can slow convergence due to performance disparities among clients. Moreover, data drift may degrade clustering accuracy and training efficiency over time. In this work, we propose a Model Structureaware Clustered Federated Learning (MSCFL) framework that simultaneously addresses the issues of data heterogeneity, system heterogeneity, and data drift. MSCFL incorporates model pruning (MP) into the CFL framework to enhance training efficiency under system heterogeneity. To enable this integration, we address the key challenge of performing effective clustering based on heterogeneous, pruned local models with varying structures. To this end, we design a model structure-based similarity computation algorithm to integrate CFL with MP. To effectively address data drift, we propose a dynamic cluster migration strategy that efficiently monitors model structures via Hamming Distance and triggers re-clustering only when necessary. Extensive experimental results show that MSCFL improves the accuracy and convergence speed of cluster models, outperforming traditional CFL in various settings.

PaperID: 4000

Authors:Jiaqi Xue, Hongji Dong, Yucen Gao, Xiaofeng Gao, Guihai Chen

Affiliations: Shanghai Key Laboratory of Scalable Computing and Systems, School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: ProCAST: A Projection Framework for Coupled Aggregation Constrained Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Abstract:
Aggregated time series are widely used in business and economics, where toplevel sequences (e.g., category sales) aggregated from underlying sequences (e.g., individual items) often exhibit clearer trends and are therefore typically the primary focus of forecasting tasks. However, treating top-level sequences as ordinary multivariate time series is inappropriate in the presence of coupled aggregation constraints. The core challenge arises in coupled aggregation structures, where a single underlying sequence contributes to multiple top-level sequences, as simple nonnegativity constraints of underlying sequences induce highly complex constraints among top-level sequences. Existing methods fail to achieve high accuracy while satisfying these constraints. To address this, we propose ProCAST, a projection-based framework that adjusts forecasts from any multivariate base model to satisfy coupled aggregation constraints. By introducing virtual underlying sequences and leveraging orthogonal and oblique projection, our method ensures that the top-level forecasts are feasible without explicitly deriving complex constraints. Theoretically, we prove that the proposed method guarantees improved accuracy under distance-based loss functions. Experiments on real-world datasets show that our method completely eliminates constraint violations while achieving higher accuracy than current state-of-the-art approaches.

PaperID: 4001

Authors:Zhiwen Yang, Jiehua Zhang, Chenggang Yan, Yuhan Gao, Zongpeng Li, Xichun Sheng, Liang Li

Affiliations: Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Macao Polytechnic University, Institute of Computing Technology

Title: Forgetting Knowledge Localization and Isolation for Continual Forgetting of Pre-trained Vision Models

Abstract:
Continual forgetting task aims to continuously remove multiple target knowledge subsets from pretrained models while maintaining the integrity of remaining knowledge. Existing methods suffer from both incomplete forgetting of target knowledge and unintended forgetting of indistinguishable remaining knowledge. To address these challenges, we propose the forgetting knowledge localization and isolation for continual forgetting in pre-trained vision models which precisely forgets target knowledge while reducing over-forgetting of remaining knowledge. To achieve precise forgetting, we first propose the forgetting knowledge layer localization to explore layers in the model which are more related to forgetting knowledge. Then, we design the forgetting knowledge parameter isolation to isolate the parameters sensitive to forgetting knowledge in these selected layers, mitigating over-forgetting of remaining knowledge. Finally, we fine-tune these isolated parameters and freeze the remaining parameters to achieve efficient forgetting while maintaining high performance on retained datasets. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods across multiple continual forgetting tasks.

PaperID: 4002

Authors:Xiangjian Zeng, Wenjing Li, Qingqiang Wu, Liang Zhang

Affiliations: School of Journalism and Communication, Xiamen University, State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, School of Film, Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Xiaohongshu Inc.

Title: FDC-Ground: Improving GRPO for GUI Grounding via Exponential Rewards and Fact-Aligned Pruning

Abstract:
This paper presents FDCGround, a reinforcement learning framework that addresses the high-cost, low-signal challenge of GUI grounding training. The framework introduces two core contributions: (1) the Exponentially Decayed Distance Reward (EDDR), which provides resolution-robust and continuous feedback for position predictions, and (2) the Fact-Aligned Dynamic Completions Pruning (FDC-Pruning) strategy, which selectively retains completions whose advantage signs align with factual correctness, thereby reducing computational overhead while enhancing gradient quality and training stability. Using only 3.2K training samples and a single epoch, our 7B-parameter model achieves 88.3% and 91.0% accuracy on ScreenSpot and ScreenSpot-v2, outperforming several RL-based models such as UIShift and SE-GUI. Our 3B-parameter model based on Qwen2.5-VL-3B surpasses its original performance by +26.6%, demonstrating the effectiveness of our reward design and pruning strategy under low-resource conditions. Furthermore, the proposed FDC-Pruning strategy achieves a 1.18× training speedup and a +5.9% accuracy improvement over standard GRPO, and expanding the exploration space to 4× yields an additional +10.5% gain, confirming both the scalability and the training efficiency of our approach. These findings highlight that combining EDDR with FDC-Pruning offers a practical path toward scalable and efficient RL-based GUI grounding, even in low-resource settings.

PaperID: 4003

Authors:He Zhang, Bang Wu, Xiaoning Liu, Karin Verspoor, Xun Yi

Affiliations: RMIT University

Title: Imprint of the Forgotten: Stealthy Membership Inference in Unlearned Graph Neural Networks

Abstract:
Graphs effectively model interactions in realworld applications such as social and trade networks, where Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel at tasks such as link prediction to enhance user experiences. Despite these benefits, users raise privacy concerns as user data can be exploited to improve GNN performance without consent. Accordingly, various graph unlearning methods have been developed. Prior work shows that comparing models before and after unlearning enables attackers to launch former membership inference attacks (FMIA) on unlearned data. However, the imprint of unlearned data left in the unlearned model itself remains underexplored, and existing membership inference methods mainly exploit overfitting, making them ineffective for identifying unlearned data. To address this, we conducted theoretical analysis and proposed an attack framework targeting unlearned GNNs by learning the distribution patterns of unlearned data to distinguish them from normal test data. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets and GNN architectures confirm our framework's effectiveness and reveal significant vulnerabilities in current graph unlearning methods.

PaperID: 4004

Authors:Yibo Zhang, Dengpeng Xing

Affiliations: Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Enhancing Exploration and Exploitation in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with Subgoal Graph Learning

Abstract:
Goalconditioned hierarchical reinforcement learning has demonstrated effectiveness in addressing complicated decision-making tasks by providing ''temporal extraction'', which decomposes tasks into smaller and more manageable ''subgoals''. This enables agents to plan over a longer time scale. However, achieving optimal exploration and exploitation still remains a challenge, especially for long-horizon or sparse-reward scenarios. In this paper, we introduce Active exploraion and hierarchical Self-Imitation (ASI), an effective scheme to enhance exploration and exploitation based on subgoal representation learning. The key point of ASI is to utilize temporal adjacency information in the representation space. We construct and dynamically update an adjacency graph that captures the relationships between subgoals. Based on the adjacency information provided by the graph, we design two mechanisms: active ``frontier-reaching'' exploration that faster expands the explored area by targeting boundary regions, and hierarchical self-imitation learning that leverages historical experience to facilitate both frontier reaching and policy training. Experimental results show that our method accelerates exploration and outperforms existing baselines in challenging long-horizon continuous control tasks.

PaperID: 4005

Authors:Yu-Xuan Zhang, Zhengchun Zhou, Weisha Liu, Mingxing Zhang

Affiliations: School of Information Science and Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University, SWJTU-Leeds Joint School, School of Mathematics

Title: Rethinking Multi-Instance Learning Through Graph-Driven Fusion: A Dual-Path Approach to Adaptive Representation

Abstract:
Multiinstance learning (MIL) has become a powerful paradigm for weakly supervised learning tasks, where each sample is a bag of unlabeled instances with only the bag-level label. While graph-based MIL methods enhance bag topological structure modeling, they often suffer from high computation costs and limited representation due to rigid graph construction and insufficient integration of intra-bag semantics. To address these challenges, we propose GDF-MIL, a novel graph-driven MIL framework, which introduces a dual-path feature fusion mechanism to adaptively balance topological structure modeling and semantic feature preservation. First, the adaptive bag mapping module (ABMM) performs soft clustering to extract compact and informative representations. Subsequently, a dynamic graph structure learning (DGSL) component efficiently learns sparse topological structures via weighted connectivity, aggregating them into a comprehensive graph-level representation. Finally, to balance fast graph construction and bag-level knowledge, dual-path feature fusion (DPFF) employs a dual-path gating mechanism to integrate both types of features, which are then passed to the classifier for bag label prediction. Extensive experiments on twenty-four datasets across four domains show that GDF-MIL significantly outperforms eighteen state-of-the-art methods on the majority of datasets.

PaperID: 4006

Authors:Qihua Zhou, Wangjiang Gong, Zili Meng, Yaxiong Xie, Yaodong Huang, Junchen Jiang, Laizhong Cui

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, State University of New York at Buffalo, University of Chicago

Title: DeNC++: Efficient Diffusion-Enhanced Neural Codec for End-to-end Semantic Streaming at the Edge

Abstract:
The neuralenhanced video streaming (NeVS) has been an emerging technique to integrate neural models into video codecs for higher streaming efficiency. The state-of-the-art methods, e.g., DeNC and Gemino, typically compress videos in RGB space and restore video quality via a neural enhancement model hosted on the external media server. However, these methods are not always accessible in resource-constrained edge environments due to their heavy reliance on the media server's computation, which undermines end-to-end performance and restricts NeVS's usage boundary. This limitation raises an interesting question: is it possible to make NeVS lightweight so that all neural codec operations can be handled directly by clients' edge devices? In this paper, we present the answer yes and develop a new plug-and-play module called DeNC++, which significantly improves the compression-restoration-overhead trade-off over existing methods. Our core design philosophy is to wrap all the codec operations within a latent semantic space, in which the original high-dimensional visual signals are efficiently embedded into low-dimensional semantic representations. With this fundamental transformation, DeNC++'s neural encoder introduces the triple semantic-bitwidth-resolution compression to effectively lower the streaming traffic. Meanwhile, we make DeNC++'s neural decoder aware of the perceptual loss caused by its encoder and design tiny generative models to guarantee high restoration quality. We also strictly restrict the runtime computational overhead and accelerate the neural enhancement process, making DeNC++ compatible with commodity edge devices. Real-world evaluations reveal that DeNC++ consistently provides higher restoration quality while achieving 24-55 times higher compression ratio and 5-7 times end-to-end speedup over the latest NeVS solutions.

PaperID: 4007

Authors:Xiren Zhou, Chuyang Wei, Ao Chen, Shikang Liu, Xiangyu Wang, Huanhuan Chen

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China

Title: Fault Diagnosis of Irregular Sequences by Adjoint Learning in Continuous-Time Model Space

Abstract:
Fault Diagnosis (FD) on sequential data suffers from irregular sampling (with missing values), limited training data, and varying underlying environments. In response, this paper proposes FD by adjoint learning in continuoustime model space. Model-Space Learning employs well-fitted models that capture data's dynamics (i.e., changing information) as more stable and concise representations of the original data. The Continuous-Time Reservoir Computing Network (CT-Res) is first introduced, which embeds Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) within the reservoir-based hidden layer to govern continuous-time hidden-state evolution, naturally handling irregular sampling without relying on fixed time steps and effectively capturing intrinsic data dynamics. By fitting each sequence via CT-Res and representing it with the fitted model, the original sequences are mapped from the data space into the continuous-time model space. We further develop an adjoint learning strategy by incorporating a discrete-time "adjoint Echo State Network (ESN)" that shares structure and parameters with CT-Res, thus enabling efficient training by bypassing the computationally intensive ODE solver, with joint optimization of fitting accuracy and class discrimination in the model space. Experiments on multiple FD benchmarks highlight the effectiveness and efficiency of our study, particularly with missing values and scarce training data.

PaperID: 4008

Authors:Die Hu, Jingguo Ge, Weitao Tang, He Kong, Liangxiong Li, Bingzhen Wu

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Security Defense, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, School of Cyber Security

Title: Orion: Steering Personalized Web Agents via Global-Micro Profiling and Adaptive Intent Tracking

Abstract:
Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) based Web Agents have shown significant potential in web understanding and interaction tasks. However, their personalization ability and user experience remain limited by the ambiguity and dynamic nature of user intent, struggling to model diverse user interests and track intent changes over time. To address these challenges, this paper proposes Orion, a novel personalized Web Agent. Orion adopts a globalmicro profiling mechanism to balance users' long-term stable preferences and scenario-based needs, and introduces context-aware interest retrieval to enhance personalization. Additionally, we design adaptive profile tracking and proactive disambiguation mechanisms to effectively address the continuous evolution of user intent in multi-turn interactions. Orion is optimized through end-to-end online reinforcement learning, improving personalized reasoning and decision-making ability in real interactive scenarios. Experiments demonstrate that Orion significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in personalized understanding and task efficiency.

PaperID: 4009

Authors:Qiwei Liu, Ye Yuan, Lingyue Zhang, Kaitian Chen, Yunkai Lv, Sheng Gao, Huaicheng Yan

Affiliations: East China University of Science and Technology

Title: Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Distributional Safety Critic and Maximum Entropy Optimization

Abstract:
Deploying multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) in safety-critical systems faces significant challenges due to insufficient agent exploration and inadequate safety constraint guarantees. Current approaches are constrained by two fundamental limitations: inefficient exploration leading to suboptimal policies, and expected-cost-based constraint frameworks failing to ensure full-process safety. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel safety-aware maximum entropy MARL framework using Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) as a joint safety metric, which quantifies constraint satisfaction under worst-case scenarios for multi-agent systems. Moreover, we develop the Worst-Case Multi-Agent Soft Actor-Critic (WCMASAC) algorithm, incorporating sequential update mechanisms and maximum entropy optimization for heterogeneous agents, enhanced with distributed safety critics. Theoretically, we establish the monotonic improvement property, guaranteed constraint satisfaction, and convergence to a generalized Nash equilibrium for WCMASAC. Extensive experiments on Safety-Gymnasium based benchmarks demonstrate that WCMASAC outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both task reward acquisition and safety constraint violation reduction, while exhibiting superior exploration efficiency and risk-aware control capabilities.

PaperID: 4010

Authors:Yuan Xue, Xiaoyu Lu, Yunfei Bai, Yunan Liu, Hoiyi Ng

Affiliations: The Ohio State University Amazon

Title: RECoRD: A Multi-Agent LLM Framework for Reverse Engineering Codebase to Relational Diagram

Abstract:
Understanding the behavior and logical structure of complex algorithms is a fundamental challenge in industrial systems. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable code understanding capabilities. However, their potential for reverse engineering algorithms into interpretable causal structures remains unexplored. In this work, we develop a multiagent framework, RECoRD, that leverages LLMs to Reverse Engineering Codebase to Causal Relational Diagram. RECoRD uses reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) to enhance the reasoning accuracy of the relation extraction agent. Fine-tuning on expert-curated causal graphs allows smaller specialized models to outperform larger foundation models on domain-specific tasks. Experiments on three real-world use cases - News Vendor, MiniSCOT, and Black-Scholes - demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The RFT-trained models significantly outperformed their foundation counterparts, improving F1 score from 0.69 to 0.97 on MiniSCOT. RECoRD also exhibited strong generalization, with models fine-tuned on one use case improving performance on others. We further show how the extracted causal graphs can be leveraged to build a deep-dive assistant that reasons like domain experts, enabling rapid root cause analysis in complex software systems. By automating the construction of interpretable causal models from code, RECoRD has wide-ranging applications in areas such as software debugging, operational optimization, and risk management.

PaperID: 4011

Authors:Jingxuan Yu, Ju Jia, Simeng Qin, Xiaojun Jia, Siqi Ma, Yihao Huang, Yali Yuan, Guang Cheng

Affiliations: Southeast University, Ministry of Education, Northeastern University, Nanyang Technological University, University of Wollongong, National University of Singapore

Title: MPAS: Breaking Sequential Constraints of Multi-Agent Communication Topologies via Individual-Epistemic Message Propagation

Abstract:
Large language model (LLM)driven agents are designed to handle a wide range of tasks autonomously. As tasks become increasingly composite, the integration of multiple agents into a graph-structured system offers a promising solution. Recent advances mainly architect the communication order among agents into a specified directed acyclic graph, from which a one-by-one execution can be determined by topological sort. However, sequential architectures restrict the diversity of the information flow, hinder parallel computation, and exhibit vulnerabilities to potential backdoor threats. To overcome underlying shortcomings of sequential structures, we propose a node-wise multi-agent scheme, named message passing agent system (MPAS). Specifically, to parallelize the communication across agents, we extend the message propagation mechanism in graph representation learning to multi-agent scenarios and introduce our individual-epistemic message propagation. To further enhance expressiveness and robustness, we investigate three self-driven message aggregators. To achieve desired working flows, collaborative connections can be optimized without constraints. The experimental results reveal that compared to state-of-the-art sequential designs, MPAS could architect more advanced algorithms in 93.8% of the evaluations, reduce the average communication time from 84.6 seconds to 14.2 seconds per round on AQuA, and improve resilience against backdoor misinformation injection in 94.4% tests.

PaperID: 4012

Authors:Boxi Cao, Ruotong Pan, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Affiliations: Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Does Question Really Matter? The Attribution of Answer Bias in LLM Evaluation

Abstract:
Multiplechoices question answering (MCQA) has emerged as one of the most popular task formats for large language models (LLMs) evaluation. Unfortunately, there exist substantial evidence that the evaluation of current MCQA benchmarks suffers from significant answer bias, which severely undermines the reliability of the evaluation conclusions. Specifically, many LLMs achieve performance significantly higher than random selection even when the questions are omitted from input information. To this end, we conduct a systematic investigation of the attribution of answer bias, and demonstrate a strong correlation between the degree of data contamination and the severity of answer bias, while the position of options and the popularity of answers have relatively minor effects. Building on these insights, we further propose OPD, a straightforward yet effective tool for contamination detection and dataset debiasing without requiring access to the model’s internal training data. Our findings and algorithms provide valuable insights for the design of future trustworthy LLM evaluation protocols.

PaperID: 4013

Authors:Yi Cao, Weijie Shi, Wei-Jie Xu, Yucheng Shen, Yue Cui, Hanghui Guo, Shimin Di, Ziyi Liu, Jiaming Li, Alexander Zhou, Jia Zhu, Jiajie Xu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University, Alibaba Group, Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Intelligent Education Technology and Application, Zhejiang Normal University, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: TIV: Thought Injection via Vectors for Efficient Reasoning in Large Reasoning Models

Abstract:
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have recently demonstrated impressive performance across a range of reasoning tasks by generating intermediate thoughts. However, these models can suffer from overthinking—generating excessive tokens that contribute little to final accuracy while increasing inference cost. To mitigate this, we propose TIV (Thought Injection via Vectors), an innovative framework that compresses tokenlevel reasoning into compact vectors without sacrificing performance. Rather than generating explicit thoughts, TIV injects learnable vectors into the post-attention hidden states of the final token across Transformer layers, enabling implicit and lightweight reasoning. We further introduce a two-stage reinforcement learning strategy: the first stage calibrates the model's reasoning distribution, and the second distills it into a vector-based policy optimized for both accuracy and brevity. Experiments on three reasoning benchmarks show that TIV preserves over 99% of the original accuracy while reducing output length by more than 65% on average, reaching up to 80% in some cases. Moreover, TIV consistently achieves superior trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency compared to existing methods, distinguishing itself as a state-of-the-art (SOTA) approach for efficient reasoning in LRMs.

PaperID: 4014

Authors:Dinh-Truong Do, Nguyen-Khang Le, Le-Minh Nguyen

Affiliations: Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Title: AdaSpec: Adaptive Multilingual Speculative Decoding with Self-Synthesized Language-Aware Training and Vocabulary Simplification

Abstract:
Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a lightweight drafter to propose multiple tokens, which are then verified in parallel by the base model. While effective in English, existing methods often struggle in multilingual scenarios due to static vocabularies and the lack of languagespecific instruction data. To address these limitations, we present AdaSpec, a multilingual speculative decoding framework that dynamically adapts both the drafter and vocabulary at decoding time. AdaSpec generates language-specific instruction data using the LLM itself, enabling training of drafters for low-resource languages. It also constructs adaptive vocabularies tailored to each language's characteristics. In addition, we introduce Multi-SpecBench, a comprehensive multilingual benchmark covering seven languages and seven generation tasks, to evaluate multilingual speculative decoding performance. Extensive experiments show that AdaSpec achieves up to 2.3× speedup over the state-of-the-art method of EAGLE-2, even in English, demonstrating its effectiveness across diverse languages and tasks.

PaperID: 4015

Authors:Yi He, Ping Wang, Shiqiang Xiong, Chao Chen, Haixiang Hu

Affiliations: Ant Group

Title: FinMathBench: A Formula-Driven Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs’ Math Reasoning Capabilities in Finance

Abstract:
Many existing financial math reasoning benchmarks suffer from data contamination and high manual construction costs. To address this, we propose a novel formuladriven approach to dynamically construct math reasoning benchmarks in finance. Our two-stage approach: (1) generates single-formula questions by LLMs using a "Mask-for-Solve" paradigm for ground truth answers, and (2) synthesizes multi-formula questions through hierarchical tree-based DAGs. Our approach ensures novelty (via LLMs' creativity) and controllability of difficulty (via DAG structure). Based on a self-constructed financial formula bank, we utilize the proposed method to build FinMathBench, the first formula-driven and fully LLM-generated benchmark aimed at assessing LLMs' math reasoning abilities in finance, containing 946 questions across 4 complexity levels. Evaluation results on 40 LLMs demonstrate significant accuracy drops in multi-formula questions, e.g., 72.9% (1-Formula) to 14.0% (4-Formula) for GPT-4o under Chain-of-Thought prompting. Three critical flaws of LLMs are also observed: poor direct calculation performance, bias toward frequently solved variables in formulas, and erroneous "correction" of valid but extreme financial values. These findings highlight gaps in current LLMs' domain-specific reasoning and underscore FinMathBench's value for advancing robust financial LLMs.

PaperID: 4016

Authors:Zishang Jiang, Jinyi Han, Tingyun Li, Xinyi Wang, Sihang Jiang, Xiaojun Meng, Jiansheng Wei, Jiaqing Liang, Yanghua Xiao

Affiliations: Fudan University, East China Normal University, Huawei Large Model Data Technology Lab

Title: Difficulty Is Not Enough: Curriculum Learning for LLMs Fine-tuning Must Consider Utility

Abstract:
Finetuning plays an essential role in improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) on specific tasks. A central challenge lies in designing data-efficient strategy to achieve better fine-tuning performance. Curriculum learning, which organizes data from easy to hard, has become a widely adopted technique in LLMs training. However, existing methods for curriculum learning focus only on the difficulty of samples, while neglecting their contribution to improving model performance, making them vulnerable when applied to fine-tuning LLMs. To address this, we propose Difficulty-Utility Curriculum Learning (DUCL), a curriculum learning framework that jointly considers difficulty and utility. DUCL introduces a novel scoring method, Difficulty-Utility Evaluation (DUE), and a soft scheduling strategy called Window Ordering, which together promote efficient and effective fine-tuning. Our method not only improves convergence and final performance with negligible computational overhead, but is also broadly applicable across a wide range of tasks, making it a practical and scalable solution for LLMs fine-tuning.

PaperID: 4017

Authors:Chengyu Jiao, Siyin Huang, Yu Zhang

Affiliations: Southern University of Science and Technology

Title: Embracing Positional Bias in Multiple-Choice Question Answering via Permutation Equivariant Neural Networks

Abstract:
Several studies have demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) exhibit positional bias when answering multiplechoice questions (MCQs). Previous methods have identified such bias to be detrimental, leading to the development of techniques to mitigate it. However, we observe that certain permutations of options can actually improve the performance. Therefore, instead of eliminating such bias, we propose an EMbracing the Bias EquivaRiantly (EMBER) network. Specifically, the EMBER network, which outputs a permutation of options in MCQs, is optimized towards the beneficial permutations to which the LLM is biased. Additionally, to solve the positional bias among different permutations of options, the EMBER network is designed to grant the equivariance to the permutation to the LLMs. Theoretically and empirically, we show that the proposed EMBER network can effectively utilize the positional bias and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance over various baselines.

PaperID: 4018

Authors:Qizhi Li, Xuyang Wang, Yingke Chen, Ming Yan, Dezhong Peng, Xi Peng, Xu Wang

Affiliations: Sichuan University, Northumbria University, Xinjiang University, Tianfu Jincheng Laboratory

Title: Learning Beyond Domains: Misleading Prompts and Pseudo-Label Contrast for Text Domain Generalization

Abstract:
Recent advancements in Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) have significantly enhanced performance across various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, the variability in data distributions across different domains presents challenges in generalizing these models to unseen domains. Domain generalization offers a promising solution, but existing text domain generalization methods typically rely on adversarial training to learn domain-invariant features, which often leads to models with high computational and memory overhead. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel solution named Generalization via Prompts and Contrastive Learning (GenPromptCL) to enhance the generalization capability in domain generalization. GenPromptCL consists of two key components: Domain-Misleading Prompt Learning (DMPL) and Pseudo Label-based Contrastive Learning (PCL). Specifically, DMPL disrupts domain labels randomly, misleading the model into producing incorrect domain labels. This forces the model to learn domain-invariant features. Meanwhile, PCL generates pseudo labels within a single mini-batch, enabling the model to learn both intra-class and inter-class discriminative representations with low time and space complexity. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that GenPromptCL achieves state-of-the-art performance on three distinct text classification tasks (sentiment analysis, rumor detection, and natural language inference) while significantly improving model operation efficiency.

PaperID: 4019

Authors:Shike Li, Xiaokai Wang, Xiaofeng Liu, Xin Tong, Hu Zhang

Affiliations: Shanxi University, Taiyuan University of Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: CoFact: Dynamic Coordination of Attention Heads for Improving Factual Consistency in LLMs

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) frequently generate fluent yet factually inaccurate content, a phenomenon known as hallucination. Recent inferencetime approaches aim to improve truthfulness by steering model activations toward semantically meaningful directions. While effective to some extent, these methods typically process activations independently, neglecting the internal coordination structure of multi-head attention (MHA), where attention heads interact to form semantic representations. In this work, we propose CoFact, an adaptive inference-time mechanism that improves factual consistency by dynamically coordinating attention head behaviors. Inspired by cooperative game theory, CoFact conceptualizes attention heads as collaborative agents. It models the semantic utility and redundancy of each head and adaptively modulates their contributions to the final attention output. Notably, rather than directly altering intermediate representations, CoFact performs token-level coordination to encourage diverse and complementary attention patterns across heads. CoFact is plug-and-play compatible with mainstream LLM architectures and requires no additional supervision or model retraining. Experimental results across multiple standard factuality benchmarks demonstrate that CoFact consistently enhances factual accuracy while maintaining generation fluency.

PaperID: 4020

Authors:Ren-Biao Liu, Jiang-Tian Xue, Chao-Zeng Ma, Hui Sun, Xin-Ye Li, Ming Li

Affiliations: Nanjing University

Title: Dynamic-Static Synergistic Selection Method for Candidate Code Solutions with Generated Test Cases

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) show significant improvement in code generation. A common practice is sampling multiple candidate codes to increase the likelihood of producing an accurate solution. However, effectively identifying the best candidate from the pool is a significant challenge. Although existing code consensus methods attempt to solve this issue, they suffer from a critical problem: relying on test cases generated by LLMs, which can be flawed or provide incomplete coverage. This problem can result in erroneous validations, causing correct code to fail flawed tests and preventing the detection of functional differences in candidate code solutions. To address these issues, we present the DynamicStatic Synergistic Selection Method, a novel framework that combines two complementary analytical approaches. First, it uses the abstract syntax tree (AST) to detect and filter candidate solutions and test cases. Second, the method statically analyzes the quality of the solutions and then dynamically validates functional consistency based on the execution results of the extracted inputs, thereby neutralizing the impact of faulty tests. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this synergistic approach significantly outperforms existing methods, substantially enhancing the correctness of the selected code.

PaperID: 4021

Authors:Zhao Lv, Haoran Zhou, Ying Chen, Youdian Gao, Xinhui Li, Ruibo Fu, Cunhang Fan

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Opto-Electronic Information Acquisition and Protection Technology, (School of Computer Science and Technology), Anhui University, P. R. China, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Trainable EEG Interpolation and Structure-Sharing Dual-Path Encoders for Brain-Assisted Target Speaker Extraction

Abstract:
Brainassisted target speaker extraction (TSE) isolates a target speaker's voice from a mixture by leveraging task-specific representations in Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. However, existing methods rely on fixed interpolation for EEG-audio alignment, introducing redundant computations. They also employ single-path encoders that extract only target-relevant features while neglecting complementary, irrelevant ones, limiting discriminability. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a Trainable EEG Interpolation and Structure-sharing Dual-path Encoders network (TIDENet). The proposed Trainable EEG Interpolation (TEI) uses a neural network module to leverage cross-sample EEG information during resampling by parameters updating, thereby overcoming the limitations of fixed interpolation. The Structure-sharing Dual-path Encoders (SSDPE) extend existing speech and EEG encoders by introducing dual paths that separately process features relevant and irrelevant to the target speaker and incorporates interactive fusion between them, which enhances the encoder's ability to capture task-relevant information. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate that TIDENet achieves relative improvements of up to 20.47%, 22.22%, 2.91%, 6.20%, and 15.84% in signal-to-distortion ratio (SDR), scale-invariant SDR (SI-SDR), short-time objective intelligibility (STOI), extended STOI (ESTOI), and perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ), respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art. These significant gains validate the effectiveness of the proposed TEI method and SSDPE architecture.

PaperID: 4022

Authors:Kailun Lyu, Zehan Li, Fu Zhang, Jingwei Cheng

Affiliations: Northeastern University

Title: A Boundary Token Graph for Zero-Shot Relation Triplet Extraction Involving Discontinuous Entities

Abstract:
ZeroShot Relation Triplet Extraction (ZSRTE) aims to extract head-tail entity pairs and their corresponding relations from sentences, where the relations available during inference are not seen during training. Existing methods typically assume that entities are continuous; however, in practice, entities can be discontinuous, which poses challenges to these approaches. To address this issue, we are the first to discuss and study the ZSRTE task involving discontinuous entities, and propose an innovative BoG framework, which is based on our proposed Boundary Token Graph structure. This method first predicts and adds edges between boundary tokens of (dis)continuous entities to construct a token graph, and then innovatively transforms the relation triplet extraction task into a process of finding paths in the graph. Additionally, we design a Boundary Token-Aware Prompt for each relation to further enhance the interaction between boundary tokens and relation semantics. Experimental results on four ZSRTE datasets—with or without discontinuous entities—consistently demonstrate that our method outperforms previous approaches, achieving state-of-the-art results.

PaperID: 4023

Authors:Fengji Ma, Chenxing Li, Li Liu

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Title: Cueing Without Gapping: Cuer-Independent Cued Speech Recognition Powered by Cross-Cuer Invariant Modeling

Abstract:
Automatic Cued Speech Recognition (ACSR) is a vital communication system designed to enhance spoken language accessibility for the hearingimpaired by combining lip movements and hand gestures to encode phonemes. Despite its effectiveness, current ACSR methods face significant challenges, including poor generalization to unseen cuers due to the limited scale of CS datasets, which restricts the ability of existing visual encoder to capture cuer-invariant CS visual features. Additionally, previous approaches relying on Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) decoding fail to incorporate prior linguistic sequence knowledge, further limiting their performance. To address these issues, we propose a novel Two Auxiliary Modalities guided Cross-cuer Invariant Adaptation method (TACIA), introducing pose and text modalities to help extract cuer-invariant motion and semantic features, thereby improving generalization. In addition, we introduce a Visual-guided Cued Token Prediction (VG-NTP) method, inspired by large language models. This method replaces CTC decoding by incorporating language modeling, leveraging rich linguistic knowledge, including semantics, to address the suboptimal issues present in the CTC decoding process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) on Chinese and British CS datasets, significantly advancing the accuracy and quality of ACSR systems.

PaperID: 4024

Authors:Yunlong Ma, Bo Wang, Yihong Tang, Zifei Yu, Chenyun Xue, Gaoke Zhang, Yuexian Hou

Affiliations: School of New Media and Communication, Tianjin University, College of Intelligence and Computing, Harbin Institute of Technology, Tianjin Huizhixingyuan Information Technology Co.

Title: QueryAligner: Customizing User Query to Match LLMs Preferences for Better Intent Recognition

Abstract:
The interpretative efficacy of large language models (LLMs) fundamentally hinges on the intricate alignment between user inputs and modelspecific linguistic priors. Existing methodologies predominantly employ static input optimization strategies, failing to account for the empirically observed divergence in linguistic preference spaces across distinct LLM architectures, including variations in syntactic parsing heuristics, semantic grounding mechanisms, and knowledge retrieval pathways. We propose QueryAligner, an adaptive rewriting system implementing dynamic model-aware input transformation through architecture-specific preference modeling. Our framework introduces two pivotal innovations: 1) A dual-phase optimization engine integrating supervised learning on reverse-engineered cross-architectural training data with reinforcement learning driven by multi-objective reward signals, ensuring simultaneous preservation of semantic integrity and maximization of target model compatibility; 2) An architecture-informed rewriting protocol that automatically discovers latent alignment patterns encoded within distinct LLMs' parametric configurations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance compared to conventional input optimization techniques.

PaperID: 4025

Authors:Xiaobin Rong, Qinwen Hu, Mansur Yesilbursa, Kamil Wojcicki, Jing Lu

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Modern Acoustics, Cisco Systems, Collaboration AI, Nanjing University NJU-Horizon Intelligent Audio Lab, Horizon Robotics

Title: PASE: Leveraging the Phonological Prior of WavLM for Low-Hallucination Generative Speech Enhancement

Abstract:
Generative models have shown remarkable performance in speech enhancement (SE), achieving superior perceptual quality over traditional discriminative approaches. However, existing generative SE approaches often overlook the risk of hallucination under severe noise, leading to incorrect spoken content or inconsistent speaker characteristics, which we term linguistic and acoustic hallucinations, respectively. We argue that linguistic hallucination stems from models' failure to constrain valid phonological structures and it is a more fundamental challenge. While language models (LMs) are wellsuited for capturing the underlying speech structure through modeling the distribution of discrete tokens, existing approaches are limited in learning from noise-corrupted representations, which can lead to contaminated priors and hallucinations. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Phonologically Anchored Speech Enhancer (PASE), a generative SE framework that leverages the robust phonological prior embedded in the pre-trained WavLM model to mitigate hallucinations. First, we adapt WavLM into a denoising expert via representation distillation to clean its final-layer features. Guided by the model's intrinsic phonological prior, this process enables robust denoising while minimizing linguistic hallucinations. To further reduce acoustic hallucinations, we train the vocoder with a dual-stream representation: the high-level phonetic representation provides clean linguistic content, while a low-level acoustic representation retains speaker identity and prosody. Experimental results demonstrate that PASE not only surpasses state-of-the-art discriminative models in perceptual quality, but also significantly outperforms prior generative models with substantially lower linguistic and acoustic hallucinations.

PaperID: 4026

Authors:Yuhu Shang, Xiang Cheng, Yimeng Ren, Huijia Wu, Xuexiong Luo, Kangkang Lu, Jian Zhao, Zhaofeng He

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Macquarie University, Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom, China Northwestern Polytechnical University

Title: From Chaos to Cure: A Prefix Heuristics Guided Model-Agnostic Adaptive Detoxification Framework

Abstract:
The impressive performance of large language models (LLMs) also brings inherent toxicity risks, prompting the need for effective detoxification to support responsible deployment. Prevailing methods generally follow an inflexible modelspecific fashion, addressing only individual models or model families. Moreover, overlooking the underlying toxic risks involved in the input prefix can lead to toxic accumulation during autoregressive generation. Existing methods rely on external strong attribute interventions to address this issue, which further exacerbates contextual semantic inconsistencies and makes it difficult to balance toxicity efficacy and generation quality. To address these concerns, we propose a novel Model-Agnostic Adaptive Detoxification (MAAD) framework. To address accumulating toxicity, we present prefix heuristics that serve as contextual signals, guiding the base LLM toward safer generation. Along this line, we construct an antidote dataset to support a lightweight model, Detoxifier, which steers the base LLM to make in-scope and reliable detoxifying distribution adjustments while preserving fluency and contextual understanding. Designed as an easy-to-deploy module, Detoxifier requires a small amount of data and can be seamlessly applied to various base LLMs with one-off training. Since over-purifying often reduces diversity, we also propose a dynamic truncation method called CW-cutoff sampling to trade off language model quality and diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAAD strikes a better balance between detoxification effectiveness and generation quality, while also maintaining model utility.

PaperID: 4027

Authors:Yize Sui, Yan Xu, Kun Hu, Jing Ren, Wenjing Yang

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology

Title: ECD: Evidence-guided Contrastive Decoding in Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Accurate Knowledge Reference Adjustment

Abstract:
RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) enhances the quality of question answering by integrating external knowledge with internal knowledge. A robust RAG system needs to precisely regulate the dependence of the response on the two types of knowledge. The recently proposed context-aware contrastive decoding (CCD) method attempts to achieve this goal by adjusting the knowledge reference weights by comparing the output distribution differences of LLMS when they rely on different knowledge sources. However, these methods are based on probabilistic knowledge reference adjustment strategies (such as the highest probability or entropy), only focus on the relative confidence of the output responses at each decoding step, without considering the absolute confidence of the responses, which may lead to misjudgment of the external knowledge and internal knowledge reference degree in the decoding process. To this end, we propose a novel decoding method, Evidence-guided Contrastive Decoding (ECD), which conducts evidence modeling by constructing the Dirichlet distribution and regards logits as evidence vectors, so as to regulate the reference degree of internal and external knowledge more accurately, and finally improve the quality of generated responses. Extensive evaluations across four public benchmark datasets on three mainstream LLMs have demonstrated the effectiveness and advantages of ECD.

PaperID: 4028

Authors:Kai Sun, Yuxin Lin, Bo Dong, Jingyao Zhang, Bin Shi

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

Title: Enhancing Pre-training Data Detection in LLMs Through Discriminative and Symmetric Prefix Selection

Abstract:
The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has relied on access to highquality, large-scale datasets, yet growing concerns around data privacy and security have spurred substantial research into pre-training data detection. While state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods such as RECALL and CON-RECALL leverage auxiliary prefixes to enhance detection performance, their dependence on individual prefixes introduces notable instability across varying prefix conditions. To address this, we first conduct a theoretical analysis to assess the impact of prefixes on existing prefix-based methods. Building on the analysis, we propose a novel prefix selection method to identify optimal prefixes. Specifically, our method derives two key criteria Discriminability and Symmetry. These criteria serve to quantify the effectiveness of prefixes in detecting pre-training data, enabling precise selection of high-performing candidate prefixes. Experiments on the WikiMIA dataset demonstrate that our method consistently improves the performance of RECALL and CON-RECALL, achieving gains of up to 21.1% in AUC scores while significantly enhancing robustness.

PaperID: 4029

Authors:Zehao Wang, Lianwei Wu, Wenbo An, Hang Zhang, Yaxiong Wang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Hefei University of Technology

Title: Multi-level Style Preference Optimization: An Adaptive Detection Framework for Human-Machine Hybrid Text

Abstract:
Large language model (LLM) generated texts now rival human quality, creating four text categories: purely machinegenerated, machine-rewritten, machine-polished, and human-written content. Traditional detection methods face significant challenges in human-machine hybrid scenarios where LLMs perform rewriting or polishing, as existing approaches focus on single-level features and fail to capture subtle, multi-layered machine traces. To address this, we propose the Multi-level Style Preference Optimization (MSPO) framework, capturing machine style features at multiple granularities: sequence-level (overall consistency), phrase-level (distinctive n-gram patterns), and lexical-level (word selection distributions). We further incorporate four text complexity indicators (Type-Token Ratio, Average Sentence Length, Average Word Length, and Punctuation Ratio) to dynamically adjust optimization parameters based on human-machine text complexity differences, enhancing adaptability across diverse text types. Additionally, we construct a comprehensive detection dataset spanning three representative domains (scientific writing, news articles, and creative writing) across four text types (human-written, purely machine-generated, machine-rewritten, and machine-polished), generated using state-of-the-art LLMs for robust evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that MSPO significantly outperforms existing methods across all text types. On the challenging rewritten texts, MSPO achieves up to 82.14% AUROC, representing an improvement of 11.15 percentage points over the strongest baseline ImBD, while maintaining robust cross-domain generalizability across scientific, news, and creative writing domains.

PaperID: 4030

Authors:Yangbo Wei, Zhen Huang, Shaoqiang Lu, Junhong Qian, Dongge Qin, Ting Jung Lin, WEI W. XING, Chen Wu, Lei He

Affiliations: Southeast University, Eastern Institute of Technology, University of Sheffield

Title: Mixture-of-Trees: Learning to Select and Weigh Reasoning Paths for Efficient LLM Inference

Abstract:
We introduce Mixtureof-Trees (MoT), a novel framework that integrates sparse expert activation with structured tree-based reasoning for efficient LLM inference. MoT employs a learned gating mechanism to selectively activate only the most relevant expert reasoning trees for each problem, where experts use models of varying capacities based on task complexity. The framework features three key innovations: (1) sparse expert activation through unified gating networks, (2) specialized expert trees that leverage domain-specific expertise while optimizing the quality-efficiency trade-off, and (3) collaborative debate mechanisms for conflicting solutions. Additionally, MoT includes a shared baseline tree with early stopping—activated experts perform lightweight validation and terminate early when confidence is high. Experiments across five benchmarks (GSM8K, MATH, AIME 2024, MMLU, HotpotQA) show that MoT achieves 2-7 percentage point accuracy improvements while reducing LLM calls by 37-40% compared to existing multi-path methods.

PaperID: 4031

Authors:Chenghao Xu, Jiexi Yan, Muli Yang, Fen Fang, Huilin Chen, Cheng Deng

Affiliations: Xidian University

Title: Editing Is a Bargaining Game: Balanced Knowledge Editing in Large Language Models

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to generating incorrect or outdated information, thereby necessitating efficient and precise mechanisms for knowledge updates. Existing knowledge editing approaches, however, often encounter conflicts between two competing objectives: maintaining existing knowledge (preservation) and incorporating new information (editing). During gradientbased optimization, these conflicting objectives can lead to imbalanced update directions, where one gradient dominates, ultimately resulting in suboptimal learning dynamics. To address this challenge, we propose a balanced knowledge editing framework inspired by Nash bargaining theory. Our method guides the optimization process toward a Pareto stationary point, ensuring an equilibrium solution wherein any deviation from the final state would degrade the overall performance with respect to both objectives. This guarantees optimality in preserving prior knowledge while integrating new information. We empirically validate the effectiveness of our approach across a range of evaluation metrics on standard benchmark datasets. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art techniques, achieving a superior balance between knowledge preservation and update accuracy.

PaperID: 4032

Authors:Bo-Wen Zhang, Yan Yan, Guang Liu, Xu-Cheng Yin

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology Beijing, China University of Mining Technology Beijing, Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence

Title: Predicting Emergent Tool Use in LLMs Before It Emerges: A Proxy Perspective

Abstract:
Tooluse capabilities fundamentally transform large language models (LLMs) from passive language generators into active agents with real-world utility, drawing intense research focus. Yet, their emergent nature renders traditional scaling laws ineffective for early-stage prediction, obstructing principled model design and efficient training. In this work, we propose a proxy-task perspective that predicts tool-use capabilities by measuring early model performance on selected non-emergent proxy tasks. Our method quantifies two properties of each proxy task: alignment, which reflects how well it captures tool-use trajectories, and stability, which indicates how consistently it behaves across training conditions. These properties are used to weight predictive signals. Theoretically, we formalize how these weighted signals approximate emergent tool use through bounded extrapolation under relaxed assumptions. Empirically, we validate our approach across training checkpoints, model scales, and data setups. Results show that a carefully weighted ensemble of proxy tasks can accurately rank downstream tool-use ability long before it arises. Our findings provide new theoretical foundations and practical tools for efficient training and capability planning, and advance the understanding of how complex abilities arise in LLMs.

PaperID: 4033

Authors:Daipeng Zhang, Wenhuan Lu, Xianghu Yue, Hongcheng Zhang, Jianguo Wei

Affiliations: School of New Media and Communication, Tianjin University, China School of Intelligence Science and Engineering, Qinghai Minzu University, College of Intelligence and Computing

Title: EA-VAE: Learning to Reconstruct Dysarthric Speech via Variational Autoencoder with Encoding Alignment

Abstract:
Dysarthric speech reconstruction (DSR) aims to enhance the intelligibility of dysarthric speech. Compared with normal speech, the dysarthric speech is characterized by its pathological features, including discontinuous pronunciation, slow speech, hoarseness, and improper pauses. Significant disparities in the feature space between normal and dysarthric speech may result in suboptimal speech reconstruction, thereby degrading speech intelligibility. To enhance the reconstruction ability of speech feature spaces, this paper proposes a DSR model named the EncodingAligned Variational Autoencoder (EA-VAE). By incorporating alignment modules of frame-level embedding features, prior distributions, and duration into the encoder of the VAE, the model explicitly aligns the dysarthric speech encoding with a representation of the parallel normal speech. A shared decoder is then used to generate speech with improved intelligibility. Experimental results on the UASpeech benchmark confirm that EA-VAE achieves state-of-the-art performance, with a 31.7% relative word error rate reduction and the highest subjective MOS score (4.48), thoroughly validating the effectiveness and advancements of the proposed method in dysarthric speech reconstruction.

PaperID: 4034

Authors:Jie Zhang, Chenxu Niu, Zhefeng Nan, Yangyan Xu, Jinta Weng

Affiliations: Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Institute of Information Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, HiThink Research, School of Cyber Security

Title: Steering Representations, Safeguarding Privacy: A Cross-Modal Privacy Protection Method for Generative AI

Abstract:
Privacy concerns have long been a critical issue in AI models. With the rapid advancement of generative AI, the privacy awareness of models has drawn attention, raising new challenges for privacy protection that is independent of data and tasks. This paper introduces a novel framework for enhancing privacy protection through directional steering in representation space, which seamlessly integrates with both language and visionlanguage models. Specifically, we first construct a comprehensive privacy-related dataset based on the Solove taxonomy of privacy. Then, we leverage this dataset to enhance model privacy awareness in the representation space, steering the model to protect privacy during inference. Experiments on 12 models validate the effectiveness and generalization of our method. Moreover, we demonstrate the transferability of privacy-enhanced representations between same-source large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), offering a scalable solution for privacy protection in frontier AI models.

PaperID: 4035

Authors:Mengfei Zhang, Zhenglin Wang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Southeast University

Title: CATS: Category-Aware Token-level Steering for Training-Free Redundancy Reduction in Large Reasoning Models

Abstract:
While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities in complex tasks, they often suffer from excessive redundancy in their chainof-thought reasoning. This significantly reduces inference efficiency and increases computational costs. We identify that LRM redundancy is not uniformly homogeneous but can be taxonomized according to whether it is destructive to the final answer: destructive redundancy (e.g., logical drift, hallucination amplification) versus non-destructive redundancy (e.g., repetition, over-elaboration). Moreover, LRM's redundant and concise responses exhibit a significant distinction in their hidden layer representation spaces. Based on these insights, we propose CATS (Category-Aware Token-level Steering), a training-free and lightweight method to reduce the redundancy phenomenon. CATS decomposes redundancy into six semantically interpretable characteristic dimensions. By flexibly weighting and combining the differential vectors corresponding to these dimensions, CATS synthesizes a composite intervention vector, enabling zero-parameter intervention in the hidden layers. Experiments across three LRM models and five mathematical reasoning datasets demonstrate that CATS reduces reasoning length by an average of 25% while maintaining or even slightly improving task accuracy. CATS offers a pluggable, training-free, and lightweight solution, making it particularly beneficial for users in low-resource environments.

PaperID: 4036

Authors:Zijing Zhang, Boning Zhang

Affiliations: Peking University, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: When Instinct Guides and Insight Grounds: Staged RL Training for LLM Agents

Abstract:
Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong potential in complex, interactive decisionmaking tasks. However, when training LLM agents end-to-end with reinforcement learning (RL), efficiently optimizing agent policies in dynamic environments remains a significant challenge. Existing RL-based LLM agent paradigms commonly organize interactions in a cycle where reasoning is followed by action. In our work, we observe a phenomenon we call Exploration Contraction, where the explicit introduction of a reasoning stage reduces the diversity of actions—quantified by lower action entropy—which in turn limits exploration and leads to premature policy convergence. To address this limitation, we propose Act-before-Reasoning (ActRe), a two-stage RL training framework. In the first stage, we reverse the typical rollout order, prompting the agent to generate actions prior to reasoning, which encourages exploration driven by model intuition. In the second stage, we restore the standard reasoning-then-action order for training and evaluation, ensuring robust and interpretable decision-making. Experiments on the ALFWorld and WebShop benchmarks show that ActRe effectively mitigates exploration contraction, yielding consistently higher task success rates and improved training robustness compared to strong RL baselines. Our analysis underscores the importance of action entropy in the exploration-exploitation trade-off during LLM agent training and provides a practical approach to maintain the benefits of explicit reasoning while promoting sufficient exploration.

PaperID: 4037

Authors:Zhengzhong Zhu, Pei Zhou, Weihong Du, Shiquan Min, Jiangping Zhu

Affiliations: Sichuan University

Title: Unsupervised Semantic Discovery via Global and Local Semantic Alignment in Multimodal Clustering

Abstract:
Unsupervised multimodal semantic discovery aims to learn discriminative representations from multimodal data. However, existing methods suffer from two key limitations. First, they only align instances across modalities without modeling semanticlevel consistency, which fails to mitigate semantic bias caused by the gaps among feature distributions of multiple modalities. Second, they inevitably generate incorrect negative pairs during contrastive learning, pushing semantically similar samples apart. To address these challenges, we propose GLAD (Global and Local semantic Alignment for unsupervised multimodal semantic Discovery), which aligns multimodal data at both global and local semantic levels. At the global level, GSA integrates multi-modal features into a shared space and employs joint clustering via optimal transport to capture common semantic patterns while mitigating cross-modality semantic bias. At the local level, LSA adaptively weights samples within each cluster based on their semantic importance, alleviating the effect of incorrect negative pairs. Through the joint optimization of GSA and LSA, GLAD effectively captures both the global semantic structure and the local semantic nuances of multimodal data. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate GLAD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with an average improvement of 3.22%.

PaperID: 4038

Authors:Jianwei Fei, Yunshu Dai, Peipeng Yu, Zhihua Xia, Dasara Shullani, Daniele Baracchi, Alessandro Piva

Affiliations: University of Florence, Sun Yat-sen University, Jinan University

Title: One for All: Synthesis-Free Fingerprint Learning for Attribution of In-the-Wild Synthetic Images

Abstract:
Attributing synthetic images to their source generative models is critical for digital forensics and security. While most existing attribution methods can distinguish images produced by known models and reject those from unknown ones, they are unable to verify whether a given image was produced by a specific, previously unseen model. To address this limitation, we formulate an openset verification problem: determining whether a given image was generated by a specific model. Our key insight is that synthetic images from different models show consistent, content-independent fingerprints in their amplitude spectrum. Based on this insight, we design a dynamic fingerprint simulator capable of simulating over 1.6 trillion generative model architectures. We further train an extractor to capture model-specific fingerprint representations with supervised contrastive learning, enabling accurate attribution of synthetic images, even from previously unseen models. Our method does not rely on any synthetic images, instead, it is trained solely on real images. On DMDetection and AIGCBenchmark, which comprises dozens of state-of-the-art and in-the-wild generative models, our method improves the attribution performance (AUC) of the prior method from random level to 94.05% and 83.05%, respectively. On GenImage and OSMA datasets, we obtain 85.08%, and 88.48% OSCR, outperforming the SOTA methods by 4.30% and 9.37% under the same settings.

PaperID: 4039

Authors:Haojie Hao, Jiakai Wang, Aishan Liu, Yuqing Ma, Haotong Qin, Yuanfang Guo, Xianglong Liu

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Complex & Critical Software Environment, Beihang University, Zhongguancun Laboratory, Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, ETH Zurich

Title: Activation Manipulation Attack: Penetrating and Harmful Jailbreak Attack Against Large Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
Recently, Large VisionLanguage Models (LVLMs) have been demonstrated to be vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, highlighting the urgent need for further research to comprehensively identify and mitigate these threats. Unfortunately, existing jailbreak studies primarily focus on coarse-grained input manipulation to elicit specific responses, overlooking the exploitation of internal representations, i.e., intermediate activations, which constrains their ability to penetrate alignment safeguards and generate harmful responses. To tackle this issue, we propose the Activation Manipulation (ActMan) Attack framework, which performs fine-grained activation manipulations inspired by the perception and cognition stages of human decision-making, enhancing both the penetration capability and harmfulness of attacks. To improve penetration capability, we introduce a Deceptive Visual Camouflage module inspired by the masking effect in human perception. This module uses a benign activation-guided attention redirection strategy to conceal abnormal activation patterns, thereby suppressing LVLM's defense detection during early-stage decoding. To enhance harmfulness, we design a Malicious Semantic Induction module drawing from the framing effect in human cognition, which reconstructs jailbreak instructions using malicious activation guidance to change LVLM’s risk assessment during late-stage decoding, thereby amplifying the harmfulness of model responses. Extensive experiments on six mainstream LVLMs demonstrate that our method remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average relative ASR improvement of 12.06%.

PaperID: 4040

Authors:Zhanyi Hu, Cen Chen, Yanhao Wang

Affiliations: East China Normal University

Title: FILTER: A Framework for Defending Against Backdoor Attacks in Vertical Federated Learning

Abstract:
Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm in which participants train models with vertically partitioned data. Many previous studies have identified backdoor vulnerabilities in VFL systems. However, limited effort has been devoted to developing defenses against such attacks. Unlike centralized machine learning or horizontal FL, VFL poses new challenges for defending against backdoor attacks, particularly because the central server lacks control over the entire model. In this paper, we first explore defenses against backdoor attacks in VFL when the attacker possesses sufficient knowledge of the label information. Specifically, we propose FILTER, a framework for defending against backdoor attacks in VFL to ensure the integrity of VFL systems during training in the presence of malicious participants. To address backdoor risks in VFL, it incorporates two novel filters: an embeddingbased filter and a loss-based filter, which effectively identify and remove poisoned samples in later stages of training. Through extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets against four state-of-the-art backdoor attacks, we demonstrate that FILTER significantly reduces the success rate of attacks while maintaining accuracy on clean data close to that of the models trained without such defenses.

PaperID: 4041

Authors:Fanli Jin, Feng Lin, Gaojian Wang, Tong Wu, Zhisheng Yan

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University Hangzhou High-Tech Zone (Binjiang) Institute of Blockchain and Data Security, Department of Information Sciences and Technology, George Mason University

Title: DySy-Det: A Synergistic Framework with Dynamic Reconstruction-Path Consistency for AI-Generated Image Detection

Abstract:
Advanced image generative models have led to concerns about malicious use, underscoring the necessity for generalizable detection methods. However, existing approaches tend to overfit to domainspecific forgery patterns, while overlooking complementary cues from different domains. Therefore, we introduce DySy-Det (Dynamic Synergy Detector), a novel framework that mines collaborative and robust forgery artifacts from multiple evidence domains. First, DySy-Det fine-tunes a CLIP vision transformer to extract high-level semantics for identifying conceptual inconsistencies, while generating attention maps that pinpoint key discriminative regions. Then, this semantic guidance, in the form of a mask, directs a targeted reconstruction process. By focusing on these salient areas, our approach effectively extracts localized reconstruction errors, thereby filtering out irrelevant background noise. Furthermore, inspired by the intrinsic generative mechanics of diffusion models, we introduce the concept of Reconstruction-Path Consistency (RPC), which quantifies the temporal stability of the denoising trajectory to expose dynamic generative artifacts. We capture this by computing noise alignment scores across multiple timesteps and encode them via a lightweight network. Extensive evaluations on GenImage and UniversalFakeDetect benchmarks demonstrate that DySy-Det outperforms the state-of-the-art detector by 6.14% and 1.57% in mean accuracy, respectively.

PaperID: 4042

Authors:Yue Liu, Zhongying Ru, Shimin Di, Jipeng Zhang, Ruiyuan Zhang, Xiaofang Zhou

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Independent Researcher, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University Key Laboratory of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Technology and Its Interdisciplinary Applications, Hong Kong Generative AI Research and Development Center (HKGAI)

Title: Faithful in Steps: Improving Generalization and Citation in RAG via Query Decomposition

Abstract:
Retrievalaugment generation is a prevalent strategy to mitigate hallucinations of LLMs. The attributable RAG (RAGQ) generates quotes for its answers. The quotes indicate which input contexts support the RAG to derive the answers, enhancing the answer's verifiability and trustworthiness. However, existing RAGQs exhibit significant degradation when dealing with questions that require multi-hop reasoning and multi-modal understanding, suffering from over-citation, implicit entity identification failure, and poor generalization. In this paper, we propose a novel RAGQ framework, namely QDRAG. QDRAG breaks down the input question into atomic subquestions to identify the implicit entities. Then, the reranker prunes context distractors to eliminate the downstream over-citation. To facilitate query decomposition, we propose two zero-shot approaches: QD-C and QD-R, which guide the QD MLLM to decompose the question based on context knowledge and retrieval rewards, respectively. One interesting finding is that finetuning on the QD task shows better generalizability compared to directly finetuning on the downstream RAGQ task. Experiments on four multi-modal QA benchmarks demonstrate QDRAG's efficacy in grounding answers and generating faithful citations. The framework significantly outperforms all the baselines on both in-domain and out-of-domain tests, even surpassing Gemini-Pro.

PaperID: 4043

Authors:Xuankun Rong, Wenke Huang, Wenzheng Jiang, Yiming Li, Wenxuan Wang, Mang Ye

Affiliations: Wuhan University, National University of Defense Technology, Nanyang Technological University, Renmin University of China

Title: Probing Semantic Insensitivity for Inference-Time Backdoor Defense in Multimodal Large Language Model

Abstract:
The massive scale of data and computation required for training Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has fueled the rise of FineTuning as a Service (FTaaS), enabling users to rapidly customize models for diverse real-world tasks. While FTaaS democratizes access to advanced multimodal intelligence, it also introduces serious security concerns, particularly backdoor attacks. In this work, we systematically analyze backdoor vulnerabilities in MLLMs under the FTaaS paradigm, revealing two key phenomena: (1) markedly reduced sensitivity to textual variations when a visual trigger is present, and (2) abnormally stable model confidence even under strong semantic perturbations. Building on these insights, we propose Trap on Text (ToT), a novel inference-time backdoor detection framework. ToT applies controlled semantic perturbations to textual prompts and jointly analyzes the semantic consistency and confidence drift of the model’s responses, enabling robust detection of backdoor activations without requiring model parameters, architectures or clean reference data. Extensive experiments across architectures and datasets show that ToT achieves strong attack mitigation and preserves clean accuracy, offering a practical solution for safeguarding FTaaS workflows.

PaperID: 4044

Authors:Jingchen Jiang, Xuan Zhou, Jiayuan Li, Geng Han, Xiang Shi, Fang Deng

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology, Tsinghua University

Title: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with Topology-Aware Exploration Framework for Multi-path Commodity Flow Problem

Abstract:
The multipath commodity flow problem (MPCFP) is crucial for ensuring reliable and high-speed data transmission in communication networks. However, existing studies that employ pre-generated routing paths neglect real-time load state and the coupling among decisions, thus hindering the achievement of high-quality solutions. To overcome this, we propose Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with Topology-Aware Exploration (HRL-TAE), which is the first fully end-to-end framework that dynamically produces high-quality solutions based on real-time network states. HRL-TAE integrates an exploration mechanism and utilizes the State Transition Guiding List (STGL) to guide state transitions, thereby transforming topology exploration into a Markov decision process. Guided by STGL, two closely coupled layers in HRL-TAE, that is, the path construct layer and the ratio allocate layer, construct multiple subpaths for each flow and allocate traffic ratios among them. Subsequently, adaptive constraint-driven masks exclude infeasible actions during decision making, thereby guaranteeing that all constraints are satisfied. We also adopt a tailored training approach to obtain accurate gradient estimates and improve training efficiency. Simulations and real-world experiments demonstrate that HRL-TAE achieves superior performance.

PaperID: 4045

Authors:Wendi Li, Hao Wu, Han Gao, Bing Mao, Fengyuan Xu, Sheng Zhong

Affiliations: National Key Lab for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University

Title: Diverse Human Driving Vehicle Simulation in Background Traffic for Autonomous Driving Tests

Abstract:
Realistic background traffic is critical to the simulation platforms for autonomous driving (AD) testing. Given that most vehicles in reality are driven by human beings, introducing human driving (HD) vehicles to the background traffic is necessary to be able to discover more problems of the tested AD vehicle in the simulation stage. However, existing methods rely on adhoc rules or data-driven training to mimic partial human driver behaviors, which are not comprehensive and lack transparency. In this work, we design a smart human driving vehicle simulator HDSim which is empowered by cognitively inspired modeling and AI models. HDSim enables diverse, realistic, and scalable HD traffic simulation on AD testing platforms like CARLA in a non-intrusive manner. There are two novel components in HDSim. First, we introduce a driver model to guide the generation of diverse human driving styles by using different combinations of latent cognitive factors in a hierarchy. Second, we design a Perception-Mediated Behavior Influence (PMBI) mechanism to use LLM-assisted perceptual transformations to indirectly fuse driving actions with driving styles. Experiments show that HDSim traffic can help simulation platforms like CARLA to reveal 68% more failures of tested AD vehicles, and the explainability of reported accidents is also improved.

PaperID: 4046

Authors:Johan de Aguas

Affiliations: University of Oslo

Title: Interpolated Stochastic Interventions Based on Propensity Scores, Target Policies and Treatment-Specific Costs

Abstract:
We introduce two families of stochastic interventions with discrete treatments that connect causal modeling to costsensitive decision making. The interventions arise from a cost-penalized information projection of the independent product of the organic propensity scores and a reference policy, yielding closed-form Boltzmann-Gibbs couplings. The induced marginals define modified stochastic policies that interpolate smoothly, via a tilt parameter, from the organic law or from the reference law toward a product-of-experts limit when all destination costs are strictly positive. The first family recovers and extends incremental propensity score interventions, retaining identification without global positivity. For inference on the expected outcomes after these policies, we derive the efficient influence functions under a nonparametric model and construct one-step estimators. In simulations, the proposed estimators improve stability and robustness to nuisance misspecification relative to plug-in baselines. The framework can operationalize graded scientific hypotheses under realistic constraints. Because inputs are modular, analysts can sweep feasible policy spaces, prototype candidates, and align interventions with budgets and logistics before committing experimental resources.

PaperID: 4047

Authors:Xin Chen, Chunfeng Cui, Deren Han, Liqun Qi

Affiliations: School of Mathematical Sciences, Beihang University, Department of Applied Mathematics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: Parallelizable Riemannian Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers for Non-convex Pose Graph Optimization

Abstract:
Pose graph optimization (PGO) is fundamental to robot perception and navigation systems, serving as the mathematical backbone for solving simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Existing solvers suffer from polynomial growth in computational complexity with graph size, hindering realtime deployment in large-scale scenarios. In this paper, by duplicating variables and introducing equality constraints, we reformulate the problem and propose a Parallelizable Riemannian Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (PRADMM) to solve it efficiently. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods that usually exhibit polynomial time complexity growth with graph size, PRADMM enables efficient parallel computation across vertices regardless of graph size. Crucially, all subproblems admit closed-form solutions, ensuring PRADMM maintains exceptionally stable performance. Furthermore, by carefully exploiting the structures of the coefficient matrices in the constraints, we establish the global convergence of PRADMM under mild conditions, enabling larger relaxation step sizes within the interval (0,2). Extensive empirical validation on two synthetic datasets and multiple real-world 3D SLAM benchmarks confirms the superior computational performance of PRADMM.

PaperID: 4048

Authors:Maxim Divilkovskiy, Alexander Gasnikov

Affiliations: Innopolis University, Research Center of the Artificial Intelligence Institute, Russia MIPT ISP RAS

Title: Stochastic Decentralized Optimization of Non-Smooth Convex and Convex-Concave Problems over Time-Varying Networks

Abstract:
We study nonsmooth stochastic decentralized optimization problems over time-varying networks, where objective functions are distributed across nodes and network connections may intermittently appear or break. Specifically, we consider two settings: (i) stochastic non-smooth (strongly) convex optimization, and (ii) stochastic non-smooth (strongly) convex–(strongly) concave saddle point optimization. Convex problems of this type commonly arise in deep neural network training, while saddle point problems are central to machine learning tasks such as the training of generative adversarial networks (GANs). Prior works have primarily focused on the smooth setting, or time-invariant network scenarios. We extend the existing theory to the more general non-smooth and stochastic setting over time-varying networks and saddle point problems. Our analysis establishes upper bounds on both the number of stochastic oracle calls and communication rounds, matching lower bounds for both convex and saddle point optimization problems.

PaperID: 4049

Authors:Jie Lin, Lei Jiang, Zongyi Chen, Liansheng Wang

Affiliations: Xiamen University

Title: CRAF: A Clinical Reasoning-Adaptive Framework via Reinforcement Learning for Similar Case Retrieval

Abstract:
With the advancement of information retrieval (IR) technologies toward deep semantic understanding, reasoningbased methods—featuring explicit chain-of-thought generation—have demonstrated significant advantages in multi-hop and causal reasoning tasks. However, in complex clinical case retrieval scenarios, implicit reasoning cues within clinical data often hinder current models from effectively capturing deep semantic associations between queries and cases. Query rewriting and expansion techniques based on reasoning offer a promising solution to this challenge by uncovering and completing the latent clinical intent behind user queries, thereby enhancing semantic coverage and reasoning sensitivity. In this paper, we propose CRAF, a clinically adaptive reasoning framework tailored for similar case retrieval. Our method generates clinical reasoning paths and incorporates a fine-grained semantic reward mechanism, enabling efficient query rewriting through reinforcement learning. Experimental results on the PMC-Patients benchmark demonstrate that CRAF consistently delivers robust improvements across multiple retrieval tasks, achieving reasoning performance comparable to that of commercial models.

PaperID: 4050

Authors:He Li, Xiaojun Chen, Jingcheng He, Zhendong Zhao, Shuguang Yuan, Xin Zhao, Yunfei Yang

Affiliations: Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China State Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Security Defense, China School of Cyber Security

Title: ARGH-Mark: Anchor-Synchronized Watermarking with Hamming Correction for Robust and Quality-Preserving LLM Attribution

Abstract:
The proliferation of large language models has intensified demands for reliable content attribution, yet existing watermarking techniques face a fundamental trilemma: they cannot simultaneously optimize for robustness against attacks, minimal text quality degradation, and detection efficiency. To resolve this challenge, we propose ARGHMark, a novel watermarking framework that integrates three synergistic innovations: (1) Anchor-synchronized phase recovery for maintaining detection integrity under insertion/deletion attacks, (2) RG-balanced vocabulary modulation that dynamically partitions lexicons via contextual hashing to preserve generation quality, and (3) Hamming-based error correction enabling single-bit error rectification through algebraic coding. Comprehensive evaluations across question answering (ELI5), summarization (CNN/DailyMail), and text generation (C4) demonstrate state-of-the-art performance: the proposed ARGH-Mark framework achieves near-perfect match rate and bit accuracy across diverse configurations, while preserving the quality of the generated text. It significantly reduces detection latency, enabling real-time extraction, and maintains high robustness against token tampering attacks through integrated Hamming error correction, ensuring reliable attribution in adversarial settings. ARGH-Mark achieves a new Pareto frontier in the watermarking design space and advances trustworthy deployment of generative AI in alignment-critical applications.

PaperID: 4051

Authors:Yaowen Liu, Shenjia Jing, Yufei Wei, Shoumin Zhang, Jinglu Zhang, Zhen Mei, Liangliang Yue, Jiarui Wang, Peng Zhang

Affiliations: China People's Police University, East China Normal University

Title: DarkBench+: An Extended Benchmark for Evaluating Dark Patterns in Large Language Models

Abstract:
With the widespread deployment of large language models (LLMs) in humancomputer interaction, dark patterns have extended from traditional visual interfaces to conversational AI systems. While existing research has confirmed the prevalence of dark patterns in LLMs, current evaluation benchmarks face critical challenges including limited classification coverage, overlooked risks specific to reasoning models, and inadequate consideration of cross-linguistic differences. To address these limitations, we propose DarkBench+, an extended benchmark for evaluating dark patterns in LLMs. We construct an expanded taxonomy containing 10 major categories and 24 subcategories, introduce an annotation workflow combining manual and automated methods, and design 2,088 bilingual test samples in Chinese and English. This benchmark is the first to develop specialized evaluation dimensions for reasoning models and systematically evaluates dark pattern behaviors across nearly 40 mainstream LLMs. Experimental results demonstrate significant manipulation risks in reasoning models' transparency displays, while cross-linguistic evaluation analyzes AI manipulation behavior differences across different linguistic environments, promoting more ethical and responsible LLM development.

PaperID: 4052

Authors:Hoe Sung Ryu, Christian Wallraven

Affiliations: Korea University

Title: Mind the Gap: Quantifying and Aligning HumanAI Visual Attention for Accident Anticipation

Abstract:
Quantifying and understanding humanAI alignment in high-risk tasks such as traffic accident prediction is crucial for deployment of AI systems. Existing alignment studies, however, focus mostly on the static domain and neglect the importance of attentional processing. Here, we present Attention‑DADA, a dataset of accident and non-accident traffic situations that contains detailed human prediction and frame-level eye gaze annotations. Using this benchmark, we evaluate open- and closed-source, state‑of‑the‑art large vision-language-models (VLMs) in terms of their alignment in accident prediction performance and attentional processing in both zero-shot and attention-guided settings. Our results show that human prediction performance and consistency improve as the event time approaches. Similarly, human attentional patterns show dynamic updating throughout event progression. Conversely, while attention guidance improves VLM prediction performance, both performance and attentional alignment stay significantly below human levels as the event approaches, with the performance gap becoming significant 3.5 seconds (s) prior to the event. These results provide the first quantitative evidence of misalignment both in terms of performance and attentional processing during analysis of time-critical, dynamic events, highlighting the need for future improvements in this area.

PaperID: 4053

Authors:Weixiang Zhao, Haozhen Li, Yanyan Zhao, Haixiao Liu, Biye Li, Ting Liu, Bing Qin

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Du Xiaoman Financial

Title: CultureRL: Internalizing Cultural Principles in Large Language Models via Norm-Driven Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across culturally diverse regions, ensuring that their responses align with users’ cultural norms has become a critical challenge. Existing approaches to cultural alignment primarily rely on prompting or dataaugmentation-based supervised finetuning, which teach models to follow norms indirectly through example-based supervision. However, these methods are difficult to scale and often fail to generalize, particularly in low-resource cultural settings. In this work, we propose CultureRL, a culture-norm-driven reinforcement learning framework that directly encodes cultural principles into model behavior. Rather than relying on output imitation, CultureRL provides normative feedback during training, enabling the model to internalize high-level cultural rules. It consists of two key components: (1) Norm Pool Construction (NPC), which clusters data from the World Values Survey into abstract cultural concepts to form a structured and retrievable norm pool; and (2) Norm Cluster-based Reward Mechanism (NCRM), which retrieves the relevant norm for each input and uses an external reward model to assess conformity, guiding model updates through cultural alignment. We evaluate CultureRL in both one-for-one (per-culture) and one-for-all (multi-culture) settings across nine cultures and three benchmarks. Results show that CultureRL consistently outperforms strong baselines, especially in terms of cultural consistency and adaptability.

PaperID: 4054

Authors:Sumana Basu, Flemming Kondrup, Adriana Romero-Soriano, Doina Precup

Affiliations: McGill University

Title: Bootstrapping Personalized Insulin Therapy via Model-Based Reinforcement Learning: An In Silico Study

Abstract:
Personalized insulin therapy for individuals with Type 1 Diabetes via closed‑loop artificial pancreas systems requires rapid adaptation of dosing strategies to each patient's unique insulin response. However, learning patient‑specific policies from scratch demands extensive exploration, which is often impractical. In this work, we study a framework that integrates insulinresponse-informed transfer learning with model-based reinforcement learning for insulin dosing. We first train an LSTM‑based insulin responsiveness predictor on virtual patients, using their glucose, insulin, and meal history to forecast future glucose levels. Analysis of insulin responsiveness of in-silico patients uncovers natural insulin‑response groups characterized by similar sensitivity and dynamics profiles. For a new patient, we identify a representative model from their response group and use it to generate synthetic trajectories. These trajectories are integrated into an enhanced H-step Deep Dyna-Q algorithm, enabling accelerated policy optimization through model-based planning. The dynamics model trained entirely in simulation achieves 91.31% accuracy in predicting blood glucose ranges on the Ohio Type 1 Diabetes dataset, indicating strong zero-shot generalization. Additionally, we find that bootstrapping a new patient with a physiologically-matched reference model accelerates convergence of effective dosing policies across in-silico cohorts of children, adolescents, and adults. These findings suggest that leveraging response-group-specific synthetic experience can expedite personalized insulin therapy, offering a promising pathway towards clinical validation.

PaperID: 4055

Authors:Kuai Dai, Hui Su, Chengxing Zhai, Huiwei Lin, Mingliang Bai

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: SatSolarCast: A Flexible Framework for Multimodal Solar Irradiance Forecasting via Memory-Alignment Learning

Abstract:
Solar irradiance forecast aims to accurately estimate future solar irradiance based on historical data, playing a vital role in energy production and grid management. While groundbased station measurements provide local accuracy, geostationary satellites offer much broader environmental contexts, such as cloud coverage, which serves as a key factor for accurate forecasting. However, effectively integrating these multimodal observations remains a challenge, with existing methods suffering from inflexibility and high computational costs. To address this problem, we propose SatSolarCast, a flexible and efficient multimodal framework that introduces a memory alignment learning mechanism to integrate geostationary satellite data and historical irradiance observations. By preserving and recalling long-term spatiotemporal patterns from a specialized satellite memory bank, SatSolarCast enables effective guidance for both short- and long-term prediction. Additionally, SatSolarCast offers plug-and-play compatibility and can be incorporated into various forecasting architectures. Extensive experiments across four ground stations demonstrate that SatSolarCast substantially improves forecasting performance compared to prior methods with much lower computational costs.

PaperID: 4056

Authors:Shuaibo Li, Laixin Zhang, Wei Ma, Jianwei Guo, Shibiao Xu, Zhijie Qiu, Hongbin Zha

Affiliations: College of Computer Science, Beijing University of Technology, School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing Normal University, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Anqing Normal University School of IST, Peking University

Title: RealNet: Efficient and Unsupervised Detection of AI-Generated Images via Real-Only Representation Learning

Abstract:
Detecting AIgenerated images remains a persistent challenge, as existing detectors often struggle to generalize to forgeries produced by previously unseen generative models. This generalization gap mainly stems from entanglement with semantic content and overfitting to model-specific artifacts. Moreover, many state-of-the-art methods rely on large pre-trained backbones or computationally intensive pipelines, which limit their applicability in real-world, resource-constrained environments. We propose RealNet, a lightweight and unsupervised framework that constructs a disentangled, forgery-aware representation space using only real images. RealNet first extracts semantic-agnostic representations through a dual adversarial denoising mechanism, producing compact features with low intra-class variance. These representations are then perturbed in feature space to generate pseudo-negative samples, which are combined with the original real features to train a lightweight discriminator, enabling robust detection without any dependence on synthetic images during training. Comprehensive evaluations across GAN, diffusion, and emerging VAR-based paradigms demonstrate that RealNet achieves superior cross-model generalization and robustness. RealNet surpasses previous state-of-the-art approaches by 4.51% in accuracy and 3.93% in average precision, while maintaining significantly lower computational cost. Furthermore, we introduce a medically relevant synthetic image dataset and show RealNet remains effective under severe distribution shifts, highlighting its potential for deployment in high-stakes real-world scenarios. Together, these advantages position RealNet as a practical, scalable and socially impactful solution for robust AI-generated image detection.

PaperID: 4057

Authors:Jianrong Lu, Junwei Liu, Xingyun Zheng, Minghui Yang, Jian Wang, Ping Wang, Yechao Zhang

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Peking University, Ant Group, Nanyang Technological University

Title: MHB: Medical Hallucination Benchmark for Large Language Models in Complex Clinical Tasks

Abstract:
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into clinical applications presents transformative potential but is undermined by the critical risk of hallucination, the generation of plausible but factually incorrect information. Such failures pose a direct threat to patient safety and the integrity of clinical decisionmaking. To address this challenge, we introduce MHB, a novel and comprehensive benchmark framework designed to evaluate LLM reliability in two complex, high-stakes clinical contexts: multi-turn medical dialogues and clinical case report analysis. The core of our contribution is a systematic methodology for generating adversarial test cases by injecting ``hallucination traps" into realistic medical data, guided by a fine-grained taxonomy of clinical errors. MHB, comprising 4,695 samples and 20,288 evaluation rubrics, underwent a rigorous, two-stage validation by a panel of 60 licensed physicians from top-tier hospitals, ensuring high clinical realism and consistency. This comprehensive assessment of leading LLMs revealed significant, clinically relevant shortcomings across the board. Even the best-performing model, Claude-4-Sonnet, exhibited a hallucination rate of 29.1%, with some open-source models exceeding 57.0%. All models struggled with specific traps, like fabricated medical data or non-existent guidelines, highlighting prevalent systemic weaknesses.

PaperID: 4058

Authors:Dahai Yu, Rongchao Xu, Dingyi Zhuang, Yuheng Bu, Shenhao Wang, Guang Wang

Affiliations: Florida State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California, Santa Barbara, University of Florida

Title: TrustEnergy: A Unified Framework for Accurate and Reliable User-level Energy Usage Prediction

Abstract:
Energy usage prediction is important for various realworld applications, including grid management, infrastructure planning, and disaster response. Although a plethora of deep learning approaches have been proposed to perform this task, most of them either overlook the essential spatial correlations across households or fail to scale to individualized prediction, making them less effective for accurate fine-grained user-level prediction. In addition, due to the dynamic and uncertain nature of energy usage caused by various factors such as extreme weather events, quantifying uncertainty for reliable prediction is also significant, but it has not been fully explored in existing work. In this paper, we propose a unified framework called TrustEnergy for accurate and reliable user-level energy usage prediction. There are two key technical components in TrustEnergy, (i) a Hierarchical Spatiotemporal Representation module to efficiently capture both macro and micro energy usage patterns with a novel memory-augmented spatiotemporal graph neural network, and (ii) an innovative Sequential Conformalized Quantile Regression module to dynamically adjust uncertainty bounds to ensure valid prediction intervals over time, without making strong assumptions about the underlying data distribution. We implement and evaluate our TrustEnergy framework by working with an electricity provider in Florida, and the results show our TrustEnergy can achieve a 5.4% increase in prediction accuracy and 5.7% improvement in uncertainty quantification compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperID: 4059

Authors:Zhongjie Ba, Liang Yi, Peng Cheng, Qingcao Li, Qinglong Wang, Li Lu

Affiliations: The State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University, School of Cyber Science and Engineering

Title: Beyond Content: A Comprehensive Speech Toxicity Dataset and Detection Framework Incorporating Paralinguistic Cues

Abstract:
Toxic speech detection has become a crucial challenge in maintaining safe online communication environments. However, existing approaches to toxic speech detection often neglect the contribution of paralinguistic cues, such as emotion, intonation, and speech rate, which are key to detecting speech toxicity. Moreover, current toxic speech datasets are predominantly textbased, limiting the development of models that can capture paralinguistic cues. To address these challenges, we present ToxiAlert-Bench, a large-scale audio dataset comprising over 30,000 audio clips annotated with seven major toxic categories and twenty fine-grained toxic labels. Uniquely, our dataset annotates toxicity sources—distinguishing between textual content and paralinguistic origins—for comprehensive toxic speech analysis. Furthermore, we propose a dual-head neural network with a multi-stage training strategy tailored for toxic speech detection. This architecture features two task-specific classification headers: one for identifying the source of sensitivity (textual or paralinguistic), and the other for categorizing the specific toxic type. The training process involves independent head training followed by joint fine-tuning to reduce task interference. To mitigate data class imbalance, we incorporate class-balanced sampling and weighted loss functions. Our experimental results show that leveraging paralinguistic features significantly improves detection performance. Our method consistently outperforms existing baselines across multiple evaluation metrics, with a 21.1% relative improvement in Macro-F1 score and a 13.0% relative gain in accuracy over the strongest baseline, highlighting its enhanced effectiveness and practical applicability.

PaperID: 4060

Authors:Zenan Fu, Dongzhou Cheng, Lei Zhang, Wenbo Huang, Zhenghao Chen, Hao Wu

Affiliations: Nanjing Normal University, Shanghai Innovation Institute, Southeast University Institute of Science Tokyo, University of Newcastle, Yunnan University

Title: DeepSenseMoE: Harnessing Power of Time Series Foundation Models for Few-Shot Human Activity Recognition

Abstract:
Recent advances in Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have fundamentally revolutionized general time series analysis across domains like finance, retail, weather, and power. However, how to unlock the hidden capacity of generalpurpose TSFMs for wearable activity recognition still remains largely unexplored, given severe sensor annotation scarcity and highly heterogeneous sensor data. To address these challenges, we propose DeepSenseMoE—a novel multi-scale convolution-based Mixture of Experts (MoE) module for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of general-purpose TSFMs to sensor-based activity recognition. DeepSenseMoE integrates three key innovations: (1) Multi-scale convolutional experts with different filter sizes responsible for capturing varying sensor contexts; (2) Shared-expert isolation mechanism compressing common activity knowledge into a single shared expert while reducing redundancy among routed experts; and (3) Hierarchical supervised contrastive alignment guiding experts to further learn discriminative activity features. Extensive experiments on three challenging HAR benchmarks demonstrate DeepSenseMoE's superiority, achieving up to 9.5% accuracy gains over state-of-the-art under few-shot and full-supervised settings, with only <1% additional trainable parameters. We hope that this work may establish a solid foundation to accelerate development and deployment of powerful TSFMs in data-scarce wearable activity recognition tasks while reducing the reliance on labeled sensor data.

PaperID: 4061

Authors:Zhiqiang Hao, Chuanyi Li, Ye Fan, Jun Cai, Xiao Fu, Shangqi Wang, Hao Shen, Jiao Yin, Jidong Ge, Bin Luo, Vincent Ng

Affiliations: Nanjing University, China Mobile Communications Group Jiangsu Co., University of Texas at Dallas

Title: CHASE: Contextual History for Adaptive and Simple Exploitation in Large Language Model Jailbreaking

Abstract:
We propose Contextual History for Adaptive and Simple Exploitation (CHASE), a novel multiturn method for Large Language Model (LLM) jailbreaking. Rather than directly attack an LLM that may be difficult to jailbreak, CHASE first collects jailbroken histories from an easy-to-jailbreak LLM and then transfers them to the target LLM. Through this history transfer process, CHASE misleads the target LLM into thinking that it is responsible for producing the jailbroken histories and increases the chances of successful jailbreaking by prompting it to continue the conversation. Extensive evaluations on mainstream LLMs show that CHASE consistently achieves higher attack success rates and demands fewer computational resources compared to existing methods.

PaperID: 4062

Authors:Shunfan Li, Jiangkai Long, Xin Zou, Chang Tang, Yuanyuan Liu, Xiao He, Xuesong Yan

Affiliations: China University of Geoscience, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: PLA-MGRA: Multi-Granularity and Relation-Aware Learning for Efficient and Generalizable Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction

Abstract:
ProteinLigand Affinity (PLA) prediction quantifies the interaction strength to guide rational drug design. Existing approaches typically analyze interaction at a single granularity and overlook tightly coupled relationships between protein and ligand in both structure and functionality, consequently yielding suboptimal representations, leading to significant performance drops in real-world scenarios. To address this problem, we propose PLA-MGRA, a minimalist and effective PLA prediction framework. Specifically, PLA-MGRA captures both fine-grained atomic details and coarse grained functional semantics within the 3D structure of protein–ligand complexes, through multi-granularity learning. To further parse the coupled protein–ligand relationships, we design relation-aware learning to enhance the binding nature of representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple protein–ligand affinity prediction benchmarks, while also offering generalizability and interpretability.

PaperID: 4063

Authors:Wayne Lu, Yiheng Li

Affiliations: Independent Researcher, University of International Business and Economics

Title: From Blind Transfer to Wise Selection: Prototype-Driven Neighbor-Domain Adaptation for Fake News Detection

Abstract:
Multimodal fake news detection across different domains is hampered by the critical challenge of negative transfer, which arises from the indiscriminate fusion of knowledge from all available source domains. Existing methods attempt to learn domaininvariant features or leverage external knowledge but often aggregate information from all domains equally. However, these approaches largely ignore the asymmetric relationships between domains, leading to performance degradation when irrelevant or conflicting knowledge is introduced. To address this, we propose a novel PANDA (Prototype-driven Asymmetric Neighbor-Domain Adaptation) framework that dynamically selects and integrates knowledge from only the most beneficial domains. Initially, PANDA employs a Domain-aware Modal Prompt Generation (DMPG) module to learn transferable knowledge representations for each domain. We then introduce a novel Prototype-based Asymmetric Distance (PAD) to quantify directional domain transferability, which guides a Gumbel-based Neighbor Selector (GNS) to identify the most relevant neighbor domains. Subsequently, a Domain-Collaborative Attention (DCA) module adaptively fuses the selected knowledge to enhance the target domain's representation. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate PANDA's superiority, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines with an F1-score improvement of 1.5% on the Weibo-21 dataset.

PaperID: 4064

Authors:Xiaohan Qin, Chao Wang, Zhengyang Zhou, Linjiang Chen, Wenjie Du, Yang Wang

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China

Title: MSAnchor: De Novo Molecular Generation from Mass Spectrometry Data with Anchor-Extended Molecular Scaffolds

Abstract:
Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) is a critical tool for identifying molecular structures. By efficiently separating molecular fragments based on their massto-charge (m/z) ratios, it facilitates molecular generation and subsequent scientific discoveries. However, de novo molecular generation from MS/MS spectra remains fundamentally constrained by two paramount challenges: the vast chemical space requires effective structural constraints, and the absence of fine-grained substructural generation weakens the correspondences between spectral features and molecular structures. In this work, we propose MSAnchor, a novel two-stage framework for MS/MS-based molecular structure generation. We mitigate the search space challenge through the introduction of Anchor-Extended Molecular Scaffold (AEMS) representation that explicitly encodes side-chain anchoring points, thereby dramatically reducing combinatorial complexity. Leveraging the explicit attachment sites provided by AEMS, we develop anchor-specific priors that establish effective alignments between spectral features and molecular substructures. This fine-grained substructural correspondence is further enhanced by a modified Conditional Information Bottleneck (CIB) module that extracts the most informative spectral components in a structure-aware manner. These innovations enable MSAnchor to generate molecular structures that closely reflect spectral characteristics while constraining combinatorial complexity. Extensive experiments on the CANOPUS and MassSpecGym datasets demonstrate that MSAnchor achieves state-of-the-art performance in molecular structure prediction from MS/MS spectra, with performance improvements that are particularly more pronounced for molecules with higher complexity.

PaperID: 4065

Authors:Chunli Song, Jie Liu, Peiyang Wang, Ying Huang, Guixuan Zhang, Zhi Zeng, Shuwu Zhang

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: Dual-Branch Asymmetric Discrepancy Learning Based on Fake Image Pattern-Coexistence for AI-Generated Image Detection

Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of generative models, highfidelity AI-generated images have become increasingly indistinguishable from real images, posing significant challenges to traditional detection methods that rely on explicit artifacts or uniform feature learning. We hypothesize that detection ambiguity originates from pattern coexistence: synthetic images simultaneously embed (a) authentic patterns inherited from real-image distributions and (b) synthetic patterns induced by generative architectures, whereas real images maintain consistent patterns. We validate this hypothesis through SHAP-based quantitative analysis, demonstrating that synthetic images inherently exhibit a dual distribution—simultaneously containing authentic patterns and synthetic traces—while real images show a unimodal distribution. Building on this insight, this paper proposes a Dual-Branch Asymmetric Discrepancy Learning (DADL) framework. The DADL leverages multi-scale feature extraction and Asymmetric Feature Discrepancy Loss to capture and amplify such pattern differences across multiple scales. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks (AIGCDetectBenchmark, GenImage, and Chameleon) show that DADL achieves state-of-the-art performance, with particular strengths in detecting high-fidelity synthetic images from diffusion models (e.g., Midjourney, SDv1.4, SDv1.5) and enhancing generalization across diverse generative paradigms. This study not only offers an effective approach for AIGI detection but also sheds light on the intrinsic properties of synthetic images, providing a new perspective for advancing AIGI forensics.

PaperID: 4066

Authors:Xiaohua Wu, Lin Li, Kaize Shi, Xiaohui Tao, Jianwei Zhang, Yuefeng Li

Affiliations: Wuhan University of Technology, Queensland University of Technology, University of Southern Queensland, Iwate University

Title: Exploring Selective Avoidance for Online User Behavior Analysis: A Forest of Thought Explanation

Abstract:
The response behaviors observed in online usergenerated content (UGC) frequently demonstrate non-linear characteristics, such as conditional branching and selective avoidance. These patterns present additional challenges for ensuring the trustworthiness of Large Language Model (LLMs) reasoning, particularly as their unidirectional, left-to-right inference mechanisms may not adequately capture such complex reasoning dynamics. To address this, we propose a Forest of Thought Explanation (FoTE), a novel prompting that models the selective avoidance in UGC while ensuring explanation consensus through reasoning paths across all decision sub-trees. FoTE firstly generates various reasoning paths through an adaptive CoT prompting. Each generated thought is subsequently evaluated through cooperative game theory to quantify its fair influence. The thoughts with the top-k contribution scores are preserved and randomly sampled to emulate selective avoidance for the next reasoning iteration. Through extensive evaluations across three open-source LLMs and two established social science problems (spanning four benchmark datasets), FoTE demonstrates superior success rates compared to competing prompting strategies. Notably, its performance gains increase with the strength of selective avoidance in social problems. The trustworthiness of our FoTE is enhanced by the incorporation of (1) a solid theoretical foundation and (2) a transparent reasoning path that converges toward consensus.

PaperID: 4067

Authors:Chengsheng Yuan, Zhaonan Ji, Qi Cui, Zhili Zhou, Xinting Li, Zhihua Xia

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Guangzhou University, National University of Defense Technology, Jinan University

Title: Towards Provably Secure and Highly Robust Generative Image Steganography Leveraging Latent Diffusion Model

Abstract:
Generative image steganography has attracted significant attention for its exceptional resistance to steganalysis. However, current generative steganography methods still face limitations in terms of the lack of provable security guarantees under statistical analysis and vulnerability to realworld, unforeseen channel attacks. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel generative image steganography framework that leverages the Latent Diffusion Model (LDM). Notably, we have uncover a consistent trend: regardless of whether an image has undergone attacks such as compression or noise addition, the sign pattern of values in its latent vector encoded by the LDM remains largely invariant. Capitalizing on this trend, we have devised an adaptive distribution-preserving mapping (ADPM) mechanism, capable of converting a secret message into a latent vector that follows standard normal distribution in an adjustable way. Since both the secret latent vector and the latent vector randomly generated during regular image generation follow the same distribution, satisfying the optimal input conditions for the diffusion model, the proposed method can achieve provable security. Experimental results demonstrate the outstanding performance of our approach in terms of robustness, security, and extraction accuracy.

PaperID: 4068

Authors:Hao Wang, Jiayu Ye, Qingxiang Wang

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Computing Power Network and Information Security, Ministry of Education, Shandong Computer Science Center (National Supercomputer Center in Jinan), Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences), China Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Industrial Network and Information System Security, Shandong Fundamental Research Center for Computer Science, School of Computer Science, Guangdong University of Technology

Title: Dep-MAP: A Multi-level Alignment Framework with Semantic Prototypes for Video-based Automatic Depression Assessment

Abstract:
Spatiotemporal analysis of facial behavior is a crucial method for evaluating the mental state of depression patients. However, in practice, depressed patients often display facial behaviors similar to healthy individuals due to masking tendencies. Additionally, facial expressions among depressed patients are also different, increasing the difficulty of assessment. To address this, we propose a videobased automatic depression assessment model Dep-MAP for complex facial behaviors of depression patients. Dep-MAP adopts a dual-branch architecture to extract visual features of facial behavior and capture corresponding emotional semantic features. Specifically, the extracted deep semantic features are clustered, resulting in semantically distinct prototype sets, where each severity group learns a set of discriminative facial behavior prototype representations, to suppress inter-class semantic confusion. Subsequently, we propose a semantic prototype-supervised contrastive learning method, which aligns latent semantics between shallow and deep features, realizing emotional semantic guidance and self-knowledge distillation for the visual feature branch, effectively suppressing intra-class difference. Then, we integrate key depression cues across multiple spatiotemporal scales via a multi-scale weighted fusion strategy, achieving automatic depression assessment. Experimental results demonstrate that Dep-MAP effectively identifies potential key frames in temporal sequences, and aggregates key frame representations with semantic consistency, achieving significantly superior state-of-the-art results on the AVEC2013 and AVEC2014 public datasets.

PaperID: 4069

Authors:Baiqiang Wu, Yang Li

Affiliations: Beihang University

Title: DHCM-CACL: Dynamic Hierarchical Cross-modal Mamba with Confidence-Adaptive Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Emotion Recognition

Abstract:
Multimodal emotion recognition plays a crucial role in enhancing the intelligence of humancomputer interaction and emotional understanding. However, conventional approaches face challenges such as scarcity of annotated data, significant modality heterogeneity, and temporal misalignment. To address these issues, we propose DHCM-CACL, a novel self-supervised emotion recognition framework integrating EEG and facial expressions. During the pre-training phase, we propose a Dynamic Hierarchical Cross-modal Mamba module (DHCM), which models long-term dependencies through dynamic state matrices, incorporates forgetting gates for noise suppression, and constructs a hierarchical cross-modal interaction structure, effectively achieving cross-modal temporal alignment and mitigating modality heterogeneity. Subsequently, we propose a Confidence-Adaptive Contrastive Learning module (CACL) that dynamically adjusts sample weights using gated confidence signals derived from DHCM to compute loss, prioritizing reliable samples while suppressing noisy instances through adaptive weighting, thereby enhancing representation reliability and generalization in data-scarce scenarios. During the fine-tuning phase, we integrate a cross-modal attention gating mechanism to reinforce temporal associations and adopt an evidence-aware joint optimization objective, providing probabilistic credibility outputs for emotion prediction. Experimental results on the DEAP and MAHNOB-HCI datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in emotion classification under both subject-dependent and subject-independent settings.

PaperID: 4070

Authors:Zhuangzhuang Chen, Qiangyu Chen, Chubin Ou, Xiaomeng Li

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen University, Southern Medical University

Title: CaPro: Curvilinear-aware Prompt Learning with Single Unlabeled Image for Cost-effective Curvilinear Structure Segmentation

Abstract:
Curvilinear structure segmentation (CSS) plays a vital role in industrial applications, including medical imaging and structural health monitoring. Recently, the strong capacity of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has inspired its downstream application in CSS tasks. To adapt SAM to CSS tasks, previous methods heavily rely on a certain number of samples and costly pixellevel annotation, which are hard to access for a new scenario. Considering this, the goal of our work is to adapt SAM in a very cost-effective setting where only a single unlabeled image is given. This is far more challenging than the typical supervised, unsupervised, or self-supervised learning manner that needs a large number of training samples. To tackle this problem, we propose a finetuning-free SAM for curvilinear structure segmentation, called curvilinear-aware prompt learning (CaPro), which aims to automatically learn visual prompts via a single unlabeled image. In the first stage, we generate extensive curvilinear structures and oriented sub-curvilinear box annotations. To increase the realism of generated curvilinear structures, we adapt these structures into real image domains via the Fourier Transform using a single real-world unlabeled image. Now, these adapted images can be used to train our oriented sub-curvilinear detector. In the second stage, we propose the curvilinear-aware discrete representation matching to filter those unreliable detection results. Afterward, these reliable detection results can be converted into informative prompts, contributing to the cost-effective SAM adaptation to CSS tasks. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CaPro on medical image and crack segmentation tasks.

PaperID: 4071

Authors:Wencan Cheng, Gim Hee Lee

Affiliations: National University of Singapore

Title: HandMCM: Multi-modal Point Cloud-based Correspondence State Space Model for 3D Hand Pose Estimation

Abstract:
3D hand pose estimation that involves accurate estimation of 3D human hand keypoint locations is crucial for many humancomputer interaction applications such as augmented reality. However, this task poses significant challenges due to self-occlusion of the hands and occlusions caused by interactions with objects. In this paper, we propose HandMCM to address these challenges. Our HandMCM is a novel method based on the powerful state space model (Mamba). By incorporating modules for local information injection/filtering and correspondence modeling, the proposed correspondence Mamba effectively learns the highly dynamic kinematic topology of keypoints across various occlusion scenarios. Moreover, by integrating multi-modal image features, we enhance the robustness and representational capacity of the input, leading to more accurate hand pose estimation. Empirical evaluations on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, particularly in challenging scenarios involving severe occlusions. These results highlight the potential of our approach to advance the accuracy and reliability of 3D hand pose estimation in practical applications.

PaperID: 4072

Authors:Honghao Dai, Yuanfeng Zhou, Guangshun Wei, Zhihao Li, Wenping Wang

Affiliations: Shandong University, Texas A&M University - College Station

Title: DentalGS: Pose-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting from Five Intraoral Images for Novel View Synthesis

Abstract:
Orthodontic treatment needs regular tooth alignment checks, but current methods depend on clinic visits, limiting remote care. With the emergence of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), realistic novel views can be synthesized, making it possible for clinicians to remotely monitor orthodontic conditions. However, using only five intraoral images with unknown camera poses and dynamic lighting presents major challenges in dental applications. To address these challenges, we propose DentalGS, an enhanced 3DGS framework capable of synthesizing novel intraoral views from five postorthodontic intraoral images and pre-orthodontic intraoral scan (IOS) data as prior, without camera poses. Our method initializes a Gaussian point cloud labeled with ISO-FDI tooth classes based on the patient’s pre-orthodontic IOS data, then estimates camera poses through iterative optimization. We introduce a Progressive Pair Generation Strategy as a data augmentation method that generates damage–repair image pairs to train a RepairNet, aiming to restore degraded geometry and appearance caused by the limited number of intraoral images. Additionally, we introduce a Lighting-Aware 3DGS inspired by physical reflectance properties to mitigate the effects of dynamic lighting conditions. Experimental results show that our method produces high-quality novel views while preserving geometric structure even under extreme viewpoints, offering an efficient and reliable solution for 3D tooth visualization in remote orthodontic monitoring.

PaperID: 4073

Authors:Yang Deng, Zhanke Wang, Jiahao Wu, Jie Liang, Jingui Ma, Yang Hu, Ronggang Wang

Affiliations: Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Ultra High Definition Immersive Media Technology, Shenzhen Graduate School, Peking University

Title: Pano-GS: Perception-Aware Gaussian Optimization with Gradient Consistency and Multi-Criteria Densification for High-Quality Rendering

Abstract:
Reconstructing 3D scenes from multiview image sequences remains a significant challenge in practical applications. While recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting have enabled high-quality rendering, existing methods rely heavily on pixel-level L1 loss, which misaligns with human perception, leading to a lack of high-frequency details and the emergence of artifacts. Additionally, the position gradient-based densification strategy often results in under-densified Gaussian primitives, thereby degrading rendering quality. To address these challenges, we propose Pano-GS, a perception-aware Gaussian optimization framework. Specifically, we introduce a gradient consistency-constrained loss to capture high-frequency details, mitigating the inherent shortcomings of traditional L1 loss and enhancing reconstruction fidelity. In addition, we use a multi-criteria densification strategy to reduce the sole reliance on average position gradients. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Pano-GS achieves state-of-the-art performance, confirming its effectiveness and robust generalization across diverse real-world scenes.

PaperID: 4074

Authors:Songcheng Du, Yang Zou, Jiaxin Li, Mingxuan Liu, Ying Li, Changjing Shang, Qiang Shen

Affiliations: Northwest Polytechnical University, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Aberystwyth University

Title: Pansharpening for Thin-Cloud Contaminated Remote Sensing Images: A Unified Framework and Benchmark Dataset

Abstract:
Pansharpening under thin cloudy conditions is a practically significant yet rarely addressed task, challenged by simultaneous spatial resolution degradation and cloudinduced spectral distortions. Existing methods often address cloud removal and pansharpening sequentially, leading to cumulative errors and suboptimal performance due to the lack of joint degradation modeling. To address these challenges, we propose a Unified Pansharpening Model with Thin Cloud Removal (Pan-TCR), an end-to-end framework that integrates physical priors. Motivated by theoretical analysis in the frequency domain, we design a frequency-decoupled restoration (FDR) block that disentangles the restoration of multispectral image (MSI) features into amplitude and phase components, each guided by complementary degradation-robust prompts: the near-infrared (NIR) band amplitude for cloud-resilient restoration, and the panchromatic (PAN) phase for high-resolution structural enhancement. To ensure coherence between the two components, we further introduce an interactive inter-frequency consistency (IFC) module, enabling cross-modal refinement that enforces consistency and robustness across frequency cues. Furthermore, we introduce the first real-world thin-cloud contaminated pansharpening dataset (PanTCR-GF2), comprising paired clean and cloudy PAN-MSI images, to enable robust benchmarking under realistic conditions. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate the superiority and robustness of Pan-TCR, establishing a new benchmark for pansharpening under realistic atmospheric degradations.

PaperID: 4075

Authors:Jinfang Gan, Wenzheng Zeng, Yang Xiao, Xintao Zhang, Chaoyang Zheng, Ran Zhao, Ran Wang, Min Du, Zhiguo Cao

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: DeFB: Decomposed Feature Learning for Real-Time Multi-Person Eyeblink Detection in Untrimmed In-the-Wild Videos

Abstract:
Multiperson eyeblink detection in untrimmed in-the-wild videos is a recently emerged and challenging task. Due to its significant spatio-temporal fine-grained characteristics compared to general actions, we empirically find that general action detectors, though effective in general domains, struggle with this task (i.e., Blink-AP < 2%). Specialized eyeblink detection methods alleviate it through fine-grained spatio-temporal operations. SOTA method proposes a unified model combining instance-aware face localization and eyeblink detection through joint multi-task learning and feature sharing. While effective, it exhibits two critical limitations that may contribute to its unsatisfactory performance (i.e., Blink-AP=10.11%): (1) Face localization and eyeblink detection require distinct spatio-temporal feature granularities, making joint modeling in a unified feature space suboptimal. (2) Eyeblink task training could be largely affected by unstable face-eye feature learning under the joint training paradigm. To address this, we propose DeFB, a decomposed feature learning paradigm with favorable effectiveness and efficiency: (1) We model faces and eyes in granularity-specific feature spaces, which enhances fine-grained perception while reducing computational costs compared to a unified feature space. (2) To mitigate face-eye feature learning instability, we adopt an asynchronous learning mechanism where eye feature learning refines well-trained coarse face features, with shared queries acting as a bridge between stages to retain the efficient feature sharing of existing unified models. Compared with SOTA method, DeFB doubles the performance (Blink-AP: 24.65% v.s. 10.11%) while boosting efficiency by nearly 35%. DeFB can also be integrated as a plug-in to substantially augment the eyeblink detection capabilities of general action detectors.

PaperID: 4076

Authors:Lihong Huang, Sheng-hua Zhong, Zhi Zhang, Yan Liu

Affiliations: Shenzhen University, College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Department of Computing, Hong Kong

Title: From Pixels to Logic: A Perception-Reasoning Decomposition Framework for Open-World Referring Expression Comprehension

Abstract:
Recent advances in Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) have been largely driven by supervised learning on curated datasets, where each expression is assumed to refer to exactly one known object. However, such assumptions rarely hold in realworld scenarios, where expressions can refer to multiple objects, fail to refer to any, or involve novel categories and complex semantics. These challenges define the task of open-world REC, which demands robust generalization and structured reasoning beyond the scope of traditional REC methods. In this work, we introduce a novel, training-free framework that decouples visual perception from linguistic reasoning to address open-world REC. Our method first transforms the visual scene into a rich textual representation using an open-vocabulary multimodal perception module. It then employs a reasoning language model to interpret the referring expression and perform explicit logical inference over the perceived scene, enabling transparent decision-making and strong generalization in open-world scenarios. Experiments on three standard REC benchmarks as well as two more challenging ones, gRefCOCO and D³, demonstrate that our framework achieves highly competitive zero-shot performance, often surpassing supervised baselines.

PaperID: 4077

Authors:Sunbeom Jeong, Sehwan Kim, Hyeonggeun Han, Hyungjun Joo, Sangwoo Hong, Jungwoo Lee

Affiliations: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Seoul National University, Samsung Electronics, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Konkuk University

Title: An Adaptive Sampling Framework for Diffusion-based Dataset Distillation with High Fidelity and Diversity

Abstract:
Dataset distillation (DD) aims to generate a compact synthetic dataset that enables efficient training of neural networks while maintaining performance comparable to that achieved with the original dataset. However, existing methods often suffer from two main limitations. They either rely on computationally intensive iterative optimization procedures or depend heavily on architecturespecific designs. These issues limit their practicality for large-scale datasets and hinder generalization across different model architectures. To overcome these challenges, recent research has explored the use of diffusion models as an architecture-agnostic approach to dataset distillation, offering improved scalability and generalization for large-scale datasets across diverse model architectures. While diffusion-based dataset distillation methods have shown considerable potential, several challenges remain. Notably, certain approaches exhibit a distributional mismatch between the pre-trained diffusion model and the target dataset, which can adversely affect the fidelity and representativeness of the generated samples. Others require substantial fine-tuning to achieve high fidelity, which negates the benefits of architectural flexibility. In this work, we propose a new diffusion-based dataset distillation framework that effectively preserves the characteristics of the original dataset without requiring any fine-tuning. Our method employs adaptive sampling and repulsion regularization to enhance both the fidelity and diversity of generated samples. As a result, the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art distillation methods across a wide range of datasets and model architectures.

PaperID: 4078

Authors:Yuzhe Ji, Haotian Wang, Yijie Chen, Xiang Cheng, Liuqing Yang, Xinhu Zheng

Affiliations: Peking University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: Towards Robust Event-Based Depth Estimation: Bridging Synthetic and Real Domains with Motion Adaptation

Abstract:
Event cameras provide microsecond latency and high dynamic range, making them ideal for 3D perception tasks in traffic scenes with challenging lighting conditions. Yet existing methods often struggle to generalize to outof-domain environments due to the limited availability of diverse training data. While synthetic data offers an easily accessible alternative, it introduces a significant sim-to-real gap, particularly in motion patterns. We tackle this challenge by introducing Motion-Adaptation Mamba (MA-Mamba), a dual-track framework that advances both architecture and data augmentation. At the architectural level, we introduce a lightweight Spatio-Temporal Association module that captures motion-induced appearance variations at arbitrary scales, and an Adaptive Memory Balancing module, built on the Mamba state-space framework, that adaptively filters memory updates to maintain stable scene context under diverse dynamics. At the data level, we design event-oriented augmentations that simulate varied motion patterns and apply priority-based masked sequence modeling to strengthen long-range spatio-temporal reasoning. Trained solely on synthetic data, MA-Mamba delivers substantial zero-shot gains on multiple real-world benchmarks, demonstrating strong robustness and generalizability.

PaperID: 4079

Authors:Yiming Jiang, Wenfeng Song, Shuai Li, Aimin Hao

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Beihang University, Computer School, Beijing Information Science and Technology University, China Zhongguancun Laboratory, China Research Unit of Virtual Human and Virtual Surgery Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences

Title: DECON: Reconstruction of Clothed-Geometric Multiple Humans from a Single Image via Geometry-Guided Decoupling

Abstract:
3D multihuman reconstruction from single images holds significant potential for advancing AR/VR applications. While remarkable progress has been made in single-human reconstruction, existing methods face challenges when reconstructing multiple humans. These challenges include: (1) severe inter-occlusion that disrupts individual body structures, and (2) the absence of physically plausible relative positioning among subjects. We present DECON, a novel DEcouple-and-reCONstruct framework that systematically addresses these limitations through two technical innovations: (1) a decouple-and-reconstruct framework with multi-view synthesis. It separates individuals and reconstructs detailed 3D bodies from a single image. (2) a Perspective-Aware Position Optimization (PAPO) approach. It ensures realistic positioning by fixing overlaps and gaps between subjects. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method's capability to reconstruct fully separated, anatomically complete 3D humans with clothed-geometric details and plausible interactions. Quantitative evaluations show a 54% reduction in Chamfer Distance and 35% in Point-to-Surface Distance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 4080

Authors:Yuqi Jiang, Yupeng Hu, Jinyuan Deng, Xiaotian Qiu, Yucheng Cui, Xuyang He, Ruidong Li, Qi Sun, Cheng Zhuo

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Shandong Yunhai Guochuang Cloud Computing Equipment Industry Innovation Co.

Title: Circuit-Think: A Multimodal Reasoning Framework for Automated Circuit-to-Netlist Translation with Trajectory-Guided Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong performance in multimodal understanding, offering promise for the circuitto-netlist translation task. However, the diverse component symbols and complex connections in circuit images challenge VLMs in understanding physical layouts and reasoning for electrical connection logic. To address these, we propose Circuit-Think, the first multimodal reasoning framework for the automated circuit-to-netlist translation task, which employs a Trajectory-Guided Reinforcement Learning (TGRL) paradigm for structured logical reasoning on circuit images. Circuit-Think initializes reasoning capabilities through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on image-netlist pairs, then optimizes reasoning trajectories and netlist generation decisions using TGRL. Firstly, TGRL introduces a step-by-step reasoning paradigm, which guides the model with stepwise reward functions to simulate the human cognitive trajectory of ``identifying ports, recognizing devices, and inferring connections''. Secondly, we customize a multi-level reward that maps reasoning and answers into graph structures and node sets, jointly optimizing logical consistency and netlist accuracy via graph similarity and set matching. Thirdly, TGRL contains a reflective learning mechanism for low-scoring samples, which corrects the reasoning trajectory through reference answers as hints, avoiding local optima caused by sparse reward signals or erroneous reasoning paths. Moreover, we construct a circuit image-netlist reasoning dataset with 3,100 samples, offering step-by-step annotations for converting circuit images to netlists. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Circuit-Think achieves SOTA netlist accuracy and significantly improves the accuracy of downstream tasks.

PaperID: 4081

Authors:Xianglong Jin, Zheng Wang, Rong Wang, Feiping Nie

Affiliations: Northwestern Polytechnical University

Title: Reliable-View 2D-3D Key-Part Aligned Transformer with Reinforced Masking for 3D Point Cloud Understanding

Abstract:
Selfsupervised 3D point cloud understanding is crucial for scene understanding, where Masked Autoencoders (MAE) have achieved excellent performance in point cloud representation learning. However, existing MAE-style methods fail to consider spatial-semantic variations in masking strategies, and joint learning with multi-view images often overlooks view redundancy. To address these challenges, we propose an MAE framework enhanced with reliable multi-view 2D-3D Key-part alignment and Reinforced masking, named as KR-MAE. Our approach comprises three key innovations: Reinforced Masking (RM) strategically samples visible tokens based on semantic saliency to enhance reconstruction fidelity; Reliable Multi-View Selector (RVS) dynamically refines the most informative image subset by filtering occluded or low-texture views, mitigating detrimental redundancy; Reliable-view 2D-3D Key-part Aligned Transformer (KAT) establishes semantic-aligned correspondence between salient 3D point cloud parts and reliable multi-view 2D image patches, leveraging rich texture cues from 2D images to compensate for sparse geometry in point cloud. Extensive experiments on 3D classification and segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that KR-MAE achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing prior multi-modal methods.

PaperID: 4082

Authors:Yaoqian Li, Xikai Yang, Dunyuan Xu, Yang YU, Litao Zhao, Xiaowei Hu, Jinpeng Li, Pheng-Ann Heng

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, School of Future Technology, South China University of Technology

Title: SurgPub-Video: A Comprehensive Surgical Video Framework for Enhanced Surgical Intelligence in Vision-Language Model

Abstract:
VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) have shown significant potential in surgical scene analysis, yet existing models are limited by frame-level datasets and lack high-quality video data with procedural surgical knowledge. To address these challenges, we make the following contributions: (i) SurgPub-Video, a comprehensive dataset of over 3,000 surgical videos and 25 million annotated frames across 11 specialities, sourced from peer-reviewed clinical journals, (ii) SurgLLaVA-Video, a specialized VLM for surgical video understanding, built upon the TinyLLaVA-Video architecture that supports both video-level and frame-level inputs, and (iii) a video-level surgical Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmark, covering diverse 11 surgical specialities, such as vascular, cardiology, and thoracic. Extensive experiments, conducted on the proposed benchmark and three additional surgical downstream tasks (action recognition, skill assessment, and triplet recognition), show that SurgLLaVA-Video significantly outperforms both general-purpose and surgical-specific VLMs with only three billion parameters.

PaperID: 4083

Authors:GuangHao Meng, Jinpeng Wang, Qian-Wei Wang, XuDong Ren, Dan Zhao

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Tsinghua University, Pengcheng Laborotary

Title: Imagine with Layout and Sketch: Enhancing Vision-Language Retrieval with Dual-Stream Multi-Modal Query Refinement

Abstract:
VisionLanguage Retrieval (VLR) aims to retrieve relevant visual or textual information from multimodal data using language or image queries. However, traditional VLR methods often rely on data-driven shallow semantic alignment and fail to understand the deeper structural and fine-grained entity features of queries, resulting in poor performance on multi-entity layouts and challenging entities. In this paper, we propose the Layout-Aware and Sketch-Enhanced (LASE) VLR framework, which refines query representations by incorporating multimodal layout and sketch knowledge. Specifically, layout knowledge encodes the spatial arrangement of entities, while sketch knowledge refines entity perception by capturing essential structural details. To extract these knowledge representations, we leverage Large Language Models' (LLMs) powerful semantic understanding for layout generation, and Diffusion Models' (DMs) fine-grained cross-modal generative capabilities for sketch generation. However, integrating knowledge into queries may introduce biases and query-specific preferences due to varying visual content and knowledge demands. To address this, we propose the Gated Dual-Stream Knowledge Module (GDKM), which consists of a multi-instance fusion network with a sample-aware gating network. The fusion network aggregates diverse knowledge using multi-head attention to reduce bias, while the gating network adjusts knowledge weights based on query characteristics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the LASE significantly enhances VLR performance across multiple benchmarks, with superior generalization and transferability.

PaperID: 4084

Authors:Bin Pu, Jiewen Yang, Xingguo Lv, Kai Xu, Kenli Li

Affiliations: Hunan University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Yunnan University

Title: Unified Mixture-of-Experts Framework for Joint Cardiac and Vascular Ultrasound Analysis and Report Generation

Abstract:
Echocardiography and vascular ultrasound are essential for comprehensive cardiovascular assessment, yet manual evaluation and writing reports are laborintensive, time-consuming, and require expertise from both cardiology and vascular surgery departments. Current automated report generation systems mainly focus on X-ray or CT, often neglecting echocardiographic modalities and critical quantitative parameters like aortic diameter and main pulmonary artery diameter, limiting their clinical utility. Moreover, the interdependence between cardiac and peripheral vascular health necessitates cross-departmental insights, which existing methods fail to incorporate. To address these limitations, we first propose the vision-language framework named the Echo-Cardiac-Vascular (ECV), for joint cardiac and vascular ultrasound report generation and parameter measurements. ECV introduces a Mixture-of-Experts vision encoder tailored for distinct ultrasound subtypes, a structured parameter measurement module for accurate quantification, and task-specific decoders that generate interpretable, multimodal diagnostic reports. Our framework, trained on 10K+ paired records, achieves high accuracy, improving diagnostic efficiency, consistency, and cross-disciplinary clinical applicability.

PaperID: 4085

Authors:Junhui Qiu, Xiang Xiang, Hongyun Wang, Jiaqi Gui

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, School of Computer Science and Technology

Title: AerialFusion: Co-Motion-Driven Unified Registration and Fusion on Multi-modal Data Streams from Aerial View

Abstract:
Aerial multimodal visual streams registration and fusion can generate more comprehensive scene information representations for UAVs' cross-modal perception. However, current challenges lie primarily in the essential difficulty of joint spatiotemporal representation learning from dynamic background and moving targets, and a critical shortage exists in large-scale, well-annotated multi-modal visual streams benchmark for UAV platforms. In this paper, we propose AerialFusion, a co-motion-driven unified UAVs visual streams registration and fusion that fully mines modality-invariant common features based on motion-aware, enabling spatiotemporally coherent registration and fusion. Specifically, 1) a Skewed Motion Distribution Field Co-Motion-Driven Image Registration, 2) a Co-Motion Generative Fusion, 3) a Streams-based Unified Learning. Furthermore, we introduce EUM3D, a registration and fusion benchmark for UAVs cross-modal perception. This benchmark contains 60 synchronized visible-infrared visual streams, or 122k spatially and temporally aligned pairs, most of which were taken at low-light scenes. And EUM3D provides pixel-level alignment guarantees via perspective-transform ground-truth. Extensive experiments reveal that AerialFusion surpasses current focus on image and static background fusion methods in aerial sequence scenarios, addressing spatiotemporal mismatches while suppressing cross-modal interference.

PaperID: 4086

Authors:Sheng Shang, Chenglong Zhao, Ruixin Zhang, Jianlong Jin, Jingyun Zhang, Jun Wang, Yang Zhao, Shouhong Ding, Wei Jia

Affiliations: Hefei University of Technology, Tencent Youtu Lab

Title: LSAP-PV: High-Fidelity Palm Vein Image Synthesis via Layered Spectral Absorption Projection-Guided Diffusion Model

Abstract:
Palm vein recognition has emerged as a promising biometric technology, yet its development remains constrained by the scarcity of largescale publicly available datasets. Several methods of palm vein image generation have been proposed to address this issue. These methods usually focus on the anatomical realism of palm vein patterns, but overlook the biophysical correlation between identities and vein patterns, particularly in simulating identity-specific vein contrast. To tackle this limitation, we propose a novel biophysics-driven synthesis method. Our method constructs a 3D palm vascular tree via established modeling method. Then, a projection model is proposed to map the 3D tree into 2D space to derive palm vein patterns. The projection model is based on skin spectral absorption and simulates the natural attenuation of light passing through the skin using a layer integration method. For different identities, we sample different skin parameters, resulting in varying degrees of attenuation. This method effectively simulates the variation in vein contrast across different identities. Furthermore, we introduce a conditional diffusion model that uses the projected patterns as identity conditions to generate palm vein images. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first palm vein generation method based on the diffusion model. Experimental results demonstrate that our method not only outperforms existing methods, but also enables a recognition model trained on our synthetic data to achieve superior performance compared to a model trained on real-world data at a scale of 2,000 IDs under an open-set protocol with a TAR@FAR=1:1 of 1e-4.

PaperID: 4087

Authors:Huan Wang, Haoran Li, Yuxin Lin, Huaming Chen, Jun Yan, Lijuan Wang, Jiahua Shi, Qihao Xu, Yongting Hu, Yong Xu, Jun Shen

Affiliations: University of Wollongong, Harbin Institute of Technology, The University of Sydney, Xidian University, The University of Queensland

Title: Towards Zero-Shot Diabetic Retinopathy Grading: Learning Generalized Knowledge via Prompt-Driven Matching and Emulating

Abstract:
As one of the primary causes of visual impairment, Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) requires accurate and robust grading to facilitate timely diagnosis and intervention. Different from conventional DR grading methods that utilize singleview images, recent clinical studies have revealed that multi-view fundus images can significantly enhance DR grading performance by expanding the field of view (FOV). However, there is a long-tailed distribution problem in fundus image analysis, i.e., a high prevalence of mild DR grades and a low prevalence of rare ones (e.g., cases of high severity), which presents a significant challenge to developing a unified model capable of detecting rare or unseen DR grades not encountered during training. In this paper, we propose ProME-DR, a Prompt-driven zero-shot DR grading framework, which leverages prompt Matching and Emulating to recognize the unseen DR categories and views beyond the training set. ProME-DR disentangles the training process into two stages to learn generalized knowledge for novel DR disease grading. Initially, ProME-DR leverages two sets of prompt units to capture semantic and inter-view consistency knowledge via a split-and-mask manner, gathering instance-level DR visual clues. Subsequently, it constructs a concept-aware emulator to generate context prompt units, linking extensible knowledge learned from the previously seen DR attributes for zero-shot DR grading. Extensive experiments conducted on eight datasets and various scenarios confirm the superiority of ProME-DR.

PaperID: 4088

Authors:Ziyang Wang, Mengwei Li, Hao Yin, Wenhao Liu, Zilei Wang

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China

Title: PosPrune: Visual Token Pruning with Positional Bias Correction for Efficient Large Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
Large VisionLanguage Models (LVLMs) enhance performance on vision-language tasks by integrating visual features from pre-trained vision encoders into large language models (LLMs). However, the large number of visual tokens introduces significant computational overhead. Existing token pruning methods either perform global selection via [CLS]-based attention in the vision encode or prune within LLM decoding layers. These approaches face two key challenges: (1) [CLS]-based attention primarily focuses on visually salient regions across the entire image, often overlooking semantically important tokens essential for reasoning; and (2) strong positional bias in the shallow decoder layers causes the model to favor later-positioned tokens, while neglecting earlier ones that may carry critical reasoning cues. To address these issues, we propose PosPrune, a training-free, two-stage visual token pruning framework. At the vision encoder, we introduce an Asymmetric Region-aware Pruning (ARP) strategy that retains more tokens in semantically rich regions while discarding more tokens from semantically less informative regions, thus preserving spatial diversity and task-relevant details. In the LLM decoding stage, we find that the positional bias in shallow layers is primarily driven by model architecture rather than task semantics. Based on this insight, we propose a novel Positional Bias Correction (PBC) mechanism to mitigate this bias. To further reduce redundancy, we apply Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) to select tokens that best balance textual relevance and diversity. Extensive experiments on various LVLMs and benchmarks demonstrate the general effectiveness of our approach. Notably, when applied to LLaVA-1.5-7B, PosPrune achieves a reduction of 85% in FLOPs while preserving 98.5% of the original performance.

PaperID: 4089

Authors:Ziyi Wang, Shengcheng Ye, Faming Fang, Haichuan Song

Affiliations: East China Normal University

Title: Towards Privacy-Protected Generalized Gaze Estimation Using Diffusion Models and Domain Stability Adaptation Framework

Abstract:
Modern gaze estimation models can accurately predict human gaze from facial images. However, due to privacy concerns and intricate data collection procedures, gaze estimation datasets are typically smaller and less diverse compared to those for other vision tasks, which directly leads to poor generalization in gaze estimation models. Common solutions, such as domain adaptation models, require additional domainspecific data, yet such data is often difficult to obtain due to privacy restrictions. Meanwhile, domain generalization models suffer from limited performance due to insufficient training data. To address these fundamental challenges---privacy and data diversity---we explore privacy-preserving gaze data generation schemes and propose a novel data-driven generalization solution. Specifically, we develop two diffusion-based generative models, DDPM-Gaze and LDM-Gaze, for synthesizing gaze data. We demonstrate that synthetic data can significantly improve generalization performance when simply used with fine-tuning-based methods. Furthermore, we introduce the Domain Stability Adaptation (DSA) framework, a simple yet effective domain generalization approach that enhances model robustness by increasing the domain uncertainty of input samples while reducing prediction uncertainty. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our synthetic data and demonstrate the superiority of our data-driven generalization solution.

PaperID: 4090

Authors:Xuexin Wu, Zhenhui Ding, Huisi Wu, Jing Qin

Affiliations: Shenzhen University, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: CiNuSeg: Class Incremental Nuclei Segmentation via Anchor-driven Consistency Learning with Dual Region Regularization

Abstract:
Recent advances in deep learning have led to significant improvements in nuclei segmentation from histological images, particularly when labels of all classes are available simultaneously during training. However, in clinical practice, realworld scenarios require a model to perform well in an incremental learning setting, where we anticipate the model to achieve satisfactory performance on previously unseen data while effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting of old classes. Most previous methods alleviate forgetting by distilling old class knowledge through prototypes; however, they fail to adequately capture fine-grained details to address the challenge of high class similarity, which is particularly severe in histological images. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel incremental learning method for nuclei segmentation (we call it CiNuSeg), which is composed of two key innovative modules. First, we propose a new Anchor-driven Consistency Learning (ACL) module to construct multi-level class anchors within each sample to effectively capture fine structural and textural details of nuclei, thereby significantly mitigating forgetting. Second, we develop a Dual Region Regularization (DRR) module to suppress new class representations within old class regions while enhancing new class representations within new class regions, strengthening the model's ability to discriminate between different nuclei types and improving inter-class separability. We further introduce an Adaptive Temperature Tuning (ATT) strategy to dynamically balance model stability and plasticity. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmarking MoNuSAC and CoNSeP pathological datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, consistently achieving better performance than SOTAs in different settings. Codes will be available upon publication.

PaperID: 4091

Authors:Long Xi, Jia Ma, ZhenYu Yuan, Tao Xue, Wen Tang, Wen Lv

Affiliations: Xi'an Polytechnic University, Bournemouth University

Title: 3DDM: Physically-based Anisotropic 3D Diffusion Model with 3D Gaussian for Point Cloud Completion

Abstract:
A 3D point cloud completion task is to generate completed 3D objects given partial observations. Autoencoder-based models suffer from poor generalization ability to untrained 3D data. Current diffusion-based models add isotropic noise with the same variance in three x, y, z axes. More importantly, these models ignore real-world anisotropic evolution properties of 3D particles from a non-equilibrium state to thermodynamic equilibrium in the real physical world due to the velocity and energy thermodynamics of the particles, leading to unstable completions of 3D object topology. This paper presents a novel physically-based anisotropic 3D diffusion model (3DDM) to address these issues. We also present derivations of our proposed forward and reverse processes and a loss function in closed form, thus reproducibility. The 3DDM contains anisotropic energy-aware forward and reverse processes with a novel anisotropic quadratic loss function. The forward process adds anisotropic 3D Gaussian noises per-axis and mimics the thermal non-equilibrium evolution towards Maxwellian equilibrium based on velocity and kinetic energy evolutions of 3D particles in the real physical space. The reverse process learns to denoise along per-axis and per-timestep anisotropically. The anisotropic quadratic loss function penalizes errors along certain axes, yielding a highly flexible and anisotropic reverse diffusion process and a physically realistic generative model. The 3DDM denoises along x, y, z axes with different velocities from the non-equilibrium evolution, achieving fewer than 20 diffusion steps and strong generalization to unseen 3D objects and real-world scenes that were not trained.

PaperID: 4092

Authors:Mingye Xie, Jiacheng Ruan, Xian Gao, Ting Liu, Yuzhuo Fu

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: Unnoticed Yet Effective: A Hybrid Physical Camouflage Framework Against DNNs and Human Perception

Abstract:
While adversarial attacks can effectively deceive deep neural networks, their realworld applicability is often limited by complex and conspicuous patterns that reveal their attack intent to human observers. To overcome this limitation, we propose UYE, a novel camouflage framework designed to simultaneously mislead DNNs and evade human perception. UYE incorporates two key components: an attention refiner leveraging a pre-trained vision encoder to optimize adversarial patterns for robust attacks across diverse environments, and a perception evaluator trained on a preference dataset curated using tailored prompts from human-aligned large multimodal models to ensure natural and unobtrusive camouflage generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UYE outperforms state-of-the-art methods in achieving an optimal balance between human stealth and model deception while maintaining effectiveness in real-world scenarios.

PaperID: 4093

Authors:Weixing Xie, Ying Ye, Xian Wu, Jintian Li, Bingchuan Li, Yanchen Lin, Junfeng Yao

Affiliations: Xiamen University, Fujian Normal University

Title: MGD:Mesh-guided Gaussians with Diffusion Priors for Dynamic Objects Reconstruction from Monocular RGB-D Video

Abstract:
Reconstructing dynamic objects from monocular RGBD video is critical for advancing 3D vision applications and enhancing user experience. However, monocular RGB-D video provides limited 3D observations, making the reconstruction of unobserved regions highly under-constrained. Despite recent advances that combine neural implicit surfaces with diffusion models, the inherent limitations of implicit representations and the lack of effective guidance in diffusion priors lead to blurry appearance and inaccurate geometry in dynamic object reconstruction. To address the issue, we present MGD, which leverages scene-adaptive diffusion priors and Mesh-guided Gaussians for realistic rendering and geometrically accurate reconstruction of dynamic objects, including unobserved regions. The dynamic 3D objects reconstructed by MGD are represented using our proposed Mesh-guided Gaussians, which leverage global and local Gaussians to capture large-scale deformations and fine-grained appearance details, respectively. Additionally, in order to utilize depth information, we integrate a depth ControlNet into the diffusion model and conduct scene-adaptive fine-tuning. We design a self-generated image-pair strategy to produce image pairs used for fine-tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MGD achieves state-of-the-art performance in both high-fidelity reconstruction and structural completeness, while maintaining real-time efficiency during training and rendering.

PaperID: 4094

Authors:Qinglong Yan, Tong Zou, Xunpeng Yi, Xinyu Xiang, Xuying Wu, Hao Zhang, Jiayi Ma

Affiliations: Wuhan University

Title: Diff-NAT: Better Naturalistic and Aggressive Adversarial Attacks via Class-Optimized Diffusion for Object Detection

Abstract:
Recent advances in naturalistic physical adversarial patch generation show great promise in protecting personal privacy against detectorbased malicious surveillance while remaining inconspicuous to human observers. In this work, we present the first systematic categorization and in-depth re-examination of existing methods into three representative paradigms, revealing a pervasive imbalance: enforcing naturalness constraints inherently restricts the adversarial search space, thus limiting attack performance. To address this challenge, we propose a novel paradigm based on class-optimized diffusion, termed Diff-NAT. Diff-NAT leverages pretrained diffusion models as powerful natural image priors and introduces a unified iterative framework that jointly optimizes two complementary components: semantic-level textual prompts and instance-level latent codes. Specifically, prompt optimization enables broad traversal across inter-class semantic regions, while latent refinement allows for fine-grained manipulation within class objectives. This dual-level optimization facilitates progressive navigation toward adversarial distributions embedded within the natural semantic manifold. Extensive experiments in both digital and physical settings demonstrate that Diff-NAT outperforms existing SOTA approaches in terms of both visual realism and aggressiveness.

PaperID: 4095

Authors:Rui Yang, Yunfei Bai, Yuehua Liu, Xiaomao Li, Shaorong Xie

Affiliations: School of Computer Engineering and Science, Shanghai University, School of Mechatronic Engineering and Automation

Title: Learning Beyond Vision: Vision-Language Distillation and Edge-Aware Mix Diffusion in Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Abstract:
In semisupervised semantic segmentation (SSSS), segmentation performance is heavily constrained by the quality of pseudo labels. However, prevalent pseudo-label optimization approaches rely on the model’s internal self-correction. When the model fails to recognize or adequately represent certain classes, this self-enhancement mechanism amplifies initial mistakes, ultimately leading to poor semantic or spatial consistency. To address this limitation, we propose ViLaDiff to enhance pseudo-label quality. Specifically, ViLaDiff first employs a prompt-guided image captioning task to generate descriptive text for each input image, providing high-level semantic context. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to introduce vision-language modeling into SSSS. We design a vision-language fusion module to enhance feature semantics and discriminative capability. It integrates cross-modal interactions with dual-path knowledge to ensure semantic consistency. Additionally, while language provides high-level semantic guidance, it is inherently limited in expressing fine-grained spatial structures. Therefore, we propose an edge-aware mixed-noise diffusion process. It simulates feature-level uncertainty through Gaussian perturbations and introduces class-flipping noise into the masks to model misclassification errors. To enhance boundary refinement, we apply a higher flipping probability along mask edges, enabling edge-aware modeling during denoising. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks validate that our method significantly improves pseudo-label quality and segmentation performance.

PaperID: 4096

Authors:Ying Yang, Hui Yin, Aixin Chong, Hui Wang, Zhengyin Liang

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Advanced Rail Autonomous Operation, Beijing Jiaotong University, School of Computer Science & Technology, Shandong University of Technology, School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queen’s University Belfast

Title: RobusTor3D: Robust Multimodal 3D Object Detector for Autonomous Driving by Vision-Language Knowledge Blending

Abstract:
Multimodal 3D object detection for autonomous driving, a task for realworld applications, poses substantial challenges in maintaining robust performance under various perturbations and complex environmental conditions. However, most existing approaches primarily focus on performance optimization under relatively ideal scenarios or focus on one or few disturbing conditions (or adverse conditions), lacking systematic exploration of robustness against real-world factors, including high class imbalance, adverse weather conditions, sensor jitter and failures, and significant scene variations. To address this issue, we propose a robust multimodal 3D detector, termed RobusTor3D, which integrates robustness at both the structural and supervisory levels by blending the knowledge from Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Structurally, textual descriptions are incorporated to enhance the semantic richness and diversity of rare classes. This novel semantic injection operation compensates for the inherent class imbalance and modality weakness in conventional visual features. Furthermore, semantic alignment capability and robust representation by Vision-Language Knowledge Extraction (V-LKE) serve as semantic priors to complement modality-specific representations, significantly improving model adaptability. At the supervisory level, we propose a Scene-level Multimodal Consistency Learning (SMCL) strategy, which jointly enforces global semantic constraints across modalities, encouraging the learning of stable and abundant semantic representations. This special design specifically reduces the impact of spatial alignment, while notably enabling semantic compensation under modality-loss conditions. Extensive robustness experiments conducted on KITTI, KITTI-C, and CADC benchmarks evaluate five robustness aspects, including long-tail problem, adverse weather (rain, snow, fog, strong sunlight), sensor spatial misalignment and motion blur, modality loss, and cross-domain scenarios. The results show that RobusTor3D demonstrates superior robustness across all five evaluated aspects. It consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under various challenging conditions.

PaperID: 4097

Authors:Shuo Zhang, Jiaming Huang, Wenbing Tang, Jing Liu, LI HAN, Jiandun Li, Hongchun Yuan, Zizhu Fan

Affiliations: School of Electronic Information Engineering, Shanghai Dianji University, Technology Center, College of Information Engineering, Northwest A&F University, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Trustworthy Computing, East China Normal University, College of Information Technology, Shanghai Ocean University, College of Computer Science and Technology, Shanghai University of Electric Power

Title: SimpleDiffusion: A Lightweight and Efficient Conditional Diffusion Model for Multi-Modal Salient Object Detection

Abstract:
Multimodal salient object detection (MSOD), which integrates complementary modalities such as depth or thermal data, primarily faces two challenges: accurately preserving salient object details and effectively aligning cross-modal features. Recent advances in using Stable Diffusion to generate images with fine edge details have inspired researchers to reformulate MSOD as a conditional mask generation process guided by salient features, which has achieved excellent visual results. However, these approaches often overlook the high computational cost and large-scale architecture of Stable Diffusion, both of which render it unsuitable for real-world MSOD applications. Therefore, we propose SimpleDiffusion, the first lightweight and efficient conditional diffusion model for MSOD that does not rely on Stable Diffusion. Specifically, we propose an Adaptive Cross-Modal Fusion Conditional Network and a Latent Denoising Network to reduce the complexity of diffusion models. Furthermore, we design a Multi-modal Feature Rectification and Fusion Module to enhance the representational capacity of cross-modal salient features. Customized training and sampling strategies are also developed to improve inference efficiency and reduce erroneous object segmentations. Experiments on multiple MSOD datasets demonstrate that SimpleDiffusion reduces model size by over tenfold and improves inference speed by more than fivefold compared to other diffusion-based methods, while maintaining comparable or superior performance.

PaperID: 4098

Authors:Weiyu Zhao, Chenyang Wang, Liangxiao Hu, Zonglin Li, Wei Yu, Shengping Zhang

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Tsinghua University

Title: DialoGen: Towards Dialog Gesture Generation via Identity-Decoupled Style Guidance in Interactive Diffusion Model

Abstract:
We propose DialoGen, a novel framework for generating realistic gestures for both interlocutors in dialog scenarios, conditioned on conversational audios. Unlike most existing methods that focus solely on a single speaker, DialoGen simultaneously generates synchronized gestures for both participants while also embedding identitydecoupled style into generated gestures that enhance realism and expressiveness. To ensure precise synchronization between interlocutors, DialoGen adopts an interactive dual-diffusion model with mutual interaction estimation, which integrates interaction correlation into the diffusion process. More importantly, by leveraging supervised contrastive learning, we develop the identity-decoupled style guidance to adaptively decompose the identity-specific style of interlocutors into latent space, enabling multi-style dialog gesture generation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms existing methods in generating realistic, speech-aligned, identity-specific gestures, offering a high-quality solution for various dialog scenarios.

PaperID: 4099

Authors:Xiaojie Zhao, Jinqiao Shi, Yi Li, Junmin Huang, Chongru Fan

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: Good Gradients Poison Your Model: Evading Defenses in Federated Learning via Boundary-adaptive Perturbation

Abstract:
Federated learning (FL) allows for collaborative model training while preserving data privacy, but its distributed nature makes it vulnerable to poisoning attacks. Existing defense methods typically rely on using gradients from multiple clients to define a trusted region, selecting only the trustworthy update (good gradients) within this region for aggregation. Mainstream defense boundaries are categorized as hard boundaries, soft boundaries, and semisoft boundaries. However, we argue that even good gradients within these boundaries can still be exploited by attackers to poison the model. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a boundary-adaptive attack method that leverages the directional properties of optimization techniques to derive baseline poisoned gradients. Through iterative perturbation, it generates seemingly innocent gradients that subtly deviate from the global model. Our extensive study on benchmark datasets and mainstream defensive mechanisms confirms that the proposed attack raises a significantly threat to the integrity and security of FL practices, regardless of the flourishing of robust FL methods.

PaperID: 4100

Authors:Yujiao Zhao, Yizhan Xiang, Jiangnan Li, Yiyuan Wang, Minghao Yin

Affiliations: Northeast Normal University

Title: Improving Exact Algorithm for Pseudo Boolean Optimization with Two New Phase Selection Heuristics

Abstract:
PseudoBoolean optimization (PBO) problem involves optimizing a linear objective function under linear inequality constraints defined over Boolean variables. PBO is widely used for modeling many combinational optimization problems, particularly in some real-world scenarios. In core-guided CDCL-based exact solvers, the way branching variables are assigned, known as phase selection, significantly affects the solving efficiency. This paper introduces two strategies to enhance solver performance by improving phase selection. Firstly, we design a new phase selection strategy that actively guides variables in the objective function toward assignments closer to the optimal solution. Secondly, to prevent the solver from becoming trapped in local solutions, we propose a reinforcement learning-based rephase mechanism that dynamically updates and resets variable phases. We integrate two phase selection strategies into two state-of-the-art PBO solvers and compare them against top-performing solvers from the PB competitions, using benchmarks from these competitions for assessment. The experimental results show that our solvers outperform the winning solver from the competitions.

PaperID: 4101

Authors:Ling Ding, Zhizhi Yu, Di Jin, Lei Huang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Tianjin University, School of Software Engineering, China Key Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence Application Technology, Qinghai Minzu University

Title: ARNS: Adaptive Relation-Aware Negative Sampling with Curriculum Learning for Inductive Knowledge Graph Completion

Abstract:
Inductive knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to predict missing links involving unseen entities, making it a particularly challenging task for knowledge representation learning. Traditional embeddingbased methods often fall short in this setting due to their limited structural reasoning capabilities. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) offer a promising alternative by explicitly modeling the graph topology. However, their performance heavily relies on the quality of negative samples during training, which significantly influences the learned representations and generalization ability. To tackle this issue, we propose Adaptive Relation-Aware Negative Sampling (ARNS), a negative sampling approach specifically tailored for GNN-based inductive KGC. It integrates three key strategies: (1) High-quality negatives via Linear WD for discriminative learning, (2) Relation-aware negatives utilizing relation graphs to preserve structural patterns, as well as (3) Adaptive curriculum learning that dynamically adjusts sampling ratios based on performance feedback. Our key innovation lies in a performance-driven adaptation mechanism that monitors training dynamics and modulates negative sample difficulty. This approach starts with easier samples for stability, and progressively introduces challenging negatives. Experiments demonstrate that ARNS outperforms state-of-the-art methods with significant MRR improvements while maintaining training stability. The adaptive design is particularly beneficial in inductive scenarios, where models can infer structural patterns from limited observations.

PaperID: 4102

Authors:Cuiying Huo, Xiaotong Huang, Dongxiao He, Yixuan Du, Wenhuan Lu, Di Jin

Affiliations: Tianjin University

Title: DuoKD: Dual Knowledge Distillation from Large Language Models for Robust Graph Neural Networks

Abstract:
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have become a dominant modeling paradigm for graphstructured data, and the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has spurred growing interest in integrating external semantic knowledge into GNNs. Current LLM-based GNNs are devoted to extracting semantically similar information from LLMs to enhance representation learning. However, they generally overlook key signals that are semantically dissimilar but exhibit stronger inter-class discriminative ability. Especially when the original graph data contains noise or semantic ambiguity, a single similarity-based semantic augmentation strategy not only fails to provide effective enhancement, but may also amplify misleading signals generated by the LLM in response to low-quality inputs or its own hallucinations, further degrading the discriminative power and robustness of GNNs. To this end, we propose a dual positive-negative knowledge extraction strategy based on LLMs, and integrate it with a knowledge distillation mechanism to dynamically transfer multi-dimensional enhanced signals to GNNs, thereby achieving fine-grained and robust graph representation learning. Specifically, we design personalized prompts to guide LLMs in generating semantically similar positive signals and semantically dissimilar negative signals, which help the model capture intra-class consistency and inter-class distinction. Then, we further generate structural and semantic reasoning as supplementary knowledge to support the rationality and guidance of supervision signals. To identify high-confidence transferred knowledge, we introduce a language-based evaluation mechanism to filter low-confidence or hallucinated outputs. Finally, under a unified distillation framework, our method uses both positive and negative knowledge to guide GNN training, achieving adaptive and robust representation learning. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets verify the superior performance of our approach across various tasks.

PaperID: 4103

Authors:Chao Li, Runshuo Liu, Zhongying Zhao, Hui Zhou, Qingtian Zeng

Affiliations: Shandong University of Science and Technology

Title: FreqTAD: Multi-scale Frequency Encoding and Time-Frequency Attention for Anomaly Detection in Dynamic Graphs

Abstract:
Anomaly detection in dynamic graphs aims to capture the dynamic evolution characteristics of graphs, and then identify abnormal behaviors that deviate from normal patterns. However, previous studies fail to decouple periodic and bursty information during the time encoding process, which hinders their performances. In addition, most existing methods use attention mechanisms to capture the importance of time points. They fail to leverage the normal and abnormal characteristics in the frequency domain. To address the above issues, we propose a model that integrates multiscale Frequency encoding with Time-frequency Attention for Anomaly Detection in dynamic graphs, named FreqTAD. We design a multi-scale frequency encoder that decomposes time series into distinct periodic and bursty components. Moreover, we present an effective time-frequency attention mechanism that focuses on frequency components to differentiate frequency-domain features of normal and abnormal behaviors. Experimental results on four datasets demonstrate the superior performance of FreqTAD in both anomaly detection accuracy and computational efficiency.

PaperID: 4104

Authors:Haodong Li, Lianyong Qi, Weiming Liu, Fan Wang, Chong Li, Shengye Pang, Wenwen Gong, Yanwei Xu, Xiaoxiao Chi, Yang Zhang, Xiaokang Zhou

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, China University of Petroleum (East China), China Shandong Key Laboratory of Intelligent Oil and Gas Industrial Software, ByteDance Inc., Zhejiang University, School of Computer Engineering and Science, Shanghai University, College of Information and Electrical Engineering, China Agricultural University, School of Computer Science, Peking University, School of Computing, Macquarie University, Anuradha and Vikas Sinha Department of Data Science, University of North Texas, Faculty of Business and Data Science, Kansai University, Japan RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project

Title: Subspace-Aware Graph Construction and Contrastive Alignment for Multimodal Recommendation with Large Language Models

Abstract:
Multimedia content offers additional context for recommender systems to better understand user interests. Existing studies on multimodal recommendation primarily focus on constructing itemitem semantic graphs. However, most of these methods capture only shallow semantic structures based on feature similarity and struggle to model more complex or cross-entity semantic relationships (e.g., user-item). Moreover, in these methods, collaborative signals often dominate and suppress semantic knowledge, which limits its role in representation learning. To address these issues, we propose SCALE, a novel framework that combines subspace-aware graph construction and contrastive alignment for multimodal recommendation with large language models. Specifically, we first use large language models and encoders to extract user and item features. Following the subspace clustering assumption, we apply the Orthogonal Matching Pursuit algorithm to mine complex semantic structures within the item-item, user-user, and user-item spaces, and integrate them into a unified semantic graph. We then perform graph convolution on both the semantic and interaction graphs, and aggregate the results for recommendation. Furthermore, contrastive losses are employed to enhance semantic fusion and alignment. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate that SCALE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art multimodal recommendation models, highlighting its effectiveness in modeling complex relationships and integrating semantic knowledge with collaborative signals.

PaperID: 4105

Authors:Zexuan Wan, Bo Wang, Kuofei Fang, Bin Wu

Affiliations: Beijing Key Laboratory of Intelligent Telecommunications Software and Multimedia, School of Computer Science (National Pilot Software Engineering School), Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing China

Title: TGCA-LLM: Time-Aware Graph-Text Contrastive Alignment for Enhancing LLMs in Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion

Abstract:
Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion (TKGC) aims to infer missing facts by modeling historical events and latent temporal dependencies in Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs). Recently, TKGC methods that integrate graph embeddings into Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great promise by leveraging the structural information of TKGs together with the powerful reasoning capabilities of LLMs. However, these embeddingbased methods are limited by suboptimal graph representations due to noise and long-tail issues in real-world scenarios, and insufficient cross-modal alignment between graph and language, hindering LLMs' ability to fully capture the temporal and structural information of TKGs. To address these issues, we propose TGCA-LLM, a novel embedding-based framework for TKGC. Specifically, TGCA-LLM first employs time-aware contrastive learning to align fact texts with graph structures in the temporal dimension, generating robust graph embeddings and establishing initial cross-modal alignment. Then, through a two-stage tuning process, it enables LLMs to gradually acquire structural and temporal knowledge from graph embeddings while enhancing their cross-modal reasoning capabilities in TKGC. Extensive experiments on three widely used real-world benchmarks demonstrate that TGCA-LLM outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines by at least 8.7% MRR, highlighting its effectiveness.

PaperID: 4106

Authors:Qiang Zhou, Xudong Tong, Yuting Liu, ChuanXing Liu, Jingjing Gu

Affiliations: Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Title: Exploiting Pre-trained Language Model for Cross-city Urban Flow Prediction Guided by Information-theoretic Analysis

Abstract:
Crosscity urban flow prediction is critical for democratizing smart application benefits in data-scarce developing cities. However, existing methods face an inherent performance ceiling, constrained by both the inevitably finite samples from the source city and the distributional gap between cities. In this paper, we present PLM-CUP, the first theoretically-grounded framework that breaks this bottleneck by leveraging a pre-trained language model (PLM) as an additional source domain. Through an information-theoretic analysis of the generalization error bound, we reveal that the key challenge lies in constructing a semantic bridge encoder and a task-specific adapter to enable cross-domain alignment when incorporating a PLM. Accordingly, PLM-CUP adopts a three-stage architecture, including a semantic bridge encoder that transforms spatiotemporal flow patterns into languagealigned representations via trend-periodicity decomposition, a PLM fine-tuned for knowledge transfer, and a task adapter with spatiotemporal self-attention to conduct multi-step prediction. We further introduce GDAConv, a graph convolution module with dual activation functions that enhances spatial modeling throughout the framework. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that PLM-CUP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, validating the effectiveness of the proposed PLM enhanced cross-city transfer paradigm for urban flow prediction.

PaperID: 4107

Authors:Xingyu Qian, Haoran Yu

Affiliations: School of Computer Science & Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology

Title: Inferring Heterogeneous Private Valuations from Offline Market Data via Entropic Risk-Sensitive Utility Maximization

Abstract:
Inferring humans' private valuations for goods from their observed market behavior is essential for evaluating market efficiency and improving trading mechanism design. A core challenge lies in uncovering the human decision function that maps private valuations and observed market states to actions. In complex market settings where humans make sequential decisions in stochastic environments, neural networks offer the flexibility to model this decision function. However, training them without access to private valuations or environment dynamics remains challenging. We tackle this challenge and study how to infer heterogeneous human valuations from offline decision data in continuous double auctions. We propose learning the decision function via risk‑sensitive utility maximization. First, we train a generative model on offline bid and ask data to simulate individual trading behavior. Using this generative model, we instantiate simulated markets composed of randomly generated buyers and sellers. Second, we introduce an agent into these simulated markets and use reinforcement learning to learn a risksensitive utility-maximizing decision function for the agent. Third, we formulate a bilevel optimization to jointly recover private valuations and risk preference parameters. Our extensive experiments on a large‑scale continuous double auction dataset demonstrate that our framework significantly reduces errors in inferring real human valuations.

PaperID: 4108

Authors:Geng Tu, Dingming Li, Jun Huang, Ruifeng Xu

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Shenzhen Peng Cheng Laboratory Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Novel Security Intelligence Technologies

Title: Consensus-Driven Multi-Agent Cognitive Reasoning for Enhancing the Emotional Intelligence of Large Language Models

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in various NLP tasks but remain limited in emotional intelligence (EI). Benchmarks such as EmoBench attribute this gap to deficiencies in cognitively demanding tasks that require inferring others’ latent mental states, intentions, and emotions in nuanced social contexts. To address this, we propose MACRo, a MultiAgent Cognitive Reasoning framework that generates a structured Cognitive Chain of Thought comprising Situation, Clue, Thought, Action, and Emotion. Each component is generated by a specialized agent, enabling modular, interpretable multi-step reasoning. To ensure coherence and mitigate hallucinations, a coordinator agent verifies outputs, and a consensus game mechanism enforces alignment across reasoning steps. Extensive Experiments on EmoBench show that MACRo significantly enhances both emotional understanding and application across LLMs. Further evaluations confirm its generalizability to real-world social applications such as emotional support conversations.

PaperID: 4109

Authors:Yifan Wang, Der-Horng Lee, Bruce X.B. Yu

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, ZJU-UIUC Institute

Title: BraSTORM: A Dual-Branch Self-Supervised Framework for EEG Representation Learning via Input-Level Spatio-Temporal Decomposition

Abstract:
Prevalent pretraining strategies for Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are often constrained by spatio-temporal entanglement. This critical issue arises from processing multi-channel Electroencephalography (EEG) signals as monolithic sequences, which intertwines the signal's temporal dynamics with its spatial topography and hinders the learning of robust and generalizable representations. To address this, we introduce BraSTORM, a framework that explicitly disentangles EEG data into separate temporal and spatial streams at the input level. Two streams are processed by parallel encoders trained with a composite dual-objective: a masked signal reconstruction loss captures fine-grained, intra-modal details, while a cross-modal contrastive loss enforces high-level semantic alignment. Extensive fine-tuning experiments on six benchmarks covering three major BCI downstream tasks—Emotion Recognition, Sleep Staging, and Motor Imagery—demonstrate that BraSTORM achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our findings validate that resolving spatio-temporal entanglement at the input level can be a competitive pre-training framework for the BCI field.

PaperID: 4110

Authors:Weining Weng, Yang Gu, Yuan Ma, Yuchen Liu, Yingwei Zhang, Yiqiang Chen

Affiliations: Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: State Mamba: Spatiotemporal EEG State-Space Model with Dynamic Brain Alignment for Cross-Subject Representation

Abstract:
Crosssubject EEG decoding remains a fundamental challenge due to substantial inter-subject variability in brain activity, which hinders the development of subject-independent EEG models. Despite progress in extracting cross-subject invariant features, existing studies neglect the shared neural responses that arise under similar cognitive or emotional states across individuals, limiting their ability to learn generalized and consistent EEG representations. To address the challenges, we propose State Mamba, a novel spatiotemporal EEG state-space model that explicitly models and aligns neural responses and their spatiotemporal state transitions to learn consistent and generalizable representations across subjects. Innovatively, State Mamba theoretically formulates a multi-channel Mamba architecture that jointly models spatial and temporal brain state transitions, supporting principled analysis of neural responses. To enhance spatiotemporal feature coupling, we introduce the LGANN module, which adopts global-local attention to integrate long- and short-term brain activity into a compact EEG representation. Furthermore, we design two self-supervised pretext tasks to extract consistent neural patterns across subjects: (1) representation alignment to align EEG representation, and (2) pattern alignment to align their transition rules under identical conditions, jointly promoting subject-invariant EEG representations. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, FACED, DEAP, and ISRUC, demonstrate the superior performance of State Mamba in cross-subject emotion and sleep recognition tasks, validating its robust generalization capability.

PaperID: 4111

Authors:Longlong Yu, Wenxi Li, Yaoqi Sun, Hang Xu, Chenggang Yan, Yuchen Guo

Affiliations: School of Communication Engineering, Hangzhou Dianzi University, China Zhuoxi Lab, School of Statistics, East China Normal University, Lishui University, Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University

Title: 2D-CrossScan Mamba: Enhancing State Space Models with Spatially Consistent Multi-Path 2D Information Propagation

Abstract:
Despite recent progress in adapting State Space Models such as Mamba to vision tasks, their intrinsic 1D scanning mechanism imposes limitations when applied to inherently 2Dstructured data like images. Existing adaptations, including VMamba and 2DMamba, either suffer from inconsistency between scanning order and spatial locality or restrict inter-patch communication to singular paths, hindering effective information propagation. In this paper, we propose 2D-CrossScan, a novel 2D-compatible scan framework that enables spatially consistent, multi-path hidden state propagation by integrating modified state equations over two-dimensional neighborhoods. Furthermore, we mitigate redundant information accumulation due to overlapping paths via cross-directional subtraction. To fully align with the 2D spatial structure, we introduce a multi-directional scanning strategy that starts simultaneously from all four corners of the image, enabling diverse propagation paths and better feature integration. Our approach maintains efficiency, requiring only minimal architectural changes to existing Mamba variants. Experimental results demonstrate substantial improvements in multiple visual tasks, including object detection and semantic segmentation on PANDA and COCO datasets. Compared to baseline SSM-based methods, 2D-CrossScan consistently yields better spatial representations, as confirmed by extensive effective receptive field visualizations and attention analyses. These results highlight the importance of geometry-aware state propagation and validate 2D-CrossScan as a simple yet powerful extension to SSMs for vision.

PaperID: 4112

Authors:Sha Zhao, Mingyi Peng, Haiteng Jiang, Tao Li, Shijian Li

Affiliations: Zhejiang University

Title: EEG Agent: A Unified Framework for Automated EEG Analysis Using Large Language Models

Abstract:
Scalable and generalizable analysis of brain activity is essential for advancing both clinical diagnostics and cognitive research. Electroencephalography (EEG), a noninvasive modality with high temporal resolution, has been widely used for brain states analysis. However, most exiting EEG models are usually tailored for single specific tasks, limiting their utility in realistic scenarios where EEG analysis often involves multi-task and continuous reasoning. In this work, we introduce EEG Agent, a general-purpose framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to schedule and plan multiple tools to automatically complete EEG-related tasks. EEG Agent is capable of performing the key functions: EEG basic information perception, spatiotemporal EEG exploration, EEG event detection, interaction with users, and EEG report generation. To realize the capabilities, we design a toolbox composed of different tools for EEG preprocessing, feature extraction, event detection, etc. These capabilities were evaluated on public datasets, and our EEG Agent can support flexible and interpretable EEG analysis, highlighting its potential for real-world clinical applications.

PaperID: 4113

Authors:Xu Li, Leendert Van der Torre, Liuwen Yu

Affiliations: University of Luxembourg

Title: A Logical Analysis of an Information Filtering Architecture Based on Epistemic Trust Inference

Abstract:
In agent theory, epistemic trust is used to infer beliefs, for example by filtering out the information the agent receives from untrustworthy agents. Moreover, trust itself can be inferred from other information. We introduce a simple information filtering architecture that clearly distinguishes the relation between the two kinds of inference. We provide a logical analysis of the architecture, based on a new family of input/output logics. We then explore information filtering and belief manipulation within this formal framework. Our key finding is that with this architecture, some of the widely debated logical rules for trust inference are redundant with respect to informationfiltering mechanisms and some others are redundant with respect to belief manipulation.

PaperID: 4114

Authors:Junyang Chen, Huan Wang, Yirui Wu, Qiuzhen Lin, Yunfeng Diao, Junkai Ji

Affiliations: Shenzhen University, Huazhong Agricultural University, Hohai University, Hefei University of Technology

Title: Zero-shot Recommendation: Towards Class Semantic Relation Learning for Inferring Labels of Unseen Micro-videos

Abstract:
Microvideo label prediction plays a pivotal role on contemporary video-sharing platforms, such as Kwai and Tiktok. The emergence of video content lacking labels presents a formidable challenge for conventional user interest prediction methods. This paper addresses the challenge of micro-video label prediction, particularly for unseen videos, by proposing a zero-shot method called Class Semantic Relation Learning (CSRL). Unlike traditional user interest prediction models, CSRL leverages the pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM) to enhance prediction accuracy for unlabeled videos. The novelty of CSRL lies in its integration of three key components: a raw feature autoencoder, LLM-enhanced features, and a decomposed graph network. The decomposed graph network is specifically designed to disentangle the relationships between labeled and unlabeled videos, offering a significant improvement over previous methods. By fusing hidden topics with LLM-enhanced text, CSRL effectively handles sparse video features. Experiments on large-scale datasets from the Kwai platform show that CSRL achieves state-of-the-art results, with up to 44.64% improvement in Hit Ratio (HR), highlighting its superiority over existing zero-shot recommendation models in predicting user interests within the user-video network.

PaperID: 4115

Authors:Zhaoliang Chen, William K. Cheung, Hong-Ning Dai, Byron Choi, Jiming Liu

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong SAR

Title: Gated Variational Graph Autoencoders as Experts with Competition and Consensus for Multi-view Clustering

Abstract:
Multiview clustering has been found useful to leverage diverse data sources for accurate and robust underlying data representations. It typically relies on effectively integrating the latent features from different views through allocating weights while simultaneously mining their specificity and consensus information. However, it remains open how to achieve a more fine-grained sample-level weight allocation for promoting view-specific information fusion and view-shared consensus. To address this problem, we propose a novel multi-expert learning framework named Gated Variational Graph AutoEncoder with Competition and Consensus (GVGAE-C2). In particular, it employs multiple view-specific Variational Graph AutoEncoders (VGAEs) as experts to capture the latent features from their own views. Furthermore, we design a fine-grained structure-aware gating network, which dynamically computes sample-level weights based on the proposed structure-aware quality evaluation on each expert, thus facilitating competition among experts. Meanwhile, each expert is trained not only to study its assigned view's specificity features, but also explicitly encouraged to learn consensus-aware features across views. Extensive multi-view clustering experiments on benchmark datasets reveal that GVGAE-C2 significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 4116

Authors:Renke Dai, Hebin Hu, Jiahui Zhang, Yilin Kang, Ah-Hwee Tan

Affiliations: South-Central Minzu University, Singapore Management University

Title: MemoryART: Enhancing LLMs via Multi-Memory Models with Adaptive Resonance Theory for Healthcare Agents

Abstract:
Though promising in healthcare consultation applications, large language models (LLMs) face critical limitations in retaining and utilizing longterm memory across multi-turn interactions. In particular, existing memory enhancing paradigms are constrained by limited context windows and embedding-based retrieval, often failing to maintain task relevance and still suffering from memory prototype collapse in multi-turn healthcare consultation. To address these challenges, we propose a cognitively-inspired memory framework named MemoryART, which is grounded in Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART)—a cognitive and learning theory of how humans and animals adapt to dynamic environments. MemoryART employs three memory modules—working memory, episodic memory, and semantic memory to support task-aware memory organization and dynamic retrieval. Specifically, episodic memory provides the storage of specific experiences along with contextual clues, which is crucial for managing patient-specific information and perfect for multi-turn healthcare consultation interactions. Building upon this concept, MemoryART leverages multi-channel competitive learning and resonance matching to enable efficient and interpretable episodic memory encoding, alleviating issues of prototype collapse and noisy memory associations. For evaluation, we construct a long-term medical dialogue benchmark called MediLongChat using a LLM-based generation pipeline. The resulting dataset features realistic, multi-disease chat histories, each exceeding 100K tokens across 20–30 dialogues, simulating real-world healthcare interaction patterns. Our experimental results show that MemoryART outperforms mainstream approaches in memory-intensive tasks, achieving SOTA results and significantly reducing token consumption across five popular LLMs, confirming its effectiveness and efficiency in providing scalable, reliable memory for LLMs in healthcare.

PaperID: 4117

Authors:Yonghao Dong, Qiang He, Penghong Rui, Zhenzhe Zheng, Zhao Li, Feifei Chen, Hai Jin, Yun Yang

Affiliations: National Engineering Research Center for Big Data Technology and System, China Services Computing Technology and System Lab, China Cluster and Grid Computing Lab, China School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Zhejiang Lab, Deakin University, Swinburne University of Technology

Title: EnViT: Enhancing the Performance of Early-Exit Vision Transformers via Exit-Aware Structured Dropout-Enabled Self-Distillation

Abstract:
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have gained significant attention and widespread adoption due to their impressive performance in various computer vision tasks. However, in practice, their substantial computational overhead often leads to high inference latency and increased overheads when deployed on resourceconstrained edge devices like smartphones, autonomous vehicles, and robots. To address these challenges, Early Exit (EE) has emerged as a promising approach for lightweight inference on edge devices. It accelerates inference and reduces computational overhead by adaptively producing predictions through early exits based on sample complexity. Existing EE methods typically suffer from substantial accuracy decreases in late exits while providing only marginal accuracy improvements to early exits. This paper presents EnViT, an exit-aware structured dropout-enabled self-distillation approach that enhances the performance of early exits without compromising late exits. EnViT leverages structured dropout to enable self-distillation, where the full model serves as the teacher and its own virtual sub-models generated by structured dropout as students. This mechanism effectively distills knowledge from the full model to early exits and avoids performance degradation in late exits by mitigating parameter conflicts across exits during training. Evaluation on five datasets shows that our EnViT achieves accuracy improvements ranging from 0.36% to 7.92% while maintaining competitive speed-up ratios of 1.72x to 2.23x.

PaperID: 4118

Authors:Zehua Duo, Jiang Li, Xiangdong Su, Guanglai Gao

Affiliations: College of Computer Science, Inner Mongolia University National & Local Joint Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Information Processing Technology for Mongolian Inner Mongolia Key Laboratory of Multilingual Artificial Intelligence Technology

Title: FlorE: Integrating Full Lorentz Group and Directional Offsets for Effective Knowledge Graph Embedding

Abstract:
Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) aims to map entities and relationships into a continuous vector space to facilitate reasoning and downstream tasks. Although previous KGE methods based on Euclidean, complex spaces, or hyperbolic spaces have performed well, they still struggle to effectively model ZParadox relation patterns which account for a large proportion in each knowledge graph. To address this issue, we propose a novel KGE method FlorE which integrates full Lorentz Group and directional offset operation in hyperbolic space for KGE task. Specifically, we incorporates the full Lorentz Group to enable the same relation in knowledge graph (KG) to perform indefinite isometry, thus avoiding the overlapping of entities. Meanwhile, we implement directional offset operation via exponential mapping to transform the relations to the same Lorentz manifold of the entities, thus maintaining geometric consistency for the relations and entities in KG. By integrating these two techniques, FlorE can effectively model the Z-Paradox relation patterns and improve the representation learning ability for KGs. Experiments on the five benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. For the Z-Paradox relation patterns, the improvement achieves 26.7%, 15.6%, 35.4%, 33.7%, and 31.5% on FB15k-237, WN18RR, CoDEx-S, CoDEx-M and CoDEx-L, respectively.

PaperID: 4119

Authors:Fen Fang, Xinan Liang, Muli Yang, Jinghong Zheng, Tobias Mass, Ying Sun, Xulei Yang, Xuewu Xu, Zhengguo Li

Affiliations: Institute for Infocomm Research A*STAR, Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE), Singapore National Semiconductor Translation and Innovation Center (NSTIC), MetaOptics Technologies

Title: Towards Illumination-Aware Restoration of Metalens-Captured Images: A New Dataset and a Strong Baseline

Abstract:
Metalenses offer compelling advantages such as lightweight and ultrathin design, making them promising alternatives to conventional lenses. However, their widespread adoption is hindered by image quality degradation caused by chromatic and angular aberrations. To mitigate this, restoration processes are often necessary to recover high-quality RGB images from metalens-captured inputs. While recent deep learning-based restoration methods show promise, they typically (1) blur or distort peripheral regions, or (2) fail entirely under unseen illumination conditions. To advance metalens image restoration, we introduce IlluMeta---the first and largest real-world, illumination-aware metalens image dataset—captured across diverse lighting environments. In addition, we propose a novel end-to-end restoration framework that directs attention to challenging regions and adaptively adjusts to varying illuminations via reinforcement learning. Experiments show that our method can be applied in a plug-and-play manner to enhance existing models, significantly improving image restoration quality, especially under unseen lighting conditions, paving the way for broader real-world deployment of metalens technologies.

PaperID: 4120

Authors:Binbin Feng, Shikun He, Yingxin Wang, Pengwei Wang, Xiang Gao, Zhijun Ding

Affiliations: School of Economics and Management, Tongji University, Ministry of Education, Key Laboratory of Embedded System and Service Computing, School of Computer Science and Technology, Donghua University, High Performance Computing Facility Research Center, Zhejiang Lab

Title: WIET: Harmonizing Group-aware Model Weighting and Worker Allocation for Ensemble Temporal Prediction MaaS

Abstract:
Ensemble Temporal Prediction Modelas-a-Service (ETP-MaaS) has become crucial in fields like financial modeling and cloud monitoring. Existing solutions fail to co-optimally address a two-fold challenge of dynamic collaboration and heterogeneity, treating models as independent entities and employing simplistic worker allocation rules. However, at the model level, data volatility means that optimal performance requires identifying and weighting constantly shifting subgroups of base models, not just individual ones; at the system level, these model groups must be efficiently mapped to a pool of heterogeneous and dynamically available workers. To this end, we introduce WIET, an efficient ETP-MaaS system that co-optimizes model weighting and worker allocation. For adaptive weighting, WIET identifies evolving group behaviors among base models and propose a novel group temporal locality-enhanced weighting method. Additionally, WIET develops an efficient, multi-dimensional worker allocation method powered by hybrid heuristic optimization, effectively reducing bottlenecks and resource waste. Experiments show WIET consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy, latency, and resource usage across various workloads and tasks.

PaperID: 4121

Authors:Hang Gao, Zuosong Cai, Yuze Li, Cheng Liu, Gaoyang Li, Ying Li, Wei Du, You Zhou

Affiliations: Jilin University, Huaqiao University Shantou University, Nanjing Medical University

Title: Learning Whom to Align With: Progressive Anomaly Combination Detection for Partially View-Aligned Clustering

Abstract:
Partially Viewaligned Clustering (PVC) addresses the challenge of partial view alignment in multi-view learning by leveraging complementary and consistent information. While existing PVC methods show promise, most rely on distance-based strategies that are sensitive to view-specific details and noise, limiting their robustness. In this work, we propose a novel view alignment strategy that reformulates the alignment task as an anomaly detection problem. Rather than learning a view-alignment matrix that enforces strict one-to-one correspondences across views, we adopt a progressive approach to identify well-aligned samples. Specifically, we sample subsets of data by generating random view combinations from unaligned samples and propose an anomaly combination detection module to evaluate the alignment consistency of these combinations. In addition, our progressive training framework alternates between updating model parameters and selecting high-confidence view combinations for subsequent optimization. By reformulating view alignment as an anomaly detection task, our approach provides a more robust and effective solution to partial view alignment. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in the PVC problem.

PaperID: 4122

Authors:Yuxiang Guo, Yan Zhuang, Qi Liu, Zhenya Huang, Xianquan Wang, Liyang He, Jiatong Li, Rui Li, Shijin Wang

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Intelligence, University of Science and Technology of China, IFLYTEK Research

Title: From Diagnosis to Generalization: A Cognitive Approach to Data Selection for Educational LLMs

Abstract:
Specializing Large Language Models for educational domains is a key frontier in creating personalized learning tools. The central challenge is not data scarcity but its abundance: efficiently selecting a curated data subset from vast corpora to enhance specialized skills and foster generalization, without degrading existing abilities. Existing data selection paradigms, relying on superficial semantic similarity or model training dynamics, often lack a principled framework to identify data that promotes true cognitive growth. Our work proposes a paradigm shift from leveraging indirect proxies of learning value, such as semantic similarity and training dynamics, towards a framework that performs a direct, cognitivelevel modeling of the learner's state. We introduce CASS, a novel framework that implements this cognitive approach through a clear pipeline, moving from an initial Diagnosis to the ultimate goal of expanding the model's cognitive frontier. First, CASS diagnoses the LLM's cognitive frontier using Multidimensional Item Response Theory. Leveraging this diagnosis, it then employs Fisher Information to select a data subset situated at LLM's cognitive frontier that offers maximum informational gain. Finally, the model is fine-tuned on this curated data using a structured, easy-to-hard curriculum to ensure effective learning. Experiments on our new multi-subject dataset show that models trained with CASS not only achieve superior accuracy in the target domain but also exhibit enhanced generalization. CASS provides a more efficient, effective, and theoretically-grounded paradigm for building expert educational LLMs.

PaperID: 4123

Authors:Heyan Huang, Yizhe Yang, Huashan Sun, Jiawei Li, Yang Gao

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology

Title: Simulated Rewards, Skewed Strategies: Tracing the Acquired Preference Bias in LLM-Based Dialogue Planners

Abstract:
Large language models have enabled sophisticated dialogue planning policy, but their reliance on LLMgenerated simulation and feedback for policy optimization may introduce systematic preference bias. We present the first comprehensive analysis of preference bias in LLM-based dialogue planners, evaluating four state-of-the-art planning policies across three dialogue domains using multiple LLM families at varying scales. Our investigation reveals that all tested planners exhibit significant preference bias, systematically favoring narrow strategy sets rather than maintaining balanced distributions. User simulation emerges as the primary bias driver, while diverse persona simulation fails as an effective mitigation strategy. Most concerning, preference bias drives planners toward ethically problematic strategies that achieve short-term success while undermining real-world effectiveness and ethical standards. Our findings establish fundamental challenges for responsible deployment of LLM-based dialogue systems and provide crucial insights for developing more reliable and ethically-aligned planning approaches.

PaperID: 4124

Authors:Ziwen Lan, Keisuke Maeda, Takahiro Ogawa, Miki Haseyama

Affiliations: Hokkaido University

Title: Adversarial Perturbation Shield: Preventing Concept Bleed-through in Continual Learning of Personalized Generative Models

Abstract:
Personalized textto-image diffusion models have gained increasing attention because they can generate images that contain unique concepts based on limited training data. However, in continual learning scenarios, these models suffer from concept bleed-through, where newly introduced concepts frequently overwrite or interfere with the previously learned concepts. Previous studies have attempted to mitigate this issue at the model adaptation level; however, they failed to fully preserve the distinct semantic representations in the latent space. Thus, this paper proposes an adversarial perturbation-based training strategy to address concept bleed-through in continual learning for personalized diffusion models. The proposed method introduces adversarial perturbations into the training images, which strategically shifts their semantic representations in the latent space to ensure that the newly learned concepts remain distinct and do not interfere with the previously acquired knowledge. Unlike structural modifications to the model, the proposed method operates at the data level, which makes it broadly applicable to existing continual personalization frameworks without increasing model complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves concept separation while maintaining high image fidelity, offering a solution to enhance the reliability of continual learning in personalized generative models.

PaperID: 4125

Authors:Cuihong Li, Xiaowen Huang, Chuanhuan Yin, Jitao Sang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing Key Laboratory of Traffic Data Mining and Embodied Intelligence, Key Laboratory of Big Data & Artificial Intelligence in Transportation, Ministry of Education.

Title: Membership Inference Attack Against Large Language Model-Based Recommendation Systems: A New Distillation-Based Paradigm

Abstract:
Membership Inference Attack (MIA) aims to determine whether a specific data sample was included in the training dataset of a target model. Traditional MIA approaches rely on shadow models to mimic target model behavior, but their effectiveness diminishes for Large Language Model (LLM)based recommendation systems due to the scale and complexity of training data. This paper introduces a novel knowledge distillation-based MIA paradigm tailored for LLM-based recommendation systems. Our method constructs a reference model via distillation, applying distinct strategies for member and non-member data to enhance discriminative capabilities. The paradigm extracts fused features (e.g., confidence, entropy, loss, and hidden layer vectors) from the reference model to train an attack model, overcoming limitations of individual features. Extensive experiments on extended datasets (Last.FM, MovieLens, Book-Crossing, Delicious) and diverse LLMs (T5, GPT-2, LLaMA3) demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms shadow model-based MIAs and individual-feature baselines. The results show its practicality for privacy attacks in LLM-driven recommender systems.

PaperID: 4126

Authors:Xingwang Li, Fei Teng, Xin Wu, Qiang Duan

Affiliations: School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwest Jiaotong University, Ministry of Education, Information Sciences and Technology Department, The Pennsylvania State University

Title: Uncovering Hidden Degeneration: A Physics-Guided Bidirectional Inference Framework for Industrial Time Series Prediction

Abstract:
Hidden degenerations in industrial time series often precede observable failures, they remain undetected by standard monitoring systems until anomalies become apparent. This gap between microscopic degradation and macroscopic observation renders conventional predictors inherently reactive, as they rely on correlations in sensor data rather than uncovering the underlying, physics‑consistent degradation states. Crucially, the microscopic mechanisms governing system evolution depend on macroscopic state variables—whose measurements are expectations over microscopic probability distributions—so purely data‑driven “top‑down” or purely physics‑guided “bottom‑up” approaches cannot forecast degeneration‑entangled industrial faults. To address these challenges, we propose a PhysicsGuided Bidirectional Inference Framework that represents hidden microscopic states from macroscopic measurements. Our approach uniquely combines: (1) bottom-up physics-based simulation using Continuum Damage Mechanics to model micro-scale damage evolution under environmental stressors, and (2) top-down probabilistic inference via maximum entropy formalism to estimate latent microstate distributions from sparse sensor data. This bidirectional mechanism enables early failure prediction by bridging observable measurements with unobservable degeneration. Validation on real-world railway infrastruc datasets demonstrates significant improvements in early fault prediction compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Our method establishes a new paradigm for safety-critical industrial applications requiring reliable prediction of hidden degeneration processes.

PaperID: 4127

Authors:Gen Liu, Zhongying Zhao, Hui Zhou, Chao Li, Qingtian Zeng

Affiliations: Shandong University of Science and Technology

Title: Can Pseudo-Label Be More Reliable? A Simple yet Effective Topology-Aware Graph Self-Training Method

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated impressive success across a range of graphbased tasks. However, their performance in node classification typically relies on enough high-quality labeled data which are difficult to obtain in practice. Self-training emerges as a promising solution to tackle the issue of label scarcity. Most existing studies in this direction mainly rely on classification scores to explore high-confidence unlabeled samples. Nevertheless, these methods often lead to false positive samples, which hinders the capability of GNNs. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective Topology-Aware Graph Self-Training (TA-GST) method. Specifically, we first explore the origin of false positives in pseudo-labeled samples. We then design a topology-aware scoring method, which considers both the classification score and connectivity pattern to enhance the reliability of pseudo-labeled samples. Besides, we depart TA-GST from the traditional teacher-student pattern and simplify it in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments on seven real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

PaperID: 4128

Authors:Shaolei Liu, Yuting Wu, Dongchen Zhu, Jiamao Li

Affiliations: Bio-vision System Laboratory, Science and Technology on Micro-system Laboratory, Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Energy-guided Dual Domain-invariant Prompting Framework with Fourier Regularization for Generalized Few-Shot Medical Segmentation

Abstract:
Precise segmentation of organ and tissue lesions is essential for clinical diagnosis and treatment. Despite the progress of deep learning and foundation segmentation models, their domain generalization capability remains limited particularly when dealing with crossdomain scenarios or unseen data, leading to significant performance degradation. Current medical SAM-based generalization methods face two primary challenges: First, existing prompt-tuning strategies inadequately capture key domain-invariant features; Second, the reliance on fully labeled source domain data is unrealistic in clinical practice. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Dual domain-Invariant Prompt Optimization (DIPO) enhanced by energy-guided augmentation and frequency consistency regularization for few-shot medical image segmentation generalization. Our approach introduces a multi-band momentum enhancement strategy to dynamically augment source data by leveraging diverse frequency bands of the Fourier amplitude spectrum. Furthermore, we integrate multiscale geometric representation-based non-subsampled shearlet transform and text prompts to strengthen the extraction of shape- and texture-related domain-invariant features. Finally, we employ frequency consistency regularization to refine model robustness using predictions from unlabeled data. Experimental results in prostate and fundus datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 4129

Authors:Yantao Lu, Shiqi Sun, Ning Liu, Bo Jiang, Ying Zhang, Jinchao Chen, Chenglie Du

Affiliations: Northwest Polytechnical University Xi'an, Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics, Didi Chuxing

Title: STEP-Nav: Spatial-Temporal Efficient Visual Token Pruning for Vision-and-Language Navigation with Large Language Models

Abstract:
Visionand-Language Navigation (VLN) plays a critical role in tasks of embodied AI, particularly in unseen environments following natural language instructions. Recent advancements leverage large language models (LLMs) to improve the accuracy and generalizability of VLN systems by encoding image sequences as dense token representations. However, this tokenization approach incurs substantial computational overhead due to two key inefficiencies: 1) ego-centric camera views often include navigation-irrelevant re- gions (e.g., sky or distant backgrounds), and 2) high-frame-rate image sequences introduce temporal redundancy. To address these challenges, we propose Spatial-Temporal Efficient Visual Token Pruning (STEP-Nav), a unified frame- work that simultaneously prunes redundant visual tokens and fine-tunes VLN models to preserve navigation performance. In particular, STEP-Nav incorporates a distance- and content-aware token evaluation mechanism to remove irrelevant tokens at the spatial level, along with temporal level similarity-based filtering to reduce redundancy across sequential frames. To ensure pruning does not harm task performance, we introduce a distortion-aware fine-tuning strategy that aligns pruned-token representations with their full-token counterparts while maintaining navigation accuracy. Experiments on the R2R and RxR benchmarks using Navid-CE and NavGPT-2 as base models demonstrate that STEP-Nav preserves over 95% of the performance while reducing 66.7% of tokens, outperforming existing token pruning baselines.

PaperID: 4130

Authors:Soheila Molaei, Bahareh Fatemi, Anshul Thakur, Andrew Soltan, Fazle Rabbi, Andreas L. Opdahl, Kim Branson, Patrick Schwab, Danielle Belgrave, David A. Clifton

Affiliations: Department of Engineering Science, Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen

Title: Neuro-Symbolic Federated Learning over Heterogeneous Data-Views: A Structured Approach to Distributive EHR Modelling

Abstract:
Federated learning (FL) enables privacypreserving model training across distributed Electronic Health Records (EHRs), but its deployment remains limited by data-view heterogeneity, where institutions maintain incompatible local schemas. Most existing methods address this by enforcing flat, aligned data views, which require extensive cross-site preprocessing and manual harmonisation that often discards client-specific features, or by projecting inputs into a shared latent space, which sacrifices interpretability. We propose a modelling shift from conventional FL with vectorised inputs to a symbolic, relation-centric framework, where each client organises its EHR data as a structured, type-aware relational graph. This enables client-specific inference without requiring schema alignment and supports FL across heterogeneous data views. To model over these symbolic structures, we introduce an architecture that combines relation-aware message passing with a learnable feature relevance mechanism, jointly enabling accurate local predictions and client-specific interpretability while supporting parameter sharing across clients. Beyond strong performance on three real-world EHR datasets exhibiting data-view heterogeneity, we further show that our framework supports multimodal FL under modality-level heterogeneity. Using MC-MED, a publicly available multimodal emergency department dataset, we demonstrate that our method accommodates clients with partially missing modalities, highlighting its robustness and scalability in real-world clinical settings.

PaperID: 4131

Authors:Zhibin Ni, Chenghao Zhang, Hai Wan, Xibin Zhao

Affiliations: School of Software, Tsinghua University

Title: Disentangled Generation-Based Prototypical Alignment for Few-Shot Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Graph-Level Anomaly Detection

Abstract:
GraphLevel Anomaly Detection (GLAD) seeks to identify anomalous graphs within graph datasets, which has significant applications across diverse real-world fields. Most existing GLAD methods are trained in an unsupervised manner due to high costs for labeling, resulting in sub-optimal performance when compared to supervised methods. To fill this gap, we propose a Disentangled Generation-Based Prototypical Alignment (DGPA) method that extends graph-level anomaly detection to Few-Shot Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (FUDA) setting, aiming to identify anomalous graphs from a set of unlabeled graphs (target domain) by using partially labeled graphs from a different but related domain (source domain), which fulfills the practical requirement of transferring anomaly knowledge. This is specifically achieved through a dedicated Disentangled Sample Generation module, which addresses label scarcity by generating faithful samples with disentangled representation learning grounded in Information Bottleneck principle, along with a Graph-based Prototypical Self-Supervision module, which alleviates domain shift by encoding and aligning semantic structures in the shared latent space across domains in a self-supervised manner. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets reveal the effectiveness of our proposed DGPA.

PaperID: 4132

Authors:Jungwuk Park, Dong-Jun Han, Jaekyun Moon

Affiliations: Yonsei University

Title: ProLoG: Hybrid Prompt and LoRA Based Adaptation of Vision-Language Models for OOD Generalization

Abstract:
While visionlanguage foundation models (VLMs) achieve remarkable performance when fine-tuned on downstream in-distribution (ID) data, this process compromises their generalization ability on out-of-distribution (OOD) data that deviate from the downstream tasks due to overfitting. To address this, we propose ProLoG, a new adaptation method that effectively fine-tunes VLMs on downstream tasks while achieving high OOD performance. Specifically, we design a unique integration of prompt tuning and LoRA, offering a robust hybrid platform to improve performance. During training, we propose an augmentation-based regularization loss that enhances the generalization of our hybrid network by using augmented image features aligned with LLM-generated texts containing key attributes of each class. By leveraging our hybrid design, we also introduce an adaptive inference strategy that flexibly applies trained prompts and LoRA based on a task similarity score to effectively handle both ID and OOD data. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing works on various datasets, confirming its advantages.

PaperID: 4133

Authors:Maqsudur Rahman, Jun Zhuang

Affiliations: Boise State University

Title: QAPNet: A Quantum-Attentive Patchwise Network for Robust Medical Image Classification Under Noisy Inputs

Abstract:
Robust medical image classification under input corruption and baglevel annotation remains a critical challenge in clinical AI applications. We propose QAPNet, a Quantum- Attentive Patchwise Network that integrates quantum neural encoding, additive attention-based instance reweighting, and prototype-contrastive regularization for reliable diagnosis from degraded inputs. Our framework uses a sliding-window strategy to divide each MRI medical Image into overlapping patches, where each is encoded via an 8-qubit quantum circuit using RY -based noise-sensitive layers for yielding expressive low-dimensional representations without relying on classical CNNs. A lightweight additive attention mechanism computes instance-wise importance weights that enable interpretable and noise-aware bag-level aggregation. To enhance robustness, we apply a contrastive loss that aligns clean and noisy embeddings and enforce prototype-guided clustering via class-wise centroids. We evaluate QAPNet across seven benchmark medical imaging datasets under three levels of additive Gaussian noise (σ ∈ 5%, 10%, 30%). QAPNet consistently outperforms eight strong baselines and achieves up to +20.8% higher accuracy in OASIS (with 30% noise), +17.7% in PathMNIST, and maintains stable performance (< 4% degradation) in all settings. Ablation studies confirm the critical role of quantum encoding, attention-based aggregation, and prototype contrastive learning. These results suggest that QAPNet offers a scalable and interpretable architecture for noisy medical imaging tasks in the real world to bridge the quantum representation learning with robust clinical prediction.

PaperID: 4134

Authors:Vipul Kumar Singh, Jyotismita Barman, Sandeep Kumar, Tapan K. Gandhi, Jayadeva

Affiliations: Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, India Yardi School of Artificial Intelligence, India Bharti School of Telecommunication Technology and Management, India Biofin Capital, New Jersey, United States of America

Title: Leap of FAITH from GNN-to-MLP: Fairness Aware Inference via DisTillation of GrapH Knowledge

Abstract:
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are expressive architectures for learning from complex graphstructured data. However, their practical use is often limited by the high computational cost of neighborhood aggregation. Recent efforts have focused on knowledge distillation from GNNs to inference-efficient Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs). However, most existing works treat this distillation as an embedding alignment problem, overlooking the need to replicate the topology-aware smoothing behavior that arises from message passing in GNNs. Moreover, existing methods are primarily performance driven, ignoring critical real-world requirements such as fairness. In this work, we make two key observations: (1) state-of-the-art distillation methods fail to capture the heterogeneous smoothness patterns of GNNs, limiting structural awareness in MLPs, and (2) they introduce significant individual and group fairness violations. We introduce FAITH, the first fair and structurally aware GNN-to-MLP distillation framework with graph-free inference. To improve structural awareness in MLPs, we propose a neighborhood-guided energy alignment objective that transfers not only node-level energy, but also the distribution of energies across local neighborhoods. To improve individual fairness, FAITH introduces a novel ℓ2,1-norm objective that preserves structured similarity in the learned representations. Additionally, we incorporate a counterfactual invariance objective that explicitly encourages the model to learn representations that are statistically independent of the sensitive attribute. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of FAITH, interpreting it through a novel instantiation of the Information Bottleneck principle. Extensive experiments on 11 benchmark datasets show that FAITH achieves stronger structural awareness and delivers a better trade-off between utility and fairness than existing methods.

PaperID: 4135

Authors:Xin Sun, Heng Zhou, Yuhao Wu, Chao Li

Affiliations: International Business School, Zhejiang University, China National Engineering Laboratory for Industrial Control System Security Technology

Title: State-Derivative-Aware Neural Controlled Differential Equations for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection and Diagnosis

Abstract:
Multivariate time series anomaly detection is a crucial factor in realworld applications but a challenging task due to the complex temporal dependencies and system dynamics. Reconstruction-based methods have made great improvements in recent years. However, we observe an issue these methods are suffering, that they primarily measure deviations in the time points themselves when performing anomaly detection but ignore changes in the dynamic properties of the system. In these cases, they are unable to produce sufficient reconstruction errors to detect anomalies, so some potential abnormal time points caused by the dynamic evolution of the system are missing. To address this problem, we propose a novel method, SDA2D, which models system dynamics by the derivative of the NCDE-derived state vector with respect to time, enabling the learning of reconstruction deviation and system evolution jointly. Our experimental results show that SDA2D achieves noticeable improvements in four benchmark datasets, and the visualization also provides further instructions for anomaly diagnosis, which helps locate the sources of these anomalies.

PaperID: 4136

Authors:Cheng Tang, Guochong Sui, Wenqi Lou, Zihan Wang, Jiayi Tuo, Wenqian Xie, Yinkang Gao, Yixuan Zhu, Lei Gong, Chao Wang, Xuehai Zhou

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, Duke University

Title: CloserToMe: A Unified Framework for Accurate and Transferable Latency Prediction Across Heterogeneous Devices

Abstract:
Hardware accelerators such as GPUs, NPUs, and FPGAs are essential to meeting AI’s computational demands. With the proliferation of heterogeneous devices across cloud and edge, various model optimization techniques adapt to diverse hardware characteristics through operator transformations and structural modifications. Accurate, efficient latency prediction enables rapid selection of optimal strategies across hardware backends. Many existing methods treat hardware as a blackbox executor, directly regressing latency without explicitly modeling the intricate interactions between neural network (NN) structures and device-specific execution behaviors. To address these challenges, we introduce a new modeling perspective that captures the interaction between neural architectures and hardware execution. To capture device-specific characteristics, we propose two complementary modeling strategies. The Device Behavior Signature Selector (DBSel) characterizes hardware execution behavior by selectively probing a small set of representative architectures, forming a compact, workload-driven profile. In parallel, we construct capability vectors that capture the hierarchical memory of each device and compute characteristics, providing a structured abstraction of its architectural capacity. To unify both behavioral and structural views, we introduce the Hardware–Operation Dialogue Module (HODM), which models fine-grained interactions between neural operators and hardware properties. Together, these components empower CloserToMe to deliver accurate and transferable latency predictions across unseen and diverse platforms.

PaperID: 4137

Authors:Guanjun Wang, Jianhao Zhang, Jiaming Ma, Sheng Huang, Pengkun Wang, Zhengyang Zhou, Binwu Wang, Yang Wang

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: U2B: Scale-unbiased Representation Converter for Graph Classification with Imbalanced and Balanced Scale Distributions

Abstract:
Graph classification is a critical task in analyzing graph data, with applications across various domains. While graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable results, their ability to generalize across graphs of varying scales remains a challenge. Conventional models often perform well on largescale graphs but struggle with distributions that are skewed towards small scales. Conversely, models tailored to address scale imbalances frequently prioritize small-scale graphs, leading to diminished performance in more balanced scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a Unbalanced-Balanced Representation Converter (U2B), which exhibits no explicit bias toward graph scales. U2B employs a two-step workflow: a distillation phase to extract base features from both node-level and graph-level representations, followed by a refinement phase to generate unbiased representations for improved balance. In the distillation phase, a static constraint guides node-level adjustments, improving the representation of nodes in small graphs. Simultaneously, a dynamic constraint in the graph-level process mitigates biases toward features from large graphs. To ensure harmony between the representations, a consistency alignment loss is introduced, aligning node-level and graph-level features to create more cohesive and balanced graph representations. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that U2B achieves competitive performance.

PaperID: 4138

Authors:Ge Yan, Yuchen Wang, Junchi Yan

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: Towards Real-Time Neutral Atom Array Assembly via Unsupervised Hologram Generation and Path Optimization

Abstract:
The rapid and reliable assembly of defectfree atom arrays poses a fundamental challenge for neutral atom quantum computing. While parallel rearrangement methods using spatial light modulators show promise, they suffer from significant overhead in two sub-tasks: atom-site matching and hologram generation. We propose a framework to address these bottlenecks and enhance the efficiency and fidelity of the assembly process. It features a new optimization objective for atom-site matching that minimizes the longest movement path, and a Fourier U-Net model that integrates Fourier operators with image-to-image translation to enable real-time hologram generation. The model is trained in a fully self-supervised paradigm, leveraging the physical properties of holography to remove the need for costly ground-truth labels. Experimental results show our framework not only significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art supervised CNN-based model but also achieves an inference speed orders of magnitude faster than traditional iterative algorithms, enabling real-time, dynamic atom rearrangement.

PaperID: 4139

Authors:Ziduo Yang, Yi-Ming Zhao, Xian Wang, Wei Zhuo, Xiaoqing Liu, Lei Shen

Affiliations: Jinan University, National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University

Title: Equivariant Atomic and Lattice Modeling Using Geometric Deep Learning for Crystal Structure Optimization

Abstract:
Structure optimization, which yields the relaxed structure (minimum‑energy state), is essential for reliable materials property calculations, yet traditional ab initio approaches such as density‑functional theory (DFT) are computationally intensive. Machine learning (ML) has emerged to alleviate this bottleneck but suffers from two major limitations: (i) existing models operate mainly on atoms, leaving lattice vectors implicit despite their critical role in structural optimization; and (ii) they often rely on multistage, non-end-to-end workflows that are prone to error accumulation. Here, we present E³Relax, an end-to-end equivariant graph neural network that maps an unrelaxed crystal directly to its relaxed structure. E³Relax promotes both atoms and lattice vectors to graph nodes endowed with dual scalar–vector features, enabling unified and symmetry‑preserving modeling of atomic displacements and lattice deformations. A layer‑wise supervision strategy forces every network depth to make a physically meaningful refinement, mimicking the incremental convergence of DFT while preserving a fully end‑to‑end pipeline. We evaluate E³Relax on four benchmark datasets and demonstrate that it achieves remarkable accuracy and efficiency. Through DFT validations, we show that the structures predicted by E³Relax are energetically favorable, making them suitable as high-quality initial configurations to accelerate DFT calculations.

PaperID: 4140

Authors:Guanyuan Yu, Yijun Chen, Liang Xu, Gang Kou

Affiliations: Southwest University of Finance and Economics, Big Data Laboratory on Financial Security and Behavior, SWUFE (Laboratory of Philosophy and Social Sciences, Ministry of Education), Xiangjiang Laboratory

Title: CastX: Cohort-Level Causal Inference Meets Statistical Testing for Faithful and Reliable GNN Explanations

Abstract:
Explainability plays a critical role in understanding the workings of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). While recent methods have introduced causal inference into GNN explanation, they predominantly rely on individuallevel interventions and lack rigorous statistical causality testing, resulting in unfaithful and unreliable explanations. To address these challenges, we propose CastX that integrates cohort-level causal analysis with statistical causality testing for GNN explanations. Specifically, CastX formulates the discovery of explanatory subgraphs as a dynamic edge pruning task guided by Conditional Average Treatment Effect (CATE) estimation. A reinforcement learning agent is employed to iteratively eliminate spurious edges and identify causally informative substructures. To further enhance reliability, we introduce an i.i.d.-agnostic non-parametric permutation test that assesses the statistical significance of each target edge. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our CastX outperforms existing methods in yielding explanatory subgraphs that are concise, faithful, reliable, and statistically supported.

PaperID: 4141

Authors:Yongshan Zhang, Kangyue Zheng, Shuaikang Yan, Xinxin Wang, Zhihua Cai

Affiliations: China University of Geosciences Wuhan, University of Macau

Title: Efficient Tensorized Multi-View Anchor Graph Clustering with Affinity Propagation for Remote Sensing Data

Abstract:
Multiview clustering of remote sensing data presents significant challenges, as it integrates diverse data representations to improve Earth observation. Although existing anchor graph-based methods have yielded promising results, they generally exhibit two key limitations: (1) the time-consuming process of directly exploring pixel clustering structures, and (2) insufficient modeling of high-order correlations among different views. To address these issues, we propose an Efficient Tensorized multi-view anchor graph clustering method with Affinity Propagation (ETAP) for remote sensing data. Based on superpixel preprocessing, anchor graphs are learned from view-specific pixels and anchors, while compressed anchor graphs are simultaneously learned from the view-specific anchors. An adaptive weighting scheme is introduced to facilitate the learning of these anchor graphs. To capture high-order correlations, tensor Schatten p-norm regularization is applied to the compressed anchor graphs. A connectivity constraint is introduced to uncover the clustering structures of anchors. Finally, pixel clustering structures are then efficiently revealed from the pseudo-labeled anchors through affinity propagation without requiring additional clustering steps. To solve the proposed formulation, we develop an alternating optimization algorithm. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed method over state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 4142

Authors:Zhixiang Zhang, Shuo Chen, Yexin Li, Feng Wang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University

Title: ADAPT: Adaptive Decentralized Architecture with Perception-Aligned Training for Structural Generalization in Multi-Agent RL

Abstract:
Multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) excels in cooperative and competitive tasks, but most architectures are tied to fixed input-output sizes and require retraining when the number of perceptible or controllable objects changes. While structural generalization techniques mitigate this, they rely on centralized training, raising concerns about scalability and privacy. We propose ADAPT, the first framework to support structural generalization under a decentralized training and decentralized execution (DTDE) paradigm. Every agent adopts an object-centric view, encoding each observed object into a feature vector and aggregating them into a variable-length set representation. To enable each agent to infer task-level contexts from this dynamic input independently, we propose a dynamic-consistency loss that enforces spatio-temporal alignment between context representations and observed environmental dynamics. Agents then condition their policies on the inferred contexts to make locally aligned decisions. For zero-shot transfer, we propose FINE (Foresight INdex for multi-agEnt), a metric that considers Q-value overestimation and enables cross-policy comparison of long-term impact, facilitating effective policy transfer. Experiments show that ADAPT surpasses existing DTDE methods and outperforms CTDE baselines in zero-shot generalization.

PaperID: 4143

Authors:Hengcheng Zhou

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Title: Scalable Privacy-Preserving Neural Network Training over Z2k via RMFE-Based Packing and Mixed-Circuit Computation

Abstract:
We introduce a novel framework for privacypreserving multi-party neural network training over ℤ_(2^k) with semi-honest security in the honest-majority setting. Our work utilizes Shamir secret sharing scheme over Galois rings GR(2^k, d) and is scalable in the number of participants. Our primary contribution is a generalization of existing data packing techniques used in private training through Reverse Multiplication-Friendly Embedding (RMFE), which enables a higher packing density and thus more efficient SIMD-style parallel computation. Notably, our work is the first to support a general form of RMFE, lifting a common restriction from previous approaches. To holistically optimize the training process, we further integrate mixed-circuit techniques to be fully compatible with our RMFE-based packing scheme. This enables our protocol to efficiently compute nonlinear functions, such as comparison, by leveraging bit-wise computations over GR(2, d). We consolidate these advances into an end-to-end parallel training framework. Experimental results on both fully connected and convolutional neural networks validate the practical performance advantages of our framework compared to existing methods.

PaperID: 4144

Authors:Chuqiao Zong, Molei Qin, Haochong Xia, Bo An

Affiliations: Nanyang Technological University

Title: ArchetypeTrader: Reinforcement Learning for Selecting and Refining Learnable Strategic Archetypes in Quantitative Trading

Abstract:
Quantitative trading using mathematical models and automated execution to generate trading decisions has been widely applied acorss financial markets. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for developing profitable trading strategies, especially in highly volatile markets like cryptocurrency. However, existing RL methods for cryptocurrency trading face two critical drawbacks: 1) Prior RL algorithms segment markets using handcrafted indicators (e.g., trend or volatility) to train specialized subpolicies. However, these coarse labels oversimplify market dynamics into rigid categories, biasing policies toward obvious patterns like trend-following and neglecting nuanced but lucrative opportunities. 2) Current RL methods fail to systematically use demonstration data. While some approaches ignore demonstrations altogether, others rely on “optimal” yet overly granular trajectories or human-crafted strategies, both of which can overwhelm learning and introduce significant bias, resulting in high variance and significant profit losses. To address these problems, we propose ArchetypeTrader, a novel reinforcement learning framework that automatically selects and refines data-driven trading archetypes distilled from demonstrations. The framework operates in three phases: 1) We use dynamic programming (DP) to generate representative expert trajectories and train a vector-quantized encoder-decoder architecture to distill these demonstrations into discrete, reusable strategic archetypes through self-supervised learning, capturing nuanced market-behavior patterns without human heuristics. 2) We then train an RL agent to select contextually appropriate archetypes from the learned codebook and reconstruct action sequences for the upcoming horizons, effectively performing demonstration-guided strategy reuse. 3) We finally train a policy adapter that leverages hindsight-informed rewards to dynamically refine the archetype actions based on real-time market observations and performance, enabling more fine-grained decision-making and yielding profitable and robust trading strategies. Extensive experiments on four popular cryptocurrency trading pairs demonstrate that ArchetypeTrader significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both profit generation and risk management.

PaperID: 4145

Authors:Yijie Chen, Yuzhe Ji, Haotian Wang, Xiaoyun Qiu, Ying-Cong Chen, Xinhu Zheng

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Title: ZeRCP: Towards Communication-Efficient Collaborative Perception and Future Scene Prediction via Request-Free Spatial Filtering

Abstract:
MultiAgent collaboration addresses inherent limitations of individual agent systems, including limited sensing range and occlusion-induced blind spots. Despite significant progress, persistent challenges such as constrained communication bandwidth and under-explored subsequent extensions still hinder real-time deployment and further developments of collaborative autonomous driving systems. In this work, we propose ZeRCP, a unified communication-efficient framework that bridges collaborative perception with future scene prediction. Specifically, (i) we devise a plug-and-play request-free spatial filtering module (ZeroR) that eliminates the reliance on request maps while preserving inter-agent spatial complementarity modeling. This approach further reduce communication latency and bandwidth consumptions. (ii) We design a multi-scale pyramidal prediction network anchored by a novel Spatial-Temporal Deformable Attention (STDA) module, extending frame-wise detection to multi-frame predictions. This method adeptly models spatiotemporal dynamics without relying on auto-regressive recursion. We evaluate our method on a large-scale dataset in challenging semantic segmentation and scene prediction tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of ZeRCP in bandwidth-constrained collaboration scenarios and spatiotemporal prediction applications.

PaperID: 4146

Authors:Lei Chen, Tengteng Cheng, BoYu Gao, Zitao Liu, Weiqi Luo

Affiliations: Jinan University

Title: Learning from Scoring Disagreements: Contrastive Error Mining for Efficient and Robust LLM-based Assessment

Abstract:
Automated grading of student responses still faces numerous challenges, particularly when dealing with complex and ambiguous answers. In particular, large models are prone to scoring bias when handling uncertain responses, and fewshot reasoning methods often lack stability, which limits their applicability in real educational scenarios. To tackle these challenges, we propose the Contrastive Error Mining and FineTuning (CEM-FT) framework, which automatically identifies high-value hard samples by analyzing scoring disagreements between a full fine-tuned model and a few-shot model. A lightweight LoRA adapter is then trained on these samples to refine model performance with minimal computational overhead. Experiments on the SciEntsbank, Beetle, and Mohler datasets show that CEM-FT can improve QWK by up to 3.9% compared to the fine-tuned Qwen model on SciEntsbank datasets, which is a significant improvement over the few-shot baseline. The proposed framework substantially enhances both scoring accuracy and consistency, providing a practical, robust solution for reliable automated assessment with large language models.

PaperID: 4147

Authors:Yibo Fan, Jingru Li, Huan Li

Affiliations: College of Artificial Intelligence, Nankai University

Title: GlitchCleaner: Lightweight Glitch Tokens Repairing by Lossless Gated LoRA in Large Language Models

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly applied across a wide range of domains. However, recent studies have identified the presence of certain glitch tokens in their vocabularies, which can trigger hallucinations and lead to unpredictable or even harmful outputs. While various methods have been proposed to detect such tokens, effectively repairing them remains a key challenge for ensuring the reliability of LLMs. In this work, we propose GlitchCleaner, a lightweight yet effective approach to mitigate the adverse effects caused by glitch tokens. GlitchCleaner introduces auxiliary branches into specific components within selected layers of the model, enabling efficient and targeted token repair. These branches are implemented using the lowrank adaptation (LoRA) technique, adding less than 0.1% additional parameters to the original model. Furthermore, a gating mechanism dynamically controls the activation of these branches based on the model’s input, ensuring precise intervention without disrupting normal inference behavior. Experimental results across multiple mainstream models demonstrate that our method achieves an average repair rate of 86.88%, representing an improvement of over 30% compared to existing approaches, while ensuring lossless preservation of the model’s baseline capabilities and causing negligible impact on inference speed.

PaperID: 4148

Authors:Chengpeng Fu, Xiaocheng Feng, Yichong Huang, Wenshuai Huo, Baohang Li, Yang Xiang, Ting Liu

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Peng Cheng Laboratory

Title: The Visual Prism: Refracting Images into Parallel Multilingual Descriptions with Structured Visual Guidance

Abstract:
Parallel corpora, as the foundation of machine translation, remain crucial even in the era of large language models (LLMs) for pretraining and fine-tuning. However, annotating parallel corpora is extremely costly, as it requires annotators to be proficient in multiple languages. To reduce this cost, prior work has explored image-pivoted corpus synthesis, generating multilingual captions for the same image as pseudo-parallel data. Unfortunately, these pseudo corpora suffer from the serious issue of multilingual focus divergence, i.e., the model attending to distinct aspects of the image when generating captions in different languages. To address this problem, we propose a method called PRISMS (Parallel Refracting ImageS into Multilingual descriptions with Structured visual guidance), which leverages semantic graphs as structured visual guidance to unify the focus of multilingual captions. To ensure adherence to this guidance, we introduce two key techniques: supervised fine-tuning using self-generated instructional data, and reinforcement learning with a reward signal based on semantic graph consistency. Experimental results on five languages show that our PRISMS significantly improves the image-pivot parallel corpora synthesis, enabling LLMs to achieve translation performance comparable to that of models trained on manually annotated corpora.

PaperID: 4149

Authors:Xilin Lan, Huan Zhang, Yang Yang, Chengwu Xue, Li Kuang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University

Title: LC3: Long Cross-Language Code Clone Detection Enhanced by Opcode Sequences and Affinity Aggregation

Abstract:
Crosslanguage code clone detection, which identifies functionally similar code across programming languages, is critical for ensuring synchronized evolution and reducing maintenance costs in multi-platform software development. While zero-shot approaches have emerged as a practical solution to data scarcity, state-of-the-art methods still face two major limitations: an insufficiency in learning language-agnostic representations and information loss during the processing of long code. To address these challenges, we propose LC3, a novel framework for robust zero-shot cross-language code clone detection. To overcome the language-agnostic representation insufficiency, LC3 fuses source code with its underlying opcode sequences, leveraging a bimodal architecture and adversarial training to learn a language-agnostic representation. To resolve long-code information loss, LC3 introduces a semantic affinity aggregation strategy. This strategy synthesizes a robust clone score from a complete pairwise similarity matrix computed between segmented code blocks, overcoming the limitations of both simple truncation and aggregation. Extensive experiments show that LC3 significantly outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot baselines, especially in challenging long-code scenarios.

PaperID: 4150

Authors:Jiaqi Liu, Yankun Yang, Jiakang Xu, Zhongqiang Du, Wenbin Jiang

Affiliations: Beijing Normal University

Title: Dynamic Cognitive Planning for Cognitive-Functional Dialogue: A Case Study in Emotional Support Conversation

Abstract:
Cognitivefunctional dialogues, such as those for persuasion, consultation, and question-answering, are prevalent throughout human social interaction. The core difference between these dialogues and casual chat lies in their objective: to guide a person's cognitive and psychological state toward a predetermined one. Existing conversational technologies perform poorly in handling such dialogues. The fundamental reason is that the transformation of human cognitive psychology follows specific patterns, yet existing technologies neither account for these patterns nor possess cognitive guidance planning based on them. This deficiency makes it difficult for dialogues to achieve their intended cognitive-functional goals effectively. To address this, we propose a dynamic cognitive planning method (DyCoP). By modeling the long-term evolution of a user's cognitive psychology during the dialogue process, this method dynamically generates dialogue guidance plans that align with the principles of cognitive-psychological evolution. This allows for the generation of appropriate dialogue responses based on prior user psychology and the immediate conversational context, thereby achieving cognitive-functional goals more efficiently and accurately. Simultaneously, we constructed an evaluation framework for cognitive-functional dialogues and constructed a richly annotated emotional support conversation dataset. Comprehensive automatic and human evaluations show that our proposed DyCoP method demonstrates significant advantages over existing baseline models.

PaperID: 4151

Authors:Yiran Liu, Zhiyi Hou, Xiaoang Xu, Shuo Wang, Huijia Wu, Kaicheng Yu, Yang Yu, ChengXiang Zhai

Affiliations: Tsinghua University, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Westlake University, China University of Petroleum (Beijing), University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign

Title: HEV Generative Sandbox: A Framework for Assessing Domain-Specific Social Risks Through Human-LLM Simulation

Abstract:
Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) in specialized domains introduces significant societal and compliance risks, including bias amplification, misinformation propagation, and privacy violations. These risks predominantly emerge from the dynamic interactions between LLMs and humans in specific contexts. Different domains face unique distribution of hazards, and varying interaction modalities introduce distinct levels of exposure and vulnerability. However, current risk assessment frameworks lack a systematic methodology to capture this dynamic interplay. In this work, we introduce the HEV Generative Sandbox, a novel risk evaluation framework that simulates humanLLM behavior to quantify domain-contextual risks across three interdependent dimensions: 1) Hazard (H): Domain-specific threats inherent to a given context; 2) Exposure (E): The extent to which the LLM and its users are subjected to hazardous scenarios; 3) Vulnerability (V): The susceptibility of the system to risk due to human interaction or model weaknesses. Our approach pioneers "domain-rooted scenario generation", wherein we sample contextual distributions from domain-specific corpora and simulate diverse inputs. By unifying dynamic scenario simulation, causal risk decomposition, and closed-loop evaluation, the HEV Generative Sandbox provides a scalable, domain-sensitive methodology for responsible LLM deployment. This work contributes to advancing the safe deployment of LLMs by providing a comprehensive and automated risk evaluation framework.

PaperID: 4152

Authors:Yuying Liu, Xuechen Zhao, Yanyi Huang, Ye Wang, Xin Song, Yue Zhang, Haiyan Liu, Bin Zhou

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology, Shandong Women's University, State Grid Fujian Information & Telecommunication Company

Title: Schema-Guided Event Reasoning: A Plug-and-Play Event Reasoning Framework Based on Large Language Models

Abstract:
Recent advancements in Large Language Models have increasingly demonstrated their potential for event reasoning. However, LLMs still struggle with this task due to inadequate modeling of event structures. Although introducing schema knowledge has been shown to improve event reasoning performance, existing methods rely on predefined schema library, compromising their scalability and lightweight deployment. To address these challenges, we propose SGER, a plugand-play Schema-Guided Event Reasoning framework. In the schema extraction stage, the model maps event descriptions with diverse surface forms to potential semantic structure representations, achieving an abstract transformation from instances to schemas. The schema prediction stage captures the potential associations between historical event schemas to make forward-looking inferences about possible future event schemas. In the event reasoning stage, we integrate historical events and predicted schemas into prompts to guide LLMs in generating specific, contextually consistent predicted events. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our framework significantly improves event reasoning performance of LLMs.

PaperID: 4153

Authors:Luis Frentzen Salim, Lun-Wei Ku, Hsing-Kuo Kenneth Pao

Affiliations: Institute of Information Science, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Academia Sinica, Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering

Title: Positional Cognitive Specialization: Where Do LLMs Learn to Comprehend and Speak Your Language?

Abstract:
Adapting large language models (LLMs) to new languages is an expensive and opaque process. Understanding how language models acquire new languages and multilingual abilities is key to achieve efficient adaptation. Prior work on multilingual interpretability research focuses primarily on how trained models process multilingual instructions, leaving unexplored the mechanisms through which they acquire new languages during training. We investigate these training dynamics on decoderonly transformers through the lens of two functional cognitive specializations: language perception (input comprehension) and production (output generation). Through experiments on low-resource languages, we demonstrate how perceptual and productive specialization emerges in different regions of a language model by running layer ablation sweeps from the model’s input and output directions. Based on the observed specialization patterns, we propose CogSym, a layer-wise heuristic that enables effective adaptation by exclusively finetuning a few early and late layers. We show that tuning only the 25% outermost layers achieves downstream task performance within 2–3% deviation from the full finetuning baseline. Unlike similar layer-selection methods, the proposed method requires no extra data or computation while retaining comparable performance, which is especially beneficial for low-resource languages. CogSym yields consistent performance with adapter methods such as LoRA, showcasing generalization beyond full finetuning. These findings provide insights to better understand how LLMs learn new languages and push toward accessible and inclusive language modeling.

PaperID: 4154

Authors:Qiyao Sun, Xingming Li, Xixiang He, Ao Cheng, Xuanyu Ji, Hailun Lu, Runke Huang, Qingyong Hu

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology, Intelligent Game and Decision Lab, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title: Efficient Hallucination Detection: Adaptive Bayesian Estimation of Semantic Entropy with Guided Semantic Exploration

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in various natural language processing tasks, yet they remain prone to generating factually incorrect outputs—known as "hallucinations". While recent approaches have shown promise for hallucination detection by repeatedly sampling from LLMs and quantifying the semantic inconsistency among the generated responses, they rely on fixed sampling budgets that fail to adapt to query complexity, resulting in computational inefficiency. We propose an Adaptive Bayesian Estimation framework for Semantic Entropy with Guided Semantic Exploration, which dynamically adjusts sampling requirements based on observed uncertainty. Our approach employs a hierarchical Bayesian framework to model the semantic distribution, enabling dynamic control of sampling iterations through variancebased thresholds that terminate generation once sufficient certainty is achieved. We also develop a perturbation-based importance sampling strategy to systematically explore the semantic space. Extensive experiments on four QA datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior hallucination detection performance with significant efficiency gains. In low-budget scenarios, our approach requires about 50% fewer samples to achieve comparable detection performance to existing methods, while delivers an average AUROC improvement of 12.6% under the same sampling budget.

PaperID: 4155

Authors:Peiyuan Tang, Haojie Xin, Xiaodong Zhang, Jun Sun, Qin Xia, Zijiang James Yang

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, University of Science and Technology of China, Singapore Management University

Title: SafetyReminder: Reviving Delayed Safety Awareness of Vision-Language Models to Defend Against Jailbreak Attacks

Abstract:
VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) extend Large Language Models (LLMs) with visual perception capabilities, unlocking broad applications across many domains. However, ensuring their safety remains a critical challenge, as adversarial visual inputs can easily bypass built-in safeguards and elicit harmful content. In this paper, we uncover a phenomenon we call delayed safety awareness, where a jailbroken VLM initially produces harmful content but ultimately recognizes the harmfulness at the end of the generation process. We attribute this phenomenon to the fact that the model's safety awareness against jailbreaks cannot be effectively transferred to the intermediate stages of text generation. Motivated by this insight, we introduce SafetyReminder, a simple yet effective defense that optimizes a learnable soft prompt using our proposed Safety-Activation Prompt Tuning (SAPT). This soft prompt is inserted into the generated text to activate the safety awareness of the model, steering it toward refusal when harmful content arises while preserving helpfulness in benign scenarios. We evaluate our method on three established harmful benchmarks and across three types of adversarial attacks. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art defense performance with strong generalization, offering a practical and lightweight solution for safe deployment of VLMs.

PaperID: 4156

Authors:Huazheng Wang, Yongcheng Jing, Haifeng Sun, Jingyu Wang, Jianxin Liao, Leszek Rutkowski, Dacheng Tao

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanyang Technological University, Beijing China, AGH University of Krakow, and the SAN University

Title: Bridging the Tokenizer Gap: Semantics and Distribution-aware Knowledge Transfer for Unbiased Cross-Tokenizer Distillation

Abstract:
Crosstokenizer knowledge distillation, where the teacher and student employ different tokenizers, is becoming increasingly prevalent, yet it poses underexplored challenges: existing methods fail to capture the rich knowledge encoded in teacher logits, as evidenced by the neglect of semantic information, inaccurate and biased logit alignment, and discarding distributional structure—ultimately leading to unfavorable distillation. To address these issues, we propose SeDi, a semantics and distribution-aware knowledge transfer framework tailored for cross-tokenizer distillation. To preserve factual knowledge, SeDi employs bipartite graph-based alignment at the tokenization level and a sliding window re-encoding strategy at the vocabulary level, enabling unbiased transfer of the teacher’s next-token predictions into the student’s vocabulary space. To further retain distributional information, we align the student’s entropy with that of the teacher by incorporating the student’s own logits during training, which helps to mitigate the exposure bias problem. Experiments on ten datasets across three task domains and five different teacher-student model pairs with varying vocabulary sizes demonstrate that SeDi delivers substantial improvements, with gains of up to 19.8%.

PaperID: 4157

Authors:Zhuojie Yang, Wentao Wan, Keze Wang

Affiliations: Sun Yat-sen University

Title: ORACLE: Optimizing Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Models via Constraint-Led Synthetic Data Elicitation

Abstract:
Training large language models (LLMs) with synthetic reasoning data has become a popular approach to enhancing their reasoning capabilities, while a key factor influencing the effectiveness of this paradigm is the quality of the generated multistep reasoning data. To generate high-quality reasoning data, many recent methods generate synthetic reasoning paths and filter them based on final answer correctness, often overlooking flaws in intermediate reasoning steps. To enhance the verification of intermediate reasoning steps, prior work primarily resorts to code execution or symbolic reasoning engines. However, code-based validation is restricted to code or mathematical tasks, and reasoning engines require a well-structured and complete context. As a result, existing methods fail to function effectively in natural language reasoning tasks that involve ambiguous or incomplete contexts. In these tasks, synthetic data still lack reliable checks for verifying each reasoning step. To address this challenge, we introduce ORACLE, a structured data generation framework inspired by syllogistic reasoning. ORACLE integrates the generative strengths of LLMs with symbolic supervision: the LLM produces step-wise reasoning contexts, while a symbolic reasoning engine verifies the validity of each intermediate step. By employing a unified prompting template to elicit modular reasoning chains, ORACLE enables fine-grained, step-level validation, facilitating the construction of high-quality multi-step reasoning data. Across six logical, factual, and commonsense reasoning benchmarks, our ORACLE consistently outperforms strong baselines on multiple models.

PaperID: 4158

Authors:Jinman Zhao, Erxue Min, Hui Wu, Ziheng Li, Zexu Sun, Hengyi Cai, Shuaiqiang Wang, Xu Chen, Gerald Penn

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Baidu Inc, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peking University, Renmin University of China

Title: Beyond Step Pruning: Information Theory Based Step-level Optimization for Self-Refining Large Language Models

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in natural language tasks, yet they continue to struggle with multistep mathematical reasoning, where correctness depends on a precise chain of intermediate steps. Preference optimization methods such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have improved answer-level alignment, but they often overlook the reasoning process itself, providing little supervision over intermediate steps that are critical for complex problem-solving. Existing fine-grained approaches typically rely on strong annotators or reward models to assess the quality of individual steps. However, reward models are vulnerable to reward hacking. To address this, we propose ISLA, a reward-model-free framework that constructs step-level preference data directly from SFT gold traces. ISLA also introduces a self-improving pruning mechanism that identifies informative steps based on two signals: their marginal contribution to final accuracy (relative accuracy) and the model’s uncertainty, inspired by the concept of information gain. Empirically, ISLA achieves better performance than DPO while using only 12% of the training tokens, demonstrating that careful step-level selection can significantly improve both reasoning accuracy and training efficiency.

PaperID: 4159

Authors:Hongyi Zhou, Jianfeng Pan, Min Peng, Shaomang Huang, Hanzhong Zheng

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University. Beijing, Security Technology Inc. Beijing

Title: HyperGLLM: An Efficient Framework for Endpoint Threat Detection via Hypergraph-Enhanced Large Language Models

Abstract:
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) systems are a cornerstone of modern threat detection and endpoint protection. However, conventional heuristicand learning-based approaches often fail to address sophisticated and continuously evolving attack patterns. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) offer promising capabilities for behavioral analysis in EDR logs, yet their effectiveness is hindered by the high volume of events and the interleaved nature of behavior sequences---posing significant challenges for long-context modeling and stealthy threat detection. To address these issues, we propose HyperGLLM, a novel detection framework that introduces hypergraph reasoning into LLMs. It first constructs an attribute-value level relation-aware graph to model low-order structural semantics while reducing textual redundancy. Then, it introduces a differential hypergraph module with multi-granularity clustering to capture high-order behavioral dependencies embedded in interleaved events and reinforce threat semantics. Finally, the hypergraph representations are aligned with an LLM for efficient contextual reasoning over potential malicious behaviors. To facilitate empirical evaluation, we curate EDR3.6B-63F, a large-scale EDR dataset containing 3.6 billion events across 63 distinct behavior families. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HyperGLLM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods by reducing the false alarm rate to 1.67%, achieving 94.65% accuracy across 63 behavior families, and improving the modeling efficiency of LLMs on long EDR logs. Our framework and dataset provide a solid foundation for future research and support the development of advanced detection solutions in endpoint security.

PaperID: 4160

Authors:Jie Xiao, Yuhao Huang, Yanjiao Gao, Aizhu Liu, Zhezhao Yang, Xinyue Yu, Qianwei Zhou, Fan Terry Zhang

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, Hangzhou China, Zhejiang University

Title: CL-Guard: Defending DNNs Against Backdoors via Fine-Grained Neuron Analysis and Collaborative Dual-Network Learning

Abstract:
Backdoor attacks on deep neural networks (DNNs) have garnered significant attention, particularly in edge computing applications. Given the complexity and opacity of DNNs, defending against backdoor attacks remains a formidable challenge. To address this, we propose CLGuard, a dual-network-based defense framework designed to effectively eliminate potential backdoors in models. First, it leverages an inter-layer backpropagation algorithm to quantify each neuron's contribution to model prediction. Next, it constructs a critical neuron set through a recursive hierarchical partitioning method and an adaptive search strategy, identifying neurons critical to model prediction while minimizing the inclusion of backdoor-related neurons. Then, we perform sparse training on the non-critical neuron set, effectively strengthening the weights of critical neurons while disrupting the association between trigger features and backdoor-related neurons. Finally, we design a dual-network architecture that incorporates a fine-grained gradient backpropagation mechanism and dynamic collaborative learning, enabling the model to retain its original accuracy while preventing backdoor reactivation. The experimental results indicate that CL-Guard achieves an average Security Effectiveness Index (SEI) of approximately 95.42%, representing a 21.23% improvement over the state-of-the-art FT-SAM method.

PaperID: 4161

Authors:Lu Zhang, Liang Zeng

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Tsinghua University

Title: MSAT-LDM: Toward Transferable High-Fidelity Watermarking for Latent Diffusion Model via Modular Self-Augmented Training

Abstract:
The rapid proliferation of AIgenerated images necessitates effective watermarking techniques to protect intellectual property and detect fraudulent content. While existing training-based watermarking methods show promise, they often struggle with generalization across diverse prompts, introduce visible artifacts, and require substantial external data for retraining on new model variants. To this end, we propose Modular Self-Augmented Training for Latent Diffusion Models (MSAT-LDM), a novel and transferable watermarking framework. MSAT-LDM integrates two key components: (1) Self-Augmented Training (SAT) leverages an internally generated "free generation" distribution to train the watermark module, aligning the training and testing phases without relying on external data. We theoretically demonstrate that this design improves generalization by inducing a tighter generalization bound. (2) Modular watermark architecture is a plug-and-play module that can be independently fine-tuned, enabling efficient adaptation to various fine-tuned backbones or LoRA-enhanced variants with minimal overhead. Extensive experiments show that MSAT-LDM achieves robust watermarking, significantly improves the quality of watermarked images across diverse prompts, and exhibits strong transfer performance--all without the need for external training data.

PaperID: 4162

Authors:Tao Li, Xingchen Li, Haoyue Ma, Zhi-Hui Zhan

Affiliations: Henan Normal University, Nankai University

Title: A Solution Space Transformation-Guided Co-Evolution for Energy-Saving Distributed Heterogeneous Flexible Job Shop Scheduling

Abstract:
Solving energysaving distributed heterogeneous flexible job shop scheduling problem (ES-DHFJSP) aims to enhance industrial production efficiency while minimizing energy consumption. State-of-the-art co-evolutionary algorithms have emerged as effective approaches for addressing ES-DHFJSP. However, existing methodologies demonstrate compromised convergence rates and excessive computational overhead when confronted with vast search spaces. In this work, we propose a novel solution space transformation-guided co-evolution algorithm (SSTCE) to overcome this limitation. In SSTCE, we first establish an inter-job similarity metric and incorporate constrained hierarchical clustering with optimal leaf ordering (CHC-OLO) to generate clustered job sets, which are subsequently utilized for population initialization that achieves a favorable balance between convergence and diversity. To enhance search capability in expansive solution spaces, we devise a dynamic solution space transformation mechanism that effectively reduces inefficient searches within the algorithm. Furthermore, we develop tailored local search strategies leveraging domain-specific knowledge of DHFJSP properties. Extensive experimental evaluations across 20 benchmark instances demonstrate that SSTCE significantly outperforms existing evolutionary algorithms in solving ES-DHFJSP.

PaperID: 4163

Authors:Nastaran Darabi, Devashri Naik, Sina Tayebati, Dinithi Jayasuriya, Amit Ranjan Trivedi

Affiliations: University of Illinois at Chicago

Title: Resilience in Ambient Multi-Agent LLMs via Decentralized Bio-Autonomic Control and Immune-Inspired Anomaly Detection

Abstract:
Large Language Model (LLM) agents are now widely deployed in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) environments, where autonomous agents must sense, act, and coordinate at scale. As agent capabilities and interdependence increase, traditional reliability strategies such as isolated adaptive control, anomaly detection, or trust modeling have proven inadequate due to their fragmented and scenariospecific nature. Comprehensive architectures that enable integrated self-management, collective anomaly response, robust information dissemination, and privacy-preserving adaptation remain scarce. We propose a bio-autonomic framework for decentralized resilience in multi-agent LLM systems where a unified architecture systematically applies principles from biological autonomic systems to LLM-based multi-agent environments. Specifically, each agent implements an autonomic control loop, formally structured as Monitor-Analyze-Plan-Execute over a shared Knowledge base (MAPE-K), for self-regulation. At the system level, the framework integrates immune-inspired anomaly detection using the Dendritic Cell Algorithm, probabilistic computational trust, decentralized gossip for robust information sharing, and federated learning with homomorphic encryption for collaborative, privacy-preserving adaptation. This holistic approach enables LLM agent ecosystems to self-organize, detect and isolate faults, and collectively adapt as system complexity increases. Empirical evaluations show that our framework achieves substantially improved resilience and recovery compared to state-of-the-art multi-agent baselines.

PaperID: 4164

Authors:Pankayaraj Pathmanathan, Udari Madhushani Sehwag, Michael-Andrei Panaitescu-Liess, Cho-Yu Jason Chiang, Furong Huang

Affiliations: University of Maryland, College Park, Scale AI

Title: AdvBDGen: A Robust Framework for Generating Adaptive and Stealthy Backdoors in LLM Alignment

Abstract:
With the increasing adoption of reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) to align large language models (LLMs), the risk of backdoor installation during the alignment process has grown, potentially leading to unintended and harmful behaviors. Existing backdoor attacks mostly focus on simpler tasks, such as sequence classification, making them either difficult to install in LLM alignment or installable but easily detectable and removable. In this work, we introduce AdvBDGen, a generative finetuning framework that automatically creates prompt-specific paraphrases as triggers, enabling stealthier and more resilient backdoor attacks in LLM alignment. AdvBDGen is designed to exploit the disparities in learning speeds between strong and weak discriminators to craft backdoors that are both installable and stealthy. Using as little as 3% of the fine-tuning data, AdvBDGen can install highly effective backdoor triggers that, once installed, not only jailbreak LLMs during inference but also exhibit greater stability against input perturbations and improved robustness to trigger removal methods. Our findings highlight the growing vulnerability of LLM alignment pipelines to advanced backdoor attacks, underscoring the pressing need for more robust defense mechanisms.

PaperID: 4165

Authors:Chang Huang, Zhou Zhexin, Jun Ma, Jiatong Shen, Peixuan Xiong, Huayong Yang, Kaishun Wu

Affiliations: Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Guangzhou), The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Title: DRM-Net: Explicit Residual Modelling with Subaquatic Multi-Scale Context Fusion for Underwater Image Enhancement

Abstract:
Clear and highquality underwater images are essential for marine applications, including autonomous navigation, ecological monitoring, and infrastructure inspection. However, underwater images typically suffer from severe colour distortion, low contrast, and diminished structural visibility due to wavelength-dependent attenuation, scattering, and uneven illumination conditions. Recent deep learning-based underwater image enhancement (UIE) methods primarily adopt end-to-end frameworks, directly regressing enhanced images from degraded inputs. While these approaches have achieved significant progress, they often lack explicit modeling of the degradation process, leading to limited interpretability and suboptimal recovery of fine-grained details. To address these limitations, we propose DRM-Net, an explicit residual learning framework for UIE. Rather than estimating the enhanced image directly, DRM-Net first predicts a pixel-wise Degradation Residual Map (DRM) in the perceptually uniform CIELab colour space. This map explicitly quantifies local colour, contrast, and structural degradations, thereby enabling the network to precisely reconstruct missing visual information. Furthermore, we design a lightweight Subaquatic Multi-Scale Context Fusion module, which utilizes parallel atrous convolutions with softmax-weighted feature aggregation, significantly enhancing robustness against spatially heterogeneous scattering. Trained jointly with pixel-wise DRM and VGG-based perceptual losses, DRM-Net achieves superior colour fidelity, perceptual realism, and structural detail recovery. Comprehensive experiments conducted on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed approach attains competitive quantitative results and superior qualitative visual performance compared to state-of-the-art UIE methods, while maintaining low computational overhead, making it particularly suitable for resource-constrained underwater robotic systems.

PaperID: 4166

Authors:Zeqiang Wang, Rebecca Oldroyd, Yuqi Wang, Jiageng Wu, Jie Yang, Wei Wang, Nishanth R. Sastry, Jon Johnson, Suparna De

Affiliations: University of Surrey, University College London, University of London, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard University, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

Title: Trustworthy Classification for Complex Social Surveys: A Memory-Enhanced Hierarchical Framework with Calibrated Uncertainty

Abstract:
Automated classification of complex social survey questionnaires is crucial for largescale social science research but faces significant reliability challenges due to intricate hierarchical label structures, severe class imbalance, semantic ambiguity, and incomplete data coverage. Conventional classification methods often struggle with these combined complexities, yielding results that lack trustworthiness. We introduce HOCM, a framework designed for trustworthy classification in complex, real-world taxonomies. It features two synergistic components: (1) memory-enhanced contrastive learning, tailored to learn robust representations from noisy, imbalanced data by leveraging quality-aware category memory banks; and (2) hierarchical uncertainty calibration, which enforces taxonomic consistency while providing reliable confidence estimates and identifying inputs falling outside well-represented known categories. Our evaluation on a large-scale, real-world social survey dataset—a challenging exemplar of our target problem class—demonstrates that HOCM maintains strong accuracy on known classes while effectively identifying uncertain cases, significantly boosting accuracy on confident predictions. Furthermore, it adeptly detects low-resource/unknown categories. HOCM provides a more reliable automated classification tool, enabling efficient expert review and enhancing the trustworthiness of analysis in domains with complex, hierarchical data.

PaperID: 4167

Authors:Yiming Zhang, Baojia Han, Ximing Li, Wei Pang, Fausto Giunchiglia, Xiaoyue Feng, Renchu Guan

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of the Ministry of Education, College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento

Title: SPARD: Single-step Inference with Adaptive Sampling in Residual Diffusion for Human Motion Prediction

Abstract:
The task of stochastic human motion prediction has attracted significant attention in recent years due to its wideranging applications in robotics, animation, and human-computer interaction. While diffusion models have demonstrated promising progress in this domain, they remain hindered by two critical limitations: (1) slow inference speeds due to their reliance on iterative sampling, and (2) performance degradation resulting from suboptimal sample allocation during generation. To overcome these challenges, we propose SPARD (Single-step Inference with Adaptive Sampling in Residual Diffusion for Human Motion Prediction), a novel framework that achieves efficient single-step inference while maintaining high predictive accuracy. Furthermore, we introduce a novel adaptive noise predictor module that dynamically samples latent representations based on observed motion sequences, ensuring both accuracy and plausibility in generated motions. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that SPARD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both inference efficiency and motion quality, achieving a 15× to 18× speedup in sampling time compared to conventional diffusion-based baselines while preserving generation quality.

PaperID: 4168

Authors:Bowei He, Bowen Gao, Yankai Chen, Yanyan Lan, Chen Ma, Philip S. Yu, Ya-Qin Zhang, Wei-Ying Ma

Affiliations: City University of Hong Kong, Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University, University of Illinois Chicago

Title: S²Drug: Bridging Protein Sequence and 3D Structure in Contrastive Representation Learning for Virtual Screening

Abstract:
Virtual screening (VS) is an essential task in drug discovery, focusing on the identification of smallmolecule ligands that bind to specific protein pockets. Existing deep learning methods, from early regression models to recent contrastive learning approaches, primarily rely on structural data while overlooking protein sequences, which are more accessible and can enhance generalizability. However, directly integrating protein sequences poses challenges due to the redundancy and noise in large-scale protein-ligand datasets. To address these limitations, we propose S²Drug, a two-stage framework that explicitly incorporates protein Sequence information and 3D Structure context in protein-ligand contrastive representation learning. In the first stage, we perform protein sequence pretraining on ChemBL using an ESM2-based backbone, combined with a tailored data sampling strategy to reduce redundancy and noise on both protein and ligand sides. In the second stage, we fine-tune on PDBBind by fusing sequence and structure information through a residue-level gating module, while introducing an auxiliary binding site prediction task. This auxiliary task guides the model to accurately localize binding residues within the protein sequence and capture their 3D spatial arrangement, thereby refining protein-ligand matching. Across multiple benchmarks, S²Drug consistently improves virtual screening performance and achieves strong results on binding site prediction, demonstrating the value of bridging sequence and structure in contrastive learning.

PaperID: 4169

Authors:Xovee Xu, Shuojun Lin, Fan Zhou, Jingkuan Song

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: Learning to Curate Context: Jointly Optimizing Retrieval and Prediction for Multimodal Social Media Popularity

Abstract:
Predicting the popularity of usergenerated content (UGC) is a crucial but challenging task in social media analysis. While existing retrieval-augmented models enhance predictions by supplying rich contextual information, they remain limited by a fundamental precision-recall dilemma: enlarging the retrieval set increases coverage but introduces noisy, irrelevant context that harms prediction. In this work, we propose a unified framework that learns to retrieve, filter, and predict. Central to our approach is a Mixture-of-Logits-based retrieval module that replaces static similarity metrics with a dynamic, multi-faceted scoring function, enabling the retriever to be directly optimized by the prediction objective. Then an uncertainty-aware filter is designed to perform differentiable subset selection and refine the selected representations using the information bottleneck principle. At last, to enhance predictive robustness, we introduce a confidence-weighted test-time perturbation strategy. By learning to retrieve UGCs that are beneficial for prediction and filtering out uncertainty, our framework provides more relevant and reliable context. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, consistently outperforming strong baselines.

PaperID: 4170

Authors:Ziqi Yi, Guitao Xu, Shihang Wu, Peirong Zhang, Lianwen Jin

Affiliations: South China University of Technology

Title: Frequency Mining Empowered by Text Aggregation: A New Perspective on Document Image Tampering Detection

Abstract:
Document image tampering detection faces significant challenges due to the subtle and spatially dispersed nature of tampering traces, which are often confined to localized regions within tampered text. While existing methods leverage frequency domain information to reveal hidden artifacts, they fail to fully exploit the rich frequency spectrum and lack effective mechanisms for aggregating scattered tampering evidence across extended text regions. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Text Aggregation and multiFrequency Enhancement Network (TAFE-Net). Specifically, to capture more subtle tampering traces, we design a Multi-Frequency Feature Extractor that comprehensively utilizes various proven effective frequency information. In addition, the Visual-Frequency Integration Module and Direction-aware Frequency Decoupling Enhancement module are introduced to aggregate text features in both horizontal and vertical directions within the frequency domain, from coarse to fine granularity, addressing the incomplete detection of tampered text caused by dispersed tampering traces. Experiments on the DocTamper and RTM datasets demonstrate that our approach establishes new state-of-the-art results and maintains superior robustness against various degradations.

PaperID: 4171

Authors:Weibin Li, Wendu Li, Quanying Liu

Affiliations: Southern University of Science and Technology

Title: DCHO: A Decomposition–Composition Framework for Predicting Higher-Order Brain Connectivity to Enhance Diverse Downstream Applications

Abstract:
Higherorder brain connectivity (HOBC), which captures interactions among three or more brain regions, provides richer organizational information than traditional pairwise functional connectivity (FC). Recent studies have begun to infer latent HOBC from noninvasive imaging data, but they mainly focus on static analyses, limiting their applicability in dynamic prediction tasks. To address this gap, we propose DCHO, a unified approach for modeling and forecasting the temporal evolution of HOBC based on a decomposition–composition framework, which is applicable to both non-predictive tasks (state classification) and predictive tasks (brain dynamics forecasting). DCHO adopts a decomposition–composition strategy that reformulates the prediction task into two manageable subproblems: HOBC inference and latent trajectory prediction. In the inference stage, we propose a dual-view encoder to extract multiscale topological features and a latent combinatorial learner to capture high-level HOBC information. In the forecasting stage, we introduce a latent-space prediction loss to enhance the modeling of temporal trajectories. Extensive experiments on multiple neuroimaging datasets demonstrate that DCHO achieves superior performance in both non-predictive tasks (state classification) and predictive tasks (brain dynamics forecasting), significantly outperforming existing methods.

PaperID: 4172

Authors:Tian Bai, Zheng Qiu, Haojie Chen, Ziyang Dai

Affiliations: Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research, University of Science and Technology of China

Title: Plug-and-Play Optimization for 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression: Distribution Regularization, Probabilistic Pruning and Detail Compensation

Abstract:
Recent advancements in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have demonstrated remarkable rendering quality, However, their substantial computational demands hinder practical deployment on resourceconstrained devices. We propose a novel plug-and-play structured compression framework that significantly reduces computational overhead while maintaining rendering fidelity. We first discover that the statistical distribution of anchor vectors is decoupled from rendering quality. Based on this finding, we propose a distribution regularization method that enforces alignment to standard Gaussian distribution through KL divergence while optimizing Gaussian radius, significantly improving entropy coding efficiency. Second, we innovatively introduce an opacity-based probabilistic pruning mechanism that transforms pruning into an opacity optimization problem, achieving intelligent scene sparsification while allowing flexible adjustment according to hardware resources. Finally, we design a lightweight high-frequency compensation network that regards the high-frequency loss caused by over-compression as a residual and effectively recovers the high-frequency details lost during the compression process through residual learning. All modules are plug-and-play and can be seamlessly integrated into mainstream structured 3DGS frameworks. Extensive experiments on Synthetic-NeRF, Tanks&Temples, Mip-NeRF360 and DeepBlending datasets demonstrate that our method significantly reduces size by over 80x compared to vanilla 3DGS while simultaneously improving fidelity. Furthermore, it achieves a better size reduction and a 20% improvement in entropy encoding efficiency when compared to HAC, while meeting the requirements for real-time rendering.

PaperID: 4173

Authors:Guilian Chen, Xiaoling Luo, Huisi Wu, Jing Qin

Affiliations: Shenzhen University, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: VPSentry: Semi-supervised Video Polyp Segmentation via Sentry-guided Long-term Prototype Fusion with Correlation Dynamic Propagation

Abstract:
Automated polyp segmentation in colonoscopy videos is an essential computeraided technology for early detection and removal of polyps. However, most existing video polyp segmentation methods are designed with pixel-level temporal learning mechanisms, at the cost of time-consuming frame-wise annotations. In this paper, we present VPSentry, a novel semi-supervised segmentation model with a sentry mechanism. Our model integrates a prototype memory to store the long-term spatiotemporal cues of colonoscopy videos. Moreover, we devise adaptive prototypes to capture and generalize critical representations from individual frames, enabling long-term temporal fusion across labeled and unlabeled frames. In addition, we propose a correlation dynamic propagation module that propagates information from prototypes to features while simultaneously extracting dynamic features to perceive variations in polyp details between adjacent frames. Since colonoscopy scenes may change among consecutive frames, we further employ a sentry mechanism to assess the inter-frame continuity. This mechanism guides the prototype memory updating and the correlation dynamic propagation, further facilitating robust temporal propagation and dynamic detail perception for semi-supervised learning of long-term colonoscopy video sequences. Extensive experiments on the large-scale SUN-SEG dataset demonstrate that our model achieves optimal segmentation performance with real-time inference efficiency.

PaperID: 4174

Authors:Weiwei Duan, Luping Ji, Jianghong Huang, Sicheng Zhu

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Title: SeViL: Semi-supervised Vision-Language Learning with Text Prompt Guiding for Moving Infrared Small Target Detection

Abstract:
Unlike traditional object detection, moving infrared small target detection is highly challenging due to tiny target size and limited labeled samples. Currently, most existing methods mainly focus on the purevision features usually by fully-supervised learning, heavily relying on extensive high-cost manual annotations. Moreover, they almost have not concerned the potentials of multi-modal (e.g., vision and text) learning yet. To address these issues, inspired by prevalent vision-language models, we propose the first semi-supervised vision-language (SeViL) framework with adaptive text prompt guiding. Breaking through traditional pure-vision modality, it takes text prompts as prior knowledge to adaptively enhance target regions and then filter the low-quality pseudo-labels generated on unlabeled data. In the meanwhile, we employ an adaptive cross-modal masking strategy to align text and vision features, promoting cross-modal deep interactions. Remarkably, our extensive experiments on three public datasets (DAUB, ITSDT-15K and IRDST) verify that our new scheme could outperform other semi-supervised ones, and even achieve comparable performance to fully-supervised state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, with only 10% labeled training samples.

PaperID: 4175

Authors:Yuyang Huang, Tianzuo Luo, Hengyuan Guo, Yuren Zhang

Affiliations: ByteDance Inc.

Title: Text-Guided Gradient Refinement: Resolving Multimodal Gradient Conflicts to Boost Adversarial Attacks on Vision-Language Models

Abstract:
VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) have advanced multimodal understanding, yet they remain susceptible to adversarial attacks. Among various strategies, transfer-based attacks are notably effective, especially in black-box scenarios. The dominant approach within this paradigm leverages generative models to create image targets from text, consistently outperforming text-only methods. However, this approach suffers from a fundamental limitation: generative models introduce visual features irrelevant or even detrimental to textual semantics, misguiding optimization. To investigate this limitation, we conduct comprehensive analysis revealing two critical findings. First, optimal attack directions lie in synergistic spaces between image and text gradients, demonstrating that text provides complementary information. Second, widespread gradient conflicts occur when combining modalities, where image-target gradients oppose text-target directions. This conflict provides direct evidence that extraneous visual information actively harms optimization, driving it away from intended textual objectives. Based on these insights, we propose Text-Guided Gradient Refinement (TGGR), a novel framework that employs a conflict-aware projection mechanism to resolve this conflict. TGGR preserves the beneficial characteristics of image targets by decomposing the image gradient and surgically removing components that oppose the textual guidance. Extensive experiments on models such as LLaVA and GPT-4o demonstrate that TGGR substantially improves attack success rates. Specifically, on GPT-4o, TGGR yields an improvement of up to 14% over state-of-the-art methods, achieving 96% attack success rate. Our work offers a principled framework for developing more synergistic and effective adversarial strategies against VLMs.

PaperID: 4176

Authors:Wei Li, Long Ji, Ying Wang, Xiao Wu, Zhaoquan Yuan, Penglin Dai

Affiliations: Southwest Jiaotong University

Title: Monocular Vehicle Pose and Shape Reconstruction via Dynamic Context Adaptation and Progressive Geometry Refinement

Abstract:
Accurate reconstruction of 3D vehicle pose and shape from monocular images is challenging, particularly for distant objects in autonomous driving. Existing methods often suffer from geometric ambiguity in depth estimation and structural hollowness in shape recovery, primarily due to inadequate multiscale feature aggregation and unflexible prior modeling. To overcome these limitations, MonoVPR is proposed, a novel framework integrating dynamic context adaptation and progressive geometry refinement. Specifically, a Hierarchical Dual-Context Attention (HDCA) module is introduced to resolve scale-dependent degradation through gated cross-attention across multi-resolution feature maps, dynamically fusing object-centric geometric cues with scene-centric semantics. For shape refinement, the Bounded Iterative Mesh Refiner (BIMR) progressively optimizes template-guided deformations via multi-head attention and a tanh-bounded correction loop, ensuring physically plausible reconstructions.Extensive experiments on the ApolloCar3D benchmark demonstrate MonoVPR achieves state-of-the-art performance, showing exceptional capability in reconstructing geometrically consistent shapes and precise poses for challenging long-range scenarios.

PaperID: 4177

Authors:Yangwei Li, Xiaochuan Wang, Xin Shang, Haisheng Li

Affiliations: Beijing Technology and Business University

Title: Not All Distortions Are Created Equal: Distortion-Selective Domain Adaptation for Point Cloud Quality Assessment

Abstract:
Point cloud quality assessment (PCQA) has advanced significantly with synthetic datasets offering diverse distortion coverage for model training. However, when applied to new application scenarios, models often suffer from performance drops due to mismatched distortion characteristics between source and target domains. Most current methods use all available synthetic distortions, which may introduce irrelevant features and hinder generalization. To address this, we propose DSTPCQA, a distortion-selective training framework for PCQA. Unlike previous approaches that treat all distortions equally, DST-PCQA identifies and selects distortion types most relevant to a target domain by analyzing inter-domain distortion similarity. This selective strategy reduces negative transfer and enables efficient domain-specific training. To fully leverage the selected distortions for both classification and quality prediction, we adopt a dual-branch architecture that fuses 2D visual cues and 3D geometric structure via cross-modal attention. This design supports multi-level feature alignment across modalities and enables fine-grained distortion understanding. Extensive evaluations across three target domains have verified the effectiveness of DST-PCQA over full-set training baselines. Moreover, its distortion-selective strategy is orthogonal to existing model-based PCQA methods, enabling improved cross-domain performance and reduced training costs across a wide range of architectures.

PaperID: 4178

Authors:Junjie Linghu, Qiang Ling

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China

Title: DenoiseGS: Delta-Based 3D Gaussian Splatting with B-spline Trajectory Optimization for Dynamic Driving Scene Reconstruction

Abstract:
3D street scene reconstruction is a challenging yet crucial task for autonomous driving. Many reconstruction methods often overlook two key limitations for highquality driving scene reconstruction, sensitivity to camera parameter noise from high-speed vehicles and heavy reliance on precise dynamic object annotations of datasets. To resolve these issues, we propose DenoiseGS, a simple yet effective approach based on explicit 3D Gaussian splatting. Specifically, we propose a novel learnable Delta attribute per Gaussian primitive that operates on the image plane during rasterization to mitigate the impact of noisy camera parameters through modulating the inputs of the alpha-blending process. To enhance the representation of this Delta attribute, we propose a DeltaEstimator that encodes viewing direction and contextual cues to facilitate view dependence. We also extend additional CUDA operations to enable efficient gradient update for the delta attribute. Furthermore, to overcome the limitation of inaccurate annotations for dynamic objects, we propose a learnable B-spline trajectory optimization with a few control points to model the trajectory of a moving object. Comprehensive experiments conducted on nuScenes and Waymo Open Dataset demonstrate that our DenoiseGS outperforms some state-of-the-art methods across all metrics of both reconstruction quality and novel view synthesis.

PaperID: 4179

Authors:Yu Bing Luo, Nian Shi, Jia Qin, Zekai Ji, Pinle Qin, Jianchao Zeng, Jianghui Cai

Affiliations: North University of China

Title: Revisiting Downsampling in Semantic Segmentation: Fighting Aliasing with Dynamic Gaussian and Gabor Frequency Filters

Abstract:
Downsampling is essential in semantic segmentation for reducing computational cost and guiding the learning of classdiscriminative features. Existing models typically rely on strided convolutions or patch splitting to obtain features with lower resolution. However, we observe that such operations often introduce edge jagging and texture degradation, the underlying cause is that aliasing of the high frequency induces phase distortion. We conducted a systematic analysis of phase distortion and identified two key properties: spatial non-uniformity (concentrated near boundaries) and directional sparsity (accumulated along a few dominant directions). These properties cause crucial high-frequency cues to be misrepresented or lost during sampling. To address this issue, we propose a frequency aware filter consisting of two complementary modules: a dynamic Gaussian kernel (DGK) and a learnable Gabor-based frequency selector (LFS). To mitigate spatial non-uniformity, the DGK predicts edge normals from gradients, applies strong low-pass filtering along the normal direction, and leaves the tangential direction virtually untouched, thereby suppressing phase distortion while preserving contour continuity. To handle directional sparsity, the Learnable Gabor Selector (LFS) then performs directional band-pass filtering to attenuate residual aliasing peaks and adaptively boost informative texture. We further introduce phase-error energy (PE) to quantify distortion severity. Visualization and quantitative results demonstrate that frequency-aware filter offers a plug-and-play remedy for aliasing, yielding sharper boundaries and consistent gains across datasets.

PaperID: 4180

Authors:Yingnan Ma, Zhenye Liu, Siying Liu, Anup Basu

Affiliations: University of Alberta

Title: StyleFM: Frequency Manipulation Empowered by Recursive Attention on Diffusion Models for Arbitrary Style Transfer

Abstract:
Given the remarkable performance of diffusion models in image generation, recent research has been exploring their adaptation to style transfer. However, current diffusionbased approaches encounter persistent challenges, such as style distortions and the reliance on textual prompts for content preservation. To address these limitations, we introduce StyleFM, a novel training-free diffusion-based style transfer approach that incorporates optimization strategies into both the frequency and temporal domains. The proposed method provides two core innovations: (1) Tripartite Frequency Manipulation: To more precisely tailor frequency manipulation, StyleFM introduces a tripartite frequency design with a buffer band accounting for the overlap of content and style representations. In addition, StyleFM designs a frequency superposition editing method to achieve frequency enhancement. (2) Recursive Attention: StyleFM proposes the recursive attention strategy within the diffusion process, which facilitates the progressive and consistent injection of style information throughout the temporal process without reliance on text guidance. Experiments demonstrate that StyleFM outperforms state-of-the-art methods. It effectively preserves content fidelity while achieving sufficient style embedding.

PaperID: 4181

Authors:Yucong Meng, Zhiwei Yang, Kexue Fu, Zhijian Song, Yonghong Shi

Affiliations: Digital Medical Research Center, School of Basic Medical Science, Fudan University, Shanghai China, Shandong Computer Science Center, Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences)

Title: Image Content Matters: An Image Content Aware State Space Model for Accelerated MRI Reconstruction

Abstract:
The challenge of accelerated MRI reconstruction lies in recovering highquality images from undersampled k-space. Recently, the selective state space model (Mamba) has shown promising results in various tasks with balanced global receptive field and computational efficiency, shedding new light on MRI reconstruction. However, existing approaches directly flatten 2D images based on spatial positions and apply Mamba to vision tasks, failing to preserve and explore the content properties. In this paper, we posit that the key to unlocking Mamba's full potential for MRI reconstruction lies in content-aware sequence modeling. We investigate two fundamental challenges: (1) how to reasonably preserve semantic information when converting 2D images into 1D sequences, and (2) how to effectively identify and recover the crucial high-frequency textures. To this end, we introduce CAM, a novel framework that shifts Mamba-based MRI reconstruction from position-based to content-aware sequence modeling. Specifically, we introduce three modules: (1) the Semantic Preservation Scanning Module (SPSM) introduces learnable clustering centers to group similar pixels, establishing the semantic preserved sequence. (2) The Texture Extraction Scanning Module (TESM) acts as a differentiable local texture descriptor to estimate crucial high-frequency information, forming the texture emphasized sequence. (3) The Texture Enhancement Mamba Module (TEMM) further modulates the semantic sequence with texture-informed system matrices derived from the texture sequence, yielding both context- and texture-aware sequential representations. With these enhancements, CAM significantly outperforms existing methods across various datasets and under-sampling masks.

PaperID: 4182

Authors:Yayun Qi, Xinxiao Wu

Affiliations: Beijing Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Technology, School of Computer Science & Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology Guangdong Laboratory of Machine Perception and Intelligent Computing, Shenzhen MSU-BIT University

Title: What to Trust? A Trust-aware Knowledge-guided Method for Zero-shot Object State Understanding in Videos

Abstract:
Object state understanding aims at recognizing the cooccurrence and transitions of multiple object states in videos. While learning from videos handles seen object states well, it struggles with novel ones. We address this task in a zero-shot setting by extracting state-specific knowledge from pre-trained models and using Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to verify whether such knowledge is visually grounded in videos. However, the extracted knowledge varies in its ability to distinguish states, and VLM observations are not always trustworthy. To address this issue, we propose a trust-aware knowledge-guided method to model knowledge trustworthiness and emphasize highly discriminative knowledge that VLMs can reliably observe. Specifically, we collect spatial knowledge for each object state from retrieved images and cues generated from a Large Language Model, then use VLMs to vote on each knowledge element by scoring its visual consistency with the video. In addition to a single scene, temporal dependencies of object states across scenes are also captured using a generative VLM. Under spatial and temporal constraints, we propose an adaptive knowledge refinement module that iteratively updates knowledge reliability weights to achieve a global consensus in object state inference across the video. Finally, object states are inferred by combining the refined weights with VLM voting results. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

PaperID: 4183

Authors:Jin Wei, Yaqiang Wu, Jiayi Yan, Zeng Li, Zhen Xu, Yu Zhou, Lingling Zhang, QianYing Wang

Affiliations: Lenovo AI Technology Center, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Tsinghua University, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, VCIP & TMCC & DISSec, College of Computer Science & College of Cryptology and Cyber Science, Nankai University, School of Computer Science and Technology, Technology Strategy & Platforms

Title: ST-SAM: Multimodal Scene Text Segmentation with Dense Visual and Sparse Textual Prompts via SAM

Abstract:
Scene text segmentation is a critical preprocessing step in various textbased applications. Specialist text segmentation methods, often relying on a detect-then-segment paradigm, tend to exhibit reduced robustness and can lead to cascading errors. The introduction of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has revolutionized general segmentation by leveraging vision foundation models. However, SAM still falls short when applied to domain-specific tasks such as scene text segmentation. To bridge this gap between SAM and specialized scene text segmentation approaches, we propose ST-SAM (Scene Text SAM), a parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework tailored to adapt SAM for high-quality scene text segmentation without relying on explicit text detection. ST-SAM incorporates a multimodal prompting mechanism: a lightweight visual encoder generates multi-scale spatial features to provide precise visual context; and textual prompts generated by a large language model offer high-level semantic guidance. We demonstrate the advantages of the proposed ST-SAM as follows: (1) ST-SAM achieves new state-of-the-art performance on multiple scene text segmentation benchmarks, including 85.30% fgIoU on Total-Text and 91.03% fgIoU on TextSeg, outperforming both specialist and generalist models. (2) ST-SAM enables effective domain adaptation by flexibly adapting the general SAM architecture to the domain of scene text. (3) By discarding the detect-then-segment pipeline, ST-SAM simplifies the inference process while still achieving robust performance on complex text cases.

PaperID: 4184

Authors:Su Yan, Jiahua Li, Kun Wei, Cheng Deng

Affiliations: Xidian University

Title: Backtrace Mamba: Reviving Critical Temporal Contexts via Hierarchical Memory Compression for Online Action Detection

Abstract:
Online Action Detection (OAD) requires realtime prediction of ongoing actions without access to future frames, posing challenges in balancing computational efficiency and long-term dependencies modeling.Existing methods either suffer from slow training and limited temporal receptive fields, or face high computational costs and delayed inference, lacking the capability to tackle extra-long video inputs. Thus, we present a novel Mamba-based OAD framework (MOAD) that efficiently and effectively performs OAD.The hierarchical memory mechanism is introduced to intelligently store high-value scene and action frames based on motion-aware similarity metrics, preserving essential historical knowledge in an online manner. To further reduce storage space, we design a memory quantization method to compress the stored historical features. Additionally, the temporal soft pruning strategy built upon the memory bank is proposed to dynamically remove redundant features, reducing temporal redundancy while maintaining temporal coherence. Sufficient experiments on four challenging benchmarks prove our method significantly outperforms existing methods.

PaperID: 4185

Authors:Lingfeng Zhang, Haoxiang Fu, Xiaoshuai Hao, Shuyi Zhang, Qiang Zhang, Rui Liu, Long Chen, Wenbo Ding

Affiliations: Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, National University of Singapore, Xiaomi EV, Institute of Automation, Inner Mongolia University, Tsinghua University

Title: What You See Is What You Reach: Towards Spatial Navigation with High-Level Human Instructions

Abstract:
Embodied navigation is a fundamental capability that enables embodied agents to effectively interact with the physical world in various complex environments. However, a significant gap remains between current embodied navigation tasks and realworld requirements, as existing methods often struggle to integrate high-level human instructions with spatial understanding. To address this gap, we propose a new task of embodied navigation called spatial navigation, which encompasses two key components: spatial object navigation (SpON) for object-specific guidance and spatial area navigation (SpAN) for navigating to designated areas. Specifically, SpON guides agents to specific objects by leveraging spatial relationships and contextual understanding, while SpAN focuses on navigating to defined areas within complex environments. Together, these components significantly enhance agents’ navigation capabilities, enabling more effective interactions in real-world scenarios. To support this task, we have generated a spatial navigation dataset consisting of 10K trajectories within the simulator. This dataset includes high-level human instructions, detailed observations, and corresponding navigation actions, providing a comprehensive resource to enhance agent training and performance. Building on the spatial navigation dataset, we introduce SpNav, a hierarchical navigation framework. Specifically, SpNav employs vision-language model (VLM) to interpret high-level human instructions and accurately identify goal objects or areas within the observation range, achieving precise point-to-point navigation using a map and enhancing the agent’s ability to oper- ate effectively in complex environments by bridging the gap between perception and action. Extensive experiments show that SpNav achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in spatial navigation tasks across both simulated and real-world environments, validating the effectiveness of our method.

PaperID: 4186

Authors:Mingwei Zhang, Jingtao Hu, Qiang Li, Qi Wang

Affiliations: Northwestern Polytechnical University

Title: Exploring Generalizable Remote Sensing Change Detection via Low-Rank Exchange Adaptation of Vision Foundation Model

Abstract:
Remote sensing change detection (CD) has achieved remarkable progress in recent years. However, little attention has been paid to generalizable change detection (GCD) methods that can effectively generalize to unseen scenarios or domains beyond the training distribution. The major challenges in GCD arise from domain diversity and bitemporal domain shifts in remote sensing images, caused by variations in imaging platforms, acquisition times, geographic regions, and observed events. To tackle these challenges, we propose GenCD, a GCD framework built upon vision foundation models (VFMs). Specifically, GenCD introduces two key components: (1) a LowRank Exchange Adaptation (LREA) strategy of VFMs that aligns bitemporal representations while preserving the generalization capacity of VFMs on single-temporal inputs; and (2) a Token-Guided Feature Refinement (TGFR) mechanism that leverages an input-independent token as a guide to refine difference features, improving the discrimination between changed and unchanged regions. We conduct extensive cross-dataset evaluations on eight diverse datasets across three binary CD tasks: land cover, land use, and building-only CD. The results consistently demonstrate the superior generalization of GenCD over SoTA methods, highlighting its effectiveness in GCD.

PaperID: 4187

Authors:Xiaohan Zhang, Zhangkai Shen, Si-Yuan Cao, Xiaokai Bai, Yiming Li, Zheheng Han, Zhe Wu, Qi Ming, Hui-Liang Shen

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Beijing University of Technology

Title: Learning Better UAV-Based Cross-View Object Geo-Localization from Multi-Modal Prompts: MoP-UAV Benchmark and MoPT Framework

Abstract:
We present MoPUAV, a new benchmark for UAV-based cross-view object geo-localization guided by multi-modal prompts. MoP-UAV supports fine-grained object-level cross-view localization under diverse prompt modalities, including natural language, bounding boxes, and click points. It offers potential for incorporating large foundation models like large language models (LLMs) and promotes the building of more flexible and intelligent UAV agents. Based on the benchmark, we propose MoPT, a multi-modal-prompt-guided tansformer that embeds prompts as token sequences and extract object location from UAV and satellite features via cross-attention. To enhance semantic consistency and performance, we further adopt a cross-view contrastive loss and propose a RefCOCOg-based pre-training strategy. Extensive experiments show that MoPT achieves robust localization under arbitrary prompt combinations. Notably, multi-modal-prompt training significantly boosts unimodal-prompt inference performance, highlighting the generalization benefits of multi-modal learning. MoPT trained with multi-modal prompts outperforms prior unimodal prompt works under the same setting.

PaperID: 4188

Authors:Zheyuan Zhang, Jiwei Zhang, Boyu Zhou, Linzhimeng Duan, Hong Chen

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: D²-VPR: A Parameter-efficient Visual-foundation-model-based Visual Place Recognition Method via Knowledge Distillation and Deformable Aggregation

Abstract:
Visual Place Recognition (VPR) aims to determine the geographic location of a query image by retrieving its most visually similar counterpart from a geotagged reference database. Recently, the emergence of the powerful visual foundation model, DINOv2, trained in a self-supervised manner on massive datasets, has significantly improved VPR performance. This improvement stems from DINOv2’s exceptional feature generalization capabilities but is often accompanied by increased model complexity and computational overhead that impede deployment on resource-constrained devices. To address this challenge, we propose D2-VPR, a Distillation- and Deformable-based framework that retains the strong feature extraction capabilities of visual foundation models while significantly reducing model parameters and achieving a more favorable performance-efficiency trade-off. Specifically, first, we employ a two-stage training strategy that integrates knowledge distillation and fine-tuning. Additionally, we introduce a Distillation Recovery Module (DRM) to better align the feature spaces between the teacher and student models, thereby minimizing knowledge transfer losses to the greatest extent possible. Second, we design a Top-Down-attention-based Deformable Aggregator (TDDA) that leverages global semantic features to dynamically and adaptively adjust the Regions of Interest (ROI) used for aggregation, thereby improving adaptability to irregular structures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Meanwhile, it reduces the parameter count by approximately 64.2% (compared to CricaVPR).

PaperID: 4189

Authors:Yan Zheng, Zhenxiao Liang, Xiaoyan Cong, Yi Yang, Lanqing Guo, Yuehao Wang, Peihao Wang, Zhangyang Wang

Affiliations: University of Texas at Austin, Brown University, The University of Edinburgh

Title: Oscillation Inversion: Training-Free Image and Video Enhancement Through Oscillated Latents in Large Flow Models

Abstract:
We explore the oscillatory behavior observed in inversion methods applied to largescale flow models, including text-to-image and text-to-video. By employing an augmented fixed-point-inspired iterative approach to invert real-world images, we observe that the solution does not achieve convergence, instead oscillating between distinct clusters. Through both experiments on synthetic data, text-to-image and text-to-video, we demonstrate that these oscillating clusters exhibit notable semantic coherence. We offer theoretical insights, showing that this behavior arises from oscillatory dynamics in flow models. Building on this understanding, we introduce a simple and fast distribution transfer technique that facilitates training-free image and video editing/enhancement. Furthermore, we provide quantitative results demonstrating the effectiveness of our method on tasks such as image enhancement, editing, and reconstruction. Notably, our approach enables the transformation of image-only enhancers and editors into lightweight, video-capable tools—without additional training—highlighting its practical versatility and impact.

PaperID: 4190

Authors:Yucheng Zhou, Jihai Zhang, Guanjie Chen, Jianbing Shen, Yu Cheng

Affiliations: University of Macau, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shanghai Jiaotong University

Title: Less Is More: Vision Representation Compression for Efficient Video Generation with Large Language Models

Abstract:
Video generation using Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown promising potential, effectively leveraging the extensive LLM infrastructure to provide a unified framework for multimodal understanding and content generation. However, these methods face critical challenges, i.e., token redundancy and inefficiencies arising from long sequences, which constrain their performance and efficiency compared to diffusionbased approaches. In this study, we investigate the impact of token redundancy in LLM-based video generation by information-theoretic analysis and propose Vision Representation Compression (VRC), a novel framework designed to achieve more in both performance and efficiency with less video token representations. VRC introduces learnable representation compressor and decompressor to compress video token representations, enabling autoregressive next-sequence prediction in a compact latent space. Our approach reduces redundancy, shortens token sequences, and improves model's ability to capture underlying video structures. Our experiments demonstrate that VRC reduces token sequence lengths by a factor of 4, achieving more than 9~14x acceleration in inference while maintaining performance comparable to state-of-the-art video generation models. VRC not only accelerates the inference but also significantly reduces memory requirements during both model training and inference.

PaperID: 4191

Authors:Weizhi Chen, Baoyun Peng, Bo Liu, Xingkong Ma, Houjie Qiu

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology, Academy of Military Sciences

Title: ProRec-Video: Guiding Hierarchical Interest Transitions for Proactive Short Video Recommendation with Dynamic Feedback Adaptation

Abstract:
Traditional short video recommendations primarily enhance user retention by reinforcing existing user preferences, potentially leading to information cocoons. Conversely, proactive recommendations aim to diversify user interests by exposing users to content beyond their historical preferences. However, current proactive approaches face three limitations: (1) homogeneous receptivity assumption, neglecting individual differences in users' openness to new interests; (2) shortterm item exposure without interest anchoring, focusing on item-level shifts rather than interest evolution; and (3) static feedback utilization, failing to incorporate dynamic user feedback during the recommendation adequately. To address these challenges, we propose ProRec-Video, a proactive framework that guides hierarchical interest transitions through three innovations. First, User Receptivity Profiling assesses individual openness for new interests, ensuring personalized transition pacing. Second, Hierarchical Interest Transition Planning decomposes complex interest shifts into intermediate steps to generate smooth interest transition paths and semantically coherent video sequences, addressing overemphasis on item exposure. Third, Dynamic Feedback Adaptation integrates agent-based simulation and Reflexion mechanisms to refine interest transition paths and video sequences based on real-time user feedback, enhancing adaptability and satisfaction. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate that ProRec-Video achieves a significant improvement in proactive recommendation performance, with an interest transition success rate of 85% and a user satisfaction rate of 78.3%.

PaperID: 4192

Authors:Tong Lu, Zhichun Wang, Yaoyu Zhou, Yiming Guan, Zhiyong Bai, Junsheng Du

Affiliations: School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing Normal University, Ministry of Education, Faculty of Education, School of intelligent system engineering, Sun Yat-sen University

Title: SciMKG: A Multimodal Knowledge Graph for Science Education with Text, Image, Video and Audio

Abstract:
Knowledge graphs (KGs) play a vital role in intelligent education by offering structured representations of educational content. However, constructing multimodal educational knowledge graphs (EKGs) from diverse open educational resources remains a challenge due to the reliance on costly manual annotations and the lack of multimodal integration. In this work, we propose an automated framework that harnesses the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to construct multimodal EKGs from open courses efficiently. In our framework, an ExtractionVerification-Integration-Augmentation pipeline is designed to incrementally extract and refine disciplinary concepts from learning resources. Texts, images, videos and audios are aligned with their corresponding concepts. To ensure semantic consistency across modalities, we propose a cross-modal alignment method based on shared structural and semantic features. Using our framework, we build SciMKG, a large-scale multimodal EKG for Chinese K12 education in sciences (biology, physics, and chemistry), encompassing 1,356 knowledge points, 34,630 multimodal concepts, and 403,400 relational triples. Experimental results show that our method improves concept extraction F1 score by 9 % over state-of-the-art baselines; both automatic and human evaluations confirm the robustness of our multimodal alignment method. SciMKG and our construction toolkit will be publicly released to support further research and applications in AI-driven education.

PaperID: 4193

Authors:Chung Park, Taesan Kim, Hyeongjun Yun, Dongjoon Hong, Junui Hong, Kijung Park, MinCheol Cho, Min Sung Choi, Jihwan Seok, Jaegul Choo

Affiliations: SK Telecom, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Title: Think Wise, Collaborate Effectively: A Rationale-Aware LLM-Based Recommender with Reinforcement Learning from Collaborative Signals

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently emerged as powerful reasoning engines in recommender systems, generating naturallanguage explanations that foster user engagement. However, their recommendation performance remains limited, as they lack exposure to collaborative user-item interaction patterns. In contrast, collaborative filtering (CF) models achieve strong performance by learning from these behavioral patterns at scale. To unify the strengths of both paradigms, we propose TWiCE-Rec (Think Wise, Collaborate Effectively), a rationale-aware LLM-based recommender that incorporates collaborative user-item interactions. In the first stage, we construct a rationale dataset by applying in-context learning with self-annotated curation. A state-of-the-art LLM is guided to generate persuasive rationales that explain the causal relationship between the user’s interaction sequence and the ground-truth next item, resulting in a curated post-hoc training dataset. In the second stage, we perform multi-task instruction-tuned adaptation—based on the rationale-augmented training dataset—comprising item description generation and both non-reasoning and reasoning-based sequential recommendation, to equip the LLM with the ability to generate rationales that reflect how user preferences align with item characteristics. Finally, we aim to enhance the LLM’s recommendation performance by incorporating user-item interaction patterns derived from the CF-Rec model. To achieve this, we propose a confidence-weighted reinforcement learning strategy that adjusts rewards in proportion to both the LLM’s prediction alignment with the ground-truth and the confidence from the pretrained CF-Rec model. Our method outperforms both CF- and LLM-Rec models on Amazon datasets in terms of recommendation performance and rationale quality. In an online A/B test, it achieved about 8% higher click-through rate than existing models, demonstrating practical value.

PaperID: 4194

Authors:Fan Zhang, Jinpeng Chen, Tao Wang, Huan Li, Senzhang Wang, Feifei Kou, Ye Ji, Kaimin Wei, Zhenye Yang

Affiliations: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications Key Laboratory of Trustworthy Distributed Computing and Service (BUPT), Ministry of Education, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications Anhui University Key Laboratory of Trustworthy Distributed Computing and Service (BUPT), Zhejiang University, Central South University, TravelSky Technology Limited, Jinan University

Title: DiMA: Distinguishing Resident and Tourist Preferences via Multi-Modal LLM Alignment for Out-of-Town Cross-Domain Recommendation

Abstract:
Outof-Town (OOT) recommendation aims to provide personalized suggestions for users in unfamiliar cities. However, OOT recommendation faces two fundamental challenges: the difficulty of reasoning across modalities, as preference signals in disparate formats such as images and text are hard to compare; and the preference deviation problem, since a user's resident and tourist preferences often diverge, rendering simple preference transfer ineffective. To address these challenges, we propose Distinguishing Resident and Tourist Preferences via Multi-Modal LLM Alignment for Out-of-Town Cross-Domain Recommendation (DiMA), a framework for re-ranking Points of Interest (POIs). To tackle the multimodal challenge, DiMA first leverages Multimodal Large Language Models and Large Language Models (LLMs) to transform heterogeneous POI data into unified semantic tags, enabling both cross-modal reasoning and efficient downstream processing. To address preference deviation, a ``teacher'' LLM executes a custom Chain-of-Thought (CoT) process to disentangle resident and tourist preferences from multi-city histories for re-ranking. Finally, a lightweight student model learns this CoT reasoning via Supervised Fine-Tuning and is then refined with Direct Preference Optimization to align with true user choices, with the potential to surpass the teacher. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset demonstrate that DiMA significantly enhances the performance of baseline models in the OOT recommendation re-ranking task.

PaperID: 4195

Authors:Xiao Zhang, Xingyu Zhao, Yuan Cao, Bin Wang, Guiyuan Jiang, Yanwei Yu

Affiliations: Faculty of Information Science and Engineering, Ocean University of China

Title: TrajAgg: Dual-Scale Feature Aggregation with Hybrid Training for Trajectory Similarity Computation in Free Space

Abstract:
With the widespread use of locationtracking technologies, large volumes of trajectory data are continuously generated. Trajectory similarity computation is a core task in trajectory mining with broad applications. However, existing methods still face two key challenges: (1) the difficulty of balancing efficiency and representation quality, and (2) the reliance on a single training paradigm, which limits the ability to capture both pairwise similarity and batch-level coherence. To address these challenges, we propose a trajectory similarity computation framework named TrajAgg. Specifically, our framework incorporates a novel Aggregation Transformer that efficiently aggregates GPS and grid features through two stages of direct interaction and enhances the expressiveness of the resulting trajectory embeddings. In addition, by integrating two distinct training paradigms, our model captures both fine-grained pairwise relationships and global structural consistency. We further analyze its effectiveness from the perspective of mutual information. Extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets show that TrajAgg consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Our method achieves average improvements of 15.11%, 16.49%, 10.41%, and 40.15% in HR@1 under four distance measures across three datasets, respectively.

PaperID: 4196

Authors:Giordano Giambartolomei, Bart de Keijzer

Affiliations: King's College London

Title: On the Approximation Ratio of Optimal Fixed-Price Mechanisms for Single and Multi-Unit Bilateral Trade

Abstract:
Multiunit bilateral trade refers to the setting, where there is a buyer and a seller, who holds a finite number of units of an indivisible item. An automated mechanism has to decide how many units are transferred from the seller to the buyer and the corresponding payment from the buyer to the seller. The buyer and the seller have both either increasing or increasing submodular valuation functions in the number of units in possession. The (single-unit) bilateral trade problem arises as a particular case. We study the problem of social welfare maximisation by establishing the fraction (approximation ratio) of the optimal social welfare that a fixed-price mechanism can recover. Fixed-price mechanisms, understood as per-unit price in the multi-unit setting, have been characterised as the only truthful, individually rational and strongly budget balanced mechanisms. We narrow the gap on the approximation ratio of optimal fixed-price mechanisms for bilateral trade, which has been shown to lie between 0.72 and 0.7381. We show that it must lie between 0.7292 and 0.73805, which leads to improved bounds on the approximation ratio of optimal fixed-price mechanisms for multi-unit bilateral trade. In particular, we show that multi-unit bilateral trade is at least as hard as single-unit bilateral trade, and obtain several hardness results for different numbers of units.

PaperID: 4197

Authors:Kim Hammar, Tansu Alpcan

Affiliations: University of Melbourne

Title: Scalable Solutions to Zero-Sum Partially Observable Stochastic Games Through Belief Aggregation with Approximation Guarantees

Abstract:
We study the problem of solving onesided, zero-sum, partially observable stochastic games (POSGs). These games model sequential interactions between two adversaries, where one player has partial observability of the game state. They are applicable to many important domains, such as robotics and cybersecurity. Solving such games is computationally challenging since the solution depends on the first player's belief about the game state, which belongs to a continuous (and often high-dimensional) belief space. In the literature, only a single method has demonstrated reliable performance for solving these types of games, namely Heuristic Search Value Iteration (HSVI). However, this method is restricted to small games. We address this limitation by presenting a new method with similar approximation and convergence guarantees but improved scalability and flexibility, which we call SAB: Shapley iteration with Aggregated Beliefs. Our method aggregates the belief space into a finite set of representative beliefs and computes their values through Shapley iteration. It then approximates the value function of the POSG through interpolation from these values. We prove that SAB converges and provide a bound on its approximation error. Experiments across several benchmark games show that SAB matches the performance of HSVI on small game instances while also scaling to larger games. Moreover, we find that SAB is up to 79% faster than HSVI at obtaining a near-optimal approximation.

PaperID: 4198

Authors:Jing Li, Yanxin Luo, Donghong Han, Yimeng Zhan, Xiaoming Fu, Baiyou Qiao, Gang Wu

Affiliations: Northeastern University, University of Göttingen

Title: ESCA: An Emotional Support Conversation Agent for Enhancing Reasonable Strategy Planning and Effective Expression

Abstract:
Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) aims to alleviate individuals’ negative emotions through multiturn dialogues, where effective strategy planning and response generation are essential. However, existing methods often suffer from limitations in both planning reasonable support strategies and effectively expressing them in responses. To the end, we propose a novel LLM-based Emotional Support Conversation Agent (ESCA) with a plug-in strategy planner and a strategy-aligned prompt generator. The strategy planner cooperates with four aspects of the seeker’s state, including emotion intensity, trust degree, dialogue behavior, and stage of change, to enhance the rationality and effectiveness of the strategy prediction. To ensure that predicted strategies are better conveyed, the prompt generator integrates strategy-aligned instructions, knowledge, and context to generate the soft prompt for guiding the LLM to generate supportive responses. In addition to supervised fine-tuning, the prompt generator is further optimized by reinforcement learning. Experimental results demonstrate that ESCA significantly improves both response quality and the success rate of achieving the ESC task goal.

PaperID: 4199

Authors:Shilin Zhang, Suixue Wang, Qingchen Zhang, Xiulong Liu

Affiliations: Tianjin University, Hainan University

Title: SAMGTD: Spatial-Aware Masked Graph Transformer-Diffusion Model for Enhanced Cell Type Deconvolution in Spatial Transcriptomics

Abstract:
Recent advances in spatial transcriptomics have enabled the integration of gene expression profiles with precise spatial coordinates, which have facilitated the exploration of tumor occurrence and development mechanisms, as well as the development of more effective targeted and immunotherapy approaches for tumor treatment. Deciphering cell type represents a critical challenge in spatial transcriptomics research. Existing methods are limited by the pervasive “dropout” events in spatial transcriptomics, hindering their ability to fully capture the relationship between spatial location and gene expression, thereby compromising the performance of cell type deconvolution. To address these limitations, we propose a spatialaware masked graph transformer-diffusion model (SAMGTD) for enhanced cell type deconvolution in spatial transcriptomics. For spatial transcriptomics, the masked graph transformer model is designed to adaptively capture complex dependencies between spatial locations and gene expression. It employs a masking strategy that guides the model to focus on important local information during training, while the multi-head attention mechanism captures global context. More importantly, the spatial diffusion model is constructed to achieve the dual enhancement of spatial transcriptomics, including denoising and data imputation. It incorporates the multi-head attention mechanism and residual blocks, effectively addressing the “dropout” issue commonly encountered in spatial transcriptomics. For scRNA-seq, we construct a variational autoencoder to reduce noise interference while preserving key gene expression information. Finally, we construct a spatial-aware contrastive learning model to integrate scRNA-seq and spatial transcriptomics for cell type deconvolution. Experiments conducted on three datasets demonstrate that SAMGTD outperforms baseline methods.

PaperID: 4200

Authors:Ankit Kanwar, Hartej Soin, Abhinav Barnawal, Mudit Chopra, Harshil Vagadia, Tamajit Banerjee, Shreshth Tuli, Rohan Paul, Souvik Chakraborty

Affiliations: Indian Institute of Technology

Title: PhyPlan: Learning to Plan Tasks with Generalizable and Rapid Physical Reasoning for Embodied Manipulation

Abstract:
Given the task of landing a ball in a goal region beyond direct reach, humans can often throw, slide, or rebound objects against the wall to attain the goal. Enabling robots to replicate such reasoning is nontrivial as it requires multi-step planning and involves a mixture of discrete and continuous action spaces, a sparse and sensitive reward structure, computationally expensive simulations, and an incomplete understanding of the environment's physics. We present PhyPlan, a physics-informed and adaptable planning framework for efficient multi-step physical reasoning. At its core, PhyPlan comprises of Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to explore and evaluate sequences of object interactions. GFlowNets sample discrete action sequences in proportion to their associated reward, enabling broad and reward-driven exploration of the discrete planning space. MCTS complements this by adaptively balancing the use of a fast but approximate pre-trained physics-informed dynamics predictor and costly but accurate environment rollouts, ensuring both speed and precision in planning. The known and actual physics discrepancy is captured using Gaussian Process Regression. Experiments on benchmark simulated tasks requiring composition of collisions, slides, and rebounds demonstrate that PhyPlan achieves a 45% higher success rate and up to 3× efficiency gains over state-of-the-art model-based reinforcement learning approaches.

PaperID: 4201

Authors:Wuyuan Xie, Zhenming Li, Yuwu Lu, Di Lin, Yun Song, Miaohui Wang

Affiliations: College of Computer Science & Software Engineering, Shenzhen University, School of Artificial Intelligence, South China Normal University, College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjing University, School of Computer Science and Technology, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Guangdong Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing

Title: Firing Bits Where It Matters: Spiking-Guided Just Recognizable Distortion Modeling for Machine-Centric Video Coding

Abstract:
Just recognizable distortion (JRD) has emerged as a promising paradigm for machinecentric video coding. However, existing JRD-guided coding methods are limited by coarse annotation granularity and high computational cost, which hinder their deployment. In this paper, we first investigate the impact of different JRD annotation strategies on downstream task performance. By incorporating both instance-level and contextual information, we construct a new JRD dataset with fine-grained annotations compatible with object detection and instance segmentation tasks. To enhance quantization parameter (QP) map prediction while maintaining computational efficiency, we propose a novel spiking neural network (SNN)-based framework that decomposes video frames into spatial structures, channel interactions, and temporal patterns. Furthermore, we introduce a spiking attention mechanism to aggregate task-relevant features and employ adaptive scaling vectors to suppress machine-perceived redundancy, enabling targeted bitrate allocation aligned with task-critical content. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and backbones demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art codec-based and JRD-guided methods in maintaining task performance at ultra-low bitrates, while significantly reducing computational overhead.

PaperID: 4202

Authors:Yeming Li, Chenxi Liu, Jie Zou, Cheng Long, Chaoning Zhang, Peng Wang, Yang Yang

Affiliations: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Nanyang Technological University

Title: From Dialogue to Destination: Geography-Aware Large Language Models with Multimodal Fusion for Conversational Recommendation

Abstract:
Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS) aim to provide personalized recommendations by interacting with users through natural language dialogue. However, in scenarios requiring deep geospatial awareness, existing methods, including those based on Large Language Models (LLMs), still face significant challenges in effectively fusing heterogeneous, multimodal geographic information with dynamic dialogue context. Simple fusion strategies struggle to resolve the asymmetric dependencies between dynamic user intent and static geographic context and fail to bridge the semantic gap between LLMs and structured geospatial data. To address these issues, we propose a framework for geographyaware CRS, named GeoCRS. Our core idea is to empower a frozen LLM with powerful geospatial reasoning capabilities by conditioning it on a dynamic, multimodal guidance signal generated by an external fusion architecture, all without altering the LLM's internal parameters. Specifically, we first design a hierarchical geographical encoder to uniformly represent heterogeneous geographic data. Subsequently, we introduce a contextual feature modulation module that asymmetrically injects the geographic context into the user's dialogue intent via a novel modulation mechanism to improve conversational recommendation via both geographic and dialogue context. Extensive experiments on public benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed GeoCRS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on the geography-aware conversational recommendation task.

PaperID: 4203

Authors:Yao Deng, Xiang Xiang, Jiaqi Gui

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Title: Random Amalgamation of Adapters for Flatter Loss Landscapes: Towards Class-Incremental Learning with Better Stability

Abstract:
Classincremental learning (CIL) enables models to continuously learn from streaming data while mitigating catastrophic forgetting of prior knowledge. Our research reveals that the CIL performance of pre-trained models (PTMs) varies significantly across different datasets, a phenomenon underexplored in existing studies. Through visualization, we observe that flatter loss landscapes correlate with superior CIL performance. This insight motivates us to enhance PTMs' CIL capability by promoting loss landscapes' flatness. Initially, we propose independently optimizing multiple adapter branches to equip PTMs with diverse learnable parameters, thereby improving stability during parameter updates. However, given computational and memory constraints, the number of adapters a PTM can accommodate is limited. To address this, we introduce a training strategy with randomized adapter amalgamation (RAA), compelling the model to maintain low loss across a broader and more continuous parameter space, significantly enhancing flatness. Furthermore, we refine existing sharpness-aware minimization techniques to further optimize the loss landscapes. Our extensive experiments and visualization results validate the efficacy of the method, resulting in the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.

PaperID: 4204

Authors:Xiangxiang Gao, Weisheng Xie, Lixin, Xuwei Fang, Chen Hang, Changqun Li, Yuhan Lin, Xiaolong Xu

Affiliations: Bestpay AI Lab

Title: Talon: Breaking the Synchronization Barrier in Speculative Decoding with Hybrid Model-based and Retrieve-based Drafting

Abstract:
Large Language Models face fundamental deployment challenges due to the computational demands of autoregressive token-by-token generation. While speculative decoding has emerged as a promising acceleration technique through its draft-then-verify framework, current implementations suffer from two critical limitations: (1) mutual waiting problem caused by sequential dependencies between draft generation and verification phases, and (2) constrained token acceptance rates where retrieval-based drafting methods under-perform in general domains while models-based drafting approaches show reduced efficacy in knowledge-intensive scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose Talon, a novel parallel inference architecture featuring two key innovations: (1) a novel asynchronous execution paradigm that decouples draft generation from verification, effectively eliminating synchronization bottlenecks, and (2) an adaptive hybrid drafting strategy that dynamically combines model-based and retrieval-based approaches to improve token acceptance rates across diverse domains. Extensive evaluations across standard benchmarks (MT-Bench, HumanEval, GSM8K, Alpaca, CNN/DM) demonstrate Talon's exceptional performance, achieving 4.04x–6.52x acceleration across multiple model families including Vicuna, Deepseek, and LLaMA series. These results represent a significant advancement over existing speculative decoding methods (EAGLE 1-3, Hydra, Medusa, Lookahead, SPS, and PLD), establishing a new paradigm for speculative decoding.

PaperID: 4205

Authors:Aoyun Geng, Chunyan Cui, Yunyun Su, Zhenjie Luo, Feifei Cui, Zilong Zhang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Hainan University

Title: TLAGC: Taylor Linear Attention-Guided Graph Convolutions for Revealing Spatial Domains in Spatial Multi-Omics Data

Abstract:
With the rapid advance of spatial multiomics technologies, it has become possible to simultaneously profile transcripts, proteins and chromatin states at their native spatial coordinates, thereby uncovering molecular architecture that transcends any single-omics perspective. However, the resulting data matrices are often highly sparse and suffer from unstable dimensionality. Graph-based neural methods capture only local neighborhood information, whereas conventional Transformers, although capable of modelling long-range dependencies, incur prohibitive computational costs on such data. To overcome these limitations, we propose TLAGC—a Taylor-Linear-Attention-Guided Graph Convolutional framework that couples a Taylor-expanded linear attention (TLA) mechanism with graph convolutional networks. By eliminating the soft-max operation and linking the LocalGCN via residual connections, TLA preserves local structural information while enabling the integration of global and local contexts, thereby alleviating ineffective information propagation between spatially distant yet transcriptionally similar regions. Theoretical analysis confirms that TLA indeed reduces computational complexity, and extensive experiments on multiple spatial multi-omics benchmarks demonstrate that TLAGC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in delineating spatial domains.

PaperID: 4206

Authors:Ming-Yi Hong, You-Chen Teng, Shao-En Lin, Chih-Yu Wang, Che Lin

Affiliations: National Taiwan University, Academia Sinica

Title: HINPool: A Unified Heterogeneous Graph Pooling Framework for Accurate Molecular and Protein Property Prediction

Abstract:
Graph pooling has gained significant progress in recent years as an effective solution for graphlevel property classification tasks. With the emergence of research on Heterogeneous Information Networks (HINs), this paper argues that graph-level datasets for graph classification should be treated as HINs rather than homogeneous graphs to enhance information aggregation. We propose HINPool, a novel and general graph pooling framework for graph-level property classification with HINs. First, we devise a systematic HIN construction procedure from the original data to capture complex interactions. Next, we introduce a type-aware heterogeneous graph pooling method featuring a Type-Aware Selector (TAS) to select essential nodes and a Readout Aggregator (RA) to fuse critical information into a graph-level representation. Finally, a cross-layer fusion function is applied to combine the output embeddings from each graph pooling layer, creating a final graph representation for downstream classification tasks. Our approach achieves near state-of-the-art performance on widely used graph classification benchmark datasets, demonstrating significant improvements in four out of five datasets. This work redefines the strategy for graph-level property classification with HGNNs and heterogeneous graph pooling to model intricate relationships, enhancing performance without requiring extensive domain-specific knowledge.

PaperID: 4207

Authors:Qing Hu, Tianchi Liao, Shuyi Wu, Lei Yang, Chuan Chen

Affiliations: Sun Yat-Sen University

Title: FedLAGC: Towards High Performance System-Heterogeneous Federated Learning via Layer-Adaptive Submodel Extraction and Gradient Correction

Abstract:
Federated learning has emerged as a promising paradigm for collaborative model training while preserving data privacy. However, many existing FL methods implicitly assume that clients have sufficient computational and storage resources, making them less applicable in realworld scenarios with severe system heterogeneity. To address this, submodel extraction has recently gained attention as a promising strategy to tailor the global model to resource-constrained clients. Despite this progress, existing methods often suffer from noticeable performance gaps across clients and structural inconsistency in the extracted models, leading to degraded global performance and increased communication overhead. In this work, we propose FedLAGC, a novel federated framework that jointly tackles performance imbalance and communication inefficiency through Layer-Adaptive submodel extraction and Gradient Correction. Specifically, FedLAGC constructs client-specific submodels by selecting structurally important parameters according to layer-wise importance scores, ensuring both resource adaptiveness and architectural consistency. Additionally, we propose a lightweight correction mechanism that captures historical optimization drift, helping to align local updates with the global direction and reduce redundant communication. The rigorous convergence analysis of FedLAGC for system-heterogeneous federated learning under non-convex objectives is given. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 with ResNet-18 and ResNet-34 under various system and data heterogeneity settings demonstrate the significant superiority of FedLAGC (up to 24% accuracy improvement and 3.66× communication efficiency) over state-of-the-art methods.

PaperID: 4208

Authors:Zhixin Ou, Peng Liang, Linbo Qiao, Jianchen Han, Baihui Liu

Affiliations: National Key Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Computing, College of Computer Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology

Title: ParaDySe: A Parallel Strategy Switching Framework for Dynamic Sequences in Transformer-based Large Language Models

Abstract:
Dynamic sequences with varying lengths have been widely used in the training of Transformerbased large language models (LLMs). However, current training frameworks adopt a pre-defined static parallel strategy for these sequences, causing neither communication-parallelization cancellation on short sequences nor out-of-memory on long sequences. To mitigate these issues, we propose ParaDySe, a novel adaptive Parallel strategy switching framework for Dynamic Sequences. ParaDySe enables on-the-fly optimal strategy adoption according to the immediate input sequence. It first implements the modular function libraries for parallel strategies with unified tensor layout specifications, and then builds sequence-aware memory and time cost models with hybrid methods. Guided by cost models, ParaDySe selects optimal layer-wise strategies for dynamic sequences via an efficient heuristic algorithm. By integrating these techniques together, ParaDySe achieves seamless hot-switching of optimal strategies through its well-designed function libraries. We compare ParaDySe with baselines on representative LLMs under datasets with sequence lengths up to 624K. Experimental results indicate that ParaDySe addresses OOM and CPC bottlenecks in LLM training by systematically integrating long-sequence optimizations with existing frameworks.

PaperID: 4209

Authors:Jie Shi, Xiaodong Yue, Wei Liu, Yufei Chen, Feifan Dong

Affiliations: School of Computer Engineering and Science, Shanghai University, Institute of Artificial Intelligence, School of Computer Science and Technology, Tongji University, School of Future Technology

Title: Not All Inconsistency Is Equal: Decomposing LVLM Uncertainty into Belief Divergence and Belief Conflict

Abstract:
Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) is critical for detecting hallucinations in blackbox Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). However, prevailing methods like Discrete Semantic Entropy (DSE) are unreliable, as their scores are primarily dominated by the number of semantic clusters. This renders them incapable of distinguishing between benign semantic ambiguity (varied but coherent responses) and severe belief conflict (contradictory responses). We address this limitation by proposing a novel framework rooted in Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence, built on the premise that not all inconsistency is equal. Our method decomposes uncertainty into two complementary metrics: Belief Divergence, which quantifies ambiguity by measuring the separation between viewpoints, and Belief Conflict, which captures direct logical contradictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework provides a more reliable measure of uncertainty.

PaperID: 4210

Authors:Lingyun Song, Ziyao Chen, Kang Pan, Xiaolin Han, Xinbiao Gan, Yudai Pan, Xiaofan Sun, Xiaoqi Wang, Xuequn Shang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Intelligent Education Technology and Application, Zhejiang Normal University, Independent Researcher, National University of Defense Technology, Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Big Data Storage and Management, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology

Title: KSS-MoE: Knowledge Space Synergy Framework in Mixture of Experts for Continual Visual Instruction Tuning

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) employing the Mixtureof-Experts (MoE) structure exhibit encouraging results in visual language tasks. However, they struggle with catastrophic forgetting due to a lack of effective collaboration among experts and negative transfer across tasks. This happens because the router typically employed in MoE for managing expert assignments is inadequate when there are significant shifts in data distribution across various tasks. A drop in the effectiveness of earlier tasks is caused by negative transfer, which occurs due to conflicts in shared knowledge between tasks, disturbing the knowledge already acquired. To address these issues, we propose the Knowledge Space Synergy Framework in Mixture of Experts (KSS-MoE) for Continual Visual Instruction Tuning (CVIT). It dynamically combines the knowledge subspaces of experts to improve the integration of fine-grained complementary knowledge and collaborative abilities of experts, thus addressing the limitations of the basic router. Furthermore, we introduce a general expert that maintains orthogonal subspaces for shared knowledge, enabling effective cross-task knowledge utilization while reducing negative transfer. Extensive experiments conducted on eight CVIT tasks confirm the excellence of KSS-MoE, showcasing its top-tier performance.

PaperID: 4211

Authors:Chengwei Sun, Jiwei Wei, Shiyuan He, Zeyu Ma, Yuyang Zhou, Ran Ran, Jie Zou, Yang Yang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, School of Cyberspace Security, Hainan University

Title: DWTSG: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Pre-trained Models via Discrete Wavelet Transform and Subband Guidance

Abstract:
Fully finetuning large pre-trained models for each downstream task is impractical due to prohibitive memory, computation, and storage costs. Although parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods address this issue, leading methods like LoRA still exhibit linear scaling of trainable parameters with hidden size. Recent studies have explored PEFT in the frequency domain to reduce computational costs by employing fast Fourier transform and discrete cosine transform with sparse frequency selection. These methods rely on global frequency representations that lack spatial locality and disperse energy across the domain. As a result, sparse coefficient selection struggles to preserve fine-grained structural information and often introduces artifacts such as ringing near boundaries. To address these limitations, we propose DWTSG, a novel PEFT framework based on discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and subband guidance. DWTSG decomposes pre-trained weights into four wavelet subbands that jointly encode global context and local details. It fine-tunes only the most informative coefficients in each subband through an energy-based selection strategy that prioritizes coefficients based on their individual importance and interactions. Finally, inverse DWT reconstructs the updated weights, enabling efficient and precise adaptation. Extensive experiments on natural language understanding, commonsense reasoning, and image classification demonstrate that DWTSG outperforms existing PEFT methods, achieving superior performance and higher parameter efficiency.

PaperID: 4212

Authors:Qi Sun, Zhen Cao, Kaige Geng, Ziyi Zhang, Biao Hou

Affiliations: Xidian University

Title: Optimization Method for Surrogate Function in Spiking Neural Networks Based on Membrane Potential Distribution

Abstract:
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer promising energy efficiency and temporal sparsity for edge intelligence, but their training remains difficult due to gradient mismatch, membrane potential drift, and discretization errors. In this paper, we propose a membrane potentialguided surrogate optimization(MPO) framework that dynamically aligns the surrogate function with the membrane potential distribution to enhance the gradient propagation. Specifically, we introduce a KL-divergence-based regularization to stabilize membrane potential dynamics, and an adaptive width constraint to synchronize the surrogate gradient range with neural activity statistics. Additionally, we design a spike discretization error metric and a correction strategy to mitigate temporal discretization effects. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet show our method achieves 94.76%, 74.20%, and 65.70% top-1 accuracy respectively, while improving gradient stability and energy efficiency. This work provides a principled optimization scheme for robust and scalable SNN training in practical neuromorphic systems.

PaperID: 4213

Authors:Mengbo Wang, Zhuochen Fan, Dayu Wang, Guorui Xie, Qing Li, Zeyu Luan, Yong Jiang, Tong Yang, Mingwei Xu

Affiliations: Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Pengcheng Laboratory, Department of Strategic and Advanced Interdisciplinary Research, State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University, Institute for Network Sciences and Cyberspace

Title: RatioSketch: Towards More Accurate Frequency Estimation in Data Streams via a Lightweight Neural Network

Abstract:
Sketchbased solutions are widely used to estimate item frequencies in infinite data streams.Traditional hand-crafted sketches face the bottleneck of further eliminating errors because they cannot fully utilize the data stream distribution.Although recent neural sketches represented by MetaSketch and LegoSketch have improved generalization capabilities, they face bottlenecks such as high computational overhead and parameter sensitivity.Meanwhile, they ignore load information, fail to fully utilize the local information in hand-crafted sketches, and do not focus on the frequent items that are usually more important in data streams.In this paper, we propose RatioSketch, a novel lightweight neural network correction framework that synergizes the advantages of hand-crafted sketches and neural sketches in a ``micro-correction'' paradigm.The key idea is to retain the efficient underlying data structure of the hand-crafted sketch and to build a neural correction layer in its output space. We select multiple representative hand-crafted sketches as use cases to study the correction performance of RatioSketch on them.Extensive experimental evaluations on several real-world datasets show that RatioSketch-corrected sketches achieve consistently higher estimation accuracy than their uncorrected counterparts, as well as outperforming neural baselines such as MetaSketch and LegoSketch under identical memory budgets.

PaperID: 4214

Authors:Xiuxian Wang, Yuting Su, Wenhui Li, Xiaowen Wang, Zhuojun Li, Anan Liu

Affiliations: School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University

Title: SGoT-R1: Social Graph of Thought Reasoning-Enhanced Multimodal Large Language Model for Harmful Meme Detection

Abstract:
Internet memes serve as widely distributed multimodal social content that conveys complex ideas through metaphorical expressions, often containing harmful implications that make accurate harmful meme detection an important problem. Reasoning knowledge extracted from large language models plays a crucial role in recent advances in harmful meme detection. However, these methods only perform reasoning analysis on memes from a single opinion, ignoring that memes are essentially products of group consensus, where their true meaning interpretation highly depends on the collision and aggregation process of diverse user viewpoints. To address this problem, we propose a Social Graph of Thought Reasoning Enhancement (SGoTRE) framework for harmful meme detection. The SGoTRE contains three key steps: First, through multiagent simulation technology, we obtain diverse chains of thought that represent the parsing logic of users from different backgrounds toward memes, authentically restoring the diversity characteristics of group cognition. Second, we construct a Social Graph of Thought (SGoT) that effectively integrates multi-chain reasoning processes and structurally expresses the consensus and diversity of viewpoints among users. Finally, we utilize the SGoT for cognitive distillation, internalizing multi-opinion reasoning logic into a single multimodal large model SGoT-R1 to achieve efficient and interpretable harmful meme detection. Experimental results show that SGoT-R1 significantly improves detection performance on mainstream datasets. Particularly on the most challenging FHM dataset, SGoT-R1 achieves an 8.9% improvement over state-of-the-art models.

PaperID: 4215

Authors:Yingchao Wang, Wenqi Niu, Xingshan Yao, Li You, Weilun Fei

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology

Title: Rethinking the Dark Knowledge and Kullback-Leibler Divergence Loss in Knowledge Distillation Under Capacity Mismatching

Abstract:
Knowledge Distillation (KD) aims to transfer the dark knowledge that encodes interclass similarity, semantic structure, and decision boundaries from a powerful teacher model to a compact student model by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between their output distributions. While effective, we demonstrate that KL-based KD is designed to match values precisely and does not explicitly constrain the relative relationships between classes. Meanwhile, we empirically find that vanilla KL-based KD suffers from gradient competition due to the zero-sum constraint in the softmax space, which may implicitly change the inter-class rank relationships learned by the student model, particularly under capacity mismatching. Therefore, we argue that the student model should learn not only the output values but also the relative ranking of classes. Accordingly, we propose a simple yet effective Relative Confidence Knowledge Distillation (RCKD) method that aligns the teacher’s and student’s relative confidence matrices via cosine similarity, achieving more efficient and robust distillation from a stronger teacher model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RCKD consistently outperforms existing logit-based KD methods and exhibits strong adaptability across various teacher architectures and capacities.

PaperID: 4216

Authors:Shiwang Xing, Jianwei Niu, Tao Ren

Affiliations: Beihang University, Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: DoKnowAD: Calibrating Normal Representations with Refined Domain Knowledge to Enhance Time Series Anomaly Detection

Abstract:
Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) is critical in various realworld applications. Due to the high cost of manual annotation, unsupervised methods are commonly employed to distinguish abnormal patterns from normal ones based on data or representation characteristics. However, the limited coverage of a single dataset often leads to misclassifying test-time normal patterns that deviate from the training distribution as anomalies. In view of this, we propose to introduce domain knowledge from auxiliary datasets (AuxSets) to enhance domain-level normality understanding in the target dataset (TargetSet). However, through in-depth analysis on the representation space of the TargetSet after incorporating AuxSets, we find that consistent knowledge about normality from homogeneous AuxSets do little help to TargetSet, while diverse knowledge from heterogeneous AuxSets can bring semantic confusion of normality for TargetSet, both of which can degrade TargetSet detection performance. To address the issue, we design DoKnowAD, a framework that introduces a Representation HyperVolume Estimation metric to identify helpful heterogeneous AuxSets, and further adopts contrastive learning to enforce loose coupling between datasets and high cohesion within single dataset to calibrate the TargetSet’s representation space, thus mitigating knowledge confusion. Extensive experiments on five popular datasets across different domains demonstrate that DoKnowAD consistently outperforms existing TSAD baselines in various metrics.

PaperID: 4217

Authors:Lang Xiong, Ning Liu, Ao Ren, Yuheng Bai, Haining Fang, Binyan Zhang, Zhe Jiang, Yujuan Tan, Duo Liu

Affiliations: Chongqing University, Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics, National University of Defense Technology

Title: D2 Prune: Sparsifying Large Language Models via Dual Taylor Expansion and Attention Distribution Awareness

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) face significant deployment challenges due to their massive computational demands. While pruning offers a promising compression solution, existing methods suffer from two critical limitations: (1) They neglect activation distribution shifts between calibration data and test data, resulting in inaccurate error estimations; (2) Overlooking the longtail distribution characteristics of activations in the attention module. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel pruning method, D²Prune. First, we propose a dual Taylor expansion-based method that jointly models weight and activation perturbations for precise error estimation, leading to precise pruning mask selection and weight updating and facilitating error minimization during pruning. Second, we propose an attention-aware dynamic update strategy that preserves the long-tail attention pattern by jointly minimizing the KL divergence of attention distributions and the reconstruction error. Extensive experiments show that D²Prune consistently outperforms SOTA methods across various LLMs (e.g., OPT-125M, LLaMA2/3, Qwen3). Moreover, the dynamic attention update mechanism also generalizes well to ViT-based vision models like DeiT, achieving superior accuracy on ImageNet-1K.

PaperID: 4218

Authors:Zhiwei Ye, Songsong Zhang, Wen Zhou, Libing Wu, Jun Shen, Ting Cai, Mingwei Wang, Jixin Zhang

Affiliations: Hubei University of Technology, Wuhan University, University of Wollongong

Title: Incomplete Multi-View Unsupervised Federated Feature Selection via Cooperative Particle Swarm Optimization and Tensor-Aligned Learning

Abstract:
With the widespread adoption of multiview data in numerous fields, multi-view unsupervised feature selection (MUFS) has made notable strides in both feature pruning and missing-view completion. Nonetheless, existing MUFS methods typically rely on centralized servers, which cannot meet real-world demands for privacy preservation and distributed learning, and they often suffer from suboptimal solution and weak convergence guarantees. To address these challenges, IMUFFS, an incomplete multi-view unsupervised federated feature selection via cooperative particle swarm optimization (CPSO) and tensor-aligned learning (TAL) is proposed. Specifically, each client executes CPSO-TAL at two stages: (i) an external optimization phase that involves a CPSO, inspired by the co-evolutionary mechanism of hybrid breeding optimization algorithm, performing a global search in the feature space, and (ii) an internal optimization phase that leverages TAL with imputation and CP decomposition, where CP decomposition reduces dimensionality by decomposing the original tensor into a sum of core components, to learn low-dimensional embeddings, while simultaneously updating anchor graphs and view preference weights, thereby harmonizing imputation and representation learning. On the server side, a federated aggregation strategy using adaptive normalized mutual information (NMI) weighting combines the locally optimized feature selection (FS) weights and NMI scores from clients, ensuring privacy while improving the quality of FS and convergence. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that IMUFFS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, yielding more effective and robust FS and enhancing better missing-view completion.

PaperID: 4219

Authors:Zihong Gao, Hongjian Liang, Yuanhui Hao, Lei Hao, Liangjun Ke

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University

Title: GRDC: A Unified Graph-Driven Framework for Role Discovery and Communication in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Effective coordination in MultiAgent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is particularly challenging under partial observability, where agents must reason about potential collaborators using only local information. Existing methods fall into two categories: communication-based approaches that enable message exchange but often fix or misidentify who the collaborators are, and role-based approaches that encourage specialization based on behavioral similarity. However, both lines of work overlook the task‑induced cooperative dependencies that decide which agents should collaborate, leading to miscommunication or role misassignment under partial observability. We introduce GRDC (Graph‑driven Role Discovery and Communication), a unified framework that approximates these dependencies by dynamically constructing local interaction graphs from trajectory embeddings, then uses these graphs to infer roles via prototype matching and to restrict communication to intra‑role agents with attention-based aggregation. Beyond role inference and communication, GRDC maximizes role entropy, decorrelates prototypes, and dynamically prunes redundant ones to obtain structured yet compact role specialization. Experimental results on Predator Prey, Cooperative Navigation, and SMACv2 demonstrate that GRDC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art communication- and role-based baselines, improving coordination efficiency and training stability across tasks.

PaperID: 4220

Authors:Weipeng Jiang, Juan Zhai, Shiqing Ma, Ziyan Lei, Xiaofei Xie, Yige Wang, Chao Shen

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Bristol, Singapore Management University

Title: From Chaos to Clarity: A Knowledge Graph-Driven Audit Dataset Generation Framework for LLM Unlearning

Abstract:
Recently LLMs have faced increasing demands to selectively remove specific information through Machine Unlearning. While evaluating unlearning effectiveness is crucial, existing benchmarks suffer from fundamental limitations in audit dataset generation from unstructured corpora. We identify two critical challenges: ensuring audit adequacy and handling knowledge redundancy between forget and retain datasets. Current approaches rely on adhoc question generation from unstructured text, leading to unpredictable coverage gaps and evaluation blind spots. Knowledge redundancy between forget and retain corpora further obscures evaluation, making it difficult to distinguish genuine unlearning failures from legitimately retained knowledge. To bring clarity to this challenge, we propose LUCID, an automated framework that leverages knowledge graphs to achieve comprehensive audit dataset generation with fine-grained coverage and systematic redundancy elimination. By converting unstructured corpora into structured knowledge representations, it transforms the ad-hoc audit dataset generation process into a transparent and automated generation pipeline that ensures both adequacy and non-redundancy. Applying LUCID to the MUSE benchmark, we generated over 69,000 and 111,000 audit cases for News and Books datasets respectively, identifying thousands of previously undetected knowledge memorization instances. Our analysis reveals that knowledge redundancy significantly skews metrics, artificially inflating ROUGE from 19.7% to 26.1% and Entailment Scores from 32.4% to 35.2%, highlighting the necessity of deduplication for accurate assessment.

PaperID: 4221

Authors:Xun Liang, Mengwei Wang, Yuefeng Ma, Simin Niu

Affiliations: Renmin University of China, Qufu Normal University

Title: Safe RAG by RAG: Untying the Bell That RAG Rang with the RAG Hand

Abstract:
Retrievalaugmented generation (RAG) is widely adopted for knowledge-intensive tasks, but unverified external knowledge can pose risks such as data injection and retrieval pollution, leading to unexpected generation. Existing defenses rely on patch-based fixes, which limit generalization and increase system latency. To address these issues, we propose RAG2RAG, a framework-level security solution specifically designed for RAG. Inspired by human intuition to reason about what can and cannot be said during RAG phase, RAG2RAG augments the main RAG module with a lightweight RAG-based security expert module composed of two components: (1) a Detective that dynamically retrieves supporting evidence, and (2) a Judge that makes final decisions based on retrieved context. The main and expert modules operate in parallel without causing noticeable delays. Experiments across two languages, six domains, and seven types of poisoning attacks demonstrate that RAG2RAG overall achieves higher accuracy and lower attack success rates than seven mainstream baselines. Furthermore, it integrates seamlessly with various RAG architectures, offering efficient protection across diverse threat scenarios.

PaperID: 4222

Authors:Yi Lin, Ziyi Zhou, Jiashi Gao, Xinwei Guo, Jiaxin Zhang, Haiyan Wu, Xin Yao, Xuetao Wei

Affiliations: Southern University of Science and Technology, University of Macau, Lingnan University

Title: GeWu: A Culturally-Grounded Chinese Benchmark for Multi-Stage Social Bias Evaluation in Large Language Models

Abstract:
With the rapid deployment of Chinese large language models (LLMs), culturallygrounded bias evaluation remains understudied due to the dominance of English benchmarks and simplistic Chinese scenarios. To address this, we propose GeWu, a comprehensive benchmark featuring a culturally-aware dataset of 60,192 questions spanning 14 social groups with fine-grained Chinese contexts, significantly exceeding existing resources in breadth and depth. Our two-stage evaluation first quantifies bias via multiple-choice questions using a novel probability-based scoring mechanism to sensitively capture bias tendencies, distilling high-bias scenarios into GeWu-1K. This refined subset then enables multi-turn dialogue evaluations for in-depth analysis under realistic conditions. Experiments reveal that GeWu effectively exposes social biases in state-of-the-art Chinese LLMs, with 13.93% of scenarios eliciting universal bias across all models. This highlights persistent challenges and provides actionable insights for bias mitigation in Chinese contexts.

PaperID: 4223

Authors:Priyanshu Priya, Asif Ekbal

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna

Title: Facilitating Early Maladaptive Schema–Guided Polite and Empathetic Psychotherapeutic Support: An LLM-Driven MoE-RL-Based Dialogue System

Abstract:
In Psychotherapy, Early Maladaptive Schemas (EMS) are entrenched negative perceptions of self or others that perpetuate mental health challenges, contribute to treatment resistance and relapse, and obstruct therapeutic progress. Addressing EMS using appropriate psychotherapeutic support (PS) strategies helps resolve core emotional deficits, mitigate resistance, and improve client engagement. Moreover, adapting polite and empathetic communication based on clients’ emotional states fosters trust, emotional safety, and a conducive therapeutic environment, which is critical for addressing EMS and achieving positive outcomes. Motivated by these insights, we introduce MATE a novel EMS-guided polite and empAthetic dialogue sysTem for psychothErapeutic support. MATE integrates a Large Language Model (LLM) with a Mixture of Experts-based Reinforcement Learning (MoE-RL) approach to overcome the limitations of traditional RL methods, such as large action spaces and generic responses. The LLM captures diverse semantic patterns from dialogue context. MoE-RL leverages dedicated psychotherapeutic, politeness, and empathy experts, along with a new reward function, comprising PS, politeness, empathy, contextual consistency, and diversity rewards to guide policy learning for effective response generation. Evaluations on the HOPE and PSYCON datasets demonstrate MATE’s efficacy in generating polite and empathetic psychotherapeutic responses based on clients’ EMS and emotional cues while ensuring contextual consistency and diversity.

PaperID: 4224

Authors:Kai Sun, Wenqiang Li, Bo Dong, Yuxin Lin, Jingyao Zhang, Bin Shi

Affiliations: Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

Title: Scope Delineation Before Localization: A Two-Stage Framework for Enhancing Failure Attribution in Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) are seeing growing adoption in multiagent systems. In these systems, efficient failure attribution is critical for ensuring robustness and interpretability. Current LLM-based attribution methods often face challenges with lengthy logs and lacking expert knowledge. Drawing inspiration from human debugging strategies, we propose an automated failure attribution framework, Scope Delineation Before Localization, which operates in two key stages: (1) identifying the failure scope and (2) pinpointing the failure step. By decoupling failure attribution into the two stages, our approach alleviates the reasoning workload of LLMs, enabling more precise failure attribution. To support scope delineation, we further introduce two strategies: Stepwise Scope Delineation and Expertise-Assisted Scope Delineation. Experiments on the Who&When dataset validate the efficacy of our two-stage framework, demonstrating substantial improvements over prior methods (up to 24.27% on step-level accuracy).

PaperID: 4225

Authors:Zhouxing Tan, Hanlin Xue, Yulong Wan, Ruochong Xiong, Xu Chu, Xiang Li, Junfei Liu

Affiliations: National Engineering Research Center for Software Engineering, Peking University, School of Software and Microelectronics, College of Electrical and Information Engineering, Northeast Agricultural University

Title: Efficient Transcoder Adaptation for Fine-Tuned Models: Revealing Medical Reasoning Mechanisms in Large Language Models

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) suffer from a lack of decisionmaking transparency, limiting their deployment in high-stakes domains such as healthcare. We propose a mechanistic interpretability framework that introduces two novel paradigms: Medical Fine-Tuning with Frozen Attention Layers (FTFA) and Posterior Adaptation Transcoders (PAT). FTFA freezes attention layers while fine-tuning only feed-forward network (FFN) parameters, enabling PAT to efficiently adapt pre-trained transcoders on the same data. This approach achieves over 1000× efficiency improvement compared to training transcoders from scratch. We theoretically justify this methodology and demonstrate its cost-effectiveness for cross-domain transfer. Transcoders are sparse autoencoders that replace MLP layers to provide interpretable feature representations. By substituting MLP layers of both base Gemma2-2b and its medical fine-tuned variant with per-layer transcoders, we enable feature-level attribution analysis. Through systematic pruning and node merging of resulting attribution graphs, we construct human-interpretable decision pathways. Our analysis reveals that LLMs employ two parallel mechanisms for medical diagnosis: pattern matching and multi-hop reasoning, with fine-tuned models demonstrating enhanced correct reasoning patterns. This work provides a practical framework for training transcoders on fine-tuned models at minimal cost, enabling broader application of mechanistic interpretability across domains and potentially guiding model training through transcoder-based analysis.

PaperID: 4226

Authors:Shaofei Wang, Yunan Liu, Xiaolan Tang, Wenlong Chen

Affiliations: Capital Normal University

Title: Collaborative Enhancement of Large and Small Models for Question Answering via Dual Knowledge Transfer

Abstract:
Our statistical analysis reveals a complementary phenomenon between large language modelbased question answering (QA) and small model-based QA. To facilitate dual knowledge transfer between these two paradigms, this paper introduces a collaborative enhancement method of large and small models for question answering. The proposed method consists of two iterative steps: i) small4large step, in which the small model first predicts an answer for a given question along with its confidence, and these results are then leveraged as prompts to strengthen the large model's performance; ii) large4small step, where the large model enhances the small model through distillation, judgment and reflection. Through iteration of these two steps, the large and small models could enhance each other progressively. Experimental evaluations across eight datasets spanning five domains demonstrate that the proposed method effectively improves the question answering performance of both large and small models simultaneously.

PaperID: 4227

Authors:Tingjiang Wei, Qin Ni, Rong Gao, Yingying Wang, Liang He

Affiliations: Lab of Artificial Intelligence for Education, East China Normal University, Institute of Language Sciences, Shanghai International Studies University, School of Computer Science and Technology

Title: MovieGraph-ToM: Evaluating Long-Range Theory of Mind in Large Language Models via Implicit Social-Causal Graphs

Abstract:
The capacity for social reasoning, particularly Theory of Mind (ToM), is a foundational prerequisite for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values. However, current evaluations are predominantly confined to simplistic, shorttext scenarios, obscuring their true capabilities and potential failure modes in complex, long-range social dynamics. To address this deficit, we introduce MovieGraph-ToM, a large-scale benchmark for evaluating long-range ToM and social cognition within extended, multimodal narratives. We employ a "scaffold-and-probe" methodology: we construct a ground-truth Social-Causal Graph offline, which maps the narrative's latent mental states and causal chains. During evaluation, the model is denied access to this graph and must reason directly from raw multimodal inputs. This decoupling forces genuine inference over superficial pattern matching. Reasoning is probed via a hierarchical questioning framework designed to differentiate spontaneous understanding from logical robustness. Our empirical results reveal systematic vulnerabilities in even state-of-the-art models. We identify a critical "multiple-choice pitfall," where accuracy plummets against well-crafted distractors, and a stark "generative-discriminative divide," where models fail to construct coherent explanations for answers they correctly identify. These findings highlight a latent risk, as models that feign comprehension could lead to unpredictable and misaligned behaviors. MovieGraph-ToM thus offers a rigorous platform for assessing and advancing the robust social intelligence required for safely aligned AI systems.

PaperID: 4228

Authors:Lianwei Wu, Botao Wang, Wenbo An, Tieqiao Li, Xianghua Li

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, School of Artificial Intelligence, Optics and Electronics (iOPEN), Northwest Polytechnical University

Title: Cognitive Enhancement Chain-of-Thought Towards Enhancing Style Learning and Content Preservation for Long Style Transfer

Abstract:
Current text style transfer task mainly focuses on short texts, while the field has not been fully developed for long texts. Considering the richer semantics and more complex sentence structures in long text sequences, existing methods that employ traditional stylecontent disentanglement ways and learn the target style to generate target sequences face two key issues: 1) During disentanglement, they usually directly separate style words or fragments, such coarse-grained disentanglement risks losing original semantics and hinder the model's content preservation. 2) During target style learning, they often focus on the transfer of certain style attributes or aspects, which makes it difficult to grasp the holistic style of target objects. To this end, we propose Cognitive enhancement Chain-of-Thought (CeCoT) towards enhancing style learning and content preservation for long style transfer. CeCoT first constructs progressive CoT to facilitate LLMs to gradually rewrite source content and separate source styles, thereby enhancing the retention of original content. Then, we propose cognitive CoT, which comprehensively considers hierarchical cognitive content (i.e., shallower-deeper-normal level) and cognitive behavior (i.e., prompt order of CoT) to learn the overall target style. To enhance the robustness of our model, we also propose two constraint losses in a dual validation way towards content preservation enhancing and style consistency learning. Extensive experiments on two competitive datasets demonstrate the superiority of our CeCoT.

PaperID: 4229

Authors:Shu Wu, Chenxing Li, Wenfu Wang, Hao Zhang, Hualei Wang, Meng Yu, Dong Yu

Affiliations: Tencent AI Lab

Title: Audio-Thinker: Guiding Large Audio Language Model When and How to Think via Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Recent advancements in large language models, multimodal large language models, and large audio language models (LALMs) have significantly improved their reasoning capabilities through reinforcement learning utilizing rulebased rewards. However, the explicit reasoning process has not yet yielded substantial benefits for audio question answering, and effectively leveraging deep reasoning remains an open challenge, with LALMs still falling short of achieving human-level auditory-language reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose Audio-Thinker, a reinforcement learning framework designed to enhance the reasoning capabilities of LALMs through improved adaptability, consistency, and effectiveness. Our approach introduces an adaptive think accuracy reward, enabling the model to adjust its reasoning strategies based on task complexity. Furthermore, we incorporate an external reward model to evaluate the overall consistency and quality of the reasoning process, complemented by think-based rewards that assist the model in distinguishing between valid and flawed reasoning paths during training. Experimental results demonstrate that Audio-Thinker models outperform existing reasoning-oriented LALMs across various benchmark tasks, exhibiting superior reasoning and generalization capabilities.

PaperID: 4230

Authors:Zhewei Zhi, Yingyi Zhang, Yizhen Jing, Xianneng Li, Jianing Liu, Huajie Liu, Yongliang Ding

Affiliations: School of Economics and Management, Dalian University of Technology, City University of Hong Kong

Title: Compress-then-Rank: Faster and Better Listwise Reranking with Large Language Models via Ranking-Aware Passage Compression

Abstract:
Listwise reranking with Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as the stateof-the-art approach, consistently establishing new performance benchmarks in passage reranking. However, their practical application faces two critical hurdles: the prohibitive computational overhead and high latency of processing long token sequences, and the performance degradation caused by phenomena like "lost in the middle" in long contexts. To address these challenges, we introduce Compress-then-Rank (C2R), an efficient framework that performs listwise reranking not on original passages, but on their compact multi-vector surrogates. These surrogates can be pre-computed and cached for all passages in the corpus. The effectiveness of C2R hinges on three key innovations. First, the compressor model is pre-trained on a combination of text restoration and continuation objectives, enabling high-fidelity compressed vector sequences that mitigate the semantic loss common in single-vector methods. Second, a novel input scheme prepends embeddings of each ordinal index (e.g., [1]:) to its corresponding compressed vector sequence, which both delineates passage boundaries and guides the reranker LLM to generate a ranked list. Finally, the compressor and reranker are jointly optimized, making the compression explicitly ranking-aware for the ranking objective. Extensive experiments on major reranking benchmarks demonstrate that C2R provides substantial speedups while achieving competitive and even superior ranking performance compared to full-text reranking methods.

PaperID: 4231

Authors:Yuran Bian, Xiaohan Zhang, Zhiyuan Yu, Changqing Li, Li Pan

Affiliations: School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai Shanghai Key Laboratory of Integrated Administration Technologies for Information Security, Shanghai China, Washington University in St. Louis

Title: Your Prompts Are Not Safe: Output-Free Membership Inference via Prompt Vectors in Vision-Language Tuning

Abstract:
Prompt tuning enables VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) to efficiently adapt to new tasks through learnable prompt vectors. This naturally raises a question: do these prompts leak private information about their training data? While Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) can quantify this risk, current methods rely on access to model outputs or internal gradients. This limitation prevents a clear assessment of a prompt’s standalone privacy leakage, particularly in deployment scenarios where such information is inaccessible. In this paper, we propose Prompt Intrinsic Privacy Risk Analyzer (PIPRA) to address this gap. As the first output-free MIA, PIPRA leverages open-source pre-trained VLMs to extract features from both prompts and samples within a shared cross-modal semantic space. By employing a contrastive learning-based feature projector to enhance these representations, PIPRA enables a subsequent discriminator to effectively perform membership inference. Extensive experiments across nine benchmark datasets and multiple VLMs show PIPRA achieves an average AUC of 87.58%, significantly outperforming traditional output-dependent methods (77.05%). These findings reveal that prompts pose a substantially greater privacy risk than previously recognized, highlighting the urgent need for prompt-level privacy protection.

PaperID: 4232

Authors:Xueyi Zhang, Chengwei Zhang, Zheng Li, Xiyu Wang, Siqi Cai, Mingrui Lao, Yanming Guo, Huiping Zhuang

Affiliations: University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, National University of Defense Technology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen Shenzhen Loop Area Institute, South China University of Technology

Title: Rep Deep & Machine Learning: Exemplar-Free Continual Video Action Recognition via Slow-Fast Collaborative Learning

Abstract:
In realworld applications, video action recognition models must continuously learn new action categories while retaining previously acquired knowledge. However, most existing approaches rely on storing historical data for replay, which introduces storage burdens and raises data privacy concerns. To address these challenges, we investigate the problem of Exemplar-Free Continual Video Action Recognition (EF-CVAR) and propose a novel framework named Slow-Fast Collaborative Learning (SFCL). SFCL integrates two complementary learning paradigms: a slow branch based on gradient-driven deep learning, which provides strong adaptability to new tasks, and a fast branch based on analytic learning (e.g., Recursive Least Squares), which efficiently preserves old knowledge without requiring access to past samples. To enable effective collaboration between the two branches, we design the Slow-Fast Dynamic Re-parameterization (SFDR) mechanism for adaptive fusion, and the Knowledge Reflection Mechanism (KRM), which mitigates forgetting and task-recency bias via pseudo-feature generation and dual-level knowledge distillation. Extensive experiments on UCF101, HMDB51, and Something-Something V2 demonstrate that SFCL achieves superior performance compared to existing replay-based methods, despite being exemplar-free. Notably, in long-duration continual learning scenarios, SFCL exhibits remarkable robustness, achieving up to a 30.39% improvement in accuracy over baselines while maintaining a low forgetting rate, highlighting its scalability and effectiveness in real-world video recognition tasks.

PaperID: 4233

Authors:Xiaofei Zhao

Affiliations: Lanzhou Petrochemical University of Vocational Technology Lanzhou Jiaotong University

Title: Composable Assurance for AI Alignment: A Framework for Propagating Formal Safety Properties Through MLOps

Abstract:
The increasing complexity of modern AI systems exposes a significant assurance gap: safety evidence from practices like redteaming and robustness testing remains fragmented, lacking a formal mechanism for composition and propagation throughout the development lifecycle. This prevents the construction of rigorous, dynamic safety cases essential for trustworthy AI. We introduce the Composable Assurance Framework (CAF), a novel engineering methodology that integrates safety assurance directly into MLOps workflows. At its core is the Formal Safety Assertion (FSA), a standardized, machine-readable structure that verifiably links safety properties—such as robustness scores or the absence of deceptive circuits—to specific AI artifacts. We then define a Composition Calculus, a set of formal rules governing how FSAs are propagated and aggregated as components are combined into a system. This approach transforms the development pipeline into an automated evidence-gathering engine, whose output is a dynamic Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) of assertions that constitutes a living safety case. Through a prototype and a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) case study, we demonstrate how CAF automatically enforces a predefined safety policy, blocking non-compliant deployments.

PaperID: 4234

Authors:Kuai Dai, Hui Su, Xutao Li, Chengxing Zhai

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: Efficient Forecasting of Geostationary Infrared Brightness Temperature Sequences: A Benchmark and a Lightweight Model

Abstract:
Forecasting geostationary infrared brightness temperature sequences from historical observations is a significant and challenging task. By analyzing these predictions, cloud evolution, convective activity, and atmospheric radiative states can be revealed in advance, offering high potential value in domains such as weather nowcasting, energy management, and disaster monitoring. Recently, artificial intelligence techniques have provided valuable insights into this task. However, as a nascent research area, the lack of a standardized, highquality benchmark has significantly impeded progress. Moreover, training existing deep learning models for this task remains computationally expensive due to the complexity of their network architectures and modeling mechanisms. To address these challenges, we introduce a new benchmark, FY4ABT, and propose a lightweight prediction model, WavePredNet. Specifically, FY4ABT comprises three sub-datasets designed to respectively evaluate prediction performance under short-term, medium-term, and long-term scenarios. Meanwhile, WavePredNet effectively captures multi-scale dynamics, including both low- and high-frequency components with low computational costs while delivering exceptional performance.

PaperID: 4235

Authors:Guangrui Fan, Dandan Liu, Lihu Pan

Affiliations: Taiyuan University of Science and Technology, Universiti Malaya

Title: Mind the Gap: Predicting, Explaining and Reducing Time-to-First-Comment (Reply Gap) in Online Mental-Health Communities

Abstract:
Online peersupport communities are vital for mental health, but their therapeutic benefit hinges on receiving a timely and helpful first reply. Posts that languish unanswered can exacerbate feelings of distress and abandonment. This paper develops and validates an integrated framework to predict, explain, and reduce this ``reply gap" on Reddit. First, using survival analysis on over 91,000 posts (2018–2025), we show that a deep learning model (DySurv) can accurately predict reply times (C-Index = 0.742), with a post's lexico-semantic content being a far stronger predictor than author history. Second, moving from correlation to causation, we use a causal inference framework on 48,612 posts to estimate the effect of different support types. We find that initial replies providing emotional support are most effective, increasing the odds of a positive user response by 49% (OR=1.49), an effect most pronounced for high-risk users. Third, we operationalize these insights in RiskMatch, a recommender system that routes at-risk posts to historically effective helpers. Rigorous counterfactual evaluation using inverse propensity scoring (IPS)—a method that corrects for biases in historical data—demonstrates that our system reduces the median wait time by 26 minutes for the highest-risk quintile. This work provides a validated, data-driven methodology to build more responsive and effective peer-support ecosystems, offering a concrete pathway to ensure fewer calls for help go unanswered.

PaperID: 4236

Authors:Xianglu Tang, Joyee W. Jin, Emily Ma, Xingyu Li

Affiliations: Institute for Human-centered AI, Stanford University, University of Toronto

Title: AI in the Wild: A Meta-Analytic Evaluation of Depression Detection from Social Media Data

Abstract:
As AI moves into highstakes, human-centered settings, we still lack clear evidence on when and why these systems succeed or fail. This meta-analysis synthesizes all empirical studies published between 2022 and 2025 that use social-media data to predict depression, quantifying pooled accuracy and testing study-level moderators. By showing how data sources and model architecture shape outcomes, we offer an empirical foundation for a more reliable, socially aware deployment of AI in mental health. Across 67 studies, overall performance is strong (pooled r ≈ 0.80) and climbs even higher in 2024, driven by deep, transformer-based and multimodal systems. The gains, however, are uneven: post-level binary detectors improve the most, user-level severity estimation still lags, and results hinge as much on label provenance and platform context as on model size—highlighting a persistent gap between leaderboard success and clinically meaningful reliability. To address that gap, we propose a Psych-Aligned Evaluation Framework that maps predictions onto validated symptom dimensions and adds three deployment-critical tests—PHQ error, temporal stability, and clinician agreement. This framework converts single-number benchmarks into a multidimensional yardstick for real-world, psychologically meaningful depression detection.

PaperID: 4237

Authors:Shanshan Qin, Joshua L. Pughe-Sanford, Alexander Genkin, Pembe Gizem Ozdil, Philip Greengard, Anirvan M. Sengupta, Dmitri Chklovskii

Affiliations: Flatiron Institute

Title: A Network of Biologically Inspired Rectified Spectral Units (ReSUs) Learns Hierarchical Features Without Error Backpropagation

Abstract:
We introduce a biologically inspired, multilayer neural architecture composed of Rectified Spectral Units (ReSUs). Each ReSU projects a recent window of its input history onto a canonical direction obtained via canonical correlation analysis (CCA) of previously observed past–future input pairs, and then rectifies either its positive or negative component. By encoding canonical directions in synaptic weights and temporal filters, ReSUs implement a local, selfsupervised algorithm for progressively constructing increasingly complex features. To evaluate both computational power and biological fidelity, we trained a two-layer ReSU network in a self-supervised regime on translating natural scenes. First-layer units, each driven by a single pixel, developed temporal filters resembling those of Drosophila post-photoreceptor neurons (L1/L2 and L3), including their empirically observed adaptation to signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Second-layer units, which pooled spatially over the first layer, became direction-selective—analogous to T4 motion-detecting cells—with learned synaptic weight patterns approximating those derived from connectomic reconstructions. Together, these results suggest that ReSUs offer (i) a principled framework for modeling sensory circuits and (ii) a biologically grounded, backpropagation-free paradigm for constructing deep self-supervised neural networks.

PaperID: 4238

Authors:Yufeng Chen, Yuan Sun, Hao Pan, Xujian Zhao, Jian Dai, Zhenwen Ren, Xingfeng Li

Affiliations: School of information and Control Engineering, Southwest University of Science and Technology, National Key Laboratory of Fundamental Algorithms and Models for Engineering Numerical Simulation, Sichuan University, School of Computer Science and Technology, Southwest Automation Research Institute

Title: Revisiting Network Inertia: Dynamic Inertia Inhibition Coupled Multidimensional Periodicity for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

Abstract:
Infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) technology has become a frontier of great interest due to the ability to integrate information from multiple sources. However, the progressive slowdown of weight updates in deep networks (i.e., “network laziness” phenomenon), makes existing methods far from realizing the full characterization potential. To this end, we propose a lightweight fusion method for IVIF, AntiInert Dynamic Fusion (AIDFusion), to fully utilize the potential of the network at all levels. Specifically, by progressively regulating the collaborative Learning process of multi-level prediction in the network, Dynamic Inertia Inhibition Learning Strategy (DIILS) is proposed to adaptively and efficiently inhibit inertia accumulation. Subsequently, to deeply explore the representation potential while breaking through the performance threshold, lightweight Multi-dimensional modulation fusion module (MMFM) is specifically proposed to capture comprehensive multi-view and multi-scale features efficiently. Finally, considering the semantic bias between the prediction maps of DIILS and the fusion feature of MMFM, Fourier Analysis Convolution (FAConv) is designed in feature recovery as a bridge between prediction and fusion to accomplish the implicit periodic modeling. Based on the above study, extensive experiments on three public IVIF datasets demonstrate the dual advantages of AIDFusion in terms of fusion performance and computational overhead compared to state-of-the-art baseline methods.

PaperID: 4239

Authors:Lei Cheng, Daikun Liu, Zhikun Chen, Teng Wang

Affiliations: Southeast University

Title: First Learn, Then Review: Human-Like Continual Learning for Cross-View Geo-Localization with Limited Field of View

Abstract:
This paper addresses crossview geo-localization in real-world scenarios, where the field-of-view (FoV) is restricted and the orientation is unknown for ground-view images. This task is extremely challenging due to the huge domain gap. Existing methods typically treat tasks with different FoVs as independent tasks. These approaches not only require separate retraining for each FoV, but also neglect the strong correlations between different FoVs, leading to poor performance under extremely limited FoV. To overcome these limitations, we propose HCL-Geo, a framework follows human-like continual learning paradigm of "first learn, then review" for geo-localization: in the first "learn" stage, tasks are presented to the model in an easy-to-hard sequence to enable gradual learning and knowledge retention, so that their natural correlations could be exploited to facilitate knowledge transfer. In the second "review" stage, expert modules are incorporated to efficiently handle tasks with varying FoVs. This approach eliminates the need for retraining separate models and demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across different FoVs with strong generalization capabilities. Remarkably, the recall rate@top-1 improves from 49.1% to 68.3% and from 24.6% to 34.3% respectively on CVUSA and CVACT benchmarks with 70° FoV.

PaperID: 4240

Authors:Xiang Fang, Wanlong Fang, Changshuo Wang

Affiliations: School of Software Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Nanyang Technological University, University College London

Title: Unveiling the Fragility of Vision-Language Models: Multi-Modal Adversarial Synergy via Texture-Constrained Perturbations and Cross-Modal Optimization

Abstract:
Large VisionLanguage Models (LVLMs) have transformed multi-modal understanding, excelling in tasks like image captioning and visual question answering by integrating visual and textual inputs. However, their robustness against adversarial attacks—particularly those exploiting both modalities—remains underexplored, posing risks to critical applications like autonomous driving and content moderation. Existing attacks focus on single modalities or require impractical white-box access, limiting their real-world relevance. In this paper, we introduce Multi-Modal Adversarial Synergy (MMAS), a groundbreaking framework that crafts universal, black-box multi-modal attacks against LVLMs. MMAS simultaneously generates a texture scale-constrained Universal Adversarial Perturbation (UAP) for images and a learnable prompt perturbation for text, optimized jointly using only model queries. The image perturbation, bounded by an L∞-norm, leverages wavelet-based texture constraints to ensure imperceptibility and robustness across diverse visual inputs. The text perturbation, constrained by an L2-norm in the embedding space, maintains semantic coherence while steering outputs toward a target. A novel cross-modal regularization term aligns the perturbations’ gradient directions, enhancing their synergistic impact and transferability across tasks and models. Extensive experiments are conducted to verify the strong universal adversarial capabilities of our proposed attack with prevalent LVLMs, spanning a spectrum of tasks on various datasets, all achieved without delving into the details of the model structures.

PaperID: 4241

Authors:Daixian Liu, Hau-Sing So, Haoran Chen, Jiao Li, Shanshan Wang, Mengzhu Wang, Jingcai Guo

Affiliations: Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, University of Macau, Sichuan Agricultural University, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Anhui University, Hebei University of Technology, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Title: Learning to Cluster Rare Cell Types: Implicit Semantic Data Augmentation for Spatial Multi-modal Omics Analysis

Abstract:
Spatial multimodal omics technologies have transformed biological research by enabling the simultaneous profiling of gene expression, protein abundance, and chromatin accessibility within their native spatial contexts. Despite these advances, accurately clustering rare cell types remains a major challenge due to data sparsity, high dimensionality, and limited annotated samples. While Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown potential in modeling spatial omics data, their effectiveness is often constrained by the use of fixed K-nearest neighbor (KNN) graph structures, which fail to capture latent semantic relationships masked by sequencing noise. To overcome these limitations, we propose CRCT (Clustering Rare Cell Types): a novel framework that combines Implicit Semantic Data Augmentation (ISDA) with adaptive graph learning for spatial multi-modal omics analysis. Unlike traditional augmentation strategies that generate explicit synthetic samples, CRCT operates in the deep feature space by dynamically estimating intra-class covariance matrices and implicitly perturbing features along semantically meaningful directions. This enables effective augmentation for rare cell populations while preserving biological fidelity. Extensive experiments across four real-world datasets (HLN, MB, Stereo‑CITE‑seq, and SPOTS) and one synthetic benchmark demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of CRCT, achieving improvements of up to +1.7 NMI and +7.8 ARI over strong baseline methods.

PaperID: 4242

Authors:Zhangyang Qi, Jinsong Li, Hongjian Wu, Jiaqi Wang, Hengshuang Zhao

Affiliations: The University of Hong Kong, Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Title: Game Ground Bench: Probing the Limits of LVLMs in Complex Semantic Grounding Across Game Universes

Abstract:
Large VisionLanguage Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, yet their ability to ground language in complex, interactive environments such as video games remains a critical frontier. Existing benchmarks are inadequate for this purpose: real-world datasets like RefCOCO introduce a domain gap; GUI-centric benchmarks lack the complexity of modern game interfaces; and existing game-specific benchmarks are often too simplistic or narrow, failing to assess fine-grained, generalizable grounding capabilities. To address this issue, we propose GGBench — a large-scale, cross-genre benchmark designed to probe the grounding capabilities of LVLMs in diverse gaming scenarios. GGBench features unprecedented genre diversity, encompassing 10 categories including card games, first-person shooters, and role-playing games, with a total of 1335 test images. It focuses on tasks that require connecting natural language instructions to specific in-game objects and UI elements. Experimental results show existing models perform poorly on GGBench, with weak grounding abilities, especially in complex game scenarios. Due to limited data scale, fine-tuning them for gaming scenarios is also challenging. To address this, we propose Game-R1, a novel training method centered on the Grounded Reinforcement Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm. GRPO maximizes limited interaction data utility and enables robust few-shot generalization across games. Extensive experiments show Game-R1 significantly outperforms existing LVLMs on GGBench, validating our approach. GGBench provides a solid and comprehensive evaluation platform for subsequent research on agents in gaming environments, which strongly promotes development in this field.

PaperID: 4243

Authors:Weixun Wan, Xinyang Jiang, Zilong Wang, Bei Li, Cairong Zhao

Affiliations: Tongji University, Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine

Title: Tuning Medical Foundation Models for Inner Ear Temporal CT Analysis with Plug-and-play Domain Knowledge Aggregator

Abstract:
Highresolution computed tomography (CT) is essential for diagnosing hearing loss and planning interventions such as cochlear implantation, as it provides detailed visualization of inner-ear anatomy. This paper focuses on advancing AI-based analysis of inner-ear CT scans to support clinical decision-making. However, a major challenge lies in the scarcity of annotated data, which limits the applicability of conventional supervised learning techniques. To address this, we present the first publicly available Children's Inner Ear CT Dataset (CIED), comprising 722 CT scans labeled for structural anomaly detection, postoperative hearing outcome prediction, and anatomical segmentation. In addition, we explore the use of medical foundation models to improve generalization in data-scarce scenarios. Existing parameter-efficient adaptation methods often fall short in two ways: they lack a unified mechanism to adapt across diverse foundation model architectures and they are not specifically designed to incorporate domain expert knowledge of inner-ear anatomy and pathology. To overcome these limitations, we propose Domain Knowledge Guided Tuning (DKGT), a plug-and-play framework that introduces a unified adapter—Domain Knowledge Aggregator (DKA)—to inject radiomics-based anatomical features into foundation models via cross-attention. DKA supports various backbone types and preserves pretrained representations of foundation model while enabling multi-layer integration of expert knowledge. Extensive experiments across multiple tasks demonstrate that DKGT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art classification methods, achieving superior performance and generalizability on inner-ear CT analysis.

PaperID: 4244

Authors:Hang Xu, Yang Xiao, Changlong Jiang, Haohong Kuang, Kaidi Zhang, Min Du, Ran Wang

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology, ByteDance Inc.

Title: MoEG-HOI: Mixture of Expert Groups for One-Stage Hand-Object Interaction Motion Generation with Hand-Finger-Joint Semantic Guidance

Abstract:
In this paper, MoEGHOI is proposed as a novel method for the challenging 3D hand-object interaction (HOI) motion generation task, by introducing Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to this field for the first time. Almost all the mainstream approaches in HOI motion generation leverage diffusion model as its strong generative ability. Nevertheless, due to HOI’s fine-grained property, well training diffusion in one-stage way is actually not trivial. Existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods (e.g.,Text2HOI and MF-MDM) alleviate this mainly via a coarse-to-fine, multi-stage paradigm. Although effective and practical, this paradigm prevents end-to-end training for optimal performance. In contrast, MoEG-HOI applies MoE to address this in one-stage way, with end-to-end training ability. This allows each expert to specialize in certain distinct HOI patterns, which alleviates individual expert’s training difficulty. However, intuitively applying MoE is not optimal due to the issues of: (1) towards expert design, original MoE cannot well characterize hand’s articulated structure at the levels of hand, finger, and joint explicitly, and (2) for expert routing mechanism, the characteristics of variational HOI action classes and diffusion noise levels have not been concerned. Towards the first problem, MoE’s experts are designed into groups that correspond to motion generation for hand, finger, and joint respectively, under the semantic guidance from global to local. To facilitate this, HOI’s text description will be correspondingly refined at Hand-Finger-Joint levels using LLM. Secondly, during MoE routing, the information of HOI’s action label and diffusion noise level is concerned to select experts jointly, to better reveal actions’ inter-class variation and dynamics of diffusion generation. SOTA performance on ARCTIC, GRAB and H2O datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of our method.

PaperID: 4245

Authors:Liwen Zhang, Zhaoji Miao, Yusong Shen, Zechen Wei, Hui Hui, Jie Tian

Affiliations: The Key Laboratory of Cognition and Decision Intelligence for Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Beijing Key Laboratory of Molecular Imaging, Chinese Academy of Sciences, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, CAS Key Laboratory of Molecular Imaging, Beihang University

Title: MPI-Mamba: Latent Feature Fusion Mamba for Anisotropic Image Calibration and Deblurring in Magnetic Particle Imaging

Abstract:
Magnetic Particle Imaging (MPI) is an innovative medical modality, providing nanomolarscale in vivo sensitivity and radiation-free dynamic real-time detection for precision medicine. However, MPI faces a challenging problem in accurately visualizing nanoparticle distributions, where the reconstructed images with unidirectional scanning exhibit anisotropy. The anisotropy in spatial resolution leads to distortion and blurred image boundaries. Existing deep learning methods for anisotropy calibration are only limited to simulation data due to lacking of real-world MPI datasets. To address the aforementioned problems, we spent over three years designing and constructing a real-world MPI anisotropic image datasets (20,156 images) with diverse phantoms (sensitivity, resolution, vessel, shape) and animal scanning. Then, we introduce a novel Mamba-based method, MPI-Mamba, for anisotropic image calibration. Specifically, we propose a latent feature fusion state space model (LFF-SSM) block for feature fusion and leverage conditional latent diffusion model (CL-DM) branch for feature extraction. The CL-DM is performed to extract latent features in a highly compressed latent space for guiding the calibration and deblurring process. Next, we exploit the LFF-SSM to fully fuse the extracted multi-scale features to capture contextual information from the image structure, enabling the model to learn the overall distribution of signal concentration. We evaluate our method and competing methods on simulation dataset and our constructed diverse real-world MPI datasets. The results show that our proposed approach outperforms competing methods for anisotropic image calibration and deblurring.

PaperID: 4246

Authors:Ziyi Cao, Rui Liu, Yong Chen

Affiliations: Beihang University, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Title: VBF++: Variational Bayesian Fusion with Context-Aware Priors and Recommendation-Guided Adversarial Refinement for Multimodal Video Recommendation

Abstract:
Multimodal video recommendation systems face fundamental challenges in determining optimal fusion strategies across diverse content types and user preferences. Existing methods suffer from two critical limitations: (1) their fusion strategies are guided by contextagnostic priors that ignore the semantic structure of content, assuming the same simple distribution (typically a standard multivariate Gaussian prior) governs optimal fusion for all video types, and (2) their optimization objectives, particularly the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO), are misaligned with the final recommendation goal, optimizing for feature reconstruction rather than ranking performance. To address these fundamental issues, this work proposes VBF++, a novel framework that introduces context-aware structured priors and recommendation-guided adversarial refinement. First, the method designs context-aware priors that learn cluster-specific distributions based on video semantic categories, replacing uninformative priors with structured, content-aware prior distributions. Second, it introduces a Recommendation-Guided Adversarial Refinement (RAR) paradigm that explicitly steers the learning process towards generating recommendation-optimal fusion strategies, resolving the objective misalignment inherent in variational learning. Enhanced with domain-adaptive meta-learning, extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate consistent improvements of 4.7-8.3 percent in Precision@10 over state-of-the-art methods. Analysis reveals that learned fusion strategies exhibit semantically meaningful patterns, prioritizing visual features for action content, acoustic information for music videos, and textual descriptions for documentary material.

PaperID: 4247

Authors:Aoyu Liu, Yaying Zhang

Affiliations: Tongji University

Title: UrbanPG: An Efficient Framework with Personalized Context and General Backbone Interaction for Urban Spatio-Temporal Learning

Abstract:
As urban data expands, existing spatiotemporal models encounter challenges such as high context dependency, poor cross-scenario generalization, and inefficient computational performance. To address these issues, we propose UrbanPG, an efficient and scalable framework for spatio-temporal learning. UrbanPG separates task-specific personalized patterns from general patterns, enabling unified spatio-temporal modeling and efficient knowledge generalization across scenarios. The key innovations of UrbanPG include: the development of a lightweight, context-independent general backbone utilizing linear spatio-temporal attention for scalable cross-scenario deployment; a personalized context prompt mechanism designed to model heterogeneity through spatio-temporal embeddings and random perturbation regularization, interacting with the backbone to enhance pattern differentiation; the proposal of multi spatio-temporal learning paradigms for rapid knowledge transfer and generalization to downstream tasks through fine-tuning personalized context prompts while freezing the backbone. Experimental results demonstrate that UrbanPG achieves state-of-the-art performance in large-scale forecasting, few-shot transfer, and continual learning tasks across eight real-world datasets, showcasing exceptional performance, strong generalization, and significant reductions in computational overhead.

PaperID: 4248

Authors:Hengyang Lu, Xin Guo, Shuai Feng, Wenyu Jiang, Yuntao Du, Chang Xia, Chenyou Fan

Affiliations: Jiangnan University, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing University, Shandong University, Anhui University, South China Normal University

Title: A Novel Fine-Tuned CLIP-OOD Detection Method with Double Loss Constraint Through Optimal Transport Semantic Alignment

Abstract:
Detecting OutOf-Distribution (OOD) samples in image classification is crucial for model reliability. With the rise of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), CLIP-OOD has become a research hotspot. However, we observe the Low Focus Attention phenomenon from the image encoders of CLIP, which means the attention of image encoders often spreads to non-in-distribution regions. This phenomenon comes from the semantic mismalignment and inter-class feature confusion. To address these issues, we propose a novel fine-tuned OOD detection method with the Double loss constraint based on Optimal Transport (DOT-OOD). DOT-OOD integrates the Double Loss Constraint (DLC) module and Optimal Transport (OT) module. The DLC module comprises the Aligned Image-Text Concept Matching Loss and the Negative Sample Repulsion Loss, which respectively (1) focus on the core semantics of ID images and achieve cross-modal semantic alignment, (2) expand inter-class distances and enhance discriminative. While the OT module is introduced to obtain enhanced image feature representations. Extensive experimental results show that in the 16-shot scenario of the ImageNet-1k benchmark, DOT-OOD reduces the FPR95 by over 10% and improves the AUROC from 94.48% to 96.57% compared with SOTAs.

PaperID: 4249

Authors:Weiyi Zhong, Weiming Liu, Lianyong Qi, Xiaoran Zhao, Xiaolong Xu, Haolong Xiang, Yang Cao, Shichao Pei, Qiang Ni

Affiliations: Qufu Normal University, ByteDance Inc., China University of Petroleum (East China), Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Great Bay University, University of Massachusetts Boston, Lancaster University, United Kingdom

Title: IdeFN: Identifying Unclicked Space False Negatives via Relaxed Partial Optimal Transport for Conversion Rate Prediction

Abstract:
Accurate conversion rate (CVR) prediction is critical for recommender systems to capture user conversion intent and increase platform revenues. Traditional CVR models commonly suffer from sample selection bias (SSB) and data sparsity (DS), which has led to the adoption of clickthrough & conversion rate (CTCVR) multi-task learning frameworks to alleviate these issues. However, existing methods implicitly mislabel some unclicked samples with genuine conversion potential as negatives, thereby exacerbating the false negative sample (FNS) problem. To address this, we propose IdeFN, a multi‑task CVR framework that identifies false negatives in the unclicked space to enable CVR prediction across the entire exposure space and leverages CTR as an auxiliary task for shared‑parameter learning. Specifically, IdeFN consists of two main components, i.e., relaxed partial optimal transport (RPOT) module and sample relabeling mechanism (SRM). The former estimates the soft matching strengths between unclicked samples and positive samples under a relaxed partial optimal transport formulation, establishing corresponding relationships between these samples. The latter adaptively re-labels the unclicked samples according to the derived matching strengths, without relying on static or heuristic thresholds, thus enhancing the reliability of the generated pseudo-labels. Experimental results demonstrate that IdeFN effectively mitigates the FNS problem, achieving substantial improvements in CVR prediction accuracy.

PaperID: 4250

Authors:Caterina Fregosi, Lucia Vicente, Andrea Campagner, Federico Cabitza

Affiliations: University of Milano-Bicocca

Title: Too Sure for Our Own Good: A User Study on AI Confidence and Human Reliance

Abstract:
Achieving appropriate human reliance on Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems remains a central challenge in HumanComputer Interaction. Confidence scores—indicators of an AI system’s certainty in its recommendations—have been proposed as a means to help users calibrate their trust and reliance on AI Decision Support Systems (DSS). However, limited research has explored how well-calibrated versus miscalibrated confidence scores affect human decision-making. We report a study examining the effects of confidence calibration on user reliance, decision accuracy, and perceived utility of an AI DSS. In a within-subjects experiment involving 184 participants solving logic puzzles, we found that well-calibrated confidence scores significantly improved decision accuracy (+20%, 95% CI: [0.18, 0.23]), whereas miscalibrated scores yielded minimal accuracy gains (+2%, 95% CI: [-0.00, 0.04]) and increased vulnerability to automation bias and conservatism bias. Participants were more likely to accept AI recommendations when high confidence was expressed, even when those recommendations were incorrect, resulting in errors. Conversely, miscalibrated and low-confidence recommendations increased conservatism bias, leading users to reject even accurate AI suggestions. Perceived utility of the AI system was higher when confidence levels were high (p < 0.001) and when confidence was well-calibrated (p = 0.002). These findings underscore the importance of designing AI systems with properly calibrated confidence cues to improve human-AI collaboration and mitigate reliance-related biases.

PaperID: 4251

Authors:Yuting Bai, Hanwen Lv, Wanwan Shi, Zhiyi Zou, Jiawei Luo

Affiliations: Hunan University

Title: Multi-Level Domain Adaptation and Contrastive Domain Isolation with Bilinear Fusion for Patient Drug Response Prediction

Abstract:
Accurate prediction of patient drug response is critical for precision cancer medicine but remains constrained by limited clinical data. While in vitro cell line data offer a scalable alternative, effective crossdomain transfer remains challenging. Many existing methods tend to overlook heterogeneous domain shifts across biological contexts, underrepresent the intrinsic differences between cell lines and patient tissues, and insufficiently capture high-order gene-drug interactions. To address these challenges, we propose MACB-DRP, a hierarchical transfer learning framework comprising three complementary stages that progressively coordinate adaptation across tissue, drug, and sample levels while enabling representation separation. The framework begins with tissue-aware domain adaptation, leveraging cancer-type classification and unsupervised alignment to preserve biologically meaningful structure across domains. It then incorporates drug-conditioned adversarial transfer for distribution alignment, coupled with bilinear fusion to model nonlinear and high-order gene-drug interactions. Finally, contrastive anchoring with feature-matched pairs enables fine-grained sample-level alignment, while feature-mismatched negatives preserve irreducible biological disparities. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that MACB-DRP achieves comprehensive predictive performance for patient drug responses, with robust results across multiple cancer types and nine drugs, and further reveals hierarchical structure across drugs and tissues in the visualization. These findings highlight the potential of biologically guided domain adaptation for improving translational pharmacogenomics.

PaperID: 4252

Authors:Haoming Chen, Hongliang Guo

Affiliations: Sichuan University

Title: MS-PPO: Mean Standard Deviation Proximal Policy Optimization for Reliable Parking Space Search in Structured Environments

Abstract:
This paper investigates the reliable parking space search problem in structured environments, with the objective of minimizing the linear combination of mean and standard deviation (meanstd) parking space search time. While canonical parking space search algorithms usually target the minimal expected search time, we argue that risk-averse users would like to trade expectation with its variance, leading to the reliable parking space search problem, which minimizes the mean-std search time. However, the non-additive nature of standard deviation makes the reliable parking space search problem difficult to solve with canonical search algorithms. To address the challenge, we propose a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm, namely MS-PPO, which simultaneously estimates the mean and standard deviation of the current decision-making policy's search time, and performs policy optimization via clipped mean-std advantage function maximization. MS-PPO is compared with several baseline parking space search algorithms as well as canonical reinforcement learning algorithms in a range of representative parking lot networks, and achieves the best overall performance in terms of the mean-std parking space search time. We also validate the effectiveness of MS-PPO in a real parking garage by deploying it to an autonomous vehicle testbed.

PaperID: 4253

Authors:Yuan Dong, Zhe Zhao, Liheng Yu, Di Wu, Pengkun Wang

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China

Title: Learning Dynamics as Feedback: An Adaptive Entropy Flow Dynamics Framework for Long-tailed Human Action Recognition

Abstract:
Deep human action recognition models trained on realworld data are often challenged by long-tailed distributions, where performance on rare classes is severely degraded. Current solutions typically apply static or heuristic interventions that are disconnected from the model's evolving internal state. To overcome this limitation, we reconceptualize long-tailed human action recognition as a closed-loop, self-regulating system, inspired by ecological theory. We further introduce an Adaptive Ecological Entropy Dynamics (AEED) framework, which is built upon three synergistic components. First, AEED perceives the learning state through entropy flow, providing a robust and directional signal of learning progress. Second, this signal drives an adaptation mechanism, which dynamically adjusts class-specific loss weights to allocate more learning resources to underperforming classes. Finally, AEED facilitates intelligent knowledge transfer via Confidence-Guided Symbiosis (CS-Mix). Extensive experiments demonstrate that AEED achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging skeleton-based action recognition benchmarks, including NTU-60-LT and Kinetics-400-LT.

PaperID: 4254

Authors:Meiju Li, Ruixiang Sun, Xin Li, Mingzhong Wang

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology, University of the Sunshine Coast

Title: From Tokens to Latent States: Leveraging Pre-trained Language Models for Improving Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) present significant challenges for reinforcement learning, as agents must learn optimal policies while maintaining belief states over unobserved environment states based on partial observations. We observe a compelling analogy: large language models (LLMs) autoregressively generate token probability distributions based on preceding context, mirroring how belief states are maintained and updated in POMDPs. This insight motivates leveraging the rich prior knowledge embedded in pretrained LLMs for latent states estimation from observation-action histories. However, two critical challenges emerge: on the one hand, modality misalignment prevents LLMs from directly encoding visual observations and discrete actions; on the other hand, semantic misalignment exists between observation-action sequences and token sequences. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel framework ELSLLM that employs a Johnson-Lindenstrauss projection (JLP) module to transform input dimensions while preserving state similarity with theoretical guarantees, and utilizes modern Hopfield networks (MHN) to store all word embeddings from pre-trained LLMs as a knowledge repository. Through retrieval and querying mechanisms, ELSLLM achieves token-level knowledge alignment without requiring fine-tuning of the pre-trained LLMs. Extensive experiments on partially observable environments demonstrate that ELSLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming baseline methods with and without LSTM memory mechanisms. Our work opens new avenues for integrating pre-trained LLMs with reinforcement learning in partially observable settings.

PaperID: 4255

Authors:Li Lin, Xinrui Zhang, Qi Zhang, Shuai Wang, Kaiwen Xia

Affiliations: Southeast University

Title: ORTCL: Towards Continual Learning of Time Series Foundation Models on Streaming Data via Orthogonal Rotation

Abstract:
Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have emerged as a promising approach in time series analysis. Due to the largescale parameters of TSFMs and pretraining cost, how to adapt TDFMs in streaming data is always the key factor constraining their application effectiveness. Because streaming data often experiences data distribution and task drifts, which cannot be learnt by offline training. Existing methods typically address streaming data modeling with continuous learning through model fine-tuning or model editing. However, fine-tuning incurs significant computational costs, while editing methods can lead to shifts in the original feature space during streaming updates. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Orthogonal Rotation Transformation-based Continuous Learning method, called ORTCL, for TSFMs. Our key insight is to apply orthogonal matrix rotations to the input and output feature spaces of the TSFMs during model editing. This preserves the metric structure of the original feature space and enables new data to be directly mapped into the existing feature space of the TSFMs. Specifically, we obtain the orthogonal matrix for the input layer via singular value decomposition and derive the corresponding transformation matrix for the output layer through least squares optimization. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that ORTCL outperforms existing methods in both single-domain and cross-domain streaming time series forecasting tasks, effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting.

PaperID: 4256

Authors:Bach Ngo, Nguyen Hoang Khoi Do

Affiliations: The Frazer School for Competitive Academics, University of Florida

Title: Hexaïssa: Standing on Giants’ Shoulders—Routing the Best Chess Engines with Mixture-of-Experts and Latent Reward Learning

Abstract:
We present Hexaïssa, a novel framework for adaptive chess engine routing that formulates expert selection as a Mixtureof-Experts (MoE) problem. Hexaïssa learns a gating policy that dynamically selects among heterogeneous state-of-the-art engines—such as Stockfish, LCZero, and Obsidian—based on the tactical and strategic complexity of each board state. This adaptivity enables stronger play and more efficient computation than any fixed engine or static configuration. However, training such a gating policy is fundamentally challenging due to sparse optimization signals and long-horizon credit assignment in chess games. To address these challenges, we introduce a score-based inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) method that models expert engine trajectories as samples from a latent distribution over optimal behaviors. By recovering the Stein score function of this distribution via stochastic differential equations (SDEs), we infer dense, per-move reward signals consistent with potential-based IRL. These latent rewards allow efficient training of the gating network without requiring additional environment interaction or human supervision. Empirical results on standard chess benchmarks demonstrate that Hexaïssa significantly outperforms individual engines, conventional MoE models, and IRL baselines.

PaperID: 4257

Authors:Yiming Wang, Kaiyan Zhao, Xu Li, Yan Li, Jiayu Chen, Steven Morad, Leong Hou U

Affiliations: University of Macau, Wuhan University, Shenzhen Polytechnic University, University of Hong Kong

Title: Explore to Learn: Latent Exploration Through Disentangled Synergy Patterns for Reinforcement Learning in Overactuated Control

Abstract:
Control in highdimensional action spaces remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), primarily due to inefficient exploration of the action space. While recent methods attempt to guide exploration, they often fall short of achieving the agility and coordination exhibited in biological motor control. Inspired by how organisms exploit muscle synergies for efficient movement, we propose Explore to Learn (ETL), a two-stage framework that first discovers fundamental synergy patterns and then leverages them for task-specific policy learning. In the first stage, ETL discovers underlying synergy patterns by deploying a targeted exploration policy. These patterns are modeled as latent directions in a low-dimensional space, along which the agent is guided to collect diverse and structured muscle activation trajectories. A variational autoencoder (VAE) is then trained to encode high-dimensional actions into a latent space whose dimensions correspond to the synergy patterns. In the second stage, the policy is trained entirely in this synergy-aware latent space, producing synergy coefficients that the decoder maps back to full-dimensional muscle actions. This structured representation significantly reduces the complexity of learning, while the decoder is further fine-tuned to enhance expressiveness and generalization across downstream tasks. Extensive experiments across musculoskeletal environments and the DMControl suite demonstrate that ETL consistently outperforms prior methods in both exploration efficiency and control performance, achieving superior scalability and generalization in overactuated control tasks.

PaperID: 4258

Authors:Yuanyi Xu, Xiangru Zhu, Sihang Jiang, Zhixu Li, Bei Yang, Xiaoxiao Xu, Yanghua Xiao, Wei Wang

Affiliations: Fudan University, Renmin University of China, Alibaba Group

Title: Adaptive Hallucination Alleviation in Multimodal Large Language Models: From Strategic Data Selection to Severity-Guided Training

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently achieved strong performance across a variety of multimodal tasks. However, they still suffer from various forms of hallucination, which hinder their practical deployment. Prior approaches often struggle to efficiently construct highquality hallucination-related samples and to process them in a fine-grained manner, resulting in limited effectiveness in hallucination alleviation. To address this issue, we propose a data sampling strategy that selects samples better suited for hallucination-oriented training, thereby enhancing training effectiveness. In addition, we introduce a quantitative method for measuring hallucination severity and assign individualized weights to training samples accordingly. Building on this, we present Hallucination-Differentiated Direct Preference Optimization (HD-DPO), a novel preference optimization framework. During fine-tuning, HD-DPO incorporates these weights into both the formulation of customized loss functions and the modulation of localized visual attention, enabling fine-grained optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing fine-tuning strategies across multiple benchmarks and generalizes well to diverse MLLM architectures, effectively reducing hallucination rates and enhancing overall model performance.

PaperID: 4259

Authors:Jie Yang, Junxiong Zhang, Kun Qian, Qingyu Yang, Weikai Li, Zhen Cheng

Affiliations: Chinese Academy of Sciences, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Shandong Jianzhu University

Title: Bridging the Modality Reliability Gap in Drug-Target Interaction Prediction via a Confidence-aware Multimodal Fusion Framework

Abstract:
With the rapid advancement of deep learning, drug target interaction (DTI) prediction has seen substantial performance enhancements. However, existing methodologies face a critical, yet unaddressed challenge, i.e., the Modality Reliability Gap. Such a gap arises from the unpredictable variance in the informativeness and reliability of 1D sequence versus 3D structural data across different drugtarget pairs, critically limiting model robustness and domain generalization capabilities. To overcome it, we introduce DrugCMF, a novel Drug-Target interaction prediction method via Confidence-aware Multimodal Fusion framework designed specifically to bridge the Modality Reliability Gap. Specifically, the DrugCMF employs a four-stage approach: (1) it extracts rich features by utilizing four pre-trained models to obtain token-level embeddings from both 1D sequences and 3D structures. (2) it preserves modality informativeness by independently learning interaction patterns within each modality through a Token-level Interaction module. (3) it explicitly quantifies the reliability gap by employing a novel confidence estimation mechanism to dynamically learn weights for each modality. (4) it bridges the gap by using these confidence scores to guide a learnable cross-modal fusion module, adaptively fusing information from the most trustworthy source. By methodically addressing the Modality Reliability Gap, DrugCMF significantly outperforms SOTA methods.

PaperID: 4260

Authors:Zhuohao Yu, Zhe Liu, Tao Ren, Chenxue Wang, Junjie Wang, Qing Wang

Affiliations: State Key Laboratory of Complex System Modeling and Simulation Technology, China Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, China University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Many Minds, One Path: LLM-Augmented Consensus Decision for Distributed Control in Multi-Agent Collaborative Stable Scenarios

Abstract:
Distributed multiagent systems are increasingly deployed in dynamic and high-stakes environments such as power grids, intelligent traffic systems, and collaborative robotics. In these systems, long-term stability, the ability to maintain coherent and safe system behavior over time, is critical but underexplored in existing research. This paper presents LLMASC, a framework designed to enhance long-term stability in multi-agent collaboration by combining semantic reasoning with decentralized control. LLMASC comprises three key components: a Semantic Perception Encoder that transforms heterogeneous agent observations into structured natural language; an LLM-Guided Consensus Decision module that enables strategic alignment through proposal exchange and voting; and a Policy Execution Controller that maps high-level plans to executable actions via reinforcement learning. We evaluate LLMASC across three representative simulation domains (Multi-Walker, Simulation of Urban Mobility and Power Grid Stabilization), spanning both physical and cyber-physical systems. Experiments show that LLMASC consistently outperforms the best baselines, improving stability rates by up to 44% and long-term success by 31%. Further analysis confirms its decision-making efficiency and robustness under varying agent populations and model choices.

PaperID: 4261

Authors:Hao Li, Tao He, Jiafeng Liang, Zheng Chu, Ming Liu

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, China; PengCheng Laboratory

Title: From Sampling to Cognition: Modeling Internal Cognitive Confidence in Language Models for Robust Uncertainty Calibration

Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, yet they generally lack selfawareness, often displaying overconfidence when confronted with questions beyond their knowledge boundaries. This limitation severely hinders their trustworthiness in high-stakes scenarios. Existing calibration methods typically rely on sampling accuracy, derived from multiple outputs, as a proxy for model confidence. However, this coarse-grained metric fails to capture the model’s internal cognitive states, such as confusion, hallucination, or persistent belief in false knowledge. To address this, we propose CogConf (Cognitive Confidence), a cognitively grounded uncertainty signal that extends sampling accuracy by incorporating the semantic diversity of incorrect answers and the model’s abstention behaviors. By shifting the focus from sampling-based to cognition-oriented uncertainty modeling, CogConf offers a more faithful reflection of the model's internal beliefs. Building on this signal, we introduce CogAlign, a simple yet effective alignment framework that explicitly aligns the model’s verbalized confidence with CogConf, thereby producing uncertainty estimates that better reflect the model’s internal cognition. Experimental results on six knowledge-intensive in-domain and out-of-domain QA datasets demonstrate that CogConf robustly characterizes the model's internal uncertainty. Building on this foundation, CogAlign guides the model's expression to significantly enhance the trustworthiness and utility of its uncertainty calibration without compromising its underlying QA capabilities, while also demonstrating strong cross-task generalization and output stability. Offering a new pathway toward building more trustworthy LLMs.

PaperID: 4262

Authors:Jingping Liu, Xueyan Wu, Hanxuan Chen, Ziyan Liu, Zhangquan Chen, Ronghao Chen, Huacan Wang

Affiliations: Sun Yat-sen University, East China University of Science and Technology, Hunan University, Tsinghua University, Peking University, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Easy for Children, Hard for AI: The Limits of Multimodal LLMs in Early Childhood Learning

Abstract:
Early childhood is a critical stage for cognitive development, involving core skills such as visual perception and reasoning. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress in various generalpurpose tasks, their ability to support early education remains largely underexplored. Existing research on child-related AI largely centers on modeling language, emotion, or behavior, with limited focus on evaluating cognitive tasks relevant to early learning. To address this gap, we propose ChildBench, a multimodal benchmark designed to assess models on tasks inspired by early childhood cognitive development. It covers five key domains through ten tasks, including spatial reasoning, visual reasoning, visual discrimination, counting skills, and visual tracking. The benchmark includes 4,890 carefully constructed images and 5,346 manually annotated samples, ensuring both diversity and age-appropriate content. We evaluate a range of state-of-the-art (SoTA) open-source and closed-source MLLMs—including GPT-4o, Gemini, and Qwen2.5-VL—on ChildBench. Despite strong performance on other benchmarks, the best 7B-parameter model with LoRA tuning achieves only 52.01% accuracy, far below the 96% achieved by 5-year-old children. These results reveal critical limitations in fine-grained perception and reasoning. We further analyze failure cases and discuss directions for future model development.

PaperID: 4263

Authors:Ao Shen, Ruizhang Huang, Jingjing Xue, Ruina Bai

Affiliations: Guizhou University

Title: Constructing Superior Representations Beyond the Original Documents via a Contrastive Gaussian Fusion Network for Clustering

Abstract:
Document clustering plays an important role in text mining and information retrieval. Existing methods primarily focus on documentintrinsic features, overlooking dataset-level features and consequently failing to construct superior representations. We propose a Contrastive Gaussian Fusion Network (CGFN) that can construct superior representations beyond the original documents. Specifically, CGFN fuses the Gaussian distributions of neighbor-derived information and intrinsic textual features in the latent space. By incorporating contrastive learning into the fusion process, our proposed method is able to learn high-quality representations while simultaneously mitigating noise and minimizing information loss. Experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that CGFN outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior clustering by robustly capturing holistic distributions and neighbor patterns.

PaperID: 4264

Authors:Chenghao Sun, Zhen Huang, Yonggang Zhang, Xinmei Tian, Xu Shen, Jieping Ye

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology of China, Independent Researcher, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: Bridging the Language Gap: Uncovering and Aligning Shared Circuits for Multi-Hop Reasoning in Multilingual LLMs

Abstract:
Large language models (LLMs) present a paradox: they can correctly answer a multihop factual query in a high-resource language like English, yet fail on the identical query in another language. This raises a fundamental question about the nature of multilingual knowledge: are facts missing, or merely inaccessible? The underlying mechanisms for this knowledge gap have remained largely unexplored. In this work, we resolve this question by introducing a mechanistic interpretability framework that traces the causal pathways of multi-hop knowledge reasoning. Our analysis reveals a core, non-obvious finding: cross-lingual inconsistencies do not stem from a knowledge deficit. Instead, factual knowledge is robustly stored in a set of shared, language-agnostic semantic neurons. The failure originates from misaligned attention pathways, where a common set of critical attention heads fails to correctly route information along the reasoning chain to the appropriate knowledge neurons in lower-resource languages. This mechanistic diagnosis motivates a targeted alignment strategy: a surgical fine-tuning of only these critical heads. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements in multilingual multi-hop factuality—with positive cross-lingual transfer—while uniquely preserving general model capabilities, offering a scalable and mechanistically-grounded approach to building more reliable multilingual models.

PaperID: 4265

Authors:Zehua Wang, Shipeng Li, Buzhou Tang

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, Harbin Institue of Technology (Shenzhen), China Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing

Title: CP-Search: A Chain Progressive Search Training Framework Incentivizing the Cognitive Behaviors for Searching in LLMs

Abstract:
RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) has been demonstrated to effectively mitigate the knowledge recency issue in Large Language Models (LLMs) while significantly reducing hallucinations. However, existing RAG methods exhibit insufficient capability in modeling reasoning paths for complex multi-hop reasoning tasks. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated success in enhancing model reasoning ability, Token-level RL frameworks exhibit inherent limitations in maintaining coherent reasoning trajectories. This approach remains susceptible to the compounding accumulation of contextual errors during the retrieval process, ultimately resulting in erroneous output generation. To address this challenge, we propose Chain Progressive Search (CP-Search), a novel two-stage training framework designed to enhance the model's retrieval capability in complex scenarios. This framework models the entire retrieval process as a Retrieval-level Markov Decision Process, systematically optimizing the model's retrieval behavior at each step of the chained retrieval. Specifically, CP-Search first constructs a retrieval-cognitive behavioral dataset and employs Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) to endow the model with cognitive behaviors for searching. More importantly, by introducing a dense progressive procedural reward in reinforcement learning training, CP-Search significantly improves the model's reasoning consistency and feedback correction ability in chained retrieval. Experiments conducted on multiple multi-hop datasets demonstrate that CP-Search significantly outperforms existing RAG methods in complex multi-hop reasoning tasks.

PaperID: 4266

Authors:Jiahua Huang, Wentai Wu, Yongheng Liu, Guozhi Liu, Yang Wang, Weiwei Lin

Affiliations: Jinan University, Pengcheng Laboratory, South China University of Technology, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Title: Experiential Fairness: Bridging the Gap Between User Experience and Resource-Centric Fairness in Online LLM Services

Abstract:
Conventional fairness in multitenant Large Language Model (LLM) inference services is typically defined by system-centric metrics such as equitable resource allocation. We argue that this is unilateral and it creates a gap between measured system performance and actual user-perceived quality. We challenge this notion by introducing and formalizing Experiential Fairness, a user-centric paradigm that shifts the objective from equality of opportunity (resource access) to equity of outcome (user experience). With this motivation we propose ExFairS, a lightweight scheduling framework that perceives each user's satisfaction as a composite measure of Service Level Objective (SLO) compliance and resource consumption, and dynamically re-orders the serving queue guided by a credit-based priority mechanism. Extensive experiments on an 8-GPU NVIDIA V100 node show that ExFairS reduces the SLO violation rate by up to 100% and improves system throughput by 14-21.9%, outperforming state-of-the-art schedulers and delivering a demonstrably higher degree of Experiential Fairness.

PaperID: 4267

Authors:Haotian Deng, Sitian Wang, Ruxin Wang, Chen Wei, Quanying Liu

Affiliations: Southern University of Science and Technology

Title: When Proxy Agents Disagree, Do Humans Mirror? Manipulating Human Behavior in Moral Dilemmas Through Agents

Abstract:
The diversity across populations and the variability between individuals have long posed a significant challenge in cognitive science. Although large language models (LLMs) have made notable progress in aligning with human values, faithfully capturing the high degree of diversity and uncertainty in human judgment remains an unresolved challenge.This study investigates whether computational models, or `proxy agents," can not only emulate human decision patterns but also systematically modulate them. We propose a framework wherein we first finetune BERT-based proxy agents to replicate both aggregate and individual-level human judgments on a large-scale moral dilemma dataset. We then hypothesize that stimuli identified as maximally divisive for these individualized agents will similarly elicit high disagreement among human participants. Through a manipulating experiment, we validate this hypothesis, demonstrating that agent-selected stimuli can predictably induce targeted divergence in human moral choices. Our findings provide empirical evidence that AI agents can bias human perceptual variability by strategically filtering information. We further analyze this induced moral divergence using a Bayesian framework and concept decomposition to identify the distinct conceptual dimensions driving individual differences. This work quantifies the potential for AI-driven cognitive modulation and underscores the urgent need for ethical guidelines to prevent the misuse of such capabilities.

PaperID: 4268

Authors:Ruohan Li, Zhihao Wang, Xiaowei Jia, Gengchen Mai, Lei Ma, George C. Hurtt, Quan Shen, Zhili Li, Yiqun Xie

Affiliations: University of Maryland, College Park, University of Pittsburgh, University of Texas at Austin

Title: EcoDiffusion: Uncertainty-Aware Emulation of Ecosystem Processes with Conditional Diffusion for Long Sequences with Single-Step Initialization

Abstract:
Terrestrial ecosystems constitute a major component of the global carbon sink and play a critical role in regulating the global carbon cycle. Although processbased models such as the Ecosystem Demography (ED) model are widely used to simulate these dynamics and widely adopted in research and applications, they remain computationally intensive and are not well suited for large-scale (e.g., global) projections at high spatial and temporal resolution, or under wide-range of future scenarios. AI-based emulators of process-based physical models have emerged as promising ways to accelerate the computation. However, there are several challenges in developing emulators for ecosystem processes, including error accumulation over long sequences, single-step initial conditions, and high-dimensional environmental conditions. Existing works often rely on time-series patterns in look-back windows, which are not well-suited for the problem with single-step initial conditions. Moreover, they often do not consider uncertainty, making it hard to know when the approximations are highly confident and when the results may need to be updated, e.g., by the process-based models. To address these limitations, we introduce EcoDiffusion, a conditional diffusion framework tailored for ecosystem dynamics emulation. We evaluated EcoDiffusion at locations distributed worldwide under different scenarios and showed that it demonstrated significant improvements over existing models.

PaperID: 4269

Authors:Yixuan Xie, Yang He, Xiaoyu Yang, Xu Gai, Pan Hui

Affiliations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, University of Macau, University of Bonn

Title: LLM Safety in Judicial AI: A Stress Test of Social Media Influence on Real-World Judgments

Abstract:
Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into judicial decisionmaking demands rigorous safety examination against non-legal influences. This paper presents a novel stress test where we evaluate LLM-generated labor dispute outcomes by introducing social media sentiment as an external pressure, critically comparing them against 10,000 real-world court judgments from China Judgments Online (CJOL). Our findings reveal significant LLM safety vulnerabilities: models exhibit inherent deviations from real rulings, and public opinion substantially amplifies these discrepancies, leading to unstable and often inflated compensation predictions. Furthermore, these safety risks are compounded across low-skilled occupational categories and emotionally charged topics. This study uncovers critical threats to judicial integrity and public trust, underscoring the urgent need for robust safeguards against non-legal influences in AI legal systems.

PaperID: 4270

Authors:Yiran Pang, Zhen Ni, Xiangnan Zhong

Affiliations: Florida Atlantic University

Title: Decoupling Shared and Personalized Knowledge: A Dual-Branch Federated Learning Framework for Multi-Domain with Non-IID Data

Abstract:
Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without centralizing data. In multidomain scenarios with non-identically and independently distributed (non-IID) data, prediction performance is often hindered by catastrophic forgetting of specialized local knowledge and negative transfer from conflicting client updates. To address these challenges, we propose a personalized FL framework with dual-branch (pFedDB) structure and a two-phase training protocol. The dual-branch architecture separates the model into a shared branch for cross-client aggregation and a private branch that remains on each local client. The private branch is never overwritten by server updates, which prevents the catastrophic forgetting of domain-specific knowledge. This structure also significantly reduces communication overhead per round as only the shared branch is transmitted. To mitigate negative transfer, our two-phase protocol first establishes a personalized knowledge anchor by training a single-branch expert model on each client’s local data. In the second phase, the locally trained model is cloned to initialize private and shared branches. Only the shared branch is aggregated in federated training. This process enables the shared branch to learn a general representation that complements the established local expertise. This design consistently improves the performance of every client over its single-domain baseline, overcoming the challenge of negative transfer among clients. Experiments on our new Chest-X-Ray-4 suite and three public benchmarks show that the proposed pFedDB method obtains 30% saving in communication overhead per round and competitive or better accuracy performance than recent FL methods.

PaperID: 4271

Authors:Yitian Kou, Yihe Gu, Chen Zhou, Dandan Zhu, Shu-Guang Kuai

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, East China Normal University., Shanghai Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Psychological Crisis Intervention, University of Glasgow.

Title: RLSLM: A Hybrid Framework Combining Reinforcement Learning and a Rule-based Social Locomotion Model for Socially-aware Navigation

Abstract:
Navigating humanpopulated environments without causing discomfort is a critical capability for socially-aware agents. While rule-based approaches offer interpretability through predefined psychological principles, they often lack generalizability and flexibility. Conversely, data-driven methods can learn complex behaviors from large-scale datasets, but are typically inefficient, opaque, and difficult to align with human intuitions. To bridge this gap, we propose RLSLM, a hybrid Reinforcement Learning framework that integrates a rule-based Social Locomotion Model, grounded in empirical behavioral experiments, into the reward function of a reinforcement learning framework. The social locomotion model generates an orientation-sensitive social comfort field that quantifies human comfort across space, enabling socially aligned navigation policies with minimal training. RLSLM then jointly optimizes mechanical energy and social comfort, allowing agents to avoid intrusions into personal or group space. A human-agent interaction experiment using an immersive VR-based setup demonstrates that RLSLM outperforms state-of-the-art rule-based models in user experience. Ablation and sensitivity analyses further show the model’s significantly improved interpretability over conventional data-driven methods. This work presents a scalable, human-centered methodology that effectively integrates cognitive science and machine learning for real-world social navigation.

PaperID: 4272

Authors:Xingyi Wang, Wen Huang, Mengqiang Hu, Junhui Chen, Weixin Zhao, Wenzheng Xu, Jian Peng

Affiliations: Sichuan University, Tsinghua University

Title: Rejoining Precious Artifacts: Efficiently Bone Stick Rejoining Based Massive Fragment Images by Contour, Script, and Texture

Abstract:
Rejoining fragment images of precious artifacts is a meaningful task because complete artifacts could provide valuable clues for the research of human civilization. However, existing rejoining methods face several challenges including timeconsuming manual annotation, insufficient rejoining accuracy, and prohibitive computation cost. For rejoining fragment images of bone sticks (a precious artifact), we propose a lightweight vision graph neural network called RejoinViG to address these challenges. First, our method avoids time-consuming manual annotation of ballast contour data by experts. Specifically, our method directly takes a pair of fragment images as input and then determines whether the image pair is rejoinable. Second, our method improves rejoining accuracy by contour, script, and texture through dynamically constructing local and global graphs. Third, our method improves rejoining accuracy while reducing computation cost by introducing a new attention mechanism named node self-attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly. For example, the Top-1 accuracy of our method is 3.9 times that of SFF-Siam. Surprisingly, our method successfully rejoins a pair of previously unknown but rejoinable fragment images of bone sticks in a real-world scenario.

PaperID: 4273

Authors:Guiyang Hou, Yihui Fu, Chen Wu, Xiang Huang, Zhe Zheng, Wenqi Zhang, Yongliang Shen, Weiming Lu

Affiliations: Zhejiang University, Northwest University, Tongyi Lab

Title: Reality vs Counterfactual: Multi-World Contrastive Reinforcement Learning for Enhancing MLLM’s Theory of Mind in Egocentric Videos

Abstract:
Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability to infer others' mental states, which is an essential capability for embodied AI agents to effectively collaborate and interact with humans. While improving Large Language Models' ability to reason about characters' mental states in textbased stories/dialogues has been extensively studied, enhancing Multimodal Large Language Models' ToM capabilities, particularly in egocentric video from an embodied perspective, remains unexplored. In this paper, we propose a contrastive Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigm that explicitly encourages models to leverage temporal and causal evolutionary patterns in user action sequences to infer user's mental states (goals, beliefs, and potential next actions). Evaluation results on in-domain and out-of-domain demonstrate that our method achieves performance improvements of (+30.00%, +2.00%) and (+5.83%, +5.00%) compared to the backbone model and vanilla Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) model, respectively. Additionally, we compare the performance of two post-training paradigms (Supervise Fine-Tuning and RL) and systematically analyze the reasoning trajectories across the base model, vanilla GRPO model, and our proposed method.

PaperID: 4274

Authors:Yue Cao, Sizhao Li, Liguo Zhang

Affiliations: College of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Engineering University

Title: Robust Noise Modeling for Spike Camera via Time-Interval Quantification and Spike-DSLR Multimodal Dataset in Low-Light Imaging

Abstract:
The inherent differences between spike cameras and traditional framebased cameras lead to more complex and diverse noise characteristics, particularly under extremely low-light conditions. Existing noise modeling approaches for spike camera predominantly rely on inter-spike intervals (ISI) for noise quantification, which often results in inaccurate noise characterization. Moreover, current datasets for spike camera image reconstruction tasks are either synthetic or lack corresponding high-quality reference images, severely limiting rigorous evaluation of noise modeling methods. To address this limitation, we propose a multimodal noise modeling framework for spike camera that integrates insights from traditional frame-based imaging into spike imaging. Specifically, we introduce a time-interval-based quantification method inspired by the exposure-time concept used in traditional frame-based cameras, enabling accurate noise characterization for spike camera. Furthermore, we present the Spike-DSLR Multimodal Dataset (SDMD), the first real-world dataset capturing aligned multimodal data pairs from spike cameras and Digital Single-Lens Reflex (DSLR) cameras, explicitly designed for evaluating spike camera noise models. Experimental results on SDMD demonstrate that our noise modeling approach significantly enhances spike camera image reconstruction quality under low-light conditions, achieving more than 1.6 dB improvement in PSNR compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. This validates both the necessity and effectiveness of adopting a multimodal perspective in spike camera noise modeling.

PaperID: 4275

Authors:Liwen Li, Xinrui Guo, Wentao Guo, Shunqi Yang, Fumin Guo

Affiliations: Huazhong University of Science and Technology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Title: DFMN: A Dual-feet Matching Network with Hybrid Transformer-based Feature Extractor for Unsupervised Deformable Medical Image Registration

Abstract:
Deformable medical image registration is essential in medical image analyses. Recent transformerbased registration methods have achieved high registration accuracy. However, these methods often rely on patch embedding at the beginning of encoding, resulting in limited ability to capture detailed anatomical structural information in the images and explore local semantic relationships within individual patches. Here, we proposed a novel Dual-feet Encoder (DFEnc) to asynchronously model semantic information from moving and fixed images at various scales through two separate branches in three steps. For each step, features from adjacent resolution levels were processed by a Single Step Hybrid Extractor (SSHExt), which performed patch convolution to preserve local information, followed by several transformer blocks to capture global context. Dense connections were employed to enhance semantic awareness across adjacent feature resolution levels. Additionally, we introduced a Feature Fusion-based Decoder (FFDec) to progressively fuse features related to the fixed and moving images and to generate intermediate deformation fields at each stage, enabling accurate image alignment through stepwise warping and alignment refinement. Extensive ablation studies demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed DFEnc, SSHExt, and FFDec. Compared to a state-of-the-art AutoFuse-Trans method, our approach yielded improvements in Dice of 1.14%, 1.77%, and 4.47% on the ACDC, OASIS, and Abdomen CT datasets, respectively, while maintaining relatively low computational cost. These results suggest the utility of the proposed approach for broad research and clinical applications.

PaperID: 4276

Authors:Mingxuan Li, Zihao Huang, Xiaohui Chu, Fazhan Zhang, Bohan Fu, Runze Hu

Affiliations: Beijing Institute of Technology

Title: Points Meet Pixels: Bridging 2D Vision-Language Model and 3D Perception Gaps for Point Cloud Quality Assessment

Abstract:
VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in quality assessment tasks. However, a fundamental paradox arises when their application to Point Cloud Quality Assessment (PCQA). Existing VLMs, designed for image-text pairs, are inherently incompatible with 3D point cloud data due to the modality gap. While some PCQA research attempts to adapt point clouds to VLMs by 2D projection, this approach inevitably sacrifices crucial spatial structure information essential for accurate quality assessment. Conversely, directly integrating a dedicated 3D branch into a VLM-based PCQA framework introduces feature space misalignment and an influx of quality-insensitive information. To bridge these fundamental conflicts hindering VLMs' adaptation to PCQA, we propose the PMP-PCQA framework, which leverages the inherent mapping relationship between points and pixels to seamlessly apply VLMs to PCQA. Our approach introduces three key innovations: a Spatial Awareness Enhancer(SAE) module that enriches the image features with spatial coordinate clues to reinforce geometric awareness in 2D visual representations; a Fine-to-coarse Consistency Alignment(FCA) module that bridges the gap between 2D and 3D modalities by leveraging point-pixel correspondences to construct bridging features; and a Text-Guided Adaptive Miner(TAM) module that dynamically suppresses quality-insensitive features to mine discriminative visual clues for PCQA. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that PMP-PCQA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple benchmarks.

PaperID: 4277

Authors:Yuxin Lin, Haoran Li, Haoyu Cao, Yongting Hu, Qihao Xu, Chengliang Liu, Xiaoling Luo, Zhihao Wu, Yong Xu, Wei Wang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Visual Object Detection and Recognition, School of Information Technology, University of Wollongong, Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence in Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University, School of Artificial Intelligence

Title: Frequency-Aligned Cross-Modal Learning with Top-K Wavelet Fusion and Dynamic Expert Routing for Enhanced Retinal Disease Diagnosis

Abstract:
Multimodal fusion of color fundus photography (CFP) and optical coherence tomography (OCT) Bscan images has demonstrated superior diagnostic potential for retinal diseases compared to single-modality approaches. However, existing fusion paradigms - whether through naive concatenation or attention mechanisms - treat cross-modal interactions indiscriminately, lacking adaptive modulation of modality-specific contributions under varying clinical scenarios. We propose an adaptive fusion framework that dynamically routes and refines multimodal signals for enhancing disease recognition. The framework comprises two key components: 1) Dynamic Cross-Modal Expert Routing (CMER), which selectively activates convolutional neural network (CNN) experts from one modality based on contextual guidance from the other, ensuring only the most relevant feature extractors contribute to fusion; and 2) Top-K Expert-Guided Wavelet Fusion (TEWF), which performs discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to decompose selected features into low- and high-frequency subbands. Cross-modal attention is then applied specifically to high-frequency components, where lesion-specific microstructures reside, enabling frequency-aware fusion. Finally, inverse DWT (IDWT) reconstructs the fused representation, weighted by CMER-derived importance scores to amplify informative modality cues while suppressing redundancy. Experimental validation on two multimodal retinal datasets demonstrates that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing fusion strategies by significant margins in disease classification accuracy and robustness.

PaperID: 4278

Authors:GuangHao Meng, Jinpeng Wang, Jieming Zhu, Letian Zhang, Yong Jiang, Dan Zhao, Qing Li

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology, Huawei Noah's Ark Lab, Tsinghua University, Pengcheng Laboratory

Title: Suit the Remedy to the Retriever: Interpretable Query Optimization with Retriever Preference Alignment for Vision-Language Retrieval

Abstract:
Visionlanguage retrieval (VLR), which uses text or image queries to retrieve corresponding cross-modal content, plays a crucial role in multimedia and computer vision tasks. However, challenging concepts in queries often confuse retrievers, limiting their ability to align concepts with visual content. Existing query optimization methods neglect retrievers’ preferences (i.e., text descriptions that better match their corresponding visual content), resulting in unadapted to the retriever and leading to suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose the Retriever-Adaptive Query Optimization (RAQO), an interpretable framework that rewrites queries based on retriever-specific preferences. Specifically, we first leverages multimodal large language Models (MLLMs) and retrieval's feedback to construct the MLLMs-Driven Preference-Aware Dataset Engine (MPADE), which automatically refine queries offline, capturing the retriever’s implicit preferences. Then, we introduce a ``detect-then-rewrite" chain-of-thought rewriting (ReCoT) strategy equipped with a progressive preference alignment pipeline, including three stages: ambiguity detection fine-tuning, query rewriting fine-tuning, and preference rank optimization. This design enables the rewriter to focus on confusing concepts and produce retriever-adapted, high-quality queries. Extensive VLR benchmark experiments have demonstrated the superiority of RAQO in cross-modal retrieval, as well as its interpretability, generalizability and transferability.

PaperID: 4279

Authors:Tianxu Tong, Xinrun Liu, Hongmin Liu, Bin Fan

Affiliations: University of Science and Technology Beijing

Title: Towards Accurate 3D Object Detection in Adverse Weather by Leveraging 4D Radar for LiDAR Geometry Enhancement

Abstract:
3D object detection is a critical component of autonomous driving, yet its performance degrades severely in adverse weather due to the degradation of LiDAR point clouds. While existing LiDAR4D radar fusion methods enhance robustness by incorporating weather-robust 4D radar data, they often depend on well geometric structures from LiDAR and so struggle to effectively exploit radar data in case of degraded LiDAR data. To tackle this challenge, we propose REL, a novel 4D radar-guided LiDAR geometric enhancement framework. It utilizes 4D radar features to dynamically generate virtual LiDAR points, effectively increasing the density of degraded LiDAR data. Moreover, a Position-Guided Cross Attention (PGCA) module is proposed to enhance the feature representation of virtual points, while an Adaptive Feature Fusion (AFF) module is designed to integrate virtual and real LiDAR features. Extensive experiments on the K-Radar and Vod-Fog datasets demonstrate that REL achieves state-of-the-art 3D object detection performance under diverse adverse weather conditions. Notably, REL improves the overall AP3D by 9.3% on K-Radar and boosts the cyclist class by up to 52.9% 3D mAP under the most severe foggy condition on Vod-Fog.

PaperID: 4280

Authors:Chongjun Tu, Peng Ye, Dongzhan Zhou, Tao Chen, Wanli Ouyang

Affiliations: College of Future Information Technology, Fudan University, Shanghai Artificial Intelligent Laboratory

Title: Mitigating Low-Quality Reasoning in MLLMs: Self-Driven Refined Multimodal CoT with Selective Thinking and Step-wise Visual Enhancement

Abstract:
Current Multimodal Chainof-Thought (MCoT) methods suffer from low-quality multimodal reasoning, characterized by overthinking on simple queries and inefficient utilization of visual information, resulting in vast inefficient and ineffective computations. In this paper, we discover that Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) possess inherent capabilities to distinguish between simple and difficult queries and enhance task-related visual information, which remain underutilized by existing approaches. Based on this insight, we propose Self-Driven Refined Multimodal CoT (SDR-MCoT), a training-free framework that mitigates these issues through two self-driven modules. First, our selective thinking module employs entropy-based confidence estimation to determine whether queries require detailed reasoning, preventing overthinking on simple questions. Second, our step-wise visual enhancement module strengthens attention to relevant visual regions at each reasoning step without inserting additional tokens, achieving fine-grained visual grounding and enhancement with minimal overhead. Moreover, SDR-MCoT can be seamlessly integrated into various MLLMs, offering a practical solution for improving multimodal reasoning. Comprehensive experiments across eight benchmarks from diverse domains (multimodal reasoning, visual understanding, hallucination, and mathematical reasoning) demonstrate that SDR-MCoT consistently outperforms existing MCoT methods on four different base models with reduced overhead. For instance, on Qwen2-VL-7B, our method improves average accuracy by over 6% while reducing token consumption by approximately 60% compared to zero-shot CoT.

PaperID: 4281

Authors:Haiming Yao, Qiyu Chen, Wei Luo, Zheng Zhang, Jianxing Liao, Wei You

Affiliations: Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd, Institute of Automation, Advanced Computing and Storage Lab

Title: TDSS: Task Dynamic-Synergistic Skill Adaptation for Boosting Efficient and Scalable Multi-Task Learning in Dense Visual Prediction

Abstract:
The transfer of knowledge from largescale pre-trained models to diverse downstream tasks has achieved remarkable success. Beyond the traditional full fine-tuning paradigm, Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has emerged as a more efficient model adaptation approach. However, applying existing PEFT methods to adapt dense vision models, particularly in multi-task settings, remains inadequately explored due to their low efficiency, limited task scalability, and neglect of cross-task fine-tuning interactions. To address these challenges, we propose the Task Dynamic-Synergistic Skill Adaptation, termed TDSS, an efficient and scalable multi-task model adaptation framework for dense visual predictions. TDSS comprises two key components: Task-Dynamic Skill Adapters (TDSA) and Task-Synergistic Adaptation Interaction (TSAI). Specifically, TDSA are inserted in parallel into pre-trained vision models to extract task-specific adapted features through the construction of skill representation experts and task dynamic gating. TSAI is developed to enhance cross-task adaptation interaction by bridging global generic and task-specific adapted features. Extensive experiments on multi-task dense visual predictions demonstrate that TDSS surpasses existing state-of-the-art parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, while exhibiting remarkable efficiency and scalability in parameters and computational complexity.

PaperID: 4282

Authors:Yunpeng Zhao, Cheng Chen, Qing You Pang, Yibing Fu, Quanzheng Li, Carol Tang, Beng Ti Ang, Yueming Jin

Affiliations: Department of Biomedical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, National Neuroscience Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School

Title: Tackling Dual-stage Missing Modalities in Brain Tumor Segmentation via Robust Modality Reconstruction and Prompt-guided Modality Adaptation

Abstract:
Addressing missing modalities is a critical challenge in multimodal brain tumor segmentation. Most existing approaches merely handle modalityincomplete inputs during inference, assuming a full set of modalities for all training samples. However, this unrealistic assumption limits the usage of abundant modality-incomplete data commonly observed in clinical practice. In this paper, we explore a more practical task of tackling missing modalities during both training and inference. We propose a universal model featuring robust modality reconstruction and prompt-guided modality adaptation. Our mask-reconstruction pre-training enables robust modality-invariant representation learning, during which we design a novel distribution approximation method that supervises the reconstruction of absent modalities without requiring full-modal training data. Afterwards, when adapting our model to the segmentation task, we introduce the complete-then-distill (CTD) paradigm, which first estimates missing modalities in training samples from the available ones, and then distills the knowledge from the reconstructed full-modal representations to enhance learning from modality-incomplete data. Moreover, we propose prompt-guided modality adaptation to personalize a subset of model parameters during CTD, enabling the model to adapt to each distinct modality input scenario by using prompts with rich visual-textual information. Extensive experiments on two brain tumor segmentation benchmarks show our method consistently surpasses previous state-of-the-art approaches under dual-stage missing modality settings across various missing ratios.

PaperID: 4283

Authors:Victor Lagerkvist, Johanna Groven, Leif Eriksson

Affiliations: Linköping University

Title: Towards Single Exponential Time for Temporal and Spatial Reasoning: A Study via Redundancy and Dynamic Programming

Abstract:
The region connection calculus (RCC) and Allen's interval algebra (IA) are two wellknown NP-hard spatial-temporal qualitative reasoning problems. They are solvable in 2^(O(n log n)) time, where n is the number of variables, and IA is additionally known to be solvable in o(n)^n time. However, no improvement over exhaustive search is known for RCC, and if they are also solvable in single exponential time 2^O(n) is unknown. We investigate multiple avenues towards reaching such bounds. First, we show that branching is insufficient since there are too many non-redundant constraints. Concretely, we classify the maximum number of non-redundant constraints in RCC and IA. Algorithmically, we make two significant contributions based on dynamic programming (DP). The first algorithm runs in 4^n time and is applicable to a non-trivial, NP-hard fragment of IA, which includes the well-known interval graph sandwich problem of (Golumbic and Shamir 1993). For the richer RCC problem with 8 basic relations we use a more sophisticated approach which asymptotically matches the o(n)^n bound for IA.

PaperID: 4284

Authors:Le Liu, Yuhao Wang, Bohan Shen, Wei Zeng, Shizhou Zhang, Di Xu, Peng Wang

Affiliations: Northwestern Polytechnical University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Title: Do Large Language Models Reason About Uncertainty Like Humans? A Benchmark on Hurricane Forecast Visualization Comprehension

Abstract:
Uncertainty visualizations, such as hurricane cones and ensemble tracks, are essential for risk communication but are often misinterpreted, leading to harmful decisions. As AI assistants like large language models (LLMs) increasingly support understanding of graphics and decisionmaking, they offer a promising pathway to enhance the interpretation of complex visualizations and a new opportunity to examine and improve the interpretation of uncertainty. We introduce UnReason, the first benchmark that systematically compares how humans and LLMs reason about hurricane forecast uncertainty visualizations. UnReason spans two escalating phases, seven representative visualization formats, six real hurricane cases, and three agent types (humans, LLMs with context, and LLMs without context), including 880 visualizations and 117,600 structured question–answer pairs under matched evaluation conditions. Phase 1 evaluates reasoning across implicit and explicit uncertainty encodings; Phase 2 examines reasoning under single- versus multi-dimensional uncertainty representations. We thoroughly assess damage estimation, reasoning strategies, and comprehension patterns, revealing that LLMs have a stronger semantic and conceptual understanding of uncertainty, and are less misled by visual variability, but still replicate key human biases during decision-making. Our findings offer insights into aligning LLM behavior with human cognition in uncertainty-rich visual reasoning tasks.

PaperID: 4285

Authors:Miaohui Wang, Runnan Huang, Taojun Liu, Shuyuan Lin, Ye Liu, Yun Song

Affiliations: Guangdong Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Shenzhen University, College of Cyber Security, Jinan University, School of Automation, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, School of Computer Science and Technology, Changsha University of Science and Technology

Title: Perceive More with Less: LiDAR Point Cloud Compression at Just Recognizable Distortion for 3D Scene Understanding

Abstract:
Existing LiDAR point cloud (LPC) data coding methods primarily focus on balancing compression efficiency and reconstruction quality according to the human vision system (HVS). However, these methods rarely consider the requirements of downstream scene understanding tasks from the perspective of the machine vision system (MVS). To address this challenge, we explore the maximum degree of LPC compression that has negligible impact on perception accuracy, called LPCbased just recognizable compression distortion (lpcJRCD). Specifically, we introduce a novel point-wise quantization approach for constructing a MVS-based LiDAR dataset and present a new lpcJRCD-guided intelligent compression framework tailored for MVS applications. To enhance MVS-based LPC compression efficiency, we develop a dual-feature interaction (DFI) module that fuses point and voxel features. Additionally, we propose a mask-based loss function to ensure accurate point-wise quality level prediction. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model in reducing the average bit rate by up to 94.98% while preserving perception accuracy in autonomous vehicles.

PaperID: 4286

Authors:Shibo Wang, Yan Zhao, Shigang Wang, Jian Wei, Shuo Li

Affiliations: Jilin University

Title: A Brain-Inspired Saliency Prediction Framework for Human-AI Cognitive Consistency in AIGC Content via Multi-Region Liquid Neurons

Abstract:
In recent years, humanAI cognitive consistency has emerged as a crucial perspective for evaluating the perceptual quality and interpretability of AIGC (Artificial Intelligence Generated Content). This paper proposes a biologically inspired saliency prediction framework that models six core regions of the human visual system—namely V1, V2, V4, MT, LIP, and FEF—using liquid neurons to capture the dynamic saliency features aligned with human gaze behavior. To enable effective alignment between AIGC models and human cognitive mechanisms, we introduce a cross-domain dual-teacher distillation strategy and construct a large-scale multimodal dataset comprising natural images, eye-tracking data, AIGC-generated images, and their corresponding cross-attention maps. Furthermore, we propose HAMCI (Human-AI Mutual Cognitive Index), a novel metric designed to quantitatively assess the spatial and semantic alignment between predicted saliency maps and model attention distributions. The proposed method demonstrates promising performance across various saliency prediction and cognitive alignment tasks, with results comparable to or surpassing recent state-of-the-art methods in several benchmarks. The code and dataset will be released upon acceptance to facilitate future research on cognitively aligned AIGC evaluation.

PaperID: 4287

Authors:Shilin Zhang, Weiliang Huo, Qingchen Zhang, Xiulong Liu

Affiliations: Tianjin University, Hainan University

Title: GATCL: An Adaptive Contrastive Learning Framework Based on MHGAT for Spatial Domain Identification in Spatial Transcriptomics

Abstract:
Recent advances in spatial transcriptomics have enabled the simultaneous measurement of gene expression profiles and spatial location information, offering a more comprehensive and indepth view for studying the tissue microenvironment. Spatial domain identification is a crucial step in analyzing spatial transcriptomics. However, current methods have poor accuracy and visualization because they lack self-adaptability to different tissue data, and moreover, they cannot effectively extract spatial location information. To address these issues, we propose an adaptive graph contrastive learning framework based on multi-head graph attention networks (GATCL) for spatial domain identification. Specifically, we design a data augmentation module to mask and shuffle the pre-processed gene expression data to generate more differentiated negative samples. In addition, we construct the multi-head graph attention networks (MHGAT) to encode gene expression profiles and spatial location information. More importantly, we design an adaptive graph contrastive learning model that works both with positive and negative samples from spatial transcriptomics. We introduce the attention pooling mechanism to dynamically and adaptively aggregate the spots' neighborhood information, and to improve the model's generalization ability for different spatial transcriptomics data. Furthermore, we design a discriminator that adds spectral normalization to bilinear functions. Experimental results on DLPFC, breast cancer, and mouse somatosensory cortex datasets demonstrate that the average Adjusted Rand Index (ARI) scores are 0.5746, 0.6182, and 0.6496, respectively, significantly outperforming baseline methods. More importantly, GATCL provides a more detailed visualization of different spatial transcriptomics data.

PaperID: 4288

Authors:Guoqing Chen, Fu Zhang, Bingqian Liu, Chenglong Lu, Jingwei Cheng

Affiliations: Northeastern University

Title: VCGD: Visual Clue Guided Decoding with Caption Model for Mitigating Hallucination in Multimodal Large Language Models

Abstract:
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate strong capabilities in multimodal understanding, reasoning, and interaction but still face the fundamental limitation of hallucinations, where they generate erroneous or fabricated information. Most existing research induces hallucinations by manually perturbing visual or instruction inputs, then uses output differences or modelgenerated descriptions as references to mitigate hallucinations and improve responsevisual consistency. However, these methods are constrained by model capabilities and prone to hallucination propagation. We propose Visual Clue Guided Decoding (VCGD), a novel decoding strategy that introduces an auxiliary Caption Model to generate precise visual clues during decoding for guiding model generation. It further incorporates image confidence constraints to critically suppress hallucination propagation during generation, thereby significantly improving content reliability and visual consistency. Specifically, VCGD leverages high-quality visual descriptions to guide MLLMs in correcting perceptual biases while generating answers. Furthermore, we introduce a Reinforcement Learning-based training paradigm for the Caption Model, in which a Reward Agent provides feedback on the quality of visual clues, further enhancing the accuracy of visual information. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark datasets and state-of-the-art MLLMs demonstrate that VCGD significantly reduces hallucination rates and improves cross-modal consistency. Our method exhibits strong generalizability and scalability, offering an effective decoding enhancement strategy that can be seamlessly integrated into existing multimodal frameworks.

PaperID: 4289

Authors:Shezheng Song, Kangcheng Ding, Shan Zhao, Shasha Li, Xiaopeng Li, Chengyu Wang, Qian Wan, Bin Ji, Jie Yu

Affiliations: National University of Defense Technology, Hefei University of Technology, Hunan University, Central China Normal University

Title: Leveraging Image as Compressed Visual Prompt and Hierarchical Visual Knowledge for Effective Image Utilization in MLLMs

Abstract:
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) integrate text and images for complex reasoning tasks, but efficiently utilizing image remains a challenge due to redundancy and noise. Traditional methods take the entire image features as visual prompt into the MLLMs, leading to excessive visual tokens that disrupt textual information expression. Thus, recent studies treat image features as visual knowledge, storing them in the feedforward network for retrieval when needed. These methods, completely removing images from the input, may hinder the activation of image-related knowledge. Besides, current visual knowledge focuses on fine-grained details but overlooks the hierarchical process of visual perception. As described in feature integration theory, global structure is first processed before details are integrated. Ignoring this process may lead to a fragmented visual understanding, making it difficult to capture high-level semantic relationships. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel image utilization mechanism in MLLMs. We leverage a compression-based attention mechanism to generate the compressed visual prompt, which not only mitigates the interference of excessively long visual prompts but also preserves crucial visual information necessary for activating knowledge in the MLLM. Furthermore, we extract hierarchical visual features as visual knowledge using wavelet transforms, allowing the model to capture both global structures and fine-grained details. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

PaperID: 4290

Authors:Ran Jing, Geng Tu, Yice Zhang, Ruifeng Xu

Affiliations: Harbin Institute of Technology

Title: Causal-ERC: A Multimodal Framework with Causal Prompting for Emotion Recognition in Conversations with Large Language Models

Abstract:
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has revitalised research in Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC). However, existing LLMbased ERC approaches operate solely on textual input, whereas MLLM-based emotion recognition methods in non-conversational scenarios typically perform only basic multimodal fusion and fail to consider speaker-sensitive contextual dependencies, which limits their performance on ERC tasks. To integrate multimodal cues effectively and address their limitations in handling contextual dependencies, we propose a novel LLM-based framework, Causal-ERC, which captures context representations within each modality and incorporates them into the LLM. Moreover, experimental results show that LLMs perform poorly on long conversations. To improve LLMs' ability to model long conversations, we adjust corresponding causal prompts according to the causal type of each utterance. Experiments on two benchmark MERC datasets demonstrate that our Causal-ERC framework consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches and improves LLM's performance in long-context scenarios.

PaperID: 4291

Authors:Xu Liu, Yongheng Zhang, Qiguang Chen, Yao Li, Sheng Wang, Libo Qin

Affiliations: Institute of Computing and Intelligence, Harbin Institute of Technology, Guizhou University, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University, Shanghai Aviation Electric Co., Aviation Industry Corporation of China

Title: Let’s Think with Images Efficiently! An Interleaved-Modal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Framework with Dynamic and Precise Visual Thoughts

Abstract:
Recently, Interleavedmodal Chain-of-Thought (ICoT) reasoning has achieved remarkable success by leveraging both multimodal inputs and outputs, attracting increasing attention. While achieving promising performance, current ICoT methods still suffer from two major limitations: (1) Static Visual Thought Positioning, which statically inserts visual information at fixed steps, resulting in inefficient and inflexible reasoning; and (2) Broken Visual Thought Representation, which involves discontinuous and semantically incoherent visual tokens. To address these limitations, we introduce Interleaved-modal Chain-of-Thought reasoning with Dynamic and Precise Visual Thoughts (DaP-ICoT), which incorporates two key components: (1) Dynamic Visual Thought Integration adaptively introduces visual inputs based on reasoning needs, reducing redundancy and improving efficiency. (2) Precise Visual Thought Guidance ensures visual semantically coherent and contextually aligned representations. Experiments across multiple benchmarks and models demonstrate that DaP-ICoT achieves state-of-the-art performance. In addition, DaP-ICoT significantly reduces the number of inserted images, leading to a 72.6% decrease in token consumption, enabling more efficient ICoT reasoning.

PaperID: 4292

Authors:Claudio Pinhanez, Paulo Cavalin, Cassia Sanctos, Marcelo Carpinette Grave

Affiliations: IBM Research Brazil

Title: Small Models Exhibit Limited Answer Consistency in Repetition Trials of the Multiple-Choice MMLU-Redux and MedQA Benchmarks

Abstract:
This work explores the consistency of LLMs in answering multiple times the same question. In particular, we study how known, opensource LLMs respond to 10 repetitions of questions from the multiple-choice benchmarks MMLU-Redux and MedQA, considering different inference temperatures, small (2B-10B parameters) vs. medium models (50B-80B), finetuned vs. base models, and other parameters. The paper also examines the effects of requiring answer consistency in repetitive inferences on accuracy and the trade-offs involved in deciding which model best provides both of them, for what we propose some new representations. Results show that the number of questions which can be answered consistently vary wildly among models but typically is in the 50%-85% range for small models and that accuracy among consistent answers correlates to overall accuracy at low inference temperatures. Results for medium-sized models seem to indicate much higher levels of answer consistency.

PaperID: 4293

Authors:Wenjie Wang, Yufeng Jiang, Ge Sun, Chenghang Dong, Zheng Jun, Li Mengjie, Lixin Chen, Huan Wang, Haoyu Wang, Bin Chen

Affiliations: Ant Group

Title: OmniBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark Integrating Real-World, Time-sensitive, and Multi-Hop Questions with a Multi-Dimensional Hybrid Evaluation Framework

Abstract:
Recently, with the increasing capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), AI applications have gradually emerged to solve various problems in people's daily lives, so accurately measuring their performance and reliability is paramount. However, existing benchmarks predominantly rely on closedended, multiple-choice or short-answer question formats. While useful for assessment, these formats exhibit a significant gap compared to the diverse and open-ended nature of questions posed by real-world users. To bridge this gap, we produce OmniBench, a comprehensive open-domain benchmark. OmniBench is uniquely composed of authentic, user-generated questions harvested from real-world interactions on various websites and applications, covering 16 rigorously defined knowledge domains and 5 crucial user intents derived from a large-scale analysis of the mass corpus. Crucially, we propose three automated data construction pipelines that enable the continuous and periodic updating of the benchmark dataset. This approach not only ensures that the questions can keep up with current events, but also effectively mitigates the critical issue of data contamination prevalent in static benchmarks. Moreover, a multi-dimensional hybrid evaluation framework named OmniEval is proposed for evaluating the responses. This framework combines diverse metrics and evaluation methods to capture nuanced aspects of answer performance. Extensive validation demonstrates that this evaluation framework exhibits strong alignment with human judgments, ensuring the reliability of the benchmark results.

PaperID: 4294

Authors:Daniel Lutalo, Pascal Bercher

Affiliations: Australian National University

Title: Automated Repair of Totally-Ordered Hierarchical Task Network Domains via Context-Free Grammars with Large Language Model Support

Abstract:
Repairing flawed domain models remains a critical challenge in AI planning, with few effective techniques available. We propose a novel approach for repairing totally ordered hierarchical task network (TOHTN) models with missing actions, guided by a plan that must be valid for the repaired model. This problem has only one previously documented approach, which relies on complex re-encoding that's solved via TO-HTN planning. In contrast, our approach translates the repair task into a context-free grammar repair problem and leverages a large language model (LLM) to identify and insert relevant actions directly, simplifying the repair process. We evaluate our approach on established benchmarks and demonstrate substantially improved results over the prior approach, achieving nearly three times the number of instances solved, and nearly solving all instances of domains in which the previous approach solved zero. Importantly, we mask all natural language hints, such as action names, forcing the LLM to simulate reasoning and planning, and mitigating the risk of data leakage from its training corpus.

PaperID: 4295

Authors:Hadyn Tang, Pascal Bercher

Affiliations: The Australian National University

Title: Symmetries and Other Variations of “End-Recursive” HTN Problems: Mapping the Border Between Decidable and Undecidable Restrictions

Abstract:
In this paper, we investigate the complexity of determining if various restricted forms of hierarchical task network (HTN) planning have a plan. We perform a systematic analysis of new restrictions formed by applying symmetries and relaxations to two existing restrictions called regularity and tailrecursiveness. By doing so, we confirm that many variations on common restrictions do not affect the complexity of the plan existence problem. However, we also obtain the counter-intuitive result that combining some of these seemingly inert relaxations together renders the plan existence problem undecidable. Additionally, we unearth a critical difference in definitions between an early paper on HTN planning and modern formalisms that appears to have gone unnoticed.

PaperID: 4296

Authors:Kirtan Brijeshbhai Soni, Krish Rupapara, Arpit Rana, Ghanshyam Verma, Paul Buitelaar

Affiliations: Dhirubhai Ambani University, Smart Energy Learning Centre, Insight Research Ireland Centre for Data Analytics, Data Science Institute, University of Galway

Title: EvalQAG: A Framework for Automatic Complex QA Generation and a Benchmark QA Dataset for Policy Documents

Abstract:
Accelerating research in renewable energy policy is critical for addressing climate change and enabling informed decisionmaking. Question answering (QA) over public policy documents presents unique challenges due to their legal structure, conditional dependencies, and domain-specific vocabulary. In this paper, we introduce EvalQAG, a framework for generating high-quality QA pairs from renewable energy policy documents. EvalQAG combines structured prompts, retrieval-augmented inputs, and multi-stage evaluation using large language models (LLMs) to support accurate and diverse QA generation. Using this framework, we construct REPolicyQA, a domain-specific QA dataset comprising approximately 160,000 QA pairs from over 1,000 U.S. renewable energy policy documents. The dataset covers five policy-relevant question types: Yes/No, Yes/No with Conditions, Factual, Legal Obligation, and Descriptive, which capture a wide range of reasoning patterns grounded in regulatory texts. We evaluate multiple QA models and uncover significant performance gaps, particularly in legal reasoning and conditional inference, highlighting major shortcomings in current systems. Our results establish EvalQAG as a generalizable QA generation pipeline for policy texts and position REPolicyQA as a new benchmark for advancing QA research in policy and regulatory domains. We believe this work can foster impactful research in the renewable energy sector, particularly by enabling more robust and explainable QA systems for legal and condition-heavy regulatory documents.

PaperID: 4297

Authors:Miles Stanley, Soumyajit Datta, Ashutosh Kumar, Ashiqur R. KhudaBukhsh

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, University of Washington, Rochester Institute of Technology

Title: Investigating Vaccine Buyer’s Remorse: Post-Vaccination Decision Regret in COVID-19 Social Media Using Politically Diverse Human Annotation

Abstract:
A significant gap exists in datasets regarding postCOVID-19 vaccination experiences, particularly “vaccine buyer's remorse”. Understanding the prevalence and nature of vaccine regret, whether based on personal or vicarious experiences, is vital for addressing vaccine hesitancy and refining public health communication. In this paper, we curate a novel dataset from a large YouTube news corpus capturing COVID-19 vaccination experiences, and construct a benchmark subset focused on vaccine regret, annotated by a politically diverse panel to account for the subjective and often politicized nature of the topic. We utilize large language models (LLMs) to identify posts expressing vaccine regret, analyze the reasons behind this regret, and quantify its occurrence in both first and second-person accounts. This paper aims to (1) quantify the prevalence of vaccine regret; (2) identify common reasons for this sentiment; (3) analyze differences between first-person and vicarious experiences; and (4) assess potential biases introduced by different LLMs. We find that while vaccine buyer's remorse appears in only <2% of public discourse, it is disproportionately concentrated in vaccine-skeptic influencer communities and is predominantly expressed through first-person narratives citing adverse health events.

PaperID: 4298

Authors:Jiahua Bao, Siyao Cheng, Jiaxing Du, Yuhang Jia, Boyang Niu, Zeming Lang, Changjiang He, Hao Zhang, Jie Liu

Affiliations: Research Center of Ubiquitous Computing and Intelligent Systems, Harbin Institute of Technology, China National Key Laboratory of Smart Farming Technology and Systems, China China Mobile Institute

Title: Stop Mixing Things Up! BISCUIT Teaches Vision-Language Models to Learn New Concepts from Images on the Spot

Abstract:
VisionLanguage Models (VLMs) have achieved impressive performance across various tasks, but often struggle to apply newly introduced visual concepts during inference. A common failure pattern is what we call Mixing Things Up: VLMs frequently confuse concept names, resulting in vague descriptions and failure to ground the concept correctly. Existing approaches mainly address person-related concepts through text prompts or tokenizer modifications. However, VLMs still miss or misinterpret untrained visual concepts, underscoring the need to learn new concepts directly from visual input, without relying on prior textual injection. To overcome these limitations, we propose BISCUIT (Basis-aligned Inference through Structured Concept Unification and Identification-aware Tuning), a two-step training method. Step I proposes a dual-stream structure-aware vision encoder that fuses RGB and edge-based embeddings within a shared basis space to enhance concept recognition. Step II enhances generation quality through identification-aware tuning, which encourages alignment between the generated text and the newly introduced visual concepts. Existing methods mainly focus on person concepts and lack comprehensive evaluation across diverse visual categories. We further propose a benchmark BiscuitVQA to evaluate VLMs performance on recognizing and applying novel image-introduced concepts across diverse concept types and task types, including real people, cartoons, animals, and symbolic content. We apply BISCUIT to LLaVA-1.5 and Qwen2.5-VL, achieving competitive results among open-source models and narrowing the gap to Gemini-2.5 and GPT-4o. Interestingly, our BISCUIT maintains strong generalization, showing minimal degradation on other downstream tasks.

PaperID: 4299

Authors:Yongjoon Lee, Donghyeon Cho

Affiliations: Hanyang University

Title: GPGS: Consistent 3D Object Removal via Geometry-Aware 3D Inpainting and Projected Image Refinement in 3D Gaussian Splatting

Abstract:
Object removal in 3D space is a key technology for immersive applications such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and the metaverse. While recent approaches have attempted to address this task using 2D inpainting models, they often suffer from two major limitations: (1) inaccurate geometric restoration in the removed regions, and (2) visual inconsistency across multiple viewpoints. To address these challenges, we propose GPGS, a novel pipeline built upon the 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) framework. First, we perform geometryaware 3D inpainting by leveraging a pre-trained point cloud completion model and a coarse-to-fine inference strategy, enabling accurate restoration of unseen 3D structures. Next, we introduce a projected image refinement method that improves the appearance of novel-view projections by addressing view-dependent artifacts such as brightness shifts and texture misalignments. GPGS further enhances overall scene consistency through fine-tuning of the original 3DGS scene using the refined multi-view images. Experimental results show that our GPGS makes geometrically accurate and visually coherent outputs, even in challenging 360° panoramic scenes, significantly outperforming existing methods.

PaperID: 4300

Authors:Zeyu Wang, Jiayu Wang, Haiyu Song

Affiliations: Dalian Minzu University

Title: Breaking Task Boundaries: A Unified Model for 3D Medical Image Fusion and Segmentation Guided by Manifold Perspective

Abstract:
3D medical image fusion (MIF) and segmentation (MIS) are critical and inherently synergistic tasks in medical image analysis. However, fundamentally integrating them remains highly challenging, since effective collaborative paradigms are still scarce and their optimization objectives fundamentally diverge. Moreover, existing continual learning techniques are unable to achieve truly advanced performance for both tasks using a shared weight. To address these challenges, we propose M²CoFS, a unified model capable of jointly handling both tasks. Our core contribution is a “network-guided network learning” paradigm designed to break the task boundaries. We model the weight spaces of MIF and MIS as high-dimensional manifolds and innovatively use a lightweight neural network to implicitly construct a shared manifold. Interestingly, this network yields a unified weight for both tasks. To ensure the shared manifold retains the intrinsic geometry of both original manifolds, we embed manifold distances into the loss function of this network as a constraint. Additionally, we design a tailored three-stage training paradigm for our core contribution mentioned above. Stage I focuses on independent task optimization for high-quality weights; Stage II aims to reduce parameter-space distance between tasks via our cross-task weight adaptation strategy; Our core innovation serves as stage III. Experimental results show that M²-CoFS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art comparison models on both MlF and MIS.

PaperID: 4301

Authors:Ya-Hsi Chang, Po-Chih Kuo

Affiliations: National Tsing Hua University

Title: Benchmarking Reinforcement Learning Algorithms for ICU Ventilator Settings: An Interpretable and Probabilistic Patient Environment for Doctor Agents

Abstract:
Mechanical ventilation is essential in intensive care units (ICUs), but prolonged use increases patient risk. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers potential for optimizing ventilator management, yet its clinical adoption is limited by the lack of interpretable and realistic simulation environments. We propose an interpretable and probabilistic patient environment simulator based on actionbased k-nearest neighbors and empirical transition probabilities, modeling stochastic state transitions grounded in real ICU data (MIMIC-IV and eICU). The simulator supports anomaly detection and provides probabilistic next-state distributions to enhance transparency and safety. Within this environment, we benchmark seven offline RL algorithms under clinically guided reward designs, including five distinct reward function configurations to explore the impact of reward shaping on agent behavior. Our results show that RL agents such as Double DQN and NFQ outperform empirical physician policies in meeting extubation guidelines, especially for high-severity patients. This benchmark enables standardized, interpretable evaluation of RL-based decision support tools for critical care.

PaperID: 4302

Authors:Xin Qin, Mengna Liu, Wenjie Wang, Shuxin Li, Tianjiao Li, Xiufeng Liu, Xu Cheng

Affiliations: Tianjin University of Technology, Technical University of Denmark

Title: Beyond Missing Data Imputation: Information-Theoretic Coupling of Missingness and Class Imbalance for Optimal Irregular Time Series Classification

Abstract:
Irregular time series (IRTS) are prevalent in realworld applications, where uneven sampling and missing data pose fundamental challenges to deep learning-based feature modeling. Although existing methods attempt to retain timestamp information, they often overlook the structured patterns embedded within the missingness itself, and tend to perform poorly when confronted with class imbalance exacerbated by data incompleteness. Specifically, temporal irregularity hinders the modeling of long-range dependencies and local patterns, while sparse observations limit representational capacity, disproportionately impairing minority classes and leading to severe classification bias. To address these deeply coupled challenges, we propose SPECTRA (Structured Pattern and Enriched Context-aware Temporal Representation Architecture), a unified framework for robust IRTS classification. SPECTRA introduces a frequency-guided observation encoder that reconstructs temporal dependencies in a stable manner, mitigating spectral distortion and information corruption. Complementarily, a missingness pattern encoder explicitly captures the dynamic evolution of missing data and leverages it as a discriminative signal. In addition, a prototype-constrained classification paradigm directly optimizes the geometric structure of the feature space, enhancing intra-class compactness and alleviating generalization bottlenecks caused by class imbalance. Extensive experiments on three public IRTS datasets—P12, P19, and PAM—demonstrate the superior performance of SPECTRA under both missing and imbalanced conditions.

PaperID: 4303

Authors:Xiean Wang, Pin Chen, Liqin Tan, Yutong Lu, Qingsong Zou

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, China National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou, China Guangdong Province Key Laboratory of Computational Science

Title: FUSION: Dataset Pruning via Fusing Uncertainty with Structural Information for Optimal Neural Training in Crystal Property Prediction

Abstract:
The rapid expansion of materials databases offers unprecedented opportunities for accelerating materials discovery via machine learning. However, the widespread assumption that larger datasets inherently produce better models does not hold in practice. We propose FUSION (Fusing Uncertainty with Structural Information for Optimal Neural training), an offline dataset pruning strategy that synergistically combines uncertainty quantification with crystallographic structure analysis via geometric fingerprinting, framing dataset pruning as a discrete optimization problem. Through evaluation across 3 benchmark datasets, FUSION consistently outperforms baselines, including random pruning, uncertainty sampling, weighting factor pruning, diversity sampling, and active learning. It demonstrates robust transferability across 11 diverse architectures, outperforming random pruning by 1.91–13.65% across different datasets, with an average improvement of 6.36%. Moreover, our analysis suggests that different models exhibit varying robustness characteristics when faced with pruned training data, highlighting the importance of model selection tailored to dataset composition. We identify optimal pruning points where removing just 0–8% of training data improves model performance, yielding gains up to 12.67% in specific model–dataset combinations. These results establish a new paradigm for materials informatics that prioritizes data quality over quantity, offering a pathway toward more efficient and sustainable machine learning workflows in computational materials science.

PaperID: 4304

Authors:Wenhao Zhang, Chun Zhang, Wei Bai, Ning Zhang, Changxia Gao, Yuxin Jia, Chenhao Shi, Shaoxiong Pang

Affiliations: School of Computer Science & Technology, The Center of National Railway Intelligent Transportation System Engineering and Technology China Academy of Railway Sciences Institute of Computing Technologies, Beijing Jiaotong University

Title: Unifying Channel Independence and Mixing: Multi-Scale Patch Recursion for Global–Local Representation Synergy in Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Abstract:
Multivariate time series forecasting underpins applications in finance, meteorology, and industrial operations. Yet two persistent hurdles remain: (i) models typically choose between Channel–Independent (CI) and Channel–Mixed (CM) formulations—each with distinct strengths—leading to large performance variance across datasets; and (ii) shortterm dynamics and long-term trends are hard to model jointly, making it difficult to capture both transient bursts and periodic patterns. We propose FusionTimePatch (FTP), a purely MLP-driven, lightweight framework composed of three modules: (1) Dual-View Global–Local Fusion (Dual-GLF), which runs CI and CM views in parallel and employs multi-scale patch recursion to adaptively adjust the look-back window, thereby coupling global tendencies with local details; (2) Channel Enhancement (CE), which adaptively identifies and amplifies salient channel signals and diffuses them to others, improving sensitivity to abrupt events and latent drivers; and (3) a Linear Fusion layer, which unifies Dual-GLF and CE outputs to strengthen cross-view interactions and enhance robustness. Extensive experiments on multiple public benchmarks show FTP consistently surpasses state-of-the-art counterparts in both accuracy and efficiency, offering a scalable new paradigm for multichannel forecasting. Code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/Zhveh7/FTP.

PaperID: 4305

Authors:Cong Tan, Yongqi Shao, Hong Huo, Tao Fang

Affiliations: Shanghai Jiaotong University

Title: Improving the Accuracy of Dense Retrieval on the Quantized Indexes via Gradient Optimization of the Target Embeddings

Abstract:
Dense retrieval models commonly use flat indexes to achieve highprecision retrieval by computing exact distances between embedding vectors. However, flat indexes are memory-intensive and inefficient, limiting their scalability in large-scale retrieval tasks. In contrast, quantized indexes enable faster retrieval with significantly lower memory usage, but their accuracy tends to decrease. Therefore, we propose a scalable and efficient training method for the dual-encoder models to improves the retrieval accuracy on quantized indexes. Our approach combines the direct gradient update to the cached target embeddings with large scale negative sampling based on similarity, significantly reducing computational overhead and GPU memory usage. Target embeddings are initialized with a pre-trained encoder and stored in a memory buffer, which is directly updated via backpropagation, thus avoiding the repeated re-encoding of the full corpus. To build a rich set of negatives, we retrieve the top-k most similar targets for each query from cached embeddings using the quantized index, including both query-specific and cross-batch top-k results. This design effectively approximates the truncated softmax distribution. The experiments show that our method achieves performs exceptionally well on quantized indexes, providing a practical and scalable solution for real-world retrieval systems.

PaperID: 4306

Authors:Yuqing Ye, Xuan Zhou, Zhifu Chen, Dandan Li, Hengnian Gu, Jin Peng Zhou, Dongdai Zhou

Affiliations: Northeast Normal University, Cornell University, New York, United States

Title: K-12EduBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models’ Knowledge, Problem-Solving, and Educational Goal Cognition in K-12 Education

Abstract:
Large language models hold great promise for transforming K12 education, but there is an urgent need for systematic evaluation of their core educational capabilities. Existing benchmarks often overlook educational goal cognition and overemphasize answer accuracy, thereby failing to capture deeper subject-level knowledge ability and problem-solving ability. To address this gap, we introduce K-12EduBench: a benchmark for evaluating LLMs’ subject-level knowledge ability, subject-specific problem-solving ability, and educational goal cognition ability in K-12 education. K-12EduBench comprises four components: (1) a dataset of 2,640 objective and 619 subjective questions across nine subjects, annotated with answers, problem-solving processes, and cognitive-level labels; (2) nine Item Response Theory (IRT) models for estimating subject-level knowledge ability; (3) evaluation methods and metrics for assessing multi-step problem-solving ability; and (4) prompts and scoring rubrics for measuring alignment with target cognitive levels. Experiments on advanced LLMs show that education-optimized models consistently outperform general-purpose ones across all three abilities, while under-scaled models lag substantially. We observe a strong positive correlation between subject-level knowledge ability and subject-specific problem-solving ability. Despite gains in educational goal cognition ability, current models—even those tailored for education—still fall short of real-world instructional needs.

PaperID: 4307

Authors:Minsung Lee, Seo Hyun Kim, Yeonsu Park, Hyeongseok Seo, Jongmin Lee

Affiliations: Ajou University, Kangwon National University, Pusan National University

Title: A Paradigm Shift in High-Resolution Depth Estimation Using SPAD-Based LiDAR Histograms: From Signal Filtering to Lightweight Similarity Learning

Abstract:
Accurate and efficient depth estimation from timeof-flight (ToF) LiDAR is essential for autonomous systems operating in real-world environments. However, traditional histogram-based depth estimation (HBDE) algorithms face fundamental limitations in balancing depth performance and computational cost, and they struggle under signal-induced pile-up distortion. While deep learning has shown promise, existing neural network-based methods rely on large models that are impractical for deployment on edge hardware. To bridge this critical gap, we propose a paradigm shift in histogram-based ToF estimation, reframing depth estimation from signal filtering to lightweight similarity learning. Instead of attempting to correct the distorted signal, our approach learns a specialized metric where the measure of similarity between the distorted histogram and a reference pulse is the temporal shift itself. The resulting 57.61 KB model, over 215.2 times smaller than state-of-the-art deep learning approaches, achieves real-time performance (106.27 fps) on an FPGA. It delivers superior accuracy across nearly all signal-noise conditions, including 2.21 cm RMSE at severe pile-up scenarios, significantly outperforming conventional methods while remaining practical for on-device deployment.

PaperID: 4308

Authors:Jiedong Zhuang, Lu Lu, Ming Dai, Rui Hu, Jian Chen, Qiang Liu, Haoji Hu

Affiliations: Alibaba Group, Zhejiang University

Title: Q Cache: Visual Attention Is Valuable in Less than Half of Decode Layers for Multimodal Large Language Model

Abstract:
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are plagued by exorbitant inference costs attributable to the profusion of visual tokens within the vision encoder. The redundant visual tokens engenders a substantial computational load and keyvalue (KV) cache footprint bottleneck. Existing approaches focus on token-wise optimization, leveraging diverse intricate token pruning techniques to eliminate non-crucial visual tokens. Nevertheless, these methods often unavoidably undermine the integrity of the KV cache, resulting in failures in long-text generation tasks. To this end, we conduct an in-depth investigation towards the attention mechanism of the model from a new perspective, and discern that attention within more than half of all decode layers are semantic similar. Upon this finding, we contend that the attention in certain layers can be streamlined by inheriting the attention from their preceding layers. Consequently, we propose Lazy Attention, an efficient attention mechanism that enables cross-layer sharing of similar attention patterns. It ingeniously reduces layer-wise redundant computation in attention. In Lazy Attention, we develop a novel layer-shared cache, Q Cache, tailored for MLLMs, which facilitates the reuse of queries across adjacent layers. In particular, Q Cache is lightweight and fully compatible with existing inference frameworks, including Flash Attention and KV cache. Additionally, our method is highly flexible as it is orthogonal to existing token-wise techniques and can be deployed independently or combined with token pruning approaches. Empirical evaluations on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method can reduce KV cache usage by over 35% and achieve 1.5x throughput improvement, while sacrificing only approximately 1% of performance on various MLLMs. Compared with SOTA token-wise methods, our technique achieves superior accuracy preservation.

PaperID: 4309

Authors:Lintao Long, Ruizhang Huang, Ruina Bai, Yongbin Qin, Qihang Fu

Affiliations: Guizhou University

Title: Intuitive Thinking: Expanding Large Language Models’ Thinking for Rapid Decision-Making on Candidate Corrections in Chinese Grammar Error Correction

Abstract:
Chinese Grammar Error Correction (CGEC) aims to identify and correct grammatical errors in Chinese sentences. Finetuning Large Language Models (LLMs) is a popular current method. However, we have observed a significant flaw: LLMs learn grammatical knowledge but often fail to explicitly use specific grammatical concepts to correct erroneous sentences, leading to multiple corrections without a clear indication of which is the most reliable. Humans possess an "intuitive thinking" mode, which allows them to quickly decide which correction is more reliable based on experience and intuition. To address this deficiency in LLMs, we propose the Expanding Intuitive Thinking Model (ExIT). ExIT extends the thinking process of LLMs for CGEC, providing them with a human-like rapid decision-making process. This enables LLMs to quickly select a more reliable correction from multiple alternatives based on experience and intuition. Unlike the LLM decoding process, which focuses only on the trustworthiness of local tokens, this is a global thinking process concerning the erroneous sentence and its correction. ExIT is a lightweight model that performs rapid computations without significantly increasing overhead. Our experimental results on CGEC datasets demonstrate that the proposed ExIT can substantially unleash the error correction potential of LLMs.

PaperID: 4310

Authors:Yongkang Yin, Yuexian Zou

Affiliations: Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Ultra High Definition lmmersive Media Technology, Shenzhen Graduate School, School of ECE, Peking University

Title: WhisperDiari: A Whisper-Based Speaker Diarization Framework in Token Space Leveraging Semantic and Speaker Information for Better Text Adaptability

Abstract:
Speaker diarization is a fundamental task in speech processing aims to determine 'who speaks when'. When combined with ASR, it enables speakerlabeled transcription with broad practical value. Most existing methods rely on frame-level classification, but the high cost of annotating mixed-speaker audio limits the availability of large-scale, accurately labeled datasets. As a result, even state-of-the-art models struggle with imprecise speaker boundary detection and semantic segmentation errors, which degrade timestamp accuracy and downstream ASR performance. To address these challenges, we propose WhisperDiari, a unified framework for speaker diarization and ASR. We first construct LibriDiari, a dataset derived from LibriSpeech, containing 2–4 speaker mixed audio annotated with transcripts and speaker labels. WhisperDiari builds on the Whisper model, incorporating speaker adapters and Speaker Similarity Matrix Supervision to enhance speaker representation. In addition, a dedicated speaker decoder fuses speaker embeddings with contextual semantics from Whisper's decoder, enabling token-level diarization. This design effectively resolves segmentation ambiguity, aligns diarization with semantic units, and jointly models 'who speaks what and when', producing accurate, timestamped transcripts. We train the model on LibriDiari and evaluate it on both LibriDiari and the real-world AMI corpus. Experimental results demonstrate that WhisperDiari consistently outperforms state-of-the-art open-source baselines.

PaperID: 4311

Authors:Babette Bühler, Ivo Bueno, Enkelejda Kasneci

Affiliations: Technical University of Munich, Germany Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML)

Title: Democratizing Writing Support with AI: Insights from One Year of Real-World Interactions with an Open-Access Writing Feedback Tool

Abstract:
Writing is a foundational skill for educational, professional, and civic participation, yet access to frequent and timely writing feedback remains deeply unequal. Teachers face significant workload constraints, particularly in large classes, and many learners lack alternative sources of individualized feedback. While large language models (LLMs) offer the opportunity for scalable, adaptive support, little is known about how students engage with such feedback tools in realworld, self-directed settings. We present a large-scale, year-long analysis of 23,650 voluntary interactions with an open-access AI writing feedback system used by students across diverse educational contexts and age groups, conducted in accordance with strict data protection standards. Using a clustering approach, we identify 2,800 iterative revision chains and apply a validated LLM-based multidimensional scoring framework to assess text quality over time. Our findings reveal that students who revised their texts after receiving AI feedback demonstrated statistically significant, albeit modest, improvements across both content and language-related dimensions (overall writing quality: ∆ = 0.067, p < .001, r = .17), with the greatest gains observed among initially low-performing writers. Revision frequency was positively associated with improvement, particularly in higher-order writing skills. However, engagement was uneven, with higher usage among students in academically oriented schools. These results demonstrate both the technical feasibility and social potential of deploying generative AI for educational support at scale, while highlighting the need for inclusive infrastructure, accessible design, and targeted outreach to truly democratize educational benefits.

PaperID: 4312

Authors:XuWen Zhang, Xiao Xue, Xia Xie, Qun Ma

Affiliations: College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University, China Tianjin Key Laboratory of Healthy Habitat and Smart Technology, China Laboratory of Computation and Analytics of Complex Management Systems, School of Computer Science and Technology, Hainan University

Title: Adaptive Regulation via Dual-Layer Evolution (ARDE): A Multi-Agent Approach to Balancing Efficiency, Fairness, and Diversity in Crowdsourced Platforms

Abstract:
Crowdsourced delivery platforms (e.g., Meituan, Uber Eats, DoorDash) have become vital infrastructure in urban logistics, yet their competitive ordergrabbing mechanisms often lead to strategy homogenization, inefficiency, and income inequality. This paper presents ARDE (Adaptive Regulation via Dual-layer Evolution), an evolutionary governance framework that integrates individual reinforcement learning with adaptive platform-level regulation. The outer agent dynamically generates governance signals based on system diagnostics (strategy entropy, Gini coefficient, completion rate), while inner agents employ Diffusion Q-Learning guided by a language-model-driven reward shaping module to promote fairness and strategy diversity. Experiments on real-world datasets show that ARDE achieves stable diversity (0.997 ± 0.184), reduces inequality (Gini change 1.3%), and maintains high efficiency. Further comparison (ARDE-PPO vs. MAPPO) confirms that its advantages stem from explicit hierarchical governance rather than algorithmic coincidence. Overall, ARDE offers a scalable and interpretable paradigm for reconciling individual rationality with collective welfare in gig economies and other multi-agent socio-technical systems.

PaperID: 4313

Authors:Shuai Yu, Xiaoliang He, Kangjie Dong, Yi Yu

Affiliations: Dalian University of Technology, Donghua University, Hiroshima University

Title: Every Little Bit Helps: Exploring Better Utilization of Unlabeled Data for Semi-supervised Singing Melody Extraction Using Multi-bands Diffusion Model

Abstract:
Semisupervised singing melody extraction (SSME) is one of the key tasks in the field of music information retrieval (MIR). Recently, several SSME methods have been proposed and achieved remarkable successes. However, existing methods are still facing two critical issues: firstly, there is a lack of an effective data augmentation method for SSME, which results in insufficient utilization of unlabeled data. Secondly, existing SSME methods discards too much unlabeled data in the stage of consistency regularization, which hinders the further improvements of SSME task. In this paper, we present \emphELH-SME, a novel framework that better utilizes the unlabeled musical data for SSME task. Specifically, our proposed ELH-SME framework consists of three modules: (1) we first propose a diffusion-based multi-bands augmentation (DMA) method to increase the amounts of training data. The proposed DMA methods employs a diffusion model to generate perturbation at the specific frequency bands in an end-to-end manner, thereby avoiding sharply perturbations to the spectrogram. (2) To improve the utilization rate of unlabeled data, we suggest a global-class confidence (GCC) module. During the phase of consistency regularization, we consider both the global-wise and class-wise confidence values, improving the utilization rate of unlabeled data. (3) To further improve the utilization of unlabeled data, we also propose to enhance the representation capability of unlabeled data by extracting channel-level features from labeled data via channel cross attention (CCA). We evaluate our proposed framework on several well-known public available datasets, and the conducted experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

PaperID: 4314

Authors:Arka Dutta, Reza Fayyazi, Shanchieh Yang, Ashiqur R. KhudaBukhsh

Affiliations: Rochester Institute of Technology, Gonzaga University

Title: How Can You Tell if Your Large Language Model Could Be a Closet Antisemite? An Explainability-Based Audit Framework for Implicit Bias

Abstract:
Auditing large language models (LLMs) for biases is an ongoing and dynamic process, resembling a proverbial catand-mouse game. As researchers identify new vulnerabilities in LLMs, guardrails are updated to address them, prompting the need for innovative approaches to audit the increasingly fortified LLMs for biases. This paper makes three contributions. First, it introduces a scalable, explainable framework to measure biases against various identity groups across multiple open large language models. Second, it conducts a bias audit considering five well-known open LLMs and demonstrates their bias inclinations towards several historically disadvantaged groups. Our audit reveals disturbing antisemitic, Islamophobic, and xenophobic biases present in several well-known LLMs. Finally, we release a dataset of 1,000 probes curated under the supervision of an expert social scientist that can facilitate similar audits.

PaperID: 4315

Authors:Yingying Wang, Qin Ni, Haoxin Xu, Jiaqi Yin, Tingjiang Wei

Affiliations: School of Computer Science and Technology, East China Normal University, Zhongshan North Road, Shanghai China, Key Laboratory of Multilingual Education with AI, Shanghai International Studies University, Wengxiang Road, School of Education, Hainan Normal University, Longkun South Road, Haikou China

Title: Shaping Human–AI Collaboration in Education: Effects of AI-Assisted Decision-Making Paradigms and Human–AI Decision Consistency on Pre-Service Teachers’ Psychological States and Performance

Abstract:
Artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly important role in supporting decisionmaking, particularly in educational contexts, where it serves as a critical tool to assist teacher judgment and optimize instructional decisions. However, limited research has examined how different AI-assisted decision-making paradigms influence the Performance of human-AI collaboration, as well as the underlying psychological mechanisms and causal pathways. Therefore, this study investigated 59 pre-service teachers to examine how AI-assisted decision-making paradigms and human-AI consistency influenced their psychological states and task performance. Specifically, this study employed a two-factor mixed experimental design, with the AI-assisted decision-making paradigms as the between-subjects factor and human-AI consistency as the within-subjects factor. Data were analyzed using the Bayesian cumulative link mixed model and structural equation modeling. The results reveal that AI-assisted decision-making paradigms do not have a significant direct effect on task performance. However, when the moderating role of human-AI decision consistency is taken into account, the effect of AI-assisted decision-making paradigms on task performance can exert its influence indirectly through a sequential psychological pathway involving users’ confidence and their trust in the AI. Consistency between human and AI decisions not only significantly enhances users’ trust in AI, confidence, and task performance, but the proportion of consistent decisions also significantly moderates the impact of AI-assisted decision-making paradigms on users’ confidence levels. Notably, our findings indicate that users maintain a moderately level of trust in AI even when their decisions diverge from those of AI. In summary, this study highlights the mediating mechanism by which AI-assisted decision-making paradigms influence task performance through psychological states and identifies the moderating role of human-AI consistency in this pathway. These findings advance the theoretical understanding of human-AI interaction models in educational contexts and offer mechanistic insights to guide the optimization of instructional AI systems.